The Stranger

Though we share so many secrets,
there are some we never tell.

“You!”

The woman marching toward him was the very definition of “on a mission.” Tom and Deacon were at her heels, and Carrington stalked behind at a slower pace, looking as sour as anything. Nick grimaced.

“We’ve given you plenty of time.” Desdemona was on the windup before she’d even come within a yard of him, and he felt accosted into a halt. “It’s almost noon, now. We can’t afford delays. We need to debrief the pair of you.” At this, Deacon glanced around, ginger brows wrinkling above his sunglasses with the first, cold bead of sweat of oncoming panic. It seemed to come to him so easily now, Nick noted. He wondered why he hadn’t put much thought into it before – Nora hadn’t been the only one trapped down there in the dark.

“Where’s Bullseye?” Deacon’s eyes were firmly on Nick, and the synth could only stretch his grimace wider across his lips in reply. The little Railroad envoy glanced at one another, save for Deacon, who was most certainly glaring, unseen, at Nick. “How – how do you keep losing an entire person?” This little bit of outrage brought the group’s attention to the spy, Carrington huffing audibly in as much disapproval as he could he could force into a single exhale – which, if you had ever been on the wrong end of his dressing-downs, you’d recognize as being a whole hell of a lot.

“I – wouldn’t say lost,” was all Nick could muster. Deacon pressed him silently under that shaded stare. There was something fiercely loyal there, something that Nick felt he could understand, if only vaguely. “You might wanna talk to Hancock. He’s – getting patched up.”

The boiling anger under Deacon’s skin ran visibly cold. “Shit.” There was sudden realization – sudden complete and total understanding in his expression. It scared Nick a little, if he was honest with himself. But he was grateful for it, too. He nodded, and Deacon was on the steps up to the old state house before Nick’s head had even drawn back level. Just as Dez and Carrington began to object, their agent spun toward them, hands held up with strange firmness for the man in question. “I’ll get her.” Again, there was a jumble of words as two people tried to contradict this decision, but this was met with another, stronger, “I’ll get her.” With that, he was gone into the building, leaving Nick to face the little crowd on his own.

“How long until she’s back?” Desdemona sounded like a woman at the very end of a usually long rope.

“I don’t – know. She’s not really—”

“Nick, we had an agreement.”

“She can’t avoid us forever. This kind of dereliction—”

“Damn it, what the hell do you want from me?” Nick barked over Carrington’s indignant tone. “What do you want from her? She’s trying. She’s…” He sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose with metal fingers.

I’m doing what I can, Nick. I'm trying, too.

“You know what happened to her.” His voice was hollow in a way that gave Tom clear pause, who shifted slightly away from his employers. “You know what – what that does to a person. You can guess, anyway.” Nick frowned. This was uncharted territory for the most part, and he was already up to his neck in the mud of it. How had he ever thought he could do this? How had he ever thought he should?

He shoved his hands helplessly into his pockets. “I know what you’re doing is important. Look at who you’re talking to. I know better than most.” When he met Desdemona’s gaze, he registered shock in her expression as he watched her see him – really see him, the state he was in, for the first time. “You didn’t ask if she gave anything away.” He didn’t give them a chance to reply. “Because you know she didn’t. She wouldn’t. She’d die first, and she damn near did. She didn’t do that for herself. Didn’t do it for Deacon or even for me. She did it for you.”

“He’s right.” The sound of Tom’s voice was so unexpected that all three turned to him – Carrington’s obvious outrage tempered by the surprise of the others. “Dez – we have a little time. Whatever’s left, they’re not what they used to be. And they’re not close. Look, I’ll – I’ll go talk to Amari, okay?” He looked up to Nick with such a fiercely honest face it made a synthetic heart twist with uncertain guilt. “You can trust me.”

There was a stretched, prickly moment. Then Nick nodded, and Dez relented. She held a hand up to Carrington’s immediate objections, and Tinker took off in the direction of the Memory Den. “Fine,” she told Nick, glaring up at him with that quiet, calculated anger she always held close to the surface. “I understand.” She absently ran a set of fingers over her covered shoulder, and Nick knew immediately there would be a scar there – maybe even a set of scars. The way her jaw twitched under the pressure of her teeth pumped that guilt all the harder through his coolant. He didn’t want to be at odds with Desdemona – lord knew she had to have made sacrifices of her own. “I understand. We’ll do what we can for now. But we do need her. We absolutely do.”

Again, all Nick could do was nod. The remaining Railroad representation drifted away, and Nick took a moment to light and finish a cigarette before retreating back into the old state house.

When he mounted the stairs and made his way upward, he could hear the scene before he could see it. There was a quiet rumbling of voices – one raspy, one strained with some kind of west coast whine, and one stern and exasperated. Hancock was leaning his back heavily against a wall, legs sprawled in front of him. Deacon was crouching at one side, speaking low and urgently, and Fahrenheit was at the other, stimpak gripped in her teeth and hands quickly and deftly wrapping a fresh wound on the mayor’s arm.

There must have been hell itself on Nick’s face, because the moment Hancock caught his expression he waved his uninjured arm like swatting away some irrelevant fly. “Flesh wound. Got plenty’a those already.” When this didn’t seem to calm the detective, he continued with a little more effort in his smile. “My fault, anyway. Shouldn’t’a tried to get her knife off her.”

Deacon groaned in recognition, though not without sympathy. Nick’s forehead fell into the cradle of his own hand as Hancock issued a little grunt in response to some sharp action delivered by Fahrenheit. It was a mess, all of it. This whole situation. He should never have – he just –

He’d known something wasn’t quite right when she’d woken up in the middle of the night. He’d heard Deacon and Hancock mention as much, but she’d seemed so…calm in the few days since her return. But she’d shot up next to him, sweating and whimpering, and she hadn’t let him touch her. He had tried to understand that, tried to empathize but – she’d always been so unflinching with him, always so accepting of his physical presence in her space. It was the hook that drew him in; if touch was a rare commodity for Hancock, it was something of a fairytale for Nick. Granted, that was mostly by his own doing; he tended to avoid touching people altogether in a surefire measure of circumventing the cold pang that struck him when they recoiled. And Nora, in that quiet, careful way of hers, had never allowed him to keep her at that arm’s length – rather literally. It had surprised him at first, even in the little ways she breached that level of intimacy. A touch of her hand against his arm, a little squeeze of his fingers in her warm palm, the first time she’d ever kissed his cheek and set him on fire.

And suddenly he realized – perhaps, really, for the first time – how much he’d grown used to the consistency she brought to him in that regard. Nick had thrummed with an unnamed ache in the year she’d been gone, and in the short days since she’d come back he hadn’t had any real amount of time to think of anything other than her absolute, real, very immediate physical presence. He had wanted so badly to pull her in against him, but one touch of his fingers against her trembling shoulder and she had screamed and scrambled backward and sobbed. He’d curled that metal hand in like an unwitting monster, tried – hoarsely – to whisper to her, to call her back into the moment from wherever she’d gone (and he had his horrible suspicions).

But Nora had looked at him in a way he’d never experienced before. She looked at him with fear. From the moment she’d laid eyes on him down in that stinking vault, she’d never shown fear. Curiosity, certainly, and then fondness and then – something a little more carnal that he guiltily enjoyed. But this? This was like a blade between his steel ribs. This was a sudden, sharp mystery he hadn’t the faintest idea how to solve.

He’d crept toward her on his knees and she’d pressed herself into the corner after scooping up her switchblade. He knew she slept with it under her pillow, and was certain that was a new habit, but he hadn’t thought much of it. It made a kind of sense. Anything that made her feel secure – he wasn’t going to question it. But she’d brandished it at him, hair in her face and teeth bared like an animal. She held it out like a threatening shield. And he’d crumbled.

Nick had made it to the folding stairs in a strange, half-circle crawl, as though rotating around a woodland creature he didn’t want to frighten – though, he had to admit, probably one that foamed at the mouth with radiation and was well at home with quick and messy kills. He’d scrambled downstairs floor in the dark, bungled his way into a chair, the table, Hancock’s leg, and finally managed to make enough racket to wake the ghoul. There were raised voices, a scramble for light, a terse and confused explanation, and then she had appeared on the stairs, his button-down still hanging haphazardly on her frame, knife still in her hand, completely unfamiliar expression on her face. John had approached her in that same, cautious way, had tried to soothe the taut aggression out of her spring-ready-to-snap stance, had placed his hand ever so gingerly over the blade in her hands –

And had gotten that blade in a clean slice down his forearm for his trouble. She’d fled back into the dim of the tower and Fahrenheit had stepped in like a bolt of lightning, slamming the stairs home to their groove in the ceiling and immediately crouching next to the mayor. Nick opened his mouth to protest – he didn’t want to isolate her now, of all times – but Hancock was mumbling and Fahr fixed him with a cold, stony glance.

“It’s better this way,” she said. Her voice was as clipped as it usually was. Not unlike Nora, Fahrenheit played her words carefully, never spoke more than she had to. Every sentence was a meticulously aimed projectile. She was all points, no small talk. “When she has a fit, she mostly wants to be alone. If she wants out, she’ll use the window.”

