Chapter Text
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Sometime in the winter of 2284, when there’s ice crunching under his boots and snow banking around rivers, he finds a Vault. Not a big one; actually pretty small by Vault-Tec standards. But it’s a Vault, which by its own right is a find of the year, so he wraps his layers tighter, hefts his rifle, and breaks inside. Evidence of Gunners and other raider activity is evident, but everything has been looted already, stripped clean to the barest of materials around, to the things not even the most desperate would take: empty crates, trash cans, moldy mattresses and empty shell casings from every weapon Deacon could think of.
He shuffles through the detritus, occasionally picking up casings he recognizes to be reused later while also stopping at every terminal he can reach and unlock. Most of it is the usual Vault-Tec fare - odd social experiments and personal logs, with this particular Vault being an investigation of criminals put into power of Overseer. It’s boring and the evidence of its success is clear all around him. He gets bored by the time he reaches the Overseer’s office, but once he unlocks the terminal at the desk and starts reading, he has a smile on his face.
A Vault, similar in size to this one, but further north. It’s in a place called “Sanctuary”: a tiny development that was intended to be the future of American neighbourhoods, with its advanced technology, a Mr.Handy in every home, and its diverse population. He doesn’t know what information on this Vault is doing in this one until he finds a cigar box full of Vault-Tec holotapes under the desk, each one labeled with other Vaults in the area. Each one has recorded bare-bones information on them, but it’s enough: the one in Sanctuary piques his interest.
A cryo-Vault. Not a normal vault. Its residents were skimmed from the population in Sanctuary, men and women and children alike, each completely unrelated except for the neighbourhood they all lived in. They weren’t aware of the Vault’s true intentions, even when they were given vault suits and shoved into cryopods. The whole thing is normal for Vault-Tec, but the fact that it’s a freezer is what matters. Not only to him; his friendly neighbourhood opposition wouldn’t be so stupid to pass up the opportunities a pre-war ice cube could present them.
He scoops the cigar box full of holotapes into his pack and worms his way back out of the darkness of the Vault onto the surface. He’s too excited to feel the cold nipping at his fingers as he practically sprints across the ‘Wealth back to HQ, where he dumps his stash of Vault tapes into a safe he dug into the floor of his room before he tells Dez he has a lead on some ghosts and leaves again. She barely has time to give him an odd look as he presses past her for the escape tunnel.
Sanctuary is located near the mountains in the north-western tip of the Commonwealth. A river runs through it, and a forest that stretches up to the mountains themselves rings behind it as a road that was never finished winds up the hills to the entrance of the Vault. Skeletons of people and military equipment litter the way up to the Vault’s subterranean elevator, and when he steps on the elevator itself, nothing happens. More scouting reveals a working terminal and button that activates the elevator, and he deigns not to mess with it for now. He only looks around long enough to confirm that it’s the refrigerator he wants - Vault 111, excuse him - before he sets up camp up the hill above the Vault. Far enough away to not be noticed, but close enough to observe through binoculars.
His project reveals nothing for a long couple of years. By the time 2286 rolls by, a part of him is ready to call it quits - if the Institute wasn’t interested now, when their synths were already walking and talking like real humans, they wouldn’t be now. But he waits it out. He shows up every week to do some observations, check the elevator, make sure no one has disturbed it, and then he takes off again to work that bears fruit.
He worries and he waits for three years. Just when he’s about to really abandon his project and cut his losses, a loud boom echoes from the Vault’s direction as he lounges in his chair, enjoying the previously quiet afternoon, and as he fumbles with his binoculars, a man in a Vault 111 jumpsuit steps off the Vault’s elevator platform.
Deacon worries no more. He tells Dez that Project Wanderer, on a chilly spring day in 2287, is a resounding success.
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Of course someone was going to walk out of that Vault. He knew from the beginning someone , somewhere, was either going to walk in and come back out, or someone from the Vault itself, who had been a resident, was going to walk out. He was hoping to catch an Institute spy or a Courser, because at least he knows how to deal with those things. Usually they want to kill him, and he’s good at killing back, so it would have been simple and easy if things had come to that.
But the smallest of possibilities he had considered had come true. So now he had a walking popsicle roaming the ‘Wealth, and whether that was a good thing or a bad thing wasn’t totally apparent when his prize took his first steps into a brave new world. It really still wasn’t - he’d been tailing Wanderer for close to a month before he’d learned his name. His moral ambiguity still stood, and while for good reason, Deacon was still left confused every time his target went back home to Sanctuary after a long day of wiping raiders off the map.
Maybe it was shock. Deacon wouldn’t put it past him. While he had grown up in this world, this world post-apocalypse, his target - Nate was his name - hadn’t. He was probably some rich kid that grew up with the world under his thumb only to have it taken away from him when some bigger fish decided it was time to end it all. A world where every day amenities were taken away and replaced with holes in the ground to shit in was probably the most culture shock someone could possibly experience all at once.
So he left Nate to it. Deacon backed off, just the tiniest bit, but when he got word his target was moving, he would move with him. He was there during the argument between Nate, Piper, and the Diamond City Mayor. He was there when Wanderer met Hancock and shook his hand while blood still dripped off the ghoul’s fingers. He was there during his first visit to Bunker Hill, hidden behind the bhramin his mercenary group was escorting halfway across the ‘Wealth. His target became more popular, and more dangerous, and with each turn he learned more about him despite his place in the shadows.
Deacon learned about his past: about the bomb blast eating up everything in its path as he and his wife and his baby boy descended into the cold dark of the Vault. About being frozen, only to wake up to witness his son’s kidnapping at the hands of some mercenary and two people in hazmat suits, and his wife’s murder. But instead of the cryopod spitting him out onto the Vault’s floor to face the reality of his love’s death, he was frozen again, to be woken ten years later to the world when there was nothing to be done. He’d made it his duty to find his baby boy - now a ten year old kid - if not for himself, then for his dead spouse. Even after the hundredth time Nate had told this story, Deacon’s heart still ached.
A part of him knew what it all felt like.
He knew the little moments, too. Small things that Nate probably didn’t even know himself. But when he started to stumble down the Freedom Trail - a half-baked attempt to find people that truly believed in the Railroad’s cause, forgotten only because Deacon had started Project Wanderer - Deacon backed off. He was too close to HQ for comfort, and he knew Dez had people watching Nate as soon as he started to sniff around the Old North Church. So he disappeared, like he always did, and when he returned to HQ the back way and found Nate standing in the floodlights in front of Dez, covered in mud and dirt with a dog snarling behind him and good ol’ Nick Valentine pointing a laser rifle over his shoulder, he knew his time had come.
Because what’s a play without a good entrance?
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