#w h e w i'm so glad to have this chapter over & done with ads;lkfj it was a beast to write

[druidgroves]

Chapter 11: Just In Time

Fandom: Fallout 4 Words: 8,557 Characters: Georgia Tate (Canon Divergent Sole Survivor), RJ MacCready, Original Characters Notes: content warnings for game-standard violence & gore. otherwise, enjoy !

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Because of—or perhaps in spite of—hope, things didn’t go south as much as they had gone shit-fucking sideways. Which was another way to say they lived, but not without scraping their way to a win nearly every step of the way.

Mac should have known something was wrong as soon as they were ready to head out. In hindsight, it should have been more obvious. When they started on the road again, Georgia had lagged behind a bit after having taken point the day before. The usual pep in her step had been traded in for overcompensation for a foot that hadn’t fully healed. He knew she wasn’t totally healed, had that aching suspicion that she hadn’t been entirely truthful when he asked her. He wouldn’t have cared as much if she weren’t literally helping him wipe out an entire Gunner squad that deemed him Kill On Sight. She hadn’t complained one bit either, which should have been another tick in the “something is definitely fucking wrong” column, but Mac had been too in his own head about what they were getting ready to do to fully realize it.

He had been full of anxious energy all morning, but forced himself to keep his cool as they traveled to the interchange. Evidently, he’d been doing a piss-poor job of hiding it, because Georgia had pinged him almost immediately.

“You alright, Hotshot?” she asked quietly as she sidled up to him, and leaned in close to give them some semblance of privacy. Her voice had a nervous edge to it despite her efforts to bolster him with the nickname, but it gave Mac some measure of comfort to know he wasn’t the only one feeling the same.

“You know how it is, just about to face a whole group of people that want me dead,” he replied with an attempt at a nonchalant shrug. He was aiming for a joke, too, but it didn’t quite land judging by the look on Georgia’s face.

“Well, we’ve got your back,” she said, and made a little gesture to the rest of the team. “Tell us how you want us to go at it, and we’ll work from there, alright? You make the calls.”

Honestly, Mac should have expected it to all go south the moment she handed off the reins to him so casually like that, looking to him to lead instead of the other way around. It shouldn’t have surprised him so much—this was his personal business anyways—but he’d been so used to her calling the shots that it made the role reversal that much more jarring. It occurred to him then that Georgia must have been in a similar position when she was made General by virtue of simply being there, as she described it, responsibility thrust onto her shoulders. He had punched someone for the position of mayor, though, so he was familiar with undertaking responsibility. It was just the fact that she put the lives of her people into his hands, meaning he really, really couldn’t afford to fuck up.

Mac decided to converge with Curtis about the approach, given his knowledge of the Gunner base. Curtis suggested going in from the northeast, away from the main road. He said the squad stationed there had put up what he called a “multi-purpose extortion playground” that their group needed to steer clear of—the Gunners forced tolls, supplies, or even the lives out of the hands of those just trying to pass through. He had described it with such venom in his voice that his comical demeanor had been nowhere to be found. Mac reminded himself not to get on the man’s bad side.

“They’ve got two lifts at opposite ends of the highway that they use to get up,” he explained, describing the layout as they walked. “The one close to the road is guarded at all hours, but there’s another one we’ll come up on the way we’re going. They’ve got it hidden away as an escape option, but they only ever had one guy guarding it.”

“We’ll split the group then,” Mac decided, running the plan through his head. “Have one team take out the guards near the main lift, meanwhile the other team focuses on the back entry. Classic flank maneuver.”

The rear attack consisted of Georgia, Gonzalez, Hollow, and Collins. Gonzalez would take out the guard with her silencer and get them in after the frontal assault distraction provided by Mac, Curtis, and Buckley. It had seemed like the start of a good plan, really. Curtis did his best to describe a mental map of the place for everyone, and when they started to stake the place out, they even thought they had run into a bit of luck.

The interchange itself was high above, covered in sheet metal and branded with the Gunners’ insignia. A few of the Gunners were on the edge of the road and had started taking pot shots at a passing herd of wild brahmin during their silent approach. They were all looking down their scopes and completely distracted.

“Stupidest way to pass the time that they’ve picked up yet,” Curtis had said once Gonzalez reported back from her forward scouting mission. After discussing the details, they reviewed the plan once more and got ready to split into their groups.

Before they parted ways, Georgia pulled Mac to the side, facing away from the rest of their team.

“Just wanted to say good luck,” she said, bumping him with her shoulder. “We’ll make it through, okay?”

“Yeah, sure,” he replied, trying to convince himself more than her. There was no backing out now, not when they had come this far. “Just…Try to save Winlock or Barnes for me, alright? It’s personal with them. You know how it is.”

“Consider them all yours. See you in a bit, Mac.” She gave him a small, encouraging smile.

“See you in a bit,” he echoed back, gripping his rifle tightly as they took off with their groups.

