The Stranger

I used to believe
I was such a great romancer
‘til I came home to a woman
that I could not recognize.

“So – here’s something I don’t understand.”

Another day had passed, and the quartet were taking advantage of the childless school hours to relax in the sun, tucked away in the little nook above the office. It was relatively secluded, given that it was stuffed behind Arturo’s elevated bullet trailer, and walled off at the back. So Nick had relented a long time ago and set up a table and a couple of chairs, and Piper had since insisted their ongoing investigation be conducted in the fresh air due to the horrible habit of a certain unnamed pair smoking like chimneys whenever they had to think with any level of intensity.

Nick stood near the edge of the roof, leaning against the large, rusted water pipe that bent into the corner of the makeshift little deck, letting his smoke drift outward and upward to mix with the general smell of the city – which, he had pointed out to no avail, was really no better than his office, just more varied. Piper had said that variety was the spice of life, Nora had mentioned that should wouldn’t mind getting outside, and Deacon hadn’t offered much of an opinion one way or the other. So there they were.

Piper had hunkered down in a rickety chair, balancing her boots on the table and thumbing through Nora’s by now well-wrinkled report for the countless time. Nora was seated crisscross-applesauce on the metal sheet of the roof, poring over a few worn out maps of the country that were filled with useless, pre-war information. Her back rested gently against Deacon’s legs, who sat slightly hunched in his own chair, fussing over cobbling together a report of his own. He hated paperwork, and the party was very well aware, given that he had vocalized it at least ten times already.

“Lay it on us,” he mumbled in a grumpy sort of voice, and Nora nudged him gently with her shoulder, smiling faintly.

“What’s this Unknown/M.S. you keep mentioning?” Piper had thumb-marked a few pages with this strange description, noting that it was underlined each time – presumably by Nick.

Deacon looked down at his partner with a face that shouted really? so loudly even his sunglasses couldn’t hide it. Nora carefully did not acknowledge him, though she did pass an apologetic look to Nick’s back. Piper caught this with a quirked brow, glancing between the paper, Nick, and Nora a few times before a funny kind of disbelieving smile slipped onto her face.

“Wait, you don’t mean – you can’t mean…” She looked again at Nora’s neat scrawl, full of pre-war loops and joined-up letters that hadn’t made the transition from pre- to post-war, for the most part. “M.S.,” she pondered, shaking her head and trying out different solutions before finally adding, “There’s no way. You don’t mean Nick’s stranger?”

Nick stiffened a little, blowing a cloud through his teeth and grunting in a way that indicated disapproval.

“Bullseye,” Deacon began, using a tone one might employ to talk a wild-eyed child down from a particularly imaginative fantasy.

“Don’t,” was all Nora had to say, and her partner threw up his hands in a defeated gesture, shaking his head.

“I just wanna go on record saying I’m not completely on board with this.”

“Noted,” she answered stiffly, pulling up from her maps and winding a pencil a little nervously between her fingers. “It’s…a theory,” she began, decidedly not making eye contact with anyone, though Deacon moved his leg just perceptively enough to give her a little more support. She responded by leaning against him a little more firmly. Piper couldn’t put her finger on it, but between those two, something… Well, she had her suspicions, but for once, they weren’t ones she wanted to poke at.

Nick said nothing, but he cocked his head over his shoulder with a mild frown, watching his old partner sidelong.

“Zimmer said some things, and when we were…getting out, I found some files. Nothing concrete,” she added hastily, when Deacon’s hand brushed briefly across the crown of her head. “I’m not putting all my eggs in this basket. It’s just…” She sighed, daring to glance at Nick again, who had turned fully to face her, leaning his opposite shoulder against the pipe and flicking the ash from his cigarette with a thumb.

“I’ve seen Nick’s notes,” Nora pressed on, dropping her gaze a little guiltily, though Nick had only shrugged. He wasn’t really hiding them, and if she’d asked he would have offered them freely. Besides, it wasn’t as if his pet project was much of a secret, anyway. When Piper snooped around, more or less the whole city got informed.

“Some things match up that are sort of – it scared me a little.”

“So you think,” Piper summarized in a you-can’t-actually-think-this voice, “there’s some two-hundred-year-old serial killer popping in and out of existence all around the U.S. playing some kind of vigilante routine?”

