33. True Betrayal

Beth POV

Things have been going relatively good since the Institute's day of doom. Shaun got situated in his room, he and Duncan had hit it off really well, and we even got a positive response in telling him his true identity. When we told him that Curie and Danse were synths, too, he seemed kinda excited he wasn't alone. After that, he'd run off to visit with Danse, and actually spent the night with him. All in all, I couldn't have seen a better home life.

It's now two weeks later—two weeks of the Commonwealth being Institute-free. Two weeks, and I just now realized I have something I should probably do. So, off to Old North Church with Robert and myself.

"I wonder why we haven't seen Deacon," I muse aloud. "He was always around—somewhere, even if we couldn't see him, but he was there." Hopefully I didn't scare him off when we fought the other week…

"I'm not sure," he responds. "Maybe the Railroad is just too busy celebrating the end of the Institute and he hasn't had the time."

"Possibly," I agree with a chuckle. "He always struck me as the party animal type, anyway."

"Same. Guess we'll find out."

MacCready POV

Thunderbird by Hans Zimmer

We walked into the church and found nothing but silence. We continued into the corridor leading to the catacombs. Still nothing. Even going into HQ yielded us zilch. I saw the question on Beth's face: Where are they? Finally, once we were in the escape tunnel—where we always met with Deacon—we found something. Someone.

In the near-darkness, "I was starting to wonder about you," followed by a hiccup. The voice lit a lantern, and Beth and I were faced by a very drunk-looking Deacon. "Hello, Beth."

She had stared at the bottle of rotgut in his hand, asking "What are you doing down here in the dark? And where is everyone else?"

"Moved back to Switchboard." He held his bottle out to us. "Want some? I have plenty." He gestured to the litter of empty bottles around him.

Her expression seemed uncomfortable to me. "Deacon… this isn't normal for you. What's going on?"

"You don't know?" He stood and threw his bottle against the wall six or seven feet from us, making her jump when it broke. "You don't know?" He took a few unsteady steps toward her. I could tell she sensed a rising anger in him, so she took a few steps back for countermeasure.

"You took it from us," he continued on. "You took all those lives. You probably didn't even think about it. You were just so ready to murder your son, you didn't even think about all the other people who would die in the explosion." I saw her cringe when he said she murdered her son. I saw it. I can't let this go on, I thought. He would have just kept going, rubbing more salt into the wound.

"Deacon," I said, cutting into his speech. "Beth did what had to be done. The Railroad wanted the Institute to burn, too—you can't deny it."

"You're right, MacCready." He turned his attention to me—for however long, I didn't know. "We did. But not with all those synths still in there. They deserved a chance." His gaze diverted back to Beth. "Not that you'd care about them anyway, right? If they're not your own personal nurse, bodyguard, or son—why would you care about them? They're just synths, huh?"

He looked around the room, as if he was seeing things we couldn't—and with how many drinks he had had, who knows if he wasn't.

"You know what Barbara would think?" He stopped mid-search as he said this, as if he could see her. "Barbara would be disgusted with you—you didn't even give them a chance to fight.

"They took her from me without thinking about what it'd cost me. Now you took all those synths without thinking about how it'd affect us. Tell you what. I'll make it fair." He went back to where he was sitting before we came in, and brought forth a shotgun, surprising both of us by aiming it toward me.

I had no idea what he was doing, so I just raised my hands, hoping to God his drunken judgement would have been better than most people when sober. I hoped he would decide to stop whatever he had planned.

He continued, "See this here shotgun?" He checked the chamber for shells. "This here is the gun that will even out the playing field. I got my lover taken from me because of synths. After today, you can say the same damn thing." He noticed his aim had gotten a bit off during his explanation. But once he realized this, he again pointed the end of the shotgun—maybe four feet away from me—directly at my face.

This is it, I thought. I'll never see my little boy again. I'll never feel Beth's embrace. This isn't the way I wanted to go… I wouldn't look at him. If he wanted me dead, I wouldn't even give him the pleasure of eye contact. Over this, I couldn't dare look at Beth. I didn't want the last thing I saw being Beth's expression—I could only imagine it: scared as hell, possibly some anger mixed in, and both of these painted onto her features would end me far before Deacon had the chance to pull the trigger. I decided closing my eyes would be the best option at that point.

I then heard Deacon utter, "Say goodbye, Beth," before I heard him take a deep breath. Then the sound of a gunshot.

However, I felt… alive?

I heard a body drop, followed by Beth asking, "Are you okay?" I opened my eyes to a scene beyond words.

Beth had shot Deacon with a pistol she had hidden somewhere—and his body was lying crumpled on the ground, a few feet from me. I was too busy staring at him to look at her, too dumbstruck to speak. I nodded my head for her answer. "Good," she said, seeming slightly relieved. A couple seconds later, "He made me do it—I didn't have a choice."

I finally found my voice, and said, "I know. He kind of gave you an ultimatum."

"He didn't give me a choice," she had said around tears, to which I realized she must've been talking to herself, trying to convince herself that she had to do it.

"Beth…" I walked over to her, where she was still standing, staring at the body of one of her closest friends, who forced her to kill him. I wrapped my arms around her in comfort, and she just lost it. She started crying harder than I've ever seen her cry before—and that's saying something, considering we'd been through some tough stuff together.

