Chapter Text
Doctor Amari’s lab filtered into view as the jumbled memories cleared from her eyes. Dee lurched in her seat, disoriented, blinded by the bright lights. The doctor urged her to be careful, patient, and, most importantly, seated. But she ignored Amari, hands groping blindly for the door and stumbling out, desperate for fresh air.
The doctor wisely let her go. Dee was almost at the top of the steps when she realized there was no fresh air anywhere; only dust and radiation. She leaned heavily against the handrail. Flickers of Kellogg’s thoughts intersected with hers. Would it always be this way now? The man that had made her a widow, always whispering, reminding? Her grip tightened as if it were his throat.
A baby in her arms – not mine. The features blurred together, her baby and Kellogg’s. Two babies. One baby. Either way, gone.
The Memory Den’s proprietor, Irma, watched her lurch from the steps towards the enclosed waiting area. Likely a common sight.
The other memory machines were all taken by every type of person imaginable. Every age, every lifestyle, tapped into a machine to let them relive their favorite moments. More likely, just a single moment, over and over again. Some poor idiot had even taken his sunglasses in with him. Dee passed blissful smiles and streaming tears alike. How many were repeat customers? How many sat in day after day, living out the one good thing they saw in their whole lives in this pit?
Before – before Kellogg, before the Vault, before Boston – she would have been curious to peek. The wonder! To see the world through the eyes of another, to feel as they felt, to lurk in their minds and observe. The stuff of science fiction, as common as a drug. She only felt bile rise at the thought now. Some things were meant to stay in the past, never to be relived.
Nick sat in the closed off waiting area, hands folded in his lap, ankles crossed. A memory floated up; it was her own this time, a natural recollection. Her father waiting for the bus on a bench, hands folded in his lap, ankles crossed.
His eyes were unfocused. When she had learned to distinguish the different states of a synth eye was a mystery. He looked up as she approached, his face making the small shifts from solemn to worried. However they had built him, they had paid a good amount of attention to his eyes. To the brow, the lower lid, the crux of human emotion.
“You okay?” he asked as she sat.
She nodded vaguely. “Fine.” But the crack in the word gave her away.
She couldn’t bring herself to say no. Nothing good could come of it. It would bring doubts and doubts made her slow. Dee knew herself; once she stopped, she would never be able to break herself out of the cycle of questions. Even now, she knew she had to get up and find a way to get to the Institute; a piece of her prowled in bloody anticipation, ready to rip down walls and men alike to get back her son.
But she sat gripping the edge of the bench, not quite able to move but her heart still lurching.
“Dee…” Nick said. He’d given her that nickname when her old one – the one Ryan had called her – turned out to be the same as his assistant’s, and it had stuck. Hardly mattered what anyone called her now. No government records to confirm or deny it.
She shook her head rapidly. “I just – I need a minute, okay?”
Nick nodded, unconvinced, and leaned back in his seat.
A thought struck her. She dug deep into her pockets for a small tape and plugged it into her Pip-Boy. Codsworth had given it to her, but to play it at the time – she had been too raw. Then she had become too afraid. Playing the tape seemed like admitting Ryan was gone. Admitting this wasn’t some cryosleep dream.
But denial’s simple comforts could only go so far. Ryan was dead. Shaun was gone. The tape fit into the Pip-Boy and clicked as it began to play.
Ryan’s laugh poured from the device alongside Shaun’s eager gurgles. The recording was tinny and faded, but it was Ryan’s voice. She’d gone too long without it. There was no visual accompaniment, but she still stared the Pip-Boy raptly, letting herself imagine him sitting with Shaun. At home, the room sunlit. She smiled lopsidedly as he urged Shaun to speak.
“Hi, honey!” he said. “Listen. I don’t think Shaun and I need to tell you how great of a mother you are. But we’re going to anyway!”
Dee shook her head at the Pip-Boy. He’d always been better with the baby, and he hadn’t even been there half of the year. She’d vanished somehow. Without going anywhere, she’d vanished once the baby was out. The doctors called it one thing and she’d snorted and called it what it was: terrible mothering.
He listed virtues. Kind, loving, funny. Patient. All untrue.
Not that she thought he was lying on purpose. He was merely deceived, his good heart tricking him into seeing what he wanted to see out of his wife.
He promised the coming days would improve; he’d reintegrate with the civilian workforce and she’d go back to the advertisement company. All still untrue, though that wasn’t his fault.
Shaun gurgled his goodbyes. The memories mixed and Ryan’s chest flooded with red.
“We love you!” he concluded, smile audible even in the recording.