Nora fixed her with a surprisingly amused expression. “That’s really the strangest thing you can think of? Look at who you’re talking to.”

“You don’t magically teleport all around.” She paused. “Anymore,” she added.

Nora laughed good-naturedly, dropping her pencil onto her maps and running her fingers through her hair like a woman who desperately needed a break. A long one. “I know how it sounds. I really do,” this she said with her head tilted back to look at Deacon, and they exchanged another silent conversation over the span of a few seconds. Nick was trying to get used to it. He’d seen it before, but now it seemed practically nonstop. He didn’t really know why it irked him the way it did, and he didn’t particularly want to solve that mystery.

“But I think – it’s complicated. I think he’s real.” She laid down this confession with an obvious “but” hooked on the end, though this didn’t stop Piper from ramping up to talk her back to her senses.

“Blue—”

Nora held up her hands, and Deacon sighed, sitting back in his chair after reaching down to give her shoulder a little squeeze. “Just listen. I think it’s – complicated,” she repeated, and Nick’s eyes narrowed just slightly. He still hadn’t spoken, and that fact was doing nothing for Nora’s hesitation. “He – the Institute thinks he’s real. Or, they think something’s real, they’ve got records of a project, we got what we could from Tom a while ago.”

“Which miiight go to show how reliable it is,” Deacon finally chimed in, but shut up abruptly at the way Nora’s back stiffened against his shins.

“I didn’t listen to Tom, if that makes any difference.” Her voice had a tinge of bitterness to it. “I just read what he could download from his program. I think around the time they were focused on upgrading the Gen 2’s, they started recording something they called the Multi-presence Subcode.”

“So what does that mean in English?”

“That’s…sort of the problem. All we can reliably decipher is that it was a small string of code that appeared sporadically and spanned across multiple systems. Gen 2’s from entirely different lines would develop it in their idle processes, and they couldn’t figure out where it was coming from. What made it difficult is that it was never whole. It never showed up completely before becoming garbled junk data that got tossed at the end of the day. One Gen 2 would show one string that got cut off halfway through, and a week later another entirely different iteration would show the second half with no interaction between the systems. The department heads were pretty furious about it, but the grunts started to talk about it in their notes like it was…alive.”

“I did say English, right? You gettin’ any of this, Nick?”

“I’m following,” he answered dryly, and finally Nora met his eye, straining with some silent sentiment he couldn’t quite grasp. He was beginning to hate that.

“Well I’m not,” Piper lamented with a huff, depositing the papers on the table and crossing her arms. “Can you dumb it down for those of us who aren’t of the egghead variety?”

Deacon flew to the rescue, though in his usual, sarcasm-laden fashion. “They’d build a bot from the ground up and it would come up with a super-secret code nobody gave it permission to have. Someone else would build another bot and it would have another part of it. Naughty synths.”

Nora nudged him with an elbow, but he merely shrugged. His comfort level was sinking, and though Nick could see it plain as day, he wasn’t precisely sure why. It definitely wasn’t the strangest idea any of them had presented, and a far cry from the strangest truth they had ever experienced. There was something under that general disbelief – something like fear, which was something he couldn’t recall ever seeing Deacon wear.

“So – they named the code? That’s the M.S.?”

“They gave it a term,” Nora answered with a brief hesitation, “it was the general lab team that named it.”

“Think of a bunch of Toms finding something cool and high tech that they didn’t invent.”

“Stacy? Lola? Gwen?”

Deacon cracked a smile, and Nora sighed a little. “The Stranger.”

Piper’s face was torn between several different kinds of disbelief, but Nick was standing straighter, interest piqued, though he wasn’t exactly radiating joy.

“You think he’s in my head.” It wasn’t a question. He wasn’t particularly pleased.

“I think he’s real,” Nora was almost pleading, looking up at Nick with the same kind of sorry eyes she’d laid on her son a few nights ago. For some reason he didn’t feel like exploring, it only fueled the embers of his crackling new flame.

“You think he’s some – some leftover Institute garbage code.”

“I really don’t, I think he’s…”

“Complicated,” Nick spat, tossing his spent filter to the alley floor below.

“Hey look,” Deacon chimed, all brittle brightness, “you two are out of cigarettes. Piper, you wanna show me where the cigarettes are? Downstairs?”

“Not real—”

“Interview me, then,” he hissed, getting to his feet and edging his way around Nora to seize the reporter by the elbow and guide her to the upper door of the office.