“You – what – you mean this happened before?” Nick stood, helpless. Nothing was making sense. Hancock shot him a deeply sympathetic look that somehow made him angry. Why couldn’t he understand? John Hancock, the ghoul most out of his gourd in the entire Commonwealth, seemed to have some kind of certainty about Nora that he, Nick, just couldn’t keep from slipping between his fingers. His teeth clenched. He didn’t understand his own anger, either. He wasn’t entitled to her – to any part of her. But he wanted this. And he was trying –

He was trying. He’d never been brave enough for that before. Never – felt enough about anyone to gather his courage, before. Had never been so close to having something before.

“Someone’s gotta go run crowd control,” John grunted, flexing his fingers which caused another dribble of blood to squeeze itself loose and earned him an exasperated sigh from his temporary nurse. At the blank look on Nick’s face, he let out a light, sad kind of laugh. “She’s gonna be outta commish for at least a day. Those Railroad bigwigs ain’t gonna cotton to that. Gotta keep ‘em off her ass for a while. No job for the faint of heart.”

“Why?” He hated this – this useless feeling.

“They don’t know how to stop pushing. They can’t. They can’t afford to.” Fahrenheit was speaking again, mechanic and battle-worn. “Unstoppable force, immovable object.”

“They’re gonna do what they gotta,” Hancock chimed in, though he paused to grumble when Fahr took a moment to mention stitches. They argued briefly – something about a ghoul’s skin not holding itself together long enough for a stimpak to heal a wound under tension, something else about the injury not being that bad, something more about someone not putting up with anyone’s idiot stubbornness just so he could go and get himself a good infection in the name of macho bravado.

“You – approve of that?” Nick felt more lost than ever.

“’Course not,” John answered in a tone that very clearly displayed offense at the idea that anyone could think otherwise. “I’m on her side, here. But she knows what she signed up for, and they know it, too. If it means snuffin’ out the last pieces of the Institute? When it comes down to it, she’s expendable.”

There was an audible click of metal-on-metal as Nick instinctively clenched his fists. Before he could argue, before he could voice any frustration, Fahrenheit spoke up again, turning her gaze up to rest steadily on him at long last. “Not to us. We’re small picture when it comes to Nora. But she works for an organization that’s all about the big picture.” The woman sighed, brushing her ragged cut of hair out of her face. “Go outside. Get some air. Stop them from getting too close, yet.”

So he’d gone. He’d left only by a few feet, not even a yard away from the old state house, but somehow Nick still felt like he was abandoning…everything. Like he was running away. It was an oily feeling that clung inside him even now, as Deacon pushed himself to his feet and spoke.

“She still upstairs?”

“She didn’t come down,” was all Hancock could provide. Deacon seemed to understand. In the best of times, no one could guarantee Nora’s position if she was out of sight – she liked to fight from the shadows, and more by habit than anything else, she drifted off the edges whenever there weren’t eyes pinning her to one place. Now, her mind where it was - there was no telling.

“Okay,” Deacon answered through a sigh, running his hands rather believably over that pompadour wig. Nick wondered briefly how long he’d kept his hair that he would instinctively remember it after all these years of sequential disguises. Before that train of thought could station itself at any conclusion, however, Deacon had turned to him with a curt nod. “Okay. We’ll give her a few minutes of quiet, and then I’ll go up.”

“You sure—”

“Nick.” The use of his name shocked him into silence. Deacon was usually one for colorful epithets, or at least a sarcastically lilting Mr. Valentine. “I can’t – it’s not up to me to tell you everything. But you gotta trust me. She’s not – herself right now. But I – know that person up there. I got this.”

“Helluva thing to ask, to trust a liar,” Nick answered helplessly.

“Yeah.” Deacon smiled in an equally ineffective way, sharing a brief moment of relief with the synth in front of him. It would be easier with fewer objections, and he knew – very intimately – how much it had to hurt, being shut out of Nora’s world like this. Hopefully Nick could understand it was for the greater good.

He hated himself for that thought. That was the way the Institute rationalized their evils. The greater good was worth a few hundred, maybe thousand deaths. A million enslaved lives. But this, he soothed himself, was not the world’s greater good. It was just Nora’s. And that, he decided, was something worth sacrificing for.

Hancock was repositioned to his favored couch, given an inhaler like a child is given a pacifier, and slouched into bleary contentedness in a matter of minutes. Fahrenheit returned to her general position in the shadows, though stayed notably closer to the mayor, shoulders against the wall and arms crossed. Nick had tried to sit on the opposite sofa, but in the end couldn’t contain his nervous energy, and instead began to take a slow turn about the room, cigarette in his mouth as predictably as ever. Deacon watched him, sympathy welling up in him. He wondered, vaguely, if Nora had ever felt this way – if, during Deacon’s darker moments, she had paced around the room and fretted in her concentrated, pointed way.

There was little conversation. Hancock occasionally murmured something, sometimes earning a quiet reply from Fahrenheit or Deacon, sometimes not. Fifteen minutes and six cigarettes had passed, and the room was a haze of smoke. Nick grumbled at his newly emptied pack, to which Hancock laughed and offered up one of his own. Fifteen more minutes, three more cigarettes – he was trying to conserve, now.

At last, Deacon stood, and the room’s eyes were on him. He simply nodded. Understanding immediately settled over the group, and Deacon made careful, quiet work of unlatching the attic stairs and tip-toeing his way up. Nick watched uselessly as the man’s legs disappeared, and Fahrenheit gingerly folded the stairs back into place. It felt like a lifeline was being cut. He sighed in a cloud of smoke and returned to his slow, circular track.



Deacon let the dark settle around him and into his eyes when the stairs closed behind him. When he could make out the general silhouettes of the space inside the tower, he took a few steps toward the center. Peering up expectantly into the dusty and half-collapsed rafters, he called out in the most familiar way he knew: “Marco?”

He waited. The silence went on too long. He wanted to believe she’d just run off, nervous as that would make him. They had an agreement. You always answer. Always.

No matter what.




“Marco.”

Her breath stings. She coughs up something wet and warm. Rough concrete cuts at her legs through the rips in her jeans, and the slump of a figure next to her remains motionless.

“Marco.” She is more emphatic, more desperate. She sees flashes of the times they would call to each other across the corpses of a cleared battlefield, half in jest, half in relief to hear that the other survived while out of sight. She coughs again and it feels like something tears inside, and she sees the blood this time, thick and dark on the pavement beneath her scabbed hands.

“Fucking Marco!” Nora hobbles on her knees to close the few inches that separate them, and she shoves the bloody pulp of Deacon onto his back, watches his chest shake and hears his lungs rattling with the effort. She breathes hard, and the fact that he is breathing the same air is nearly enough to take the edge of agony off the action.

“Fuck’s sake,” she hisses, collapsing onto the ground beside him, resting for the first time in – god, who could tell anymore? In a basement with no windows, no clocks, no light – pain became the only measure of time. Time only related the rests between assaults. The world outside, the way it turned and spun beneath the sun? None of that had mattered for a long while.

“You answer me, fucker,” she half-sobs, sprawling like him on her back, aching hands resting over her stomach. “You always answer me.”

The bruises and still-swollen bumps of Deacon’s face shift just enough to show a smile, and she can feel it more than see it under the glare of nearly forgotten sunlight. “Polo,” he spits, and she hears the blood spatter with the effort. He keeps his broken arm pulled into his core like a wounded wing, but reaches blindly with the other to take hold of her hand. She grips him hard, and it is painful for both of them, but there is something magical to that – something so distinctly alive about it. They are free. They are together, here, and they are fee.

They lay like this for an incalculable amount of time. They watch the sky in spite of the pain that the light drives into their heads, having been absent from their lives for so long. They watch the occasional, mottled bird or two streak across the blue in hapless, tiny flocks, disjunct and belabored in their flapping. They savor the white of clouds passing inside the frame of ruined buildings that surround their little paved courtyard. They drink in the world, they suck down the air, they taste the coppery, bloodstained flavor of a life they had once resigned themselves to losing.

When darkness begins to creep over the wasteland, they rouse from in-and-out sleep that stole their consciousness in brief waves. Bracing against each other and the walls, they find a door that gives – thank god; neither of them think they can manage the dexterity it would take to fiddle with a good lock and both are sure they don’t have a bobby pin between them – and discover the U-shape of a building they’d been surrounded by comprises a small apartment complex. This gives them a little pause – a lot of hidey-hole compartments throughout a larger shell, and they have no weapons beyond the switchblade she’d rescued from her cell and the shoddy pipe pistol he’d wrested from a guard, which held all of three shots. They can’t run. They can barely stand. So they relent. If they die now, at least they die free.

They stumble down a hallway until they reach a door that’s locked – the best promise of salvage. The doorframe is warped and rotted, and Nora just manages to slide the blade of her knife into the crack like a teenager with a credit card, forcing the bolt back and letting the moldy wood swing inward. To the pair of broken people at its entrance, the apartment is a haven. Secluded enough to avoid most looting, it still boasts a sofa, a ransacked but not quite emptied kitchenette, a broken window facing outward on the far wall, a set of small, in-tact stairs in the corner, and even the mostly moth-eaten remains of a large rug.

