It was a rough, quiet walk back to Diamond City. Dogmeat took turns comforting Marian and Nick, but the other two didn’t say anything to each other. Marian led, looking out for danger with

her usual hyper awareness. Nick followed a few paces behind, afraid to say anything.

Nick Valentine was used to dealing with people who blamed him for not being able to save their loved ones. He even had a few accuse him of doing so on purpose. He often let Ellie deal with the grieving loved ones and made sure to turn the violent ones over to the city guards before Ellie got hurt.

Somehow, this accusation hurt more than any of the ones he could remember. He could tell just by looking at her that Lisi was dead before Marian got to his office. He was too intimately familiar with the decay rate of ghouls. He was praying to which ever god would listen to the prayers of a synth that it wasn’t Lisi’s body. That god may be the ficklest god in his pantheon.

He still wanted Marian to work with him. He liked the idea of seeing her every day. Knowing she was safe, hearing her voice speak his name, seeing her smile at him. It was like a dream, being able to have her near him long term. He still wanted that dream but asking her to pay her debt at that moment felt too crass.

He would walk her to her remaining friends to deliver the bad news. Then he would leave her comforting the other ghouls, while they comfort her in return like the family he saw them behave as months ago in Quincy. When she was ready, she would return to his office, and she would pay off her debt. Nick wondered if it was a good idea to pray to his cruel god to have her decide to remain his partner after her debt was finished. She obviously liked helping people, and she could do a lot of good in the Commonwealth. It was a beautiful dream that he was still clinging to like a foolish teenager.

They were outside of the Library when Nick decided he wanted to talk to Marian where she could have her privacy. “Hey, wait up, I want to have a word with you before we finish our walk,” he called to her.

Marian turned; her face was its former schooled neutrality. Nick felt a bolt of electricity going through his heart when he saw the old Marian had returned. He wished that he could give her the dress he was carrying and have the woman who twirled like a little kid smiling at him again instead of this woman who was looking for a way out of her pain. He wanted to hold her and have her grieve into his trench coat, not wonder if she was going to blame him for Lisi’s death and avenge her.

“I want to talk privately about our arrangement,” he told her.

She was silent for a few moments. He watched her eyes shift as if she was taking part in whole conversation between them, not two minutes of silence. “I figured it would happen this way,” she finally said. “I don’t know what else I can do to pay you back. Maybe if you need me to run people home so you can focus on the case.”

“What? No!” Nick said with too much vehemence. “Trust me, darling, I still want to work with you. I’m not sure if there’s anything I want more. But I understand you’re hurting. It’s never easy to lose a friend. If you want to take some time off, maybe stay with your friends for a week or two, I understand. There will still be plenty of cases for us when you get back,” he joked. He wanted to lighten the mood, but Marian’s eyes shifted downward.

She reached out and scratched Dogmeat’s ear. She was still looking at Dogmeat when she started talking again. “No,” she said. “I want to get this done. I want to pay off my debt.”

“You don’t have to do it right away,” Nick told her. “I know you’re good for it.”

She looked up at him, all the pain behind her eyes tore at his servos. “I am good for it,” she said. “But I’m tired. I want to go home.”

“Okay,” Nick said. “We can talk more tomorrow.”

“No, I want to go home,” she repeated. “I’m tired, and this place isn’t fun anymore. I just want to pay off my debt so I can leave.”

Nick’s heart dropped. Everyone had told him that The Capital Wasteland was suicide for her. That was Ellie’s big defense on why she was part of the conspiracy to keep Marian in The Commonwealth. The idea of Marian leaving and him never seeing her again scared him. Even if she left in a good mood, he would still lose her.

“I thought you still had other debts,” Nick argued.

“I have set up less appealing alternative to having them paid off,” she said. “I have to accept those alternatives. Yefim has been cooking the books to keep me in debt. I’ll never get out if I don’t use them.”

“He cares about you,” Nick said.

“He should save his concern for something that deserves to live,” she responded

Nick took a step forward. He was going to comfort her, but she stepped back, avoiding his embrace.

“No,” she said. “No more. If you do that. If you keep doing that. I’ll like it too much, and it may be too hard for me to go home.”

“Why do you have to think of that place as your home? Why can’t the Commonwealth be your home? You have people here who…who care about you. Who want to see you thrive. Just give them a chance.”

“I have stuff I have to do there. Stuff I have to make right. Maybe after my family is dead, I can move back to the New California Republic. Fix some stuff my family broke there. If nothing is clever enough to kill me by then.”

