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Chapter Text

Danse braced his shoulder into the barricade as the next wave hit, bones and nails and hungry teeth colliding with metal sheets and sandbags. The air tasted like mold and burned hair. Rhys sat propped up on the steps, both hands clamped over his abdomen, blood coming fast between his fingers. Haylen had her palms stacked on top of his, one glove already red to the wrist, while she shouted into the radio.

“Recon squad Gladius at Cambridge Police… multiple hostiles… requesting immediate– ” Static answered, thin and indifferent.

No support was coming. The Citadel might as well have been on the moon.

Danse fired until the ruby line from his pistol thinned; the capacitor whine dipped. He ducked, ejected the hot cell, slammed a fresh one home, and popped back up. Ghouls rushed in from all angles, black eyes focused on him with hungry intentions and sharp, quick, inhuman movements.

A figure slipped through a gap in the barricade without a word. Practical clothes, not armor; thick denim jeans with rough armor patches hand-sewn at the thighs, a simple shirt treated the same; a blue bandana tied around her upper arm that meant nothing to him. She carried a worn pump shotgun low and ready.

The barrel came up. First feral, skull snapped back, a wet crack. Pump. The second fell before the first hit the asphalt. She paused and ejected the spent shells, brass clattering on the stone steps. Her eyes were not full with hesitation, but calculation, and she thumbed two shells from her belt into the tube with cold efficiency. Danse’s fresh cell spun his pistol up, and he burned a hole through a leaping chest as she racked and dropped the third.

The hoard thinned to a trickle, then to nothing. The last feral twitched on the sidewalk with a sound like a defeated beast. Silence rushed in.

Danse kept the pistol up, scanning for another wave. Nothing moved.

He turned. Close up, she was younger than he had first thought, probably late twenties, but with a stern expression that spoke of hard years surviving in the wasteland. No insignia. No brand. The shotgun was clean where it mattered, battered everywhere else. The blue band at her arm caught his eye again– bright, deliberate.

“Nice shooting for a civilian,” he said, meaning it to be a compliment, but cringing at the accidental condescension. 

“I’m not a civilian,” she said, already scanning past him toward the steps. “I’m a doctor.” 

Her chin lifted to Rhys. “He needs a sterilized suture kit and maybe a pint or two of blood. Do you know his blood type? My clinic is a few blocks away.”

Danse’s training pulled in opposite directions. Hold the position. Keep the unit intact. Don’t trust unknown variables. He ran the mental inventory: last coagulant gone on the previous sweep, gauze low, stimpaks nearly spent, suture kit questionable. Rhys’s color was wrong; the blood was still gushing around Haylen’s hands.

“Paladin!” Haylen’s voice cracked, fierce with fear. “If we don’t go with her, Rhys is going to die.”

Danse holstered the pistol without another thought. He slid an arm under Rhys’s shoulders and another under his knees, lifting. He weighed nothing to Danse in full power armor. Rhys hissed but didn’t spit a curse. Haylen kept pressure and grabbed her pack.

The woman– doctor, he corrected, slung the shotgun behind her and stepped through the barricade, head on a swivel, angles checked before commitment. 

“Stay tight,” she said. “We cut east and keep to the alleys.”

“Identify yourself,” Danse said, her anonymity nagging at his strict protocol.

“You can call me Doctor.” A brief look at Rhys’s belly. “You’re burning time we don’t have.”

He grunted once. Adjusted his grip. Followed her into the alleys, Haylen at his flank, the station and its terrible quiet shrinking behind them as their boots hammered a path toward whatever this blue-banded stranger had built within saving distance. He prayed it wasn’t a trap. He had to trust her, though, as the alternative was even worse. He only hoped they wouldn’t be too late. 

Abraham changed the dressing the way she’d taught him: gloved hands, clean cloth, slow breath so he didn’t rush the corners. The boy on the cot hissed but kept still. Outside, Liberty was waking up: hammers on scaffolds, someone arguing about brahmin feed, a radio two streets over fighting to pull music out of static. Inside the clinic, the only music was the boil of the kettle and the soft rip of tape.

Blue tape. The strip across the broken concrete floor had been down long enough to fray at the edges, but the rule it made was still visible. A line in the sand that no one disrespected. Not anymore.

They’d never had a clinic before she came. Liberty had a man who could yank a tooth for caps, a woman who knew where to put a splint, maybe even a stimpak or two for trade now and then, but mostly a lot of hoping for the best. They’d been isolated in their corner of what once was Philadelphia until the day a traveling doctor swept in one morning like she’d been there yesterday and meant to be there tomorrow. Practical clothes, blue bandana around her arm, a satchel that clinked with unknown vials and stimpaks. She picked a spot on the old loading dock at the edge of town, snapped her fingers for a broom, and laid that run of blue tape like she was drawing a border the settlement didn’t know it needed.

“No weapons past the line,” she said, voice even, like reading a recipe. “Everyone is a patient inside the line.”

She didn’t ask permission. Liberty watched, suspicious, curious, and though they wouldn’t say it, hungry. People get tired of waiting for help that never comes. When someone arrives and acts like help is the most ordinary thing in the world, you test them or you follow. Abraham followed.

He’d never sewn a torn shirt straight, but when she asked for volunteers, his hand went up before his brain voted. 

She set a kettle on the hot plate someone scrounged. 

“Water boils at a rolling, not a whisper,” she told him, and he watched for the difference.

She showed him how to fold cloth so a clean side stayed clean. She made him count seconds while the gauze sat in the boil. “Not too long or you ruin them. Not too short or you ruin people.” Dry humor, like the bandages they hung to cool.

When a farmer came in with a split forearm, she talked while she stitched. “Hold the skin, not the needle. You’re not pinning a butterfly; you’re convincing two sides to shake hands.” Her hands moved like she’d done it a thousand times and still thought it mattered. She made him try the last two stitches. His first knot squinted back at him, doubtful. She untied it without judgment. “Again.” The second held.

What shocked Liberty wasn’t the competence. It was the neutrality. She treated a raider with the same voice she used on Mrs. Kline’s boy when he fell off the wall. She took no caps from the penniless and no extra from the proud. Word went around that if you were bleeding and could walk to the dock, you’d be seen. A few didn’t like it. Mostly men who’d lost someone to a spike bat or a bad deal before she arrived. But the tape kept finding feet on the safe side.

Until it didn’t.

Late afternoon: light slanting through the busted garage door, dust like snow in the beam. Abraham was rinsing a basin. She was checking a fever. The tape lay there, quiet and blue. A man came straight through with a pistol in his hand and a face like rust, like anger left in the weather too long. He didn’t look at Abraham. He didn’t look at the sign. He looked at the cot in the corner where a raider lay with stitches like railroad ties across his belly, and his boots crossed the blue tape without a glance down. 

“Get up,” the man said, “This one owes me.”

The air changed. The kettle’s chatter vanished from Abraham’s awareness. The doctor didn’t raise her voice, but the venom in it was clear. 

“No weapons past the blue tape.”

He kept coming, the gait of a man who’d decided on a future and meant to drag the world to it.

She met him in two steps. Abraham didn’t see the moment her hand left the thermometer and found the man’s wrist.  

He heard the grunt as the man hit the concrete hard, the Doctor’s grip on him wrenching and contorting until she had him under control. The pistol in his hand fell from limp fingers, and Abraham didn’t see the moment she snatched it. She stood over the man with his own barrel an inch from his forehead, breath calm.

“No weapons past the blue tape,” she repeated, same tone she’d use for “change the dressing at noon.”

He spat about rights and debts and tried to scramble into a crouch. He tried to reach for the gun. 

She shot him once in the head. 

Zero hesitation. The shot rang out in the room with an echo against the crumbling concrete walls. He went still the way people do when they learn the rules apply to them after all.

“Drag him out,” she said to the two nearest men. No drama, no sermon. She kicked the pistol sharply across the line and farther, out into the street. She called for someone to clean up the blood pooling on the concrete. 

Word moved faster than the radio. The story changed a little each retelling; a second shot, a warning, a speech, but the important part didn’t: the blue line was sacred, and the Doctor would keep it that way. After that day, no one crossed it with a weapon. People checked each other at the door without being asked. A scavver unbuckled his knife and asked Abraham to hold it once, like they’d been doing this for years.

And then one day, just like that… she left. No goodbye, no look back. One morning, Abraham came in early to boil gauze and found a crate the size of a hope chest and a book that had been read to threads. The crate held antibiotics, gloves, a suture kit that made him whistle, glass vials with hand-scratched labels, and a half dozen things he had to look up in the book before he trusted himself to touch them. The book was plain: Basic Field Procedures on the cover, margins full of tight notes. Tucked under the lid was a roll of blue tape, bigger than his fist, and a folded sheet that read in block letters: NO WEAPONS PAST THE LINE.

People asked her name after she’d gone. Abraham told them the only truth he had: they’d called her Doctor. It was enough. The legacy she left behind was enough. 

“Almost done,” he told the boy on the cot now, smoothing the fresh bandage. The boy watched him with the dazed gratitude of the recently injured. He discarded his gloves and ruffled the kid’s hair. “You did good.”

He logged the change in the ledger she’d started: time, supplies, who sterilized, outcome pending, and checked the kettle. Rolling, not whispering. He laid a new strip of blue tape over the old where feet had worn it thin. It felt like renewing a promise.

Outside, someone laughed. Inside, the clinic smelled like boiling water, antiseptic, and clean cloth. Things he hadn’t known could smell like safety. He wasn’t a hero. He was a man who’d learned where to put his hands. Liberty was better for it. The blue tape helped people remember who they were when they stepped over it. So did he, when he tied a knot that held.

If she ever came back, Abraham would tell her the rule stuck. No one had tried to cross with a weapon since. They dragged the line straighter every week. Little by little, Liberty thrived. The sick were healed. The injured were stitched back up. Abraham sighed and changed the dressing on a raider’s leg wound. He turned and checked the IV for a local merchant. The blue tape stood sentry by the door, promising safety within the walls. 

He had meant to arrive as an Elder.

The coat. The insignia. The voice that bent rooms to attention. The report from Gladius had been clipped and unsettling: civilian clinic with enforced disarmament, wounded Knight treated without charge, no credentials, no sanction. He’d read it twice, jaw tight, imagining cracked tiles, dirty syringes, and a self-styled “doctor” playing at medicine. He had already drafted orders for a med-evac for Knight Rhys. Better to risk transport than let his soldier linger on a stranger’s dirty cot.

Instead, he found an old diner sanded down into something that looked more like discipline than improvisation.

The sign over the door was painted by hand, blue paint on white boards: NO WEAPONS PAST THE LINE. Someone had wiped the place down hard enough to sand the shine off the counters. Everything had a place. Nothing had a speck of rust. Cots lined the scuffed tile floor in military rows. A battered cooler was marked ANTIBIOTICS in a careful hand, with a penciled note beneath: low supply. On the counter, a ledger sat open to neat columns and cramped handwriting, every letter and number in perfect rows. 

A strip of blue tape cut across the entrance like a horizon.

A boy stood guard at it, freckles bright against his pale skin, shoulders squared with effort. His Adam’s apple jumped when Arthur entered.

“Sir,” the boy said, voice wobbling but not breaking. “I need you to disarm if you’re coming in.”

Arthur’s gaze slid to the tape, then to the boy again. The Elder of the Brotherhood of Steel, asked to hand over his sidearm by a civilian who could barely be a teenager. For the first time that day, something like wry amusement tugged at him. There was courage in that voice, even if it rattled.

“I see the sign,” Arthur said. His hands moved slow, deliberate, unbuckling the pistol and the knife at his belt. He set them on the tray by the door. The boy let out a breath but didn’t flinch, didn’t thank him. Arthur stepped across the tape, noting the audacity of it. The line itself meant nothing, but still, the order it carried was respected.

The room hummed with human noise: the rasp of labored breath from one cot, the hiss of pain as a dressing was changed, the kettle bubbling in a low boil. Danse leaned against the far wall in his flight suit, sharp eyes following every movement; Haylen half-dozed in a chair beside Rhys, boots neatly aligned beneath her. Rhys himself was pale but alive, his brow furrowed even in sleep.

Arthur was halfway to them when another voice, steady and unhurried, cut through.

“Check the sutures at midday. If there’s seepage, you’ll re-pack the wound. Gloves on. Fresh dressing. Count the seconds while the forceps boil.”

It was the same cadence he remembered from boyhood drills at the Citadel, only sharper with years of use. He turned.

A woman in a stained apron was bent over a patient, her hands steady, her voice low but carrying. Her movements were precise, practiced– needle in, knot tied, dressing smoothed as if every step mattered. She didn’t look up right away, too intent on finishing the work, too focused on the patient in front of her. A strand of dark hair escaped her bun and fell across her cheekbone. The blue bandana around her bicep shone like a beacon. 

Arthur’s throat closed. His chest tightened like a fist around his heart. He forced himself to stand straight, to breathe evenly, to let nothing show. But his pulse rattled anyway, heat crawling under his collar.

She finished the stitch, tied off the thread, and smoothed the edge of the bandage. Her gloves snapped into the bin, her hands moved to rinse in a basin, exact and measured.

Then she looked up.

The room stilled to a slow, sluggish heartbeat. The boil of the kettle dulled, the low hiss of a patient’s breath blurred. It was as if the air itself tightened between them.

Her eyes found his, and something passed across her face; shock, sharp and clean, then recognition like a blade sliding into place. For an instant, she wasn’t the doctor commanding a room, wasn’t the legend whispered about in broadcasts and broadsheets. She was the woman he’d last seen years and years ago. Same stern but kind expression, same set of her jaw like the world would bend to her will if she tried hard enough. Same dark blue eyes he’d memorized every fleck of turquoise within. 

She blinked once, and the mask tried to reassemble: calm, steady, unflinching. But he caught it. The faint flicker in her expression, the barest tremor at the corner of her mouth, the momentary widening of her eyes. Years apart had driven iron into the door between them, but in that look, the hinges groaned and shifted. The door was open again, whether either of them wanted it or not.

“Arthur,” she said simply, with no waver to her voice. 

For him, the clinic’s noise collapsed into that ringing sound after an explosion. The rest of him devolved into that boy at the Citadel chessboard, pretending he studied openings while memorizing the way she tapped a pawn when she thought. That teenage crush had never left; it had just calcified into something he could carry without limping.

Then the medbay in DC slammed back: too-bright lights, the sheet over Sarah. And her, legendary in her own right and usually so composed, sobbing over the body until a well-meaning scribe tried to pull her away. He’d never seen her crack; kindness and competence were her armor. That day, they failed. It told him in a language no report ever could how much Sarah had meant to her– more than anyone understood, maybe more than she’d let herself admit. Later, in a side corridor, she’d pulled him in hard, not a pat or a simple hug, but a hold, teaching his lungs how to work again.

It’s going to hurt for a long time, she’d said. But it will get easier. 

He hadn’t understood it was a goodbye until it was too late.

 It was the last time he saw her.

The radio kept her alive in the halls for a while, Three Dog and, later, other voices. Celebrating her successes, marking her movement through the capital. He’d listened too hard, building a map in his head that always ended at the Citadel gate. She never came.

Now she was here. Beautiful the way a blade is beautiful: purpose first. And when she said his name, the floor shifted like a deck taking a hit. The shock wasn’t dull. It was exact: heart stutter, throat locked, the sense that gravity had been discreetly renegotiated without his consent.

He met her eyes and understood, with the bleak certainty of a man who has survived too many impact reports, that every system he’d built to live without her had just failed its stress test.

“Abby,” he breathed, and hated how rough it came out. He hadn’t said it out loud in years, what felt like a decade. He coughed once and corrected himself. 

“Abigail.” One side of her lips quirked into the barest suggestion of a smile at his slip into old nicknames.

The silence between them stretched until it ached. Arthur pulled air into his lungs the way he’d been trained under fire; measured, deliberate, denying the chaos in his chest. He forced his pulse back into rhythm and locked his jaw. He was Elder Maxson, not the boy at the chessboard.

“We had a report,” he said at last, voice clipped, “that a civilian treated Brotherhood soldiers without proper protocols.”

“Patients,” she corrected. “Inside the tape, everyone’s a patient.”

“You have no authority to treat my soldiers.”

Her eyes didn’t flinch. “You expected me to seek authorization when your Knight would have bled out in minutes?”

Her tone was calm, but the calm itself was confrontational, like a scalpel pressed flat against skin. She said it with such certainty, pointing out his flawed logic as easily as she’d once declared checkmate. She turned back to her work, tying off a dressing with a surgeon’s knot, her hands as steady as they had been nearly a decade ago. He caught himself watching the way she trimmed the thread, precise down to the millimeter.

Arthur studied her. The apron stiff with old stains, her hair tied back with a scrap of blue cloth, the faint shadows under her eyes from too many nights without sleep. She radiated competence, but he saw the crack beneath: the weariness she hid, the effort it cost her to keep that calm.

And damn him, he admired it. Admired her. But suspicion dug in anyway, sharp as glass.

“The Brotherhood has its own medics, Abigail,” he said finally, his voice clipped.

She didn’t flinch. “I was Brotherhood once. A Paladin, for God’s sake. Trained. Uniform and all. You think I forgot protocols?”

“Once,” Arthur corrected coldly. “Technically, you’re a deserter.”

Her glower was sharp enough to cut steel. 

“Deserter? That’s what you call this?” 

She turned, crossing her arms, and began rattling off with the crisp efficiency of a drill sergeant. 

“Forceps boiled. Dressings sterilized and sealed. Ledgers logged down to the minute: who sterilized what, who changed which bandage, what symptoms presented, and how they were treated. Supplies inventoried nightly. And every single one accounted for.”

She took a step closer, her eyes locked on his, even as she had to tilt her chin up to compensate for his height. “That’s more regulation than half the field medics I worked beside at the Citadel. Ask Knight-Captain Argus. He’d be proud.”

Her tone softened just for a moment, a wisp of memory sliding in. “My father would approve, too.” But the words snagged, and she cut herself off, lips pressing into a hard line.

Arthur’s throat went tight. He wanted to snap back, to throw more rules and regulations at her, but the words knotted in his chest. Because she wasn’t wrong. She’d been there after Project Purity, after the Enclave’s defeat, steady as steel while the halls of the Citadel buzzed with her name whispered like a hymn.

She’d been there for years, through Owyn Lyon’s passing. Right up until Sarah’s death.

And then she was gone. No word. No explanation. Just absence, as sharp and sudden as a blade between his ribs.

He remembered himself at fifteen, almost sixteen, sitting across from her at a chessboard in the quiet mess hall after curfew. The jokes she made at his expense caused his heart to stutter. Watching her bite her lip in concentration before putting him in check for the third time. The sparring matches she used to win, until he grew enough to tower over her in height. 

And then, barely a year later, the entire weight of the Brotherhood had come crashing down onto his shoulders. A title. Command. A legacy too heavy for a boy still learning how to breathe without breaking.

And she hadn’t been there.

The wound had never closed. Seeing her here, calm and competent and unshaken, split it wide open again.

Arthur held her gaze, jaw clenched so tight it ached. He didn’t trust himself to speak, because the words waiting in his throat weren’t about protocols at all.

He turned to inspect her ledger, desperate for discipline. Pencil columns met his eyes: sterilization times, sutures counted, supplies logged with relentless precision. Boil 0900. Needles opened bedside. Antibiotics: three courses left. Rumor of scarcity made fact in a few tight strokes of graphite. She was right, every Brotherhood protocol followed meticulously. 

He shut the book before his chest betrayed him. 

“You do this for everyone?” he asked, voice low, even. “Settlers. Raiders. Ghouls. Where do you draw the line?”

“At breathing.”

“You expect me to believe a strip of tape keeps order?” His voice came out sharper than intended. “That anyone who walks in bleeding suddenly obeys because you tell them to?”

“It isn’t tape.” She dried her hands, each motion exact. “It’s a rule. And rules hold when people see they’ll be enforced.”

It should have sounded naive. Instead, it landed with the same inevitability as an order. He felt his jaw tighten.

“Do not mistake survival for sanction. My soldiers’ presence here does not make this place legitimate.”

Her head tilted, just slightly. “Legitimacy isn’t yours to give. It’s up to the people.”

His eyes flicked to the blue bandana and down to the matching cobalt line in the sand. 

She moved to Knight Rhys, checking his blood pressure with a rusted stethoscope and a pocket watch. 

“He will need to stay for another night before I’ll release him,” she said, as if stating the law rather than a request. 

Her voice stayed calm, her back straight, but Arthur saw the faint tremor in her fingers when she set the watch down. It rattled her, too, seeing him again. She just hid it better.

At the door, he re-buckled his sidearm, every motion mechanical. He didn’t linger, didn’t look back a second time. But the smell of boiled water and antiseptic clung to him, and the shape of her name still burned in his mouth as he stepped into the alley, the generator’s cough loud in his ears.

He had arrived as the Elder of the Brotherhood of Steel. 

He was leaving as a man shaken up by the ghosts of his past. 

One ghost. One he never thought he’d see again. 

The savior of the Capital Wasteland. 

The Lone Wanderer.

Abigail. 

Chapter Text

Boston Commons at night wasn’t what the pre-war brochures promised. Sure, you could still feed the ducks… if you liked them feral, half-feathered, and meaner than super mutants on a rampage. The fountains didn’t flow, unless you counted the occasional geyser of sewage bubbling up through the busted concrete. But it made for a decent meeting spot if you wanted privacy. Even though he’d been neutralized by a woman in a vault suit weeks ago, the legend of Swan still lingered and kept the square clear of eavesdroppers. 

Deacon spotted her before she saw him. Practical clothes, boots laced tight, blue band tied around her arm like the stripe of a uniform only she saluted. She leaned on the rail near the water, posture straight, eyes scanning the dark like she expected it to blink back at her. She never slouched, never dropped her guard. The kind of woman who carried order with her like a shadow.

Doctor Abigail. That was what she called herself these days. To some, just “Doctor.”

But Deacon knew better.

He knew the story: the vault kid from 101 who walked into the Capital Wasteland and saved it from itself. The kid who dragged Project Purity across the finish line when the world kept trying to trip her. The daughter of the deified James Quinn, a name the world still couldn’t stop polishing like it was gold. 

A lone wanderer in the wasteland. 

The Lone Wanderer.

She’d never told him, of course. She never would. But he’d stitched the facts together the way he always did: the timelines, the voice on old holotapes, the way escaped synths whispered about her blue tape clinics as if they were shrines. Deacon never liked shrines. But he liked what she was doing.

Of course, the fact that it had been Three Dog —the idealistic idiot on the airwaves in D.C.-- who had initially put them in contact was a huge clue. 

But he liked her, though he’d rather chew glass than admit it out loud.

She heard him coming; she always did, and didn’t flinch when he dropped onto the bench beside her. Just gave him that flat, steady look that could probably stop a behemoth mid-charge.

“You said you had news,” she said.

Straight to business. No small talk. He kind of admired it.

“One of our new guests fresh outta the Institute swears up and down that Madison Li is alive and well, living the good life in white coats and bad company.”

That got her. Not much, not from her. Just the tiniest catch in her throat, a flicker in her eyes before the shutters slammed back down.

“They have her,” she said, voice even.

“They have her,” Deacon echoed. “And if half of what our friend said is true, she’s not chained to a wall. She’s working for them.”

Her jaw tightened. “They’ll be forcing her. Manipulating her. Madison wouldn’t—” She cut herself short, recalibrated. “She wouldn’t stay there if she had a choice.”

Deacon let her have that. In his head, he could already hear the arguments: maybe Li wasn’t just a collaborator, maybe she was just tired of chasing miracles and wanted a lab with the lights still on. He didn’t say it. Telling her “Dr. Li doesn’t need saving” was about as helpful as telling the tide to quit rolling in.

“You want her,” he said, though they both knew it wasn’t a question.

“I need her,” she corrected. “It can’t be replicated without her. My father—” She stopped, but the word was already loose in the night, hanging there like a ghost.

He didn’t push. Just tilted his head and played it casual. “She’s in the Institute. That’s the good news. The bad news is, y’know… she’s in the Institute. Not exactly a place you can knock on the door and ask to borrow a cup of sugar.”

