Chapter Text
Crows have been circling the vault entrance for days.
Deacon knows enough to recognize Watchers when he sees them. They haven't eaten or otherwise interacted beyond basic bird functions of flying and pecking the ground vacantly, and they haven't left.
He's been sitting on this empty project for months now, ever since there were rumors of institute activity up here, and normally he'd go as far away from that as possible, but... there was a chance it was something big.
An unopened vault, rare as they were, usually didn't yield anything good except for two centuries' worth of bones and depression, and he wouldn't bother with the week-long trek out here, not through gunner outposts and frankly unwarranted amounts of wild bears for another fine-aged tragedy covered in rust.
Yet obviously the institute was invested in something that resided in this particular one, so once the Watchers started swarming, he cashed in a sabbatical and hauled ass northwards after them to this cozy little backwater of nothing and cawing demons for company.
Lining up finger-gun headshots on the horrid little birds is barely much of a pasttime, but when it's interrupted by the teeth-rendingly hideous screeching of rusted metal that tipped him out of his chair in a startled panic, Deacon feels like he'd rather line those headshots as a full-time job. The noise drags on and on, the elevator limping its way down to the depths of the vault. Something called for it from the inside.
Even the crows seemed to pause and watch, eerily still and silent, and he fought the urge to hold his breath as the seconds counted down until slowly, painfully, the grand prize made its way back up to the surface.
A vault dweller.
An honest-to-god vault dweller, still in a mostly pristine suit with a big yellow 111 emblazoned on the back of it, and a pip-boy clasped securely around one wrist.
The figure is that of a woman, fairly lean, the suit cutting skin-tight about her form. Richly auburn-colored hair flows straight and heavy from her head, shrouding any look he could otherwise catch of her face.
She staggers a little, shielding her eyes from admittedly watery sun peering its way down through thin cloud onto her, and as the damnable crows scatter into the air cawing raucously, she stands still for a moment.
It's a very long moment, it feels like, the tension running like a current through him.
The vault itself, 111, has lain dormant and sealed tighter than a can of cram dropped into an arc welder for longer than he's been alive.
Sure, the elevator still works, but that massive steel door has remained unbudged and indifferent to the prying attempts of raiders and scavvers. The sole indicator that she's genuinely from the vault is that suit: there are zero instances of that particular number, in that particular condition, out in the entire Commonwealth. He'll have to go down later and check that it's well and truly cracked open in there, because he wouldn't be Deacon if he didn't explore every possibility, but that can come later when he knows he won't get caught snooping.
It'd be something of a shock, he supposes, to come out of whatever isolated situation she'd lived in down there. As the vault had never been opened, like 81 hadn't been for generations, she'd be the first, and his heart almost aches for the world she'd have to discover all alone. Hell, he has no idea why she's the only person out – though he's not sure if the institute is keeping tabs on her, or they just wanted to know that the vault was opened.
The reasons why don't particularly bother him right now: he wants to see how she reacts before he steps in.
He's kind of expecting her to break down, or to wander shellshocked, hell, maybe even rush off as her mind snaps entirely, or simply turn tail and head straight back down again.
Instead, however, she seems to be... surveying?
Huh.
She's tense, that's for certain, but she's looking around as if she's used to pathfinding at least, and there's a decent scope of the land up on the vault's hill. From there she'd definitely be able to see the nearest prize: a pre-war residential area he remembers from the crumbling sign as Sanctuary Hills is situated at the foot of the hill, some ten minutes of easy walking leading to shattered roads and buildings long since reduced to gap-paneled frames.
She takes a moment to fiddle with the pip-boy, poking at a couple of the buttons he can't see from the distance he is, and then she's moving. Quick and suspicious, glancing everywhere, keeping constant stock of her surroundings.
He follows.
Deacon knows the area well, having scouted it all out in the past two weeks of his vigil in between sitting on the slight hilltop, and he's pretty sure she won't run into any trouble other than some bugs. There's a 10mm pistol on her hip that she carries with the confidence of someone who isn't unfamiliar with shooting a gun, though it speaks nothing of her aim. He hopes it counts where she needs it.
