Games We Play: Lies
Notes: Everything belongs to Bethesda and Obsidian, I'm just playing with their toys. Please be aware of two things: yes, I know Deacon's accepted backstory, but I've decided that since he's rarely honest, why trust him on that? So I've added to it/changed it. And, #2, Momoko means "peach" in Japanese. Yes, this is pertinent to the story.
lie(s)
noun
a false statement made with deliberate intent to deceive; an intentional untruth; a falsehood.
It's difficult, sometimes, keeping track of what he really knows about Charmer and what he's allowed to know about her. Or at least it would be, if his entire brain wasn't divided into truth and non-truth. It's just one more dual list of facts to keep in mind, one more set of lies to tally. It's only slightly complicated by the fact that she keeps feeding him information that is patently false but that he isn't supposed to know is untrue.
Deacon knows, for example, that she is the mother of Shaun, the Director. He knows that she was frozen for two centuries before the Institute freed her from the cryo pod in Vault 111. He knows that before the war, she was a lawyer, and that she loved musicals and even starred in a couple in college. He knows that when she escaped the vault, she wandered the wasteland for weeks, learning to scavenge and defend herself, even as all major threats were somehow removed before she could end up in real danger.
He also knows, conversely, that she doesn't talk about her past or where she comes from. She hates the Institute as much as anyone else, but when questioned only gives bland platitudes. She killed a courser before she found them in the crypt beneath the church but doesn't like to brag about it. She's quick with a pistol but prefers to linger in the shadows and, when possible, talk her way out of a problem.
Some of the lies are small, inconsequential. Before they formally met, he overheard her telling Savoldi that she hated Nuka Quantum, but she's told him she loathes the Cherry variety while she sipped a Quantum and vodka. When added to the other lies and omissions he has to keep track of, the weight of her lies isn't so heavy.
It takes a liar to recognize a liar, and Deacon, well, he's a master.
He doesn't mention that he knows she's untruthful - it's part of their unspoken agreement. Just as no parents named them "Charmer" or "Deacon," he wouldn't betray the game by telling her outright that he knows her stories are phony. He reasons that he shouldn't know that her name is really Momoko or that she is so driven because of her son. He's not really sure what her endgame is anyway - not now that she knows the truth about who that baby grew up to be.
If he forces her to be honest, after all, he'll have to be too. It's only fair, and whatever else - whoever else - Deacon is, he's very interested in fairness.
So he keeps his mouth shut and keeps his tally and follows her around the wasteland, from dead drop to safe house to Bunker Hill to HQ and around again, destroying those who stand in their way and letting her spin her tales.
He almost drops his juggling facts on an unseasonably warm day near the end of December. They're sitting around the cookfire at Taffington - Mercer Safehouse, now - and getting ready to head back to HQ. She mentions, off-handedly, that she found an extra pack of smokes in the boathouse and is bringing them for him. And then, stupidly, he says this:
"Gee, thanks. You're such a peach."
It's only a moment, but he realizes the second after she does what he said. Time stops and he's not sure if it's the narrowing of her eyes, or the way her hands pause slightly as she shoves things in her pack, but he realizes suddenly that it's all going to come crashing down on him in a moment.
The time starts up again, faster somehow than before, and she just smiles and says he's welcome and brushes her hair out of her eyes in that way she has while he thanks whatever deity is listening for the protection his sunglasses grant. When they start on the road, everything feels companionable again: just two world-class liars on a morning stroll but really out to destroy a megalomaniac's empire. You know, the usual.
Deacon's old enough to know better. He's been doing this for more than twenty years, since he himself left the Institute. He's never slipped before - he's always invented different stories to tell different people, sometimes contradicting each other. Keeping people on their toes is, like, his thing and now he's blown it.
She grants him a sidelong glance as they trek down the road together, shoulders bumping companionably in the morning sun, and a trickle of sweat beads its way down his scalp under the heavy wig he's wearing. Some days he wonders why he bothers. Other days he wonders what color his hair would be now - still ginger and gold, or gray like his father's?
Their boots make a rhythmic tattoo on the broken pavement as they head south. He keeps catching her glancing at him with the same look on her face: like a piece of a puzzle has just appeared in an unexpected place. The first couple times he catches her he asks her if she needed something, and the second time she asks for a cigarette.
Even though they've been on the road together for months and he has literally never seen her smoke before, she lights it and sucks in the smoke easily, holding it casually at her side as they walk. A thought occurs to him that he may have met his match and he tamps it back down, trying to avoid the annoyance that the idea he might be getting played raises in him. Instead he lights his own cigarette and keeps an eye on the hill to their right. He'd hate for something to sneak up on them.
