THE BRIGHT SIDE
By: SneakAttack29

Disclaimer: I don't own Fallout 4. All rights go to their respective peoples-I only own my OCs and the subplot that's going to be swirling around.

Author's Note: Heya! I'm starting a new fanfic. Why? Lockdown has driven me insane, and Fallout 4 has been the balm to that. Who knew that would lead me to starting yet another project? Whoever said grad school makes you smart was very wrong, but here we are.

So this is going to be an eventual Deacon/F!SS because I fell into Deacon Hell, however the F!SS is NOT Nora. She is an OC. There are two survivors of Vault 111. I got the idea starting a new playthrough when I noticed that there's a cryopod at the end of the row right across from the terminal in the room you wake up in that's empty. Made me think of what if there was someone to occupy that pod? Then this happened.

Aaaanyway, I hope you enjoy this first chapter. I have no idea when the second chapter will be done and I make no promises on how often this is gonna end up being updated. My ADHD combined with being in a very writing-intensive program mean most of the writing ability I can muster has to go towards my dissertation, but I will be writing when I can for my own sanity. Rest assured. This has a 2,800 word outline, it's getting done one way or another.

Anyway, enjoy!

CHAPTER ONE: Devastation

"I know that in life there will be sickness, devastation, disappointments, heartache—it's a given. What's not a given is the way you choose to get through it all. If you look hard enough, you can always find the bright side."

-Rashida Jones

It should have been an ordinary day. For all accounts, it started that way, a crisp autumnal morning in a quiet, picturesque Massachusetts neighborhood. She'd been up at six from nightmares, hazy things she can't recall after waking beyond a lingering dreg of anxiety, but that's never been too out of the ordinary. No cause for concern consumed her as she sipped coffee over quick pre-packaged pancakes and the morning's newspaper aside from impending babysitting duties and how to juggle them with the pile of ungraded essays on the coffee table. All in all, that October morn left her content for the first time in a long while.

Even Nora saw it as she opened the door in response to her cautious knocking, green eyes sparkling upon seeing her usually reserved neighbor almost skipping and jolly. Nate ruffled her hair affectionately and called her "bunny", acting the older sibling despite her having a solid 13 years on him and his wife, but she couldn't help the joy. Something about the day felt good. Like it held the secrets for the beginning of the rest of her life, cliché as that risks sounding. She truly believed it.

Naïve little idiot, she believed it.

"Failure in cryogenic array." Far away, distant, and faded, an electronic intonation drawls alongside an alarm. She can't really hear it over the agony across her chest, down her arms, over her ribs. Rhythmic, painful pressure. Something forces her lungs to inhale. Exhale. More pressure.

What does she remember? Pain is familiar, but not physical. Anguish at the monstrous fireball so many miles out but still large both physically and in its implications. "Confirmed detonations in New York and Pennsylvania" is what Nate and Nora's TV said.

That's right, she survived the end of the world.

She thinks of a small mountain-held farm hundreds of miles away, and wonders idly if it survived, too. That also hurts.

"—sabeth! Elisabeth, c'mon, wake up dammit!" Another voice, not robotic but low and gravelly with frantic urgency. Familiar. Nate? She remembers now.

She was meant to watch Shaun that night but forgot what time, so she ran down the street to check instead of bother with a phone call two-doors down and risk waking a fussy infant with a ringing phone. It happened in the midst of a good-natured joke with Nora. Nuclear detonations. Air raid sirens, running to the Vault with her neighbors. Seeing the explosion just before being lowered.

The end of the world.

She fuzzily recalls stepping into what a shady Vault-Tec doctor (too goddamn happy) called a decontamination chamber, and then…

Nothing.

Consciousness comes a little clearer. Pitter-patter of dripping water, screeching alarms, frigid air, and the stench of something utterly foul she can't place. She fights to pry her aching eyes open with a soul-deep groan. The floor presses into her back, digging into a hip as if offended at its presence. Someone is shaking her. Cropped brown hair and broad shoulders almost too wide for the cobalt vault suit. In any other situation, less painful perhaps, she would tease him mercilessly for it. "Nate?"

