After a long, tireless stretch—everyone settled into Sanctuary.
Olivia and Codsworth were certain to help the Minutemen remnants to escort their wounded friend to safety—and now, as the end of the day drew near, everyone was resting in the house Preston selected for his friends, Mama Murphy sleeping in the back bedroom, Sturges resting as he recovered on the couch, and Olivia sitting thoughtfully on the edge of the driveway.
Once Preston was finished speaking with a dreary Sturges—he stepped outside, sauntering over to Olivia and sinking down beside her, releasing a deep cloud of breath.
"Listen, I uh…" he started, scratching his cheek and glancing over at her. "I really appreciate the help. You and your Mr. Handy showing up was a Godsend. I only wish you two came into town a few minutes earlier… then the Longs wouldn't be…"
He trailed off, clearing his throat and shaking his head, then offered her a pained smile.
"Well… anyway, thank you," Preston said. "I can't believe there are only three of us left, but… three's better than none. And we're finally safe now. Thank you."
Olivia nodded distantly, gazing straight ahead and absentmindedly watching Codsworth trim the hedges of the broken house across the way.
"Is this… is this what the whole world is now?" she mumbled, facing him and motioning loosely to the desolate Sanctuary around her. "Just… just a bunch of empty nothingness, and people killing each other?"
Preston raised his brows, glimpsing away and stroking along his chin. "Well… that depends on where you go. Some places are that… some places are civilized… and some places just haven't been brought back to life yet. Like here."
Olivia pondered on this, then blinked, surveying him up and down. "What are you? You look like a… colonial, or something…"
"I'm… the last leader standing among the Commonwealth Minutemen," Preston explained. "The rest of us dwindled away, or died out… but I've been trying to bring it back to fruition. Helping people, and connecting settlements… it could make the world a lot less like what we saw in Concord. We just haven't had enough good luck to pull it off. And now… with nearly all of us gone… I don't know how it's gonna go from here."
"Oh… well, you could still do all that. Just need more people," Olivia mumbled with a shrug. "But you guys should take some time to recover and get settled first. Work on the bigger problems later."
"Yeah… very true," Preston nodded in agreement. "Very true…"
They both fell silent, mulling over the close calls in Concord and taking a moment to cherish the serenity in Sanctuary now.
And—as the time continued to pass, and the sensation of serenity and security brought them to peace—they both eventually stood, marching off and beginning the task of fixing up the place around them.
Before Olivia knew it—she found herself cleaning and repairing nearly everything she came across, sweeping the floors of the house, setting the overturned furniture upright, nailing plywood to the open spots in the wall, and reconnecting the pipe to the broken sink in the kitchen. Preston started building in the garage—dragging large slabs of wood and metal over to the house and propping them upright in the garage's rear corner—and he began walling off the back section, creating another room outside. At Olivia's request, Codsworth whizzed off and scoured the neighborhood in search of some source of power, eventually returning with the news that an abandoned fusion generator was sitting behind one of the houses. So—using the flatbed dolly they'd brought from Concord—Olivia and Codsworth brought the generator over to the house, setting it on the lawn for future use.
Without anyone saying or deciding so, Olivia and Codsworth simply took on the task of assisting the last three Minutemen.
In fact—it carried on for days.
Olivia wandered off at the end of the first day, sleeping soundly in the house adjacent. And, in the days to follow, she continued to help the Minutemen repair their new home, occasionally greeted by a smile and a 'thank you' from one of them. Sturges was slowly recovering, periodically reaching his feet and forcing himself to make repairs in the bathroom, and Preston did his best to fix up the back bedroom for Mama Murphy, even placing a cozy kitten portrait on the wall above her bed.
After a week came and went—the creek had a water purifier on its edge, the generator was connected to the house, and the small traps around the outskirts of Sanctuary would occasionally capture molerats for them to skin, cook, and eat. A radio played softly from the corner of the now comfortable living room, and Preston and Sturges were seated on the couch, discussing their plans for later expansion.
