nate kept what little he could of bridgette in a grey tortoise pocket tobacco tin and considered it (her) his good luck charm, i like to think that he also kept at least two cigarettes in there at all times as well as little notes that he would scribble for her. they still smelled like tobacco whenever they got to her
bridgette perry, the sole survivor, again and again
rookie of the year, mother of the bicentennial.
general. bridge. bj. mommy. codename: charmer
one. 500 miles - peter, paul, and mary
two. farewell, angelina - joan baez
three. yesterday - the beatles
four. the circle game - joni mitchell
five. landslide - fleetwood mac
six. suzanne - leonard cohen
seven. empty chairs - don mclean
eight. leaving on a jet plane - john denver
Post-BB story between Bridgette and Danse. It makes more sense with the context of this post, but is easily readable without it.
Part 2 | ao3 link
CW: suicidal ideation, depictions of violence (strangulation) and its consequences.
word count: 2,584
He rounds the corner just to see that the door’s already open. Bridgette’s sitting on the edge of the bed; the windows are open, and light from the afternoon sun has poured in something that stretches across the floor and over her entirely. She’s practically glowing in a room otherwise shaded by the curtains drawn over the other windows. And yet, she’s the darkest thing in the room.
She’s been like this for a few days now, quieter than usual, distant. Or so Danse has heard.
Danse knows why, the bruises at her throat are still there and although they’ve mostly dulled out to some greenish-yellow, he can still see where fingers had once been. And her bottom lip is still a little swollen, the scuff of where a fist had split it open has left the area crimson. It doesn’t help that she chews on it, like she’s doing now, her gaze focused on nothing as she rubs a thumb over the frayed hem of her sweater’s sleeve.
He announces himself with a soft knock on the frame of her bedroom door and accompanies it with a soft ‘hey’ but Bridgette still startles with a small curse beneath her breath. It makes the springs of the bed creak, and he stays exactly where he is. Watching and waiting for an invitation that would’ve come without hesitation only days ago.
Bridgette stares for a moment and Danse does, too. She’s exhausted. But he can see how wound up her shoulders are, she’s not getting any rest at all, he thinks, not even now.
He takes this moment of hesitation to study Bridgette’s face. She doesn’t look great, but she does look a lot better than she had when she and the mercenary had come trudging through the Castle’s doors again. It was the filthiest Danse had ever seen either of them; covered in sweat and dirt, and blood. There was still someone else’s brain matter in her hair when she wordlessly walked past him, the mercenary having said little, too.
But a shower and a drink had gotten it out of MacCready. His rifle had jammed — for the first time ever — while he’d been spotting her and she hadn’t been able to keep up with the crowd of raiders that surrounded them alone. She had been able to knock three of them clean out cold with that bat of hers when the big one finally caught her.
MacCready told him how he tried to get to her, how he’d used the butt of his rifle as a bludgeon and whatever piece of shit weapon that those pieces of shit dropped, but he wasn’t fast enough. And he was forced to watch as Bridgette was pinned to the floor with two hands at her throat, kicking and scratching until she just wasn't anymore.
“She was purple by the time I got to her,” MacCready said quietly, his gaze as far away as hers currently was now.
Danse watched, just like he watched Bridgette now, as MacCready pulled his cap over his face to conceal the tears that had his shoulders shaking. And listened to MacCready quietly sob until he’d finally gained the nerve to rest a firm hand on the kid’s shoulder.
“It wasn’t your fault.”
“Yeah? Tell that to Bridgette.”
Danse had heard them, a day or so later, once she’d cleaned up and gotten checked out in the Castle’s infirmary. Listening from around a corner to the apologies from MacCready and the strained shushes of a voice that was so hoarse that he hadn’t realized it was hers until MacCready had said her name.
“I should’a been there, Bridge. My gun — it - it jammed, you know that, right? I would’a put those fuckers down sooner if it hadn’t. You’ve gotta believe me.”
“I know, RJ. It wasn’t your fault.”
It was his.
Danse knew that.
Danse was the one that was supposed to be with her, Danse was the one that had told her ‘no’ and to take the kid instead. Just like he had last time, and the time before that. Bridgette had come back hurt every time, each time because somebody else had been sent in his place. A sprained ankle the first time, eight stitches to her right forearm the second, and now this.
Danse also knew that this was the reason why she was hesitating still, with lips rolled between teeth as she chewed at an invitation that he himself hadn’t given her in weeks.
