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Chapter Text

Danse braced his shoulder into the barricade as the next wave hit, bones and nails and hungry teeth colliding with metal sheets and sandbags. The air tasted like mold and burned hair. Rhys sat propped up on the steps, both hands clamped over his abdomen, blood coming fast between his fingers. Haylen had her palms stacked on top of his, one glove already red to the wrist, while she shouted into the radio.

“Recon squad Gladius at Cambridge Police… multiple hostiles… requesting immediate– ” Static answered, thin and indifferent.

No support was coming. The Citadel might as well have been on the moon.

Danse fired until the ruby line from his pistol thinned; the capacitor whine dipped. He ducked, ejected the hot cell, slammed a fresh one home, and popped back up. Ghouls rushed in from all angles, black eyes focused on him with hungry intentions and sharp, quick, inhuman movements.

A figure slipped through a gap in the barricade without a word. Practical clothes, not armor; thick denim jeans with rough armor patches hand-sewn at the thighs, a simple shirt treated the same; a blue bandana tied around her upper arm that meant nothing to him. She carried a worn pump shotgun low and ready.

The barrel came up. First feral, skull snapped back, a wet crack. Pump. The second fell before the first hit the asphalt. She paused and ejected the spent shells, brass clattering on the stone steps. Her eyes were not full with hesitation, but calculation, and she thumbed two shells from her belt into the tube with cold efficiency. Danse’s fresh cell spun his pistol up, and he burned a hole through a leaping chest as she racked and dropped the third.

The hoard thinned to a trickle, then to nothing. The last feral twitched on the sidewalk with a sound like a defeated beast. Silence rushed in.

Danse kept the pistol up, scanning for another wave. Nothing moved.

He turned. Close up, she was younger than he had first thought, probably late twenties, but with a stern expression that spoke of hard years surviving in the wasteland. No insignia. No brand. The shotgun was clean where it mattered, battered everywhere else. The blue band at her arm caught his eye again– bright, deliberate.

“Nice shooting for a civilian,” he said, meaning it to be a compliment, but cringing at the accidental condescension. 

“I’m not a civilian,” she said, already scanning past him toward the steps. “I’m a doctor.” 

Her chin lifted to Rhys. “He needs a sterilized suture kit and maybe a pint or two of blood. Do you know his blood type? My clinic is a few blocks away.”

Danse’s training pulled in opposite directions. Hold the position. Keep the unit intact. Don’t trust unknown variables. He ran the mental inventory: last coagulant gone on the previous sweep, gauze low, stimpaks nearly spent, suture kit questionable. Rhys’s color was wrong; the blood was still gushing around Haylen’s hands.

“Paladin!” Haylen’s voice cracked, fierce with fear. “If we don’t go with her, Rhys is going to die.”

Danse holstered the pistol without another thought. He slid an arm under Rhys’s shoulders and another under his knees, lifting. He weighed nothing to Danse in full power armor. Rhys hissed but didn’t spit a curse. Haylen kept pressure and grabbed her pack.

The woman– doctor, he corrected, slung the shotgun behind her and stepped through the barricade, head on a swivel, angles checked before commitment. 

“Stay tight,” she said. “We cut east and keep to the alleys.”

“Identify yourself,” Danse said, her anonymity nagging at his strict protocol.

“You can call me Doctor.” A brief look at Rhys’s belly. “You’re burning time we don’t have.”

He grunted once. Adjusted his grip. Followed her into the alleys, Haylen at his flank, the station and its terrible quiet shrinking behind them as their boots hammered a path toward whatever this blue-banded stranger had built within saving distance. He prayed it wasn’t a trap. He had to trust her, though, as the alternative was even worse. He only hoped they wouldn’t be too late. 

Abraham changed the dressing the way she’d taught him: gloved hands, clean cloth, slow breath so he didn’t rush the corners. The boy on the cot hissed but kept still. Outside, Liberty was waking up: hammers on scaffolds, someone arguing about brahmin feed, a radio two streets over fighting to pull music out of static. Inside the clinic, the only music was the boil of the kettle and the soft rip of tape.

Blue tape. The strip across the broken concrete floor had been down long enough to fray at the edges, but the rule it made was still visible. A line in the sand that no one disrespected. Not anymore.

They’d never had a clinic before she came. Liberty had a man who could yank a tooth for caps, a woman who knew where to put a splint, maybe even a stimpak or two for trade now and then, but mostly a lot of hoping for the best. They’d been isolated in their corner of what once was Philadelphia until the day a traveling doctor swept in one morning like she’d been there yesterday and meant to be there tomorrow. Practical clothes, blue bandana around her arm, a satchel that clinked with unknown vials and stimpaks. She picked a spot on the old loading dock at the edge of town, snapped her fingers for a broom, and laid that run of blue tape like she was drawing a border the settlement didn’t know it needed.

“No weapons past the line,” she said, voice even, like reading a recipe. “Everyone is a patient inside the line.”

She didn’t ask permission. Liberty watched, suspicious, curious, and though they wouldn’t say it, hungry. People get tired of waiting for help that never comes. When someone arrives and acts like help is the most ordinary thing in the world, you test them or you follow. Abraham followed.

He’d never sewn a torn shirt straight, but when she asked for volunteers, his hand went up before his brain voted. 

She set a kettle on the hot plate someone scrounged. 

“Water boils at a rolling, not a whisper,” she told him, and he watched for the difference.

She showed him how to fold cloth so a clean side stayed clean. She made him count seconds while the gauze sat in the boil. “Not too long or you ruin them. Not too short or you ruin people.” Dry humor, like the bandages they hung to cool.

When a farmer came in with a split forearm, she talked while she stitched. “Hold the skin, not the needle. You’re not pinning a butterfly; you’re convincing two sides to shake hands.” Her hands moved like she’d done it a thousand times and still thought it mattered. She made him try the last two stitches. His first knot squinted back at him, doubtful. She untied it without judgment. “Again.” The second held.

What shocked Liberty wasn’t the competence. It was the neutrality. She treated a raider with the same voice she used on Mrs. Kline’s boy when he fell off the wall. She took no caps from the penniless and no extra from the proud. Word went around that if you were bleeding and could walk to the dock, you’d be seen. A few didn’t like it. Mostly men who’d lost someone to a spike bat or a bad deal before she arrived. But the tape kept finding feet on the safe side.

Until it didn’t.