Nothing could be that clever. Nick wanted to believe she could outwit anything that wanted to kill her. She seemed to have been succeeding for ten years. She almost failed yesterday.

“Okay,” he said. “We can stay professional. It’s getting late, if you want to stay at my place tonight, you can.”

“I’ll be fine,” she said. Her voice sounded so empty. It was like she was saying words she was ordered to say, not something she truly believed.

Nick wanted to call her out on that. He wanted to insist that she should stay the night in his house. He wanted to wrap his arms around her and let her cry into his shoulder until she felt better. Instead, he impotently stood there, staring at her. Hoping that she really would be fine.

After several seconds of silence, she turned around and continued walking back to Diamond City. “I’ll keep an eye on her,” he promised Dogmeat as he patted the canine’s head.

Dogmeat whimpered slightly, leaning into Nick, before wandering off to help someone else in the Commonwealth.

The synth followed Marian back to Diamond City. She was quiet, and it seemed her friends should tell there was something wrong. Most guards, however, even her friends, didn’t seem to see anything other than Marian doing her job while walking Nick to Diamond City.

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The two of them entered. Nick wanted to think of her as another detective, but that seemed to be a fading dream. He stayed close to her as they walked through the streets, no one seemed to notice that she wasn’t waving “hello”. Nick wanted to dash around the city, shake people awake. Couldn’t they see that she was hurting? Why wasn’t anyone helping him wake her up?

“Nick! Marian!” a familiar voice shouted from Takahashi Noodles. Good old Ellie. She was always so happy to see Nick home. The secretary left her seat and her bowl of noodles to run up to them. “How did things go?” It was obvious that she wanted to say more, but Marian’s silence and facial expressions told her all she needed to know.

“We’ll talk later,” Nick said quietly, placing a hand on Ellie’s shoulder. “Go ahead and finish your meal, I’m going to need your help drawing up a contract.”

“There wasn’t enough left to return to,” Ellie excused quietly. “Marian, I found a book you might like.”

Marian looked at Ellie quietly. Woman looked like she was preparing for her own funeral. In a way, she was. “I would love to hear about it,” she responded. The words were Marian’s. Nick had heard her say phrases like that before, but it didn’t have her enthusiasm.

“That’s great!” Ellie said. “Maybe we can talk about it tomorrow?”

“I’d like that.”

This was wrong. Nick was supposed to be the robot, the AI, not Marian. But the words were being spoken with the predictability of a program. When someone says X, respond with Y. That wasn’t a way to live, that wasn’t a way to be a person. Then again, did Marian ever learn how to be a person, or did she fake it as well as he did without the peeling skin?

The three of them made their way to the office. Marian led the way through the narrow hall to the door, Nick following the women, wishing he could fix things. As Marian entered the office, Nick could tell something was not right. Ellie always locked the door; Marian shouldn’t have been able to open it.

“What are you doing here?” Ellie said. She didn’t sound scared. It sounded like she knew the intruder.

“What is this?” Piper’s voice came from the door. Nick rounded the door to see Piper holding something in her hand, a beaded chain dangling from it. “Do you want to leave a comment on why you’re carrying this around?”

“Give it back!” Marian shouted. She started to lunge, but Nick wrapped his arms around her and picked her up.

“Easy,” he breathed in her ear. Her emotions were already running high, Piper knew how to take advantage of that, but she didn’t know how to defuse it. He believed that Marian would take all of her emotions out on Piper. He didn’t know if she could kill her, but she wouldn’t have minded the results as long as someone was dead.

“This is going to be good stuff,” Piper teased. “I can see the headline now. ‘Beloved bodyguard secret informant’. All you have to do is give an explanation, I’m sure it’ll be a good one.”

Nick placed Marian down outside the door. “Walk it off,” he instructed. “Let me handle this, I’ll come by your apartment, but you can’t kill her. Not in city limits, not if you want to be able to keep helping people.”

Marian seemed to understand what he was getting at and ran off. He hated making her helpless but letting her kill Piper would have been bad for everyone involved. Though the idea was tempting at that moment.

Nick turned on Piper. She normally would have asked for a quote from him at that moment, but it was obvious that she could tell he was mad. Ellie had moved into a corner, a passive observer of the drama unfolding in the office.

“Get out,” he said in a low voice.

“Nick!” Piper started.

“There is no excuse for what you’ve done. You broke into my house, went through the possessions of my client, and then decided to antagonize her for what you found. I know you want to write about this, but if you do, you will destroy my business. Now, give me her property, and get out. You are not welcomed here anymore.”

