A/N: HOLY FUCK it's 11:52PM and I just remembered that I had to post this chapter.

Cass sips at her drink – her own concoction this time, good ol' moonshine, with no chance of having been tampered with by a certain sniper – as she sits alone at the kitchen table with her feet propped up on the smooth wooden surface. She stares absently at the dark red and black-patterned wallpaper that wraps all around the room, admiring how good the quality is. She's never seen wallpaper look so neat and not-peely, and she quickly realizes that that's probably the most boring thought she's ever had the displeasure of thinking.

She needs something to do, damn it.

After spending nearly a week with little to no real activity, even the exclusive nature and luxurious surroundings of the Lucky 38's presidential suite have begun to lose their shiny appeal. There's only so much pool one can play, only so many rooms one can lounge in, and only so much of being cooped up with three other people, a robot, and a dog that one can take before they start to get just a tiny bit… antsy.

Naturally, she settles for the drink, which still remains her oldest friend and constant comfort in any and all trying times.

Cass is straddling the border between tipsy and drunk, and she starts considering new kinds of mixes she could try out in the future – maybe testing them out by sharing them with the Courier when the damned woman finally comes back – when she feels something slimy stroking along the back of her hand.

She jumps and yanks her hand back, as though it's been burned. On the floor next to her chair, Rex peers up at her with big devastatingly hopeful eyes, tongue darting out to give her one last tentative lick when she slowly lets her hand fall again. His tail wags with uncertainty.

She indulges the dog with a small, lopsided smile and scratches at the underside of his jaw. "I get it, now that I'm not wearing my hat we're suddenly best friends."

His movements quickly become more excited, more certain with the more attention she gives him, and he leans his head down and uses the tip of his nose to nudge an object on the floor to roll closer to her.

"What's this?" she questions despite herself, reaching down to grab it. It's made of an extremely faded and dirtied green felt, and it's slimy, obviously covered in dog spit from having been carried in Rex's mouth for however long he's had it. Cass grimaces as she turns it around in her grip, examining it with a critical eye. "Where did you find a ball? Who let you find a ball?"

Rex simply gives her an energetic bark in response, his whole body wiggling as he furiously wags his tail in anticipation. Never once do his eyes leave the ball.

"You're bored too, huh? I can relate to that," she tells him, throwing all of her reservations regarding talking to a dog to the wind because fuck it, she's drunk and bored. She tosses the ball up in the air experimentally, and immediately lets out a sharp yelp in surprise when Rex all but leaps onto her with his front legs to snatch the ball between his teeth.

"Ow, shit," she complains, pushing him off and rubbing at her stinging thighs. "Robot toes are just as bad as regular dog toes."

The ball is deposited in Cass' lap, streaking her jeans with saliva and making her grimace again. Rex just watches her expectantly.

She sighs and throws the ball up in the air again, but this time further away from where she's sitting. As Rex leaps in the air to try to grab it, Cass wipes futilely at the dark, wet marks on her legs with distaste. She looks back up just in time to see the dog picking the ball up from where it had landed and rolled into a corner. He spins around as soon as he has it to run it back to her with vigor.

The long, hard stare she gives the dog goes completely unnoticed; he's far more interested in the ball, watching it with an unfaltering gaze. He begins whining lowly when she makes no move to even touch it, and eventually goes so far as to bark at her in protest.

"Alright, alright," Cass relents after shushing him. When she picks the slobbery ball up, Rex nearly loses his goddamn mind, even attempting to jump up and nip at her hands to take it from her. She gives him a quick and sharp tsk and takes her sweet time having a deep swig of her moonshine. The burning trail it leaves as it slides down her throat is satisfying beyond belief. She turns the ball around in her hand.

"You wanna play?" She feels the familiar creeping of heat seeping slowly to her face, a telltale sign of a blooming inebriated blush. It only serves to make her grin crookedly in delight. "Then let's play."