Late afternoon: light slanting through the busted garage door, dust like snow in the beam. Abraham was rinsing a basin. She was checking a fever. The tape lay there, quiet and blue. A man came straight through with a pistol in his hand and a face like rust, like anger left in the weather too long. He didn’t look at Abraham. He didn’t look at the sign. He looked at the cot in the corner where a raider lay with stitches like railroad ties across his belly, and his boots crossed the blue tape without a glance down. 

“Get up,” the man said, “This one owes me.”

The air changed. The kettle’s chatter vanished from Abraham’s awareness. The doctor didn’t raise her voice, but the venom in it was clear. 

“No weapons past the blue tape.”

He kept coming, the gait of a man who’d decided on a future and meant to drag the world to it.

She met him in two steps. Abraham didn’t see the moment her hand left the thermometer and found the man’s wrist.  

He heard the grunt as the man hit the concrete hard, the Doctor’s grip on him wrenching and contorting until she had him under control. The pistol in his hand fell from limp fingers, and Abraham didn’t see the moment she snatched it. She stood over the man with his own barrel an inch from his forehead, breath calm.

“No weapons past the blue tape,” she repeated, same tone she’d use for “change the dressing at noon.”

He spat about rights and debts and tried to scramble into a crouch. He tried to reach for the gun. 

She shot him once in the head. 

Zero hesitation. The shot rang out in the room with an echo against the crumbling concrete walls. He went still the way people do when they learn the rules apply to them after all.

“Drag him out,” she said to the two nearest men. No drama, no sermon. She kicked the pistol sharply across the line and farther, out into the street. She called for someone to clean up the blood pooling on the concrete. 

Word moved faster than the radio. The story changed a little each retelling; a second shot, a warning, a speech, but the important part didn’t: the blue line was sacred, and the Doctor would keep it that way. After that day, no one crossed it with a weapon. People checked each other at the door without being asked. A scavver unbuckled his knife and asked Abraham to hold it once, like they’d been doing this for years.

And then one day, just like that… she left. No goodbye, no look back. One morning, Abraham came in early to boil gauze and found a crate the size of a hope chest and a book that had been read to threads. The crate held antibiotics, gloves, a suture kit that made him whistle, glass vials with hand-scratched labels, and a half dozen things he had to look up in the book before he trusted himself to touch them. The book was plain: Basic Field Procedures on the cover, margins full of tight notes. Tucked under the lid was a roll of blue tape, bigger than his fist, and a folded sheet that read in block letters: NO WEAPONS PAST THE LINE.

People asked her name after she’d gone. Abraham told them the only truth he had: they’d called her Doctor. It was enough. The legacy she left behind was enough. 

“Almost done,” he told the boy on the cot now, smoothing the fresh bandage. The boy watched him with the dazed gratitude of the recently injured. He discarded his gloves and ruffled the kid’s hair. “You did good.”

He logged the change in the ledger she’d started: time, supplies, who sterilized, outcome pending, and checked the kettle. Rolling, not whispering. He laid a new strip of blue tape over the old where feet had worn it thin. It felt like renewing a promise.

Outside, someone laughed. Inside, the clinic smelled like boiling water, antiseptic, and clean cloth. Things he hadn’t known could smell like safety. He wasn’t a hero. He was a man who’d learned where to put his hands. Liberty was better for it. The blue tape helped people remember who they were when they stepped over it. So did he, when he tied a knot that held.

If she ever came back, Abraham would tell her the rule stuck. No one had tried to cross with a weapon since. They dragged the line straighter every week. Little by little, Liberty thrived. The sick were healed. The injured were stitched back up. Abraham sighed and changed the dressing on a raider’s leg wound. He turned and checked the IV for a local merchant. The blue tape stood sentry by the door, promising safety within the walls. 

He had meant to arrive as an Elder.

The coat. The insignia. The voice that bent rooms to attention. The report from Gladius had been clipped and unsettling: civilian clinic with enforced disarmament, wounded Knight treated without charge, no credentials, no sanction. He’d read it twice, jaw tight, imagining cracked tiles, dirty syringes, and a self-styled “doctor” playing at medicine. He had already drafted orders for a med-evac for Knight Rhys. Better to risk transport than let his soldier linger on a stranger’s dirty cot.

Instead, he found an old diner sanded down into something that looked more like discipline than improvisation.

The sign over the door was painted by hand, blue paint on white boards: NO WEAPONS PAST THE LINE. Someone had wiped the place down hard enough to sand the shine off the counters. Everything had a place. Nothing had a speck of rust. Cots lined the scuffed tile floor in military rows. A battered cooler was marked ANTIBIOTICS in a careful hand, with a penciled note beneath: low supply. On the counter, a ledger sat open to neat columns and cramped handwriting, every letter and number in perfect rows. 

A strip of blue tape cut across the entrance like a horizon.

A boy stood guard at it, freckles bright against his pale skin, shoulders squared with effort. His Adam’s apple jumped when Arthur entered.

“Sir,” the boy said, voice wobbling but not breaking. “I need you to disarm if you’re coming in.”

Arthur’s gaze slid to the tape, then to the boy again. The Elder of the Brotherhood of Steel, asked to hand over his sidearm by a civilian who could barely be a teenager. For the first time that day, something like wry amusement tugged at him. There was courage in that voice, even if it rattled.

“I see the sign,” Arthur said. His hands moved slow, deliberate, unbuckling the pistol and the knife at his belt. He set them on the tray by the door. The boy let out a breath but didn’t flinch, didn’t thank him. Arthur stepped across the tape, noting the audacity of it. The line itself meant nothing, but still, the order it carried was respected.

The room hummed with human noise: the rasp of labored breath from one cot, the hiss of pain as a dressing was changed, the kettle bubbling in a low boil. Danse leaned against the far wall in his flight suit, sharp eyes following every movement; Haylen half-dozed in a chair beside Rhys, boots neatly aligned beneath her. Rhys himself was pale but alive, his brow furrowed even in sleep.

Arthur was halfway to them when another voice, steady and unhurried, cut through.

“Check the sutures at midday. If there’s seepage, you’ll re-pack the wound. Gloves on. Fresh dressing. Count the seconds while the forceps boil.”

It was the same cadence he remembered from boyhood drills at the Citadel, only sharper with years of use. He turned.

A woman in a stained apron was bent over a patient, her hands steady, her voice low but carrying. Her movements were precise, practiced– needle in, knot tied, dressing smoothed as if every step mattered. She didn’t look up right away, too intent on finishing the work, too focused on the patient in front of her. A strand of dark hair escaped her bun and fell across her cheekbone. The blue bandana around her bicep shone like a beacon. 

