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Martha McDonough wasn’t an educated woman. She didn’t have the same steady sophistication of Doctor Amari, who’d left Diamond City after a month because she was disgusted with the entry requirements that kept the bulk of settlers out in the cold. The fairly manic theorizing and experiments of Doctor Duff in the Science! Centre were beyond her entirely, let alone Professor Scara’s precise and sort of severe lecturing.
She wasn’t a doctor and she didn’t know two things about the biology of mutated wasteland animals, but she knew her sons. Her eldest, George, was confident to a fault, and knew how to please people. He wasn’t charming precisely and Martha didn’t want to call it manipulative, but he was able to modify his behaviour to impress whoever he wanted. At the end of the day, though, he was always the same boy and remained uninfluenced by the masks he put on.
Johnny was different in a thousand ways and she worried about him. He was a live wire, a fresh wound that kept reopening— sensitive, but not always in a bad way. Compassionate to a fault and as much a leader as his big brother, John refused to put on the same song and dance to get anywhere. All his talent was going to waste because if he thought someone was acting stupid, he’d tell them to their faces no matter who they happened to be.
There was also something… wrong with him. Not wrong— she hated using that word to describe John because it wasn’t his fault and it was only bad because it made him unhappy— but something affected him that his brother didn’t share. Consequences didn’t seem to bother George, and patience and damage control were his home run swing. He could get riled up as bad as the next person, but in handling it he appealed to trustworthiness and reliability. John let it get to him, let the whole world get to him and bore that weight on his shoulders until it crushed him.
His father was always a bit too hard on him. He liked George’s drive, his ambition that would get them into Diamond City. He was always going to make something of himself, whereas John needed help they couldn’t give him. There wasn’t anyone who specialized in brains besides Doctor Amari, who had long since moved on to Goodneighbor— besides, Martha was fairly sure that physical brains were different than trying to fix hurting ones.
When she looked at John after his brother was elected mayor, after the ghouls had been chased out and he’d stormed out of the office after begging him to call this whole nightmare off… she wished she could have done more for him. He was still young but he was still just as wounded as he had ever been. The tears streaming down his face weren’t sadness— it was anger. He’d broken like a dam and just like he shouldered all the sadness and unfairness of the world, he took on its rage as well. He carried pain and fury and Martha wished she could have known how to help him because he was never going to speak to his brother again.
And when his bed was empty when she got up the next morning, she wondered if he would ever forgive her either.
. . . . .
“Drey this is a shitty idea.” Two steps forward, three steps back. Audrey hadn’t known John’s parents were still alive, sitting pretty in the house they’d lived in when Hancock was a kid. They moved back after McDonough kicked out the ghouls. They weren’t fucking cruel like him, and they knew what he did was fucked up. He’d never even mentioned them before, but once he did it was like a switch had been turned. He wanted to see his parents.
Now that they were close, he wanted to go back to Goodneighbor.
“We can wait,” she assured him, which moved him a few steps forward. Scared but stubborn, he always jetted forward when she suggested turning back. I ran away, abandoned my family. It was shitty and they deserve to know I’m not dead, battled constantly with I ran the fuck away. I’m a shitty son and they’re better off thinking I died.
“I’m just… shit. They’re not really gunna be proud of me,” he said, like he was begging her to understand. She reached out to take his hand, squeezing it tight so he didn’t drift right off into a panic. He might have anyway, but it was all she knew how to do for him.
“Speaking as the world’s most disappointed mother, you’ve done a lot to be proud of. Maybe skim over a few stabbings, but otherwise? You’re like The Silver Shroud,” she said gently. He shook his head and laughed a little, his eyes still darting anxiously around like his dad was gunna be out for a stroll down the alley they were standing in.
“You and Kent are fucking nerds, you know that?” he asked, dragging her over to hang onto like an anchor. She smiled against his neck.
“Don’t tell me you didn’t like the voice,” she scolded. He squeezed her, then dropped her and moved forward a few feet. The house was down the road and it was just early enough in the evening to still be polite to drop by. Maybe they wouldn’t even try to shoot them first thing.
“What do I say when they ask about the ghoul thing?” he asked, stopping all at once.
