Chapter Text
Prologue
Everybody knows how the Great War happened... Everybody knows that mankind went to hell because it couldn't sustain itself anymore and destroyed itself fighting over what resources were left... But few are alive today who have seen it firsthand.
My name is Connor Alexander Stevens. I was born August 5th 2000, seventy seven years and two months before the Great War, to Adam and Miranda Stevens in Sacred Cross Hospital in San Diego, California. I held the rank of Captain in the United States Army, from which I was honorably discharged in 2076. Before I held rank in the United States Armed Forces, I was an engineer.
I am married to my husband Jude Adams Foster-Stevens, and have been since February 22nd 2022. We met when I was thirteen and he was twelve and soon after we fell in love. Soon after my dad interfered and tried to keep us apart. A long, complicated messy story involving lies, copious amounts of angst, a couple stolen kisses and a gunshot wound to the foot followed before we finally succeeded in getting together. We won that war.
The next war was a war against the continual disapproval of my father, and we lost that war. We suffered through a failed long distance relationship when I moved to L.A for a short time because I couldn't stand to live with Dad's homophobic attitude. During this time, the distance killed our relationship, and we broke up and lost contact for a short time until my dad finally came around after a year and a half of me in L.A, and I was able to come home and reunite with Jude. After three months of a renewed friendship that involved a ton of walking on eggshells around each other, Jude and I rekindled our relationship in the same way it began; with a midnight kiss during a camping trip.
In the end, we won that final war. We won the right to be together. We won the right to love each other, and we won the right to live as we pleased with no interference.
We watched with glee and held each other, sobbing tears of joy as the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in favor of the nationwide legalization of same-sex marriage on June 26th 2015.
We got married and everything was going fine. We were happy. Then, two years after we got married, I got sick.
I was diagnosed with an aggressive, barely operable form of Leukemia. The day we found out was one of the worst in my entire life. The doctors told us that I only had a thirty percent chance of making it to remission. I still have nightmares of being held by Jude as he sobbed heartbrokenly into my shoulder. The sight of his heartbreak was the one thing that could really break me.
Then we heard of Vault-Tec.
We both remember the first time Vault-Tec was ever in the news. It was in 2025. The year I turned twenty five years old. I had been going through chemotherapy for over a year, and it wasn't doing a damned thing. I remember wondering why the company was called Vault-Tec. There were ads in the paper asking for people to take part in clinical trials for a new drug their medical sciences division had developed. The drug was supposed to slow down the effects of aging, and dramatically increase a person's life span. My beloved and I were intrigued, so we looked into it. We saw this clinical trial as a last ditch effort to save my own life from the leukemia, which was slowly killing me. The chemotherapy was doing absolutely nothing, and the thought of me being cured was all it took to convince Jude to agree.
The trial itself was simple. Jude and I went in at our scheduled time, and we were sedated and injected with the drug. After a couple of hours, we woke up and were allowed to leave. Three days after we took part in the clinical trials, the drug was banned by the Food and Drug Administration, and a month later the medical sciences division of Vault-Tec split off to become Med-Tek. Little to no reason was given for the banning of the drug. Some people said that the drug was an example of immoral tampering with human life, and others said it was a matter of ethics. We were among only one hundred people to participate.
Over the first few weeks, we started to notice side effects. I broke my leg on the job. When I woke up the next day, I walked downstairs in a sleep deprived stupor and was halfway through my bowl of cereal before I realized that my leg was healed. Jude cut himself shaving the same morning and the cut healed almost immediately. Later, I went in for a chemotherapy treatment, only to find out that the cancer was gone. The doctors were flabbergasted, and the shock of being cured caused me to faint. After a few tests, Jude and I found out that the drug hadn't just slowed our aging. It boosted our immune systems, and increased our bodies' responses to physical injury.
Being as close to immortal as is humanly possible has its benefits. We've lived long enough to see miracles of technology, to see the things we once thought as science fiction become a reality. I owned a fusion powered car (although I sold it soon after when I saw the mess caused by a crash between two of them and the ensuing explosion.). You could have a robot butler called a Mr. Handy, a floating robot with a charming British accent a friendly personality. They invented suits of fusion powered battle armor, which Jude and I would eventually become intimately acquainted with. Miracle medicine that can immediately cure radiation poisoning, injections that immediately cure all injuries and addictions. Hell, some psycho in Germany even built a working lightsaber and posted the schematics online. Jude and I both tried to build one, but it proved beyond our capabilities.
Our long life, however, had also bore a curse.
