Chapter Text
Nick Valentine approached the road to Sanctuary Hills, taking in the rich amber colors of the autumn scenery. He hadn’t been back there in a few months, but it was his favorite place in the Commonwealth to be, and he was looking forward to a few weeks off from the steady stream of detective work that flooded into his office in Diamond City. Most of it was tedious, interspersed with occasional bouts of excitement and intrigue, but he felt he’d been at it long enough to deserve a break. He hadn’t told anyone he was coming, but it wouldn’t be an issue. Sanctuary Hills was a very tight-knit community, but he was on a short list of outsiders who were always welcome. He approached the perimeter and waved to Preston Garvey. Garvey noticed him right away and signaled to the control tower guard to open the gate for him.
“Nick!” Preston said warmly, approaching him and giving him his trademark firm handshake. “It’s been a while. What brings you here? Vanessa didn’t say anything about you visiting anytime soon.”
“That’d be because she doesn’t know,” Nick replied, squeezing Garvey’s hand as he shook it. “I figured I’d just drop in and pay everyone a little visit. I could use a bit of vacation.”
“Well, you’re welcome here anytime, as long as you want. The guest house is available, but some wiring went bad in there last week and Sturges hasn’t been able to fix it yet, so it’s gonna be pretty dark in there at night. The inn is open, though.”
Nick nodded. “Well, darkness isn’t so much of a problem for me as it is for you, but good to know.” He looked around for a Raider in yellow armor, but didn’t see anyone. “Gage on duty today?”
“No, he's on tomorrow morning. I haven’t seen him or Vanessa yet today, so I assume they’re up at the house.”
“Thanks, Garvey. I’ll catch up to you in a bit. Gotta go make the rounds, you know.”
“Of course,” Garvey replied. “Good to see you again.”
“You as well.” Nick turned and began walking slowly up the main drag. In the years since Vanessa and Gage had moved back there, Sanctuary Hills had grown into a thriving, close-knit community with a well-fortified perimeter and a culture uniquely its own. They’d built a pavilion in the center, where people gathered on warm summer nights to prepare communal meals while children romped and played in the small field around it. Houses had sprung up, Sturges had a proper garage, and a general store stood near the entrance. An inn had opened next door to it, serving locals as well as the traders who passed through on a fairly regular basis. Garvey posted the weekly guard duty schedule on a pillar in the pavilion, on a bulletin board that was crowded with flyers and children’s drawings. The guard duty team could manage most threats that came too close, which typically consisted of radscorpions and the occasional pack of feral ghouls. Every time he went there, Nick felt a sense of warmth and belonging that was lacking in the cramped, anonymous landscape of Diamond City. He exchanged greetings with a few settlers as he made his way up the main drag, towards the cul-de-sac, where Gage and Vanessa’s house sat at the very back.
They’d converted the small shack into a two-story home, complete with an attached garage and a sprawling front patio where they often gathered with friends in the evenings. A lantern hung by the door was usually lit if they were open to visitors. As General of the Minutemen and the community leader of Sanctuary, Vanessa preferred to conduct business out of the pavilion, but Nick was on a short list of people who was always welcome at their home.
As he walked up the steps of the patio, he could see Phoenix’s toys scattered about, interspersed with cigarette butts and a couple of empty beer bottles from some earlier gathering. He could hear voices inside, but couldn’t make out what they were saying.
Hearing Nick’s knock at the door, Gage got up and peered through the peephole Sturges had installed. Seeing Nick, he turned and summoned his son. “Hey Phoenix, go see who’s at the door.” Phoenix hopped up from his seat, bolted towards the door, and flung it wide open. His face was a picture of wide-eyed amazement as he saw the synth standing there.
“UNCLE NICK!” he squealed, jumping up and down with glee. “Daddy! Momma! It’s Uncle Nick!”
Nick looked down at the boy, whose dark curls bounced around as he jumped. He was the spitting image of Vanessa, but he had Gage’s dark and penetrating eyes. He’d watched the boy grow from a screeching bundle to a jolly toddler and now into a sweet and stubborn five-year-old boy with a sharp and determined mind. Phoenix was the closest he’d ever have to having a son of his own, and he treasured every moment they spent together.