They immediately seek out the bathroom. They move as one, and neither tries to force the other to rest while they explore alone. Neither wants to separate. Neither wants to risk it – not now, not ever again. So they bear one another’s weight and rifle through drawers, open hinged medicine-mirrors, dig into cabinets until they come across a first aid kit. There are three stimpaks sitting haphazardly within, and without needing to consult, they each take one to gingerly inject into some less beaten part of the other. They save the third. They will need it, and probably soon. They don’t want to debate over who will receive it.

There is a single bed upstairs that they don’t take. Nora gathers the blankets and two rotten pillows into her arms, and Deacon helps her pull the ripped cushions off the couch on the first floor. They sleep close, on top of the rug, on their little pile of cushions and pillows, huddled under the thin blanket. He wakes up to silent screams in the dead of night, shouts “Marco!” into the dark, and she has her arms around his sore ribs in a second.

“Polo,” she answers in a whisper against his back, nosing into his spine.

When she can’t find sleep and his breathing stills, she leans over his body, tries to suss out the sounds of life, and finally whispers a desperate “Marco?” into his ear. He wakes at once and turns toward her, their arms tangling together.

“Polo,” he assures her, and they drift off fitfully again, calling out every so often and always, always answering. It’s a promise – unspoken but firm. They will always answer.



Deacon stilled his body in the way he’d been trained to, trying to filter through the sounds of the creaking old building and the bustle outside in search of familiar, human noises. At last, carried on the afternoon breeze through the hole knocked out of the bricked window, he heard it: A weak, soft, “Polo.”

He exhaled relief. True to their tacit promise, she answered – she would always answer.

It took him a little time to struggle out to the roof – he wasn’t quite so flexible and nimble as she; he vaguely recalled her mentioning something about “gymnastics” before the war, but admittedly he had been less than alert after that as his mental faculties had become consumed with an attempt to figure out how to wedge “gymnasty” into a conversation. She would forgive him later, when he applied the perfect pun at the perfect moment. When at last he’d made it through, Deacon did his best not to look down as he edged around the outside of the tower until he found her, tucked up against the outer wall and shrouded in the afternoon shadow it cast. Perfect place to see but not be seen. It made sense.

“You here, partner?” It may have sounded a bit convoluted to anyone else, but he saw understanding register in Nora, and watched her simply nod in response. Taking this as his all-clear, he crouched next to her, preserving a little space between them cautiously. Eventually, she lifted her free hand – the other still clasping her knife – and he recognized the invitation. Deacon took that hand in his own and tucked himself in beside her, leaning his shoulder briefly and gently into hers. They sat like this for a good while, saying nothing, barely moving, barely there.

There had been quite a few days like this, after they’d made it out. Silence while they mended and clung to one another. There was never much to say – never much that could be said. There weren’t words for their circumstances, and so they didn’t try to make any. They just kept close and quiet, sharing something unspeakable.

“Where’d you go?” Deacon prompted eventually, running the pad of his thumb gingerly over her knuckles. She took a little while to answer, but he had nearly infinite patience for Nora, so he waited, letting her come to her words in whatever way she needed.

“The raiders.” Her voice was dead. His hand around hers was suddenly vice-like. They didn’t speak, but he pulled her in, looped his arms around her and let her, by degrees, sink until she buried her face into his shoulder.

“I hurt Hancock,” Nora choked at last, and his grip around her tightened into a squeeze again.

“Not too bad.”

“I hurt him.”

“He understands.”

“I attacked him.”

Deacon sighed. She was right. He knew it, she knew it – everyone downstairs would know it, too. He couldn’t lie to her about it, either. It was a problem. But, he felt himself inwardly insist, it was an understandable one. A worthy one. It wasn’t for nothing, and it wasn’t anything they all weren’t willing to take on.

“Yeah,” was all he said, rubbing his palm gently over her far shoulder. She cried again, and he let her. He didn’t shush her, didn’t try to quell the tears, he just let her, held her, understood. The place she’d gone to, the moments she’d relived – no one came back from that right, no one came back from that anything short of terrified and mad as hell.

On the morning of the third day, they decide they have to move. The stims have done all the work they can, and to use the third would be a waste just yet. They are neither of them well or healed, but Deacon’s arm has at least set itself and the deep purple of that elbow has begun to fade. The extended corner of Nora’s mouth has knit itself back together, letting her move her jaw without threatening to tear her cheek open anymore. The entirety of their swelling has mostly faded, but that seems to be the extent a single stimpak can accomplish on their broken bodies.

There’s no food left in the apartment. They had found a few cans of Cram and a beaten up box of candied apples and had feasted like starved dogs, scooping their meal into their mouth with dirty fingers and maneuvering the stale, sticky taste of the Dandy Boys around their tongues. It could have been dirt and it would have tasted like ambrosia. There hadn’t been any water, but the war-torn fridge had housed a few bottles of warm Nuka-Cola, and they drank it like nectar. Too much too fast – both had been sick afterward, which only lent itself to their current hunger, their need to move on.

They leave at twilight, after fishing a tote out of the upstairs closet and gathering the empty bottles, the few clothes they could find, and the blanket. They had both found a new pair of ill-fitting shoes each, Nora having to go sockless to make hers fit without cutting off circulation, and Deacon having to pull three pairs over his feet and line the souls with scraps of pillowcase to keep a grip on them. They start out down the road, tense and alert, and ease very slightly as night settles. The two agree that night-travel is best – combat is more likely with a greater field of vision, and neither of them are up to a fight. Nora is still slightly dragging a leg, and Deacon still pools little dots of blood at the corner of his mouth. Wherever they go, they decide, they need more stims. They have no caps between them, and hold little hope of medical attention from a professional, though neither of them say so. It’s a sickly little thought they can feel in one another.

They travel only a bit more than a mile before they have to stop, and they both know it’s a shameful pace for them. On a good day, before – well, before, they could clear ten miles in a relatively combat-free day. Now they are out of breath and stumbling into a gas station – not a Red Rocket, they note; they must still be pretty far out from the commonwealth – using one another like crutches. Nora takes point with the pipe pistol, and Deacon takes her knife. It’s a poor defense, but they can’t risk being caught any less than prepared to their fullest. A pair of molerats forces them to use a bullet, though Deacon manages to take down the second close-quarters, earning a few painful bites on his forearms in the process.

There are no stims here. There's barely anything at all – most of the interior has been ripped to shreds, and the backroom’s stock has been all but cleaned out. They recover half a box of Sugar Bombs and go thirsty for the night, huddling together in the stockroom and sleeping badly in turns. When the sun starts to set over the station, it happens. They are jostled roughly from their rest and dragged out of the back room by dirty, calloused hands. They scream with throats sore and accustomed to the sound, and they are met with bestial growls and laughter.

The small group around them consist, as far as they can tell, of dirt- and oil-smeared men, their armor hodge-podge and their demeanors like the serrated edge of a hidden knife. The pair put up what fight they can, but a boot to Deacon’s chest calls forth another spurt of blood between his teeth, knuckles crunching beneath another rough sole and switchblade kicked out of his hand – though not before he lands it hard in the foot of a less suspecting raider. Nora manages a clear shot of the pipe pistol while the group is distracted, and though this earns her a kick to the face that splits her tongue, filling her mouth with blood and turning her vision to purple clouds, she smiles darkly at the strained voice crying “my fucking knee!” some distance to her left.

A few more fists and boots catch their prone bodies – the pistol spinning away noisily across the broken road – before anyone speaks again.

“There’s Med-X on the cart, quit shitting your pants.”

“My fucking knee has a fucking hole in it!”

“Tell Mandy,” the first, gruff voice spits, and there come the sounds of a body scrambling slowly and painfully off the ground and away. There are still at least eight legs surrounding the wounded pair, and as Nora’s eyes re-focus bit by bit, she can see a set of gnarled, grinning teeth hovering above her. The voice speaks from this creature’s mouth, and it feels like pins and needles in her veins. “Her first,” he announces, landing a toe in her side so hard she can feel a rib shift out of place.

There are leering, greasy laughs of agreement from the rest of the crowd, and one calls out, “Dibs on Ginger.” The voice above Nora sneers, scoffs, and lowers its body into a crouch next to her. “All yours,” it says.

She feels his eyes on her, and bile rises in the back of her throat. Suddenly she knows this man, knows who and what he is, knows what he will do – what he will encourage to be done to the both of them. And Deacon seems to know, too, because his hand finds hers and she can only just turn her head to meet his eyes. He doesn’t look away. His focus is on her. He is here. He is here, and though it is all that he can give to her – especially given the foot still pinning itself against his chest and occasionally pressing down to coax out a little more blood – he gives it all to her. Every inch of what he has.

Nora leaves. She is gone, and he watches her eyes die as the fabric of her bloody shirt is carelessly split by the edge of a blade. He watches her face go dim as the figure over her crouches, breathes hot and stinking against her neck. He watches her limp body jerk, watches even as the toe of that boot on his chest slides down to apply uncomfortable pressure between his thighs.

He doesn’t hear the cry of “what the fuck,” but he watches the wide spray of blood paint the exposed side of Nora’s face. He does hear the shouts that follow, the three subsequent gunshots, the brief struggle, the last shot, the distinctive, lifeless thud of falling bodies. He watches the figure hovering over Nora fall, blood flooding from several new, small holes in his torso, against her chest.

