Work Text:
It’s been nothing but chaos from the moment they’d entered ArcJet, robots and lasers and ruin, and all Paladin Danse has done is give Bridgette some dull history lesson throughout all of it.
He’s told her no heroics and Bridgette’s not entirely sure what that means because all she’s armed with is her bat and the laser pistol Knight Rhys had given her before heading out. She’s only fired it once and Danse keeps insisting that she either starts using it or just get out of the goddamn way, so she does. She gets really, really out of the way.
She’s tiptoeing behind him, like some big chicken with her bat held high, and she keeps having to adjust the riot helmet Scribe Haylen had found for her in the back of the precinct because it’s too big and the buckle for it’s strap broke a century ago. And all Danse is doing is shaking the floor beneath her feet as he stomps through a building actively crumbling beneath them in a set of ten-ton armor as he nitpicks at every little thing she does.
It’s driving her crazy but she’s so goddamn scared that every little bump, jostle, and hiss of Danse’s laser rifle has her heart hammering like some ready-to-explode bunny rabbit, so she just nods in agreement about how taking her with him probably was a mistake on his part, and that once all of this is over, they’ll likely have to split ways.
She’s not even hurt about it because she’s only known this guy for about three-ish days now and she’s only known this world for maybe a week longer than that, and everyone else that she's ran into has either tried to kill her, rob her, or both. And he hasn’t seem interested in doing any of that to her — but he also doesn’t seem particularly phased at the prospect of getting her killed. And God willing, if she survives this, she’ll proudly scamper back to Sanctuary Hills and she and Codsworth will meld the minds and try to come up with a better plan that isn’t high-tailing to a police station to report her missing baby after 200 years of post-nuclear annihilation.
But he thanks her, and he actually sounds sincere, when she goes over to that lab analyst’s terminal, resets a password, and gets them past that security door.
It takes a few minutes of smashing in the heads of the polymer men waiting for them behind it before Danse asks it, “Do you consider yourself to be proficient in pre-war technology, Missus Perry?”
She’s still trying to catch her breath when she shakes her head, “Not at all,” she answers, and it’s true, resetting passwords really is about the extent of her computer skills, “and please don’t call me that.”
But he does, again and again, until Bridgette finally reminds him with a snap that her husband is dead, and that her name is Bridgette, and if he can’t remember that then it’s best he just settles for You instead.
He calls her Perry once they make it to the engine room and it’s enough for her, it was her maiden name after all. “Power’s out in this section,” he says behind her, illuminating the very steps that they’re now slowly stepping down, “so watch your footing, Perry.”
“Aye-aye.”
But Bridgette’s hackles are so far up that she can’t particularly focus on only the floor, so she missteps and her boot goes directly into a Bridgette-sized hole that requires Danse to catch her with some angry curse before she can plummet to her recently thawed out demise.
Danse’s titanium fist is wrapped so tightly around her upper arm that it’s crushing and his voice has gone back to nothing but pure irritation again, “I told you to watch your step.”
“I know — I know,” she grumbles once she’s got two feet planted on the floor again, “m’sorry, my vision isn’t what it used to be.”
It’s mostly an excuse but it is also the truth. Bridgette’s 20-20 vision really isn’t what it used to be after cryogenic freezing and while the edges of things aren’t as blurry as they were at the beginning, darkness still leaves her squinting and blindly groping into it. She’s been trying to avoid it as much as possible but a world without constant electricity keeps preventing that.
“It’s alright,” he says quietly, she almost thinks he sounds a little apologetic, “just try to be more careful.”
She doesn’t say anything and while she does trip again, it’s only on the toe of her boot and there’s thankfully a wall and a railing and an entire floor to catch her when she does.
“Blind and clumsy,” she grumbles underneath her breath, “it’ll be a miracle if I make it to next week.”
Danse snorts behind her, at least someone sees the humor in all of this, it’s surprising that it’s him.
“There has to be a backup system somewhere,” Danse says once the floor is finally solid beneath them again, and he directs his headlamp at the dim glow of red coming from an open door, “probably in that maintenance area off of the main chamber. I’ll remain here. Watch our backs.”
She glances up at him in disbelief and she meets the cold gaze of his helmet, “What if there’s more of those things in there?”
“Then use the laser pistol that Knight Rhys gave you.”
All Bridgette can do is sniff her upper lip and grumble. All Rhys had given her was a fifteen minute tutorial on how to shoot the thing and all it had left her with was a scorch mark about three feet away from her intended target and a hand that didn’t stop tingling or smelling like ozone for nearly an hour and a half afterwards.
