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Kye is seven when she’s taught what her role in the vault would be.
She has no choice really. After all, both her mom and her dad have been part of the vault security force like their parents and their parents before. She knows how much honour the role carried. Protecting their home like her family had always done, going back all the way before the vault had closed. Her ancestors had protected America with honour and that was the reason they’d been granted access to the vault. They were the reason why they had been protected while the world above burned. And thus it was an honour to be part of their family, and she should act that way. She shouldn’t question her family and their place in the vault. She shouldn't question the way the vault worked in general. And she should absolutely never ask about the outside. She’d learn more about that when she was older.
This was what she knows by the time she was seven.
And she doesn’t understand why Jess doesn’t see things the same way. Why she’s rebelling against the honour of following in their ancestor’s footsteps. Why she fights with their parents every chance she gets. Why Kye hears her whisper to herself in the depths of night, wondering what the outside world looked like and what it would be like to explore it.
She’d be lying if she said she doesn’t wonder that herself. In the depths of night when Jess is whispering to herself she finds herself letting her imagination wander along with her sister’s.
Not that she would ever admit to this.
Because that would be going against everything she’d been taught.
Kye is nine when she asks her sister about this for the first time.
Jess is supposed to be helping her with her homework. Kye really needs the help. But dad got mad the last time she asked him to help her and mom told her to ask Jess. But her sister’s entire focus is on her own homework instead. She’s been talking about wanting to become a scientist recently. Kye had watched how her dad had slapped Jess when she’d brought it up for the first time. How it had ended in one of their famous screaming matches. How her mom had ended up stepping in and had begged her dad to calm down. How her thirteen year old sister had stormed off and had not come back for two days.
“Jess?” she speaks up, wandering over to the other side of the table and tapping her sister to break her concentration.
She’s met with a glare and a short “What?”
Jess has been responding a lot like that lately. Ever since Kye had started expressing more that she was going to become a security officer just like her mom and dad. Kye doesn’t understand why.
She takes a breath and forges ahead with her question. “Why do you not want to be a security officer like mom and dad? It’s such an honour. Why do you not want that?” she asks quietly.
Jess draws in an angry breath and almost starts shouting at her sister before she looks again. Something about her little sister’s painful sincerity makes her stop and respond quietly instead.
“I- I want to have a choice Kye. I don’t want to have to fight or defend people. I just want to help people. Maybe become a doctor or botanist. Maybe I want to go outside of the vault! I want that choice. At this point my best chance is to try and convince mom and dad to let me become a weapons technician but I don’t want that either. I might have to though. If they’d listen to me at all…”
“But then you’re not honouring our ancestors, right?” Kye asks.
“Why do I have to be exactly like them to honour them?” Jess responds.
This is a question she’s never considered, and she falls silent in response for a while. “I don’t know,” is her quiet admission at the end of her contemplation. “I just know I want to become a security officer because that’s how I’m supposed to honour my family.”
“But is that what you want to do with your life?”
Kye is saved from having to respond when her mom walks in.
It’s two months later when Kye stands up for her sister for the first time. Jess and dad are screaming at each other again.
“Why do you have to be so damn difficult Jess?! We’ve tried to be flexible but you keep throwing it back in our face! Is it SO hard for you to be a part of this family?! Why can’t you honour our traditions?!” dad shouts.
Jess squares up to respond when Kye cuts in instead. “Maybe she can do support stuff for the security force, dad?” her dad’s intensely angry gaze turns towards her, and she quickly plows ahead before she loses confidence. “That way she can help everyone and still be a part of the family traditions.”
Her dad deflates a little, but clearly doesn’t stop being angry. “Kye, you don’t understand. You’re too young to understand what Jess is trying to do.”
She has no idea how to respond to this, but she can feel Jess’s gratitude. Even as the fight picks back up again.
Kye is eleven when her parents finally give in and allow Jess to talk to her teacher about becoming a weapons technician.
Maybe it has something to do with Kye joining the junior security team. Something she’d been asking to do since she was ten. A year of impatiently waiting, occasionally sneaking dad’s BB gun out of it’s storage locker to look at it and hold it.
She can’t help but feel that it should feel more natural to hold it. But the gun feels weird in her hands. She likes looking at it, but holding it is a whole other ballpark.
The other members of the junior security team know it too. She isn’t bullied. Not exactly. But there’s a distance between her and the people who are supposed to be her friends. She grew up with them. Almost all of their parents are part of the security force like her parents.
But they are just better than she is. They aim better, they pay more attention in training, they’re stronger.
And Kye doesn’t understand what she’s doing wrong. But her parents seem happy. They tell her that she’s bringing honour to their family. And that’s all that matters.
