You're a red string tied to my finger...
"Come on," he grumbled, watching the screen of the barely functioning PipBoy flicker off before small green text began scrolling, again. He had managed to barter the piece of junk off an ex-dweller of Vault 81 just two days ago for nearly a thousand caps. He used to pride himself with being able to haggle everyone down, but he ended up trekking to Vault 111 with a wounded ego and a better understanding of price gauging.
The screen finally came back on for him and he tried again, gingerly pulling the plug from the PipBoy out and shoving it into the control panel he was standing before. There was a sudden "click!" and the cover for the big red button unlatched itself.
"Finally," he sighed and jammed his fist into the large button. Almost immediately sirens began blaring and he ducked down behind the controls, wondering if he had messed something up. Instead, the massive Vault 111 door pulled backwards and began to roll off to the side, opening the vault to Deacon.
His heart sped up, unsure what he would find in the last known but unexplored vault of the Commonwealth. The moment he learned about it he was hooked, gathering as much information as he could. So far, there wasn't much except that almost 90% of the Commonwealth believed it to be destroyed or that all the dwellers had died. He soon believed the latter to be true, noting the dry skeletons of Vault-Tec employees strewn about the vault. He did find an odd absence of actual Dwellers, be they corpses or living, and a quick hack into a terminal gave him more information.
There had been some sort of mutiny, after the Vault was supposed to open in 2078, however the Overseer was never given an OK. There wasn't much else on any of the other terminals and everything, all entries he could find ended on the same day. He did, however, learn the fate of the Dwellers. When the bombs fell in 2077, the Dwellers were tricked into being frozen in Cryopods, and that's where they remained, for two centuries.
He searched them all, not finding a single survivor, as his mind raced with thoughts of talking to a person who lived before this apocalypse. Not willing to give up, he checked the last pods, the terminal making his heart skip a beat when it said there was one sole survivor, one living and breathing relic still alive, an Artemis Wright. She was across from her husband, Nate Wright, and infant son Shaun, according to the terminal.
However this was not the case when Deacon made his way down the row of dead Dwellers. There was in fact a man across from the pod he was headed to, however there was no infant, just a bloody and frozen bullet wound in his chest.
Holding his breath, he turned around and walked up to Artemis. He expected her to be holding the infant, but instead she had both of her hands frozen to the door of her Cryopod. She looked as if she had been frozen in the middle of screaming, her body slumped awkwardly to one side, mouth slightly open, dark and thin eyebrows knitted together, her black hair askew with frost.
Deacon looked back to her husband and couldn't help but wonder why someone would want him dead, and where the hell was the kid? He double checked the other pods and nobody looked disturbed, not like Artemis, and nobody was shot like Nate. And nobody was missing, like the infant Shaun.
In the end he couldn't brig himself to wake the woman up, unsure if she would live through the defrosting or not. Instead he did the next best thing and made his way back to the surface. He was heading for Sanctuary Hills, the old neighborhood the vault overlooked, wondering if there was any remnants of Artemis' life there.
He was caught off guard, something that never happened to him, as he walked down the old street, looking for a mailbox marked "Wright".
"Good day to you, sir," he heard and turned on his heel, stopping before he could pull his pistol from his waistband. The object that greeted him was an old pre-war model of Mr. Handy. Deacon blinked a few times beneath his sunglasses, shocked by the odd scene of the robot trimming some bushes outside the house he was looking for.
He cleared his throat before responding. "Good day to you as well... Is Artemis home?"
"Artemis?" The Mr. Handy asked, stopping his task to float closer to Deacon, who gripped the handle of his pistol tighter, unsure if this would work or if the robot would go haywire and try to hack him to pieces with his buzz-saw arm.
"Or Nate? The Wrights? This is their house, correct?"
The Mr. Handy was silent to him, his three eyes dialing before he shocked himself back into a response. "Yes of course you have the 'Wright' house!" The robot joked and Deacon almost smiled, were it not for his dismay. "You must be the electrician I've sent for. Or are you the plumber? However I'm afraid that they are out for the day. Would you like me to notify them when they come home of your arrival?"
Deacon's jaw almost hit the pavement. This wasn't happening, how could he be so lucky? "It shouldn't take long, surely I'll be in and out before they get home, right? No sense in rescheduling," he played along and followed the robot into the home.
While staring an a nearly disintegrated electrical box in the home, Deacon was able to weasel out some more information out of the robot, to the point where he accepted some "tea" from him (it was a broken teacup filled with filthy water and ash). Deacon managed to learn what Nate had done and, more importantly, what Artemis had done, for a living. He found out how the couple met, the date of their wedding anniversary, when they became pregnant with their son, even the emergency cesarean Artemis had when she was barely thirty weeks along.
Deacon must have had a conversation with the robot for three hours before it began getting dark and he felt he had everything he needed.
"Thank you again for the tea, Codsworth!" He waved at the robot.
"Don't forget to let your superiors know of the situation here, we are in dire need of repairs. No reflection on your work of course!" The robot called back before Deacon left, debating on heading back to the vault or to the Railroad headquarters. In a split second decision he decided to head for Cambridge, deciding to gather more information on what a lawyer was and what Artemis studied.
Twelve years. Twelve years he had stared at her face, read the same books she had, walked the same roads she had. He had visited every place he knew Artemis had visited, be it her college, the law firm she worked at, the hospital she gave birth in. He even found her and her husband's names listed in a registry for the military in an emergency supply station. Twelve years had passed and now, he stood, heart racing and mouth dry, in front of her Cryopod. He had ran endless situations through his head, countless scenarios for talking to her, actually releasing her. Deacon, however failed to imaginable the situation he was in.
He had caught wind of the Institute's piked interest in this vault from a dead drop and nearly ran the whole way here, expecting Artemis to be gone or, even worse, dead. Twelve years. Twelve years and he had no idea what to say to her. Twelve years and he had no idea how to act. Twelve years and he still wasn't prepared to meet Artemis.
"Do something you asshole!" He screamed at himself, shaking as he stared at her. His hands ran over his shaved head, trying to wipe away the anxiety he felt. Twelve years. Deacon wasn't going to let anybody take her away from him. He wasn't going to lose something this precious to him again. It pained him, but the truth was that he had been preoccupied with "Project Wanderer", as Desdemona spitefully named Deacon's constant absence, longer than he had known his dead wife.
He exhaled and turned quickly, making his way to the terminal, as if he could walk away from the thought. His fingers shook terribly as he typed in the commands, finally bringing Artemis back to life. As soon as he heard her pod hiss and open he couldn't handle himself anymore and disappeared, literally. He had chickened out and popped a stealthboy on, remaining invisible as he watched the woman choke and fall to her knees out of her pod. He stayed silent as she screamed her husband's name. He moved silently when she frantically ran to the terminal he had been using to try and free Nate. He stayed unseen while she pulled him out, fell over, and cried on the ground with his frozen head in her lap.
Deacon stayed and watched, feeling his gut wretch and his heart sink as Artemis held Nate and cried for hours. And finally, Deacon followed a frightened Artemis out of the vault and to her new life.