#fsosuweek

“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.”

Nights in the Castle were rarely quiet, even when Ruby returned to her quarters late. Between the drills and the lively community that had sprung up in the past couple of months, there was plenty of noise to be had outdoors, and the quarters she shared with her family were no quieter.

And yet, on this night, Ruby returned to their quarters to find little noise at all. Usually, with two young sons, there would be something- laughter, crying, an imitation deathclaw roar. Metal would clang against metal as Shaun tinkered with something; Duncan would cause a crash when he knocked over the snack cakes he was trying to steal. Quiet was just not something Ruby expected these days.

She took a quick look around to make sure everything was alright. Codsworth, she knew, was just fine, puttering around as he finished cleaning for the night. He outright refused to confine himself to their quarters, instead taking on the responsibility of cleaning the whole of the Castle. Right now, it seemed he was about to head over to the armory, which usually needed tidying up at this hour.

Dogmeat and Garland, a dog whom she’d bought off a man wandering the Commonwealth a month back, were already sleeping in the doghouse just outside the quarters. The cats were… well, she was never quite sure where the cats were most of the time, but she assumed they could take care of themselves. They tended to disappear during the day and pop up in the armory, or near the gardens, or by the artillery. So long as they came back in once in awhile for food, she wasn’t too worried.

The kitchen and living area that served as the entrance to their quarters were both still. Her and MacCready’s bedroom was dark, and the small washroom they had was dark. There wasn’t all that much to check.

When she finally peeked into the room Duncan and Shaun shared, she stopped.

There, on Duncan’s bed, lay her husband, comic book in hand. Tucked under one arm was Duncan, and curled up to the other side of him was Shaun. Both boys were listening intently as MacCready read aloud to them. None of them seemed to notice her in the doorway.

“Flee, citizens! Flee!” MacCready said in a voice much shriller than she’d ever heard him make. Duncan giggled at the noise. “You cannot stop the wrath of the AntAgonizer!”

“The voice, Daddy!” The quiet laughter from the boys slowed down as Duncan pointed to another character on the page. “Do the voice!”

MacCready cleared his throat, and when he spoke again, his voice was lower than usual and featured an accent vaguely reminiscent of Vadim back in Diamond City. “Stand down, villain! Grognak will stop you! You cannot win!”

The boys gasped at something on the page, something Ruby couldn’t see from this angle. Duncan let out a quiet, “What happens next?”

“We’ll just have to see,” MacCready said, back to his normal voice, before turning the page.

Another gasp came from the boys, and Shaun’s nose wrinkled in disgust. “Ewwww.”

“That’s a lot of blood, huh?”

“Uh-huh.”

MacCready grinned before preparing to speak again. “My ants!” he squealed in that shrill voice from earlier. “You’ll pay for that, barbarian!”

Giggles erupted from both sons yet again, and the story continued. MacCready did a different voice for each character: some children had squeakier voices, brutes sounded gruff and burly, and other villagers had a soft lilt. As he made each voice, he made faces to go along with them. His nose scrunched; his mouth twisted to the side. No matter the character, the boys seemed completely engrossed in the story.

Ruby leaned against the doorframe and smiled. The irritable, emotionally distant merc from Goodneighbor seemed a thing of the past. The nightmares she’d had about losing Shaun again, or of raising her son and stepson in the Commonwealth, or of the possibility of seeing MacCready die as Nate had, were all but gone in this moment.

The boys had changed, too. When Duncan had first arrived, he had trouble talking to anyone but his father, but he had since bonded to Shaun and to Ruby. He had no hesitations now in commenting on the story, even with his stepbrother next to him. Shaun, likewise, seemed like a kid again. Ruby often wondered if his time in the Institute was what made him so serious or if that was just his natural inclination. Now, however, he was just as enraptured by the comic as Duncan, as a young boy ought to be.

As the story drew to a close, Ruby watched the boys laugh and react to their father. He loved comics at least as much as they did, and he seemed to love spending time with them even more

“Another!” Duncan exclaimed as MacCready finally closed the comic.

“I think that’s enough for tonight, buddy. It’s about time for you to get some sleep.”

Shaun sighed. “Aw, man! Bedtime already?”

“Tell you what,” MacCready said as he ruffled Duncan’s hair and sat up again. “Maybe your mom can read you two a comic tomorrow night. She does a killer Silver Shroud.”

Ruby laughed. “I hope you’re not just saying that for my benefit.”

All three heads shot up at once. A smile spread across Duncan’s face, Shaun blinked in surprise, and MacCready scrambled to finish sitting upright. “It wasn’t, I promise,” her husband said. “When did you- how long were you standing there?”

“Not long. Just for the last few pages or so.” Ruby pushed herself away from the door frame and walked towards them. “Come on, boys. Time for bed.”

Shaun hopped off and crossed the room to his own bed. “Night, mom. Night, Grognak.”

Ruby snorted. “Good night, Shaun.” Once he’d climbed in, she pulled his blanket over him and pressed a kiss to his forehead. MacCready did the same for Duncan on the other side of the room.

When she crossed the room to Duncan’s bed, the young boy looked up at her pleadingly. “Five more minutes? Please?”

“Not tonight, sweetheart. You’ll need some shut-eye if you and Shaun want to take the dogs all over the castle again tomorrow.” Duncan giggled at that, and Ruby smiled at him. “Besides, you’re sleepy already.”

“ ‘M not sleepy,” Duncan said with a yawn. For a moment after he stopped, he looked thoughtful. Ruby was just about to finish tucking him in and give him a kiss goodnight when he spoke. “Can you really do the Silver Shroud voice?”

Ruby brushed his hair off his forehead as she thought. “You’ll just have to ask all the bad guys I put away. See how they think I did.” She chuckled when Duncan’s jaw dropped a little. “Good night, sweetie.”

Duncan yawned again and turned over on his side as she pressed a kiss to his forehead. “G’night, mommy.”

As she stood up straight again, MacCready walked over to her and slung his arm around her waist. Together they walked back towards the door and the lightswitch. “Good night, boys,” MacCready said one last time before they turned off the light and left the room.

They walked in silence back to their own room. MacCready squeezed her side gently as she pecked a kiss to his cheek. Bedtime for the boys usually meant bedtime for them, too, if they wanted any rest that night.

“You’re a good dad, you know,” Ruby said as she shucked off her jacket and searched for her nightgown.

MacCready chuckled behind her. “I’m trying.”

“You’re succeeding.”

“You think so?”

“Mhmm.” She turned back towards him as she changed out of her clothes. “RJ, I know that we weren’t sure how well all of this would go, whether they’d get along, and with Shaun being… well, you know-”

“I know.” He climbed into their bed and patted the spot beside him. Ruby quickly tossed her nightgown before climbing in beside him. “Wouldn’t be able to do it without you.”

She tucked her head against his shoulder and smiled as he pressed a kiss to the top of her head. “Guess we’ll just have to read to them together tomorrow, huh?”

“We’ll figure something out.”

Ruby closed her eyes and hummed happily as MacCready worked his arm around her to hold her close. With the boys asleep, and with all outside evening activities finished, there was nothing left to keep them awake.