Chapter Text
“You're not actually nervous, right?” Rahasia asked.
“No,” Preston lied unconvincingly.
“Relax. This is the most pro forma election I've ever seen, and I've seen elections where people ran unopposed.”
Preston, very technically, was not running for Sanctuary's Colonel unopposed; this was as much a test run as it was an election, and it didn't feel right to run it without at least two options. He'd wanted Rahasia to fill in as an opponent, but she was ineligible on the grounds of already being the General, and kind of afraid that people would actually vote for her besides. Preston's second choice had been Sturges, who had politely but emphatically declined anything that came with any risk of being in a position of authority. In addition to stymying the election, that also knocked out Preston's first choice for a Major of Defense. Rahasia had been about to suggest Mama Murphy when the old woman had shuffled up behind them and said “Mama Murphy's too old for this democracy shit.”
Deacon ended up solving the problem by simply marching up to the board and writing That Asshole In The Sunglasses, and then filling out the space for his personal statement with two bullet points reading ‘don't vote for this guy’ and ‘he knows where you sleep’. Mac got a pair of sunglasses and stationed himself next to the board, ready to do his best Deacon impression to anyone who might need that read aloud.
Talking everyone into casting a vote had been a lot more difficult: most of her friends had been surprised to be handed a ballot at breakfast this morning, though only Piper had any kind of valid reason for not casting a vote. She was afraid that if word got back to Diamond City, the mayor would take that as proof that she was no longer a resident, evict her and her sister, and then send the guard to confiscate her printing press. Everyone else had just somehow thought they didn't really live here.
Well, they all did, so they were all voting- bar Piper who was excused because Mayor McDonough was a raging fetid dick.
She'd probably have to deal with that at some point, but… later.
Codsworth floated by, sporting one of the “I VOTED” stickers she'd looted from the church in Concord. It would have been her and Natanael's polling location, if the apocalypse had waited another couple of weeks.
“Hey Codsworth,” Preston greeted him. “How's that civic duty treating you?”
“I'm finding it quite invigorating, Colonel Garvey!” Codsworth replied with a wave.
Rahasia had been kind of surprised to find that robots voting wasn't going to be a problem. Apparently they'd been doing it in Diamond City for decades, and most of the larger settlements had instituted similar provisions.
“I mean, I'm pretty sure it's one of those things that mostly just keeps the Lower Fields/Upper Stands divide going strong,” Piper had explained. “You kind of have to be wealthy to afford a robot and most of them aren't as independent as Codsworth. Percy just votes however Myrnah tells him to, for example, and all the municipal robots are ultimately answerable to the mayor, so…”
“On the other hand, that's the only reason they can't turn me away at the polls,” Nick had chimed in. “There's also Takahashi. God only knows how he votes, but vote he does, every year.”
“We don't really have general elections in Goodneighbor, but if you think I could get away with cutting out KL-E-O and Charlie out of the decision making process you've got another thing coming,” Hancock had added. “They've got seats on my council and everything.”
Rahasia, who had been gearing up to present the ad hoc Turing test she and Sturges had come up with the previous evening to prove Codsworth's sapience, had only been able to say “Huh.”
It didn't make immediate sense, robots voting in paranoid, xenophobic Diamond City, but she could sort of tease out the logic after a few hours thought. Piper was definitely right about that being a way to give more power to those with more caps, but she doubted that most people thought of it that way. Probably it was the fact that robots were pretty ordinary, especially here in the Commonwealth where the triple threat of industry, military, and academia had made them quite common before the war. Probably, for a while after the bombs there had been more robots than humans- they would have been a familiar sight. Familiar and subservient- to certain powerful individuals, at least. But being answerable to a human, rather than something that was, despite all intents and purposes, an artificially constructed human, probably seemed safer to many. And, of course, most people weren't going to think about it in that level of detail. They just kind of went with it because that was The Way Things Were Done.
God, the more things changed…
“So, Earlene's agreed to be my Major of Defense,” Preston said, in the here and now.
“Good choice,” Rahasia told him, because it was.
