What the Wasteland Keeps (Fallout Fanfiction)

Vault-Tec regrets to inform you that hope does not meet minimum radiation safety standards.

Twenty-five years after Shady Sands burned, the wasteland still hasn't stopped asking who lit the match.

Lucy MacLean was raised on cooperation, kindness, and the firm belief that every problem has a solution if you're just polite enough about finding it. The surface has other ideas. Three hundred and sixty degrees of dust, ruin, and people who stopped believing in polite a long time before she was born - and somewhere out there, a father who vanished with nothing but six unfinished sentences and a warning not to follow.

She followed anyway.

Elias Graves doesn't do hope. He does names, and debts, and a mission that's outlived every version of himself he used to be - a mortal man in an immortal grudge, running out of time to finish what a dead town started. He isn't looking for a vault girl with good intentions and no survival instincts. He's looking for the truth, and if the truth happens to be wearing her father's name, that's not his problem to soften.

It becomes his problem anyway.

Two strangers. One buried town. A trail of the quietly, procedurally dead - and a wasteland that keeps every secret it's ever swallowed, right up until it doesn't.

Some doors don't get safer to open. Some people open them anyway.