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At first, the time didn’t bother him. Sure, he might have puffed down on those first few cigarettes a bit too fast – why the hell not? His lover was alone in the middle of the Institute, and whether things went off without a hitch was mostly reliant on those first few minutes. He might show up right next to a pack of Coursers. He might get caught and hunted down. And who knew what the Institute had in the way of defenses?
Before the first hour was up, he was shooting up some Jet. Sturges rolled his eyes at him, but, well – humans and ghouls, they were different when it came to Jet. And Sturges’ opinion didn’t matter to him, anyway. Only Shen, and that angel couldn’t give a damn as long as Hancock didn’t go too crazy. Which he didn’t.
But, well, then two hours passed, and there wasn’t enough Jet in the world. He started pacing. Sturges got annoyed enough to actually set him to work, though that ended up backfiring when the man realized Hancock wasn’t exactly Shen’s mechanical equal.
Then a third hour, and still nothing. The machines were still fried; Sturges was still battling them out, and the longer they went without being able to fix it, the longer Shen might be trapped. He was smart, sure; he could probably wrangle up some way of using the transporter at the Institute to go wherever they would go. They’d picked up that initial reading at the Ruins. Should he go? Or would Shen want him to stay here, in case Sturges got the power-fed monstrosity ready? He wouldn’t even know if Sturges got it fixed. Shen could come back, find out he’d left for the Ruins, and have to crawl all the way to Hancock after whatever might have – might be – going on in the Institute.
He became Sturges’ walking heavyweight lifter. He moved power couplings and vacuum tubes and the weird satellite thing and just. Anything. More often than not, he caught Sturges making him take something to one place, only to move it straight back a few minutes later. He was beyond caring. It was busy work. He would take it.
It was better than acknowledging that they were both beyond being able to help Shen.
The sun started giving up on them six hours after Shen had gone through the transporter. The only lights became the few powered by the generators Shen had cooked up for these people in Sanctuary. Tinny music came from one of the buildings Shen had created. Sturges had finally accepted the mangled mess of machinery as a lost cause, and that just left Hancock wandering through the town, not certain if Shen was already back and traveling to Sanctuary, or to home, or to who even knew where, or… or if he was still stuck inside the Institute. Or if he was already dead. That… that was a possibility, too.
He went inside only once to listen to the music. It made him think of his and Shen’s garage down at the Red Rocket, where Shen had a classical radio that he said had been there since before he’d ever set foot on the premises. (The mole rat mounds were apparently there because he’d set foot on the premises.) The reminder itched until he had to walk away; he was afraid to go and wait back at their home. Afraid that he would be waiting there forever.
The ruckus came just as the sun dipped its last inch below the horizon, when half of the sky was dark and the other blazing red. It centered on the bridge entering the little street. He’d hoped it was raiders. Somewhere, something in him had already begun breaking down the process of grief; after so long, he no longer expected Shen to return. But he did.
He did in fire.
“Hancock!” Shen ran down the street. Hancock watched Shen’s gaze dart about the area, only to land on him. “Hancock!” he breathed. Then Shen made a beeline for him.
He opened his mouth to ask what was wrong, but Shen just came up to him, raised his arms, and fell onto him. Shen wrapped Hancock up in a hug and just… dissolved. He became such dead weight Hancock barely managed to keep them from spilling onto the blacktop. His heart skipped into pounding in his chest; he gripped Shen to him, feeling for a gunshot wound, or… then Shen… trembled. Shook. He heard some sort of cut-off sound. It sounded like a grunt, but only because Shen hadn’t let it become a sob.
His kid.
Hancock caught his breath. He didn’t know how to ask. And in the next instant, it was too late.
Shen pushed off of him and marched over to Sturges, who’d begun heading over after seeing that Shen had returned. Shen reached into a pocket of his Vault suit and pulled out a tape. “Here,” he said. “We need to find a way to take the fight to them.”
Sturges promised to look into the information Shen had managed to steal from the Institute’s servers. Hancock nearly vibrated behind the two of them. That moment had come and gone in the blink of an eye, but Hancock could still feel it on his fingers, in his bones. That body, slowly vibrating apart. Those breaths, nearly gasps, as if Shen was dying in his very arms. He looked down at his left hand, where Shen’s wife’s ring rested on his finger. What did someone in a happy, healthy relationship say to their loved one when that person had just lost the child from a previous relationship?
Hell, what did someone say to someone who’d just lost their son?
Normally, he just said something about revenge and shit. Suddenly, that seemed horribly inadequate.
He wasn’t made for stuff like this.
Shen turned from Sturges the moment he finished promising to look into the tape and walked away, passing by Hancock as he did. “I want to go home,” he said, his voice low.
It was the last thing Shen would say for some time. They walked quickly from Sanctuary, Shen silent and Hancock fumbling with what to say in his mind. They reached Red Rocket without a word spoken between them.
