Chapter Text
Nick had only ever seen Nora cry once and it had caught him entirely off guard. She didn’t cry during their first meeting, when she recounted the tragedies that, to her, had occurred so recently. Her manner was that of a shell shocked sobriety. She fixated on facts, her words low and steady, but lingered over patterns. The most common pattern were the sounds.
She told him about what it sounded like when her reality ended, the deafening boom that had only temporarily hidden the screams of her friends and neighbors, a single ringing burst that took her country from her. Her voice was gravelly and low when she spoke of the second sound that tore her apart, the sharp snap of the gunshot that ended her husband’s life but her voice cracked only once, when she described the strangers who tore her baby from her husband’s limp hands, a move that had ended not just her society but her world.
Nick had wondered at that, wondered if maybe she searched for her child out of obligation and not love. He changed his mind when he saw her eyes the first time she killed to get closer to her goal. There was pain there, desperate and savage, but the slate brown of her gaze had been untouched by tears when she had turned to him. Her face was drawn and taut with tension but the pain was already hidden away, buried.
‘Maybe buried with her husband’, Nick had thought at the time but he had always been a bit of a romantic at heart so he dismissed the phrase as quickly as it came.
By then, there had already begun the faintest flashes of unwanted emotion when he watched her, a disgusting little burst of fondness tinged with the faintest reek of jealousy. He had filed it away as unimportant or, at the very least, unwanted. Instead, he had searched the body for clues as she searched the room for supplies, as methodical and mechanical as the human Nick had been so many years ago.
He’d expected to see her tears when she detonated the bomb. They had worked for so long, suffered so much to find her child only to uncover a dying old man with a rotten heart. She had kissed his withered forehead as she left him to waste away but had not hesitated to press the button that would end his life and his life’s work.
Her expression had been hidden from him at that final moment, turned towards the massive sinkhole that was her child’s grave but when she turned away, her eyes lit by the ringed glow of Nick’s stare, they had been as empty as the day he met her. Nick remembered reaching out to her, his affection blooming in his chest like pain, but she had brushed by him, lowering his attempted embrace with a hand that felt frozen, cold and still as her heart sometimes seemed.
He’d already loved her then, a friendship he thought was impossible finalized in the crackling words of old-world confessions and the splattered red of his final goal realized.
They went back to his office that day but she left quickly. Nick spent the evening tidying for the first time in years, a pathetic attempt for control or comfort. His office was the cleanest he had ever seen it by the time Nora returned, stinking of moonshine and wobbling on her feet.
Even then she had been expressionless, her lids lowered from the alcohol but her inhibitions still solidly in place. Nick had jumped from his chair, offering up his seat in the feeblest attempt at kindness but Nora had just stumbled by, collapsing on the floor by his desk, her back propped up against the wall nearest his chair.
She had asked him to work. She wanted to hear the scratch of his pen on paper, the whir of his mechanics that so often accompanied his focus. Nick had obliged but it hadn’t been his best work. Half of his attention was on the papers in his hand but the other half kept drifting to the real puzzle he wanted to solve, his sleeping friend, slumped and breathing quietly by his feet.
Nick had given up any thought of her tears after that. If anything could trigger her, a second bomb detonating all of her dreams and expectations should have done it but she remained stoic. The only change he could see was the abrupt absence of her dry quips.
Her humor leaving her was unsurprising, of course, but it was the only difference he could find, the detective in him twisting with the unprofessional worry that so often clouded his mind in the weeks that followed. In fact, that was what he had been dwelling on when he heard the gunshot.
She had barely said a word to him that day but she had joined him on his search for a client's missing husband without question The trail had taken them to the center of Boston, the towering skyscrapers creaking in the wind like ancient trees and Nora had wordlessly taken guard, strolling the parameter with her rifle readied, so quiet in the broken rubble that he lost track of her steps almost instantly.
The gunshot was what had alerted him to her location. He dropped the bloodied sleeve he had been studying to rush to her aid, his pistol already cocked under his thumb but his feet slowed when he spotted her. She was on her knees, crumbled next to a limp, furred body, keening like her heart had been torn from her chest.
