Chapter Text
With the muzzle of a rifle tickling gently at my uvula, I was drooling and fighting the urge to throw up. My knees hurt against the cold concrete floor of the bunker. My wrists were cuffed together behind my back, my ankles ditto, and rough hands were stripping me of all my lovingly modded armor, and of my Pip-Boy, and my boots and socks; then the rough hands were at my throat, at the buttons of my fatigues, undoing them, and patting down the bare skin underneath. Squeezing at the cups of my bra. My legs were dragged roughly out behind me, and my pants were pulled most of the way off, until they snagged on the ankle cuffs, and then someone drew a knife.
Just stay alive, I told myself silently. Once Deacon, who had very intelligently popped a Stealth Boy and run like hell once he saw the way the tide was turning, got back to the Castle and let them know what was happening to their general/wife/mother in a Brotherhood bunker up north--
Why hadn’t I listened to PAM? Why hadn’t I listened to Michael when he begged to come along on this trip? Why hadn’t I listened to Deacon when he told me that if I hesitated to fight, or to fight back, we were going to be doomed? Why didn’t I ever listen to anybody?
The knife sliced my beloved ballistic-weave fatigues the rest of the way off me, and then cut off my bra and panties, and then, finally, once I knelt there stark naked, cuffed hand and foot, the gun was withdrawn from my mouth.
“Agent Bullseye,” said one of the knights, drawing it out as if it tasted delicious. “Brothers and sisters, I believe we’ve just acquired a valuable asset.”
“Listen,” I said, and he hit me across the face with his power-armored hand, making my head ring. I tasted blood, fought not to whimper.
Someone else grabbed a fistful of my hair and dragged me up by it, and then picked me up, slung me over his shoulder, and carried me upside down for a ways, my face banging against his power armor. I didn’t want to try too hard to wriggle around and see where we were going, in case he took it as resistance and beat me up some more, so I just dangled meekly until we stopped at a barred cell, which the guy dumped me in, knocking the wind out of me.
“My name’s Nora Bowman!” I called after him as soon as I got it back, but he was already slamming another door behind him. “I’m the General of the-- fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
I took stock of my injuries-- my vision was blurry, which could have been a concussion or just getting hit in the eye. One of my eyes did feel swollen. I had a bullet wound in the shoulder. I was naked, and already shivering on the cold concrete floor. My mouth was bloody and wet with drool, although when I checked with my tongue, none of my teeth seemed to be loose. My scalp was burning from being yanked up by the hair, my arms were already sore-- quite apart from the bullet wound-- and my wrists chafed from the cuffs.
All in all, I was almost relieved when the Brotherhood came back, four of them, without power armor this time, but all armed.
“I’m Nora Bowman,” I said hopefully, as one of them unlocked the door of the cell and two of them stepped inside; the others stood outside with drawn guns.
“How grandiose,” said the guy who’d carried me in here; he had pale carroty hair and pale blue eyes, and thin lips. “I imagine the Minutemen will be here shortly to rescue you, then.”
I’d been thinking about that. Seven hours or so overland to the Castle, if Deacon really booked it, and didn’t stop to rest or eat, which-- we’d already been kind of tired when we got here. Then say an hour at the Castle for preparations, and then seven hours-ish for Hancock and Michael and the Minutemen to make it back up here. Fifteen hours, best-case scenario; probably, if I was being realistic, more like twenty or even twenty-four.
“Yeah,” I said. “They’ll be here. Eventually.”
The red-haired guy laughed. It wasn’t a friendly laugh.
“You can save yourself considerable suffering by sparing us your ridiculous lies, Agent,” he said. “You were apprehended in the company of a known Railroad agent, who addressed you as ‘Bullseye’ within the hearing of one of our scouts.”
After all the shit Deacon had given me about secrecy and stealth. I was never going to let him live this down.
“That guy’s a Railroad agent?” I asked, hoping I was hitting the right note of surprise and indignation. “He said he was bringing me to a settlement that needed my help. I thought he was just impressed with my aim.”
The Brotherhood guy laughed again, and then, suddenly, pulled his fist back and punched me hard in the belly. I gasped for breath. He drew a knife, reached out, took a fistful of my hair, and dragged me towards him.
“Where is Railroad headquarters located?” he asked.
I closed my eyes as he forced my head down, forehead pressed against the concrete floor, and put a knee on the small of my back. The knife blade touched the back of my neck.
“I live at Minutemen headquarters,” I said, as the blade scraped upward, sawing at the roots of my hair, and I realized he was shaving my head. “At Fort Independence. Please-- please stop.”
“Oh, Bullseye,” he said, shaving away methodically, if not gently. “We’ve only just started.”
