From above, a third and seemingly final explosion split the great airship in two, and Elder Maxson fell to his knees aboard the vertibird that had stolen him as the sky filled with fire. It had begun to rain, and he thought the fact fitting.

I'm sorry.

His stomach churned and he heaved, pieces of his hair dripping like wet oil into his eyes, but there was nothing left in him but smoke and whiskey and the blood that spilled over his face and past his tongue and he didn't know whether it was his or not. The howls of the zeppelin's sirens pleaded with him as if he was not centuries away, as if her passengers were not already burning inside her, their shrill warning warped into an eerie moaning by the speed at which her bow plummeted to the earth, and he was helpless. The vertibird quivered underneath him as its pilot shouted but he was numb to the words, and he licked the blisters on his lips and tasted the ashes that blew in on the wind; the flames had made quick work of his crew, and he folded over and gagged again around a breath that smelled to him like melting steel and bone, like cooking flesh, his hands grasping at what they could of the cold metal floor from within their bindings.

"Arthur."

The sound of her behind him threatened to undo him, and his hands shook in his attempt to ignore her. That she knew his first name, though it common knowledge, and could say it then as if it were not forbidden to her, as if it were not a curse sent an unwarranted shiver down his spine, and he grimaced. The handcuffs cut mercilessly into his wrists and he fought against them, the heat stifling the screams that burned like bile in his throat, a surge of angry color boiling over the edges of his vision forcing him back on his feet. He cast his gaze downward; the sands of a beach had begun to approach them from below—fifty feet, forty feet, only thirty feet down, but he was not a patient man, especially now. He took a step forward.

"Elder Maxson."

The irony of his title spoken aloud while her fire raged around them was overwhelming, and it would've taken very little for him to turn around and laugh in her face, but his legs moved him away without his permission like a machine's. Sweat stung at his wounds and glistened like tears in the horrible light on the horizon, mushroom-clouds fading, and he rubbed it away from his eyes with the heel of his palm so that he could watch his feet move beneath him. He thought he felt fingers brush against the back of his jacket, trying to grab at him, to stop him, but all that was left now of the Prydwen was her skeleton, and he had reached the precipice.

He wasn't supposed to be there.

His body toppled gracelessly from the side of the aircraft, twisting and reaching for something solid, for something to save him as if it still possessed the will to live, and he wondered absently if the distance would be enough to kill him; they had always told him that he would live forever, but in reality he was very much a mortal man, and he realized the truth of this when his head hit the ground with a harrowing and very mortal crunch and pain bloomed behind his skull like the glow off of his sunken ship.

It was the face of Paladin Bishop that he saw as his vision turned to black.

She wasn't supposed to be there.

The grey storm that shook the metal hull of the Prydwen from outside was enough to turn her knees to jelly without the dread that had begun to beat into her chest as if it were a war-drum, and in her anxiety she had taken the walk that led up to his door a few times more for good measure before her knuckles rapped on the steel, short and polite, as if pleasantries were any good anymore. She stole a glance over her shoulder, half-expecting to find a mob of tin soldiers and their rifles at her back, but she had been careful, she knew; the patrol on the catwalks had saluted her after she had placed the explosives—"Paladin," the one had said, his chin proud and fist steady, and though she couldn't look him directly in the eye as she returned the gesture, Nora had felt, for the first time since the world had been torn out from under her and replaced by a ruined and dying imposter, confident.

That moment had promptly fled after she had started down the ladder to the command deck only to be faced with the door of Arthur's quarters, and she remembered.

Not like this.

"Elder Maxson?" She said after the silence in the room lasted more than what her frayed nerves could tolerate, and she swallowed around her heart in her throat. "Paladin Bishop, sir. May I come in?"

She could've run, then, forsaken him and his soldiers and the tenets that had slowly but surely become her own as if they had never existed, had never mattered, and returned to the 'bird that Tinker had waiting for her outside; she should've, because she wasn't this anymore, because she had more faith in the bombs that blinked red two stories above her head than in the Brotherhood's empty rhetoric, in Arthur Maxson's self-proclaimed godhood, because she wasn't supposed to care this much, but then she heard him grunt in answer from someplace behind the wall at her nose, granting her entry, sealing his fate, and she was lost to the screaming in her veins.

The metal groaned under the hesitant weight of her palm as she pushed it open.

He was bent over the table that she had grown to notice was habitually crowded by discarded liquor bottles, all in varying degrees of emptiness, and she saw that now was no different—he had a hand curled protectively over one vial filled with ominously dark liquid, and he nursed a sip from it before his eyes shot up to where she stood with startling lucidity. His heavy brows cast shadows over his face, twisting him until any residual semblance of youth was eaten by the clever lies written plain on his skin that half-won battles had made him wise, and he regarded her boldly and with a harshness equal to the forces that had scarred him.

"Paladin," he said, more as a statement than a greeting, and without standing he gestured with a lazy hand to the chair that sat opposite to him. "Sit."

"No," she said, her feet stubbornly sticking to the floor outside of his door left ajar, and she wondered at how she had lasted so long already. She thought quickly. "There's been an accident. On the flight deck. They're asking for you personally, sir."

