Nick Valentine was not drunk. No one gets drunk at eleven in the morning. That’s not true, he had seen plenty of people drunk at eleven am, but they usually lived in the holding cell. He hadn’t been in there for any less than professional reason, so he couldn’t be drunk.
Nick reflected on this as he poured himself another bourbon. He didn’t bother to measure it. He only used the glass to remind himself he wasn’t drunk. If he was drunk, he would be drinking straight out of the bottle. That was last week, this week he was back to drinking from the glass.
A repeating sound came from outside his apartment. Nick yelled, spilling a large portion of his drink. Nick grasped the edge of his desk with one hand, clutching to his now half empty cup with the other, breathing hard as he calmed down. It was a knock, not a tommy gun. He wished he could feel better about the truth.
“Nicholas, are you there?” It was Jenny’s mother. Nick hadn’t seen her since the funeral. He had troubles leaving his apartment since the funeral.
“Mrs. Lands?” Nick called out through the door.
“It’s me Nicholas. I am worried about you. You promised to have dinner with the family last night. Are you alright?”
The family dinner! Nick promised Jenny’s parents that he would keep in contact with her family. They promised to love him like the son he almost became. He tried remembering what he was doing last night. Whiskey sounded right.
Nick put down his glass and stumbled over to his door to let Mrs. Lands into his apartment, but when he got there, the thought of opening the door was too much. Images of one of Winter’s goons holding Mrs. Lands at gunpoint flashed through his mind, and he was too afraid to look. He laid his forehead against the door instead.
“I’m fine, Mrs. Lands. Things have just been hard lately; ever since…. you know.”
“It’s not your fault, Nicholas,” she tried to console him.
“I wish I can believe you,” Nick could feel his eyes starting to sting again. They have been stinging a lot since Jenny died.
“You made her happy. I know if she knew this was going to happen, she would have chosen to stay with you anyway.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Lands.”
“I’m going to leave leftovers at the door. There should be enough for a few days. We’ll try again next week. Do you want Frank to come get you?”
“I should be okay.”
“Alright, if you change your mind, just give us a call. I just want what’s best for you right now, Nicholas.”
Nick could hear Mrs. Lands’ foot falls fade away from his apartment door. He waited until he could overcome the thought of a hitman standing outside the door before he opened it. He picked up the casserole dish and dessert before closing the door and locking it.
He put the food in his refrigerator before making his way back to his desk to grab a cigarette. Scattered across the surface was evidence he had collected against Eddie Winter. Papers and pictures mostly. The man had his finger in enough pies to throw him in the oven for life. That was until the BADTFL announced that he was off limits, and now Nick had to swallow the fact he would never see justice.
Nick took a cigarette out of the pack and placed it in his mouth. He lit the stick, drawing in the comforting nicotine as he looked down at the pile on his desk. Pictures of her were scattered among pictures of “him”. Nick downed the remains of his glass, trying to swallow his tears with his bourbon.
Nick flicked ash into an over full ashtray before he sat down at his desk, looking at the pictures of the person he loved the most and the person he hated the most. Maybe he could go private and get Winters that way. But there was no point in trying to arrest him without a warrant to make it stick. It would be even harder to get from the private sphere than if he stayed on the force. Nick found himself laying his head in his hand, trying to think. Trying not to cry.
There was another repeating rapping at his door. Nick raised his head from his desk. The light in his apartment seemed dimmer than it did a moment ago. Slightly redder.
“Valentine? Are you in there? It’s me, Officer Kelly.”
Kelly. Kelly was a good kid. A young officer who had a lot of potential and believed in the force enough to make any grizzled veteran believe in it as well. Captain Widmark knew what he was doing sending Kelly to talk to him.
“I’m here,” Nick called. His mouth felt dry. Nick checked his photos, praying he didn’t drool on any of her pictures. His cigarette was nothing more than the butt, sitting in a hole in his carpet.