Arthur’s throat closed. His chest tightened like a fist around his heart. He forced himself to stand straight, to breathe evenly, to let nothing show. But his pulse rattled anyway, heat crawling under his collar.

She finished the stitch, tied off the thread, and smoothed the edge of the bandage. Her gloves snapped into the bin, her hands moved to rinse in a basin, exact and measured.

Then she looked up.

The room stilled to a slow, sluggish heartbeat. The boil of the kettle dulled, the low hiss of a patient’s breath blurred. It was as if the air itself tightened between them.

Her eyes found his, and something passed across her face; shock, sharp and clean, then recognition like a blade sliding into place. For an instant, she wasn’t the doctor commanding a room, wasn’t the legend whispered about in broadcasts and broadsheets. She was the woman he’d last seen years and years ago. Same stern but kind expression, same set of her jaw like the world would bend to her will if she tried hard enough. Same dark blue eyes he’d memorized every fleck of turquoise within. 

She blinked once, and the mask tried to reassemble: calm, steady, unflinching. But he caught it. The faint flicker in her expression, the barest tremor at the corner of her mouth, the momentary widening of her eyes. Years apart had driven iron into the door between them, but in that look, the hinges groaned and shifted. The door was open again, whether either of them wanted it or not.

“Arthur,” she said simply, with no waver to her voice. 

For him, the clinic’s noise collapsed into that ringing sound after an explosion. The rest of him devolved into that boy at the Citadel chessboard, pretending he studied openings while memorizing the way she tapped a pawn when she thought. That teenage crush had never left; it had just calcified into something he could carry without limping.

Then the medbay in DC slammed back: too-bright lights, the sheet over Sarah. And her, legendary in her own right and usually so composed, sobbing over the body until a well-meaning scribe tried to pull her away. He’d never seen her crack; kindness and competence were her armor. That day, they failed. It told him in a language no report ever could how much Sarah had meant to her– more than anyone understood, maybe more than she’d let herself admit. Later, in a side corridor, she’d pulled him in hard, not a pat or a simple hug, but a hold, teaching his lungs how to work again.

It’s going to hurt for a long time, she’d said. But it will get easier. 

He hadn’t understood it was a goodbye until it was too late.

 It was the last time he saw her.

The radio kept her alive in the halls for a while, Three Dog and, later, other voices. Celebrating her successes, marking her movement through the capital. He’d listened too hard, building a map in his head that always ended at the Citadel gate. She never came.

Now she was here. Beautiful the way a blade is beautiful: purpose first. And when she said his name, the floor shifted like a deck taking a hit. The shock wasn’t dull. It was exact: heart stutter, throat locked, the sense that gravity had been discreetly renegotiated without his consent.

He met her eyes and understood, with the bleak certainty of a man who has survived too many impact reports, that every system he’d built to live without her had just failed its stress test.

“Abby,” he breathed, and hated how rough it came out. He hadn’t said it out loud in years, what felt like a decade. He coughed once and corrected himself. 

“Abigail.” One side of her lips quirked into the barest suggestion of a smile at his slip into old nicknames.

The silence between them stretched until it ached. Arthur pulled air into his lungs the way he’d been trained under fire; measured, deliberate, denying the chaos in his chest. He forced his pulse back into rhythm and locked his jaw. He was Elder Maxson, not the boy at the chessboard.

“We had a report,” he said at last, voice clipped, “that a civilian treated Brotherhood soldiers without proper protocols.”

“Patients,” she corrected. “Inside the tape, everyone’s a patient.”

“You have no authority to treat my soldiers.”

Her eyes didn’t flinch. “You expected me to seek authorization when your Knight would have bled out in minutes?”

Her tone was calm, but the calm itself was confrontational, like a scalpel pressed flat against skin. She said it with such certainty, pointing out his flawed logic as easily as she’d once declared checkmate. She turned back to her work, tying off a dressing with a surgeon’s knot, her hands as steady as they had been nearly a decade ago. He caught himself watching the way she trimmed the thread, precise down to the millimeter.

Arthur studied her. The apron stiff with old stains, her hair tied back with a scrap of blue cloth, the faint shadows under her eyes from too many nights without sleep. She radiated competence, but he saw the crack beneath: the weariness she hid, the effort it cost her to keep that calm.

And damn him, he admired it. Admired her. But suspicion dug in anyway, sharp as glass.

“The Brotherhood has its own medics, Abigail,” he said finally, his voice clipped.

She didn’t flinch. “I was Brotherhood once. A Paladin, for God’s sake. Trained. Uniform and all. You think I forgot protocols?”

“Once,” Arthur corrected coldly. “Technically, you’re a deserter.”

Her glower was sharp enough to cut steel. 

“Deserter? That’s what you call this?” 

She turned, crossing her arms, and began rattling off with the crisp efficiency of a drill sergeant. 

“Forceps boiled. Dressings sterilized and sealed. Ledgers logged down to the minute: who sterilized what, who changed which bandage, what symptoms presented, and how they were treated. Supplies inventoried nightly. And every single one accounted for.”

She took a step closer, her eyes locked on his, even as she had to tilt her chin up to compensate for his height. “That’s more regulation than half the field medics I worked beside at the Citadel. Ask Knight-Captain Argus. He’d be proud.”

Her tone softened just for a moment, a wisp of memory sliding in. “My father would approve, too.” But the words snagged, and she cut herself off, lips pressing into a hard line.

Arthur’s throat went tight. He wanted to snap back, to throw more rules and regulations at her, but the words knotted in his chest. Because she wasn’t wrong. She’d been there after Project Purity, after the Enclave’s defeat, steady as steel while the halls of the Citadel buzzed with her name whispered like a hymn.

She’d been there for years, through Owyn Lyon’s passing. Right up until Sarah’s death.

And then she was gone. No word. No explanation. Just absence, as sharp and sudden as a blade between his ribs.

He remembered himself at fifteen, almost sixteen, sitting across from her at a chessboard in the quiet mess hall after curfew. The jokes she made at his expense caused his heart to stutter. Watching her bite her lip in concentration before putting him in check for the third time. The sparring matches she used to win, until he grew enough to tower over her in height. 

And then, barely a year later, the entire weight of the Brotherhood had come crashing down onto his shoulders. A title. Command. A legacy too heavy for a boy still learning how to breathe without breaking.

