Pre first "friendship" conversation with Danse. No major plot spoilers
Paladin Danse grunted with frustration from inside his helmet and removed it, his dark eyebrows furrowed as he looked at the cracked eyeglass. "It's no good," he said, his voice flat with annoyance. "Can't see a thing. We'll have to return to the Prydwen for a replacement."
"I might have a spare lens at my place," Sam offered. She'd already removed her helmet, preferring to have her face exposed to the sun and wind when they weren't being attacked. The sun was a bit dim, though, as if afternoon was waning, though it was only just the middle of the day according to her Pip-Boy.
"Are we close?"
She pointed to the line of trees in the distance. "About an hour's walk east."
He nodded. "I appreciate it, soldier."
"No problem. Thanks for assisting at Abernathy's. Glad you were there to help me get the engine running again. I was ten seconds away from taking a shotgun to the blasted thing."
Danse's brow furrowed again. "A shotgun would not have—Oh." His expression cleared, a small smile appearing through his beard. "Yes, then I am glad I was there as well."
"Even though the brahmin kicked you?"
He frowned again, though it looked more rueful than upset. "I should have been paying more attention. All I was thinking was that the part I needed had rolled into the animal pen. If I hadn't been so... tunnel-visioned, I would have realized she was upset about me being too close to her calf."
"Well, at least your helmet was on." Sam grimaced. "You'd have quite the shiner if you took that hoof full on."
"Agreed."
They walked for several more minutes in comfortable silence. Sam couldn't remember the last time she'd been able to do that with someone. Nate had been a chatterbox. He talked about anything and everything, and she could keep up with him sometimes, but mostly she loved to listen. His propensity to talk had proven a reliable indicator of his mood, even in the early days of their dating relationship. Frustrated Nate talked in short, clipped sentences that tended to be fast and hard, like a boxer's right hook. Silent Nate was the worst, though. It meant his PTSD was acting up and he needed all of his concentration just to function.
Sam wasn't afraid of Danse's silences. Danse was quiet like... she glanced around, her eyes falling upon a massive oak, whose trunk was so big around it might have been a sapling in her day. Danse was like that, big and solid, a silent and watchful sentinel. His silence meant he was paying attention.
She liked that he'd been willing to help her with her duties to the Minutemen and the painfully slow search for Shaun… but she had to wonder. Danse was devoted to the Brotherhood. How much longer would he be willing to put Brotherhood concerns aside? Would he order her back on mission? Would she have to leave the Brotherhood behind to continue her search on her terms? The thought made her more uneasy than it should. The Brotherhood resources were invaluable against whatever mysterious forces had conspired to steal her son… but if she were honest with herself, she would miss Danse if she were forced to part ways with him. She'd come to rely on him more than she would have thought possible.
Danse suddenly stiffened, his head going up as he sniffed the air. "How close are we?"
"Why? What's wrong?" Sam asked, alarmed at his attitude, though his voice was as calm as it ever was.
"Rad storm coming," he said, wrinkling his nose. "And by the smell of it, a bad acid rain."
Sam looked at the sky, just now noticing the sickly yellow-green tint of the clouds that had moved to cover the sun. "I've been out in a rad storm before," she said slowly. "It wasn't pleasant, but I survived. And acid rain doesn't usually bother humans." That had been before she'd taken to wearing power armor everywhere, when she'd first tried to set out to Diamond City to look up the mysterious lead Mama Murphy had claimed to See.
The storm had caught her as she left the road and she'd only barely made it back to the Truck Stop before she'd thrown up worse than she ever had with morning sickness. The radiation sickness had kept her down until Dogmeat had come, dragging Preston into her garage and barking like crazy. He'd been the one to give her a RadAway pack that she'd been too sick to reach, poking the IV needle into her arm with calm, practiced precision that was the hallmark of everything he did. At the memory, she shuddered, glad that she'd thought to sanitize everything she ever scavenged. Honestly, sometimes the thing she missed most about the old world was simple cleanliness.
Danse shook his head, picking up his pace. "I don't know how acid rain was back before the war, but every once in awhile, some freak wind carries a lot more poison in the rain from all the munitions factories and power stations that got destroyed in the Glowing Sea. Enough to even corrode our suits and sting human skin. We have to get to cover."
Sam picked up her pace too, but it was too late. The wind came from the west with a roar like a freight train from the old days, bitter cold and stinking worse than an old well, sulfuric and bitter. Her hair whipped around her face, pulling loose of the regulation bun at the base of her skull.
