MACCREADY - Redemption

We were staying the night in Diamond City before we made the long, arduous trip to Sanctuary. We had just ransacked Kellogg's house and had come to the conclusion that the best way to track him would be to use a dog, and Veronica just so happened to know where we could find one. Apparently, just before she hired me, she'd run into some Raiders that this mutt had helped sniff out. With the dog on her side, she managed to take down the gang of degenerates and saved a small group of people from a miserable fate. It still baffled me how she had managed to do that with no real shooting experience, and now that I had learnt all about her real situation, I was even more baffled that she'd stopped to help anyone in the first place.

It was part of my rules for survival. Help no one but yourself. Sneak away from the fight. Don't trust a soul. If I didn't live by those rules, I might not have been alive today. I might not have been able to send caps and food back to Duncan. I couldn't bear to think of the alternative.

Still, it was good to hear that there were still some decent folk in the world. Veronica was new to this environment, she didn't realise how hostile it was out here. Lucky for her, she'd hired the right mercenary to watch her back. And, man, what an intense twenty-four hours it had been so far.

I still couldn't get my head around it - Veronica was alive before the war! She was technically over 200 years old. No wonder she'd seemed so ethereal when she'd first stepped into my corner at the Third Rail. Her skin was practically luminous with how clean it was, and her hair cascaded down to her shoulders with bounce and the gorgeous colour of fire. But her eyes, they had struck me first. So big and blue, so full of curiosity and fear. So... innocent. She hadn't lived the kind of life everyone else had. She hadn't seen the things we'd seen.

We went back to her friend's house, some mouthy reporter called Piper, who very clearly didn't trust me. I couldn't blame her – like I said, it was one of my rules. I was given a space on the floor to sleep on and had to hand over my rifle, to be stored in a locked cupboard, until we left in the morning. I complied because I was on a job and worried that if I made a fuss, I'd have my fee taken from me. Or at least, that's what I told myself. You see, ever since I learnt about Veronica's son, I was starting to change my mind about the whole agreement. I'd told her that I'd stick around until we'd found Shaun because… because I knew what it was like to worry about a child. And hell, she'd been through the ringer enough already. I knew that if I left her to hunt him down alone, she would die. Perhaps I was growing soft. Perhaps I just understood her pain.

Either way, I couldn't sleep, so I propped myself up against the shack wall and pulled out a cigarette. For a split second, as my matchstick lit up the room in an eerie but temporary glow, I saw Veronica's face from the couch where she laid. She wasn't asleep, and she was looking right at me. As quickly as I spotted her, I was back in the darkness. I let my eyes adjust to it and soon enough, I could make out her small frame across from me. She was hugging herself, her eyes now closed. I guessed it must've just been a coincidence that we both locked eyes at the same time.

Finding each other in the pitch black, a moment so fleeting it was barely a moment.

I finished my cigarette and laid back down, putting my back towards Veronica. After a while, she began crying. I didn't know what to do about it; this was kind of new territory to me. So, I just listened to her quiet sobbing and kept my eyes scrunched shut. She's just a contract, I told myself. No need to ask how she's feeling or get involved with any of that. Just because she has a pretty face… I couldn't let myself be distracted. I just had an understanding, that was all. I also knew what it was like to lose a partner. Thinking about Lucy stifled my breath and it felt like someone was planting weights on my chest. Oh, Lucy.

Veronica was right, before. If the Institute was involved with Shaun's kidnapping, this job was definitely worth more than 200 caps. So why was I still hanging around again? I thought about her dead husband and her missing son and then I thought about Lucy and Duncan, and I knew there and then why I was staying.

Redemption.