And she hadn’t been there.

The wound had never closed. Seeing her here, calm and competent and unshaken, split it wide open again.

Arthur held her gaze, jaw clenched so tight it ached. He didn’t trust himself to speak, because the words waiting in his throat weren’t about protocols at all.

He turned to inspect her ledger, desperate for discipline. Pencil columns met his eyes: sterilization times, sutures counted, supplies logged with relentless precision. Boil 0900. Needles opened bedside. Antibiotics: three courses left. Rumor of scarcity made fact in a few tight strokes of graphite. She was right, every Brotherhood protocol followed meticulously. 

He shut the book before his chest betrayed him. 

“You do this for everyone?” he asked, voice low, even. “Settlers. Raiders. Ghouls. Where do you draw the line?”

“At breathing.”

“You expect me to believe a strip of tape keeps order?” His voice came out sharper than intended. “That anyone who walks in bleeding suddenly obeys because you tell them to?”

“It isn’t tape.” She dried her hands, each motion exact. “It’s a rule. And rules hold when people see they’ll be enforced.”

It should have sounded naive. Instead, it landed with the same inevitability as an order. He felt his jaw tighten.

“Do not mistake survival for sanction. My soldiers’ presence here does not make this place legitimate.”

Her head tilted, just slightly. “Legitimacy isn’t yours to give. It’s up to the people.”

His eyes flicked to the blue bandana and down to the matching cobalt line in the sand. 

She moved to Knight Rhys, checking his blood pressure with a rusted stethoscope and a pocket watch. 

“He will need to stay for another night before I’ll release him,” she said, as if stating the law rather than a request. 

Her voice stayed calm, her back straight, but Arthur saw the faint tremor in her fingers when she set the watch down. It rattled her, too, seeing him again. She just hid it better.

At the door, he re-buckled his sidearm, every motion mechanical. He didn’t linger, didn’t look back a second time. But the smell of boiled water and antiseptic clung to him, and the shape of her name still burned in his mouth as he stepped into the alley, the generator’s cough loud in his ears.

He had arrived as the Elder of the Brotherhood of Steel. 

He was leaving as a man shaken up by the ghosts of his past. 

One ghost. One he never thought he’d see again. 

The savior of the Capital Wasteland. 

The Lone Wanderer.

Abigail. 

Chapter Text

Boston Commons at night wasn’t what the pre-war brochures promised. Sure, you could still feed the ducks… if you liked them feral, half-feathered, and meaner than super mutants on a rampage. The fountains didn’t flow, unless you counted the occasional geyser of sewage bubbling up through the busted concrete. But it made for a decent meeting spot if you wanted privacy. Even though he’d been neutralized by a woman in a vault suit weeks ago, the legend of Swan still lingered and kept the square clear of eavesdroppers. 

Deacon spotted her before she saw him. Practical clothes, boots laced tight, blue band tied around her arm like the stripe of a uniform only she saluted. She leaned on the rail near the water, posture straight, eyes scanning the dark like she expected it to blink back at her. She never slouched, never dropped her guard. The kind of woman who carried order with her like a shadow.

Doctor Abigail. That was what she called herself these days. To some, just “Doctor.”

But Deacon knew better.

He knew the story: the vault kid from 101 who walked into the Capital Wasteland and saved it from itself. The kid who dragged Project Purity across the finish line when the world kept trying to trip her. The daughter of the deified James Quinn, a name the world still couldn’t stop polishing like it was gold. 

A lone wanderer in the wasteland. 

The Lone Wanderer.

She’d never told him, of course. She never would. But he’d stitched the facts together the way he always did: the timelines, the voice on old holotapes, the way escaped synths whispered about her blue tape clinics as if they were shrines. Deacon never liked shrines. But he liked what she was doing.

Of course, the fact that it had been Three Dog —the idealistic idiot on the airwaves in D.C.-- who had initially put them in contact was a huge clue. 

But he liked her, though he’d rather chew glass than admit it out loud.

She heard him coming; she always did, and didn’t flinch when he dropped onto the bench beside her. Just gave him that flat, steady look that could probably stop a behemoth mid-charge.

“You said you had news,” she said.

Straight to business. No small talk. He kind of admired it.

“One of our new guests fresh outta the Institute swears up and down that Madison Li is alive and well, living the good life in white coats and bad company.”

That got her. Not much, not from her. Just the tiniest catch in her throat, a flicker in her eyes before the shutters slammed back down.

“They have her,” she said, voice even.

“They have her,” Deacon echoed. “And if half of what our friend said is true, she’s not chained to a wall. She’s working for them.”

Her jaw tightened. “They’ll be forcing her. Manipulating her. Madison wouldn’t—” She cut herself short, recalibrated. “She wouldn’t stay there if she had a choice.”

Deacon let her have that. In his head, he could already hear the arguments: maybe Li wasn’t just a collaborator, maybe she was just tired of chasing miracles and wanted a lab with the lights still on. He didn’t say it. Telling her “Dr. Li doesn’t need saving” was about as helpful as telling the tide to quit rolling in.

“You want her,” he said, though they both knew it wasn’t a question.

“I need her,” she corrected. “It can’t be replicated without her. My father—” She stopped, but the word was already loose in the night, hanging there like a ghost.

He didn’t push. Just tilted his head and played it casual. “She’s in the Institute. That’s the good news. The bad news is, y’know… she’s in the Institute. Not exactly a place you can knock on the door and ask to borrow a cup of sugar.”

Her gaze cut back to him, steady and fierce. “Where is it?”

That made him grin. Not because it was funny, but because he liked the inevitability in her voice. As if she’d already decided she’d walk through the front door the second she knew where to find it.

“Where is it?” he repeated, spreading his hands. “If only. That’s the million-cap question, Doc. Nobody knows. It’s like a magician’s trick. You see the smoke, you see the mirrors, but the hands? They’re invisible.”

Her lips pressed tight, not quite a frown, not quite disbelief. She hated walls she couldn’t break down.

“Look,” he went on, lowering his voice, “we’ve seen their work topside. Replacements. People yanked off the street, swapped with a person who looks, walks, and talks exactly like them. Whole families unaware. Hell, the synths don’t even know it themselves. Whole towns torn apart because the wrong guy twitched at dinner or said the wrong thing at the wrong time, often they’re not even synths. It’s not just paranoia. The Institute makes sure of that.”