Her gaze cut back to him, steady and fierce. “Where is it?”

That made him grin. Not because it was funny, but because he liked the inevitability in her voice. As if she’d already decided she’d walk through the front door the second she knew where to find it.

“Where is it?” he repeated, spreading his hands. “If only. That’s the million-cap question, Doc. Nobody knows. It’s like a magician’s trick. You see the smoke, you see the mirrors, but the hands? They’re invisible.”

Her lips pressed tight, not quite a frown, not quite disbelief. She hated walls she couldn’t break down.

“Look,” he went on, lowering his voice, “we’ve seen their work topside. Replacements. People yanked off the street, swapped with a person who looks, walks, and talks exactly like them. Whole families unaware. Hell, the synths don’t even know it themselves. Whole towns torn apart because the wrong guy twitched at dinner or said the wrong thing at the wrong time, often they’re not even synths. It’s not just paranoia. The Institute makes sure of that.”

He shifted, elbows draped along the back of the bench like he was telling a story over drinks, but his eyes were sharp. “Couple years back we had what folks call the Broken Mask Incident. Guy shows up in Diamond City. Traveler, came in from out west, full of stories. Had the crowd eating out of his hand. Then, mid-sentence, his smile drops. Face starts to twitch, jaw locking up like a chewed-up gear. Next thing you know, he’s putting people down with cold efficiency. Bullets, fists, didn’t matter. Seven dead before the guards dropped him. And when they opened him up?”

Deacon gave a humorless grin. “Bolts and plastic where there should’ve been lungs and blood. The first time anyone realized Generation 3 synths were walking around in our skin. No wonder the whole Commonwealth’s been jumpier than a radstag in hunting season ever since. Brothers turning on each other, mobs stringing up anyone who sneezes wrong. And that paranoia? The Institute counts on it. Keeps people scared, keeps us distracted.”

Abigail’s eyes didn’t leave his, steady, dark. She didn’t flinch.

He tipped his head, almost approving. “That’s why we smuggle the runaways. Give ’em a chance instead of letting an angry crowd find a rope. Not everyone’s as lucky as your friend Harkness back in Rivet City. He got his shot at freedom, and you helped make sure he kept it. Most don’t.”

Her jaw tightened, but her voice was calm. “Then that’s another reason Li doesn’t belong there. Even if she is working for them, it’s not freedom. It’s not what she stood for. I have to get her out.”

Deacon leaned back, letting the silence stretch, studying her from the corner of his eye. Determination radiated off her like heat. All the horrors he laid out, the mobs, the massacres, paranoia thick enough to choke a city, and she still looked ready to walk into hell with a med kit and a steady hand.

He almost smiled. 

The Lone Wanderer never did back down from a challenge.

“So yeah,” Deacon finished, “we know they’re out there. We know they’ve got Li. But as for finding their front door?” He gave a little shrug. “We’re still fumbling in the dark.”

She looked away, jaw working, gaze fixed on the black water where the fountain used to cascade. For a second, he thought he saw the weight hit her; the exhaustion, the grief she hid so well. Then the mask reset: calm, unflinching.

“I’ll find a way,” she said. Not hope. Not speculation. Just fact.

That was the thing about her. She didn’t ask if it could be done. She simply declared that it would.

They talked longer: what the escapee had said, what it might mean, what steps she wanted to take next. Her voice stayed even, steady, like every word was weighed before she let it loose. Not once did she say who she really was. Not once did she admit to being the kid from Vault 101, the girl who became legend through radio broadcasts and whispered tales around campfires. Deacon never let on that he already knew.

She wanted to be Abigail. Just Abigail. The doctor with blue tape and steady hands. And Deacon understood that. Better than most.

But he thought about it, sitting there under the broken lamps of Boston Commons, how her little clinics had begun to sprout like weeds after rain. Reports had trickled in for months– hell, years at this point: a loading dock in Philadelphia, a basement in Baltimore, a gutted church outside New Haven. Always the same sign, the same rule. No weapons past the line. Everyone a patient. A line of tape and a woman’s word strong enough to keep raiders and settlers alike in check. No faction ever pulled that off.

He almost laughed at the thought of pitching her to Desdemona. She would’ve been an incredible asset; sharp mind, steady hands, a creed that cut sharper than steel. But she’d never tie herself to the Railroad. Not when her whole mission was neutrality. Not when her only flag was a strip of blue tape, and her only allegiance was to those bleeding on the wrong side of it.

Still, he couldn’t help himself. He wanted to help her. Because when someone like her asked, it meant more than words. She wasn’t the kind to waste breath. If she said she needed to save Dr. Li, it wasn’t out of pride, or politics, or payback. It was because she believed saving Li meant saving people. And Deacon had spent long enough in the shadows to know how rare that was.

She was the kind of person the wasteland needed. The kind who built sanctuaries out of crumbling buildings, who asked for nothing but compliance and compassion in return. She worked in the shadows, stitched people back together, gave them a reason to believe the world wasn’t finished yet.

And maybe that’s why he didn’t tell her the truth. That Li wasn’t a prisoner so much as a collaborator, that she might not want saving. Let Abigail keep her conviction. Let her keep her mission. Because the wasteland needed her to keep walking, keep drawing lines where none existed, keep forcing people to remember their own humanity.

Deacon shifted, tugged the hood lower over his face. He’d help her find Li. He’d lie if he had to. 

When they parted, she slipped into the dark like she’d grown out of it. Silent, certain, already on to the next battle only she could see.

Deacon lingered. He watched the ripples where the old fountain had been. He thought about the synths who had landed on her cots in the last month, shivering and terrified, and how she treated them the same way she treated raiders, settlers, or merchants. No hesitation. No sermon. Just clean hands, clean sutures, a calm voice telling them they’d make it if they held still.

That was her creed: neutrality so strict it became sacred. And people respected it. They checked their weapons at the line because they knew she’d check everything else with equal reverence. She treated tape like a commandment, medicine like scripture, and the patients followed because the world was starved for rules that actually saved lives.

He thought about what he’d tell Des back at HQ. 

The blue tape clinics? Safe zones. 

The doctor who ran them? Worth keeping alive. 

Worth respecting.

Would he tell Des she was the Lone Wanderer, the mythical vault kid who saved the Capital a decade ago, still striving to save the rest? 

No. That was her secret to keep.

He looked back once, just to see the spot where she’d stood. Felt a flicker of deja vu he didn’t care for. Another vault dweller was out there right now, younger, angrier, tearing the Commonwealth apart to find her son. He’d have to throw himself into that mess soon enough.

The Commonwealth didn’t hand out miracles often. Abigail Quinn deserved to keep hers.

Ralph had run brahmin caravans up and down the coast long enough to know that most jobs were dull. Hauling scrap, ammo, food, chems, caps. Same routes, same dangers, same folks waving him down for trade. But a few months back, he picked up a job that stuck to his ribs.

A woman in the Capital Wasteland had found him at Rivet City. Didn’t haggle, didn’t waste words. Just handed him a slip of paper with destinations and told him to pack every jug he could carry. She already had them bottled. Gallon jugs stacked in neat rows, the word PURIFIED stamped bold across the plastic. 

“Take it north,” she said. “Leave it. Don’t take caps. Don’t wait for thanks.”

Strangest gig he ever took, but the pay came from her, not the thirsty mouths waiting at the end of the road. And she paid well.

He figured it was a one-off. It wasn’t.

Ralph made the trip over and over, bringing fresh water to communities without. 

A few months later, she flagged him again. But not with water. This time, it was chests. Heavy things, iron corners and tight seals, the kind old pre-war adventure stories said held buried treasure. She gave him instructions: which town, how long to wait, where to put it. Usually inside some old church or workshop, always at night. And every time, somehow, she was already there. Standing in the shadows, pointing out the spot, quiet as a ghost. She’d travel with him a day or two, maybe three, then vanish again. Weeks later, when he came to the next place, she’d be there waiting again, like she’d stepped out of the dark just to keep the game going.

He never asked how she did it. Wasn’t his business.

Still… he wondered.

He’d grown up in the Capital, knew the stories about Project Purity. Knew the name James Quinn. Folks said his daughter had been the one to finish what he started, that she’d saved the whole damn Wasteland. A legend. Too big to be real. But the woman who hired him… well, she would’ve been about the right age. Stern, quiet, eyes like they’d seen too much. He’d caught her once, watching kids drink from the jugs he’d hauled, her face lit by lantern light. There’d been no pride there, just a hard kind of defiance, like she was daring the world to try and poison them again.

Now, months later, his routes took him farther north, toward Boston. And everywhere he dropped one of those chests, whispers followed: a clinic had opened. A place marked by a strip of blue tape across the floor and a rule that everyone respected. No weapons past the line. Raiders, settlers, didn’t matter. The wounded walked in, and they walked out stitched, cleaned, healed. Or buried, but buried with dignity.

Ralph told himself he didn’t care. He was just the deliveryman. But one hot afternoon, while his brahmin chewed cud under the shade of an old billboard, curiosity bit harder than caution. He pried the lid off a chest.

Inside: bandages folded with care. Glass jars labeled in a steady hand. A book, dog-eared and patched together, its cover stamped Basic Field Procedures, margins crowded with tight, neat notes. And on top of it all, a roll of blue tape.

Ralph sat back on his heels, staring.

It wasn’t treasure in the old-world sense. But for the Wasteland, it was worth more than gold.

He shut the chest quick and wiped his hands on his trousers, like the contents might burn him. He didn’t tell a soul. Not about the tape, not about the book. Not about the woman who rode with him, who might’ve been a legend, or just another ghost with work to finish.

All he knew was this: when she asked him to haul, he hauled. And when he heard about another clinic marked by blue tape, he felt a little piece of pride bloom in his chest. Like maybe, just maybe, the road he traveled was carrying something bigger than trade.

Arthur needed the ground.

The air on the Prydwen had been stifling. Paperwork, reports, endless strategy briefings. He told himself that these field inspections kept morale high, reminding the men that their Elder wasn’t a ghost locked in a war room. Truth was, he needed the cracked streets and burned-out husks to keep from drowning in his own thoughts. Out here, the world was brutal but simple. Out here, he could breathe.

The squad moved through the narrow street, steel boots crunching glass, the weight of power armor pressing the silence flat. Arthur walked among them in his coat, not his armor. A presence, not a weapon. His rifle stayed slung; he hadn’t planned to fire it.

Then the shot cracked the air.

A scream followed. Knight Boyd jerked, staggered, and went down hard. The round had found the seam just under his ribs, where the weakness of the plate was evident, where no plating could shield him. His gauntlets clawed at the pavement, fingers flexing uselessly as blood filled the undersuit.

Arthur’s stomach lurched. A burst of return fire already neutralized the sniper, but the damage was done.

They tried to lift Boyd, but the armor dragged them down with him. “Take it off!” Arthur barked. Gauntlets hit the street with dull thuds, chest plate unlatched, helmet rolled into the gutter. Blood smeared every piece they peeled away. Boyd screamed until he didn’t, his breath shallow, his eyes wide and glassy.

“Medic two blocks east!” one of the Knights shouted. “Workshop!”

Arthur nodded, curt and sharp, and gave the order. But inside, he was already unraveling. They hauled him, armor plates left clattering behind, until the building loomed: a mechanic’s workshop patched with rusted tin and tarps. A generator hummed in the alley. And there it was.

A cobalt line slashed across the floor inside the wide doorway.

Arthur stopped dead.

The Knights pushed past, Boyd groaning between them, but Arthur just stared at the tape. His pulse roared in his ears. Another clinic. Not the diner. She had spread them here, too. That line had followed him from the Citadel to Boston, from childhood chessboards to command tables.

He thought he’d gotten control of it. He thought a week was enough to lock it all away again, to build the walls back up. He was wrong.

“Sir?” one of the Knights urged.

Arthur forced his hand to move. He unbuckled his sidearm and dropped it on the tray. He stepped over the line.

They stripped the last of Boyd’s armor and laid him on the cot. Blood pooled fast, soaking the sheets, the smell copper-sharp in Arthur’s nose. His hands hovered uselessly at his sides. The boy’s lips moved soundlessly, his body jerking. And then the seizure hit.

Arthur froze.

The convulsions rattled the cot, the foam bubbling at Boyd’s lips. The Knights shouted for help, for action, but Arthur’s legs felt nailed to the floor. His chest constricted. He had commanded men into fire, watched them die by the dozen, and here he was: useless, staring at the twitch of a boy’s hands as though he’d never seen blood before.

Then a hand seized his wrist. 

Her hand seized his wrist. 

Abigail was here.

“Hold him down!” She barked, orders resonating as clear as on any command deck. 

Her grip burned, and Arthur jolted into motion. He pressed Boyd’s shoulders against the cot, muscles straining as the Knight convulsed beneath him. Foam flecked Boyd’s lips; his eyes rolled white. Arthur’s heart slammed, not with fear of the seizure, but with the sound of her voice; sharp as a blade, cutting him back into the moment.

She moved fast. Syringe drawn, cap snapped off with her teeth, dose thumbed into place. She slid the needle home with precision, her hand steady even as Boyd bucked. Within moments, the convulsions ebbed, the soldier’s chest stuttering into shallow, exhausted breaths.

Arthur exhaled, only then realizing he’d been holding his own breath. His coat sleeves were stained, the sticky warmth seeping through wool to skin.

But she didn’t stop.

“Forceps,” she snapped, hand out. A young volunteer stared, frozen. She snapped her fingers once, twice, and the boy jolted, dropping the instrument into her palm. Arthur had seen squads dissolve under weaker hands. She didn’t falter.

The flash of steel, the wet sound as she worked, the sharp hiss of cauterization, the smell filling the air. Boyd groaned, half-conscious, legs twitching.

And Arthur… he watched her.

He watched the way her brows knit together when she bit her lip in concentration. The way sweat slipped down her temple and she shoved it back with the corner of her sleeve, never daring to risk her gloves. The way she barked for gauze and the boy jumped to obey, then softened her tone a beat later, reminding him to count to twenty when boiling the next set of forceps.

It was control. It was authority. It was Abigail in her element, and it hit Arthur harder than any sniper’s bullet.

His mind betrayed him. For one fractured instant, the workshop blurred, and he was back in the Citadel medbay, Sarah under a sheet, Abigail sobbing over her. He smelled the same copper tang, heard the same rattled breaths. Another Knight, another table. On repeat.

It had been a week since Cambridge. A week since Rhys nearly bled out.

Now here was Boyd, stomach opened, blood pooling on the concrete, another man under his command dragged through the Commonwealth in pieces. The cycle repeating.

Finally, the bleeding slowed and the sutures held. Boyd was as stable as he could be in his state. Abigail dropped the last stained gauze into the bin, peeled her gloves away, and wiped her forearm across her brow. Her shoulders slumped, just for a second, before straightening again. She reached for a cloth and scrubbed her hands, red soaking into the fibers.

Arthur flexed his own stiff fingers. His soldier’s breathing was shallow but steady. The quiet pressed close, broken only by the low buzz of the generator outside.

“The bullet wasn’t clean,” Abigail said, voice low. She didn’t meet his eyes at first, just stared at the floor as though weighing how much truth to give him. Then she looked up. “It hit too much. Stomach. Liver. Kidney. He… he might not see morning.”

Arthur’s chest tightened, his throat dry. The Elder in him wanted to nod, issue orders, delegate. But the man in him, the boy at the chessboard, wanted to deny it, to push the world back together with sheer force of will.

He forced his voice steady and turned to the nervous squad of soldiers at the front of the garage. “The rest of you, back to the Prydwen. Strip the armor, carry it with you. Send a vertibird at first light.”

The Knights hesitated, eyes flicking from their Elder to the doctor, then back. But a single sharp look sent them scurrying. Boots thundered out the door, fading into the night until the workshop was quiet again.

Arthur pulled a chair close, lowered himself into it, and sat beside Boyd’s cot. His hands were sticky with blood. His mind was still ringing with her voice, with the memory of her grip dragging him back into himself. 

Her gaze lingered on him. For the briefest moment, he caught the crack in her armor; the grief she swallowed, the fatigue she masked, the sorrow she wouldn’t show the others. Just a flicker, and then it was gone.

She tried, though. She even managed the corner of a wry smile. “At least your coat matches the décor now,” she said dryly, nodding at the blood splattered up his front.

It was a kindness wrapped in sarcasm, the only kind she could give. He almost smiled back, but stopped himself. He couldn’t get too close. He knew better. He’d told himself this was a mistake the moment he stepped over the blue line.

But Boyd might not make it through the night. And if his man slipped away, Arthur would damn well be here when he did.

She seemed to know, somehow. Her eyes softened, her mouth tugged into a small, sad smile, and then she turned back to her ledger, pencil scratching neat rows as though the world hadn’t just threatened to break open again.

Arthur stayed.

He woke with a start, his neck stiff, head tipped back against the cool concrete wall. The lanterns had burned low, shadows swallowing the corners of the workshop. Boyd still breathed on the cot, shallow and uneven, but alive. Arthur studied his face, pale as wax. Too young. They were all too young.

He dragged a hand down his face. He wasn’t going to sleep. Not here, not with his thoughts this loud.

They churned restlessly, Boyd bleeding out on the cot, Rhys a week before, Sarah’s body under the sheet years ago. Ghosts, every one of them, piling up in the dark. And Abigail among them. The snap of her fingers for forceps. The steel in her voice. The way she could command a room by sheer will. Watching her work had tightened something inside him until he could hardly breathe. He had come to Boston armored in doctrine, but it was nothing compared to the armor she wore: neutrality, precision, that calm voice. And yet he couldn’t shake the memory of her hand on his wrist, dragging him back into motion.

Arthur stood abruptly. The scrape of the chair legs seemed too loud in the quiet. He needed the cold, needed the air, anything to bleed off the pressure in his chest.

Outside, the night bit into him. The generator hummed like a heart too wired to stop. A half-moon hung overhead, clouds dragging past like smoke, throwing cold light across the cracked pavement. Arthur breathed deep, hoping for clarity. Instead, he found memory pressing closer: the Citadel courtyard, Sarah laughing at a joke Abigail made; chess pieces clinking under her steady fingers; the last tight embrace she gave him in the corridor before she disappeared for good. Too much. All of it.

He turned down the alley and froze.

A glow in the dark. Small, ember-red. Then the shape of her.

Abigail sat on the chipped steps of the workshop’s side door, knees pulled up, one arm looped tight around them. The cigarette wavered in her fingers as she drew, the ember flaring, the smoke curling pale against the star-pricked sky.

Arthur’s pulse stumbled.

Inside the clinic, she was command, unshakable, hands steady as stone. But here, under the moon, she looked undone. Haunted. The cigarette trembled. Her dark hair was loose, no longer pulled into a practical bun but churning with the night breeze. The weight she carried inside the walls had followed her out here, raw and uncovered.

And for a moment, Arthur saw her as she had been: the young woman in the Citadel, nineteen, bearing the weight of a wasteland that had demanded salvation from her. Too young for it. Too human for it. That same look was on her now, the one that said she bore it all anyway.

Arthur’s chest clenched. He felt like an intruder, like he had stepped into something private and sacred. His instinct was to turn, retreat into duty before she noticed him. The Elder had no place in this.

He shifted his weight, ready to leave.

Then her voice cut the night, quiet, unflinching.

“Couldn’t sleep either?”

Her voice carried just enough to reach him, low and steady. Not the bark she used inside the clinic, not even the flat patience she wore like armor. This was softer, almost tired.

Arthur paused, caught. He hadn’t meant to intrude. But she didn’t look at him, only flicked ash against the cracked pavement and took another drag. Smoke curled up, blurring the stars.

“No,” he admitted. His own voice sounded rough, too loud in the hush of the alley.

He should have left it there. Instead, he pulled an old crate out from the shadows, flipped it over, and sat across from her in the narrow alley, only a short distance from the stairs she sat upon. The wood groaned under his weight. For a long moment, neither spoke. The generator hummed, the night cold enough to sting his throat when he breathed.

She broke the silence first. “He’s young. Boyd.” Another drag, ember flaring, smoke drifting. “I could see it in the way his hands shook when they cut his armor loose. I can stitch, I can cauterize, I can medicate… but bullets don’t care how steady your hands are. I don’t think I can save him.”

Arthur clenched his jaw. He hated the truth in her words, hated more that she said it so plainly. “You did what you could.”

Her lips twitched, not quite a smile. “I always do.” Then softer, almost to herself, “Doesn’t mean it’s enough.”

“You’ve lost people before,” he said, not a question.

Her shoulders tightened. She didn’t look at him, just stared at the cherry of the cigarette that illuminated her face. Haunted.  “Don’t you dare think I’ve forgotten how that feels.”

The words struck like a blow. Arthur sat straighter, the cold biting deeper. He opened his mouth, then shut it again. He could still see her in the Citadel medbay, begging Sarah to wake up until they pulled the sheet over her. He remembered how she would change the subject whenever her father came up in conversation, still raw from his death. Abigail had ghosts following her, the kind she couldn’t save. 

“You left,” he said quietly. Not accusation, not command. Just truth.

Her laugh was short, bitter. “What else was I supposed to do? Stay there? Pretend I could walk those halls every day with Sarah’s ghost at my shoulder? Pretend I didn’t hear her laugh in every corner?” She dragged hard on the cigarette, held the smoke in, let it curl out in a hiss. “I would’ve drowned in it. I had to leave, Arthur.”

He studied her face in the half-light. For the first time, he understood. Really understood. She hadn’t abandoned them; she’d saved herself. Arthur felt his throat constrict. He realized he’d been angry at her for leaving, furious even. But hearing that edge in her voice, he finally saw how childish that had been. She hadn’t left to run. She’d left because if she hadn’t, Sarah’s ghost would have buried her alive.

He drew a slow breath, steadying himself. For the first time since he sat down, he looked at her not as the former Paladin, not as the Lone Wanderer, but as Abby. And he knew then that he had no right to judge her for surviving.

Arthur said nothing. The night pressed close, heavy with the weight of memory.

Abigail flicked the cigarette butt with her thumb, ash drifting to the asphalt below, and leaned back against the step, exhaling like she’d been holding her lungs hostage. After a beat, she huffed out something that might have been a laugh. “Guess I’m still terrible company for a smoke break.”

It wasn’t much, but the corner of her mouth tugged upward, just enough to count as a joke. The old dry wit she used to flash over a chessboard when he moved a pawn into danger.

Arthur’s lips almost answered in kind. Almost. He let out a slow breath through his nose instead. “Not the worst company I’ve kept.”

Her eyes slid toward him then, catching his in the half-light. For a moment, neither looked away.

“You carried it young,” he said finally. The words felt scraped raw on his tongue. “The weight of the wasteland. Right out of that vault, everyone expected you to hold it up. To save it. Too much for anyone.”

Her brow furrowed, the faintest crease, but she didn’t deny it. She wrapped her arm tighter around her legs, as if holding herself together. “You talk like you don’t know the feeling.”

Arthur’s mouth quirked bitterly. “I was born into it. You were thrown into it. Doesn’t make the burden lighter either way.”

That landed between them and lingered. The hum of the generator, the whisper of wind down the alley, the pale glow of the moon; all of it conspired to hold the silence taut until it felt fragile.

Arthur found himself watching her more closely than he meant to. The shadows around her eyes, the way her shoulders slumped just a little now that no one else was watching. And then, in the moonlight, her gaze lifted to him.

There was recognition in it– not of the boy at the Citadel chessboard. No. She was watching him, measuring the man he’d become, and finding something familiar. A kindred spirit weathered by the same storms.

“It hurts for a long time,” she murmured, almost as if testing the memory. “But it gets easier.”

He remembered a long corridor in the Citadel. He hadn’t understood then. He did now.

Arthur’s chest clenched tight, his pulse climbing hard against his throat. She wasn’t looking at him like a comrade, or a memory, or the doctor behind a ledger. There was something raw in her eyes, unguarded, stripped of her usual calm. It was dangerous. It was magnetic. It pulled at him with a force he wasn’t prepared for.

