Title: Professional Disguise
Summary: The various and sundry thoughts of an LGT dealer.
Disclaimer: I don't own anything like the Liar Game. Which is probably a good thing.
Author's Notes: Because the Liar Game needs dealer!fic. Most of this isn't canon (well, duh), but maybe it's at least plausible (and enjoyable) stream-of-dealer-consciousness.
No one ever recognizes him.
No one ever sees his face.
He remembers his first time participating as a dealer, plain white mask, white shirt, dark pants. A salary man at a costume ball. He might have asked once, if someone would figure him out in the real world. His sempai just laughed. By what? Your hair? Just style it differently.
Neither family (parents he hasn't seen since university) nor friends (drinking buddies mostly) know what he really does for a living, just that he makes enough money to wear designer clothing, take one night stands out on expensive dates, and drive a nice car all on work hours that are the envy of anyone who notice that he spends most of his days wandering around the city.
Oh, and that he owns a tux, and a nice collection of painted masks, the real one carefully hidden among the fakes (style is one of the perks of promotion).
Anyone he knows outside the game guesses either male escort or host. At these ludicrous suggestions, he just gives a faint smile.
Actually, he works constantly, even if he only serves as a dealer once every few weeks or so.
When he goes to get his car tuned-up and notices a mechanic toy very seriously with the thought of keying the finish, he works.
When he observes that the waitress at the restaurant constantly reapplies lotion to her hands but doesn't seem to notice the green remains of a seaweed facial mask behind her ears, he works.
When the young man with a mohawk at a record store shows up later sweeping up a cafe storefront and then at a construction site hauling bricks, he works.
When he goes to a nightclub and hears one of the hostesses ask "Yuuji" to bring her her keys (because she forgot them), and Yuuji ends up being hotter than the hostess, he works.
When he drops 100 yen outside the convenience store, and a girl picks it up and chases after him to give it back, and then smiles like it's not a big deal, he works.
A list of names, 100, 200, slowly narrows itself down, as he constantly seeks to answer the basic questions.
Who will be worth watching?
Who will be the most vulnerable?
Who will make the game interesting?
Once he makes his final recommendations. Who will fight in his block. Why he thinks they'll be a good addition to the tournament, he washes his hands of the selections.
He never sent a single invitation. Never wrote a single address on a box of money. Never encourages a single person to succumb to curiosity and open said box of money (not that anyone ever needs encouragement).
They've all met him, indirectly. The stranger on the street. The customer. The client. Some will meet him again, if they win their first round. No one will recognize him though.
If such a thing as a soul exists, and such a thing could be sold, he certainly did such a thing in accepting this job. For a salary that outmatches a regular salaryman's by 10 and almost unlimited time, he hand-picks people to lead into the metaphorical fire.
The amount of misery, the amount of pressure, his chosen ones feel, he knows from many of these tournaments is immense, enough to turn charcoal to diamonds, if the charcoal doesn't crumble first.
As most of them do.
It's just a job.
He sleeps well at night. He is not his job. It is a different name, a different identity that callously picks the lives to ruin. The players in a game that he only deals in. Leronira.
Besides, all he does is let survival run it's course. Why should society protect the weak and punish the strong? Why shouldn't the clever and the skillful get the rewards? Doesn't it say something about society that it takes a convoluted game to make sure the right people get rewarded.
Plus, he admits, every new round is a curiosity. Who will emerge? Who will enter unexpectedly? Who will have their hidden talents exposed? How many tournaments has he worked now? Three? Four?
Even if the players as a mass remain predictable, there always remains a few surprises.
He stays for that. More than the money. More than the fancy clothes (provided at someone else's expense). He stays for the discovery, the something new.
For nothing forces people to surpass their limitations better than desperation.
In a few days, he'll meet the winners again. The slight worry crosses his mind--as it does before every round--that they recognize something of him, the real him in the characters he plays. Masks and tuxes and different hair doesn't hide everything. The posture of a body. It's motion.
The modulation of the voice (even if the words are far more formal than anything he would say in a normal situation).
If in every good lie, there is a kernel of truth, then in his portrayal of Leronira, there is a bit of himself he cannot hide for fear of his disguise seeming fake.
It's this he fears people will see.
They never do.
They never recognize him.