She hadn’t looked at him when he approached or when he felt the low, surprised tone pushed from his chest at the sight of her hands, clenched tight around two large torn-away clumps of her own dark hair. She just sobbed, bent over, her body wracked with each terrible cry.
Nora was not a small woman, she was nearly Nick’s exact height and she held her stature with an intimidating girth. Her hips and shoulders were wide, her muscles bulky instead of lean and she carried a layer of fat that hinted at her child and a well-supplied prewar life. But there, on the ground, surrounded by Goliath-sized tombstones for a society collapsed under its own ambition, she looked impossibly small.
Nick joined her in the rubble, placed a cautious hand on her back like she was one of his missing marks.
“What happened?” His voice had been soft, almost dragged away by the echoing winds, but she heard him all the same.
“It...” She choked then, her face twisted in a ghoulish amount of pain, tear streaks tracing clean paths down her dusty cheeks.
“It startled me. It ran up to me from out of the alley.” Her words came half-strangled and Nick had moved closer, his hand sliding from her back to her shoulder, the closest he’d ever been to her without a rain of bullets being the cause. He looked down at the dog then. It was a mutt, skinny and small enough to show it was young. Part of its skull was missing and it stared forward with empty brown eyes.
“I shot without thinking but it wasn’t attacking me.” She was tense under his arm, unresponsive to his touch but also unmoving. If she minded his proximity, she didn’t show it.
“I think it was wagging its tail. It wanted help or affection and I...” The next sob that wracked her body sent her down, she crumbled under the weight of her pain and Nick was left clutching at air.
“I fucking killed it. I killed it. I killed it. It’s all I know how to do.” Her voice had trailed off on her final words, the last sentiment a whisper that Nick hadn’t been certain he was meant to hear. Still, the phrase pulled at his rusted-out heart as solidly as a rope might so he lifted his other hand, the faux skin on his palm cracked like old leather and he held her, the first of a very scantly few times.
He had curled around her as if his broken old body could offer protection from the world and she had cried, a bottomless sorrow for the murdered pup by their sides but also, Nick knew, for the husband who still rotted away in the hillside by her old neighborhood and for the child she had never truly gotten to love.
…
A year later, when all had been said and done and she had turned to him with a weapon in her hands as his words died on his lips, Nick found himself expecting to see those tears again. It was evening and her eyes were lit by the yellow glow of his own, the light staining her cheeks like the tears she never seemed to shed.
“Don’t say that,” her voice was low, the tone she used only when she was negotiating. It wasn’t the warm, comforting dulcimers of first terms, however. It was last chance dry, the sound cold and sharp enough to disguise the click of her safety as she readied her attack. She didn’t have a gun this time around however, her scarred fingers were wrapped around something much worse.
Nick’s pistol was by his side but he didn’t reach for it, didn’t want to.
“Do you want me to take it back? I could but I don’t think it would mean much at this point.” Dry sarcasm to spark the wick of her cool collection. He always could match her word for word and while there was a storm in his chest, betrayed by the whirling of his mechanics, his tone was the same he had always used. In a way, they were too similar, too unwilling to show their hands. He had given her a flash of his occasionally. Tonight he had finally splayed them across the table, and the bond they had seemed to break at the sight of it.
“I could take it back for you.” Nora fingered the detonator but the threat in her voice wasn’t enough to hide the pain underneath. It hurt, to know he had caused that, but the betrayal hurt more.
“I’d rather you didn’t.” He couldn’t beg, not even then. Not after the speech he’d just vomited out, like blood in his synthetic lungs.
She didn’t say anything then, just stared at him. He watched her expression and, despite everything, felt a selfish part of him ache that even this wasn’t enough for her to crack. He opened his mouth. To apologize? To reiterate? Nick would never know because the motion was enough to force her hand. Nora pressed the button, threw it at him with an expression that somewhat resembled shame, and ran.
Nick’s world lit up. His system shut down and when he came to, three days later, the only memory he had of her was the budding of their friendship and a broad emptiness that finalized with the last expression on her face, an empty stare with eyes that looked like pain.