What was the most brutal/cruelest thing Valentine has ever done?
I’ve had this ask sitting around for a little while, mostly because I was stumped by it. Cruelty is just...so antithetical to Nick’s personality that I can’t come up with a circumstance that would qualify.
And I think that’s what makes his behavior during Winter’s End so startling. The thing about Nick is that he’s capable of ruthlessly pursuing someone across not just miles or years, but lifetimes, yet his moral character is so strict that we never get to see the extent of how scary he could be if he had fewer principles. He’d do Wonder Woman proud, because 99.5% of the time, he lives based on the philosophy that you shouldn’t kill if you can wound, wound if you can subdue, subdue if you can pacify, or raise your hand at all until you’ve first extended it.
But then he tells you about the tapes. Once you’ve agreed to help, he brings it up again so frequently that it can actually be bothersome. And when you finally hand him the last one he immediately breaks into a run (well, a jog - come on, he’s old) across town, pries a 240+ year old man out of a nuclear bunker that sat uncracked for centuries, and foregoes his customary, efficient pistol for a shotgun - a change you’d only really make if you wanted to splatter someone’s organs against the facing wall. Nick doesn’t do bloody kills - if he has to do it, it’s fast and merciful, except for this one case.
And sure, Eddie Winter was a scumbag - no one is shedding tears over him, but jackass did have a little bit of a point, calling Nick out for making this blatant exception to his otherwise bulletproof code over a crime that took place centuries ago and affected people he never knew. I don’t particularly feel that Nick was wrong for killing Winter - he deserved it, but in my opinion being stuck in that one room for two hundred years was better than any jail sentence he could have received, and it might have been just as well to leave him there in a hell of his own making.
But Nick didn’t consider that. He wanted blood. He wanted a target for all of his pent up rage and resentment over both his past and his state of being, and he made one for himself early on by projecting those feelings onto a man that he objectively had little reason to care about. So he blows the bastard away, thinking this is going to be the great catharsis he’s been anticipating over the course of the long hunt, and then...nothing. He’s still wound up and tense and distressed, except now he’s hollowed out too, and what rings in that empty space is the realization of how pointless what he just did was. When it’s done he can finally get a clear-headed look at his own motives, and he has to step out, try to regain some perspective, remind himself that this whole caper started with justice, not vengeance.
I think killing Winter was the moment that finally startled Nick out of dwelling on the past, and turned him toward both the future and his own personhood, but it wouldn’t have been able to do that if the brutality of the thing hadn’t been so completely out of character for him. So, hope I managed to make a boring answer interesting.
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