He shifted, elbows draped along the back of the bench like he was telling a story over drinks, but his eyes were sharp. “Couple years back we had what folks call the Broken Mask Incident. Guy shows up in Diamond City. Traveler, came in from out west, full of stories. Had the crowd eating out of his hand. Then, mid-sentence, his smile drops. Face starts to twitch, jaw locking up like a chewed-up gear. Next thing you know, he’s putting people down with cold efficiency. Bullets, fists, didn’t matter. Seven dead before the guards dropped him. And when they opened him up?”

Deacon gave a humorless grin. “Bolts and plastic where there should’ve been lungs and blood. The first time anyone realized Generation 3 synths were walking around in our skin. No wonder the whole Commonwealth’s been jumpier than a radstag in hunting season ever since. Brothers turning on each other, mobs stringing up anyone who sneezes wrong. And that paranoia? The Institute counts on it. Keeps people scared, keeps us distracted.”

Abigail’s eyes didn’t leave his, steady, dark. She didn’t flinch.

He tipped his head, almost approving. “That’s why we smuggle the runaways. Give ’em a chance instead of letting an angry crowd find a rope. Not everyone’s as lucky as your friend Harkness back in Rivet City. He got his shot at freedom, and you helped make sure he kept it. Most don’t.”

Her jaw tightened, but her voice was calm. “Then that’s another reason Li doesn’t belong there. Even if she is working for them, it’s not freedom. It’s not what she stood for. I have to get her out.”

Deacon leaned back, letting the silence stretch, studying her from the corner of his eye. Determination radiated off her like heat. All the horrors he laid out, the mobs, the massacres, paranoia thick enough to choke a city, and she still looked ready to walk into hell with a med kit and a steady hand.

He almost smiled. 

The Lone Wanderer never did back down from a challenge.

“So yeah,” Deacon finished, “we know they’re out there. We know they’ve got Li. But as for finding their front door?” He gave a little shrug. “We’re still fumbling in the dark.”

She looked away, jaw working, gaze fixed on the black water where the fountain used to cascade. For a second, he thought he saw the weight hit her; the exhaustion, the grief she hid so well. Then the mask reset: calm, unflinching.

“I’ll find a way,” she said. Not hope. Not speculation. Just fact.

That was the thing about her. She didn’t ask if it could be done. She simply declared that it would.

They talked longer: what the escapee had said, what it might mean, what steps she wanted to take next. Her voice stayed even, steady, like every word was weighed before she let it loose. Not once did she say who she really was. Not once did she admit to being the kid from Vault 101, the girl who became legend through radio broadcasts and whispered tales around campfires. Deacon never let on that he already knew.

She wanted to be Abigail. Just Abigail. The doctor with blue tape and steady hands. And Deacon understood that. Better than most.

But he thought about it, sitting there under the broken lamps of Boston Commons, how her little clinics had begun to sprout like weeds after rain. Reports had trickled in for months– hell, years at this point: a loading dock in Philadelphia, a basement in Baltimore, a gutted church outside New Haven. Always the same sign, the same rule. No weapons past the line. Everyone a patient. A line of tape and a woman’s word strong enough to keep raiders and settlers alike in check. No faction ever pulled that off.

He almost laughed at the thought of pitching her to Desdemona. She would’ve been an incredible asset; sharp mind, steady hands, a creed that cut sharper than steel. But she’d never tie herself to the Railroad. Not when her whole mission was neutrality. Not when her only flag was a strip of blue tape, and her only allegiance was to those bleeding on the wrong side of it.

Still, he couldn’t help himself. He wanted to help her. Because when someone like her asked, it meant more than words. She wasn’t the kind to waste breath. If she said she needed to save Dr. Li, it wasn’t out of pride, or politics, or payback. It was because she believed saving Li meant saving people. And Deacon had spent long enough in the shadows to know how rare that was.

She was the kind of person the wasteland needed. The kind who built sanctuaries out of crumbling buildings, who asked for nothing but compliance and compassion in return. She worked in the shadows, stitched people back together, gave them a reason to believe the world wasn’t finished yet.

And maybe that’s why he didn’t tell her the truth. That Li wasn’t a prisoner so much as a collaborator, that she might not want saving. Let Abigail keep her conviction. Let her keep her mission. Because the wasteland needed her to keep walking, keep drawing lines where none existed, keep forcing people to remember their own humanity.

Deacon shifted, tugged the hood lower over his face. He’d help her find Li. He’d lie if he had to. 

When they parted, she slipped into the dark like she’d grown out of it. Silent, certain, already on to the next battle only she could see.

Deacon lingered. He watched the ripples where the old fountain had been. He thought about the synths who had landed on her cots in the last month, shivering and terrified, and how she treated them the same way she treated raiders, settlers, or merchants. No hesitation. No sermon. Just clean hands, clean sutures, a calm voice telling them they’d make it if they held still.

That was her creed: neutrality so strict it became sacred. And people respected it. They checked their weapons at the line because they knew she’d check everything else with equal reverence. She treated tape like a commandment, medicine like scripture, and the patients followed because the world was starved for rules that actually saved lives.

He thought about what he’d tell Des back at HQ. 

The blue tape clinics? Safe zones. 

The doctor who ran them? Worth keeping alive. 

Worth respecting.

Would he tell Des she was the Lone Wanderer, the mythical vault kid who saved the Capital a decade ago, still striving to save the rest? 

No. That was her secret to keep.

He looked back once, just to see the spot where she’d stood. Felt a flicker of deja vu he didn’t care for. Another vault dweller was out there right now, younger, angrier, tearing the Commonwealth apart to find her son. He’d have to throw himself into that mess soon enough.

The Commonwealth didn’t hand out miracles often. Abigail Quinn deserved to keep hers.

Ralph had run brahmin caravans up and down the coast long enough to know that most jobs were dull. Hauling scrap, ammo, food, chems, caps. Same routes, same dangers, same folks waving him down for trade. But a few months back, he picked up a job that stuck to his ribs.

A woman in the Capital Wasteland had found him at Rivet City. Didn’t haggle, didn’t waste words. Just handed him a slip of paper with destinations and told him to pack every jug he could carry. She already had them bottled. Gallon jugs stacked in neat rows, the word PURIFIED stamped bold across the plastic. 

“Take it north,” she said. “Leave it. Don’t take caps. Don’t wait for thanks.”

Strangest gig he ever took, but the pay came from her, not the thirsty mouths waiting at the end of the road. And she paid well.