She makes her way down the hill from the vault, along a path littered with moss-grown remains of skeletons. She spares them a glance, but it barely breaks her pace as she's moving on.
A forested creek runs along the foot of the hill before the slope inclines up again into Sanctuary's bounds, and it's at that creek she pauses.
He's at the vault itself now crouching in the shadows against a rocky backdrop with a rough dirt-patched jacket covering his torso, hiding him neatly from obvious view. While he still can't see her face - it's in his best interests to keep himself at her back always, especially with how sharp-eyed she seems to be - he'll wager she's eyeing the innocent-looking creek as a particularly suspicious prize.
Any water source is unclean, he knows. Everyone knows. It's just basic wasteland principle to never trust any water unless it's directly from a decent-quality filter, or bottled and stamped and priced exorbitantly high. She would have lived a rad-free life underground, and drinking this water is guaranteed to make her ill, if not with the rads then with the dozens of different horrid little parasites that live in outdoor water these days. Half of him wants to call out, to warn her as she reaches for the creek with her hand cupped, crouched on its muddy bank, but half of him... still wants to see what she'll do.
She's surprised him so far.
She flicks something on the pip-boy's screen, tapping at a little section of the device as if to stabilize a sensor or other and wait- didn't those things have a built-in geiger counter? That'd come in handy, though almost everything would be sending it haywire in some small degree.
In the end, she doesn't drink the water, but she does dip her hand in, letting the current ripple over her fingers. Shortly thereafter, she turns her attention to her surroundings again; specifically, to the plants.
He understands why. Water that runs shallow and clear like this has at least some relatively healthy plant life, and some of it is useable – mostly for chems, if he's honest, but still. Not likely to drop anyone dead.
It's a fairly lush wooded area, untouched by any signs of recent settlers and regrown in the rough tangled way that comes in the wake of two hundred years of irradiated struggling. The leaf cover is sporadic at best, leaving more of an open scraggly field than shaded woods, but at least the foliage has had a chance to spring back in a way some areas haven't, the lack of tree cover preventing any shelter from the harsh glare of the sun or icy winter weather.
The vault dweller reaches for the most eye-catching plant: a broad-leafed crimson beauty growing strong in the shallow water itself. She checks its leaves, its wide and flat array of roots, picks off a tiny piece of the plant and gives it an experimental chew.
Wisely, she doesn't swallow it.
Next on her list are a few nondescript shrubs, also written off as inedible, and then she's inspecting a silt bean growing wild and twisted in the mud. Deacon's never had much of a preference for vegetation, he has no idea what keys her in to the fact that this sour-tasting mutant legume is safe to eat, but she picks all of the pods from the plant and stuffs them into her vault suit's pockets, and that's when he realizes belatedly that she doesn't have a bag. She has nowhere to store any of the stuff needed to survive.
Pocketfuls of beans won't get you very far these days.
And isn't that the crux of it – he'd been tossing up the idea that the vault had been a survival-focused one, with how she's moving and checking.
He's heard the stories of Vault-Tec's wacky experiments that resulted in most of the dwellers usually ending up dead only a few years in, of course, most people have in varying degrees of accuracy to urban myth. The Capital Wasteland had its fair share of derelict holes in the ground filled with all sorts of horror stories. So he'd been imagining some intense survivalist upbringing, and maybe they'd choose the best or worst amongst them by an unspecified time limit, and toss them out to see how they'd do.
It's not a bad idea, as Deacon Ideas go, but the presence of a gun instead of a backpack makes very little sense – unless she could choose one thing, and picked the 10mm.
Or maybe a roulette, that'd sure spice things up Vault-Tec style.
Either way, he supposes, he'll find out the truth when he inspects the vault proper, once she heads into Sanctuary or something. Until then, he trails behind her silently, only pausing to tie a mud-stained shirt over his head when the sun saw fit to emerge from behind the clouds.
