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Six hundred hours, his alarm blares. He’s been awake for four minutes, letting his eyes adjust to the dark, and the high-pitched ringing is mostly a cue to get out of bed. Seven minutes later, a cloud of steam blooms from the shower. A towel is wrapped around his waist, one hand wipes at the mirror.
His reflection glares back at him in the streak left behind. Every ounce of glass and steel on the Prydwen had been meticulously scrubbed and sanitized before being assembled, and his image is sharper than in the one back home. He’s had to confront this every morning for one hundred and eighty-two days now.
Some days are easier than others. Today, not quite.
Wax is swept over already slick hair. Skin tightens around scar tissue, and itches.
—
One hundred and twenty-three days ago, he sat fighting that same itch as a scrawl of information blurred in front of him. It was barely sunrise, but his days were stacked and this meeting was squeezed in between breakfast and his first round of reports.
A fleet had arrived, just fifteen minutes earlier: more an underfed garden snake than a python, they wove across the airport grounds, braking by the docking station. Maxson had observed it all from the deck. A scribe appeared at his shoulder, informing him what he already knew. He nodded his acknowledgment, drained his coffee in a single gulp.
“General.”
She didn’t, doesn’t, look like one. He observed to himself the ratty blue coat that nearly swallowed her whole, a wilted leather hat that teetered sideways off a mop of dark hair. And utterly ignorant of the inspection he’d just held for her, she smiled.
It was pleasant, practiced. A stark white contrast to the grime lining her costume. “You can call me Nora.”
He doesn’t step into alliances lightly, and from the beginning this one looked bleak at best. He’d done the research in his own time, though there wasn’t much, summarized in a single page that lay before him. The Minutemen have a short, broken history, and a collection of numbers which would have been pitiful for a raider street gang. And this new leader, the one with flashing teeth and unmarred skin, had even less.
He told her as such, save for the last, looking up from the paper with his conclusion already drawn. “So what is it exactly that the Minutemen intend to offer the Brotherhood?”
The General (you can call me Nora) shifted in her seat, eyes darting around the deck. “This is a nice ship.” She fell silent for twenty seconds, a small crease appearing between her brows. “I was outside Fort Hagen when it arrived. Have you heard of it?”
He hadn’t.
Thoughtfully, as if each syllable spilling from her lips wasn’t another second passing on the clock, she explained to him its location, its layout, even its pre-war history. She explained how she knew this—a detective, a mutt, cigars. It was mostly lost on him, his focus shifting to the ticking clock with every tangent she found herself on. This was a waste of time and he was already ruing his lost progress.
Then she reached into her knapsack.
“I also have this. And I don’t know what to do with it.”
That’s how he ended up with half a brain stuffed with Institute tech. That’s how the Brotherhood came closer to their enemy in a half-hour than they had in the past four months. That’s how he ended up offering his hand her, covering her faction’s shortcomings with the sleeve of his coat. And that’s how he got caught in her gaze as she gushed gratitude, his attention seized by the warmth in her eyes, drawing him into an endless pool of sincerity.
He broke away, overcome, and she expressed her thanks a final time before pursing her lips.
“Can I call you Arthur?”
—
Dressed and caffeinated, the cool air of the observation deck does little to soothe his nerves. Half past six gives him a stack of files and another steaming mug. The scribe knows to wait as he flicks through the first page of each one.
“Is that everything?”
“Of course, Elder Maxson.”
The title grates against his ear drum. He waves his hand to dismiss, staring down at his cup. White ceramic has been stained yellow over the years but the coffee itself looks warm and inviting.
He takes a long sip, trying to drown in the mahogany.
—
For a woman who barely had two soldiers to command and make a third, the General, you can call me Nora , had more bite than he had initially assumed.
He liked to think her confidence was grown from her now-steady supply of armor parts and recon squads, but after meeting with her once, twice, and now a third time, he couldn’t be certain. The only conclusion he had drawn about her was that the desperation which no longer lined her every word came out in other ways. Death-brushing ways. And despite only spending a matter of hours with her, he felt a familiar sense of dread when she sauntered up to him for their scheduled meeting on the command deck.
He had not yet uncovered why she was here. But she was.
She would bring him her idea of the week. Last time, he ended up giving her a crate full of grenades, mostly against his better judgment but they were running minutes over their allotted time. She blew up her basement and handed him artillery schematics the day after, about as casually as she had given him a chunk of brain matter.
Death-brushing and hauntingly efficient. The scribes were having a field day with the blueprints as they spoke.
This time, she wanted to walk into Goodneighbor, a place he wouldn’t send his men within a nuclear bomb’s radial distance of. Something about a neural physiologist. His emphatic no turned into a hesitant list of conditions, which she whittled down into one: “Bring someone.”