He looked confused, and she thought that only fair. He cocked his head as he started to rise, brow knitted, his joints popping and his jacket falling in gentle ripples around his thighs as he unfurled from his seat to utterly tower over her, and if she were a lesser woman, a blinder woman, she might've been more intimidated by the display.

"What kind of accident?"

She stumbled, stiffening under his inspection, her feet shifting eagerly in their need to get away, to turn around and start walking and not look back until the fire had taken it all, with or without him, but her resolve (compassion? Pity?) was stronger. "A vertibird. It came in too hot."

"And I'm being asked to do what, exactly? Supervise?"

She sighed internally, patience buckling, stuttering something unintelligible in exasperation before taking a step towards him and extending an arm out and into the hallway, motioning for him to please, just go, holding his gaze with mirrored ferocity.

"They were insistent, sir."

He looked as though he might've argued against that logic, or lack thereof, before he straightened, squared his shoulders, and nodded curtly down at her. He cared about his soldiers, that she knew, and she suppressed the bittersweet wave of satisfaction that sung in her bones at having succeeded in her task, no matter how foolish, how selfish, as he moved to follow her.

"Take me."

She had hit him hard from behind with the butt of her rifle as they emerged onto the exterior deck, the two patrolmen slumped against the wall of their stations having met a similar fate on her way in. He remained coherent enough to struggle, albeit weakly, against her grip as she whistled for Deacon to help her, and between Maxson's weight and Deacon's protests, it took them a while to reach the vertibird, crimson beginning to stain the blue and supple leather of her armor at the crook of her neck from beneath the wound she had given him. She was thankful that she had brought the handcuffs as a precaution as Arthur woke to the sound of the first explosive going off behind them, fireworks against the congregation of thunderclouds, but she was unprepared for the strength of his reaction, and her bloodied hands stung with uncertainty as he crumpled to his knees.

"I'm sorry."

"Jesus, is he dead?"

Spots of muted color danced in front of his eyes as he tested them, his body rolling listlessly as the very ground awoke beneath him and recoiled at his touch—sand, he remembered, and he clung to a fistful of it as if it would drop away and leave him falling again into oblivion. He shifted the distant hum of his consciousness in order to assess the damage done, finding with thorough disappointment that he was, in fact, alive; his left arm had been pinned at an inhuman angle beneath his weight, and, amongst all the lesser aches, something had certainly been punctured in his chest, but he could still move himself. He did so, then, hovering just inches over the fickle slope of the beach so that he might pull the twisted remainder of his ruined limb, still handcuffed to the other, out from underneath him, and the sensation was overwhelming. He groaned, a glorified whimper, the sound a pitiful echo between the raw flesh at his ears, and in response he felt the sand near his head make way for a pair of obscenely feminine hands as someone kneeled to look on his agony for themselves.

"I don't think so," the hands said, and though his neck resisted his plea to turn and see the face that they belonged to, their voice was sweet, and haughty, and he knew it all too well.

Traitor.

"Bad plan, Whisper. Bad fucking pla-"

Arthur barreled forwards, his good arm pushing him from the ground in a raw whiplash of power to catch his shoulder in the delicate juncture of Bishop's throat and clavicle, indifferent to the cacophony of protestation from his barely-functioning body. They fumbled, blood spattering from the multitude of sources on his skin before he regained the momentum to hurl her downwards, muscles screaming, and he growled. He heard her choke on a breath beneath him as they dropped, her soft hands on his back, on his head, scratching at his hair and returning red with the end-product of his fall, but his knee pinned her at the stomach when she met the ground, the broken tatters of his left forearm across her chest, and she was trapped.

He imagined punching through her as his interlocked fists came down on her cheekbone, just under her eye, and she gasped fast in surprise and began to yell before a second lick tore through her bottom lip and silenced her. Something hitched in his chest as a wet gash crawled up the pale planes of her face, bright eyes lolling, but the white-hot madness flooding his veins took no mind, and his arms coiled at the command to finish her, to correct her, to stop the fucking pain.

Two male voices shouted at him, one distinctly closer than the other, and before he could land another blow someone had hit him from behind with something short and hard, and he had fallen to the beach again.

The vertibird's pilot and a slight man in sunglasses tended to Nora as Maxson collapsed onto his back at her side, easing his spine and the bruises that already pooled there to the sand, adrenaline receding like the tide that pulled gently at his feet. Blinding rage made way for anguish, the sudden shift disorienting, and as he stilled there was nothing left to concentrate on but the way his bones grated under his ruptured flesh, the incessant pounding at his temples, the barrel of the 10mm that had remained trained on his chest, but when he willed unconsciousness to take him the call went unanswered.

"It's okay, Tinker," Bishop grunted, and he watched through slitted eyes as she rose and motioned for the pilot to lower his pistol, rubbing at the back of her head as the other man hovered closely at her elbow. He saw that her nose had also been split in his assault, tender cartilage leaking and turning purple in the firelight that bounced off of the waters, and he was woefully uncertain of how to feel about it.

She looked down at him then without such doubt.

"He won't be getting much more action where he's going."