Games We Play: Concessions

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

I want to add a thank you to Margaret Smoke for chatting with me and giving me some excellent feedback. You're really helping me get a handle on Deacon as a character, and I appreciate it. Thanks!


concessions

noun

the act of yielding, as a right, a privilege, or a point or fact in an argument:

Amelia Stockton is in bad shape when they finally get to her. Deacon's never seen Charmer so visibly...anything, really. In this case angry, but he's never really seen her sad or happy before, either. As she fires her gun ten times into Dr. Chambers, the image of her in her cryo pod flits back up, the rage and anguish on her frozen on her face for an eternity.

She leaves him by Amelia as she blasts her way through the Compound, back the way they came, a violent tempest of grief and bullets. From another tunnel, he hears three loud bangs - grenades? - and the screams of a man, cut short with gunfire. He could stop her, but he knows better. This is something she needs to do, and it's not like they don't deserve it.

After an eternity, she returns, her face calm again, her hair wild. There's a splatter of blood across one of her cheekbones and her pants are caked with it. Under scorch marks and blood, he can't tell if she's injured, but she's moving well.

It's not the cryo pod he thinks of then. He tries not to, but the brutality - it makes him think of University Point.

Charmer doesn't look at him but stares past him to Amelia, who cowers in one corner of her cell, grimy and terrified. When she speaks to the timid girl, Charmer's voice is calm, even sweet.

"Let's get you home, huh?"

No one argues with that.


And so, barely a week after they left, they're back in Bunker Hill just after suppertime. It took a little convincing, but he finally got Charmer to take off her blood-soaked jacket and leave it a mile outside of town in an old trash can. There'd be no getting it clean, and it was just going to draw attention to them. Her pants, despite being caked with blood when they left, were quickly covered in dust from the dry roads. They looked no worse than usual, even though they had to be stiff around the calves.

Deacon and Amelia go into town first; Charmer lingers outside, talking to Trashcan Carla for a few minutes before she heads over to Savoldi's to buy a room for the night. Amelia is overwhelmed to be reunited with her father, and Old Man Stockton gives Deacon a knowing look that answers a lot of lingering questions. He makes a few trades and if the bag of caps Stockton gives him is heavier than it should be, no one will know the difference.

By the time Deacon makes it over to the bar, Charmer's washed up and changed into some spare clothes. It's a Saturday night and the place is teeming with caravaneers staying overnight after a healthy market day - combined with the locals, the place is loud, and busy. No one is likely to notice if he says hi to the pretty transient on the other side of a burn barrel. He gets a beer from Joe Savoldi and finds an empty seat next to Charmer.

"Mind if I join you, stranger?" The look she gives him makes it clear she's humoring him; she knows the words and the volume are for everyone else's benefit. She nods, and he sits down next to her. She's sitting very still; this close he can see how tensely she's holding her jaw. She'll have a hell of a headache later.

It'd be better - easier - if she'd just talk about it. Of all the ways Deacon's found to cope with the devastation he's seen and caused, that's his favorite.

Even if it's all couched in lies.

But Charmer doesn't say anything, just sips her whiskey and stares into the fire. The tight grip she has on her glass reminds him of the swatter he used that day, twenty or so years ago. The satisfying sound the wooden bat made when it met bone. The way the blood trickled into each crack of the pavement after he bashed Ace's head in, before he turned on Barbara.

He shakes his head, as if that'll clear out the memories. It doesn't work - when does it ever? - but he somehow he gets a better grip on himself. He's Deacon again, not Rascal. Not John D. Not...the person he was before.

Deacon.

Tentatively, without looking at her, he takes one hand off his beer bottle and places it over the hand she has resting in her lap. It's a risk - someone might see - but with the fire in the burn barrel between them and everyone else, it's one he feels secure taking. He has to let her know she's not alone.

Her face is very still, but she doesn't move her hand away.


"Deacon?" From just his name, she can tell she's drunk.

It's very late, sometime after midnight. It's still black outside, though. From the top of the monument, he can't see much in the blackness, except for a few cookfires or lights kept on by small generators. At the top of Trinity Tower, one white light blinks to a rhythm he can't quite figure out.