“You could tell them the truth?” she suggested. Hancock had never insinuated that he didn’t like his parents, so she didn’t have any reason to believe that they needed to keep anything from them.
“Kind of a bummer to open with a suicide attempt,” he groused, but she could tell he didn’t disagree with her. He jetted forward to an old wrecked up picnic table, hopping up to sit on it. His hands were shaking and he lit a cigarette. “Used to use this as a safe zone for tag,” he said with the smoke in his mouth, banging his foot down on the bench. “Me, George, and a few other kids that lived around here. Don’t even remember their names.”
“That’s cute,” she said, hopping up beside him and leaning on his shoulder.
“What about you?”
“What about me?”
“You grew up in Canada. What was up with that?” he asked. He wanted a diversion, maybe something to keep them late enough that they wouldn’t approach the house in case they got mistaken for raiders. She indulged him, because they could just try again if he wanted.
“I lived in Niagara Falls,” she told him. “It was right across from New York— they had a waterfall, and we had a waterfall. Prohibition wasn’t big in the city; we were kind a tourist hotspot even when it was only rich people that could still take a vacation. Locals still wanted to party to take their minds off it, so me and my friends used to hang around at night. The streets would get lit up with whatever lights people could get going that late, and bands would play all night long,” she told him. The biggest shock when they’d moved to Boston to avoid the pressure America was putting on the country was how uptight and closed off everyone was. Fear ruled there, and while there’d been plenty of fear in her hometown it was a shared thing. No one in Boston seemed to dare speak to each other in case their neighbour reported them for being Commies.
“Excuse me?” Audrey hadn’t noticed the civilian approach them, but if she started at the noise then Hancock jumped right out of his fucking skin. He scared the woman, who skittered backwards a few feet— more when he stood up straight like she was his drill sergeant come for inspection. Looking closer at the stranger, and the man who joined her anxiously, Drey suddenly understood why.
Ghoulification had changed Hancock, but not that drastically. The woman had his wide jaw and narrow cheekbones, and the long hooked nose that would have suited him so well if Drey had ever seen it. Her hair was salt and pepper black, curls held back in a tight ponytail— he was blonde like his dad, but the curls were his.
Audrey stood up next to him, and the woman put up her hands. “We’re unarmed,” she said slowly.
“Don’t announce it,” Patrick hissed, grabbing one of her hands.
“It’s all right,” Audrey assured them while Hancock tried to thaw out a little. She shrugged one shoulder to indicate her rifle and the knife on her thigh, then reached around and pulled John’s jacket to the side to reveal his shotgun. “You can see all our weapons.”
“I’m Martha and this is Patrick,” she said. “I know you.” John got tenser if that was possible. “You’re the mayor of Goodneighbor… Hancock, right? We’ve heard about you.” He deflated all at once, like he’d suddenly got a hit of Med-X in him and was going numb.
“Yeah.” His voice was raspier than usual, like there was something in his throat. Audrey waited, because she wasn’t gunna force him to say anything, but this was painful.
“Look I don’t know much about you or your town, but my son John—” John could have just been shot and looked less upset about it, “—he used to sneak out there all the time. I know you’re the mayor and you probably don’t know—”
“Which is why we shouldn’t have bothered the man, Martha,” Patrick hissed. Evidently they’d heard quite a bit more about Goodneighbor than Mrs. McDonough let on.
“—but he’s been missing for a very long time and I just wanted to know if you’d seen him,” she finished, ignoring her husband. Hancock barely breathed. “Are you from Goodneighbor?” she asked Audrey once it became obvious that he wasn’t going to say anything.
“Kinda,” she said with a shrug, and suddenly felt weird. She hadn’t considered that this trip would also be her first time meeting his family— family she hadn’t yet threatened the life of, and family that still had their real, original bodies. She felt very… scabby, all of the sudden. A radier had nicked her shoulder with a knife but it hadn’t been deep enough to waste a stimpak on, so she’d just left it. Blood was crusting over the wound she hadn’t even bothered to cover, and she must have looked almost as scary as Hancock with his reputation. Meeting Nate’s moms had been at least thirty times less intimidating than this— number one, they both knew who their son was. She also hadn’t had face tattoos or visible wounds and hadn’t killed anyone recently.