He gave her some thin smile, his lips pressed just as tightly together as hers were.
She doesn’t return the smile but she does let her shoulders sag.
“Hey.”
Her voice is still some weak croak, she’d been told to whisper, she’d chosen to just not speak instead.
“Can I come in?”
She scoots on the bed and she’s no longer in the light anymore. But it’s been gone from her for much longer, Danse can see it now once his thigh is finally flush with hers. The bed creaks, the wind outside the window whistles, and he listens to Bridgette’s steady breathing. It's rickety, and there’s a wheeze that comes with each inhale. She’s lucky to be alive, he thinks.
“Garvey asked me to come check on you,” Danse says, it’s the honest truth, he wouldn’t have come if her deputy hadn’t cared so much.
She nods just slightly with a face that tells him she’s disappointed. He just sniffs, it’s not a new expression. She’s been this way with him for a while now.
“How are you feeling?”
Bridgette shrugs. It’s an answer and Danse has done his job but he continues to sit there with his hands clasped in his lap, just like hers are.
Silence isn’t new with them. It’s not uncomfortable either, but there’s an air there, like something is supposed to be addressed. Neither of them do it.
He keeps his gaze down, focusing on the floor and his boots, they’re a new pair, cobbled by some Minuteman that Bridgette helped recruit in her newfound position. They’re comfortable and soiled from the earth he’s been kneeling in for the last few weeks. In the silence he picks at a nail that has some of that same dirt stuck beneath it.
Bridgette does the same, and he watches from the corner of his eye. She’s missing a fingernail, and suddenly he’s going back to what MacCready told him.
“She clawed his eyes out and that bastard still didn’t let go.”
He lets out a breath that he didn’t know he was holding and Bridgette looks up at him then, as if expecting him to actually say something, and Danse finally, truly sees her up close for the time in weeks.
She looks awful.
There’s bruises underneath her eyes from lack of sleep and broken capillaries, and it’s inside of her eyes, so much so that there’s still enough blood in her right eye that the brown of her iris almost blends into it. Her lip is worse than he thought, because it’s still split completely in two, and all she ever does is chew on it which is only making it worse. And her hair is tied back, but the curls that have always sprung from her crown and poked out from its slicked back style are flat. And there’s a lifelessness to her that makes her so gaunt, so sallow, that she’s almost gray in the shadow of the afternoon sun.
And it’s all his fault, isn’t it?
“I’m glad that you’re okay,” Danse says quietly and Bridgette isn’t looking at him anymore, “you seem to be recovering quickly.”
She says nothing. Fidgets with another dirty nail.
Danse doesn't know where he’s going but he keeps talking anyways, “I’ve been worried about you,” he says and Bridgette scoffs bitterly, he pretends that she doesn't, “especially now.”
She’s shaking her head and he doesn't blame her. So he stops talking. But he doesn’t move either.
“You should’ve — ” Bridgette begins, but her voice is so hoarse that she has to clear it, it sounds the same when she continues, “you should’ve been there.”
“I know.”
She lets out a shaky breath. He does, too.
“You could’ve — ”
“I know.”
Bridgette lets out a small cough, just a few words in and she’s already overextended herself. The inhale after it makes her choke, and soon she’s coughing so hard that he’s resting a hand on her back, soothing small circles in between her shoulders until she finally begins to settle again.
He keeps his hand there. Bridgette doesn’t push him away. Not like he did with her.
“I’m sorry,” he says quietly.
Bridgette nods slightly and he can see the way her mouth fidgets, like it always does when she has something to say. He’d rather she just did, he’s never really been good at this whole checking in on people thing.
“Do you —” he pauses to swallow that lump in his throat, “do you want to talk about it?”
Bridgette breathes in slowly, wets her lips, and then she turns to him. He can see the way that it pains her to move her neck, so he shifts with her so that his knee is touching hers and she’s able to straighten herself out again, “I almost died, Danse.”
He could say that he knows again but then he’d really sound like a robot, wouldn’t he? So he just nods his head and presses his lips together in some thin frown.
“I —” she clears her throat, once, then twice, and she winces when she swallows, “all he did —”
She coughs again and thankfully she doesn’t cough too hard this time, but she brings a hand to her throat. The one that’s missing a nail, and he keeps his focus there and not on the sudden tremble of her chin.