He figured it was a one-off. It wasn’t.

Ralph made the trip over and over, bringing fresh water to communities without. 

A few months later, she flagged him again. But not with water. This time, it was chests. Heavy things, iron corners and tight seals, the kind old pre-war adventure stories said held buried treasure. She gave him instructions: which town, how long to wait, where to put it. Usually inside some old church or workshop, always at night. And every time, somehow, she was already there. Standing in the shadows, pointing out the spot, quiet as a ghost. She’d travel with him a day or two, maybe three, then vanish again. Weeks later, when he came to the next place, she’d be there waiting again, like she’d stepped out of the dark just to keep the game going.

He never asked how she did it. Wasn’t his business.

Still… he wondered.

He’d grown up in the Capital, knew the stories about Project Purity. Knew the name James Quinn. Folks said his daughter had been the one to finish what he started, that she’d saved the whole damn Wasteland. A legend. Too big to be real. But the woman who hired him… well, she would’ve been about the right age. Stern, quiet, eyes like they’d seen too much. He’d caught her once, watching kids drink from the jugs he’d hauled, her face lit by lantern light. There’d been no pride there, just a hard kind of defiance, like she was daring the world to try and poison them again.

Now, months later, his routes took him farther north, toward Boston. And everywhere he dropped one of those chests, whispers followed: a clinic had opened. A place marked by a strip of blue tape across the floor and a rule that everyone respected. No weapons past the line. Raiders, settlers, didn’t matter. The wounded walked in, and they walked out stitched, cleaned, healed. Or buried, but buried with dignity.

Ralph told himself he didn’t care. He was just the deliveryman. But one hot afternoon, while his brahmin chewed cud under the shade of an old billboard, curiosity bit harder than caution. He pried the lid off a chest.

Inside: bandages folded with care. Glass jars labeled in a steady hand. A book, dog-eared and patched together, its cover stamped Basic Field Procedures, margins crowded with tight, neat notes. And on top of it all, a roll of blue tape.

Ralph sat back on his heels, staring.

It wasn’t treasure in the old-world sense. But for the Wasteland, it was worth more than gold.

He shut the chest quick and wiped his hands on his trousers, like the contents might burn him. He didn’t tell a soul. Not about the tape, not about the book. Not about the woman who rode with him, who might’ve been a legend, or just another ghost with work to finish.

All he knew was this: when she asked him to haul, he hauled. And when he heard about another clinic marked by blue tape, he felt a little piece of pride bloom in his chest. Like maybe, just maybe, the road he traveled was carrying something bigger than trade.

Arthur needed the ground.

The air on the Prydwen had been stifling. Paperwork, reports, endless strategy briefings. He told himself that these field inspections kept morale high, reminding the men that their Elder wasn’t a ghost locked in a war room. Truth was, he needed the cracked streets and burned-out husks to keep from drowning in his own thoughts. Out here, the world was brutal but simple. Out here, he could breathe.

The squad moved through the narrow street, steel boots crunching glass, the weight of power armor pressing the silence flat. Arthur walked among them in his coat, not his armor. A presence, not a weapon. His rifle stayed slung; he hadn’t planned to fire it.

Then the shot cracked the air.

A scream followed. Knight Boyd jerked, staggered, and went down hard. The round had found the seam just under his ribs, where the weakness of the plate was evident, where no plating could shield him. His gauntlets clawed at the pavement, fingers flexing uselessly as blood filled the undersuit.

Arthur’s stomach lurched. A burst of return fire already neutralized the sniper, but the damage was done.

They tried to lift Boyd, but the armor dragged them down with him. “Take it off!” Arthur barked. Gauntlets hit the street with dull thuds, chest plate unlatched, helmet rolled into the gutter. Blood smeared every piece they peeled away. Boyd screamed until he didn’t, his breath shallow, his eyes wide and glassy.

“Medic two blocks east!” one of the Knights shouted. “Workshop!”

Arthur nodded, curt and sharp, and gave the order. But inside, he was already unraveling. They hauled him, armor plates left clattering behind, until the building loomed: a mechanic’s workshop patched with rusted tin and tarps. A generator hummed in the alley. And there it was.

A cobalt line slashed across the floor inside the wide doorway.

Arthur stopped dead.

The Knights pushed past, Boyd groaning between them, but Arthur just stared at the tape. His pulse roared in his ears. Another clinic. Not the diner. She had spread them here, too. That line had followed him from the Citadel to Boston, from childhood chessboards to command tables.

He thought he’d gotten control of it. He thought a week was enough to lock it all away again, to build the walls back up. He was wrong.

“Sir?” one of the Knights urged.

Arthur forced his hand to move. He unbuckled his sidearm and dropped it on the tray. He stepped over the line.

They stripped the last of Boyd’s armor and laid him on the cot. Blood pooled fast, soaking the sheets, the smell copper-sharp in Arthur’s nose. His hands hovered uselessly at his sides. The boy’s lips moved soundlessly, his body jerking. And then the seizure hit.

Arthur froze.

The convulsions rattled the cot, the foam bubbling at Boyd’s lips. The Knights shouted for help, for action, but Arthur’s legs felt nailed to the floor. His chest constricted. He had commanded men into fire, watched them die by the dozen, and here he was: useless, staring at the twitch of a boy’s hands as though he’d never seen blood before.

Then a hand seized his wrist. 

Her hand seized his wrist. 

Abigail was here.

“Hold him down!” She barked, orders resonating as clear as on any command deck. 

Her grip burned, and Arthur jolted into motion. He pressed Boyd’s shoulders against the cot, muscles straining as the Knight convulsed beneath him. Foam flecked Boyd’s lips; his eyes rolled white. Arthur’s heart slammed, not with fear of the seizure, but with the sound of her voice; sharp as a blade, cutting him back into the moment.

She moved fast. Syringe drawn, cap snapped off with her teeth, dose thumbed into place. She slid the needle home with precision, her hand steady even as Boyd bucked. Within moments, the convulsions ebbed, the soldier’s chest stuttering into shallow, exhausted breaths.

Arthur exhaled, only then realizing he’d been holding his own breath. His coat sleeves were stained, the sticky warmth seeping through wool to skin.

But she didn’t stop.

“Forceps,” she snapped, hand out. A young volunteer stared, frozen. She snapped her fingers once, twice, and the boy jolted, dropping the instrument into her palm. Arthur had seen squads dissolve under weaker hands. She didn’t falter.