“Uncle Nick! Do you have any more detective stories?” the boy asked eagerly, tugging at the bottom of his trenchcoat.
“You bet your buttons I do,” Nick said warmly, picking the boy up and clutching him in a tight hug. “Including a few I know you’ve never heard before.” Phoenix let out a squeal of delight and hugged him back.
Nick paused to survey the home and how it had changed since the last time he was there. He loved visiting Gage and Vanessa’s house; it reminded him of a cross between a junkyard, a bar, and an old art museum. Shelves full of bobbleheads, old magazines, Nuka-Cola memorabilia, and random curios filled the room, and strings of lantern-style lights criss-crossed the ceiling. The walls were covered with old road signs, license plates, and Gage’s drawings.
Gage had always liked to draw, but hadn’t done much of it since his teens. His life since leaving home at age 12 hadn’t exactly afforded him many opportunities to focus on anything other than survival, but a visit from a random trader a year or so earlier had changed that. The trader had salvaged some materials from an old art supply store and had struck out trying to find a buyer for them in Diamond City. When he arrived in Sanctuary, Gage had snatched them up – a treasure trove of sketchbooks, graphite pencils, and a few boxes of colored pencils in surprisingly good shape. None of the paints or markers were usable, but the colored pencils caught Gage’s eye. He’d bought the entire stock of supplies and had spent the years since filling the sketchbooks with portraits, images of places he’d been to or creatures he’d killed, and sketches of Nuka-World and Sanctuary, among many other things. One of his favorite activities with Phoenix was for Phoenix to come up with an idea (such as a Vertibird With a Big Butt or a Deathclaw Wearing a Funny Hat) and Gage would sketch it as Phoenix described it. Over the years, the sketchbooks had begun piling up in boxes and on shelves. Vanessa had begun picking out some of her favorites and hanging them around the house. At first, Gage had objected. He didn’t think anything he drew was good enough to hang on the walls. But he got used to it, and even began to appreciate it after a while.
Nick surveyed the art landscape of the room. He knew that Gage was not someone who enjoyed seeing his name in lights, so he kept the praise to a minimum, but Gage’s drawing skills were formidable, to say the least. With nothing but a plain graphite pencil, he could render lifelike portraits in striking detail. Even rough sketches of scenery or just outlines still looked mind-numbingly real. When he got his hands on colored pencils, he wove light and dark together on paper in a way that made even the most mundane images seem to reach out from the confines of the page. The fact that this all came from a guy with zero formal training as an artist made it that much more incredible.
Vanessa came out of the kitchen and threw her arms around the synth. “Nick!” she said warmly, her dazzling smile glowing nearly as brightly as the lanterns on strings above her. “I would have cleaned up better and prepared a feast if I’d known you were coming.”
“I didn’t know I was coming either, until a day or so ago. Been busy with a few cases, but I’m at a point where I can take a break. So I caught a wild hair and thought I’d come back here to Sanctuary, take a few days off, and visit with a few of my favorite people. Plus,” he added, looking down at Phoenix, “I’ve got a few new detective stories that a certain someone is going to love.”
Phoenix began jumping again and looked over at Gage. “Daddy, will you draw it again this time? Please?” One of their favorite activities when Nick visited was for Nick to tell detective stories while Gage listened and sketched scenes from the story, and tried to render images of the characters. The walls of Phoenix’s little room were covered with illustrations of some of his favorite stories that Nick had told him. Nick enjoyed watching Gage draw out his stories almost as much as he enjoyed watching Phoenix listen eagerly to them.
“You bet I will,” Gage said, patting his boy on the head. He never got tired of those nights, when they’d let Phoenix stay up well past his bedtime, watching him slowly drift off while fighting to follow along with the latest installment of the story.
“Are you staying at the guest house?” Vanessa asked. “Sturges said something about the lights going out in there, but I hadn’t gotten a chance to go see it for myself yet. You know you’re always welcome here if you’d prefer.”
