Nora paused, not wholly voluntarily, as though her feet had been entangled midstep by an invisible bolas. She was turning before she could process what she was doing, a fluid reactive movement borne of finding herself under gunfire, or the choking graveled snarl of a disturbed nest of ferals, or –
Before she finished dissociatedly processing the new autonomy her limbs had decided to exercise, time caught up to her and she blinked, taking in a pastiche of changes to the formerly-peaceful evening. The cracked, crazed remains of what was once a maze of access roads leading off the I-90 interchange towards Terminal E's parking area at Logan; two new divots pocked into the fatigued tarmac surface. The bitter tang of spent propellant residue hanging in the damp coastal air. A biting feel against the skin of her palms – her pistol grip, retooled in sharkskin by an insistent Sturges when he saw the sorry state of it some three months before. The vibrating neuropathy of her right hand, tingling numbly against the snap of recoil she didn't remember feeling.
A mix of wariness and disgust radiating from the so-called Paladin, the left foot of his T-60-rigged chassis now shifted back, away from those two divots in the tarmac and into a combat-ready brace position – he's left-handed, she thought detachedly. His rifle raised but not sighted, its blocky barrel facing her, the nearby turrets focused but not firing. The sharp intake of breath – the sound meant to mimic it – behind her. A quiet, worried voice, carrying a strained edge.
"Hey! There's a time and a place for that. And neither's here."
She snapped her head around to face him, fifteen feet or so farther down the tarmac, farther away from the airport. From behind her, she caught another indistinct, outraged, derogatory comment from the Paladin, and made to round on him once more – this time minus the warning shots – but again, Nick's voice gave her pause.
"Don't pay 'em any mind," he called out softly. "…Not that they'd know what to do with one, anyway." His lip curled as he glanced from her to the Paladin, but, she observed the smirk on his face doesn't reach his eyes. In the twilight, the evening gloom not yet quite strong enough, they hovered just at the edge of luminous - almost…dull, waning to dark. Even at noon they burned bright, like one of his signature Grey Tortoises right after he ashed and took a drag, but now? Trick of the light, he would insist, given the chance. I'm alright, Doll, don't worry about me.
Oh, who would he be fooling.
Her head swiveled back to the monstrosity of piecemeal cement-and-steel gates thrown up outside of the Terminal E entrance, the Prydwen moored above. Behold, all their crumbling grandeur. This whole outfit was the brainchild of a stunted lack of empathy and delusions of competence. They had one functional airship, they couldn't keep their 'birds airborne for more than twenty minutes at a time, they were a wan, smeared shadow of the military might and past technological glory they claimed to "preserve." They had no concept of the military from the Time Before, and they were just as little "protection" to the people now as their predecessors were Then. These fucking toy soldiers in their tin-can suits were playing playing at war, sneering at – shooting at – anything that wasn't one of them - and they had the hall to claim they blessed the Massachusetts Commonwealth with their protection? If there weren't children on that airship...
The worst part is that it could have been different, she thought bitterly. If only...
One night, holed up in a tin shack abutting a cliff beneath an overpass, huddled in salvaged sleeping bags as the February wind tried its damnedest to shred the thin corrugated walls, she and MacCready had swapped stories and a bottle of whiskey between them to fend off the chill. They had found a John Doe in a Brotherhood jumpsuit that day. They'd both seen the Prydwen fly over long before, and he knew she found the whole concept of the Brotherhood to be unsettling and more than passing strange.
But he had told her, that night, of a different kind of Brotherhood, in between choked laughter at tales of his "mayorship" in Little Lamplight and his wistful descriptions of the caves (at least they had been warm). A man he'd known - respected, clearly - back in the outskirts of old D.C. had spoken highly of Commander Lyons, the woman who'd been at the helm of the Prydwen before Maxson; had thought enough of her that they'd been partners in all but name. MacCready had talked of the Brotherhood's great five-sided fortress called the Citadel; had listened with incredulity when she had explained how that "fortress" was once just called the Pentagon, how the end of the Great War wasn't the first attack to cause it heavy damage, and how the "Great War" wasn't even the first war to bear that name.
He'd talked of how he had switched on GNR as explosions in the fight for the Memorial shook the caves, tens of miles distant; how the rest of the Little Lamplighters crowded close to hang on Three Dog's words; how he had heard that Lyons and the 'mungo vault dweller been spotted in the heart of combat; heard they barely made it out alive.
He'd talked of Project Purity; of how Lyons had become the Citadel's leader; had been willing to step away from the rest of her Order's obsession with rebuilding that dam- …danged giant robot because she believed their resources were better used distributing safe water throughout the wastes.
She spoke in turn of the old Resource Wars, and the massacres unleashed in Boston by chassis-wearing shock troops when rioters breached the military caches of food and water in late October of That Year. That gave both of them pause.
He told her how years later, he learned that Lyons had been willing to take his friend's place in the Memorial; had volunteered to save his friend's life; that his friend turned her down.
