She walks for nearly two weeks.

In the beginning, it can only be called running. She runs forty miles or so in a day and a half. There's mostly numbness at first, only the briefest trickles of relief and terror breaking through.

She runs along the shores of Lake Mead, as far away from the lights of New Vegas as she possibly can. Where her fitness begins to fail her, the thought of anyone finding her carries her through. After that, her fury that she has to run at all.

She hates herself for having been drawn into another one of the NCR's games. They'd once made her complicit in something too filthy to ever be cleansed, a crime that once again has no name. They'd come back to demand that she play their hero anyways. How dare they scorn her methods now?

Her memory of the Remnants flying off to the East moments after the battle often surfaces involuntarily, and with it the remembered pain of abandonment. She's endangered one of the most genuinely decent and compassionate people she's ever met in her life, and that knowledge feeds the part of her mind that thinks she ought to just stop.

She walks anyways. ED-E comes with her, packed before the battle and able to carry enough supplies that she's not totally convinced that she's going to die out in the desert alone somewhere. She trusts ED-E, knows that he's entirely loyal to her now that Ulysses is just another body in her hazy memories of the Divide.

She can appreciate that she'd at least had the foresight to know that she'd be running just as soon as the dust settled enough for people to start pointing fingers. She can be honest with herself in this way, that she's always intended to live through this.

She walks mostly from dusk until midmorning, trying to seek shelter and stay still during the most oppressive heat. ED-E guards her as she rests. She follows the roads through desert and valley, briefly rejoining the 15. It isn't until she's well into Utah that she begins to feel reasonably confident in her own ability to avoid danger when she's actually inclined to.

Finally, she walks along the waters of the Virgin river once again.

She's definitely not numb anymore. She's so many things that it's hard to keep track from one moment to the next.

She finds him in the same cave she's regretted leaving every day for the past two years. It's almost surreal seeing him again. Everything around her is so familiar when she stops to take it in.

Everything happening in the outside world had felt so important. Benny, Ulysses, her place in the battle against the Legion. She'd been so foolish, so easily convinced of her own importance. She's exhausted, wants desperately to get this part right but she doesn't think she can anymore.

She's also nauseated with hope that she might still be wanted here.

There are tears running down her face. She's not really sure when that started.

"You came back to us," he says. She feels something safe and good at the cautious way he sets his gun down on his desk and steps away from it without coming any closer, at the welcoming and gentle tone of his voice. "Are you alright?"

She nods silently, wiping her face off with a dusty sleeve and unlatching the Mohave Express messenger bag she thinks she's done carrying now. One way or another, she will not choose to leave this valley again.

She tosses Edward's mark and that pretentious fucking pin she'd ripped off his tunic onto the ground before Joshua's feet.

She stands at the end of it all.

He holds out a gloved hand and welcomes her home.