One, two, three, four.
Nick Valentine paced his prison, counting each footstep. The number wasn’t always the same. Sometimes he took smaller steps than other times. Sometimes he checked to see how big he could make his steps. Sometimes, he just sat down next to his companion who probably died two hundred years ago and wonder if that man was as bored as he was.
This wasn’t the first time Nick Valentine was captured. It was a hazard of his job. One that happened more often than he would ever willingly admit to. Normally the person who captured him knew who he was and what he was. In this case, the people who captured him thought he was just another synth. They would have killed him without a thought if it weren’t for MacCready putting his own life on the line to let them know how financially valuable he was to them.
At that moment, Nick wondered if this group of slavers had found someone to buy MacCready yet. Did they have a market yet, or were they still setting up with kidnappings? Nick could have kicked himself at his own foolishness. Of course, they would have stealth boys. He knew they did, but he didn’t think to watch for them. Now he was waiting to find out how much he could be sold for to his enemies. One thing about being a detective was that he wasn’t short on those.
The synth sat down next to the skeleton in his prison. He sometimes wondered if this man died in the initial explosion, or if he was locked in this same area and died of starvation. Neither sounded liked a good death to Nick.
Perhaps the worst part of this prison wasn’t just the loneliness, no one bothered to open the prison up, but the fact that his internal chronometer was working just fine. He couldn’t sit back and let time flow, but he had to be acutely aware of every second that passed. It had been ten days. The time was 1:06 pm.
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He heard voices occasionally, but nothing loud enough for him to figure out what they were saying. Nothing loud enough for him to even figure out if they were male, female or ghoul. He wasn’t even sure if they were real voices, or if his head was making up stuff.
Nick found himself reaching for a pocket that no longer existed in a trench coat that was cut away from him. The slavers could have at least left him with his cigarettes to kill time with.; instead of cutting away his clothes and leaving him as naked as when he left the assembly line. He thought about how long he’d had those clothes and wondered what it would take to replace them.
Sounds came from outside. Were those sounds of gunfire and explosions he was hearing? The noises were indistinct, like they could have been coming from anywhere around him, and all around him. There was what sounded like an explosion. Then, nothing. The sounds were dead within two minutes.
“Must be glitching,” Nick muttered to himself. “Been cooped up in here for so long, I don’t know what I’m really hearing.”
He thought about doing a diagnostics check. He had been doing them regularly. He spent the entire third day doing nothing but a very deep diagnostics check. He had been religiously doing one every night from Midnight to 6:00 am. He could hear Marian getting on his case, making sure he didn’t glitch on her again. He wondered if he could do diagnostics checks until the only thing he knew was Old Nick’s memories, and this room. He didn’t want to test it. The thought of how lost and confused the person he would become would be made him shudder.
He decided to sit down next to his companion. Maybe he should name him. He wasn’t that bored yet. Instead, he wondered who would buy him, and what kind of tortures they would do to him once he was sold.