Author's note: I wrote this in honor of the Lone Wanderer, because she/he gets put through way too much. I almost feel bad for making them jump off Tenpenny Tower multiple times. Almost. And for saving the world. I kind of do feel bad about that, even if it is just a video game.

I kind of wrote this after reading AliBlack's Pulowski Preservation Shelter, so if you see any similarities between the two, then you can feel good knowing that you made the right connection. And you should also read that story.

Disclaimer: Fallout and other related things are owned by Todd Howard and other related people. All hail the awesome Todd Howard.

Story down there.

I am going to die.

Like everyone else, really. The only ones who escape death in the wasteland, at least for a long time, are the lucky ones, the cautious ones.

I am unlucky. I am careless. I am going to die.

This was not entirely unexpected. In fact, it was expectations that brought me here. Not my expectations. My father's expectations. And even those were more for him than for me, because I was not invited into this wasteland to save it. I was not asked to be a hero.

I am a hero. But then, I am a lot of things.

A woman. A daughter. A human. A savior.

Abandoned.

Alone.

That's what they call me. A lone wanderer. But I am not alone. I do not wander.

I know exactly where I am going now. I am going to my grave.

I am going to die.

And I am not always alone. There is always a new problem to welcome me with violent enthusiasm that more often than not ends with me in pieces, mentally and physically. Danger is always ready to join my by now perilous journeys. Difficulty accompanies my every move.

Safety and peace would rather pass me by.

I am going to die, playing this game of chance that is life. But I knew that from the beginning, when I first chose to play.

My entire life has been in jeopardy. It might have started with when I decided that I would play protector to a land of strangers and monsters that both had the same amount of danger in them.

And there were so many monsters, everyone was a monster, everyone. There were the monsters with green skin, the monsters with shells, with claws, with sticks for smashing and sticks for slicing, with guns, always with guns. Always with weapons. Always with a hate for my existence. Always wanting me dead.

And then there were the monsters with words, with promises and threats and truths and lies. Wielding demands instead of guns, they were the ones that hurt more.

Because there were so many of them. Never there to give, always to want and take, to send me away so I could bring and they could receive.

And now there is still no one to help. Still to want, and need, and crave because they always want more, always more. And there is not enough that I can give except for myself, and I've used up so much of me on them that there isn't hardly any more of me for them to take. I don't know if there ever will be enough to give.

I am going to die. And there is nobody to give to me for once.

It might have all started when I left the vault behind. I could have stayed, if I really wished to. But I had to go, had to go find my father. And besides, I wanted to see more than just what there was in the stupid, stupid, perfect little vault.

The vault with it's ugly grey walls and fluorescent lights, and so many tunnels but never one that lead out.

And that damnable Overseer. I wish…I wish Amata would have just woken up and realized how horrible, how unfair he was. I wish I could've just grabbed her shoulders and shook her and told her "hey, look at what he's done to us! Look at how he's ruined our life!"

But she wouldn't have listened. She never listened. We were just two people brought together by common experiences, but sometimes it felt like so much more. Sometimes I felt like she knew me.

Sometimes I felt like we were one in the same, and I always wanted her to be happy, I always wanted us to be happy.

And I wanted it to just be us, no Overseer to watch us, and control us like we were his puppets. It felt, sometimes, like we were even less than that, because he never used us for anything other than to feel like he had power.

I wanted him dead, but I didn't kill him for Amata's sake. I wanted us to be happy, but I knew she wasn't ready to be.

Maybe I was just another monster then. I always wanted more, until I took up all that was to be offered.

Just look at where I am, where that brought me. I am going to die.

Maybe it started with when I was born. I wasn't supposed to, I disrupted the fate of my father, my mother, Project Purity and, ultimately, the whole world.

Now I just have to feel horrible, to shame myself, because I was not wanted here anyway. I was the beginning, the mistake that sparked this whole mess.

It all started with me.

And now, I am just so tired of all this. I'm so tired of all the fighting and death and needs. I never once caught my second wind, just fell into a new kind of exhaustion and fatigue. I don't think that anybody ever stopped to think of just what this was doing to me. Never asked, only told. I was like some source that would never, ever run out and stop giving.

What I really need is to know who I am, and who I am not. I know that I'm the hero in this wasteland, I know that there are all the people that I love that I need to save, and I know that I am the one to do it.

I know I am not perfect, not even close, but I know that I am not a coward.

I didn't stay in the vault (had no choice) and I didn't abandon my father (needed to find him) and I never once backed down.

Because I was the hero. Because I am the hero.

Maybe I am the lone wanderer. Maybe I have just been drifting through everything to end up here, to finish off what I stopped and to give just once more.

Revelation 21:6. My mother's favorite passage, although I would never know it. I enter in the numbers 216 on the pad in the rotunda, and listen to each click bring me closer to dying, and see how Sarah is staring at me through the glass on the other side of danger with all the expectations and hope in her face that fuel me to save this godforsaken wasteland, and wish hard that I could have lived to somehow be 216, that I didn't have to die all alone because nobody is ever going to come to help me, that there was nobody that I needed to give to anymore, that I had done my best and that I was, for once, all it took.

But right now, I know exactly who I am.

I am the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end….