Olivia strolled into the house and marched past them, carrying a soft blue blanket slung over her shoulder, which she'd lifted from one of the other houses and intended to give to Mama Murphy. She headed down the hall toward the back bedroom, finding Mama Murphy sitting quietly in the rolling chair by the wall, gazing out the window and looking deep in thought.
"Hey… this is better than those sheets," Olivia remarked, nodding over at her small bed, which had only been fitted with a couple layers of thin sheets until now. "It's getting colder now, so…"
"Ahh… thank you, dear," Mama Murphy replied, turning to her and flashing a smile.
Olivia tossed the blanket over the bed and spread it out best she could.
Mama Murphy observed her intently.
Just when Olivia moved to walk out of the room—she spoke again.
"You're a woman out of time," Mama Murphy uttered.
Olivia halted in the doorway, her eyes narrowing, and she turned back to the old woman, staring at her with questioning interest.
"You lived here before… didn't you?" Mama Murphy speculated, returning her look of intrigue. "First, Sanctuary… then, Concord… but not Sanctuary or Concord like we know 'em. Nooo… something's different. Your energy… it's… twisted up in history."
Olivia stared, her mouth drifting agape, feeling suddenly surprised and spotlighted. Ol' Mama Murphy seemed to know more about her than she herself could even remember.
Then, Mama Murphy pushed herself upright, standing from her chair and meandering over to her. Her eyes wandered downward, landing on the fob watch hanging from around Olivia's neck, and the old woman slowly raised a hand, gently stroking along its shiny surface.
"Messaline," Mama Murphy murmured, her eyes beginning to close, looking as if her mind was wandering far away from her. "He thought you wouldn't… oh, but you did, didn't you? Shot down… and you arose again… new… whole… and…"
Mama Murphy inhaled a deep, thoughtful breath, her eyes easing open again and landing firmly onto Olivia's.
"Regenerated," she said.
Olivia gulped, reeling slightly back and feeling a spark of urgency inside, though she wasn't sure why.
"So, so far from each other… and you still managed to reunite," Mama Murphy smiled. "You ended up a lot younger when you bounced back, didn't you? Couldn't remember a thing… so, then came a new name, and a new life, and… then… your father found you. There you were… little kid, stranded on earth… so of course he thought it'd be safe, just to raise you here… before the Great War took it all away…"
"Okay, I don't—I don't know what you're talking about," Olivia stammered, mostly truthfully.
"Oh… it's the sight, kid," Mama Murphy explained. "I can see beyond what's here and now. It's not always clear… and it's not always precise… but it's always… always true."
Olivia swallowed, glaring at her with both shock and investment. "What else do you know?"
"Ah… I'm tired, kid," Mama Murphy sighed, sinking down to the edge of the bed. "I'd be able to see a bit more… if you brought me some jet…"
Olivia squinted at her. "What's jet…?"
"No," Preston's voice joined in, as he was leaning into the room and giving Mama Murphy a stern look now. "That junk's gonna kill you."
"Oh, shush, Preston—we all gotta die someday," Mama Murphy replied. "The sight got us here, and it got us to our new friend too, now didn't it?"
The two of them began arguing back and forth, and Olivia quietly slipped out of the room, strolling down the hall and stroking along the fob watch as she did.
Later that evening—when Olivia curled up in her bed for the night, huddled up in the darkened bedroom she'd claimed for herself in the adjacent house—she lay awake for a long while, gazing deeply into the ceiling and dwelling intensely on her thoughts.
Unlike the Minutemen house, this home hadn't been worked on, still dirty and unkempt with no power, leaving her to ponder alone in the darkness, her satchel bag still sitting beside the bed where it had been all week, partly open, Codsworth hovering around somewhere in the kitchen, working to put a meal together for her despite that he couldn't use the stove, and despite that she'd told him not to bother.
Eventually, he floated into the room, his three eyes fixating on her.
"Mu'm… I'm afraid I can't whip together anything that my sensors deem safe for human consumption," Codsworth informed.