“Preston’s already cleared out his whole schedule,” she answered.
That hadn’t been what he meant, but he couldn’t stop to correct her as she wandered back to that awfully loyal second-in-command, who looked at her with such deep concern that Maxson barely noticed his next meeting stepping up in her place, already rattling off their report. The man looked tense, and always did whenever he stepped foot on the airship. The General laughed him off, but that only seemed to deepen his agitation.
She looked back over her shoulder then, catching Maxson watching their heated exchange. Fingertips passed over the brim of her hat in faux salute, before she turned back to her second.
Maybe she raised her voice knowing she had an audience, or maybe he was on alert from being caught. Either way, her voice went crystal clear as she crooked a smile and said, “Well, I think he’s nice.”
—
Eight hundred hours.
The first convoy of vertibirds return.
The reports are in his hand within fifteen minutes. Most are overnight patrols, nothing of interest. One by one, squads file in to announce their numbers before retiring to the bunks for the day, and each meaningless update shrinks his patience like a dynamite wick. For two hours, he somehow holds it together until the last paladin leaves his presence and he catches Kells on his way back to the foredeck.
“Are there any updates from the Glowing Sea?”
The captain shrugs. “Last report said they’re on track to finish the mission as scheduled.”
“That report was from three days ago.”
“If it was uncertain, Danse would have notified us by now.” Kells scans his superior, draws a silent conclusion to himself, and sighs. “But I can spare a ‘bird to meet our patrols on the border, get an update by tonight.”
It’s not even noon.
—
“How long do you expect this take?”
He was staring at a map of Goodneighbor. He had it memorized before unfurling in front the General, you can call me Nora, but he knew if he dared waver from the crinkled paper that the exigency of this meeting would evaporate from his mind.
Because she was staring at him. Hours of scribe work spent categorizing and itemizing. Overtime. Internal personnel restructuring. Laid out neatly on his desk, all for her to wander in, pass her dark gaze over it once. She greets him with small talk, every single time. Meaningless. It should tell him something about her but all it did was cost him five minutes the last time they met. Those five minutes had accumulated during the rest of his day, swerve as he might to correct.
They met at night, now, and her disturbances in his schedule carried into his sleep. He went to Cade after sending her home with half a crate of stimpaks, because her journey to find this goddamn den of ghouls had been riddled with molerats and supermutants, and she hadn’t even made it to the entrance.
The medic reported an elevated heart rate, high blood pressure, unevenness of breath.
“Reduce your environmental stressors,” Cade had said. “Given your age, I doubt your heart is about to explode. And maybe try to stay hydrated.”
His eyes stayed glued to the map as he downed half a cup of water. Dark hair spilled over the crumpled corners, a slender shadow darkening the lines around enemy territory that he was certain she couldn’t have committed to memory.
“Shouldn’t be longer than two days. Maybe three.”
“We need an exact time.”
“Okay, three.” He could hear the smile in her voice when she added, “But if it takes two, you’re not getting a snippet of intel until our scheduled meeting time.”
That was fine. That was ideal. That was how schedules worked . He desperately needed her to understand that, but she wasn’t a knight beneath his command that he could scold or lecture. And she was looking at him again, he could feel.
“Slow, methodical approaches tend to work best with volatile hostiles,” he stated, to no one in particular.
He pushed the fact that medical supplies weren’t infinite to the forefront of his mind, ignoring everything else as he marked a litany of circles around the settlement. Squads would be stationed there, a recent restructure in the Brotherhood’s plan to maximize efficiency in the city center and not because of her refusal to have one of them accompany her directly. Vertibird patrols. He signed off a ticket so she could pick up a laser rifle from Teagan. Armor, too. Signal grenades, as an afterthought. Minimal expenses in the grand scheme of things.
The tension in his shoulders only seemed to release when she came back three days later, only a minute late. She glanced down at the clock he had been staring at, a sheepish grin crossing her face. “Oops.”
—
He takes lunch in his quarters, away from the buzz of the command deck. Every scribe, knight, and proctor must deal with their papercuts without input from their Elder for half an hour each day, and Maxson’s temples get a small relief in the permanent din of his room.
A plated sandwich, a single file folder, and a map of the Glowing Sea are lined up before him in a neat row. He ignores the first, and opens the file to the last report from Recon Squad Gladius. The General youcancallmeNora last checked in three days ago, on schedule, with written notes from the runaway scientist. He stares at the circle marking the hideout, then picks up his pen.
A good suit of power armor, and he had given her a good one, could accelerate walking speed by fifty percent. The communications unit within power armor had a radial distance of fifteen kilometers. The hideout was double that from where his soldiers were stationed; walkable in a day, technically, but the radiation of the Sea would wear on stamina over time.
