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It got to be a routine between the two of them to spend the first week of establishing a new settlement on site, just the two of them building shit up and living on it themselves. That way they got to observe what kind of shittery went on around it, and try to judge if the settlers could deal with it on their own. It was one thing to park a settlement near a barn that attracted ferals, but a whole other deal to accidentally build it beside a deathclaw nest. Audrey would usually focus on constructing buildings and setting up fields and seeds, while Hancock patrolled around looking for shit to shoot.
To be fair, they didn’t try to set up a whole bunch of places. Audrey was adamant, for some reason, about not ending up as a Minuteman. “They’re too militia for me,” was her evasive answer when he’d asked why. He never really weaseled anything better out of her, but she avoided conversations with Preston about rebuilding the group and had flat out refused his offer to become General. Still, when she came across a settlement and happened to make them happy enough to let her use the workshop, she always did her job and set up some routine defenses and fixed up the site. Generally supply routes were saved for places she meant to keep more than a rudimentary eye on.
They were at Outpost Zimonja about three months after starting out together, and Hancock was nursing a cigarette and watching her try and build a radio. This place was gunna be one of hers; he could feel it. There wasn’t any logic behind where she picked a settlement (that he could tell, anyway), and this seemed like a particularly bad choice with the pile of dead Raiders they’d had to clear out, but she just shrugged when he’d said as much and kept working on the supports for the shack. Only recently had she moved on to cosmetic shit like the radios— she made one at least once for every settlement they built, and he’d asked her why ages ago. “Back before the war, the first thing they did to us was cut us off from each other.”
“The communists?”
“No, the government. You can commit a lot more war crimes if no one knows about them, and the people that do know can’t tell anyone. In the days leading up to the bomb I hadn’t spoken to anyone but Nate and a few neighbours for probably about a month,” she explained. “So what the Commonwealth needs, besides the concept of basic human dignity, is open communication.”
He couldn’t disagree with that, but didn’t get how she just knew off the top of her head how to disassemble and rebuild busted radios until the signal came in loud and clear. He took a perfunctory look around— nothing but ferals really bothered the settlement, and the Raiders seemed to give up on the place after Boomer got turned inside out— then shifted a bit closer to her. “You spend a lot of time building tech pre-war?” he asked, politely turning his head to blow the smoke downwind. She shook her head, her tongue pressed between her teeth as she tried to jimmy a wire.
“Nah, I’m just good with machines. I usually stick to the programming part but building them hasn’t been as big of a jump as I thought it would.” She got her wire to stick and grinned. “Used to hack into people’s private computers— I knew all the nasty shit the government was doing and looking for, and when I left I took it all with me.” She tapped her head, stealing his smoke and taking a drag. Not a lot of humans would share spit with a ghoul, but Audrey did it thoughtlessly. He wasn’t ballsy enough to try it back yet, but it was good to know he didn’t gross her out too bad.
“Worked for The Man?” he teased, taking his smoke back. She turned her focus back to the wires, shrugging flippantly.
“Up until I didn’t. You know, there was a full three weeks while they tried to replace me that no one in the office knew how to change the fucking passwords.” Hancock snorted. “They all knew it was me stealing emails but they didn’t know how to stop it. They did so many searches of my apartment and seizures of my stuff but couldn’t find anything.”
“No shit?” He was impressed. She’d been fucking with corrupt governments two hundred years before he’d even been born— hell, before his dickshit corrupt brother even. “Did they ever get close?”
She was quiet for a while, her hands busily reconnecting wires and soldering shit into place. She had the advantage of working with a broken radio they’d lifted from Parson’s— all of the Red Rocket was outfitted with her improvised models that were a lot less classy-looking. “They suddenly stopped trying to catch me a few weeks after me and Nate announced we were gunna have Shaun through a surrogate. His bosses found out and I guess word travelled upwards. I thought maybe they actually believed in some sort of courtesy code when it came to families, but…”
“But?” It sounded an awful lot like prying when he said it out loud. It was a good story though— not like all the shit that weird Brother Thomas fuck tried to sell about the Old World, but some real, gritty truth that shortened the gap between then and now.
“A few weeks later we were informed that we had a spot in Vault 111 through my dedicated service to government security. I was surprised because I’d thought they’d give it to the ex-soldier before the one who made a database of all their private emails, but thinking back… I don’t really think Vault-Tec worked in isolation.” Shit.
