Sloan really needed to learn to stop opening bathroom stalls.
"Nick, I am so, so sorry."
What was this? The third time?
Nick was sitting on the floor, his eyes glaring yellow from the darkness.
Probably reconsidering his offer to help.
"I just-" he sighed, and shook his head. His hands were twitching against the floor as he very obviously fought to urge to grab his leg.
Or at least, what was left of it.
Who the hell had decided it was a good idea to booby trap bathroom stalls with grenades?
"What in the world possessed you to open that door? What the heck were you hoping to find?" His voice was somewhere between incredulous, angry, and just plain old downright confused.
What had Sloan been hoping to find?
A working toilet.
And...toilet paper.
And some more Abraxo cleaner for Stimpacks…
And whatever other valuable things Commonwealthers liked hiding in bathroom stalls.
These people were weird, it wasn't too far of a stretch to think they'd put valuable things in a bathroom. Someone had thought it was a good idea to store radioactive material underneath a gas station for crying out loud! Who was to say there wasn't a stall out there somewhere with hoards of...of food, or blankets, or ammo or money out there somewhere, just waiting for someone to open it?
"I was looking for stuff, okay? And don't you even start, because without all this 'junk' I spend my time gathering, Sanctuary Hills would still be a radioactive ghost town, and last time I checked, you weren't complaining about having a roof over your head that didn't leak enough to fill fifteen buckets."
Fifteen, big metal buckets. That was how Nick managed to keep his office and apartment from getting flooded every time it rained.
Diamond City, the so-called "Jewel of the Commonwealth", was a craphole, and even with all the resources around them, no one did anything about it.
The roofs leaked, they had no windows to speak of, the walls were drafty, the roads were made of dirt, and they had an entire stadium at their disposal.
Preston and his gang had been awed by the state Sanctuary Hills was in when they got there. They acted like it was heaven on Earth.
Sloan hadn't even started clearing away the dead trees yet. There was broken glass everywhere, mold on everything, houses that had actually collapsed, houses that were threatening to, and not to mention the dead bodies of everyone who hadn't been in the Vault when the bomb dropped.
Sloan had assured them that they could all stay in the Vault until they got repairs finished, and…
They'd stared like they'd never heard the word repair before.
Mama Murphy had started laughing, and Preston shook his head, assuring with the utmost confidence that they would be fine setting up camp in one of the abandoned houses.
They'd started toward Sloan's.
They were persuaded to stay elsewhere.
Sloan didn't want anyone going in that house except for Coddsworth. Not until…
Not until Shawn was safe.
And that was exactly the reason that they were now sitting in the bathroom of a stupid building filled with stupid raiders, or Gunmen, or Triggers, or, or whatever the hell it was that this group of murderous idiot psychos called themselves.
And it was the reason that Nick was now missing everything from the shin down on his right leg.
If Kellogg hadn't taken Shawn, Sloan wouldn't have had any reason to go looking around in bathroom stalls in the middle of a half-destroyed building in a half-destroyed city in the middle of the apocalypse.
Nick glared. "There is nothing wrong with my bucket system, thank you very much. I don't care about what things used to be like, okay? This is a hard world we live in, and we work with what we have."
Sloan couldn't believe what he'd just said.
"You-you work with what you have?" Had the radiation killed off all intelligence on the planet?
Sloan stood abruptly, ignoring the trail of blood that was left on the floor from...well, Nick hadn't been the only one standing too close to the grenade when it went off.
It was just too bad his endurance wasn't as high as Sloan's. If he'd had the absolute luxury of being cryogenically frozen and experimented on for the past two centuries, maybe he'd still have his foot.
As it was, with the way the world was now, Sloan was pretty sure that Nick would be a cripple for the rest of his life.
Well, that was if Nick, or any of these other idiots, had anything to say about it.
Sighing loudly, Sloan stalked over to the backpack propped against the doorway in the next room over, barely even limping.
"What?" Nick called out, "You gonna just leave me here now that you've gone and gotten my leg blown off?" When he didn't get an immediate response, Sloan heard him mutter under his breath, "Some friend you are…"
Resisting the biggest eye roll in history, Sloan dug through the backpack, anger starting to warm the blood that was unfortunately still leaking from a certain leg that had been too close to a certain, idiotic, useless booby trap.
What the hell was the point in booby trapping something if you didn't even have anything hidden there? That was the point of booby traps! To protect things!
Now where had it gotten to? Sloan had asked Nick to carry it until they could find a merchant-or at least a sturdy table, or a patch of floor that wasn't too filthy-but wow, for a computer, that guy was absolutely useless when it came to organization.
There were several very distinct pockets on the outside of the backpack, and all Nick had to do was put it in the right pocket. But no. He'd tossed it right in with the miscellaneous stuff, even though he'd been told that it was supposed to go in the topmost, right hand pocket.
Finally, Sloan found it, buried in the very bottom of the bag.
"Nick, be very glad you're traveling with me, as opposed to, you know, Trashcan Carla. You'd probably be scrap metal by now." An even more sarcastic comment waited behind what were probably the last white teeth in existence, but Sloan sighed and remained silent instead, letting the statement hang as it was.
"Yeah, well…" Nick glared, yellow eyes hard. "It's already looking to end that way isn't it? You know, my first conscious memories are of waking up in a pile of other failed prototypes. It'd be poetic if I ended the same way, don't you think? Once scrap metal, always scrap metal."
