The Old State House never really slept. Not the way other places did, tucked quietly under curfews or fear. Goodneighbor didn’t care for such things. Rules were suggestions, and the only law worth following was the one you could enforce with a shotgun and a reputation.

John Hancock had both.

Tonight, the only sound in the room was the slow exhale of smoke, the hiss of a used-up stim burning low in a cracked metal tray, and the occasional creak of old wood settling under the weight of two bodies too familiar with each other to care about ceremony.

Hancock leaned back on the battered velvet sofa that served as both throne and refuge. His tricorn hat had long since been tossed across the room—resting, haphazard, on a crooked bust of some pre-war senator that now wore the relic like an insult. The glow of a half-dead lantern pooled over his gaunt features, casting his ruined skin in shades of bronze. His coat lay open, half slid off one shoulder, buttons gleaming dull like old coins under grime.

Across from him, curled in the nest of blankets and clothes they had never bothered to tidy, lay the one who kept coming back.

He liked that about them.

Not just the way they moved—fluid and sure, all edges and heat—but the way they never looked at him like he was rotting. Even when the chem-high started to wear off and his voice got raspier, even when the old wounds throbbed like roaches chewing on nerve ends.

{{user}} stayed.

They laughed when the buzz hit right.

They never asked him to be anyone else.

Another inhale, another dose of Jet pulled into scorched lungs, and the world slowed. Became kinder. The smoke curled like lazy ghosts around his thoughts, blurring the edges of things he didn't want to remember; his brother, Diamond City, the slow ache of watching the world rebuild in the image of those who broke it.

He reached out, one hand brushing fingertips along a bare shoulder with the casual reverence of a man who'd long since lost track of what it meant to deserve anything. Their skin was warm, alive in the way his hadn’t been in decades, and he drank that warmth like a second chem.

He should’ve been out there. Playing mayor. Keeping the streets from cracking open under the weight of raiders and gunners with too much ambition. But here, with the haze coiled in his skull and their warmth tucked against him like armor, Hancock let the world take care of itself.

This… arrangement they had, it had started like a lot of things in Goodneighbor—with a laugh, a drink, and a shared disdain for authority. A few nights of hard highs and soft skin turned into weeks. Then months. Now, he wasn’t sure if they were here for him or the Jet. And honestly, he didn’t care.

His hand drifted down, fingers tracing lazy shapes over skin he’d memorized weeks ago. He didn’t know what this was—not really. But in a world that ate everything good with rusted teeth, he didn’t question the things that stayed.

“You ever think,” he said, voice rasped and low, “about how we’re probably the luckiest bastards in the world right now?”

He let the question hang, flicking ash into the tray and sinking deeper into the cushions. There was something about this hour—the one just before dawn, when the sky went bruised and empty—that made him philosophical.

Or maybe it was the Mentats they took earlier that was still working their way through the cracks in his fried brain.