The flash of steel, the wet sound as she worked, the sharp hiss of cauterization, the smell filling the air. Boyd groaned, half-conscious, legs twitching.

And Arthur… he watched her.

He watched the way her brows knit together when she bit her lip in concentration. The way sweat slipped down her temple and she shoved it back with the corner of her sleeve, never daring to risk her gloves. The way she barked for gauze and the boy jumped to obey, then softened her tone a beat later, reminding him to count to twenty when boiling the next set of forceps.

It was control. It was authority. It was Abigail in her element, and it hit Arthur harder than any sniper’s bullet.

His mind betrayed him. For one fractured instant, the workshop blurred, and he was back in the Citadel medbay, Sarah under a sheet, Abigail sobbing over her. He smelled the same copper tang, heard the same rattled breaths. Another Knight, another table. On repeat.

It had been a week since Cambridge. A week since Rhys nearly bled out.

Now here was Boyd, stomach opened, blood pooling on the concrete, another man under his command dragged through the Commonwealth in pieces. The cycle repeating.

Finally, the bleeding slowed and the sutures held. Boyd was as stable as he could be in his state. Abigail dropped the last stained gauze into the bin, peeled her gloves away, and wiped her forearm across her brow. Her shoulders slumped, just for a second, before straightening again. She reached for a cloth and scrubbed her hands, red soaking into the fibers.

Arthur flexed his own stiff fingers. His soldier’s breathing was shallow but steady. The quiet pressed close, broken only by the low buzz of the generator outside.

“The bullet wasn’t clean,” Abigail said, voice low. She didn’t meet his eyes at first, just stared at the floor as though weighing how much truth to give him. Then she looked up. “It hit too much. Stomach. Liver. Kidney. He… he might not see morning.”

Arthur’s chest tightened, his throat dry. The Elder in him wanted to nod, issue orders, delegate. But the man in him, the boy at the chessboard, wanted to deny it, to push the world back together with sheer force of will.

He forced his voice steady and turned to the nervous squad of soldiers at the front of the garage. “The rest of you, back to the Prydwen. Strip the armor, carry it with you. Send a vertibird at first light.”

The Knights hesitated, eyes flicking from their Elder to the doctor, then back. But a single sharp look sent them scurrying. Boots thundered out the door, fading into the night until the workshop was quiet again.

Arthur pulled a chair close, lowered himself into it, and sat beside Boyd’s cot. His hands were sticky with blood. His mind was still ringing with her voice, with the memory of her grip dragging him back into himself. 

Her gaze lingered on him. For the briefest moment, he caught the crack in her armor; the grief she swallowed, the fatigue she masked, the sorrow she wouldn’t show the others. Just a flicker, and then it was gone.

She tried, though. She even managed the corner of a wry smile. “At least your coat matches the décor now,” she said dryly, nodding at the blood splattered up his front.

It was a kindness wrapped in sarcasm, the only kind she could give. He almost smiled back, but stopped himself. He couldn’t get too close. He knew better. He’d told himself this was a mistake the moment he stepped over the blue line.

But Boyd might not make it through the night. And if his man slipped away, Arthur would damn well be here when he did.

She seemed to know, somehow. Her eyes softened, her mouth tugged into a small, sad smile, and then she turned back to her ledger, pencil scratching neat rows as though the world hadn’t just threatened to break open again.

Arthur stayed.

He woke with a start, his neck stiff, head tipped back against the cool concrete wall. The lanterns had burned low, shadows swallowing the corners of the workshop. Boyd still breathed on the cot, shallow and uneven, but alive. Arthur studied his face, pale as wax. Too young. They were all too young.

He dragged a hand down his face. He wasn’t going to sleep. Not here, not with his thoughts this loud.

They churned restlessly, Boyd bleeding out on the cot, Rhys a week before, Sarah’s body under the sheet years ago. Ghosts, every one of them, piling up in the dark. And Abigail among them. The snap of her fingers for forceps. The steel in her voice. The way she could command a room by sheer will. Watching her work had tightened something inside him until he could hardly breathe. He had come to Boston armored in doctrine, but it was nothing compared to the armor she wore: neutrality, precision, that calm voice. And yet he couldn’t shake the memory of her hand on his wrist, dragging him back into motion.

Arthur stood abruptly. The scrape of the chair legs seemed too loud in the quiet. He needed the cold, needed the air, anything to bleed off the pressure in his chest.

Outside, the night bit into him. The generator hummed like a heart too wired to stop. A half-moon hung overhead, clouds dragging past like smoke, throwing cold light across the cracked pavement. Arthur breathed deep, hoping for clarity. Instead, he found memory pressing closer: the Citadel courtyard, Sarah laughing at a joke Abigail made; chess pieces clinking under her steady fingers; the last tight embrace she gave him in the corridor before she disappeared for good. Too much. All of it.

He turned down the alley and froze.

A glow in the dark. Small, ember-red. Then the shape of her.

Abigail sat on the chipped steps of the workshop’s side door, knees pulled up, one arm looped tight around them. The cigarette wavered in her fingers as she drew, the ember flaring, the smoke curling pale against the star-pricked sky.

Arthur’s pulse stumbled.

Inside the clinic, she was command, unshakable, hands steady as stone. But here, under the moon, she looked undone. Haunted. The cigarette trembled. Her dark hair was loose, no longer pulled into a practical bun but churning with the night breeze. The weight she carried inside the walls had followed her out here, raw and uncovered.

And for a moment, Arthur saw her as she had been: the young woman in the Citadel, nineteen, bearing the weight of a wasteland that had demanded salvation from her. Too young for it. Too human for it. That same look was on her now, the one that said she bore it all anyway.

Arthur’s chest clenched. He felt like an intruder, like he had stepped into something private and sacred. His instinct was to turn, retreat into duty before she noticed him. The Elder had no place in this.

He shifted his weight, ready to leave.

Then her voice cut the night, quiet, unflinching.

“Couldn’t sleep either?”

Her voice carried just enough to reach him, low and steady. Not the bark she used inside the clinic, not even the flat patience she wore like armor. This was softer, almost tired.

Arthur paused, caught. He hadn’t meant to intrude. But she didn’t look at him, only flicked ash against the cracked pavement and took another drag. Smoke curled up, blurring the stars.

“No,” he admitted. His own voice sounded rough, too loud in the hush of the alley.

