"Codsworth? What's wrong?" ask Lara.

Alex handed Shaun to Lara and gestured for her to follow him into the living room. On the television was a solemn looking news anchor read from a sheet of paper.

"Followed by...yes followed by flashes. Blinding flashes. Sounds of explosions...We're...we're trying to get confirmation...but we seem to have lost contact with our affiliate stations...we do have...coming in...confirmed reports. I repeat confirmed reports of nuclear detonations in New York and Pennsylvania. My god."

The tv shut off and a shocked silence filled the room, the only sound in the room was the whirring of Codsworth's engine.

"Oh my god...Alex...oh my god"

Outside sirens started to go off, getting louder and louder and over the speakers a prerecorded message played letting everyone know that this was not a drill.

"We need to get to the vault now!" ordered Alex grabbing hold of his wife who still held onto their son. He pulled open the door to see pandemonium, their neighbors who acted so refined pushed, and shoved, clawed and kicked to get passed people they'd been calling friends only a few moments ago. Alex lifted Lara up into his arms and took off full tilt down the road towards the vault, all the while reassuring his family and himself that they'd be okay, that everything would be okay, that his friends from the old days would be able to handle it and not let things get worse. The run was short, especially with his enhanced muscles pumping as hard as they could to get his family to safety. There was a horde of families crowded around the gate that marked the entrance to the vault, amongst them was the Vault-Tec representative and from the looks of the conversation he was having with the military police at the gate things weren't going his way. He yelled something in frustration and stomped off passed Alex and his family as they ran to talk to the MP in charge.

"We're on the list, Captain Alexander Morgan and my family, let us in!" Alex practically commanded the guard.

"You're on the list sir, follow me," said the MP as he took off in a jog along a path that led to the top of Sanctuary Hill. He stopped at the edge of a giant circular platform and gestured towards it. "Get on and don't move we'll lower it in a second."

"We...we made it...we're gonna be fine hun," Alex said between breaths as he put down his wife. He hadn't meant to carry her the whole way, she was an independent woman and normally he'd respect that, but with what was going on he had held onto her to reassure himself, more than to reassure her, that everything would be okay.

"We will be, your friends they'll fix things just like you guys always used too. They won't let anything happen to us," now it was Lara's turn to reassure her husband, "don't lose hope, even when we have nothing we always have hope."

But Alex wasn't fully listening to her, his focus was solely on three small objects in the distance, too far away for a normal human to see. Two of the shapes were moving at incredible speed towards the third shape which was in a downward descent aimed in the direction of Boston, a missile. After a second, he figured out what, or rather who, the two shapes were. Two of his former teammates, Garth and Liala, twin aliens from a planet destroyed in a war with another planet. They fled to Earth and gained incredible powers due to the radiation coming from the Sun. As he watched one of the shapes looked like it collided with the other, which went flying off in a perpendicular path to the missile, but he knew what really happened. Garth, most likely, had pushed Liala away from danger probably because he was worried that they wouldn't be able to survive the blast if the missile went off. The twins were near impervious to most things except for the same thing that gave them their powers, radiation. Too much radiation was actually harmful to the twins. As Alex continued to watch his friend fly toward the missile he knew he wasn't going to make it in time to stop it before it detonated a few hundred meters above the ground. Alex had trained and fought alongside Garth long enough to know what his limits were. Surviving a nuclear blast wasn't something he could walk away from. The seconds raced by and Alex felt the elevator beneath him start to descend but he didn't take his eyes off his friend, racing to save everyone's lives and for a brief second Alex had hope, hope that his friend would somehow disarm the missile or find a way to minimize the damage. But in an bright, blinding instant his hope was destroyed, and he assumed so was his friend.

"Everybody get down!" Alex exclaimed throwing his body over his wife like a shield. Screams erupted from everyone's throats, Shaun was crying while Lara comforted him despite being terrified herself. There was a loud slamming sound, then darkness and seconds later the sound of whooshing wind signifying the concussion passing overhead. Down and down they went until they came to a stop in front of a metal walkway leading through a giant, gear-shaped door. One by one they were ushered off the platform and up the stairs onto the metal walkway where they were greeted by a scientist.