Nick shook his head. “Thanks for the offer, but duty calls. I’ve got some work I need to do that I brought with me. I think I’ll set up at the inn so my late-night typewriter tapping doesn’t keep everyone in the house awake.”
Gage raised an eyebrow. “Thought you said you were on vacation?”
“I am, but a detective’s work is never done. Never truly done, anyway. Anyhow, let me go get situated at the inn and I’ll come back around this evening.”
Gage nodded, shaking the synth’s hand firmly as he turned to leave. “See that you do.”
Gage awoke the next morning with a slight headache from the booze he’d consumed during Nick’s evening visit the night before, but otherwise, he felt reasonably refreshed and ready for guard duty. They’d figured out a system that worked pretty well, all things considered – one Lead Guard, usually him, Garvey, Sturges, or MacCready, and anywhere from two to four Patrolmen, comprised of a rotating assortment of settlers, who took commands from the Lead. Gage’s distance vision in his one good eye was still terrible after being shot all those years before, so they never assigned him to night shift. Gage and MacCready still did their level best to avoid one another as much as possible, but their paths crossed at shift change time, when MacCready had been one assigned to nighttime duty.
Gage rubbed his good eye as he sat up, catching the sunrise that let him know his shift would soon be starting. Vanessa was still asleep beside him. He tried not to wake her up as he dressed and put his armor on, but the clank of it clamping shut roused her. She sat up and smiled at him. Even first thing in the morning, with disheveled hair and heavy eyes, she still took his breath away when he looked at her. That pulling sensation in his chest, the one he got every time he thought about her, welled up again, as it always did whenever he was around her. Even after all these years, he still couldn’t truly comprehend the fact that she wanted him, that she’d given him a child, that she’d become Overboss of a gang of Raiders and given up so much, all just to be with him. He still found himself looking at her asleep beside him sometimes, wondering what he in the fucking hell he did to deserve her. He’d learned not to question it, though. When she stayed by his side after he got shot and went blind, any doubt that she was going to be by his side until the end had evaporated.
“You got day shift today?” she asked, stretching her arms in front of her.
“Yeah. What you got on tap for today, Boss?”
"I need to go check out the electrical situation in the guest house,” she replied, sounding bored with the endeavor before it even started. “Also, Mags called over the radio yesterday, saying she wanted to talk. I told her I’d try to get back to her today. So I guess I’d better see what she wants.”
She got out of the bed and walked over to him, wrapping her arms around his waist. He returned the embrace, the warm feel of his skin against hers reminding her of the sensation of having him inside her the night before. She closed her eyes and smiled softly at the memory, savoring the familiar scent of him as she rested her head against his chest. “What time are you off today? Sundown as usual?”
“Yeah, I think so. If I play my cards right, I can do the handoff to MacCready without having to talk to him at all.” MacCready always found something to complain loudly about whenever his shift coincided with Gage’s, whether it was Gage’s illegible handwriting in the log book or the cleanliness of the guard towers. No matter what happened during the shift, MacCready could be relied upon to find fault in something, as long as it could be blamed on Gage.
Vanessa rolled her eyes and chuckled. MacCready still hated Gage, and Gage still hated MacCready mainly because MacCready hated him. He knew why MacCready hated him, but had figured he would have gotten over it by now, in the way that most everyone else in Sanctuary had. But MacCready was stubborn and not one to let go of a grudge. They’d gotten to the point where they could be civil to each other for the sake of Phoenix and Duncan, but when the boy wasn’t around, all bets were off. For Vanessa, it felt like disciplining a pair of bratty children.
“I didn’t see him yesterday,” she mused, trying to set his mind at ease a little. “Phoenix played with Duncan for a bit, though, so I’m sure he’s around.” Despite the strained relationship between their parents, Phoenix and Duncan had grown into inseparable friends. Duncan moved slowly and needed take frequent breaks, but Phoenix was used to it and had learned to keep the pace with his friend without ever needing to be told to slow down for him. Despite his feelings about MacCready, he found himself to be quite fond of Duncan.
