Maybe I should have chosen the caravan for my next meeting, they were the time sensitive ones after all. Still, they would be gone tomorrow, and for now, I would still be here.

Thus my next trip was to the former DiPietro house. If I remembered correctly, he was among the corpses in cryogenic sarcophagi in the vault. An insurance actuary by trade and a high strung little fellow by nature, he'd been gaining weight in the months leading up to the war. A stress eater I assumed, not a good thing to be when you spent your days calculating the odds of death and destruction. He used to trail people at barbeques, telling them their odds of choking to death, or death by heart disease, or my personal favorite, the likelihood of the grill blowing up and killing Nate.

It was obvious that Rebecca had been hard at work restoring the place, almost all of the holes had been patched, pieces of metal welded into place told of Codsworth's work. The windows had been boarded up and they'd managed to get the door back in place. All in all, it wasn't in bad shape when all things were considered.

This was where the family we'd pulled out of Walden Pond a few days ago, or two days actually. It was hard to believe that it had been less than a week since Mikhail and I had come out of the vault for the first time. Felt like a lifetime ago. Still, focus on the moment. I stepped up to the door and rapped twice with my knuckles.

"One second," A woman's voice, Rebecca, came through the door. A second later the door opened and I got my first real look at the woman we'd rescued from raiders. She was about my height, with brown hair pulled up into a messy ponytail. The strangest thing about her was that she was wearing a vault suit, and it was unzipped almost to her navel. "Oh, hi."

"Uh, hi," God, she is hot, and very much flaunting it. "Can I come in?"

"Oh sure." She stepped out of the way, letting me inside. "The lady in the hill pays us a visit, to what do we owe the honor."

I surveyed the interior, she had been just as busy on the inside as on the outside. She'd dragged a couch and a couple of chairs from the other houses, and she'd torn down the barricade that was here when we were clearing out the bugs. The table and chairs from the barricade were arranged in the classic pattern. The entire thing resembled my old house, a mocking attempt at replicating the old world. "Just checking in, I haven't had time since…" I wasn't sure how to put it, I didn't usually speak to the people I pulled out of hot zones, "the operation."

Thankfully, she wasn't offended, smiled in fact. "Is that what you guys call it?" She shut the door behind us. "I like it, very medical, like excising a tumor."

There was a series of hacking coughs coming from one of the rooms. Rebecca looked at me, apology all over her face. "Just give me one minute."

I shook my head, "No problem, my son had horrible colic for the first year."

She smiled in sympathy and rushed off to deal with the sick child. I'd say it was the boy by the sound of it. I found one of the ancient easy chairs and tentatively took a seat. Amazing how well these things had weathered the centuries.

I felt like the reminder of Shaun should have been painful, but it wasn't, or maybe that emptiness was the pain. Losing a son wasn't a kind of grief that I was familiar with, friend yes, colleagues certainly, even a love, but a son was new to me. It was a new flavor of pain I didn't know, so I didn't know if I was feeling it or not.

Studying the room, a long formed habit, I picked out a few more details. On the coffee table was a copy of one of the old home décor magazines, this one called Picket Fences. That explained where she had gotten the layout from. On the counter sat a hot plate, attached to a fission battery. Tireless as he was, Sturges was stretched thin, a lot of projects were on the table and he couldn't have time for all of them, the electric grid being a big one that had been shuffled to the bottom of the stack. I'd have to press gang the Longs into service, even Murphy could probably handle some of the lighter stuff. More likely I'd have Mikhail do it, he needed to be seen as the authority after all.

Another, more urgent thing I noticed was what sat atop the hot plate, a pot containing a boiling liquid that smelled absolutely divine. I say urgent because my stomach decided to make itself known, growling like a wounded dog ready to bite, reminding me I hadn't eaten since before the operation. I'd have to remember to grab a bite at some point

"Sorry about that, Rina has a horrible case of the flu." Rebecca came back into the room, wiping her hands on her pants. "Probably picked it up from that time stuck in the water under the pond." A dark look crossed her face, "Those fuckers got off too easy, I should have skinned them alive." Then she seemed to remember she had company, "Sorry."

