Chapter Text
That night, Frank brought back all of his finds to the dimly lit townhouse he shared with a handful of Goodneighbor settlers. A tight-knit group of quiet people laying low from troubling pasts, none of them spoke as the super mutant shut the door behind him and gave a simple wave. None of them asked questions, not to him and not to any other housemate, and he entered his room while literally carrying a missile launcher without protest from the others.
Once inside the long combined kitchen and dining room which was now his messy personal room, he shed his armor, put his new finds in the pantry he used as an armory, and started his evening pre-sleep preparations. Opening the dresser and rummaging past the items he’d salvaged from a men’s big and tall clothier, he pulled out a rolled-up throw rug he used as a blanket and laid it over the four mattresses he’d stacked on the dining room floor as his sleeping space. Before he could lay down, however, he remembered that he’d left a few junk items in his plastic garbage bag in the kitchen, and he returned to sort out his finds of the day.
Quite by accident, the last item he pulled out of the bag was the diary he’d discovered in the pawn shop. The fact that he‘d even brought troubled him. Although the person who’d written it was likely dead and gone, the thoughts and feelings were still a private matter. To keep it felt wrong, but…the notion of discarding it felt even more wrong. Taking a seat on the creaky couch he’d used to cover up the broken valves on one end of the kitchen wall, he held the leather-bound book up in his hands and pondered the discovery for the first time since he’d left the pawn shop.
Guilt prickled at the back of his neck, but his curiosity proved to be a stronger instinct when he opened up the diary for the second time. The classy, well designed case sealed the paper off from the air outside, and the pages were only slightly aged. The pages smelled like old food, which explained the light brown stains on the edges of numerous pages. Most of the pages were unblemished, and the handwriting was legible, but there was one problem which stood out beyond all others: a stain covered the writer’s name on the inside cover.
As he began to flip through the pages, he felt a puzzle forming in his mind. His mind was a plodding, muddled mess, but eventually the puzzle did form. The entries were short yet numerous, terse yet revealing, all of them dated and most of them accompanied with illustrations. In fact, more than half of the pages were occupied by all sorts of mediocre quality sketches. So many details were included, so many of them revealing, yet the obfuscation of the name felt frustrating. Once Frank overcame the initial sense of wrongdoing over flipping through another person’s thoughts, he found himself amused by the irony of so many personal details of who this writer once was all remaining unconnected due to one strategic food stain.
He glanced over to the refurbished end table next to his couch, noting the still-early evening hour on his piecemeal mechanical clock. His initial misgivings forgotten, he opened the diary back to the beginning and started to read.