"It's multiplying on the outside, but I'm pretty sure that it's not lethally aggressive towards other organisms anymore, not like it was when it spread through Vault 22. X-rays haven't produced anything concrete yet, but at this rate – in the human subjects, at least – some sort of blockage in the lungs would have begun to make itself apparent almost immediately. Say, wheezing or coughing or just breathing problems in general." Arcade watches the small black rat in the containment unit skitter around – as much as she can with her healing bite wounds – and smiles. "Of course, it's a bit too early to tell, I'll have to wait for another two or three weeks, but she seems to be fine so far. I'd almost expect the process to happen sooner, really, given how much smaller a rat is compared to a human, so I'm… hopeful, to say the least."

Veronica nods along with his words and stares dumbly at the rat. She realizes that Arcade is now simply staring at her, waiting for some sort of response.

"So…does she have a name?"

He raises a brow at her. "That's all you can think of?"

"I don't know what else to say!" the woman defends. "This is your activity; I'm just along for the ride." Rex barks again from somewhere else in the suite, but they both ignore it. Veronica nods at the rat. "So, does she?"

"I never thought to name her."

"You introduce the poor thing to some potentially deadly spores and you don't even have the decency to give her a name? Rude, Gannon. Poor form."

"I have no defense against that," he admits with a laugh. "She was just a 'present' from Rex, and I saw an opportunity."

The rat's tiny pink nose and soft-looking ears twitch as she sniffs around and listens to their voices through the barrier of the isolation unit. She reaches up with a hind leg and scratches at the back of her head, a frantic, jerky movement that is slightly hindered by the stained bandages wrapped around her middle.

Of course Arcade is sympathetic to the small creature; he'd found her not three days before, just barely hanging onto life as she bled out on the floor of the foyer. She'd been grabbed with sharp canine teeth and carried to rest at the Courier's door, undoubtedly Rex's idea of a present to his ever-absent master. Arcade had cradled her gently as he picked her up and set to wrapping her up in an attempt to stop the bleeding. The rat had calmed down considerably when he left her small bits of chopped up carrot and a bowl of water, even letting him stroke at her tiny head. He'd also done well to make sure that Rex wasn't able to catch sight of her, for fear that he might try to attack her again and finish her off for good.

The idea to use the rat as a test subject is not his proudest, but he required a live specimen of some sort. That, paired with his faith in his hypothesis, made him decide that perhaps the rat was exactly what he needed.

"Eliza," Veronica says suddenly, still watching the rat. "I just decided."

"You want to name her Eliza?" Arcade asks with a small laugh, glancing down at Veronica. "You must really like that musical."

"It's a story about a woman that learns to be all fancy and dresses up and stuff, what more do you want from me?"

"Fair enough. Eliza it is."

Their attention is torn from watching the rat do her rat things when suddenly an old tennis ball bounces into the room, followed shortly by a lively and bounding Rex. The dog runs in with so much determination and force that he nearly knocks Veronica over with a small squeak – luckily, Arcade is close enough and quick enough that he's able to quickly put his hands on her shoulders from behind to steady her out and prevent her from falling onto him.

They watch, bewildered, as Rex hunts for the ball, which had rolled underneath one of the beds. He switches between growling and whining, desperately pawing at the floor to try to wiggle his body underneath the wooden frame.

Cass walks in and spares the dog only a glance before she starts snorting.

"Oh man, I was wrong about that dog," she laughs, putting a hand out on the desk to steady her sluggish and unsteady movements. "He's a lot of fun."

Arcade eyes the unmarked bottle clutched in her other hand warily. "You're playing drunk fetch with the dog indoors?"

The caravanner rolls her eyes, a more exaggerated motion than usual since she's on her way to being blind-ass drunk. "Oh, come on," she says, dragging out the last word with a whine. "It's boring as hell around here, what else to you expect me to do?"

"Oh, I don't know," he retorts, crossing his arms with a slight frown, "not play drunk fetch with the dog indoors? Where there's people," he gestures to Veronica, "and things", he gestures to his experimentation area, "that can be knocked over?"

"Don't you scold me, doctor man," Cass growls, taking one final drink before roughly setting her bottle down on the desk, next to the containment unit. Veronica makes a dismayed sound when the rat, Eliza, jumps and gives a fearful squeak, running about with nowhere to hide from the loud noises and rattling surfaces.