The alley around them blurred, muted to nothing but the white glow of moonlight draped across her cheekbones, the nervous curl of smoke leaving her lips, the slight tremor in her fingers where they clutched the cigarette. He drank it in: the damp shine at the corner of her eyes, the rise and fall of her shoulders as she breathed, the sharp line of her jaw fighting to hold steady. Every detail struck him like it had been waiting in his memory, half-remembered, begging to be completed.

His thoughts scrambled. He told himself to look away, to hold the line, but his eyes betrayed him. Her lips parted just slightly, an unconscious motion, and for the barest instant, he saw it; her gaze flick down, then up again. A fraction of a second. Just enough to tell him he wasn’t alone in the tension– just enough to undo him.

Arthur’s breath caught. The space between them thinned to a thread. The mask of Elder Maxson faltered, falling away until he was just a man staring at the woman who haunted his sleepless nights. He leaned forward a fraction, too far, not far enough—

It would take nothing. Just one breath. Just one lapse.

At the exact moment, it caught up to them both just what was happening. 

He tore his gaze away first, breath hissing through his teeth as if he’d been burned. She blinked hard and shook her head like someone waking from a dream, swiping her sleeve across her eyes with too much force. She stamped out the dead cigarette on the concrete as she fumbled for another, the unlit paper twitching against her knuckles.

Arthur scraped a hand down his face, grounding himself in discipline, in duty, in anything but the truth of what almost happened. He rose abruptly, the crate groaning under the shift, needing space, needing distance before the air suffocated him.

The alley stretched thin with shadows as he turned toward the front of the clinic. Fragile shadows, fragile resolve.

Neither of them spoke. Neither of them moved to acknowledge it. But both of them knew. The thread had nearly snapped. And once stretched that tight, it would never be the same again.

Halfway to the corner, he looked back. She was still sitting there on the steps, cigarette loose between her fingers, watching him with an expression he couldn’t name.

“You should get back to your Knight,” she said, voice low and still a little shaky.

He nodded once. “Try to get some sleep.”

For a heartbeat, it felt like neither of them meant what they said.

Then Arthur turned, and the night swallowed the rest.

Chapter Text

FREE HEALING, NO CAPS? MYSTERIOUS “BLUE CLINICS” STIR HOPE IN THE WASTELAND

by Piper Wright, Publick Occurrences

Free healthcare in the Commonwealth. Sounds like a punchline, doesn’t it? But ask around, and you’ll hear the same story whispered from Bunker Hill to Goodneighbor: a strip of blue tape laid across a cracked floor, a sign that reads “No weapons past the line.”

That’s the rule of the so-called Blue Clinics, and by all accounts, people are listening.

There are four of them so far, scattered across Boston’s metro ruins, with a rumored fifth somewhere near Salem. No one can quite pin down who’s running them, only that patients call her Doctor. No last name, no history, just a woman in a bandana who stitches, cleans, and sets bones without ever asking for a cap in return.

Dr. Sun of Diamond City had some choice words when I asked his opinion. “Charity doesn’t keep the lights on,” he scoffed. “Sterile supplies cost money. Antibiotics don’t fall out of the sky. Whoever’s doing this won’t last. And if they’re cutting corners to keep things free, people will pay the price in infections and funerals.”

But not everyone agrees.

I spoke with one man, who asked not to be named, who claimed he stumbled into one of the clinics after a raider ambush left him with a bullet wound in his leg. “She’s no joke,” he told me, voice shaking just a little. “She knew exactly what she was doing. Didn’t take any s***, either. I tried to get smart with her, and she gave me a look that shut me right up. When she was done, I walked out alive. No caps, no debt.”

So, who is the Doctor behind the blue tape? A rogue medic? A lunatic with a death wish? Or maybe someone who actually believes the Commonwealth deserves better than stimpaks-for-caps and the grave for anyone who can’t pay?

The cynics say the Blue Clinics are pipe dreams, doomed to burn out when supplies run dry or raiders take notice. But the people stepping over those lines? The ones walking back out with their wounds bound and their fevers broken? For them, the dream feels real.

Maybe the Commonwealth doesn’t hand out miracles often. But maybe, just maybe, someone’s trying to build one anyway.

MacCready kept his hand on the strap of his satchel like the whole Commonwealth was trying to rip it off him. The little glass vial inside weighed heavier than his rifle ever had. Med-Tek’s miracle. Duncan’s miracle. Bouncing against his hip with every step. It was the kind of prize raiders or chem fiends would gut him for without a second thought, but none of them would ever understand what it meant.

The thought of the gnashing teeth of ferals and the bark of his rifle while he and Nora fought through the facility to reach the cure made him shiver, even in the warm breeze of the night. Flashes of the battle just to get this tiny vial. This small miracle. He’d go through it all again, a hundred times, if it meant he could save his boy. 

Duncan. He tried not to picture the boy coughing, sweating through the sheets, his small body rattling every time his chest seized. Blue boils across his small frame that pulsed and leaked. Growing up in the wasteland was hell enough without being sick on top of it. MacCready had sworn to him that he’d make it right, no matter what it took. And now he had it. A cure, small enough to fit in the palm of his hand, worth more to him than every cap in the Commonwealth.

He just had to get it home.

He adjusted the hunting rifle on his shoulder, the familiar weight of it settling against his back. The night was quiet for Boston, but quiet here meant “wait a minute, then something tries to eat your face.” He stayed sharp, eyes cutting over alleyways and rooflines, thumb brushing the edge of his trigger guard like a nervous tic.

A glow cut through the dark up ahead, faint but steady. A lantern burning in the old diner. Someone had told him the Doctor there could help. He wasn’t sure if he believed it. People whispered plenty about this “blue line doctor.” Too good to be true usually meant a bullet or a scam.

Still, the light was there. A promise in the dark.

MacCready shifted the satchel against his hip and squared his shoulders. If this “Doctor” was half as reliable as the stories said, maybe Duncan had a shot after all.

It was crazy. Completely, absolutely insane to trust a stranger with the most important thing in his life. He’d run jobs for people who swore on their mothers they’d keep a promise, and half of them were gunning for his caps before the dust settled. Handing over Duncan’s future to some mysterious “Doc” he’d never met? Yeah, brilliant plan, MacCready.

He stopped at the diner’s entrance, hand tightening on the satchel again. He took a deep breath, long and steady. The kind he would take right before pulling the trigger on a target 200 yards away. Then he pushed the door open.

The first thing he saw wasn’t the lantern glow, or the cots lining the walls. It was the strip of tape across the floor, stark and simple. Bright blue against the cracked tile, daring anyone to cross it wrong. MacCready froze for a second, rifle heavy in his grip. He hated the idea of letting it out of his sight. But rules were rules, and this was the only door in.

With a muttered curse under his breath, he set the rifle down against the little table shoved up against the wall, just outside the tape. It felt like leaving a limb behind.

Stepping over the line felt… awkward, like he was intruding on something sacred. He half expected someone to shout at him. Instead, a kid with freckles and a mop of red hair hurried up to him, looking nervous but trying hard to play professional.

“What’s your injury?” the boy asked simply, kindly.

MacCready shook his head quickly. “Not injured. “just need to talk to the Doc.” His voice came out rougher than he meant, a little too sharp, but hell, he wasn’t here to make friends.

The boy nodded, scurrying off toward the back. MacCready stayed where he was, shifting his weight from one boot to the other, letting his eyes sweep the place.

He’d been expecting something rough. Rusty scalpels, dirty rags, maybe a cot or two with more bloodstains than fabric. That was the wasteland he knew. But this? This was… different.

The diner was still a diner, sure, cracked tiles, booths patched with mismatched leather, but it was clean. The air smelled faintly of antiseptic instead of mildew and rot. The cots lined up against the wall looked old, but freshly scrubbed, with worn but clean blankets folded neatly at the foot of each one. A lantern flickered in the corner, throwing a soft golden light that turned the sharp edges of the place warm. Safe, even.

Against his better judgment, MacCready felt the corner of his mouth twitch. The wasteland wasn’t big on “safe.” But this… this felt close.

Movement caught his eye. A silhouette framed in the lantern glow, head bowed as she checked an IV line dripping steady into the arm of a patient he couldn’t quite see. Her motions were practiced, precise, hands steady in a way only someone who’d done this a hundred times could pull off. He felt himself taking a step forward before he even realized it, drawn in by the quiet competence of the figure.

And then he froze.

Something about the set of her shoulders, the curve of her jaw in profile. Recognition slammed into him so hard he forgot to breathe.

He stayed rooted to the spot, eyes fixed on her silhouette as she stripped off her gloves with practiced flicks and dropped them neatly into a tin tray. She moved to the cracked porcelain basin at the side, scrubbing her hands like she had all the time in the world. The rhythm of it was steady, unhurried. Normal.

MacCready’s chest tightened. He knew that profile. Knew the curve of her cheek, the way her hair framed her face when she tilted her head just so. But, no. That was impossible. She couldn’t be here. Not her.

She dried her hands on a cloth, turned—

And his heart dropped straight into his stomach.

“No fucking way,” he breathed, the words slipping out before he could stop them.

Abigail Quinn’s mouth curved into that smirk he remembered all too well. “Still got that mouth on you after all these years, RJ?”

The nickname hit like a hammer. RJ. Nobody called him that anymore. Not since Lamplight.

It all came rushing back at once; the vault girl who showed up like some kind of ghost from another world, hauling in food and water, dropping off bandages and meds they hadn’t even known they needed. Her voice, calm and patient, when the rest of them were half-feral kids with more bravado than sense. She hadn’t just kept them alive; she’d treated them like they were worth saving. Like they weren’t just a bunch of doomed runts playing mayor and scavenger in the dark.

MacCready swallowed hard, the weight of years collapsing into that one moment.

“Abby?” The name felt strange on his tongue. Half-forgotten, dragged out of some locked corner of his memory.

And then she smiled. Not the tight-lipped mask he’d expect from someone running a clinic in the Commonwealth, but a real smile, warm and easy in a way that made him feel ten years younger for a heartbeat.

She finished drying her hands, set the cloth aside, and walked closer. Each step only made it more real. Yeah, it was her. Still alive. Still doing what she always did: helping.

“Son of a—” he muttered, words tripping over themselves. “You’re… shit, you’re really–” He cursed under his breath, shaking his head as though he could rattle his thoughts back into order. “I, uh–hell, I don’t even know what to say. Abby… I need your help.”

Her expression softened, but she didn’t let him ramble any further. She just laid a gentle hand on his forearm, steadying him, the same way she used to calm down a scared kid.

“Come on,” she said quietly, giving the barest tug.

He let her guide him, boots dragging just a little as if his body still couldn’t believe this was happening. She led him toward the back of the diner, past the cots and the soft sounds of sleeping patients, until they reached a small corner table. The lantern glow pooled across its surface, shadows shifting as she gestured for him to sit.

He dropped into the chair, still a little dazed.

Abby settled in across from him, folding her hands for a moment before lifting her gaze to meet his. There was a steadiness in those blue eyes, always had been, even when she was barely older than the rest of them.

“You’ve grown up, RJ,” she said softly, and for once it didn’t sound like a jab. Just fact. Just the truth. She tilted her head, studying him like she was piecing together the boy she remembered with the man in front of her. “I was so sorry to hear about Lucy.”

The name hit him like a slug to the chest. He blinked, caught off guard by the sincerity in her tone. Somehow, even through all these years, she’d kept tabs on him. Did she do the same for all the Lamplight kids? The ones who ended up in Bigtown and the ones who had ventured beyond? 

Then he felt it; the light touch of her hand sliding across the table to rest over his. Easy, unthinking contact, the way she used to calm the storm out of scared kids who thought the world was ending. It soothed a part of him he hadn’t realized was tense. 

And just like that, he was back in those tunnels, the stench of damp rock and too many kids crammed together. Back to the day Bumble had gotten caught in one of the traps, her little arm torn up and bloody, crying so hard it rattled the walls. Abby had pulled the girl into her lap, whispering something steady while she cleaned and wrapped the wound, humming softly until the sobs quieted.

Or the times she’d just put a hand on his shoulder, firm and steady, when he was about to lose his temper or break under the weight of pretending to be Mayor when he was just a kid playing at power. She hadn’t just been a passerby, she’d been an anchor. The only mungo they trusted, the one who treated them like people instead of a nuisance.

Even when she left, she didn’t really leave. A bag of food, a few bandages, sometimes even candy or toys, would appear by the mouth of the cave. Little things that meant she hadn’t forgotten them. When the gifts stopped, when she’d disappeared altogether, it had left a hollow ache none of them wanted to admit out loud. They’d speculated she must have died. But here she was– alive. 

MacCready’s throat felt tight. He stared at her hand over his, at the calm way she looked at him, like no time had passed at all.

Abby’s hand lingered on his a moment longer before she drew back enough to lace her fingers together on the table. Her eyes searched his face, then softened.

“And Duncan?” she asked gently. “How’s he holding up?”

RJ’s jaw clenched. He shifted in the chair, thumb brushing against the worn strap of his satchel like he needed the anchor. “That’s… that’s why I’m here, Abby– I mean, Doc.” His voice was tight, thin, like the words themselves scraped on the way out. He leaned forward, unbuckled the flap, and carefully pulled out the small vial. He set it down between them as if it were made of glass and prayers, his hand hovering even after he’d let go.

Abby’s gaze dropped to it. The lantern light gleamed off the pale liquid inside, and she murmured, almost to herself, “Prevent.” Her eyes lifted, sharp and knowing. “Duncan has the Blue Spots?”

The image hit him like a knife: his little boy with boils blued around the edges, the fever that wouldn’t break, the sound of Duncan’s breath rattling too loud in a quiet room. RJ forced himself to nod.

Abby’s expression grew solemn, her face unreadable except for the steadying calm in her eyes. She reached for the vial, rolling it lightly between her fingers, checking the seal, the clarity. Then she nodded back, firm and certain. “It’ll work. I’ve seen it help before.”

Something in MacCready’s chest broke loose at that. His throat burned. He pressed the heel of his hand against his mouth for a second, but when he spoke, his voice cracked anyway.

“Duncan’s… he’s everything. The most important thing in the world to me. If I—if I lose him…” He swallowed hard, blinking fast. “I wouldn’t… I don’t know if… ”

Abby didn’t flinch from his desperation, didn’t look away. She just listened, patient as ever, her other hand sliding back across the table until it rested lightly over his knuckles. She didn’t crowd him, she just stayed there, a steady presence like she’d always been.

She gave his hand the lightest squeeze. “RJ,” she said softly, the way she used to when he was bristling in Lamplight, “he’s going to make it. You’re doing everything you can for him. And he’s got your grit in his blood, you know that.”

The crack in his chest eased, just a little, enough for him to breathe again. She tilted her head, her voice steady but gentle. “Tell me what I can do.”

He exhaled, shaky, fingers drumming the tabletop before curling back around the satchel like he might lose his nerve if he didn’t hold onto something. “Duncan’s back in the Capital. Rivet City. Friends are keeping an eye on him, but he doesn’t have time. He needs this cure now.”

Abby nodded slowly, eyes narrowing in thought, every line of her face focused. Not pity, never pity, just that sharp concentration she wore like armor when she was fixing a patient’s wound.

“I can’t carry it back myself,” RJ went on quickly. “Not with the jobs I’ve got here, not with the miles in between. But the word around town is… you’ve got reach. People say you can work miracles.”

For the first time since he’d walked in, something like humor ghosted across her face. Abby huffed, almost a laugh, shaking her head as she leaned back in the chair. “I’m no miracle worker.” Her eyes flicked to the vial, then back to him, steady and sure. “But I can help, RJ.”

MacCready let out a breath he didn’t even know he’d been holding, the sound raw in the back of his throat. Relief hit him first, sharp and dizzying, then gratitude, then something heavier, warmer, that left his chest aching. Awe, maybe. Or just the feeling of safety he hadn’t known in years, settling over him with her words.

Abby reached for the vial without ceremony, her hands steady as she turned it in her fingers once more before standing. He watched, eyes tracking her every move, as she crossed to a shelf against the wall, pulled down a small wooden box, and eased the glass into it like it was a treasure. She carried the box into the little storage room behind the counter, and when she came back, she dusted her palms off like it was done. Final. Settled.

“It’ll be on the first caravan out in the morning,” she said, voice certain as steel. “I’ve got routes I trust, friends who know the tunnels well enough to get it into Rivet City safe.”

RJ slumped back against the booth, shoulders loosening for the first time in weeks. “Abby…” He didn’t know what to say. Thank you didn’t cover it. Nothing did.

But she only gave him that small, knowing smile, the one that said she’d already heard the words even if he couldn’t speak them.

Then, without a beat, she reached under the counter, pulled out a half-empty bottle of amber liquid, and set it down with a dull clink. Two chipped glasses followed, one slid across to him. She poured them both a finger’s worth and sat back down across from him.

“Something to settle the nerves,” she said, her tone lighter now, “and to have a drink with an old friend.”

Arthur’s quarters on the Prydwen were quiet save for the groan of steel and the faint thrum of engines beneath the deck. A lantern hissed on his desk, throwing long shadows across the neatly stacked reports that had been waiting for him since dawn.

He was still awake, flight suit half-stripped and coat draped over the back of the chair. Fatigue pulled at him, but he refused to give in. Better to keep moving, keep reading, keep working. Better than letting his mind wander where it wanted to go.

He skimmed through field reports, forcing his focus to stay sharp. Patrol routes logged, minor skirmishes resolved, a Vertibird in need of recalibration. He initialed each one with brisk precision. Next page: intelligence briefings. Rumors of Institute movement, scattered sightings of coursers. He jotted the necessary notes, underlined what needed follow-up.

The following report was stamped Fort Hagen Incident. Conrad Kellogg, long suspected as an Institute asset, had vanished. Last sighting put him inside the fort, then gunfire, explosions, and silence. Locals swore a woman in a Vault 111 jumpsuit walked away with a dog and a Gen-2 synth at her side. Arthur frowned. Wasteland rumor, maybe. But Kellogg’s disappearance was fact. It needed more investigation. 

He turned to the next report and froze.

Medical supplies, Prydwen stock.

The columns lined up neatly in front of him. Stimpack reserves steady. Blood packs showing a slight surplus. Dressings, chems, even surgical tools: all accounted for, all comfortably in the black. And then—

Antibiotics: low.

Arthur’s jaw clenched.

For a moment, the paper blurred, the sterile ink replaced by the cramped, precise ledger he’d held in his own hands. Abigail’s handwriting: Antibiotics: three courses left. Her voice in his ears, even, deliberate, explaining how she rationed them. How she made choices no one should have to make.

And with the memory came the rest: her calm precision as she stitched a wound, the way her hair had slipped loose at her temple, the unshakable way she met his eyes across that strip of blue tape. 

Steady. Unyielding.

He leaned back in his chair, the report crumpling faintly in his grip. Years had passed since the Citadel, since the boy with the chessboard and the girl who always won. He had changed. The world around him had changed. But Abby—

Abby was the same.

Steady. An anchor in the storm.

And yet, dangerous. Because the same presence that steadied him could also pull him under. She could drown him if he let her.

He rubbed a hand across his face, trying to push the thought away, to reframe it in terms of strategy. Protecting her clinics meant goodwill with settlements, less pressure on Brotherhood medics, healthier recruits in the long term. It was practical. Tactical.

There were four of them now. Four blue tape clinics across the Boston metro area. He didn’t need a report to tell him; word traveled fast through the ranks, whispered among soldiers who didn’t even know her name.

One stood out more than the rest: the little clinic tucked between Goodneighbor and Bunker Hill in an old bank building. That one had become popular enough that the occasional neighborhood watch posted outside, standing guard with rifles at the ready on the side of the tape that allowed them, making sure her neutrality wasn’t violated. Arthur had no doubt the order had come from the Mayor himself. The ghoul had a reputation for protecting his own, and apparently that circle now included the woman Arthur couldn’t stop thinking about.

He set the report down, pressing his palms hard against his eyes, as if pressure alone could smother the memories.

Arthur pictured her again, the paradox she embodied. Inside her clinics, she was all cold competence and no-nonsense precision, her voice steady as she stitched wounds and taught others to do the same. She left knowledge in her wake, ensuring that when she moved on, others could carry the work forward.

But outside, he saw her as she’d been in the alley. Smoking like it would settle her nerves, her hands shaking just slightly, her face haunted. He had watched her then, stripped of the mask, and something in him had shifted. The way she looked after she couldn’t save Boyd… it was a burden he understood in his own way. He knew the weight of sending soldiers into the field, of signing orders that sometimes meant death. That guilt gnawed, but it was abstract until the bodies came home. He’d sent Boyd’s body back to his young wife and infant child back in D.C. 

For her, it was different. She was the last line of defense, the final hope when someone staggered through her door bleeding out. If she failed, there was no one else. How many deaths sat on her shoulders? How did she bear it without falling apart?

He pressed his palms flat to the desk, staring down at the inked reports, but all he could see was her face under that dim half-moon. The way her voice had cracked when she thought no one heard. The way they’d been inches apart, seconds away from crossing a line neither of them could take back.

Not the blue tape line. Another line, far more dangerous.

And they were inching toward it inch by inevitable inch. 

Arthur stayed frozen at his desk, reports scattered like loose shrapnel around him, until his hand strayed to the drawer on his right. He slid it open slowly, the groan of the wood loud in the quiet of his quarters.

Inside, tucked away beneath a stack of old maps and folded directives, lay a single chess piece.

The Queen.

He lifted it out carefully, as if it might crumble under his touch. The enamel paint was worn thin, edges dulled and smoothed by years of turning it over in restless fingers. In places, the wood grain showed through, pale scars of time.

It was her piece.

He’d kept it since before she left Citadel, since the afternoons spent hunched over a board he’d only half-understood. He was supposed to be training, supposed to be sharpening into the soldier everyone demanded. But when she’d sat across from him, when she’d tapped her finger thoughtfully against the board, when she’d smiled at his clumsy attempts, he hadn’t cared about sparring drills. Only about the game that let him sit there longer, watching her bite her lip in concentration, listening to her steady voice explaining tactics he pretended not to grasp so she’d explain them again.

She’d taught him the queen’s gambit, her voice calm, patient. Sacrifice a pawn, open the board, control the center. It looks risky, but it gives you room to breathe later. It keeps your options open, Arthur.

He’d clung to the piece long after she was gone. Through the collapse of Lyons’ Pride, through the bitter years of fracture and civil war within the Brotherhood. Through his rise to command, he had carried it, hidden in a pocket or in a drawer, grounding himself with the memory of a time before his shoulders bowed under the weight of a title he hadn’t asked for.

The queen rested in his palm now, feeling heavier than it should be. He turned it slowly between his fingertips, remembering the way she used to fall silent when she spoke of playing chess with her father in the Vault. She’d go quiet, lips pressed together, eyes sliding away as if the name itself cut too deep. He’d wanted to ask, to push, but something in her expression warned him away.

Arthur clenched his fist around the piece. A queen; versatile, relentless, dangerous. She’d always been that, even when he was too young to see her clearly. Now, older, worn, tempered by years of command, he could see it for what it was. For what she was.

The one piece on the board that could change everything.

Or the piece that could undo him entirely.

He wondered if, when she looked at him, she still saw the boy he’d been in the Citadel. The squire with too much to prove, trailing after her in the library stacks, clumsy and hopelessly smitten. To her, maybe he would always be that boy, someone to tease and protect, never the man who bore her name on his heart like a battle standard.

That was the thought that gnawed at him in the quiet hours: that he might be the only one who felt this pull, this reckless hunger that burned hotter every time he saw her. He could command armies, inspire loyalty, bend the Brotherhood to his will…but with her, all he had was the question. Did she see him as he was now? Or only the boy he used to be?

He knew how people looked at him now. He’d caught the lingering glances from scribes and initiates, even the frank stares from Knights and Paladins who should have known better. Men and women alike had let desire slip across their faces, and Arthur knew the signs well enough. But with Abby… he could never be sure. There were flashes, moments when her mask slipped, her gaze holding his just a second too long. Maybe he was imagining it. Maybe he was projecting the things he wanted to see, convincing himself of shadows.

