Melting Steel ➼ Fallout

Four

❝  It is not clear why we choose the fire pathway  ❞

➸ LP

Shaky breaths leave my lips but I keep my steps steady. My eyes dart to the soldiers that watch me carefully and I recognise some but they can't seem to meet my gaze so I keep my eyes to the echoing steel beneath my feet.

This place was never my home and I left every chance I had, scouring the wastes for scraps of technology, eliminating synths, helping young Squires down at the airport. I avoided the slim halls with everything I had. But I still know these halls like the back of my hand and I know the path I walk. Towards the Elder, towards that dome of windows overlooking the dark reaches of Boston. It was one of the few places I didn't feel as though the walls were crushing me. But I feel no happiness now as I'm led into the wide room and see Elder Maxson looking over the land he has 'cleansed', hands clasped behind his back.

I stand tall, short nails digging into my palms as I keep steely eyes on his tense back. He will not break me again, he will not bring me to my knees, he never has and never will own me.

We stand in silence, his soldiers leaving us alone. My ragged breaths fill the air, my lungs squeezing painfully in my chest as I wait for him to speak, tell me my crimes, execute me, beat me, whatever it is he does to traitors.

"I've spent a long time searching for you, Annabel," he says quietly, his voice gravelly and low. The handcuffs around my wrists bite into my skin as I clench my fists. "You always had a way of becoming a ghost."

"What do you want?" I question, my voice wavering.

"Me?" He gives me a chuckle that holds no warmth and he finally turns to me, his eyes swimming with darkness, his lips pressed into a cruel line. "I want nothing from you."

"Then why am I here? I left for a reason, you shouldn't have come looking."

"A part of me wanted closure, I suppose," he says, squaring his shoulders and looking down at me with distaste. "I gave you everything, a home, food, a title, and you threw it in my face for a synth."

"He was your friend," I say in a small voice and a flicker of pain passes across his face before he slips that mask back into place, the devoted leader, ready to make the tough decisions, even if they are wrong but justified to him.

"You pulled the trigger," he answers quietly and my lungs force the rest of the air from my body and I nearly choke. I see it every time I close my eyes, the image of my hand around the handle of the gun, my finger trembling over the trigger, burned into the back of my eyelids. His jolt, the body tumbling to the ground, the very real and human blood that pooled beneath him branding me like hot iron.

Yes, I pulled the trigger. I may as well have pulled it on myself too in that moment for what it's done to me.

"Have you come to gloat about your winnings, about how many innocents you killed?" my voice is not my own as I say this, it's hollow, faraway, belonging to a woman that is braver than the one that stands before Maxson with little of herself left.

"I tried to save as many as I could," he says and turns away, stepping towards that expanse of windows.

"You didn't try, Elder Maxson," I murmur, my eyes falling to the layer of dust on my boots. "I begged you to find another way, that I could find another way, but you refused. You speak of honour and duty but you are so deluded by your own pride that you don't even care how many innocent people died. There were families in the Institute, people with true intentions of helping the world but you don't care, do you?" I step towards him, my lip curling with anger and hatred, the words boiling within me. "Because anything that isn't fighting beneath your banner of might needs to be destroyed. You call yourself the good guy yet you don't even see all of the blood—"

"I don't call myself such a thing, Annabel," he says without turning but the pain in his voice gives me pause. "I thought..." His words break away. His hands come away from his lower back and he grips the railing, leaning against it and taking a shuddering breath. "I could have done things differently, I know that. But the synths are not people, they can't live amongst people, it's wrong." Silence stretches between us and I watch him. Maxson has a conscious, he buries it down beneath layers of supposed steel but I always saw it. Everyone has demons they battle with, he just likes to keep his behind closed doors.

I close my eyes, remember spending a night in his quarters, I had been wounded, gnawed at by some vicious beast and I couldn't be alone, the darkness had seemed to seep into my head and nestle there, refusing to let me sleep. So, I'd spent the night with Maxson, simply closed my eyes in his arms with his warmth at my back. But I remember, I remember the way he had jolted in his sleep, his incoherent mutterings. The man has blood on his hands and the horrors of the things he has had to do in his years, even young as he is, has a way of sinking its claws into him when his shields are lax.

"Why am I here?" I question again, hating the guilt that I feel at tossing such words at him. I know he struggles but he doesn't deserve my kindness, not after everything he's taken from me.

"I found your son in the Institute," he says and it's like a knife twisting in my gut, sudden and fierce. My son. Yes, I remember my son. A man with twisted ideals and chaotic convictions, no better than the man that stands before me. I knew my son could not be saved, that he was bent on blood.

"There was nothing I could do to save him," I whisper, my eyes sightless. He'd called me mother and it had made me feel sick. He wasn't my son. He had shared the same silver eyes, the same urge for cleanliness and order. But his misgivings had taken him down a dark path.

"I got him out, Annabel," Maxson says, turning to me again but my ears don't hear him properly. My son was a murderer, I couldn't save him. "Annabel." I meet his blue eyes and give a quick shake of my head.

"What?"

"I got your son out of the Institute, before it was destroyed." I gape at him, finally digesting his words. He saved the leader of the cause he was bent on destroying? No, that's impossible. "He asks for you every day. He looks like you too, has your black hair, your smile..." I stop listening, watching his mouth move but his words are a muffled haze in my ears. The man who had called me mother was a sixty-year-old killer with grey hair, aged while I had stayed stagnant. He had never cared for me. Maxson couldn't have saved him, it's not possible.

Then it suddenly dawns on me. Like a brick connecting with my cheek and leaving a deep pounding behind my eyes and a loud screech in my ears. The lies I had told Maxson, that my son was within the Institute but I couldn't reach him. I had never told him that Shaun was the active leader of the organization, I had never said a word of it and I had erased all evidence that he was. Maxson doesn't know. My son. My son is dead but the little black haired boy with the large silver eyes is not dead. But he may as well be because he is a synth.

"He's here?" I ask quietly and Maxson gives a stiff nod, stepping closer to me.

"I can take you to him. No harm will come to you here, Annabel." He reaches for the cuffs at my wrists but I stumble away, my breaths short and broken. My son is dead and whatever little boy I am going to see is not my son. He is a replica of the boy I lost, he is a fake, a replacement. He will never be mine.

"Don't touch me," I gasp, the walls closing around me, the steel herding me into a corner. Where is the air? This place has stolen it from my lungs as it has stolen everything else. My son died in Vault 111 and in a way, I did too. He is not my son and I am... I am... The air is gone and darkness swims through my head, dragging me down into its cold depths.