The first time I did this, I nearly blew my head off.

Honestly, what sort of moron forgets to empty the chamber before stripping down a gun?

Me, apparently.

What can I say? It was the first time. Up until then, the only weapon I'd ever handled was a BB gun.

Now here I am, running around with laser rifles, forty-four magnums and enough grenades to excavate a new Vault.

They say that necessity is the mother of invention. It's also a good incentive to learn new skills. Like how to strip a gun without blowing your own brains out.

I'm good at it now.

I finish stripping down the ten-millimetre pistol and sit back in my chair for a moment. I've grown used to the creaking. The whole house creaks.

"House" is a bit generous, I suppose. It's little more than a metal shack. But it has four walls, a roof which only leaks a little, and plenty of space for my clutter. Said clutter is mostly tools, guns, medical supplies and junk I honestly don't know what to do with.

The "house" was a gift, and I needed somewhere to sleep besides some slightly less irradiated spot of grass. Nearly getting my nose torn off by a radroach is not something I'd care to repeat. It won't be the highlight of my memoirs, no matter what Moira says.

So yeah, I'll happily live in this "house". A place to live isn't a bad trade for disarming a nuclear bomb which happens to be in the centre of a town.

People are weird. Maybe I'm the weirdest one.

I run my hand through my hair, forgetting that my hand is stained with oil and grease as usual. Oh well. I can wash my hair later. It's not one of my redeeming features anyway, or so I tell myself.

Most of my days end up with me covered in dust, grime and occasionally blood. There doesn't seem to be much point in trying to look pretty. It's not like I'm much good at picking people up in bars anyway. Hell, I'd say I'm hopeless at it.

Give me something mechanical to work with any day. At least I don't have to practice my small talk when I'm loosening the screws on an old terminal.

I know from my scavenging that this is an N99 pistol, common, sturdy, powerful if you keep it in good condition. One of my knacks. I always had a penchant for taking things apart and putting them back together.

Back in the Vault, I was well known for tinkering. Give me a radio and I'd have it in bits in minutes, then I'd cobble it into something I hoped was better. Stanley sometimes brought old stuff round for me to tinker with, stuff he found lying around in storage. A broken telephone—that was fun to work with—an old set of circuit boards—spent an entire afternoon messing around with a soldering iron—a typewriter—oh, how Dad laughed when he came in to find me on the floor, surrounded by keys, screws and gears, a screwdriver in my hand.

"You've been busy, Sweetheart." He'd stated as he sat next to me. "What was this? And what is it going to be next?"

"A typewriter!" I piped up. I had always been squeaky as a child. I still am a little high-pitched, stuck with a prepubescent voice even at twenty. People find my voice funny—when I'm not pointing a weapon at them anyway. "And it's going to be... a typewriter! A better one!"

"Would you let me type up notes on it? Or would you prefer to do that?"

"Can we do it together?"

He put his arm around my shoulders, not caring that my jumpsuit was stained with grease. "Of course we can."

That was one of the best days of my life. We spent hours tinkering on that typewriter. Dad indulged me by asking questions, organising bits and pieces with me, even running down to maintenance to borrow tools.

I feel my eyes start to burn at the memory. I have to wipe them as they blur with fresh tears.

I hate this.

Every memory I have of Dad is made painful by one thing: he's gone. He's dead.

My Dad is dead.

I was so powerless. I had gone through so much to try to find him. I stumbled through a hostile wasteland. I got hurt. I got shot. I got stabbed. I got bitten. I got clawed. I risked my life. I killed to find him.

When I found him I thought we would be able to start again, start a new life. He even had something for me to tinker with, something which could make life out here so much better for everybody: Project Purity. Fresh, clean water for everybody. For a tinkerer like me who wanted to make a difference, it was a dream come true. And Dad and I would have worked on it together.

And then he was murdered. Right in front of me. And I couldn't do a fucking thing to save him.

I tried. God! I tried so hard!

I remember pounding on the reinforced glass as the chamber filled with radiation. The bastard Autumn had some sort of drug to save himself, but my Dad didn't.

He told me to run before he died.

