Work Text:
12 September, 2289
I, Nora of Sanctuary Hills, the General of the Minutemen, also variously known as the “Sole Survivor” and “The Train Conductor,” being of sound mind, hereby write this last will and testament in order to promote the peaceful transition of power from the Minutemen to the Commonwealth Council and my own personal abdication of the title and powers of General now and hereafter. I hope that these materials may also provide some context for every human and ghoul affected by the massive changes the Commonwealth has faced in the past 2 years:
The documents in this folio are now broadly known as The Declaration among the Commonwealth. It contains the personal journals of The General, as well as tables of military organization, notes on military strategy, and a handwritten set of premises about rule of law and the use of ‘courts’ for determining guilt and punishments, instead of duels. They were apparently put together ad hoc over the two years that The General was active in the Commonwealth. These documents, along with the General’s famous rifle, “Whisper,” were brought to the Castle by the Journalist and known Synth Sympathizer, Piper of Diamond City, a close personal friend of The General, who was, by all accounts, quite beside herself that day. Also present was one Valentine, a synthetic “private dick,” (whatever that may be understood to mean). It appears the synth had malfunctioned while obtaining these documents, as its visual sensors were leaking conductive fluid at the time they were presented to the Minutemen leadership. It is unknown if this was a sign damage from a fight with the General before she disappeared.
We have here reprinted the final document in the package, written last and in apparent haste. It takes the form of an open letter to the Commonwealth. It has been authenticated by Dr. “Scribe” Haylen, professor of pre-war studies at the newly christened Redsocks College. Despite content felt to be unbecoming of the memory of the One True General of the Minutemen, Dr. Haylen and a large number of well-armed former associates of the General have insisted it not be edited for content or clarity. It is thus presented as-is, despite the protests of the editorial staff.
23 October 2289
Nate died today. My husband, a man none of you have ever heard of or cared about.
Two hundred and twelve years ago today, the strongest, most caring man I’ve ever known was prepping for a speech at the VFW post. He had really only accepted because he was hoping to chat up some old buddies who’d recently gotten a private security gig. Making ends meet had been hard for us ever since getting back from service. I was working on my law degree, working nights when Shaun was born. Shortly after Nate had lost his engineering job to a group of high school mentat addicts. All three of us had a hard go of it, but him most of all. He’d been raised to be a good American Man, it killed him to be provided for by his wife and his disability benefits. He hid it well, but I knew. We argued a lot that year, usually over stupid small things. We both knew we weren’t really angry at each other. When the nightmares started, we’d always wake to find ourselves in the others’ arms, even after a row. The nightmares had been getting worse for both of us when the bombs dropped.
We thought going to the suburbs would help keep the nightmares at bay, maybe help us return to civilian life and evade the creeping cynicism of our country. Then I met the other wives of Sanctuary Hills. I spent so much time finding excuses to avoid listening to their petty sniping. I spent more and more time in the garden so I couldn’t see their pointed disapproving glances at the scars running down my neck to beneath appropriately pastel sun dresses. That I would have to deal with them after everything I’d given up for my family and a misplaced desire to help my country. God I hated them. I think that if the bombs hadn’t dropped, I’d have ended up at least throttling Milly, that bitch.
Which I suppose leads me even further back, to the Chinese front. I’d first met Nate from about 600 meters away, as I covered his team with sniper fire from a hill on the south bank of a tributary of the Yellow River. He had been with his powered armor fire team on routine patrol, but then they’d been cut down and battered by relentless Chinese artillery for 2 days when I finally got the go ahead to take down the artillery spotters.
The war was turning sour around then, new Chinese stealthboys were running rings around our patrols. Even if the Chinese armored units couldn’t directly take on our T-54s. The stealthy bastards could call in devastatingly accurate artillery fire from close range. Our boys got cut to ribbons. Which was where I came in. Nate’s team had managed to shelter in a cave system, he was periodically sending out two-man fire teams from random cave exits to lace the surrounding hillsides with lead and napalm. It was a smart move. That kept the artillery from taking them out directly, but they were stuck with their backs up against the wall in a known location. It was just a matter of time.