Those too-vast shoulders—soldier's shoulders—slump. It takes her haywire and groggy brain a few sluggish seconds to realize that his posture slackens in relief. "Thank god." She blinks. God is out of place, Nate's not religious, not even to casually blaspheme with the rest of them. That's Nora. Where's Nora? Shaun? There's a distinct lack of infant crying. Too much alarm, not enough accompanying baby.

Somewhere in her head, that thought makes sense.

"What…?" Even just a single word slurs on her tongue, limp and weak like her arms as she tries to raise herself up. And the pain. So much pain. Nate's hand keeps her down with a gentleness out of place on an ox of a man like himself, a tenderness he used with his wife and son and her once she weaseled into the small family's life. The sister I never had; he would tell her. It meant—means—more than she cares to admit.

"Don't, Eli," Nate hushes. He would be quieter, but it's clear he can't soften his voice any more or else he risks the alarm and scratchy robot voice droning on about system failures drowning him out. Cryogenic array is a phrase she tries to commit to memory because something tells her it's important even though it doesn't sound remotely good. "I-I almost thought I didn't get you out in time. Rest a minute, I think we're safe as we can be right now."

His voice shakes—and Nathaniel Sullivan's voice never shakes. She doesn't try to rise again, but her gaze, so brown it's almost black, does sharpen to a laser focus. Pale grey eyes are just a tad too sparkly in the flickering fluorescent lighting, bouncing off of his face just the wrong way, reflecting a meager bit differently than light ought to. Crying, she realizes like a punch to her already tender (for some reason) gut. Nate has been crying.

She recalls a fleeting momentary thought from seconds ago. Where's Nora? No. Where's Shaun? Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck—

But she doesn't need to ask, and perhaps Nate was counting on her intuition, her perception. Her eyes flick to the decontamination pod—yeah, decontamination pod her ass—diagonal from the one she had been inhabiting. The singular plexiglass panel is tiny, and her angle isn't very good. But there is enough and she can see the occupant, a woman who had lived at the end of the cul-de-sac whose name, along with her husband's, she'd never remembered (why had she never remembered?). What she sees is slumped, pale and blue in one and far too still, eerily grave-like. Dead.

Fuck, fuck, fuck, goddammit, no, fuck.

The steady drip, drip, drip echoes in a room that is truly tiny with all of the equipment crowding it but for all its implications feels suddenly cavernous. One pod down the row she can see past Nate's shoulder is propped open to mirror her own. That had been his. The one across from it, Nora's, is sealed, but Elisabeth knows it is not so simple as that. It never is. Her neighbor's face, his tears, tell her otherwise.

Why can it never be simple?

She looks back to Nate, back to his face that is wrong but does him the service of not mentioning the moisture now freely tracking down his stubbly jaw. "What happened?" A simple two words she wishes she doesn't have to ask and Nate clearly doesn't want to answer. But she needs to know, and he also is aware of this. There are puzzle pieces missing she can't gather without him giving them to her.

"I," he chokes. She pretends not to notice this, too. "I don't know. God, Eli, I don't know. They froze us. Everyone else is dead. Nora..." He cuts himself off, and she maybe not understands in the empathetic sense, but she can logic why. This isn't easy for her to hear. She can't, doesn't want to, imagine having to put it into words.

Again, she doesn't want to ask. Gods does she not want to ask. But she does anyway and tries to be as gentle as her shot-to-hell post-frozen nap croaking (decontamination pod her fucking ass) allows. "Shaun?"

"Taken." If she is expecting any answer in particular, it certainly isn't that. "Someone…someone came in, a man and I think a woman in a hazmat suit. Opened Nor's pod and…and. She wouldn't give them Shaun. Eli, he shot her."

Elisabeth nods, digesting (can anyone even digest something like this, though?). She takes a few moments to find the words, in part because she doesn't think there are any and also because it's clear Nate needs to regain what little composure he can feasibly muster. She doesn't need her psychology degree to know that while everything's gone to shit, this is still delicate. It's not a descriptor she ever fathomed she'd think in reference to Nate, but here she is.

Another nod, less shaky, more final. "Okay. Okay, so it's us, intruders, and we gotta' find Shaun. You said they froze us? How long?" He takes a shaky inhale. She doesn't blame him as she struggles to sit propped against the cryogenic pod (definitely not decontamination, the lying liars) that, if what Nate implied is correct, was almost her tomb.

