They don't sleep except for a couple of stolen minutes on the way back to see Nick. It's not enough, but Clara pushes on anyway, and Deacon doesn't try to change the pace.

It's weird walking into Diamond City with Deacon by her side instead of guarding the gate as Clara slinks in. Clara catches herself, too many times, reaching down to pat Dogmeat and not finding his comforting presence there.

Deacon either doesn't notice her the first couple times that she reaches for Dogmeat or he doesn't think it's comment-worthy until the third time. "If it makes you feel better, boss, you can scratch my head."

Clara hates the blush that crawls up her neck, every blotch a sign of her own body betraying her, and the betrayal worsens when she sees Deacon smirk at her. The thought flits through her mind that she doesn't know how old he is. He's fit, clearly, and a little better fed than the average wastelander, but there are lines that don't go away when he stops smirking, and if she looks closely at the skin around his sunglasses Clara thinks she can make out a few wrinkles around his eyes, too.

It's silly to be thinking about this when Nick supposedly has information about where Shaun is, so Clara shakes her head and lengthens her stride. Deacon stays tight on her heels in the bastardized catcher's uniform that all the Diamond City guards wear, and nobody thinks twice about stopping them until they run into Nat.

"Hey, lady! You're Piper's friend?" Nat says, voice a little less abrasive when she lights on Clara's vault suit. Clara nods, and Nat's face brightens immensely. "Here! Your interview with my sister sold out, but I saved you a copy!"

Clara doesn't have the heart to tell Nat that her English reading comprehension is even worse than her spoken English, so she tucks it into her pack and thanks Nat before scurrying away as fast as her legs can carry her.

"Not going to read your debut in the press, Atlas?" Deacon asks, and Clara doesn't stop walking to answer him.

"B-bigger fish to f-fry, Deacon." Clara hopes desperately that she is using that idiom right, and she must have been, because she doesn't think Deacon would have let her get away with it without poking fun if she hadn't.

Clara stops outside the detective agency, stills herself with a deep breath, and knocks twice on the rickety door. Deacon gives her a look, one with a raised eyebrow to match, and Clara matches her look with her own.

"No one's knocked since 2077, Atlas," Deacon says, but they're interrupted by Nick answering the door.

Nick would look like a detective out of a film if not for the mechanical bits, Clara thinks, and Deacon must have been right. He looks surprised that anyone would be rapping on the door, but Clara hears Ellie behind him say, "Oh, is that Clara? She's the only one who's ever knocked. They should really start that practice up again."

Clara feels the heat come into her face again, but Nick just smiles at her kindly. "Come on in, kid. We've got a lot to talk about."

Deacon looks at Clara in mock outrage. "I can't believe that you'd let another man call you kid."

"I c-can't believe that y-you never s-stop talking," Clara shoots back, as snarkily as she can when her stutter seems to worsen whenever there's a blush on her face.

Nick's eyes widen in recognition when he sees Clara's companion. "Deacon. Haven't seen you 'round these parts since I lost my Geiger counter.

"Yeah, well," Deacon says smoothly, "The shop's kind of out of commission at the moment."

Nick steps to the side to let them in, and Clara could hit herself. Deacon and Nick make for a logical partnership; of course they know each other. Nick's a synth on the inside in Diamond City, a place where people generally don't trust each other even as far as they can throw them, and Deacon's intelligence network seems to have tendrils everywhere.

Ellie greets Clara with a hug and a kiss on the cheek, affection that's surprising but not unwelcome. Ellie grips both her shoulders and says, "I'm so glad to see you! Do you want anything to drink?"

Clara shakes her head. Nick says, in what can only be described as a friendly scold, "She didn't come here for hospitality, El."

Ellie rolls her eyes, but backs off, and Clara takes a seat. Deacon stands just behind her, and Ellie takes a seat at what is normally Nick's desk. Every muscle in Clara's body is tense, and if someone surprised her now, she would easily jump through the shoddy ceiling of Nick's office.

Nick sighs like he doesn't know where to begin before leading with, "I found Kellogg."

Atlas's back goes ramrod straight when Nick says he knows where Kellogg is. Mumbling something under her breath in that same language that Deacon doesn't understand, Atlas quiets when Nick acts like he's going to continue.

"He's holed up in Fort Hagen, an old army base west of here. I scoped it out a bit. Didn't get too close, but the place has several turrets up top and it's crawling with synths. If my pre-war memories serve me right, there's a command center underneath. Kellogg's there; I'd put my money on it."

Atlas nods and stands, making a motion like she's ready to go and ready to go now, but Nick says, "Wait."

If Atlas's hair was ever down from the bun that's so tight it must give her headaches, it might have whipped her in the face. Deacon marvels at how there's never a strand out of place. There's dirt smudged on her face, a rip in her vault suit that exposes skin near her ribs that should be at least covered by raider leathers if nothing else, but her hair stays as close to immaculate as possible at all times.

"You're no use to your son dead, Clara. Don't do anything stupid."

