hadriel_logs | some patients can't be saved, but that burden's not on you [CLOSED]

Entry tags:

nick valentine,
rey

some patients can't be saved, but that burden's not on you [CLOSED]

Who: Rey and Nick Valentine.
What: Some violence inspires a much needed talk between roommates/family.
Where: House 1401.
When: June 1st, a few hours after Rey's little "street brawl" with Sato.
Warnings: Blood and mentions of gore.

A hiss escapes between her teeth as Rey finishes the makeshift binder around her ribcage. "Fuck!"

It'll do, for now, as she pulls the bottom of her tanktop over the bandages. She tries not to spend too much time in front of the mirror, rather not caring to see her own already scarred face. All she does is clean up the blood with a damp towel, last on her laundry list of things to do when it comes to patching herself up.

Shit, her arm is killing her. It hangs limply at her side, being something of a challenge with every inch she has to force it. Probably dislocated. She'll have to deal with that soon, too. The sharp pain is becoming difficult to ignore.

At some point, in the middle of patching herself up in the bathroom of her shared home, she hears scratching and deep mowing sounds outside. Every now and then she glances towards the space under the door, where skinny, hairless paws continue reaching inside as if that would somehow help. It's nothing of concern, or so Rey thought, as that damned one-eyed cat that's started following her around couldn't get to her between doors. She disregards it, telling it to stop but to no avail -- it persists.

Eventually, the damned thing practically contorts itself. Body compressing and squeezing through the gap, the cat-like creature somehow manages to get from the outside to its destination.

Rey's heart skips, jumping when the hideous creature is halfway there with her back pressed to the sink. "What are you--? Hey!"

Next thing she knows, the cat is sitting upright, its gangly front paw posed between its hindquarters as it blinks up at her with its one, yellow-green eye.

Her eyes narrow. "You son of a bitch," she mutters under her breath.

"Mow."

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The look Nick gives Rey says he knows -- she'll listen. They might not always agree, but she'd listen anyway because that's what family does. They're there for one another.

Finding a good place to start is the toughest part sometimes.

"It's not just Shadow," he utters, frustration etching into the creases of his face. "It's Maketh. Danse. Me. Hell, I don't even know where to start."

For it being such a tough subject to breach, it's already a start. She leans in, bearing the posture of one who's attentive and ready to hear what her family has to say.

Maketh, she can understand; sometimes Rey herself has a difficult time with that woman. Shadow and Danse even make plenty of sense on their own.

"You?" She squints at Nick, confused. "Did something happen?"

"No, no. Nothing happened." Nothing major, and nothing recent. It's just been eating away at him, bit by bit, wearing him down the longer he's thought about it.

"I've just been doing a lot of thinking lately about the things I don't remember, wondering just how much of it I should."

And more importantly, the things he doesn't yet know and wants to, but can't.

They've lived together long enough for even Rey to notice when something has been wearing down on Nick. He carries it in his disposition, like any living, feeling human carrying emotions. Nick is more than just a machine pretending to be a person -- far as Rey is concerned these days, he is one.

Which is why thinking about him hurting in any way troubles her. He doesn't feel pain in the way a normal human would, if his physical state is any indicator. In a way, the affliction he experiences is far worse than that.

"That have anything to do with that machine you've got hooked up in your room?"

It could hardly be considered a computer, but it sure as hell isn't something any of the gods could have imagined up.

The corner of Nick's mouth quirks upward in a somber kind of half-smile, one given when he's been found out, but isn't particularly troubled by it. While he didn't exactly divulge what that thing is in his room, he didn't make any real business of hiding it, either.

"It's a terminal," he explains. "The kind you'd find it my neck of the woods. I got it when the gods had that little competition of theirs." And while he hadn't put forth a great deal of effort to make sure Tranquility won, he did do his part in keeping the peace. Thankfully, that's what he tries to do every day.

"Thing's filled with the same kinds of gizmos the scooters are," he continues, idly petting the one-eyed cat as the feline saunters past his leg. "But it works, so I guess that counts for something. I was using it to keep some notes, files and memos the Guard uses as a backup."

He pauses there, but only for a moment, and that half-smile fades. "Got some wires to connect to it, too."

Something told Rey that she might be on the right track, even now. And when Nick adds that last comment, she suspects it even more.

"Connecting wires?" Rey echoes with a slight lift of her brows. "You need those for your notes, too?"

She's been connected to a terminal enough times over the last few years of her life to know what that actually means.

"Not for my notes," he returns. He knows that she knows, but he continues anyway.

"I've been meaning to do some... poking around up there," he admits. "The more I think about it, the more gaps I find -- things I didn't realize I didn't remember. I want to know what else there is, and why."

Just what she expected, but a little confirmation doesn't hurt. "I get it," she says.

Having holes in your memories is frustrating. Rey's been there. Been lost in the not knowing. She doesn't ever want to he in that place again, without the knowledge of who and what she is.

"Is that something you should be doing on your own, though? Memories are tricky enough as they are without them being stored in data form."

Too many things could easily go wrong. One slip, deleted or misplaced or wrong script, and you could cause a whole system crash.

Rey's right: there's so much that can go wrong when futzing around with the processor that makes up his brain. He's taken a lot of blows over the years, had some shortages, the occasional crossed wire that needed soldering, and even a bout of god-induced amnesia. Still, there's plenty he doesn't know, and he can't help but wonder just how much he should. Someone like Danse might have had a grudge against him just for what he is, but he can tell when he looks the man in the eye that there's more to it than that. The question is if it's all in the future, or if there's something else in the past -- something else missing from his data banks.