Footsteps scampered away, one set a little more reluctantly than the other. Rusty hinges creaked. A heavy door fell shut. Nora looked blankly down at her maps. Nick glared skyward.

Minutes passed.

“I don’t have anything conclusive,” Nora spoke up quietly, lifting her legs to fold her knees to her chest, “I don’t have any proof.”

“Spare me the pity.”

“I don’t—”

“You don’t,” Nick hissed through slightly gritted teeth, scowling in earnest now. “You keep lookin’ at me with that sad mug and you wanna tell me you’re not feelin’ sorry for me?”

“I don’t pity you,” she answered lowly, hunching her shoulders forward. “I sympathize.”

Nick gave a hollow laugh. “You gonna debate semantics with me now?”

“It’s not semantics.” She rolled herself onto her feet, wringing her hands together for a moment or two. “I know what you’re feeling, I think. A little bit, at least. I know what it’s like to have to – fend off pity and doubt.”

Nick scoffed again. “Who pities you, savior of the Commonwealth?”

“Woman out of time with a dead husband and a dead son.” She had flinched at his words, but her tone was sharper now, and she was glaring furiously away from him. And suddenly he felt like a heel.

“Look, I didn’t mean—”

But her eyes turned on him, steely and cold, and he was pierced in a way he’d never felt around her before. It…hurt.

“You can feel whatever way about it, Nick Valentine.” The use of his full name felt like a stab. “I’m asking for your help, I really think I need it. You don’t have to give it to me, and I can go at it on my own. But I think,” she added, tone still icy and uninflected as she turned around to gather the papers Piper and Deacon had left behind, “this is important. I think you could really make a difference. And I think there’s nobody else I’d trust as much to help me. There’s nobody else I’d – really want to be with me through it.” Her slight hesitation was another jab in the chest, and he wished not for the first time he could be a better man with a clearer head.

“Nora – I’m – I’m trying, here.” He was practically begging, and even he couldn’t say precisely for what.

She paused, heaving a little sigh and considering the roof beneath them carefully. “I know,” she breathed, tucking the papers to her chest with one arm and pinching the bridge of her nose with her free hand. “I know. It’s – my fault, really. Everything is so…” She gestured ineffectively at what could have been the whole city, the whole world. “I feel like – like I’m wandering out of the vault all over again.”

Nick moved with considerable trepidation toward her, slowly bracing his good hand against her folded arm. She smiled painfully up at him with glassy eyes, and he wondered how he could feel like an ass and still this angry all at once. “I’m in the reeds, here. This is all…” He imitated her widely indicative gesture helplessly, unable to articulate this – this thisness. “Suddenly you’re back, and then…” When his sentence dropped off in the air, the previous night bloomed between them like a tangible thought. A shared and uncertain memory.

A brief kiss that stretched through a decade. Another where he could taste her mouth. A tipsy apology, the awkward end of half a slow-dance. The distance that divided them when she’d curled up in his unused bed and he’d retired to his chair in an empty room. A burning sensation that lit up the long night even after he’d shut off the lamps.

“I want…” He was all ellipses and no substance today. It wasn’t much of a change, really; he wasn’t exactly the chattiest. But he’d never really tried and failed this badly, this many times in a row.

“Tell you what,” she filled the silence between them, voice a little frail. She reached up to fiddle idly with the length of his tie, staring there instead of his face, and he lifted a metal hand to curl gently around hers. “When you figure it out, you let me know. I’ll be here.”

And after scooping up her slightly scattered maps, she was gone – though he did note the sounds of scrambling and quiet exclamations of pain when she’d opened the door.

He sighed, scratching the back of his neck and shoving a wandering wire back into place when it caught on a finger. How could you take the complicated out of being a real person?



“Well,” Ellie Perkins’ voice greeted the three of them as they stumbled down the stairs (Deacon and Piper both furiously pretending they hadn’t just taken a metal door to the head), “don’t you three look like a storm cloud just rolled in.” Sometime in the while they’d spent on the roof, Ellie had let herself in and made herself useful, tidying up the office space and, Nora noticed with a grateful little laugh, even gathering Shaun’s spare projects that had been slowly finding their way down the stairs.