Atlas looks like she's got a biting remark dancing there just on the edge of her tongue, terror making her want to lash out. Deacon knows how that feels; it's a defense mechanism. He beats her to the punch, hoping to save her from saying something she might regret to Nick. "I'm the beauty, boss is the brains. I'm plenty of stupid for the both of us."

It works as a defusal of a bomb that may or may not have been ready to go off, and Ellie grips Atlas tight when Atlas says goodbye. Atlas steps out of the building, and Deacon makes to follow her, but not before Nick can say, "Deacon. Watch out for her."

Deacon acts like he doesn't hear, but he files it away, and when the door to Nick's office swings shut behind him, he asks, "Atlas? Still firing on all cylinders?"

"I d-don't know what that m-means," Atlas says, but begins her stride towards the gate. Her legs have to be at least a little shorter than his; Deacon doesn't know how she's keeping up that pace, but jogs to catch up with her before falling into stride.

"Was asking if you were okay, boss."

"P-peachy."

They don't exchange words again, ascending from the markets to the wasteland after stopping to pick up every bit of ammo they can afford. If Deacon counts the time, he and Atlas have been on the move for thirty-six hours, and they've gotten two hours of sleep between the two of them – an hour for Atlas and an hour for him. Atlas isn't showing any sign of stopping this pace.

Their subtlety compliments each others' skillsets. Deliverer is the perfect weapon for Atlas, letting her kill in the mid-range she likes without alerting anyone but the mark she's already shot to her presence, and if she does get caught, Deacon can almost always take out the person that's onto her. It's been a while since he's worked with a partner long-term (long-term being more than about three days); his last one had been Glory, too many moons ago, and he had known they weren't going to work out before the op even started.

This feels good. Refreshing, even, like there's a part of him that had wanted this and he hadn't even realized it. Whether he deserves this partnership is another thing entirely.

They are a few miles from Fort Hagen when Atlas's gait slows. She still shows no sign of stopping, but Atlas has slowed down and she is breathing more heavily than she has the last forty-eight hours now.

"Atlas."

When he says her codename the first time, she doesn't respond, just lightly picking her steps forward.

"Atlas." When Deacon calls out a second time, she hears him, and the fire is still there in her eyes but it's dulled to an ember. She's exhausted, and on the verge of tears, terrified for her son.

"We c-can't stop. My son n-needs me," Atlas says before he even says another word.

"Your son isn't going to have anything left but a corpse unless you recover for a minute before you go in after Kellogg."

Atlas clenches and unclenches her first before looking in the general direction of where Fort Hagen should be. When she looks back to Deacon, her jaw loosens, and Deacon expects an argument, but what he gets from her is, "Okay."

There's something a lot like a montage in her head, images flitting in and out that never solidify but are just real enough to make her feel.

The realest image is maybe the first one, Clara lying on a hospital bed with her feet propped up. There are stringy strands of hair clinging to her forehead, matted there by stress, and a few too many doctors there for Clara to feel comfortable. She thinks the baby's cresting, if the pain on her face is any indicator.

The first night home from the hospital may as well be a nightmare unto itself. Nate isn't home; Clara can't remember why, but the baby is crying and she's got a knife picked up from the kitchen and she's so tired that she can't even see straight. Suddenly she's over the bed with the knife in her hand and all Clara remembers is shame, so much shame that she's never divulged the fact that she almost killed Shaun herself when he wasn't even a week old.

The doctor tells her she's undernourished and, as a result, so is Shaun. He's lost weight instead of gained it and the fallout between her and Nate afterwards is enough to make Clara wonder if her father was right and she really had made a mistake coming to America at all.

The piano is a bright spot in a dark, dark night, a beautifully tuned masterpiece that brings back songs of Denmark that Clara had worried she might never hear again. Nate even smiles when she plays it, and Shaun stops crying long enough to listen to thirty seconds of music before erupting into tears again.

Clara finally jerks awake when she feels herself hand Shaun over to Nate, this baby she wasn't even sure she wanted that now she's scouring the Commonwealth to find, and she's crying. Clara's has rivulets running down her face in a way that's so dramatic it reminds her of a soap opera. She fell in love with her son somewhere along the line, when he was crying so much that she was getting barely two hours of sleep a night and when breastfeeding was leaving her exhausted and underweight. There's a part of her that's incomprehensibly thankful that she didn't have to relive coming up out of the vault again, rediscovering Sanctuary as a ruin.

She wonders if Deacon heard her, then realizes she doesn't care. He did hear or he didn't, and it clicks into place for Clara that she's grieving, that this has been trauma.

Clara's never understood the word traumatized before, but she gets it now.

Atlas's sleep is restless, and Deacon knows a nightmare when he sees one. She gets two hours of sleep before she comes to relieve Deacon of his watch, and Atlas wakes him after six hours.

Her eyes look downright bloodthirsty when she shakes him awake, this clever little vault girl. "Where's the fire?" Deacon asks, and she's already packing up camp to get on the move.

"I'm going to kill the man who stole my s-son and made me a widow."

Clara's voice is steady, only wavering on the word son. Deacon doesn't think that this will make her feel any better, killing Kellogg – killing the Deathclaws didn't bring Barbara back, after all – but he's also pretty confident that that's a lesson she has to learn on her own.