He labels each of his markings with precision, left with a small inked radius where Nora could be. Somehow, it doesn’t make him feel better, staring at his calculations. He can send a squad to search the area, but they are three days without a check-in and it will be another eight hours to assemble a proper crew. Eight hours which won’t matter if she ends up being dead.
What?
Shaking his head, he crumples his fifteen minutes of work, swatting them from his desk. Wasting time on hypotheticals only leads to paranoia, and he tries not to dwell on such as he drops his face into his hands.
A minute passes. The clock ticks.
Then he rises out of his seat, picking up the bin near his desk. Shoves all the wasted paper in, puts the folder back into its place in the drawer. Pen placed into its holder, sandwich forced down his throat with a swig of water. He has actual, real work to do, and he replaces all evidence of his distraction with a pile of requisition forms.
He takes a different pen out of the holder, and sits back down. He’s signed his own name enough times that he can do it without looking, and five papers in he finds his view shifting, back over the top of the paper, past the edge of the desk.
To a navy blue coat, slung over the chair.
—
Cade flitted about her about in silence, checking her pulse and drawing a small sample of blood from her bicep. If anything, she looked a bit bored, which utterly confounded Maxson as he stood before her with his hands clasped behind his back. The doctor checked off another item, and the Elder’s stomach sank further.
“Fit for service.”
Wordlessly, Maxson turned on his heel and marched out the medbay.
—
He takes the long way back to the command deck, a route which lets him visit each section of the Prydwen. He doesn’t patrol often, but he’s got energy building up and he won’t be seen jittery in front of his men. A distraction finds itself in the armor station, where Ingram stands hunched over a table of scrap metal.
“Proctor,” he greets. “Report.”
“Still re-organizing our inventory,” Ingram says, distracted. “Not gonna let us getting to the Institute be delayed by bad component labeling.”
With a pair of tweezers, she picks up a rusty screw and places it into a box filled with the same, before finally looking up. For her expression when she sees him, she keeps her comments to herself.
“Remind me the specs you placed in the General’s power armor,” Maxson says, keeping his voice level.
“T-60C. Rad scrubbers. Sensory array. Targeting heads up. Motion assist, medic pump, kinetic servos—this is the third time you’ve asked me, Elder,” Ingram lists off, informing him what he already knows. “Are we missing some parts or something? I signed it all off with Teagan.”
“What’s the communications range on a T-60?”
“Fifteen kliks.”
He knows that too.
The proctor turns back to her table.
The command deck greets him with a long line of squads. Every day at fourteen-hundred hours, the vertibirds refill their tanks and if there’s time, a scribe cleans any clutter and viscera within the vehicle, to prepare for the fresh roster of soldiers. Every day at fourteen-thirty, the Elder signs off on each team with a mission briefing and a few words of encouragement.
He skips the latter today.
—
She slid between the half-open door to his room, dressed in a flightsuit. There was still blood splattered around the neckline where the previous owner had died in it.
From his desk, he squinted.
“When will you return?”
She shrugged, fiddling with all the latches and hooks that were engineered, meticulously crafted, by his scribes. To reduce strain and friction in a suit of power armor. So she could traipse into the Glowing Sea, unassisted, to speak to a supposedly intelligent supermutant, which apparently existed.
When she examined her fingertips, raising her eyebrows at the residue, he softened, if only a little bit. “I apologize. That’s all we have.”
“I pulled this off a corpse, so I guess I’m used to it,” she said, shaking out the lump of navy in her arm and hanging it across the chair opposite him, before sitting down. “What does your plan say?”
“I proposed a plan that spans a fortnight,” he said. “But you should consider any adjustments you might make.”
He had fruitlessly hoped she would consider something, anything at all. He’d given her the detailed file to do exactly that at the expense of a night’s sleep. A file that was not seen anywhere on her person as she sat before him now. He had a copy in his desk, wondered briefly if he should pull it out.
“I trust you, Arthur.” Not enough to take a vertibird. Not enough to take a squad, even though he’d offered several times. “If you think it’ll take two weeks, then it most likely will.”
This was true. If he had been planning it for his own men, it would have only been a week. He’d added a three-day barrier on either side so she wouldn’t rush, become reckless. “Okay.”
She smiled. “Fourteen days.”
He nodded.
Her smile widened, quirking up in one corner. “Three hundred and thirty-six hours.”
He realized a bit too late that she’s provoking him. His neck heated up around the edges, unsure how to respond.
“Twenty-thousand, one hundred—”
He raised his hand, cutting her off. “Thank you, General.”
“It’s Nora,” she reminded him. She stood up, fixated on the clock he hasn’t looked at once since she entered. “I’ll be back on the dot.”
—
Sun waning, caffeine crashing, he dismisses the last recon squad and updates his calendar. A scribe appears with a draft of their monthly summary to be sent back to Mariposa, and when the deck has emptied, Kells appears at the top of the stairs.