“Hopefully not with too much radiation.” Piper’s demeanor changed perceptibly as she scurried forward to snake her arms around Ellie’s waist and pull the secretary in for a warm squeeze of an embrace. Deacon and Nora exchanged a short, good-natured glance. But he caught the slightly sad edge to her smile, and naturally braced an arm across the backs of their shoulders.

“Hey,” he spoke low and close to her ear, garnering A Look from Piper (she hated not being ‘in the loop’, as she would call it) to which he paid no mind, “I got you.”

“You’re enough of a nuclear blast all by yourself,” Ellie teased, lighting a blush on the apples of Piper’s cheeks when she placed an affectionate little kiss at the edge of her jaw. “What’s got you all doom-and-gloom?” This she addressed to the three of them at large, turning outwards so she was shoulder to shoulder with Piper, both women hooking an arm around the other’s waist.

Nora shrugged a little apologetically, clearly anticipating some kind of dramatic reaction not entirely unlike Piper’s fond hello. “Detective’s work is never easy?” She presented it like a peace offering, and Ellie just laughed.

“Save it, slick,” she answered with her signature, easygoing smile. “Piper already told me. Sounds like she gave you enough grief for the both of us.” Piper very pointedly did not meet anyone’s eyes, and Nora relaxed with a relieved chuckle.

“It’s good to see you, Ellie.”

And now the woman broke apart from Piper to tangle Nora up in a hug so earnest it made Nora feel strangely guilty. “It’s good to have you back, sweetheart. We were all so worried.”

Nora patted her hands gingerly against Ellie’s spine until she drew back, all smiles and forgiveness. “Sorry about that,” Nora managed, but Ellie just shook her head and laughed again.

“Word is there’s a big new mystery on the table. You all on the case this time?”

“Seems like,” Piper answered, threading her fingers together behind her head and leaning back lazily on one heel. Try as she might, she couldn’t keep the little glow hidden when Ellie was near, and Nora felt a rush of appreciation for the pair of them. They deserved that kind of happiness, more than most people she knew. “It’s got Big and Complicated written all over it,” the reporter added, hitting the consonants hard in that way she had whenever something had captivated her interest.

“So nothing new, huh?” Ellie teased, and Piper simply grinned. “What’s the next step, then?” She prompted, just as knowing as she had ever been – she was good at her job. “You look like you’ve hit an impasse.” She gestured vaguely to the papers and maps bundled in Nora’s arms, who shrugged a little in response.

“Sort of. We might need to travel.”

“Far?” Ellie’s tone was a little flatter, and she leaned her weight to one side so that her hip was flush with Piper’s. Nora’s face was a series of apologies.

“Piper doesn’t have to come,” she offered, glancing desperately toward her friend in question, who, for her part, was shifting into oh-no-you-don’t gear with an all-too-familiar wrinkle between her brows.

“Like hell—”

Ellie silenced her just by gently looping an arm around her, gaze still steady on Nora. “I think we both know that’s not going to happen. Even if I could get her to stay she’d be pacing the place and tearing her hair out. Where do you need to go?”

“For now, only as far as Goodneighbor,” was Nora’s slightly hesitant answer. “But, after that…maybe farther.” Maybe a lot farther was the unsaid sentiment that thickened the air of the office, and Ellie’s lips bunched up to one corner as she considered her friend and then her partner carefully.

Deacon watched the toe of his sneaker. Piper fiddled with the hand Ellie had planted on her side. Nora and Ellie simply watched each other, impassive consideration running headlong against apologetic guilt.

“What’s in Goodneighbor?” She asked at last, and though Nora opened her mouth to answer, it was not her voice that spoke.

“An old friend.” Nick was quietly descending the stairs by then, and Nora wondered how long he’d been standing at the top of them, listening and waiting. A good detective knows when it’s best to just observe.

Ellie cocked a brow above a dawning smirk, and she leaned a little more firmly into Piper, who met her weight gratefully and looped her arms around the woman yet again, hands knotting above her opposite hip. “Any particular one?”

Nick used the excuse of lighting another cigarette, already pinned in his mouth, to keep his gaze from meeting anyone else’s. “A specialist. Only doc I’ve ever trusted.”

“Well you give Amari my regards.” She turned her eyes at last on Deacon, who was scuffing his shoe against the floor and fiddling idly with the fabric of Nora’s shirt at her shoulder. “You’ve been awfully quiet, stranger.”

She sensed the entire room flinch, but was uncertain as to why.

