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It was one of those dreams where she knew she was dreaming and could do absolutely nothing about it. The world was indistinct on the edges because her brain didn’t need to bother with details to fool itself when it already knew not to try. The people she was walking past didn’t have faces. Words and the setup of the world around her didn’t quite make sense and she knew for a fact it didn’t make sense, and the dream didn’t make her feel otherwise.
It was night. It had always been night; from the moment she realised it was night it had never been anything else.
The sky was a black void. Empty and devoid of stars. The moon was full and bright over the horizon.
And Nora was in a swamp. Green mist rolled around her ankles, and Nora was walking towards a dead-end cliff. The trees loomed high overhead like prison bars. The mud underneath her feet and vault suit clung, making every step towards the inevitable a fight.
Oh. Nora was having The Deathclaw Dream again.
There was no smell. Swamps smelt awful; Nora knew that now. This one smelt of nothing. The mud clung and made it hard to move, but it did not squelch. There was no texture, just the sense of it pulling at her. And the trees around her were big and green. Trees weren’t like that anymore. It was a dream after all.
The deathclaw matriarch stood before her; easily the biggest creature she’d ever seen. By far and large, without question or competition, the most monstrous, terrifying thing Nora had ever seen.
Easily the height of at least two trucks, with long claws as long as she was tall. The inside of its mouth and the cracks between its scales glowed. Blood dripped from its teeth and its claws and every sharp bit. And there were so many, many sharp parts.
Its eyes were not sharp, though.
It’s eyes glowed, and were wise and intelligent as any person. Sometimes it felt like the deathclaw had Mama Murphey’s eyes. Felt like it, at least. Mama had been in Nora’s life for such a short time and with so little time spent between them, that she could scarcely remember what the woman looked like, for all the impact she’d had.
Nora walked closer. The deathclaw’s growl reverberated like a firework: shuddering in her chest and down her limbs until it felt like the ground was shaking.
The only thing between Nora and the deathclaw now was the nest. The deathclaw was big enough she could have reached out and broken Nora into pieces with a single blow without so much as disturbing the edge.
She didn’t.
She watched.
The world was quiet; the night warm and silent, and there was a strange pressure in Nora’s ears.
Nora knelt down. The nest looked like a bird’s nest; a hollowed out half sphere made of woven sticks and grasses, like the nests the crows would make in the trees of her backyard 200 years ago. The dog - their original dog, the one who had disappeared a few days before as though he had known what would happen - had barked at the crows every year, and still they came back.
Baby blankets were woven into the nest alongside the twigs; the same pattern as the one her mother-in-law had given to her at her baby shower. The rockets of Shaun’s mobile, grown to several times their real size, were pinned around the edges.
Nora gently placed the egg into the nest; with as much care and reverence as she’d held her own baby, the first night in the hospital. Tucked the blankets over the egg in a swaddle, the way she’d practiced over and over again (and yet could never get it nearly as neat as Cogsworth).
She let her hand linger over the egg’s surface, admiring how it was warm and smooth under her palm.
Then she stood up, and looked the deathclaw in the eye.
The space nest wasn’t between them now. The deathclaw’s breath tickled her hair. It smelt like heat and raw meat. Nora’s heart beat so loudly in her ears that she wasn’t sure where hers ended and the deathclaw’s started.
She reached out and lay a hand flat on the deathclaw’s snout.
Its skin is scaled and cool under her hand. She’s not sure whether it feels rough or silkily textured. Her own palms are roughly textured now, calloused from weapons that were unfamiliar to her. The little bump on her fourth finger from holding a pen is long smoothed out as though it never existed, but her palms and fingertips are practically covered in hard scales.
Nora wasn’t sure if she’d actually done this in the real event. She’d had the deathclaw dream so often that her mind played tricks on her.
She would have let her. Nora knows in her soul. The deathclaw would have let her touch it like this. The deathclaw matriarch and Nora - they were the same. There was a connection. The deathclaw had to have known it too.
Now, in the dream, the deathclaw lets out a little sigh and leans its face down, pressing into Nora’s hand until their foreheads were touching. This, she knows for a fact didn’t happen.
“They took my baby,” Nora whispers quietly into the still air of the night as their breaths mingle.
