Chapter Text
29th July 2258, somewhere West of DC
He is abruptly awoken by a loud bang, his own teeth shaking in his mouth as the explosion reverberated throughout the structure.
His father calls his name, and he throws himself out of bed and fetches his boots in no time. He puts his trusted rifle around his shoulder and picks up his baby sister, taking care in wrapping her tightly in her covers: she’s crying, of course. Damn, he would have cried too if his father didn’t need him so badly at the moment.
“Sssh, it’s okay, I’ve got you.” She looks up at him, those same shiny ebony eyes as their mother’s. He protectively wraps his arms around her: if she was the last thing he had got to remember her, he would have done anything to make sure she survived the night.
When he turns around, he spots in the dim light Dad pushing the magazine inside the gun and clunking it close. “We must go!” he hisses, and he follows his orders.
He missed the old times when everything was fine, when he still was his dad and not this poor excuse of a general. He missed mum, above everything else.
He gulps, cradles his sister in his arms and tries to fight back the knot in his stomach. Dad gets out of the door and he follows, his steps quiet among the confusion generated by the attack.
They walk around the building, but after roaming two corridors they still hadn’t found a safe way out. Light comes in from the windows, but he doesn’t look outside, doesn’t want to know what the super mutants were doing to the people they had already caught.
He just keeps following Dad, crouching underneath the windows when need be, the light coming from the outside hurting his eyes, the grunts of the super mutants the only thing he could hear above the shrieks of the other settlers as the intruders kept setting fire to anything and anyone revolting against them.
He thought he had heard a mutant biting off part of someone’s arm, but he confined that horrible munching sound in the back of his mind and focused on the task at hand.
Suddenly, a Molotov is thrown just outside the window, the explosion shattering the glasses: glass chips are sent flying towards him, getting mainly caught in his hair and jacket. He shields his little sister with his body, falls to his knees pushed by the force of the explosion – a couple of glass shards pierce his jeans and dig in his flesh, but there’s no time to worry about that.
“You okay?” he just nods, fighting tears back. They start pacing quicker towards the door at the end of the hallway, almost running.
Maya is crying again. ‘dammit.’ He swears undertone, before showering her with all the soothing words that came up to his mind. “May, please, stop crying. Big brother is here, I won’t let anything happen to you, I promise. But you have to be quiet.”
He keeps looking at the baby in his arms and running behind his father: she has such a pitiful look on her face. All that’s left of mum, he reminds himself with a sigh.
When they reach the door, Dad tries to turn the doorknob, but it’s locked. He looks at him, another silent command issued.
He passes him little Maya and digs in his pockets to find a bobby pin and his switchblade: his hands are shacking – but he knows Dad needs him. He stills himself, takes a deep breath, and releases it just when the lock clunks open.
He gets in first, descending the set of stairs, realizing too late his father isn’t following him: something crushes through the remaining windows, two grenades land just in front of James, and another one rolls towards the corner of the hallway, right where the door was.
He hears his name being shouted, and when he turns around a roar deafens him and a blinding light pushes him down the stairs: he lands on his back, air kicked out of his lungs.
He must have blacked out for a couple of seconds, his head spinning and nostrils filled with concrete dust.
He pins his elbows on the ground and lifts his upper body with a grunt, looking towards the door: it takes him a while to adjust to the darkness, but no matter how hard he tried he couldn’t see the door frame anymore.
“Dad?” no answer, just a crumpled brick wall in front of him. “Dad!!” he coughs in the dust raised by the structure collapsing, screams and the roaring of distant explosions getting nearer and nearer.
He grabs the assault rifle hanging from the sling around his shoulder and grasps it tightly between his fingers: Dad had given it to him for a reason, after all.
“C’mon, pull it together. You can do this.”
Mom’s face flashes before him for a split second, but he immediately squeezes his eyes at it: it’s dangerous now, there’s no time to cry. He needed to find Dad and little Maya again, and everything would have been fine: Dad always knew what to do.
The fallen concrete creaks underneath his boots, cold sweat running down his spine as he made his best to cautiously lurk around the place: he needs to stay in the shadows, the only place where someone as little as him was safe. He knelt with his back against a wall, just beside the opening of a door: he took in a deep breath and leant to check the aisle, rifle aimed towards the end of the corridor.
He checks once, twice, counts his heartbeats, scolds himself for getting distracted with counting, and moves on, crouching near the ground as best he could.
He walks around the place, the bangs and the shouts of the mutants coming from seemingly every direction.
His hands are shaking, and there’s no way to stop them now: he bites his lower lip and clenches his fingers on the rifle. Soon he feels tears prickling his eyes again: he brushes them away with his dusty sleeve and keeps walking, muffling the sobs as best he could.