I even tried to shoot my way through the glass. I fired my laser's cell into it, my pistol's magazine, I even tried to smash through it with the stock of my rifle, not even stopping when the stock snapped. I was screaming and blinded by my own tears as I was dragged away, Doctor Li yelling in my ear that Dad was dead and that we had to run.

Dad was dead, and there was nothing I could do.

My head's in my hands now. Tears are falling onto the disassembled pistol. Before I know it, I'm sobbing my heart out again, all but slamming my head into the table as I tip forwards, gasping for breath as I choke on my anguish.

He had one of them. General Autumn. He had a gun just like mine, another N99. It wasn't what killed Dad, but I can still see him pointing the damn thing at his head. It was because of him that Dad died. He might as well have pulled that trigger and taken Dad from me.

I wanted to kill him. It was the first time I had actually wanted to put a gun to somebody's head and squeeze the trigger.

But when the time came...

I remember him standing there, so certain of himself and his twisted beliefs.

He had two Enclave troopers with him. But that would not have saved him.

By then, I had killed a lot of them. I'd had a fully loaded modified plasma rifle in my hands—courtesy of a man I'd helped back in Rivet City. There had been a squad of Brotherhood Knights and Paladins with me, as well as a massive Super Mutant armed with a Gatling laser.

But even without my allies, I could have melted those bastards' heads into gooey mush and had Autumn at my mercy.

I even saw it in my head as he stood there. A shot to the knee, and then I would walk up to him, pull my pistol, and tell him that I was doing this for Dad.

And then I would blow his fucking brains all over the place. I would have emptied the clip into his smug fucking face, and kept at it until he had no fucking face.

When I did start cursing this much? Even mentally? I used to be so polite. Dad taught me manners and courtesies as soon as I could talk. Despite my tomboyish ways and fist-fights with Butch, I was known for being quite sweet when I kept my temper in check.

I remembered Dad in that moment too. I knew he was gone, but it was as if he was there with me.

What would he have felt if he had seen his little girl kill somebody like that? What would he say if the daughter he had sat and built a typewriter with had acted out of hatred?

So what did I do?

I did what Dad would have done. What he taught me to do.

I held my temper, a temper I was infamous for once, a temper which earned me a bloody nose on more than one occasion, and I told him to leave.

I told him to go and never come back.

I told him that he had already lost, and it was the truth. He had nothing left to fight for, because I had blown his base, his army and his "President" to hell.

I told him that there was no point in anybody else dying that day.

I watched him walk away. I let the gun fall from my hands.

Thank you, Dad.

Killing him would not have brought Dad back. Nothing ever would. And he would not have wanted the life-giving work he had sacrificed himself for to be tarnished with blood shed for the sake of vengeance.

He wouldn't have wanted his little girl to do that.

I should have died then and there. When the time came, I stepped into that chamber expecting it to be the last thing I ever did. I still remember falling to the floor, crawling to the controls, and collapsing when it was done.

It would have been fitting, me dying where Dad died. Finishing what he started, what he abandoned to raise me.

But death didn't come for me that day. It was never going to be that easy. I wasn't meant to see Dad or Mom again, not then, not yet.

The gun is still on the table, wet with my tears now. It's the same gun I would have killed Autumn with. It's the same one I left the Vault with, the one Amata insisted on giving me.

It was the first weapon I killed with for the first time. I can still see his face in my dreams.

The others... God, I've killed so many that I can't even remember how many there were. My Pip-Boy would tell me, but I don't want to know. The guilt would eat me alive.

Yes, some of them deserved it. That's what I tell myself. But who am I to decide that? At the end of the day, I was just luckier. I just had more bullets. I was just the better shot. Sometimes it was simply because I tinkered, and because of that my gun didn't jam.

But I was always haunted by simple questions: could those people I had killed have redeemed themselves? Were they loved? Did somebody need them?

There were times when I would look at one of my weapons and wonder if I shouldn't just end it all. If I just put the barrel against my head, under my chin, in my mouth, and gave the trigger a little squeeze, it would all end then and there.

I wouldn't have to ever wake up in the morning and find a reason to live. And I had fast been running out of reasons.

