The Stranger

P R O L O G U E

I am but a dream -- your dream, creature of your imagination.

This - this is how he remembers it. How he remembers her.

A clean beach; salt spray over a pinkening sky; that too-big, too-wild floppy hat she has to keep pinned to her head with one hand against the ocean breeze. And her mouth wide in that kind of belly laugh that comes from a moment without self-consciousness, without inhibitions, with a pure bubble of joy. And he's so damn happy, it rings like a bell and he records it, plays it over to lull him to sleep at night, the first time he's ever heard her laugh that way. He keeps it.

And she looks at him, peeling her silly oversized sunglasses off and letting the wind play waywardly with the fabric of her dress, that laugh still curling her lips into a smile, and beckons him.

You wouldn't know there'd ever been an apocalypse unless, like he does, you let your hand clasp and unclasp the little bottle of Rad-X in his pocket. Not that he needs it, but she - she's got her feet in the water, basking in the strangeness of it all, in the familiarity of the ocean after all this time, after all this mess.

He shakes his head, issues some tongue-in-cheek excuse and she laughs again but she's upon him in less than a minute. She's red in the cheeks and sandy in the knees and a little out of breath, but she drops to a crouch in front of him and slides those silly glasses over his slightly uneven ears.

"Nick Valentine," she chides, and he doesn't object to the attention, doesn't resist his new set of specs, "you come down and enjoy yourself this minute."

"I am enjoying myself."

"Why do I always have to twist your arm to get you to have a little fun?"

"I'm having fun. G'won." He gestures out to the edge of the sea with a metallic hand, leaning his weight on the other.

She heaves a dramatic sigh and plops down beside him, folding her dress over her bent knees and burying her toes in the sand. He remembers this, watches this, this simple thing - this unconscious way she roots herself in the moment. He keeps that, too.

"I've never seen the beach so clean," she says, curling her fingers around her own ankles and marveling at the darkening view.

"Not all of it is. Just here."

"You did this?" She arches a brow at him, a confused but prepared-to-be-grateful smile already revealing her teeth.

"I - might have had something to do with it. I wanted..." But he trails off, like he always does, too soon. Too stiff, too guarded. He clears his throat and glances away, pulling the sunglasses off and hooking them into his collar for safekeeping.

But her air is still easy, her pleasure still radiating off her. He can feel it, like heat. Like a generator. How on earth did she keep it going?

"You remember, when it would get dark, and the moon would get big, and you could hear the boats calling in the night?"

He squints. Her voice is quiet, and it's a genuine question -- there's no guarantee he will remember, but at the very least, with that nostalgia in her voice, he thinks he can picture it. "Sort of," is his answer as he sits up a little straighter, brushing sand off his palm and onto the knee of his trousers.

"When I was little, in Chicago, the trains would always put me to sleep. I missed it so much when we moved to Boston. I thought it would be so quiet, too quiet. But then - I heard the boats. I'd never seen the ocean before. I'd been to the lake, but the ocean is just..." She trails off too, but happily. He knows that moment - when there's not a precise enough word for a feeling.

He's not ungrateful for their lapse into silence. It's really the only comfortable silence he knows. Even Ellie fills the room with sound when it gets too quiet. But Nora doesn't fill space just because it's there. She's careful like that - but content like that, too. He likes that so much about her, and he's never been able to put his finger on why.

"I used to be afraid of it, you know. Still am, sort of."

"The ocean?" He can't help but crack a grin at this, lifting a metal finger to scoot the brim of his hat a little higher so he can see her better, judge the joke she may or may not be spinning. "I don't believe that," he decides, shaking his head a little.

"It's true!" She gives him a smack to the back of the shoulder without any force behind it, and he chuckles, and even as she tells him not to laugh she's laughing, too.

"I've seen you take down a 'Lurk close quarters," he states simply, falling into the habit of fumbling in his pocket for that ever-present, wrinkled pack of smokes. His fingers hit the bottle first, and he withdraws it, giving the pills inside a little rattle. "Here."

"I've had one," she starts, but he's never taken her shit, and she only smiles and opens her hand palm-up when he insists with another, firmer, "here." When he shakes out a capsule for her, she tosses it back obediently and dry-swallows like the pro she is. But she still makes that face. And he smiles. That silly face.

That done, he pockets the bottle again and retrieves his cigarettes, shaking one to the opened square on one side and offered the protruding filter to her automatically. Just as habitually, she takes it, waiting patiently for a light as she continues to explain.

"It's not like the lake. If you had all day --" she laughs a little "-- maybe two, and enough determination, you could walk around it. It had borders. But the ocean is like..." Her eyes return to the last hint of purple above the horizon, and she chews her lip, searching for the right words. Always careful. "There could be a whole different world on the other side of that. Hell, there might not even be another side to it."

"Don't tell me you're buying Tom's the-earth-is-flat theory," he teases, but his expression shifts into a frown when his digging finger can't find another cigarette in the crumpled cardboard box. Damn. Did he really smoke that much? But then, he's not the only one who smokes them anymore.