The opportunity with the brahmin allowed Buckly, Curtis, and himself to get into position in order to deal with the three guards posted around the main lift. Mac settled into his spot, and once he saw the other two find their own through his scope, he lined up his crosshairs with his target and waited for another shot from the overpass. One was near the lift and two were at opposing guard stations, eyes on the road ahead where helpless traders and settlers were more likely to pass through.

The success of Georgia’s group hinged on his own group timing their shots perfectly with the ones being aimed at the herd of brahmin. If they could manage to pull it off, Mac thought, they might actually get the upper hand.

A shot rang out from the overpass, and in the split second between its firing and the echo it left behind, Curtis and Mac took out their respective targets with a sniper’s grace (though Mac would say he was the cleaner shot). Two bloody holes appeared in the temples of two different Gunners as they fell from their guard stations.

It would have been perfect, flawless even, but Buckley had only managed to clip the last Gunner in the shoulder. She’d had just enough time to slap her hand over the lift button, sending it up before Mac had her in his sights. The lift began to rattle upwards while the woman began to choke on her own blood, dead before the three of them could make it out of hiding.

“Shit,” Mac cursed before he could stop himself, shooting out of his position like a bat out of hell, “shit, shit, shit, shit.”

Curtis reached the lift before he did, his long strides catapulting him up the stairs of the platform. The lift itself had already started going up, and they would have to wait for it to stop at the top before coming back down. They all seemed to come to that realization as gunfire began echoing off the road above them.

Mac’s blood ran cold.

Georgia.

“Can’t this thing go any faster?!” Mac snapped as Curtis slammed the call button over and over.

“C’mon, you piece of shit fucking goddamn—” Curtis growled, his string of profanities unceasing until the thing had finally come back down, the gunfire above never stopping.

The three of them jumped onto the lift, Buckley spouting off apologies the entire way up, and what they were met with on the overpass was chaos.

Any thought of a plan went out the window as a decked out assaultron immediately came into view from behind a hollowed out bus. As it began charging the laser beam in the center of its plated face, all three of them took aim at the red dot like a bullseye. Before it could fire, their bullets converged and it exploded into metal and wires.

A blast of heat hit Mac in the face when it did, and he hoped the explosion didn’t singe off his eyebrows as he shouted to Curtis, “You didn’t think the assaultron was worth mentioning?!”

“That one’s new!” Curtis shouted back as he took cover behind a concrete barrier while Mac ducked behind the shell of the bus. “My bad!”

Buckley had gone somewhere off to the right, evidence of his direction in the sound of opposing gunfire being abruptly cut off. Once Mac had pulled all his limbs behind his own cover, his eyes darted across the overpass frantically, looking for one person amongst the bullets pinging off support beams and old vehicles. Curtis moved from his cover just as Collins ran by with the ends of her hair on fire, and Hollow’s voice could be heard yelling something panicky. Gonzalez was shooting from behind an old Nuka-Cola machine while her arm bled from a bullet to her bicep. Everyone else was accounted for—but no Georgia.

Mac didn’t know how many Gunners there were. All he could do was aim at the turret spitting bullets at Buckley as he came upon one Mac remembered from his time on the squad. He didn’t feel too bad as the turret exploded into a ball of flame, distracting the Gunner—he was a Corporal if Mac remembered right—just long enough for Buckley to pick him off.

Then he saw both of them at the same time: Winlock in his Gunner green breastplate, eyes focused through the scope of his weapon, a perfect O+ making a target on his temple, and a suit of power armor off to the side looking ready to crush a panic-stricken Georgia underneath its foot.

Mac had always prided himself in thinking on his feet and making tough choices in high stress situations. It was what had made him a good mayor, what had allowed him to survive for so long in the wastes, and what kept him with just enough caps to get by. In the space of a heartbeat, he made the easiest choice he could have made in the moment.

The unprotected head of the Gunner, who must’ve forgotten his helmet in the chaos, burst like an overripe mutfruit as Mac pulled the trigger. Georgia managed to roll out of the way just enough for the foot to come down on the edge of her jacket instead of the middle of her torso. She popped up behind a metal barrier a second later, pulling her shotgun up and aiming it right at Winlock.

He couldn’t blame her for taking the chance: it was the perfect shot. The whole thing couldn’t have been lined up better if even she had planned it, Winlock’s back to her as he looked down his scope at—

Oh fuck.

The red beam from Winlock’s laser gun burned through the meat of Mac’s right shoulder as he narrowly ducked and rolled his head out of the way. The smell of burning flesh quickly began to coat the inside of his nose and throat as he clamped down on the wound with a litany of curses. He could pick out the sound of Georgia’s gun firing again, followed by an errant yelp from Curtis and one of Collins’ homemade frag grenades exploding in the distance. His shoulder screamed in pain at him, but he ignored it to lift his rifle again and take aim at a Gunner hiding behind a stone barrier.