But the walkway is clear and with each step there’s a little more light until Bridgette is finally standing in a maintenance room that’s full of nothing but rubble and junk and a switchboard of buttons that Bridgette couldn’t make sense of even if she tried.
“Uh,” she stands above it, and there is a big red button that she knows she probably shouldn’t touch, but none of the other smaller ones around it are blinking either, “nothing’s working,” she shouts to him as she jams a finger into one of the smaller, less doomsday-ish looking buttons, “what am I supposed to do?”
“Look for a terminal!” He shouts.
There isn’t one.
“I don’t see one!”
She hears him curse from behind the glass.
“Is there another room back there?”
She looks back, there is. She doesn’t give him the satisfaction of a yes.
The room is dark and scary and there is actually a working generator but it’s clearly not doing much for the switchboard upfront. It is, however, keeping the terminal that she was looking for up and functioning.
It takes a few key smashes but pretty soon Bridgette is opening a window to another automated password reset, and suddenly she’s in! And she thinks, that maybe she’s a little more tech-savvy than she initially thought.
There’s a groan and a hum and suddenly the lights are fully on in the little maintenance room and Bridgette is able to confidently walk out to a switchboard completely alight, and an engine room buzzing half-alive, too. But it’s not just brimming with the glow of some too bright overheads but the repeated flashes of more of those robots rifles and pistols from outside its window, too. And they’re bouncing off of Danse’s power armor so quickly that she knows, that there’s one: a lot of them, and two: if she goes outside to try to help Danse fend them off, she’ll be toast before she even gets her foot out the door.
So, she watches in horror — amazement even — as Danse knocks them back with a war cry about how he’s going to send each and every one of them back to Hell.
But there’s a lot of them and they don’t seem to be stopping, and even though Danse doesn’t miss a single beat in reloading a fresh cartridge into his rifle, he’s clearly starting to become overwhelmed.
“What do I do?” Repeats from her mouth in a desperate mumble and for a second she thinks that maybe if she does try to be a hero, that somehow she’ll figure out how to use that laser pistol of hers, and she’ll save the day and Danse. But there’s at least fifteen of them now and Danse is shouting that he’s running out of ammo, and to activate the goddamn engine.
She slaps that big red button before she can tell herself not to. Because his power armor’s got thermal coating and that probably means that Danse will be able to withstand the blast of a couple thousand joules of nuclear-powered rocket engine heat. Hopefully.
It’s blinding and she can’t help but scream in horror as Danse disappears under a blast of fire that radiates so much heat that she can feel it from behind the concrete wall that separates them.
He’s still there when it stops but he’s been brought down to one of his knees and Bridgette is running as fast as she can to get to him, to make sure that he’s okay.
“Oh, my god!” Bridgette shouts once the blast doors are open again, the whole room is sweltering and the ground that she drops on her knees to is so hot that she can feel it through the leather of her jumpsuit but that doesn’t matter because Danse is just kneeling there and groaning. “Danse!”
Bridgette knows where the latch is on his helmet, because it was on Nate’s too, and she knows how to take it off because Nate had insisted she at least try when she’d greeted him on the vertibird pad of his final deployment. It requires ten fingers and a twist, and so she reaches for him because she’s so terrified that she might’ve just killed the only person that hasn’t tried to kill her, and she recoils before Danse can tell her not to.
She doesn’t know what she was thinking because the pain is instantaneous and the flesh of her palms is already bubbling by the time she’s cradling them to her chest. It’s the worst pain she’s ever felt in her life and she can’t help but wail because she’s in agony and it’s all because she was terrified that Danse was in worse condition than he actually is. And because she couldn’t have his blood on her hands, because she didn’t have any on them still.
Danse’s helmet is off with that exact hiss that she was going for and it’s tossed a few feet away from him and into the ashes of the very robots Bridgette had just vaporized moments ago and he’s wide-eyed in the exact same horror that she’d been in just moments ago.
“What the hell were you thinking!” He shouts and it only makes her cry harder, “Are you out of your goddamn mind!”
Yes, she thinks. Yes! Yes! Yes! Bridgette’s completely out of her mind because the world just ended two fucking weeks ago and she has absolutely no idea what she’s doing, and her hands hurt so bad that she’s writhing on the ground in front of him, unable to decide where to put them because they hurt no matter where or how she holds them.
Danse reaches for her but stops because he’s smarter — or at least a little more level-headed — than her at this very given moment, and he watches her with those titanium hands of his held in fists.
She wants to ask him why he isn’t helping her and he answers before she can gasp it out.
