Author's Note: A short chapter. But I wanted to include it. And I wanted the next part to be separate.
Chapter Two
Picking Up the Pieces
Her house… her home. It's almost unrecognizable. As though in a daze, she walked through the shell of what had one been her family's loving home. Though it is still standing, most of the walls were apparently ripped open by the blast of the bomb, and fell apart over time. Rubble litters the floors. The glass windows are long gone. She flips the light switch, but of course there's no power. The fridge is busted in. The dining room chairs are all turned over. Only one isn't completely broken. By some miracle the television set is still in one piece, but of course there's no way to see if it works without any power. And she doubted there would be any programs still running. The furniture in the family room is still intact, but it's so dirty she doesn't dare sit on it. Instead she trails her hand along a dusty shelf where their family photos, set in handsome and polished frames, had once stood. She supposed it would have been too much to expect those to survive the past two-hundred years.
Two-hundred years?
It just wasn't possible. She could barely imagine it. At twenty-six years old, that was the sum of her entire life eight times over. But to her, it was as though none of that time actually existed. It seemed like mere hours had passed since her home and her family had been happy and whole. How could so much time have elapsed with her completely unaware? She knew enough about history to know that a lot could happen in two hundred years. What kind of world had she found herself in? The idea frightened her more than a little. Her only experience with this world so far was that a man had come into the vault, shot her husband, and stolen her baby. What kind of man did something like that? What kind of world allowed that kind of behavior? Taking a deep breath, she tried to remind herself that that might not be the norm. After all, there had been criminals before the war, hadn't there?
She was vaguely aware of Codsworth watching her progress throughout the house; it had been with a sense of relief that she'd found him, still trimming the hedges surrounding their home as though nothing had happened. It made her feel that maybe not everything had changed. But as she swept through her house, she knew that just wasn't true.
With her heart trembling inside her, she made her way back to the bedrooms. The first thing to draw her gaze was Shaun's crib, still bright blue and sitting in the middle of his room as though waiting for her to place him safely inside it. It brought a lump to her throat, and she quickly looked away. She wasn't ready for that. Turning to her left, she stepped into her bedroom. The door was missing, as was half the exterior wall; she could see clear down the street from where she stood.
The bed was in shambles. The mattress was gone entirely, and the frame itself had clasped to the floor. It didn't matter. She never wanted to sleep in that bed again. Turning away from it, she started opening the drawers of the dresser where she'd kept her clothes. Most of them were gone, or the fabric had rotted away. The only thing she could find to wear was a cream-colored dress made of a stiff linen; Nathan had always loved her in this dress, and just holding it in her hands bright another lump to her throat. But she had promised herself there would be no more tears until she found her son, so she swallowed her grief. Even though there was no one around, she moved into the relative privacy of the bathroom before stripping away that horrible vault suit. She sighed with relief as she felt the folds of fabric falling to her knees. It had no sleeves, but the weather hadn't yet grown cool. After some more searching, she found a worn, scuffed up pair of flats to cover her feet, and with that she took the vault suit and boots down to the river and threw the wretched things into the water.
After spending a few minutes watching the blue fabric flow downstream, she returned to her house and sat at the kitchen table, wondering what she should do next. Codsworth had suggested she search for Shaun in Concord, where there were supposedly other survivors. In her mind's eye, she remembered Concord as a quaint historical town; once she'd been to the historical museum there. She wasn't optimistic enough to think that it would be remotely the same a she remembered, but if there were other people who'd survived the war, maybe they could help her. Some kind of law enforcement perhaps, if such a thing still existed. If the world still had criminals capable of murder and kidnapping, surely there must be some kind of judicial system to balance the tables.
Comforted by this thought, she looked out the door toward the sky. It was still the middle of the day. She had plenty of time to walk the distance there.
"Well you be going now, mum?" Codsworth asked as she got to her feet.
"Yes," she said. "If there are survivors in Concord, maybe they saw who took Shaun."
"Very well, mum. I shall wait here for your return."
And humming to himself, he went outside the continue trimming the hedges.