A/N: Hey there! Thanks for taking a chance on my story. It won't be a long one, maybe 5 or so chapters, so I might actually finish it this year! Haha.

So a little backstory: this story was inspired by that random, unmarked location in Fallout 4. At Chestnut Hillock Reservoir, southwest of Boston, there's a little house by the lake with a terminal inside. Reading the terminal, a man named Edwin apparently met a woman named Annika at that house years ago. She put a shotgun to his chest the first time they met, but they eventually fell in love and spent their lives together. Well, three years ago she died, and now Edwin's sad and lonely. He lost Annika's locket, the only thing he has to remember her by, in the lake when he was fishing on it. He has nothing to lose, so he goes in after it, drowning in rads, holding her locket. You can find his skeleton and her locket at the bottom of the lake.

So unbelievably sad.

Little random stories like this inspire me, and this one most of all. So this is the story of how Edwin met and fell in love with Annika.

Hope you enjoy it! Leave a review! It lets me know how I'm doing.

Thanks!

"Ed, run!"

And run he did.

With Cable's dying words echoing in his ringing ears, and the image of his grisly murder still burning fresh in his mind, Ed reeled and plunged headfirst into the dark web of trees at the edge of the parking lot. Ignoring the clawing branches that ripped at his skin and clutched at his clothes, he blindly forced his way into the forest.

Voices and gunshots and screams of fury and agony and death followed him. Someone was howling things into the night, things he could not understand, and there was a name – his name – though he couldn't be certain it was one of Cable's men or one of Absent's. Not that it mattered. Cable's men were few and caught off guard, and would all soon be dead, including Ed.

The forest was dense and old, and had you been here two hundred years ago, black as the darkest of darks. But the forest was also dead and arid, allowing small slivers of moonbeams to dance through the barren branches and reach the sandy floor. It was barely enough to see by, and just enough to turn the forest into a maze of frightening shadows and silhouettes. Towering beeches and mutated oaks stood like long-dead sentinels, surrounded by parched scrub and recesses so black they could have held almost anything.

Ed had no idea where he was going – only the overwhelming urge to flee guided his pounding feet. He stumbled over twisted roots and pointed rocks that jutted out of the uneven ground, and slammed into black tree trunks that kept springing up from nowhere. Dry and crumbling sand gave way beneath his feet, making his balance dangerous and his journey treacherous, and it felt as if the world would fall away into nothingness at any moment. The forest was entirely disorienting, a mad and desperate jumble, and so was time itself. He might have been running in circles for a lifetime and he would not have known it.

He heard men behind him again, closer this time, giving chase – to him, surely, and the others unlucky enough to be on the wrong side of it all. There was the sharp cracking of assault rifles to his right, and a sizzling laser gun somewhere just behind, and grunts and moans and the sort of wet wailing sounds men make as they die. Cable's men, and also Absent's, many of whom he'd know for years. All of them friends, for a time. All of them dead and dying now.

As he frantically ran on, images kept whirling through Ed's mind. The flickering red light of the failing drive-in sign, and Cable standing on a crate. Cable with his sniper rifle, and his stupid mohawk, and his silky words that swayed so many of them. Skit and Lefty and Johnny Mathis, his closest friends, all there with him, all huddled close and listening to Cable's pretty, empty words. And then Absent – Old Absent, with his rusty armour and rusty shotgun and rusty old eyepatch over his missing eye – Absent finding them there, Absent roaring in anger, Absent sending the rest of the gang loyal to him against Cable, against Ed and his friends. Traitors, he'd screamed. Which was true. Traitors and liars and backstabbers. All true. But even the lowliest of traitors has a reason for his crimes.

Ed. Traitor. Liar. Backstabber.

Murderer.

Swiftly and almost violently, Ed's balance was ripped from him and he slid on the dusty ground awkwardly, desperately trying to keep his footing but ultimately slamming his head against a tree trunk, crying out in pain. He gave up, letting himself crumple to the ground, giving into his blurry vision, his throbbing skull, the white-hot ache that blotted out all reason. He put a hand to his head and felt a warm, wet stickiness through his hair.

He lay there in the moonlit shadows, chest heaving, cradling his head like a child might, and if he tried hard enough, he could almost ignore the sounds of battle and murder raging on all around him.