"You're killing my buzz," the redhead continues, still completely oblivious to the presence of the rat, as she staggers over to where Rex is still painstakingly working to retrieve his ball. She gets down onto the floor and crawls under the bed, grabbing it herself and then standing to taunt the dog with his prize.

Rex jumps and snaps at the ball whenever it comes near, but even Cass' drunken reflexes are able to keep it away from him, making him bark and whine like he's prone to do when he's denied access to a new toy. The caravanner laughs heartily at the dog's desperation.

"Watch this," she tells Arcade and Veronica with a grin. Before Arcade can stop her, the ball is flying out of her hand, sailing across the too-small room. It bounces hard off of the wall and comes right back towards them. Veronica is just barely able to dodge it as it goes flying past her and back out into the foyer, but she isn't able to get out of the way of Rex, who runs after the ball with an almost violent determination.

The dog barrels into her, and Arcade isn't able to catch her like he had before; she falls onto the desk behind her, knocking the containment unit loose and sending it, the sample, Eliza, and Cass' bottle to the floor. Rex simply shakes the collision off and continues running after the ball, knocking down Arcade's UV light on the way out.

The three of them stand in silent shock, staring at the mess that had been the experiment setup. More importantly, they stare at the shattered Petri dish, bathed in the light of the fallen UV lamp.

"Oh my god, that's that contagious shit, isn' it?" Cass slurs as her eyes go wide. She watches as every particle of the spores floating in the air and on the floor is highlighted by the deep purple light. Behind the wall of drunkenness, her panic begins to rise as she realizes the danger of the situation. She lets out a shout when some of the particles float close to her, looking to Arcade with wild eyes. "Do somethin'!"

The doctor makes a mindless gesticulation towards the mess. "There's not much I can do, but I don't think-"

"I'm not gonna die with lungs full of hitchhiking plants!" Cass shouts. She pushes past Arcade and reaches down under the desk, grabbing for the small flamethrower she remembers the doctor storing under there in case of this exact emergency.

"Cass, no!" Arcade reaches out to swipe the weapon from her hands, but she refuses to relent as she shouts curses at him and tries to aim the nozzle at the makeshift lab area. "You're drunk, for god's sake, give that to me -"

On the floor, Veronica scrambles to find Eliza as the other two continue to fight over the flamethrower. She finds the rat just in the doorway of the room, contemplating scurrying out and possibly catching Rex's attention as opposed to staying in the room with the angry and loud humans. Veronica takes the opportunity to grab the rat, despite the immediate jerking and wiggling it causes, and sticks the creature within one large brown sleeve before crawling away from the line of (literal) fire.

"Screw off, Gannon!" Cass yells, finally using all of her strength to bodily push Arcade back. She sends him toppling to the floor, where he lands on his back with enough force that it temporarily knocks the breath out of his lungs. He hears a dangerous click and wheezes out more words of threat and caution, but they go ignored by the angry, frightened caravanner.

The roar and glare of flames fills the small room as Cass completely torches the entire desk with a loud, continuous yell, setting the whole thing aflame. The spilled moonshine is ignited quickly, only serving to make the fire flare more and spread faster. She wobbles on her drunken feet – she's given only a small amount of clarity through the haze of the alcohol due to the giant line of flame pouring from the nozzle of the flamethrower she holds – and aims wildly around in the air to get rid of any floating spores there might be.

"Kill it!" she yells, sweeping the flamethrower from side to side. "Kill it with fire!"

She doesn't stop until she's knocked off of her feet by Arcade, who forcibly tackles her to the ground and is quick to yank the flamethrower away from her and turn it off. She snarls at him as he sits on her abdomen and holds her struggling arms over her head, yelling words she can't understand over the crackles and pops of the steadily growing desk-fire that glows behind him.

Standing hurriedly and stumbling in the face of the growing fire, Veronica eyes the rising trails of smoke that lick at the ceiling – and the smoke detector that rests there.

