@defrostedhoward and I plotted.
The hunt for Hank MacLean had turned cold so Lucy and Cooper had decided to split up, cover more ground around New Vegas to see if they could perhaps pick up a lead and meet up a few days later. Traveling around with the kid wasn't ideal, but after everything came up, Cooper even had to admit that the kid was growing on him, whether he liked it or not. But today he found himself in Goodsprings, Nevada. The town was busier than normal and Cooper kept to himself, for the most part people left him alone, but he'd occasionally hear a normal Ghoul slur thrown at him. But most knew not to fuck with him, and he was thankful for that.
Walking down one of the side streets, he heard a girl scream. It's not like he hasn't heard thousands of them before, but the way this scream pierced through him like a blade he stopped dead in his tracks. He knew that scream, he had heard it before. His mind went back to the worst day of his life.
"Daddy!!" Cooper struggled against the military men holding him back from Janey, who was being carried away by her mother and other Vault-Tec executives. Her hysteric screams and sobs as she was taken from him still haunted Cooper to this day. Getting past the military men briefly, Cooper ran up to the metal fence.
"JANEY BABY I LOVE YOU!" Cooper yelled towards his daughter, sobbing just as hard as she was, the men tried to pull him off the fence as he continued, "I swear to God, Janey! I will find you! I promise I-" That was when the world went black, he got the hilt of a gun to his temple, knocking him out.
The months and years after his separation from Janey were the worst years of Cooper's painfully long life. As they experimented on him, changed him to a ghoul, his mind, delirious from the pain and drugs would hear Janey scream, he would wake up, frantic to find his baby girl. The scientist would coldly tell him, "Janey is gone." And Cooper would just spiral.
Looking around he heard the scream again, he took off towards it, he didn't know what to expect to see, but he would never forgive himself if he didn't try to see what it was. As he came quickly around a corner, he saw a young girl, probably not much older than Lucy, standing between two bodies, covered in blood. She had dropped them, he wasn't going to say anything but then he took a look at her and his heart pounded in his chest, could it be after all these years?
He was so scared to say anything, god what if he scared her? But he finally conjured up the nerve and said almost like a prayer, "Janey?"