“Fuck them,” he said automatically. There was no use trying to apologize for bringing up such a sore spot, reopening a wound— she’d just wave him off and that would be it. The least he could do was justify her anger.
“Yeah,” she agreed quietly, then put down the dissected radio and turned to face him. “You ask a lot of questions about me,” she told him, and he felt sort of guilty.
“You’re kinda unusual,” he reminded her, then quickly added, “If it bugs you I can quit. Didn’t mean to bring up bad shit.”
“It’s fine,” she assured him. “I just don’t know a whole lot about you— I don’t ask. I assumed that was… wasteland courtesy? Especially for someone who calls himself Hancock.” That was a bit surprising, that she’d just watched his back without ever expecting to really get to know him.
“You can ask me whatever you want,” he told her, mentally drawing some lines in his mind. He’d done a lot of things he wasn’t proud of, and he liked Audrey. He hadn’t had someone so steady behind him since he’d met Fahr and didn’t want to scare her away with all his… issues.
Drey was easy on the eyes, too, if he was being honest with himself. He didn’t think he’d ever get someone who’d grown up without ghouls to take him seriously, but if looking was what he had to stick with then he’d sure as hell wear his eyes out doing it.
“Can I ask what your name is?” He figured it was pretty fucking obvious that Hancock was part of the costume, but no one had ever really bothered with finding out anything else. Wasteland courtesy wasn’t actually too far off the mark. “I mean if you don’t want to then it doesn’t matter but I mean— I’m just not used to people not giving me a straight name and I’ve been trying to guess—”
“Really?”
“Yeah. I’ve narrowed it down to George or Tom,” she said, almost defensively. He snorted.
“Still going with Founding Fathers?” She shrugged. “You’re gunna feel dumb when I tell you.”
“Is it a Founding Father?” she asked. He nodded.
“John.” She smiled a little, uncertainly.
“Yeah, John Hancock. I get it,” she teased. He shook his head and shrugged.
“Nope. Ma named me John— the Hancock thing was just convenient. Never really gave anyone a last name, so no one knew that I was faking it.” Very few people in Goodneighbor even knew who John Hancock was, to be honest. Diamond City you’d end up hitting a few that didn’t nod off in Zwicky’s history lessons, but Goodneighbor? Maybe they’d recognize the name from the plaque in the State House, and that was a great big maybe.
“You have a last name?” He could always tell her no, backtrack a little bit— it wasn’t unusual for wasters to not have surnames. Last names usually meant either you had a relative somewhere along the line that cared enough to make one up, or if you were like the Hawthorne’s in the upper stands, your family had held the fuck on to it since the bombs hit. He was pretty sure his ma’s dad had taken McDonough from a rotted out copy of Live and Love, but his parents liked to insist theirs came from before the war.
“I do,” he said, watching her with a lazy smile. He wanted to relax her a little bit— she was scared of pissing him off or going too far, which was sort of funny since he’d led her right into a conversation about how the government had turned her and hers into guinea pigs as punishment.
“And?”
“You know the mayor up in Diamond City?” he asked. She nodded, her mouth turning unconsciously. That was always the sort of reaction McDonough got, and he fucking well deserved it. “He don’t talk about his baby brother John too much, does he?” The big drop was always worth the reaction it got, and Audrey’s hand slapped over her mouth.
“Jesus, you shoulda stopped me from shit-talking him so much,” she scolded, and he shrugged with a snort that was mostly bitterness.
“Why? You think I give a rat’s ass about him?”
“He’s your brother.”
“Some brother.” Silence fell for a second and he let her take the time to figure out what she was gunna say next. He knew where she was coming from, he figured— it was bad taste to shit on someone’s family— but she didn’t really grasp just how fucking dead to him that asshole was.
“Gunna be honest, I didn’t see that one coming,” she admitted, turning back to her radio. He grinned, taking a bit of a gamble and scooting over to sit right beside her. She didn’t even flinch.
“You know me, sister— full of surprises,” he teased, a bit quieter than before.
“I bet you are,” she returned, casting him a quick smile before getting right back to work. It wasn’t flirty— couldn’t be, he wouldn’t get his hopes up like that— but it sure as shit sounded like it.