Chapter Text
MacCready watched his new employer from across the fire as she repeatedly fumbled the reassembly of her rifle, a simple bolt action piece with a barrel sawed uselessly short by a former owner. A pot of miscellaneous vegetables and parts of recently deceased mole rats simmered away, the woman's dog gnawing happily at his share of the mole rats raw.
"So," he said to stop himself from taking the weapon and finishing its maintenance himself, "what's a girl like you doing in a place like this?"
Jennifer blinked at him a moment, her concentration interrupted. "I told you. I was trying to get from a settlement called Tenpines to Diamond City, but I got lost. Thought I'd better hire a guide before I was lost and dead." She looked back at the disassembled rifle in her hands. "I'm not very good with this. I thought help would be a good idea."
MacCready laughed shortly, more a snort of amusement. "You ain't lyin. I meant before that. Pretty clear you're not from the Commonwealth, you still have all your own teeth."
She bit her bottom lip, thinking for a moment, then dropped the pieces of her rifle in her lap. "Fine. You probably won't believe me. I'm from a vault. Vault 111, north of Concord."
He held out his hands, indicating the pile of metal with a tip of his head. "Here, pass that over. I knew a lady who used to live in a vault back when I was a kid, down in the Capital Wasteland." He began methodically checking each piece of her rifle over, reassembling it with casual ease. "There's a vault here, 81. It does some trading. Guessing yours doesn't."
Jennifer shook her head. "No. It. I mean-- it doesn't. It can't." She stopped, closed her eyes a moment, and swallowed. "I'm the only one left. They froze us the day the bombs fell, and I woke up a week ago. To this."
MacCready paused in screwing the barrel of the rifle back into the receiver. "You're telling me," he paused to eye her suspiciously, "that you've been frozen. Since the war." She nodded, staring down at her hands and nervously picking at her nails. "Well, shit. I mean crap. That...explains a lot."
Jennifer leaned forward to poke at the mole rat stew with a ladle she'd scrounged up earlier. "I guess it does. After I got thawed out, I tried to go home. My robot butler was still there." Her small laugh seemed to startle her. "He told me there were people in Concord, so I found them. Spent some time getting them settled in my old neighborhood, and then Preston, he's their leader, asked me to help Tenpines. So I went."
She dug around in her mostly empty pack and came out with two empty bowls, then began dipping out the stew. It smelled like food, at least. MacCready set the reassembled rifle down gently. "Why not go back to your old neighborhood, then?" he asked, accepting a bowl and fishing a spoon out of one of his pockets. His mild curiosity turned sharp when she set her bowl down at the question and buried her face in her hands. "Hey, whoa, it's ok, I'm just...just passing the time. You don't have to tell me."
She shook her head, breathing shuddery for a moment, then picked her head up with a sniff, her eyes wet. "No. It's ok. I...this wasn't the first time I woke up, a week ago." Jennifer picked up her bowl with one hand and fumbled in her pack until she found a fork. MacCready watched her hands shake, chewing at a lump of mole rat. "I woke up before, I don't know when. Some people were there. Th-they opened my husband's pod thing. They shot him, and they took my son."
Dropping her bowl to the ground, she gave up and rested her forehead on her knees and cried, as MacCready felt old grief break open in him like an abscess.