The rain hit just as they crested the hill above the Red Rocket Truck Stop, pouring down in sheets that stung like bites from a thousand insects. Sam ducked, trying to cover her face, completely forgetting about her helmet at her belt. The rain hissed as it hit her bare skin. A drop got in her eye and she shrieked at the pain, stumbling and falling to her armor-clad knees with a crash.
Danse hauled her up, using the handles on the back of the suit. He groaned and she looked over at him in concern as they ran. His face was streaked red with acid burns, faint smoke coming from his beard where the acid had hit hair.
"It's getting into my suit," he said, gritting his teeth. With growing horror, Sam realized it was happening to her too. The helmet was intended to be a tight seal over the whole suit, but without it, both of them were collecting rain in the scoop of space between the armor and where the helmet should go and it was seeping into the undercarriage of the armor. She could feel it sluicing down her back, burning as it went.
Finally, Truck Stop was right in front of them.
"Under the overhang," she yelled, spitting as rain got into her mouth. Luckily, he didn't question her orders and skirted the closed garage door, heading instead to the shelter of the overhang where the old fuel pumps still dangled. Both of them immediately climbed out of their suits, releasing a deluge of acidic water that quickly drained away from them. There was a drain in the garage, but it was clogged with two-hundred years worth of gunk, and Sam knew that if they'd opened them up there, they would just be stepping in it.
Danse's hands were covering his face, which she could see was covered in welts and his eyes were swollen almost shut. Now he was clawing at his uniform, yelling incoherently. The acid was corroding even the stiff material, almost dissolving it in places. Sam felt the same pain and itchiness too and clambered out of her Vault suit. In her bra and underwear, she ran to the water pump just by the door to the diner area, grabbing the nearby bucket she kept there. She pumped it, sobbing and shaking, and took the half-full bucket over to where Danse was shivering, his bare chest streaked with red blisters.
"Water!" she shouted in a hoarse voice, attempting to give him some warning, and upended the bucket over him.
He spluttered and shuddered, but rubbed his face with his hands, washing the acid away. Sam did the same for herself and pumped another bucket more for each of them.
"I c-can't see," Danse said, still shivering. "Carter?"
"I'm here," she said, touching his shoulder. "I'm going to get some soap. Stay here."
The downpour had stopped, thankfully, but green lighting still shot through the sky, followed by fitful rumbles of thunder, and she could feel the telltale signs of radiation poisoning begin to creep through her: nausea and a faint headache. Danse would be feeling the same too. They had to get under cover, load up on RadAway, and wait it out.
She walked to the back of the Truck Stop where Preston had helped her build a bathhouse complete with a huge stockpile of soap. About a month ago, she'd found an old ghoul trader who actually remembered making soap before the war and had managed to make some of his own, scented with hubflower. After buying out his stock, she'd offered him a five-hundred caps investment for his little business and a request to change his route to come her way.
Sam grabbed a bar of the hubflower soap and hurried back to Danse. He was no longer shivering, but stood frowning out at the distance.
"Are your eyes any better?"
"A little," he said, turning toward her. "Everything's fuzzy; out of focus…" Not out of focus enough, apparently. Sam saw his gaze flit over her and crimson that wasn't related to the acid burned on his cheeks. Then he looked away.
"My apologies for my disrespectful behavior," he said quickly. "I shouldn't have stared."
Sam loaded her bucket at the pump again, oddly touched by the apology. How many men would openly acknowledge such a thing and then apologize for it?
Nate would, she thought with a pang of familiar grief. And then he'd crack jokes about it to break the tension. She plunged her hands into the soapy water, making sure to take off her ring and wash beneath it before slipping it back on.
"Come here. We're going to get the rest of the acid off before we get inside." She pressed the soap into his hands and went back to her power armor as he splashed in the bucket to wash himself. She hesitated at the valve, but gritted her teeth and opened her armor back up. Her hands began to sting anew at touching the acid wet metal, but inside, she reached in and pulled out two stimpaks from the auto-dispenser.
"Stimpak," she said, hissing in pain, as she hurried back to Danse. "Hold out your arm."
He did so without hesitation, and she plunged the needle in, Her wet, acid slick hands slipped on the second and it fell to the ground, shattering against the concrete.
"Damnit!"
"Carter?"
"Never mind. Are you finished with the soap?"
He passed it, and she scrubbed all over, feeling a little better once the sulfuric smell was replaced by the clean smell of the soap. She rinsed off with yet another bucket of water, then started to pump once more, her limbs aching and her head spinning.
"What are you doing?" Danse asked, blinking rapidly, as if to clear his vision.
