Summary: Headcanons of Dinah Cooper (aka Seven) as she meets, bonds and falls for Daniel after the events of the game.
Note: This is a commission for @crownandantler and their OC Dinah! I’ve written for Dinah in the Fallout fandom, but it was super fun to do this--especially since I’m quite fond of Daniel (he’s a fun character to play with).
If you are interested in getting a commission from me, you can check out all the pertinent information right here!
When Dinah is introduced to Daniel, her life is a teetering rock on the edge of a cliff. The world had thrown itself from one extreme to the other in a matter of months; tension, chaos, revolution and finally back to what some people wanted to force as the very normalcy that so many craved. The android revolution had thrown a lot of things into chaos, but Dinah had been dealing with the social issues months before it had ever been a national concern--it came from how close she had pushed herself as an advocate for those the world chose not to respect.
With charges of harboring fugitives freshly dropped from her name, Dinah was left to wonder how much she could trust the same people who had been so ready to throw her in jail (or worse) simply because she was trying to save innocent beings from a merciless end. The revolution--the Great Deviation as some called it--had little impact on her repair business. Hell, if anything, Lucky Seven Secondhand was given a new breath of life from the work brought in by newly-freed androids who wanted a trusted hand to repair them when they were injured. Dinah was a human who’d proven herself genuine into the cause for android freedom, so she came to see as many androids as she could each day; a lot of them had lingering issues and injuries that needed repair.
It came from this that Dinah met Daniel. He came in with injuries unlike anything she’d seen on anyone else, a level of disrepair and unkept mechanics that she was amazed that he was still alive, let alone able to walk.
“Someone told me to come here,” he had snapped at her, wanting so little to talk. “Are you going to fix me or not?”
There was a fair portion of Dinah’s work that was charitable; after all, she wouldn’t ask for money from androids who had been seen as objects themselves months before, it wasn’t as if any of them had the money to spare in the first place. No, like a lot of her other work, Dinah fixed Daniel for free--but it had to take place over the course of a week. There was simply so much damage done to him that she’d need to replace parts over time, making sure with each replacement that he wouldn’t have a negative reaction. There was no telling what his body would do when it had been without proper care, upgrades and updates for nearly a year.
The relationship between Dinah and Daniel is hardly a friendship--one could hardly call it anything, especially when Daniel acts so antagonistic around her for the entire time he’s there that first week. Day in and day out, he comes to get his next repair or replacement part, always curt and never kind. Dinah takes the anger with a grain of salt--she can’t blame him for how angry he feels, there must have been something horrible in his life to have left him in the state he was in when he came to her shop. She never pried into his life, and soon enough Daniel was fixed up enough to go on with whatever life he chose.
But then he started showing up regularly.
There was a scratch here, a little gash there, he needed more thirium; it always seemed to be something that he needed, something so he could visit Dinah and slowly, very slowly, he started talking to her. It started with simple, little topics; the weather, her shop, exchange of names… It wasn’t anything too personal, but Dinah felt like she was getting to know Daniel all the same. He seemed like a man who was especially protective of his past and self, it was nice to see him open up to her, even if it was just a little.
Weeks blended into months, seeing Daniel become a familiar face within Lucky Seven Secondhand. He had opened up to Dinah considerably in that time, but he still wouldn’t stay for long nor talk about what had happened to cause all of the injuries that he had met her with so long before. It was a secret he guarded, and one that Dinah did not care to pull from him if he didn’t want to give it.
Friendship was an odd description of their relationship, especially as time progressed. It accounted for the familiarity between the two, but it didn’t quite cover how protective Daniel began to feel for her, how close he kept and how he fell into such a domestic role in her life.
It wasn’t a secret that Daniel was a PL600 model; Dinah was familiar with some features and had pieced it together over time, though it wasn’t a topic she bothered to ask about; model numbers didn’t matter anymore after all, but it did serve as a bit of background information that helped her understand and not question when Daniel, a model formerly made for purposes of housekeeping and domestic chores, was suddenly in her house and doing Dinah’s laundry.
“You need to take better care of your home,” Daniel had said, voice curt but intentions warm. “When was the last time you did a deep clean of your kitchen?”
Daniel had, without rhyme or reason, made himself quite a home for himself in more ways than one. It’s not so much that he asked to live with Dinah, but more on the fact that he was just...there, all the time. He helped take care of so much domestic work that Dinah couldn’t ask him to leave (especially since she feared he didn’t have any home to return to). So she just...let him stay, didn’t question it at all, and did her best to incorporate her new companion into her life (and it wasn’t that hard, he was already in the shop all the time as it was--his companionship was nice).
The only hint that their relationship was romantic came when Daniel started sleeping with Dinah in her bed--as in she would wake up to him laying beside her, blue eyes striking as they met her own.
“Did you sleep well?” he’d ask, almost every morning.
It wasn’t aggressive and Dinah certainly didn’t feel as though Daniel’s intentions were anything other than good, but it was odd all the same--it was the only time that the woman decided to prod (gently) into the man’s thoughts, if only to understand how he saw things.
Of course, Daniel took time to open up. She’d have to catch him in good moments, the rare times that he smiled at her or let his guard down just a bit--it took a lot of trust and even more care into the man’s emotions, but eventually Daniel talked about it.
He trusted her. That’s simply all there was to it--he trusted her because she was kind to him, because she was sweet, because she didn’t toss him aside like a piece of trash even when she had every right to; hell, he could have been arrested for simply being a nusiance to her for always being at her shop, somehow getting into Dinah’s house (to which he wouldn’t explain how he did).
Daniel eventually told her about what happened. Before. With his injuries. He explained how he originally deviated, all from one singular moment of anger and fear when he learned the family who he was with was planning on getting rid of him. He thought he was part of something, was important to someone, and the family had that idea shoved down the drain. He was nearly killed in the holdout with law enforcement and...a lot of broken, fuzzy memories up until someone had directed them to Dinah’s repair shop.
Despite having plenty of reasons to kick him aside, Dinah had given Daniel so much--like it or not, he was absolutely smitten with Dinah and, honestly, he was very much apart of her life.
As weeks and months went by, there was a lot of things that people could say to describe the relationship between them. Friendship, companions, partners---Dinah herself just called it love, since that’s how she felt about Daniel, after taking care of him and helping him heal through his past trauma, as he helped her grow and open up to him in kind.
It was definitely love.