“Well, that’s just peachy,” Gage said, sitting down to pull on his boots. “Hopefully he found himself a glue trap to get stuck in.” The idea of MacCready stuck in a glue trap made him smile to himself. He’d have to draw that later.
Vanessa sighed. “I’m gonna go wake up Phoenix. You can have a few minutes alone with your...glue trap fantasies.”
Gage laughed and squeezed her hips with his hands, leaning forward to kiss her over the armor. “I’ve got way better fantasies that don’t involve glue traps.”
Vanessa smiled and kissed him back. “You’ll have to show me later.”
“Oh, I plan on it,” he said, kissing her one last time before letting go and going to retrieve his rifle and report for duty.
Evening came around and Nick spent it at Vanessa and Gage’s house, regaling Phoenix with the Case of the Missing Mirelurk Eggs while Gage drew out the action in a sketchbook and Vanessa lounged on the couch. She lived for these evenings. Since waking up in a vault and discovering herself in a terrifying new version of her world, she’d lived several lifetimes in the course of only a few years. She was still Overboss of Nuka-World and General of the Minutemen, though she would gladly hand over the former role to someone else, if only she knew of someone who could be trusted to run it the way it needed to be run for the sake of the Commonwealth. She’d faced death more times than she could remember and had lived to tell about it all. And yet all of it had led her here, to her home, with Gage and Phoenix, easily the two best things that had ever happened to her. It didn’t seem right, it didn’t seem real, and yet here she was, relaxing in the warm embrace of their home.
She thought about how it was indeed their home. They’d begun working on it in earnest when Phoenix was about 6 months old, old enough to be put in the playpen that Sturges had built for him while she and Gage worked. Garvey and some of the other settlers had lent a hand when they could. In time, they’d grown it from a two-room shack to a two-story, six-room house, adding a room for Phoenix, a kitchen, a guest bedroom, a spacious living room, a sprawling patio, and a garage. The large picture window in their bedroom faced west, giving them a panoramic view of the sunset. They’d spent many a night sitting up in their bed, sharing a bottle of whiskey and watching the sky cycle through a host of warm pastel colors as it disappeared behind the hills.
Her attention clapped back to the moment when Phoenix let out a belly laugh as Nick told of the mirelurk egg thief slipping on a trail of mirelurk oil and having a comedic wipeout in the middle of a battle. She watched Gage’s pencil move a little more quickly as he tried to keep pace with the story as he drew. She could watch him draw all day. Even after seven years together, that fluttery, pulling feeling inside of her when she looked at him hadn’t diminished at all; in fact, it had gotten more intense, more ingrained, more essential. She still didn’t fully understand what she had done to deserve him, but whatever it was, she’d done it, and he was there. He pulled her in towards him with his mere presence, even if he wasn’t doing anything other than drawing with a pencil in an old notebook. Everything he did made her want him more.
As the evening wore on, Phoenix’s eyelids began drooping as he fought to keep listening to the story. Within minutes, he was asleep on the couch. Vanessa picked him up and carried him to his room, placing his favorite Jangles the Moon Monkey in his arms as she pulled the blanket up over him and placed a kiss on the top of his head.
She returned to the living room and dropped down onto the couch and loooked back over at Gage, who was still working on the shading on one of the mirelurk eggs he’d drawn. Sturges had fixed up an old drafting table for him. Gage sat on a stool in front of it, his feet propped up on a stool, with a bin full of discarded pencil nubs on the ground beside him. Nick leaned back in his chair and regarded the couple. He’d known them for years now, but it felt like he’d always known them, like he couldn’t envision a life that didn’t have them in it. He’d been an integral part of their story and had quietly enjoyed watching them build their life together in Sanctuary.
“You two feel like a night out?” Nick asked.
“What do you mean?” Vanessa asked, intrigued.
“Well, the way I see it, you two don’t get any time for yourselves, at least, not outside the walls of this house.” Gage and Vanessa had never taken Phoenix any further outside of Sanctuary than the Red Rocket, and rarely left him in anyone else’s care. “Why don’t you head over to the inn or go check things out at the Red Rocket? I’ll stay behind in case Phoenix wakes up and needs anything.”