Jude and I were both born in the year 2000. It's now 2077. We are seventy seven years old, and we don't look a day over thirty. While we've remained youthful, we've suffered through the grueling torture that is watching our entire family wither away and die while we could do nothing to stop it. Our fathers, our mothers, his siblings… They're almost all gone now, and they took a piece of us with them every time. Today, the only surviving member of Jude's forever family is his older brother Jesus, and Jude and I believe that the only reason he's still alive is because he's too fucking stubborn to die.
As if to add the cherry to the top of the cake that seemed to be made entirely of untold quantities of human feces, we've also lived long enough to live the special torture of watching the entire world unravel. We should have known that our first "wars" wouldn't be our last. Losing my parents in 2068 is what drove me to enlist in the REAL war. Despite me spending months trying desperately to dissuade him of the notion, Jude enlisted with me.
The Resource Wars.
The war that eventually spelled the final death nail in the coffin for mankind and the world as we knew it. The years of runaway resource use had led to shortages in damned near everything. Gasoline. Nuclear materials. Every form of fuel. Eventually, things got so bad that the United Nations disbanded, the United States annexed Canada (which caused riots all across Canada which the army was forced to step in to stop them), and the fifty states were reformed into thirteen commonwealths.
Then, China invaded Anchorage in Alaska, which was the home to one of our last running oil refineries. My husband and I were among the soldiers who eventually repelled them. We fought long and we fought hard. The Chinese were stubborn bastards, that's for sure. Marching into the refinery, side by side with Jude, wearing T-60e Power Armor is something I'll never forget for as long as we all live. We were present to watch Chinese General Jingwei commit suicide with his electrified sword. The Chinese were repelled, and Anchorage was liberated. We soldiers were welcomed home as heroes, for however briefly we were able to go home. That wasn't the end of the fighting of course. We weren't discharged as we'd hoped we'd be. We were reassigned and redeployed.
We fought in many battles in the war. When North Korea and China invaded Japan, our unit was there. We fought all over Japan until it fell. The Battle of Nagasaki. The Decimation at Hiroshima. The Loss of Kyoto. The Sacking of Tokyo. We watched them all burn. The Chinese and the Koreans tore through Japan with no mercy, burning any defending city to the ground, devouring any recourse they could get their hands on.
Jude and I were both injured during the Sacking of Tokyo. When the Generals ordered the retreat, our positioned was dialed in for a missile strike. They missed, but only but a couple of yards, and it was still enough to maim me. The last thing I remember of that day was being thrown twenty feet by the explosion. We were hauled onto a Vertibird headed for the USS Abraham Lincoln, which sat of the coast of Japan. I awoke five days later, and I was informed that my leg was amputated. Turns out our enhanced healing abilities can't regrow a ruined limb, even with the help of Stimpaks. Jude's injuries were fixed with a combination of his enhanced healing and the administration of a couple of stimpaks. I was issued an advanced prosthetic, and we were both discharged. We went home to San Diego, and then not even a month later we moved to Boston. Staying in San Diego meant that we would have to live with constant reminders of our former lives. Our parents. Our families. Our friends long since decayed away to dust.
We ended up settled in a place called Sanctuary Hills, a small Cul de sac northwest of Concord and about an hour's drive north of downtown Boston. There's a statue right across the bridge which is a monument to the original Minute Men of the American Revolutionary War. There was also a Vault-Tec Vault built nearby. Vault 111. We received notification that we both automatically had a place reserved inside in the event of a nuclear war. When we asked why, we were told that all of the original one hundred trial volunteers were immediately reserved a spot in any Vault in the country.
We were glad for that. Jude and I both knew that the world as we knew it wouldn't be there by the next year. The world stood on the brink of total nuclear war.
Our neighbor, Nate, and his wife Nora were both terrified of what the future holds. Nate is one of our oldest friends. We met him in the army, and when we were discharged we ended up buying the house next to his. He is like a brother to us and Nora is like our sister. We were at their wedding, and we were there the day their son, Shaun was born. I am Shaun's godfather.
We all knew how dire the situation was. The President of the United States was operating the country from on office aboard a Poseidon Energy Oil Rig off the West Coast. They called it the Enclave initiative. It wasn't until much later that Jude and I would find out just how badly that went wrong.
This is where our story begins. The day was October 23rd, 2077, and we all knew where we were headed. We were all afraid. Nate and Nora were afraid. Jude was afraid. I was afraid. We all knew our third war was on its way, and the one thing we've all learned about war?
War never changes.