“Holy shit,” a woman breathes, voice shaking, “holy shit.” Small hands heave the bloodied shoulders off of Nora, rolling the body away with an adrenaline-fueled stream of terrified curses. “Holy shit,” the voice chokes again, and it is followed by the sound of retching. When the unknown woman returns, hovering over the sprawled pair, she coughs through the last of her gags. “Are you – is she – hey! Are you dead?”

Something in this brings a flicker of life back to Nora. She sputters, spits blood and a fragment of tooth, which Deacon sees her immediately collect and pocket. She sits up, looks blearily at the woman in front of them, who is still clutching the short shotgun in white-knuckled, shaking hands.

“You,” Nora rasps, and Deacon struggles into a seated position. “One of them?”

“I –” The woman’s entire body is shaking, but Deacon can’t hear a lie when she speaks. “Yeah but – Jesus, fuck, I didn’t sign up for this shit.”

Nora stands, body somehow suddenly foreign and unwieldy. By the time Deacon manages to get to his feet, she has already retrieved both the pistol and the knife from the small scattering of bodies around them. When the woman with the shotgun tries to speak, Deacon shoots her a look that silences her, even in his badly battered state. Nora stands over her attacker, stares blankly down at him as he gasps against the shotgun spread riddling his chest, cocks the last bullet of the pistol and plants it directly into his forehead. The sound of the shot rings out louder than anything Deacon has ever heard. But it doesn’t startle him half so much as the scream she lets out after a minute, crumbling to her knees and, pistol tossed aside, takes her switchblade in both fists and with forceful, overhead downswings, stabs the blade home in the death mask that stares up at her.

They watch a woman spend the last of her energy on this act of violence, and when the last remaining raider starts toward her, Deacon actually reaches out, grabs her arm, squeezes as menacingly as he can in his weakened condition. So they let Nora drain herself to tears, sobbing and stabbing, until she is simply a hunched back above the mangled pulp of what had once been a face. Deacon moves quickly, yanking the raider behind him so he can keep an eye on her. After dipping back into the station, he returns with their scavenged tote in his free hand. Finally, he releases the raider, digs into the bag, and retrieves the thin blanket. He hangs it gently over Nora’s shoulders, but he doesn’t call her to her feet. He doesn’t pull her away. He lets her cry and crouch. He lets her mourn and rage. When she finally stands, he offers a hand, and when she pulls in close he wraps his arms around her and lets her cry until her throat is raw again, lets her beat weak and bloodied fists against his back, lets her claw and fight until she stills, hanging heavy against him.

“I –” But the woman doesn’t have time to finish before Deacon rounds on her.

“You got a cart?”

“What? Yeah. Well, it was Saw’s but—”

“Like a caravan?”

“Uh – yeah. Got a radstag to pull it. Listen, what—”

“You know the Commonwealth?”

“I’ve – I know where it is?”

“Okay.” Deacon turns to the woman leaning against him, shifts under Nora’s weight just enough to catch her eye. They exchange some heavy, silent conversation, and then he turns his attention back. “What’s your name?”

“Mandy.”

He looks at her, really looks her, and sees her for what she is. Some kid, some runaway more than likely, probably not even twenty with big wide eyes and bad aim – not that you needed very good aim at close quarters with a shotgun. Her face is white as a sheet, there are tracks of tears in the grime on her cheeks. He knows Nora will forgive her, will understand, will rationalize the behavior so she doesn’t have to harbor more hate, so Deacon resolves that he will not. He will hold onto that anger, and he will use it like a too-tight leash. He will not forgive this kid. Not for this.

“You got supplies? Stims?”

“Just some Jet and some Med-X.”

“Fine,” Deacon sighs through grit teeth and the lingering taste of blood. “Fine. You’re gonna take us to the Commonwealth, you got it?”

“I don’t—”

“You’re gonna take us in your fucking radioactive sleigh and deliver us like Christmas presents and you’re going to do it as fast as you possibly can.” His voice is stone. Her face is a picture of confusion and terror. He relents – only a little, and only for the sake of the kind of woman he knows Nora to be. “You can take us to Goodneighbor. Little slice of a town, we know the mayor. He can set you up with a job and maybe protection. If you take us there. Fast. Now.”

On the cart, bundled under the blanket and amid a rag-tag haul of weapons, scavenged foodstuffs, rattling ammo and a first-aid box, Deacon slides the needle of the Med-X syringe into Nora’s unflinching arm. Then he immediately jerks, looking down to the sudden prick of pain in the crook of his elbow to find her hands, sneaky as they ever were, around their last Stimpak, feeding its contents into his veins with as much of a smile as she can muster. “Got ya,” she manages sleepily, and his heart breaks all over again while the recent bites on his forearms begin to close. He watches her terrifyingly swollen, red eye drift shut as she settles against him. Even shielded by its lid, the eye is bulging in a worrying fashion. He remembers the slice of tooth she’d spat out, and absently tongues the gaps in his own gums.

They peel out of the small, ruined parking lot in a confusion of hoof beats and rattling cargo. Deacon spares only a second of a glance to the carnage they leave behind: The faceless raider, his three accomplices spread around him, the man with a slug through his knee crumpled next to where the cart had been parked, and another – one he vaguely recognizes as the boot through which he’d plunged Nora’s knife – discarded nearby, blood coating his neck and pooling beneath him. It would have been a relatively clean job worth complimenting if he didn’t currently harbor such absolute hatred for the young woman in the driver’s seat.

They mostly sleep for the next handful of days. Mandy, to her credit, barely rests, works the radstag harder than she probably should have, only stopping when the beast threatens to fall over from exhaustion. She doesn’t speak much, but Deacon catches her glancing frequently to Nora with a kind of recognition that churns his stomach despite his steadfast despair of her. When night settles over their third day, and he can see more familiar territory blooming around them – their days, he calculates, must have been at least eight hours of hard riding; with the time they’re making, they might even arrive tomorrow night – and Nora curls into the inner corner of the cart’s flatbed with a fresh (and their second to last) dose of Med-X, Deacon finally stirs.

He carefully makes his way over the clutter and into the space beside Mandy at the helm of the rickety vehicle, and she tightens her grip nervously on the makeshift reins. She looks at him out of the corner of her eye, but when she catches him staring right back, returns her attention to the darkening road ahead. They sit like this in silence for a while, and he not-quite-secretly enjoys the nervousness he instills in her. He won’t forgive her, he reminds himself. But, he supposes, that doesn’t mean he can’t spare her some sympathy.

“They do it to you?” It’s a heavy question, and it hits her with the according weight. She flinches under it, and remains silent for a little while, expression tortured.

“They – called it initiation. I was – I was the only girl. I figured – I don’t know. I didn’t see a way out. I thought it would be…”

“Just you?”

Silence settles between them again. They jerk around a little with the movement of the cart, and Deacon allows himself a moment of appreciation for the ingenuity of taming a radstag for a pack animal – far faster than a brahmin, though perhaps less hardy. Still, speed counted for a lot on the open road.

“You saved our lives,” he acknowledges after a while. It is not an entirely grateful tone, but he knows the fact deserves its due.

Mandy glances over her shoulder to the sleeping, swollen, still bloody figure of Nora tucked under her blanket. When she speaks again, her voice is a familiar kind of lifeless, and it brings to mind that haunting image of those dead eyes locked on him while Nora made herself disappear.

“No. I didn’t.”

“Bullseye.” She didn’t stir, and Deacon swallowed the lump in his throat. “Nora.”

It was her name that shocked her into attentiveness, and she stared up at him, wide-eyed and frightened. Deacon pressed her reassuringly into his side again, frowning. “You – you’ve gotta talk to somebody about all this.” He looked down, clearing his throat. “Probably we both do.”

“I can’t tell—”

“Not them,” he interrupted, desperation cracking his voice. “Not – not me, not anybody like that. Someone who can help. You can’t – it’s eating you up. It’s like – it’s happening all over again, all the time.”

Nora fell quiet, curled a little helplessly against his side, and stewed like that for a few minutes. He didn’t interrupt, he knew better than that. He wasn’t telling her anything easy, and nothing exactly kind.

“I know,” she sighed eventually, and the way she slumped her entire weight so suddenly against him brought Deacon to a cold, immediate kind of fear. “I’m so tired, D.” The toneless, emptiness of her voice brought that fear home in his heart, and he gripped her tight, half turning toward her to gather her to his chest. “I’m tired of waking up with your teeth in my hands. I’m tired of – of smelling his breath. I’m tired of always being there, even when I’m here.”

Deacon nodded into the crown of her head. He understood, far too well, the exhaustion that came with the nightmares; with the cold sweats that broke out on the back of your neck when something shuffled behind you in an alley; the searing memory of pain that rose to the surface at the sight of a nail, a set of pliers, a staple. They rested that way until the sky was tinged with orange, and Deacon insisted that she eat. He didn’t try to coax her off the roof – she was safe here, and he was happy to let her shroud herself in that feeling. But he left to retrieve dinner, though he paused with one leg slung over the broken window blockade. “I’ll send Nick up with it?”

