An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Welp, guess I am posting this thing! It’s not finished, as I’d intended it to be before kicking the first chapter out in the world, but this might actually motivate me to write the last two chapters.
Thanks to @theartofblossoming, for encouraging me to post this, so loooooong ago. <3
VAULT 831 - Day 26 <b>A Crossover</b> http://archiveofourown.org/works/11638140/chapters/26914107 @mustinvestigate 's Nora Freis and Vincent 'Nate' Hudson just happened to go to boot camp together.
My writing progress has pretty much fallen off a cliff, but I have been working a bit on the next Nora Freis story, which is a Preston & MacCready adventure dealing with the ripples she’s left through the Commonwealth factions. Except so far it’s literally been nine pages of them hanging out in a bar shooting the shit because, you know, lockdown. Here’s the opening:
Life is a race, Preston Garvey reads off the battered billboard that looms over Goodneighbor as he and the green provisioner stride closer, its lower corner illuminated in blue, then red, then blue… He softens his eyes, waits for the glint of neon on gunmetal, but no. No sniper looks over the wall into the narrow alley approach, despite the blood-splattered Gunner bivouac and wounded, furious mutants blocking their path.
He raises a fist, looks back to catch the provisioner’s nod and tightening grip on his brahmin’s halter, before leaning around an outcropping of smashed marble to snap off four quick shots at knee-level. Ducking back, he pops a fresh energy cell in his musket, gathering from the howls that he’s caught both at least once and should be safe from the bigger one’s sledgehammer long enough to take out the one with the minigun.
So long as there really were only two, and they don’t have a buddy taking a leak around the corner…
No beep no beep no beep, he prays to anything listening, because if they’ve got one of those maniacs with an armed mini-nuke on its arm he’s gonna have to come up with a Plan B real quick.
But something up there both hears and gives a damn, for once. Two energy cells later, the mutants are glowing piles of ash, and the alley’s blessedly quiet. He waves for the provisioner to catch up, giving the den and Gunner camp a quick once over for anything useful, only half-expecting a guard from the gates within eyeshot to come investigate the noise.
He stuffs a box of 5mm ammo in his backpack and turns back to find the deceptively slight provisioner heft the minigun up on his brahmin, sledgehammer already slung across his back, before glaring at the still-unmanned gate with perverse satisfaction.
“Typical.”
“Pardon?” the provisioner asks, still with that funny stiffness Preston’s been trying to talk him out of all afternoon.
“Nothing, Beau.” The brahmin noses at Preston’s pocket until he gives the pushy beast another strip of dried mutfruit. “Well, not nothing, but it’s not aimed at you. People should be more careful out here, is all. It’s like Quincy never…”
Preston shakes his head, reloading his musket with a fresh cell, even though the last one has two shots left.
“Quincy?” Beau prompts, looking over his shoulder.
“We should get going. These two might’ve had friends.”
He smiles to lighten any abruptness in his tone, but Beau only nods, toes the ash pile like there might be something valuable inside the organic dust, then tugs at the brahmin’s halter.
The gate gives way under his shoulder, and no one challenges them as he ushers the provisioner through or helps him unload the few valuable pieces.
“Ma’am - ma’am.” Preston nods at the assaultron vendor, then the ghoul woman with the excellent wig, in the respective storefronts, and lifts the minigun that’s already making his shoulder ache.
The ghoul laughs and points him toward her colleague. “Oh, I wager that one’s more K-L-E0’s clientele than mine. Any good scrap, though...”
Preston sets it on the assualtron’s counter, watching ripples move through Goodneighbor’s half-assed Watch like he’s dropped a rock in a deep puddle. One sloops closer to him, hand on his rifle, while another sidles backward into the Old State House.
“Captain Garvey…” the provisioner murmurs, patting the brahmin’s side as it picks up his nerves, snorting and swishing her tail.
“It’s just Garvey,” Preston corrects. Again. “And it’s fine. Don’t worry - they’re not Minutemen, but we’ve got a mutual aid agreement. Get Bessy settled in, and I’ll have a beer waiting for you in the Rail.”
The brahmin snuffles at his chest, but this time he only pats one head’s horn ridge before pushing her toward the caravan pen, next to a half-hearted tato patch roughly downwind of the main square.
Beau nods again, head dipping as he scuttles ahead of Bessy to open the gate.
“Another dumb animal,” K-L-E0 observes, scanning the minigun with an internal whir.
“You mean Bessy, or me?”
The other vendor laughs, leaning over to watch him through a gap in the wall. “You’re Garvey, right?”
He tips his hat. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Came through here with my girl Nora, oh, six, seven months ago?”
He smiles, resetting his hat. “You have an excellent memory.”
She shrugs with a salesman’s self-deprecation. “Don’t see a lot of new faces around here.”
He smiles, the reflexive one Nora calls his ambassador game face. “I find that hard to believe.”
“Well, you don’t see a lot of new faces around here, twice.” She glances at an old bloodstain on the low wall by his elbow, the head-height laser scoring on the wooden gate behind him. “Can’t imagine how we’re not making a better impression on customers. You think I should run some kinda promotion, maybe - free bottle of antibiotics with every stabbing?”
Preston laughs, a real one, earning a rusty chuckle in return. “I’d come back, for sure - and tell my friends.”
She reminds him, somehow, of that odd Vault-Tek obsessed ghoul Nora brought back to Sanctuary not long after they parted ways. He wonders if she knows him, but doesn’t ask. It’s just rude to assume all ghouls know each other, even if they’ve mostly all had two centuries to cross paths.
“Don’t bother,” the assaultron sneers, in that distant, impersonal way robots can have which gives him the shudders far worse than anything a raider’s ever screamed at him. “You Minutemen have no ambition - or imagination. And the subframe on this minigun is all out of alignment - have you been...chewing...on it?”
K-L-E0 rips him off, but the other one - Daisy’s her name, as it turns out - gives him “the Nora discount” on some fresh ammo and meds. Between the two, he’s got enough caps leftover to cover the three beers on his little corner table when Goodneighbor’s mayor saunters in, listens to the end of Magnolia’s song, applauds wildly, and only then pretends to notice Preston, a splotch of Minuteman blue amidst the Goodneighbor pinstripes.
Nora’s remarkably chill back there after flambéing a new companion.
Woah, still a bit toasty…
Also, the fact he easily survived being roasted like a baked potato by a jet engine maybe should’ve tipped Nora off to Danse’s origin. She knows the limitations of power armor better than the average wastelander.