“My armor,” he says to her, there’s an urgency in his voice, “it’s too hot still, I’ll only make things worse.”
Seconds, maybe even minutes pass, and it feels like a lifetime and then Danse is suddenly upright and there’s a hiss, and there’s a man and not a tin-soldier kneeling in front of her again, “Give me your hands,” he says once his med-kit is unzipped and poured onto the ground next to them.
It hurts too much to hold them out and he grabs at her wrists with a rough yank. It’s the most mind-numbing, brain-squeezing pain she’s ever experienced and somehow him peeling open her squeezed fists is worse than the burns that’s left them charred.
“Please — ” she gasps out, her throat is wet with tears and snot, and she chokes on it as he continues to pull open her hand, “please stop, I’m begging you.”
“We need to take care of your burns.”
She almost thinks of begging him to just kill her instead.
The pour of his canteen over her hands is a sensation that has her dropping her chin to her chest but the relief is brief and the needle that he continues to stab into her left palm has her just about ready to pass out, whatever it is, it’s warm yet cooling and soon her hand is numb and he’s taking another needle — a stimpak — and he’s plucking it into her palm over and over again.
She watches as the bubbles that blister her skin begin to drain into nothing and she focuses on it, or at least tries to, as Danse begins to treat her right hand the exact same way as the other. It hurts all the same but her nerves are starting to settle under his surprisingly gentle care.
He finally speaks once both of her hands are completely numb and he’s got a roll of gauze that he’s begun to wrap around her wrist and over her palms, “What were you thinking?” He asks her again, his voice is low and harrowed, and Bridgette can’t look him in the eye, “Do you have any idea just how much heat just came out of that engine?”
Her nod is small and Danse must not notice it.
“Answer me.”
“Yes,” she croaks out, “yes, I know.”
“Then — ” there’s an irritation rising in his voice again but he stops himself, and Danse takes a deep breath before he continues, “then why? What in the world were you thinking reaching for my helmet like that?”
“I was scared,” Bridgette answers, and it’s the truth, “I thought I — ” she swallows and she’s crying again but it’s not because of her hands anymore, “I don’t know. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
He says nothing and she can see from where she’s still hanging her head the way that he’s shaking his. “I was in my power armor,” he says quietly, “I was fine and you were — ”
“Stupid.”
“Reckless.”
They say it at the same time and Bridgette finally meets his eye. He’s not glaring at her like she thought he would be, but he’s definitely looking at her. His brows are furrowed and his mouth is set into some thin-lipped frown and she watches as his Adam’s apple bobs in some thick swallow before he speaks again.
“Remind me again how long it’s been since you left the Vault.”
“A little less than two weeks.”
Danse drops his chin back to his chest again with some small nod and continues to wordlessly wrap her hands, the sensation in them is starting to come back again and she can feel just how tight he’s actually wrapped them. But she just keeps her attention on him.
“You’re burnt, too.”
His skin, from his forehead to his neck are flushed an angry red, his hands are, too, and she can see the way that the bridge of his nose is beginning to blister.
“They’re surface burns,” he tells her, “there’s nothing I can do for them.”
She doesn’t say anything, not until Danse tells her that he’s done, “Thank you, Paladin Danse,” she says quietly and he keeps his attention on the way that she’s now flexing her fingers, they’re stiff and she knows that the grip on her bat is going to be too awkward to be helpful, “I’m sorry for putting you in this position.”
His smile is thin and flimsy, as if it’s something that he doesn’t normally — or ever — do, and it drops as soon as it starts but it is weirdly comforting, “All that matters to me is that we’re still alive, Perry.”
She nods and accepts the hand that pulls her to her feet.
“We still have to get that transmitter,” Danse says as he bends down to pick up the helmet he’d abandoned moments ago and Bridgette accepts it with only the slightest bit of hesitation when he steps back into his power armor again, “and we've wasted enough time, so let’s go.”
Bridgette hands Danse his helmet back with the same flimsy smile he’d given her just moments ago and his metal hands cover hers in their entirety, it’s incredible, she thinks.
“Aye-aye.”
The elevator ride is awkward because it’s just exactly that: an elevator ride and the space is cramped because Danse is a titan of a steel again that has her cornered and crammed behind him, and it’s almost funny the way the elevator still dings when they reach their intended floor.
But there’s another slew of robots with lasers and batons and she prepares to finally be turned into toast but Danse just raises his rifle and blasts all four of them away before Bridgette can even bat an eyelash.
“That was amazing,” she mumbles as she files in behind him, “I mean, really — how do you even do that?”