“Me? Oh I’m just arm candy.” Deacon’s smirk fought to ease the tension, and Ellie’s laugh helped that along just fine.

There was a quick, debating kind of chatter between Piper and Ellie, and Deacon lapsed back into easy silence. Nick and Nora shared a brief look of mutual and indecipherable apologies, and the fingertips of his metal hand gave a feather-light brush to the backs of her knuckles as their arms hung idle between them. She smiled a little sadly and turned away, and he sighed in a cloud of smoke.

“Ellie,” Nora began in a tone twisted with regret, “I hate to ask—”

“You don’t have to,” she cut off, smiling and shrugging. “Nat’ll be glad to have him over, and I’m sure he’d like something other than omelets, even if he’s too polite to say.”

They all laughed at this, even Nick in his grumpy kind of way, and they were glad of the truce Ellie somehow cultivated between all of them.

“So when do you all have to head out?”

Instinctively, all eyes were on Nora, and she felt the weight of the decision with perceptible reluctance. Probably, Nick supposed, she hated the idea of having to make the decision to leave – again. And so soon. He knew none of them would hold it against her if she chose to take a break, to stay for a few days, a week, even a month before chasing this lead. But that wasn’t Nora. She wasn’t one to sit on her hands when there was a threat out there.

“Tomorrow,” she sighed at last, hugging her papers and maps a little closer to her chest. “In the morning.” Deacon braced her shoulder a little tighter. Nobody would have accused her of making an easy choice.

“You can’t,” Shaun’s voice was a desperate, squeak of a plea, “you just got here.”

Nick leaned against the wall at the base of the stairs, opening and closing the lid of his lighter in a fidgety way. He could hear the pair of them, seated on Shaun’s bed, and he knew Nora was trying to keep it together, could hear the strain in her voice, too.

Ellie and Piper had snuck off to ostensibly “pack” for the trip, though Deacon had his own suspicions about the advantage of a temporarily empty house. He sat in Nick’s old chair, heels kicked up on the desk and head lolling back. His eyes remained fixed on the corner of ceiling he knew supported mother and child, and he tried not to think about his partner’s heartbreak.

“Honey – I wouldn’t go if it wasn’t important. I won’t be gone for long, I promise.”

“But last time—”

“I know,” her voice cracked, causing both men below to wince, “I’m so sorry, Shaun, I really am. But I will be back soon this time.”

“Can’t you take me with you?”

“It’s safer for you here. You’ll be with Ellie and Nat, and I won’t worry – I know you’ll be okay.”

“Don’t you want to see me anymore?”

Three hearts fluttered with pain at that.

“Oh – sweetie – of course, of course I do. But I want you to be safe. You and Nat and Ellie and…everyone. So I have to do this.”

“Is it – is it because of what I am?” Shaun’s voice was quiet, but his question dropped like a lead weight.

Deacon sat up fast enough to give himself whiplash. Nick bit through the filter of his cigarette, coughing out the piece that fell into his mouth and frantically patting down his front to find the lit end before it burned anything important.

“…what do you mean, honey?”

“Because – I’m like Nick. Kind of. I’m not…really real.”

Nick hissed a quiet “shit” as he caught the smoking end of his cigarette in the fingers of his good hand, Deacon’s fists clenched and unclenched on the desktop.

“Shaun.” Nora’s voice was suddenly stern, so much so that it startled both men in the office. “You are like Nick. And that means you’re just as real as anyone else. And it doesn’t mean you’re not my son. And it will never – ever,” she emphasized, in that same, iron voice, “stop me from loving you. Do you understand me?”

There came no audible response from the boy, but after a little while there was the faint sound of muffled sobs, and Nora’s gentle and patient shushing layered over them.

Later that night, when she was pulling the covers up around him, she asked quietly, “How long have you known?”

“I don’t know,” was his answer, “maybe always? I just…feel things sometimes. Sometimes Miss Curie visits and talks about things and it just…makes sense.”

“Are you upset I didn’t tell you?”

Shaun seemed to consider this for a little while, thumbing the ragged edge of his blanket. “I don’t know. How would you have told me?”

She laughed a little sadly, brushing a hand through his hair. “I don’t know. I thought about it for a long time. I don’t know how I would want someone to tell me. I don’t really know if I would want them to tell me at all.”