The deathclaw had been the master of her domain. The biggest, baddest, most fearsome creature around. There had never been a creature she couldn’t hunt, had never felt fear, had never been anything but the very apex predator.
“They took your baby.”
The world Nora knew was one of peace and safety and abundance. There was a war, but it was a distant thing. People had food and water and opportunity. People listened to the police, and laws mattered, and no one held a gun, and the idea of outlaws and raiders and threatening people for money or caps was something out of the long-ago Wild West. Times past that they’d grown past and Nora could never have imagined.
And then the humans came, with their armor and guns and bigger guns. And they’d shot at the deathclaw and her mate, with those things that spit fire and metal that the deathclaw could not imagine and could not understand. And they’d pinned the deathclaw, killed her mate, and stolen their eggs with the deathclaw roared and screamed and screamed.
Strangers had come to a place that should have been safe and protected, leaving her kin bloodied and dead and stolen her eggs away. Had taken her eggs to a strange place that she didn’t know and couldn’t understand. And she’d chased and fought, because these were her children who she loved and would have much rather died to keep safe than-
And Nora had woken in a world she couldn’t understand. That she couldn’t afford to waste time understanding. A world that was as strange and foreign and wrong to her as the inside of a human building was wrong to a deathclaw. Against a monster like the institute; a bogeyman that she had no frame of reference for in all her history and natural order, who had ways and methods and powers that were unfathomable to Nora.
It felt like Nora was watching the dream from her eyes, and from outside herself at the same time. She watched herself stand there; foreheads pressed against the deathclaw’s. She saw the mate of the deathclaw lay dead behind then; lying prone on its back against a rock as ice leaked from a hole in its chest instead of blood.
The Salem Museum memorialised a time when people feared what they didn’t understand. Where they accused people of being a witch and to be a witch meant being feared and loathed and hated. For no good reason whatsoever, because what was a witch except a way to be angry instead of afraid, because people were different to each other and they did not understand the why’s and how’s of it. A place and time where the only way to prove your innocence was to die. Because you couldn’t prove anything. No one cared about the truth; just what they wanted to believe. A time and a place that was for humans only, with politics and interpersonal relationships and kangaroo courts that a creature as simple and straightforward and sincere as a deathclaw could not understand.
The institute was a place of synths. A strange fear that everyone in the commonwealth hated and loathed and feared. And wanted dead, because the why and how of synths was not something they understood. Where the only way to prove you weren’t a synth was to die, and being called a synth was a death sentence. Where that people thought you might be a synth was more important than the truth. In a place and a world that Nora did not understand.
“They. Took. Our. Baby.”
Nora had studied law. She’d done well in school, and in English class; that the parallels kept layering on top of each other was not lost on her. The kinship between her and this deathclaw was enough to make you weep.
She did weep, as a matter of fact. Here in this dream; heaving sobs that she didn’t care let out in real life, hot tears sliding down her face and then down the cool snout of the deathclaw until it looked as though the matriarch was crying as well.
Nora and the deathclaw pressed their foreheads together and wept, under a dark night sky that had no stars and was unfamiliar, in a landscape that was warped and not at all like home. Their hearts beat in Nora’s ears. The deathclaw breathed out and she breathed in, until she wasn’t sure where the deathclaw’s story ended and Nora’s began.
And at long last, Nora was understood. Here she was, a mother, grieving with another mother for children lost and stolen. The universe had changed, but this had not. This was something that transcended time and space and species. Like the cavemen of ancient time, like the women of Salem desperately trying to plead for their daughters, like the crows swooping her dog 200 years ago to keep him from their nests.
Her mate, dead and bleeding ice instead of blood. The body of a deathclaw killed trying to rescue their eggs. A terrible, evil man with a scar down his face, lying on the Salem Museum surrounded by broken eggs.
Nora’s hand gripped the deathclaw’s protruding horn so hard it felt like she was pulling the giant lizard down to look her in the eye.
“They TOOK MY BABY!” Anger. Injustice-how-dare-they-don’t-they-know-what-I-am. Not a scream but a roar.