The shot went wide when he pulled the trigger, the kickback against his burning shoulder nearly making Mac’s vision white out. He fell out of his cover just far enough for his target to be quick on the uptake. Pain split through his left side as he fell, trying desperately to scramble back behind his cover. He looked down at where he felt the pain, at first feeling warm, then very, very wet. The bullet had just barely missed some vital organs, but that didn’t make it scream any less as blood gushed from the wound.

Firmly hidden behind the bus again, Mac forced his breath to steady and began putting pressure on the bullet hole, relieved to find an exit wound not even two inches away from the entry. If he could just stop the bleeding, it’d be an easy fix. Hopefully.

“Mac!” Georgia was suddenly on her knees in front of him, her voice shrill and spitting words faster than he could make out. Her eyes went from his blood covered hands to his face and back. “Oh, fuck, are you okay? What can I do? What do I need to do? Mac, tellmewhatyouneedmetodo—”

“Medkit—from my pack,” he hissed through gritted teeth, pressing down harder on his side. Georgia’s eyes were bloodshot with panic and as wide as dinner plates behind her crooked glasses. “If you can get to it—”

“No time,” she said, rolling around to the other side of him as she tore off her pack, shaking hands fumbling through the pocket on the front. She pulled out a stimpak of her own, then looked panickedly between the burn on his shoulder and the bullet wound bleeding freely at his side. Mac was trying to staunch the blood flow as best he could, but crimson seeped between his fingers and stained everything in its path.

“Which one is worse?!” Georgia cried as a bullet whistled past her head, making her yelp and duck.

“Which one—Which one do you think is worse?!” Mac shot back, but then she stabbed him with the stimpak, narrowly missing the hand on his side as she traded the needle for her gun. At the sight of the stimpak she left inside him, Mac allowed a guttural “fuck” to leave his mouth. Georgia, meanwhile, took aim on one knee and pulled the trigger. He heard a body fall and felt fear pulse through him as he realized how close the person had come to their shared cover.

After that, there were a panicked few seconds where Mac could only hear the drumming of his own pulse in his ears while the stimpak injected its contents. Georgia whipped around with her shotgun, eyes wide and wild as she tried to pin down any more Gunners. The both of them flinched when they heard Curtis’ voice echo off the concrete.

“Sound off!” he called somewhere from their left.

“Here!” Mac and Georgia shouted together.

“Mac’s down!” she shouted after, then quickly leaned back down to look him over as they heard Gonzalez, Collins, Buckley, and Hollow shout back from their various spots across the base. Everybody made it out.

Relief flooded through Mac’s entire body at the same time Georgia yanked the stimpak out of his side.

“Jesus christ,” he groaned, pressing his hand harder against the steadying flow of blood, “you weren’t kidding when you said you were bad at this.”

Georgia shoved her arm back into her pack, handing him the first piece of cloth she could find to help with the blood: a folded pair of tube socks. By that point, a puddle of the stuff had formed underneath him and filled the air with a coppery scent. Despite the mangled application of the stimpak, the pain in his side began to slowly reside. He’d need stitches, but the bleeding was beginning to stop at least. Mac’s head fell back against the hull of the bus, shoulder stinging still—the only good thing about laser rounds was that they cauterized the wounds they left behind.

“Christ alive, Mac, I thought you were dead,” Georgia heaved, collapsing next to him against the bus. He looked over at her, hands all covered in his blood and staining parts of her clothes. She wasn’t crying, but her voice sounded like she wanted to. “I watched you go down and I couldn’t see you, and—”

“It’ll take a lot more than these bastards to get rid of me,” he said, and a grateful, nervous laugh escaped her. “My side is gonna be bruised from that stimpak if I don’t bleed out first, though.”

“Oh, shit, right. Someone come help me get Mac up!” she shouted, and in an instant Hollow was hopping over a concrete barrier. One eye was swollen shut and his lip was busted, fresh bruises blooming underneath his skin like he’d gone ten rounds in the ring.

“You should see the other guy,” he said as he leaned down to help Mac up. An expression crossed Georgia’s face like she most definitely did not, but it quickly morphed into one of pain as she tried to stand.

She cursed up and down through her clenched teeth, clutching at her foot as Curtis appeared around the corner of the bus. He helped her get upright, keeping as much weight off her foot as possible.

“The one in the power armor, I tripped over my own feet tryin’ to get away from him,” she explained. “I might be back at square one. Sorry for ruinin’ your hardwork, Mac.”

Mac only shook his head as Hollow and Curtis guided them towards the makeshift med-bay Collins and Buckley had started setting up in the Gunner’s openair sleeping quarters. They navigated around the cooling bodies that he noticed Georgia avoided looking at too directly. Mac, on the other hand, was happy to see them rot.

He had caught sight of her job on Winlock earlier, but as Hollow helped him sit down on an old bed, he saw three bloody holes in the middle of Barnes’ chest near a ruined turret. The overpass reeked of sweat and blood, leaving a metallic taste in Mac’s mouth.