I leaned back in the chair, "If it's any consolation, the last one was pissing himself in fear as he ran away. You might still get the chance."

The grin she responded with reminded me of some nature documentaries I'd seen, where a group of wolves decided to attack a bear cub, and then mama showed up and made them regret it. I always enjoyed watching nature take its course. "You do strike a hell of a figure in that outfit. You should let me borrow it sometime."

I chuckled, shaking my head, "Tailor made for me I'm afraid, not in your size."

She went to stir the pot. "So, what's the mysterious lady of the hill's story?"

One of my eyebrows went up, that was the second time she'd called me that. "Is that really what people are calling me?"

She shrugged, "Just me so far, I've been trying to spread it around, but the neighbors just aren't buying it."

"They're an interesting bunch." Best to keep neutral for now.

That earned me a laugh, "Marcy's a bitch, Jun is catatonic, and Murphy's a drug addict." Realizing she might want to keep it neutral to, she backtracked. "I mean, don't get me wrong, Jun was helpful with fixing up and Murphy is nice, but…" She set down the spoon she was stirring with and decided that if she was digging herself a hole, she didn't want to dig any deeper. "You know, maybe all that shit is still getting to me."

I tried to look congenial, "If it helps, we're on the same page." Then my curiosity sparked, "Don't take this the wrong way, but where did you learn the word catatonic?"

She gave me a quizzical glance, "I used to help Doctor Sun at the Mega Surgery Center back in Diamond City. Why?"

"No reason." I really needed to learn a more subtle way to ask that question.

"Trying to figure out how stupid the bombs made us?" How did she…? "Codsworth mentioned you and the big guy were from before the war, didn't say how you guys are still alive though."

I inhaled sharply through my nose, Codsworth and I were going to have a chat about information control. Then again, I hadn't exactly been keeping it a secret either. "Cryogenics, they froze us, we were only defrosted a couple of days ago."

That threw her for the usual loop, I was getting used to the reaction. "So you guys were popsicles for 200 years. Where's everybody else?"

I knew what she meant, but I delayed anyway. "What do you mean?"

"I'm assuming they didn't just freeze you two, I don't know much about the life before the bombs, but freezing people seems like something you'd want to do in bulk." Damn, I usually like perceptive people, but this wasn't something I really wanted to talk about.

"They're dead, someone shut down life support for everyone but Mikhail and I. I'd assume they were the same people who shot my husband, kidnapped my son, and then put me back under for I don't know how long." If I was going to tell it, might as well tell it all.

That was the first time I seemed to leave her speechless, "oh."

For lack of anything else to say, "yeah."

There was a silence between us that lasted for the time it took her to rifle through the belongings she had stashed in the cabinets of the counter. When she reemerged, she was holding two glasses and a bottle of wine. "I know people's condolences only irritate me, and I'm assuming the same for you, so instead, daydrinking."

That actually made me laugh, "You have a sick kid in bed and soup boiling on the stove, and I've got to meet with the caravan. Neither of us can afford to be drunk right now."

She came back to the couch and set the glasses on the coffee table, filling each. "We're just down the hall from Rina, The soup still has a half an hour before its done, and that caravan will be there all night. Besides that, a few glasses of wine won't even give me a buzz, unless you're a lightweight."

There was something very likable about this woman, and she had a point, "fine," and I punctuated it with a long gulp. I've had good wine, I've had the best wine in the pre-war world. This was not good wine, but it contained alcohol, and it did its job.

The gauntlet had been thrown down, and Rebecca was happy to pick it up. She shotgunned the glass of wine and poured herself another. "So tell me, what did you do in the old days?" The she held up her hand, "Wait, don't tell me, you sold make up."

