#fsoleweek

“Time for another round of ‘Are Nick’s sealants still working?’” Nick quips sardonically as he and his latest client wade through knee-deep water in the Mass Pike Tunnel West.

“Sorry,” the Survivor of Vault 111 calls back, “I shoulda realized it’d collect water down here.”

Nick suppresses a sigh. His client was constantly apologizing to him for not foreseeing and preparing for every possible contingency. He could never quite get through to her that it wasn’t necessary to worry on his account; he was long past his warranty date anyway.  Considering everything that was on her shoulders—a murdered husband, a kidnapped son, awakening in a strange world 210 years removed from the one she knew—he didn’t understand why she chose to worry about a battered old synth like him too.

“No need to worry about--” He cut himself off as the sound of awakening feral ghouls reaches his audio sensors. “Ferals!” he calls out. By the way he sees her already starting to shoulder her laser rifle, he can tell she hears them too.

They spend the next half hour without conversation, both of them focused on taking out the feral ghouls infesting the tunnel. The two of them seem to coordinate quite naturally, Nick notices as they fight. Neither of them had thought to discuss a strategy before the fight started, but he finds himself predicting her shots and adjusting his own strategy to match with scarcely a second thought, and she seems to be doing the same for him. They rarely need to speak except to yell an occasional warning when one of the ferals breaks from the pack and gets too close.

Things get dicey for a bit when they discover a Glowing One in one of the side tunnels, but between the two of them even that goes down without too much trouble. It doesn’t take long to clear the rest of the tunnel after that.

A little while later, the two of them are sitting next to small campfire in a warehouse at the Boston Police Rationing Site. They’d decided to stop here and rest while their waterlogged boots and socks dry out rather than trying to walk back to Diamond City right away in wet shoes. 

Nick lights up a cigarette as he watches his client sort through the scav they’ve picked up so far today, deciding what is worth keeping or selling and what should be left behind.

“Hey, um, Nick…” Her voice is hesitant, barely audible over the crackling of the fire.

“I’m listening, sweetheart.”

“How are your sealants? You didn’t get any water in you, did you? I can check them for you if you want.”

Nick raises his eyebrows in surprise. He hadn’t expected her to remember that comment he’d made earlier this afternoon. And she was going off and worrying about him again. At this rate, she’d end up fussing over him more than Ellie did, and Ellie had the whole mother hen routine down pat already.

“You don’t need to worry yourself on my account, doll.” He takes a drag on his cigarette.  “Now, there’s something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about, now that we’ve got a free moment,” he tries to deflects the subject.

“Okay, um, sure.”

The Vault Survivor wraps her arms around her knees and stares into the fire. She never looked directly at him when they were talking, he’d noticed. Normally he’d assume she didn’t want to look at him on account of his being a synth, but she never seemed to make eye contact with anyone else either. Shy, maybe? But his detective’s instinct told him it was more than just that.

“It’s just with everything that’s happened, with you, your family,” he says. “It’s a whole hell of a lot to process. I wanted to make sure you’re holding up alright.”

“I’m…surviving, I guess,” she says with weary sigh. “Course, it’s not like I have a whole lot of other options.” She laughs bleakly. “Well, I guess there is another, but it’s not an option I should take, regardless of how tempting it is some mornings. Some days it feels like the only thing keeping me going is the thought that Nate wouldn’t have wanted me to.”

She doesn’t say it out loud, but Nick knows all too well what the “option” she’s talking about is. He can remember the despair that he – well, the original Nick Valentine – had felt after Jenny was killed. There had been more than one occasion where his former self had thought about how easy it would be to just turn his gun on himself and end everything.

Nick forcibly redirects that train of thought. This wasn’t about wallowing in his own self-pity. This was about her, his client, and even more importantly, someone who was quickly becoming his friend.

“Y’know, it took me a long damn time to get a feel for this place,” he tries to reassure her. “Thank goodness I found Diamond City. It’s got its flaws, but beats the hell out of anywhere else in the Commonwealth. 

“Course, when I took up there back when, people were just as scared of the Institute as they are now, maybe more. The massacre of the CPG was still pretty fresh in people’s minds at that point and folks were still losing sleep over the Broken Mask. Plenty of people assumed I was just a saboteur, moving in to melt down the reactor or poison the drinking water. But at the time, they couldn’t exactly turn me away.”