Georgia thanked Curtis as he put her on a bed nearby. Collins, whose hair was no longer on fire but now had charred and uneven ends, helped Gonzalez to one of the beds as well. She had a bullet wound in her non-dominant arm, but had largely stopped the bleeding with a ripped part of her shirt. Buckley came running up with a bottle of clear alcohol he’d snatched from one of the tables scattered about and presented it to the group.

“For disinfecting,” he said as they gathered, and began treating their wounded.

“How’s everybody feeling?” Curtis asked. A resounding groan came from the rest of the group.

“I thought we were fucked for a minute there,” Gonzalez said as Collins popped the cap on the bottle and doused her hands before passing it to Buckley. “What the hell happened with you guys? By the time I took out that back guard, you hadn’t even made it up.”

Buckley suddenly looked sheepish. If he had hit his target right the first time, maybe they wouldn’t have walked into the pandemonium that met them on the overpass. Mac cleared his throat as he took out his medkit.

“Had to wait for the stupid lift to come down,” he said before Buckley could explain himself, catching his eye along with Curtis. “I guess they kept it up as a security measure. I’m just glad it didn’t completely screw us.”

“Well, you can’t—ah, ow, ow, ow—account for everything,” Georgia said in between a pained noise as she removed her boot. “We all made it out in one piece, didn’t we?”

“Speak for yourself, General,” Collins grumbled as she uncapped a stimpak, the blackened ends of her once long hair hanging around her face. “That stupid assaultron nearly made me bald.”

A round of laughter shot through them as they continued to patch everyone up. Mac pulled out his own needle and thread while Buckley pilfered through what the base had in the way of medical supplies. Stimpaks and an extra needle were passed between them all, sterilized with the bottle of liquor and a flip lighter to boot.

The bleeding on his abdomen had mostly stopped, and once he cleaned it away, Mac bit down on his scarf and began to stitch himself up. It wasn’t the first time he’d done his own doctoring, and it certainly wouldn’t be the last. The Med-X in his kit whispered his name but he refused to give into it; no telling when a situation would arise where he’d need it more. Once he was done (with not even a whimper every time the needle pierced flesh), he tied off the thread and cut it with his knife.

The burn on his shoulder was an easier fix. A can of purified water and a roll of clean bandages later, Mac was fully patched up. The rest of the group were nearly done as well, save for Georgia, who sat on a bed with her foot propped up on top of her backpack. She had a stimpak in her lap, trying to decide the best way to go about sticking herself with it he supposed. When she caught him staring, she perked up and Mac shook his head at her in slight exasperation.

“Give it to me,” he sighed, gingerly pushing himself off his own bed and walking over with his hand held out.

She gladly handed him the stimpak as he sat at the opposite end of her bed and got to work. The rest of the team had started picking over the base for anything else useful they could take. Weapons, chems, and ammo were plentiful, leaving the two of them to talk in semi-privacy.

“You know, I don’t think we’d keep ending up here if you had just stayed off your damn foot,” he chastised, taking a look at it. It wasn’t nearly as bad as it was when she first injured it, but it still wasn’t pretty. “This is what, the fourth time I’ve been at your feet this week?”

“Fifth, actually—how quickly you forget, Doctor MacCready.”

“Funny. You should do stand-up,” he replied with a flat look at her foot. “Oh, wait, you can’t.”

“You could stay there, y’know,” Georgia said as he flicked the cap off the needle of the stimpak. She took on a playful grin as she mused, “Wouldn’t mind bein’ worshiped like that, come to think of it, like some kinda goddess.”

Mac felt something lurch in his chest, and instead of acknowledging it, he simply stuck her with the stim. She yelped in surprise and he had to hold her leg down by her ankle to keep her from knocking the needle around.

“Ow! Jesus, warn a girl next time,” she huffed as the swelling began to subside.

“I will when you start to save some ego for the rest of us,” Mac replied once the stim was empty. “But hey, after all of this, I guess I’ll be singing your praises. We sent a message to the Gunners loud and clear.”

“Do you think they’ll retaliate once they find out?” Georgia asked, her foot twitching slightly as he reached over to his medkit for some bandages.

“The way these lunatics work, you’d think they would, but I know better,” he said as he began to wrap. “For them, it’s always about the bottom line. They lost this entire waystation, and believe me, that cost ‘em big. Besides, they have no way of knowing any of us were involved.”

With the amount of chaos he’d met when his group came up to the road, there was no way that he would have ever been able to pull the whole thing off by himself. Hell, even a team of seven people didn’t come out the other side without more than a few scratches. He had to hand it to them though—a group of Minutemen had wiped out an entire Gunner squadron without any losses. After Quincy, it was no small feat. Sure, they couldn’t go bragging about it without all their sneaking around being exposed, but Mac was sure that wiping out one more stain on the Commonwealth wouldn’t go unwelcomed. It felt like a weight had been lifted off of his chest, a new reminder that he didn’t have to keep looking over his shoulder anymore, and he had Georgia to thank for that.