Wouldn't do to get sunburned on the job, after all.
-
Jake isn't particularly concerned by the state of affairs.
The world was fucked when she went into the vault, and the world was fucked when she came out of it again. The fucking of it was just a little more on the surface this time, rather than behind political boundaries and fighting lines far off like distant worries.
It's a lot easier this way, if she's honest with herself.
Nobody's here to greet her, which is not surprising; it seems like nobody's been alive up this part of Boston in a very long time.
Sanctuary is down the hill, right where she left it and about as attractive to her as it ever was. Improved, even. The tacky paint job and utopian sprawl of suburbs was stifling and unnatural, so seeing the bright cheery colors washed out and barely clinging to standing integrity sends a vindictive thrill through her, just for a moment. The loathsome residential area felt like a prison, and for all intents and purposes, it was. People like her don't get confined to the faux-upperclass out the ass-end of Concord because they won the lottery.
Well. It'll do in a pinch if she's desperate for shelter, as long as she keeps her bearings, because not much else is recognizable. Even here the roads are cracked and parched, crumbling away to be reclaimed by gravel and patchy grass sods.
It's hard to gauge how long she'd really spent in the vault – collectively for her, it's been about an hour at best between heading underground and coming back up, and in the interim the entire world looks like it's been picked up and dropped again, leaving only a passing resemblance. It's hard to tell what season it is, too, other than 'not winter'. There's a brisk breeze that does nothing to help the residual icy tension that clings to her bones from the cryo pods, but the sky is mostly clear, cast over only by white smears of cloud. Trees have regrown in spindly, ragtag clusters close to the touch of old humanity, and none of the lush thick undergrowth that used to be here, instead replaced by scraggly tough bushes.
Hardly any of it was familiar to her, and she assumes it's from the radiation – which doesn't help her scope of things, because severe mutations could stunt growth or promote it beyond natural means, growing everything back faster and weirder.
A lot more than landscape has probably changed from the radiation, if the vault's wayward giant roaches had any say in the condition of things. The handgun on her hip remains a comforting weight.
The stream, shockingly enough, is still running out the back of Sanctuary's border, which is ideal given that running water is her top priority
Scratch that – non-irradiated running water is her top priority, as her pip-boy's geiger counter takes umbrage with the clear stream when she dips her hand in. Probably rare out here as well. She could drink dirty water in a pinch, though, and knew how to filter things with basic iodine mixes, if there was a source for that too.
The plant life intrigues her far more, though, and she picks at a few of them. Strong bitterness is usually an indicator of being inedible, at least without preparation, but the beans she finds are familiar even if harsh conditions have twisted their flavor into something bitter and earthy.
There's a very lush-looking wild bush a little ways upstream, too, and it's got a couple of thick purple fruits roughly the size of small apples hanging amid the sickly green leaves and other unripe produce on it. She picks one, splitting it open.
It's fairly dry with no running juice, but it smells sweet. The geiger counter on her wrist ticks up very slightly like it did with the beans when she held them close, but nothing close to the level of the water, so she hazards a taste. It's... bland. There's a hint of bitterness, and the sweetness is mostly held in the skin. The flesh itself tastes kind of smoky and overall not great, but she finishes it.
Everything's experimental and nothing's certain. She's curious about the full extent of what the wasteland's plant life has to offer, and there's probably more underground like tubers or something she can try and dig for later, once she's out of basic survival mode and set up a camp. The fruit was a pretty good start, and it's definitely something to keep an eye out for if she can find no other options to pad out her diet. It'll most likely make her sick, but she's not going to back down.
Her body will just have to adapt or die; it's either that or starve to death – though, she supposes, she could always see what wildlife is lurking about and fling herself into whatever looks predatory enough to make quick work of her, if she ends up getting a prion disease from something as benign as lumpy fruit.
