Games We Play: Surveillance

Notes: Everything belongs to Bethesda and Obsidian, I'm just playing with their toys.


surveillance

noun

continuous observation of a place, person, group, or ongoing activity in order to gather information

Waiting goes arm in arm with surveillance. If you're no good at the former, you'll be even worse at the latter. Like waiting, Deacon has more experience with surveillance than he cares to admit - far more than any other Railroad agent. Before he came above ground, the Institute supplied him with gadgets and toys to help him keep tabs on his targets. Now there's just this ratty old pair of binoculars with one eye popped out while Charmer holds her .44 and watches his back.

Given what he knows, and what he's done, he prefers it this way. Better to have shitty equipment than a shitty soul, he figures.

They huddle inside an avocado green Corvega with rust blossoming on one side, slumped in the backseat. He faces Covenant, watching people come and go through the pinhole that still works, his other eye closed against the shattered glass that still lingers in the binoculars. He'll have to take a break soon; staring through one side like this is giving him a headache.

There's a tap on his back - Charmer's hand, warning him to get down - and a rustle as she scrunches down in the seat. Deacon does the same, dropping the binoculars into his lap and pulling a mildewed blanket over him, thinking to himself that he's just a skeleton and skeletons don't need to breathe. After a moment, there's the telltale sound of brahmin hooves in the road, the heavy gait of a packbeast. It feels like a century before he feels another tap and is able to lift his head again, peeking out the rear window through his binoculars.

Now Lucas Miller approaches the front gate. One guard walks level with him. The pack brahmin trails behind them, and behind the lumbering beast comes another guard, holstering his weapon. Over by the gate, Miller and the guy out front in the leather jacket are talking, but this far away Deacon can't read their lips. It's probably the usual pleasantries.

Charmer jabs him in the ribs with one bony elbow. It hurts, but he keeps his eye on the two men up ahead.

"What's going on?" Her whisper is soft, her hot breath a distraction at his ear. Impatient as she is, watching the gate isn't easy. Next to him she fidgets.

"He's talking to Lucas Miller now. One of the caravan guards is building a fire," Deacon murmurs, half to himself as he tries to decide what to do. If it was up to him, he'd sit here for days on end, keeping track of who enters and exits and what they're doing or carrying. Compared to the wait outside Sanctuary, a few days in front of Covenant would be a breeze.

They've only been here a couple hours, though, and he can tell Charmer's already at the end of her rope. She's more of a charge in and ask questions type. He prefers to know as much as possible first, but her style does have its perks, especially given how good she is at telling when people aren't being truthful.

"So what's the game plan?" She's picking at her nails in the dying light, frowning at a cuticle.

"Well, right now the plan is to keep an eye on what's happening. Later we'll figure out what to do with that information, and go from there."

Over by the gate, Lucas and the guy in the jacket are smoking and laughing about something. Lucas has his back to the car, his shoulder obscuring bottom half of the other guy's face.

"So...you brought me all the way out here to sit in the backseat of a car with you?" Even though he can't see her face, he can tell that she's teasing from the tone of her voice. What was it he read about pre-war folks and the backseat of cars?

Oh. That.

He's grateful for his sunglasses, for the fact that the setting sun has turned everything it touches a brilliant orange; it's gotta hide the flush he can feel burning his ears. It's the closest they've come to talking about what happened last night. The whole way here he's been pretending to himself it didn't happen.

Maybe it didn't. Maybe it was a dream.

No. It wasn't a dream.

"Yeah, of course," he teases back. "Look at the genuine fake leather seats complete with two hundred year-old mold stains. Fascinating." Pretending to misunderstand her is the only hope he has of avoiding a conversation he'd rather not have. Not now, not while he's still trying to parse what happened.

Why it happened.

Well, no, why it happened is easy. He's read enough psychology to understand about transference and that's gotta be kind of like what happened here. It's not the first time a new recruit has come onto him; it's how he got tangled up with Clover a couple years ago, and that wasn't the first time either. And given all the years he's spent thinking about her, watching her, it makes sense that he gave in.

Familiarity leads to fuzzy boundaries. It's not the first time.

"I can't just sit here staring at this road for a week, Deacon," she sighs next to him. Before he realizes what's happening, her hand is on the door handle and she's started to turn it. He drops the binoculars, scrambling to lean over her and put his hand over hers before she can open the door.

"Whoa, whoa, whoa, where are you going?"

"Just going to take a leak." She lifts both her hands and gives him a smile. It's hard to read her but he's fairly certain it isn't real.

He lets out a bark of laughter. She had to know he wasn't going to buy that. Right?

"No you're not. You're going to try to go in."

She sighs again, drops her hands, and rolls her eyes. "Come on, Deacon, we're never really going to know anything until we get in there anyway. I'll go in alone and you can watch me the whole time if you want. Whaddaya say?" She waggles her eyebrows comically and for a moment he knows how Desdemona always feels, talking to him.

In the end, though, he relents. "Fine," he says, releasing the door pull and her hand. "Go on in, see what you can find out."

The smile she gives him in return is dazzling. "Thanks, friend." As she opens the door and rolls out of the Corvega, she blows him a kiss. He shakes his head as she shuts the door quietly and stands, making her way to the gate. Leaning with his chest against the seatback, he raises the binoculars to his eyes again, closing the one on the broken side.

