I Know That Nick's Whole Personal Mission To Kill Eddie Winter Kinda Gets Glossed Over In The Game And

I know that Nick's whole personal mission to kill Eddie Winter kinda gets glossed over in the game and Nick's emotions regarding everything he's been through are only lightly touched on, but y'all best believe that Nick and his thoughts/feelings on everything are gonna get MESSY in my fic.

Nick woke up in the fucking garbage and throughout the game we see him be- (what I would refer to as) -passively suicidal and have some very deep-rooted self-esteem issues. He doesn't see himself as a person, he doesn't really stand up for himself- (aside from a snarky comeback here and there) -when other characters treat him like shit, he is CONSTANTLY throwing himself into extremely dangerous situations to help people without any care to whether or not he'll come out of it in one piece, he refers to himself almost exclusively using insults, he asks the PC if his face is really the last one they want to see, etc. etc.

Nick literally sees himself as some shitty knockoff of the "real" Nick Valentine, a pretender, a ghost, and like...that's gotta fuck him up a little---especially given that he thinks the Institute, the people who made him, just tossed him in the trash. He thinks that he's unwanted and about half of the Commonwealth just reinforces that based on the fact that he's a synth, there's no fucking way that this man is well adjusted in the slightest.

Not to mention the fact that he REMEMBERS BEING the original Nick Valentine, he has all these memories and flashes of things that happened to him, but it’s NOT him and he knows that logically, but it’s shown to all sort-of bleed together for him- (we see this in his personal mission when he goes back and forth between calling Jennifer “Nick’s fiancée” and “my fiancée”) -and that’s got to be so confusing and fucked up for him, because he can’t tell where Nick Valentine ends and he begins!

Who is he without the memories of some prewar detective plugged into his brain? How much of his personality is his and how much of it is “stolen?” Would he still be himself without the echos of the original Nick Valentine knocking around in his skull? He doesn’t have the answers to any of these questions and I think that should fuck him up SEVERELY!

I think he should be angry and confused and depressed, and I think he should get to work through all of that—and DAMN IT HE WILL, BUT ITS GONNA GET WORSE BEFORE IT GETS BETTER!