Chapter Text
Take heart in time of sorrow,
Though you face death’s door.
The candle flickers before it dies,
And wounded lions roar.
- Shmuel Hanagid
They were planned to go back home the day after the bombs fell. Home, away from Boston, away from Massachusetts, and away from the sense of displacement that it would give Claudia.
Home, nestled alongside some blink-and-miss-it road off of one of the many canyons cutting through the Rocky Mountains. Where her dogs (Watcher, Roo, Dixie, Bee, Lieutenant, Ellie , she forces her mind to wrap around the names) are waiting for her and Nate and now Shaun.
“You can’t just be a forest dwelling hermit for the rest of your life, you know,” Nate would always tease her.
“Why not?” she’d reply, “That’s how I met you, isn’t it?” Nate would then roll his eyes, that gentle smile on his face, before he would wrap an arm around her shoulders and place a kiss to the top of her head.
Sitting, now, on the chilled floor while looking up into the window of the cryopod in front of her, she finds it difficult to attach the memories she has to the scene before her. Can’t seem to make the connection in her mind that the thing (“Person!” the noise in her head screams, “He was a person!” ) is the same one in these recollections of a man whose laughter rang with such a honey-sweet cadence, who would drink coffee with way too much sugar, who was so excited to be a father, and who had a habit of humming when he worked with his hands or when the silence got to be too much.
The silence was all consuming now. And Nate was in no position to be filling it.
“I’m not giving you Shaun!”
Regardless of how corny Claudia thought the comparison was, it doesn’t change the fact that it felt as if she was watching the entire thing happen in slow motion.
I’ve never heard him raise his voice like that , she remembers thinking. And then the shot rang out.
The back of Nate’s head is in bits, frozen to the back of the cryopod. Frozen streams of congealed blood draw stark lines down his face from his nose and from the bullet hole in his temple.
Claudia should probably stop looking, but she quite honestly doesn’t know what to do otherwise. She doesn’t know how long she’s been sitting there, but her hip aches something awful and her feet have fallen asleep. The frost that covered her has long been melted and she now sits in a puddle.
The silence of the vault burrows into her bones, makes a home in her rib cage that makes it hard to take a full breath. Even the buzzing in her head has nothing to say.
Claudia’s face is numb and she knows it’s not from the cryostasis.
Nate is dead, she reminds herself, Shaun is gone. You are alone. They took your baby. Nate can’t help you.
She watches herself rise to her feet, the snapping of her joints seem as loud as the bomb was as they ring out into the deadened room. She looks around her for the first time since she woke up, taking in too much and nothing at all. The red light is what catches her attention.
Status: Deceased
Status: Deceased
Status: Deceased
Status: Deceased
Deceased
Deceased
deceased
Deceaseddeceased
Deceased
Deceaseddeceaseddeceaseddeceaseddeceaseddeceaseddeceaseddeceaseddeceaseddeceaseddeceaseddeceased
deceaseddeceaseddeceaseddeceased
deceaseddeceaseddeceaseddeceased
Claudia turns back to the mausoleum behind her. She’s second guessing if it was a good idea to look through the terminal or not.
Nate is dead. Shaun is gone. You are alone. They took your baby. Nate can’t help you.
Her sight is trained in front of her as she leaves the room. She feels the cold from the corpses around her follow on the way out.
The vault looks different from when they first got there, she supposes. Then again, she wasn’t really in the mindset to be critiquing the interior decorating of a post-nuclear vault. As it is now, the metal walls and pipes are rusted, the air is stagnant with dust and lack of use, and red alarm lights illuminate the hallways in front of her.
Claudia tries to be as quiet as possible. Just because she was the only one to wake up in the vault doesn’t mean she’s the only one roaming the vault.
The first room she comes across seems to be the commissary. There is little to be found but a police baton. She takes it, doubting that she’s going to be of any use with it. A room that holds bunks but no bodies to put in them is where she tries to find any evidence of people. Little but degraded knick-knacks are found shoved in random, forgotten corners of the room, until she finds a bag. It’s a small backpack that smells of mildew and the outermost fabric flakes off if she scrapes it with her nail, but it leaves her better off than she was.
The gun in the Overseer’s office makes her skin crawl when she picks it up. She leaves it tucked in the belt of her vault suit and stashes the bullets in her bag.
By the time she finds the pip-boy and forces her leadened limbs to operate the vault door controls, she’s floating. Her mind is full of cotton that screeches against each other when she tries to have a single thought about anything that’s going on. Her body feels as if it will start unraveling into space. The pack hugging her back, the pip-boy clutching to her arm, and the cold weight of the gun against her hip are the only sensations she can feel through the murky soup that now makes up her consciousness.