She's just as bad as Glory, he thinks, watching her make her way towards the gate. As much as he doesn't want to admit it to himself, it's kind of great watching her walk away.


He's still in the backseat, wrapped in the dry-rotten blanket, shivering and blowing on his fingers when there's a noise up the hill, near the gates. Deacon pops his head up, pushing his sunglasses onto his forehead - there's no one around to see him, anyway.

Three figures come out Covenant's gate. One of them is Lucas Miller - the big merchant stands against the wall outside the settlement, unzips his pants, and sighs as he pees against the battered wood. Gross. Why do some guys have to pee on everything? Some primal holdover from when everyone was clunking each other in the head with clubs?

It's the other two men that hold Deacon's attention, though. They walk up the hill, towards the water. He debates with himself for a moment - Charmer could come back any time and it might be safer to stay put, but he doesn't want to lose them - and before he can talk himself out of it, he opens the car door and rolls onto the broken pavement below.

Following them is easy enough, if he sticks to the sandy bank of the small pond. The moon is a sliver and even the stars seem dimmer than usual, but one of them lights a lantern partway down the road, so he's able to keep a bead on them and let them get farther ahead. The two of them are laughing about something and as he lurks closer, it sounds like a bunch of nonsense.

"Didya hear the last one? 'Oooh, I don't play baseball, I play soccer,'" the one on the left raises his deep bass voice to a cracking falsetto while the other chortles.

"They'll probably send her over to the Compound tomorrow anyway, if she keeps asking questions." This one, the one on the right, has a heavy step.

The two of them cut down towards the lakeshore, and Deacon freezes, watching. They turn off their lantern and splash into the pond, not thirty feet away from him. He waits for his eyes to adjust to the darkness, and catches them swimming into one of the huge sewer pipes on the other bank. There's the sound of a door and then it's quiet again.

On his way back to the car, he mulls over what he's heard, but can't make any sense of it. Baseball? Soccer? Compound? There's something about it all that makes him really fuckin' uneasy, but he can't make heads or tails of it.


"Working hard, I see."

Deacon cracks an eye open, grateful for the shade provided by his sunglasses in the bright sunshine. Scrunched next to him in the car is Charmer, a crooked smile on her face and a sandwich in her hand. When she hands it to him, he could kiss - no. No, he couldn't. That might not be the best idea.

Bad train of thought.

Scrambling to get his head in gear, Deacon takes the sandwich gratefully and takes a big bite, chewing as he tries to figure out what time it is from the quality of the light. Must be nearly noon - he must've been more tired than he thought.

"Good?" She's still looking at him like he's a wild animal, so he swallows, running his tongue over his teeth to check for any bits of food stuck there. Everything feels good, so he flashes her a smile.

"Great, thanks." He salutes her with the sandwich. "Thanks for breakfast."

A nod from Charmer. "So," she gets down to business. "You'll never believe how fuckin' weird it is in there."

Deacon takes another bite of his sandwich. "Tell me more."

So she tells him about the test she had to take just to walk in, and the unnerving friendliness of all the citizens. She tells him about how she talked to a visitor, who said a caravan was missing and last seen in Covenant, except the residents all said they'd never seen it. As she goes on, Deacon can feel the hairs on his arms raising; something is definitely wrong here.

"So, I finally got someone to….um, talk to me." Something in her voice makes Deacon look up from his sandwich, an eyebrow arching at the tone.

"Talk to you? Why do you say it like that?"

Usually he has a hard time telling what's going through her head, but not this time. This time, the blush spreads across her cheeks and up into her ears. It's pretty clear what she means by talking this time, and it's so funny Deacon lets out a bark of laughter only slightly tempered by the smack in the arm she gives him, a furious expression crossing her face.

"You sassy little minx," he crows, for once not worrying about being heard.

"It's not my fault," Charmer murmurs, "She kept making moves on me. It just seemed...easier that way. And it worked."

"How far did it go with her?" Her eyes narrow and he realizes suddenly that he's gone too far, crossed some unknown line. It's not a joke all of a sudden, and he reins himself in, taking another bite of his sandwich. With his mouth full of razorgrain bread and tatos, he can't insert his foot any more than he already has. He chews and they sit quietly while he tries to figure out a way to take back his teasing. Finally, he swallows with a gulp.

"Look, we've all done it at one point or another. Sometimes it's easier to get information by...flirting -"

"Kissing," she interjects. "It was just a little kissing."

"Ok, so, sometimes you can get the information you need through kissing and you don't need -"

"And maybe a little over the bra action," Charmer flushes pink again, but this time her mouth quirks up in a smile. Deacon tries not to think about this, afraid his own face will betray his feelings about it, and continues on.

"Sometimes," he says, vowing to get the sentence out no matter what else she might say, "it's best to get your information without killing anyone. And that's what you did. So good job." He takes another bite of his sandwich and then, through a mouthful, asks, "What'd you learn?"

"It sounds like they take anyone they suspect of being a synth over to this compound across the pond."

There's a pinging in Deacon's head, the feeling of all the pieces sliding into place.

"I think I know where they are," he says. His limbs feel loose, his brain light. He knows where this is going and he always feels this way before he walks into a massacre.

"You do? Great, we gotta get going," her hand is already on the door handle.

"Can I finish my sandwich first?"

Charmer sighs heavily and opens the door, taking off before he can stop her.

Guess not, he grumbles to himself, jamming it in his mouth as he pulls his weapon and follows her lead.