He felt the thickness of the sudden, sharp silence rise between them like a muggy heat wave. It wasn’t somewhere he’d normally poke his nose – well, he would definitely snoop, but he wouldn’t intervene. But – god, he’d seen them. He knew them. And he knew Nora – knew her to his bones, like his own arm. Knew that ache she felt far too intimately – knew it in the way the ghost of his own ache clung to him wherever he went. He’d lost, but she – well, she still had a chance. If she could find something good in this fucked up world, after everything, then she deserved an opportunity to hold onto it. He wasn’t above being a pushy big brother about it.

“Okay,” Nora answered after a moment, and he released a breath he’d been clenching. With that, he offered her a goofy smile and disappeared into the tower, making a bit of a production of the bumps and thumps of falling inside. Her ghost of a little laugh warmed him like good whiskey, and he made his way downstairs at last.

Fahrenheit, like the phantom mind reader she’d always proven to be, met him at the base of the attic stairs with two plates, hot and heavy with the weight of a cut of meat. He opened his mouth to inquire about the menu, but the woman shook her head sharply. “Don’t ask,” she advised, and he decided that for once, he wouldn’t pry. Instead of turning right back around as the room seemed to assume he would, Deacon faced the sofas that each bore a man, one relaxing into his latest hit of Jet, the other chewing agitatedly on the end of a long since burned-out cigarette.

“You’re up, metal man.” The smile was supposed to be reassuring, but he registered annoyance in Nick’s expression. He was pleased with that, too. Never could get rid of that rascally streak.

“What?”

Deacon offered one plate toward the detective at the end of an extended arm, giving it a tiny shake when this gesture didn’t seem to get the message across. “A growing girl’s gotta eat. You’re playing delivery boy.”

Nick stood, but nervousness had visibly taken hold of him. A metal hand rubbed at the back of his head with surplus anxiety-born energy, tipping his hat to a silly angle in the process. Deacon’s smile grew. God, did he know Nora. And Nick – well, if it had to be anybody, Nick wasn’t a bad choice. A good choice, even. Hancock had been right. Probably about more things than Deacon wanted to consider, but at least about his assessment on the pair. Nick was falling over himself already, like he’d done something wrong. Nora was safe, just like she had been in the field with him. And, Deacon knew all too well, Nick was considerably safer with Bullseye at his side. She’d grown into a deadly force not to be taken lightly. He couldn’t be more proud.

“Does she even want—”

“You got a wire twisted? Lady needs her dinner.” Hancock grinned horribly up at him from under the lessening fog of his high, and Nick shot a scowl in the ghoul’s direction that brought low, pleasantly rumbling laughter out of him.

“She doesn’t want to see Hancock?”

“I’ll see her,” John reassured almost lazily, shrugging his pinched shoulders. “She’ll be raw about it, don’t wanna give her too much too soon. We’ll work it out.”

Much as the man generally annoyed him, Nick had to appreciate this good nature. He had every right to be upset, to be raging, even – more of a right than Nick had, to be sure. But he was easy, calm. He didn’t give a damn. He understood. Nick wondered again if it was his synthetic nature that separated him from this full kind of comprehension. It had always been a barrier for him in some respect, and much as he liked to believe – much as she liked to encourage his belief – that she was the exception, he couldn’t douse the doubts.

She’d recoiled.

“Hey.” Deacon was suddenly close, and Nick realized he hadn’t exactly been occupying the here-and-now for the past minute or so. A plate was being shoved gently but firmly into his hands, and a man was grinning sympathetically up at him from behind his sunglasses. “Don’t think too hard about it, okay?” He had to reach up to pat Nick’s shoulder, making it a slightly awkward gesture. “Think with your heart, tin-man.”

“That make you the scarecrow?” It was an instinctive barb more than it was genuine, but it brought sporting laughter out of Deacon.

“That title probably goes to our illustrious mayor here. I like to think of myself as a – lyin’ kinda guy.” He seemed delighted by the groan this earned him, and Hancock piped up from the background, demanding to know what any of this meant.

“Story time!” Deacon declared, spinning away from Nick and plopping down onto the sofa next to the mayor. He tossed an arm around the ghoul after settling his own plate in his lap, and Nick did not miss the way John leaned into that gesture, nor did he miss the ever-so-slight pause this gave Deacon. He smirked. Maybe he’d share his suspicions with Nora.

His partner. They always traded notes, shared evidence and information.

Nick’s resolve renewed, and he made his plodding way up the steps. He muffled the laughter and aggravated sounds of confusion below by pulling the stairs up after him, and stood to glance around in the dim. Deacon had spent too long up here for it to be empty, and yet…

With the kind of note-accuracy available only to the self-tunable voice, he whistled a beckoning duo of notes. After nearly a minute, he heard a faint, sputtering response and couldn’t help his smile. She always was a horrible whistler.

He didn’t risk trying to carry the plate out through the hole that was far too much of a struggle for his stature, so Nick held it out instead, and waited until it was gingerly lifted from his hand. The warmth of her fingers brushed against half-numb metal, and he absorbed the distinct way she didn’t flinch like water to a sponge. It reignited him.

Carefully, he sat just to the side of the brick-framed window, remaining inside the tower and stretching his legs out in front of him from the creaky chair he’d dragged over to support him. Habitually, he fumbled in his pocket for the gifted pack of cigarettes. “How you holdin’ up, kid?”

He let the silence stretch out between them, but he couldn’t pretend it didn’t put him more on edge with each passing moment.

“I hurt Hancock.” Nora’s voice drifted through the half-bricked window, soft enough to break his heart. He felt himself suck in a needless breath. And what could he say to that? It was a cold, naked truth – a knife of a phrase.

“He’s all patched up,” was all Nick could come up with. The tense silence stretched out again.

“He taught me how to do it. How to use a knife like that.”

“I know.”

“And I used it against him.”

He stayed quiet. He lit his cigarette, took a drag to get it started, and then offered it at the window. Her hand reached out eventually, and he watched her fingers wrap around the filter, lingering against his own for just a fraction of a second longer than necessary. The smell of smoke blew in from the darkening evening, and he listened to her breathe for a little while.

“I’m all fucked up.” There was a watery laugh in her voice, and he turned his head with the instinctive urge to reach out to her, to at least look at her. But he kept the wall between them, let her stay just out of his sight.

“Out here?” Nick’s humor was dry in his tone, and his voice was tight. It was hard to placate with harder truths. “We all are.”

“Guess I lost that shiny new appeal.”

“How do you mean?”

“Remember that talk you gave me?” The nostalgia in her words was palpable and wistful. “After – after that group in hangman’s alley, when they tried to surrender?”

Nick frowned. He remembered vividly, though he tried not to. It was the first time he’d felt real fear for her – for the preservation of her. She had looked so cold behind that pistol. He knew she had a reason – a hell of a good one. He was standing over the bodies with her, he could see how young they were, how defenseless they had been. Ill-prepared and barely armed and trying to make their way to the great green jewel. But the boys on the other side of her gun were young, too. And their hands were in the air.

He knew she had her reasons. Good reasons. Knew much more poignantly when he’d first met Shaun, how alike in stature and form he’d been to one of the smaller, mangled bodies. He understood, now. But at the time, it had scared him. He was watching the Commonwealth sink its teeth into her, and he wanted to stop it – to save her.

She never really needed saving. Hell, she did the saving most of the time.

“You talked about seeing what the Commonwealth does to people. Told me you didn’t want it to get me, too.”

Had he always been so dense? Why did Nora seem to occupy his singular, permanent blind spot? Nick felt himself tense at the recollection of his own words. He’d been swallowing acid at the time, had been scolding himself for so boyishly hoping to preserve the last vestige of a world he didn’t even technically belong to. Now he was berating himself for being so damn selfish. Maybe it hadn’t been right, when she pulled that trigger. But it hadn’t been unforgiveable. It hadn’t been without cause.

“Took it to heart, from what I remember.” Nick said it bitterly, but at the time he had been overjoyed. He had lit up when he caught her looking at him before launching into a firefight, considering him and his influence before making a hard decision. It thrilled him. He had preserved her, he thought. He’d kept her whole, and he’d been able to do it with a gentle hand. And now it was coming back to bight him in his stupid ass.

“I tried.” He heard her blow out another cloud of smoke, ached to be this separated from her, stiffened against the wall that separated them. “It got me.”

“Nora…”

She laughed and choked and he knew she was crying. Again. Because of him. Synthetic down to his core. Couldn’t even muster enough humanity to be soft to the woman he –

Tin-man.

He swallowed. “You know what I remember?” She didn’t speak, but her silence had a draw to it, so he pressed on. “Must’ve been…maybe a week later?” Nick fished around in that packet again, retrieving another cigarette for himself, taking a moment to examine how bent it had become in either Hancock’s careless storage or his own nervous manhandling. “Back in the city. You’d been out of town a few days.”

“…with Deacon.” Recollection rang in Nora’s voice, and suddenly her air was hungry. So, obligingly, he fed her the rest.

“Probably your – third, maybe fourth op with the ‘Road. Didn’t like to see you gone for so long back then, but you’ve always been stubborn.” She scoffed, and he smiled. “You came waltzing into the office, pretty damn pleased with yourself.”

“It was a good op,” Nora related, a new, slight pleasantness in her voice. “Got a lot done.”

“So you said.”

“That’s what you remember?”

“Not exactly.” He took a long drag and blew it out in a thoughtful haze. “It was the first time I ever saw you in a dress.”

