MOVED ! URL IS THE SAME

        A START, and he’s awake. there was an explosion. in the back of his head, in the back of his mind. a fiery blast of oranges and reds and HEAT  -- shattered remains of a vertibird in his mind’s eyes pulling him suddenly to the surface with a deep, rattling noise in his lungs. it’s dark -- dark enough to almost pull himself back to the commonwealth dust with a smoldering, fallen brotherhood vessel beside him and the searing pain of missing limb and blood. he’s trembling, he realizes fleetingly. and he’s sweating -- locks of hair plastered against temples and flesh as he rolls over with a grunt, barely aware. barely conscious as it slowly and surely slips into his consciousness that he is not in danger. that he is not in pain ; despite the phantom ache that creeps up his synthetic arm and into his shoulder blade, causing him to tense.        he was never one to wake loudly from a dream -- even a nightmare. but the panicked look behind his dark eyes and the sweat on his brow was enough to give him away as his eyes finally open in the dark. he sees her -- and she’s awake as well. before he can speak, before he can apologize for likely waking her -- she’s moving faster than his eyes can track. there’s a hand around his throat and his shoulder is shoved into the mattress ; and the former paladin -- the former solider -- is helpless under her weight as she gives him a cruel smile in the dark, whites flashing as she tightens her grip -- and he gasps around her fingers, trying to force air flow around her unrelenting hold; one hand going by impulse to her wrist -- in an attempt to pry her grip off.     he bucks and tries to knee at her, but his fight is ebbing away -- darkness eating at the corners of his vision once more -- “ sar .. ah .. - “ he manages, voice barely a rasp ---           ANOTHER START -- this one louder, startled. a gasp so sharp that it felt like he swallowed ashes and he’s jerking to full awareness ; sitting up so quickly that his world spins. so quickly that he realizes sarah wasn’t actually on top of him. that the weight on his chest was actually a crippling anxiety that was trying to swallow him alive in his sleep. eyes flicker around the small room like a trapped and lost child, no immediate threat even if his body trembled as if there was a knife to his throat.             she wasn’t even awake yet, body pliant and quiet ; still, much less not at his throat. sarah wouldn’t, his sarah wouldn’t. he groans, shoving both fingers into his hair and squeezing his eyes shut. trying to fool himself into thinking he could tuck the nightmare aware and find the will inside of himself to go back to sleep.

Dark days are coming. She wonders if Danse can feel it, like the heaviness in the air before a storm. The Railroad had been cut from the head, leaving the base to flounder from the toppled hierarchy. Powers will continue to shift and change. ‘ARTHUR LOST SIGHT OF WHAT THE BROTHERHOOD SHOULD STAND FOR’ is not just an observation, but a foreshadow of what’s to come. The Commonwealth is a sickly thing, and as Quinn shuffles the pieces across the board, she intends to see it restored.

Even so, she’s placing a gamble on the former Paladin. His loyalty has never been to a person, but an idea, and ideas are tricky, tricky things; less fallible than people; less corruptible; LESS. 

Quinn reaches into her coat now, producing a folded up paper–thick leaf, but the yellowed edges belies its age. She unfolds it, flattening it out across the table. 

“These are the schematics of the Yangtze-31 – a nuclear submarine PREVIOUSLY in Boston Harbor. They believe the submarine is still active…. and that it still has a living crew.” It does. Just a sole Captain, but she doesn’t disclose this. “I’m sure you can imagine the repercussions to letting a nuclear submarine escape.”

Danse had been told he was an intense individual ; he never saw it that way. He merely knew where his own loyalties lay and would defend them to a tee. LOYALTY had been everything to Frederick Danse --- and where did that get him? it got him chewed up by the very men and women he had spent more than a decade serving and spat back out like he meant nothing, despite all he had done for them. Despite the blood he had shed, despite the sweat. And tears. And deaths he had witnessed. All of it meant nothing, when faced with the truth of what he was. And, the reality of it all had left the former paladin reeling without a handhold to grasp onto. Within a few hours, everything fell apart before he could scarcely comprehend it.  And, at the same time, it left him to reevaluate everything he had been taught to believe.   He wonders -- wonders idly if one day soon, would be be forced to come gun to gun with his former soldiers? Would he have to choose between his own life, and the former family that had sheltered him after Rivet City -- that had given him a true purpose for the first time in his life? The thought alone made his stomach quake.  He takes a step back when she reaches into her coat -- caution more than anything -- and watching her take out of the paper; tipping his head back to look at what she was indicating before flickering his stoic gaze between the paper and her. And, behind that calculated gaze he knew how to call upon so easily was a war with himself. Brotherhood of Steel soldiers outside of the Commonwealth still had a chance at becoming what they meant to be; instead of becoming poisoned by Maxson -- just as he had been.

MUN FACTS | ACCEPTING

Tension dug the rigid edges of the switchblade’s grip into his calloused palm, fist clenching tighter the longer the ex-Paladin spoke. Anger was indeed a present feeling, and an obvious expression that intensified with every passing second while his shoulders pressed back and his head lowered, stare unflinching. 

“You think you’re not accountable for all the lives before then? You helped murder countless slaves of the Institute, outed as Synths in exactly the same way as you,” he heard Desdemona’s words pour from his own mouth, until- “But you’re still standing. Alive.” His poise shifted, a leg brought away from the other while his hand was removed from his pants pocket, the knife carefully opened in the shadow of his opposite-facing side. 

“What makes you so special?”

sith inquisitor QUINN.  

                            “i’ll see you in hell, coward.”

                                       imagined by :                    van