Her fingers dust over the bruises and for a second he sees the way that her hand begins to clasp around it, like she has to show him and Danse reaches for her before she can speak again.
“Show me,” he says, and he doesn’t know why, “don't touch them, Bridgette. Just show me.”
Bridgette’s hand has gone still against his throat and the pads of five too cold fingers send a chill down his spine. He reaches for her other hand, the one that’s been sitting balled in a fist on her lap since the moment they’d faced one another, and it relaxes within his hold, until her hand is just as open as the other and it’s resting now on the other side of his neck.
“Danse,” she whispers, she’s horrified. He is, too. He doesn’t know why he’s doing this. But she can’t speak, and he hasn’t been able to feel, and he thinks that deep down: both of them need this just as badly as the other.
“It’s okay, Bridgette,” he whispers, and his hands are around her wrists now, pushing her hands a little deeper into her throat, encouraging her to do something outrageous, “just show me.”
It’s tentative at first, just a small squeeze that feels like the grip that he currently has on her wrists and he just repeats himself to her, that it’s okay.
He feels it with each passing second, time having slowed itself since the moment all of this had started, the way that her hands slowly begin to tighten their grip. Bridgette is strong, stronger than most people think and he knows this, she does, too. So when it finally gets to be a little uncomfortable, he knows that she’s not even putting half of her strength into it.
His skin is starting to get warm and he feels the bulge beneath his eyelids, and Bridgette’s face is starting to change into something he’s only seen once or twice before. She’s focused and she’s angry, and she’s finally begun to cry, but her breathing has steadied out from where it was starting to pick up during their conversation and he just gapes a little in some attempt to get a breath, but she keeps going and he lets her.
It’s when his chest is really starting to burn that Bridgette finally begins to push him back into the mattress, and there’s a moment of brief reprieve that allows him to return some air into his lungs as she adjusts to the angle, but soon Bridgette has both of her legs straddling his stomach and she’s driving two stiff arms so deeply into his throat that one of his feet kicks instinctively for her to get off of him.
But she keeps going.
And he lets her.
He’s gasping but no air is coming into him and she’s squeezing even harder than before, and the vision in the corners of his eyes is starting to blur, and he almost lifts a finger to get her to stop but she lets out a small sob instead.
He decides that he can keep going.
“You should’ve been there,” she repeats, her voice is broken and it’s not because her windpipe was crushed under hands even stronger than hers, “you’re supposed to have my back.”
He nods and it only makes the pain behind his eyes that much worse, and he tries to mouth an I know. But all Danse can do is let out some gurgled noise, she doesn’t even flinch at it, she just squeezes a little tighter.
He lets her.
“Why?” She asks him quietly, and he couldn’t answer it even if she didn’t have her hands around his throat, “Why do you keep pushing me away?”
He tries to wave her off because it — she — is finally beginning to be too much, but his arms are suddenly starting to feel heavy, so he pats at her thigh. It’s nothing more than some light brush against her pantleg but it’s enough for two hands and the entire weight of Bridgette to come flying off of him with a gasp as loud as his.
It hurts when the air rushes back into him again and Danse is panting so hard that he begins to cough just like she did, hacking and wheezing, until he coughs so hard that he gags and Bridgette is no longer standing over him but kneeling at his side, she’s got a hand on his chest and she’s rubbing small circles as she apologizes to him over and over again, and it takes all of the strength in him to bat her off once he can.
He’s not angry, he thinks. He’s not even hurt that Bridgette really did try to kill him.
He’s just annoyed that she didn’t.
So he rolls to his side with his back turned away from her and he lets his hand hang off the mattress. And Danse lets himself breathe, and she must’ve caught the hint because the mattress sinks a little more beside him and all she’s doing is just breathing with him until everything’s gone steady again and the tingling in his fingers finally stops.
He clenches his fist, once. Twice. He thinks about her strength and the man that brought this out of her.
“How did you kill him?” He asks, his voice nowhere near as raspy as hers.
“I didn’t,” she whispers, and he can hear the way that she’s disappointed over it, too, “RJ did.”
He lets out a hum of acknowledgment and Bridgette lets out a sigh.
It’s Preston that tells her because of course it would be him and not Danse. They haven't spoken since that moment in the bedroom, where a conversation died the moment she’d taken her hands off of his throat.
They’ve seen each other around, sat at the same table come supper, but every time she’s turned her head to meet his lingering gaze, he’s already turned away from her again. Looking down into a glass, or at the earth, but most of the time it’s nothing.