-
Deacon is straight up impressed by the balls of this vault dweller. Barely ten minutes out of the pit and she's just eating things straight off the plants. Granted, the mutfruit is about as safe as it can be with scrounged foods, but still – it sure doesn't look like any pre-war cultivars he's familiar with. Hell, even he doesn't know where it came from. Just one of those things that decided to mutate so severely one day it looked like it popped up from nothing.
The rads in it will probably hit her hard.
After the mutfruit he watches as she checks over a fern, poking at the fronds, and then after finding the fern some degree of inedible-but-satisfactory to some unknown metric, making her way east along the edge of the creek. Parallel to Sanctuary, it's impossible to miss once she hits the lake off the eastern tip of the suburb itself.
He'd bet ten caps she'd loiter where he can find her later, poking about the houses that are soundly abandoned due to their kitset nature – most of the raider-type folks like to shack up in the Concord residential areas due to the much lower chance of the roof collapsing on them, but it's honestly nothing a sturdy tarp and some elbow grease couldn't fix. Or maybe a lot of tarps. Maybe some nails.
Either way, more effort than the raiders like to put in, so his point still stands.
There honestly isn't much else for her to find up here otherwise, either. The lake is devoid of any life, its water running murky and feeding a polluted stream that runs off towards the southern dam. Concord itself is off in the distance, the water tower and edges of roofs visible over the gentle slope of hills, and she'll likely be familiar with it if she had a place in the vault, but Sanctuary is the only place worth exploring, even if it's to find maybe something to shove all her scavenged food in before going on her way.
Either way, he estimates he's got about an hour to poke about; once he's sure she's way off into the surrounding hills doing her weird girl scout rummaging for plants, he activates the lift and descends into the vault.
Rusted metal screeches against rusted metal; the lift is a steady vertical motion one, built on hydraulics and relying only on interlocking edges to seal it up. Time has not been easy on the thing, and it sets his teeth on edge as he steps out of the operation booth and onto the descending lift platform.
That it's working at all is a feat in itself, truly.
“Think I just found a new fear besides heights,” he grouses to himself, shuddering as the darkness below swallows him up.
It's freezing inside the vault.
There were signs of people camping at the base of the elevator where the massive steel door once barred their entrance to the vault proper, but it's all old stuff like empty cans and bedding. All long abandoned due to the cold and wet, of course.
The floor is clean, barely any corrosion on the railings, and the vault door had obviously opened from the inside, because while the outer one doesn't show signs of tampering or vandalism, it does show signs of not being there at all, which is not a good sign.
Vault-Tec didn't want anyone cracking this vault before its time.
But cracked it is, and he steps easily over the threshold.
The first thing Deacon sees is the skeletons, and that's when he knows something's gone wrong far beyond a long-locked vault. Not a single corpse laying on the floor is fresh – hell, not a single one even has flesh still on the bones, which now places the woman who came out alone firmly in 'suspicious' territory.
Not that he considers she ate them, they're far too old for any flesh to have remained on the bones even in cold storage and were probably nothing but slop after the first couple of decades. The presence of stamped-on radroaches puts paid to cannibalism as well – the little bastards can get in anywhere when they're small, especially centuries-old corroding vault wall joins accelerated by the moisture in the air.
With a sigh, Deacon lets his wonderful ideas of a hardcore survival training vault slip away into the ether.
There's a terminal at the overseer's desk to the left of the entrance room, and he flicks through the entries inside; stuff about Vault-Tec, cryogenics, keeping the dwellers calm and compliant up until they're frozen long-term. A particularly harrowing entry mourns the loss of most of the staff, some with children, who received the call too late and almost a hundred never made it in, including the longterm supply deliveries currently being hauled over in a military supply convoy. This thing was meant to be a multigenerational project that failed catastrophically.
As resources among the living staff began to dwindle, fighting broke out, and ultimately their fate is shown in the two-hundred-year-old dead bones scattered about the place.
And wasn't that quite the literal bombshell to drop on him - the logs refer back to the day the bombs fell. If his math is adding up here, and he finds the rest of the cryopods, hell, the woman he just saw unleashed all by her lonesome upon a ravaged world would have last seen it when it was fresh. Clean. Rad-free. Two hundred fucking years ago.
