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"What if I just bug out? Take off? Vanish?"
"I'll hunt you down," says Nora serenely.
"And drag me back?"
"Nah," says Nora. "Just make sure you're safe. And eating right. We don't need you here."
That might be the most comforting thing she's ever said to him.
He's lying down on the couch, like one of those old cartoons of a psychiatrist's office. Being psychoanalyzed, by Nora, who's not, however, in a high-backed leather armchair on the other side of the room, with a pen and pad of paper, but perched unprofessionally on the arm of the couch, leaning her arm on the couch's back and looking down at him, benevolently, the way she does. As if there's nothing much wrong with him, really.
"I mean," she goes on, reaching down and touching his forehead lightly but firmly with the backs of her fingers, like she's checking to see if he's really too sick to go to school, "we'd miss you. I'd miss you, and Max would miss you, and Elizabeth, and Shaun, and Tom, and Emily, and Victoria-- and we'd talk about you a lot, like when we were reading a book you'd like, or when a new synth came home, or when we saw Des or Doc Carrington, or when I told stories about the old world. We'd say how much we missed you, or just get quiet for a bit, and know what everybody was thinking. That we all hoped you'd decide to come home one day, and be with the people who love you. But we don't need you. None of us do."
"What about--"
He can't say it.
He can't look at her, either. He looks at the ceiling, instead.
It's not the stone ceiling he got kind of used to at the Castle, in the library where she tucked him in, where synths came and went and gathered in the evenings, the air warm with their collective heat, just a notch above human. It's not the cracked, stained, once-white plaster ceiling of her old house at Sanctuary, where he used to lie on the ruined couch and try to imagine her old life, try to think of the right things to say to her, to make her laugh, to make her stay, long enough for the Railroad's purpose. Having no idea what he was playing with, what kind of fire.
This is a new ceiling. Metal-reinforced wood, carefully sanded and weatherproofed. They all pitched in, once the council decided that even the Castle, of Minuteman legend, was getting too small to hold Nora Bowman's family.
Their new base of operations is the better part of what used to be Cambridge. Nora and her council chose it after long, serious deliberation, their heads bent over maps, considering. Dee wasn't at the meeting, but Emily and Danse were expansive, effervescent, in the library afterwards, talking over each other about the centrality of the location, the pre-existing houses that just needed to be repaired and shored up and cleaned out, the old hospital that could be turned into a combination medical and research facility, the old campus library, the Red Rocket station nearby, so much room to build, to rebuild, from the heart of the Commonwealth outward.
(It's not so far from the black crater of the Institute, either, or the Cambridge police station, where so many of Danse's former comrades died. But the kingdom Nora's claimed for her children is haunted and blighted by grief, no two ways about it. From the Castle wall, Danse could see where the Prydwyn used to float at anchor, before Dee sent Nora aboard with explosives; Elizabeth says she feels a lurch of homesickness, sometimes, just seeing the sky, the rooflessness overhead. There's no dodging or fleeing or hiding from the hurt, really; there's just the decision, taken every day, to tilt your chin at it, and hold on tight, and stay.)
Nora says, "What about who, Dee?"
Goddammit, she knows who.
She says, "Are you talking about General Bowman's first grandchild? With the horde of expectant aunts and uncles? Need you? You're gonna have to sign up for a time slot to see your own kid."
The last three words sink in like--
Like Hancock's fingers around his neck, when he came home without Nora, the time he got her captured and tortured. Or like X6's fingers on his upper arms, when he went to try to bring Nora back her son. Or like Elizabeth's fingers on his shoulders, curled around the back of his neck, when she clings to him, as if he's solid enough to hold her up, keep her safe.
Only these fingers aren't on his skin, they're wrapped around his heart and his stomach, tight. Warm, alive, but inexorable and inescapable as iron.
"Oh, Dee," says Nora, her voice a balm, a beacon, a lifeline, bright and soft and easy, as if-- "It's OK, sweetheart. Everything's gonna be OK."
After a bit, Dee's throat too tight for argument, she starts to hum, a song he doesn't know, and then she sings, in her low, clear voice, with little cracks of breath in it, the voice of a girl he bets used to sing along with the radio a lot, before the world ended:
"O to grace how great a debtor
Daily I'm constrained to be.
Let thy goodness, like a fetter,
Bind my wandering heart to thee."
He says, forgetting he can't speak, "I've seen that. In an old hymnal. In a church."
"Maybe our old church," says Nora. "We had Shaun baptized, up in front of everybody, and he loved it, the water, and everybody standing up, saying, "We receive you into the household of God."
..............
He makes it back to the house-- his house, their house, although home still has too many meanings, too many echoes, to say easily-- on his own feet, although he isn't sure how. Time skips a bit on him lately. Too many thoughts crowding in. His autopilot seems to be mostly functional, though, and when it isn't, he just blinks back in to a bunch of fond smiles, like being this twitterpated is only to be expected of an expectant--
Of an--
He makes it in the door.
