#dios nate is so dumb

[its-cullenminating]

Cigarette Burns

Find the rest of my writing here.

Beta’d by my lovely friend @mindoir! Thanks, hon!

If Nick had to put an adjective to the Wasteland, it would be difficult.

Difficult to relate to, to sleep through, to survive in. He knows from experience, waking up to everything dead and mutated does a number on a person. It had taken him months to adjust, and not just because he’d had a tattered set of rags for skin and a dead man’s memories.

This girl, this kid, this Angela. She seems to be taking everything remarkably well, all things considered. She smiles, laughs, exchanges quips with Piper, and reassures her Mr. Handy that everything’ll be alright, Codsworth. Eventually.

Sometimes, Nick can even swear that grin of hers reaches her eyes.

It’s all too… much, somehow, to be real. Too much teeth in her smile, too much laughter for his puns. Just a bit -- the kid’s a good liar, and she’s been here a while (if her lack of surprise at Wasteland mutants is any indication), but he’s seen what she’s like when her friends turn away. That smile, however toothy, drops like a sack of bricks.

There’s something wrong with that decorated little saviour of his, his gut screams at him, and Nick Valentine, detective of a half-century, has solved too many cases on gut instincts alone to leave Angela be.

It’s sunny when he finds her, alone, sitting on a desecrated seat in the Upper Stands, swirling the last sip of a Nuka Cola around the bottom of the bottle. She doesn’t say anything as he comes to stand beside her, hands in the pockets of his trenchcoat, or as he fishes out a cigarette and lights up. They stand there a while, silent, watching the city below go about it’s day.

Finally, she sighs, shoulders slumping forwards, the coins and beads in her hair clinking together as she bows her head.

“What do you want, Nick?” she asks, her voice quiet and weary. She sounds tired.

“Wanted to check in on ya,” he drawls, taking a heavy drag off his cigarette. When he releases the smoke, it winds its way out through the tears in his throat and chest. “You’ve been actin’ strange, doll. What’s eatin’ you?”

Angela doesn’t look at him, but back out at the city. He watches her, yellow eyes trained on the top of her head as she brushes her dark hair back, the Old World coins tied within glinting in the light.

She’s silent a moment more, shoulders tense, movements stiff when she sets her Nuka Cola aside.

“Just tired, s’all,” she says, and even though he can’t see her face, he knows she’s lying.

“Don’t try to pull the wool over my eyes here, kid.”

She shrugs, and Nick takes one last, long drag off his cigarette. If she’s not gonna talk, and Nick knows she won’t, knows it like he knows the world’s ended, then he’s not going to bother her. Maybe she just needs some time alone, to think.

The thought sits wrong, though, and even as he moves to scuff the filter of his cigarette against the bottom of his shoe, even as he moves to leave, he does it slowly. Giving her time, an option.

“Do you miss it?”

The question is sudden, still tired, but laced with something that smells an awful lot like desperation. Nick pauses, skeletal hand resting on the stairway railing. When he looks at her, his glowing yellow meets her coffee brown.

She looks close to tears.

“Miss what, exactly?” he asks, although he has an inkling as to what she means. He didn’t plan on having this conversation today, but…

Well.

“Boston,” she replies, gesturing around her. “Trees, cars, a world that doesn't reek of death and metal. Take your pick.”  

He sighs and puts his hands back in his pockets as he ambles back to her. For all her usual bravado, she’s small in her chair, knees pulled up to her chest and brown eyes watery.

“Sometimes,” he says, retaking his position next to her. “Nick-- the first one, the human one-- his memories act up sometimes. Pre-war, old as dirt.” She flinches at that, and he takes a deep, unnecessary breath before continuing. “It comes and goes. Sometimes I’ll pass by somethin’, a shop or a house, a street sign, and I know it, even if these eyes have never seen it before. It’s…”

He trails off, unsure of what to say. This is normally where he’d talk about being a synth and what it’s like to be living in another man’s head, but something tells him that’s not what she needs to hear right now.

“Like the world’s layered on top of itself,” Angela murmurs, looking back out at Diamond City.

“Yeah, guess you could put it like that. Like those old ads, those before and after shots.”

“Except instead of Abraxo, it’s Perma-rads. The mutation sensation that’s sweeping the nation!” She laughs, shoulders giving a feeble shake.

He chuckles and resists the urge to put his hand on her shoulder; comforting her is what Nick wants to do (what human Nick would’ve done), but not everyone wants a synth touching them. He can understand why, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t need to check himself every now and again. Instead, he reaches into his pocket and pulls out another cigarette -- just seems appropriate, somehow.

“Those things are gonna be the death of you, Valentine,” Angela quips, snatching the unlit cig from one hand and his flip lighter from the other. “Keep that up, people are gonna mistake you for a fireplace instead of a detective.”

He stares for a moment, bewildered, watches as she lights the cigarette and takes a deep, practiced drag.

“Be that as it may be, I didn’t have you pegged for a smoker, doll,” he mutters, returning his hands to the safety of his trenchcoat.

