Could u tell me more about your president's merc au I'm highkey super interested, I've not seen many people ship with Myers.. I'm curious how they met, how they get along? do they argue and what about? :0
Hiiiii @ashalsdream! Thank you for asking about my toxic yuri couple! Sorry not sorry, but this will go long. I have a LOT of feelings about them, and I was reading through some handwritten parts of The Tower AU just the other night when I scheduled this week's Shippy Saturday set.
Aside from the influence of Vesna and Baddieghest who ship Rosalind and Kurt Hansen (which I do love but don't personally HC), there aren't too many active ships that I've seen. I personally only know of a couple others on tumblr. There are more authors who write about her on AO3, however.
Before I get into my ship, a clarification: the "president's merc AU" is a catchall tag for what has become two different AUs—the original "president's merc AU" that doesn't have a real name yet looool, and the secondary AU "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" that's based on The Tower ending. Basically it functions as their ship tag. I never imagined Val having an AU where she doesn't end up with Mitch, much less two where she ends up with Rosalind, so I didn't start tagging them separately until recently. I really need to go back and clean up my tags for them.
Here's the whole, messy tag in chronological order, so you can see my meltdown happen.
They meet the same way in both AUs, through the events of hooking up in the safehouse Phantom Liberty.
The "Original" President's Merc AU
First some backstory...
After they reach the safehouse and hook up, Val attempts to get in contact with Solomon Reed, but he's MIA. Val sticks around Dogtown for a few days, and they spend that time, uh, bonding. When V finally does get in touch with Sol, the narrative resumes per usual.
Moments before said hookup
As things progress through Dogtown, Val grows more and more suspicious of Song's motives, and ultimately sides with Sol and attempts to hack her at the stadium. That goes very badly, of course, and she works with Sol to track her down and subdue her.
V had been working on a quickhack that could shut down Song's connection to the Blackwall. When she finally catches up with her in the Cynosure mainframe, V realizes she can't turn Song over to the NUSA in her current state; she can't do that to another streetkid who's story isn't too different from her own. She modifies her quickhack to severe Song's synapses so that she'll essentially be comatose (handwave-y techno-medical babble here), but still technically alive so that she fulfills her part of the bargain with Ros and the NUS.
When she and Sol deliver Song to Rosalind outside of the city, V decides not to take the offer from NUSA; she would rather see what other options she has. Fast forward a few weeks to sitting on the rooftop with Johnny, and they decide to go to Arasaka Tower together.
Later, after she has taken over The Afterlife (and theoretically been cured after Path of Glory, which I'm just going to assume happens for narrative purposes [read: I don't want to deal with saving her myself lmao]) she reaches out to "Mittens" and they start a casual flirtation via text. Rosalind asks her for advice on an outfit for the magazine interview she's doing in NC, and V is able to turn that into the promised dinner date at Embers.
A couple of my favorite pics from their date at Embers. The fact that Rosalind kept the scar instead of having it removed just kills me 😩
They go back to Val's apartment (she doesn't like the mansion so she kept her place in The Glen) and start seeing each other in private. Eventually Ros invites her to DC and V becomes an advisor, filling some of Songbird's former role. As for their endgame, I don't know what happens yet. I have suspicions about how long Rosalind can stay in power, but Val will be her loyal guard dog until the end.
My favorite pic of them, probably
Here is my original post sketching out their ship. The trajectory hasn't changed much in the year and a half since I shared that, but they did develop another AU....
Boulevard of Broken Dreams, or The Tower AU
I don't think Rosalind would be at the hospital when V wakes up but I can dream, right?
The Tower AU is much darker for Val. All of her AUs work on the theory that our lives are massive decision trees. Change one decision and you can change the course of a character's trajectory. In this AU, Val never bonded with anyone in NC aside from Jack, Misty, and Vik.
She goes to Dogtown as soon as she's finished the VDBS quests. Things progress with the Phantom Liberty story as usual—after they hook up in the safehouse, ofc, which is the subject of my most recent piece on AO3. Because of their similar backgrounds, V grows close to Song and sides with her at the stadium despite—or maybe in spite of—her feelings for Rosalind. When Song finally admits the whole truth on the train to the shuttle, V feels betrayed and calls Sol to turn her over. She feels guilty about betraying another Streetkid, but not enough to prevent her from doing it. When Sol calls her a few days later, she goes willingly with the NUS. (I haven't decided if she and Johnny are fully-friended in this one, but I'd like to think so because The Tower ending is so much more emotionally wrought when he is.)
Two years later, she wakes up in a completely changed world. She has no combat cyberware, can't use an internal cyberdeck, and she'll never be a merc again. When she returns to NC and finds Vik has sold out and Misty is leaving, she tries being "one of the crowd" but can't stand it. With no one left in NC, she calls up Solomon Reed and takes up his offer of a job with the FIA.
After she arrives in DC, she's invited to lunch at the White House. It's a difficult situation for V, as to her it's only been a few weeks since the events of Dogtown. She admits to Rosalind that she's having a hard time adjusting, and that she can't talk to anyone about the events due to the sensitive nature—the "official story" is nothing like what happened, and doesn't include what happened between the two of them, of course. Rosalind suggests that she could be act as a therapist for V, since she is one of the few people who does know the whole story—and has the proper security clearance. They start meeting regularly, and things go from there.
What things? IDK, I haven't gotten that far lmao but it's possible that Val will find out the truth about what happened to Songbird. (Don't ask, I have no fucking clue lmao) I do know that Val ends up in more of a protective role, like Federal Secret Service vs. being an adviser in the other AU. I have Thoughts ™️about what happened to V during the two years she was in a coma, and suspect that her cyberware isn't as fucked as the NUSA doctors say.
If you ask Val, Rosalind never smokes, which is the real reason she's on Ros's security detail
Their Relationship: How They Get Along
In both AUs, they get along like a house on fire.
Rosalind picks up on Val's praise kink embarrassingly quickly when they're escaping from Barghest, and knows how to use that to her advantage. In general, Val does not do well with authority figures, but with Rosalind it's different—because of the circumstances during the DLC, Rosalind isn't in her usual political mode; she's much more vulnerable and honest with V than she would be in literally any other situation, so that lets V see the real person instead of the politician.
Mostly when they argue, it's because Val is being protective of Rosalind—she's a very good guard dog, it turns out—though she does have a tendency toward jealousy, even if she knows that Rosalind is playing her political games. Rosalind tolerates it, for the most part, though she will get irritated by Val's jealousy if it lingers. If the world's most powerful woman ends up in your bed at the end of the night, does it really matter what she did during the day?
One of the things that Rosalind really appreciates about Val is how inexperienced she is. She gets to share all kinds of things with Val that are firsts for her—travel and food are the two biggest opportunities—and she appreciates how eager Val is to learn new things.
In Conclusion: Some of My Favorite Pics of Them
Thank you again for the ask! 🥰