He should have left it there. Instead, he pulled an old crate out from the shadows, flipped it over, and sat across from her in the narrow alley, only a short distance from the stairs she sat upon. The wood groaned under his weight. For a long moment, neither spoke. The generator hummed, the night cold enough to sting his throat when he breathed.

She broke the silence first. “He’s young. Boyd.” Another drag, ember flaring, smoke drifting. “I could see it in the way his hands shook when they cut his armor loose. I can stitch, I can cauterize, I can medicate… but bullets don’t care how steady your hands are. I don’t think I can save him.”

Arthur clenched his jaw. He hated the truth in her words, hated more that she said it so plainly. “You did what you could.”

Her lips twitched, not quite a smile. “I always do.” Then softer, almost to herself, “Doesn’t mean it’s enough.”

“You’ve lost people before,” he said, not a question.

Her shoulders tightened. She didn’t look at him, just stared at the cherry of the cigarette that illuminated her face. Haunted.  “Don’t you dare think I’ve forgotten how that feels.”

The words struck like a blow. Arthur sat straighter, the cold biting deeper. He opened his mouth, then shut it again. He could still see her in the Citadel medbay, begging Sarah to wake up until they pulled the sheet over her. He remembered how she would change the subject whenever her father came up in conversation, still raw from his death. Abigail had ghosts following her, the kind she couldn’t save. 

“You left,” he said quietly. Not accusation, not command. Just truth.

Her laugh was short, bitter. “What else was I supposed to do? Stay there? Pretend I could walk those halls every day with Sarah’s ghost at my shoulder? Pretend I didn’t hear her laugh in every corner?” She dragged hard on the cigarette, held the smoke in, let it curl out in a hiss. “I would’ve drowned in it. I had to leave, Arthur.”

He studied her face in the half-light. For the first time, he understood. Really understood. She hadn’t abandoned them; she’d saved herself. Arthur felt his throat constrict. He realized he’d been angry at her for leaving, furious even. But hearing that edge in her voice, he finally saw how childish that had been. She hadn’t left to run. She’d left because if she hadn’t, Sarah’s ghost would have buried her alive.

He drew a slow breath, steadying himself. For the first time since he sat down, he looked at her not as the former Paladin, not as the Lone Wanderer, but as Abby. And he knew then that he had no right to judge her for surviving.

Arthur said nothing. The night pressed close, heavy with the weight of memory.

Abigail flicked the cigarette butt with her thumb, ash drifting to the asphalt below, and leaned back against the step, exhaling like she’d been holding her lungs hostage. After a beat, she huffed out something that might have been a laugh. “Guess I’m still terrible company for a smoke break.”

It wasn’t much, but the corner of her mouth tugged upward, just enough to count as a joke. The old dry wit she used to flash over a chessboard when he moved a pawn into danger.

Arthur’s lips almost answered in kind. Almost. He let out a slow breath through his nose instead. “Not the worst company I’ve kept.”

Her eyes slid toward him then, catching his in the half-light. For a moment, neither looked away.

“You carried it young,” he said finally. The words felt scraped raw on his tongue. “The weight of the wasteland. Right out of that vault, everyone expected you to hold it up. To save it. Too much for anyone.”

Her brow furrowed, the faintest crease, but she didn’t deny it. She wrapped her arm tighter around her legs, as if holding herself together. “You talk like you don’t know the feeling.”

Arthur’s mouth quirked bitterly. “I was born into it. You were thrown into it. Doesn’t make the burden lighter either way.”

That landed between them and lingered. The hum of the generator, the whisper of wind down the alley, the pale glow of the moon; all of it conspired to hold the silence taut until it felt fragile.

Arthur found himself watching her more closely than he meant to. The shadows around her eyes, the way her shoulders slumped just a little now that no one else was watching. And then, in the moonlight, her gaze lifted to him.

There was recognition in it– not of the boy at the Citadel chessboard. No. She was watching him, measuring the man he’d become, and finding something familiar. A kindred spirit weathered by the same storms.

“It hurts for a long time,” she murmured, almost as if testing the memory. “But it gets easier.”

He remembered a long corridor in the Citadel. He hadn’t understood then. He did now.

Arthur’s chest clenched tight, his pulse climbing hard against his throat. She wasn’t looking at him like a comrade, or a memory, or the doctor behind a ledger. There was something raw in her eyes, unguarded, stripped of her usual calm. It was dangerous. It was magnetic. It pulled at him with a force he wasn’t prepared for.

The alley around them blurred, muted to nothing but the white glow of moonlight draped across her cheekbones, the nervous curl of smoke leaving her lips, the slight tremor in her fingers where they clutched the cigarette. He drank it in: the damp shine at the corner of her eyes, the rise and fall of her shoulders as she breathed, the sharp line of her jaw fighting to hold steady. Every detail struck him like it had been waiting in his memory, half-remembered, begging to be completed.

His thoughts scrambled. He told himself to look away, to hold the line, but his eyes betrayed him. Her lips parted just slightly, an unconscious motion, and for the barest instant, he saw it; her gaze flick down, then up again. A fraction of a second. Just enough to tell him he wasn’t alone in the tension– just enough to undo him.

Arthur’s breath caught. The space between them thinned to a thread. The mask of Elder Maxson faltered, falling away until he was just a man staring at the woman who haunted his sleepless nights. He leaned forward a fraction, too far, not far enough—

It would take nothing. Just one breath. Just one lapse.

At the exact moment, it caught up to them both just what was happening. 

He tore his gaze away first, breath hissing through his teeth as if he’d been burned. She blinked hard and shook her head like someone waking from a dream, swiping her sleeve across her eyes with too much force. She stamped out the dead cigarette on the concrete as she fumbled for another, the unlit paper twitching against her knuckles.

Arthur scraped a hand down his face, grounding himself in discipline, in duty, in anything but the truth of what almost happened. He rose abruptly, the crate groaning under the shift, needing space, needing distance before the air suffocated him.

The alley stretched thin with shadows as he turned toward the front of the clinic. Fragile shadows, fragile resolve.

Neither of them spoke. Neither of them moved to acknowledge it. But both of them knew. The thread had nearly snapped. And once stretched that tight, it would never be the same again.

Halfway to the corner, he looked back. She was still sitting there on the steps, cigarette loose between her fingers, watching him with an expression he couldn’t name.

“You should get back to your Knight,” she said, voice low and still a little shaky.

He nodded once. “Try to get some sleep.”

For a heartbeat, it felt like neither of them meant what they said.

Then Arthur turned, and the night swallowed the rest.