“But you’re not a synth,” Shaun objected mildly, and she chuckled again.

“That I know of.” Nora lifted one shoulder in a kind of half shrug. “And if I was, I don’t think it would matter too much. I’d still be me. You’d still be you.”

“I think it’s probably important to know what you are,” Shaun ventured, and Nora considered this in earnest.

“The what,” she concluded at last, “I don’t think matters too much. The who is what counts.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Well,” she began, forced to unpack her own opinions in that way that was so entirely Shaun – he brought that out in people. It made her rather proud. “The what is just sort of the container. The who is the person inside. The choices you make, the things you believe are right. Have those things changed any since you found out?”

He paused. “No,” was his answer at last.

“Then what do you think?”

His silence lasted a little longer this time, a sleepy smile slowly sliding onto his face. “I love you, Mom.”

“I love you too, kiddo,” she beamed down at him, leaning in to plant a kiss to the crown of his head. “Get some sleep. I’ll be here to see you off to school in the morning, okay?”

He nodded and rolled comfortably to his side, and she fished a cigarette out from its place tucked behind her ear, sliding it into the corner of her mouth and quietly opening the door to the roof.

It didn’t surprise her that Nick was already out there, nursing his own cigarette, but she did suck in a bit of a gasp when he cleared his throat to announce himself. Here in the dark, he blended in before her eyes adjusted, and he could make himself go so quiet sometimes.

“Jumpy,” he noted, shifting his shoulder against the wall so he could better look at her. His eyes and the red cherry on the end of his cigarette were the first things she could make out, and she made her way slowly closer, letting her eyes get comfortable with the darkness in the process.

“Sometimes,” she answered, breaching the dim glow of his stare and his smoke. When he recognized the cylinder in the corner of her mouth, he held out his own, and with a strange kind of silent intimacy, she sucked the heat of his cigarette into her own.

They stayed like that for a little while, silently trading clouds, watching the alley below and the patches of stars above in turns.

“You ever gonna give me the whole story?” It was a little selfish, he knew, but that struggling anger in him wanted to escape, pried its petty way to the surface when it could.

“Nick…” She gave a kind of exasperated sigh, gripping her filter between two fingers and rubbing her forehead with the backside of that thumb. They watched each other for a few minutes longer, the night breeze carrying bits of ash away from them.

“Hey.” At last, she reached out to him, and so gingerly he could barely feel it, hooked just the very tips of her fingers into the ragged lower edge of his jaw. “C’mere.” Her touch was so light as to not be there, but when she drew him forward, he followed easily, stooping a little lower so their noses nearly touched. The pad of her thumb brushed the corner of his mouth, and when his lips parted just slightly in response, she pursed her lips and blew a precise stream of smoke into the space he provided. Her eyes were cool and distant, but locked intently on his, and Nick could feel his processors heating, his moving parts straining against one another in an incalculable fit.

There was some kind of tacit, intimate communication there that he could feel the edges of but just couldn’t quite gain purchase on. It was driving him mad.

“I’m doing what I can, Nick,” she whispered, and he could taste her breath. “I’m trying, too.”

Her smoke twisted up into the night air through the side of his neck, and seemed to carry with it all of his sense. Unthinking, he closed the gap between them, pulled her into the warmth of his coat, kissed her like the first taste of water in an endless desert. He’d feel guilty and complicated about it later, but that seemed like a problem for Future Nick. For Nick Right Now, with her so warm against him, he was content to give his common sense a break.



In the morning, the office was packed to bursting with guests for breakfast – which, thankfully, Ellie handled this time. The room was alight with chatter and laughter, and Nora sank into the warm, easy feeling with palpable gratitude. Deacon flicked a tarberry across the makeshift table (the desks joined together back-to-back). She caught it in her mouth, which started a bit of a war between all of them, with Nat and Shaun soundly taking the victory by juggling berries onto one another’s waiting tongues simultaneously. There was a round of applause for this, and pair bowed theatrically in appreciation.

They saw the kids off to school as one large, strangely parental group, though Nora and Shaun shared a tight, slightly overlong hug and a short whisper of a conversation that Nick couldn’t quite make out over the general din of so many people in so small a space.