I got airdropped in under cover of night. I made my way to the opposite hillside. I readied myself to stew in the smell of fields fertilized with shit percolating through my ghille suit. Almost immediately, though, I saw it: the subtle flicker of shadow where there shouldn’t be. Stealthboys were great at hiding the light of a person, but shadows on the ground never passed clean through. It was more like sun filtering through leaves. There were two of them. Unfortunately, I lost my shot when a fire team came out to persuade them away with napalm; I could feel the heat of their insistence from across the river.
The next day as morning crept over the hills I got my second shot. A flicker in the brush, stroke the trigger, sudden black convulsion with an exclamation point of red. The stealth field failed, and a member of the team broke cover to complete the job. One red stripe, the team’s lieutenant. Stupid to put himself at risk. They must have been desperate: he made a good target. I had already made to break for a new hiding spot when I saw him stumble. I immediately dropped back to the ground, resetting my rifle only to see a second knife flash from invisibility out into the arm joint of the suit, crippling it. Even with the dead limb, he was dangerous, though. He spun about faster than I’d seen in power armor, swinging the dead arm like a club. It clipped the unseen attacker as he moved into the way of my shot. The target was down, but would be back out and invisible again in moments.
I spat out several curses at the idiot, and angrily took a shot between his legs. The depleted uranium sabot struck the spy in the gut, eviscerating him. The armored soldier flinched back well after it would have done any good. He paused, then saluted jauntily to the sky with his working arm. Just to be contrary, he then finished off the remnants of spy with a dead club-arm to the head. I made my way out of the immediate situation, keeping my eyes peeled for any further shadows. I didn’t see or hear anything, and the artillery had finally subsided. I radioed in the all-clear for our own artillery cover and an evac shuttle, finding my own way slowly back to base.
It was another few months before I met the idiot lieutenant, now field promoted to captain after the death of the majority of his commanding officers. In that time one of his team had been trying to find out who pulled their asses out of the fire and almost castrated their team leader. They had apparently vowed to wine and dine the sniper and request he humbly complete the job. When they learned it was a woman, they were apparently overjoyed and gave him no end of shit.
I was at the local NCO watering hole at Main Operations Singapore after a weeklong game of cat and mouse out in the field with a frustratingly cautious target. So I was in a shitty mood when the two jarheads grabbed me from my perch at the end of the bar, knocking over my beer and batting away the Fairbairn knife that quickly appeared out of my sleeve into my hand. I got dragged to their team’s table, biting and cursing all the while, before being dropped into a chair with a new mug of beer pressed into my hands. It was cold. You had to pay extra for the beer from the fridge, and I never could afford it. I decided I could wait to kill them and settled for glaring. They laughed, already very drunk. They must have been, to try and sneak up on a sniper. One of the jarheads was doing a handstand in an armor frame, he’d freed one arm from the frame and was trying to chug his beer upside down, and the others were cheering him on.
The Lt wasn’t joining in the festivities, he was looking at me. A smile crept onto his face as he ignored the armor tipping backwards and skidding against a table of airmen. I decided I might not kill him, at least. The rest of the team set out to do that job for me in the time-honored tradition of shore leave. They had just gotten into a joyous drunken fistfight with the airmen. The Captain’s name was Nate, and he had been the valiant and not particularly tactful soldier I’d almost nutted. I liked his eyes, green to my brown, but they were the same as mine. They were haunted by the shit he’d seen, a bone deep knowledge you knew would never leave you. We finished our drinks and walked out into the sweltering Singaporean night before the fight had wound down. We weren’t missed.
I got to know him that night, against the wall in an alley. After hot noodles and another beer, we got to know each other again on a park bench while watching the lights of shipping moving slowly through the harbor.
Reality struck soon enough, though. A few months later we were both discharged. He received commendations for valor at the end of his service contract. I received a positive urine test and a packet marked ‘dishonorable.’
Then, and even after, when the bombs hit, it was still going to be ok, because we were together. In a day, however, everything was taken from me. I woke up missing 200 years of life in a cryo chamber in 2287. Those rumors, at least are true. It was the vault that now serves as the granary and refrigeration center North of Sanctuary Hills. I know Sanctuary has grown into a thriving town and trading center, but I can never go back there.
