Disclaimer: Bethesda and Obsidian own everything Fallout. I'm just a silly person obsessed with fictional characters :)

This is all pretty much just my headcanon for Dean. It's a flashback type thing I guess (I'm just realizing it's in present tense...) so...yeah. Just him muttering to himself and being a big manchild.


He had dirt on every one of them, all right, every last actor and actress he'd ever shared a stage with, ever done a show or a flick with, hell - practiced lines together, anything. He had them all stacked up like bottles at a carnival booth, ready to take them out if he ever chanced upon their calloused words.

And sometimes before, if he felt it was necessary. He'd learned early on in his career to trust your gut if it spoke to you, and when his was tap dancing around inside him, warning sirens shouting up with the words "Danger" in big neon lights, well, he sure as hell wasn't about to ignore it.

Preemptive strike, just to be careful really, he'd tell himself.

Every one in Hollywood is guilty of something. Now there was a justification. A golden truth, a safe truth, one you could bet your conscious on. Isn't doing anyone an injustice – God, he hated the word! - to knock 'em down a few pegs if they've already screwed half the schmucks in the business.

And in this business, that's all you needed, really, to plop your career in the shitter; one slip-up, one alleyway indiscretion, and you'd be sentenced to a lifetime of – Christ - TV appearances and guest hosting at some god awful beauty pageant in the ass end of Mississippi.

There were worse things than being forgotten. Much, much worse.

And he had his little finger waiting on the button to set it all off.

Why all the precaution?

Well, he had to secure the upper hand, didn't he? Make sure others never found out about his own slip-ups and occasional lapses in judgment, and what better way to do that than by setting up the first strike? Especially if anyone should ever choose to dip into the particulars of his past. Not that that was easy, mind you, with how well he destroyed the records. Might as well have dropped an atomic bomb on the subject for all that was left.

A secret others would consider inconsequential, certainly not as dire a subject as he made it out to be, but then again they weren't the ones forced to keep it, now were they? Knowing there was something that separated them from the others, an invisible wedge that seethed under their skin and left the sickening taste of salt on their tongue. Unspoken connotations ringing, guessing at hidden messages, wondering how far their words truly went or if, in his stammering paranoia, he just imagined that glint in the corner of their eyes when they recognized him from across the room. Were those whispers he just barely caught, was that his name he heard? How much did they know and was he too late, too maddeningly far behind the trail of speculation to halt it before it reached anything veritable.

It was his past that haunted him. His debilitatingly average past.

No sob story to catch the public's ear, no battles fought in the face of adversity; no – just average, Savannah bred parents raising an average, public school, car pooling, goddamn white bread cul-de-sac son!

It wasn't perfect, but even the minor roads bumps in his childhood failed to make an impact - the occasional bickering between his parents loud enough to bring questioning neighbors knocking, the pocket money he'd steal from the other cul-de-sac kids so he could afford to hang out with them come Friday nights (even that wasn't out of necessity; his parents stopped providing him money whenever he cut class to sneak down to the theater, or, when he got a bit older, dropped in on drama classes at the local excuse for a college). These adolescent trials, while bothersome, failed to give him the same strength as, say, an orphan on the streets of Brooklyn. Fighting for their next meal, determined to survive even facing the insurmountable odds against them. Now there's a life that would have prepared him for showbiz! He'd dream to have a history so colored with misfortune; he'd have grown from it, shaped into an impeccable amalgam of brains and brawn, a strong character stemmed with modesty and self-assurance. He'd of had the world begging for him.

But no, no he had to be born middle class. Practically a death sentence to his character. And even when he'd finally gotten a break, convinced his folks to let him move out to Hollywood with his Gran (she'd profited enough from his Grandad's death to more than tide the two of them over) it was hardly any different on the other side of the states. He'd see the starving actors littering the streets, you'd practically trip of them any place you went, and the jealousy would just be ripe within him. He was seething at their good fortune, the damn idiots had no idea what cards they possessed.

With his misfortune, he ended up working for the stars in the beginning, not with them. It was humiliating. Delivering coffee and snacks and anything else their little prepped up mugs desired, all at the drop of a hat. And even when he'd finished every last god awful triviality demanded of him, not one had a moment to look at his resume, all their precious time vanished, evaporated into the blasted sky whenever he needed a word in. They treated him trash, like a second-class citizen, like a goddamn chinamen.

So he secured his first part using the only language these "stars" seemed to understand: bribery. Lying. Blackmail. These people hadn't an ounce of humanity, but they did have reputations, and none could withstand his tenacity, the persistence of a man who hasn't a mind for costs so long as results are cinched by the time he lay his head down at the end of the day. Slept like a baby every night, he might add - no guilt for miles.

Guilt was an impediment to people who wanted results, he found. It was an excuse for laziness, the terribly "holier than thou" lazy.

He was more than happy to take down their ilk.

And every sidewards glance, every whisper from the stars who shared his spotlight now stopped his heart, drudged up the one question never far from his mind: how much do they know?

It wasn't just a lump in his throat, it was a goddamn boulder crushing the life out of him with its weight, pushing down down down on his mind when the suspicion, winding in circles, chased his coherent thoughts to the winds.

And so, possessed with singular purpose, the world and its entirety freezing around the periphery of his target, not to be bothered with, at least not at this moment - with this tunnel vision he would pursue. He'd find out what knowledge they possessed and destroy them regardless of the answer.

Two hundred years in the Madre couldn't crush his persistence.

Nothing on this earth could.

Reputation. That was all he had left. That was all he ever had, bombs or no, and he wasn't leaving until the world

knew

his

name.