He’d have to thank Curtis too, given that he’d helped plan the whole ordeal (Mac theorized that he’d never hear the end of it if he didn’t). The man and his squad had been the difference between a long life and a short death, but it was Georgia that Mac owed a personal debt to.

“Anyways,” he continued once he was done, “I guess I owe you a favor now. After all, you hired me, but I’m the one that dragged you out here for this.”

Georgia’s expression screwed up in confusion. “What? No,” she said like he was speaking nonsense. “Remember our whole friendship conversation? This is what friends do. Well, maybe they don’t really go out of their way to take out a buncha people that wanna murder you, but times have changed, I suppose. I have your back is what I’m sayin’, and so do the others. Besides, you literally saved my ass from becomin’ feral food. If anythin’, I owed you.”

It’s not like you haven’t done enough for me already, a thought flashing across his mind whispered, almost startling him at the nakedness of it. He let go of a nervous laugh and brushed it away.

“That was me doing my job,” he said instead, and began to dig around in his pack. “I was just your merc back then. You’re still one up on me, and I like everything to remain nice and even.”

He fished for the caps at the bottom, pulling out three pouches of fifty each.

“I want to give you back the caps you paid me in Goodneighbor. I’ll still stick with you because that was part of the original deal,” he said before she could protest, “but now we’re even. To me.”

“Mac,” she insisted, attempting to shove the caps back when he held them out to her, “I’m not takin’ your money. You got it fair and square anyhow.”

By now, Mac knew Georgia wasn’t the type to hold this over his head, but he still couldn’t help the knee jerk reaction he had to the idea of leaving debts unsettled. Anyone else and they’d keep it over him and dangle it anytime they wanted something from him. With Georgia, he had a hard time imagining that scenario. She seemed to play just as fair as he did, when it counted.

“Fine,” he relented, already thinking of ways to sneak the caps into her pack anyways, but went ahead and stowed them back inside his own. As he did up the straps the others approached, looking eager to leave.

“If you’re done, we might wanna get outta here soon,” Curtis said, shoulding his laser rifle. “They didn’t have any radio communications set up, but I know they send runners to check in every now and then. We don’t wanna be here when they come.”

After a round of agreement, the team got ready to move out. They picked the place clean of supplies and put the Mass Pike Interchange behind them as they traveled back to their own base. Mac was glad to be done with it.

With Georgia’s foot reinjured, she was supported the entire way back by Curtis, who seemed the least injured of them all. Mac could walk, but the burn on his shoulder made shooting his rifle a painful and near impossible ordeal. Thankfully, Buckley and Hollow had put themselves in the positions of rear and front guard to help compensate for both of the group’s snipers being put out.

They decided to go back to the house they had camped out in the night before, getting back sometime in the middle of the afternoon. It was still empty and the group wasted no time in settling back down inside. They collapsed over chairs and couches, an ache in their bones that only a high stakes firefight could provide. Back in relative safety, things would start to move a little slower.

The rest of the day was spent napping and recuperating until later in the night, when Curtis offered to cook up dinner. They still had enough in their shared bag of rations and anything they took from the interchange to make a decent meal. When Georgia offered to help cook, though, Mac shot her down with a glare.

“If you re-mangle your foot a third time, I’m not fixing it,” he warned and she just laughed.

“Alright, jeez. Sorry, y’all, looks like you won’t get to taste my cookin’,” she said as she leaned back down on the couch she had claimed. “Not to brag, but I’ve been told I make a mean radstag and pota—er, tato stew. Maybe next time.”

They shared a laugh while Curtis got to work on building a fire in the rusted out grill on the porch. The rest of them gathered around a wobbly coffee table and started a game of cards when Hollow pulled the deck out of his pack and began to deal everyone in.

“Oh, fuck off with that look, Frankie,” Collins grumbled during their third round, folding her hand to Hollow’s shit-eating grin before throwing her cards down on the table.

They had been playing for bullets instead of caps, the pile between them growing with every ante, and Hollow had been wiping the floor with them for the most part. Gonzalez had folded earlier, and Buckley had opted to sit back and watch after all the bullets he’d started with ended up in front of Hollow. Georgia had a modest amount still left in front of her, her glasses pushed to the top of her head as she kept her cards close to her chest.

“I told you guys not to play poker with him,” Curtis called out, the smell of grilled wild corn wafting through the open door. “He’s a filthy cheat and he knows it.”

“I do not cheat!” Hollow proclaimed, shooting up from his chair.

Mac caught a glimpse of Hollow’s hand as the man stood up—four of a kind to his own straight flush. His poker face had been solid, but the luck of the cards hadn’t graced him until that moment.

“Don’t get too cocky now,” he said to Hollow as he spread his cards out on the table, watching the Minuteman’s still bruised face fall. “Straight flush.”

The others began to holler at his cards and give Hollow a hard time before Georgia chimed in, a deceptively sweet smile on her face as she tutted them, “Ah, ah, ah. Read it and weep, y’all.”