She hears his voice in passing. Danse is quieter than he used to be, and she can hear how shaken his confidence is now and how he no longer speaks as if he’s superior. But he’s polite and surprisingly popular, so she hears him laugh occasionally, too. It’s a different laugh than the one she knows, but it’s real and sometimes it accompanies a confirmation of some late night rendezvous with one of the many new tenants of the Castle.
She’s not jealous, she thinks.
They were never like that. Not once.
But it hurts all the same because Danse was hers once, and she - him. And now they’re not anymore and Bridgette still can’t understand why.
He’s never told her, not even when they were still kind of talking. But she doesn’t push and he hasn’t pulled for her. Not once since that moment outside of the bunker, when Maxson ripped the carpet out from underneath the both of them and cast them into that endless sea.
The Minutemen were supposed to keep them afloat, this new title of hers their anchor.
Until things got better — he got better. So they could find Shaun. And destroy the very thing that brought them to this point —
Together.
But Danse has refused her at every chance, instead choosing to just keep his head down, burying it beneath the soil that he’d chosen to kneel in instead.
Bridgette's been told that Danse makes for a half-decent farmhand. He’s tall and strong, with enough muscle between each shoulder that none of the older folks have to do the heavy lifting anymore. Someone jokes that he was built for it at the table one evening and they both wince.
That’s not the reason for his existence.
She’s not sure if shoveling brahmin shit is either.
So, Bridgette goes to Preston behind his back. It’s a conversation that happens a couple of times, Danse needs something better than what he’s doing now, he needs something purposeful.
Preston doesn’t disagree.
“Believe me, Bridge, I’ve tried. But he’s just not interested,” he tells her over a late night cup of coffee, sighing with the same exasperation as he did last time, “and I can’t force a man to do something he doesn’t want to do.”
Bridgette hardly finds that fair. But she doesn’t push it any further than that.
It’s when she finally drops the subject for good that Preston brings it up to her again. He looks tired when he says it, as if it’s been keeping him up at night, and it looks like there’s pity in his eyes but she knows that Preston is too good of a man to look at her like that.
“Danse came to me a few days ago,” he says, and Bridgette has an idea of just exactly when, “he told me that he’s ready for a job.”
Bridgette’s already rolling her lips between her teeth and gnawing at that scab that just won’t heal when she nods, “That’s great,” she mumbles, and Preston’s small nod tells her that it isn’t, “where to?”
Preston’s hat is hung on a rack at the door of his quarters, alongside his duster, and he’s not her deputy in this moment but her friend, so she holds her breath when Preston acts like one. He’s no longer looking her in the eye anymore, that’s his first tell, the second is when he scrubs a hand in his scalp for a moment.
“I’m not going, am I?”
“No,” Preston answers, and it is pity that she sees, but she doesn’t blame him, she’s been pretty pathetic about this situation for a while now, “he specifically asked that you didn’t.”
She nods, sniffs a couple of times. She can taste blood in her mouth because she’s officially chewed away at that scab again and she wets her lips so that she can at least try to ground herself.
“Did he say why?”
Preston shakes his head but Bridgette knows that he’s lying, she doesn’t press him for the truth.
Bridgette doesn’t say anything before she shuts the door behind her. Nor anything to the dozen or so people that line the halls, all of them greeting her with tips of their hats, and a nickname she’s never once standed. But she does nod to them, gives them some thin-lipped smile. It’s what she’s always done and no one says anything about it anymore. At least now she doesn’t have to worry about a Doin’ ok, General? that will eat up the time that’s supposed to be spent on figuring out what to say to him this time.
Unfortunately, she still hasn’t come up with anything when she finally spots him.
“Thought I’d find you here,” she says and Danse doesn’t flinch, not like she still does. He doesn’t move at all, his focus still on the water that they’re now standing in front of together.
“Garvey told you, didn’t he?” Danse asks, his tone is flat, his expression stone. He’s so cold that the sea breeze doesn’t even chill her like it should, she pulls her jacket in on herself regardless.
“Yes,” she answers, and he nods stiffly, his jaw is clenched and the tip of his ears are pink, she wonders how long he’s been standing here on this early spring morning for there to finally be some color to his face, “because you weren’t going to.”
He doesn’t deny her.
