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Hell of a thing.
Nick Valentine flicked another cigarette butt into his ashtray. It was overflowing. Ellie would not be pleased– he’d have to clean it out before she showed up in the morning if he didn’t want another lecture about what all that tar was doing to his circuits.
His eyes made a desultory pass over the casefile open on his desk in front of him. Reports of increased raider activity to the west of the city. Maybe he’d tell Claire, offer to go in with her and clean them out.
Claire again. His thoughts circled back to her with worrying regularity, as if his processes were caught in an infinite loop. He’d been doing a fine job so far of pretending that everything he’d done since their midnight rendezvous hadn’t been done with her in mind, that some stray algorithm or another hadn’t been running in the background to trace the exact slope of her curves in that dress (that dress) and repeat the sound of her voice like a skipping record in his ears.
The only reason he was at work this late was to stop himself hanging around Sanctuary like an abandoned stray, waiting for her to stop by and flash those green eyes at him, shoot him a suggestive grin, give his tie a quick tug before whooshing past on another Important Mission. That was as far as it’d gone for days, and he may have been made of metal but he damn well wasn’t made of stone. It was maddening.
For weeks she’d been making eyes at him, eyes he’d studiously ignored on account of the utter absurdity of a lovely young woman involving herself carnally with something as strange and careworn as him, even in this world gone to hell. And all it had taken was one night, one iconic movie-scene encounter (and that dress, he reminded himself, helpfully, as if he’d forgotten for even a second) to turn the tables. Leaving him in uncharted and perilous territory.
Nick the human had liked the ladies well enough. But Nick the human had had a heart, and red blood pumping through his veins, and a good handful of other important parts Nick the synth lacked. Technically, he wasn’t even sure it should be possible for him to feel the things he was feeling now. Something had sure as hell happened when she touched him, though, and neither Nick had ever put much stock in technicalities.
The sensors in his fingertips remembered the exact texture and temperature of the skin just under the hem of her skirt, and the memory, the need to feel it again, was nearly an ache. The memory of what she’d done to him made him feel like everything inside him was running too hot and too fast. He would’ve called it lust if he were a man; he didn’t know what to call it. Except damned frustrating. He had work to do.
Diamond City’s most effective detective, undone by a dame. He lit another cigarette, for lack of anything better to do, and shook his head. Hell of a thing.
___
It was another few days before he managed to make any time with her at all, and when he did finally catch up with her at Sanctuary she was just back from establishing a new settlement out east. She was exhausted and dirty and wearing some ridiculous armor she’d salvaged and cobbled together from dead raiders, and still she looked to him like what he imagined a bourbon on the rocks must look like to an alcoholic in withdrawal.
He stood in the doorway of her room, watching as she took her hair down, a dark curtain of waves tumbling onto her shoulders. “Hey,” he said. As greetings went, it was a few steps below smooth or suave.
Tired as she obviously was, her responding smile was sly and her eyes gleamed at him. “Hey, shamus.”
He cleared his throat. It was a somewhat pointless holdover from his human days, but then again, he was a synth who smoked without actual lungs and drank without the ability to become intoxicated; he let himself have his little comforts. “I was hoping–” he began.
Faster than she had any right to be, she was across the room and against him, the chestplate of her armor falling abandoned at his feet. “So was I,” she breathed against his lips.
He closed his eyes, took hold of her hips (careful not to dig into her skin too hard with his bare metal hand), inhaled the scent of clean sweat and dust in her hair. Missed you, doll, he didn’t say. Not just yet.
“I meant to stop by the office,” she murmured. “The Railroad’s safehouses are under attack again and there were… disagreements at a few of the settlements.”
“And Madam Liberator of the Commonwealth has no time for a broken-down old PI,” he teased. “I’ll just put myself in standby until the world’s saved, then.”
She laughed. He felt good. Better than he had in days. There was a part of him, a big part of him if he was honest, that had wondered if he hadn’t been an experiment of a sort for her– a curiosity, and now that her curiosity was satisfied, the only thing he’d get to see those interminable and mesmerizing legs of hers do was walk away. But from the way she was pressing into him, her skin radiating heat through the thin fabric of her undershirt– no. Not an experiment, or at least one she was extremely interested in repeating.
“I think,” she said, kissing him between words, “I could use–” she reached behind him and pushed the door closed– “a break–” she pushed him against the door, warm quick fingers unbuttoning his shirt– “from saving the world.”
She pushed his shirt off his shoulders, keeping the tie on again (he carefully filed that detail away for future exploration). The light in her room was better than in his office, and he was still amazed to see the admiration in her eyes as she took in his unfinished, battered form.
She was still wearing her undershirt, and the thin leggings she wore under her armor. This was a problem. He realized he hadn’t seen her, really seen her yet, and all at once it was a tangible longing he needed to remedy. He tried to be careful, managed not to tear anything with the rough edges of his metal hand as he helped her undress.
She had the kind of curves that looked even better out of clothes than in them– the kind of body that could make a man find religion, or lose it. All that soft, pale, flushed skin was mesmerizing.
“You’re staring.” She crossed her arms under her breasts and grinned at him.
“I prefer to call it admiring the view.”
She arched an eyebrow, smirking. “You gonna stand there and look at me all day or is this investigation gonna get hands-on, gumshoe?”