When the troupe had sorted through and confirmed the contents of their respective packs, Ellie saw them all off to the gate. In the shadow of the protective hunk of rusted steel, she took Piper’s face lovingly between her palms. “Be safe,” she instructed, and Piper’s hands curled affectionately around her wrists. Ellie planted on her a kiss that garnered a whistle from Deacon (which earned him an elbow in the stomach from Nora, turning his whistle into a little gasp for the air she’d knocked out of him), and the pair laughed against each other for a moment or two.

With another short peck, Ellie turned to take up Nora’s hands in her own, squeezing them gently. “You take care of them. These two love to push their luck.”

Nora had promised to do her best and Piper had rolled her eyes while Deacon crafted some smart comment about vaults and gangsters. “That was one time,” Nick had stated, a kind of generalized frown settling onto his face. They left the city in a little wave of laughter.

Nora took point first, and Deacon fell naturally to bring up the rear. As they picked their way across the ruins, a gun in every hand, Piper voiced the question she’d been simmering on for the past day.

“So what’s the plan with Amari?”

“We’re gonna ask the doc if she can’t fish some code out of yours truly,” Nick answered, through the side of his mouth – a habit of his in the field, when his concentration was only minimally on the conversation.

“The multi-whatever?”

“That’s the plan.”

“So this is the Brain Train Take Two?”

“Synthetic boogaloo,” Nora murmured through a smirk, mostly to herself, though it earned a gruff kind of laugh from Nick.

“What?” Piper’s voice was all confusion.

“It’s some old world thing, trust me.” Deacon’s voice carried from the back, and Nora tossed him a not-so-apologetic smile over her shoulder. “They do this all the time. It’s actually kind of annoying,” he added, tone ridiculously bright.

“That your professional opinion?” But Nora’s voice was easy, her teasing toothless.

“Ugh, pissing contest aside,” Piper tried to steer them back to the topic at hand.

“Pft, ‘cause I’d win,” Deacon murmured in something like a pout.

“You wish,” was Nora’s reply, not quite under her breath.

“Children,” Piper scolded, and Nick scoffed without any bite in it. “Why do we think Nick has the multi-whosit anyway?”

Nora didn’t answer. Deacon kept his mouth shut, for once. So Nick begrudgingly took on the duty, replying in a kind of prolonged sigh. “Because I’ve seen the stranger.”

“So what does that mean?”

“It might be,” he explained a little reluctantly, “that it’s how I’m interpreting the rogue code.”

“Older synths are more like – really smart, mobile terminals. Everything is pretty literally ones and zeros,” Deacon offered what little expertise he had to provide. “Nicky here’s got an authentic human personality. Humans tend to resist things they can’t understand. Could be the code’s getting processed kinda like a person.”

“So, like,” Piper ventured thoughtfully, “a synth hallucination?”

Nick grit his teeth and Nora stopped so suddenly that Piper nearly ran into her back. “No,” she answered firmly, shifting so she could look back at the group sidelong, keeping at least half her attention on their surroundings. “A hallucination isn’t tangible, no one else can see it.”

“That sort of sounds like—”

“The code is physically there. You can see it; you could interpret it if you had the know-how. If that’s what it is, if it’s the subcode – it’s more like a…ghost, I guess.”

“Also not real,” Deacon piped up before he could stop himself. Nora shot him such a venomous look that he physically shrank back, mumbling, “I’m not saying – I’m just saying.”

“A presence, then. A kind of – entity. If Nick’s processing it like a person, then I think it’s trying to…communicate with him, somehow.”

“Like, have a conversation, or…?” Piper’s tone was trying to walk a fine and gentle line, simultaneously battling against her ludicrous and natural curiosity.

“I don’t know,” Nora admitted, turning back ahead and starting the group off again. “Something like that, maybe. The only thing we know for sure is that whatever it is, the Institute couldn’t control it, and it had them scared. And angry. It’s practically all Zimmer’s logs talked about, from what I could gather. It was kind of hard to parse. He was kind of…”

“Unhinged,” Deacon supplied darkly, and met no argument from Nora.

“So,” Piper began, in that tone she used when she wanted to summarize information to get a better handle on it, “powerful people are afraid of this ghost in the machine –” Nick grunted at this “—and some half-boiled Institute bigwig got driven the rest of the way crazy thinking about it. And we want to get close to this thing because?”

“The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” was Nick’s flat answer, his frown stretching deeper. “Not exactly sure I like where I fit into that equation.”