“Captain Widmark sent me,” Kelly told him. “He asked me to deliver this holotape to you.”
“Just leave it at the door,” Nick called. Thank god the pictures were safe.
“For what it’s worth, I hope you come back soon,” Kelly admitted. “The force isn’t the same without you.”
“Thanks, kid,” Nick said.
Nick waited several minutes before opening his door again. He picked up the tape and brought it into his apartment. He quickly shut the door and locked it again. Somehow the room seemed even darker.
The words “We are done” was barely visible in the vanishing light. The detective placed the holotape in his player. He paced around his apartment while he sipped on his drink listening to the tape.
“Detective Valentine. Nick. Listen…I’m sorry,” Widmark’s voice started. “You’ve got every right to be upset, but you need to believe me when I tell you I had no idea.”
Nick stopped listening, he went to the kitchenette to warm up some food and get another bottle. This one was scotch. He wasn’t really paying attention to Widmark’s rambling until he heard Jenny’s name. He started paying attention again.
“Some new program they have to deal with trauma. Scanning brainwaves or some such. I’ll get you the info. You’re going. That’s an order.”
An order? Winters was walking free! He was untouchable. Jenny was dead, and instead of Winters having to face justice, Nick was finding he was going to be treated like some sort of screw ball. A bunch of eggheads were going to open him up and see what makes him tick, while Eddie Winter goes back to his life of crime.
“Fucking Hell!” Nick shouted as he punched a wall.
Nick saw a hand made out of metal pushed up against a wall. He somehow knew it was his hand and slowly pulled it away from the wall. He looked around and saw that his dark apartment was replaced by a diner with inconsistent lighting. There were skeletons scatters around the room, and a living woman whose hair was little more than stubble, standing near a booth. She looked like she was caught in a moment of indecision.
“Halcombe?” Nick addressed the woman.
“Are you back?” Marian asked. Her voice was slow, even for her. Nick patiently waited for her to finish her sentence.
“I think so. How long was I gone?” Nick asked.
“Just…a few hours,” Marian sat back in the booth. Her ubiquitous backpack was sitting on the floor next to her booth.
His internal clock told him she was lying, but he didn’t want to call her on it. Her movements were jerkier and heavier than usual. Nick wanted to ask if she was alright, but he knew she would blow him off. Instead he walked up to join her at the booth. He moved a skeleton out of his way so he could sit across from her. She was wiping down the parts to her rifle.
“I kept myself busy,” she told him as she handed her half of the case file to him. She didn’t even look at him.
Nick took the file, but instead of looking at its contents, he looked down at the guts of her assault rifle. They looked spotless, but Marian was still running a rag over each piece as if there was crude caked onto them.
“How did you get me here?” Nick asked, realizing they were in the Mean Pastries. It was a favorite place that Old Nick would go for a quick bite. He had found that it now made for a good spot to hide from trouble for a few hours. It lacked basic commodities to make it useful for more than a few hours.
“You were pretty…pliable,” Marian explained as she cleaned the chamber bolt. “For the most part, you went wherever I lead you.”
“For the most part?” Nick asked.
Marian didn’t answer, she started scraping with a bore brush at a spot Nick couldn’t see, but Marian treated like it was Lady Macbeth’s damned spot. Nick decided something happened that she didn’t want to talk about. He decided it would be best to change the subject.
“What were you going to do if something came in here?” he asked as he looked at the parts of the weapon Marian was obsessed with. A collection of parts would be useless in a fight.
“I took your…revolver,” she answered idly gesturing toward the wall before she used the firing pin to open the chamber bolt.
Nick looked over to the wall. He wondered if he was really all back yet. His own gun sat neatly along with his lighter and his tie. He would have noticed those things normally, but for some reason he didn’t see them until she pointed them out.
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“I took anything you could have hurt yourself with,” she continued to explain.
Nick collected his things, impressed by the amount of work Marian went through to help him. She could have stood by and watched him make a fool of himself for the whole world to see. Instead, she got him to a discrete location and took steps to keep him safe from himself.
