Chapter One: Mindful Ignorance

The bullet bit into her skin with no warning, it's travel through the thick air unaccompanied by sound or the familiar flash of the glass in a sniper's scope catching green nuclear sunlight. It jumped along her jawline on her left side, garnering blood but missing bone, tagging the corner of her ear on its way into the sky behind her, leaving an angry sting and liquid fire dripping down her neck. She inhaled sharp and fast in surprise, unwarranted, her hand abandoning its grip on her rifle without her telling it to, unconsciously rising to asses the damage, to press away the pain, to hold her flesh together in the case that the raider was a good shot.

He wasn't.

Nora shifted, her fingers returning red but steady, sure, the stiff fabric of her stale orange uniform and the makeshift leather armor she had retrofitted it with tugging harshly at her stomach as she dragged herself, laying prone, against the concrete and exposed piping of the roof. She stole a hard look at the line of buildings that hid the horizon about 120 yards to her northwest, the supposed direction of the sniper, before rolling over onto her back and behind the cover of an exhaust vent, pulling her gun off of the railing it had been supported by and down with her. She stopped, listened, breathed, felt the strength of the ground at her back, counted the drops of blood that fell like tears from her face, breathed again, and then she had crawled the length of the roof, her shoulder sliding along the cool metal of the vent, reappearing on the opposite side to line up her shot. Her fingers slipped back onto the trigger quick and easy, her brow pressing hard against the scope, comforting, and with bittersweet satisfaction she watched as her bullet shot across the block and ate straight through the side of the last raider's head.

Finally.

"Outstanding shot, soldier."

Without turning, she threw a quick thumbs up to the voice that came from behind her, close and deep and reassuring, keeping the opposite building in her sights until she had cleared each window, scoured each wall, upturned each piece of fallen debris through her scope, unyielding, catching the last vestiges of stubborn life leak from the sniper's body in a pool before withdrawing. She wiggled away from the ledge with an adrenaline-fueled smile, twisting her body to face the towering figure that remained patiently crouched near cover.

"Fuckin' A was what that was," she said, voice still hushed, steely eyes bubbling in silent laughter as she took into stride the one of many disapproving looks her sponsor had given her that day. "-sir."

Paladin Danse unfurled himself from his awkward position, his own laser rifle gripped tight in careful, calloused hands and held at the ready, always at the ready, knees pushing off the ground with a series of groans and guttural cries of protest from his suit of power armor — as subtle as it was battery-efficient — and stood, straightening his spine and unknotting his muscles with a sigh, nearly eight feet of monstrous steel and, somewhere, hidden and almost indistinguishable, man. He walked his hard feet into the hard ground until he came up beside her and surveyed the skyline with eyes soft as caramel, thinking, regrouping, running on auto-pilot, replaying the day and its unending stream of completed missions as if they might've missed some, surely, inconsequential detail or forgotten some protocol, as if his mind was as machine as his armor, gears shifting noiselessly, only to stop suddenly to look down at Nora with a frown.

"You were hit," he stated in his usual monotone, so bland and matter-of-factly, but the concern staining his face, the darkness under his eyes that she only just seemed to notice took her off guard nonetheless.

"Oh, yeah," she looked away absently only for a second to touch the fire at her cheek, still wet and sticky, before her gaze snapped back up to his with a strength she could have only learned from him. "I mean, no. Barely nicked me. It'll leave a scar, but that's it." She shrugged, struggled to her knees and quickly smiled up to him, a lopsided, childish thing, and reached out a hand. "Now help me up so we can go find some booze."

Danse grunted, frown deepening, grabbing hold of her forearm and hoisting her up with a gentleness almost unnatural for someone of his stature. "Negative, knight. We will bring these stolen supplies back to Cambridge and then return to the Prydwen. You'll need stitches for that." He motioned to her wound with a finger, momentarily inspecting it with a thoroughness and care that brought heat to the fleshy parts of her face, before he let go of her arm and squared his shoulders. "Understood?"

"Sir, yes, sir, understood, paladin, sir!" She declared with mocking enthusiasm, bringing her hand to her forehead in a overly dramatic salute as she bent to pick up her rifle. "But you better be buying me a drink after this."

"Purified water is provided free of charge at the Pryd-"

"You know what I mean."

