Nate looked almost peaceful laying on a makeshift cot in Widmer's house. They'd been keeping him under on what few doses of Med-x they had, as medical supplies were scarce. The prof was confident that he'd recover but wanted to keep him under for a few more days until he was sure the wounds wouldn't become gangrenous. She told herself it was no different from the times he'd gotten injured overseas. That it was only more frightening because she was present to see the blood and damage. Nora held his hand and ran her thumb along his palm.

Yeah, the bloodstained bandages were the only reason she was freaking out. Definitely not because he wasn't in a proper medical facility. Or any of the other bullshit she'd been assailed with since waking up in the vault. If Nate didn't recover, she didn't know what she'd do. Her other hand trailed down to ruffle the fur on Dogmeat's head. The canine had been taken a shine to her for some reason, refusing to leave her side for anything.

It was comforting. Like having a piece of the old world. If she pretended hard enough it was like having one of her father's hunting hounds. All she needed was a collar. Even Codsworth greeting people and trying to repair parts of the house gave her a sense of normalcy. Why just the other day she'd caught Codsworth watering the patch where she used to grow flowers.

A perfect example.

If she thought about things for too long she wasn't sure whether to start laughing or crying. Or both. Both was good too.

"Are you sure you want to tag along?" Preston asked as he pulled up alongside her. "I understand if you need..."

"No, it's alright." she said quickly, looking up from Nate.

She was torn up about it.

Was she really going to leave?

It was necessary, she reminded herself for the dozenth time. If the situation was reversed, he'd do everything in his power to find Shaun and bring him back before she woke up. If that meant going along with Preston as he searched for other members of his organization to stop Jared's gang from kidnapping people then so be it. The more she learned about the new Commonwealth the better chance they'd have at bringing their son home.

"Its just been one thing after another for you folks, huh. A lot to adjust to."

Nora replayed her memories, the blood and death and screaming, crabs and moles and mosquitos and god knew what else. She clutched the musket they'd given her just a little tighter. Dogmeat padded softly by her side, following a scent with his nose.

"Yeah. It's—yeah," she said, before abruptly changing the subject. "So your people seemed rather unfazed about meeting two-hundred-year old vault dwellers."

It was the first thing that she'd noticed about them besides the so called psychic bleeding to death in her arms and the general stink of unwashed bodies. It was pretty damn noticeable, but then deodorant probably hadn't survived the centuries. What about soap? Maybe it was just because they'd been running from mercenaries for weeks and hadn't had a chance to clean themselves up. They'd bathed in the lake outside the neighborhood with little to no regard for the radiation.

Nora and the other survivors of 111 had gone back to the vault to use the showers with actual running water, deigning to be cagey about their reasons for doing so.

Sadly, the espresso machine in the vault cafeteria had long since stopped working, and there no coffee beans to be found, which was ( to use one of her father's sayings) a bitch and a half.

"Well you're not the first dwellers I've met," Preston said thoughtfully. "There's the folks in vault 81. Secretive bunch, real mistrustful of outsiders. Not that I blame them."

"How—how long has their vault been open?" she said slowly.

"About ten years, I'd say? I've met a few but they've never talked about what it's like in there."

Nora felt a sliver of hope creeping into her heart. Other vault dwellers. Possibly unfrozen for only a decade. It was a longshot, she knew. The data in 111 had shown that the pods were supposed to be opened after the radiation levels dropped, but with the whole mutiny it had never happened.

"Then there are the ghouls. Not all of them go feral. There's ghouls in goodneighbor that still have their wits about them."

Getting to the year 2277 the long way round. It boggled her mind. There was a chance, however slim that she might meet someone she knew. Or at least someone that remembered the way things used to be. It was hard though, trying to picture a zombie that was capable of coherent speech.

Especially after encountering her neighbors in such a condition.

"Was it better back then?" Preston asked, an unreadable look on his face. Nora shrugged.

"The armies were bigger but everyone was fighting over resources then too."

Oil and uranium were a bit different than simple food and water but in the end she supposed the struggle had the same result.

She was struggling too.

Every day she was bombarded with new information; with more reminders that the world she was gone. That only tatters remained. It was difficult to keep up with it. The only way she could was by shutting down and shutting it out. Acting like it wasn't as big of a deal as it was. Being sarcastic.

Deflecting.

"So what's the deal with the minutemen?" she wondered aloud, trying to steer the conversation away from her memories of the past. For a second or two in the museum, she'd considered making a quip about traveling backwards in time, but would any of them even know what the revolutionary war had been? God, she couldn't even joke properly with the rubes.

