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So this was how it was going to end.
All that he’d built. All that the people before him, the directors and the scientists, all that they’d sacrificed.
All of it would be coming down soon, and as much as he hated to admit it, it was his fault.
Shaun closed his eyes.
He was tired.
In his final moments, he could afford to be truthful with himself. There was no reason to deny it. It was his fault. The Minutemen wouldn’t be storming the Institute walls and shooting down synths, had he not been caught up in a momentary stroke of unnecessary feelings.
He was the one, after all, who’d wanted to see what would happen.
How was he supposed to have known that releasing his mother would lead into this? There’d been no guarantee that she’d even survive the first day. She was a woman out of her time, forced into a world that was nothing like hers. He couldn’t have known.
Shaun hadn’t wanted this.
He didn’t know what he’d wanted.
His one mistake, one lapse in judgment, was what spelled doom for the Institute. Everything up until that moment had been done right and by the book. The Institute had molded Shaun into what he was and he’d molded the Institute back in kind. He’d been the perfect leader right up until the last moment.
He’d been what they made him to be.
He’d made the Institute blossom.
And yet…
Now his mistake would be what made it wilt. Just because he’d gotten sentimental. Because he’d thought it could be afforded to him, one moment of weakness on his dying days.
How illogical of him.
Shaun sighed. The sigh turned into coughs in his failing lungs. The medical bed he’d been strapped onto started to pump more painkillers into his system, but there was only so much they could do at this point. It wouldn’t be long now. If it wasn’t his mother’s betrayal that would take him, then it would be his body’s.
It didn’t matter. Not anymore.
Soon there would be no one left alive to blame him.
Shaun could hear the gunfire from here. The Minutemen in their raggedy gear, cobbled together weapons and dirt caked armor were tearing through the elite Institute forces just outside. His synth troops were doing their programmed best, but it was clear already, who would emerge victorious. A damn blight they were. The Gunners should have finished what they started. Wiped the Minutemen off the face of the Wasteland once and for all. But no. Like radroaches, they survived, scurried through the cracks and built up anew. Multiplied. Gathered in their hovels.
All because of the man who’d turned Sanctuary Hills into a trash heap filled with dirty, diseased, rad-ridden people. A man, who’d turned his mother against him.
How bitter the loss tasted.
No… No. It was a lie. The Minuteman hadn’t turned Shaun’s mother against him. He just told himself that to make him feel better. To make it go down easier. That his mother had been so naïve that she could be turned from him that easily. That she’d been so scared of the new world around her that she’d taken to the first kind face she’d met.
All lies. It had been his mother who’d made the choice to forsake him.
He’d just wanted to see what would happen.
He’d just…
What had he wanted?
His mother ought to have died when first tumbling out of the Vault, weak and tired from the cryo stasis. With a law degree from a time gone by, she shouldn’t have made it further than Sanctuary Hills. Father, maybe… He had been a soldier. Him Shaun could have seen surviving, but not mother.
When she’d pushed through, searching for her lost baby, when she’d grabbed a weapon and cried for her lost Shaun, he’d dared to hope.
What had he wanted, when he released her?
He’d just wanted to see what would happen.
No. That was a lie as well. And dying men shouldn’t feel the need to lie to themselves. Deep down Shaun knew what he’d wanted.
The future that hadn’t come to pass. The future, that had turned into past already. A home that could have been without the apocalypse.
He didn’t know. Shaun hadn’t been in his right mind.
He’d found out he was dying. His body had turned against him. Even here, away from the radiation of the ground above, it had started to grow wrong.
And now mother was going to blow up everything he’d built.
He should have seen it coming. From the way she cut her way through the wastes. He would have seen it coming, had he really looked.
But.
How caring she was. Mother. Caring for everyone she met. Shedding tears for the unworthy. From a dirty mutt she’d found begging for scraps to a radiation devoured ghoul, she cared so much. Too much. Wherever she went, she left things better than they’d been when she’d found them.
He should have seen it coming. She clung onto some old, pre-war notion of good and bad and he hadn’t seen how she’d grown to hate the Institute for being the ultimate display of logic over emotion. Future over the present.
The world outside was beyond repair, yet she clutched onto it as if she could pull it back together by stubbornness alone. She didn’t see it from an outsider’s perspective, she was too close to it. America had torn itself to shreds even before the bombs had fallen, force-fed itself into malnourishment and then tried to shift blame to something else. The Resource Wars, annexing Canada, it had all been written on the walls. She should have seen how things hadn’t changed at all. But she had the problem of living through it, not looking at it from a distance. Raiders were killing people, people who they needed to grow the food they ate. Strong were preying on the weak, ravaging the land further in the name of power. People were picking petty fights over scraps.
Was it not sensible to burn it all and begin again, with better people?
No. Apparently not, because that was the world mother had chosen over Shaun.
