Work Text:
The edges of the gashes torn into the sides of Nick Valentine’s face and neck never stopped hurting. The pain didn’t fade. Even now, decades later, it hurt just as much as the day he got them.
For something so life changing, it felt wrong that it had been just like any other fight in the wasteland. Every single time Nick stepped out of the safety of his office he risked another incident that took something else from him. The stakes were, well, not quite higher for him as a synth, but they were different. He would never heal from the damage on his own.
All repairs were patchwork repairs.
He would never scar, his non-organic body would never age. It would simply break and break and break until one day it couldn’t break any more. He would have to live an awfully long time with this old mug.
At some point, maybe around the decade mark of this life, something changed. The daily ache of his old bones, the skittering static at the borders of missing skin, all combined. He slipped into the feeling and forgot ever having been anything else.
Sometimes, here and there, he would get a glimpse, a memory, from this life or the last one, of a pain-free moment. He stood unnaturally still as the memory lodged itself into his skull, flashing across his senses like a camera flash, only to be snatched away just as quickly.
It took a while to move past it. Those moments, though rare, hurt more than the pain these days.
In a way, he was proud of the wounds he had. They showed he had made it through terrible situations and came out the other end swinging. On the other hand, every rip in his synthetic skin bared his metal inner workings to the world at least a little bit. Sometimes he caught sight of the steel underneath, - rusting, because even when he could make himself care about the machine he lived in, it was difficult to maintain in the world he lived in. The image of it was undeniable proof his lack of humanity, but strangely,, the metal still reminded him of an open wound. On nights when he couldn’t help but feel sorry for himself, a mere glimpse of the gaping holes in his body coupled with the agony of it all would be too much, and he would stare off into the distance wishing he could cry. Times like those weren’t too helpful for his line of work. Being distracted by the pain in an inopportune moment was something that terrified him. Not in an abstract way, but rather an old and chillingly familiar one.
A client had gotten killed before because of him. More than one, but this one hurt the most because they had been so close to safety. His hand shook from the movement of new pains on top of old ones, and his promise to watch their back was quickly broken.
Ever since, he did better. He practiced, put himself in intense situations on purpose where no one but him would get hurt, and kept going.
He wouldn’t let anyone else under his care get hurt.
So Nick kept moving, forced himself through the day even when it got too much, because he knew there would be times when he couldn’t afford to take breaks, and god damn it he had to be ready.
Nick Valentine never got over the pain. He merely learned to live with it.