Disclaimer: All characters and settings belong to Bethesda.
Project Wanderer
Chapter Two: It's All Over But the Crying
This had to be a dream.
Nora stumbled down the path that she'd walked on only one hour ago. Step after step, she headed down the hill towards her home. Her legs trembled, her body shook uncontrollably. The sun was shining bright above, yet she was freezing. It didn't make sense. None of these did.
This had to be nothing but a vivid dream.
Across the creek, she saw familiar houses. The Callahan's home was where it's supposed to be. The house over there belonged to the Ables. Next to it, the Whitfields. Then, the Cofrans. All the buildings were there, yet... they were all destroyed...
This had to be a nightmare.
Nora hurried across a broken bridge – the same sturdy bridge she'd crossed not long ago, now threatened to break under her weight. The idyllic neighborhood she had called home was now a ghost town. Torn buildings, fallen lampposts, rusty mailboxes, abandon tricycles. Sanctuary Hills was dead.
Nora took a shaky breath and dug her nails into her palms. She could feel the pain.
This wasn't a nightmare.
She took a hesitant step towards her own house, too afraid to find out what it looked like. It's the place where she'd moved in while she's pregnant, where they'd brought Shaun back from the hospital, where they'd built a life, a dream upon.
Nora stopped in front of a house. Her house. Light blue panels were torn or peeled from the frame. Bright red door left ajar, hanging from a skewed frame. Through the broken windows, she could see the damages within. The couch Nate had insisted on buying was now covered with dirt and burned marks. The antique armoire she'd inherited from her mother – although still standing – was broken. The curtains she had painstakingly chosen were all gone. Her favorite rug was half-burned, half covered with moots. The globe Nate'd bought for Shaun was now lying sideways on the damaged kitchen counter, its base missing.
Nora tore her gaze from the house to stop herself from digging further. The longer she looked, the more she's convinced it wasn't the same house she'd left an hour ago. It was as if she had entered the Twilight Zone. Only that she wasn't playing a part in her favorite TV show.
This was real.
Her husband was murdered. Her son was kidnapped. And her house was destroyed.
This was all painfully real.
Then, she heard a noise. A light hum of propeller engine, accompanied by a few metallic clicks.
Nora knew this familiar sound. "...Codsworth?"
Around the corner came a Mr. Handy. He stopped in his tracks when he saw her, all three of his 'eyes' turned towards Nora. "...As I live and breathe..."
The spotless, shiny Mr. Handy was now far less polished. Grimes and dirt covered his chrome body. But Nora knew it was the same Mr. Handy that had become part of her family. "Codsworth!"
"Oh! It's... it's REALLY you!" Codsworth floated to her, sounding like he was about to cry. "Miss Nora!"
"Oh god! You're still here!"
"So good to see you again, mum! You've no idea how horrible it's been without anyone to talk to, no one to serve. Where is sir, by the way?"
Nate... The lump in her throat almost suffocated her. "...He's... he's dead..."
"Oh dear god! …But I suppose I shouldn't be too surprised, it's been two hundred years, after all."
Nora could only blink hard. "...What did you say? ...Two hundred years?"
Deacon blinked.
Carefully hidden out of sight, Deacon had heard every single word from the reunion between the woman and the Mr. Handy.
And it was a tale so crazy even he couldn't make up. Frozen for two hundred and ten years, husband murdered, baby kidnapped. If he hadn't watched her crawled out from the vault, Deacon would have called bullshit.
Still, those were just words. There's one way to find out if she was telling the truth, or this was a very elaborate lie weaved by the Institute. Leaving the woman with her robot friend, Deacon quietly sneaked out of her backyard and headed back to where it all started. Vault 111.
The vault was down right creepy. It didn't take long for Deacon to locate both cryogenic chambers. The larger one contained more than a dozen pods with frozen corpses trapped forever within. The smaller chamber housed eight, only one of them was left open, empty.
A quick check at the terminal nearby told him about the equipment malfunction that inevitably killed everyone.
Except Nora.
Either she was the luckiest (or unluckiest) woman in the Commonwealth, or there was some foul play going on. And Deacon would bet all the caps in the 'Wealth that it had nothing to do with luck. Her pod had been unlocked intentionally. By whom? He had a pretty good idea. But the question that had been bugging him was why. Why did the Institute release her?
