She didn't recognize it at first. The skeletal remains of a bench cracked through what bits of glass endured from the front window. Strips of the red banner littered the ground - most of it long since scrounged away. Nostalgia punched harder across her jaw than anything a raider could manage, and she sucked in a breath.

"You okay?" the ghoul traveling with her asked.

Nodding, her fingers bit deeper into the duct taped grip on her gun. She couldn't take her eyes off the door, the boards pried away by fumbling fingers, perhaps ferals.

"If you need a minute…" Hancock continued, sliding back to a cocked hip. He kept an occasional eye out at the road, desolate and unrecognizable to what she knew 200 years ago, but this diner…

"This was where Nate and I first met," she spoke the words, her voice raspier than usual. "Right there," she gestured to a hole through the concrete and pipes exposing just a sliver of a table propped up against it. The silver edge and cracking plastic brought another pang to her heart. That might have even been the very table.

"Shit. First date?"

"Yes…actually," she caught herself, tucking her hair behind her ear. What was the point of continuing the lie here? "That was what we told people. Why do people always ask that?" Hancock only watched her, his black eyes drifting across hers then back out towards a pile of wreckage that could hold any manner of horrors. Hiding spots full of creatures that didn't exist 200 years ago when her world was simpler and the worst thing she could have imagined was what put her in Nate's path.

"I was on a date with another man. I can't even remember his name now. A blind one my friend Anne set up. I was nervous as shit, shredding up napkins in the booth trying to play it cool. After an hour passed I realized he wasn't going to show."

"That's a fucking idiot right there."

She only shrugged a shoulder, "I dunno, maybe it was the stress of finals week, or just facing another long holiday alone, but I lost it in the booth. Big, stupid tears over nothing important."

Snorting at her outburst centuries past, she blinked back a smaller happy tear and smiled, "That's when Nate stepped over. Still in his ROTC uniform he asked if he could sit with me. But I was wounded, exposed, embarrassed beyond measure. I snarled at him that I didn't need his pity. But he didn't leave, didn't throw his hands up at the bitch sulking in the corner. He said aloud to the whole diner that he would feel safer if he sat with me. I laughed at the absurdity of the idea, but…I dunno."

Patting the gun she'd stolen off a super mutant whose skull she splattered not a day earlier, she continued "Maybe he saw more in me than even I knew. Spent the whole day talking, forgot about what's his name. God, I…" She tipped her head back, blinking away tears from centuries ago.

Hancock lightly touched her shoulder, "It's okay. Ain't nothing wrong with breaking down sometimes."

She smiled at him, gripping onto his fingers but not too tightly. He was warmer than she expected. "That kindness from Nate was so unexpected how could I not fall head over heels for him? It's funny, I never really had a type physically just…" her words paused as she looked over at the strange ghoul that wound his life around hers without cause, "kindness. He needs to be kind."

Hancock smiled that surprisingly charming grin as he slipped his hand off her shoulder. She let it go, turning back to watch the rusted diner long picked clean by scavengers and people trying to survive alike. In this new world she woke up to your very life could depend on someone deciding in that second to be helpful or not.

"A moment of kindness from a stranger was rare back in my day, rarer now."

"You're teaching the Commonwealth some of the old tricks," he smiled, his dark eyes sparkling.

"I'm not the only one," she said, still watching the diner. Something moved in the shadows.

"Yeah, well, it's that or crawl back into the chems," Hancock joked. "You want to get that diner back?"

Two hundred years. She could forget while gazing out at the grassless landscape, pocked and gutted, all the landmarks shattered from time. But now, now it all landed on her with one quick hit. Everything was gone, and it was up to her to rebuild it, create something of a life for herself and her baby.

"No, let the radroaches have it. We have work to do."