She flinched. Kellogg pointed the gun and the shot rang through the underground lab. What a lucky widow she was, having had the unique privilege of seeing Ryan slump over from two angles, blood flooding the vault suit.
She hit the replay button before it even finished playing. Again. A fourth time. She latched onto every syllable, every word, memorizing. If she could have no good memory of his face, she would remember his voice. A fifth time.
“But everything we do, no matter how hard…”
Eyes shut, she pulled her wrist closer, dripping tears and snot onto the Pip-Boy. Ryan always said she was messy when she cried, and it was rare enough to be noticeable.It’s ‘cause you let it pile up and then blow it all out into a tissue. Or fifty. He laughed easily and teared up easily, much faster than her. But there was never anger. Shewas always angry about something. It was easier to be angry than it was to be patient.
“We’ll do it as a family.”
Sixth.
Shaun crying as he was pulled out of Ryan’s grasp. Shaun, a child of ten (she’d missed his first words, first steps – and the second, and third, and the thousandth), polite, saying his thank yous to Mr. Kellogg like he was a friendly neighbor babysitting.
The anger flooded. What kind of sick fuck lost his wife and child and decided it would be a good life decision to do the same to someone else? For just a moment, there had been the hope that she could understand Kellogg. Even in her anger, she could see he had seemed aware and resigned to his fate, too weary to challenge it. But the more she knew, the less she understood. Would she end up like him, if she failed to reach Shaun?
A sob shook her. She didn’t want to cry. The lack of tears had been a point of pride, tangible proof that she was being strong like a mother was supposed to. But there was no ache in her bones and muscles as strong as this one. No bout, no fight, no bruise, no sprain that hurt the way this did. She reached blindly to replay the tape a seventh time. Metal fingers closed around her hand instead. It didn’t take much pressure to stop her.
“We love you!” Ryan reminded her. Shaun giggled. The recording played itself into silence.
Dee trembled, trying to contain herself. “Ryan should have been the one here. I should be dead. He can do this.” Her words were slurred and thick with mucus. “I can’t do this, I can’t.”
Nick’s arm came around her shoulder, and she wailed as he said softly, You can. You have. You will.
Her father smelled (had smelled, two hundred years ago) like oil and smoke and sweat, all the things his beloved motor cars smelled of. Unexpectedly, perhaps because he ran on the same principles, Nick smelled almost the same. It was baked into his coat – old smells, muted, mixed with woods, the scent of old file folders, hints of Ellie’s perfume. There was even burnt metal and coolant, hanging about the way sweat did. Between sobs, the sound of something ticking at roughly the tempo of a heartbeat. Nick simultaneously eased her homesickness and made it worse.
It was easy to forget that there was more to people than shooting and threats and stabbing and picking through corpses for fucking bottlecaps and a spare clip of ammunition. Nick wasn’t warm, but he didn’t need to be. He didn’t pat or murmur, no attempts at soothing her silent. Only the comforting weight of his hand settled on her shoulder. He was unambiguously there when everything else seemed to tear out of her grasp. He was sitting through her tears even though he had just risked his whole being to process Kellogg’s implant. Which she, endlessly selfish, hadn’t thanked him for or even asked how he was. That reminder got her sobs to subside a little.
It took several tries to get words to come out between gasps for breath. “Thank you,” she managed to croak into his coat. “Thank you for everything.”
He gave her another few seconds, then let her sit back. She wasn’t sure how long she’d been crying, but it had probably been some time. His patience was endless and inhuman – and she was glad for it. He drew a clean-looking handkerchief from his pocket and handed it over.
Dee couldn’t help but scoff into it. “You’re prepared for anything, aren’t you?”
The corner of his mouth tilted up. “I’ll admit, you’ve thrown a few curveballs, but a good detective knows there’s always crying. Hope it’ll be happy tears by the end.”
She cleaned her face under her glasses but didn’t hand back the handkerchief. “I’ll, uh, wash it and give it back.”
“You… hang on to it,” he said with a nod.
She sniffed, giving a small smile that faded quickly.
“You feel any better?”
“No,” she admitted. There was no point in lying about that anymore. It still remained fact that Ryan should have been here and not her. He could have found Shaun faster, better, more bravely. But she was here and he was not and if wishes were pennies, she’d have a million of a currency that no longer mattered. “I want to raise Kellogg from the dead and kill him all over again.” She paused. “That’s terrifying.”
“Well– people have killed for less…” he said cautiously.
She stared at the the snotty cloth in her hand and gave another latent sniff. “I’ve never been a killer. I was punchy, sure. But it was never… I’ve never – I just want to crush him again. He killed Ryan, he took Shaun. And for these people who– How could someone do that?"