She looks at the water that he’s still staring into. It’s reflection from the sky and the algae beneath its surface has left it a tealish color. It bounces languidly against the pebble shore in a way that Bridgette has always found soothing. It’s frothy and she knows without having to touch it that it’s ice cold, and the air smells like salt and the exhaust of the Castle’s generators.
It’s like any other morning, she thinks, except soon he’ll be gone.
“I think a week is the longest we’ve ever been apart,” Bridgette says quietly, she said the exact same thing to Nate right before he’d left for his first deployment, the way she feels now is not like how she felt then, “but then again — ”
Danse interrupts her as if he’s actually read her mind, “I’m not your husband,” he says and Bridgette doesn’t even know what to think anymore but there’s tears in the corners of her eyes now and a lump so thick in her throat that she has to swallow twice just to get it down.
“And I’m not your CO either.”
“I know that.”
Danse sniffs next to her. It’s harsh and loud, and from the corner of her eye Bridgette can see the way his nostrils have flared. She can also see that he’s wearing that knit navy sweater that she’d gifted him, buttoned underneath the red flannel that she’d packaged along with it. And there’s an irony there that Bridgette can’t help but chuckle at.
He looks at her because of it.
Her hands are buried in her pockets because she hadn’t thought to put on her gloves before finding him, so she gestures to what he’s wearing with a nudge of her elbow against his, “Not my husband,” she repeats back to him, “but you’re wearing his clothes.”
Danse looks down on himself with a frown, at the flannel and the sweater, to the belt buckled around his waist, and he runs a hand down himself, smoothing at wrinkles that aren’t there.
“I’ll return them when I can.”
Bridgette chuckles again because if she doesn’t she’ll cry, “Don’t. He’s gone.”
Danse is about to be, too.
“Toss ‘em out if you want, I don’t care.”
His tongue clicks before he swallows, and he doesn’t say that he will or won’t. Knowing Danse, he won’t but a lot’s changed, and she’s not sure that she knows him anymore.
The silence that’s fallen over them again is interrupted by the sound of hooves and a wagon drawn behind them, there’s enough voices accompanying it for Bridgette to know that this isn’t some fetch and return job. She looks back at it with him and her eyes land on the wagon and the tarp thrown over it, it’s practically a mountain of wood and steel, but there’s a little boy — Douglas, if she remembered correctly, sat on top of it — and she can’t help but suck her teeth.
“Where are you going?” she asks.
“West,” he answers and she knows that he’s intentionally being vague, she’s got a map of every cleared and ready location pinned up in the operations room, were Danse to give her an actual answer, she’d be on his doorstep come noon.
“For how long?”
Danse doesn’t answer and this is when she finally turns to look at him. She meets his gaze immediately. His expression is serious but she can see it in his eyes, it’s the same grief that’s been tearing apart her insides for weeks.
“How long, Danse?”
His jaw rolls before letting out a heavy sigh, “I don’t know,” Danse answers and he’s still not being honest with her, “probably until everyone gets settled in.”
“That could take weeks.”
Months.
Danse nods. He knows this.
“Why?”
“I don’t want to be here anymore,” he says without skipping a beat and Bridgette isn’t quite sure how serious here could possibly be, “I don’t want to be at the Castle. I don’t want to — ”
He pauses and Bridgette feels the earth go still. No wind, no sea. But she hears the pebbles crunch underneath Danse’s boot as he shifts his weight slightly.
“I don’t want to be where you are.”
She recoils so hard that she has to take a step away from him, his words having knocked the wind out of her completely and her question is a stuttered gasp, “What do you mean? How can you even say that?”
Danse doesn’t even looks like he regrets what he’s said but he does look ashamed, and he’s turned himself back to the water.
“Being here — with you — is killing me.”
She doesn't understand.
“I don’t understand.”
He crouches down to pick up a handful of pebbles. It’s something they've done in the past, when time needed to be spent and they couldn’t think of anything to say. Bridgette is the one that taught him how to do it, and she watches as the first pebble skips three times across the now still water.
“Danse.”
The second one hits the water with a plop and he tosses the third one immediately after.
One — two — six more skips and then it finally sinks.
“But you’re my friend,” she says, and it’s the most ridiculous thing a 234 year old woman can actually say, “we — you — ”
“I was your CO,” he corrects, and Bridgette has to wipe away a quick tear, “and now I’m not.”
“That doesn’t change anything, Danse.”
It’s the first time she’s heard Danse raise his voice in weeks, maybe months, and it’s the first time she flinches at it, “Goddamnit, Bridgette. It changes everything.”