“Wait a sec,” she interrupts. “CPG, Broken Mask, what are those?”

Nick almost smiles. Leave it to his client to want to know about everything that had happened in the Commonwealth while she had been cryogenically frozen. She was like a damn sponge for information, that dame, soaking up every piece of data she could get her hands on.

So he tells her about the CPG, and how the Institute had sabotaged the chance for the Commonwealth to set up a unified government. But when he starts talking about Broken Mask, she interrupts him again.

“Hang on, that’s the thing Piper wrote about in her ‘Synthetic Truth’ article, right? The synth that went haywire and shot a bunch of people, and that’s how people found out the Institute could make synths good enough to pass for human.”

This was the most animated Nick had ever seen her, practically excited even, as she starts making connections the between pieces of information she’d gathered since waking up. And damn if she didn’t neatly summarize Piper’s article too.

“Right you are,” he says.

She’d make a good detective, he muses. Smart as a whip, that dame is. And Ellie keeps telling me I need a new partner. First things first though, I need to solve the case at hand and find her son. Who knows if she’ll have time after that.

“So, if so many people thought you were a spy, how come they let you in?” she asks.

Nick tells her about rescuing the mayor’s daughter. When he gets to the part about pretending to have a bomb inside him, she bursts out into laughter.

“And they actually believed that?”

“The hardest part of that rescue was keeping from laughing as they climbed over each other to get away,” he says with a chuckle. 

“Oh my God, that sounds amazing. I wish I could’ve seen that.” She grins at him. It’s the first time he’s seen her happy since he’d met her.

He tells her about settling into Diamond City, how people kept coming to him whenever someone went missing, and eventually deciding to found the agency.

“It took me a long time to realize home is where you make it,” he says. “With some time and effort, this place can be home for you too. Long story, but I hope it helps.”

The Survivor from Vault 111 shifts to sit closer to him as he finishes speaking. “Thank you, Nick. I really needed to hear that,” she says softly, her eyes glistening.

She sniffles a bit. “Oh God, now I’m gonna end up crying on you.  I was trying so hard not to do that.”

Nick pulls out a handkerchief from a pocket inside his trench coat and hands it to her. “Don’t worry, sweetheart. Go ahead and cry all you need to.”

“I just…everything’s been so…since well, you know….” She trails off. “You’re the first person I’ve felt safe around since leaving the Vault. Even including Piper. Piper’s nice, but she can be kind of…exhausting to be around sometimes.” She dabs her eyes with the handkerchief. 

Nick has to chuckle at that. Easier to laugh than examine the idea that she thought of him as “safe” too closely. “Miss Wright certainly has a nose for trouble, doesn’t she?”

“No kidding. You know the first time I met her she’d been locked out of Diamond City? She had to con the gate guard into thinking I was a trader before he’d let us in.”

“Sounds like the kind of stunt she’d pull. Speaking of Diamond City, think you’ll ready to head back soon? Sunset’s in about an hour.”

Ruby lives in Sanctuary for a while after the start of the game- she’s got a house in Diamond City, sure, and most of the settlements develop guest houses/hotels eventually, but she primarily lives here when she can help it. She might go a week or three without returning, though, because her duties often take her other places. She doesn’t stay in her pre-War house since it brings back too many memories, and she doesn’t let it be repurposed until after the debacle with the Institute.

After she and MacCready start their relationship, they live together here. There’s some electrical power- enough to power all their basic needs, including a television. Not that they’ve got a lot to watch on TV, but Ruby does eventually start collecting holotapes of old movies when she gets the chance. The kitchen is fairly well-stocked when she’s in town, since Sanctuary develops a steady trade line.

A few months after MacCready sends Duncan’s cure to him, they receive word that he’s mostly recovered (barring a few lasting effects that don’t seem to signify the disease is still present). MacCready brings him back up to live with them, and he gets a room to himself along with a bunch of toys Ruby’s found around the Commonwealth. He’s the only kid that lives there, since Ruby relocates them all to the Castle before the events of The Nuclear Option.

Ruby and MacCready share a room (and a bed). She’s got a terminal that she uses to keep herself organized. She and Mac both use it for the terminal games she finds around the Commonwealth. Their room is also a good place to store some of her favorite clothes and weapons.