Everything I’ve done since waking up has already been told and retold a hundred times, usually by Piper’s newspaper, with varying degrees of realism. I’ve had folks breathlessly tell me about the nigh-invulnerable General, describing in exacting detail a number of battles I’d won singlehandedly. They also describe her surpassing beauty and commanding presence with a nearly-psychic gaze, not realizing that the scarred woman with a limp they’re talking to is she. Amazing what shaving off a Mohawk will do. The majority of those victories, the few that really happened, were the result of a single bullet from long distance. I was in a bad place those first few years, but my aim was not.
Even though the worst has calmed down since the major regional powers have settled out, there are still raiders and famine and super mutants striking out from nests deep within irradiated subway tunnels. We’ve built up a semblance of law and government with the force of arms, but there will still be dangers from within and without. The last time the minutemen fell it was due to petty rivalries from within, and eventually this version will probably suffer the same fate. I’m not a leader, in any case. I got the title, but I’ve always been a Scout Sniper. Always will be. I can do the job in front of me, but I’m not a leader. I couldn’t organize a household, much less a civilization.
So that’s where I came from. You can take it or leave it, I don’t care what you think about it. I’m not a hero, a symbol, or your bloody General. I lost the love of my life 212 years ago today, and the apocalypse can shove it. No matter what I keep trying to build, it keeps crashing down. I thought the synths were the only people in the Commonwealth worth saving, the only ones who didn’t constantly invite their own destruction with new and creative ways to torture and lie to themselves. I saved them from the Institute trying to stifle their own children without regard for their humanity. I killed the monster that was my son to do it. A son who tried to make me a lab rat of his own after it was all he had ever known of himself: I had never been there to protect him from it. I later protected the railroad from the Brotherhood when their attempts to hoard knowledge threatened to cause just as much harm to the people of the Commonwealth as the Institute had. I resolved to do it all for the synths trying to survive. For children who would not make the same mistakes we had.
We humans had fucked up so badly. I thought maybe, just maybe, the synths deserved the future that we no longer did. And then I went to Far Harbor. There was a synth up there, name of Dima. He spoke like a kindly grandfather. Only to find he’d lied to himself for decades more completely than any human could. He continued believing he was perfectly just and kind even as he erased his own memories to do so. It turns out he was very human after all. He betrayed both the humans and the rad zealots on that island. I’ll admit, I walked away from their pleas. I give up. I couldn’t do it anymore. I can’t keep trying to force the world into making sense. I can’t assuage the emptiness inside with temporary victories and allegiances. For anyone. I am only good at killing, and I could never kill enough people to prevent others from being taken advantage of. Not without becoming the worst thing to happen to this world since the bomb. And then I would have become just like Major Pencil Dick who dishonorably discharged me. I’d be like Vault Tec, playing with people’s lives like dolls. I’d be joining the Institute and the Brotherhood. Everything would be better if only I controlled it all and I could make other people’s choices for them. That’s the way we’ve been doing it for the last thousands of years. And it keeps never working. Fuck that. I won’t do that anymore. That way is nothing but War, and War Never Changes.
Goodbye, Massachusetts,
Nora
For 2 months after the General’s disappearance, The Minutemen Interim Leadership Council sent search parties into the Glowing Sea composed of volunteer ghouls and freedsynths. Eventually, an empty set of power armor with drained fusion cores was found a few dozen miles from the western edge of the deepest radiation field. No body was ever found, and the searches had to be called off due to the coming winter. Multiple sources have corroborated the General’s adaptability for survival in challenging environments, even reportedly crossing the Glowing Sea once before, although reports vary. Despite the harsh words contained herein, we believe the General to have faked her disappearance in order to further her goals bringing the Commonwealth back from chaos, as evidenced by the many clues she left, including addressing the letter to one “Massachusetts.” No individuals thus named have so far come forward. The Minutemen know that their General will always have the Commonwealth in her heart, and wherever she is will forever watch over us and point us towards a safer, more just Commonwealth.