It's been killing him, the last few months. Usually he loves knowing more about people than they realize he does. It's a game he plays with himself, conning them into revealing things he already knows about them. And yet, somehow, she keeps him on his toes.
It's frustrating as all hell not to be in charge.
"So what was it actually like in the Institute? I mean, what was it like as a synth?"
Deacon can tell what she's doing; she's trying to catch him in a lie. He's done enough of it to realize when it's being done to him. Whether it's because he fucked up earlier calling her a peach or because she's somehow always known, it's clear she doesn't buy that story. She didn't fall for the one about him being the leader of the Railroad, either, although in some ways that's probably closest to the truth.
As if he'd ever tell anyone the truth. It's too ugly, too complicated and disgusting to share.
It's the root of all his lies.
"Well, you know," he reaches into his memory, trying to come up with a bit of bullshit that's mundane enough that she'll lose interest but not so close to the truth that it leaves him devastated later. "There was a lot of cleaning," he finishes, knowing even before she arches her eyebrow at him that this was too lame; she can smell it.
"That's all you have to say?" Her voice is lightly-accented; her years in Japan before the war are obvious every time she speaks. There's a tone to it he finds beautiful; it always makes him sad that he didn't get to see the world before it was destroyed.
"Mopping floors was mostly what I did. Why do you think I wanted to leave?" From the look in her eyes, it's clear that this joke's flat too and he drops the act. "How did you know?"
A piece of paper flips out of her hand and into his face, sticking on his lower lip for a moment before it flutters to the ground. He knows even without looking at it that it's his 'recall code.'
"'You can't trust everyone.' Geez, man," she snorts, and has to give it to her: she has a point. He has no one to blame for that one. She's no idiot and has shown herself to have one of the most curious and logical brains he's ever encountered - of course she picked up that he wasn't telling the truth and read it.
Charmer takes a drag of the cigarette and blows out the smoke at him, her mouth turned down in annoyance even as her eyes twinkle at him. She's not really mad after all.
"So you're not the leader of the Railroad, obviously," she counts off the pointer finger on her left hand and moves to the middle. "And you're not an 'escaped synth.' So what's really going on here? How did you get into this?"
It's on the tip of his tongue. He suddenly wants to tell her the truth, about growing up below ground, about being shunted into a job that made him hate himself, about the subjugation he saw every day. He wants to tell her, but it's too hard and so he doesn't.
Instead he settles for a half-truth, the story about the University Point Deathclaws and the synth they killed. The story that features Barbara and his revenge. There's enough of the truth in it that when he tells it, he hits all the high and low points. Maybe she'll just leave him alone.
Charmer's still looking at him skeptically from under the veil of her eyelashes. Is it just his lies that make her doubt him, or does it go deeper than that - is it the tragedy of Shaun and the Institute? Did something happen before she was frozen that made her doubt everything?
She was a lawyer, after all.
"How long is this story going to be true?" She asks finally.
Nope, she doesn't buy it. Just as he feared. Feared? Thought? Assumed? He's not sure what he really thought.
"It expires at midnight," he says. His voice sounds more jovial than he feels. Inside he's tense and somehow exhausted from all the lies. He tosses his cigarette by the side of the road, crushing it out with his boot.
All this joke earns is a nod from her. Not even a smile.
Ahead of them, a bridge looms. It looks empty, but that's when things seem to be most dangerous. He pauses in the road and bends at the knee, lowering his profile. Something about the bridge sets him ill at-ease. Charmer follows his lead and ups the ante by pulling Deliverer from her holster and tossing her own cigarette butt onto the pavement.
"I don't like this," he says, somewhat unnecessarily as they slink towards the bridge. Still, no one's in sight.
"I will hasten and not delay to follow your commands," she says softly, and that rings a dim bell for him but he can't figure out why.
"What?" He whispers as they creep ever closer to the bridge. He'd feel better about the whole thing if there wasn't a mostly-intact Corvega lying on its side facing the wrong way and blocking most the the entrance. Anything could be lurking behind that thing.
"It's from the Bible, genius," Charmer murmurs to the left of his shoulder. "One of the Psalms. It means I trust you. You did call yourself 'Deacon,' I thought for sure you'd get that one."
She trusts him. Somehow, despite the snarl of deceit between them, she still trusts him when it matters. Something in this warms him deep in his gut, in a place where he hasn't been warm in a very long time.