The realization is enough to stagger him. The bigger question right now is: where are the other residents, and why only her?
His project is starting to feel a little less empty now, at least.
But also like something that's way bigger than he could have imagined.
Feeling courageous in his shaken state, he picks up a discarded wrench and starts banging on the walls as he continues exploring, letting the clangor announce his presence as obnoxiously as possible.
“Hello!” His voice echoes eerily, and yet not enough. The shout goes unanswered. The halls, the atrium, the sleeping quarters, all empty and boarded up. There's no sign of supplies in any of the drier rooms too, the massive storage sitting empty, garden beds that never held anything in them. Hallways that never knew the laughter of children. Just cold, empty ice.
The wrench smacks off a chunk of vault wall support, taking an entire rivet with it, so he puts it aside hastily.
Totally wasn't him.
Further in, there's a generator that's on the fritz, wires chewed by roaches and corroded by time, and beyond that: the cryogenic pods themselves. There's a blaring alarm in these rooms, frosted over and dripping with condensation.
Something about a malfunction, blurred out by static.
Deacon feels like he's sunk up to his chest in icewater, numbing him to his core.
It's a mass grave.
One pod is open and empty that the woman must've emerged from, and another shows signs of tampering, resealed cracks like scars in the thick frozen runoff around its doorframe giving that away.
Staring closely through the glass front, there's... something that might be blood, glittering an ugly black-red blotch in the vault suit of the woman inside. The rest of her visible skin is sunken and sickly from decay and he's glad the pod is sealed, because part-thawed soggy vault dweller would stink out the entire room and then some – to say nothing of what the roaches would've done to her.
He's seen some icky things out there.
Deacon checks into a terminal at the end of the hall, its screen flickering and glitching from the frost-turned-condensation in the air.
There are enough errors to give P.A.M an overload, but the next screen shows him the twelve occupants of the room. Of the pod with the visibly dead woman, there was supposed to be a baby. There's also an annotation that a manual override was performed onsite, before the entire vault entered some sort of lockdown as a result of tampering.
It was that lockdown that eventually killed the rest of the occupants, removing the failsafe that would release all the residents in case of life support failing as it obviously had.
They'd all suffocated in their sleep.
Poor bastards.
The empty pod, however, was activated externally right as the life support had started spitting out alerts, and Deacon's willing to bet his ass that the external activation - locked as it is behind heavy encryption and a remote connection - was performed by the institute somehow.
The command was simple: it diverted all failing power to that one cryopod and freed one sole survivor, a woman named Jake.
-
She hears the vault elevator.
Relatively, the sound of that lift has been the only thing she's heard several times in quick succession. It's been scant few waking moments across all of them. The first time, descending into the vault in the wake of a blinding new detonation on the horizon, the heavy thrum of working mechanisms deep in the ground was all she knew.
Calling it down again as she waited at the newly-opened vault door, sparks falling down the shaft as it creaked its way down to her level.
Coming back up instantly told her the ages that had passed in between her waking moments, the smooth hum replaced with peeling paint and rust patches that caught on each other.
At the distance Jake is from it, she doesn't hear the noises clearly. It's more a feeling, the vibrations in the earth, and she knows:
She didn't come up as unnoticed or alone as she thought.
Evidence of people trying the vault's entrance is obvious: there's old camp supplies, some ammunition she swiped, clothing torn by time and use, empty cans. Not much useful, but it gave her at least a little preparation of what life would be like ahead of her, and the fact that people are still alive.
She's assuming whoever went into the vault is going to be a while down there, likely looking for supplies or perhaps sating curiosity. Either way, they're someone who knows she just emerged and seized the opportunity that situation presented, and if she were unlucky enough, it's also someone who intends to exploit or kill her for what they thought she might've taken from the vault.
Before the bombs, such a thing wasn't unheard of as prices skyrocketed and food ran thin – even the people who were supposed to keep the peace did it from time to time, so she'd guess it to be all the more common now.