“Thanks, Doll,” Nick said as he opened his revolver. It was missing three bullets, even the casings were gone. Did he forget to fill those chambers?
“I cleaned your…weapon for you,” Marian said.
Nick wanted the missing bullets to be explained away with that statement, but he couldn’t picture her stealing three bullets that didn’t fit her rifle. Nick could feel his fluid pump sink at the thought of where those bullets could have gone.
“Don’t you ever do…PMC...S?” she asked passing her fingertips across her forehead.
“Don’t I ever do what?”
“Weapons maintenance,” she explained, putting the chamber bolt back together. “Don’t you ever do it? I felt like I was doing an…archeological dig with the…strata of…carbon on that thing.”
“It’s not very popular around here,” Nick muttered as he holstered his gun.
“Why the fuck not?” Marian asked. “Weapon’s maintenance is...important. If you don’t do it, then the only asshole your gun will kill is you.”
Nick thought it sounded like she was quoting someone, but he wasn’t sure. He decided to let her slide on her accusation. She did save his reputation at the least.
He found himself chuckling. “I guess I haven’t thought about that before.”
Marian continued to clean her spotless gun in silence while Nick put his tie back on. His weapon wasn’t the only thing that he had been ignoring maintenance on.
“What all did I do?” Nick finally brought himself to asking. He had an idea. This sort of thing had happened before, back when he was still figuring out what being a synth meant, but he was hoping she would tell him what happened to his bullets. He was hoping she would say those bullets went into the air, not into her.
Marian looked up at him for the first time since they sat at the table. The bruise on her cheek was gone but there were now bruises under her eyes. They were deeper and darker than if she had waited two hours to sleep.
“It was weird,” she finally explained going back to her cleaning. “You would walk around and pick up things that weren’t there. You would talk to people that only you could see or hear. I had to stop you from trying to walk through the walls a few times. You also kept trying to eat things. Personally, I think even the things here that were once food are…inedible now. You let me take anything from you if you picked it up...luckily.”
That was probably why Marian was cleaning her gun instead of taking a much-needed nap while she waited for him to snap out of it. She probably knows a lot more about him than she did before. She probably would have known even more if she got more than a lot of one-sided conversations.
“What did I…witness?” She looked up finally addressing the ten-megaton elephant in the room.
Nick would rather have not responded. He would rather have just put that elephant back in its cage and pretended that the past few hours never happened. Marian deserved better than that. He didn’t know how much she deserved. He probably would never find out. What he knew was that she helped him possibly even taking three bullets in the process, and was asking for nothing more than an explanation in return.
“It’s a glitch,” Nick told her. “It happens if I don’t run diagnostics checks regularly.”
Marian seemed to have forgotten her gutted weapon as she listened intently to what he said. She seemed genuinely interested, and even mildly concerned. She looked like she was having trouble getting her sleep deprived brain to make sense of what he said. “How long has it been since the last time you did one?” She asked sounding as casually as he would sound if he was asking her when the last time she slept while staring at those tired blue eyes.
Nick hesitated for a moment. He had not thought about how long it had been until she had to put it into words. “About six months,” Nick admitted. As he started talking, he felt his gaze leaving her eyes and falling on his lighter. He picked it up and flicked it on, making sure it still worked.
“Why haven’t you been doing your damned…diagnostics checks?” Marian asked, her voice was taking on a hard edge.
Nick put his lighter back in his pocket, he couldn’t bring himself to making eye contact with her. “Every time I do a check like that, I lose memories. There’s this friend who I haven’t seen in a while, I’m afraid of forgetting him.” The excuse sounded about as strong as a wet paper bag when he said it out loud.
Marian’s face showed she felt the same. Nick didn’t know someone could be made more attractive as they got scarier before. “You fucking IDIOT!” She shouted at him.
