Robert Joseph MacCready was sitting in the Third Rail VIP room. He was finishing off a beer while trying not to fall asleep from boredom. He missed the days when Nate would show up at any time and insist the two of them shoot things together. Now, the gun for hire was jobless and back to waiting for someone who needed a gun to hire. A need which had dropped off since Nate decided that an army of generation 1 and generation 2 synths could keep the Commonwealth safe. The idea that he wasn’t needed any more was a bitter pill to swallow. Maybe he should just go back to being a farmer in the Capital Wasteland, he did miss Duncan.

MacCready got up from the couch and went from the VIP room to the main part of the bar. He could use another drink. His last job was over a month ago. He had finished a run helping Mayor Hancock secure an underground tunnel from a house in the city to a warehouse just outside it. The tunnel that Nate famously helped make, leading to his unbreakable friendship with the mayor of Goodneighbor. Hancock originally planned to collapse it and destroy the path, until someone responsible for finding the safest place to collapse the tunnel pointed out there was no safe place to collapse the tunnel. MacCready didn’t care to find out what Hancock did after that, he just took his money and has watched it disappear while waiting for the next job to come along.

Magnolia was singing “Baby It’s Just You”. He secretly enjoyed Magnolia’s singing. He often found excuses to listen to her live performances in the Third Rail, but he didn’t want to admit he was interested in any music but rock and roll. He did still have a reputation to protect.

As soon as he reached the bar, he was greeted by his favorite booze dispensing Mr. Handy.

“Back again, MacCready? What will you put on your tab this time?” Whitechapel Charlie asked briskly in his cockney accent.

“Hey, hey, Charlie! It’s cool, I’ll pay you as soon as I have the caps to pay you, just give me a beer.” MacCready responded.

“You’ll pay when you have caps to pay for a beer? What about your past tab? You still haven’t paid for that,” Whitechapel Charlie responded.

MacCready tried not to groan. He knew his tab was coming due, he was hoping to put that off until he got another job. That was the problem with The Commonwealth becoming a safer place, it meant less work for people who made money from shooting bullets. Peace was great for people who didn’t have jobs that required fighting. It caused people like him to beg and starve.

“Please, Chuck,” MacCready begged. “Just one more, for old time’s sake?”

“For old time’s sake, for old time’s sake. And what am I supposed to tell Mayor Hancock when he does the fucking books and finds that I advanced ya more than I’m worth ‘for old time’s sake’?”

MacCready was unable to answer the question. Hancock was one of the few people in The Commonwealth who believe that everyone deserves the same rights as humans. He even goes as far as being willing give a Mr. Handy like Charlie freedoms that many thought was impossible. But that wouldn’t stop him from firing the bartender if Charlie was advancing more than could be paid.

“It’s ok, Chuck,” a deeper, third voice chimed in from behind him. “Put it on my tab.”

“Right, Mr. Valentine,” Charlie answered and handed MacCready a beer. “Just keep him out of trouble.” Charlie hovered away muttering to himself, “Old times sake is nothing more than a bottle.”

MacCready turned around to his old friend, genuinely glad to see him, and for more reasons than a free beer. “Hey, Nick! Thanks for the drink!”

“Consider it payment for you time,” Nick responded curtly before directing the young man to a nearby table. “This won’t take long, and I doubt anyone will bother listening in as long as we don’t talk to loud.”

Of course, this wasn’t a social call. Nick couldn’t stand most other robots and Charlie was high on that list. MacCready wasn’t sure if he’d ever seen the famous synth detective talk to Charlie without it becoming a fight. And he was sure he’d heard Valentine claim in the most interesting ways that he wouldn’t spend a single cap in that bar. If Nick was going back on his word and giving Charlie caps, then MacCready knew it was important.

MacCready sat down at the table between the stairs and the bar with his back facing the VIP lounge, Nick walked around the table and sat with his back to the stairs. They were lucky, the table was usually occupied. The detective pulled out a cigarette before offering one to MacCready. The younger man gladly accepted the offer.

“So, Nick,” MacCready started the conversation off while Nick lit his own cigarette, “what brings you to Good Neighbor?”