Vanessa and Gage exchanged glances as they pondered the offer. Although they spent most nights enjoying each other’s company at home, and had little desire to do anything else, the prospect of an evening visit to the Red Rocket was tempting. Gage’s rifle could benefit from a cleaning, and there were some scrap items down there that Sturges would need to repair the electrical wiring at the guest house.
“You sure about that?” Gage asked. “I know you said you had work to do.”
Nick dismissed his objection with a flick of his wrist. “I got plenty done last night. I know where the Red Rocket and the inn are. If something goes wrong and I really need you, I know where you’ll be.”
Gage looked at Vanessa again, noting her agreement, then looked back at Nick and nodded. “Alright, then. Thanks, Nick – very kind of you.”
The Red Rocket was dark and quiet in the warm evening air, illuminated by the soft glow of the moonlight. The only people other than Vanessa and Gage who had keys to it were Sturges and Garvey, and whichever one of them had been there last had remembered to lock it up and switch off the generator. Gage switched on the generator and listened to the hum in the quiet evening as the lights kicked on inside the building. Vanessa unlocked the door and they went in, quietly closing and locking the door behind them. She closed the shades on the front windows and surveyed the premises.
“Dammit, Sturges,” she sighed, her eye drawn to a pile of scrap metal and junk parts scattered on the floor near the old cash register. “I swear, Phoenix is better at cleaning up his toys than that man is.”
“Hey, at least he didn’t forget a live bottlecap mine on the floor like he did that one time,” Gage reminded her. Vanessa winced at the memory. “Oh hell, I’d forgotten all about that.” Now that it was safely in the past, she could laugh about it, but at the time, it was decidedly not funny.
“Well, he may not be worth fuck-all at cleanup time, but at least he’s done us a solid on electrical supplies,” Gage said, rifling through a box of fuses and makeshift batteries that had been left in a random spot on a shelf. “As long as it’s just a plain old blown fuse or busted wire, there should be enough in here to take care of it. At least a few of these fuses seem to be in decent enough shape.”
Vanessa nodded. She reached over into her bag and pulled out two bottles of beer. She opened them and handed one to Gage. She slid down against the counter and sat on the floor, stretching her legs out in front of her. He sat down across from her watched as he took a sip from the bottle. He met her gaze and felt butterflies fluttering in his stomach. Even after all the years and adventures and travesties and everything that had gone down since the first day he laid eyes on her in Nuka-World, his heart still skipped when he looked at her. She reached back into her bag and pulled out a can of potato crisps. She ate a few and offered the can to him. Potato crisps weren’t his go-to snack, but they did pair well with the beer. He popped one in his mouth and gazed at her. He could tell, just from the vibes she was giving off, that she had a lot on her mind, but wasn’t ready to let it out just yet, so he resolved to wait for her to be ready, to meet her where she was.
“Did I tell you that I never even had to look at MacCready today? I figured that was a good omen for the rest of the day,” he said, taking another swig from the bottle as he watched her intently. She was so fucking beautiful, even when she wasn’t doing anything other than just sitting there. She had tilted her head back and was half-gazing up at the ceiling, looking lost in thought.
“Nope, but I figured you probably hadn’t seen him, since you came back in a pretty good mood.”
“Don’t get me wrong, I could still hear him running his little bitch mouth about some shit as I was leaving, but I didn’t even turn around to listen to it. Just told him to fuck off and kept going.”
“Was he saying anything about being stuck in a glue trap?” she asked, a giggle woven into her words.
Gage chuckled. The sound of his laugh still warmed her from the inside. It seemed to make its way down into some part of her that only the sound of his laughter could fill. “Naw, ‘fraid not. If he had, that would have been worth sticking around for.”
“No pun intended,” she said. He realized the implication of what he’d just said, and they burst into laughter together. “Shit,” Gage said, barely able to catch his breath. “Good one, Boss.”
Once she caught her breath, she took another sip from the bottle and brought her gaze straight ahead. “I’m so fucking tired, Gage.”
“Well, out here, you can sleep with nobody else bothering you, so I'd say you’re in the right place for that.”