She threw down her hand—a royal flush to the tune of the suit of hearts—and the group went wild. Hollow tossed his cards, swearing up a storm as Gonzalez chided him for going all in in the first place.

“Are we playin’ for keeps or is my victory…hollow?” Georgia grinned, sending another wave of laughter throughout the group.

Mac chuckled, sliding his own cards into the middle of the table. “I didn’t know you were such a card shark.”

“You should see me play pool,” she told him. “My grandpa taught me, turned me into an absolute monster by the time I was seventeen. Last time I played, I had seven grown men nearly snap their pool sticks.”

“Remind me not to play against you,” he laughed as Curtis announced that dinner was ready.

The rest of the night was spent eating, drinking, and playing cards, and Mac couldn’t remember a time when he last felt genuine camaraderie in a group like this. Between a few more hands of cards and a bottle of whiskey pilfered from the Gunners passed between them all, Mac felt good. Like actually good, his worries seemingly melting away for the night. Sure, he still had the big stuff to think about—Med-Tek, the cure, Duncan—but with the Gunners off his back, he could afford to relax for a little bit.

Mac hadn’t been able to trust many people in his life as a general rule. But watching Georgia and her Minutemen laugh and recall their taking of the interchange with added creative liberties, he thought that maybe, just maybe, he could trust in other people to be good, too.

-----

“I’d ask if you want to come back to the Castle with us, but I don’t think that’s an option for you right now,” Curtis said the next morning when the group was ready to head out. He gave a pointed look to Georgia sitting on the couch, her wrapped foot propped up on one of the arms.

The rest of the Minutemen had packed their things, leaving her and Mac to go back to their HQ. Their leave time was almost up and they would be expected back soon if they didn’t want suspicions to be aroused.

“We’ll stay here for a few days so we can both heal up a little more, but I’ve got stuff to take care of in Diamond City anyways,” Georgia informed him, making Mac’s curiosity pique from where he sat in a chair across from her.

“Suit yourself,” Curtis said, and after splitting up the rest of their spoils from the Gunner base, bid his farewell. “We’ll see you later, General T.” He threw a glance towards Mac before he left, “And don’t be a stranger, MacCready. Hope to see you again next time the General’s in town.”

With that, after a series of thank yous and goodbyes, the team of Minutemen disappeared down the road, leaving himself and Georgia alone.

“So,” she said once he came back inside the house after watching them leave, “looks like we’re gonna be here a couple days, at least until you take me off forced bedrest.”

“I wouldn’t have to force you if you would just stay off it,” he pointed out, then leveled her with a speaking look. “After you’re better, though…Diamond City? I thought that was just the cover to get Preston off our backs.”

A deep sigh left Georgia’s lips, but she nodded anyway. She didn’t look too pleased at the thought, going uncharacteristically quiet. It seemed that there had been some truth in her lie.

“Mr. Valentine is helpin’ me out with some stuff. I have a case with him,” she said eventually, twiddling her fingers and avoiding his eye as she talked. She still hadn’t told him the whole story about her and Piper rescuing the old synth, telling him he could buy an issue of the Publick like everyone else.

But Mac wasn’t stupid. She was working with a detective for crying out loud, it couldn’t have been more obvious that she was searching for something. For what exactly, he had no idea, but he knew it had to be tied up in all of her personal junk by the way she frowned just from mentioning it. Whatever she was looking for, it had to be important enough for her to risk her neck for the pile of nuts and bolts.

Mac wanted to prompt her for more, but she leaned up halfway on the couch to look at him suddenly.

“Hey, can I ask you somethin’?” she said, head cocked to the side.

He raised an eyebrow. “You kinda just did, but yeah, go ahead.”

The flat look she gave him quickly fell to one of worry and uncertainty.

“Why did you join the Gunners?” she asked, catching him entirely off guard. He didn’t know what he had expected her to ask him, but it hadn’t been that. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,” she added quickly, “feel free to veto it.”

Mac shook his head, catching her off guard as much as she had caught him. With what she had put on the line in helping him, he had quickly come to the conclusion that telling her how he got into all this mess in the first place was something he felt she deserved to know.

“I came to the Commonwealth a little under a year ago,” he started, trying to find the words. “Made a pretty decent name for myself before I heard that the Gunners needed some sharpshooters. Biggest mistake of my life.”

He exhaled a sigh as Georgia listened, avoiding her piercing stare. He was hyper aware of everything under it, but resolved to look at the river sparkling in the midday sun through the broken window just past her.

“They were animals. Killed anything that moved if it got in their way,” he spat out. “You saw them taking potshots at those brahmin. Those could have fed a small settlement for weeks and they were just…killing them for the hell of it. I went with them for a while because their caps were good, but…I’m not proud of it. I…I wasn’t at Quincy, if that’s what you’re wondering. That wasn’t Winlock and Barnes’ squad, though I’m sure they wouldn’t have minded if they had been there anyway.”

“Would you have gone?” Georgia asked, quieter than she had been.

“What?”

