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The air inside Vault 111 was still, the din of the vault mechanisms long-since stalled along with the life-support machines that once kept Nora’s neighbours alive in their cryogenic pods.
As Nora and her companion crept through the vault’s entrance, she could almost feel the prickling cold of the chamber on her skin.
The quiet was stifling in the all-consuming dark.
“You don’t need to do this with me,” Nora whispered. The fluorescent lights above her flickered haphazardly, almost as if in response to her subdued reluctance.
“I want to,” came her companion’s reply.
She felt her fingers intertwine with theirs as they reached out for her hand.
Turning to them, she nodded, and in the shadowed entrance, she could only hope that they would see her expression. “Thank you.”
The vault, unsurprisingly, had changed very little since the day Nora had left it. Radroach carcasses lined the floors of the main hallway, their browned blood on the rusted metal walls displayed like an abstract expressionist painting on a worn, jagged canvas.
Nora wrinkled her nose at the sight.
She cared little for the frenzied efforts of her previous artwork.
The pair remained silent as they made their way through the winding corridors and open rooms, picking through the scattered pieces of the past. Nora led the charge, her head down and pistol in her hand, though in the back of her mind, she knew there was little use for it.
Making their way through what was once the vault’s living quarters, Nora’s companion made a snarky comment about the amount of skeletal remains still entombed in Vault 111.
“Looks like these guys had as much luck as you did, huh,” they muttered as they stepped over a skeleton slumped in a chair, stained white lab coat still draped over its form.
Despite herself, Nora cracked a smile. “Hardly!”
Nearing the back of the vault, they approached a final long, empty corridor. The automatic door closed behind them with a shudder as they crossed the threshold.
At least something in the vault was still operational.
Only the ghost of their silhouettes visible in the yawning dark, they felt their way through the hall to the cryogenic chambers. Nora’s fingers grazed the metal rivets and bolts of the vault walls, the accumulation of two hundred years of rust crumbling to dust under her touch. The deep, winding cold of the underground had long ago seeped into its structure, and the atmosphere was stifling as the pair approached the final door.
The last barrier that separated Nora and her long-dead spouse.
She took a shaky breath, chest heaving and tears pricking her eyes, before stepping forward.
The door opened.
Nora blinked.
In an instant, the unbridled terror of the past slammed into her with the force of a speeding freight train, driven home by the realization of what she had lost with the Brave New World ushered in with the bombs.
The wind had been knocked out of her, and her lungs burned as she struggled to breathe, her hands on her knees, bent forward as a wave of nausea crashed into her.
Why did she think that coming here after all was said and done would bring her closure?
From behind her, her companion placed an open palm on her back. “It’s okay. We don’t have to be here-”
“I want to tell you about him,” Nora interrupted. Her vision swam with tears, but her friend’s camaraderie gave her a second wind and she pressed onward, toward her husband’s body.
The wedding ring on her finger seemed so much heavier than it had been before she walked back into the vault. Back into the past.
Stepping forward, she brushed the condensation from the window of the pod that housed her spouse, and she gazed down at the corpse, grey with death, skin tight over the masses of organs and bone, pulling her down, down, down into the pit.
She closed her eyes and took another breath.
Behind her eyelids, the visage of his decaying corpse was still burned into her retinas, and it dragged her under a tide of unfamiliar emotions, grief and anger rising up from the churning depths.
She took another breath, eyes still clamped shut.
His wedding ring was still on his finger.
Hers felt so heavy.
“He was a good man,” she murmured. “The best I’d known.”
“I don’t doubt it.”
“He had such a brilliant mind. He was so kind, too. Compassionate. Did whatever he could to improve the world. He always told me that he was the lucky one in our marriage, but-”
Nora’s words choked off in her throat as she sobbed, her chest heaving as she fell forward, her forehead pressed into the cold, smooth surface of the pod.
She was so far away from him.
The door clanked angrily, and she winced as her friend knelt beside her and placed a sympathetic hand on her shoulder.
“But, really, I was the lucky one,” she finished, sniffling.
As the pair knelt on the cold metal, Nora’s companion pulled her into a gentle embrace.
“I’m sorry for your loss.”
Nora mumbled an appreciation into her friend’s shoulder.
The two sat there on the vault floor for what felt like an eternity in the shadows and amongst the rust before Nora pulled away and dabbed at her eyes with the sleeve of her jumpsuit.
The small spark of anger was still snuggled deep within her, but it was a burning ember slowly ebbing under the incongruous waves of patient affection from her companion.
As she breathed a final sigh, she felt lighter than before, lighter than she had felt for a long time.
“Thank you,” she said. “Thanks for being here with me.”