He looked up at the stars.

They were cold and distant. Bright for the radiation clouds still plaguing the dying world. They'd shone like this last night, and all the nights before, and surely they would again tomorrow. He'd always liked the stars. Would often stare up into the sky at them, a long time ago, wishing he knew their names and stories, and wishing he was anywhere but here.

Edwin Forsythe had been many things in his short, sad, pathetic excuse of a life: poor, alone, angry, lost. Found. Beaten and broken and hurt. Lied to. Cheated on. Swindled. Traded. A chem addict. A murderer. A swindler himself. A raider. And when he thought it just about time to do something about it all, he became a traitor, a liar, a backstabber. And now he was dying.

There was a strange sort of peace in that thought. No one would know, and no one would care. The world would be a better place when he was gone. A safer place without him in it. Absent would continue to lead the Beacon Streeters to bloody, violent glory, just like he always wanted. Cable's hollow promises of justice, of a better life, of diplomatic ways of doing things would be just as lifeless and cold as he was, forever laying dead under the drive-in lights. Ed and all his friends would be forgotten, this little rebellion swept under the rug, washed away, erased. Like they never existed. One less raider in the world. The stars would still shine on.

The Wasteland was no place for justice. There was no room for hope and the naively good – only for death and crime and disparity. Maybe it always had been, even before the world ended.

The forest floor was dry and sandy against his cheek, and bits of dirt and gravel clung to it. He could taste it, sharp and gritty, on his dry tongue. He wiped the blood from his face, wincing at the raw graze on his head.

Well. If he was going to die anywhere, it might as well be here.

A sudden crunch of bone-dry twigs froze Ed right to the bone. He strained his ears and – there it was again! Footsteps, certainly. If Absent taught him anything other than where it hurt most, it was when to know if someone was sneaking up on you.

And someone was sneaking up on him.

Edwin saw the glint in the shadows a heartbeat before he heard the cry – "you fucking bastard!" – and he cast about desperately, scrambling away from the man charging out from the darkness. He had a spiked helmet and a tousled grey beard and a baseball bat high over his head. It was Cinderstick. Cinders for short.

Ed had been charged by a brahmin and a mirelurk and even a deathclaw once, but they were nothing compared to this – the pure bloodlust borne not of hunger or defence or raw animal instinct, but only of anger, human anger, and the fire that burned behind his eyes. Ed had liked Cinders before, even gave him some bullets and bummed a cigarette or two off him. Now he could hardly recognise the man.

"You bastard, Eddie!" Cinders screeched, swinging the bat down at Ed with brutal force again and again, and it was all he could do to barely scuttle away from the blows. "Thought I could trust you! Thought I could trust Skit and Lefty!"

You're stupid for trusting, Ed would have said. Instead he blabbered pathetically, heart hammering through his chest, tasting the salty sweat on his lip and the ashy spit flying from Cinder's mouth as he screamed.

"Cinders, I –"

"After everything we've been through! Everything Absent did for you!"

"Wait – !"

"You deserve to die, you fucking traitor!"

Which might have been true, and maybe Ed would have let him bash his skull in, turn it to mushy pulp like he'd seen him do before – after all, he probably deserved it – but now his body was thrashing about wildly, clawing at the barren earth, fiercely clinging to life for just a little while longer, and it was not even of his own control or desire.

Cinders caught Ed's worn boot tip with the side of his bat, making him falter and cry out. And then the bat was up in the air again, a dark and ominous thing outlined by the silver of the moon, and Cinders was right above him, and surely he would die now. Surely this was it. He held up his arm to shield himself as a last, desperate act of self-preservation but down came the bat anyways, across the centre of his forearm. There was an infinitesimal moment where nothing happened and everything was very quiet and oddly calm. It didn't last long.

It never does.

Ed heard the sickening snap and a gurgling pop long before he felt the blazing pain, so unlike anything he'd ever experience before, blossom out across his arm, stinging up into his elbow and tingling right down to his fingertips. He watched in a sick mixture of horror and fascination as his hand and forearm hung limp and dangling, like a scrawny little twig snapped halfway down. Bent at such an odd angle, such a wrong angle, his mind could not quite compute it. Strangely enough he didn't feel a thing at the fracture itself. Shock, he supposed. Shock and adrenaline.