“If Winlock and Barnes had been there, if your old squad had decided to go to Quincy, would you have gone?” she repeated. Her stare had turned serious, solemn even.

Mac thought for a moment, mulling over his morals and his conscience. Individual contracts were one thing, far less personable than wiping out an entire settlement. The idea of that much blood on his hands in one go—men, women, children—made his stomach turn.

 “I…No, I don’t think I would have.”

Georgia frowned, searching for words. “Then why did you sign up with people like that?”

“I didn’t know how bad they were at first and I was…desperate,” he shrugged, leaning back in his chair like he wasn’t still desperate for every cap he could get his hands on. “The Gunners just paid the best. I know that’s not much of an excuse, but…eventually it started to catch up with me, so I quit. I’d been out for about two months before you showed up in Goodneighbor.”

“Two months? Then you must’ve quit—”

“A little while after Quincy, yeah. Final straw, I guess.”

Quiet fell between them and when she didn’t respond right away, Mac ran his hands over his face and braced himself for her judgment. He deserved it, given what he had been willing to put up with before his departure. The kidnapping, the extortion, acting like nothing better than a souped up-raider gang. Most obviously there was the murder, and sometimes—hell, a lot of the time—it wasn’t even contracted. Even then, no contract was too bloody, too grizzly, or too brutal for the Gunners if there were enough caps in for it.

 But when he lifted his head and finally met her gaze, it was without the malice or resentment he expected. Instead, what he saw was more of that sympathy she seemed to dole out for him so easily.

“Well, then I’m glad we met when we did,” she said finally, “and not any earlier or any later.”

He couldn’t stop the breath of a laugh that escaped him, the noise causing one corner of Georgia’s mouth to quirk up in a smile.

“Me too,” he agreed, then curiosity poked at him. “What actually made you hire me in the first place? Especially after I told you from the start who I used to run with.”

An eyebrow raised behind her glasses. “I already told you why I hired you. I did that favor for Daisy—”

“No, I get that, but still, you could’ve backed out on the favor. So why me? Why not stick with Piper or Preston or one of your Minutemen?” he pressed.

“I…dunno. When I walked into the Third Rail and heard you gettin’ picked on by those two assholes, I just thought you looked like you were in a tough spot. Thought maybe I could help out,” she shrugged, laying back down on the couch. “You looked like you needed it anyhow.”

Mac couldn’t help but stare at her. How deep was this woman’s kindness that she took one look at a shitty little fuck up like him and decided she wanted to help before ever getting to know him? She helped him again when she insisted on splitting their jobs fairly, again when she called him a friend, and again when she agreed to help take out his former squad. Lucy would have called people like Georgia helpers, those who had been dealt their uneven share of awfulness in life but came out the other side with a good enough heart to keep pushing on. Mac had always seen Lucy as a helper, and he was sure she’d pin Georgia as one, too. He didn’t know the exact details of Georgia’s past that shaped her into the person before him, but whatever it was made sure that if the two of them stuck together, Mac would never stop owing her.

“Oh. Then uh…I’m glad we met when we did,” he reaffirmed, and cleared his throat.

“Glad you think so,” she replied, her usual verve returning as she spoke. “Now, if we’re gonna be here for a few days, we’re gonna need to entertain ourselves.”

“What, is my company too boring for you?”

“After yesterday? Mac, you’re the most excitin’ thing in my life right about now,” she grinned. “And considerin’ you’re the one who told me to stay off my feet, be a darlin’ and get some stuff outta my pack for me, will ya?”

“You’re not the only one with healing injuries, you know,” he pointed out as he ran a light hand over his side, but he was already getting out of his seat to walk to where her pack was leaning against the side of the couch. “What do you need?”

“Screwdriver in the side pocket,” she said as he bent down carefully, the arm of the couch obscuring her from view. “And that desk fan over there—I’ve had my eye on it ever since we first settled down.”

Mac huffed a laugh as he began rifling through the outside pockets of her pack, thinking now would’ve been an opportune time to sneak those caps in. “What for?”

“Copper wires, scrap metal, more screws than you would know what to do with—a whole treasure trove if you know how to take it apart.”

At least it wasn’t old postcards and matching cutlery she was after. When she wasn’t reading or poking around for good scav, she was usually taking something apart. He’d seen her strip typewriters, hot plates, and telephones down to their base parts, keeping what could sell and what she said would be useful in the settlements. She had told him once that every little bit counted, so now if he could find that damn screwdriver…

Mac flipped open one of the pockets on the left after the right yielded only more loose screws. The other seemed empty at first, which struck him as odd the moment he opened it, given how much junk he was used to her picking up. What wrapped around his fingers as he dug inside, however, was even more odd.

Looped through a simple leather cord with a knot at the end were two shiny gold rings. As he shifted them around in his palm, one slightly larger than the other, he caught sight of something written into the inside of each: To Have inside the bigger one and To Hold on the smaller. He knew what kind of rings they were, even if he had only ever seen them on the hands of those with more caps than he’d ever see in his life. They were wedding rings.