She pauses, then mentally shrugs. Not the most morbid thing she's ever thought.

"Intruders are gone. I don't know how long, not for sure. It's been a while though. I scouted a bit while you were out, back to the front door." It's now that she notes the gun clipped to his Vault-Tec issue belt, a 10mm she hazards, and the PipBoy at his wrist, another one on the floor next to him and both suspiciously dusty. You're slacking, Kardon. "Found roaches the size of small dogs."

"…you're kidding."

He shakes his head, face all grim lines and tear tracks. "Nope. Sadly, there are giant irradiated roaches. Point is, that didn't happen overnight." Once he's sure she's settled and able to hold herself in a sitting position with minimal support against the pod, he hands her the other PipBoy. "I haven't opened the door yet, but I have a feeling… Well, these might come in handy." Elisabeth takes it with distaste, buckling it on her left arm and feeling the probes and sensors pressing uncomfortably into her flesh through her own frigid vault suit, the monitor bulky and annoying. She used a PipBoy one time, what feels like a lifetime ago—and probably is several times over now, come to think of it. Hadn't liked it then, and she finds the same feeling of distaste bubbling up in her throat and behind her grimace while the miniature computer boots up.

Fiddling with the dials, she doesn't find much of interest outside of vitals readings once it comes online. Her pulse is sluggish, blood pressure a bit low, but that's to be expected after taking an over-glorified freeze-dried ice bath, right?

That made sense in her head, so she's sticking with it.

Eventually, in the semi-quiet of the cryogenics room where Nate has shuffled to sit next to her against the cryo pod to allow himself a moment of shell-shocked and dazed respite, she finds a page with an innocuous readout of numbers and letters on the bottom.

Oct. 23, 2287.

She blinks, running a thumb over the corner of the screen atop grainy neon symbols thinking the grime and dust is clearly making her see things. She even smacks the side, as it must be a glitch. But the numbers remain, stark and daunting and filling her with icy realization that has nothing to do with the fact she's still thawing.

"Nate…" He lazily blinks at her, and she motions wordlessly to the PipBoy. Well, hers now she supposes.

It's been 210 years, who knows if the rules of ownership still apply to anything?

"…Fuck."

That single word sums everything up quite nicely.

It's a lazy day, he thinks, fiddling with a piece of chalk simply for want of something to do. Surely, with the sun beating down on his makeshift outpost, a languid breeze rare for the irradiated wasteland that is the Commonwealth, and not a mutated Yao Guai in sight, torpid is about the only appropriate, if fanciful and outdated, moniker. Wryly, Deacon (just Deacon) muses that it's a shame no one speaks like that anymore. Well, except for him, but knowledge is his job, and knowing ten different ways to say "danger" in one language usually helps with that. Or so he claims.

His guilty pastime of rooting through centuries-old rubble for whatever scraps of literature the Wasteland can provide is survival, not an indulgence, thank you very much.

A way down the hill upon which he is perched lays the broken remnants of an old pre-War neighborhood he thinks (knows, who's he kidding?) was called Sanctuary Hills once upon a time. Home to a Mr. Handy that's surprisingly gung-ho about protecting his dilapidated turf from radroaches and not much else, he's never found substantial enough reason to go ransacking the place. Some ghosts ought to just stay dead. A bit to the left, however, in rusted ruins and ramshackle rubble lurks what he has been scrutinizing with perhaps too much intensity for the past two weeks—Vault 111. It's not specifically Des' orders that keep him here, but, well, it's not exactly like the woman (his boss, he reminds himself) is scolding him for this preoccupation. His other work is getting done, and he's more of a phantom around the Switchboard in the deadest of times, anyway. He won't be missed, though that won't stop him from goading Glory about it not because the synth tank with an unhealthy minigun obsession actually misses him, but because it annoys her and is amusing.

Subtle prodding, arm's length or five, casual snark—it's old hat by now, familiar, a bit comforting, and, more importantly, safe. Safe as anything can get in the Wastes, anyway and a young kid years ago, way before Deacon existed, learned the hard way that he'll take what he can get, thanks.