Being the detective he is, Nick likes to think he remembers most of the details of his mechanical life, but that whole dream with his 'brother' has called a lot of his own memories into question. He's turned them over and over in his head, and while some of them are fuzzy, others just plain aren't there: cases where he can't recall the outcome, faces he can't put a name with. The stuff from the real Nick should have some gaps -- it always has -- but everything from when he awoke as a machine should be clear, written into his memory the same way any file would. Is his memory as faulty as any human's? Or is there something more going on?

That's what he wants to know, and if possible, fix. Nick wouldn't let just anyone fiddle around up there... but Rey isn't just anyone.

"They are," he agrees. "I'd hoped maybe I could do some of this on my own and not bother you with this sort of thing, but if there's anyone whose help I could use here, it'd be yours."

From where Rey is standing, Nick has every right to worry. Memory tinkering isn't a minor thing; it messes with your head, your identity. If something happened, someone had done something to Nick to make him forget...

The dream comes back to mind, as Rey recalls images of Nick's brother -- rapidly scanning through files on that Institute terminal. It was a dream, not reality, but the escape part was real. Nick would have no reason to dream up a synthetic identical to himself rescuing him from that place, after believing for so long that he was simply trash discarded into a dump site.

It was a dream, and yet like the experiences Nick and Firo and Maketh saw in Rey's own head during those many nights, there were had been some realness to them as well.

"It's not a bother. I'd rather help you than let you try it yourself, or try to find some random person to do it for you," she reassures him. Frowning, she hooks her good hand around the back of her neck. "I'm not a programmer, like my... father, but I've seen him mess around with the shit in my head to have an idea on what he was doing. The code might look different in yours, but I'd like to try than so nothing."

That's a risk they'd have to take regardless of who takes a peek in Nick's memory bank, though. The only person from Nick's world who might know what he's looking at is the last person who should be entrusted with Nick's code.

As Rey hesitates at the mention of her father, Nick's lip twitches, a flash of a grimace crossing him. He's well aware what she thinks of the man who made her; from what he knows, and how he feels about Rey, Nick doesn't think much of the guy himself.

"Well, you've done great keeping me in working order so far," he says with a dry smile, as though trying to lighten the mood despite the dour topic. It fades so fast: "There're just some things I've got to know. I've tried letting go of them, but all this business with Danse being here and some of the things he's said just make me wonder how much more there is that I'm missing."

There's some solace to be found in that, knowing that she's done good for Nick. It almost makes up for how much he looks after her. She puts him through so much as it is, that he thinks he'd be an inconvenience to her so not to ask for help. They're both alike in that way.

"It's hard to let go of something that's a part of you."

Especially if that part of you is a potential family member, or as close to one as something like a synthetic can get. Rey would have a hard time letting go of the memories of her brother, or even what little she has of her mother. In that respect, that fact makes them all the more precious.

Rey glances in the direction of Nick's room, before turning her eyes back to him. "Should probably tinker around with your machine for a while, first. Get used to the hardware. Have a feeling that the tech from our respective worlds might run on different OS's."

Once she has full use of both arms, that is. One saving grace about being what she is, it shouldn't take long for her to heal.

Nick knows how hard it is to let go of something -- or someone who is a part of you. The real Nick knew it just as much as the synthetic one does.

... or at least as much as he thought he did. The loose ends still plague him: were there other brothers out there he didn't know about? Other prototypes? People he'd forgotten? Do the clockwork bits of him have an expiration date? He'd never worried much about his own mortality until Hadriel, as all he considered was putting others first; he does essentially the same now thing now, but in order to take care of Rey, he has to take care of himself, as well.

And in this case, that means dealing with this memory thing before it eats him alive.

"Yeah, I'll let you do that," he returns. "Could hook it up out here if you wanted, let you get familiar with the hardware once you're back in one piece. There anything else I can do?"

Yes, her condition is on his mind, but so still are other things; that topic change might have been a slight way to dodge around them.

Rey nods. "Should work. Don't want to just jump in there, but we should probably do something about it soon than later -- we don't exactly have an abundance of time here."

Or, they do, but there's always something in between, she realizes. Something that might make this sort of thing more difficult during or after. The last thing she wants to do is squander.

And if she needs something from the gods to make her hardware and Nick's terminal more compatible, then that'll just take even more time. She'll cross that bridge when she gets to it. Right now, she's just relieved for a subject change so she doesn't have to muse such things aloud.

"Yes, actually." She waves to her limp shoulder with her good hand. "Twist my arm?" Rey requests with a crooked, almost joking smile.

That elicits a dry grin to match her smile. "Only because you asked."

He might twist her arm -- figuratively -- for other reasons another day, but for now, Nick will save it for helping Rey put hers back into its place. Careful not to accidentally kick the cat circling him, he gets back to his feet.

"Once we're done here, I'll get the wires and let you take a look at them, show you how to hook me up to the thing. It'll give you something to do while you rest up."

And she will be doing that, no ifs, ands, or buts.

"Deal."

You know it's serious when she's being agreeable for a change.

Rey starts sitting more upright on the couch as she lifts her arm over her head. She winces, a groan escaping between her teeth clenched in pain when she does so. Yeah, she's going to need some help with that. She can barely control her limb with the joint so out of place.

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some patients can't be saved, but that burden's not on you [CLOSED]

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