Brotherhood

A few days pass as she recovers from her injuries and both detoxes and refeeds herself back to where she isn't on the brink of death. She also began to get to know the people around her, Danse mostly, she feels so safe when Danse is near her. Safer than she has in a very long time. But the man is an unknown. Nora knows almost nothing of him. The few things she does know are things she could see without asking. His name for one Paladin Danse, "Paladin" wasn't actually his first name, It was a title. He was a high ranking officer in the Brotherhood of Steel. Not super high up, but enough to where he was the commander of a squadron of people. He was also very innocent. He blushed when his squad brought up things like sex and intimacy and almost never had anything to say about the matter.

"Miss Nora? Are you decent?" Called Danse through the door of an old office that he had made in to a makeshift room for her. A bed made from a desk with a mattress on top and a small table with a drawer he salvaged from one of the surrounding apartment buildings.

'I hope shes okay in there...' He thought as he knocked again. She had just gotten sober and relatively clean. All of the jet was out of her system anyway. He had sat and talked to her for hours last night. It was a grey dawn when he had left her room. A storm rolled in yesterday evening and Nora began getting frightened, nervously pacing around the small room and it was driving him mad. So he began to try to talk to her in his most calm voice.

"Nora, would you mind coming here please." he said looking up at her from the spot he was sitting on the floor. Why was she always moving around? It was like she couldnt sit still.

"Huh? Oh... yeah I'll be right there."

"You're a Vault Dweller right? Where you born in your vault? What was it like?" He tried to say smoothly but it came out slightly shaky. "I-If you don't mind me asking."

"My Vault... No I wasn't born there. I was born in a hospital in 2040. I grew up in Boston and attended good schools who taught us that drinking and drug use would ruin our lives. I met my husba- my late husband in high school He was an Army Brat and I had lived there my whole life and we just clicked." Nora sighs looking off in to the distance and smiled.

" For our first date he took me ice skating. Ice skating of all things. I fell flat on my face about 5 minuets in to trying to keep my balance on the ice in the rink. And you know what he did? He laughed! He did help me up but he laughed at me! He nearly didn't get a second date." She smiled and looked at Danse and he then saw something. Something that not many people had here, or anywhere for that matter anymore. He saw real true happiness. Something as small as this memory was enough to make her smile like she had just won a million caps. But something bothered him. She had said she was born in 2040. That was over 200 years ago. And the things she talked about, High school, Ice Skating, and Hospitals for that matter weren't around anymore. At least not in the same way they where pre-war.

"Mam, did I hear you correctly? You said you where born pre-war, That would make you over 200 years old." He said skittishly looking at her quite confused.

" Yes. I'm from before the bombs dropped." She said solemnly and dropped her head. She knew this day would come eventually. Where she would have to relive that day. The day she emerged from the Vault. It had been nearly 4 months since then. 4 months since she had taken the ring from her husbands corpse. 4 months since she had had a decent meal. 4 months since emerging from that damned Vault. And 4 months since she had given up on ever seeing her son ever again. In reality though it had been nearly 200 years since she had seen her husband alive and held her son in her arms. It had all seemed like a single moment that she had been frozen. Over all she hadnt aged at all. But the last few months had been the hardest of her life. She had had to kill for the first time and it took its toll. She counted every human she killed. She was at 30 at the moment. She kept track of the people because it kept her sane. No one carried an ID anymore, so she knew only a few peoples names. She did't like killing people, even if it was in self defence. Animals she could deal with but not people.

"I am a Vault dweller, you do have that right. And I am not a Ghoul. I was... put in a stasis -frozen if you will, inside a cryogenic pod. Vault-Tec froze me, my late husband, and my" Nora gulped and looked away with a pained expression "... my son. We stayed frozen until a man and a woman in a clean suit came in to our vault. They took my son and shot my husband when he fought back. Then they refroze me. Some how the systems that where keeping me frozen failed and I thawed out and woke up. And now here I am. I'm a drunk drugged up mess." It hurt to say those words. They had a sense of finality to them. Like she was speaking those actions in to existence. But they where true and had happened to her. She had experienced these things and she hadn't told anyone; until now.

Danse was shocked and a bit amazed and in awe at this little slip of a woman. And he was deeply and profoundly saddened by her losses. In her life she had found love and had a child. A life before the world went to hell. And a life she could never go back to. No wonder she chose to drink and get high all the time. He looked up at her and saw that shw was nearly on the verge of tears. And for all of his training with the Brotherhood and all of the combat he had seen and even all of the interactions with his fellow soldiers, he hadn't encountered this problem. A strange woman, from a strange time, crying and needing comfort for things he could not even imagine. And for all of his training he was no where near prepared for the thing that happened next. He felt his heart beat hard and as he looked at her in the low light he really saw her for the first time. Her face smooth and lovely and her thin body with the much too large clothes hanging off of the frame. She was the first woman he had ever actually experienced real attraction to. His face flushed as he reached for her.

Nora was shocked at this display of kindness from the Paladin. He hadn't shown any affection to any of the other members of his squad not even Scribe Haylen, who in Nora's opinion was much prettier than she was. Small and lithe and obviously very determined. Nora's once beautiful and well taken care of hair was matted and a complete mess now, her normally manicured nails dirty and broken and her usually cheerful spirit had been crushed the same way.

Nora looks up at him from her place on the bed. He smiles and looks down on her sincerely, then his eyes go wide as he realizes that he had jumped up and grabbed her hands, an intimate gesture in his mind. Danse had never been good with intimacy. He grew up in an orphanage in the Capitol Wastelands and never really saw people expressing affection towards each other.

They sat across from each other until morning that night and Nora fell in to the best and deepest sleep she had gotten in months with Danse watching over her.