The old Minutemen had elected Colonels, one per settlement, and the Colonels in turn appointed two Majors to serve under them, or in their stead when they weren't around: one for Defense, who would run the settlement while the Colonel was away, and one of Offense, to partake in field missions. For now, at least, they were going to stick with that system- and given that Preston was often in the field with her, Defense was going to be the more important position in Sanctuary.
Earlene was extremely qualified: a fully trained nurse and pretty good cook with over two hundred years of experience at surviving. She was well liked by basically everyone in Sanctuary (save maybe Marcy), and had already been put in charge of the guard rotation. Plus, you know, it felt like it would be important, that the first Major appointed in the new Minutemen was a ghoul.
“How about Offense?” she asked.
Preston grimaced. “That's taking longer. Earlene was my first choice, but with Sturges taking himself out the running for Defense I don't really have an alternate. She's the best choice to promote, but…”
Rahasia hadn't ever seen the point in false modesty. “Whoever you appoint to Major of Offense has got to be able to keep up with us, and most people can't.”
Preston winced, but didn't argue. “Give Vory and Sergio a few years and they'll probably be able to manage it, but we don't exactly have years to sit on this.”
“Not really, no,” she agreed. “Well, I don't think we actually specified when you had to appoint your Majors, but it probably shouldn't be a years’ long process.”
“Nope,” Preston agreed.
“Still, we do have some wiggle room. Why don't we take stock after this round of elections? Maybe one of our settlements will have an excess of qualified people and someone will want to move.”
“And want to have the rank and responsibility," Preston added, his eyes following Sturges as he walked over to the hut they'd designated as Sanctuary's polling place. Sturges noticed and waved at them; Preston returned the gesture, but Sturges disappeared into the polling hut before he could actually say anything.
Yeah. It'd been weird between the two of them, ever since Sturges turned down being the alternate candidate. Weider than really felt warranted. Especially since Sturges hadn't been weird to her at all while they were workshopping the whole Turing test thing.
“What happened there?” she asked.
“With Sturges?” Preston checked, adding at her nod. “He's happy as he is. And I can't exactly argue that he isn't already more than pulling his weight, given that he keeps all of this running.” He gestured up at the line of turrets on the parapet above them. “That might leave us in a bind, but I don‘t think trying to pressure him into taking the job would turn out better- not if he really does not want it.”
“And that's why he's being so weird around you in particular?” Rahasia asked.
“Ah. It's that obvious, huh?” Preston asked.
“Probably not, but we've all been living on top of each other for, like, four months now, so…”
“Yeah, well… he's kind of avoiding me right now, but I'm going to guess asking him to be my Major hit a bit too close to the break up.”
“Sturges had a break up?” Rahasia asked, shocked. “Who with?”
Preston opened his mouth, furrowed his eyes, and then closed it again.
“Wait- with you? When was this?” she demanded.
“Years ago!” Preston said hurriedly. “Like… five years ago? Wow, yeah, five years.”
Five years ago Preston would have been roughly Mac's age. “First love?” she asked.
“Not exactly,” Preston said, and then he winced. “Not for me at least. First love while I wasn't still a kid. First time it lasted long enough to get comfortable… maybe I got a little too comfortable. He was thinking that we'd settle down, get into a routine at the shop, let a couple of years go by and then put our names out there for any kids that needed a home. I was thinking… absolutely none of that. I reupped with the Minutemen, and I didn't tell him right away because I sort of assumed he already knew I was going to do that. And that he was also going to do that.”
“Oooooh,” Rahasia groaned with a wince.
“Yeah, that went over about as well as you'd expect,” Preston confirmed, rubbing at the back of his neck. “Anyway, it was pretty obvious from that that we wanted different things out of life, so we called it quits. It was awkward for a bit, but we got back to being friends eventually, which is good. I kind of miss him, when we're not talking.”
Sturges came back out of the polling hut, proudly sporting his “I VOTED” sticker. He gave them another wave but didn't approach, and Rahasia watched him mosey off in the direction of the water purifiers.