"Here," she offers once she realizes what's happened, holding the last cigarette out to him without a second thought. He can hardly stand it. He doesn't even need to smoke; it's just some...something leftover. He can't feel nicotine. He just feels...smoke. And here she is feeding his habit - his stupid habit - just because she knows him. She smirks when he waves her away and retrieves his flip-lighter anyway, opening and lighting it with a practiced jerk of his wrist. He lifts his other hand - his better hand - to shield the new flame from the breeze before it flickers out. She takes a few puffs with the end of the cigarette dipped in the heat, sucking down the red bud until it truly caught, then pulls back and lets the excess smoke swirl into the night-catching air.

He likes the way she smokes - like she's on a mission. Like there's a secret at the end of every cigarette. Like she has a bone to pick with each fleck of tobacco. He likes too much about her, probably.

"No," she answers finally, with a smoke-filled smile. "I've got myself a pre-war education." She chuckles, and this gives him permission to do so as well. They both, technically, have celebrated pre-war backgrounds. And what good does it do them here, now? It keeps them alive, she would say, and he can hear her voice so clear in his head it startles him. She has homesteads and settlements all across the Commonwealth, and now she lives there, too?

"I just mean - I mean the world, the way it is...we don't even know what's there anymore. If there's anything there, anymore. I hear things as far west as California. The caravans sometimes mention Louisiana but - but beyond that? What if it's all just a bigger Glowing Sea?"

"Ah, the Reds are still around," he dismisses airily, and she pops him upside the back of his head with her palm. It's playful, and he doesn't mind, but it's a scolding also.

"The Reds," she repeats with a scoff as he adjusts the hat she knocked askew. She takes another drag of that cigarette, like she has something to prove. "What does that even mean anymore? You and me are probably the only people who even have context for that. But that submarine, that poor man..." She frowns at this memory, and he stiffens a little, too. It was a hard day down there with that man and his ghouls. They don't talk about it much.

"That's as far as I've ever heard about, and that's still on our shores. The rest of the world could be gone, I mean, we don't really know. That's a big unknown. That's the ocean - even more, now. That's not scary to you?" And now she's looking at him and those dark eyes accept no bullshit, no half-hearted answers and no beating around the bush. She is a fierce arrow of honesty and he's pierced, and when you're hit like that, you don't have any choice but to bleed your colors true and loud.

"It's...not really something I've thought about," he admits, and there's a touch of shame in his voice. "I guess - well, Boston has kind of been my whole world, and I didn't really..." He shrugs, as if that's any way to end that kind of statement. She looks at him dead in the eye, coolly collected for a moment or two and he worries, bizarrely, that he's disappointed her somehow.

But then she's smiling, and there's something...there. He catches it sometimes, on the edge of her face, like a shadow that creeps in when she burns a little dimmer. It's rare, these moments when it sneaks up on her - on him, too. She's normally burning so damn bright no shadow can survive near her.

And then she's leaning a little closer and he can only stare as that dusty-colored arm of hers stretches forward with a half-ashed cigarette held delicately in her fingers. She presses the end of the filter against his lips so casually, like his processors aren't whirring and his heat sinks aren't ready to fry. Like he can't taste the salt on her fingers and smell the dirt and tobacco and sand on her skin. And what can he do? He takes a drag, and she watches most of it filter out through the open side of his neck.

"As worlds go," she says, and that something she has, that...something, nearly stops him dead when she puts the cigarette back in her own mouth, cool and casual like he's not sitting here ready to burst, "Boston's not a bad one to have."



All this hasn't happened yet. Perhaps it won't. Or perhaps it will be different. That's the funny thing about fate, and time. And when you're out of time - and outside of it - the only thing ahead of you is the great big unknown.


Nick woke, and it wasn't really waking -- when his mind buzzed too loud and he couldn't stand looking at his own cramped chicken scratch anymore, he idled and let his body fall into a less power-consuming stasis. Coming out of it was like coming out of a dream - he thought. He was pretty sure he remembered that. But whatever happened, it was only half-processed. Which, he supposed, is what a dream really is, anyway.

The office had that empty feeling whenever Ellie left, and he knew for sure she'd gone when he straightened up from his slump over his desk and he felt the rustle of his trench coat over his shoulders. He'd told her before, he didn't really get cold, but that never stopped her from worrying. There was a stubbed out cigarette next to a pile of unsmoked ash in the little ceramic dish by his hand that punctuated the point in a way only Ellie could. How could you scold someone without even being there? She made an art of it.

He let his chair meander backwards on rusty wheels as he stood, stretching his arms before tucking them into the sleeves of his coat. He didn't need to open the door to know it was night. He didn't need to hear the patter on the tin roof to know it was raining. None of this was detective work, he had to admit -- he had sensory receptors in and out the wazoo; little could escape his notice or estimation. Or, well, not a great deal, anyway.

The woman on his doorstep, half-shadowed in the pink neon flickering of his sign, that was a surprise. But there she was, all brown and battle-worn and legs until Sunday. He knew her immediately, though it was so much easier to picture her in cobbled-together leather armor and a little more blue. But that smoke - that was a staple. The rosy bud of the cigarette hung down at her hip where her hand lazily flicked ash onto the alley floor. The smoke curled up and around the blinking light and it brought her smile with it. Something got stuck, some subroutine hit a wall, and he just stood there doing his best impression of a door.

"Hey Valentine," she greeted him, reaching into a patched bag at her side and retrieving a little bundle of papers, which she held out to his chest, "I've got a case for you."