The way she sways, it's a miracle she made it to the top of the monument at all. He'll have to be sure to help her get down or else she might ride the stairs like a bumpy slide and curse him all the next day. There's the perfume of whiskey about her; when she moves next to him, it gets stronger.

He doesn't blame her, though; he was drunk that day, with the Deathclaws and Barbara, and still tried to drown himself in gin after. Losing it like that -

Charmer's hand snakes towards him and somehow his heart flutters, only to come crashing back down when he realizes that she's reaching into his pocket to pull out his cigarettes. He helps her by lighting it for her as she bends her face over the flip lighter, then slides the pack and the lighter back where they came from. Somewhere below them people are laughing, and the radio is loud, Bob Crosby's smooth voice crooning.

Though things may look very dark,
Your dream is not in vain
For when do you find the rainbow?
Only after rain.

She looks out at the city, her face unreadable again. "Did you ever regret it?"

He likes that he always knows what she's asking. He thinks again of her face after the massacre, of that splash of blood under one eye. It's not a question he's ever asked himself; there didn't seem to be much point, not once it was already done. When he'd looked around at the bodies, there had never been a moment when he cursed himself and wished he'd done differently. There had been something inevitable about it, he knows that now.

"No," he tells her, truthfully. "No, I always knew it had to be like that. Did I wish it was different? Sure. But do I have any remorse for my part in it? No."

Caved in, Barbara's head had looked like anyone else's.

"That's how I feel too," Charmer says, taking a long drag on her cigarette. If he hadn't spent the last few weeks with her, he might not believe her; he thinks most people regret bloodshed, even when it's necessary. But it's one of the few things she's said since he met her that seems completely authentic. "I was worried that makes me a sociopath or something," she gives him a sly grin with that and Deacon can't help but laugh.

"Come on, let's go back down to the party." He puts his arm casually around her shoulders to steer her down the stairs, trying to make it seem like he's just being friendly when really he doesn't want her to topple down the stairs and crack her skull.

At ground level, he untangles his arm from her shoulder before they step out of the safety of the stone structure and into crowd. In the cover of the monument, she leans forward, up on her tiptoes. His stomach drops, flattening like a pancake against his bowels. Her lips graze his cheek and are gone before he can really register them.

"Thanks. You're a good friend."

She's gone into the crowd before he can figure out what's happened. When he sees her again, she's at the bar, half-empty glass in her hand and her arm around the waist of a pretty caravaneer with short dark curls. She leans close into the other woman, her mouth inches from her ear, and he wonders for a moment if she really is a sociopath, although he's not entirely clear on the actual medical definition of the term. A moment later, the two of them are laughing about something and Charmer glances over the woman's jacketed shoulder and catches his eye.

She turns back to the seated woman and kisses her dark lips, a soft brush that turns into more and sends a jolt down Deacon's spine. He's sure she didn't see him at all and is kicking himself for all the thoughts that are definitely not running through his head when she pulls away and meets his eye again. The wink she throws him - and the mocking smile that goes with it - are definitely not imagined.

He gives up on the party then - in this din, he's not going to learn much anyway - and climbs the stairs to the room they rented earlier.


Morning is brutally cold, but what else would he have expected in the Commonwealth in January? When Deacon gets up, it's clear Charmer's bed hasn't been slept in; the sheets and blankets are still folded neatly at the end as they were when he first came in the night before.

It looks like she found a new coping mechanism, he laughs to himself as he laces up his boots. Well, good for her. Life's so short and dangerous, it's nice that she found a way to forget herself for a night. It's not as if he's never done that.

Still, somehow, he feels a little sick thinking about it.

Charmer's at the burn barrel when he gets down there, roasting something on a skewer. Another skewer sits on the stool beside her, charred flesh releasing white steam into the cold air. When she sees him, her eyes light up. How can she look so good, so calm after the night she had?

There's no time to wonder at it, though; they'll need to head back to HQ today to report in. Des will definitely be curious to hear about Covenant. He sits at the bar, his back to her, and Tony brings him a mirelurk omelette that's only a little runny, and he tries not to think about everything he's learned about her.