She thought she saw him smiling as they took the fire escape down from the roof with the Brotherhood supplies that the raiders had stolen, or at least, as much of a smile that Danse was capable of, but it could've just been a trick of the light. Though she tried her damnedest to concentrate on the rooftops they cautiously passed under and the faint beginnings of a firefight they began to hear off in the distance, screams and emptied casings echoing between the brick, broken buildings, Nora found herself trying to remember if Danse had ever smiled before, and she thought about how much she'd like to see him do it again.

Their relationship was far from perfect, but she was in no position to judge, not after what she had seen, not after what she had become the moment she left the vault. She was every bit as hard as he was now, just a bit rougher around the edges, less refined, a little more porous, more open. He tried to iron her out, ease her into the codes, the protocols, but after maybe the first week since he had first introduced her to the Prydwen as an initiate he had given up on trying to change her. He let her breathe, because he understood, in that eerie, silent, all-seeing way of his. He never did stop his lectures; ever the Paladin and she ever his inexperienced knight, and though she always complained and rolled her eyes, she secretly enjoyed his liltless recital of the rulebook he had stowed away in his head, memorized since a time long before her, his soothing timbre a welcome distraction, the religious repetition and thrum of syllables slipping off his tongue making up verses to a song she sang to herself when her thoughts veered down darker paths. There was nothing quite like the numb, mindless acceptance of following in Danse's tactical and militaristic bearing to help her forget, if only for a little while, but there were lines that she wouldn't cross. Inevitably their ideals would clash, and she would accidentally call a synth a person in conversation, or he would refuse to help a group of stranded ghouls just because they were ghouls until she temporarily remedied his unfortunate outlook with enough berating to split his power armor in two, and he was spiteful, and angry, and sometimes she would lose him inside his head, or he would just stop talking, why won't you just talk to me, and they would burn together bitterly in the same boat until he apologized first, hesitant and stoic, knowing full well that if he didn't, no-one would.

They pushed against each other so often, an endless tidal flow for dominance, and so often she thought that one time, this time, surely he would break, like she seemed to break everything, but through the days he proved her wrong, that they were steel and iron, not porcelain and glass, and they fit into each other like nothing else did, a brotherhood in their own right, and she fought and cursed aloud and ran rebellious in the streets when he asked her to wait, but they were real, and honest, and so fucking easy, and she never felt right again without a gun in her hand and Danse at her back. She told him before anyone about her family, her son, the hole that devoured more and more of her every day; she wanted him to know, and he listened. He knew what she needed, when to give her space, when to prop her up against his shoulder, when to shut her up, and though it was three months ago that she had saved his life at the police station, with every day passed under his charge he more than repaid any debt he owed her, and she couldn't help but wonder if she could've given more back. She needed him, in and out of battle; she needed his absolute trust, but did she give him hers?

She had already come to the conclusion long ago that she was a selfish person, and a horrible mother. With each step she took not actively searching for Shaun she felt a piece of her humanity fall away. Every smile, every little happiness, every moment she spent with anything from this world was a moment stolen away from her baby boy, but it was too much, and all she wanted to do was to stop the pain, to keep herself from crumbling into dust, shattering into a million tiny pieces, just to survive for a little while longer, and she hated herself for it. She hated that she would rather be dead, that she had given up so quickly, that she was using Danse, her friend and respected superior, as a reason to abandon her search for her child, as if he were a drug and the Brotherhood's rhetoric the fumes that she pretended laced her life with purpose. She hid her pain, or otherwise hid behind it like a shield, and almost blindly she let it interfere with her work, let her hand hesitate on the trigger, her curses and taunting towards Danse strike to deeply, too close to his heart when he trapped her in a corner, and she gave him not the explanations nor the apologies he deserved, and she dug herself deeper. She knew she was wrong, that she shouldn't be so difficult, that she shouldn't be so loud, but she had been silenced for more than two-hundred years. She knew that she should be better, more grateful, that everything that she had grown to find comfort in was meaningless in retrospect, but she didn't owe the world a goddamned thing, and she considered her mindful ignorance a bliss.

In the war raged between her selfish desires and her complete disgust for what she had become, her selfishness always won, and she took shelter in the great shadow of her Paladin and his loyalty and his pride, knowing that he would never turn to her for anything in return.

Luckily for the Brotherhood of motherfucking Steel.