Cinders swung the bat down again and again, connecting brutally with Edwin's shoulder and ribs, beating him like an unwanted dog. He'd had on his leather armour, stolen from the corpse of a caravan guard last year, and so he was protected a little, but the blows crippled him inward, winded him, made him blubber like a pathetic child.

Cinders didn't say anything. He only grunted with each swift impact, groaned in pure, raw ferocity. Ed tried to crawl away from his assaulter but each hit slowed him down just a little more. He caught him in the side of the head once, making Ed's teeth rattle, causing him to bite down hard on his own tongue and nearly choke on the blood gurgling at the back of his throat.

He almost laughed, in the middle of it all. Not eviscerated by a deathclaw. Not blown up by a rival gang. Not even beaten to death by a former friend with a baseball bat. No. Edwin Forsythe was going to die drowning in his own blood.

Even a gun would've been better.

A gun.

My gun.

Ed had a gun on him somewhere. He'd dropped his hunting rifle after Absent's ambush back at the drive-in, but he had a little 10mm somewhere. He scrambled to find it, ignoring the bat and the shiny bloodspatters on it as it connected with his broken, beaten body again and again and again, ceaselessly and mercilessly. It wasn't in the holster. Wasn't in his pocket. His broken, limp arm flopped around the inside of his leather jacket, and his swollen fingers clutched numbly around the smooth, cold grip.

He pulled it out, aimed it at Cinders, and shot him in the neck until the bullets ran out.

Ed's would-be murderer paused in his ruthless beating and dropped the bat to the dusty ground. The look of blunt shock was the last emotion that would ever flicker across his friend's face, and one that Edwin would never forget. He put a hand over his wound and the hot, sticky blood oozed dark from between his fingers, glinting strangely in the watery moonlight above. He tried to say something but only made a wet gurgling sound. One, maybe two heartbeats passed, and then he dropped to the ground and never got up again.

Ed let himself lay there a moment. He felt physically ill, his stomach in twisted knots and bruises, his body shaking. Not from the cold – no, it was never truly cold out here any more. Not for a hundred and fifty years. His shoulder and ribs and back were tight, throbbing, in an excruciating agony, his head was still in a starry, blurry daze, and the metallic cloying stench of blood and gun smoke plagued his nostrils, made him want to vomit. With a pathetic keening groan, he pulled himself up, almost forgetting his swollen, broken arm, and heaved what little he'd had for supper onto the dusty, sandy forest floor. He whimpered, and collapsed, and let a loud sob rip from his bruised chest. Utter despair threatened to overwhelm him.

You're Ed. Eddie Forsythe, he reminded himself. You're a murderer. A raider. A traitor. Remember who you are.

The stars shone on brightly overhead, and for just a moment, Ed could almost imagine himself as the little boy who used to stare up into the sky and wish he was somewhere and someone else.

Remember who you are.

In the distance, the sounds of fighting grew dimmer but the noises of pursuit grew closer. It would not be long, now, before someone else stumbled across him. He was broken and bloody and dazed and out of ammunition, and it might only take a good swift kick or two to end the poor man.

He needed to run. Now was not the time for self-pity or wanton memories, for crying and giving up.

He might be a raider, a traitor, a liar and a thief, but one thing he wasn't was a quitter. Edwin Forsythe didn't give up, even if he wanted to.

Now was the time to run.

He took a deep, ragged breath, one that burned his bruised ribs, and closed his eyes. Deep down inside of him there was steel. He needed to reach down, and grab it. He did. He embraced it, tasted its bitter edge, let it cease the whirlwind inside him. When he opened his eyes, he was ready.

He hauled himself to weary feet, leaning heavily against a twisted tree. Cinder's body lay twisted and bloody in the moonlight, bent in such a way that he might have been sleeping. Uncomfortably so, but sleeping nonetheless.

A shotgun blasted off not far from him, and he saw firelight flickering between the crooked trees. He hesitated for a moment, torn between running and picking over Cinder's corpse for supplies. His instinct to live and to flee overwhelmed him, and he left that place behind.

Once again, he found himself running through the dark and stilted forest.

Eddie didn't know how long he ran for. His mind was a muddled blur of red and suffering and fire, and his pursuers were hot on his heels for what might have been hours and hours. Days. Months. Years. His muscles groaned in agony, and each step was torture itself. He needed to stop, or his burning legs would collapse and boil away beneath him.