She laughed, and it hit him like a blessing. “That’s what you remember?” Nora repeated, and he drank in the renewed delight in her voice.

“It was a nice dress.”

Silence settled over them again, but in a way so sorely familiar to Nick, it was far more comfortable. Eventually, she stirred from her side of the wall, and he could make out the hissing sound of a stubbed-out cigarette.

“I wasn’t supposed to keep it, you know. The dress. It was a disguise, but…” She hummed thoughtfully. Careful as ever with her words. “I hadn’t had a dress since – before. I know Deac didn’t want me to, but I don’t think he had the heart to tell me so. So, I kept it. Only reason I was wearing it that day—”

“You didn’t know if there’d be a special occasion to pull it out again.”

“Well remembered, old man.”

“I don’t have to take that kinda lip from a frozen banana.”

“You cut me to the quick, Valentine.”

“Only if you ask nice.”

The new tension in their sudden quiet was not plagued by discomfort. There were small smiles, indulging in the shared secret of such frank talk between two people who had only ever used their words to dance around one another. And, in a way, it was still a dance. But they were closer together now, each pressed into the other and humming in one another’s ear.

After a while, he heard the gentle click of a plate settling onto the roof, heard her shift, thought for a moment she might be making her way back inside, but then she spoke, still on the wall’s far side. “Why do you remember that?”

“Fishing for compliments?” Nick tried lightly, but she’d never put up with his shit. Sometimes she was so shrewd about it – too shrewd. But he paid her back in kind. She’d said, once, it was the glue that made them good partners.

“Nick.”

“You looked…” He trailed off, grumbling, accidentally letting ash fall into his shirt collar and making a quiet fuss over clearing it out. But she waited, patient as she always was, and the silence pulled him in. “It was the dress you wore, that day on the beach.”

“It was a special occasion,” she recalled softly, and then: “So why don’t you remember the beach?” Too shrewd.

“You been taking lessons from Doc Amari?”

“Deacon thinks I probably should.”

The weight of that thought settled abruptly on his shoulders, and he grimaced. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t been harboring the very same sentiments, but it wasn’t – he hadn’t meant to bring it up now. If he was honest with himself – which tended to be the only case in which he was decidedly dishonest – he wasn’t sure he’d have the courage to bring it up at all. He knew Nora, held no misconceptions about her fragility or her strength. But she was hurting, and that was just as much a truth as her indomitable personality. He wasn’t equipped to help her, but somebody out there would be. Every kind of wound had a doctor.

“You think I should, too,” Nora translated his brief silence, and he cursed himself inwardly. “You’re both probably right. I just—”

“You don’t have to explain yourself to me.”

“I don’t have to do anything, Valentine.” He could hear the smile in her voice, but it still stung like the artful crack of a whip. “You ever take into account what I might want to do when you’re busy winding yourself up?”

“I’m automatic. No winding necessary.”

“Nick.”

He sighed. No bullshit, he’d heard her say to Deacon – not often, but enough. It was the same inflection she put into his name. No fancy two-stepping around the question. No cleverly bantering his way out. “I – what you want – doesn’t make sense to me.”

“Well that’s nothing new.”

“Now who’s cutting?”

“Oh, come on, detective. It’s the first lesson you ever taught me about cases. We always start at square one. We always start—”

“With nothing.” He couldn’t help but chuckle. It wasn’t his best line, but when she’d first started to dig into him about proper detective work, he’d felt on the spot – he could be a detective, sure. Damn good one, if he would ever be so bold. But how did you teach that?

“So what does the evidence tell you?”

“I know,” Nick almost groaned, rubbing his forehead in irritated helplessness. He wasn’t good at this – he’d never been good at intimacy. Keeping others at arm’s length was how he survived. She’d been the first real wrench in those works, and she was too stubborn to pry herself out. “I know what’s – what I’m being told.”

“Think it’s a lie?”

“I think it’s…ill-advised.”

“So then it’s the truth.”

“Not all truths are good.”

“Not all poets are fools.”

“What?”

She laughed warmly, and annoyed though he may have been, he felt the tightness in his chest begin to loosen. “Quoth the Poe.”

He vaguely registered this, and grumbled – why was she allowed to do a jig around a premise while he was forced to shoot straight? “You’ve been spending too much time with Deacon.”

“No argument here. But I mean it. It’s a logical fallacy.”

“Practical or classical?”

“I love it when you talk nerdy.”

Nick had a bark of a laugh when he was genuinely surprised – it was hard to catch him off guard with humor, and the too-loud crack of his unintentional laughter made her heart beat itself silly against her ribs. He so rarely laughed that way. Nora found herself pressing up against the brick, straining for every last drop of that sound. He cleared his throat, and she sighed just loud enough for him to hear.

“Classical,” she answered at last, running the knuckle of her index finger idly over the rough wall above her shoulder. “The undistributed middle. Non distributio medii.” She could hear the whirs of processors kicking into a more active state, and smiled while he combed his databanks for reference.

“The Purloined Letter.”

“Knew you’d have read it.”

“Bit on the ancient side.”

“You can’t resist a good detective story.”

“You got no proof, shamus.”

“That’s sort of what I mean,” she chuckled, and he caught the sight of her fingertips absently edging around the hole in the bricked window, peeking out just beside his head. “It’s a classic syllogistic problem. Dupin deduced that the priest was a fool because he was a poet, and all fools are poets.”

“But not all poets are fools,” he echoed, absently shaking another cigarette out of the packet. It had so often been this way for them – easy talking, easy laughing, easy company in the late nights at the office, exchanging evidence and information and quick-witted jibes over open case files and ashtrays. The familiarity of the sensation bloomed inside him like the first, shy embers of a rekindled fire.

“Not all truths are good,” Nora confirmed, tracing circles on the brick just next to his head with absent-minded fingers. “It’s the right conclusion to the wrong problem. The undistributed middle. Factual, maybe, but contextually irrelevant.”

“Not like you to break out your fancy education like this.”

“Only for you.”

He panged. He ached. She breathed like it was a labor to sit still. Nearly two years of cozy, frustrating, stimulating office-nights stretched between them and he couldn’t keep his head above water, couldn’t fight his way to the shore.

“So the truth is relevant,” Nick pressed on, “but its goodness isn’t.”

“Now you’re a regular Auguste.”

“Always thought of myself as more of a Marlowe man.”

She laughed again, weak but heartfelt. “Of course you are.”

“Nora—”

“Tell me about the dress, Nick. Tell me – anything. Tell me something true.”

He heaved another sigh, and filled a few minutes with yet more silence and smoke. At last, when he spoke, he felt his throat tighten around his voice, threatening to crack it under the nervous pressure. “I – don’t think I’ve ever really seen anything beautiful in the commonwealth, before. Seen lots of things – amazing, unbelievable, downright impossible, sure. Sometimes even good. But it was like – I’d been blind, I guess. Like I hadn’t seen you before. And I thought – how could I have missed something that beautiful?”

The lull that dragged itself out began to twist at his nerves, and eventually he prompted her with a gruff, “Too corny?”

“No.” Her voice was quiet, and that only tensed him further. He hated this, when he couldn’t get a read on her. It was what made her exciting, sure, but it was dangerous. Like standing too close to a land mine. You feel more alive than you ever have the second you hear those beeps. And if you’re not fast or clever, or if you’re just plain unlucky, it could be the last time you ever do feel alive.

“Tell me something good,” she continued at last, doing nothing for his worries.

“You’re my best friend.”

It came out before he could think better of it, and it was followed by a hoarse, self-deprecating laugh. He wasn’t ashamed of it – of her. It was the way it made him feel so distinctly like a schoolboy with an impossible crush. Could he even remember school? Childhood? And yet the sensation was so real and raw he could feel it prickling in his synthetic skin. She still wasn’t speaking, and he found that for once, he couldn’t stop.

“When you were gone, god –” Nick half-laughed again and rubbed exhaustedly at his forehead with the plate of his smoking hand, careful to hold the cigarette at the very end of two extended metallic fingers “—and then you were back and it was just – it was like seeing you that day, in that dress. Like everything went from black and white to color, and I was – I shouldn’t have, but I couldn’t believe it, I thought – I really thought…”

She gave him yet more silence, and what could he do? Time to see if he had that soul after all. “It was always the best, with you. Had other partners, damn fine detectives, but it was – smooth, with you. Ellie was pushing the idea to really put your name on the signs and I wanted…” He gestured helplessly with his good arm, a man hooked at the end of a long, long line. “It was – good. Better than – never had it so good. Part of why I never – why I didn’t – I just wanted to keep you.” There. He had aired it, the selfishness he cultivated for a handful of years. His voice was suddenly heavier than he could lift, and he felt himself sag against the wall at his back. “And I knew I couldn’t, so I just – pretended. And you were always there, every night, every time we had to drag ourselves across the ‘Wealth. Ready and willing, always game. Loved that about you.”

He paused. Bit his tongue. But back-pedaling wasn’t in the cards anymore. Nick had launched himself headfirst into this, and it was sink or swim.

“Love that about you. And then you were back and it was – you asked me to pretend and I – did. Too much, maybe. I wanted to be angry, I was mad as hell. But you were there and I had just – missed you so damn much…”

This time, he couldn’t really fill the silence she provided. “Say something, kid, I’m drowning here.”