Oh god, spare the melodrama. He was a robot. He'd lost a foot. And Sloan had figured out how to turn off his pain receptors after his constant complaining and muttering and, oh, not to mention his many failed attempts at trying to sound philosophical while, still, inevitably, complaining that he had to feel pain just like everyone else.
Apparently, the Institution couldn't be bothered to program logic into any of its robots.
Or maybe that was the reason Nick was a failure. Maybe it was because he was such a complete and utter idiot who didn't realize that pain was essential to being healthy and not dying from blood loss from a wound you didn't even know you had!
Not to mention the fact that he got mad when Sloan stole ammunition and weapons from the people who were trying to kill them.
"Which do you prefer, Nick?" Sloan held up the roll of duct tape, and kicked at the random junk and debris scattered across the floor. "Classic wooden peg-leg, or something more...sci-fi?"
Nick stared. "Okay, Icebox, you have to work with me here." He said slowly, as if talking to an idiot, "You know those two hundred years of language evolution you missed? Yeah, I think they're starting to show a bit, 'cause I don't understand a word you're saying." He raised an eyebrow. "You lost me at classic."
And...once again. Radiation. Brain damage. An entire species of idiots.
Although Nick wasn't technically human, so he didn't really count.
"I-me, Sloan, the one who saved your robotic butt from that gang-am going to make you a new leg. You know what a leg is, right? It's one of the things that you walk around on. Now, you can either have a metal one, or you can have a wooden one. And don't worry, this one's just going to be temporary until we can get back to Sanctuary Hills, but it'll serve its purpose just fine."
Nick blinked.
Sloan resisted the urge to groan loudly, and shoved one hand through the roll of duct tape.
"Fine! Fine! I'll pick for you, otherwise we'll just be sitting here for the rest of eternity! Wood it is!"
There was a very convenient toilet plunger lying on the ground a few feet away that, like the rest of the world, seemed to have fared a lot better than anyone could have hoped. The fact that buildings were still even remotely standing was...amazing, actually.
If only people actually put in the effort to rebuild the ones that had fallen down…
Nick probably didn't even know what a toilet plunger was, so Sloan could enjoy this entire thing as a private joke. And...come to think of it...most people these days probably didn't know what a toilet plunger was either…
Sloan blinked, crouched on the dirty floor, one hand frozen in mid air, reaching toward the plunger.
Oh god, it was a horrible thought.
That…
It couldn't…
It was too horrible to think about.
Sloan grabbed the toilet plunger, and went to kneel at Nick's side. "Stretch your leg out and hold still."
"What are you-" Nick started to question.
"Hold. Still. And be quiet, you don't want the Gunmen to hear us."
"You mean the Gunners?"
"Whatever they're called. Now shhh. And hold still you baby."
A minute later, Sloan was glad Nick's pain receptors had been deactivated. It probably would have been a lot more difficult to attach the toilet plunger to what remained of his leg otherwise.
First, a wad of old cloth had to be pushed up into the inside of his leg to protect the wiring from getting damaged, and then the plunger had to be measured against his other leg-and Nick was grumbling and muttering the entire time because apparently he couldn't see the reason behind any of it, which was just completely and utterly confounding-and then it had to be broken off at just the right spot, pushed up inside so it rested against the cloth, and then all of it had to be duct taped into place.
All in all, it only took around ten minutes, and it actually wasn't that bad of a repair job. Well, if you were overlooking the fact that the ever-serious Nick Valentine now had a toilet plunger for a leg.
Sloan held out a hand after making sure to wrap several more layers of the duct tape around his leg and the wood of the handle to make certain it would remain secure. "Can you stand?"
Nick stared at the proffered hand for a few moments, brow furrowed in some emotion Sloan couldn't read.
Then he sighed, and gave in, accepting the hand that was offered, and allowing himself to get pulled to his feet.
He wobbled unsteadily for a few moments, leaning heavily on Sloan as though he was afraid he would fall, before gaining his balance, testing his new leg out with wide eyes and raised eyebrows.
"Hell-Icebox, what-" He couldn't seem to string a single sentence together as Sloan slowly released him to stand on his own.
"So…" Sloan eyed him carefully to make sure he wasn't going to topple over as he tapped the rubber part of the plunger against the floor experimentally. "Does this mean you'll stop treating me like a terrible person who would turn serial killer any moment just because I stole ammunition from the guy that was about to shoot us?"
Nick lowered his eyebrows just so he could raise one again. "I never accused you of murdering innocent breakfast foods." He sounded offended.
It was Sloan's turn to stare. "That was a joke...right?"
Nick's glowing eyes stared impassively for a few moments, before the corner of his mouth slowly turned upward in a smile.
"Well," he said thoughtfully, lifting one hand to scratch at his chin, "I suppose there are some advantages to traveling with you." His brow furrowed, and he looked toward the blackened stall. "Although I feel compelled to point out again that it's your fault I lost the limb in the first place."
He took a hesitant step forward, and then another, and another, his face cracking into an even wider smile than before.
He kind of looked like an idiot, and it was pretty entertaining.
Sloan went to snag the backpack before Nick could get too far away, and waltzed proudly back over toward the door that led deeper into the building.
"Come on, Tin Man, let's go kick some Gunner butt."