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Nora poured herself a cup of tea, infinitely grateful that the necessary plants had survived the war, even if it wasn’t quite the kind she was used to, and clutched the warm mug in her hands.
The sun was barely rising over the young settlement of Sanctuary, but Sturges was already at it with his hammer.
She pulled on her jacket, something leather she’d “proliferated” from her now deceased neighbours, and left the house, her black hair swaying in the wind.
She lifted a tan hand and waved to Sturges, who waved back, almost dropping his toolkit.
Then, like clockwork, Dogmeat bounded up to her, tail wagging excitedly. The tennis ball she kept in her pocket got chucked across the street, chased by a blur of brown.
Preston tipped his hat to her, “Good morning General,” she saluted back, and continued her walk.
The Vault. Every time she saw it her heart thudded against her chest, a bird desperately trying to escape.
Coming here everyday had, so far, failed to remove the deep sense of “wrong” associated with it. Pushing onwards, she activated the lift, and lost access to the dawn sun once more.
“Sweetheart,” the word got stuck in her throat, as she approached the pod that held the corpse of her wife.
Frozen forever in the last moment of her life, trying desperately to save their son.
Her dark brown eyes stared lifelessly at Nora, and she couldn’t hold back the tears. It was always meant to be them against the world. Nora and Natasha, and then baby Shaun.
It’s just Nora, in the Commonwealth. Shaun was kidnapped, and Natasha. Well Natasha is stuck down here. Stuck with all their neighbours who judged them.
“I’m sorry,” she placed her hand on the glass, flinching from the cold, the same cold she knew intimately, “I will find him.”
Nora forced herself to look away, to return to the surface, to whatever “normality” there was in the Commonwealth.