Right across from her now-empty freezer was a pod with a man inside. One bloodstained bullet hole decorated his blue vault suit. Nate, the husband, Deacon deduced and recalled his name from the conversation he'd eavesdropped earlier. Curiosity made Deacon studied the man for a brief moment. Masculine, square jaws, strong nose. A visible scar on his cheek told Deacon the man had seen some recent battles. Perhaps a cop, or a soldier, definitely a protector.
A man in his prime, who had been murdered after his infant son had been ripped from his arms.
Deacon didn't even want to imagine how devastating the last few seconds of the poor man's life had been.
Who the hell would do something like that?
The chill within the chamber made Deacon shiver. Or perhaps it was because he's standing in the middle of a murder scene. A massacre.
"Your wife is back home with your Mr. Handy," Deacon told the frozen man within the Vault-Tec tomb. "Rest easy, pal. I'll keep an eye on her."
Holding in her shaky hands was a picture frame. Within the frame was a faded picture of a young couple, smiling. One in a beautiful white dress, the other in a sharp black suit. Nora ran a trembling finger across the photograph, gently stroking Nate's handsome face. It'd been a few years, but she remembered her wedding day as clearly as if it was only yesterday. The adorable way Nate had stuttered through his vow, or how she had almost twisted her ankle by skipping down the steps of the church wearing high heels and clumsy wedding gown. Their first dance, their cake...
Now all she had left from Nathan was this wedding photo, and his ring.
This was the only picture that had survived the bomb. Codsworth had found it and carefully preserved it, hoping against hope that one day the mister and missus would return. In the end, Nora did, but without Nate, without Shaun.
Sitting on the floor by the baby crib, Nora held the wedding ring tightly inside her fist, and pressed the picture frame onto her heart, hugging it as though she was clinging onto her husband for dear life. As the stars began to shine outside, alone in her son's room, the cruel reality finally set in. Her life was gone, her family was gone, the world she knew was gone. Everything, gone. For the first time in her adult life, Nora broke down and cried.
From a distance, Deacon heard some noise. His ears guided him through the neighbor's yard and into the backyard of the vault dweller's house. Now closer, he could hear the sound – a heartbreaking sound of a woman crying.
Noiselessly, he sneaked up closer. Staying in the shadows, through the broken window, Deacon peeked inside a room. A broken blue crib and a destroyed changing table told him this room used to belong to the missing kid. At the corner, slumping against the wall was the grieving mother – the woman who had everything had been taken from her after waking up from a two-century long nap.
The paranoid part of him told Deacon this story had yet to be verified, warning him to observe but not get involved. Yet, a tiny part of him that had been long buried saw a kindred spirit in the weirdest way. For he, too, had his whole life ripped from him overnight. Many, many years ago...
Stay away from the Pandora box, his instincts told him. Even after two decades, old wounds could still hurt like hell when provoked. Pain might subside, but the scars? They're here to stay. His never-talked-about nightmares were solid proof to that theory.
The road to recovery after a life-changing loss was a never-ending journey. Deacon knew all too well. And tonight was the first of many, many nightmare-filled nights to come for Nora. The first night was always the hardest. Ignoring his self-protective instincts for once, Deacon lingered in the shadows longer, observing – and if he could be honest to himself, guarding.
Moments later, the Mr. Handy flew into the room. The noise from the robot's engine thruster was the only sound in the entire Sanctuary for a long moment as he hovered near his mistress.
"We will go to Concord, Miss Nora. First thing tomorrow," the robot promised as he draped an old blanket over the woman's shoulders. "We will bring young Shaun back home. Don't you worry."
"...Thanks, Codsworth," the woman whispered, her voice coarse from crying. "You are all I have left."
"Hush, mum. It's so good to have you back. Welcome home."
A/N: It's fun to write two Deacon/Nora stories simultaneously, with them in different stages of the story. If you're also reading "Trust No One," this story is not a prequel to that. At least for now, I intend for them to take a different path when time comes. But who knows? Characters can and do take the steering wheel from me and take the story to whichever directions they see fit. Shepard and Kaidan have done just that. I suspect Deacon and Nora might.
Anyway, thanks for reading!
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