I laughed and shook my head. "Yeah, you got me. I'm an expert in all things powder and foundation."

Rebecca smirked triumphantly, "I am a master of observation." She took a sip of her wine, the theatrics of the drinking were done. "But seriously, what did you do? Unless knife fighting and glowing bodysuits were peak of fashion back then, I'm pretty sure you were something special."

Special, that was one way to describe it, I guess. Like a lot of things, I wasn't sure how to explain it to someone who hadn't lived in the world I had. It's like trying to explain the inner workings of a fiber optic cable to a central African tribe that had never even seen a telephone. "I was an intelligence officer."

The blank look confirmed my suspicions, she had no idea what I was talking about. "I was a kind of spy, I guess you could say. My job was to find out what the enemy, usually the Chinese, was planning. Other times I had to deal with terrorists, people who wanted to make trouble, hurt people, blow things up, because of what they believed. In general, my job was to deal with problems for the United States, hopefully before they could become problems."

She soaked it all in as I spoke, after I finished, she nodded, seeming to understand. "So kind of like what I read about once. This caravan from the Capitol Wasteland was up and he had a little red book with a guy and weird writing on the cover, he let me keep it as a gift, it talked about how to hide and make bombs, and eavesdrop, and how to drug people. All sorts of stuff like that."

Little red book… "The Chinese Special Operations Manual, they were always trying to sneak those things in to help their people train up the Fifth Column," catching myself on the terminology, "some of the terrorists I mentioned, those things were all over the place in DC, every raid on Fifth Columnists would turn up one or two, never really saw them around Boston though."

"I guess, I haven't seen another one since." She swished the ine around in her glass, "I wish I still had it, it was in the house when they burned it." She snorted, "House, it was barely more than a shack of rusted metal and a couple of two by fours. I never even wanted to leave Diamond City."

"So why did you?" I felt like I could guess, but I didn't want to be insulting.

"Oh, it was all Mark's idea, his grandfather had a homestead outside of Quincy, and he used to visit, and he thought it would be better for the kids to grow up away from all the Diamond City bullshit with the drugs and backroom politics." She rolled her eyes and exhaled through her nose.

"And the real reason was?" I was prodding as gently as I could.

She closed her eyes, "He was never really comfortable with my job, he told me he was okay with it when we got married, but he never really was." I was about to ask what she did, but she answered before I could ask. "I guess I can't totally blame him, being the wife of a prostitute, no matter how well it pays."

That was a surprise, "There a thriving trade in Diamond City? I'd expect that to be more of a Goodneighbor thing from what I've been told."

"Only if you want something cheap until the doctor takes his cut. If you want quality, and have the caps for it, you go to the Red Light." There was more than a hint of pride in her voice.

There must be some rule of reality that brothels always be associated with some kind of red lights, even two hundred years after a nuclear war. "So what led you to that line of work?"

She shook her head, a question she was apparently too used to answering. "I don't get why everyone always thinks there's a story behind it. I grew up in Diamond City, had a perfectly nice childhood, daddy was security, mom was an assistant in the Science Center. I worked at the inn for a while, then I realized I could make 1200 caps a week on my back to the 400 on my feet waitressing for half the work and a lot more fun. So I told Vadim I was quitting and went to work for Madam Theodora. My parents were fine with it, they were just happy that I was safe and provided for."

Well, I suppose standards change after the apocalypse, drop the cultural taboo and well paid prostitute falls in the same career class as doctors and merchants in the eyes of parents. Still, I had to ask the obvious question. "So how did you and Mark meet?"

She took another drink and read between the lines of my question. "He wasn't a client if that's what your asking, he was a caravan guard when we met. After we got married, daddy set him up with a job in security. I think that was part of the problem, a lot of the guards were clients and I don't think he could really handle the knowledge that a lot of his friends were sleeping with his wife. I think that's the reason he wanted to move out here so bad after the kids were born," She paused, this clearly wasn't a comfortable topic. "The way he looked at his friends and the kids, like he was comparing them, looking for similarities. I think he thought James and Marina might not have been his."