He heard her stir, heard her let out a shaky breath. Then, so quietly it damn near tore him apart: “Are you still mad?” He could have laughed if it didn’t feel like he was breathing needles.

“No. I’m just sorry.”

“What? Why?”

Again, Nick gestured expansively toward the dim room in front of him. “Everything? For putting you in this situation.”

“Nick…”

“Done a lot to train myself out of high hopes. For me, anyway. Just – seeing you again. Threw me for a loop. Old dogs and all that.”

“You think – what – you forced me into—”

“No! No—I—god I hope not. I just – shouldn’t have. What you’ve been through—”

“Oh god, fuck off, Nick Valentine.”

His mouth dropped open, wordless. She’d never – well, not to him. He didn’t have long to wallow in stunned silence, though.

“You of all people – you don’t – think I can make my own decisions? I went to you first because – you weren’t supposed to – not like – yeah, I’ve been through hell. I’m all – fucked up because of it. I’ve been through hell before.”

“Not like—”

“Turn your worry mode off for a second and listen. I know what happened. Whatever you think you know – you weren’t there. Hell, Deacon wasn’t even really there. We were – they kept us in separate cells. Next to each other. But they made us – go through it alone. So I know. I just –” Nora laughed like a woman trying to keep from sobbing “—I just attacked my friend. One of the best men I know. He’s been nothing but good to me and I—” She choked back a strangled, horrible sound, and he didn’t realize his cigarette had been reduced to ash until the bud of its dying flame hit his leg and made the fabric there sizzle.

“I came to you first,” she repeated, voice barely above a whisper. “I thought – I thought for sure you’d be angry. I kind of wanted you to be. Because I wanted – I knew you’d treat me like a person. A whole person. I didn’t – I didn’t want to tell anyone. I didn’t want anyone treating me like – someone different. Like I wasn’t the same or – like I wasn’t ever going to get better.”

Nick wanted to tell her something comforting, wanted to pacify her, wanted to say things like it takes time and you’ll pull through. But the truth had his tongue before his heart did, and instead he said, “You won’t.”

“I – what?”

“It’s not…” He shifted uncomfortably, easing his way into entirely unfamiliar territory. “I don’t know exactly what happened to you. I can’t even imagine, and frankly, I don’t want to. But something like that doesn’t just – leave you. You don’t recover. You cope.” He heard her shift against the outer wall, but when she didn’t reply he simply continued. “Don’t get me wrong, I know it’s not – mine. Not really mine, but everything that happened to the old Nick – everything he tried to do to deal with it – it’s still up here.” He tapped his temple with an in-tact finger, forgetting for a moment that she couldn’t exactly see the gesture. “Not a whole lotta happy memories from that guy. Plenty of flashbacks, though.”

After a long while, he heard her sniff. “God. I’m just being shitty, aren’t I?”

“No more than the rest of us.”

“That sounds dangerously close to pity.”

“Sympathy, more like.”

Nora sighed, and he could practically hear her fold into herself. They sat like this for too long – night had well and truly fallen, leaving little light within the tower to see by. The city never slept, but its bustling had quieted considerably, and not much neon shone from this corner Goodneighbor. Eventually, Nick stood to make his way over to the unlit lantern. He’d barely taken a step before he heard her shift frantically from the other side of the wall.

“You leaving?”

“Hm?” He couldn’t help smile, despite the sudden panic in her voice. “Nah. Just gettin’ some light in here.”

“Oh.”

“Why?” Nick continued a little recklessly over the click of his lighter and brief hiss of the kerosene igniting in its glass case. “’Fraid you’ll miss me?”

“Don’t tease.” But her tone was lighter, easier – not as lively as he could remember it being, but a good sight better than just a few hours ago.

“Now where’s the fun in that?”

Nora settled somewhat at the sound of his chair creaking beneath his weight once again, letting out a little relieved sigh that sent some component spinning out of time with the rest of him. Being needed, that he was used to – he was a staple in Diamond City for a reason. But being wanted…that was still new, and incredibly novel.

“Don’t start something you can’t finish, Valentine.”

It was the strange, dark smile he could hear in her voice that caused him to shift in his seat, and he cleared his throat in some leftover human instinct. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Just what I said. Two can play at teasing.”

“Now that’s not – I didn’t –”

“You always step up to the plate with no intention to swing?”

“Now who’s teasing?”

“Mm.” He could hear her move subtly, thought he could make out the rustling of fabric, and then she spoke again, and he felt the bottom of his world crack beneath him. “Tell me about the dress.”

His tongue felt like a lead weight in his mouth. “What about it?”

“After that day in the office. Did you think about it?”

He tried not to hear the smoke in her voice, closed his eyes to the hook dangling at the end of her question, put so much effort into clearing his mind that he couldn’t respond.

“Did you think about me in it? Did you think about what was underneath?”

He could have choked. And god, she knew what she was doing – and he was helpless to it. Metal fingers curled under his chin to form a rest, and he dipped his head beneath the shadow of his hat’s brim despite the emptiness of the room around him. Nick could only listen to her talk – phrasing it all in the form of leading questions while she painted a far-too-clear picture for him. Hands sliding up her calves, thighs, pushing the fabric of her dress around her hips. Pulling the zipper down her spine with painful slowness. Sliding the sleeves down her shoulders, feeling her hands—

And then she made a sound, and his entire world fell away. He couldn’t just see her question-inflected fantasy now, he could vividly picture her – just as she was, clear as day, sliding her fingers under the hem of that shirt – his shirt. She talked, and all he could do was listen, fans kicking up into a furious whir every time her voice pitched, her breath caught, her sighs extended too long. It wasn’t until he startled himself with his own groan that he realized he’d been palming himself through his trousers.

“You’re killin’ me, here.”

The music of her laugh brought a mechanical shiver through the steel column of his spine, and then Nora was in the room, standing over him, knees grazing his and body forming a silhouette against the soft lantern light. His head cocked back to look up at her, and his hands moved to her hips with minds of their own. She immediately flinched and withdrew, and he was all emphatic apologies.

“We should stop,” Nick concluded, and she shook her head, gathering her breath.

“No – just…” With just a moment of hesitation, she gingerly wrapped her fingers around his wrists. When he put up no objection, she lifted his arms, gently pinned those wrists to the wall on either side of his head, and sank down over his lap. She hovered this way for a few minutes, watching him for reactions just as intently as he watched her for instruction. Then her lips were on his, and the action was full of hunger on both sides. Her hands found their way to the gaps in his neck, strangely emboldened, and when the warmth of one fingertip curled around a wire his entire body was afire, and he was gripping her thighs again.

She very nearly growled, and he lifted his hands like a man at the losing end of a gun as she pulled back. “Sorry,” he was almost babbling, “sorry, we can st—”

“Just –” Nora huffed, but remained where she was “—here.” She knotted her fingers under the loop of his tie and pulled it free, and even as she performed the action, understanding was dawning on him. If he had hair, it would have been on end. He found himself leaning forward before she even had to ask, and by the time he was resting his shoulders against the wall again his wrists were fastened together at the base of his back with that worn strip of fabric.

It was a funny thing, to be touched without the possibility of reciprocation. Not unpleasant, though perhaps a little frustrating. But he thought he understood, at least vaguely, and he was powerless but to provide. Her thumb had hooked into the corner of his mouth, pressed against his tongue and vibrated with the moan she coaxed from him. That wire in his neck was subjected to another tug and his body jerked up inadvertently, pressing his hips into hers with an unfamiliar kind of desperation.

She swallowed the noises he made, pinched and probed the exposed sections of his body, brought him repeatedly to some unseen edge only to leave him chasing her mouth with his own, flexing his shoulders up to reach her, nipping at the fingertips she teased around his lips. Her breathy laughter cut through him, the weight of her hips against his was searing with heat, he was practically whining by the time her hand slid down between their bodies and curled around him.

“What does it feel like?”

It was a simple enough question, innocent enough, but in her mouth and soft against his ear it was suddenly, thrillingly filthy. And then that finger of hers crooked around that wire again and he was subject to a spasm, mouth hanging open and electricity running frantic sparks across his mechanical mind.

“Shock baton.” Nick struggled to provide even that much, his twisting thoughts knocking against one another until he could rethink the sentiment enough to add, “In a good way.” And then it was her mouth at the opening his neck, her teeth on that plucked wire, and he could feel the heat of his own power shock her like a tongue on a battery. She groaned, wriggled, and he couldn’t keep still beneath her. There was some kind of intimacy in having her play a component in the completion of his circuit – something in feeling what powered him travel into her – his mind was a fog, his voice was a stilted staccato, and the soft heat of her body was burning through him.

It wasn’t that he was a total stranger to lust and desire. Even before he’d considered Nora in a more physical way, Nick had flashbacks of his namesake’s life. A lonely life it may have generally been, but it was not entirely absent of pleasure. But it was all secondhand, all half-remembered – it had never involved him, his synth body, his confused and half-broken self. On the occasional, uneventful night when he had decided to explore those memories, those human sensations, it had still been flesh and blood and Jenny. And it couldn’t possibly compare.

“Nick?”