Another stone skips.
“I’m nothing now,” he says quietly, they’ve had this conversation before, it’s still not true, it never has been, “without the Brotherhood, I’m nothing. It’s all I’ve ever known and I don't even know how much of it is actually mine to remember.”
“But we have the Minutemen now — ”
Danse whips to look at her, a damning finger pointed just inches away from her chest, and he’s angry at her, “No. You have the Minutemen, General.” He spits that name at her like it’s poison on his tongue and it’s finally starting to make sense.
“That’s not fair,” because it isn’t, “you know that I didn’t ask for this.”
His hand falls to his side again and he brushes off the sand that had been stuck to it against his pantleg and his gaze is far away again, and she barely hears his voice over the ruckus of his soon-to-be caravan behind them. “And I did?”
“No — no, of course not,” Bridgette answers quickly but Danse is speaking before she can tell him just how unfair all of this has been to the both of them.
“Do you think that I like shoveling shit and — and plucking tatos from vines, Bridgette?” He asks and the question must be rhetorical because he just keeps going, “Do you think that when the Institute made me that this was what I was supposed to be doing? Sitting on my knees and playing farmer? All while you — ”
Danse pauses.
Bridgette finishes the sentence in her head.
He says it anyways.
“Do what I can’t?”
She opens her mouth to object but he’s interrupting her again. This is the most he’s spoken to her in months and each word is just another knife. She doesn’t understand why he’s being like this. Or how she’s to blame.
“Do you have any idea just how hard I worked to become a paladin? How long it took? The things that I had to see — had to do, just so I could have a command of my own?”
They’re breathing so heavily that the air around them has gone hot and there’s no longer the puff of steam from their noses.
“And here you are,” he’s waving that hand at her again with a bitter chuckle, “my — ”
His initiate.
His charge.
Bridgette gets it now.
Danse was right, they never were friends, were they?
“And you’re a general?” Danse scoffs and this isn’t the man that who’d once promised her that he’d have her back until the end, “Give me a break. You wouldn’t be half the soldier you are now if it wasn’t for me.”
Bridgette’s too stunned to speak and he just keeps going.
“What am I supposed to do with that, Bridgette?” He asks her and Bridgette doesn’t have an answer, “It hasn’t even been eight months since everything fell apart, and here you are — ”
She’s not fine if that’s what he’s suggesting.
“Giving me orders.”
Danse stops then and for a moment all the two of them are doing is just breathing. He’s looking at the water again, and she’s looking at the ground now. She speaks to it, not him.
“That’s what all of this is about? You’re upset because you’re — what? Not the boss of me anymore?”
“No,” Danse says quickly, contradicting everything that he just said, “no, it’s not that. It’s — ” he scrubs his face with his hands and then continues to speak into them, “you’re fine, Bridgette. You’re still going and I’m not, alright? You don’t — you just don’t need me anymore and I don’t know why you keep acting like you do. And it’s torturing me.”
It's then when Bridgette finally crosses the threshold like a woman possessed and touches him, it’s the first time since that moment in the bedroom. And all she’s doing is reaching for his wrists like he did then, just so she can pull his hands from his face and see him once more.
Danse’s eyelashes are wet and they’re already a little bloodshot. This isn’t the first time he’s cried this morning, she realizes, and she doesn’t know what to say to make him stop.
“That’s not true, Danse. Of course I need you. You’re — ”
What is he?
“I’m the thing that set you back, Bridgette.”
“No.”
His hand rests gently on her wrist and she knows soon that he’s going to push her away.
“Think about it,” Danse says and there’s nothing he can say to convince her that it’s true, “were I not what I was, you’d probably have your son by now.”
“You don’t know that.”
He smiles weakly at her, it’s nothing more than some plea for her to stop. She reaches for more of him, this time with a hand resting on his cheek. She thinks she feels him lean into it.
“Do you?” He asks her quietly, “We were this close, Bridgette. We were certain that we’d found the way in and then I — ”
“It's not your fault, Danse. You didn’t know.”
“I should’ve.”
She brushes a thumb over a tear that finally spills and Danse finally rests himself in her palm. He reaches for her, too, and tucks a loose curl behind one of her ears. Not once have they ever done this. Not even at their lowest have they ever reached for each other like this.
“You’re all I’ve had for so long,” she whispers to him, “all I’ve known. If you leave me — ”
“You’ll survive.”