And yet… sometimes, he swore he caught something in her gaze. A fleeting spark. Only in glimpses, never long enough to be sure. He could be seeing something that wasn’t there, a cruel trick of his own desperate heart. 

But the memory of that night in the alley haunted him still. The world had narrowed to the space between them, the air thin with something unsaid. Her armor had cracked, just for a second. He’d seen it. Felt it. That magnetic thread stretched taut between them, his body leaning in, too close to deny, not close enough to claim.

What would have happened if he hadn’t stopped? If he’d closed that gap? Would she have met him halfway, or would he have shattered whatever fragile tether still bound them together? The thought made his chest ache, equal parts longing and fear. To lose her again– that was a risk he wasn’t sure he could take.

Arthur set the queen gently on the desk and pushed the drawer shut. The sound of wood striking wood echoed louder than it should have in the stillness. He stood, shoulders stiff, and crossed to the small cabinet in the corner.

The bottle of whiskey sat there like an old confidant, its label peeling, glass chipped at the neck. He poured three fingers into a glass that had seen better days and knocked back half in one swallow. The burn slid hot down his throat, catching in his chest, grounding him. He let the fire linger a moment, savoring the way it blotted out thought.

But it couldn’t blot out her.

She wasn’t just a piece on the board anymore. She was running the game, and he couldn’t even bring himself to resent it. He’d spent years burying what he felt, shoving it deep, convincing himself it was a boy’s foolish crush long outgrown. But the moment he saw her eyes again across that strip of blue tape, it had all come roaring back with such force it left him reeling. Whiplash, like taking a hit you never saw coming.

It took every ounce of restraint to keep the mask in place around her. To hold his voice steady when it wanted to break. To keep his hands clasped behind his back when all he wanted was to reach across that impossible distance and touch her.

God, the want was endless. Not lust alone, not some hollow hunger, though that was there too and sharp enough to ache. No, it was more dangerous than that. He wanted to show her. To prove it. To let her see how much she’d always meant to him, how much she still did.

Arthur braced one hand against the cabinet, glass in the other, and drew in a slow breath. The memory of her working filled his head; her hands precise, movements efficient, voice calm as she instructed others, teaching them how to carry on in her absence. Watching her command a clinic was like watching a maestro conduct a symphony: every element in harmony, every detail sharpened into order under her gaze. And she did it not for power, not for glory, but because she believed it mattered. Because she believed people mattered.

It unraveled him.

He took another swallow of whiskey, slower this time, letting the bitterness coat his tongue. It didn’t help. His body still hummed with the memory of her so close, the edge of her smile, the tremor she tried so hard to hide.

It wasn’t a boy’s crush anymore. It was something far sharper, far hungrier. And it was growing harder every day to pretend it wasn’t there.

Arthur drained the glass and set it down harder than he meant to, the sharp clink of glass against metal snapping through the stillness of his quarters. He braced both hands on the edge of the desk, head bowed, eyes fixed on the scattered reports he wasn’t reading.

This was the only place he could allow the storm out. Not on the flight deck, not in the command meetings, not under the watchful eyes of his Knights and Scribes. Here, alone, he could admit the truth: he was breaking. Piece by piece, moment by moment, every time her eyes found his across that damned strip of blue tape.

He couldn’t let her see it. Not her. Not Abigail.

The clinics were everything to her, he saw that clearly now. They were her mission, her sanctuary, her way of clawing order out of chaos. And wasn’t that what he was doing too, in his own way? Wasn’t the Brotherhood just another attempt to carve something steady into the wasteland, to prove there was still structure, still discipline, still purpose?

He rubbed a hand over his beard, the ghost of her voice still echoing: “Inside the line, everyone’s a patient.” The absolute certainty, the calm conviction, had left him shaken. And damned if it didn’t stir something he couldn’t quite name: admiration, yes, but also something deeper, sharper.

He told himself he’d help her because it was right. Because those clinics saved lives. Because if she believed in them, they were worth protecting. He told himself that when he diverted surplus supplies, when he quietly instructed patrols to pass by the clinics to watch for threats, when he ensured no Brotherhood boot crossed her threshold with disrespect.

But another part of him, the part he tried to drown with whiskey and silence, knew it was more than that. Helping her was an excuse, a reason to see her again. A reason to stand in the doorway and watch her move with that same exacting precision, that same impossible strength, and pretend it wasn’t tearing him apart.

What would he do when he saw her next? Would he manage to keep the mask in place? Or would something snap, the taut line inside him finally giving way?

Arthur looked down at the chess piece still resting on the desk, the queen staring back at him with mute defiance. His chest tightened.

He wasn’t sure if Abigail was the one piece that could win him the game… 

or the one that would topple his entire board.

Chapter Text

He told himself the name again as he staggered up the cracked asphalt.

Greg.

Not G4-67. 

Not anymore.

Greg bled. Greg hurt. Greg wanted to live.

That was supposed to mean something.

He pressed a trembling hand to his abdomen, fingers slick with blood. The wound wasn’t clean. Feral claws had ripped through flesh and fabric alike, and he could still feel the heat of it radiating up his ribs. It didn’t seem fair; after all those years cleaning laboratories and watering plants under artificial suns, this was how he’d die. Free for forty-eight hours and already bleeding out like one of them.

The Institute had always said pain was data. Something to be measured, catalogued, studied. But this… this was something else entirely. It wasn’t just pain. It was fear. It was want. He wanted to live.

He thought of the man called Patriot. The whispered voice through the vent shaft, the coded messages slipped beneath the hydroponics trays. He’d never even seen his face. But Patriot had promised him freedom, and the man with the sunglasses had delivered it.

That man had met him in the dark after the teleportation jump, his outline haloed by the soft blue pulse of a relay beacon. “Name’s Deacon,” he’d said, offering him a hand, a folded set of clothes, and a pistol with a single extra magazine. “Your name’s Greg now. You’ll like it better.”

Deacon had told him to head for Goodneighbor. To find a place called the Memory Den. “They’ll wipe it all clean,” he’d said. “Fresh start. No nightmares, no flashbacks, no ghosts.”

But there were ghosts following him, now. The smell of burnt skin. The weight of another synth’s body slumped in his arms as he fed it into the incinerator. The sound of the door locking behind him each night, sealing him in with only his nightmares to keep him company. Just a body to do their bidding. A synthetic body; something to be exploited. 

He was free now.

Free, and dying.

The diner loomed before him, old peeling paint and cracked glass, its windows radiating warm, golden light. A hanging sign over the door read Clinic, the letters faint but legible. He didn’t have the strength to question it.

He knew he wouldn’t make it to Goodneighbor. It was too far. He would be dead on the side of the road if he didn’t stop now. 

Greg made it to the threshold, every movement sending fire through his side. He reached for the door handle with a blood-slicked hand and pushed. The bell above the door rang in the silence. 

Inside, he saw the faint flicker of lanterns, the outline of cots, the smell of antiseptic and dust, and maybe– hope. 

Someone would help him here. They had to.

He stumbled across the doorway, past a strip of blue tape on the floor, smearing it red with his palm as his legs gave out beneath him.

“Please…” he rasped, voice catching on static and breath. “Help…”

The last thing he heard before the world dimmed was the quick scrape of a chair and the sound of hurried footsteps on the linoleum.

When Greg woke, the world felt heavy and slow, as though time had thickened into something he had to wade through.

Warmth. That was the first thing he noticed. A blanket tucked up to his ribs. The faint hum of a lantern. The muted rhythm of a heart monitor that wasn’t there, only imagined from habit. He was warm. Not cold metal or sterile walls, but warm.

He blinked groggily, the edges of the room swaying in and out of focus. The air smelled faintly of iodine and mint. His gaze drifted upward to the IV bag hanging beside the cot. Red fluid pulsed rhythmically down the tube into his arm. Blood. Real human blood, coursing through his veins.

He followed the line with sluggish eyes to the bandaged crook of his elbow. Then to his torso, bare under the blanket, wrapped tight in gauze.

Alive.

Still alive.

Still free.

The thought landed with a strange, fragile weight.

He shifted slightly, the cot creaking under his movement, and that’s when he heard her.

“You’re lucky you got to us when you did.”

The voice was calm, steady and soft, but it carried.

Greg turned his head, sluggish and heavy. She was sitting beside him in a metal chair, elbows resting on her knees, a piece of paper held loosely in her hands. Her eyes were sharp, the kind that saw more than they let on. An almost-smile flickered across her face as she watched him struggle back to consciousness.

She didn’t get up. Didn’t move to touch him. Just sat there, like she was giving him time to catch up.

He opened his mouth to speak, but the words wouldn’t come. His throat burned too much.

The woman– the doctor, he realized– didn’t seem to mind the silence. She just looked down again at the paper, turning it slightly between her fingers.

It took him a second to recognize it. His heart skipped a beat. It was the same paper the man with the sunglasses had given him. The one with the coordinates. The safehouse for after. The promise of erasure.

Her thumb brushed the edge of it like she’d been holding it a long time.

When she looked up again, her eyes met his. Dark blue, steady, knowing.

And in that instant, Greg knew that she knew.

Knew what he was.

What he wasn’t.

He braced for it– the disgust, the alarm, the shout for help. But none of it came.

She didn’t look away from him when she spoke next, her tone still gentle but threaded with something sharper. “I recognize the handwriting,” she said quietly, turning the note between her fingers. “It’s Deacon’s.”

The name hit him like a pulse through his chest. His heart beat faster.

He remembered the man’s easy grin, the way he’d tilted his sunglasses down just enough to meet his eyes. “Name’s Deacon.”

Greg froze, the sound of it echoing somewhere deep in the code and the muscle both.

Deacon. The man with the sunglasses.

She knew him.

Was that good? Or catastrophic?

If she knew Deacon, did that mean she was like him? A friend of the Railroad, someone who helped? Or was she one of the others, the kind who smiled while turning you in, who handed you back to white-coated hands and empty rooms and the hum of the incinerator?

Greg’s gaze darted around the clinic. The exits. The blue line by the door. He could make it if he ran. Maybe. If his stitches didn’t tear. If the blood in his veins stayed where it was. If she didn’t call for someone with a gun.

But his body was leaden, too slow, too human.

She leaned forward slightly, elbows still resting on her knees, lowering her voice until it was barely above a whisper. “Do you know Dr. Madison Li?”

Every muscle in Greg’s body locked. His breath caught mid-inhale.

He knew that name. Everyone in the Institute knew that name.

The scientist who built bridges between gods and machines. The one who’d come as an outsider and stayed.

After all, no one left the Institute.

He swallowed hard, his throat suddenly dry. “I… I’ve heard of her,” he managed, voice rasping like a damaged speaker. He didn’t want to say too much. 

She studied him for a long moment. Her expression didn’t shift. Not anger, not pity, not quite hope. Something quieter. Something that looked like recognition.

The doctor didn’t speak again. She only nodded, as if his answer had confirmed something she already knew. As if she didn’t want to push for more information. Folding the paper with careful precision, she slipped it back into his shaking hand.

“Hold onto it,” she murmured.

Then she stood, checking the IV line beside him, her movements calm and deliberate. The soft rustle of gauze and the faint drip of fluid filled the silence between them.

After a moment, her voice came again, gentle but steady. “What’s your name?”

The question caught him off guard. It was simple, but no one had ever asked it like that before; not as data, not as inventory, not as part of a file.

It slipped out before he could stop it. “G4–67.”

The sound of it made him flinch. A label, not a life. He swallowed hard, voice rough. “No. Sorry. My name is Greg.”

Something flickered across her face then, something almost like warmth, or pride. The corners of her mouth twitched into the faintest, tired smile.

“Nice to meet you, Greg,” she said softly. “You’re safe here. You can rest now.”

It wasn’t a command. It wasn’t pity, either. It was permission.

Greg exhaled slowly, a shuddering breath that felt like the first real one of his new life.

He didn’t know how she did it, but he believed her. He could almost feel the safety in the air. 

Maybe it was the calm in her voice, or the way she never reached for a weapon. Maybe it was the blue tape by the door, that quiet promise of neutrality. Or maybe it was just her. The strange, steady doctor who looked at him like he was a man, not a machine.

For the first time since stepping out of the relay, Greg felt it.

Safety.

Warmth.

Freedom.

He closed his eyes and let himself sink into it, the weight of exhaustion finally overtaking him.

He was alive.

He was free.

And he was going to be okay.

She didn’t care that he was a Synth. 

And after he made it to Goodneighbor, after the Memory Den, neither would he. 

The recon debrief had been short, but necessary.

A small Gunner cell had been spotted operating out of the warehouses east of the Fens. Nothing organized yet, but close enough to warrant eyes on it. Arthur’s boots echoed against the cracked pavement as he made his way toward the vertibird extraction point three blocks over. The streets were quiet, for once. Even the wind felt restrained, curling between the buildings with a low, cold whisper that cut through his coat.

He found himself savoring it, the quiet. It was the kind of silence you could only get in the aftermath of war. The city sleeping, just for a few hours, pretending it wasn’t built on bones.

And then he saw the light.

At first, just a glow through the fog. A steady orange pulse that turned the mist to gold. Then, as he walked further down the street, the shape of the building came into view. The old diner. Her clinic.

He had almost forgotten it was along this route. Almost.

Arthur slowed, the crunch of gravel beneath his boots seeming louder in the hush. Through the window, he could see her; head bowed, sleeves rolled to her elbows, cleaning instruments beneath the same soft lamplight that marked her clinic like a beacon in the dark. Her movements were measured, graceful, the same precision he’d seen a hundred times before on the battlefield, but here it looked like something else entirely.

Beautiful, he thought, and hated himself a little for it.

He’d told himself he wasn’t coming back here. Not after the way his thoughts kept returning to her, lingering like an ache that wouldn’t fade. But seeing her now, haloed in that light, something in him faltered.

She looked… peaceful. Untouched by the chaos he commanded every day. A part of the world he could never reach, no matter how much he wanted to.

He stopped at the curb, hands clasped behind his back, his reflection faint in the glass. He should have kept walking. Should have gone straight to the vertibird and left her to her quiet sanctuary.

But he didn’t.

He lingered there, watching her tuck a loose strand of dark hair behind her ear, her expression soft in the lantern glow. And for a moment, the world outside the glass didn’t exist at all.

Then, almost before he realized what he was doing, his hand lifted and knocked once against the doorframe.

Her head snapped up at the sound, eyes sharp and searching. Muscle memory, the reflex of someone who’d learned danger always came knocking. But then her eyes found his. 

Her expression shifted.

Recognition softened her features; the rigid line of her shoulders eased. She blinked once, as if surprised, then something like a smile flickered. Small, restrained, but enough to pull at the tightness in his chest.

Without a word, she set the instrument she’d been cleaning onto a tray and gestured for him to come in.

Arthur hesitated only long enough to glance down at the familiar strip of blue tape stretched across the linoleum, that narrow threshold dividing her sanctuary from the wasteland beyond. He removed his sidearm and placed it gently in the metal tray by the door before stepping across. The door closing behind him felt like shutting the danger out. 

She turned toward him, wiping her hands on a rag. The faint scent of antiseptic and something herbal, like mint, lingered in the air.

“Well,” she said, her tone lighter than the look in her eyes, “this is a surprise.”

There was a teasing lilt to her voice, but beneath it, a trace of wariness. She studied him for a moment before adding, “Tell me, Elder Maxson– what’s the leader of the Brotherhood doing out here alone, at this hour, so far from his floating fortress?”

Arthur almost smiled. Almost.

“Recon debrief,” he said simply, folding his hands behind his back. “My route back to the vertibird happened to pass by here.”

“Happened to,” she echoed, one brow lifting. “Is that what we’re calling it?”

Her tone was playful, but her gaze didn’t waver. She had a way of looking straight through his words, seeing what was behind them, and it made him feel like a man rather than an Elder. Unsettlingly so. 

He exhaled through his nose, fighting the small, unwilling smile tugging at his mouth. “You make it sound as though I’m incapable of coincidence.”

“With you?” she said, amusement ghosting across her face. “Nothing about you strikes me as coincidental.”

The words landed between them, soft but weighted.

For a moment, neither spoke. The lamplight hummed quietly over the silence, filling the space between them.

Abigail regarded him for a moment longer, then let out a faint hum, half amusement, half thought. “You look frozen,” she said finally. “And if I let you leave like that, the Brotherhood will think I’m neglecting my humanitarian duties.”

She turned to the counter without waiting for his reply, reaching for a tin canister and an old percolator already hissing faintly over the small gas flame. “You drink coffee, don’t you?”

Arthur blinked, caught off guard. “I… I suppose I do.”

“Good,” she said. “Because that’s what you’re getting.”

Steam curled upward as she poured two chipped mugs full. The smell was faintly metallic, burnt, but there was something comforting in it. “Two hundred years old and tastes like it,” she added dryly, holding out one mug toward him. “But it’s almost drinkable if you pretend hard enough.”

He took the cup from her hand before realizing he’d done it. His hand brushed her fingers. Brief contact, nothing more, but the warmth that bloomed in his chest startled him all the same. He sat opposite her at one of the old diner booths, the cracked vinyl sighing under his weight.

For a man used to commanding soldiers, he suddenly found himself unsure of where to put his hands. He settled for wrapping them around the mug, as if the warmth might give him something to focus on.

Her blue eyes found him across the table, bright in the lanternlight, and he felt pinned in place. Every trace of exhaustion she wore, the lines around her mouth, the shadows beneath her eyes, only made her seem more unshakably authentic.

“Careful,” she said, lifting her own mug, “it’s hot.”

“Noted,” he managed, though his voice came out rougher than intended.

She smirked. “I imagine the Elder of the Brotherhood’s been burned worse.”

He actually smiled at that. It felt foreign on his face.

“Perhaps,” he said. “But not like this.”

Something flickered in her expression. Surprise, then something softer. She didn’t look away.

She lifted her mug again, the chipped rim grazing her lip. Her eyes lingered on him over the steam. That gaze was steady, assessing, far too perceptive. Arthur could feel the weight of that look like a spotlight; it made him acutely aware of the space between them, the hum of the generator outside, the slow tick of the clock above the counter.

“You know,” she said finally, voice light but threaded with mischief, “if you keep showing up like this, your soldiers might start to worry.”

He huffed out something close to a laugh, low and almost genuine. “They’ll survive an hour without me.”

“Will they?” she asked, tilting her head. “Somehow, I picture them pacing the flight deck, convinced you’ve fallen into a sinkhole or defected to some raider gang.”

“Then they underestimate me,” he said, leaning back slightly, the corner of his mouth just barely curving. “Because right now, I can’t imagine anywhere I’d rather be.”

That silenced her. Her eyes flicked down to her mug, and she took another slow sip, as if buying herself time to decide what to do with the air between them.

From the back room came a faint clatter of metal striking metal, and Abigail glanced over her shoulder before calling out, “You break anything back there and you’re the one who’s fixing it, Ricky.”

A muffled voice answered sheepishly. “Just… inventorying supplies, Doc.”

She turned back to Arthur, amusement ghosting at the edges of her lips. “That boy could trip over a shadow.”

Arthur allowed himself a small, private smile. “He reminds me of some of my initiates,” he said. “All nerve, no coordination.”

“Then you’d better hope he never enlists,” she said, her tone teasing again as she reached for the coffee pot. “We’d both be doomed.”

She refilled her cup, though she didn’t drink right away. Instead, she studied the liquid surface, her voice casual when she finally spoke again. “We had the strangest shipment yesterday.”

Arthur stilled, fingers tightening slightly around his mug.

“Oh?” he said, careful. “From one of the caravans?”

“That’s the thing,” she said, glancing up at him now, that small smile playing at the edge of her mouth. “No one claimed it. No markings, no sender. It just… appeared. Stimpaks, vaccinations, clean bandages. Things I can’t usually afford.”

She raised a brow, the curve of her smile sharpening. “Almost like someone up there took pity on us.”

Arthur met her gaze, trying to summon the same controlled calm he used in every negotiation, every interrogation. But her eyes, bright, curious, entirely too knowing, made it impossible.

“I suppose someone might have thought you were due for some good fortune,” he said evenly.

“Mmmhm.” She hummed into her mug, unconvinced. “Maybe.”

She swirled the coffee in her mug, eyes flicking over him like she was assessing an injury. “Whoever sent it,” she said slowly, “has access to high-grade medical stock. Maybe even Brotherhood supply crates, if I had to guess.”

Arthur kept his expression neutral, but the muscle in his jaw betrayed him with the faintest twitch.

She noticed. Of course she did.

“No insignia, though,” she went on, pretending to muse. “No formal request for acknowledgment. No escort patrol to ‘verify delivery.’ That’s not exactly Brotherhood protocol, is it?”

Arthur’s voice stayed even. “I wouldn’t know. Logistics doesn’t run every detail past me.”

She took a slow sip, watching him over the rim again. “So it just appeared, out of the goodness of someone’s heart.”

He met her gaze this time, steady, unwavering. “Maybe someone thought the work you do deserved it.”

“That someone,” she said, setting her cup down, “would be a very rare breed in this Commonwealth.”

The corner of his mouth lifted, betraying the faintest smile. 

She let that linger a beat, her fingers tracing the chipped edge of the mug. Then her tone softened. Not mocking now, just quiet, almost thoughtful.

“I don’t think it came from the Brotherhood, actually.”

Arthur raised a brow, though he didn’t trust his voice enough to speak.

Her eyes lifted to meet his. “I think it came from you.”

The air between them seemed to still. The hum of the generator outside filled the silence, low and constant, like a heartbeat.

Arthur’s throat worked once, a faint movement he didn’t quite suppress. He wanted to deflect, to deny it, but her expression wasn’t accusing. It was knowing. Grateful. Something gentler.

He didn’t answer right away. The words she’d spoken hung between them, and in their quiet certainty, he heard every truth he’d been trying not to face.

He looked down into his mug, at the faint ripple of reflection in the dark liquid. He thought of the requisition forms signed in the dead hours of the night, the excuses made about redistribution of surplus stock, the way the scribes had traded looks but said nothing. The way Kells’s brow had furrowed as if he knew better than to ask.

He’d told himself it was strategic. A gesture to maintain good relations with a valuable neutral asset. Supplies sent where they would do the most good. That’s what he’d written in the report. But even then, part of him knew it wasn’t about strategy.

It was about her.

The way she looked now, eyes lit by the low lantern glow, life and gratitude softening the edges of her exhaustion… it made every whisper on the Prydwen worth it. If this was the only way he could help shoulder her burden, then so be it.

She was still watching him, waiting. Her tone gentled further, barely above the whisper of the cooling coffee between them. 

“Why?”

Arthur drew in a breath and let it out slowly. He didn’t want to lie. Not to her.

“The clinics,” he said, his voice low but steady. “They mean a great deal to you.” He lifted his eyes to meet hers. “And you… you’re important to me.”

For a long moment, neither of them moved. The words just sat there. Simple, weighty, irretrievable.

Abigail’s fingers stilled around her cup. The faintest tremor passed through her, like the smallest intake of breath, and then, quietly, she smiled.

“An important asset to the Brotherhood,” she countered gently, her voice steady but her eyes darting away for just a second. Trying to pull them both back to safer ground.

Arthur shook his head once, slow and certain. “No, Abby,” he said, his voice dropping low to something quieter, something almost fragile. “Not the Brotherhood.”

The words landed between them like a weight neither of them wanted to move. The lantern’s glow flickered, catching on the edges of her face, the line of her jaw, the faint pink at her cheeks. The silence stretched, full but not uncomfortable, charged with something neither of them had the language for.

Arthur found himself memorizing the way the light danced in her hair, the tremor in her breath. She looked at him with sharp eyes, and whatever deflection she’d been preparing faltered.

Then softly, deliberately, her hand crossed the table. The tips of her fingers brushed his before settling over them. Her skin was warm against his calloused knuckles, her touch light but grounding.

It completely unraveled him.

For a man who’d stood unflinching before super mutants and soldiers alike, it was astonishing how a single human touch could undo all the armor he’d ever worn. His heart hammered, his breath caught; he didn’t dare move.

Her voice, when it came, was barely above a whisper. “Thank you.”