He didn’t know what he’d wanted, when he’d released his mother.
But he was sure dying alone and bitter as his world burned down around him hadn’t been it.
He sighed, the pian dulling down. The ache in his bones lessened, but never went away fully. Not even the best scientists of the Institute could stop the ravaging growth in him.
What he’d wanted… had been to have her here. At his bedside when he drifter away. Instead of the imagined versions of her, the character he’d built up in his head over the lonely years in his most secret of thoughts, he would have had a mother. A loving mother, a force to be reckoned with, who’d fought her way through hordes of enemies just to sit by his side. A mother he could leave everything he’d built to, who could live happy in the world he’d created for her.
He didn’t know what he’d wanted.
Shaun had just…
He’d just wanted her to be there. For someone to be there. For this. The image of a woman he couldn’t remember, warmth he thought he could grasp if he closed his eyes for long enough, holding his hand and telling him it was going to be okay.
How childish. He was too old for fairytales. He hadn’t been given the soft image of a mother, of course he hadn’t. The time of his childhood had come and gone and his mother was a stranger to him now. Instead of a mother, he’d been given a blood soaked and scarred personification of wrath, who had categorically started to dismantle every faction she thought flawed.
And all for people living in ratty clothes and radiation, growing mutated vegetables and two-headed cows.
It was his fault. He’d thought he could live in his fantasy. He’d thought…
He’d thought wrong.
He’d gone old.
He’d gone soft.
In the last moments of his life, he’d destroyed everything and therefore he deserved everything coming his way.
Shaun hoped… he hoped that she would still at least take the synth child with her. She could abandon everything else, but if she just took it with her, maybe…
How illogical.
He couldn’t live through a synth child.
He was going to die alone, hooked to this machine, unable to do much more than observe the end.
“General! Please, reconsider.”
He heard steps.
“Go back, Preston.” A sharp, familiar voice. “I’ve made my choice.”
Mother.
Shaun sunk deeper into his bed. What was she doing in here?
Ah. The evacuation order. Ever the bleeding heart. She needed his computer.
“But – “
“Preston.”
The noise from the outside drowned out what they said next, if they said anything at all. He didn’t want to hear a word of it anyway. He closed his eyes and breathed deep. His mother should hurry. Surely they were planning on blowing up the reactor. It would have made sense. If that was their plan, the charges must have been set already.
And yet. He turned his head when he heard the steps approaching.
Had she come for him?
Venom slithered out of his mouth, irritation and bitterness taking words.
“I didn’t expect to see you again,” he said. “Come to see the reactor, have you? We got it working without you.”
They’d never needed her in the first place. All they’d needed were the coursers they’d created themselves.
Releasing her from the ice had been a moment’s weakness.
A mistake.
His mother offered him a small smile. Dressed in the clothes of the General of the Minutemen, she looked like nothing he’d expected her to be. In the long, sleepless nights he’d spent drying his tears when he was a child, he’d tried to imagine her. She’d never been like this. Smart, surely, he’d thought. Ruthless, but caring. And she would have been so interested in everything he did, would have complimented him on every test he aced and dulled the sharp words of the Director.
Young Shaun had imagined a kind smile and a hand on his shoulder.
Instead what he got was a woman with shadows under her weary eyes, with laser holes burnt into her coat. She smelled like smoke and fire, like cow manure and sweat. Like radiation.
Like the outside.
She was smiling, but there wasn’t much joy behind it.
“Hey,” she said. She stopped at his bedside. Her laser musket was hanging from her back. She opened and closed her hands like she was thinking about reaching for him.
He’d rather she wouldn’t.
“What are you doing in here?” he asked.
She opened her mouth, then closed it. She looked around before spotting the computer close by.
Of course it was about the evacuation.
Something was always more important than him.
Shaun didn’t want to look at her. He could hear her tapping on the computer and soon enough the evacuation orders followed. They blared throughout the entire facility, loud and inescapable. Shaun sunk deeper.
At least some of them would make it to safety. Maybe they could start from a scratch. Build the Institute back from the ground up and years in the future look back at this as a dark mark on the history of the Institute. His name would go down in infamy.
He somehow doubted his mother would let them do that, though.
She moved again. He could hear her heavy boots on the floor. He imagined the dry mud flaking off the heels and leaving a trail where she walked. She reached for the chair behind the medical bed and dragged it to his bedside.
“What are you doing?” he asked again.
She shook her head. “I’m sorry, Shaun”, she said and removed the musket from her back. She hung it from the chair and fell to sit down. Air left her lungs as she slouched. “I wish it hadn’t had to come to this.”
Sorry? She was sorry? He was too tired to even summon the ire coursing through him. Too tired to sit up and yell. Too tired to do much of anything.
“You can’t be that sorry,” he said. “Considering what you’ve done.”