“Hey now…” Nick was about to defend himself.
“NO!” Marian interrupted with finality, standing in the booth. Her left hand clutched the barrel of her assault rifle. Nick was relieved that it was broken down, or she may just shoot him. “We made a deal! We agreed…that we wouldn’t make each other’s jobs any harder than necessary. Then you go and refuse to take a nap because you’re afraid of loosing memories of some…absentee savior?”
Nick knew he lost the fight, but he did want to know how Marian knew who he was referencing. “I never said...”
“You didn’t have to!” Marian countered. “In case you haven’t figured it out yet, I’m not stupid. I listen to people, and I know everyone has stories of Nate, the Great…Vault Dweller. But I don’t know him. I never met him. And frankly, I don’t care about him. What I care about is that my job is to protect you, and having you like that makes my job much harder. What am I supposed to do if you…glitch like that in the middle of a…firefight? You already proved you won’t sit them out. And what am I supposed to tell Hancock if you hadn’t come out of the glitch? ‘He’s physically still alive, he just proposes to a...Jenny-Girl every three hours.’”
Nick was hit harder by the fact that Marian knew about Jenny than he should. He couldn’t answer her questions. He sat there dumbly, trying desperately for anything to say.
Marian sat back down. She started putting her cleaning supplies away. “Look, I’m useless for any kind of…fight right now. I’m not going to be able to search for a safe bed. I’m going to need to take a nap. If you want to head back to Goodneighbor by yourself…I get it. I’ll catch up when I can move again.”
Nick was still feeling bad for interfering with sleep Marian should have been getting in exchange for his equivalent. Her face was looking slacken. Lines that were normally unnoticeable were robust in her features as she was being overcome by her own needs.
“Go ahead and sleep,” Nick told her. “I’ll keep an eye out until you wake up.”
Marian didn’t bother thanking him, Nick didn’t feel like he deserved it at that moment. Instead she zipped up her backpack. Nick could hear several different zippers being manipulated while he sat back and pulled out a cigarette. He placed it in his mouth and lit it up with the lighter she removed earlier.
She sat up as he flipped open the file she gave him earlier.
“Do you…mind?” she asked.
“Come again?”
“Put that…damn thing…out!”
“Look, Doll, I’ve been through a lot recently. I’m sure you heard every memory I had to relive. I want this one comfort to help me think while I see what all you came up with while I was gone.”
Marian’s face turned dark with anger. She quickly put her weapon back together with practiced ease. Nick’s internal clock only counted forty-five seconds until she was standing over him with her weapon in her hands. Nick never believed she was really going to shoot him as much as he did at that moment.
“Fine then,” she said. “I’ll sleep…outside. Enjoy your ‘comfort’.”
She grabbed her backpack and walked out of the shop, leaving Nick by himself with a lit cigarette and a case file.
The synth looked down at his cigarette. Did he really need to smoke it right now? He knew she didn’t like smoking. Several of their mutual friends had told him that. He even used it to agitate her on purpose before. It didn’t matter how much he had just been through, she had to go through it with him, and she went through even more. Instead of acknowledging her vulnerable state from babysitting him and waiting up without knowing what to expect, he could only think of his own desires. She really did deserve better than that.
“Damn,” Nick cursed himself as he put the cigarette in question out on the table. He destroyed a perfectly good smoke in the process before he followed her out of the door as quickly as he could.
The stubborn detective found himself running through the outdoor dinning area and up the steps. He was soon standing in the open, staring at the green sky. He couldn’t let her sit helplessly in a radiation storm. But he couldn’t think of which direction she would have headed for a place to sleep.
“Marian!” Nick shouted to the sky, praying she was forgiving enough to respond.
A strike of green lightning flashed in Nick’s vision, irradiating the air. The sound of the thunder was followed by the crackling sound of a Geiger counter behind him. Nick looked back down and saw Marian sitting on the ground in the dining area looking up at him. Her rifle was laid across her lap, her backpack was sitting next to her.