………………………………………..
It was hard to tell, once things got underway, how long it all lasted. There were breaks, when they got tired or bored or frustrated, or hungry or thirsty (they ate and drank in front of me, of course, offering me sips of water if I’d answer a question) and left me alone for awhile. I slept a few times, or passed out, or one turned into the other.
I’d never actually been tortured before, and if someone had asked me should we assume you will spill everything you know about everything if burly men beat you with their fists until your ribs crack and your stomach turns itself inside out, and then snap your finger bones one by one, if they hold a hand over your mouth and nose until you almost black out and then let you breathe long enough to answer a question and then stop your breath again when it isn’t the right answer, if they take a ball-peen hammer and really work your feet over, I would definitely have said yes, you should. But it turned out I would have been wrong.
I didn’t feel like I was being particularly tough-- I struggled, and screamed, and begged, and cried, and puked, and pissed myself (more than once, which didn’t make much sense when I hadn’t even had any water) and generally failed to portray stoic unbreakability. But with every question-- where is Railroad HQ? Where are your safehouses? Where are your meetings? What are your passwords, what are your countersigns? Where are your agents based?
“Minuteman headquarters are at Fort Independence! Everyone knows which settlements are ours, it’s not a secret! We don’t have any passwords!”
“Give us the name of one safehouse,” said one of them-- not the red-haired one-- “and you can have a stimpak. Wherever you feel you need one most.”
“They’re all safe.” I screamed out as the redhead twisted my shattered hand. “They are! Sanctuary, Tenpines Bluff, Abernathy Farm, Sunshine Tidings Co-op-- oh God please please don’t, please--”
Maybe it was because they’d fucked up and failed to proved the good-cop type, whose job it was to make me trust him to make the pain go away if I just cooperated, and so I didn’t really believe that answering their questions about the Railroad would do me any good.
Plus, I was lucky, really: I’d been injured often enough that I had a reasonably high pain threshold, and they hadn’t done anything, yet, that couldn’t be fixed with stimpaks, if I lived.
Plus, the longer it went on, the sooner it meant my guys would be here to rescue me.
Plus, I wasn’t even really lying. I was Nora Bowman primarily, Agent Bullseye only incidentally, on an as-needed basis. It wasn’t too hard, even under torture, just to be Nora Bowman.
……………………………………………………………………….
At some point I woke up, lying face down, on fire all over and sick with thirst, with something cold and wet touching my back. I jerked violently, and screamed with the pain of the sudden movement, and heard laughter from nearby. Not that nearby, though; it wasn’t in the cell with me. Just outside, maybe.
I lay still, too tired and in too much pain to turn my head, and felt the cold-wet thing, after a moment, begin to move across my skin. A hand-- big, male-- touched my back, carefully, and I realized someone was washing me, with a wet rag or something, cleaning off the urine and vomit and blood. I wondered whether the good-cop guy had finally shown up. Or maybe they were about to move on to the brutal gang rape part of the proceedings, and didn’t want to get their weird little orangey uniforms dirty.
Still, the physical gentleness with which whoever-it-was was touching me came as such a blessed relief that I really hoped this one didn’t ask me any questions.
He didn’t, at least not right away. He washed my back, my ass, and the backs of my legs, gently and clinically, without any rough or inappropriate touches-- my teeth were chattering from the cold, but other than that, it felt great-- and then took hold of my shoulders and turned me over onto my back. I screamed again as every nerve in my body caught fire with pain, and then, as the cold cloth began to move across my chest, tried to focus through swollen eyes on the person holding it.
He wasn’t wearing a shirt, which was weird, and furthermore, there was something strange about his face-- some kind of red paint, or wound, across his forehead. No: scars. Angry red scars, in lines, curved and straight, across his forehead. Someone had carved or burned a word there, into his skin, above clear light-brown eyes that suddenly locked onto mine.
We stared at each other, the dawning shock and horror on his face pretty much exactly matching the way I felt.
I’d seen him before. We’d done a mission together. He'd tried to convince me to join the Brotherhood. I’d never seen him not in power armor-- and I certainly hadn’t seen him with the word SYNTH seared into the skin of his forehead-- but--
”Paladin Danse?” I croaked.
“Don’t bother talking to it, cunt,” said a male voice from outside my field of vision-- outside the cell, I guessed. “It won’t answer you. It’s a good Brotherhood synth.”
I was guessing he hadn’t actually heard what I’d said, but Danse had. His eyes were wide and panic-stricken, his face pale, making the scars stand out even more vividly on his forehead. I was sure he recognized me. He looked up, in the direction of the voice.
“Look at it,” said a different male voice, sounding curious. “It’s freaking the fuck out. What do you think she said to it?”