Preston's face brightened considerably and she hope she hadn't just opened Pandora's box. He was an earnest man; a few years younger than her if she had to guess. Though the reality was that anyone and everyone she encountered would be centuries younger than her.

She suppressed a manic grin at the thought.

"We're a volunteer militia," Preston said, stepping over a log and inspecting a pile of animal scat. "Help the people at a moment's notice. That was the idea anyway." He seemed to recognize whatever animal it had come from, and she hoped it wasn't another one of those giant lizards.

"I was a part of Colonel Hollis's company; one of the last active groups since General Becker died in '82. We were clearing out mirelurk nests and taking on raider gangs when we got the call from Quincy."

"Mirelurk," Nora interrupted. "What are those?"

"Big," Preston said with a sardonic chuckle. "Claws, hard shells. Mirelurks are fiercely territorial about their egg clutches. They generally don't bother you unless you approach them."

So that was what they called the crab monsters like the one Nate had killed outside of Sanctuary Hills. Who came up with the names? she wondered. How many generations had lived with these creatures as they were instead of how they used to be? When had civilization started to make a comeback? The questions kept mounting. When prepping for a case she liked, no needed to have all the facts, but there was so, so much that needed to be categorized and filed away.

And Preston was still talking and she hadn't been listening.

"— have been in Quincy otherwise. Sturges is the one that put the call out, well, at least after convincing the mayor—"

It felt like her eyes were in danger of glazing over. This was the sort of thing she needed to know but it was all just kind of blended together. The names, places and events were largely meaningless to her. None of it seemed at any way useful in helping her to find her son.

"The larger settlements all have their own security—" he was saying, and she finally managed to forget the insanity of missing two hundred years of history to pay attention.

The problem she'd surmised from his ramblings was that there was no unified governing body in the Commonwealth. Each community just sort of took care of their own and to hell with most everybody else. It was a rather dreary picture that he was painting. People going around in circles and never actually improving anything. Just stagnation, pure and simple.

"Two years ago. University point. Don't know what they did to piss off the Institute, but before the Quincy Massacre, that was the bloodiest thing I ever saw. Fifty-eight people dead. Not the just the men, but the women and children too. Slaughtered like animals. By the time the minutemen arrived, any functioning synths were long gone."

Nora nodded along, grimacing as she chewed her bottom lip. The Institute? Synths? Dare she ask what fresh new nightmare those things were supposed to be? She looked down. Nate would have listened better. It should be me laying on that bed, she thought bitterly. Nate was the one with military training. He'd have been able to hold a conversation with Preston and make sense of everything without feeling the urge to scream and possibly strangle the man.

"What do you think we'll find in Salem?" she asked, interrupting what sounded like the start of a long-winded diatribe about super mutants. Whatever the hell those were.

"Well, I'm hoping to persuade the Salem Volunteer Militia to send some folks to deal with Jared. They never officially joined the minutemen, but they've always cared about more than just their own community."

He was quiet for a moment, before looking back at her without being willing to meet her eyes.

"The way your husband charged in to help us, a bunch of strangers—"

Preston shook his head ruefully.

"That brand of heroism is in short supply. If we'd had a few more men like that maybe things wouldn't have gone south so quickly."

At least there were still people trying to make a difference. Who thought about the greater good. So maybe the new world wasn't a complete and utter hellish landscape like she'd been thinking. Danger didn't lurk around every corner. Just most of them. Civilization had stabilized save for the times when the various factions were trying to kill each other off. It was a fucking mess if she was being honest.

Furthermore, it irked her that nobody had figured out how to get cars running again.

"Hang on." he murmured, holding a hand up dropping to his knees, looking around cautiously. Nora followed suit, feeling apprehension mount as she brought her musket up to a firing position. Dogmeat growled low in his throat, ears flat against the back of his head as he sensed the sudden tension. Or the presence of something dangerous.

"Just a radstag," Preston said in relief, straightening up and pointing west of where they were. "Can you see it? Over by the tree line."

Its hide was almost purplish in the setting sun. There was something wrong with its profile though, something she understood when it turned before ambling away.

"I used to hunt deer with my dad." Nora was quiet for a moment, several emotions struggling for control of her face. Sadness, incredulity, grief. It was hard to pin any one of them down, but something halfway between a laugh and a sob escaped her throat as she finished her thought. "They only had one head back then." She lowered the musket and swallowed the hysterical giggle that was dancing on the tip of her tongue.

