outstanding.

He’d spent what felt like the greater part of the day weaving through the crowd of well-wishers. All of Rivet City and half the stragglers from DC popped by to see off the team. Even Harkness, the recalcitrant security chief, had shaken his hand, though he added a characteristic “better you than me up there,” before scowling back into the bowels of the ship.

They’d have been off at 1300 hours, had Danse had his way. Now, as the sun threatened to set and his handpicked vertibird sat idling on the Tidal Basin, he ran his hand over his freshly shaved face. He had a mission, and he itched to get it started, if only because he hated protracted goodbyes. There was no room for sentiment in the service. Moreso because the longer they tarried, the harder it’d become to leave.

He belonged here. He knew why he was going north, knew why it had to be him to try and pick up the pieces of the Artemis disaster, and find Madison Li. It had to be him. But it’s not what he wanted, god knows, but when had Danse ever gotten his way?

He breathed a sigh of relief when he spotted Arthur - Elder Maxson - off a ways on the bridge looking out over the Potomac. From this distance, in this waning light, he almost looked like the impenetrable figure most of the East Coast Brotherhood considered him to be. He almost didn’t look like the little boy over whose shoulder Danse had stood loyally by all these years.

Danse sidestepped through the rest of crowd and pushed Haylen off on the more enthusiastic folks. “We’ll get north by Christmas at this rate,” he said dryly as he came abreast of his friend. Up close, Arthur still cut the imposing figure unless you’d known him as long as Danse had. To his eyes, Arthur only looked tired and far too young.

Quinlan had promised him ad nauseam that his lungs were starting to seriously protest this addiction, but that didn’t stop Danse from lighting a cigarette and leaning against the rail of the old ship. He could afford to have one vice. He didn’t drink, he didn’t looked at chems with anything but disgust, and he’d never once shirked his duty.

This recon trip up north felt like a betrayal of his duty. He tried not to focus on that.

“We’ll send daily reports back over the wires. Haylen’s worked up a morse system that may be low tech enough to fly under the Institute’s radar. In case of emergency, our radios are set up to receive on the high priority signals, and I have confidence in her ability to encrypt them for you to send short distress calls at will. We’ll be there to answer.”

Call if you need me, for god’s sake. Don’t do this alone.

“Haylen said ‘third time’s the charm’ for the Brotherhood in the Commonwealth.” He didn’t glance at Maxson, not trusting his usually stalwart poker face. Instead he looked over the clean waters of the Potomac river, at what the Brotherhood had rebuilt in the recovering ruins of the Capital. 

I’M GOING TO NEED A LOT MORE VODKA (selectively accepting)

6: Gentle Peck

He leaned as the other gestured, pointing to a page within the book that sat comfortably within his grasp. With his own fingers squeezed around the mattress’ edge and his feet swinging to and fro beneath the bed’s iron frame, the youthful Arthur Maxson tilted his head as the story was weaved into pretty words. Once again he had convinced the aspiring soldier to read something him, but most important of all was the time they spent. Even at the age of ten, he knew how hard time was to come by, yet still the man he met not even a few months prior had gone out of his way to sit with him at every chance he got. Arthur was grateful–so much that it was evident in the way he held himself whenever the newly recruited soldier came around. His spirits lifted and for a short while, he didn’t feel so alone.

So it was with a tired yawn that he leaned, head pressed against the other’s arm as his own bright eyes scanned the page from which he was reading to follow along and match each word to its phonetic pronunciation.

“‘I never could stomach these nationalists,’ he exclaimed–” 

“What’s a ‘nationalist’?” Arthur’s head craned back, tired eyes blinking up at Danse expectantly, assuming that he had the answers to everything much like Elder Lyons did. The only difference between them was that Gavin had been willing to share the time and secrets their renown leader never could.

Arthur formally sat down to review the intel report—a movement made tosuccumb to fatigue; the silent admission behind closed doors that he was, indeed, pushed to his limits. But at the end of the day it meant little, for war never slept. The wasteland would not fix itself, not without a guiding hand. It took settling into the hard seat of the chair that his body ached; his muscles screamed at his resignation and his eyes stung. Tired he was, but sleep he could never find. And so he reserved his dwindling attention for the blinking screen as stress, insomnia and his innermost, personal wars ate away at the back of his mind.

He had reached for a bottle as the report was selected —his only solution to his internal struggles— and his rough, calloused fingers curled around the cold exterior of the glass. He drew it towards himself, the intent to consume evident, but the motion itself was paused as his gaze traveled across the emerald words that lit up the screen.

The silence that lingered was deafening, broken only by the soft shuffle of his fingers loosening around the neck of the bottle before shoving it back into its original place. In the chaos that was his own thoughts, Arthur deliberated. He weighed one unspoken decision with another, and after a time, he hauled his exhausted form from the chair and pulled on his coat.

Fingers flitted about the collar, brushing the lapels down before reaching for a belt of fusion cells and a modified fusion rifle once belonging to one of his own. With a sense of overwhelming determination and sheer will suppressing his fatigue, Arthur marched out of his chamber without a single word and departed the Prydwen, slinging the thread of ammunition over his shoulder as he headed directly for downtown Boston.

I woke up at 4 am with the urge to draw this. I just had to.

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