"Codsy… it's okay. I had dinner at Preston's," Olivia told him. "Don't worry about it."
"Very well… though, I feel I must tell you, I've fixed up your bedroom quite nicely," Codsworth said. "You can use your own bed now, if you like."
Olivia blinked, turning her head atop the pillow and giving him an odd look. "Whaddo you mean, my room?"
"The room across the hall, of course," Codsworth stated, a faint laugh echoing out from within his metal shell. "That was always your room… well, back in the day, it was. You've been sleeping in your father's bed all week. Have you not noticed? Haha. Always attached at the hip, you are. I'm sure you miss him."
At that, he hovered out of the room, resuming whatever tasks were keeping him busy on the other side of the house.
Olivia turned back to the ceiling, glaring at it and feeling an unsettled squirming inside, incredibly restless and fed up with having no solid answers to her own life's mysteries.
During the past week, her father's face was slowly clawing its way back into her mind—big brown eyes, a narrow sort of visage, and a brown, spiky fohawk—and the longer she dwelled in the shadow of her old neighborhood, the more familiar it all began to feel. Everything Mama Murphy said was still lingering on her mind—and, despite how insane it all sounded, it felt very much like it was correct, like it simply made sense, like she knew for certain it was true, even though she knew little to nothing about herself at all.
"I have to find him," she knew, feeling a sudden ignition of resolve.
Look in the bag…
Olivia inhaled a deep, slow breath, clasping the fob watch tightly and rolling over to her side. She stared down at the floor, where the satchel sat partially open, and she reached inside, digging between her tapes of music in search of something unknown.
Then, her fingers grazed against a thick, folded paper—and she pulled it out and unfolded it, a single holotape falling out of the center of it. She held the large paper closer, scanning over it intently, finding it difficult to make out in the darkness.
As her eyes adjusted, she realized it was a map—a full map of the Commonwealth, with a long red marker line drawn across it, seeming to stretch between Sanctuary and a place deeper into the city, a place circled in red. And, just above the red circle, a single phrase had been written down above it, marking the circled area as Diamond City.
Olivia's eyes darted up and down the map, studying the route to the mysterious Diamond City several times. Totally confused, she then glanced down at the holotape that had landed on her blankets from within the map, grabbing it and inserting it into her pip-boy.
She held up her arm, navigated to the correct screen, and selected PLAY.
At once—her pip-boy crackled to life, and she lay still in the dark, listening as the recording began to echo out of her arm.
"All right—backup plan," the familiar man's voice spoke from her pip-boy. "I'm assuming you've gotten to the point where you plan to hunt me down whether I want you to or not—so, Olivia, listen closely. I've bought myself a home in a place called Diamond City—brilliant place, fashioned entirely out of an old baseball stadium, really a feat of human engineering—but the place is called Home Plate, and it's right in the heart of the city. It's also the epicenter of the conspiracy I've been investigating, unbeknown to most of the people here—but it's the safest place you'll find in the Commonwealth during this time period. If you absolutely, positively have to come after me—then come to my home in Diamond City. I've marked the safest route available on the map, there. Map's a bit dated, but the roads are still there. I checked. Otherwise, you could just use that nice little doomsday shelter behind that house in Sanctuary, and you could just stay safe where you are—but, really, let's be honest. You're my daughter, so you're really unlikely to do that, aren't you? And no matter what you choose to do—keep the fob watch with you—keep yourself safe—and keep, Codsworth, with you. Eh? Understand? Good."
When the recording clicked off, Olivia lay perfectly still in the silence for a long while thereafter, her father's voice still echoing inside her mind, her heart suddenly aching.
Everything inside her urged her to stand, screamed for her to move, to pack whatever she might need, and to head off to Diamond City right now.
But, as the night grew late, and as her tiredness began to overtake her, she knew for certain she needed a night of rest first.
Then—once the sun rose on the horizon—she'd head off in her father's wake at once.