“Nick, look at this,” Piper insisted as she gave him the holotag she had obviously pulled out of Marian’s backpack. “She’s obviously a member of the Brotherhood of Steel. Why else would she have holotags from them? I’m sure she is spying for them for something, and I’m going to find out what!”

The detective looked down at the single holotag and saw the name on it. He needed to get a checkup on his coolant soon, he was sure he was overheating. “Funny,” he said calmly. “She doesn’t look like a Peter Monroe to me.”

Piper’s mouth hung open for a moment. He saw her working it like her jaw was broken before she was able to talk again. “No! Those were supposed to be hers,” the reporter moved to Nick and looked down at his hand to see he was telling the truth. “She’s a member of the Brotherhood of Steel. I know it.”

“Then you need to get some better proof of it,” Nick told her. “But you won’t get it from this office, now get out before I carry you out myself.”

Piper was silent for perhaps the first time since he met her. She skirted around him before exiting through the front door. Nick shut the door behind her with a finality that felt good, but still made him nervous that he may have cracked the wood.

“I’m sorry, Nick,” Ellie started.

“Don’t be,” he told her. “You have to live your life. You couldn’t have known that Piper was going to do that.” He stuffed holotag into his pocket before placing the items on Ellies desk that didn’t belong to either himself or Ellie into Marian’s backpack. The multiple refreshing beverages would have been nice to have twenty-four hours ago. He slung the backpack onto his back. “Take the rest of the night off. That contract I told you about, don’t worry about it. But make sure all of our doors are locked. If I find Piper here when I come back, I am legally allowed to kill her.”

Nick walked out of the office, leaving Ellie alone. He could have kicked himself all the way down the street. How could he have let himself be taken in like he had? He may have played it cool for Piper, but she did have a point. Why would Marian have been carrying holotags?

Question after question circulated through his mind. He knew Marian Halcombe wasn’t her real name, but she never told him what it was. Why would she feel the need for an alias in a place where no one was supposed to know her? Why did she stay so standoffish even around people who seemed to like her? She was friendly to everyone, but never seemed to really be anyone’s ‘friend’. She never stayed in one place for more than a few days, where did she go when she moved? Where was she when she had disappeared?

He was a fool. He couldn’t feel too bad, he wasn’t the first detective to be led astray by a pair of blue eyes. Marian knew how to play him like a finely tuned instrument. But the small moments where her personality seemed to change were blaring to him. When she went from seductress to child the night before stood out to him. Was it that she was too disgusted at the idea of kissing him? Did she need to take more time mentally preparing?

Every stage in their relationship seemed to be instigated by him. Every touch, every kiss, every quiet moment they had together. She let him set the pace, let him slowly follow her to…to what? What kind of trap did she have planned for him?

He knocked at the door to the room near Diamond City. It opened to show a tired looking Marian. How long did it take her to perfect that look?

“I dismissed Piper,” Nick said as he forced his way into the room.

Marian, or whatever her name was, backed away, giving him space.

Nick pulled the backpack off his back and let it plop on the floor behind the couch. “I believe I have all of your stuff.”

“The blue book is it there?” she asked with too much insistency. What would the book be for Nick wondered?

“I think I saw something like that on my desk,” Nick told her, “I didn’t pay attention.”

Marian rushed past him, to tear into the backpack. He didn’t have time for this. He pulled out the holotag and held it out to her. “Do you want to explain this?”

The bodyguard looked up at him and had the decency to stand up from there. “Nick, I’m not sure…”

“Just tell me what the hell they are!” He shouted.

Marian barely even flinched before looking down at her backpack again. What could be so important about that damn book? Nick regretted not going through her stuff himself, but he felt she deserved some remaining parts of her dignity. A sentiment that was fleeting by the second.

“There are only two reasons that I can think of that someone would get that emotional about a set of holotags. One is if they killed the owner, the other one is much much worse for us.”

“I’m sorry,” Marian whispered.

“Did you love him?” Nick asked.

Marian’s eyes closed like a child trying not to cry. His sympathy was worn out. He had no time for someone who was associated with the Brotherhood of Steel. He once told Nate that no one had more reason to hate the Brotherhood than he did. At that moment, he felt that hatred.

Nick tossed the tag onto the couch. “I don’t care about our debt. I don’t want you darkening my doorstep ever again.”

He turned around and walked out of the makeshift room. He quietly closed the door behind him but didn’t care enough at that moment to look at her. He couldn’t believe how stupid he had been.