His attention snapped back to the moment under the strain of so much sensory input, and he could taste that thumb in his mouth again, his lips closed around it like they were housing a prayer. Her other hand had withdrawn from his roughly opened trousers by a small margin, and he found his hips canting to follow it without direction. But the look on her face caused him to still, and she slipped that finger from between his lips to trace a soft arc over his chin.

“Mm?”

“It’s – always gonna be like this, probably.”

“Like…?” That was the thing with feedback loops. It became increasingly difficult to wrangle his processes into line.

“Weird,” she explained softly, straightening up a little. “And – not…easy.”

“So?”

“So you don’t have to stay.”

He might have laughed if it hadn’t taken all his processing power to align himself to the moment. Instinctively he moved to reach up, to wrap his arms around her, but was met with the immediate resistance of that tie around his wrists. Not that he couldn’t pretty easily break free, but that felt – inappropriate? Unnecessary? She had wanted assurance that he wouldn’t lay hands on her, and he was happy to give it to her. The restraint was just enough of a reminder to him to keep from giving into instinct, and he could appreciate its purpose. She knew the extent of his strength, too, and made it obvious by the little smile that curled onto her lips at the sight of his arms twitching unconsciously for a moment.

“You wanna untie me a sec, here?”

“Not really.” Her smile was growing, and he could only chuckle.

“Fair enough. But c’mere then.” Nick craned his neck up toward her, and she obediently leaned down so he might draw her into a brief, surprisingly chaste – given the moment – kiss. “You think I wouldn’t leave if I wanted?”

“I think you’re more interested in being nice than in self-preservation.”

“Hey, now. That’s doctoring the evidence.”

“How?” Nora chuckled a little helplessly, resting her forehead gingerly against his.

“How long have I followed you into danger and back out the other side?”

“That doesn’t disprove anything.”

“Point of order, your honor?”

She laughed in earnest, cupping her palms around his neck with a feather-light touch, curling her fingertips gently against the base of his skull. “You may proceed.”

“There might be a conflict of interest between the counselor and her case.”

“Is that so?”

“Ever heard of being too close to the source?”

“This from the P.I. who invests himself in every case he takes on?”

“I’m not the one litigating, here.”

“Consider yourself a character witness, then.”

“Might be a conflict of interest there, too.” He shifted a little beneath her, drawing her attention briefly to their position, and the activities that had brought them here, and she laughed again, pressing a gentle kiss against the corner of his mouth.

“Fair point. Off the record, then?”

“Off the record,” he echoed, catching her lips briefly again, “I like to think I’m not the type to walk out on someone.”

“It’s not walking out if I’m giving you permission.”

“Bull.”

“I don’t – want to trap you here, Nick.” Her tone had taken on a serious element, and he felt himself stretching up to press against her, to provide her the sentiment of pulling her to him without the use of his arms. “I know you. But you’ve already done right by me. You don’t have to stick around to try to pick up my pieces. They might not even all be there.”

It was his turn to laugh, a little weakly, but it brought a confused wrinkle to her brow. “Look who you’re talking to. Don’t exactly have all the pieces, myself.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“But it’s the truth.”

“Who was it that said ‘not all truths are good’?”

“Objection – hearsay.”

She chuckled again. “Sustained.”

“Listen. I’m not gonna pretend I know how this should work. There’s – a lot on the table, here. Not just from you. We’re not so different, really.” The absolute grin that suddenly took hold of her expression caused him to halt, raising surprised barely-there brows. “What?”

“It’s just – I think that’s the first time you’ve ever talked about yourself like a person.” Her fingers were curling fondly behind his ears, tracing the edge of the gap on one side, ghosting over the exposed hinge of his jaw in a way that caused the joint to twitch just slightly.

“Yeah, well,” Nick managed to gather his grousing tone, “what can I say? You’re a bad influence on me.”

“Not too late to kick the habit.” She smiled, and he leaned involuntarily to the warmth of her palm.

“You kidding? Can’t even stop smoking.”

“Mm. Always did like the look of a man with a cigarette.”

“No foolin’?”

Nora laughed again, nosing into his in-tact cheek, earning a happy little sigh of breath he didn’t need. “Never flirted with a man who wasn’t smoking. Might have been a bit of a problem when I was younger.”

“Lucky me, then.”

“You’re about to get lucky.” She smirked into the corner of his jaw, lifting his chin with the action in order to brush her teeth against the edge of a gap in his skin.

“Promises, promises.”

She planted a hand on the wall to the side of his head, covered his mouth with her own, inhaled the ashtray taste of his groans, rocked the back of his chair against the wall. She was not precisely gentle, but he muttered gentle things in her ear, brought her with him back to the edge and over, filled her with soft promises and the familiar, welcome sentiment: Safe, safe, safe.

They knew there would be prices to pay in the morning, knew that hard conversations and negotiations were coming. Knew that the next days would hold no reprieve for them, that the inside of the Memory Den would soon become a place of long labor. But for now, for tonight, he could whisper and she could rest, and when she fell asleep he could curl against her back, metal fingers gingerly tangled in hers, thrumming a steady beat of mechanical life against her spine. For now, for this moment, she could be safe.



He doesn’t dream. Just as much as this is fact, however, he knows this isn’t real – not really real. He knows because he has already lived and relived this moment a hundred times. He knows every detail. The tinny, dirty smell of the room, the gentle hum of the fluorescent lights, the silenced shot that puts down the man too busy taunting him to notice their visitors. And then that face, round and smudged with dirt and blood, peering in through that circular window; a woman on a mission and eager for her prize. She cracks the terminal at his instruction, and when she steps inside he prepares for the reaction – the brief disgust that runs through every human staring down a beaten up, chain-smoking synth for the first time. But it isn’t there, and that’s what shocks him more than anything else. More than her rescue in its entirety, more than Piper standing there at her side and grinning, more than Dogmeat prancing into the room to run a friendly circle around him and then nose into the palm of his good hand. More than anything – that look that isn’t disgust, isn’t fear or wariness. It’s something close to wonder.

“What are you?” She asks, voice a little thick with a history of maybe one too many cigarettes. But not afraid, not upset.

“A detective,” he says, because he can’t think of how else to respond. He doesn’t know what to do with the curiosity in her steely eyes, the fascination in her voice.

“You think you knew then, mac?” The voice is behind him, slick and oily, and Nick knows it’s the Stranger without having to turn around.

“Know what?” He can’t take his eyes off her. He couldn’t, in those first few minutes. All blue in that suit and fresh – fewer scars than he’s seen on almost anyone out in the Commonwealth. And smiling – smiling. Like he was something decent to look at.

“That your whole life was about to change?” The Stranger pauses, then adds in consideration, “Existence? Runtime? Whatever you got.”

“No,” Nick says automatically, because he doesn’t want this code-with-attitude to lay grubby hands on any more of his mind than he already has. Then, realizing the futility of this, he adds, “Maybe.”

It’s mostly true. He knows in the first five minutes that something singular and fantastical is occurring. Knows when she sweet talks her way around Skinny that she’s a force to be reckoned with. Knows, when he looks at her under the gray Commonwealth sky and the light beat of rain and she asks him again what he is, full of that same curiosity, that same piqued interest, that she’s trouble on legs. Knows, too, that despite his better judgment, he’s always liked trouble.

The Stranger is here with him, too, watching her climb out of the street entrance and draw up to her full height again. It isn’t much – she may be all legs but he’s still got almost a foot on her (which isn’t readily apparent most of the time; he’s mastered the art of hunching into a less assuming posture). The Stranger whistles, and Nick rolls his eyes. He would be lying if he said he didn’t notice that vault suit either – it left only details to the imagination – so he says nothing. He wonders if he noticed at the time – if he looked at her then the way he looks at her now, head-to-toe adoration and a helpless kind of hope. He can’t remember. Nora and her place in his world seems retroactive; all the lines of before are filled in with the colors of the now.

“There it is,” the Stranger says, and it shocks Nick out of his own reverie-within-a-reverie.

“What?”

“Right there. When you tell her you’re a synth.”

He looks. He doesn’t see it at first, the way you don’t see a Monet if you stand too close. But slowly, he realizes. That little lopsided smile of hers – the one that gives just the hint of teeth, too straight and white to be from this era. She doesn’t flinch or wrinkle her face in confusion. She doesn’t darken with that understanding he expects. She smiles, and he knows in an instant he’ll help her. Not the way he knows he’ll help most anyone who walks into his office. He knows she’s got someplace to take him, and he knows he’ll be along for the ride if she’ll have him.

“Yeah,” the Stranger nods. Nick doesn’t need to look to know he’s smiling that punch-me smile of his. “You knew.”

He doesn’t know if that’s true, and even if it is he doesn’t want to hash it out with this pillock. But he knows now.

She shifts against him and the vision is gone. The attic is here, dim and speckled with limited moonlight. A hand presses to his chest and she looks up at him with sleep-heavy eyes. He watches her watch him, vaguely smiling.

“You looked like you were sleeping,” she says.

“Yeah.”

“Do you dream?”

He has to think about it for a moment. “Sort of.”

She lets her cheek rest against the whir inside his chest again, and he is happy to lay here not-quite-sleeping next to her, one arm slung around her comfortably.

“Was it a good dream?” She asks, already drifting off again.

He smiles, traces a thumb gingerly over her shoulder. He says, “The best.”