Moss’s last words had left quite an impression on Kinsley, and she kept replaying them in her mind - what exactly was it that he was so [i]’certain’[/i] of? The brief clues to his religious motivations troubled her more than she would have liked to admit to herself. She found herself thinking about how others would fare under his scrutiny, his intimidating gaze and the authority that he had been given. They were all much younger than she was. Impressionable, keen to make something of herself and perhaps the only reason that Kinsley found herself ‘immune’ to Moss was that she was none of those things, youth had left her and she was here for a single reason: to heal the crew should they become wounded. 

So she occupied herself with that, away from the team as they chatted away in the near distance, Kinsley was stood over her table, writing down on paper her notes for the day, the gloom of the mess hall causing a strain on her eyes. As she muttered to herself, she completely missed the sound of approaching footsteps…

Two knocks punctuated the silence, announcing the entry of the now Knight Sergeant. He was still within his power armour but with helmet in hand while rolling back the hood of his Recon armour. A fairly large tearing of skin was on top of a mound on his head. Daniel would have "walked it off" if it wasn't something so visible on his head but given that it was precisely that he decided to go the Doctor. Maybe she'd give something for the headaches, maybe a little disinfectant for all the sweat and dirt rammed in there by the skin-tight hood. 

"Scribe Kinsley, do you have a moment?" he asked, an interrogative eyebrow raised. If she'd say she was busy he'd without a second thought turn back to return later. 

The ringing in her ears was present, but she still heard the sound of a knock, she turned around to see Estevez looking torn up, even in his power armour. Why was everyone in bad shape. The doctor rubbed her eyes with a closed fist, stifling a yawn while she regarded his question. All she had were moments. "Sit down Estevez. Or should I call you [i]Knight Sergeant[/i] now?" Even with just a cursory glance at him, it was clear the wound was gruesome but nothing that she couldn't mend. 

Nodding gratefully he took the seat, not really bothering to point out his wound given how obvious it was. "I've had my lights beaten out of me in training but never something that hurts like my head now." he said, looking at his surroundings. "Either will do, Doctor." the Knight Sergeant replied, apparently oblivious to any implications. 

“Well, they probably don’t tear you up like this in training,” she remarked, already prepared with a dampened swab to clean him up. As she pressed it to the wound, she clucked her tongue and gave another sigh. She knew the drill - that they had to scope out the area first, but Estevez really shouldn’t have been allowed to wander like this. She’d have to speak to Moss again, even if she really didn’t want to. “Is this your first mission?” she asked, starting him off in conversation before she brought a needle out.

The Knight Sergeant chuckled as his healer said they didn't tear him up in training like that. "Don't know about that." he said, thinking back to some of his encounters. "When I was sixteen I was feeling like I was the best. I beat all the other boys and… well, I relaxed. A Paladin asked me why and I told him, so that's when they brought Henry to me. He didn't treat me well in the training grounds I'll tell you that. He had a year on me and half a foot, but more importantly he'd seen things in the wasteland. When he was done I'd coughed up half my body weight in blood and they had to pull him off because he was about to pull my nose off with his fingers. Taught me a lesson I can't forget. I've never been shot or stabbed, but l know what pain is Doctor; I mean it when I say my head hurts, it's not just a boo-boo in there." 

As if to demonstrate, there wasn't the slightest tremble, flinch, sigh, grit of teeth or any other sign of hurt as the swab touched raw flesh. "But no, this isn't my first mission." he continued. "I've been out through the wasteland, though never as long as we have so far I'll admit. Never killed a man until today. It was… very, very easy." He hadn't had a chance to speak to the Paladin about this as he had planned when first realizing it, his head preoccupied with Gregory's death and his promotion during the conversation with Moss. Only now the thoughts resurfaced in a momentary slip, the previous passions only at this moment wearing off on Daniel. 

Kinsley tried to imagine a sixteen-year old Estevez, his story playing out in her mind as she worked. She got to thinking about what Victoria would have done at sixteen, definitely not fighting and training to be a soldier. She was softer than that, always was. She liked painting, reading… Kinsley shut her eyes, blinking the thoughts away. “I’ll take your word for it then, tough guy,” she added with a small chuckle of her own. Estevez had ambition, that much was true, and while Kinsley certainly questioned the motive behind Moss promoting him, she wasn’t going to let him in on that thought. He needed morale, after all. 

She raised a brow at what he let slip to her though, and she thought on an answer for a while. Occupied her mind with threading the needle, readying to stitch. “It’s not something you have time to think about when it’s you or them. You’re locked in a moment, and everything else is drowned out until you either pull the trigger or the trigger is pulled on you… How do you feel about it now?” she asked gently as the first of his tear was pulled back together. 

The Knight replied with a chuckle of his own at being called tough guy. "Not bad for a nickname, not bad at all." Yet another chuckle came, though this one was without any humour. "Well, that's the thing. Moss at one point talked to me, sized me up. Said the wasteland would chew me up, then spit me out; I'm not ready for it. All the older Knights told me about how your first kill messed you up. It's hard, there's remorse. I believed these words. But looking back, I feel nothing. I saw the whites of these men's eyes, I heard their death throes and their cries for mother. Meaningless, all of it." he paused, taking a good lock at Kinsley. He knew that mental health was important, but he also knew a Knight that went crazy going down a cycle of taking medications prescribed for a mental condition that had side effects needing a medicine that cause side effects that needed… And so on and so forth. Beyond that, Daniel didn't really want word he was a crazy to come out of this talk. But then again it was all too late to stop now. 