“I need your help with a case,” Nick explained lighting MacCready’s cigarette. “It’s a pretty common story, kid runs away to join a group of raiders. Instead of accepting the kid as one of them, they tie him up and send the parents a ransom note. Now the parents want me to find their little angel and bring him back home. And I’m not eager for an experience like what happened when I tried the same thing with Darla a year ago. If I never get locked in a vault again, it’ll be too soon.”

As Nick talked people were moving around the bar. Some were entering, some were leaving, and many were going to talk to Whitechapel Charlie to get another drink. He was right, no one seemed to bother listening in. Then again, their friendship wasn’t a secret in town, and the gangs in Goodneighbor were still regrouping after losing Skinny Malone and Sinjin. Goodneighbor was safer from gangs and mob lords than Diamond City. That is until Marowski or an upstart mob lord figures out how to take advantage of the safety everyone was feeling.

There was one figure who entered and walked from the stairs to the bar. MacCready didn’t pay much attention at first, they were just another drifter wanting food or drink before they find a place to sleep in the attic of the Old State House. But he could have sworn they looked directly at his face as they walked by even if he only noticed from the corner of his eye. He turned his head to see the person’s back to him, talking to Charlie. Something about that backpack, he knew that backpack. Nothing the person was doing was unusual, but that backpack was bringing back a memory that made the expected behavior suspicious.

“MacCready! Pay attention!” Nick raised his voice enough to call back MacCready’s attention, but not for the whole room.

MacCready forced his attention from the backpack and back to the detective.

“Sorry, Nick,” he apologized. “So, you want me to help you get this kid back?

“Sorry for yelling at you, I know I’ve been talking about this person like he’s a kid, but he’s a grown adult, just young and dumb. This guy wouldn’t have this problem if he would just take two seconds to think. And he probably wouldn’t have problems thinking if his parents hadn’t bailed him out of every scrap he ever got into.” The detective took a drag from his cigarette before talking about more than his feelings, “I need you to help me take out the raiders who are holding this kid hostage. I doubt diplomacy will work, and I know this group, they are likely going to kill…”

Nick broke off as someone came near the table and a beer bottle was quietly placed in front of MacCready. As MacCready turned his attention to the bottle, he saw a hand inches in front of his face, flicking the brim of his hat from the bottom. He reached up to stop it from flying off, only to have the still moving figure grab it from behind him. In a few seconds his hat was stolen.

He jumped up from his seat, knocking his chair to the floor. He threw his cigarette in the ashtray on the table, he didn’t want that to get in the way if there was going to be a fight. As he turned to the person walking towards the stairs, he saw that they were now putting his hat on their shaved head. He ran after the thief ready for a fight. “Hey, man, you have a problem?” He demanded. He grabbed the offender by the boney shoulder and pulled them back forcing them to turn around.

He saw what looked at first to be a skull with eyes grinning at him. The person he was staring at looked like they hadn’t eaten or slept in weeks, like she hadn’t slept in weeks. The black circles around her eyes were dark enough to pass for bruises, making her look more like a skeleton, but the fact she had lips and a nose made it easy to tell she wasn’t a ghoul. He knew this skeleton, from his past. Someone who he thought was dead. Someone who he never expected to see in the Commonwealth.

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“It’s you!” MacCready cried as he hugged his lost friend. She returned the hug with a laugh and let him rock her left and right. It felt disturbingly like hugging a skeleton. But it was so good to hear his friend laugh again.

“It’s good to see you again, RJ,” she told him as she patted his back signaling the hug was finished. That name, she always called him that because she told him siblings don’t refer to each other by last name and Robert Joseph was too much of a mouthful.

MacCready broke from the hug, and she placed his hat back on his head. “Please, sit down!” He grabbed a stray chair from the corner and moved the chair across from himself, next to Nick to help his friend sit down. Something about her presence always made him want to be a little more proper than usual.

“My gratitude,” she responded as she sat in the chair letting him push it in.

That was it. The fact there was always that past confusion about how people outside of her childhood behaved with too many Victorian novels for guides that was now a set part of her personality. No matter how rough other people got, or how rough she got, she still would have that formal air about her. They could be covered in mud and stuff that used to be inside super mutants, and that was when she was the most formal to the people around her. More formal, and big words that almost no one else understood.