I came very close more than once. I even remember gazing down the barrels of a sawn-off shotgun I'd just pulled from the mutilated hand of a raider.

I'd just killed him and his buddies. A grenade. Messy. I'd been forced to finish one of them off. The grenade had blown his legs off, so I'd put a bullet through his head. It had seemed like the decent thing to do.

It wouldn't have been necessary if I hadn't thrown the grenade.

That sawn-off would have done the trick. But my grenade had wrecked it, and even I couldn't have fixed it.

What could I fix, really? I seemed to spend more time taking people apart than anything else. People aren't easy to fix. I'd treated my own wounds more than once, but nothing could mend my heart. All I fixed were guns, which I would use to take more lives apart.

What was the point? Why should I exist?

It was a stranger who changed my mind.

I had just returned to Megaton, intending to leave something of a will in my house with the door unlocked. Then I would walk away, walk away from Megaton, find a quiet spot, lie down, look up at the stars, draw my gun and stop the pain forever.

It had to be a gun. It had to be something I'd tinkered with. Silly as it sounds, I was too scared of the pain to use a knife, and I didn't want to overdose on chems because needles scare me. Even though I've used hundreds of stimpaks to heal my wounds, I still can't watch as the needle goes in.

Yet I could still shoot people. I could shoot myself. It would be easy and it would be quick, and I knew the gun I used would work, because I was good at fixing them.

Nobody would miss me. There was nobody left to miss me.

Well, maybe Amata would have, but it wasn't like I could return home.

I saved the Vault. I was a hero. And then I had to leave.

I saved the people of the Wasteland. But I couldn't save Dad.

I was his little girl. Mom died to bring me into the world.

And then the stranger came hurrying up to me and pressed something into my hands.

"All of us are so glad you're here. We're so grateful to you!" She beamed at me, her eyes brimming with happy tears. "You've done so much for us. I know it's not much, but I wanted you to have this. You mean so much to all of us!"

Then she had hurried away, leaving me holding a box of something, something which rattled. I never even learned her name, and I haven't seen her since.

I actually laughed when I realised what she had given me: a box of sugarbombs.

I didn't write a will that night. I just sat and slowly munched my way through the sugarbombs, smiling like an idiot as tears slid down my grubby face. They were well past their sell-by date. Two-hundred years past, but every morsel was glorious. It felt like they were filling the void in my soul as well as my stomach.

I used to love eating them back in the Vault. Dad used to joke that I'd end up with false teeth by the time I turned fifteen. Well, I did have a few more fillings than most of the other kids, so he wasn't far off.

But I was so touched by that gift of old, stale sugarbombs. There were still people out there who wanted me to live, who needed me, who cared about me.

Dad might have been gone, and Amata and the Vault might have made me persona non grata, but there were still people who I could help.

I had a reason to live. I had many reasons to live.

I wipe my eyes, a little smile on my face at the memory of those sugarbombs. Teeth and radiation be damned, maybe I'll pop down to the stores and see if anybody has another box for sale. They always make me feel better these days, and not just because of the sugar.

A stranger saved my life that day. She reminded me that I had done the same for others. She reminded me that I could continue to make a difference.

Honestly, I started fixing this old gun out of habit. These days, I prefer to spend my time wandering around Megaton, looking for stuff to fix. And the best thing is that there is always plenty to fix.

I might not be able to face Project Purity easily these days, especially with the Brotherhood bustling around, telling me to put that wrench down and let the Scribes take care of the problem, but I can fix things here easily enough, and nobody tries to stop me. Hell, they even encourage me.

Just like Dad would have done.

Somewhere out there, there is somebody who cares for you. There always will be. You will always matter to them.

I wipe my eyes again and dry them on my dirty jumpsuit. This pistol isn't going to fix itself, nor are all the other broken things around Megaton, or the rest of the Wasteland. What can I say? I'm ambitious when it comes to tinkering.

First, I'll sort this old pistol out. Then I'll head out and buy myself a nice box of sugarbombs, and maybe a cold Nuka-Cola to go with it.

Then I'll find something else to fix.

Everybody needs something to do to keep the darkness away. Everybody needs something to make them smile.

I tinker and I eat sugarbombs.

What do you do?