"Guys, I think-"

Almost immediately the fire alarm begins wailing, loud and piercing. The two struggling on the floor look up at the shrieking alarm just in time to be doused by the room's subsequently-activated sprinklers, which still work for some amazing reason that they won't question for the time being. Water sprays down from the sprinklers, slowly soaking them, their clothing, and anything within a certain radius. Luckily for them, the fire is a part of that radius, and it's steadily dwindled down to smaller flames, and then eventually to nothing at all.

In the wake of the fire, a charred-beyond-repair desk and containment unit is left behind, along with a slightly blackened terminal and UV lamp. Arcade silently hopes that the terminal will still be functional, but pushes his own concerns to the back of his mind when he hears the elevator ding in the other room.

"The fire alarm has been activated on this floor," a metallic voice recites from the foyer. "Please remain calm and evacuate the floor."

Arcade carefully – yet quickly – removes himself from Cass, whose face is beet red with anger. She stands up almost too fast with a growl, but ignores him in favor of listening to the voice. They leave the guest room to warily pad out into the foyer and find a Securitron waiting at the door of the elevator.

"The fire alarm has been activated on this floor," the Securitron repeats. "Please remain calm and evacuate the floor."

"I, uh," Arcade starts, sparing a glance at the wet, smoking room, "I think it's been taken care of."

"Please remain calm and evacuate the floor."

The three look at each other in confusion, until Veronica shrugs and steps into the elevator, clutching her sleeve. Arcade sighs and follows her, whistling for Rex, who comes bounding over without a care in the world and with his ball gripped between his teeth. They look expectantly at Cass.

"I don' like him," she says, glaring at the robot. Arcade rolls his eyes.

"This isn't Victor, Cass," he tells her patiently. "They won't leave us alone until we go, though."

She mumbles unintelligibly under her breath, but listens and stumbles into the elevator car with them. The metal doors close slowly, and then they're heading down, presumably to the casino floor.

In another random moment of clarity, Cass glances around the car with a frown.

"Where're Boone and the orb?" she asks.

"They left a couple of hours ago," Veronica says, not without some amount of envy tingeing her voice. She really should have gone with them, wherever they went.

"Where the hell does he keep going," Cass grumbles, although she quickly realizes that she doesn't really care as soon as the words leave her mouth.

The elevator hits its destination with a rough jerk, and the doors open again to reveal that they are indeed on the main floor of the casino. When they all step out, they turn to the Securitron expectantly, but it only stares back at them before the doors close again and it's gone.

"Well, that was odd," Veronica comments, carefully gripping her sleeve. Arcade hums distractedly, turning towards Cass with crossed arms.

"What the fuck were you thinking?" he asks angrily. He then scoffs and throws his arms up in the air. "Who am I kidding, you clearly weren't thinking at all!"

"I was thinkin' that I didn' want to die!" Cass yells, skipping past any confrontational build-up. The alcohol in her system is enough build-up for her, coloring her face red and making her fingers twitch in violent anticipation. "No thanks to you!"

"That doesn't mean you can just torch the room!" he shouts back, waving his arms at her. "Besides, I was trying to tell you that I don't think-"

"Maybe if you had a better plan-"

"Guys-," Veronica starts gently, touching each of their arms only for them to shake her off and ignore her.

"Well, maybe if you weren't such a drunk-"

"Hey," Cass growls, waving a finger of warning in his face as they slowly gravitate closer to each other, "You shut your fucking mouth."

"Why, because you know it's true?" Arcade shoots back bitterly. Normally he isn't one for altercations, but he is more than pissed off with the entire situation. "You know that your drinking nearly burned down the only place we can really call home?"

Cass snatches him by the collar of his shirt and raises her fist, surprised when she sees Arcade do the same to her. She snarls. "You motherfucker -"

"What the hell is going on here?"

They freeze, only seconds away from trading fists, and gape in the direction of the sudden, unexpected voice. From the darkened entrance to the casino emerge three figures; Boone, ED-E, and the Courier.

At the bewildered expression on the Courier's face, Arcade's grip on Cass' collar quickly loosens and he backs away. He lowers his head with an odd sense of shame, like he's been caught doing something he shouldn't be doing.

"You're, uh," Arcade stutters, mouth gaping like a fish's for a moment as he collects his thoughts. "You're home early."

