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Sarah Lyons had always hated waiting. It was a trait her father assured her she’d inherited from her mother: a woman she remembered only in vague whispers and glimpses like faded photographs. She had been spurring the Brotherhood Knights on to action since the age of seven, climbing into the hidden nooks of the Citadel to watch them running drills so she could give suggestions for improvement. This impatient approach toward perfection had softened with age and leadership of her beloved Lyons’ Pride, but it flared up every time a mission was set into motion. She hated the preparation: why couldn’t they all just go?
She perched herself atop the railing running the upper level of the laboratory and watched as the last minute preparations were made for Liberty Prime’s launch. Her fellow pack members (as she affectionately called them) were hoisting Power Armor up onto their bodies, helping one another seal the clasps and handing out weapons. Sarah had developed the habit of all but living in her Power Armor, and her main gun was always attached to her hip. She had nothing left to do but sit and wait for the push to the Purifier to begin.
Her brain was working overtime: she could hardly believe the G.E.C.K. was a reality at all, but to find out that the Enclave had it and was headed to install it now…The Brotherhood could not lose the Purifier to them. The Lone Wanderer had told Elder Lyons of the Enclave’s ultimate plan: mass death via F.E.V. Sarah wondered if they’d really thought the plan through: who alive today didn’t have some form of mutation? “Pure” humanity as they called it no longer existed.
Someone cleared their throat softly behind her, and she looked over her shoulder to find the Lone Wanderer shifting awkwardly from foot to foot. The young woman held a set of unassembled power armor in her hands. Though she was much more muscular than when Sarah had first found her in the downtown ruins over a month ago, she still seemed weighed down by the armor.
“Your dad…I mean, Elder Lyons gave me these. But I uh…well, I never got the chance to ask Paladin Gunny to train me how to put this stuff on and…”
“Come here,” Sarah said, laughing in spite of herself. She swung her legs over the railing and hopped down onto solid ground. “I promise it isn’t as intimidating as it looks.”
The Lone Wanderer, Sara (Sentinel Lyons distinguished between them to her fellows as “H” and “No H”) grinned sheepishly as she handed over the Power Armor.
There was a long pause as they looked at one another expectantly. Sarah watched in amusement as the Lone Wanderer’s eyebrows slowly rose in confusion over the top rim of her wiry glasses at the silence.
“I’m pretty talented,” Sarah told her, “But even I haven’t figured out how to put this on over combat armor, you know.”
“Oh!” Sara’s hands immediately rose to her breastplate, but she suddenly froze. “Uh…I don’t have much on underneath this.”
“How much is not much?”
“A tank top and some pretty ratty shorts.”
“Turn around then,” Lyons instructed. “We need to make this quick.”
There was another awkward silence, as Sara did not immediately begin to strip off her combat armor. Her eyes darted over to the rest of the Pack gathered together on the lower level, finishing up their preparations.
“I don’t want them to see me half naked,” she said in a whisper.
Impatience rising in her throat, Lyons took hold of the Lone Wanderer’s arm and pulled her over into a side storage room.
“Better?”
Reluctance still evident on her face, Sara pulled the dirty combat armor off of her body. She let it fall to the floor with a resounding clang and instantly wrapped her arms around her torso, now only protected from the Citadel’s chilly air by a thin camisole.
“Turn around,” Sarah told her, careful to keep her voice gentler than she had a moment ago. “I’m sorry if I made you uncomfortable.”
“No, you didn’t,” the Lone Wanderer assured the Sentinel. “I just didn’t want to do this in front of half the Brotherhood.”
Sara did as asked at last, turning on her heel to face the opposite direction. Dropping to her knees to assist the Lone Wanderer into her leg gauntlets, Lyons found herself pausing.
It was a strange reaction. She’d helped her pack members (and more clueless recruits than she could count) into the bulky armor without a second thought. But the shivering girl hopping futilely against the chill seemed different from all the rest. Sarah remembered the sheer terror she’d seen in this young woman’s eyes when they’d first met in the ruins. She’d seemed barely more than a kid then: a kid still clothed in a Vault jumpsuit hardly suited for the harshness of the Wasteland.
And Lyons remembered when Sara had stumbled into the Citadel in the middle of the night a few weeks ago. She’d seemed oblivious to the group of scientists following her, and had stared blankly at the ground as Dr. Li filled Elder Lyons in on what had just transpired at the Jefferson Memorial.
In the time since then, Sara had perked up some, and she’d had several chats with the woman now perched awkwardly behind her about grief and loss but also about her determination to see James’ work completed.
But Lyons saw right through this invisible armor that the young woman had placed around herself to protect herself from further emotional harm. It was fragile at best, a flimsy attempt made by a girl whose entire life had been systematically ripped away from her since she’d left Vault 101 only six weeks ago. The Lone Wanderer was no good at the “lone” part of her new nickname, but she was too afraid to risk camaraderie for fear it would be torn away just like everything else she had once known.
Fitting the gauntlets over Sara’s hips and reaching around to seal them in the front, Lyons tried to think of something to say that wouldn’t sound falsely cheery in the face of the momentous task ahead of them. She traced a deep-set scar that ran along the bottom length of Sara’s spine. The Lone Wanderer shivered at the touch, but she did not stiffen or jerk away.
“Where did you get this?”
“I fell down a flight of steps in Rivet City the first time I went there.”
“Oh my God, Sara.”
The Lone Wanderer laughed. It was the first time Sarah had ever heard her do so. It was a lovely sound: it rang off the enclosed metallic walls of the storage room. When it faded, the silence they were left with was not uncomfortable as the previous two had been.
“Do you think we can do this?” Sara finally asked, sliding her arms through the slots on the side of the Power Armor breastplate with some assistance.
“Sure we can,” Lyons told her. “The Pride can do anything.”
“What would you say if I asked you to answer not as the leader of Lyons’ Pride but just as Sarah?”
She fell silent for a moment, helping the Lone Wanderer seal up the top part of her new armor. It looked bulky and out of place on the tall but lean young woman, but it looked that way on most everyone. She took Sara by the arm once again and turned her around so they were facing one another.
“I’d say that I take care of my pack. And right now you’re our newest and most important member. I especially look after my cubs.”
Without warning, Sara launched herself over at the Sentinel, wrapping her in a hug that was preceded with a magnificent smash of metal on metal. Lyons reeled backward almost a foot from the force of the hug. She attempted to awkwardly return the gesture, but her arm only wedged uselessly against Sara’s breastplate. She settled with patting the Lone Wanderer on the shoulder.
“Thank you,” Sara said. “For everything. For talking to me about my dad and how much I miss him when no one else would. For—“
“No,” Lyons told her, firmly. “We’re not talking like this. Everything is going to go just fine, and we’re going to kick the Enclave’s ass back to where it came from.”
“Right,” the Lone Wanderer said, pulling away. “Right. Of course.”
She turned to head out of the storage room and join her new fellows in Lyons’ Pride. Sarah watched her go for a few seconds, the words dancing on the tip of her tongue. She had never been one to simply dole out compliments: praise was something reserved for those who deserved it. Then again, she supposed, if anyone deserved it right now, it was the Vault kid who was marching into battle alongside some of the Wasteland’s most elite soldiers when six weeks ago the worst enemy she’d ever taken on was a Radroach.
“Sara,” Lyons called out to the Lone Wanderer’s back. “I’ve got you, okay?”
Sara turned back to smile at the Sentinel, and Lyons found she delighted in the sight of it almost as much as she loved the kid’s laugh.
“I know, Sentinel.”