Chapter Text
When Clara Pedersen met Nathaniel Davis, there was a music that swelled in her so loudly that she thought it would travel up from her stomach and make her heart explode. It was cliché and beautiful and left her with an aching body from which she thought she would never recover. She remembered it vividly, every detail, every way the military uniform he was wearing molded to his body.
The Americans bring destruction everywhere they go, her father had told her as she grew up, they are no better than the Chinese at the end of the day.
He said it in that north Jutland accent, the one he never lost no matter how Clara’s mother poked fun at him.
Clara loved the accent, a reminder of a Denmark where she had a home away from home. Here, just off the German border, the accent was different. Everyone sounded like her mother. Her father always said that even Clara sounded like her mother.
When Nate walked in, and the music swelled around her with every step he took in her direction. Clara wore a blue dress with gold-colored kitten heels, the necklace her mother had given to her when she turned eighteen around her neck. Clara’s fingers stopped moving when he looked at her, and her lips parted just barely, and when he smiled, the world stopped just as easily as her fingers had.
She had stopped playing, but the music carried on like her fingers were still fluttering along the keys.
Clara remembered it as though she had a holo of it. She wished she had a holo of it, the way his voice harmonized with how she fiddled absentmindedly at the fabric at her waist.
“Hello, I’m Nate,” he said, like he’d just teleported halfway across the room to her. He leaned against the piano, smile wide and almost too white. He was waiting for something, and Clara felt like she was stumbling even before she started speaking.
Clara had studied English in school, but never spoken it outside of a classroom except perhaps once or twice on holiday.
“C-Clara,” she answered, softly, as if speaking too loudly would shatter the dream he had managed to construct so quickly.
“Clara?” he repeated after her, looking for clarification, saying her name in altogether the wrong accent.
“No, Clara. Clahr-uh,” she enunciated it, and he repeated after her, still saying it wrong, and when she laughed, Clara knew.
Americans might have brought destruction everywhere they went, but this one? This one she had to have.
Her father threw a fit when she told him. She was the only child of a potato farmer, one who had done everything right to rise above her family’s station; a law degree, even from the University of Copenhagen, her father said, would be worthless if she went with Nate, and that there was nothing that he could give her that she couldn’t find on her own here in Denmark.
At that point, her mother had laughed, because Clara was just like her, she had said.
Clara’s mother was right. Even if she had considered staying, she would have left just to spite him and his inability to support the decision she was wanting to make.
She and Nate had been together three weeks when she found herself on her way home with him, a whirlwind romance that would have made even a film star blush. English was a hurdle they were constantly trying to tackle, but one that was avoidable; Nate spoke a fairly proficient level of German from his time stationed in the military base just south of the Danish border, and Clara was near-fluent in German, so English only ever came into play when Nate invited friends to the house that really seemed too nice for a soldier who was only in his late twenties.
“This was my fourth deployment,” Nate had told her in his heavy-handed German, as if that somehow explained things, as if she wasn’t twenty-two and a fresh college graduate who had still been living with her parents.
Clara understood more than she spoke, but that wasn’t truly giving her a lot of credit considering that her confidence in it would barely fill a thimble. Still, it didn’t matter too much, because Nate was charismatic for the both of them in a way she could have been in Danish if she perhaps had ever gotten to put her law degree to use.
The degree gathered dust, sitting on the mantle right next to the medal Nate had once explained to her was for exemplary service or something else like that. He was so excited to have someone to take care of that Clara working never even crossed his mind. The one time she brought up maybe trying to find outside of the house, Nate had looked so hurt that she’d never brought it up again.
It didn’t matter. He was beautiful and he loved her and she loved him and in just under a month and a half in this brave new world she was carving out for herself with Nate, Clara found herself with child. A week after that, she and Nate were married.
His family called it a shotgun wedding, a term she didn’t understand until one of the military wives explained it to her. They didn’t like her much, Nate’s family, or at least it didn’t seem like it. Even as Clara’s vocabulary expanded, her understanding of tone was a constant struggle. They didn’t speak any of the German that she and Nate used to bridge the gap between their worlds, and Clara’s English was improving steadily but too slowly for anyone’s liking.
When Shaun was born, English was the last thing on Clara’s mind. There were diapers and bottles and all too much vomit, and the breastfeeding was so exhausting that Clara didn’t realize that she had lost all her baby weight and ten more pounds on top of that until the baby’s third check-up when Shaun was underweight and the tears that rolled down her face burned more calories than she’d eaten in the whole day. Even with Codsworth’s assistance, she had managed to undernourish herself and the baby while she’d been at it, and no amount of consoling from Nate or Codsworth had been able to make that feel any better.
The day after that, Nate bought her a piano, one so close to the kind that Clara had been playing the day she met him that she collapsed in the doorway the moment that she saw it.
Clara wasn’t sure when the music died, when she stopped hearing crescendos every time Nate got close to her, but the second her fingers ghosted the keys, it was back, at least for bursts and moments.
The day she got her music back was the day before the bombs fell, the day before she stuffed her skin and bones body into a vault suit that wasn’t tight enough to stop itself from sagging off of her, the day before she trusted Nate enough to take Shaun into that terrible cryopod. The day she got her music back (and a microwave too) was her birthday, and to celebrate her twenty-third year beginning, the world went to hell.