The living room and kitchen are tidy. They both like it like that, and it turns out so does he, although he'd wash the windows and scrub the floors, tidy and dust and polish, even if he didn't, just to please them. He does what he can.
Elizabeth's lying down on her side on the re-upholstered, patchwork couch, her cheek pillowed on the worn khaki cloth covering Max's thigh, Max's brown fingers playing gently with her golden hair. They both look up at Dee; they both smile.
"Hey, man," says Max, and holds out his other hand. "Come sit."
Dee walks to the couch, but he doesn't sit; he goes down on his knees instead, on the floor, at Max's feet, lays his cheek down on Max's knee.
He can smell Elizabeth's hair, the soap she washes it with, something she and Tanvi and the others in the lab have started making, and the clean water that rinses it, and the sun that dries it. She lets him brush it out sometimes, bury his face in its homey light. Max's leg radiates heat.
"Hey," says Max again, and Dee can hear the grin on his warm, husky voice. "Baby's not even born yet and I already got a lap full. What am I gonna do once it pops out?"
"We can give it to Nora," says Elizabeth, sounding sleepy and contented. "She'll take good care of it."
"She says I'm gonna have to sign up for a time slot if I even wanna see it," Dee agrees, eyes shut.
Max says, "Not many newborn babies lucky enough to have so many relatives that don't sleep."
"Not many mothers lucky enough, you mean," says Elizabeth.
Max chuckles, low and deep, and puts a hand on the back of Dee's neck.
...............
At first they just talked, the three of them, in the library, or the diner, or on top of the wall, or wherever the three of them wound up. They talked about the Castle, about the Commonwealth, about Nora.
About the Institute, Elizabeth and Max both cautious at first, uncertain of each other, watching each other's reactions, then growing bolder and bolder, speaking their minds, Elizabeth listening and nodding as Max spoke, Max holding still and listening to Elizabeth.
It was when Elizabeth started to cry, one evening, in the diner, just the three of them, almost silently, her lips and eyelids and nose pinkening, her breath coming in strained little gasps, that Max, for the first time, touched her. Took her hand in his, held it, said nothing.
It was Elizabeth who said, "I'm sorry--"
"It's OK," said Max, gently. "It's worth crying over."
"But I'm not the one who--" Elizabeth's breath caught, was sucked in hard, shivered.
"If it hurts, it hurts," Max said, his voice still gentle. "It's OK, doc. Just breathe."
Elizabeth pulled his hand to her, suddenly, pressing it to her solar plexus, clutching it like a precious treasure salvaged from some incalculable disaster, and Max didn't startle or bristle, didn't pull away.
She said, her greeny-browny-gold eyes fixed on Max, "Why are you so kind to me?"
Max smiled, and Dee felt a bleak little chill of-- not jealousy, it was good to see Max turning that warm sweet smile on Elizabeth, good to see her relax a little in its glow-- but of something much more familiar, something he should never have gotten-- unused to.
The way people looked at each other. And not at him.
Max said, "Started out, because you were Jonah's girl, and I figured I had to get along with you, to be with him."
He turned, smiled the smile right at Dee, for a sunlit moment before he turned back to Elizabeth, and added, "But you're OK, doc. He's not as dumb as I thought, picking an Institute human, with so many of us fine synths around."
"Like any of you have bad enough taste to kiss me," said Dee, mostly to break the tension, and Max laughed, and said, "Never gave me the chance, did you?"
...............
Actually, Max doesn't like kissing on the lips, all that much. He's physically affectionate, with both of them, petting them like he is now, like they're cats, slipping an arm around Elizabeth's thickening waist, kissing her on her ear or her belly, or Dee on his cheek or the nape of his neck or the little bone-knob at his wrist, and he's generous with his smiles, too, his intent listening expression, like nothing either of them says could ever possibly bore him, his warm throaty laugh when Dee tries to be funny, when Elizabeth's charming or awkward or charmingly awkward, which she is, a lot.
But when he does kiss either of them on the mouth-- and he does, every so often-- it's chaste, courtly almost. Lips closed, swift, but too soft to be called a peck.
He doesn't sleep, of course, but he'll lie down with them sometimes at night, if they ask, and if he feels like it. On Elizabeth's other side, his lean arm slung across her, his hand lightly cupping the knobble of Dee's hip, buckling her in, or on Dee's other side, spooned to his back, synth-heat easing Dee's middle-aged ex-agent war-wound aches and pains, or--sometimes, not often-- between them, so they blink sleepily at each other with stupid, purblind human bliss across his perfect chest.
Other nights, if they don't ask, or if he's feeling restless, he smiles his slow, easy smile and leaves them to their own devices, which is how Elizabeth got knocked up, which makes this whole thing, if you think about it, completely Max's fault.
Elizabeth agrees.
"Why did we even make you," she complained to Max, once they realized, "if not to keep us out of trouble?"
Max laughed, the laugh that undoes knots in Dee that he isn't even conscious of until they loosen, and said, "Caught me, doc. Falling down on the job."
"Just so it doesn't happen again," said Elizabeth, in her primmest tones, and Max and Dee both laughed.