“Everyone needs somethin’ to keep them from takin’ a short jump off a tall building. Just took up the same somethin’ as everybody else in the damn Commonwealth.”

They fall back into silence, more companionable this time as she smokes his cigarette, the scent of tobacco carried on the smoke in the wind. She’s more relaxed now, having sprawled out in her chair, denim jacket halfway off her shoulders to reveal dark, splotchy freckles against an almond backdrop.

“Hey, Valentine,” she says after downing the last of her soda.

He makes a noncommittal noise in the back of his throat in response, not taking his eyes off the hustle and bustle of the people below.

“You never answered my question. Do you miss it, from before? Before the war?” She looks at him again, brown eyes hopeful now, if still sad.

“I, ah, I never lived before the war, Angela. I mean, I remember, sometimes, but that wasn’t me,” he explains hesitantly. It breaks his goddamn heart to crush that fragile hope of hers, but he’s not Nick Valentine. Just a couple scattered experiences, a personality nobody’s seen in two hundred years and enough emotion to be mistaken for human.

Her face falls. Resignation and desperation fill the space where there had been a bit of peace, some semblance of hope that somebody, anybody could relate to her. She shrinks in on herself again, hunching over her knees and stares at her cigarette.

“Right,” she says, voice broken. “I… Sorry.”

“No, kid -- Angela -- don’t be. You don’t have to apologize about asking an honest question.” He doesn’t know what to say or do to comfort the girl in front of him. Shit, what is she, eighteen? Nineteen? And her whole world, poof.

He’s not the right person to be doing this, that’s for damn sure. But he might be the only person who has any kinda clue. He’s the only one around that knows the Old World, in whatever capacity. Piper, Preston, Hancock, they only know the legends as decayed as the buildings. The Wasteland is their whole life, but Nick…

Nick remembers from before. Even if they aren’t his memories, he does have them. He remembers cars that still ran, TV that still broadcasted, going to the drive-in with his gal, pizza. He knows.

“I…” Angela sniffs and takes a shaky breath of her cigarette. She’s gripping the poor tube so tightly the filter crumples between her fingers, like it’s her last lifeline. Like when it runs out, so will she.

He puts his hand on her shoulder, his good one, and rubs in small circles. It’s an awkward motion, unpracticed as of late, but to her, he thinks it’s the effort that counts. She releases a heavy, broken sigh, and the first tears trickle down her cheeks.

“I miss Boston,” she sobs, her body jerking forwards so she’s hunched in her chair, one arm across her stomach like she’s going to throw up. “I miss my school, I miss Veronica, I miss our lunch table and my law class and that dumb fucking jock that made dick jokes about everything. I miss--”

She disso into incoherent sobs, her whole body wracked with the force of them. The cigarette burns down the ruined filter and she crushes it in her hand. Her hair hides her face in a sparkling curtain of Old World relics, bolts and beads and quarters that tinkle like windchimes as she shakes. Nick rubs her back in what he hopes are soothing motions, completely out of his element.

“I miss my family,” she finally chokes out. “I miss my mom. I miss Nate, and Shaun, and Aunt Eva on weekends. I miss Sunday dinner, I miss the spanish in the kitchen, and my bedroom and my cat, Dios mio, Nick, I miss--”

He crouches next to her, well and truly worried, one hand on her back, and she throws her arms around his neck, crying into the collar of his coat.

Nick goes still in her arms, servos seizing at the contact, but she doesn’t notice. With her, it’s always the effort that counts, and now he’s making an active effort to be responsive, to comfort his friend. Slowly, he wraps his arms around her, good hand on the back of her head while the bad one rubs her back.

“I miss my life, Nick,” she whispers, her body-wracking sobs devolving into something softer, something he can heal.

“I know, doll. I know. I did, too,” he murmurs into her hair. She smells like tobacco and hubflowers and leather in his arms, and gradually, sob by sob, she calms.

“I’m sorry,” she says, after she’s quieted down. She pulls back, face mottled russet, and becomes very interested in her clenched fist, the one that’s still holding the dead cigarette filter. “I know you don’t -- well, I know that your memories aren’t something you’re fond of, and I didn’t mean to--”

“Don’t you worry about a damn thing, Angela,” he says, cutting off her train of thought before it festers. “You, of all people, have a right to miss the Old World.”

His bad hand rubs her back while his good one gently pries her fingers open. The cigarette filter falls, destroyed, to the floor, but there’s an ugly burn in the meat of her palm. She’d crushed the thing while the cherry was still burning.

“We should get this fixed.” His hand hovers over hers, but he doesn’t move to grab it. He doesn’t want to make her uncomfortable, and people don’t like being touched by synths, after all. He’s pushing his limits already.

“Don’t. I need it.” Her voice is hard, if still shaky from tears, and there’s steel in her eyes when he meets them.

He doesn’t know what she means by that, but the way she’s looking at her hand, at the burn, tells him it’s nothing good.

