Chapter Text
For the first time in over 200 years, Nick Valentine wakes up.
It’s a strange thing. It’s like approaching the surface of a lake after having been under for... centuries. For long enough to forget there was a surface, or at least forget that he had ever reached it. It’s dark. He takes in a breath, despite knowing that he doesn’t have lungs to fill. (No, that doesn’t make sense…) He can feel an ambient coolness on his skin, all over. (Even in the places where he shouldn’t—where there hasn’t been skin to feel for years). A slow, steady rhythm throbs in his chest, radiating through him to the very tips of his limbs. Not a mechanical whirring, a beat. (Why would he think that? Why would there be whirring inside of him?). And all of this is foggy, distant—underwater.
A sound stretches into the infinite darkness. It doesn’t make any sense, but seems to have some vague sort of meaning. With an upward inflection, like a question.
His lungs empty and fill again. Why are they doing that? He isn’t telling them to do that. A faint, reddish light begins to filter through the darkness.
“---?”
That same tone, a little more insistent. He’s pretty sure it’s supposed to be a word, but it just sounds like one drawn out note.
Empty. Full. He can actually hear the air exiting and entering now.
“…Nick? Can you hear me?” What a gentle sound. Like rocking in a boat on a cloudless night.
He opens his eyes (white, pain) then snaps them shut immediately, before any of the visual information can be processed. Black again. His lungs expand violently. He hears a little hissing sound from the direction of his mouth.
The gentle voice says, “Hey, can you turn down the lights? …Thanks.”
Through the filter of Nick’s eyelids, the painful light fades back to red.
“Nick,” says the voice, and it sounds a little… tight. Anxious. “You gotta talk to me, partner. Say something.”
Nora, his brain helpfully supplies. It’s Nora speaking. He can’t quite remember at the moment, but for him to be in such a helpless state, something must have happened to him, which means Nora will be worried. That’s what Nora does—worry. When she isn’t busy saving people.
He tries again. One eyelid cracks open. The other one follows. Then, together, they slowly widen until he can see all of Nora’s face, her dark skin a silhouette surrounded by a halo of pale light from above. It occurs to him that he must be lying down.
He tries to make a sound with his mouth, but it’s silent. Suddenly he remembers there is more to talking than emitting a hum from your internal speaker while making shapes with your mouth. He tries to use his lungs. A croak comes out: “…Damn.”
That wasn’t the word he expected himself to say, but the effect it has on Nora’s expression is miraculous. The pinched look in the woman’s forehead eases up. Her eyes start shining happily. “’Damn’ is right. God, Nick… Amari said it wouldn’t take long for you to wake up, but…”
Ah, that’s right. I’m Nick, he thinks. Or tries to think. Because somehow, even in his mind where there should be no filters, it instead manifests as a question: Am I Nick?
He sucks in another breath. He simultaneously remembers and doesn’t remember the feeling of his chest being lifted up by his expanding lungs. The throbbing beat is getting stronger and faster. He says it again: “Damn…”
He is a police officer in downtown Boston.
He is a machine in a shanty town.
Two warring streams of thought are trying to fit through the same pathway in his brain and he can’t take it. By muscle memory alone, he tries to sit up.
A slew of unbearably visceral sensations blasts through him. His hands rub against rough fabric and a sticky sound assaults his ears as his back tears away from the same fabric, slick with a feverish film of sweat (he doesn’t sweat, he can’t) and he can feel hair that he doesn’t have (or does he?) standing up on the back of his neck and now he’s upright and he gets the feeling that he shouldn’t be because the room is spinning and he can feel himself shaking and his eyes won’t focus—
“No no no, not yet… easy, buddy…”
And then a small, strong pair of hands is gently but firmly pushing him back down. He doesn’t like that feeling any more than the others—skin to skin contact, too warm, too damp.
He swallows. Shudders at the wet feeling of his throat contracting, the moisture in his mouth. “I’m… Nick? Nick Valentine?” A question, not a statement.
Nora’s expression turns blank before going all pinched again. “Yeah, that’s right.”
Inhale. “Which one?”
It goes so quiet you could hear a pin drop.
--
It takes three hours for Nick to wake up in every sense of the word, with the patient help of his partner. Gone is the grogginess, but the confusion is harder to shake. Here are the facts as he knows them:
First—he is a synth.
Second—he has the memories of a long-dead human in his head, in addition to the memories he has made as a synth.
Third—sometimes those two sets of memories are harder to pull apart than a pair of magnets.
And finally—he is in the basement of the Memory Den with Nora, and he has just had his mind removed from one shell and placed into another.
Again.
Things are coming back steadily now. The super mutant camp, the firefight, the bullet jangling around in his gut ("Nora, watch your six! Lucky you’ve got yourself a willing metal shield here or you’d be in real trouble…"), and the Behemoth that, quite literally, tore him limb from limb. He vaguely remembers falling on his side and spotting the bottom half of his body about twenty feet away, severed wires sparking at the waist. Not much comes to mind after that. Nora tells him he was awake the whole time, talking even, right up until she got Nick into the Den. She says his pain sensors were firing like crazy, making him barely capable of forming a full sentence, but still coherent enough to give his consent for… that procedure. To “upgrade” him. None of that rings a bell. But then, he supposes even a synth’s brain must have some method of blocking out traumatic memories in the interest of self-preservation.
He’s been quiet for awhile, thinking, remembering. A hand falls on top of his and gives a light squeeze. Nora is looking at him—probably has been for a few minutes.
“You okay?” she asks, her naturally bold voice going unnaturally quiet. “How are you feeling?”
“…A little lost,” Nick admits. “That old bucket of bolts was my body for a long time. Gotta admit, I’ve grown pretty attached to it.” He attempts a smirk, but Nora isn’t looking anymore. She’s looking at the floor. Nick can see the anguish in her eyes, and he can deduce what she’s thinking. He doesn’t have to ask about it to know that the body—his old body—is no longer in the room. Probably wasn’t in the room for any longer than it took to hook it up to the machine and extract whatever they needed from it. Nora wouldn’t have been able to bear looking at it any longer than necessary. She’s a tough woman, a rock, with a protective streak a mile wide. Maybe the strongest person he’s ever known, in either of his lives, but nothing hurts her like the suffering of others—particularly those she’s claimed as friends.
Nick uses his free hand to pat Nora’s. He's caught off guard by how human it looks—covered with skin-colored skin and everything, none of that synthetic gray stuff. “I’ll be alright, doll. You can count on that. I’m starting to feel more like myself already.” Whoever the hell that is. “It might take a while to figure out which way is up, that’s all.”
And how. It’s been 200 years since he last woke up, because it’s been 200 years since he last slept. Sure, one might call it “waking up” when he first became aware in his gen 2 body, but that was more of an activation—immediate, thoughtless. This is a proper awakening. It isn’t usually this disorienting—at least, it wasn’t for human Nick. He’ll have to get used to it, he knows. Sleep is a thing gen 3s need (or are programmed to think they need. No one is quite sure.) He wonders, with a tiny thrill of dread, if it will be like this every time from now on. If he'll wake up feeling like he’s human, and have to relearn how to be a synth every damn morning.
He’s had quite enough of that already.