“Have you met John?” God this was the ugliest sort of déjà vu. She remembered first meeting Shaun, before she knew who he was, just knowing that he was some old guy that’d come down and deactivated the kid she’d been chasing that was clearly not who she was looking for…
“Drey,” Hancock blurted, and she looked up at him. “I can’t.”
“You wanna leave?” she asked, and Martha tensed up like she was going to stop them.
“No, but I can’t…” He gestured to his parents and Audrey understood. He wanted them to know, but he couldn’t bring himself to say the words out loud.
“You want me to…?”
“I can’t ask that,” he said. Audrey glanced over at Martha, who was listening intently and trying to decode the information they were handing her.
“Well I mean besides you, who better?” she asked. It was weird to have been in the same place as John’s mom, and a little weirder to know that Martha was a lot more dedicated to it than she’d been. Finding Shaun had been like an apology for bringing him into the shittiest world ever and then letting him get kidnapped— it was never about any maternal love. It was an obligation to a soldier she left behind, and she loved lil’ Shaun now but… they weren’t a conventional mother-son relationship.
“I’m sorry,” he mumbled.
“Go take a smoke break, stud,” she murmured, squeezing his hand. He slunk away, lighting up as soon as his back was turned. Audrey looked at Martha and Patrick, smiling because, well. They were getting good news. “I have met your son,” she started, clapping her hands together. Martha clasped a hand over her chest and Patrick sagged in relief.
“Is he okay? Is he happy?” Questions came rapid-fire, questions that Audrey had never asked Shaun. She wondered if he’d been disappointed.
“He’s great. I met him in Goodneighbor about a year ago? He saved my life— well he saved me from getting robbed and then probably killed for mouthing off. I’m… not from around here, and he helped me integrate into the Commonwealth, watches my back… he helped me find my son,” she explained. She was gunna talk him up before the big reveal, because clearly Patrick McDonough listened to Diamond City security just a little too loyally.
“You think he’ll let us see him?” Patrick asked, and to Audrey’s surprised Martha looked… hesitant. She didn’t know who John even was yet, but she was obviously not enthusiastic about tracking him down.
“I think he dragged me halfway across the ‘Wealth to find you,” she said, tilting her head back meaningfully to John’s general direction. Both of them froze, but while Martha looked squarely at Audrey, Patrick stood up. He jogged over to his son who was slouched a few houses over and on his second cigarette already, and distantly Audrey heard what, McDonough isn’t good enough for you? The name your mother’s family saved from before the war?
Grandpa read it in a burnt up mag, Hancock returned hoarsely, without any heat.
Audrey looked at Martha, who was staring at her feet now. The way she was breathing was familiar too— she remembered something about anxiety being hereditary. “I can’t,” she whispered. “We drove him off, we ruined his life… I can’t ask him to forgive me for that.”
“No offence ma’am, but you oughta get over there. He’s sort of scared his parents hate him,” she confided. John would forgive her, and as soon as it left her mouth Martha darted over like she’d been waiting for an excuse— or waiting to hear that her son didn’t hate her.
Audrey turned, feeling a bit like she was intruding but unable to resist. John was standing now and Martha had her arms slung around him. “You’re grounded, John McDonough. You better tell your goddamn town that you won’t be able to go out and play for a while because you are so goddamn grounded.” Hancock had his arms around her too, and Audrey couldn’t see clear but she knew he was crying.
She turned to give them privacy, but he called her over because of course he did. He wasn’t gunna let her sneak away and she loved it deep down. Very deep down, under layers and layers of awkwardness and shuffling and probably being beet red— even redder when he pulled her over by the hips and told his parents that she didn’t introduce herself all the way.
“Audrey Allcock,” she repeated, resisting the urge to gnaw at her nails or bring out her knife to work around her hand (or stab Hancock, the sweet embarrassing bastard). “I’m John’s girlfriend.”
She looked at Martha to see if the woman was okay with that, with this bloody beat-up vagrant showing up with her long lost son. Looking at her standing there and beaming, Audrey figured she probably hadn’t been this okay in a long time.