Chapter Text
“What was your father like?”
Looking back on it after several months, a shocking revelation, and the abandonment of the Brotherhood as a whole, Amelia would realize that this very moment was when she realized that Danse was a person worth knowing. She would sit back and think of how many people had asked her that very same question in the many years since she’d first taken up the title of Lone Wanderer and realize that she could count them all on one hand. It seemed that the moment a person looked at her and realized that she was the Savior of the Wastes, Little Miss Vault 101, they would immediately understand and know whose daughter she was. Her work and actions went hand-in-hand with her father’s reputation always, it seemed, and yet so very few people seemed to harbor any sort of curiosity for the story of the man who had made it all possible.
But Danse, stern and severe as he was, sat across from her at a table in the lunchroom of the Prydwen and took a moment of his time to ask. It was the most personal thing he’d asked her since they first met; one of the only parts of her and her past that he couldn’t find out about while scrolling through her file in the Brotherhood's archives. He watched her in that intent way he tended to watch just about everyone, and he waited.
“He was…” She pursed her lips in thought, struggling to come up with the right words to describe the man. There were a million and one phrases she’d used before to refer to the man as in the past and none of them were, she realized, fair or appropriate, given the circumstances. “He was stern. Strict, but not in an excessive way. He knew what he wanted me to be, knew what I could be, and did whatever he could to make sure that that potential wasn’t wasted. He was like that with most people, actually.”
She idly stirred the noodles she’d been picking at and looked at him. “The reports didn’t tell you what you wanted to know?”
And of course there were reports hidden away in the archives, detailing any and every bit of prolonged interaction the Brotherhood had with James and Project Purity as a whole. She’d tried to read through them once, only managing a few paragraphs—everything else left her with a bitter taste in her mouth and an uncomfortable feeling.
“They told me a great deal about who he was to the Brotherhood. There’s a wealth of information there about his abilities as a scientist, but nothing about who he was as a man.”
“And there’s a difference?” It was something Amelia had mulled over from the moment she’d first encountered the Brotherhood. An organization such as their own emphasized the uses of a person, the worth and value they could bring to the table as a soldier, a leader, a follower. To hear that Danse, who bled Brotherhood, thought differently would come as a surprise.
She would laugh at herself later, knowing that Danse was nothing if not one big surprise in and of himself.
“Of course,” he replied, frowning. “At the end of the day, a suit of armor is just that: a suit of armor. It’s the person that wears it that truly matters when the battle is over.”
The words were familiar, and Amelia chuckled. “’You’ll get yourself or your squad mates killed if you forget that your armor is an extension of yourself. Idiots think that they are their armor.’ Paladin Gunny?”
The corner of Danse’s lip quirked up, and Amelia recognized it as the closest thing to a smile anyone could get out of the man. “I trained under him for some time, yes.”
A comfortable silence fell between the two of them. Amelia hesitated to break it, but did so with a smile.
“The two of you would’ve gotten along pretty well, I think,” she said. “You and my father, I mean. Nothing was more important to him than what he felt was his duty. In the end, the only thing he really wanted was to pass down a better world than the one he'd inherited.”
Danse nodded and looked suddenly solemn. “It would have been an honor to have met him.”
And then, after another moment of silence, his smile returned. “If his daughter is any indication, I’m certain that he was an exceptional man.”
Amelia laughed and thanked him for the compliment, and that was, she would later acknowledge, the beginning of everything.