“When did you get here? Why are you here? What is going on?” MacCready talked fast as he tried to get all his questions out as quickly as possible as if that would make the answers come out faster. He fixed his chair and sat down before putting out his cigarette for her.

She looked at him with the loving big sister look she use to give him that always made him feel like she saw a growing puppy when she looked at him rather than the former mayor he was. He didn’t see when she took the beer she had placed in front of him before, but she was sipping on it now.

“I’m assuming you want to know when I have arrived to the … Commonwealth?” She asked, she said the last word as if she wasn’t sure where she was yet.

“Yeah,” MacCready confirmed.

“I got here late yesterday.”

“What brings you here now?” Nick asked.

She looked directly at MacCready while pointing at Nick with a hand she kept close to her body. MacCready knew this was one of the lessons she was always trying to teach him, but he wasn’t quite sure what lesson it was this time.

Finally, she walked him through this lesson. “RJ,” she said slowly and deliberately. “You’re supposed to introduce me to your friend.”

“Oh, right. This is a friend of mine, Nick Valentine. Nick, this is my sister…”

“Marian,” she interrupted, “Marian Holcombe.”

That wasn’t the name MacCready remembered, but he learned to trust her, especially when she played her games. She extended a hand to shake with Nick’s. MacCready saw her eyes dart from Nick’s face, to the metal skeleton that was his right hand, and back to his face. MacCready remembered how she took everything in, sometimes she even saw things no one else noticed. That skill saved them from more than one ambush.

“I didn’t know you had a sister,” Nick said. “Aren’t you a little old to have been in a settlement of children with him?”

Marian sat looking at Nick for a second, almost as if she was waiting for him to say something else. MacCready saw her eyes narrow at Nick. “Are you calling me old?” she finally asked.

“No, I’m saying that your age doesn’t fit into MacCready’s story as I know it. I want to know how he can be from a child settlement and have a sister with such an obvious age gap.”

Marian got a look on her face. One that MacCready saw sometimes, normally when she got that look, he got the willies. She was ready for a verbal fight, she rarely had them, but when she did, she normally won.

“We do have an age gap, Philo Gubb,” she started.

“Nick Valentine,” Nick corrected.

“I’ll let you know when I care. However, I adopted him as my little brother after we both became adults. I believe family means more than genealogy, and when I met RJ he needed a family. I was willing to fill that need, despite my age. Does that answer satisfy you, Soft-boiled?”

“That reminds me,” MacCready said, standing from his chair. “I owe you food, don’t I?”

“I don’t see how having a big sister obligates you to feed her,” Nick said.

“And I don’t see how it’s any of your business rather my little brother would like to buy me a meal or not,” she responded.

MacCready quickly moved away from the table to get some food from Charlie. He forgot that a blanket payment she demanded from anyone who’s life she saved was a meal every time the saved person saw her. He probably had saved her enough to keep that book balanced, but she looked so hungry.

“What is going on over there?” Whitechapel Charlie asked.

“My sister is in town. I’ll take a squirrel on a stick,” MacCready answered.

“Your sister, eh?” the Mr. Handy asked with suspicion in his voice. One of his eyes moved forward and the aperture narrowed as if he was examining her. “She doesn’t seem to be getting along with Valentine, over there.”

“What? No, they are getting along great.”

Whitechapel Charlie handed MacCready a squirrel on a stick before accepting his money. “Just make sure to have them out of my bar before they start shooting, is all I’m saying. I’ll put this on Valentine’s tab.” With that the bartender went back to cleaning glasses and ignoring anyone who didn’t want to participate in business.

MacCready returned to the table where his two friends were talking. Nick seemed to have finished his cigarette and hadn’t started a new one yet. Marian had placed her beer bottle a few extra inches away from her, a habit MacCready knew she had to remind herself that the bottle was empty. They seemed to still be in conversation when he got back.

“What I’m saying, Sweetheart, is that I want to make sure MacCready is running with the right crowd and not with people who will have him get himself in trouble.”

“That may be the first statement you’ve said that I agree with, Mr. Valentine. Though, I am remised to observe that it would seem as if RJ’s choice in friends has declined in quality since the last time I’ve seen him. However, I am forced to treat him as an adult and let him make his own decisions. Even if I believe they are to his detriment.”