Until they hear from the organiser of the junior security force that she’s falling behind. That’s when their disappointment starts showing. Not as much as with Jess, who they seem to have given up on. But dad starts pushing her harder. Making her stay up late at night to practice in the shooting range reserved for the security force. Mom makes her memorise tactics and the internal mechanics of guns. Dad drops little comments about how the supervisor of the junior force is already picking people to become junior officers and that she has to try harder to become one.
She finds solace with Jess.
Jess listens to her as she cries for the first time over this. Jess holds her and listens to her despair about not being able to keep up with the other members of the junior security force. When she’s saying that she’ll never be able to properly honour their family she gets cut off.
“Kye,” Jess begins gently. “You’re doing everything exactly like mom and dad want you to. There’s no way you could be bringing dishonour to our family. They just need more time to see how hard you’re trying.”
The silence between both of them shows that neither of them quite believe what she says.
Kye is fifteen when she takes her aptitude test. This is the test that will define her career. If she scores high enough she’ll be fast tracked onto the officer track. Mom and dad have been preparing her for months. Even Jess has been helping her with studying. Failing this test means she’ll have a lot harder of a time becoming an officer. It might even be impossible.
Her mom seems convinced she’ll do well. Her dad doesn’t seem so sure.
Kye doesn’t feel so certain about it either.
After all, she was never chosen for junior officer. Her dad’s disappointment had not been silent this time. He’d yelled at her until she was reduced to tears. Her mom had stood to the side and not said anything. It had been Jess who’d defended her. She’d screamed back at him, telling him Kye was doing her best to fit into his weird definition of honour and he should back the fuck up. Jess had even tried to take Kye with her to stay at Jess’s girlfriend friend’s compartment, but Kye had refused. Jess had been disappointed but Kye could tell she understood. After all, Jess was the bad kid and Kye was the good one. Kye would just try harder to uphold the family’s traditions while Jess worked as a weapons technician and did everything she could to not be associated with her family.
Kye is fifteen when she scores low on the aptitude test and is relegated to the regular security track.
Her dad calls her a failure.
Her mom looks at her like she betrayed her trust.
Jess holds her and tells her she’s proud of her. She tells her she’s proud of her. That she made it into the security track and that’s all that mattered, right?
Kye responds in tears. “I’m supposed to be an officer! This- this is not how- I’m bad! I’m the worst! A dishonour!” she cries. Her hands are in her hair, pulling at the roots if it in distress.
Jess squeezes her closer. “You’re not Kye. You’re not! You are the one mom and dad are proud of. Even if they don’t show it. They’ll get over you not being an officer!”
It’s the first time Kye admits her doubs out loud. “You don’t really believe that, do you?” she asks through her sobs. “You are the one who didn’t honour our legacy. I’m the one who was supposed to continue the tradition. The one who was supposed to be good. Dad and mum were counting on me to to be the legacy. So now I’m BAD!”
To be honest, it was like the world crashed around her. She’d been treated like the perfect child for years. And now she’d failed that expectation. Somewhere along the line the finish line had been moved from being in the security force in general to being an officer. And Kye hadn’t even processed that it’d moved.
Whatever Jess says, she doesn’t believe it. Kye is the good child. She’s supposed to be the good child. And she’s failed.
Jess’s girlfriend friend dies six months later, and it’s the frist time Kye holds Jess, instead of Jess holding Kye while crying.
Kye is sixteen when Hope is born. A surprise child, her mom calls her. A little miracle, her dad calls her.
Kye and Jess are painfully aware that Hope is supposed to replace both of them.
Neither of them are able to hate her for it anyway.
She’s so little. So innocent. Mom is the second in command to the security force so she’s too busy to pay attention to Hope. Dad is the right hand man of the Overseer by this point so he’s busy too. So Hope’s care falls to Jess and Kye. Mom and dad are the definition of fair weather parents. Only showing up to make Hope happy and never there when Hope actually needs to be disciplined or raised in general.
Secretly, Kye thinks mom and dad didn’t think this through. Having their “one last hope” (as Jess calls her behind mom and dad’s back) being raised by their disappointments is probably not the best idea. Kye and Jess are the ones who take Hope to her doctors appointments. Who remember Hope’s food intolerances and her other problems. Kye and Jess are really her parents, even when mom and dad claim to be hers.
(Kye couldn’t be prouder when “Jss!!” is Hope’s first word.)
Kye is training to become a member of the security force. Her teacher tells her it might take her a little longer to become a fully qualified member. She has something her teacher calls a “learning disability”. Dad scoffs when he hears this. Calls it a lame excuse for her failures. Jess tries to tell her that she can’t control this, but she doesn’t believe it. Years of words from mom (and mainly dad) tell her that she simply isn’t trying hard enough.