She looked down. Her smile was infuriating. Soft. Tired. Like she was the one losing everything.
“It had to be done,” she said. “You left me no choice, Shaun.”
And maybe she was the one losing. From her perspective. She’d lost everything in such a short time. It was hard to remember sometimes, that for her, he’d been a baby only a few months back. She’d had everything. A future, a life. And then she’d climbed out of that Vault, with her husband dead, looking for her infant son only to find that her life had passed her by without her even knowing.
She must have had plans. Before. They’d just moved to a new home, had a baby, and her husband had come back from the war. She must have had so many plans.
But whatever sorrow of loss she might have felt paled in comparison to the loss she was forcing on him now. Her personal grief was no justification for the future she was destroying.
She had no right to feel sorry for it.
All she could have done to stop it was to do as she’d been told. But she had been a bleeding heart. She had seen the synths, seen their human faces and heard their human voices and decided that they were more important to her than her own son.
”I wanted things to be different,” she said.
“Then you should have done something about it.”
“I did what I thought was right.”
”And now you’ve doomed us all,” he said, finality in his voice. He turned away, refusing to look at her any longer. ”Something you’re going to have to learn to live with. Now go. I wish to spend my last moments alone.”
The evacuation orders played in the background, repeating. The fighting outside had ceased. Shaun could no longer hear gunfire. Whether that was because it had moved somewhere else or because the Minutemen had defeated the last of his forces, he couldn’t tell.
His mother didn’t stand up. Next to him, she fiddled with her Pipboy. It let out a beep, then quieted. From the corner of his eye he could see her removing her hat and placing it on the ground. Her hair was a mess under it, strands pointing everywhere. She shimmied her arms free from her jacket and hung it from the chair. She opened and closed her gloved fingers in thought.
“Just go,” he said, exhausted.
She just smiled sadly and shook her head.
The evacuation orders rang for the last time and then it was quiet. Mother seemed to care very little about it. She made herself comfortable next to him.
“I remember,” she started slowly, then stopped and laughed a little. A tired little sound. She covered her eyes with her hand and shook her head. “Feels so funny to talk about it now, like it was ancient past, even though it was just a little while ago.” She laughed again, even though it sounded more like a quiet sob. “Feels like an eternity to me. But I remember how I used to sit like this next to your crib for hours when you were sleeping. I knew I should have been sleeping myself, but looking at you, I felt so calm. I felt safe. I know it’s silly to think about now, but I was worried something might happen to you if I took my eyes off of you even for a minute.” She leaned against her hand and swallowed. Shaun looked at her, looked at the slight wobble on her lips.
A General for the Minutemen she might have been, a blood soaked menace and ferocious too, but she was still a parent lost in time.
“I… it feels so silly now. But I wish I’d known. I wish I’d never left. Never wasted a minute sleeping.” She swallowed thickly, then pulled her hand from her face. “I wasted so much time.” She sounded exhausted. “For me, it’s only been… half a year? A little more, maybe? The world is quite different from it used to be.”
Why was she here? Hadn’t she gotten everything she came here for? Why was she here now, after everything? After all that she’d done, after she’d abandoned him, after not being there for him through most of his life and after she’d turned against him to destroy everything he’d built. Now she thought she could come to him, sit down next to him, and talk to him like this.
She was the one who’d brought him this low.
She deserved the burnt world outside. It suited her just fine.
“We’ve lost so much time,” she said, her voice stuffy and wet, her eyes red. “So many firsts I missed. Your first words, first steps. Everything.”
Shaun scoffed. As if those mattered. “That was ages ago.”
“For you, maybe.” She stared at her hands.
His throat felt scratchy.
“You should go,” he said, quiet.
“There’s no rush.”
“This place is not going to be here for long, is it?” he asked and breathed deep. He was tired. “Get going. There’s nothing here for you.”
He didn’t want her to leave. This was too much already.
But he wanted her gone. He wanted to hold onto the last dignity he had left.
He heard ruffling. His mother removed the thick gloves from her hands and flexed her fingers. A lawyer. He’d always imagined her hands as soft, fingers ruffling his hair when she’d tell him he’d done well. They would have never had more than a few paper cuts on them. But only a few months out in the Wastes and they were already scarred, burnt and calloused, dirt under her nails.
A few more years and there’d be nothing left of the woman who’d entered the Vault. She’d be born anew into the life out there.
Maybe that was good. For her. She could have the life she’d wanted, or at least the closest approximation to it she could in the world as it was now. She’d had her life taken away from her and she could forge a new one.
Maybe she could have this.
Maybe she could be happy. With the synth child Shaun had made for her.
She still wore her ring, he noticed when she reached for him. It was dented, the gold scratched, but it was there. He wanted to ask why. Why cling to the past while she was destroying the future? But the words left him, when she placed her warm hand on his.