Shen headed straight for the side entrance, nearly stomping in his sudden hurry. Hancock barely managed to cross the threshold before something cracked. He hurried forward.
He’d arrived for the first time at this place a few weeks after Shen had already pitched his tent here. He’d built a couple of beds in the room with the computer, though he didn’t sleep in either of them anymore, since he lived up in the building he’d created on the roof. Still, despite having moved up there and having learned that his son had grown through the ten years since his awakening, Shen hadn’t been able to get rid of the crib he’d initially made for Shaun that sat outside that computer room.
Now he was wrenching it apart by hand, grabbing the sides and ripping, tearing them and throwing them. One piece smacked into the counter. Another flew up and hit the shelves he’d made that held toy aliens and rockets and cars. The shelves broke. Toys scattered everywhere.
Hancock watched with wide eyes as Shen tore the plastic apart piece by piece. His eyes were wide, his hair slipping so loose from the tight ponytail he kept it in that the hairtie fell out entirely, disappearing into the chaos.
Hancock backed away slowly. This was Shen’s grief. The man screamed as he tore the bars of the crib’s sides apart, muscles stretched to their limits. He threw the pieces around, wrecking them against walls, against the doorframe, against the counter. He ripped the toy alien and slammed the rocket into the wall until it splintered, wrenched the axles from the toy car, cracked the baby rattle in half. And then, when he was finally done and the wreckage lay all around him, he stormed off up the stairs. Hancock’s heart leapt into his throat. The walls up there weren’t as sturdy. He raced off, staying out of Shen’s line of sight. He wouldn’t interrupt Shen’s absolution, but he wouldn’t let the man hurt himself, either.
Not to mention how scary it was to see Shen lose his control like this. He’d never seen his lover like this before.
Shen went to the spare room he’d created for his son and wrenched down the paintings of dogs and cats he’d managed to find. The pictures got ripped to shreds, the wooden frames splintered. Shen’s gaze went to the cabinet and the memorabilia placed there – the baseball and glove, the bowling pin, all collected from Jamaica Plains. Hancock stepped forward then as Shen made for those one-of-a-kind items, precious things from his time, and wrapped his arms around his lover, encasing those arms within his own. “Not that,” he whispered.
It was like he’d pulled the man’s cord. He just… slumped in his arms like a deflated balloon. With his arms around him, Hancock could feel Shen’s muscles shivering, trembling at the abuse. Slowly, Hancock led Shen up to their room. Shen collapsed on their bed once they got there, his eyes already half-lidded in exhaustion, his hands suddenly gripping Hancock back enough to drag him down to the bed with him. Hancock barely hit the mattress before Shen was wrapping around him like a pit viper, that trembling turning into full-on shakes, until Hancock could barely breathe but couldn’t find it in himself to ask for the space to do so.
Hancock reached up to Shen’s hair. It scattered around the man’s face, hiding those deep blue eyes from him. He pushed it all back, only to find Shen’s eyes squeezed tightly shut. Shen buried his face into Hancock’s shoulder. Hancock held the back of his head and looked out toward the wall by their bed. “Did those bastards kill him?” he asked, not knowing how else to say it and knowing Shen would hate being verbally coddled.
Shen sucked in a breath… and shook his head.
Hancock paused in the middle of petting Shen’s hair. Then what? That reaction couldn’t have been because he’d failed to find him.
Those lips moved against his skin. Shook. “He’s alive.” Before Hancock could do more than inhale, Shen continued. “He’s sixty.”
The air left him in a whoosh. “What?”
“It was a synth.” The anger bubbled back, turned those muscles tense for a short instant before Shen crumpled again. “The kid we kept seeing. It was a synth. A fake, for him to see how a father reacts to seeing his child. I was… an experiment.”
Hancock cursed.
“He said he wanted to see me. To be with me. He welcomed me into the Institution, Hancock.” The words turned bitter, until they seemed to bite. “He let me walk around freely, though he was smart enough to hide whatever his big plan was. I… got the serum for Virgil. I saw… well, we’ll have to verify what I saw,” he said, and something sank inside him. Shen continued. “I found a list of contacts giving away information to the Institute. One’s in Goodneighbor.”
Hancock snarled. “Not for much longer.”
It was more than a promise; it was something for Shen to focus on. Something other than pain and heartbreak. They both always felt better after clearing out another nest of Commonwealth shit-stains.
Shen ducked his head further, showing off nothing more than the nape of his neck. “I almost did it,” he whispered. The words, the breath they rode out on, were like lava against Hancock’s skin. He stilled. “I almost stayed. Because it was him, and he’s my son. And despite being with them and not knowing me from Adam–” Atom? “–he wanted to be with me. So I nearly stayed.”