She closes her eyes so that she can blink back her tears, “How can you be so sure?”
He’s suddenly got both hands on either side of her head and he’s pulling her towards him, and Bridgette feels it then, the scruff of his beard, the warm press of his lips. They linger there on her forehead for a moment too long and she lets out a breath that she didn’t know she was holding.
“You already are,” Danse mumbles into her skin, “you’ve been doing it for a while now.”
“And whose fault is that?”
Danse chuckles and the puff of air that blows through his nose and into her skin tickles but he kisses the sensation away, “I can’t be here anymore, not with you,” and she now knows this to be true, “I can’t keep being your shadow.”
“I never wanted you to be.”
“I know,” he says. Does he?
He lets go of her then but Bridgette is still clinging on to the collar of his shirt, it was Nate’s and now it’s his. And once again she’s being left alone in a world that she doesn’t understand. “Please don’t go.”
Danse pushes her off like she knew he would, he doesn’t even hold her hand for very long, and suddenly he’s a foot away from her and Bridgette knows that it’s about to be miles soon.
“Please don’t make me stay.”
He takes another step and she doesn’t move.
“Will you ever come back?”
“I don’t know, maybe,” he answers and she knows that it’s the last thing he’s going to say, “perhaps when I don’t need you anymore.”
“Okay,” she says because that’s all that she has left in her and he nods.
She watches him as Danse steps up the small hill that overlooks the shore and he doesn’t look back once. And she watches as he tosses a duffel bag that has the brief life she once had with him over his shoulder without so much of a heave and he’s greeted by the people that will soon become his neighbors and friends. He returns the excited chatter with a smile of his own and it’s real, and it’s relieved. And Bridgette tries to think of the last time he’d looked at her like that.
But the thought comes to an end when one of the people in his party calls for her, he’s right next to Danse so she looks at him first but he’s still turned away, “Hey, General,” the man shouts, “thanks for everything! We’ll be seein’ ya, alright?”
“Sure,” she says, and she kind of sounds like the General again, “just try to come back soon, okay?”
Danse is already a few paces ahead when the guy laughs.
“Only if you’re still here when I get back!”
She chuckles and waves him off, “Don’t you worry, I’ll always be right here — right where you left me.”
i think bridgette and danse develop a really intense alarmingly codependent relationship very quickly with one another. it teeters on sexual and there is a very brief moment where something almost happens but ultimately nothing does. she clings to him because the minutemen are in shambles, and she doesn't meet the railroad for quite some time. but there's also.. the remarkable resemblance to nate that draws her to him.
danse is in charge and he likes the power that comes from it. there's absolutely an imbalance of power and danse, even if it's unintentional, leans into it for some time. i don't think he snaps out of it until blind betrayal and even though bridgette is "wherever you go, i'll follow", there's a shift between them once they connect with the minutemen.
here she is, rising the ladder, and he's fucking beneath it. suddenly she's the boss. and although she treats him as an equal, he resents the fuck out of her for it. bridgette knows that he's grieving, that there's some deprogramming that needs to happen, but he continues to withdraw from her until it culminates in a messy as hell friendship breakup that leaves bridgette raw for a really long time.
they reconnect after the reveal that bridgette is also a synth but he's not the one to help her through it, he just can't. despite how desperately bridgette wants it to be him. he was her friend for the longest time, she saw him through his own grief. but it's not the same anymore. they're not the same
i have it in my mind that bridgette was working w/ danse and the bos for a whileeee like they were literally THIS close to getting to the institute when bb happens and i just. realistically don’t think that maxson keeps bridgette onboard with the bos. she was a SHIT initiate (shitnitiate lol) and were it not for her connection to the institute and danses “she’s literally HELPLESS” he probably wouldve never had her to begin with
so like. bb happens and she and danse are now at square fucking ONE again, this is where i really deviate in the 4 story. but quincy was still an active thriving town up until around this time. she and danse had gone there in the past, they’d met the minutemen (probably not preston though). so instead of skidaddling back to sanctuary they go to quincy just to find RUINS.
she and danse track down the quincy survivors, find them in concord, everything happens and her story kind of starts all over again. i like the idea of them being a triangle of new beginnings and finding where they belong. it’s just a shame that as much as she wants him to (and as much as he probably does to) danse just doesnt find his footing with the minutemen. maybe after he separates himself from bridgette idk.