“He's older than he looks, isn't he?” she asked, jerking her head towards Sturges.
“Yeah, he's thirty-three.”
“Fuck off, for real?”
“Yeah, for real.”
“He's older than I am? Damn, that's not fair.”
“I hate to break it to you, babe, but you're older than everyone here save maybe Earl- hey! Don't mess with the hat!”
She made a few more playful swipes at his beloved hat until he managed to duck beneath her hands and swoop in for a kiss.
“Are you sure you don't want me to run a little human interest piece about you two?” Piper drawled from somewhere behind them. “You are the first power couple the Commonwealth has seen for a good long while.”
“Absolutely not,” Preston said, as Rahasia concurred with “Don't you fucking dare.”
“Okay! Okay, just throwing it out there…”
“I think you might have enough on your plate explaining what a real election looks like,” Rahasia added. Diamond City had elections every year, technically. It was more of an election to decide whether or not to have an actual election, though, which explained why McDonough was still in power: all he had to do was periodically convince slightly more than half the population that he was a better option than some unknown opponent.
The previous mayor had died in office. Piper despaired of getting McDonough out sooner than his own death, sometimes. Rahasia, meanwhile, was beginning to think that maybe it might be simplest if he died of her shooting him in the head. But they didn't have the political capital to survive the blowback of assassinating a public figure, and she probably shouldn't set that precedent either.
“Is this what a real election looks like?” Piper asked, jerking her head across the street where Deacon was attempting to snatch the sunglasses off of MacCready's face.
“It is now,” Rahasia said with a shrug.
The three of them watched as Mac ducked out of range, fast enough to avoid losing the sunglasses but not fast enough to avoid losing his hat. Deacon placed it on his own head and then slumped against the wall, MacCready's smirk on his face. Mac settled against the wall next to him, a too-large smile on his face.
They talked. Or, well, to judge from the look of things, they did impressions of one another at each other for a couple of minutes. She watched in trepidation, ready to intervene if they started fighting outside the polling hut. But after a bit, Mac simply relinquished the sunglasses and a cigarette in exchange for his hat. Deacon put Mac's sunglasses in his wig above the pair he was currently wearing and provided the lighter for both of them.
Huh. Well. It was good to know that they could get along, she supposed.
“Yeah. I don't know how to explain this to the masses of Diamond City,” Piper said.
“Do you want us to walk you through all the safeguards we put in place to stop people like McDonough from taking advantage?” Preston offered.
“And I can provide all sorts of Pre-War election horror stories if you don't want to call him out directly,” Rahasia added.
“Ha! When don't I want to call out McDonough directly?” Piper asked. “Still… additional context could be good. It's always been McDonough's line, that he's just guiding Diamond City back to a Pre-War standard of living.”
“I mean, he's not wrong about that,” Rahasia said, thinking of the sharp class divide in Diamond City, from the “resident workers” huddling on bare mattresses set up under awnings in all weather to the residents of the Upper Stands and the way they clutched their standards of opulence about every single inconvenience. “It's just that there was a lot about the Pre-War standard of living that sucked ass.”
“But the only people that remember that are you, Nick, and the ghouls,” Piper pointed out. “Everyone else has to rely on things like Pre-War textbooks, which from the sound of it, weren't actually all that reliable.”
“Yeah, the DoE had to approve anything written in textbooks before they could be published as such, so it was basically a lot of propaganda with some incidental facts thrown in when they weren't contradictory.”
Earlene walked out the polling hut and caught sight of them. She cupped her hands around her mouth and yelled “Hey Garvey! You can't loiter within a hundred and fifty feet of a polling station! That's voter intimidation, as your other half should know!”
“Hey now! I'm the intimidating one!” Rahasia called back.
“Then you've got to find something else to do too!”
“It's fine, I'm going to interview them!” Piper added.
“Well, do that somewhere else!”
“Should we go sit down in the commissary?” Preston suggested.
“Yeah, I think Earlene's got this locked down, and it's about time for lunch anyway,” Rahasia said, as Earlene rounded on Deacon and MacCready. “Come on, let's go.”