They were the only things inside the pocket and suddenly Mac felt like he was snooping around where he shouldn’t have been.

“Oh, shoot,” Georgia’s voice said, and he quickly stashed the rings back where he had found them before she managed to scoot down to him at the end of the couch. “It might be in the front pocket, actually.”

“Here you go,” he said, immediately snatching the tool from said pocket and holding it out to her. He crossed the room to grab the desk fan and sat it on the couch next to her. “Have fun with those. I’ll, uh…I guess I’ll read some of my comics again.”

“If you ever want to borrow any of my books, you’re welcome to,” she said as she put the fan in her lap. “I think you might like The War of the Worlds. Might do you some good to read somethin’ other than a comic book.”

“I’ll have you know I’ve read plenty,” he said with a dismissive shake of his head, decidedly uneager to go perusing through her pack again. “Besides, comics are easier to carry.”

“Well, you got me there, but the offer’s still open,” she conceded, then went to quietly stripping the fan, leaving each of them to their own devices. But even with his comic pulled out, Mac had a hard time focusing.

Wedding rings. Had she found them at some point on the road, hoping to sell them whenever they made it back to the city? Probably not; if they had been just another piece of scrap she picked up, they wouldn’t have been in as good a condition as they were, shining like they were brand new. They were on a strip of leather long enough to be a necklace, kept safely tucked inside her pack by themselves. No, the rings weren’t something she happened upon—they meant something to her.

Was she married? She hadn’t mentioned anything about a family save for a grandfather who turned her into a pool shark. Then there was the something—someone?—she was searching for, turning to Nick Valentine for help…

It didn’t add up. Either Mac was thinking about it too hard or he had stumbled into more parts of her past that she hadn’t yet shared. He couldn’t help but wonder if she had a partner out there, someone waiting for her to return to them. But if she did, it didn’t make sense as to why she had both rings (if they were hers and if he wasn’t latching onto another wild theory about her personal life). She was definitely the sentimental type, that much he could be sure of, so what if…?

There were plenty of people in the wasteland who were no strangers to loss, and something in Mac’s bones told him Georgia wasn’t either. Her evasiveness about her past, the rings, the fact that she was working with Valentine, all clues that lead him to his natural train of thought: she had to be looking for a missing partner. Unfortunately in the Commonwealth, “missing” was usually a euphemism for “dead” or “snatched by the Institute”, but Mac wasn’t about to be the one to tell her that. The synth gumshoe with the neon signs could take that fall whenever they made it back to Diamond City.

It was better that she knew that, he thought, just to get it out of the way and quit holding out on hope. “Dead” was much more final than “missing.” If someone was dead, it left no other alternatives for their whereabouts or their safety. If someone was missing, though, it provided too many options, too much fear. Did they just run off, or did the Institute take them in the night? Were they kidnapped by raiders or taken out by the natural horrors of the wasteland? “Missing” bled out hope like hemophilia and made the inevitable truth that much more painful. In a way, Mac was grateful he knew Lucy was dead, as horrible as the thought was. He had no choice but to move on instead of spending the rest of his life wondering, both for his own sake as well as Duncan’s.

Even still, his thoughts settled on Lucy. They hadn’t really been married in the traditional sense; no one had done a ceremony over them, there had been no celebration with friends, and rings had always been out of the question. Once Duncan was born, though, it only seemed natural to fall into the habit of calling each other husband and wife. It had felt like the grown up thing to do at the time. Two teenagers and a baby taking their jab at playing family.

But what would Lucy think of him now, though? He’d always been a bit of a cynic, but now his dedication to being a realist was born more out of what it took to survive in this world than thinking it was naturally against him like when he was a kid. Lucy had always seen the best in him, and once upon a time he had tried to be the man worthy enough to be her husband. He had been her little soldier, wielding his gun in defense against the worst parts of the world. If she could see him now, running around the Commonwealth far away from his old homestead with Duncan, would she recognize him? Would she understand he was out here trying to save their son? Why he had to fall back on old habits to keep himself afloat?

“Ow, fuck,” Georgia hissed to herself, startling Mac from his thoughts. She dropped a piece of the fan into her lap as she sucked on her thumb.

“You alright?” he asked, voice low and hoarse. He cleared his throat and tried again. “You good?”

Georgia pulled her thumb away from her mouth, waving it around as if that would make the pain dissipate faster. “I’m fine, just cut my thumb a little.”

“I don’t want to be the one to tell Preston that his General got taken out by tetanus, so I hope your shots are up to date,” he told her. A sharp laugh cracked out of her, making him grin.

“More than you know,” she laughed, wiping the remnants of the blood on her thumb across the top of her jeans before going back to her work with a smile.

Never, not once, in his entire goddamn life had RJ MacCready done anything so good as to deserve Lucy or Duncan or the life they had shared, however briefly. Watching Georgia work, though, and thinking about the good they had done together, maybe he could be the man Lucy thought he had been, but this time for himself.