But that hasn't saved her, in the long run. Lyons was dead now, and Maxson's Brotherhood was here now, and even the former Gunner had been shocked at how hard a turn back into fascism these self-styled crusaders had taken.
If only.
She looked back at the Paladin, feeling the heat and pressure beneath her skin as her blood pressure pushed its luck.
These prigs were –This type of establishment was exactly why Nate hadn't planned to re-up his obligation even before he was wounded. More so even than the frontline horrors at Anchorage, it was this that he couldn't take; this that reduced him to an inarticulate state of weeping, screaming, struggling in the dark when he finally returned home. They had shoved him onto the lines, had expected him to kill, and kill, and kill at the behest of and for the benefit of not his homeland, his family or his wife – not any one of those things that mattered – but for the uncaring satisfaction of people part of something like this. This had forced him into exchange after bloody exchange, where the trades made on the floor were human lives and the fragments of his remaining sanity, tossed out as public offerings for the oligarchs' and nationalists' monstrous power and bravado and sheer, utter control, veneered over with glass-brittle ideals. And by the closing bell, this had forced him to trade everything there was of himself for nearly nothing at all that mattered.
He was right, she thought. "War never changes." He always said it – even That Morning he said it, eyes dull, waning to dark, staring into the bathroom mirror without even seeing himself – it's why he was going to speak at the Veterans' Hall that night, to drive that point home, even though he hated the idea of doing it and knew few would want to hear it; why he couldn't face going to the protests; why he had to shut off the television when the food riots came on the air, why he would - would just fall silent.
A cold, seeping, galvanizing feeling crept down her limbs, as a burning feeling forced itself through the expansion of her lungs and a heady rush of oxygen seared the back of her mind – These people, people just like this, broke him, she thought, and People Like This and their wars and their hatred never, ever change.
Goddamn if she would stand him feeling this way, have him abused this way, have it all happen to him - them - all over again here and now –
Her mind did something that felt like...like when you shift up, but the gears don't catch, and all of a sudden, you go from flying up the interstate to a weird loss of momentum - It couldn't happen to them again, because there was no them. Nate was gone.
She looked back at Nick, shaking off the skipped-record feeling, resetting the pin. Nick, she chastised, you're here with Nick. Present tense.
Nick was tense, waiting. She could see the unspoken plea to leave it, he's not worth it, they're not worth it, it won't change anything, it never changes anything, and God help her, as his eyes flicked from the Paladin, to her, to the Paladin, it's not worth it, I'm not worth -
No. Her mind slammed down against what she was seeing in his demeanor, in his eyes. Her earlier reaction, misplaced in time as it was, had triggered for a damned good reason. This script was a bad enough read the first time through with Nate, and - these tin cans keep trying to preserve history by re-enacting it, so here we are again, with this same crap happening to someone else.
Goddamn if she would let Nick feel this way - see the self-discounting resignation, the self-hatred in another pair of eyes - without doing something when for the first time in her life, she had the power to do something about the people whose actions placed it there.
But –
The pistol's weight sat heavily, both in her hand and on her mind. She knew Nick better than to think he would want her to solve it like this. He had more goodness in him than she did, and even for her, there was too much at stake. Too much to risk. She could almost hear him whispering, Think it through, Doll – when the going gets rough, we always go back to the evidence. It's real easy to lose your cool in a situation like this, but we can make a smarter play. Tough gal throws a punch; smart gal never needs to. What do you have to work with?
Think it through.
She considered. The Paladin was stock-still; he wouldn't fire unless ordered to, even if she decided let off more than her first couple of warning shots. He knew something of who she was, what she represented - they all did, now. Even though the meeting with Maxson had just ended, and no official orders had been issued yet, even these footsoldiers had seen both the caravan of food and the honor guard of shock troops she'd shown up with. These people were so sure of their own superiority but so unassured of their ability to obtain food; water; the basic resources that they needed. So unsure of risking their own people to get it. So unwilling to pay for those resources, but with so tenuous a foothold here, so reluctant to move against an unknown populace to gain them by force. They'd overextended themselves, whether or not Maxson would admit it, and she was the answer to that problem: On one of those first trips up to the Prydwen, when they knew of her trader contacts but not yet of her role within the Minutemen, she had been told – demanded – to serve as their emissary and quartermaster. She couldn't do that if Maxson's own troops shot her - nevermind the consequences of shooting the Minutemen's General.
Now that they knew she was the General.
After those first few trips "upstairs," she had promised to return with supplies, and today she had - arriving in her official capacity for the first time. A small detachment of forty of her men – including some twenty fitted out in chassis – as well as a small convoy of pack brahmin had assembled at Nordhagen Beach, and had walked with her to a pre-selected point a quarter-mile from the Terminal E gate. While the Prydwen had scrambled, she and Nick had sauntered straight up to the gate and - flashing Nate's dog tags, registered previously to their database - demanded to meet with Teagan and Maxson to finalize trade negotiations. Uncertainly, the gate guards had eyed her tricorne, the fiberglass breastplate with gun-and-shock blazon splashed across it in white paint. They knew what it meant by now – there were enough blue flags in the Commonwealth to spell it out for them – they just hadn't known those flags were hers.