Arthur swallowed hard, the sound almost audible in the quiet. “You don’t have to—”

“I know,” she interrupted, the corners of her mouth lifting just slightly. “But I want to.”

The silence that followed wasn’t empty. It was full of all the things they weren’t yet ready to say.

Arthur’s mind spun in the wake of her touch. It shouldn’t have undone him this way, but it did. It reminded him, impossibly, of a different table: the mess hall in the Citadel. They’d sat across from one another then, too, the hum of machinery in the walls and a chessboard between them.

He remembered the way she used to think three moves ahead, her eyes sharp and unyielding, always watching his hands, rarely ever his face. She’d never looked at him the way she was looking at him now. Never touched him like this. Back then, it had been duty and discipline and playful teasing, two would-be soldiers on opposite sides of a board, testing each other’s defenses.

Now there was no board between them. No moves left to play. Just the fragile, dangerous quiet of understanding.

His pulse thundered against his ribs. Slowly, carefully, as if afraid to break the spell, he turned his hand beneath hers, his palm open, taking her hand properly in his. She didn’t pull away.

Her eyes lifted to meet his, and the air between them seemed to hum. It was the same look he remembered from the alley, when grief and longing had blurred together. But here it was softer, warmer. The world outside the diner could have burned away, and he wouldn’t have noticed.

For that single suspended heartbeat, it wasn’t the Elder of the Brotherhood and the Doctor of the Blue Line. 

It was just Arthur and Abby.

Abigail’s eyes lingered on their joined hands. His dwarfed hers. Broad, calloused, steady. Hers were small, soft, a contrast that made the moment feel impossibly fragile. Still, she didn’t pull away.

Arthur could barely breathe.

Then, a crash from the back room shattered the spell. Both of them startled. Abby’s hand slipped from his, the warmth fading as quickly as it had come.

“Ricky,” she called, voice tighter than before.

The younger man appeared in the doorway, clutching a fallen crate and looking sheepish. “Sorry, Doc. Thought I had it.”

“You didn’t,” she said, but her tone was gentle. She brushed a strand of hair behind her ear, the faintest trace of color still in her cheeks.

Arthur rose, the vinyl of the booth creaking as he stood. He adjusted his coat out of habit, though the gesture felt hollow, his thoughts still caught on the ghost of her touch. “I should go,” he said, quietly. “They’ll be waiting at the drop point.”

Abby turned to him, something unreadable flickering behind her eyes. Regret, maybe? Or longing carefully disguised as composure. 

“Thank you,” she said again, softer this time. “For the supplies. And for…” Her words trailed off, the rest left unsaid.

Their eyes met, just for a moment too long. Then Arthur inclined his head, the motion deliberate, almost formal, because he didn’t trust what might come out if he spoke again.

He stepped out into the cold night, the door creaking shut behind him. The air bit at his face, sharp and clean. The rotors of the waiting vertibird hummed somewhere in the distance, but for now, he just stood there, fingers curling once as if he could still feel her hand in his.

The night air cut through him like a blade, sharp enough to clear his head, but not enough to quiet it. He walked a few paces toward the waiting vertibird before stopping, breath misting in the dark. The phantom warmth of her hand still clung to his skin, as if refusing to let go.

It was dangerous, how easily she rattled him. How her voice, her eyes, her quiet defiance had rooted themselves somewhere he couldn’t excise. The Brotherhood demanded discipline, distance, control. But every time he left her, he felt the pull a little stronger, like gravity; inevitable and absolute.

He turned back once. Through the fogged glass, he saw her again. Steady now, moving to help Ricky with the fallen crate. The light of the lantern framed her in gold, soft and unyielding all at once.

Arthur’s gaze dropped to the strip of blue tape at her door. It gleamed faintly in the low light, a boundary she’d built between herself and the chaos of the world. Between her and him.

He let himself hope, just for a heartbeat, that it would hold. That safety would remain on her side of that line.

Then he turned away and walked into the dark.

The generator hummed outside, steady as a heartbeat. Ricky had come to think of that sound as proof the world hadn’t ended all the way yet. It filled the silence between the clinks of glass and the scratch of his pencil as he marked the latest inventory in the ledger.

“Two gauze rolls, three antiseptic, one… uh, whatever this is,” he muttered, squinting at a vial stamped with faded pre-war lettering. Half the shipment made no sense. Medical-grade medications. Surgical gloves that still smelled of factory plastic. Sterile bandages– actually sealed in plastic, not the boiled-and-hoped kind.

Not the kind that just showed up unannounced.

He turned the label over in his hand and frowned. No sender, no stamp, no caravan tag. Just coordinates and a scribbled approval mark from someone who wanted to stay unseen.

“Nothing in this world’s free,” he said under his breath. “Not from them.”

Them being the Brotherhood. Steel knights with big guns and bigger ideas. He’d seen them once, up close, when the Elder himself came to the clinic. That was the day the Doc told him, of all people, to stand his ground.

He could still remember the weight of the Elder’s glare when he’d been the one to ask him to drop his weapon at the door. His voice had shaken when he said it, but he said it. Abby had smiled at him after, the small, approving kind that made you feel like maybe you’d done something worth doing.

He missed the farm sometimes. The smell of tilled dirt and diesel, the quiet mornings before the heat came in. But there hadn’t been much reason to stay. Four siblings, one dying crop, and a mother who told him he’d never really amount to anything meaningful.

Maybe she wasn’t wrong. But Abigail… she’d never said things like that. She was patient, calm. She’d shown him how to stitch a wound, set a splint, hold pressure until the bleeding stopped. And she’d said we when she talked about the work, like he belonged there beside her.

He wanted to believe that.

Ricky set another bottle from the crate onto the shelf and exhaled slowly. The supplies made him nervous. They were too clean, too perfect, too… Brotherhood. He didn’t trust anything that came from the sky, especially when the Elder’s eyes had been wandering toward the Doc more and more lately.

He told himself it was just paranoia. Then again, paranoia in the Commonwealth kept you alive. He’d learned that early in his life. 

The generator’s hum broke into a soft sputter, followed by silence. For a heartbeat, the only sound was his breathing. Then, through the thin wall separating him from the diner’s front room, he heard voices.

Ricky froze mid-step, a vial still in his hand. The low murmur came again, clear now through the thin wall separating the back room from the diner.

At first, he thought Abigail was talking to one of the patients. But the voice that answered her made his stomach drop. Low, precise, carrying that command that didn’t need to shout to make you stand straighter.

The Elder.

For a second, Ricky’s instinct was just… fear. The same kind he’d felt the first time the man walked through the door, broad-shouldered and unreadable, his shadow cutting across the blue tape.

That day, Ricky had thought he’d die before he could even get the words out. No weapons past the line, sir.

The Elder had stared at him like he was testing whether or not to step on an insect. But he’d done it. Set the sidearm down, crossed the line, and gone to Abby’s side like he belonged there.

And that was the worst part.

He had looked like he belonged there.

Now, hearing his voice again made Ricky’s pulse tick faster. It wasn’t anger he felt, at least not the kind that burned. More like a tremor that ran under the skin. Unease. Wariness. Maybe even worry.

The Doc didn’t need men like him around. Men with power, men who got people killed when they thought they were saving them. Men used to control. 

He could hear her voice rise a little now, a teasing lilt in it that didn’t belong anywhere near a man like that. She said something that made the Elder pause. He couldn’t make out the words, but the tone– light, almost playful– felt strange coming from her. She wasn’t like that with anyone.

There was something there, and he hated how curious it made him.

He set the vial down too hard, the glass clicking against the metal shelf. Abigail didn’t talk about her past, not really. Just occasional mentions of her “other clinics,” like a ghost trail stretching across the eastern seaboard. He’d pieced together what that meant on his own: she never stayed long. She built sanctuaries, then moved on when she felt like it was time.

It was the part he didn’t say out loud that kept him up some nights.

That someday, she’d leave this one too.

And he’d be the one left behind to keep it running. To do what she did.

He wasn’t ready for that. He didn’t think he ever would be.

The voices up front went quiet for a few seconds. He could almost hear the shift in tone before Abby spoke again, sharper now, words clipping through the muffled wall.

“I don’t think it came from the Brotherhood,” she said.

Ricky frowned. What didn’t? The supplies? 

“I think it came from you.”

The silence that followed stretched too long. Long enough that Ricky realized he was holding his breath. He strained to hear what came next, but there was nothing. Just the faint scrape of a chair and the low hum of the generator starting up again, like the building itself was pretending it hadn’t heard either.

Ricky told himself he wasn’t listening anymore. Told himself it was none of his business.

But curiosity won.

He crept toward the doorway, careful on the scuffed linoleum, wincing when one tile let out a faint creak beneath his boot. The diner’s lantern light spilled in a soft gold through the half-open door, painting a slice across his arm. He leaned just far enough to see.

And froze.

Abigail and the Elder sat across from each other at one of the corner tables. The lantern next to them cast warm halos on their faces. For a heartbeat, it looked almost ordinary, like two people just sharing coffee and talking after hours.

Except it wasn’t.

Her hand rested over his on the table, fingers curved just slightly. His much larger hand had turned palm up beneath hers, holding it there as if it were sacred. Neither spoke. The air between them was charged. Quiet but alive, the kind of stillness before lightning strikes.

Ricky didn’t understand it, not really. But he knew it was dangerous.

His stomach twisted. The Elder wasn’t a man you touched. You saluted him, you feared him, but you didn’t look at him like that, and he sure as hell didn’t look back.

And yet here they were, soft-eyed and silent, like the world outside the diner didn’t exist.

He started to back away, pulse thundering in his ears. That’s when his heel caught the edge of a crate. It tipped.

The sound was sharp in the quiet– a metallic clatter of boiled instruments spilling across the tile. Scalpel, tweezers, scissors. Each one a tiny, damning echo.

“Shit,” he hissed, dropping to his knees to gather them up. His hands shook, and he winced as one of the instruments nicked his finger. He was still fumbling with the crate when he heard her voice.

“Ricky.”

She didn’t shout. She never had to. Just his name, calm but edged. His heart hammered against his ribs.

He stood, gripping the crate like a shield, and stepped into the doorway with a sheepish half-smile.

“Sorry, Doc. Thought I had it.”

Abby’s expression was unreadable for a beat. Then she shook her head, exhaling through her nose.

“You didn’t.”

Ricky nodded quickly, setting the crate down on a counter near the door. He glanced between them, pretending not to notice what he wasn’t supposed to see. But he did notice, because now, their hands weren’t touching.

The space between them looked deliberate.

He didn’t know what scared him more: that they’d pulled apart, or that for one quiet moment, they hadn’t.

The rest of the night after the Elder left passed in a quiet shuffle of work.

Ricky had half a mind to crawl into the storeroom and sleep sitting up, but Abigail didn’t rest. Not really. She’d come back to the rear counter, calm as ever, and started checking their stock again. He followed her lead; that was what you did when the Doc was in motion. You kept up.

She didn’t say a word about what had just happened.

Neither did he.

When she reached for the crate he’d dropped earlier, he winced. “Sorry ‘bout that, Doc. I’ll—”

She cut him off gently, taking it from his hands. “They’ll need to be re-boiled. Floor’s filthy.”

“Yeah. I know.”

She set the instruments aside, her movements measured, precise, even as fatigue hung around her like smoke. She was always careful about sanitation. She said it was the first rule of keeping people alive. Even with torn rags and ancient tools, she treated everything like it mattered. Ricky admired that.

For a while, the only sound was the faint clink of glass and the muted sigh of the wind outside.

He kept meaning to say something. To tell her what he’d seen, what he was thinking. That getting too close to the Brotherhood, especially its Elder, wasn’t safe. But when he looked at her, all focused steadiness and quiet strength, the words tangled up in his throat.

He’d heard the rumors, sure. That she’d been Brotherhood once. That she’d left under strange circumstances. That she came from another wasteland, far away. Fairy tales, maybe. Or maybe the kind of stories people told because the truth was too complicated.

Either way, she was the best thing that had happened to this godforsaken stretch of the Commonwealth.

And Ricky knew one thing for sure: if the Brotherhood got too close, if the Elder got too invested, it would ruin everything.

Still, when she smiled faintly as she ticked the last item off her list, pride stirred somewhere under his ribs. What they were doing mattered. It meant something.

The diner had settled into that stillness that came just before dawn. The kind that made even the flickering lanterns seem tired. The hum of the generator pulsed steadily, the smell of boiled cloth faint in the air.

Ricky stacked the last crate and stretched, shoulders cracking. His eyes felt gritty. Abby had already told him twice to get some rest, and this time, he actually meant to listen.

“Go sleep, Ricky,” she said again, not unkindly. “Get a few hours while you can.” 

“Yeah,” he muttered, rubbing the back of his neck. “I will.”

The room tucked behind the old counter wasn’t much of a home. Just the old kitchen space with a cot shoved against the wall, a half-broken door that didn’t close right, and the smell of antiseptic baked into everything. But it was safe. Safe enough, anyway.

He’d just turned toward it when something caught his eye through the window.

A shape moved in the fog.

Ricky squinted, leaning closer. The glass was cold under his palm, slick with condensation. A figure walked slowly down the center of the street, steady, not staggering, not desperate. Someone looking for the clinic, maybe. It happened more often than you’d think at this hour.

“Doc,” he called over his shoulder, “we got somebody comin’ in.”

She straightened at once, brushing her hair back, already in motion. “Alright.” Her tone was calm, the same as always. “Let’s see what they need.”

Ricky nodded and stepped toward the door. The bell above it gave a faint, tinny ring as the figure stepped in through the fog.

The man’s armor was scuffed, but solid. Combat armor, patched in places with divots where bullets might have bounced off. His expression was unreadable. In his hands, he held a single-barreled shotgun. 

Nothing strange about that. People came armed all the time. They all did the same thing: stop, see the blue tape, and leave the weapon in the tray. Respecting the law of the line.

Ricky watched, expecting the same.

The man stood still in the doorway, just inside the frame. The fog coiled around his boots. He looked down at the blue tape.

Too long.

Something about the pause made Ricky’s stomach twist. The man didn’t move for what felt like a full minute. Then, instead of bending to set the weapon down, he shifted his grip on it.

The sound broke the quiet like a snapped bone.

Chk-shk.

The shotgun’s pump echoed against the tile, and for a second, Ricky didn’t understand what he’d just heard. His brain refused to process it.

Then the man raised his head.

Ricky froze. He didn’t breathe, didn’t blink. His pulse thundered in his chest.

The man stared at the line again, then took one deliberate step forward.

The heel of his boot came down on the other side of the blue tape with a dull, final thud.

Ricky’s mouth went dry. 

Something was wrong.

Very wrong.

He opened his mouth to call out, but nothing came.

The world held its breath.

Abigail looked up. 

Chapter Text

Dawn arrived quietly in the Commonwealth, slipping through the cracks of a world that had forgotten what peace looked like.

The light was thin, colorless. A hesitant gray that crawled across bent steel and the bones of buildings.

For a while, the only sound was the wind, whispering through the ruins like it carried secrets.

In Diamond City, the market woke up slowly.

Canvas stalls flapped in the cold breeze, the air thick with the metallic scent of rain that hadn’t yet fallen.

Myrna’s keys jingled as she fumbled with the locks, cursing softly under her breath.

Across the square, Takahashi stirred his pot, steam curling upward in ghostly tendrils.

A stray cat darted between crates, tail high, eyes reflecting the first hint of dawn.

From a small radio at Power Noodles, a voice crackled through the air. 

“G–good morning, Commonwealth! Uh, hope you’re… still out there. And dry. Heard it’s gonna rain today, so maybe, uh… maybe keep your socks off the ground? Heh. Anyway–”

Static crackled across the airwaves. Someone adjusted the dial. 

“—keep your heads down. And, y’know… uh, keep listening to Diamond City Radio. If you want.”

A weary caravan rolled through the gate, its brahmin snorting at the smell of rust.

The guards didn’t bother to look up. Another day beginning, another day surviving.

To the south, near Quincy, Brotherhood armor gleamed in the half-light.

The squad moved through the mist in perfect formation, powered joints hissing softly with each step.

Their red insignia glowed faintly in the gloom, like coals kept alive through the night.

A young knight stopped to adjust a loose cable at his shoulder.

He lifted his gaze to the east, where smoke blurred the horizon. Not black, not yet, but thick enough to raise suspicion.

“Mark it,” said the Captain.

The Knight did, pencil scraping across a weathered map.

Somewhere in that distance, a dog barked. One sound, then silence.

The captain didn’t look back.

Goodneighbor never slept, not really.

But as morning came, the noise fuzzed.

The last of the night’s drinkers stumbled into the streets, laughing too loud for the hour.

Rainwater pooled in the cracks of the cobblestones, rippling as the neon signs flickered and reflected in it.

Fresh, red words marred the brick wall across from the Third Rail, graffiti shouting into the void: BLOOD NEVER REALLY WASHES OFF.

The words blurred in the rain, the paint running like an open wound.

Inside, the lights of the Memory Den hummed red and low.

Irma adjusted a set of wires, her motions steady and practiced.

On the chair beneath the machine, Nora Murphy lay still, eyes closed, fingers twitching like she was chasing something in a dream.

Beside her, an old detective sat silently with wires connected to his circuits. 

The machine answered with a low electrical sigh.

Farther north, at Bunker Hill, merchants unrolled their tarps, shaking the light rain from them before it could soak through.

Someone turned up the volume on a portable radio to drown out the thunder.

Travis’s voice fought through the static, uncertain but determined:

“Uh, hey there, Commonwealth. If you’re out on the road this morning… hope you’re keepin’ safe. And, uh– this next one goes out to someone… someone up there in the clouds. You know who you are. Maybe? I hope.”

He chuckled nervously.

The song that followed was old… slow and aching, brass curling through the gray like smoke.

It carried over rooftops and broken streets, a fragile warmth against the cold.

It drifted into the sky, past the mist, and up into the churning clouds. 

A woman monitoring military radio chatter stopped to listen.

For a heartbeat, the whole world seemed to pause with her.

The light reached the outskirts last.

Past the skeletons of cars, the rusted signs, the scattered bones of the old world.

It found a diner beside the road, its windows dim, its paint long peeled to nothing.

A faint glow burned inside.

Warm. Steady.

The air outside was still but tense, the silence stretched too tight to be peaceful.

Somewhere down the street, a crow hopped along a telephone line, cawing once before taking flight.

A stray dog nosed at an overturned trash can, tail tucked low.

The fog had gathered in tendrils across the ground, thick and waiting.

Then, without warning, the sound split the morning.

A single gunshot. 

Sharp. Echoing. Final.

The dog bolted.

Birds scattered.

And the Commonwealth held its breath. 

Irene liked the early mornings best, before the city started making noise.

Before the merchants began hawking their scrap and the vertibirds cut the sky into ribbons.

Out here, behind the old church, it was quiet. Just the crows, the shovel, and the dirt.

She drove the blade into the earth and turned it over, again and again, each motion as familiar as breathing. The ground was still wet from the misting of rain, heavy and cold, clinging to her boots. A faint mist coiled through the graveyard, softening the crooked stones and sunken plots. The smell of damp soil and iron filled the air.

It wasn’t holy ground anymore. Hadn’t been for a long time. The church itself leaned sideways like a man too tired to keep standing, windows gaping empty, the bell long gone. Irene sometimes wondered who it had rung for last.

She worked because someone had to. 

There was no glory in it. No ceremony, no crowd of mourners in black. Just a shovel, a patch of dirt, and the quiet sound of the earth taking someone back.

Most days, the bodies just appeared. Left by the gate under the cover of night, wrapped in blankets or old tarps. No notes, no names. Once, she’d found a woman propped against the fence, hands folded neatly like she’d arranged herself before dying. Irene had buried her just the same as all the others.

Other times, families came. Not often, but every now and then someone would knock on her door, eyes hollow, voice trembling, asking if she could make a place. She’d nod, take the body, and let them say their goodbyes before the dirt covered the makeshift coffin. The words were always the same: thank you. As if she were doing something sacred, not just the work everyone else was too afraid to touch.

And then there were the ones she found herself, walking the road toward Diamond City, faces half-buried in the dust, fingers still clutching trade sacks or weapons that hadn’t saved them in the end. She’d load them into her cart, whispering apologies like prayers. Out here, dying wasn’t a tragedy; it was just the last thing that happened to you.

Still, she buried them. Every one. Because if she didn’t, who would? The thought of the dead left above ground, picked clean by dogs or left to weather down to bone, it didn’t sit right. Not even now, after all this time.

It wasn’t that she believed in souls anymore. It was just… respect. The last kindness she could still give.

The shovel struck something solid, an old root maybe, and she set her foot on the edge, pressing down until it gave. Her back ached. Her fingers were stiff, cracked from years of digging. She was no spring chicken, not anymore. But she kept going. The living still needed the dead to stay buried, and that was enough.

When she was younger, she’d told herself the job didn’t matter. Bury them, mark them, move on. But somewhere along the way, she’d started talking to them; quiet little words that didn’t mean anything but felt necessary. Sorry for the cold. Sorry for the dirt. Sorry no one came to see you off.

Maybe it was superstition. Maybe it was loneliness. She never decided which.

Lately, she’d been digging less. The bodies weren’t coming in as fast. Not from Diamond City, not from the caravans, not even from the raiders that used to get themselves shot over scraps of turf and pride.

At first, she’d thought maybe she was just missing them. Maybe someone else was burying the dead farther out, or maybe the scavvers had started burning the bodies instead. But the truth was simpler: people just weren’t dying as often.

It didn’t make sense. The wasteland didn’t stop killing people. It never did. Raiders, radiation, hunger, disease. It all took its turn. But lately, the rhythm had slowed. The violence felt thinner somehow, stretched out.

Irene didn’t know what to make of it. She’d heard whispers from the traders passing through: stories of clinics popping up in the city ruins, places where even the dying got patched up instead of put down. She’d thought it was just talk, the kind of fairy tale people told to make the world seem less cruel.

“Can’t wish for more bodies,” she muttered now, scooping another load of mud and throwing it aside. 

Hope was dangerous in the wasteland. It made you soft. But still, she couldn’t help wondering what it might mean, this strange pause in death. Maybe the world was remembering how to breathe again.

The wind picked up, carrying the faint sound of a radio somewhere nearby. She caught a few words in the static. Something about the weather, and the DJ stammering through a dedication to someone in the clouds. She smiled despite herself. Poor kid still couldn’t get a sentence out without tripping over it.

Her shovel caught again. She leaned her weight into it, grunting as it broke through the next layer.

Occasionally, she left things behind. A habit she’d picked up from the priests who used to bless these graves. A bottle of liquor, a toy, a bottlecap too warped to spend. Something to say you were here. She’d done it so long she didn’t even think about it anymore.

Today, it was a teddy bear.

The box by the gate was too small.

She’d seen it first thing that morning, half-shadowed beneath the overhang, the dew still beading on the rough boards. Someone had left it there before dawn, same as always, without a word or a name.

She’d known before she opened it what she’d find. Still, when she lifted the lid, the breath left her chest like she’d been struck. The body inside was wrapped carefully in a white sheet, the kind they used in the old world for cribs and beds and Sunday clothes. The face beneath it was soft, unmarked, and terribly still.

For a moment, Irene let herself believe the child was just sleeping. She could almost see the little chest rise, a tiny exhale clouding the morning chill. But the world didn’t give second chances. Not even to the innocent. 

She’d gone back inside for the teddy bear. Patched and mended, the thing barely held together, but it was the best she could offer. She’d found the thing half-buried near the church steps weeks ago, one eye missing, stuffing leaking from a seam. She’d meant to toss it, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. It felt wrong somehow, like throwing away a memory. 

She placed it beside the child before she nailed the lid shut. One last kindness. One more futile attempt to make death gentler than it was. The girl looked peaceful. 

Maybe that’s what death really was: peace. A mercy the living didn’t get to have. And yet, she thought, looking at the mound of dirt waiting to cover the box, what a cruel gift it was to give to someone so small.

For a long moment, she stood there, one palm on the wooden lid, her breath fogging in the chill air. There was no one to say the words, so she said them herself, voice rough and quiet.