“You sure, kid? Looks pretty nasty to me. I can go get a stimpack, some burn cream, or…” he trails off, eyes drawn to her palm again when she doesn’t respond.

“Burn cream, no stims. It’ll scar, and that’s okay. I need it right now. I -- hey, no, Valentine, don’t look at me like that!” Her hand forms a loose fist, hiding the burn, and she looks at him again, eyes red and puffy and filled with alarm when he tenses beside her, panicked. “It’s not like that! I just… need something to… make myself different, I guess.” Her voice quiets to a whisper by the time she finishes speaking, barely audible.

���Different how?” he asks, concern masking panic in his voice. He stops rubbing her back, but his skeletal hand rests on her shoulder.

She shrugs and opens her fist once more, wincing as she trails the thumb of her opposite hand across the burn. “Dunno. Just different. Than I used to be, I mean. Like everything else; still there, but all fucked up.”

“You don’t need a burn to keep standing, doll. That’s what we’re here for, you -- your friends.”

She laughs then, a bitter and breathy sound. “Ya’ know, Nick, when I first climbed out of that Vault, I thought I was going to die. My house was all but gone, my robot had gone insane, my parents dead and my brother missing. Then, suddenly, there’s a Deathclaw, and a group of people that want my teenage self to protect them, and I’d never even held a gun, much less tried to shoot a guy in the head from a rooftop.”

“That must’ve been a sight,” Nick chuckles, shaking his head. “Who did you kill first, the building or the pavement?”

It’s a well-known fact that Angela can’t shoot to save her life -- or somebody else’s. Instead, she uses a volatile mix of grenades, knives, and a recently discovered serrated machete, relying on her companions to shoot from a distance. Makes things… interesting, to say the least.

“Cabrón,” she mutters, and elbows him in the chest. “I actually managed to nail a couple, but hey, coulda’ just been the adrenaline. Either way, I got a tire iron off of one of ‘em after the Deathclaw bit the dust. And the guys I was helping did, uh… well, they did their best. They all made it out, at least. Livin’ it up at my old place, Sanctuary Hills, now, courtesy of yours truly. I stayed with them, the Minutemen, for about a year. Preston tried to teach me how to use a gun, but, well, you see how that turned out.”

He’d heard bits and pieces of this story before. He’d even met Preston Garvey, temporary General of the Minutemen, and saw for himself the holes in the poor man’s frock coat, lovingly patched by Angela after an accident neither of them want to divulge. She’s never told him so much at once, though, and when she falls silent he almost thinks she’s done talking.

“I just -- I can’t get used to all this,” she says, waving at the square below. “We came here for Nate’s birthday a couple months before the war, Rex Sox and Orioles, and now it’s--”

“Yeah, kid, I know.” There’s no humor to his tone now, as he follows her eyes to Diamond City. The faded flags fly in the breeze while the crowd continues moving beneath them, a veritable sea of people in the old baseball field. It’s so small for all its life, though, and compared to how many people there used to be, it’s nothing. A village of nobodies makes up the Great Green Jewel of the Commonwealth.

“I thought it would still be, I don’t know, normal here. It’s dumb, it’s stupid, I know, but I…” she sighs, slapping the heel of her good hand against her forehead and holding it there for a moment. “The whole world is really gone, isn’t it?”

“Not gone, just different,” he responds. He squeezes her shoulder lightly before letting his hand drop and straightening up. “Just like you.”

She raises her burned hand above her head, face contemplative. It’s angry and red, swollen. He doesn’t know how she isn’t screaming from it, but her arm is shaking underneath her jacket.

“Come on, kid, let’s get that patched up. Can never be too careful with that kinda thing in the Commonwealth,” he says, sliding his hands to their well-worn coat pockets and resisting the urge to grab a smoke. “Piper’ll kill me if it gets infected on my watch.”

A minute or two later, as they walk down the stairs to the city proper, Nick watches her out of the corner of his eyes. Her black messenger tote is slung over one shoulder, hair jingling with her heavy steps, coins shining, as they step in tandem. He can’t see her face because of the angle and her long, thick hair, but she says nothing and neither does he.

Halfway down, she stops. Nick turns halfway to face her, curious. At this angle, they’re almost at eye level. Almost.

“Nick?” she says, face tired and voice unreadable.

“Yeah?”

She grins then, exhausted and pained, but real. He can see it all over her face, in her still-red eyes, in the relaxation of her shoulders and tilt of her hips. A weight lifts from his chest as he cocks a questioning eyebrow, pistons firing a little easier at the sight.

“Thanks. For… for everything. And, uh, sorry about your coat.”

“No problem, doll. You need to talk, I’m here. God knows I could’ve used it when I woke up in that junkyard.”

Her grin spreads as she bounces the three steps down to meet him. Their arms brush when they start walking again, and Nick can’t help but wonder at this kid that’s managed to survive in this Wasteland. By all accounts, with her inexperience and her sentimentality, she should’ve died a long while back.

He’s glad she didn’t.