They laugh a lot together, the three of them. More than Dee has, since-- well. For a long time.
Max is humming softly to himself now, like Nora, but a song Dee does know, one of the songs from Diamond City Radio, his fingers in Dee's hair. Just humming, but Dee knows the words to this one.
I love those dear hearts and gentle people...
Elizabeth says, "When the baby comes, what will we name her?"
"Her?" says Max. "You guys got that ultrasound imager up and running already?"
"No," says Elizabeth. "Not yet. I just have a feeling."
"Could call her Nora," says Max. "After grandma."
"Every human female age six and under in the Commonwealth is named Nora," says Dee.
"Naveena isn't," says Elizabeth, and yawns, a little kitten meep.
Max says, "Anybody you two want to name her after? Family?"
"No," says Elizabeth, who doesn't talk about whatever family she might have had in the Institute. Dee's not exactly in a position to push her for background information she isn't eager to volunteer. She likes his stories, but her limpid gaze, the color of moss and earth and sun reflected in the little brook behind Sanctuary Hills, is the ruination of his once well-oiled lie machine. If she pushed him, he'd have to tell her everything, or cry, or both. He's glad she hasn't pushed him.
He says, "No."
"Orphans of the storm," says Max, a thoughtful small head-shake in his voice. "I wasn't even born, and I've got the most family of the three of us. Most of 'em pretty protective of their own names, though. Imagine if we tried to call ours Victoria."
Dee hopes the sound he makes passes for a laugh at the idea of Victoria's indignation, instead of the involuntary outrush of air, the punched-stomach inverted gasp, of Max saying ours.
Elizabeth says, "We could--" and trails off.
"Could what, Elizabeth?" Max asks, careful and precise as always over her name, the way he has been since she first asked him to use it, meting out each syllable with equal emphasis. Neither of them-- Dee or Max-- has ever used any of the many possible diminutives: Liz, Lizzie, Ellie, Betsy, Beth. None of them seem to fit her, the way Elizabeth does. She's an old-fashioned girl, Dee teases her, and she blushes and says, Hardly.
She says, slightly muffled, as if she's buried her face against the warmth of Max's thigh, "Nothing."
"C'mon," says Max.
There's a commotion, a stirring and creaking and shifting and rocking, as Elizabeth sits up. Dee holds still, as Max's hand goes still on his hair, his attention shifted to Elizabeth.
"What's up?" he says.
Elizabeth says, "I was just thinking. If you both-- if you thought-- it would be appropriate. And if it does turn out to be a girl. That we could name her Glory."
Fingers squeeze Dee's heart again, taking his next breath away, so that he chokes for it, tries not to make a sound.
He can't always remember Glory's exact face, but he flashes on it in that moment, her grin and the smack of her hard palm against his when they'd finished a job together, and she looks so much like Max--
It's been that long now, that she's been gone. That his old life has been over, that his wakings are to his new one. That it isn't Max who looks like Glory, now; it's the other way around.
Max says, his voice quiet, "Dee? What do you think?"
Dee can't speak, he can't lift his head, he can't even nod. He'll sob if he does. Embarrassing himself. Elizabeth and Max won't laugh at him, because they're both deeply kind and indulgent people, or why would they tolerate him at all, but still.
He reaches, instead. Blindly, groping, up.
It's Elizabeth's hand that takes his, soft, the way not many people's hands are soft. Elizabeth works hard, hard enough that Dee and Max sometimes have to go haul her, protesting, out of the lab for dinner, but it's not the kind of work that calluses your palms, whatever she and Tanvi and the others are doing. The Bioscience division, they call themselves, with less and less wry laughter, just like their laboratories are looking less and less makeshift, needing fewer quotation marks around them. Advanced Systems is down at Poseidon Energy; Robotics has ceased operations, now that synths aren't quite as disposable a commodity, and Synth Retention, Nora jokes, is in the library, its own building now, where she lures wayward synths in with books and snacks and good fellowship, where the air's always warm.
He's spent so long-- running scared. The walking wounded. Knowing he wouldn't survive another hurt like the one that had taken and mangled him, turned him-- by the time he could really remember anything again-- into something different. Someone else. Nobody much. Nobody likely to be loved, or love, not in a way that would hurt like that, not again.
How did he get here? Little by little, trembling and skittish, but so cold and so hungry and so hurt, and they were so warm, their hands and arms open, and now he's--
Max says, more firmly, "Dee?"
So-- obediently, the way you used to promise to love and honor and obey, or was it cherish, or does it matter-- he does lift his head. Lifts up his eyes, his pretty blue eyes, to Max's face. Max's eyes, dark, like the rich earth where tatoes and carrots grow, and Elizabeth's new hybrids.
Max's warm fingers touch Dee's cheek, stroke it.
Elizabeth's eyes are on him too, clear and bright and hopeful.
"Yes," he says, and his voice cracks and his eyes heat up, but hell. Hell. If not here, where. He's home. "I like that. Glory."
"That's our girl," says Max, and whichever one he's talking about, he's right.