Nick wakes, swathed in the warmth of his bed against the cool Boston air coming in from the window. The air smells distantly of the coffee Jenny must have made before heading to work, and of cleaner. Which is odd, considering that Boston typically smells like the bad end of a dog, but the neighbors are entitled to a little cleaning every now and again. God knows he needs to tidy up, after all.

He lays there for a while yet, eyes closed, and takes in the feel of his apartment. The building sighs with the movement of the other residents, the air hanging with nostalgia and a sadness he can't quite place but grows stronger over time. It's… nice. Peaceful. He hasn't felt like this for a while. He's missed just allowing himself to just be, to exist.

But all things come to an end, and he stretches, scrunching his eyes against the bright, late-morning light and reaches with one hand for a pack of cigarettes on his nightstand.

There is one problem with this plan. Problem being, there aren't any cigarettes.

Worse, there's no nightstand. Just cold, hard linoleum under his reaching fingers. The hazy warmth of the bed starts to dissolve around him, replaced by an overwhelming sense of dread.

Nick's eyes snap open only to squint shut again against the harsh fluorescent light. This, he will decide later, when he looks back on it, is the biggest mistake of his life.

Instead of the familiar walls of his apartment, he's in a room like a hospital quarantine chamber, white linoleum on the floors and pristine walls that only amplify the unsettling prickle on his skin. Nick himself is tucked away in a corner, lying prone on the floor, one hand outstretched. His skin looks almost paperwhite in the sanitized lighting, and when he flexes his fingers it doesn't quite feel like it's his hand that's moving.

"Hello?" he says, voice hoarse and echoing off the blank, windowless walls. When the door directly across from him doesn't open and no answer springs forth from the plaster, he takes his chances moving. He pushes himself into a tense crouch, back to the wall, in one smooth motion - which is unnerving, considering the pain hunching over his desk for months on end has been giving him. Not that anything about this situation isn't unnerving, but that ache has been his constant companion for almost a year, ever since he quit field work, ever since…

Jenny.

Well.

There goes the rest of that good dream, he thinks, swallowing the lump in his throat, and stands the rest of the way up despite the long-familiar sinking pit in his stomach making a return.

In a corner, a camera fixed to the ceiling whirrs to focus on his face. It looks like the same model the Boston Police Department uses in their interrogation rooms; manually operated, the blurry, greyscale footage used mostly in court, but the red eye that's boring into his own now has unnerved many a would-be criminal into talking.

But what on Earth did he do? The Boston Police Department and the jails are the only places he can think of that use those specific cameras, but he knows the PD inside and out and he's never seen a room like this in his life. So, jail? Doesn't make sense, given that this doesn't look like a prison cell. No bars, no toilet, nothing that makes it seem like he's supposed to live here.

Which begs the question: if not prison, or the Boston PD, then where the hell is he?

There's only one way to find out.

He takes a single, slow step into the center of the room, towards that camera, and it's then that he notices three things:

One, the floor is farther away than it should be.

Two, he is naked as a jaybird.

And last but most importantly, his body is not his own.

Tall and thin, muscled, whiter than a piece of paper, and as sexless as a doll, the arms and hands and feet that are responding to the mounting panic are not his.

The fingers that reach up to card through hair rake over an empty scalp, trip over a seam on the top of a head that's not Nick's.

His heartbeat kicks up a notch and is accompanied by a soft, uncomfortable buzz that grows louder by the second. That empty pit in his stomach that's been there since Jenny died grows with it, swallowing his mind in unrelenting blackness.

Strikingly, before mechanics he doesn't understand, doesn't even know he has, overheat and he falls back into unconsciousness, he notices he doesn't have any fingernails, just the crescent shape of a cuticle etched into skin far too pale to ever be human.

Fingernails, of all things.

When Nick wakes up again, he's in a crumpled heap a few steps off the center of the room. Now, there are no illusions. No soft bed, no traffic to greet him when he wakes up.

He curls into the fetal position on the floor, scrambling to remember something, anything, from therapy. Breathing techniques, counting, distractions, anything to take him away from that damn morgue, from her corpse, her funeral, the sheer pain of it all. He doesn't open his eyes, or move. Whatever kind of body he got stuck in has a disturbing knack for staying still as the grave, and in an odd way it's almost comforting.

After a time, he resorts to the only distraction available to him short of waiting for Hell to freeze over, and traces his fingers over his hands, his legs, his face. Trying to explore the unfamiliar hills and valleys of this body without any way to look at them. Not that he'd want to, anyways, what with how well it went last time. It's easier to move if he doesn't have to look at that inhuman off-white skin, he finds, and in his own blindness he memorizes this new body that responds to his commands while his mind floats somewhere in the corner, silent and grieving.

He doesn't know the date, but he knows how long he's been on the floor down to the second - hours at first, when he discovers that his mouth is dry and brushes against the wires in the back of his throat without any pain, despite whatever's left of a gag reflex kicking in.

Three days when he finds the vents along his neck and down his sides. They're small and very well hidden unless one runs their fingers against the grain.

Four when he risks opening his eyes in a final confirmation that he - if he's even Nick Valentine, at this point - is not human.

He lays there for so long he forgets to care, and tries to force these hands that somehow are and are not his to bend. He doesn't know if it's because they're not his hands, or because the linoleum underneath them reflects the glow of his eyes and he hates it.

Because of course his eyes glow, of course he knows the time like his own name and of course he can hear the sound of whatever mechanics power this shell he's stuck in instead of a human heartbeat. Whatever he is, he's not Nick anymore. Not really, he thinks, because Valentine was five-foot-six and not the solid six-foot he is now, and had thick brown hair and hazel eyes that didn't glow, God damn it.

And fingernails. It never occurred to him that robots wouldn't have fingernails, or that lacking them would bother him more than other bits that were more important, like a heart, or a liver, or a dick. All, unfortunately, missing.

Out of habit, or perhaps out of morbid curiosity, he runs his fingers along his right shoulder, where the dips and curves of Jenny's name, penned in the elegant golden cursive worthy of a reporter once crawled it's way across his skin. Back when he was still Nick With a Pulse, before he'd ever even met Jennifer Lands, he used to trace the lines of the tattoo for comfort. Jenny's dead now, of course, and Nick is… gone. Probably. Somehow.

Regardless, he'd hoped to find that tattoo there. To restore his humanity, or something just as intangible. He traces the swirls of his soulmate's cursive around a shoulder that isn't his with unfamiliar fingers. Even if the mark isn't there and Jenny's been dead for God knows how long, he keeps her name with him, under his fingers and in whatever computer's clanging around in his head in place of a brain.

That hole in his sternum grows and swallows him again while the camera watches from the ceiling.

He doesn't stand up.

And eventually, he doesn't wake up either.