"Hello, I know you've just been through a great ordeal but if you'll just follow our instructions we'll get you settled into your new home, Vault 111," explained the scientist. Alex led his wife and child through the entrance and further into the vault. They were each handed a Vault 111 jumpsuit and were told to follow a Vault-Tec security guard down a long hallway into a large chamber. Along the walls for the room were 10 pods all connected to various pipes and wires making strange noises.

"A doctor will come by shortly to vaccinate you and make sure to get rid of any residual radiation you may have picked up from the blast," the guard explained. After a brief wait the same scientist that had welcomed them all into the vault came by with an assistant holding needles and bags marked RadAway. One by one Alex, Lara and Shaun were all inoculated and given a reassuring nod from the scientist and his assistant.

"Lara, are you okay? Is Shaun okay?"

"Yes, we're okay, we're okay but what about you Mr. Toughguy how are you holding up? I noticed you staring passed me while we were waiting for the elevator to descend. What were you looking at?" His Lara, always more concerned about others before herself, it's one of the many things he loved about her.

"The twins, Gar and Lia, they were trying to stop the missile before it detonated. I watched Gar push Lia away which lets me know things were serious, and I watched him..." he couldn't finish, Gar was one of his closest friends, practically a brother. When Alex was still apart of the team, Garth and him had always seen eye to eye. The others had called them the moral compass of the group, always looking out for everyone before themselves, doing things at times that seemed impossible even by their standards simply because someone needed them too.

"Oh hun, isn't there anyway that he could've survived?"

"I want to believe there is but, with that much radiation, there's no way."

"It'll be okay, like I was saying to you earlier, we can't lost hope," Lara kissed his forehead and Shaun who'd been quiet since getting into the vault chimed in with a cute little giggle. "See, even little Shaun has hope."

"That's because he's a better man than me already," replied Alex but when he looked at Shaun's smiling faces he couldn't help but feel more cheerful than he should've felt given the circumstances.

When the scientist had finished giving everyone their shots he walked to the end of the room where he entered a command into a control terminal. A few whirs and clicks later all the lids on the pods lifted open revealing a cold, leather interior that wasn't very inviting.

"One final detoxification before we can gather you into the mess hall and begin our tour of the facility," said the scientist.

Alex and Lara were led to pods at the end of the hall and as they walked passed the other pods Alex got a closer look at them. They looked familiar, he'd seen them once before at the West Tek facility where he had been experimented on. For the life of him he couldn't remember exactly what they had been used for, but it gave him an uncomfortable feeling.

Lara noticed his look of frustration, "Don't worry, we're safe now. I know it's not in your nature but try and relax, you're almost thirty now and you don't want more stress lines than you've already got."

Alex looked her with amusement, "Your sense of humor is one of the reasons I married you, you know?"

"I should hope so, my sense of humor is fantastic just like everything else about me," she joked.

"I love you."

"Really? I never would've guessed," she pulled him in close and kissed him, "Now tell your son that you love him and get done with your chemical shower so we can go take another shower of our own."

"Yes ma'am," he leaned down to be close to his son, "You're father loves you very much, and no matter what happens daddy will always protect you." Shaun's two little hands reached up and gripped over Alex's face while he giggled with delight. Alex kissed his son on the forehead and then his wife before turning around and stepping into his pod. Despite the pleasantries that had occurred only a few seconds ago he couldn't shake that seed of doubt that something about these pods was wrong. As the lid of his pod began to close itself automatically, the temperature started dropping rapidly. That's when he remembered what he'd seen these pods used for before, cryostorage for organic matter.

The door slammed shut, the temperature dropped even further but he could see his wife stepping into her pod with Shaun. He had to warn her. He slammed against the door and the glass but they were too strong even for his enhanced strength. He shouted and screamed but it was already too late. By the time Lara noticed his frantic movements the door of her pod had already closed and without his increased endurance, her body succumbed to the cold faster than his. As ice crystals formed across the glass his strength left him and his last thought before the cold took him was of his family. Then darkness.