Claudia doesn’t know that she’s made it to the elevator until it jolts awake and begins its ascension. She can barely make out the screeching of the elevator’s rusted machinery over the cacophony in her head.
When she looks up, she sees the opening of the platform break apart as the lift brings her closer. The light of the sun feels like stakes in her eyes when they meet, which is why it takes a moment for her to sight to come back to her.
What little air she is able to take in is ripped from her the moment she looks out into the remnants of the world.
The world is shrouded in a haze. Color has been seeped out of it all. It smells of rust and decay. Remains of those she can recall working the vault litter the ground around her and Claudia still can’t feel warmth.
The first coherent thought that hits her, hits her so suddenly that she’s taken aback by its presence.
I’m the only one left .
And with that thought brings about a smothering, choking, devouring sense of utter dread. She can feel it fill her from her feet up, the loneliness that comes with such an idea permeating her entire being with a primal fear. The next thought that she can translate winds her as much as the first.
Shaun is out there in that.
Claudia falls to her knees. She looks out to the empty wilderness behind her and the only thing that keeps her company is the wind.
Nate is dead. Shaun is gone. You are alone. They took your baby. Nate can’t help you.
Fear is washed away by a more tangible feeling, one that Claudia holds onto as tightly as she can. It brings feeling back into her limbs and throws the cotton out of her head. Standing to her feet again, Claudia curates the emotion until there is no difference between her and it.
Turning and taking her first steps into the wasteland, she is held together by only one thing: rage.
There had been whisperings of Institute operations to the north-west for years now. But all that’s out there are a nasty case of bloatflies, a Mr. Handy that never really goes out beyond its usual perimeters, and a bunch of pre-war vault-tec equipment out in the boonies. When the rumors had been at its height, the Railroad starting putting the area on their radar. They had set up a couple bugs in and around the area just in case they could get any sort of idea of what the Institute was trying to do next so they wouldn’t be taken by surprise.
Which is why, when some of the recent readings had been picking up remote electronic interference and major underground movement, the head honcho sent Deacon to check it all out.
Now, Deacon knows that the moment you don’t expect something to happen is exactly when it’s going to happen, but he can’t help but think that maybe those back at the nest are just holding onto every little thing that may (unlikely) or may not (likely) be something to do with the Institute. After the whole Switchboard fiasco, resources are thin if not nonexistent and Deacon isn’t really jiving with the whole ‘go hike out to the other side of the Commonwealth because one of Tinker Tom’s toys says so’ plan.
And yet, here he is, stationed on a snug little hill at an old Railroad watch site that overlooks a good majority of the Commonwealth. He sits on some rinky-dink chair that’s held together by rust and hope with his rifle secure across his lap.
He got there a few hours earlier when the sun was still tucked behind the horizon, and the only noteworthy things that he has seen within those hours were a distant molerat trip into its own burrow with an ungraceful squeak and the bark of a tree that looks like a frowning face if he tilts his head and squints his eyes. Other than that, there had been nothing but radio silence and certainly no Institute happenings in the area.
But there is something in his gut that tells him not to pack it in and write it off as a false alarm just yet. His gut instinct hasn’t led him to make too catastrophic of decisions so far, so it’s pretty much the one thing he trusts most in this world. And right now, it’s telling him to hold out a little longer. Whether that’s just him holding out hope that this isn’t just a major waste of time is an idea that is put straight to the back of his mind as soon as a sound rumbles out from the locked up vault entrance.
He places the stock of his rifle against his shoulder, eye glued to the sight. A god awful screeching announces to the whole Commonwealth that the once-dead vault has resurrected. Deacon holds his breath, anticipating a bunch of Institute goonies to come flooding out at any moment. What actually emerges is less dramatic but decidedly more captivating.
Her head is placed right in his crosshairs and he watches this shiny, fresh-outta-the-box vault dweller get her first taste of the Wastes and all its glory.
Yep, take it all in.
Deacon has had his share of encounters with vaults and their residents and it never fails to bring him a dark glimmer of amusement to see them experience the Wasteland firsthand.
But there’s something… off about this one. Disregarding the fact that Vault 111 has been considered a dead zone for forever, the way that she just stands there with a blank expression, looking around with marble-like eyes makes Deacon think if she’s not actually just a newly deployed synth. Then she falls to the ground. He holds his breath as she looks around again and he swears that she makes direct eye contact with him. But she must not have noticed him as she gets back onto steady feet and walks away from the vault.
Well, Deacon muses, This should be interesting.