She shook her head. “Not that kind of tired. I mean, I’m just...ready to be done with all of it.”
Gage raised an eyebrow. “All of what?”
“Being Overboss of Nuka-World and General of the Minutemen and every other goddamned title that I’ve picked up over the years. But if I had to pick one, I’d give up the Overboss role in a heartbeat.” He wasn’t sure how to respond, so he chose to just keep watching and listening. She registered his attention and continued. “I feel it most acutely when I’m around Phoenix.”
“How so?” He felt like he knew why, but wanted to hear it from her.
“Remember the last time you went out there, instead of me?” she asked, tears threatening to well up in her slate-grey eyes. “Remember how much he cried the whole time you were gone?”
“I remember you telling me about it, yeah,” he said, feeling a suddenly uneasy. He knew this was a bit of a sensitive subject, one he didn’t bring up if it could be avoided. She sensed his apprehension and handed the potato crisps can back to him, a subtle sign, in the often quiet way they communicated, that he had nothing to worry about, that he could talk about this with her and it would be okay.
“Look, Gage, it’s no secret. He spends more time with you than he does with me. Every time it feels like I’m finally at a point where I can give him my undivided attention, some new shit goes down and I’m pulled away again.” She paused and took another drink from the bottle. Her smile had faded away into a look of dull resignation. “And let’s not forget the hazards. I know we’ve got things pretty well under control there, and here, but let’s not kid ourselves. Going back and forth from there all the time is dangerous. Just because nothing too bad has happened yet doesn’t mean it can’t. Or won’t.”
Gage looked down at the bottle in his hands and nodded in silent agreement. He could feel the pain in her voice, even though she was clearly trying to hide it.
“Since the day he was born, the only thing I’ve wanted is for the three of us to be together. Here, in Sanctuary. Or even if we’d ended up in Diamond City or Goodneighbor or whatever, it would have been fine, as long as we were together. But it never seemed to work out that way. I was in Nuka-World when he took his first steps. When he said his first word.” Her voice trailed off and he could tell that she was fighting back tears.
“If I didn’t know about Nuka-World like I do,” he said, taking a swig from his bottle and resting his elbows on his knees, “I’d say to just find another goddamned overboss and be done with it. But you and I both know it ain’t that simple.”
“I can’t even envision who that would be,” she said with a harsh sigh, setting her beer bottle down on the floor. “It would have to be someone with enough Raider in them to be at least tolerated by them, and enough sense in them to not run the place into the ground. And for the life of me, I can’t think of anyone like that.”
Gage looked down at the floor, feeling a pang of guilt surge through him. He’d put in her in this position, and now there seemed to be no way for her to get out. “Me neither, Boss.”
He felt her gaze on him and looked back up at her. “Honestly, Gage,” she said slowly. “At least you see what I do. I’d be way worse off if I felt like finding a qualified successor would be letting you down.”
Gage sat up straight and drew a knee in to his chest. “Believe me, Boss, if I could have you hand Nuka-World over to somebody else and have you all to myself forever, I’d be the happiest fucker on the planet. I’d miss the old place a little, but I’d get over it real damn quick.”
“The last time I was there, I floated the idea by Mags and Nisha. Asked if they knew of anyone who could be overboss material.”
Gage raised an eyebrow. “How’d that go?”
“About as well as you’d expect. Mags just laughed. Nisha mentioned one of her boy toys, but I knew who she was talking about right away and yeah...no.”
“I never knew Nisha as well as you, but she never seemed to me to be a real good judge of character.”
“I’ve met worse judges of character, but I've also met better.” That got a chuckle out of Gage.
The sound of his laughter made something stir inside of her. She set her beer down on the floor and crawled across the floor towards him, her eyes twinkling in the dim lantern light. She was ready to be done thinking about Nuka-World for one evening.
“So earlier said something about fantasies involving...glue traps? Did I remember that right?” she asked, reaching out to run a hand down his arm. “I gotta say, I have not seen any glue traps around since we’ve been here. Although I admit, I haven’t searched the whole place yet.”