“Got the update on the General,” the captain announces, and in the back of Maxson’s mind he silently corrects her name. “Her comms cut out a mile from the checkpoint. Gladius was searching the area. Scribe Haylen was at base, gave us this.”
Maxson snatches the holotape.
“We got what we needed,” Kells continues. “So if Gladius can’t find her by the end of the night, I think we should pull them out. Bit of a waste otherwise.”
Negative. Absolutely not. We have the resources, it’s a minimal expense.
“I’ll gauge the situation,” Maxson says, stuffing the holotape deep into his pocket. “Dismissed.”
Back in his quarters, he replays the tape perhaps a thousand times, stopping and rewinding before it ends. It’s four minutes and thirty-seven seconds long, and he’s only heard the last fifteen seconds once. It’s Nora’s voice, a vague description of her location which he can’t match to anything within a mile of the border on the map he’s hunched over. Gladius asks for her status, and she ignores them to read out the list of instructions the mutant has given her.
He details those instructions, filling in anything he can’t catch on repeats. Then he cleans up his draft, types it up at his terminal and sends it to all the proctors for their next meeting. When he’s done, he leans back in his chair, letting the holotape play through to completion.
“So, do deathclaws have any weak spots I should know about?”
It’s past midnight.
“General, give us your status. Do you require assistance?”
A laser rifle fires. Something crunches, the line drops. Even when the tape has been shoved in his desk it replays as he stands in the shower, as he pours vodka to the brim in a glass. The sound of blunt force impact repeats over and over as he lies in his bunk, running through scenarios in his mind.
And at some point, he must fall asleep, because the noise echoes into his dreams.
—
His hand clamps down on the intruder before he’s fully awake, flattening against the sharp angle of his bedside. The alarm clock is the first thing he sees, informing him it’s far too late for her to be standing there, illuminated by the dull green terminal he’d neglected to turn off. Or far too early.
“How did you get in here?”
His grip loosens, and she slides her hand just out of reach. He can’t make it out in the dark but can feel her fingertips resting near his, can tell he’s under her ceaseless gaze. Whatever short relief he was given by her is quickly overridden with questions, with concern, but he musters up some kind of facade of calm.
“Your door was unlocked. You surprise me, sometimes.”
“I meant how did you get here ,” he clarifies, mostly for himself. The absurdity of the question dawns on him during her silence, and he sits up, pushing back his covers. “Are you hurt?”
“Power armor worked a charm,” she answers, too immediately. When he reaches for the lamp on his bedside, she hastily adds, “Don’t.”
So he does.
He knows wasting time on hypotheticals only leads to paranoia, but it hasn’t been entirely unfounded, this time. Dark bruises litter one half of her face, disappearing beneath her collar. When his vision adjusts to the yellow light, he realizes he’s mistaken: it’s one large bruise, spanning from her cheekbone to her neck.
No visible blood, besides what was already there, but he’s already planted his feet on the floor. “A charm.”
“Well, if the deathclaw had sucker-punched me without the armor, I probably wouldn’t be standing her at all,” she says.
“I’ll get Cade.”
“It’s fine,” she insists, jolting back from an investigative hand. It falls back to his side, revelling in its uselessness. “Haylen said it’s just bruising. It looks worse than it is.”
He’s heard that several times before, even from himself. It’s never the truth. But he can’t exactly order her to the medbay, or order her to take a squad, or to simply stop running into the depths of the wasteland every time she’s heard something on the streets. He could only offer, and it’s up to her whether she wants to take.
“Okay.”
“Did you miss me?”
“I knew you were coming back,” he lies. He doesn’t know anything at all, it turns out. She looks up at him, an open book with blank pages. Written in invisible ink. “You confuse me.”
“Sorry.” She takes a step back, picking her coat up from where it was neatly folded next to his terminal. If she notices a difference in its location she doesn’t question it, shaking it out and draping it around her shoulders. “I don’t mean to.”
He has questions brimming—the full set of who, what, why . But he can see clearly how the circles under her eyes blend in with the black on her swollen cheek, both darker than the shadows that cross her face. So he settles on the familiar, what he knows won’t topple her where she stands.
“When can I see you again?”
—
Six hundred hours, his alarm blares. He hasn’t slept at all, dazed as he stands under the shower then before the sink. His reflection stares at him from the mirror, unimpressed. One hand traces over where her lips brushed his skin. The other tingles where she’d held it, for what had felt like years before she answered.
Whenever I’m ready.
Her eyes flooded with sincerity, warmed him where he stood. He can still feel it when he finally makes it to the frigid command deck, where the awaiting scribe gives him an odd look with a heaping stack of files and a coffee that’s gone cold. He’s got work to do.
He can wait.