Nick walked back down the stairs and approached her. Her head moved following him, but she had no expression. It felt almost as if she was the robot and he was the person. He sat on the ground near her, leaving the backpack between them.
He leaned back, letting his head rest against the wall. His hat moved up on his forehead, accommodating for the strange position. He took in a breath and let out a long sigh. Three more strikes of lighting sounded in this amount of time the crackling coming from her backpack followed each time.
“I’m sorry,” he brought himself to say. “I was being an idiot. You told me you didn’t like smoking. Everyone has told me you don’t like smoking. I can’t get over myself long enough to show you the same respect everyone else does when it comes to smoking. And I should.”
Another lightning strike, another crackle of the Geiger counter reminding Nick of his own guilt.
“It’s not just that I don’t like it,” Marian said, her voice sounded far away even though she was sitting right there. “I’m…allergic to it. The smoke causes me…to itch. That’s why I never sleep in a city, all the beds are normally so…saturated with smoke that I wouldn’t be able to sleep.”
Just when Nick thought he couldn’t feel like a bigger heel, Marian had to hit him with a harder truth. As he thought about it, the only building he ever saw her spend more than a few minutes in was the library and the Mean Pastries. Smoking in the library was too much of a fire hazard for anyone smart enough to visit a library to try. The Mean Pastries was abandoned to the point that if anyone did smoke in it, it was probably two-hundred years ago.
“I see,” was all Nick could say. There were too many thoughts going through his head for him to talk while still letting the subject be about Marian. He looked at the bird who had landed in front of them and was watching their drama. There was another strike. “Look, I know it’s your personal policy to not give me any ground when we fight, but can you please come inside where it’s safe? I promise not to smoke until this case is over.”
Marian pushed herself up from the ground. She grabbed the handle to her backpack and walked inside. It looked lighter; the seams didn’t strain anymore. Nick wondered if she used some of the resources her friends gave her. If so, how much? More importantly, how much did she use because of him shooting her?
Nick had to accept he would never know. Even if he asked her, he had a feeling she would never tell him. He looked up at the clearing sky and saw the sun was almost overhead, and slightly to the West. Where he would have expected it to be sixteen hours after he remembered walking out of Bunker Hill with her. Nick swallowed his guilt as he pushed himself up from the ground and followed her inside.
Marian worked her way back to the table and sat down where she was previously. Nick sat down at the open file and looked down at the sketches on all the tracing paper. He wondered if there were any blank pages left.
“Sorry I…wasted so much paper,” Marian said as she settled in.
Nick felt now was the time to teach her about being a detective. “Sweetheart, being a detective isn’t like how it’s portrayed in books. It’s not always one clue leads to another. In real life, you can’t have too much evidence, because you never know what is going to be that critical clue. Trust me, you did good. Now go to sleep.”
Marian laid her head down on her rifle like it was a pillow and was breathing softly within seconds. Nick couldn’t help but smile down at her. She looked conversely comfortable and uncomfortable sleeping with her rifle. He wondered how many times using that thing as a pillow had saved her life in the past. Another question she would probably never answer.
Nick looked down at the first sketch and placed it on the map she had in the file. It was a crude sketch. There was nothing artistic about it. There was barely anything mathematical about it. It was obvious she used a compass to draw the circles that all started at Goodneighbor.
Nick found another sheet that had dates on it. After admiring her use of cursive handwriting, he placed that sheet on top of the map and other sheet. Each date fit inside one of the circles. The list that Hancock gave her showed that the center of the circle and the dates correspond with the last settlement each caravan would have stopped at before heading to Goodneighbor.
There were more sheets many many more. Marian did need to do something to fill the time while listening to him take a trip down memory lane. Nick even found a sheet that matched the roads on the map and a sheet of note paper that seemed to suggest she was trying to find the most likely route each caravan took.
He smiled down at the sleeping woman again. She really did deserve better than him.