With his good arm he pulled her in, every one of the multitude of tiny sensors in his synthetic skin sparking to life at the closeness of her. “If that’s how it’s going to be,” he murmured against her lips. The fingers of his metal hand caressed one breast, gently, carefully. It didn’t have the same capacity for sensation as his good hand, but a few stray nerve fibers remained embedded in the metal, and he could still feel the satisfying swell of her, the way her nipple tightened at his touch.
“That’s how it’s going to be,” she breathed. She traced the seams between his panels of skin with her fingertips, and he could swear the machinery beneath stirred as surely as if he’d had real veins with real blood rushing through them. He couldn’t help leaning into the touch, and she noticed.
“How does it feel?” she asked, voice low and husky.
What could he say? That they’d given him the sharpest of senses– because what was a detective without acute awareness of his surroundings?– but never intended them to be used for this, but somehow, whether it was a quirk in his programming or a primal urge resurfacing from human Nick’s consciousness, his body seemed to be figuring it out anyway? That it felt like something he’d never hoped to experience again and probably didn’t deserve but was going to do his damndest to hold on to?
He settled on “it feels like don’t stop,” in what came out as nearly a growl, and pulled her hips roughly against his. This was another obsolete habit held over from his other life, as his synth body wasn’t particularly more sensitive there than anywhere else, and there certainly wasn’t much for her to feel. But from the way she gasped, grinding against him, she didn’t care and so neither did he.
They weren’t going to make it to the bed, he thought hazily (most of his processes occupied with withstanding her assault on his senses). This was both very exciting and a little disappointing, because maybe he was an old-fashioned guy at heart, and maybe he wanted to take her to bed properly (as properly as he could), take her slow and deliberate, take his time.
But there was that heat, that strange aching sped-up feeling in every part of him, that need. And maybe he shouldn’t press his luck just yet. He was starting to think there might be time, maybe plenty of time if he played his cards right, and that thought was nearly as exciting as the urgent messages of proximity and contact his sensors were sending to his core processor.
Before he knew it he was lifting her easily, turning her to press her back into the wall. She made an eager noise into his mouth and wrapped her legs around his waist, pulling him closer still, and for a moment the flood of messages his body was sending his brain overwhelmed him and he couldn’t tell where his skin ended and hers began.
He must have made some sort of sound, because she leaned back, the insistent rhythm of her hips stilling, and regarded him with a slight frown. “Nick? Are you–”
“Fine, doll,” he reassured her, pressing a kiss to her collarbone. “Better than fine.” He concentrated on holding her up, letting the sensations wash over him, grounding himself in the steady rhythm of the pulse in her neck under his lips. It had been overwhelming last time, but this, here, now, nothing between them– he only hoped this old, worn body of his could keep up.
Her deft fingers were moving again, finding his most sensitive spots, sending spikes and sparks of pleasure arcing through him. Her lips were hot against his ear, warm breath stirring the ragged edge of skin below it. “Tell me how to make you feel good, Nick. Tell me what you need.”
“Tell me what you need.” Blue eyes gazing down at him through waves of blonde, her body half-lit in flashes of neon from the window. Smoke still drifting lazily from a cigarette snuffed in the ashtray by the bed. Molten heat as she slowly sank down onto him. A voice– his voice– sighing her name like a prayer– “Jenny”–
“Nick!”
He blinked, slowly, found himself staring into wide, alarmed green eyes. Jenny. No, not Jenny. Claire. He felt lost, unmoored.
She pressed her forehead against his. “Talk to me, Nick. Tell me you’re okay.”
When he pulled in breath to speak, some mechanism in his throat hitched. “Sorry, doll. Those… flashes?” He tried to laugh. “He wasn’t in a sandwich shop that time, that’s for sure.”
“Oh, Nick.” It took absolutely none of his famous detective’s intuition to see the hurt in her eyes, but there was concern there, too, for him, and a kind of understanding that made him fervently wish his optics had the ability to tear up. “I’m sorry–”
“No apologizing now, sweetheart,” he said firmly, shaking off the cobwebs of memory, fixing her with the best smile he could manage. “I’m the one who went and ruined this nice mood we had going.” He kissed her softly, but the heat, the ache in his skin was gone for the moment.
She untangled herself from him, and he let her down to the floor gently. She stayed in his arms, rested her head on his chest. He wondered what she heard in place of a heartbeat.
“We don’t have to,” she said, almost too quietly for even his sensitive hearing. “I mean. Not that I don’t want to–” his sensors picked up on her subconscious shiver, the way her pulse was still racing– “but… I can wait. For you.”
He clasped her against him, and wondered if the god Nick had occasionally invoked in his darker moments would accept a sincere thank you for this woman from a synth. “Never felt right to keep a lady waiting for long,” he murmured.
—
He stayed until Claire fell asleep, humming old songs, letting fingers of metal and skin alike trail through her hair until her breathing evened out. When he slipped out of her room, the settlement was dark and still, moonlight outlining everything in shades of gray.
He lit a cigarette, stared down at the reflection of the glowing tip and his glowing eyes in the rain puddle at his feet. He thought of neon signs flashing outside windows, soft voices in his ear, long legs around his waist. Thumping blood and aching friction and overheating motors.
Undone, he thought.