There is supposed to be tech in the vault. That’s how he wound up here, bored out of his mind, with water that’s too dirty for him to actually consider drinking it. Deacon’s been posted up here for two days this time, and if he wasn’t certain that it would be a gold mine this would feel like a waste of time. He’s been scoping it out once every couple of weeks, staying a few days each time because he knows how the world works and every time he leaves he’s pretty confident the vault will open up the second he turns his back.
Desdemona thinks he’s too paranoid, even for them, for what they do, but Deacon knows they need to fortify the Switchboard even more than they already have, and if there’s anything down in that vault that could give them the upper hand, Deacon’ll be damned if he doesn’t find it.
He props his feet up on the shoddy table and leans back in the chair where he’s been sitting for the last hour or so, putting a little more faith in the chair’s legs than perhaps someone else would, and closes his eyes. Deacon’s eyes flutter shut, but he’s not foolish enough to fall asleep, not here where he’s exposed to any number of things. It’s a good position for sniping, elevated, but it’s not perfect and it’s not like he has anyone to keep watch. The nap would have to wait. His body starts when he hears a shuddering creak that rattles the general quiet that’s surrounded him the last forty-eight hours (well, save the mole rats and the radroaches, and honestly? Fuck those stingwings). He sits straight up, bracing his rifle against his lap, and the vault door starts to inch open, and well –
All he can think is that PAM definitely didn’t account for this.
Deacon looks down his scope towards where the door has painstakingly slowly creaked open – with the safety on, he’s not an animal – and there’s really no way to miss that bright blue vault suit. The woman is looking around a little too wildly and her chest is heaving so quickly that she’s going to succumb to hyperventilation if the Commonwealth doesn’t eat her alive first. Her face is bright red and Deacon isn’t sure if it’s in terror at the world she’s being faced with or if she’s been crying, but when she whips around to make sure there’s nothing behind her, he can make out faint tear tracks on her cheeks.
Deacon flips the safety off when he hears the familiar buzz of a bloatfly, swiveling quickly to put a quick and quiet bullet straight through its torso. This woman, this survivor, she’s too horrorstruck to even notice the fly or her savior. Deacon supposes he prefers it that way. After a too long survey of the immediate vicinity, the woman stumbles down the hill towards that abandoned little town that looks like it would have been a pre-war wet dream. He watches her descent initially, and when he’s convinced that she’s not coming back, at least not right away, Deacon swings his body into motion and descends into the vault.
That big beautiful freezey-gun is locked up in a case and why Deacon thought he would be able to unlock it is beyond him. He groans, knocking his forehead against the case in frustration before shouldering his rifle and deciding he ought to at least do a little exploring before reporting an absolute best to Desdemona (and Carrington, he thinks with a grimace).
Everything Clara sees makes her cry harder. The cockroaches are fifty times bigger than they were, her husband was murdered, and her baby was taken away from her when she was close enough that if there hadn’t been glass in the way she could have reached out and touch the kidnapper.
Her husband is dead, her baby is taken, and all she has to show for it is the fact that her law degree had remained untouched, right next to Nate’s medal on the mantle where they’d left the both of them when the bombs started falling. Whenever she thinks she’s taken care of the tears, that maybe they’ve stopped flowing, they come surging back again. Clara grips the wedding ring she’d taken from Nate’s body in her pocket and tries not to remember how cold he’d been, the way the blood spatter still stained his temple. The piano stands there still in the living room, and it had been perfectly tuned when Nate had gifted it to her.
How it survived is beyond Clara’s imagining, and its presence brings a ghost of a smile to her face until she plays a chord and it twangs in such an ugly manner that she realizes she has no idea how long it has stood here, needing a tuning like she needs Shaun back in her arms.
The sob that chokes her has a mind of its own, and when she sees Codsworth, Clara thinks she is hallucinating.
Codsworth is asking for an explanation, for anything, and when he asks if Nate and Shaun would be joining them for dinner, Clara lets out a wail so primal that Deacon hears it as he is exiting Vault 111.
“Dead and gone, Codsworth,” she says, the English feeling clunkier in her mouth than it ever had before, fighting for any words that felt natural. “Nate er død og Shaun blev kidnappet.”
She doesn’t know if Codsworth understands her or if he feels the grief that she is being consumed by, but his voice chokes up like he does, and he lets her hold him as she sobs.
“There are people in Concord, Mum. Perhaps they could help us find young Shaun,” Codsworth says, and when Clara looks at him, there are still tears glistening in her eyes. She nods nonetheless, and rights herself, brushing off the legs of her jumpsuit and trying to swallow the sob that seems to surface with every other breath.
The Americans bring destruction everywhere they go, her father had said, and Clara wonders if she’ll ever hear that North Jutland accent again, wonders if North Jutland even exists anymore, if Denmark is still sovereign, and when she realizes that it doesn’t matter, she laughs a little hysterically. Nate was the decorated war veteran, and his little housewife is the one who survived the nuclear apocalypse. Her mother had always loved a good subversive laugh, and the universe was certainly having one at her expense. That is the only explanation she can think of for this.
Clara kicks over a can as she heads east towards the gas station she and Nate always stopped by on the way to Concord, and lets her tears dry without wiping them away.