They'd allowed the two in.
"Surprise," she'd said, walking into Teagan's cage. Oh, what she'd have paid for a Polaroid of his face.
From the start, she had hated what they stood for. Hated Danse for once again heralding the arrival of People Like This to her home. But she was very, very used to negotiating with people she couldn't stand to get a good outcome for the people depending upon her; frankly, that had been her job description both before and after the bombs. She'd been cordial. She'd set her terms.
They would leave her men alone. No, she didn't care if some of them were synths, they were still her people, and they would leave them alone, and in case they needed additional motivation: In exchange for limiting their "resource patrols;" explicit recognition of the settlements' ownership rights in their food sources, weaponry, technology (yes, technology, Maxson) and land; non-interference with established trade and supply routes; non-salvage within a certain radius of each settlement...she would perform a diplomatic gesture and issue a personal request to the Mayor of Goodneighbor that his guards refrain from shooting the Brotherhood's resource patrols on sight for the next month (unless fired upon or otherwise harmed). She would order her own men to do likewise. She would reauthorize both the request and her own orders on a month-to-month basis depending upon progress of diplomatic relations, pursuant to a list of criteria she had plunked in front of Maxson, who had quickly relocated her meeting with Teagan to the Prydwen's bridge. She hinted that she would consider not providing John with the list of vulnerability points for the T-52 and T-60 armor that she had already distributed to her own men (bless Nate and Sturges both for that knowledge, and Nate for never shutting up about how much he hated the '60 during pre-deployment training, and the many detailed reasons as to why). She made it very clear that she maintained a base of operations, business interests, and a residence in Diamond City; ergo, she suggested strongly that the old ballfield was off limits for anything but trade relations; she'd deal with the fallout of that diplomatic overstep later.
Sticks were useless without carrots. They could salvage elsewhere as they wished, or as they negotiated with the other powers-that-be. She would also authorize sale of vertibird fuel, at below the going rate but above procurement cost, from a depot her men had secured. (Mac had been able to clue her in, via scuttlebutt from one of his old caravan contacts, on what the "going rate" was in the Capitol Wasteland around the time the Prydwen departed). And perhaps most importantly for the short term, she would privately fund assistance to address their food shortage until they could set up a hydroponics facility on the Prydwen and grow their own. She would provide them with the schematics and with starter crops. In the interim they weren't going to threaten her settlements, or shoot her or anyone under her protection, unless they wanted to waste their own caps and men and ammunition. After all, the Prydwen was an airship, and she had reasonably accurate artillery.
Today was the first time she had truly tipped her hand to the Brotherhood, and they had been stunned. Not just a jumped-up woman with small-time trade contacts and a scavenged Vault suit, after all. An actual organization that presented an actual threat to their self-styled superiority. She had plenty of disdain for that reaction: if she was being honest, it was – they were – pathetic, to be so easily set back on their heels.
She could use that clout. Both for diplomacy on a large scale, and for management of things like this paladin's…comments.
Slowly, she let out a shaking breath, pushed away the flames licking the inside of her gut, clamped down on her reflexes, and deliberately, visibly re-holstered the gun. The Paladin relaxed a fraction, his rifle barrel nosing down. She flicked the transmitter channel on her Pip-Boy open to the short-range Minutemen comm frequency, queued the mic, and walked back towards him.
"Hey, hold it. Stop ther-"
She backhanded the rifle barrel out of the way casually.
"You," she said matter-of-factly, and stabbed two fingers into the bottom bevel of his chestplate (the only part she could conveniently reach) hard enough that it rang, "will keep that trash inside your can," she rapped him in the chest again with each point of emphasis, "or I will empty it for you," a jab at the divots in the tarmac, "is that CLEAR, SOLDIER! And if I have to do that, then after those boo-boos are patched up and kissed better you will find yourself personally explaining to Teagan why your Elder Maxson and the rest of your sorry asses are suddenly dining on radrat-pup tartare!"
To the North about one quarter of a mile away, twenty headlamps snapped on over the course of this monologue. Lanterns unshielded, and several laser musket barrels flared red as they charged.
Despite their two-plus-foot height difference, the armored Paladin started and took a step back from the General. Still, he opened his mouth again, angrily, and her eyes burned him. She raised her Pip-Boy and calmly said "Preston. Hold."
The Paladin's mouth snapped shut. And then, through gritted teeth, "…Ma'am."
Some forty feet out into the growing dark, silhouetted against the headlamps, Nick guffawed and lit a cigarette.
She eyed the Paladin for a moment more before touching two fingers to the tricorne, turning back the way she came, and calling the supply train in.
Nick offered her a light and a smoke. "John'll be laughing like a hyena once he hears about that performance," he said, with a lopsided smile. She didn't care about what John would think, though. She cared that she now had no problem catching sight of Nick's eyes, gleaming golden at her, bright beneath the brim of his fedora.
It was a long walk back to Nordhagen, and she didn't mind at all.