He needed to die every death she had in the last two weeks and every death she would die again in the coming days. There was a soft ripping noise.
"Easy, there,” Nick said, a calming hand on her shoulder. She eased her grip on the handkerchief. “You’ll probably wanna redirect that anger towards the Institute.”
“I’m– I’m picking guns and– and– and bottlecaps from dead people, Nicky, I–” She looked at him, wide-eyed, and slid out of his grasp. “How am I supposed to take care of Shaun here? Now? By myself? There’s raiders and mutants and wild irradiated animals and– I… was more worried about Hancock’s face than I was about him stabbing a guy. That’s not how a mother’s supposed to think.” She ran her fingers through her hair. “I’m supposed to teach him to kill people? Look him in the eye and tell him I decked Mr. Kellogg and then shot him in his fucking face?”
Had the detective had lungs, he would certainly be sighing by now. He adjusted is hat, eyes scanning the small entry room before settling back on her. “You’ve had a rough go, I know. Seeing the end, losing your husband and son, crawling out of that vault – all that must have felt like, what, twenty minutes? An hour at most?”
She had been convinced there weren’t people alive at all for the first day and a half until she found Preston and what remained of his people.
He nodded his head, reading her expression. “Chills you, thinking how close we almost got to the end of the world, doesn’t it? But we’re all here. Listen – Commonwealth’s a mess, no doubt about it, with a lot of nasty characters. We gotta do some things to survive, to get your boy back. But you’re no murderer. You know damn well Kellogg would’ve killed you if you hadn’t fought back. And–“
"Nicky –” Dee began.
“– And –” he continued, hand raised in placation. “You’re not alone. We’re in this together, alright?”
She fell silent, considering the torn handkerchief in her hands, and let the words sink in.
Every day was a fight to get Shaun back, and that alone resulted in challenge after challenge. But it wasn’t just that. It was a million smaller tasks – food, water, a safe place to stay. Finding these things in the presence of other people, because being alone in the Wasteland would get you killed damn quick. But not the wrong kinds of people because that was just as bad. Money, weapons, ammunition, safe food, clean water. The deals and counter-deals it took to get anything done because you did it yourself or not at all. Piper had helped. Nick had helped. But she’d been under the assumption these were temporary things; that ultimately, they would go back to tending to their own survival and she would have to do the same on her own.
Nick was saying – had proven several times over – that this was not so. She exhaled and nodded slowly. “Okay. Together.”
“Right. So – stay in there. I was worried for a while. You weren’t even tearing up. Most folks, whoever they are and wherever they come from… they cry a little sooner. I can find you if someone grabs you, but it’s you that’s gotta bring yourself back if you vanish while your body’s still around.” He tilted his head, peering at her from under his hat until she met his eyes and he made sure she understood.
“I miss Ryan,” she admitted, lowering her gaze again. “I miss him so much.” They had been married, sure, but they had been friends long before and long after that. Her only friend, really. She popped the tape out of the Pip-Boy and cradled it in her hands for a moment.
“I’d be more worried if you didn’t miss him.” Golden eyes tracked the tape as it vanished back into her pocket.
When it was sealed away again, she felt less like her seams were being stretched too far. Her boundaries were re-established. With another nod, she straightened again. “I hope you have more handkerchiefs stowed away in that coat of yours. Which I’m sorry for just snotting all over, by the way.”
He gave a short laugh; it was a dry sound, but not at all mechanical. “I’ve gotten worse out of this thing. Now super mutants – those are tough to wash out. Had to scrap at least two nice jackets thanks to them.”
Her smile was a little wider this time. It was still difficult to do and expended the last reserves of her energy, but they both needed to see that she could. Perhaps, eventually, she might even laugh. But the ground was still under her feet even after she admitted to at least one of her failures, and that was all she dared ask for right now.
“Okay,” she sighed. “I should see if Doctor Amari has any more advice to give me. And then I honestly hope I never have to step in here again.”
“I’m not sure people come in here 'cause they want to,” Nick said, but gave a firm nod. “I’m still… cleaning up some functions. You talk and I’ll wait for you here.”
Dee raised her eyebrows. “Need me to fiddle with any wires back there?”
He snorted. “I’d rather you didn’t. Now go on.”
Reluctantly, Dee shuffled back across the Den and down the steps where Amari was waiting.
By Nick’s expression, it was clear he didn’t think any more of the flimsy plan than Dee did. “I guess there’s only so much more we can plan out and account for.”
She half-shrugged. “If Dogmeat could track Kellogg, this will have to do, right? Believe me, if I could radio the scientist in advance, I would.”