“May the ground be gentle,” she whispered. “And may the next life be kinder.”

The fog thickened as she filled the grave. It gathered low to the ground, curling around her boots and the edges of the mound, softening the world until it was only her, the shovel, and the hollow sound of earth hitting wood.

She didn’t hurry. Each scoop felt heavier than the last, the mud clinging to the blade as if the ground itself didn’t want to let go. The first shovelful landed with a dull, wet thud. The next struck harder. By the third, she could feel the ache building in her arms, in her chest.

The sound was different when it was a child. The box was small, the echo shorter, but it still carried that same final weight; the sound of the world closing in.

She paused halfway through, leaning on the handle, breath misting in the morning chill. The fog swallowed the horizon, and for a moment she could almost imagine there wasn’t a grave beneath her feet, just dirt and fog and quiet. But the shovel was still heavy in her hands.

When she finished, she smoothed the mound with the back of the blade, flattening the soil until it looked as undisturbed as she could make it. 

Then came the sound.

A gunshot, distant but sharp, echoing off the old church walls. The crows startled all at once, black wings beating into the fog. Irene froze, shovel in hand, and listened.

Then she sighed.

“Never ends,” she whispered. “Never does.”

She looked down at her hands; brown, cracked, streaked with mud, and rubbed them absently on her trousers. The stains never quite came off.

When she finally turned toward the gate, the mist drifted low and gentle, covering the mound as if the earth itself was trying to comfort what the wasteland had taken.

The vertibird descended through the fog, its shadow gliding across the fractured streets below. Arthur could see the diner from the air. Small, quiet. The diner-turned-clinic always glowed this time of morning, lanterns burning like sentinels against the dark. Now, only a dim orange light flickered through the windows.

He told himself it meant nothing. The scouts’ report had been vague: Incident near Blue Line Alpha, casualties likely.

He’d read those words twice, then a third time. They could’ve meant anyone. They didn’t have to mean her.

But even now, with the wind from the rotors buffeting his coat, he could feel the old dread creeping in. The kind that settled low in his gut and refused to move. Just last night, that same light had been steady and warm, spilling across the table where she’d sat opposite him. Her eyes on his, hand in his, a smile on her lips. For a few rare hours, the world hadn’t felt so broken.

Now the clinic looked cold, the glow weaker, as though the warmth of that moment had been snuffed out in the dark.

The moment the vertibird’s skids kissed the ground, he was already moving. His boots hit the pavement hard, and the hum of the engines faded into a ringing silence. He left the squad behind and stalked toward the front door.

He’d been here just hours before, when it had been peaceful and still, when she’d looked at him like she almost trusted him.

Now it was still in a way that set his teeth on edge.

He adjusted his coat, feeling the weight of every possibility clawing at him. He could see the diner ahead through the thinning mist, the familiar outline cutting through the early dawn. And there, by the curb, a figure on the ground.

A body beneath a sheet. Almost white in the morning haze, except where the blood had seeped through near the head.

Arthur stopped cold. His breath hitched, and the world narrowed. For a moment, he worried what he would see if he lifted the sheet. It could be her face there; dark hair matted with blood, steady hands gone still, her body lying where her sanctuary used to stand. The thought lodged sharp behind his ribs.

He swallowed hard and forced his legs to move.

Don’t assume. Don’t let it in.

But the truth was already there, humming under his skin: if she was gone, he wasn’t sure what kind of man he’d be when the sun came up.

Arthur steeled himself. The near-dawn light caught on the crimson stain that had soaked through the sheet, and for one suspended heartbeat, he almost turned back. He could still pretend he didn’t know. He could still imagine she was fine. Busy somewhere, steady while she worked, that almost-smile curving at the corner of her mouth.

But his boots kept moving. Every step felt heavier, the air thick with the smell of rain and blood.

He reached the door and hesitated. Through the grimy glass, he could see the faint glimmer of a lamp inside. Alive, then. He clung to that. He pushed the door open.

The blue tape stared at him from the floor just beyond the threshold: the line that had started as rumor and turned into law. A streak of blood marred the deep turquoise. For a moment, his shadow wavered over it: Elder Maxson, commander, leader… and now something else entirely. He drew his sidearm from its holster and set it carefully in the metal tray beside the door. The click of the safety sounded loud in the stillness. Only then did he step across.

The clinic was almost empty. Two patients slept under thin blankets on the far wall. Abby’s apprentice sat slumped in a chair near the counter, pale under the flickering light, his eyes glazed with exhaustion or shock. He looked up at Arthur only briefly, his eyes wide and haunted, then looked away again, hands twisting in his lap.

An overturned table lay on its side, one leg broken. A tray of instruments scattered like shrapnel across the floor. The air buzzed faintly with the dying hum of the generator. A trail of blood cut across the linoleum from the door. 

It led through the center, to a pool dark and glaring, next to an overturned cot. 

She was there.

The blood on the floor gleamed dark around her, catching what little light the early dawn had begun to give.

Abigail knelt, sleeves rolled high, moving with sharp, deliberate precision. Her apron was soaked through, her fingers slick as she worked a rag against a dark stain on the floor. Over and over. Wringing. Scrubbing. Too hard. The rhythm was too quick to be careful, too precise to be mindless.

“Abby,” he said softly, the word barely a breath.

She was covered in blood. Some of it pasted dark tendrils of her hair to her temple, smeared along her jaw, her hands and wrists burgundy and stark against the black-and-white linoleum. 

She didn’t look at him. Her movements never stopped, rag twisting, water splattering red against the tile.

Arthur took a step closer, the floor creaking under his weight. The air smelled of iron and disinfectant, sharp enough to sting his throat. This wasn’t the calm, steady woman from last night, sitting across from him, her eyes bright with something like warmth. That warmth was gone. She was all edges now, every motion stripped of softness, as if she’d scrubbed that away too.

“Abby, are you–”

Her hands slowed. Without looking up, she said, “It’s not my blood.”

Another patient lost, he thought. The hollow precision of her movements was too familiar. He’d seen it before, the ritual of doctors after failure, scrubbing at the evidence until it stopped feeling like blame. He thought of Boyd, of that same look in the alley when she’d held her grief behind her teeth and called it control.

“I’m sorry,” he murmured, not knowing what else to say. 

A faint sound left her, not quite a laugh, not quite a scoff. “Don’t be.”

Then her gaze flicked past him again. Slowly this time, steady. He followed it and saw the shotgun. Half-hidden beneath the cot, barrel streaked with drying blood. The sight of it sent a chill down his spine. The air seemed to thin around them. It didn’t belong here. Not on this side of the line.

Abby’s voice was barely above a whisper. “Throw it out,” she said, her tone so calm it almost masked the tremor underneath. “Past the line. Please.”

Arthur hesitated, glancing between her and the weapon. The request was simple enough, but there was something brittle in it. Something that told him she couldn’t do it herself. He bent, picked up the gun by the stock, and crossed back toward the threshold. The weight of it was wrong in his hands, heavy with the echo of what had happened here. 

He tossed it through the open door. 

The clatter of metal on pavement rang through the clinic, loud and final. It sounded like a verdict.

When he turned back, she was standing now. The movement was slow, deliberate, like she had to remind her body how to stay upright. He noticed then that the line of blood streaking toward the door wasn’t clean– it had been dragged, smeared across the diner’s cracked linoleum like a wound the room itself couldn’t close. A red line, contrasting the blue.

She looked down at her hands, still stained with blood. For a long moment, she only stared– like she couldn’t quite remember how they’d gotten that way. Then she crossed to the basin near the kettle.

Arthur watched in silence as she poured the water and began to wash her hands. At first, the motion was practiced; the same ritual he’d seen a dozen times before. The healer cleaning up, making herself ready for the next crisis. 

The rhythm faltered. The movements turned sharp. The sound of scrubbing grew rough, too loud in the small room, rhythm erratic. She scrubbed harder, knuckles blanching, shoulders tightening with every pass. The water clouded pink, then red, then darker. 

He’d seen her just the night before, but not like this.

Then, the lantern light had caught in her hair, not blood. She’d teased him softly over a cup of coffee gone cold, eyes bright, alive. He could still feel the ghost of her hand in his; the warmth, the stillness between them, the impossible gentleness of it before her apprentice’s clumsy interruption had shattered the moment.

Now, that warmth was gone. All that remained was the sound of her breathing, uneven and shallow, and the steady rasp of skin against skin. The same hands that had rested gently in his were raw now, her movements mechanical, punishing. The woman who had laughed with him hours ago was dissolving before his eyes, piece by piece, until all that was left was the motion.

“Abby…” he began, uncertain. She continued. 

Arthur watched the slow collapse of the composure she wore like armor. Her expression became pained. Each pass of her hands with the sponge grew rougher, as if she could peel away the stain by force. Her skin turned pink and raw, blood still clinging to her wrists and under her fingernails. She was breaking, right in front of him, and doing it so quietly it hurt to watch.

He took a hesitant step forward. “Abby, that’s enough.”

Her voice came as a whisper, hoarse and fragile. “It won’t come off.”

Arthur’s throat tightened. The sound of it, so quiet, so stripped bare, hit something deep inside him.

He stepped closer, cautious.

When he reached out, his hand finding her forearm, she recoiled instantly. Violently. The basin rocked, splashing burgundy water over her apron, the sound sharp in the stillness. She backed away, her breath coming too fast, eyes wide and shining in the lamplight.

Arthur froze where he stood, hand open, useless. He’d only meant to steady her. The recoil still echoed in him, sharper than any blow. 

Her composure returned in fragments, brittle and trembling. She turned away, shoulders rigid, arms drawn tight to her chest as if holding herself together by force. A tremor still ran through her, fine and shuddering, catching in her breath.

“Don’t,” she whispered.

Arthur lowered his hand. “Alright,” he said quietly. “Alright.”

The distance between them was only a few feet, but it felt like miles.

She turned away from him, every motion deliberate. Too deliberate. The sleeves of her shirt were still damp, her hands still trembling faintly, but she was already reaching for the overturned table.

Arthur didn’t move at first. He just watched as she righted it, the legs scraping harshly against the linoleum. One corner splintered, uneven, but she pressed it down anyway, flattening it as if restoring the clinic’s order might restore her own.

“Ricky,” she said, her voice steadier now. “Clean that trail before it dries.”

The redheaded boy stared sightlessly ahead, shell-shocked. At her voice, he startled into motion, grabbing a rag, avoiding her eyes. Abby didn’t look at him again.

The woman who had smiled at him across a table just hours ago was gone, replaced by someone colder, quieter, carrying too much.

The shift in her was more jarring than the sight of the body outside.

Arthur felt something tighten in his chest. She was trying to take back control, piece by piece, like she could glue the world together if she just kept moving. He knew that feeling. He’d felt it before: the desperate need to do something after the worst had already happened. Sarah had been the same after battles sometimes, all discipline and orders until she finally collapsed in private, shaking from the weight of everything she’d tried to carry.

And then there was the way Abby had once broken down, years ago. After Sarah. He could still see it if he closed his eyes. The white sheet pulled up, the unmistakable outline beneath it, the way Abby’s knees had given out when she realized the medics hadn’t been able to save her. She’d clung to that shape like she could will it back to life, sobbing until a scribe had to pull her away; her screams had echoed down the corridors. Later, when the silence fell, she’d found him and held him together instead. Now, watching her try to keep her composure, he wanted to do the same; to take some of that weight, steady her hands, give her back what she’d once given him. But this wasn’t something he could fix.

He should leave. He knew that. He was an intruder here, witnessing something he wasn’t meant to see. But instead of stepping back, he stayed where he was. Rooted by the same instinct that had once driven him across battlefields and wastelands to protect those who couldn’t protect themselves. Only, this time, it wasn’t duty pulling him forward.

It was her.

He wanted to take even an ounce of the weight she refused to show.

Finally, when the silence grew too heavy, he found his voice. “What happened?”

Her back was still to him. She didn’t answer right away, didn’t even turn her head. He could see the tension in her shoulders, the way she braced her palms on the table as if she could ground herself by touch alone.

“Abby,” he said again, softer.

She turned, wiping her hands absently on her apron, only succeeding in smearing more blood across her skin. Her motions were measured now, like she could will herself back into composure through repetition.

Arthur stood a few paces behind her, unsure whether to speak again. The sound of Ricky’s rag against the floor filled the silence, the low hum of the generator behind it. Then, finally, her voice cut through.

“No weapons past the blue line.”

The words were steady, but the edge beneath them was sharp enough to bleed. Her eyes flicked toward the window– toward the still shape on the curb, covered by the thin white sheet. The faintest motion of her chin, barely there, was all the answer he needed.

Arthur followed her gaze, the pieces falling together one by one. The trail of blood leading from the door. No, he thought. Leading to the door. A body dragged out. The overturned table. The shotgun he’d thrown outside. The way her hands had trembled, how she’d scrubbed until the skin went raw.

It wasn’t a patient she’d lost. It was a sanctuary she’d had to defend.

He felt something shift in his chest. That deep, wordless ache of understanding.

He took a step closer. “Abby…” His voice came quiet, careful, as though any louder sound might shatter her. “Did you kill that man?”

She didn’t turn right away. For a moment, she stood so still he wondered if she’d heard him. Then she spoke.

“I’ve killed before,” she said evenly. “Plenty of times.”

Her tone wasn’t boastful or cold. It was clinical. A statement of fact, not confession.

Arthur said nothing. He didn’t trust his voice to come out steady.

Abby’s fingers flexed at her sides, faint tremors betraying her calm. “I’ve defended the line before,” she added, quieter now.

He stepped closer, boots whispering over the tile. Every instinct told him to keep his distance, but he couldn’t. Not when she looked like the weight of her own conviction was pressing her into the floor.

He wanted to reach for something, anything, to ground them both. To right the overturned chair, to wipe the blood from the floor, to take her trembling hands in his and soothe her nerves before she spiraled harder. But he stayed where he was.

Because he knew this wasn’t a wound he could tend.

So he stood in the silence instead, watching the woman he admired unravel one layer at a time, and realized the hardest thing he could do was nothing at all.

He paused and glanced toward the window. The white sheet outside fluttered in the dawn breeze. The sight settled heavy in his chest.

He stepped back toward the blue line and opened the door just enough to call to the soldiers waiting near the vertibird. One jogged up. 

“Take care of the body,” he said quietly. “Don’t make a scene.” 

Not an order. Just a request.

When he turned back, Abby had sunk into a booth seat by the windows. Her hands were clasped in her lap, knuckles white as she clenched them. She was breathing deeply, the shallow edge of panic fighting to become something steady, something practiced. Reaching for the composed mask she always wore.

Arthur watched her for a long moment.

“Do you remember what Sarah used to say?” he asked softly. “About taking a life?”

Abby didn’t look up. 

“If it ever stops hurting,” he murmured, the rest already written in the air between them.

She finished it quietly. “…you’re no longer human.”

Their eyes met then, a fragile thread of understanding bridging the distance.

Arthur stood there for a long moment after the words faded, caught between the urge to stay and the discipline that told him to leave. The room smelled strongly of copper and blood, the scent of every field hospital he’d ever walked through, but this was different. This was her space. Her quiet kingdom of order in a world that had forgotten what mercy was supposed to look like.

A kingdom that had been violated with violence.

He turned toward the window. Outside, the vertibird waited, his soldiers waiting with it, the world still spinning. He should go back to it. Return to duty. Pretend the line he’d crossed was still intact.

But when he looked at her, he knew he couldn’t.

Something in him tightened, a pull low in his chest that felt far too much like the old ache he used to associate with the calm after a battle. He thought of her hand in his. How warm it had been. How quickly that warmth had turned to cold. The realization that somewhere between duty and admiration, he had started to need her in ways he didn’t yet have words for. He’d promised himself then that it didn’t matter. 

Now, watching her breathe unsteadily, that promise felt like another lie.

Her eyes tracked his movement toward the door, the tilt of his head toward the window. She saw the hesitation.

“Stay,” she said quietly.

He froze.

“Please?” Her voice broke the still air, small but certain. “Just a little longer.”

He swallowed, the tightness in his throat making it hard to speak. He nodded once. 

“As long as I can.”

Arthur crossed the small distance and sat beside her. The booth creaked faintly beneath his weight. For a moment, neither of them spoke. Morning light spilled across the cracked tile, soft and gold, touching the edge of the blue tape that divided the world from her sanctuary. The blood along it gleamed darkly in the dawn.

Then, quietly, she tipped her head against his shoulder.

The motion was small, hesitant, like she wasn’t sure she was allowed. But when he didn’t move, when he only breathed a slow, steady breath beside her, she stayed.

Something inside him eased. He lifted his arm and drew it around her shoulders, careful not to startle her. She was warm against him, trembling just enough that he could feel it. For a heartbeat, she stayed rigid. Then, little by little, she pressed closer.

He hesitated, just for a moment, before his other arm came around her too, gentle but sure, turning and letting her rest against his chest. Her weight settled into him, her cheek brushing against his collarbone. She fit there as though she’d been carrying this exhaustion for miles and had finally allowed herself to rest.

He could feel the slow rhythm of her breathing, still uneven but steadying. Each exhale seemed to pull her further from the edge. She was letting him take some of the weight, letting him be the one to steady her, and the realization nearly undid him.

This. Being here, holding her like this. This was what he wanted. To be the one she turned to when the world became too much. To protect her, even when she refused to be protected.

He didn’t speak. There was nothing to say that wouldn’t break the fragile peace settling over them. So he just held her. And slowly, he could feel her begin to come back to herself, piece by piece, her breathing deepening, her trembling easing.

She’d needed this. Needed to lean on someone, even for a moment. And she’d chosen him to lean on.

Arthur’s chest ached with everything he couldn’t say. 

The generator hummed softly in the background. The dawn light stretched across the floor, brushing her hair with gold.

He held her, feeling the fragile rise and fall of her breath, and made himself a quiet promise:

He’d keep her safe, whatever it cost him. 

Chapter Text

Knight Adam Redd had been in the Brotherhood long enough to know that orders didn’t need to make sense. 

But three days into this assignment, standing guard outside a half-collapsed diner the locals called a “clinic,” he still couldn’t shake the feeling that he was playing sentry to something fragile. Or dangerous. Maybe both.

These orders had come straight from the Elder himself.

Not through a Paladin, not through Kells– Maxson.

Squad Artemis had stood at attention on the Prydwen’s command deck that morning. Five of them in a row, waiting as the Elder paced before them, his tone clipped and low.

“The clinic will be under watch,” he said. “No threats breach that blue line. No exceptions.”

The way he said it stuck with Redd. Not as an order. As a warning.

There had been no explanation, but none of them needed one. Everyone had heard the rumors. A Gunner had gone into that clinic a week ago and never came out. Whispers spread fast on the airship, the kind that carried a shiver through even the most hardened Knights.

Redd had heard three versions of the story before breakfast.

One said the Gunner drew a weapon. Another said he tried to rob her.

The third, the one Redd half-believed, said she’d shoved the barrel of a shotgun under his chin and pulled the trigger. 

He’d laughed it off at the time, because that was what soldiers did when something rattled them. But now, standing out here in the ruins with rain creeping in through the seams of his armor, he wasn’t sure if it was funny anymore.

He could still hear Maxson’s voice in his head, steady and grave:

No threats breach that line.

That was three days ago. And the blue line still glared at him every time he looked at the door.

The street was empty save for the whine of wind between ruined buildings. The blue tape across the diner’s doorway stood sentry, its color too bright against the gray. Redd adjusted his grip on his rifle, scanning the horizon. He’d been stationed in worse places. Still, there was something about this silence that made his armor feel heavier than usual.

Then… movement.

A figure staggering out of the fog between rusted cars. Leather armor, patchwork plating. A Raider.

Redd lifted the rifle instinctively. “Stop!” His voice cracked across the street like thunder.

The man froze, swaying on his feet. One hand clutched his ribs, dark with blood.

“Hands up!” Redd barked. “Now!”

The man obeyed, raising his hands weakly. “Please…” his voice rasped, thin and cracking, “the doctor… they said she’d help–”

Redd’s scope caught the glint of metal at the man’s waist. A knife? A gun?

His finger brushed the trigger.

The clinic door swung open.

The young redheaded man’s voice came first, high and startled. “Hey! What’s going on–”

And then she was there.

Dr. Abigail Quinn stepped into the street like she’d been waiting for a fight. The wind caught the hem of her jacket, snapping it around her. Blue bandana tied firmly around her bicep. Her eyes found the rifle first, then the man bleeding in the dirt.

“Knight,” she said evenly, “lower your weapon.”

“Back inside, Doctor.” His tone was clipped, automatic. “He’s a raider. Orders are clear: no threats past the door.”

“He’s not a threat,” she said, taking another step forward. “He’s dying.”

“That’s how they do it,” Redd said, his pulse pounding. “They fake it. Draw you out. Get close.”

Her gaze sharpened. “And if you’re wrong?”

Redd didn’t answer. His knuckles whitened on the grip.

The raider took an unsteady step toward the clinic. Redd shifted instantly, rifle raised to his shoulder. “Don’t move!” he barked.

And then the Doctor was in front of him.

In the span of one breath, she was standing between his laser rifle and the wounded man, inches from the muzzle.

“Ma’am, move!” Redd snapped, panic cracking through his voice.

Her tone dropped to a low, steady whisper. “You’ll have to shoot through me first.”

The rain started then, slow and heavy, drops hissing against the hot metal of his gun. The sound filled the silence, the heartbeat between them.

Redd stared at her down the barrel and saw no fear in her eyes. Only the kind of calm that came from surviving too much. The kind of calm that said: I know exactly what I’m doing, and I know you won’t pull that trigger.

Her eyes locked on his, steady and cold enough to cut through steel.

In that instant, Redd felt the weight of every rumor he’d ever heard about her. The Gunner who’d crossed the line and never walked out. The whispers that said the doc wasn’t always a doctor, but something more terrifying and deadly. And for the first time, he believed them.

One wrong move, one twitch of his finger on the trigger, and he was certain he’d end up another story passed around the mess hall: the Knight who aimed at the doctor and never came home.

Her voice came again, quieter, but sharper. “You’re shaking, Knight. Lower it before you hurt someone.”

His breath hitched. She was right. The rifle trembled in his hands.

He could see his own reflection in her eyes– a soldier in power armor, pointing his weapon at a bleeding man and a doctor who refused to flinch.

Something cracked inside him.

The barrel dipped. Just an inch. Then another.

Abigail turned away from him without hesitation, already kneeling beside the raider. “Ricky!” she called. “Help me get him inside! Now!”

The young man scrambled to her side. The doctor pressed her hands to the wound, voice low and steady as spoke to the injured man. The raider gasped, choking, but she didn’t waver. Her movements were quick, practiced, merciless in their precision.

Redd just stood there, rifle hanging slack at his side. The rain plastered his hair to his forehead, streaking down his armor, washing blood into the cracks of the street.

She looked back at him once, briefly, sharply. Her eyes were the color of the churning ocean, and there was no softness in them now.

“You want to protect me, Knight?” she said. “Then don’t make me choose between saving lives and dodging bullets.”

Redd had no answer.

He just watched as she lifted the raider’s head, murmuring something he couldn’t hear, her hands already slick with blood and rain.

For the first time since his Initiate days, Redd didn’t know what the right thing was.

When they carried the wounded man inside, he stayed where he was, staring at the empty space where she’d stood in front of his rifle. The rain fell harder, hammering against his armor, washing the last of the blood from the street.

Somewhere above, thunder rolled, deep and distant.

And for the first time in his Brotherhood career, Knight Redd wondered if following orders had made him the villain of someone else’s story.

The soft static of the headset was almost comforting. A constant white noise that made the silence of the command deck less hollow.

Scribe Haylen sat at her post near the comms console, one ear tuned to the incoming Brotherhood channels, the other… well, to something a little less official.

“…and, uh– if you’re out there in the Commonwealth, you’ve heard about the, uh– the clinics? Th- those blue lines of tape showing up in old diners and– workshops? I guess?” came Travis Miles’ nervous drawl through the faint hum of Diamond City Radio. “You step inside and– and uh… everyone leaves their weapons at the door! Kinda wild, right? Like… like Switzerland, but with more ghouls. Heh.”