It was like fire. His veiny skin was cold and wrinkled, trembling on his chest. Hers was steady. Strong.
So young in comparison to his.
Shaun closed his eyes to shift the focus from the sting in them.
“Go,” he whispered, when he couldn’t trust his voice.
”We’ve lost so much time already,” she said, whispering as well. ”I’m not going.”
”What?” He turned his head to face her. Was she out of her mind?
Did they not mean to blow the place up after all?
But the evacuation…
She smiled. Her eyes were shining with unshed tears.
”I’m not leaving you again, Shaun.”
”No,” he said, realization dawning on him. She meant to stay. His voice was scratchy. “No, you can’t stay. I doubt you have much time.”
“I have all the time in the world.”
Her smile was soft and warm.
Motherly.
He faltered. Then pulled himself back together and got his hand free of her hold.
“No,” he said, sterner. “You have nothing left here. Go. I would like to spend my final moments alone.”
She took her hand back and leaned on the chair. She didn’t get up. Stubborn she was. This was the woman, who’d stormed through the wastes to get to her son, who’d taken down raiders and mutants in her search for the child she’d lost.
She wasn’t moving.
”Mother,” he said weakly. ”You have to go.” Please, he didn’t say.
”Shaun.” Her eyes were filled with warmth, even at this moment. It was spilling through, bleeding past the exhaustion and soreness, wiping away the bitterness she’d shown when she’d found out that her son was an old, old man now. Even though she was destroying everything, she still looked at him with those eyes.
He didn’t understand her. Yet he didn’t want her to leave. He so desperately didn’t. It would have been easy to just slip into it. One moment of weakness on his deathbed.
But she had to. She couldn’t stay here.
It didn’t make any sense. None of this did, but he just…
She needed a reason.
”I… reprogrammed the synth child. The perfect recreation.”
She made a questioning hum.
”It would be like nothing ever happened. I know… I know what you must think of me, but… he… He deserves more.” Please.
He’d made him for her. But he’d also made him for him. So that the child could live the life he would have wanted. So that Shaun could think that maybe… maybe, if there was even the slightest truth to what they were saying about synths being alive, then this child made out of his own DNA, the perfect recreation of him… He could, in his place…
He held no beliefs that he could live vicariously through that boy.
But at the same time. The life he would have wanted in his heart of hearts. A family, a mother.
Love and warmth.
“Shaun,” she said, shocked. “Why?”
He didn’t want to look at her.
“You should hurry. I left him with a holotape. I explained everything there.”
And still she remained.
“Come now, mother,” he said. “You yourself claimed, that they were alive. Surely you can care for a boy that looks like your child.”
“Shaun,” she said and his name was everything he’d ever wanted to hear from her. “The child. I’m sure he’d a good boy. But he’s not mine.”
He shook his head. ”You won’t know the difference. Not after a while.”
She reached for his hand again. He let her. He would have been too tired to pull away anyway.
“If he is alive, he deserves a mother,” he croaked.
“He’s alive and will be cared for,” she said. “Preston will make sure of it. But he’s not my son.” Her hold on his hand was tight. She squeezed his finger together. “You are. And I’m not leaving you again.”
It hit him like a tidal wave. It crushed him and left him heaving. He couldn’t. He was too old to cry. He was an old, bitter, loveless man, who had lived his whole life trapped between these walls. Even when he’d been old enough to leave, to make his own decision, he’d stayed here and shackled himself further. He was too old to cry, too tired, but the tears rolled down his cheeks anyway and he held onto his mother’s hand like she would disappear if he didn’t. Like he would wake up again and it would have turned out to be a dream of something better and he was alone and cold. He held tight and his mother held back.
”I’m sorry,” he choked. ”I’m – ”
”Shh.” She reached with her free hand and pushed back wispy white strands of hair. She placed a small kiss on his forehead. “It’s okay, baby. I’m here. It’s okay.”
He was too old. He was too late. He’d been too late the moment he’d been wrenched free of his father’s hold. It’d been too late the moment he’d been carried out of his home, too young to remember. When he’d been frozen and the world had ended.
He was too old.
But in that moment he felt like a child. Weak and scared.
”Mother,” he said.
”I’m here.”
Everything they should have said. Everything they could have had.
He was so tired.
”After this all over, we should head to the park,” she said. ”We were supposed to. Before the Vault. If the weather is right, we should go.”
The life that could have been.
“My darling boy. Maybe we’ll see dad there. Wouldn’t that be nice?”
There was a rumble beneath them, a shake in the ground. The facility had gone quiet around them, the air had grown stale and the lights were flickering. And now there was a rumble, like a monster rousing from long sleep. A prelude for more.
She was humming. There was something familiar to the tune. A faraway lullaby that he felt he could just about remember. He held tight onto her hand, as tight as he could, even though he could already feel himself slipping.
Shaun closed his eyes.