“It might be nothing,” Nora said, in a voice that clearly said ‘it’s definitely something.’ “But if it’s something – bad. If it’s dangerous—”

“Which it will be.”

“—shut up, Deacon.”

“Shutting up, boss.”

“If it’s too dangerous,” Nora repeated, her voice hardening into the same iron she’d used to reassure Shaun the night before, “then we pull out—”

“Ye-heah we do.”

“—shut up, Deacon.”

“Sorry, sorry.”

“I’m not putting Nick – I’m not putting anyone in danger. If it’s something we can’t handle, then we don’t.”

“So what’s Plan B then?” It was Nick’s voice this time, and there was a touch of concern at its edges.

“I’m – working on it.”

“Well, I’m definitely reassured.”

“Deacon.”

“Shutting up, shutting up.”

All at once, Nora lifted a hand from beneath her rifle, holding it up as though signaling a turn out the window of a car. The group halted obediently, all voices hushed. They hunkered down as one, assuming such reflexively natural fight-or-flight positions that Nora would have been strangely proud if she’d seen it.

Heavy thumps from around the corner. A very distant, chilling beep repeating like a countdown.

“Mutants,” she murmured, and they closed ranks without needing to be told. She signaled forward, and Nick and Piper immediately took up ready positions against either side of the mouth of an alley. Nora was nimbly scrambling up a decrepit fire escape, and Deacon lowered his gun with a frustrated sigh.

“I’m the bait,” he whispered to himself, “again. Of course I’m the bait.” Nora’s hiss came from somewhere above him, and he waved it away with an exasperated grumble. Dutifully, he crept a little further along the alley, ducking low. When he’d gone far enough to make out some green-tinted movement around the corner, he sighed again and stood a little taller. He let his rifle hang loose on its strap across his body, and cupped his hands around his mouth to carry his voice farther.

“Heeeeeey my, uh, fine green fellows! How about some free human haunch? Devilishly handsome and only slightly irradiated!”

Piper and Nick rolled their eyes in tandem. Nora smirked down the length of her scope.

Deacon was already backing up when the shuffle of heavy bodies began to grow near. “Aaaanytime, Bullseye,” he muttered to himself, swallowing dryly. When the blood-curdling beep-beep-beep of a potential explosion hurried towards its fellows, and Deacon could see three of them – one with its fist around that mini-nuke he fucking knew was coming – shoulder to shoulder and marching across the rapidly dwindling yards between them, his voice broke. “Thiiis is a little close for comfort!”

Light blinded them. Sound rushed out of the world. A wave of heat pushed him back onto his ass at the feet of Nick and Piper, his sunglasses slightly askew on his nose.

Nora’s aim was steady as ever, and she only needed one target. From her perch on the edge of a half-dilapidated roof, a single silenced bullet hit home in the heart of that mini-nuke. Three green bodies went flying apart from one another, and from themselves.

Sight and sound fell back into life all at once, and Deacon’s ears filled with a light ringing and the crackle of cracking and smoldering asphalt. “Shit,” he breathed, and two voices above him laughed with a sense of relief.

Nora dropped back down to the ground from a rusty ladder, absorbing the shock in a crouch and smiling a little cockily. Piper rested with a relaxing breath against the brick at her back, and Nick shifted his weight less aggressively on his feet.

“You know,” he said, adjusting the tilt of his hat slightly, “I’m not sure I’ll ever really get tired of that.”

“Yeah,” Deacon groused, “well I’m glad someone’s having fun.” But Nick was holding his hand – his good hand, very deliberately – down to him, and Deacon took it with a relenting kind of chuckle. “You don’t have to worry about ending up as a bag of meat.”

“You know, they tried that once,” Nick recalled, to the skeptical looks of the rest of the group. “Ended up arguing whether I was really human. It’s all the metal, see?” He gestured a little expansively to the whole of himself. “Gets stuck in their teeth.”

Nora snorted, but Piper, ever the curious one, raised a brow. “So what’d you do?”

Nick shrugged. “Told ‘em I was the vegetarian option. Made tracks while they tried to figure that one out.”

They laughed. Nora met his eyes with a genuine smile that sent an arrow through him. Briefly, her hand brushed his metal fingers, and there was that silent effort of communication again. But he thought he could understand it, this time. He was pretty certain he could recognize gratitude – though he wasn’t entirely sure for what.

They set out again, spirits a little higher.