Desperation forges cruelty, and from what she can see so far, there'll be plenty of both.
If she wasn't already set on moving on from Sanctuary as soon as possible, this would certainly change her mind.
The lakeshore is expansive, the water beyond murky and opaque with some sort of mist collecting atop it, swirling in the sunlight. She knows better than to walk out into the open, though, peering at it from the shelter of rough scrub. Her vault suit is the most obvious thing she's ever seen, gaudy and bright and marking her as a walking target – while she's yet to actually see any people, she's not stupid. People don't camp in vault entrances and stock ammo for fun.
She skirts the edges of Sanctuary as well, noting the skeletons, the infestation of overgrown insects, the way everything's been picked clean, rotted, or shoved into mini-fortifications. Nobody's been here for likely several months, and not for more than a passing stay.
She'd flip off the horrid urban pit but it's honestly not worth acknowledging, not even when she gives up the circling game and stalks through its ruined streets with no intention to stay longer than she needs to. The whole place still makes her skin itch.
The first sign of life she finds that isn't more bugs is also not life at all, but a robot. One of the neighbors', the family with the baby she didn't see amongst the frozen occupants in the vault, and it's just puttering about maintaining horrible dead hedges in a ghoulish perpetuation of its gardening protocols. Owned by some rich sods who actually wanted to live here for whatever godforsaken reason, able to actually afford a service bot and all its insane maintenance licensing.
It – he? – cheerfully points her directly south, to Concord, which she immediately decides against once he reveals there were people there who were a little bit trigger happy.
But north of Sanctuary was just rolling empty hills once the trees thinned out into nothing, and windswept, the sort you'd need to plan a roadtrip for, and none of the cars around seemed any degree of functional any more – god knows she'd fantasized about running off out there plenty of times, when the manicured hedgerows started feeling real claustrophobic, a fantasy that stopped as soon as it started when she reasoned to herself that she couldn't live on grass and uncharitable thoughts.
East she knew led to a quarry, which sounded like a poor idea all around. And there was still the issue of her mystery watcher, still exploring the vault but likely to come back up and look for her in the suburbs, and none of these options are good ones to consider because while she's capable, being wasteland-capable is another beast entirely.
So she turns and heads westwards towards a power pylon, hoping to follow its line towards the city in a more indirect route south.
She finds a charming shack instead. Cobbled together from scrap wood, planks, and scavenged cloth, it's an unwieldy and drafty construct using the pylon as structure support. Given the atrocious state of the Sanctuary homes, it's a pretty neat contrast and a feat of ingenuity, and she admires it from afar before approaching.
There are people there. Real, living people.
She doesn't know how long she has before her mystery tail gets out of the vault and comes looking, especially once they find out there's nothing of value there, but she guesses half an hour. Time to take a gamble.
There's a farm out back of the shack filled with clumpy melon vines and other small fields of stuff, and the family working it all eye her with some degree of trepidation as she stumbles in.
“I don't know where I am, I don't know how long I was out before I woke up here, and now there's a guy after me, and all I have to wear is this goddamn vault suit,” she says, putting just enough shake in her voice for it to come off as fear, as if to scream 'help, I was drugged and kidnapped and woke up naked in that weird vault up on the hill, this is all I got'.
She's not actually afraid of whoever's lurking after her, but gaining sympathy is better than foolhardiness. It pays off; the older woman's jaw tightens and she gains a sharp glint in her eye.
Jake receives some scrappy farmhand clothes to change into, a cloth to cover her distinctively clean hair, and a bandanna to cover her mouth and nose. Dust storms happen a lot this time of year, Connie says, gotta keep everything covered, may as well use it for hiding from the freaks too.
She helps out briefly on the farm, picking melons with Lucy for a handful of bottlecaps and a quick rundown of the area, which tells her that the currency is completely switched up for a singular denomination of junk item that nobody wants to carry a lot of because they get unwieldy after a couple hundred, and that the greater Boston area is well and truly fucked.