“I’ve been doing this for a long time.”
She wonders how long but Danse doesn’t seem like the guy who talks about himself very frequently, and unfortunately, there’s still a deep range transmitter that they have to look for.
“Damn it,” he snaps when another desk drawer proves to be full of the same useless papers as the last, “I don’t see the device anywhere.”
It harrows her to admit but Bridgette’s already picked at the dead. It’s how she’s got those twenty-three caps to her name and the switchblade currently tucked within her boot, and it was awful, and disgusting and thankfully she hadn’t been the ones that killed them but it still felt wrong.
And yet, right now…
“Could they have been after the transmitter, too?” She asks, her focus on one of the robots’ uncanny plasticine faces.
“Good thinking, Perry,” and Bridgette can’t help but think of his praise as her first Wasteland gold star, “fan out, check the remains.”
She finds it on the third body, it’s no bigger than the beeper she used to carry on her hip, and she holds it in the air just to make sure she’s correct.
His voice has a small lilt to it despite its distortion from the helmet’s speaker and Bridgette can’t help but hum to herself when she drops it into his palm, “That’s it. Outstanding work, Perry.”
“Glad I got to at least help out a little bit.”
Danse doesn’t acknowledge what she said but he does poke a finger against the elevator button again, “We’re officially done with this place. Let’s get out of here.”
Bridgette’s surprised to see that she’s in some sort of bunker when the doors open and Danse takes the lead again, she follows behind him with that same slow step, and when he announces that it’s clear and they’re safe to step outside, she’s got that stupid riot helmet that never once stopped falling into her face off of her head and pitched as far from her as she possibly can.
“That certainly could have gone smoother,” Danse says next to her, his voice is awkward but he sounds relieved that it’s finally over, and she doesn’t disagree so she shrugs sheepishly at him when he finishes it with a, “but mission accomplished.”
“Yup,” she’s rolling on the balls of her feet, this is awkward and weird, and unfortunately, probably the last conversation she’s ever going to have with the man, “mission accomplished.”
There’s a moment of nothing said and Bridgette decides to be the one that says it, “I suppose this is it then.”
Danse doesn’t say anything, not until his helmet is off again and it’s tucked into his elbow. He looks uncomfortable, and she is, too. “I think it would be wise if you continued to accompany me and Gladius for a while longer,” he says it remarkably coolly, and the little knit in his brow tells her that he’s not saying this because he necessarily wants to, “until you begin to settle into things a little more.”
Bridgette smiles at him wryly. She might’ve acted like an idiot in there, but she’s no fool, “Worried I won’t make it to next week?”
He chuckles and the tension between the two of them is gone, “Yes, something like that.”
It’s not a bad idea. But —
Bridgette takes in a deep breath and suddenly she’s too nervous to bring it up, despite the fact that their very first meeting had been about this very subject. He’s offering her a job, but what she needs is something else entirely.
Danse speaks as if he’s read her mind, “Give it some time,” he starts, and his voice is gentler than she expects it to be, “but the Brotherhood will have the resources, the training, everything you might possibly need so that you can be reunited with your son again.”
She can’t help but be a little lost for words.
“I couldn’t — ” he pauses to clear his throat, and suddenly his voice is a little firmer than it once was just moments ago, “I couldn’t in good conscience — um, I couldn’t let you walk away without you knowing that, without knowing what the Brotherhood could offer you — do for you.”
“Thank you,” is all she can say.
Danse hums some small noise at her and he looks about ready to crawl out of his own skin, “But like I said, it would take some time. And you’d be under my command and Gladius still has a job to do, and I’d expect you to follow orders.”
“I can do that.”
She’d do anything to have Shaun again.
He nods and there’s a sympathy in his eye that she doesn’t quite expect from him, “You need serious training,” he starts and Bridgette tries to take back that last thought, “but once you do, you’ll be able to get the justice you need against the bastards who took your family from you.”
Bridgette knows that he means well but it hurts more than anything.
“Thank you, Paladin Danse,” her voice is nothing more than a whisper, “for your kindness.”
It’s then that something snaps back into him and his upper lip has gone tight again and his brows are furrowed in an all-too serious expression. “Don’t thank me yet, soldier. You’ve got a long road ahead of you.”
Soldier.
She sniffs, somehow that’s even worse than Missus Perry.
“Don’t call me that,” she tells him and she doesn’t even blink at the way that he squints back at her, “I prefer Bridgette, only Bridgette.”
But then his brow relaxes again and she knows that he finally gets it.
“Bridgette it is then.”