Chapter Text
The first time he’d ever noticed her crying, it was an accident. Safe bet was that she didn’t mean for him to see it, but when she bent over the crib, something broke in her that triggered a familiar ache in the pit of his gut. She probably didn’t even know that anyone else was in the house.
Sturges had mentioned in passing that, when they reclaimed Sanctuary as a settlement, she hadn’t said a word, but had set herself to closing this house off. She boarded up the walls from the outside, even patching over the front door, so that the only entrance was through the garage (which she also covered over, mostly). She meticulously junked everything in the place, picking up every bit of scrap that she could scrape up with her bare hands until each room was completely empty. Preston had offered to help her, and was about to start moving the crib, when she lost her composure and screamed at him to get out. She had been nothing but sweet and kind up to that moment, he swore, and nothing but good since. No one brought it up. As far as anyone knew, Preston never held it against her, but he also never asked questions. With a shrug, Sturges told him that if the general wanted to share, she would. In other words—he knew something was wrong, but never asked.
He knew that she had assigned all of the houses in Sanctuary to some purpose—a hospital, a couple bunkers, a supplies building. This one, she had sealed off for herself. Seemed a little strange to choose this over one of the less damaged ones (he, personally, would have chosen the yellow house she turned into an infirmary). Stranger that she was so weird about it. The baby’s room was the only room in the house she didn’t touch. She left the blocks on the floor, the threadbare rug, the chair. Once, he caught her straightening the crib over and over, as if she was hoping to get it just right. It would have been funny in that dark sorta way, had he not known better. This beyond-saving blue crib, smack in the middle of a desolated suburbia. He didn’t comment on what he saw. He knew better than to ask after a kid that was nowhere to be seen.
But this time, he’d be damned if he couldn’t stop himself from waltzing right up to her. Never could ignore a cry for help when he saw one. It was the mayor in him. He had this crazy urge to tell her all about Lucy and Duncan—to show her that he understood.
“I prefer a rocky ceiling over my head, truth be told.” He didn’t know what else to say. She straightened, and slapped her hand to her cheek, jerking it away so quickly that it took him a moment to figure that gesture out. It was the small sniff that gave her away.
“We should roll out.”
“Or we could stay another night,” MacCready suggested. “Preston seems to love having you here.”
She shrugged and pushed past him out of the room. There was a bed in the room across the hall. He assumed that this must have been the master bedroom before the bombs fell. She slept in it when they were in Sanctuary, but she refused to keep her belongings there. The room was empty save the bed. He figured that it was something to do with the guns. She kept those in the wardrobe she had set up in the garage, next to the little doghouse she had built for Dogmeat, and the trunk where she kept spare clothes.
“I built a better house. We can sleep there.” He tried not to register his surprise. In all the time he had traveled with Lola, and all the things she had built for complete strangers, she had never made anything for herself. As far as he had seen, the mirelurk-shell around this old house was the only thing she’d built for herself.
Down further into the cul-de-sac, he found that she was right. She had built a whole wooden cabin—fully lit with couches, windows, a canopy ceiling, and two floors. It was neat, sparsely furnished, and uncluttered. A blank slate. Upstairs, she had placed two beds on opposite sides of the room. There was a crib on the far wall, facing the two. That muscle in the pit of his gut seized up again. He suppressed a sympathetic groan.
“Nice.”
“I made it.”
“So you said.”
She sat down on one of the mattresses and laid back, hands behind her head. It was late, but he wasn’t all that tired. She passed out in her clothes right there, faster than he had ever seen her fall asleep. He curled up on the other mattress, and clicked off the radio she had placed on the bedside table.
He wasn’t surprised when he woke up a couple of hours later to her creeping down the stairs and rushing out of the shack. He wasn’t surprised that, when he followed her, she led the m right back to that blue, walled-off house across from the town hub. He wasn’t surprised that she curled up in the chair in the baby’s room and fell asleep. The wind whistled in through the gaps in the ceiling, and the chill of it cut right through his clothes. Her hair covered her face, but her breathing steadied fast. She had probably been asleep the whole time. Sleepwalking. He’d seen it in a couple of the younger kids at Lamplight—Bumblebee, if he was remembering right. Once or twice with the gunners, but you didn’t last long with them if you wandered away from base at night. He stood there in the doorway watching her sleep until his legs were stiff. She shivered in the chair, but didn’t wake.
She was going to get sick. Plus, she wouldn’t sleep well. If she didn’t get some rest soon, she wouldn’t be up for heading back out into the wastelands anytime soon, and that would make her frustrated. They had somewhere to be, according to Nick Valentine, and it sounded (though she and Nick wouldn’t tell him what was going on) like they were running out of time. He was halfway across the room when he had convinced himself that he had to move her.
She smelled like the plain soap she had found in the hospital they sacked. He slid one arm carefully under her shoulders, and then the other under the crook of her knees. Not too heavy, really, but solid. Warm, despite the chill. He maneuvered her through the doorway, and into the old master bedroom. He set her on the mattress, and pulled the unzipped sleeping bag that she’d left there as a blanket up around her ears.
He felt a little strange, then. As if he were intruding on something intensely personal. He had seen her sleep before while he was on watch, but in this place, it was like she was a complete stranger. Her eyes looked darker here—more hazel than spring green. Her lips seemed like they would be permanently weighed down at the ends, erasing that smile she shot him whenever he said something snide on the road. Always this half-hearted frown. More defeated than anything. Somber. Fragile.
He let himself out through the garage, locking the door tight behind him. Since she had hired him, he had been leery of letting her out of his sight, especially when sleeping, but she needed the time alone. He walked back down the street to the end of the cul-de-sac, where the cheery wooden shack stood empty. He mounted the stairs and crawled into his own bed, thinking of Duncan, tucked in and dreaming in the Capitol Wasteland. She wasn’t the only one who needed a little time alone with her regrets.
In the morning, she didn’t mention her relocation, and he didn’t mention relocating her. She handed him some squirrel on a stick, and they ate breakfast in silence on the benches in the town hub. For the second time this week, he thought about telling her all about Lucy and Duncan. He just wanted her to know everything. He rubbed the pad of his thumb along the tiny cap of the wooden soldier in his pocket.
“I have to follow the lead Nick gave me. He seems to think that Dogmeat can find the man we’re looking for”
“That where we’re headed, Boss?”
“I planned on it.”
He nodded, and they were out the front gates after breakfast. Preston waved one arm high over his head as they crossed the bridge. She waved back and smiled. Real smile this time—warm, reached all the way to her eyes. She and Preston seemed close, and he wondered for a second why she would travel across the wasteland with him, and not Captain Goody-Two-Shoes. Hell, she’d only known him for a couple of weeks, and she was still paying him here and there from what they took in butchering raiders.
She rolled her shoulders forward and then back, as if shaking off the weird weight that came down over her like a lead blanket every time they were back at base. Her strides got longer, and her head a little higher as they took off down the road.