Haylen almost smiled despite herself. She shouldn’t be listening. The Elder had made his stance on wasteland radio clear: unreliable, civilian nonsense. But she liked the sound of a voice that wasn’t barked through a command channel. Travis’s voice at least felt human.

Still, the mention of the blue line clinics snagged at her thoughts.

Even up here, above the clouds, she’d heard the rumors. The story that had swept through the Prydwen faster than a power core charge: something had gone wrong at one of those clinics. Gunfire, casualties, and then, most incredible of all, the Elder himself deploying on the vertibird.

That never happened. Not for a single outpost. Not for a squad ambushed in the field. Never for a civilian.

But Elder Maxson had gone.

Haylen pretended to adjust her headset, keeping her expression neutral as Kells strode past on the upper deck. She didn’t need to ask what had happened. The tone of the reports coming back, even vague and sanitized, told her enough. There’d been blood.

And when the Elder had returned that night, his hands and coat were spattered with it.

Haylen tuned the radio lower until Travis’s nervous rambling faded into the soft hum of the engines. The mention of the blue line lingered in her head.

She didn’t know much about the person behind it. The “doctor” everyone talked about in half-whispers. The stories made her sound like a myth: some wasteland saint patching up raiders and farmers side by side, making peace in places no one else dared to walk.

But Haylen had seen her once.

The day a feral pack had torn through their squad in Cambridge, the woman had come out of nowhere. Calm, fearless. She’d shot ferals and stitched Knight Rhys back together without a tremor, with a calm and steady voice as she worked. 

After that, things had changed.

She’d noticed the small things first. A surplus shipment rerouted to a blue line site. The quiet authorization for wounded soldiers to seek care at “neutral” clinics, even if the scribes couldn’t log the visit. And now a standing patrol near one of them, or so she’d heard.

At the diner they were calling Blue Line Alpha.

The same diner that had saved Rhys. 

And every order, every authorization, came from the Elder himself.

Haylen leaned back in her chair, eyes unfocused, the muted green glow of the comms panel painting her face in artificial calm. Elder Maxson didn’t do half measures. If something had his attention, there was always a reason.

But lately, that focus felt… different.

He spoke less at the morning briefings. Spent more time looking at the maps of Boston than at his men. When Haylen passed him in the corridor, she saw the wear around his eyes, not the kind that came from battle, but from something quieter, heavier.

She didn’t know what the doctor had done to earn his attention. But whatever it was, it had changed something in him.

And he’d been going into the field more and more lately.

The soft static on the Brotherhood channel cracked, pulling Haylen back to the present. She straightened in her chair and turned the dial, filtering through the layers of cross-talk until one voice came through clear.

“--Flight Deck Control, this is ‘Bird-Three-Seven requesting clearance for landing. Civilian transport. Repeat: civilian transport, requesting docking authorization.”

Haylen blinked. She must have misheard.

“Repeat, Three-Seven. Did you say civilian?”

There was a brief pause, and she heard the faint rumble of the vertibird’s turbines over the mic.

“Affirmative, Command. Civilian transport, orders direct from Elder Maxson.”

Her stomach dropped.

A civilian on the Prydwen. That didn’t happen. She could count the number of civilians that had been on the Prydwen on one hand. 

Haylen cleared her throat, forcing her voice steady.

“Copy that, Three-Seven. You are clear for approach and landing.”

“Roger that. Three-Seven inbound.”

The channel clicked off, leaving her alone with the low drone of the engines and the pounding of her pulse. She stared at the receiver for a long second, replaying the words in her head.

Civilian.

Order from the Elder.

Haylen was still staring at the console when the doors at the far end of the deck hissed open.

Elder Maxson entered first, his stride long and purposeful, Knight-Captain Kells at his shoulder. Their voices carried. Measured, clipped, all business.

“…I want recon rotating through the western sector every six hours,” Maxson said. “If the Gunners are regrouping near Quincy, I want eyes on it before they can blink.”

“Understood, Elder,” Kells replied, flipping open a data slate. “We’ve had unverified chatter from patrol Delta about militia civilian movements—”

“Civilians don’t concern us unless they’re pointing weapons,” Maxson cut in, his tone final. He paused at the command table, leaning over the spread of maps, his fingers tracing the routes of recent patrols.

Haylen lowered her eyes, pretending to review signal logs, but her attention stayed locked on the two men. Their conversation sounded routine, but she caught the undercurrent– something brittle in the Elder’s voice, something wound too tight.

Then she heard it.

The sound of footsteps on the metal gangway above the flight deck. Even, deliberate.

For a moment, she thought it was another Paladin returning from a mission. Then she looked up.

And froze.

It wasn’t a soldier.

The woman walking toward them moved like she belonged there, even though every inch of her said otherwise. No armor. No insignia. Just a worn field coat over practical clothes, a few strands of dark hair loose around her face, and a blue bandana tied around her bicep.

The doctor.

The woman from the diner. The one who’d saved Rhys’s life.

The sound of the doctor’s boots on the metal floor echoed through the vast chamber as she crossed toward the command table– calm, composed, fearless.

And when she reached the edge of the light, she lifted her chin, eyes locking on the Elder.

“When you extend an invitation, Elder,” the doctor said, her tone cool and razor-sharp, “it should feel less like a summons.”

Haylen’s pulse skipped. She didn’t think anyone had ever spoken to the Elder like that. Certainly not a civilian.

Maxson’s expression didn’t shift, but his jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. He glanced at Kells, who read the silent order instantly.

“Captain,” Maxson said, voice even. “We’ll continue this later.”

Kells hesitated, his gaze flicking between them, then gave a short nod and withdrew, his boots echoing against the deck plates. The crew, recognizing a storm when they heard one, dropped their eyes and returned to their work with sudden, suspicious diligence.

Only Haylen kept listening.

The hum of the Prydwen’s engines filled the silence as Maxson turned back to the woman. “Doctor Quinn,” he began, voice low, controlled. “Thank you for coming on such short notice–”

“You sent armed men to my door, Maxson.”

The words hit like a gunshot.

Haylen’s jaw nearly dropped. Nobody interrupted the Elder. Nobody challenged him like that.

But this woman stood her ground, her voice steady as if she’d just stated a fact of medicine.

For a moment, the only sound was the low, electric thrum of the deck’s generators. Then, very softly, Maxson said, “They are there for your protection.”

Abigail’s brow lifted, a faint incredulous smile that didn’t reach her eyes. “You don’t send armed men to someone’s door for protection, Arthur. You do it when you don’t trust them to protect themselves.”

“Doctor—”

“Don’t ‘Doctor’ me.” Her tone sharpened, cutting through the hum of the engines. “You sent soldiers to guard my door without my consent. That’s not protection, that’s control.”

Maxson folded his hands behind his back, posture iron-straight, though Haylen could see the faint tension rippling in his shoulders. “The men at your clinic were there on my orders, yes, but not to interfere. To ensure your safety.”

“Safety,” Abigail repeated quietly. “You and I both know I can handle threats myself.”

Haylen felt that sentence like a spark hitting dry powder.

“The man you killed,” Maxson said quietly, and Haylen’s head snapped up. “He was a Gunner. One of many gathering outside Quincy. My scouts intercepted chatter: retaliation plans, maps. They want revenge, Abigail.”

He took a slow, deliberate step forward, boots ringing on the deck.

“They want to hit your clinic. You.”

That silenced even the hum of the engines.

Abigail’s chin lifted a fraction. “So your answer is to turn my doorstep into an armed checkpoint?”

“My answer is to keep you alive.”

“By scaring off the very people who need my help?” she shot back. “Your soldiers nearly shot a man bleeding to death on his way to my door.”

“You’re missing the point—”

“No,” she snapped, stepping closer. “You’re missing mine. You don’t trust me to handle it.”

“This isn’t about trust.”

“Of course it is.” Her voice rose, fierce and unflinching. “You think you’re keeping me safe, but what you’re really doing is deciding for me. You can’t stand that I draw lines you can’t cross.”

“That line nearly got you killed.”

“And your soldiers nearly made my clinic a battlefield.”

Maxson’s breath came through his nose, and his words hissed out sharply. “I’d rather have them there than standing over your grave.”

Haylen flinched at the tone. So did the doctor, though she hid it quickly, tilting her chin up and crossing her arms like armor.

“You see the world as something to control,” Abigail said quietly. “I see it as something to care for. You lead with fear, Arthur. That’s not what the clinics are about.”

He froze, eyes narrowing as though she’d struck him. “You’re so certain you can stand alone.”

“Someone has to,” she said. “Someone has to prove there’s another way to live out here that doesn’t involve a gun at every door.”

His composure cracked; the next words came low and rough. “And when that idealism gets you killed?”

“I’ve been keeping myself alive since I left the Vault,” she said, her voice rising again. “Since the Citadel. All the years after.”

He took another step, close enough now that Haylen could see the muscle in his jaw working. “If I don’t protect you, who will? You act like you’re untouchable, but you’re not. You’re one person, in a diner with tape on the floor pretending it’s law!”

“It is law,” she shot back. “Because people believe in it. Because it gives them hope. That’s more than your rifles ever did.”

“Hope won’t stop bullets.”

“Neither will power.”

His restraint finally snapped.

“It could’ve been you under that sheet, Abigail!”

The words thundered across the deck, echoing off the bulkheads. Every head in the command bay turned before discipline snapped them back down to their work.

The air felt different now. Charged, heavy.

Haylen froze at her station, heart pounding. That hadn’t been the voice of an Elder issuing a reprimand. That was something else: raw, unguarded, anger braided through with fear.

The doctor stood perfectly still. Only the faintest tremor in her jaw betrayed her composure.

For a moment, Haylen thought Maxson might apologize. He looked like a man who’d realized too late what he’d just said. But instead, he stood rigid, fists clenched, trying to cage the emotion that had slipped through his commander’s mask.

The silence between them was unbearable.

The doctor stepped closer, the soft click of her boots on the metal deck somehow louder than anything else in the room.

“Arthur,” she said, voice quieter now, steady, but threaded through with something fragile. “You can’t protect me from everything in the wasteland.”

Haylen thought she was hallucinating when she saw the woman put her hand on the Elder’s forearm.  

“And I can’t live under your flag,” she said softly. “Not anymore.”

For a long moment, neither spoke. The hum of the Prydwen filled the space where everything else had fallen away.

Haylen’s chest felt tight, like she’d intruded on something she shouldn’t have seen.

Then the doctor turned on her heel and walked out without a dismissal, her coat catching the air like a banner as the deck door hissed shut behind her.

The Elder stood motionless for several seconds, eyes fixed on the door. 

Then he stepped off the command deck, drew a slow, deliberate breath and turned his gaze toward Haylen.

“Radio Squad Artemis,” he said, voice calm but hollow. “Stand down their patrol of Blue Line Alpha.”

Haylen swallowed hard. “Yes, Elder.”

He nodded once and walked away, footsteps heavy as he disappeared down the corridor.

The deck was quiet again. Too quiet. Haylen stared at the comms console, fingers motionless over the switches. She’d seen battles, lost friends, watched steel melt under plasma fire… but she’d never seen anything like that.

After a long beat, she flipped her headset back on.

“…and, uh, that was, um… another great song about, uh… love? I think? I dunno, I just play the ‘tapes. Okay, next up– Oh! This one’s a classic.”

A soft crackle of a holotape starting up. A lively tune that didn’t fit with the tense air of the command deck. 

Haylen leaned back, eyes unfocused, the glow of the comms lights blinking steady red and green against the dark steel walls. 

“I heard it,” Knight Ames said, voice low as he cleaned the carbon from his laser rifle. “Clear as day. He practically yelled it on the command deck.”

Across the table, Scribe Collins looked up from her notes. “That she could have died?”

“Yeah,” Ames said. “And he seemed… scared.”

“The Elder? Scared? You can’t be serious.”

The laughter that followed didn’t quite sound like disbelief, more like nervousness. The idea that Maxson could fear anything was foreign, and it left a strange echo in the hangar’s recycled air.

“You should’ve heard how she talked to him,” said Scribe Collins, eyes wide as she handed off a stack of reports. “Looked him right in the eyes and didn’t back down.”

Her colleague, Scribe Patel, arched an eyebrow. “No one does that.”

“She completely tore him down. She was angry.”

“And he let her?”

Collins nodded, still half in awe. Through the window behind them, the wasteland stretched out with clouds gathering on the horizon. “He just stood there. Like he didn’t know what to do with her.”

Patel shook his head slowly. “That’s worse,” he murmured.

“He’s slipping,” Paladin Bowen muttered, running a cloth over the steel plating of his gauntlet.

“What do you mean?” asked Knight Vargas, leaning against the frame of his power armor.

“Something about those clinics. He’s taken a special interest in them.”

“Yeah, but isn’t that a good thing?”

“I don’t think so,” Bowen said. “Something’s going to go wrong.”

Vargas smirked, checking the seals on his suit. “You’re paranoid.”

“Maybe,” Bowen said. “But I remember Sarah Lyons. I’ve seen what happens when a commander starts caring too much.”

“He requisitioned surplus supplies. Sent them to Blue Line Alpha,” said the quartermaster’s assistant as he sealed another crate.

“The clinic?” asked the scribe beside him.

“Yeah. Told us to scrub the Brotherhood insignia off them too.”

“Why?”

“I have no idea,” he replied, lowering his voice. “But the Elder must have his reasons, right?”

The woman pressed her lips together, hesitating before marking the inventory tag. “Feels strange,” she murmured. “Like pretending we weren’t the ones who helped.”

“I heard she’s that Paladin,” a young Squire whispered from her bunk. “The Lone Wanderer.”

Her bunkmate leaned over the side. “No way. That was a decade ago.”

“She’d be about the right age,” the first insisted.

A third voice, older, came from the shadows. “I fought at the Citadel before Lyons died. I saw that woman once. She looks just like her.”

The squires went still, the hum of the engines the only sound between them.

“Maybe that’s why the Elder listens to her,” one of them finally said.

“The recon team’s been in Quincy for weeks,” said the radioman, tapping the comm console with a pen.

His partner frowned. “What are they even doing out there?”

“Something about Gunner activity. I don’t know.”

“Why do we care about some paramilitary gang?”

The first shrugged, eyes on the flickering radar display. “Because it’s close to her clinic.”

A pause. The static hissed between them.

The second radioman adjusted the frequency. “You think that’s a coincidence?”

Neither answered.

“He put a full squad on guard detail at the clinic.”

“Knight Redd says she stood in front of his rifle. To save a raider.”

The soldiers at the next table fell quiet. Someone laughed nervously, too loud.

“Must be a story,” one muttered. “No one’s that crazy.”

Another shook his head. “Then why’d he stand down their patrol?”

No one had an answer. The scrape of trays filled the silence that followed.

“She’s the one from D.C. James Quinn’s kid,” said one knight, half-drunk in the mess hall as the storm outside rattled the windows.

“Nah, I heard she’s a deserter. Used to be a Paladin,” said another.

“I heard she disarmed the bomb in Megaton.”

“No, she wiped the Enclave off the map.”

The group laughed, each version taller than the last.

But the squire nursing a requisitioned beer by the wall whispered, “Maybe all of them are true.”

The laughter stopped. 

“The squad that responded to the casualty incident? They said she shot the Gunner herself,” said one mechanic, wiping grease from his hands.

“Why did she shoot him?”

“He brought a weapon past the blue tape.”

“So she got the gun away from him?”

“More than that. They said he barely had a head left. Point-blank with a shotgun.”

“Jesus,” murmured another.

The clatter of tools filled the uncomfortable silence. 

The clang of wrenches echoed through the hangar, metal against metal, the smell of oil thick in the air. Sparks jumped as Knight Rhys welded a new plate onto the thigh of his power armor.

“She stitched up my stomach, remember?” he said over the noise, his voice carrying the gravel of old scar tissue.

Knight Young glanced up from where she was calibrating her suit’s hydraulics. “Yeah, hard to forget. You were damn near gutted. Feral ghouls, right?.”

Rhys snorted. “The Doc shot those fuckers too. Didn’t flinch.”

“Saved your life twice, then.”

He let the welding torch die and stared at the dull gleam of the armor for a long moment. “Yeah,” he said finally. “But then the Elder showed up, and everything changed.”

Young frowned, tightening a bolt. “Changed how?”

Rhys leaned his forearm against the armor’s chestplate. The hum of the hangar filled the pause. “He looked at her like he’d seen a ghost,” he said. “Like someone had pulled the ground out from under him.”

The other knight huffed, half-skeptical, half-uneasy. “You saying the Elder froze?”

“I’m saying,” Rhys said quietly, “there’s more between them than he wants anyone to see.”

The torch hissed to life again. Neither spoke after that. Outside, thunder rolled low and distant, and the sound of it made the steel under their boots tremble.

The comms room was quiet late at night, save for the low hum of the Prydwen’s engines and the soft crackle of static bleeding through the headset. Haylen sat at the small metal desk, sleeves rolled up, eyes half-lidded with fatigue as she twisted the transmitter dial between her fingers.

“—uh, hey, y- you still there?” came a hesitant voice through the static, warm but unsure.

“I’m here,” she replied, smiling faintly. “Signal’s fading a little. There’s a storm moving through the Commonwealth tonight.”

A nervous chuckle. “Right. Storms. Yeah, I, uh… I could tell. Kinda sounded like it, even through the, uh… the radio. Static and, you know, thunder-y noises.”

Haylen huffed a soft laugh. “You’re very observant.”

“Yeah, well,” he said, laughter breaking in again, “it’s, uh, sort of my thing. Observing. Talking. Not… not well but–”

There was a pause, then his tone softened. “So, uh, is it true? People are, um, talking.”

Haylen adjusted the mic, glancing toward the door to make sure it was closed. “People always talk. Which story is it this time?”

“The one about the Elder,” he said quickly. “And the doctor. The blue line one. Heard she, uh, she yelled at him? And he didn’t–uh– d-didn’t throw her off the ship?”

Haylen’s lips curved. “Something like that.”

He laughed again, low and awkward, then said more softly, “She sounds… kind of brave? And, uhm, scary.”

“I think she is,” Haylen said, her voice gentle. “She saved our ass in Cambridge.”

“You s-sound like you… like you admire her.”

“Maybe I do.” She leaned back in the chair, the headset cord coiling around her fingers. “Or maybe I just admire people who don’t let the world harden them.”

Static filled the silence between them before he spoke again, uncertainly: “You think that’s… what’s happening? With him?”

Haylen’s eyes flicked toward the window, where lightning briefly illuminated the rain-streaked glass. “I think maybe caring about someone doesn’t make you weak. But it’s easy to forget that when everyone expects you to be made of steel.”

There was a breath, a pause, then his voice, softer now: “That’s… that’s really nice. You- you almost sound like a– a poet. Heh.”

She laughed quietly. “Only when someone’s listening.”

He let out one more nervous chuckle. “Well, uh, lucky me then. Guess I should, um, let you get back to… you know, saving the world and all that.”

“Goodnight,” she said, voice warm.

“T– talk to you soon,” he stuttered, and the transmission clicked out.

The room fell silent again, save for the hum of the ship. Haylen took off her headset and stared out into the dark, where the storm rolled toward the horizon. 

“What if he cares about her?” Scribe Robertson asked as she and a squire reviewed field reports under the yellow flicker of a lantern.

The younger woman gave her a flat look. “You must be kidding.”

Robertson raised both hands, as if to swear she was serious. They traded reports, leaning closer when one of the head scribes passed behind them.

“He was worried she could have died,” Robertson whispered.

The squire snorted softly. “You’ve been reading too many romance novels,” she said, quill scratching across the page. “The Elder doesn’t fall in love.”

But Robertson didn’t argue. She only smiled faintly, because sometimes the things people whispered felt truer than the things they swore aloud.

Far above them all, Elder Maxson stood at the forward observation window, the light rain tapping a soft rhythm against the glass. The Commonwealth stretched endlessly beneath the Prydwen, a tangle of shadow and fractured light.

He couldn’t hear the whispers, but he didn’t need to. They lived in the air now, in the way people lowered their voices when he entered a room. In the silence that followed when they thought he’d gone.

He rested his hands on the cold railing and let the engines’ hum settle into his bones. Outside, lightning traced the edge of the horizon: the direction of Quincy. Near Blue Line Alpha. Close to her.

For a moment, he let himself imagine the glow of the clinic’s lanterns, the way they cut through the dark like a promise he had no right to keep. He told himself it was duty that drew him to her, concern for the mission, for the men she treated. But the lie tasted thin even to him.

His reflection stared back from the window, steel and shadow, armor and exhaustion. The face of a man who’d built a fortress around his heart and had started to feel the cracks.

He exhaled, slow and heavy, watching the faint fog of his breath cloud the glass.

Outside, the storm rolled across the wasteland, mirroring the storm she’d brought onto his command deck. 

And Arthur felt like he’d broken that fragile thread between them. 

Chapter Text

The air had that charged stillness that always came before a storm. Even from inside the clinic, Abigail could feel it building; pressure pressing against the windows, the faint metallic taste of radiation on the wind. Out past the cracked glass, clouds rolled low and green at the edges, shot through with flickers of distant lightning that lit the ruins in brief, eerie relief.

She watched the horizon a moment longer, hands resting on the counter, gauging distance and direction. The radstorm would hit before nightfall. 

She ran through the list automatically: seal the windows, check the water drums, make sure the generator was topped off and the cots were far from the windows. She could ride it out.

Still, the back of her mind wasn’t as quiet as it should have been. 

There were no patients in the cots. She’d insisted Ricky spend a day or two with his family. Silence, stillness, no one’s life in her hands. Just the quiet hum of the generator and her own thoughts to keep her company.

She thought fondly of Moira. Her voice echoing in her head, bright and bubbly and slightly unhinged. Those wild “experiments” in the cracked glow of Megaton’s workshop– half science, half dare. Moira had pressed a pencil into her hand one night and said, Write it down, kid. Don’t just patch people up, teach them how to do it themselves. 

Together, they’d drafted the first notes that became Basic Field Procedures. Pages stained with coffee and ink, margins crowded with sketches and questions. Now, every clinic she left behind had a copy. She wondered if Moira knew what had become of that silly, brilliant book. She wondered if Moira was even alive.

Abigail crossed the room to check the water drums, running her hand along the cold metal before crouching to inspect the filtration system. It was crude, but reliable. Just a few tubes, mesh, and scavenged charcoal, but it was the best she could manage with what the wasteland offered.

Her mind slid to Three Dog. Not just the voice that carried across the wasteland, but a friend who’d had her back when she was too young to know how much danger she was in. He’d watched the Capital, kept its pulse steady, while she chased something grander. She hadn’t heard his voice in months. The radio static where his words used to live felt like losing him all over again. Not even a note slipped to her through the usual channels.

Other faces surfaced. The kids at Little Lamplight, all sharp eyes and sharper words, pretending they didn’t need her help while secretly hoarding the small toys, gumdrops, and supplies she sometimes left at the mouth of the cave. Amata, her oldest friend, her only family in Vault 101. The last look she’d given Abigail after the Overseer’s body hit the ground. No forgiveness. No home to return to. That door had slammed shut as surely as Vault steel.

Her fists clenched when her thoughts circled back to the glass chamber, her father’s face blurred by her tears as he drowned the Enclave in radiation and left her pounding her fists against the barrier. Not now. Not when I just found you. Not when I need you the most. His sacrifice was legend now. To her, it was still an open wound.

She bent to check each lantern in the quiet diner, the faint smell of oil permeating the air. The generator could sputter out at any time; it always did, but a flame in the dark? That she could count on.

Her mind turned to Arthur. Not the Elder who commanded the skies, but the young man she remembered with too much weight on his shoulders for his age. The heir to a name so heavy, the crown bent his back before he was grown. She had been the same. Not Abigail, not even the ridiculous title of Lone Wanderer, but James Quinn’s daughter. Project Purity’s heir. Neither of them had chosen the legacy. They’d just had to carry it, stumbling forward whether they wanted to or not.