So she keeps pushing herself.
And she keeps failing.
Kye is still sixteen when her mom and dad die.
They weren’t supposed to be on patrol together. Families never were.
Yet for some reason they were anyway when the plasma conductor exploded. It killed both of them in an instant.
That’s what the doctor tells her and Jess anyway.
Kye has some doubts.
She was the one who found them. They were patrolling an area that was supposed to be one of the most stable in the whole vault. That’s why Kye was patrolling it after all. Really, two high ranking officers shouldn’t have been patrolling that area at all. Weird, but the Overseer must have had a reason.
(If Kye let herself think too much, she’d realise that that’d be a sign of how much the vault was deteriorating. But she doesn’t let herself think about that. She can't.
Jess can.)
All throughout the funeral she imagines how they must've died. After all, mom was found crawling in the direction of dad. Had he been calling out to her? Was she crawling to her husband who had been crying for her? Or had he died instantly, and had she been crawling toward a corpse?
Hope cries all throughout the funeral, not understanding that the people she wants are now nothing but ghosts. For all the days that Jess and Kye have been taking care of her, she still understands somehow that Kye and Jess are her sisters. And she somehow understands that her mom and dad are now inside those boxes, and won’t return after this ceremony.
Jess holds Hope while Kye speaks at the ceremony, trying to hold herself together.
Kye sings of their virtues. Of how good they were. How much they cared about their whole family and the whole vault. She doesn't care about how empty the words feel. She forces the pain of their rejection and her replacement by Hope to the back of her mind. She feels Jess’s eyes on her when she says this, but keeps going. She’s the good k-
Is she?
She doesn’t finish this painful though during their funeral. They have bigger things to focus on right now.
Kye is seventeen when her whole world falls apart.
The vault’s air purification system fails. Jess tells her between gasping breaths that she’s heard her colleagues talk about it for years now. They are running to the vault door while she tells her this. Hope is in Jess’s arms, crying hysterically while she’s being carried. Kye is desperately trying to remember everything she’d learned about the outside world while the door is opening.
Nothing prepares her for the reality.
The outside world is grey and brown. Dust and rust as far as the eyes can see. Dead trees with scattered plants that are barely holding on. Ruined buildings in the far distance round out the horizon. Breathing is uncomfortable, but only marginally worse than the air she’d been breathing just minutes before. It’s terrifying.
Everyone in the vault scatters when the doors open.
Luckily, Jess and Kye are used to relying on each other (and only each other) by now, so they set off in a random direction and hope for the best. Kye is holding her standard issue 10mm and Jess has dad’s old BB gun on her back. Hope is still crying in Jess’s arms while they run into the sunset.
Less than 24 hours later Hope starts to run a fever. They haven’t found any settlement or city yet. And Hope’s immune system is quickly failing. Kye and Jess are feverish themselves, their bodies not used to the wasteland viruses. Still, they are stronger than their toddler sister, and it becomes more painfully obvious by the second as Hope deteriorates.
Hope is unconscious and floppy by the time they find another human again. It’s been two? Days since they left the vault. Kye and Jess are dehydrated, hungry and sleep deprived when they stumble across the small collection of Bostonian houses. A man meets them head on, gun drawn. Kye raises her hands in despair, tears streaming down her face again for what feels like the hundredth time since they left the vault.
“Please!” she cries. “My baby sister needs help! She’s sick! I’m begging you! Please!”
The man lowers his gun and nods to her. They run inside the walled compound. She later learns it’s called Quincy, but she won’t remember this.
Hope passes away less than six hours later. The doctor tells her and Jess that he tried everything, but her immune system was just too fragile to survive the wasteland. It’s a problem he’d heard of before, more common in people born in vaults. Kye has never seen Jess this broken before. Her sister doesn’t cry. She doesn’t scream. She doesn’t hurt herself (Kye has seen the scars on her arms, even though they both pretend the other doesn’t know). She simply shuts down.
Jess shoots herself through the head that same night. She simply can’t carry the weight of failing both of her sisters. That’s what she says in the short note she leaves Kye.
I’m sorry I couldn’t save you from mom and dad’s expectations Kye. I’m sorry I couldn’t save Hope. I know how much you cared about her. And me.
I know you tried to protect me against mom and dad. I’m sorry.
I can’t do this anymore. I can’t fix it. I can’t save you, Kye. I couldn’t save Hope. I couldn’t even save myself. I’m just... sorry.
Kye is seventeen when she realizes she has no family left to honor.