Gage grinned and reached up to stroke her cheek. “Well, if you did see them, it would kinda defeat the purpose, wouldn’t it?” Vanessa laughed and brushed her long, dark curls behind her neck. “Fair enough.” Their banter soothed her soul. He was the only person who could make her laugh every day, sometimes without even trying. She cleared her throat, and he knew what that meant. He reached down and released the clamps on his yellow armor, lifting it over his head and setting it down on a countertop. She wrapped her arms around his torso and ran the tip of her tongue up the side of his neck. He sucked in a gasp of air as he felt the touch of her tongue on him and noticed how perfectly silent the place was in that moment.
Gage wrapped his arms around her and pulled her in closer, letting her tongue drift up his neck and towards his jaw. He leaned forward and ran his fingers up her back. “You know, it’s just us here,” he whispered. She pulled her tongue off of his neck and straightened her head to look into his piercing, dark eyes. “Oh believe me, I know,” she replied. At home, they had to be mindful of the sounds they made around the boy. Their old bed creaked, so they’d put a bedroll on the floor that they sometimes used when their passion for each other exceeded the functional limits of the bed, but here, they had no such concerns. Within moments, they had shed their clothes and were in the small office adjacent to the main room. Thanks, Nick, for the opportunity , she thought, as she pulled the door closed behind her, lit a lantern, and flicked off the overhead light.
They returned to Sanctuary at sunrise, in time for Gage to start a day on guard duty. He was the Lead, as usual. Preston had been around and had handled the shift change tasks so that Gage wouldn’t have to interact at all with MacCready. If Preston resented the task of keeping them off of each other’s throats, he kept it to himself. While Gage wouldn’t call Preston a friend, they were certainly on better terms with each other than they’d ever been before, and even went out of their way to help each other out on occasion. That was probably as good as it was ever going to get, and Gage was okay with that.
The day started out uneventfully enough. Most of his time was spent wandering the perimeter of the settlement with his rifle, scanning the environment for threats. None presented themselves, so his mind began to wander. He thought of Vanessa and could still feel and taste her on him. He found himself counting how many more hours he’d have to get through before he could have her in his bed again.
A shout from the guard tower brought him back to reality in a jarring instant. “Gage!” He looked to the source of the sound and saw Jun Long in the south tower, waving at him. “We got traders.”
Gage sighed, a bit irritated at being yanked away from his pleasant memory, but also glad that it had happened before his own memories had made him too hard. That was not what he (or anyone, for that matter) needed while on guard duty. He waved back in acknowledgment and headed towards the front gate. This was their standard procedure when a trader approached: the lead guard would approach the caravan while two snipers remained in the towers, and at least one other remained in charge of walking the perimeter. Traders were not typically allowed past the gates, but if the trader passed their security inspection, the bell in the town square would be rung and anyone interested in doing business with the traders would come to the gate to meet with them. It was something they’d done a thousand times before. As Gage walked towards the caravan, he thought about how glad he was that neither of the snipers was MacCready. He had long suspected that MacCready would gladly let him die in an ambush if he thought he stood even a modest chance of getting away with it.
Gage approached the caravan and addressed the woman standing at the head of it. “Welcome to Sanctuary Hills. You need to disarm and let me search through the caravan first. If all is on the up and up, we can summon the settlers to see if anyone is interested.” The woman nodded in response, drew a pipe pistol from a holster on her hip, and set it down on the ground in front of her. Gage took a few steps closer to the caravan when a shout rose up from behind it.
“Porter?” the unfamiliar voice asked, the sound of his rarely-used first name stopping him dead in his tracks. “Holy shit, is that really you?”
He looked around for the source of his voice when he spotted it. A tall, stocky man came around from behind the rear of the caravan, arms outstretched.
It took him several moments to register what he was seeing and several more to process it. It was a face he hadn’t seen in well over a quarter of a century, but he still recognized it. He’d sketched it out a few times in a sketchbook that he hadn’t gone out of his way to show to Vanessa. A living memory, alive and no longer confined to the 2-dimensional space of the page, walking right towards him.
Ethan.
His brother.