Her mind was a storm of conflict, memory and emotion colliding like static in her chest.

She kept seeing his face in the low lanternlight of that night, the rough warmth of his hand closing around hers, the calloused steadiness of it. It should have been nothing, just a gesture of comfort after chaos, but it hadn’t been. Not for her. And certainly not for him.

Then there was the way he’d held her after the shooting. No words, no pretense, just the solid weight of him beside her, his arms steadying her after she’d tried to scrub away the blood that wouldn’t come off. He hadn’t said a single word, but she’d felt it all the same: the quiet promise buried under the silence.

Abby exhaled and pushed off the counter, moving briskly through the clinic. The lanterns were trimmed and ready; the tape along the floor clean and bright. The air smelled of antiseptic and dust. She was steady now. She had to be.

And yet, when the thunder rolled closer, she thought of him again.

Her thoughts circled back, again and again, to the Prydwen. The command deck gleaming with steel, the air sharp with ozone and restraint. The echo of his voice when he’d shouted: It could’ve been you under that sheet!

The way the room had gone still after, the tension so thick it pressed against her ribs.

And then, softer, that look; guilt and something else flickering behind his eyes, like he wanted to take it back, or explain, or say something that might make sense of the chaos between them. But he hadn’t. He’d only stood there, fists clenched at his sides, steel in his spine, silent and unreadable.

Now, even here in the half-light of the clinic, with thunder rolling closer and light rain clawing at the windows, she could still hear that echo. Still see him standing there in the charged stillness.

He infuriated her. The arrogance, the protectiveness, the way he seemed to think the world would crumble if he stopped holding it up for one damn second.

And yet…

The memory of his voice– you’re important to me– cut through the storm louder than the thunder.

It was ridiculous, she told herself. The Elder of the Brotherhood had better things to worry about than a wasteland doctor and her scrap of blue tape.

Lightning flashed white through the windows, throwing a brief silhouette against the fogged glass. A tall figure, head bowed against the rain, jacket snapping in the wind.

The bell above the door rang once, sharp and bright in the stillness.

He stepped inside.

For a heartbeat, she almost didn’t recognize him. The man in her doorway wasn’t the Elder of the Brotherhood of Steel, no commanding presence cloaked in that heavy battle coat. Just Arthur. Dressed in dark civilian clothes, damp from the sputtering rain, sleeves rolled past his forearms. His hair was wet, curling slightly at the edges. He looked… human.

Their eyes met across the clinic, and for a moment neither spoke. Then he reached for his sidearm, slowly, deliberately, and set it down on the dented tray beside the door. The metal clicked softly against the steel, a sound that felt heavier than it should.

He stepped across the blue line.

“I took shore leave,” he said. His voice was low, roughened by the weather and something else she couldn’t name. The words felt like an explanation and an apology in the same breath.

Her brows lifted before she could stop them. Shore leave? The Elder of the Brotherhood, stepping away from the Prydwen without ceremony? Elder Lyons had barely left the Citadel unless it was to lead the charge. Arthur Maxson leaving the deck for anything but official business felt… unprecedented.

She folded her arms across her chest, more to keep her composure than from the chill. “Today?” she asked, arching a brow. “You picked a hell of a day for a vacation, Arthur.”

He almost smiled. Just a flicker at the corner of his mouth. It softened something in his face that she hadn’t realized was always held taut.

“It wasn’t the weather I was worried about,” he said quietly.

He stood there a moment, the rain dripping from his clothing onto the black-and-white linoleum, the faint hum of the generator underscoring the silence between them. He took another step closer, boots landing heavy on the scuffed tile. 

“What do you need done?”

It didn’t sound like a question. 

More like a certainty, a declaration: I’m here. I’ll do it. Whatever it is.

Abigail’s chest tightened. There it was. His apology, folded into five plain words.

He couldn’t say I’m sorry. That wasn’t who he was. But she heard it anyway; the regret, the worry, the clumsy sincerity that always seemed to hide under the armor.

For a long beat, she just looked at him.

She’d told herself, after that day on the Prydwen, that she’d never forgive him — not for the soldiers he sent to her clinic, not for turning her sanctuary into a military outpost, not for trying to wrap his authority around her work like a shield she never asked for. She’d been so angry she could taste it.

But now, standing there dripping rain onto her floor, vulnerable, his voice quiet and uncertain as he asked what she needed done. It disarmed her. It wasn’t command. It wasn’t guilt. It was something simpler. 

The sharpness inside her dulled. The storm in her chest lost some of its edge. Against her better judgment, she found herself softening.

Abigail drew a slow breath and looked toward the windows. The storm was closing in fast. Green light crawling across the horizon, thunder rolling deep enough to make the walls tremble.

“We need to prepare for the storm,” she said finally.

Arthur nodded once. No hesitation. No further questions. Just that quiet resolve she’d come to expect from him.

For a long moment, she just stood there, watching the storm pulse beyond the windows, green lightning crawling like veins through the clouds. She could feel him behind her. The quiet weight of his presence filling the room, the air somehow thinner when he was near. It was ridiculous, how easily he disrupted her equilibrium.

Arthur Maxson infuriated her. Not because of his temper or his authority. She could handle those. It was because he’d taken up residence in her mind without permission. Every time she thought she’d exorcised him, he appeared again: in the doorway, in her memory, in the unguarded places she didn’t like to visit.

She’d thought that part of herself was gone.

Buried with Sarah.

God, Sarah. 

The memory hit her with its usual mix of warmth and ache. The way she’d laugh after knocking Abigail flat in sparring, then offer a hand up, fingers lingering longer than necessary. The two of them sneaking away into the quiet corners of the Citadel, whispering under their breath like teenagers, though they were both too old for secrets. The feel of Sarah’s hand in hers, her touch warm and certain, when the moonlight slipped through old war-torn windows and bathed the bed in streaks of soft light. That memory was carved into her chest like a scar. The best of it, the worst of it, all tangled together.

That had been another lifetime. Before she left the Brotherhood, before she left the Capital Wasteland entirely. After Sarah, Abigail had been sure her heart was too broken to flutter. That it had learned its lesson.

And yet here she was, standing in a quiet clinic with thunder shaking the walls, feeling it again.

The realization made her pulse jump, and she turned abruptly toward the shelves just to move, to breathe. “We’ll start with the cots,” she said briskly. “They need to be moved away from the windows.”

Arthur nodded, falling into step without question.

The rhythm of action helped. He gripped the cot frames easily, dragging them into a tighter line while she crossed to the back room for the storm boards. The old wood creaked as she lifted it into place, hammering small nails into the window frames while rain began to drum harder on the tin roof.

Lightning flared again, close enough this time to illuminate the room in sharp green relief. She stole a glance over her shoulder just a fraction longer than she meant to, and saw him working in the dim light, broad shoulders bending as he shifted the last cot into position.

He shouldn’t look like this, she thought, tired and utterly normal. But he did, and her eyes betrayed her again, lingering even after the thunder crashed and she forced herself back to the task.

Outside, the wind howled low through the eaves. Inside, it was only the sound of rain and oil, the muted rhythm of their work, and the unspoken tension tightening the air between them.

A low rumble rolled through the foundation. The windows rattled in their frames, and a moment later, the lights flickered. Once. Twice. Then died.

The sudden dark was total. No hum from the generator, no soft buzz from the fluorescents, just the rain hammering the roof and the crackle of thunder splitting the world outside.

Abigail froze, one hand braced against the counter. The silence after the light vanished was so thick it felt alive. She could hear her own breathing, quick and shallow, and the faint scrape of Arthur’s boots against the floor.

Then, quietly, his voice in the dark.

“Abby?”

Before she could answer, lightning flared through the windows, harsh and green. It carved the room into sharp angles, caught his face for a heartbeat; his eyes searching, the crease of concern at his brow. Then darkness swallowed him again.

Her fingers found the lantern on the counter, and she fumbled for the matches. The first one broke. The second sparked, flaring bright and gold in the near-dark.

For a moment, it was just them. His face half-lit by the tiny flame, the rest lost to shadow. Their eyes met across the small glow, caught in the fragile space between heartbeat and lightning.

The air felt thin. Charged.

Her throat went dry. She turned too quickly, focusing on the lantern instead, the match trembling slightly in her hand as she lowered it to the wick. The flame caught, bloomed, and the soft orange light filled the room.

She exhaled hard, a shaky sound she hoped he didn’t notice. The lantern flickered between them, but its warmth did nothing to steady the pulse that still raced under her skin.

The storm outside was growing teeth, each thunderclap rolling closer, shaking dust from the ceiling.

Abigail forced a steady breath. “I’ll go check on the generator,” she said, already reaching for the toolbox beneath the counter.

Arthur’s voice came low, from behind her. “You shouldn’t go alone.”

She shot him a glance over her shoulder, the corner of her mouth twitching despite herself. “You know, you keep saying that, and I still manage to keep breathing.”

He gave a quiet huff that was almost a laugh, folding his arms. “The Lone Wanderer doesn’t like company. I’m aware.”

That earned a soft, reluctant chuckle from her; a little crack in the wall between them. “And you’re not used to being the one taking orders instead of giving them,” she countered.

Arthur tilted his head, conceding the point with a half-smile. “Fair.”

For a second, the air between them softened. Just the faint sound of rain against the glass and the hum of the lantern. It felt almost normal. Almost easy.

Then Abigail caught herself, that pulse of unease flaring up again. She shrugged on her jacket and turned briskly toward the back door. “Come on then, Elder,” she said, voice steady but too sharp around the edges. “Let’s get it running before the storm rolls in.”

When they stepped out into the alley, the air was heavy. Thick with the electric taste of something coming. The rain had stopped for now, leaving a strange, humming quiet in its wake.

The sky above was bruised green, the horizon lit by distant flashes that crackled and echoed. Each lightning strike rippled through the clouds, bright enough to turn the puddles on the pavement into mirrors for a heartbeat before fading to black again.

She could already feel the radiation, faint but insistent, crawling across her skin like static. The fine hairs on her arms rose beneath her coat. She could almost hear the phantom sound of a pipboy marking the radiation like a metronome, though she hadn’t worn one in years. 

Arthur followed her out, closing the door firmly against the wind. The faint scent of tainted petrichor hung between them, sharp, metallic, alive.

It was the kind of air that felt like it might break open at any second.

Abigail took a steadying breath and moved toward the generator. The tarp stretched over it flapped weakly in the storm’s breeze, snapping and rattling against the straps. The low hum of its motor sputtered once again, then died altogether, leaving only the faint whistle of wind between the buildings.

She crouched beside it, tugging the tarp back and flicking the flashlight on. The beam caught on rusted metal and tangled wiring slick with condensation.

Arthur stopped just behind her, the sound of his boots grounding her in the silence.

The clouds above were shifting faster now, dark swallowing what little light was left. The last sliver of sun slipped below the horizon, painting the edges of the storm a sickly gold-green.

Abigail glanced up once, seeing the clouds rousing into deadly life, and then back to the task in front of her. She didn’t flinch at the low rumble overhead. She’d faced worse storms than this.

Still, her pulse ticked faster. The calm before it hit was always the worst part.

Arthur came up behind her, close enough that she could feel the shift in the air when he moved. The wind was picking up, carrying with it the faint hiss of sand and dust from the street.

The wrench slipped in her hand, clanging against the casing. “Damn thing,” she muttered, wiping her palms on her coat before gripping it again. The bolt refused to budge, rusted and stubborn as the world around them.

Arthur crouched beside her, his shadow cutting through the weak beam of her flashlight. “You sure it’s worth saving?” he asked.

Abigail grunted, leaning her weight into the wrench. “You’d be surprised what still works if you don’t give up on it.” The bolt gave half an inch, shrieking as it turned. She smirked faintly. “Besides, finding a generator that runs longer than a week without catching fire is a miracle these days. I work with what I’ve got.”

Arthur huffed a short laugh, the kind that sounded almost like disbelief. “You make it sound noble.”

“It’s practical,” she corrected, prying the panel open. “Out here, practical keeps people alive.”

He didn’t argue, but the steady, thoughtful look he gave her lingered longer than it should have.

She reached inside, twisting a wire back into place. The flashlight flickered as she worked, light catching on her hands, on the line of his jaw when he leaned closer to see. His shoulder brushed hers, just for a second, and she felt it like a spark under her skin.

“Corrosion,” she said, forcing her voice steady. “Wiring’s probably shot. Moisture gets in, and the whole thing-”

A sudden gust of wind cut her off, loud enough that she had to raise her voice to finish. “--shorts itself out. I could replace it if I had the parts.”

“Wouldn’t it be easier to find a new one?”

She gave a short, humorless laugh.”Generators are rare. You’ve never been out scavenging before, have you, Elder?” 

The silence in the rising wind answered for him. 

The wind shifted again, the air thick and strange, humming with static. A low rumble rolled across the skyline, slow and deliberate, like the storm was gathering its breath. The clouds were lower now, heavy and green at the edges, pressing close to the rooftops.

Abigail could taste the radiation; that metallic tang on her tongue, sharp and electric. She ignored it. The generator needed to start before the storm hit in full. Her fingers worked quickly, twisting two soaked wires together.

When she risked a glance upward, Arthur was watching her. Not her hands, but her face.

The look caught her off guard. For a moment, she forgot what she was doing, her pulse skipping in a way that had nothing to do with the charge in the air. She cleared her throat, ducking her head again, pretending to study the wiring.

The silence between them hummed. It was the kind of quiet that wasn’t really quiet at all; it was filled with rain waiting to fall and words left unsaid.

“Almost there,” she murmured, just to fill it.

Arthur’s voice came low, almost thoughtful. “You never stop, do you?”

“Stop what?”

“Trying to hold the world together with your bare hands.”

She huffed softly, focusing harder on the wires. “Someone has to.”

He didn’t respond right away. When he did, his voice was softer. “Doesn’t mean it has to be you.”

That made her pause, just long enough for the storm to answer in her silence. The thunder crackled closer now, a jagged sound that made the air shiver.

She swallowed, tightening the last connection. “You think I know how to stop?”

Arthur didn’t say anything. She felt rather than saw him shift closer, the faint warmth of him brushing her shoulder.

Then, mercifully, the generator coughed once and roared to life. The low hum vibrated through the ground, steady and alive again.

She exhaled a quiet, triumphant sound. “There,” she said, brushing a wet strand of hair from her face. “See? Stubborn, but not hopeless.”

Arthur’s gaze lingered on her profile, his expression unreadable in the flickering light. “You could be talking about yourself.”

Her hands stilled. 

The storm rumbled again, rolling closer, and the air between them seemed to hold its own electricity, something raw and dangerous that had nothing to do with the sky above.

Abigail turned back to the generator. She fastened the panel back into place, fingers slick with rain and grime. It rattled once, steadied, and then hummed its steady, defiant rhythm. She took a step back to admire it just as the first drops of radioactive rain began to fall.

It came slow at first. Just light, silver streaks that hissed faintly when they hit the ground, a sound like static crawling over glass. The air prickled against her skin, each drop tingling faintly as it struck.

She looked up. The clouds overhead were pulsing with lightning that flickered behind them like the glow of some dying machine.

Arthur took a step closer, the rain catching in his hair, streaking down the scar on his cheek. “We should get inside,” he said, his voice half-lost beneath the wind.

She should have moved. Should have turned and gone. But for a moment, neither of them did.

The sky split open. A lightning bolt cracked across it, jagged and white, the thunder following instantly– a violent sound that shook the air from their lungs. It was too close. The flash lit the alley like a battlefield, stark and colorless.

Arthur’s arm came around her as if by instinct, pulling her close, shielding her from nothing and everything all at once. She gasped, startled, her hands catching on the fabric of his shirt.

For a heartbeat, the world held still.

The rain hissed down around them, cold and yet burning, but she barely felt it. His chest was warm against her palms, his breath rough in her ear. Every nerve in her body was alive, not from the radiation, but from him.

She tilted her head back to meet his eyes. They were sharp even in the dim light, reflecting the flash of another lightning strike, blue against the gray.

“You always dive toward danger,” he said quietly. “Not away from it.”

She huffed a faint, breathless laugh. “That’s funny, coming from you.”

Arthur’s mouth twitched, something almost like a smile. “Maybe that’s why it worries me.”

The words landed somewhere deep, where she didn’t expect them to. Her heart was beating too fast, the space between them too small, the storm too loud to make sense of anything anymore.

The thunder rolled again, distant this time, but neither of them moved. The moment hung there suspended and heavy, like the air right before the next strike.

“You shouldn’t worry about me,” she said softly, voice barely carrying over the wind.

Arthur didn’t answer at first. His arm was still around her, his hand steady against the small of her back as if he hadn’t realized he was still holding her there. When he finally spoke, his tone was quiet, roughened by something that wasn’t the storm.

“You make that difficult.”

The words cut through the rain like a current, grounding and disarming all at once. Abigail’s breath caught. The air between them was thin now, too thin, and she could feel the warmth of him even through the chill.

He hadn’t moved. Neither had she.

Lightning flared again, turning the world white for an instant. In that flash, she saw the way his eyes searched hers — steady, unflinching, as if waiting for permission he didn’t expect to be given.

Her pulse thrummed so hard it drowned out the storm. The world shrank to the space between them, to the shape of his hand against her back, to the heat of his breath as it brushed her cheek.

She should have stepped away. Should have said something sharp and sensible and safe. But instead, she leaned in. Close enough that the rain no longer mattered, close enough that the world felt suddenly very small.

Arthur moved too, slow, deliberate, as though any sudden motion might break the fragile gravity that had pulled them together. His face was close now, his breath mixing with hers, his eyes flicking once, down to her mouth.

He leaned in.

Mere milimeters apart. 

And then, just as his lips nearly brushed hers, her body betrayed her. A flicker of something deep and reflexive; a fear, memory, a ghost. It made her flinch unconsciously. She turned her head by the smallest fraction, enough to sever the moment completely.

Arthur froze.

The world seemed to stop with him. The rain, the wind, the low growl of thunder, it all fell away beneath the sudden silence between them.

In her head, she was already screaming.

Why? Why did you turn away?

The question echoed, sharp and merciless, louder than the thunder overhead. Her pulse thudded in her throat, her heart pounding out a rhythm of regret before the moment had even ended. She’d wanted this, hadn’t she? Wanted him, in all his impossible dichotomy of steel and warmth. Then why had she flinched? Why did her body move before her mind could stop it?

Arthur’s hand fell away from her back, slow and deliberate, as if he were afraid to startle her again. The sudden absence of his touch made the night feel colder.

He took a breath. She could see it in the rise of his chest, in the tight set of his jaw. His eyes flicked away, the lines of his face shifting into something carefully unreadable. And just like that, the air between them changed.

The rain poured harder, heavy drops hissing as they hit the cracked concrete. Lightning flickered again, throwing him into brief relief: hair plastered to his forehead, coat soaked through, eyes shadowed and distant.

She wanted to reach for him, to fix it, to say something, but the words wouldn’t come. Her stomach twisted. It felt like she’d broken something delicate and irretrievable.

Arthur turned then, glancing back at her through the rain. His voice was even, but quieter than the storm.

“Come on,” he said, extending a hand toward her. “Let’s get inside.”

The sound of it- gentle, steady, utterly composed– nearly undid her.

She hesitated, staring at his outstretched hand, the tingling rain streaking down both of them in silver lines. Then, slowly, she took it. His fingers closed around hers, firm and warm despite the chill, and the spark of that contact made her heart stutter painfully in her chest.

Neither of them spoke as he led her back toward the diner, both of them rushing through the curtain of falling rain. The storm broke around them, wind howling against the tin awning as they crossed the threshold.

Inside, the door shut behind them with a hollow thud. The silence that followed was deafening.

Abigail stared at the floor, water dripping from her coat, her pulse still hammering. Everything inside her felt unsteady, fractured, like lightning had struck her from within.

She couldn’t look at him. Her heart was still racing, and she hated that it wasn’t from the storm. She turned away quickly, grabbed two rags from the counter, and handed him one without a word.

Their fingers brushed. She pretended not to feel the jolt that came with it.

The cloth was useless; they were both soaked through, water dripping onto the tile, puddling around their boots. Still, she touseled her wet hair and wiped at her face, anything to keep her hands busy. Anything to avoid meeting his eyes.

Arthur didn’t say a word. He took the rag, slow and deliberate, his movements controlled in that way of his, like he could will the world back to order if he just kept still enough.

A few moments later, he struck a match. The sound was small, fragile against the storm’s growl outside. The tiny flame flared to life, warm and golden, and for a heartbeat it painted him in that same soft light that had undone her before.

He touched the match to the lantern’s wick, and the flame swelled. It joined the other lantern in further filling the room with flickering light.

She could still feel the warmth of him, still feel the ghost of where his arm had locked against her waist, the impossible closeness of their lips as he’d leaned in. The memory of it made her pulse skip, made her skin ache in ways she hadn’t felt in years. Her eyes lingered on his hands, steady and capable, and her thoughts betrayed her before she could stop them. 

What would it have felt like? His lips on mine. His hands still holding me, not out of reflex or comfort, but desire.

The thought hit her like another flash of lightning. Bright, dangerous, enticing.

She squeezed her eyes shut, forcing it back. 

No. Stop.

It wasn’t just foolish, it was ruinous. There was too much at stake. The clinics depended on her steadiness, her neutrality. The Brotherhood was anything but neutral. One wrong step, and everything she’d built, the blue line, the fragile peace, would shatter.

And beyond that, there was Madison. The Institute. Project Purity. The dream that had survived the ashes of D.C., the reason she was still standing. She couldn’t afford this. Couldn’t afford him.

Arthur was a distraction. Worse than that… he was temptation given form.

She told herself that again and again, clinging to it like a mantra. 

He’s a distraction. He’ll sink your ship before it makes it through the storm.

But when she risked a glance at him, at the way the lantern light flickered across the scar on his face, her chest tightened painfully.

She looked away before she could drown in it.

The silence stretched thin. Only the storm filled it; the low growl of thunder, the soft hiss of rain dripping through the seams in the roof.

Abigail moved to the counter, reaching for another lantern. Her fingers wouldn’t hold steady. The match scraped once, failed, then flared on the second try. The flame trembled, as if unsure it wanted to exist. She trembled with it, just as uncertain.

Arthur’s voice came low, almost lost beneath the rain.

“Looks like the storm is sitting right on top of us.”

She glanced over her shoulder, the light flickering across his face. He wasn’t looking at her, just at the window, watching the sheets of water blur the world outside.

He cleared his throat quietly. “I’ll ride it out here.” A pause, the faintest hint of warmth in his tone. “Can’t let you face it alone.”

It wasn’t an apology, not really. But she felt the shape of one inside it all the same. An olive branch, at the very least. 

Her lips twitched into something like a smile, sad, faint, but honest. “You’re either very brave,” she said softly, setting the lantern down, “or very foolish.”

His mouth quirked just slightly. “I’ve heard both before.”

The attempt at levity hung between them, fragile as glass.

Abigail’s eyes fell to the floor. The words she wanted to say– about before, about the almost– sat heavy in her throat, unspoken. She forced a quiet breath and tried for humor, dry and brittle: “You really know how to pick your shore leave, Maxson.”

It should’ve landed. It didn’t.

Arthur’s gaze lingered on her for a moment longer, but he only nodded once, accepting the half-joke for what it was: a truce.

The storm went on. Neither of them spoke again.

He took a seat near the window, the lantern’s light catching in the water still soaking his beard. She busied herself with straightening the supplies she’d already labeled twice over, pretending not to notice how he kept glancing toward the door, then back to her.

Time blurred, measured only by thunder and the slow ticking of the too-cheerful black cat clock on the wall. The storm began to move east, the thunder rolling farther away, the lightning dimming behind the hills.

Still, Arthur didn’t leave.

He sat there in the quiet, keeping vigil through the storm. Unyielding and, somehow, gentle.

And when she finally sat down across from him, exhausted and still trembling from everything that hadn’t happened, she let herself think how comforting it would be to feel his arms around her. To lean on him again like she had before. 

But she didn’t.

Eventually, the storm trickled to a stop. 

Inside of her, however, it continued to rage.