"They're doing wonders with medicine these days," the Courier muses as she comes closer, looking over her soaking friends with their disheveled appearances and slightly blackened clothes.

"Gannon's bein' a dick," Cass accuses, much to Arcade's chagrin. He glares at her, but chooses to say nothing.

"They're both being dicks," Veronica corrects, still fiddling with her sleeve. She grips an object inside and slowly manages to coax it out.

The Courier's confused frown melts when she sees the rat. "Who's this?"

"Eliza," Veronica tells her with a grin. "Arcade's current test subject, my new friend."

The Courier blinks. "What in the world did I miss?" she asks with a small, wavering laugh. She looks to the other two for explanation, but they only shrug. Arcade isn't even sure where to begin, let alone explaining that the rat is still technically a total danger to them on the off-chance that the spores are contagious (even though he's still certain that they aren't). He doesn't even know how to broach the subject that the Courier is going to find a charred, smoking mess in the suite when she goes up.

What a great 'Welcome Home From Your Concussion' present, he thinks.

One of the Securitrons in the large room jerks and makes an odd buzzing noise, and then its screen is changing with various flickers and fuzzes. It goes from the default face to that of a familiar cowboy before it rolls up to them.

"Good to see ya again, partner!" Victor chirps in his lazy drawl. "I hate to be a bother, but the boss would like to speak to ya right quick. Best to not keep him waiting!"

"Oh," the Courier mumbles, slightly disappointed at being summoned so soon after her return. She touches the white bandages around her forehead. "Yeah, yeah, sure. I'll go right now."

She reaches to press the call button, but Victor is quick to beat her to it. She thanks him quietly and waits for the elevator to show up.

Arcade bites his lip as he watches her, unsure of whether or not he should wait to tell her about the state that the guest room of the suite is in. He doesn't think he can adequately explain the hows and whys of the whole situation in 30 seconds, but he thinks that maybe he should give her some sort of crash-course warning before she goes back.

He doesn't get a chance to decide. When the elevator comes back to the ground floor, and she steps inside, she gives them a smile and a small wave.

Right as the doors are closing, Cass shouts, "We burned down the suite!"

"You what?" is all that the Courier is able to yell in complete shock, before the doors are closed on her.

Boone stares openly at the three of them, taking in their soaked appearances with less confusion and far more amusement than the Courier had. He raises a brow in a silent question. Arcade sighs.

"Small fire," he explains. "The Securitrons made us come down here."

"That doesn't explain how it happened."

"Cass is drunk," Veronica states as she settles Eliza back into her sleeve and jerks a thumb at the irritated caravanner, as though that's all the explanation required.

"Hey! I was bored," Cass says, opening her arms wide in defense. "I've spent too long just sitting up there, it's not my fault!"

Boone only nods slowly, thoughtfully. "So why didn't you leave?"

The three turn to him fully with matching frowns. Arcade blinks.

"Why didn't we…," he trails off, before something clicks in his head. He remembers all the times in the evenings when Boone had just disappeared into the elevator, and how none of them had bothered to question him as he'd left. Arcade purses his lips. "Is that what you did?"

"Yeah," Boone says with a shrug, like it's the simplest, most obvious thing in the world. In a way, it is, and it makes Arcade wonder why he'd never really considered it as an option. "I went to go visit her. Got some air. You guys could have easily done the same."

There's a moment of silence as they all realize that yes, they very well could have easily done the same. Veronica shoots Arcade a curious frown.

"Why didn't we do that, Arcade?"

Arcade can do no more than shrug in response.

A heavy sigh filters through the speakers of the giant monitor, much like that of a weary parent scolding an oblivious toddler.

"Do I even want to know what your little friends did that caused the fire alarm to be triggered?"

The Courier stands before the giant screen with House's face plastered on it and seems to seriously consider the question. Eventually, she simply shrugs and gives him a small, apologetic, smile, despite the fact that she herself still doesn't know what exactly happened.

"What can I say?" she replies with a laugh, followed by a sigh of her own. "Six days cramped up together without me gave them a little bit of the ol' cabin fever."

A/N: Thank you so much for reading!