Still, this unattached and solitary business is boring, and he's not shy to admit that much. Then again, he's never liked stakeouts regardless. There isn't a choice though; he tried getting into the ancient vault two weeks ago, but the aged mechanisms aboveground to call the elevator (he doesn't think he's seen a vault with an elevator before, curiously) are shot, and he doesn't want to risk the rusted gears making too much noise. Last thing he needs is a contingent of Raiders or, hell, lingering Institute spies to hear his meddling and come running. Deacon is a lot of things, but suicidal is not one of them.

So, he watches, and he waits, going the old-fashioned route despite how dull it tends to be when the target in question is an abandoned pre-War relic that hasn't been tampered with since the bombs dropped. Well, hasn't been tampered with as far as anyone knows for certain, but the rumors he's heard sprinkled around the Commonwealth would say otherwise. Everyone back at HQ thinks it's a long shot. And normally, he'd be right there with them. Chasing ghosts to fix their boogeyman issue, unsure if the ghosts can even do that, reads stupidly akin to fighting fire with fire. But maybe he's the only one who's read enough crumbling pages to remember what a controlled burn is.

Probably not, but it sounds poetic enough that he'll keep the thought.

It's another hour of waiting, peering occasionally through binoculars lifted over his sunglasses and tossing some scraps to the stray dog that's taken to meandering up to him every so often from the old gas station down the road, before something finally happens. He doesn't register the rumbling at first as coming from the Vault, not until the shrieking of old mechanisms and shrill alarms he has to think can't possibly be necessary. But once he does, he can't shake the odd disconnect, giddiness that he may have been right and anxiety because of so many ways he can still be wrong. Wide-eyed vault dweller or Institute scientist who slipped in somehow in the spare few hours a night where he wasn't paying attention? Impossible, he thinks of the jammed elevator controls and the deafening screech it's making now.

Then again, not more than 60 years ago, the Commonwealth didn't think synthetic people were possible, yet the Institute managed it.

He's not sure what exactly he's expecting to see on that platform once it reaches the top again. In a way, the two figures aren't too out of the ordinary. Cobalt vault suits too vibrant for the dull green and desolate brown of the Wasteland are expected, the figures encased within also vivacious in a way that just draws attention. Healthy in a world where there isn't really such a thing anymore, at least not strictly.

What he isn't expecting is how haggard they look. One is a hulking man of impressive stature and width, solid muscle clear even from this distance through shades and binoculars. Dark-ish hair, probably brown, eyes an indiscernible color but Deacon thinks they're light. He appears for all intents and purposes as if he holds this broken world upon his shoulders and can't quite manage the weight.

Next to him contrasting starkly is a very small woman, barely clearing the man's shoulder. Black hair that glints with something he can't make out in the irradiated sunlight, her face looking lost like a lamb but back standing somehow straighter than her companion. She places a gentle hand on the man's arm, familiar, almost familial though they don't look related (what does the face-changer know, though?). The tall pile of muscles raises his other hand that is enclosed in something Deacon thinks must be a PipBoy to drag it down his face. He mutters something to his companion, and she murmurs back, but the Railroad agent is too far removed to even begin hearing. Which just this once suits him just fine.

He flips the chalk up from where he set it down to grab his binoculars. Though no longer magnified, he still peers at the Vault platform, the now small figures lingering for another bare moment just to take in the desolation before they leave down the path and into Sanctuary Hills almost with recognition in their gaits. Deacon wants in that vault, but he's not stupid enough to try his snooping now. No, instead, the spy carefully etches out a railsign (his favorite if he's honest for once in his goddamned life) on his outpost, gathers his measly things, and begins his trek back to the Switchboard. He can come back for the vault and its leftover secrets again later when the duo is far out of earshot. For now, though…

He has a report to give, gloating to do, and preparations to make. For the first time in years, Deacon thinks he feel something akin to hope.

Final Words: Deacon is harder to write than I thought he was gonna be, goddamn. Sneaky characters will be the death of me.

I still love him. He, Hancock, and Nick are tied as my favorite characters in the whole game. Fight me (please don't I'm an academic, I will break).

Whelp, that's all I got for right now. R&R, I guess? (Or don't, I ain't forcing you into anything).

Thanks!
~Sneak