Disclaimer: None of this belongs to me. Or all of it does. You decide which is the truth.

This is a new series of drabbles based on the television show"Lie to Me". The current plan is to post one drabble for each episode, but that plan remains highly fluid.

Chapter 1: Pilot

Lying, he had long ago decided, was how the human race communicated. Social interactions as simple as greeting one another were built on lies.

How are you doing?

Fine.

Loker's 'radical honesty' was not radical so much as it was honest. But that was enough. People didn't want the truth. Didn't want to see the truth.

You can't handle the truth…

But he couldn't help but see. And his world darkened at the truth. It had been a long time since anything was black and white. All that was left now were shades of grey.

He had accepted that his world was irrevocably changed. It was if the gods had decreed a price be exacted, in return for giving such power to a mortal. And power Cal Lightman had.

The power to tell, at a glance, if someone was lying.

But not the power to turn it off.

And that was the price.

It had, in a way, wrecked his family and it had wrecked his friendships and it had wrecked his marriage and it had very nearly wrecked him.

Sometimes he thought that, in the end, the truth would kill him. That, like Icarus, he had flown too close to the sun and he wouldn't survive the fall.

From the last scene from the pilot. This was an aspect of Lightman's character that I wish they would do more with on the show.