He leaned forward onto his elbows. “There’s one other part that concerns me.”
“Just the one? Nice.”
He ignored the sarcasm and studied her, gold eyes running from crown to shoulder to elbow, then back to her face, as if scanning for fresh injury. “I’ve been going between Diamond City and Goodneighbor for years – I know the routes and people know not to mess around with the synth. Are you gonna be able to get back safely? If you get nabbed or shot here, we won’t even need to worry about the next stage.”
“Oh, no, no.” She held up a warning finger. “No. Don’t do that, Nicky.”
He raised a metal brow.
“You’re looking at me like I’m some… Vault-Dweller ingenue. I’m not. I come from before the war, but it’s not like I don’t have common sense. I can hold my own.”
“I know that. But once you get out there, everyone’s gonna know what you’re carrying is all I’m saying. People talk about their sales and who’s buying what – it’ll paint an even bigger target on your back than that blue suit does.” Fingers flitted across the brim of his hat anxiously.
She wanted his concerns to be unfounded, but they weren’t. Boston was a veritable warzone with too many enemy territories. The ring was one thing. It had rules, laws of engagement… a referee. Barring something going hideously wrong, you weren’t going to die. Maybe get a little brain damage, but you’d live. There was no such thing here. Kellogg had been a challenge on his own, and she was solid against a single opponent. The raiders entrenched in the city were ten and twenty at a time, and even dad’s lessons with a gun hadn’t covered swarming bands of irradiated assholes.
But that kind of doubt would make everything harder than she needed it to be right now, so she folded her arms again and raised her head stubbornly. “I’ve saved your… ass… circuits… or whatever you have, more than once. I don’t need a babysitter.”
“I know you’re clever,” he said quietly, eyes gleaming. “I just wanna know you’ll be careful, too.”
She sighed and stood, pacing the small room to the shabbily curtained window and back to the table. “I will. I have to be. My b– my son needs me.”
He was no longer a baby, after all. He was ten. But either way, he needed his mother.
Nick gave her a firm nod, more for his own benefit than for hers. “Alright. I’ll have to trust that. You’ve already adjusted faster than I did, but just… don’t get cocky, kid.” The frown shifted slowly into another small smile. “I’ll go back and wait for you outside the Diamond City gate in three days. But if I don’t see you then, we’re coming back with Dogmeat.”
She returned the smile. “Sounds fair.”
Nick’s chair scraped as he stood. He fixed his hat one last time and shuffled to the door to unlock it. Dee moved to give him a hug. It was still simple (and his coat still moist from her earlier sobbing). No patting. Just a firm hug.
“Take care,” she said.
“Eyes sharp. There’s worse places than Goodneighbor, but that’s not exactly high praise.”
“Yeah, I noticed the local insurance provider was pretty questionable.”
That put both their smiles right, and he left before either could start doubting again. Dee checked the hallway, warily eyeing the man passed out on the floor, and closed the door as soon as the detective was down the stairwell. The lock wasn’t secure in the least so she lodged one of the chairs under the knob. The rooftops were surer paths than the streets, warranting a mine by each of the windows and the curtains pulled closed. The caps went back in their steel case with the padlock closed. Her hand brushed the bottle of whiskey next to it that she’d found in a store safe en route. Good brand, too. She’d been meaning to save it as emergency disinfectant but –
Gunfire cracked in a street not far enough away. She pulled her hand back and zipped up the bag, stowing it beneath the slumping bed.
The room smelled like death. And sweat. And a number of other excretions. But mostly, mainly, of death. Not like bodies and rot, but like an attic untouched since the owners died years ago. Her attic. She’d risen from beneath the ground like some frozen corpse and now walked her dusty attic. The world was both familiar and so desperately different. Everything new and modern was now old and crumbling; it had taken her a full day to realize Diamond City was in Fenway Park.
And now she was going to walk into the dead middle of the blast zone of the nuclear bomb that destroyed her reality. Even with the power suit they’d been lugging around and all the RadAway she could carry, it was immensely stupid. But who else would do it? No one she could trust. With Ryan gone, there was no one to trust. Nick was the closest she could get to family out here, but she was under no illusions: he was a synth. A good one. A kind one. One who’d helped her bash in Kellogg’s skull. She trusted him a good amount and had agreed that she would trust him a while yet. But he was still subject to a warranty if the Institute decided to claim it.
With that final comforting thought, she kicked her boots to the floor and lay back, the ten-millimeter pistol gleaming in the empty spot beside her. Because that was what you did here; you slept with a loaded gun next to you, to drift off to the moans of strung out denizens. To not-so-distant shouts and gunfire.