"Power suits have acid all over them," she wheezed. "Gotta clean them off too…"
Danse shook his head, putting his hand over her arm to still the pumping. "They can wait, Carter. We need to get inside." As if to punctuate his point, another fork of green lightning split the sky. On the ground where she'd shed it, the Pip-Boy's Geiger counter clicked in warning.
"Yeah," she said, standing up woozily, "you're right. Gotta get some RadAway too…"
Carefully, she led Danse into the diner and left him to lean against the counter, while she found something for them to wear over their soaked underwear. She dug through her chest of spare clothes in the little room in the back of the diner. Most of them were just bits and pieces she'd salvaged so that Mama Murphy could make quilts for the kids in Sanctuary. But there were at least a few wearable things.
"Here," she said, pressing a soft flannel shirt and jeans into his arms. "I think these might be big enough for you."
She pulled on something shapeless and vaguely smock-like that fell to her knees.
"A couple of buttons missing, I think, but it fits more or less," Danse said, coming around to where she was standing. And then his face was getting fuzzy and the floor tilted under her feet.
"Carter?"
She frowned. Why did his voice sound so far away—
"Sam!"
The world flashed green and went dark.
#
"Hey babe."
Sam opened her eyes, wincing as the baby shifted inside. She was so big now that the baby's movements were sometimes uncomfortable, unlike the first time she'd felt him or her kick—a small fluttering of movement—now it was more like someone pummeling her from the inside with tiny fists.
Nate stood over her chair with a glass of ice water, dripping with condensation in the summer heat. "Thanks," she said, managing a smile.
She took a sip. The baby moved again and she pressed a hand against her side. Nate's eyes followed her motion and he knelt beside the chair, eyes asking permission before his hands settled on the globe of her distended belly.
Sam forgot the stifling heat of the house for a brief moment as wonder and excitement crossed her husband's face. Eight months pregnant and he still never got tired of feeling the small life within her move.
"He gives me hope," Nate said in a soft voice.
She raised her head. "He?" she repeated, raising an eyebrow.
"Or she," he answered with a quick grin. "I feel like the world can be made new again when I think about our baby. Like the war is just a distant, sad memory."
Sam woke up, her hand still curled around an invisible glass of water, and noticed that she was in bed, covered with a blanket in the small back room of the Red Rocket Truck Stop. A tube attached to an IV stand was sticking out of her arm and her eyes followed it up to a RadAway pouch which was just about empty. Her fingers probed a small red notch on the inside of her other elbow. A stimpak?
She pulled the needle from her arm, wondering if every Wasterlander knew how safely put a needle into someone else's vein. Even before the war, she couldn't comprehend knowing that as just an everyday skill, like brushing your teeth. When Preston had taught her about stimpaks, she'd been shocked. And now it was something she used all the time. Had a week gone by in this new world where she hadn't been forced to give herself a stimpak at least once?
She stood slowly from the bed, waiting for the nausea to hit, but it had fled with the magic of the RadAway, along with the headache. A can of purified water also sat next to her bed, and she popped it, sipping gingerly. Grogginess cleared as the water eased into her system and she left the room, leaving the half empty can on the counter. Her spare sleeping bag was on the floor outside her room, rolled up into a neat spiral next to the cabinet. Danse?
The smell of something burning wafted though the air and she lurched forward, following the smell outside the garage. The storm had passed and the sun was out, leaving no trace of the acid rain, except for a few puddles that smoldered with yellow steam and the wilted plant life. But this she barely noticed as she came around and saw Danse with the borrowed sleeves of the shirt rolled up, glaring at something on the grill as if seriously contemplating shooting it.
Sam's gaze went to his exposed arms. His skin looked healthy and undamaged from the acid rain, maybe a little more pink than it otherwise would have been. Had the stimpak healed her skin too? She watched for a moment, feeling strangely breathless as he knelt beneath the grill, fiddling with the barrel of Mr. Handy oil she'd attached to the grill as a fuel source. The muscles of his arms flexed and bunched as he twisted the handle and, just for an instant, she imagined those arms around her waist.
Flushing with shame and anger at herself, Sam squeezed her wedding ring tight around her finger.
She must have made some small sound, for he looked up at her. "You must be feeling better," he said in greeting, standing up. His eyes looked clear and there was a hint of a smile at the corners.
"Much," she said. "Thanks for the RadAway. And the stimpak."
"Not a problem. I'm happy to care for any soldier in my squad."
"How are you?" she asked. "Your eyes?"
"Almost back to normal," he said, wiping his hands on a cloth laying on the grill's handle. "A little fuzzy in the corners, but it's been getting better ever since I woke up."