"The Paladin is a man of the book and I'm sure he's killed a lot of people by now. I was going to talk to him about this, really, but I didn't get a chance. I keep going over in my head these little mind games to give myself remorse for the raiders. Maybe they had fought off the Enclave here long ago and seeing men in power armour and with a vertibird they thought they were back and were trying to protect their homes. Maybe some other outfit of power armoured men was wreaking havoc around here. Maybe like so many raiders back home they just have no other way to feed their kids." A thoughtful pause kept the scene quiet save for the Doctor plying her trade. "Nothing. I feel nothing. I didn't even think to put out the ones dying out of their pain and suffering, I wouldn't waste the bullets. I could go back out there with my gatling laser and do it again, this time take even more now that I know how."

Kinsley listened to Estevez, every word. Each stitch falling with his confession, it wasn’t something she had a lot of experience in. She wasn’t a trained soldier like he was, but people had died on her table, in her care. “We aren’t given a script in life, Estevez,” she began, pulling at the thread. Her stitches neat and precise, and her hands working on years of muscle memory given her time to produce an adequate response. “The nature of this beast is that is can be brutal, uncompromising. As much as you want to tell yourself they were once good people, we can’t be sure that they haven't always been bad. Evil is… hard to define. You were trained to do a certain job, and that job isn’t easy…” Kinsley paused again, unmoving.

“When I was not much older than you, I walked the wasteland. I remember we met raiders. One of them was very injured. Very, [i]very[/i] injured.” Taking a breath in the conversation, Kinsley began again with her work. “Had we not acted, he would have died. I was trained to save people, and I didn’t give any thought to whether this man had committed wrongs, or whether he had committed rights. We did our jobs and then we moved on…” She cleared her throat, and turned to be able to look Estevez in the eye, “my point being - your experience is not going to be the experience of your cohorts - today you may feel no remorse for this, the next time you kill it might make you sick to your stomach… Do you [i]want[/i] to feel remorse?” she asked at last.

It was a lot of words to consider, words that the young soldier never had thoughts even parallel to before. "The years have given you wisdom, Scribe Kinsley." Estevez said while thinking as a sort of sign he wasn't daydreaming. The beginning of her first words compounded with the story confused him, their morals seeming quite different if not quite antithetical. Eventually he began a slow and rather tentative response. 

"Maybe I will feel sick, maybe not. I'm certainly not feeling any less averse to the idea. Anyway, it's not an issue of if I want to feel remorse or not Doctor. I…" Daniel paused, looking for an analogy with his hand waving through the air. "I wish I wouldn't feel pain. It would make me a better soldier. But if I wasn't I'd know something is very, very wrong. If I can kill hundreds of men without blinking once or shedding a single tear then all the better for my duty. I would make Paladin in no time! But that's not the problem. The problem is it's not supposed to be like this. They say the feeling of power is addictive, and everything in this world you do is a hidden slippery slope. In twenty years from now I don't want to shoot a child because it means finishing a mission faster. But if I go down that path then the wishes of Knight-Sergeant Estevez won't matter to Paladin Estevez. So I'd rather the Knight Sergeant do what he can while he's still in power."

“Pain is the reminder that under all of the armour, and at the end of the day, we’re still human.” Kinsley answered softly. “Without it, we’d just be machines. If you choose to skip the pain then you’re skipping all the good feelings too - everything that makes you who you are. You’re not a better soldier if you just become a point and shoot machine, [i]Daniel[/i],” she added. There was something very poignant about him saying it while still within the confines of his armour, only his face sticking out. A comforting squeeze would be lost on the cold steel. It was heavy to think about. “All the better for duty, maybe. But being a soldier is more than killing and combat. Sounds like all you’ve done is fight,” she sighed, finishing the last of his stitches with a neat loop. He was so young, and these questions of morality were weighing heavily on him. 

“I see more than that in you. You can be a lot more than a gun on the frontline…” Kinsley brought pinched fingers to the bridge of her nose, eyes scrunched, her thoughts scrambled and turned over - she barely knew if she was making sense. “You know that Paladin comes from the latin [i]Palatinus[/i] - of the palace, essentially. In history a Paladin represents heroism and chivalry. Legendary peers and protectors… A true Paladin wouldn’t kill a child for any cause.” 

Kinsley placed her tools back on the table, picking up a fresh gauze to finish cleaning him up. “Sounds like your bump to the head knocked a few questions loose. It’s good to think about these things, and… there’s nothing [i]wrong[/i] with you for it. I’d be more worried if you didn’t question the things around you, and how you’re feeling…” 


The Knight Sergeant's brow furrowed with comprehension taking a few moments. He thought his counterpart had taken his analogy too far and too literally, but he understood the point she had made. She certainly wasn't wrong all he'd [i]really[/i] done is fight, or otherwise prepared for it. 

He hadn't really gotten resolution to what was troubling him, in fact things seemed to only get more complex. But Daniel it was the right complexity, he had to give Kinsley that. "Well, thank you Doctor." he said, thinking back to Paladin Moss, the Outcast Brotherhood Paladins, and the armoured men tormenting Daniel in his dreams. "You've read your etymologies Doctor, but brush up on your history." he continued, standing up and bowing in gratitude. He hadn't managed to bum some pills but perhaps for the best — an addiction in the field would be nasty business. "Thank you Doctor. From the depths of my soul: thank you. There's not much I can offer that isn't part of my duty, but if you ever need something of me do not hesitate to ask. I'll be seeing you about. Ad Victoriam." with that the Knight-Sergeant saluted, did an about-turn and headed off on his business. 

She had nothing left to say, and simply waved him off as he made his way back towards the campfire. Meanwhile, she let herself have that moment to slump down into the chair. The conversation had left her with more questions, weight, and a new sense of responsibility. Another worry line found its way to her forehead as she tilted her head back, giving the ceiling a long hard look before she closed her eyes.