”Well. Shit.” Deacon peered around the corner of the building he and Fixer were hiding behind, surveying the path they had intended to take. And the raiders currently filling the street between them and the safehouse.
“We could double back to the settlement,” Fixer whispered. “Stay there for the night.”
Deacon squinted up at the sky for a moment. “It’d be pitch black before we got there,” he muttered. “There’s like, what, six of these guys? We can take six guys.”
“You mean in a fight, right?” He pretended not to hear Fixer, for the sake of their continued partnership.
“Look, when I say go, run over there to the left. We can flank them from there.” Fixer started to nod, then her eyes locked onto something over Deacon’s shoulder and the color drained from her face. “What - “
Before he could get the rest of the sentence out, Fixer had darted around him and out into the street, pistol drawn and two shots fired directly into the face of a raider. He dropped and Fixer dove behind a pile of rubble, popping out a second later to shoot at a second raider. These shots missed wildly, and the rest of the group started to converge on Fixer’s hiding space.
“What the fuck,” Deacon seethed, yanking his own pistol out of its holster. One raider got his brain ventilated while another lost a kneecap, and Fixer managed to land a couple of body shots on one wearing nothing on top but a ragged leather harness.
Two left, and Deacon advanced down the street with his pistol aimed at the one further out. One shot to the chest and one in the head as he went down, and he heard the slide and click of a clip being reloaded from behind Fixer’s rubble pile as the last raider approached.
Deacon took him out at the same time Fixer peeked back out, one in the head, another for good measure, and then a third just because he was annoyed.
“What the fuck, Fix?” He slammed a new clip home and put a last bullet in the head of the kneecapped raider down the street. “Why the fuck would you run out in the middle of a bunch of raiders? And not even in the direction I told you to go?!”
”Deac - “
”No, no ‘Deac’, there’s no - “ He stopped short as he reached the other side of the rubble pile. Fixer had positioned herself between the raiders and two kids. The older of them couldn’t have been more than nine, if Deacon had to hazard a guess. The raider Fixer had popped had been aiming for them.
“Dad told us to run,” the older one said in a tiny, shaking voice. Deacon looked up the street, silently counting bodies.
He counted seven.
When he looked back down it was right into Fixer’s upturned face, meeting her eyes.
“…we’ll double back to the settlement,” he muttered, turning away. He still caught Fixer’s whispered “thank you”, even as he walked away.
“Hi,” she responded quietly. There was a long silence, and when it broke they were both trying to speak at once.
“I’m sorry I - “
“Look, you can’t just - “
They both stopped, staring at each other before Deacon just shook his head and motioned for her to continue.
“I’m sorry,” she repeated. “I know I shouldn’t have just bolted out like that, but - “ She looked into the fire, shaking her head. “Talking might have taken too long.”
Deacon sighed, rubbing at his eyes. “I get that, Fix, I do, but you gotta - I don’t know, sign language, something, fuck.” He looked over at her. She'd scared the shit out of him. He should probably tell her that. He wouldn't, but he probably should.
Fixer nodded. “Noted. I will come up with a hand sign for ‘I’m about to do something stupid for the sake of saving someone else’.”
“Oh no, that’s way too vague, You do that twice a day, minimum.”
“Fine. How about…’I’m about to do something that I can’t articulate at the moment but I promise it’s for a good reason’?”
“Same problem.”
Fixer leaned her weight back on her palms, staring up at the sky for a long moment.
“How about ‘trust me’?” She looked over at him, smiling gently. “Think we can manage that one?”
He started to respond, but the words caught in his throat and he had to clear it before he could speak.
“That one’s a given.”
”…yeah. It is.”