He did find many way outs, but there was always a group of mutants outside. After the third patrol he met, he realized these mutants weren’t as stupid as the others: they had even got a plan.
They were going to set the building on fire, wait for the humans to get out of there. Catch any survivors - if someone miracously found a way around the grenades and the other blood-thirsty mutants. No, he knew better than that: they were here mainly to see some blood running.
He presses himself against the wall, his back getting colder and colder against the bricks. He needed to find Dad, but he couldn’t die like a rat in there either.
If he was going to die, it wouldn’t have been burnt alive.
He turns around, rummages through the slim shelves scattered around the place, his eyes get stuck on a glass bottle: he could still see the factory engravings of the Nuka Cola on it. If his plan worked, he was going to fucking worship the damn thing for the rest of his life.
He paces back towards the door – mumbling ‘Nuka Cola Church’ over and over in his head to see how it sounded – careful not to be spotted: he leans out of the cover the little he needs to see two bulky green mutants waiting just around the corner; clearly, they were hoping to catch someone fleeing off guard.
He grabs the bottle and throws it with all his strength above their heads: it crashes on the ground opposite to the building and the two of them snap their heads towards that direction. He watches them mumble something and he quietly steps outside of the building, quickly reaching the shadows a few foot away from it: by the time one of them went to check the bottle, he was already gone.
He stays hidden, walks up a hill and looks over the once pristine building, now set completely ablaze. His hands haven’t yet stopped shaking. ‘Dad must be safe’ he repeats over and over in his mind, trying to convince himself, but even that simple sentence starts sounding like a lie when he sees the mutants catching everyone exiting the building.
He’s so focused on looking for survivors that he doesn’t pay much attention to the heavy thumping noises coming from behind him: when he hears that haunting growl he turns around, rifle already aimed at the creature. The mutant hound charges towards him: he never knew if it was skill or blind luck, but a bullet pierced right through its eye. Too bad it was already jumping towards him when he killed it.
He gets literally buried underneath 170 pounds of muscles and fangs. No matter how hard he pushes, the thing simply doesn’t move.
“Get off of me!” he quietly groans through gritted teeth; after a while he finally manages to slip from underneath it, but after he stands up he spots a super mutant striding towards him, the owner of the hound, judging from his angry face.
The rifle is still underneath the oversized dog, and when his flee-or-fight instincts kick in, he completely discards it and runs breathlessly away from the mutant.
The massive mutated man easily catches on him, slamming the board he was carrying as hard as he could on the back of the boy’s head, his mind barely registering hitting the ground and tasting earth on his lips before blacking out completely.
---
Dawn had just lazily set itself above the rim of the horizon, and James was already running back towards the carbonized building: the mutants had gone away a couple of hours prior, but he wanted to be sure none of them was still around before risking his and his daughter’s life again.
He had been checking the surroundings for hours: the few ones that made it, had hidden in a cavern with him. There were still strays outside – but none of them had even seen his six-years-old boy.
After the first hour, he had been hoping so much to see his kid walk down the hill, hug him tightly, crying out to never leave him again. And then he would have promised, they would have moved on, they would have been the family Catherine always wanted them to be.
But as time passed by hope had begun to fade, and was completely shattered in the morning’s first light.
Many had come back to the settlement just like him: some were there to steal anything that wasn’t nailed on the ground and leave the havoc of the building behind them, others were there to retrieve the bodies – or what remained – of their relatives. Sadly, he was among the last of them.
He spoke to one of the men there – he didn’t get his name, he didn’t really had the energies to focus anymore. He brought him to a room that was mostly spared by the fire, though the air around the complex kept smelling like burnt flesh and sooth. In there, bodies laid everywhere, sprawled on the floor in something resembling a tidy way. Some missed an arm or a leg, others the head, some had just turned into coal after being exposed to the fire for too long.
The man stops before one of these bodies: it was black and thin, too little to be an adult, its size big enough to match James’ lost boy.
Looking back, maybe he shouldn’t have given up so easily – but he was so tired of putting his hopes in reveries. It wouldn’t have done him any good believing he was still alive, somewhere far from here, just to find out he had been eaten by a mutant or he was just another one of those coal statues.
To be fair, even if he had survived the night he wasn’t going to make it through the next days without help. And James had simply no way of finding him, not when Maya needed to be constantly protected.
His baby daughter was peacefully sleeping against his chest, her head so little it easily fit in his palm.
He didn’t take his eyes off her as he walked out of the building. In a month’s time, he had lost half of his family: now she was the only one he could still save.