They said that witches made deals with devils. That they offered something in exchange for the demon’s own power. But they also said that witches came in covens; groups of two or three or four, who understood the bargains made and shared power for great and terrible purpose.
Mankind had always hated seeing women get along.
Nora gritted her fangs, jaw tight with tension “I’m going to get him back,” she swore. It felt like a different oath to the one she’s given Nate. The Deathclaw’s mate lay dead and bleeding ice in the swamp behind them
The deathclaw had gotten her egg back. It seemed like an oath and a promise. Nora too. Her too.
The deathclaw rumbled; sound passing through her chest and into Nora’s until Nora rumbled back just as deeply. Nora and the deathclaw, Nora the deathclaw, tearing the entire commonwealth apart for her baby.
It was a dream. The deathclaw had not come with Nora. Of course not, that would be silly.
But it felt like the deathclaw had left something of itself inside Nora. That’s what this dream reminded her of. That’s why she dreamt it on nights where she’d worn herself to the bone. When she’s walked and staggered until she’d just called to the ground amongst the brush of the commonwealth, far from friends and safety and utterly, utterly drained of energy and completely out of hope. It was on those nights she dreamed of the deathclaw.
Nora opened her eyes, and the deathclaw was gone. The egg and the nest were gone. The moon was gone, and so the sky had truly gone dark.
Let go of him!” Shout Nate, a ghostly vision in front of her eyes as she watched him struggle against strange, masked people. Her arms were as heavy with lead, and about as useless, when she tried to slam them against the barrier that kept her from her family.
A gunshot.
Nate falling, backwards, blood freezing in place. A horrible, ghostly scarred man that blocked her view as they took her baby away.
Shaun’s crying wailing, echoing into the great, hilly swamps of the commonwealth. Empty and alone, and an unfamiliar night sky.
Nora screamed, and then she roared.
—
And then she woke up.
Nora woke suddenly and violently. Arms thrashing. There was a deathclaw under the skin and she needed to claw it out. She was rage incarnate. Anger was heartbreak and love and the unyielding drive of a mother who needed to find her egg, and that was the only thing that made up every facet of her being.
Dogmeat whined, and she didn’t hear it. She was too busy trying to fight her way out of the sleeping bag that kept her fangs and her claws from the throats of everyone who had taken her baby -
A wet tongue against her hand.
Nora gasped, bending over in half with one hand over her mouth; breathing so hard and so choked that she felt she might throw up from the sheer force of it. When had she gotten to a standing position? Where was she?
Predawn sky, the colours not quite right to what she remembered they should be. A corpse of trees, leaves already fallen through the autumn. The sleeping bag at her feet. The empty expanse of the wasteland. Her weapon and pack, split across the ground at her feet from where she’d knocked it over.
The wind rustling the leaves on the ground. Dogmeat whining softly. Her own harsh breathing. The distant pops of gunshots again.
The warm and grounding weight of Dogmeat against her side. The itchy feeling of her clothes because she’s slept in them and had gotten sweaty. A breeze on her face.
Dust and dirt - wet dirt, one of her water containers had broken open and was spilling onto the ground. The - the… she couldn’t think of what else she smelt. Couldn’t think of what she’d tasted.
But her breathing had calmed. She was calm. She was Nora. Kellogg was dead already.
Where was she?
Nora looked around; a sleeping back on the ground, partly shielded from the wind by some tree stumps and rocks. Empty hills and grassland, with the tall towers of the city so far in the distance they almost looked blue. She wasn’t anywhere in particular or anywhere important.
Why had she stopped here? Nora stretched her brain to remember. She’d been - yes, another job, with the people who’d eventually help her get to the institute, but who wouldn’t bother until they were ready. She’d worked herself to the bone it felt like, and then just collapsed on her way back when she couldn’t walk any further.
Gods, was this what her days were like now? Just working herself to exhaustion just for the promise that maybe, maybe this would get her one step closer to getting Shaun back? It felt hopeless. Why should she-
The phantom of the deathclaw rumbled in the back of her mind, and exhaustion was brushed aside as the anger came back. Not the white-hot anger that burnt you alive, but the constant, constant low burning that kept a train full of steam.
How far had she come, on that anger? And she wanted to give up now? No. No. Never.
She was going to get Shaun back.