Not even waiting for a response, her nose flared and she snapped at me. "They are his."

I put up my hands defensively, "I believe you."

She took a deep breath and gave me a look of contrition, "I'm sorry, since what happened, I've been trying to focus on the good times, but all of the arguments Mark and I had keep playing through my mind."

I really hoped that Marina was asleep, her mother had to get this stuff out of her system, but those kids already had enough to deal with. "Don't worry about it, I know how you feel. Nathan and I fought constantly, for mostly the same reasons."

That was enough to swing her mind back to curiosity. "Being an intelligence officer involve having sex with your husband's friends too?"

She was only half joking. "No," I stopped, remembering my first assignment. "Not with your husband's friends at least." I took another drink of wine, Emma would tell me it was a delaying motion. "Nate and I had very separate views on where our lives were supposed to go. I was happy in my apartment in the city, he was the one who wanted to move out here. I was happy with my career, he wanted me to get out of intelligence, go and actually use my law degree for real rather than as a cover."

Actually, what he wanted was for me to quit working entirely to stay home and raise Shaun, but that idea went away when I didn't come home from the office for a week and a half and refused to speak to him. "He wanted the picket fence life with PTA meetings and neighborhood block parties, I wasn't even into my thirties yet, I had at least another fifteen years worth of field work before I'd have to come in from the cold. He thought the career was too dangerous for me with a son on the way. I didn't fit into the idyllic little life he had planned out."

And that was why we never worked, why he and I never shared what Ming and I had, he wasn't in love with me, he was in love with his idea of me, his dream of what we could become. He never realized that it was just that, a dream. "We fought over the move, we fought over my career, we fought over everything."

I put my glass down, the wine seemed even more bitter than before. Rebecca did the same and laid her hand over mine. She met my gaze and an understanding passed between us. Both of our marriages had been less than ideal, both of our husbands were dead, and now we were both asking the same questions. What could have been, were all those little fights worth it, would it have even lasted?

We each had different answers to those questions, and in the end we both knew it all came down to the same thing. None of it mattered, Mark or Nathan, her husband or mind, both were dead, no amount of questioning was going to change that fact. And now we both had to find our ways of moving on.

After what seemed like an eternity, a young nasally voice interrupted us. "Mom?"

Her daughter's voice jerked her out of whatever kind of moment we had been having, "Shit." Then in a louder voice, "Be right there, honey." She looked at the pot boiling on the hot plate, then looked back at me. "Would you mind…"

I waved a hand dismissively, "Go deal with your daughter I've got it."

With a thankful smile, she dashed off to deal with Marina. I stood up and went to check the soup. Grabbing the nearby ladle, I dipped it in the boiling liquid and pulled up a small sample, blowing on it to cool, I took a taste and considered before coming to the obvious culinary conclusion.

"Hmm, could use some salt."

….

So what do you guys think of Rebecca? I'm introducing a whole lot of new characters these days.

Random question, anyone want a non-explicit sex scene between these two. It won't affect the story in the long term, I've already got Madison's love interest worked out, the idea for the scene just popped into my head while I was writing this and I just thought, why not?

I could go either way, so I leave it up to you guys. Give me some Yay or Nay advice on this.

Big thanks to Valnarian, he sent me a PM with his thoughts on the story. If you guys want to do that, you're more than welcome to. Reviews, PMs, whatever, I'm always happy to talk about Fallout, my stories, the global refugee crisis, anything really. As I've said before, Nothing makes my day quite like hearing from you guys.

On a related note, my muse has dragged me over to Vegas finally. I just couldn't resist her temptations any longer. I've written a few chapters of an M rated FNV story and I'm debating posting them.

I didn't get much interest for them last time, but now that I wrote them, I figured I'd check again.

Okay, R&R people.