He was dimly aware of a yellow light up ahead, glowing softly through the trees. He focused on that, let it guide him, pull him, envelop his every sense entirely, and before long he burst out from the endless forest and into a wide clearing.

The moonlight reflected off the surface of a small lake, the water black and calm and deep. The yellow light he'd saw shone from the porchlight of a crooked little house, no more than a shack, really, teetering dangerously close to the shore, almost hidden in the swaying reeds around it.

Eddie's body lurched and staggered to the house, mind utterly slate-clean except for two piercing thoughts: one, that Absent's men were coming to kill him, and two, that he needed to make it to the house and hide from them.

He slogged through the muddy water, pushing aside mutated cattails and water reeds, feeling the irradiated water stinging through his jeans. He clambered up the crooked steps, dirty fingernails digging into the mouldy wood of the railings, slipping splinters in his palms. He went to open the door with his hand but found it wouldn't move, wouldn't work, wouldn't listen to him – oh, right. It was broken. So he used the other one, still holding the pistol and still covered in sticky blood, and rattled and pulled and beat on the door desperately as the voices from the trees grew closer and closer.

A dog barked from inside. Ed heard someone move in there, the sounds of boots on wood and metal in hand –

The door opened a little, spilling warm light across his aching face, and for the rest of his life, Edwin Forsythe would never forget what happened next.

The barrel of a shotgun was thrust against his chest, and when his eyes focused on who was behind it, they blinked stupidly, utterly at a loss for words.

A woman. A young woman. Not a raider or ghoul or lonely old farmer. A woman in grey sleeping clothes, with tangled brown hair and tired brown eyes and a black dog at her heel.

"Who are you? What do you want?" she hissed, glaring down at Eddie like he was a lowly piece of raider trash – she was right, of course, but she didn't need to know that.

"Ed," he wheezed, voice crackling and pitifully weak. "Ed. Edwin Forsythe. I'm –"

"You're knocking down my door at two in the morning is what you are," she growled, and her dog growled in unison. It would have been almost comical if he wasn't a hairsbreadth away from dying.

He swallowed, which was a mistake, because his throat was raw from screaming and running for so long. He lifted up his arm instead, and she blinked as well, as if suddenly noticing the deplorable state he was in.

"You're hurt," she said, lowering her shotgun a fraction as she stared at his broken, twisted arm, at the blood staining his teeth pink and caked to the side of his head, sticking his hair up in weird places and playing host to bits of dirt and twigs.

"Yeah. I need – to come in. Need to sit down. Please."

Then she noticed the empty pistol still clutched in his only working hand.

"Hey, whoa, whoa," she growled, bringing her weapon back up again. "Drop the gun."

Instead, like the idiot he was, Eddie brought the gun up closer and squinted at it, dazed and surprised he'd actually carried it this far.

"Hey! What did I just say? Put the fucking gun down!"

More gunshots and bloodcurdling screams in the trees behind them, and Ed began to panic a little. If this bitch wouldn't let him in, he was just gonna have to force his way in.

He grit his teeth and aimed the pistol at her with trembling hands.

"Please. Let me in."

"No! Drop the gun!"

"Let me in!"

"Drop it!"

"Ed!"

The voice echoed out from the trees, and the woman flit her eyes away behind him for a moment. Then she frowned. "You're running from someone, aren't you?"

No sense in lying about it. "Yeah. They're gonna – kill me. Please."

She thought about it for a moment, hesitating in the doorway, and Ed felt as if he was going to simply keel over and die. All his exhaustion, all the pain and weariness had caught up with him. His stomach churned and he very nearly vomited again, swaying uneasily on his feet.

It seemed a lifetime and a half before the woman finally made up her mind.

"Alright," she said, leaning out and grabbing Ed by the collar. She dragged him forward and into the bright lights of the house, slamming the door behind him.

He collapsed to the floor and his fatigue overwhelmed him at last. He only remembered the smell of flowers and candle wax, and the feel of the wooden floor smooth against his cheek and a wet dog nose against his broken hand, and the last thing he saw was the back of the woman, shotgun in hand, latching the front door shut with metal bolts and fastenings.

Darkness took him. He let it.