"Good."
"Are you hungry?" he asked. "Dosing up on RadAway always makes me want to eat. Thought I would try to make provisions…" He frowned at the burnt mess on the grill. "But I don't think I know how to use your grill very well."
Sam forced a laugh. "Sorry about that. Yeah, the Mr. Handy fuel has a lot more kick than you'd expect. I've learned to use about half of what I think I really need."
Danse scraped the crumbling mess off the grill onto a plate and tossed it into the bushes next to the building.
"That's a clever contraption," he said, gesturing at the grill. "I don't think I've ever seen anyone do that before."
Sam shrugged, padding into the garage. "I've always had a knack for machines, even as a kid I was always tinkering. Thought I would go into engineering, but Dad persuaded me to stick with the law. And he was right. I loved it too, in a different way." She walked to her weapons workbench, picking up the .44 snubnosed pistol that she'd been working on before Abernathy's had sent over a message asking for mechanical assistance with the generator that powered their main defense turrets.
She fiddled with the modified grip she'd been carving, idly picking up the screwdriver and quickly attaching the grip to the gun. Working with her hands had always helped her think… even when she'd been a lawyer, she'd often relied on physical activity like cleaning her sidearm to clear her head during difficult cases. The grip went on the gun and she held it cradled in her hand, aiming at the back wall of the garage to get a feel for it. A little more filing on the back, perhaps…
"Danse…"
His eyes raised from the gun in her hands, and she saw that he was slightly flushed, though she didn't know why. Perhaps an after affect of the acid rain. He cleared his throat. "Yes?"
"I'm returning to Diamond City tomorrow," she said. "Nick—" His eyebrows contracted at the mention of the synth. "Nick," she repeated in a firmer voice, "has found a lead on Kellogg—the man who murdered my husband and stole my son. So… I won't be able to go on the research mission that Proctor Quinlan wanted us to do." She crossed her arms. "I should have told you earlier… but I was trying to figure out how…"
His expression was unreadable. Sam pursed her lips and set down her gun, realizing with a start that she didn't even have any pants on. In her radiation haze the night before, she'd pulled on a long gray shirt that looked like feral ghouls had been drooling on it, and she hadn't even thought about it when she'd woken up.
"I realize that this puts you at odds with Maxson's orders, and I understand that you'll want to return to the Prydwen," she said, deciding to ignore her pantsless state. "If you want, I can give you the fusion core to my power armor and you can have a vertibird pick it up here."
Danse was silent for a moment. She could almost see him rehearse the words before he said them. "Elder Maxson," he said in a neutral tone, "much as I respect his vision, is a man too often limited by the big picture. He's been on the Prydwen too long. Hasn't been boots on the ground in… months? Years?" He shook his head. "Finding your son is important to you, so it's important to me too." He looked down, fiddling with one of the button holes on the borrowed shirt. "I can cover for you with Maxson and Captain Kells. You won't have to worry about them getting on your back."
Sam felt a flare of warmth start in her chest, expanding and loosening the tension she'd been feeling for days. Gripping her elbows, she nodded. Turning to go back inside and find something decent to wear, she paused, then turned to go through her box of spare parts by the power armor frame.
"Ah! I did have one." She pulled out a spare helmet lens with a triumphant grin. As he walked over to retrieve it, she bit her lip. "Danse," she said, he looked up from his examination of the lens. "I appreciate this. You've been a friend to me, not just a commanding officer and I… appreciate it." She finished lamely, cursing inwardly. What kind of lawyer was she to use the same word twice so close together. But Danse didn't seem to notice.
He offered her a small, sad smile. "Friend," he repeated, as if tasting the word. "I should tell you a story sometime…"
She cocked an eyebrow. "Well, let me get dressed and you can tell me while we fix your helmet.
His dark brown eyes searched hers a moment, and she tilted her chin up, meeting them squarely.
"All right," he said, as if seeing something in her gaze that reassured him. "Let's do it."
Note: So the acid rain part is directly inspired by a scene in the YA novel Fragments by Dan Wells. In that book, the hero and her companions with are traveling through a wasteland very much like the Fallout world (just no nuclear fallout) and get caught in an acid rain that stings them so badly that they have to strip off their clothes and wash frantically with water. It was such a memorable scene and I was playing Fallout 4 at the same time that I was reading it, I couldn't help but often put these two worlds together. The acid rain and the frantically taking off clothes is the only thing I lifted from Fragments (and I used my own words too). That being said, you should really go pick up the Partials trilogy if you like Fallout 4, because it has many of the same themes.