She learns directly that the day the war started and ended was over two hundred years ago, and now nobody knows how to do anything beyond scavenge and steal, and guns are being made from pieces of wood and metal pipes. Some of the city has been reclaimed in patches, though, so that seems like her best bet to start with at least.
It's about a day's hard trek if she doesn't stop to rest – she chalks it up to two or three days, then – along with hoping the wildlife doesn't pick her off on the way, because the giant roaches she encountered and the farm's own two-headed lumpy excuse for a cow are on the tame end. From there... well. She'll have to see what happens.
“Follow the caravan trails if you find 'em. They'll get you there in one piece,” Lucy says as they wave her off, a ragged backpack slung over one shoulder with enough stock of dense dry cornbread and ugly little tomato things to keep her fed for a couple of days with the vault suit folded at the very bottom, and a promise to do her level best to survive.
By the time early evening starts turning the hilltops a faint gold, she's long gone, swallowed up by the wasteland.
-
He's lost her.
Deacon, the intel guy, the best ever at his job, has fucking lost her.
Desdemona would be rolling in her grave laughing at him, if not for the fact that she's still alive and kicking. He can just imagine the Eyebrow Raise, epic proportions of which have never been seen before.
He's honestly surprised when he comes back up from the vault to find no evidence that she'd even been there in the first place; he camps out in Sanctuary for a while, exploring all the buildings. Not a single sign of bunking down to get her bearings, or boarding up the walls, or poking around for supplies - nothing.
She must've been a resident here, as there were few enough cryo pods to house as many people as there are houses and not many more. Surely she would've aimed straight for her old home – which makes her taking off into the wilderness that much more confusing. Sure, she clearly had some understanding of basic survival, but when something safe and familiar was an option, the obvious answer is to choose it. These houses were clearly high-end dream homes for their time.
Rusted frames with dilapidated tiling as they might be now, they've withstood two hundred years and a nuclear detonation and remained sturdy for the most part. Appearances would have been kept, lifestyles maintained, the perfect appearance for a perfect neighborhood.
Though to be honest, Deacon can't really picture a pristine garden and lawn without it looking silly and fake in his mind.
He's seen pictures and magazines of pre-war suburbs and it doesn't seem real. Even less real is the image of this vault-dweller digging up one of those weirdly round-shaped green hedges to eat the roots, or something. Her behaviour and his understanding of pre-war clashed in a way that made absolutely no sense, and he wants answers to questions that just keep happening – foremost of which is why the Institute was interested in a random two hundred year old woman, but not enough to send the damned crows to keep an eye on her.
Little buggers had vanished into thin air.
She'd vanished too. Hell, wasteland-inexperienced, undersupplied, and not used to the radiation creeping its way through literally every aspect of living? He'd be surprised if she lasted a week, two days, especially with the vault suit giving her away. He has no idea how she managed to give him the slip so successfully.
Even the damn Mr. Handy doesn't seem to want to help him, waving him off and saying it was so busy doing the yard work, surely there's someone else he can ask? He thanks it, because he's not rude, and decides Sanctuary is a bust.
He wanders into the mouth of Concord, scouting the raiders, but none of them seemed up in arms about murdering a broad in a vault suit. Occasional packs of wild dogs and molerats aren't chewing on remaining shreds of blue clothing.
There's a settlement a little ways across the river to the south, built up around a massive power pylon, one of those multi-generational farmhouses where a little bit more gets built every year or so.
A family of three there, Abernathy Farm.
It becomes rapidly clear that he's not welcome there before he even gets close. He kind of wants to ask if they shot a vaultie recently, but the woman is resting a hand on her gun in a way that means business if he doesn't clear the hell out of there right fucking now, answers or no answers, so he does just that.
It leaves him at square one.
Still, he thinks, how hard can it be to find a vault dweller, a total newbie dressed in a vibrant skintight jumpsuit, who's sensitive to radiation and wouldn't know a cap from a tin can?