“Don’t worry, M,” said the first one, with a grin in his voice. “We won’t let her steal you.”
“Hold up, though,” said the second one. “Do you think it actually recognizes her? It used to, you know, know people. If it’s seen her before, it might be able to tell us where. Shit, it might even know her civilian identity.”
“Ask it, then,” said the first one, sounding skeptical.
“M?” said the second one, in a coaxing, where's-little-Timmy tone. “You can answer. Have you seen her before?”
Danse nodded, and cleared his throat before saying hoarsely, “Cambridge police station-- and ArcJet Systems. Offered to sponsor her entrance to the Brotherhood. She said-- it would interfere with her other responsibilities. To the Minutemen. This is Nora Bowman.”
There was a pause.
“Wait,” said the first voice. “What?”
The second one said, with traces of panic around the edges of his voice, “Do you think she said something to reprogram it? To make it lie for her? Can’t they do that? With, like, a code phrase?”
“Shit, I don’t know what they can do,” said the first one. “But if there’s a possibility it’s compromised, we need to restrain it. It could turn on us. Or try to help her escape.”
“Lock yourself in there, M7-97,” said the second one, and Danse moved-- without standing up, but I could see now that he was entirely naked-- out of my field of vision, and I heard the cell door clang shut. “Well, it obeyed me. That’s a good sign, I guess.”
“Except that if it hasn’t gone rogue,” said the first one, “then what if that really is Nora Bowman in there?”
There was another pause.
“I’m gonna go tell the lancer captain what it said,” said the first one, finally. “You stay here and shoot it if it goes nuts.”
“Goes nuts how?”
“I don’t know, Initiate,” said the first one. “Moos like a brahmin. Claims to be Elder Maxson. Tries to mercy-kill the prisoner. Although if that really is Nora Bowman, we should probably kill her ourselves before the Minutemen get here and find out what we did to her.”
“You’d rather they got here and found her dead body?”
“We could hide it.” First-voice brightened. “We could blame the synth. Say it went haywire and beat her to death.”
Second-voice sounded considerably less sanguine. “They’d still kill us for not stopping it.”
“I’m gonna go tell the lancer captain,” said first-voice again, and his booted footsteps left the room.
“Go sit back over there, where I can keep an eye on you both,” said second-voice, and Danse crawled back into my field of vision and sat down. I was glad; I wanted to keep looking at him, even with the horrifying scars on his forehead. It had been so long since I’d seen him, and I'd figured he'd died on the Prydwyn, and now it turned out he was not only alive, but mine. Warmth was spreading through me, despite everything. Even if these jackasses did kill me-- and regardless of what lies they tried to tell about it-- once Hancock and Michael and the rest of the cavalry arrived, they’d kill every Brotherhood dickhole here. And once they saw the scar, they’d be sure to look after Danse for me. It was a peaceful thought. I was so tired.
The back of Danse’s hand touched my arm, on the side facing away from the cell door, and I felt a series of light taps from a finger. Luckily, Nate and I had done a lot of Morse-code back-of-arm-tapping in mixed company, in our day-- B-O-R-E-D L-E-T-S G-O, H-E-S L-Y-I-N-G, L-O-V-E U M-O-S-T-- so even in the state I was in, I could understand Danse’s silent message.
P-L-E-A-S-E M-E-R-C-Y
I smiled up at him, my dry, swollen lips cracking a bit under the strain. I couldn’t tap back-- my fingers were still all fucked up-- so I widened my eyes, and did it with long-short-long blinks.
Y-O-U-R-E G-O-O-D
He bit his lip, and I felt his finger move again. O-N B-R-O-T-H-E--
“Hey,” said second-voice. “M7-97, hands where I can see them.”
He obeyed.
Please have mercy on the Brotherhood.
It would take an awfully long time to blink out LOOK, WHEN MY HUSBAND AND SON GET HERE AND SEE THE STATE I AM IN, I AM NOT GOING TO BE ABLE TO DO VERY MUCH TO PROTECT YOUR PRECIOUS BROTHERHOOD. Not to mention THEY TREAT YOU LIKE AN OBJECT AND ALSO THEY HAVE CARVED THE WORD SYNTH INTO YOUR FOREHEAD, WHY ON GOD’S GREEN EARTH DO YOU EVEN WANT TO PROTECT THEM.
I considered a more succinct GODDAMMIT DANSE, and then, looking at his anxious face, changed my mind.
I-L-L T-R-Y
He sighed softly.
“He says just leave it in there with her for right now,” said first-voice, coming back in. “Apparently there’s some kind of--”
He was cut off by a muffled boom, and then rapid gunfire, from outside.