Hancock lowered his head. What had Shen’s headspace been like, that he’d considering joining the Institute? Well, he’d just learned that his son wasn’t a child anymore, but instead an old man, and a member of the Institute. That alone…
Wait.
“What… do you mean, his big plan?”
Shen’s breath stuttered out. “He’s their leader. He’s the leader of the Institute now. They call him Father.”
Hancock gripped him so tight he felt Shen’s bones. Shen didn’t protest. “What?”
“And now – I turned away from him. I’m going to kill him. My own son.”
Their leader? The one sending out those synths, the one terrorizing the Commonwealth, was Shen’s son? That little ten-year-old boy Shen had been searching so desperately for? That was who sent synths out to kill people and replace them, set off bombs, murdered townspeople, used innocent people as experiments? That was Shen’s little Shaun?
Sixty years old. Sixty years old, and far too late for Shen to save.
He nuzzled Shen’s hair. “I can’t say I know what you’re going through, but I do know this. The moment he was stolen from you, he was changed. Maybe, if you’d gotten to him in time – but you didn’t. You couldn’t, because they left you to freeze to death. They stole him from you, and they kept you from him all this time. They turned him into their soldier. Against your will. Against his will. He’s trapped in their machinations as surely as you were. He needs to be set free.”
Shen didn’t move for several long moments. Then, in a quiet voice, “I know.” His breath shuddered in. “I know,” he said again, forcing himself to sound stronger this time. “The things I found – what little was left for me to find – showed me what kind of world he envisioned. It wasn’t one I would have ever…” Fingers dug into Hancock’s melted skin, those nails digging into the crevices until they seemed to draw blood. “Nora would have never…” He stopped. “They turned him into… into that. He’s my enemy now.”
Hancock kissed the top of Shen’s head. His lover was a soldier. One of tragedy. And because he was a soldier, he would fight through this. Just as he had everything else.
Hancock shifted his grip on his lover, until he held him beneath his arms as if to help carry him off the battlefield. Shen stiffened for only a moment before the first full-out sob burst from his lips.
Shen was a soldier. But for tonight… for that one night, Shen was simply a father. A father who had to mourn that which he had irrevocably lost.
!i!i!i!
Sometime in the night, he scooted away from his lover, finally resting in their bed. Shen had cried himself hoarse, finally swearing, nearly begging, to wipe the Institute off the map. Shen would get through it. He wouldn’t be all right, but hey. Everyone in the Commonwealth was a little fucked up. As much as Hancock wasn’t pleased to see it, he guessed it was Shen’s turn.
This was what the Institute did to people.
He cleaned up the wood and cloth from the guest room – now definitely never to be used by Shen’s kid – and went down to begin the arduous process of cleaning up the remnants of the nursery Shen had trashed. He wanted to wash away the stain of Shen’s pain before the man had to come face to face with it himself. He was making enough hard decisions as it was – no need to shove the decision-making process in his face.
It took well past dawn, but all the scraps were pulled apart into what could be salvaged and what couldn’t, and the waste tossed out down in the remnants of Concord. Dogmeat helped him with that. “Good boy,” he said, patting the loyal dog on its head. It had been kind enough – or disturbed enough – to give Shen his space when he’d needed it. “He’ll be all right in a bit. You and me, we’ll help him through it.”
Dogmeat barked.
Finally, Hancock took off his hat and waved it in front of his face, cooling himself off after the exertion. “Done,” he murmured, and looked up. Was Shen awake yet? He hurried up the stairs. Would Shen be all right waking up alone after that? He’d given up the last of his family, his last true link with his past. He’d never been set adrift like this.
He nearly burst into their shared home on Red Rocket’s roof, only to stop cold at the sound of a woman’s voice. “…know our best days are yet to come.” He stiffened, but there were no sounds of battle, no victory cries. Slowly, he stepped forward. “There will be changes, sure. Things we’ll need to adjust to. You’ll rejoin the civilian workforce, I’ll shake the dust off my law degree…”
The voice continued, even as he went up the stairs and stepped into their room. Shen lay on their bed, the arm with his Pip-Boy resting on his legs as he stared down at it. Within his hand, held open, was that strange children’s book Hancock had caught sight of a couple of times as he and Shen had traveled together. Shen had carried it with him everywhere.
Shen looked up at him as he stepped into the room. “But everything we do, no matter how hard,” the recording in his Pip-Boy said, “we do it for our family. Now say goodbye, Shaun. Bye-bye? Say bye-bye?” In the recording, a baby giggled. “Bye, honey! We love you!”
The recording stopped. For one short moment, Hancock and Shen stared at each other in silence. Without a word, Shen got off of the bed and opened the safe underneath it. The book went in first. Then, with a soft click as it exited the Pip-Boy, the recording joined it.
Then Shen stood. “Let’s go.”
Hancock nodded and pulled out his gun.