“What does that mean?” MacCready asked as he gave Marian her food.

“Which part?” she asked.

“Detriment.”

She was silent for a moment as she took the time to put the definition into words while he sat back down in his seat. “It means that it’s to your disadvantage, but to the extreme.”

MacCready tried to make sure he would remember it, Marian got annoyed if she explained the same thing multiple times.

“So, how did you two become friends?” Nick asked before MacCready could say anything.

Marian was busy eating the food he handed her, so MacCready decided to answer. “She pushed me off a building.”

“Pushed you off a…building?” Valentine asked slowly.

“I crawled down and dragged your sorry ass to a clinic, don’t make it sound like I’m a complete monster,” Marian said.

“My leg was broken in two places.”

“I said complete monster, I’m still a monster, just not a complete one.”

The two siblings smiled at each other, enjoying the fight that was so old they were just going through the motions speaking the same lines they knew so well. Neither of them were angry about it anymore. He was never mad at her for it, it was never her fault.

“How is your leg?” she asked a little more seriously. It wasn’t her fault, but she still blamed herself. “Can’t be too bad if you walked here from the Capital Wasteland.”

“I don’t even feel the breaks anymore. I think you got me to that clinic fast enough that it’s almost as if my leg never broke.”

“I really am glad about that, truly. I better go find a safe place for the night.” She said as she pulled out her chair and stood up. “I hope to see you around, RJ.”

“I’m normally here or in the VIP room over there. If you come by later, I’ll help you get set up.”

“Much appreciated,” she responded as she grabbed her assault rifle and started walking out. “Take care of yourself, Soft-boiled. And don’t let my brother get hurt or I may have to shoot you.”

She quietly walked out of bar; there was a little sway showing she was slightly drunk. MacCready wondered if she had eaten anything that day before he gave her that squirrel on a stick. Her backpack looked thinner than he remembered ever seeing it. Did she spend the little money she had for food to buy a beer so she could play that prank on him?

He remembered how they could enter any settlement in the Capital Wasteland and there was someone who felt that they owed her enough to give her and her friend a free meal. She always told him there was more power in helping other people than helping yourself. She used to lecture him that if you make yourself helpful, people will naturally want to help you in return. He suddenly felt what she meant with those words, he wanted to return all the help she gave him over the years. He wanted to keep their books balanced.

“You should hire her, too,” MacCready told Nick. “She’s not as good of a shot as me, but she can sneak better than anyone I know. Can I have another cigarette?”

“I’m sure she can,” Nick replied dryly. “Why did you put out that last one?”

“She doesn’t like smoking,” MacCready answered. Nick handed him another cigarette before lighting it up for him. MacCready then swirled Marian’s beer bottle to see if it was really empty before checking to see if there was any left in his own bottle.

“I don’t think we need her help with this job,” Nick said. “I’ll pay you your usual for the job.”

“Two hundred fifty caps?” MacCready asked.

“Half now, half when the job is done.” He said as he handed over the promised caps.

“Hey, Nick, you know I’m good for it!”

“I do, but that doesn’t mean I want to give you an excuse to get drunk tonight and hung over while we do the job tomorrow. We’ll leave first thing in the morning. I figured I can go in shooting while you snipe them off. We want to confuse them enough they don’t just kill the hostage while we fight to save him.”

“Works for me,” MacCready agreed. “And if you change your mind, I’m sure Marian will be happy to help.”

“I won’t,” Nick said as he got up and left the bar.

MacCready finished his cigarette before getting another beer and returning to the VIP lounge. He knew how Marian survived between jobs. She would probably stay in the area killing anything dangerous to travelers and using what she scavenged to survive from one day to the next. The area around Good Neighbor was probably going to be the safest it’s been since Nate was active. More so since she was going to focus on the area she was in until she got a job. He always thought it hurt her business, but she never seemed to care about business, or caps, or anything else he did.

She liked helping people, just like Nick. She liked reading books and solving puzzles. The more he thought about it, the more she was like Nick. Those two will get along great while she’s in the Commonwealth. MacCready just knew it.