I guided her toward the place Deacon was when we came in and sat down. We continued to sit there for the following span of time—probably close to an hour. Beth only looked up and around the room after she's dried her eyes out. They were red and looked far beyond sore, but the look in them had changed dramatically.

She was no longer saddened or unsure of what to do next—they were displaying a range of rage and determination.

She stood and started heading toward the exit. "Come on," she called. "We have a job to finish."

"Are you sure you want to do this?" I asked her for the hundredth time. "It was only Deacon that attacked us. Does Desdemona or any of the others have to pay?"

"You heard Dea— …you heard him. He said 'us,' not 'me.' Sounded like the rest wanted me dead, too. Might as well beat them to it." She opened the door at the end of the pipe leading into Switchboard—the same door we came in with Deacon all that time ago—and stepped through, hell-bent on seeking revenge.

Apparently, Tinker Tom had managed to set up some more turrets, as the last batch had been destroyed during the Institute's raid that sent all the agents scattering. Beth was able to deactivate them before they could spot either of us, helping us sneak in more efficiently.

The first line of defense was composed of a couple Railroad agents she hadn't been introduced to. She disposed of them quickly and quietly. Second line, a couple more unnamed agents. Once we got to the third row however, Beth paused slightly, then ultimately put a bullet into Glory's head, directly after Drummer Boy's. She took a deep breath, steadying herself before we moved into the old HQ itself.

Carrington—the Railroad's resident butthole—was the first one to go once we made it inside. This had gotten the attention of the last two members of the faction.

"Beth!" Tom shouted when he saw Carrington go down. "What're you doing?"

"Putting an end to a threat," she replied, calmly as ever. She looked at Desdemona, raised her rifle, and killed Tom with no mercy.

Desdemona's eyes went wide, looking at the body of the man in front of her—the man that always took care of all the group's mechanical needs, dead.

She looked up at Beth, her eyes still round in bewilderment. "You're a monster…" she muttered. "I thought you were more civil than this."

"I could say the same thing about the entire Railroad, Dez," Beth responded, her voice cool and collect, giving it an extra vicious edge. "I always thought the Railroad was trying to make the Commonwealth a better place. But it occurred to me earlier that that wasn't your intent after all. All you guys cared about were synths—not the humans that needed help. Cause screw them, right?

"You see Tom and Carrington here in front of you. But you can't see Drummer Boy or Glory in the halls out there," she pointed in the direction we came in. "You can't see all the other dead agents I killed right under your nose. For me, they make up for all the people you let die out there, because you were too busy worrying about breathing machines.

"I'll admit I have synth friends. My son—he's a synth. But I don't care. At least I take care of humans, too.

"By the way… Deacon's dead." Dez's expression shifted into anger far more than it had at that point, even when Dr. Butthole and Thomas the Engineer were killed. "He forced my hand," Beth continued, ignoring the leader of the Railroad and her facial expression. "It's a shame, really. But I didn't pick this fight." She raised her rifle yet again and gave Desdemona a new orifice, right between the eyes.

"Babe!"

I turn around and look at Beth. "What?"

"Have you not heard me for like, the past few minutes?" she asks me. I look around and see we're still trekking in the city, on our way to Old North Church.

"Uh…" I scratch the back of my head. "I guess not. I'm sorry—I was daydreaming, I guess."

She laughs. "Okay. What were you thinking about?"

I point ahead of us. "How this meeting is going to go. It's been a while since we've seen any of them, and our last visit with Deacon was less than satisfactory."

"Yeah… I've been wondering, too. But I can't think about it too much or I start to get nervous, you know?"

"I do," I agree, thinking back to all of what my mind had cooked up a bit ago.

Beth POV

Walking down the halls of the catacombs feels weirder than I remembered. Were they always this empty?

Going through the door of the Railroad's HQ tells me why. It is empty.

I walk up to the center of the room—the round meeting table, or whatever it is, to find a note. "Hey, Robert?" He looks up from his search of the room and walks over to me. "Look at this."

I hold the note out so both of us can read it:

Beth,

I knew you were bound to show up sooner or later, and I didn't want to confuse you, so I left you this note.

The Railroad has disbanded. Over thirty years of being a group, losing agents, freeing synths—it's all over now. Our goal has been met… yet our dream was shattered. The Institute is no more, and we have you to thank. …And those Brotherhood goons, too. But all those synths that died… We don't have anything else to do, now that they're gone with it.

I don't even know where the rest of the Railroad has gone. I think Tom might have gone out west, to get a job in New Vegas or something—I'm not sure. Dez may have went down south. I heard she had family there.

Me, I hear you ask? Where am I going? I don't know where I'm headed, to be honest. Might head down to Rivet City and work as a guard there for a while—might roam around here for the rest of my life. I guess I'll go wherever the wind takes me.

I just hope you guys have a good life. Tell Robert hey for me, and to keep you safe. Ugh, who am I kidding? You know I'll always be around to watch your back from the shadows. That way Mayor Mungo doesn't have to do all of it—I don't think I trust him enough anyway (don't tell him I said that… or that I called him Mayor Mungo, ok?).

Maybe I'll see you around Boston sometime, Bethany. I look forward to it.

-D

A/N: I absolutely did not want to kill Deacon in-game. This was me living vicariously through writing so I wouldn't have to do so—in one universe, at least.