Two-headed deer. Because of course there were.

Nothing was sacred.

As she sat on the outskirts of the village, Nora noted that there wasn't even a sign to denote what it was. The buildings were few and built in a small cluster surrounding several rows of crops. Tenpines bluff. Population under two dozen according to Preston. He was talking with the man in charge while she sat by a community firepit and stared at the people farming. By rights she should have been in her element, chatting up people for information and faking enjoying the small talk.

But she couldn't. She had no frame of reference. What was small talk without baseball and grocery shopping? What, should crack a joke about making it through another day without something trying to eat her?

They seemed distrustful of her and Preston anyway.

Not that she blamed them. From what she could hear of the conversation Preston was having, Jared's gang had attacked them, killed three people and kidnapped the children. And on top of that, neither of the men they'd sent to Quincy had made it back. There was a measure of respect being afforded to Preston though, even if their body language seemed uncomfortable.

Nora's mind wandered as she watched a woman apply manure to the base of what looked to be potato plants. While she'd been trying to avoid thinking about it, Mama Murphy's weird words kept floating back to her. All that stuff about people needing help. Knowing about the vault; though obviously she'd put two and two together concerning their vault suits and Vault 81. Some ailment had to be responsible for her death as well. There were no such things as the kind of superpowers the old woman had mentioned. Psychics and unbreakable bones. Impossible.

Or at the very least, there hadn't been any humans mutated by the radiation. Well, barring the ghouls.

A grimace stole over Nora's face. Perhaps expecting the unexpected needed to become the motto by which she lived. Could she really discount anything from being possible, given what she'd seen in her short time outside of the vault? She sighed, taking off the brimmed militia hat that Sturges had given her and turning it over in her hands. What she needed to do was stop and collect herself. She still hadn't despite telling herself that that was what she needed to do several times.

Tenpines was looking like a bust.

"Got some good news and some bad news."

Nora looked up to see Garvey. The man he'd been talking to had gone back to his crops.

"They're willing to put together a posse to help assault Lexington, but not until some raiders closer to home are dealt with. The way I figure it , the old military installation not far from here serves as a scouting outpost belonging to Jared's gang."

"What makes you say that?"

Preston shrugged.

"Gut feeling. Folks here said the raiders had white face paint. We're only a few days from Lexington. Very good chance that they're Rev-heads. And only about eight? Even the two of us should be able to take them no problem."

The two of them? Against eight raiders? Maybe if all the raiders had were baseball bats and she was shooting them from behind a duck blind.

"I've never killed anyone Preston."

It was a morbid thought and one that hadn't even crossed her mind yet.

"I saw you shooting those bloatflies the other night," Preston said with a warm smile. "Aim like that is a valuable skill. I'm just saying, it'll be necessary at some point. Would get these folks on our side a whole lot quicker."

It was an honest truth, but it still made her uncomfortable. She lapsed into silence after picturing herself exploding someone's head with the laser musket, same as the flies. Could she do it if it was a matter of life or death? She'd never asked Nate about the lives he'd taken in the war. It wasn't something he liked to talk about. Maybe she should have. Perhaps her mood was evident, because Preston quickly changed the subject.

"We should be able to make it to Lynn Woods by tomorrow evening if we leave at sunrise. Pat was also saying that there's some people camped out in the old quarry, might be something worth checking out."

A quarry?

Thicket excavations. Had to be. Though it was doubtful any of the machinery was functional or that anyone was mining for granite. The shacks in Tenpines were mostly constructed of corrugated metal sheets and wooden frames. The metal was rusted to hell in many places as well. Where had they even gotten the materials? The roof of one shack was just several blankets stitched together.

She wondered if it was rude of her to be so appalled by the quality of living.

"What's Lynn Woods like?" she asked hesitantly.

It had been a municipal park before. A camping ground or two. But more importantly, unlike Tenpines it was a place she actually remembered. She could only wonder how many more of her memories would be trod upon.

"It's a small trading town. Bigger than Tenpines and better protected. Or at least it was the last time I was up here."

Nora nodded, wondering what qualified something for town status in the brave new frontier. Diamond City had been mentioned a few times since Preston's group had moved into her old neighborhood, but she still knew little about it other than that it was in Boston proper. Or at least what used to be Boston. Nora patted Dogmeat's head absentmindedly.

She hoped Nate wouldn't be too upset when he woke up and couldn't find her. He'd understand. He had to.

Merry Christmas! I had hoped to get this chapter finished a couple days ago but the holiday season caught up to me. Hope everyone's doing well.