"can't sleep?" vannika/veronica for the angst prompts thing! :)
Anna Karenina
Characters: Courier Six (Vannika), Veronica Santangelo
Pairings: Courier/Veronica (implied)
(fic is below the cut)
“Can’t sleep?”
The Courier already knew who it was that stood behind her long before they ever spoke. The gentle, almost tentative pattern of footsteps, the rustle of burlap fabric, the soft scent of creosote and primrose…
“Verochka,” she acknowledged her unexpected guest as she cleared a spot beside her on the concrete rooftop. “So you’ve found me.”
Veronica eagerly plopped herself down next to her, dangling her legs over the edge of the building, staring down into the streets of Freeside intently. Even at near 4AM, the local criers could still be heard hard at work, voices echoing through the maze of crumbling buildings. Perhaps it was the city itself which couldn’t sleep.
“There’s a trail of empty bottles and cigarette butts leading up here, it wasn’t hard to figure out that this is where you disappear to every night. You know, with this being the Atomic Wrangler and all, at first I was expecting you to be doing more… fun activities at night, not drinking alone on a rooftop.”
If it had been anyone else poking their nose into her nightly habits, the Courier would have been threatening them at knifepoint right about now. Her business was hers alone, as was her journey, or so she had been so sure until the morning she had passed through the 188 Trading Post and greeted by a starry-eyed girl in a tattered hood.
“To answer your initial question,” the Courier took a long gulp from a clear, glass bottle before passing it to her companion, “sleeping is difficult for me.”
Veronica accepted the bottle and took a cautious sip before sputtering at the taste of the cheap vodka, quickly passing it back. “You’ve been fighting pretty hard at the Thorn lately, don’t you get tired? And more importantly, can’t you afford something that tastes, hm, a little less like battery acid? How many caps are we at now?”
“800, more or less. We’ve been here for weeks and we’re not even halfway to the minimum entry requirement. And Benny… that rat bastard, he’s so close I can practically see him and yet-.” The Courier’s words were emphasized by the audible crack of glass as her grip tightened on the vodka bottle, tiny cracks spreading across the surface like bolts of desert lightning. She released her grip and sent it shattering to the street, her sudden burst of anger along with it.
“But no, I don’t feel tired,” she finally answered, more calmly this time. The neon sign of the Atomic Wrangler made her pale eyes glow in an unsettling red color.
Shifting ever closer, Veronica settled her head against the Courier’s shoulder, taking in the view of the endless desert sky shining beyond the city limits. It wasn’t only her that wasn’t suited for life here. “What do you think about then, when you’re up here?”
The Courier was silent for a moment, as if contemplating the reply carefully. “It’s not so much what I think… I try to remember. About myself. My past. Who I once was. ‘Rummaging in our souls, we often dig up something that ought to have lain there unnoticed.’ From Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, do you know it?”
Veronica wrapped herself around the Courier’s arm now, the single sip of vodka giving her more courage than she had anticipated. She inhaled deeply, finally knowing that the Courier smelled of smoke, sage brush, and agave. Sweeter than she had been expecting.
“Can’t say I have, even in the bunker. I didn’t know you’re reading Tolstoy, Courier.”
The Courier leaned into Veronica’s touch, although she did not look down to meet her eyes. Her gaze remained trained harshly on the desert horizon.
“That’s the very thing, Verochka. I don’t read Tolstoy, not since crawling out of my own grave. And yet I know I once did, because I can remember a damned quote that has no meaning to me, but I can’t even remember my own name. Memory… it’s a burden after all, isn’t it.”
Veronica quietly hummed a tune as she kicked her legs against the concrete. She wasn’t sure how to answer. She never knew how best to reply to the Courier in these moments, despite how her heart beat hard against her chest in urgency to do so.
“We can start over,” Veronica replied at last.
“Start over?”
“Exactly. We’ll start over. I’ll forget that I was ever part of the Brotherhood, or came out of a bunker. No more Veronica Santangelo, I’ll be someone new! Just like you. Who cares what your name used to be, you can pick a new one, and we can start our lives all over again. Together.”
The Courier was quiet for a long moment, her mouth twisted partly into a grin but her brows furrowed into the worried look that always darkened her face.
Veronica held onto her arm tighter, as if scared that she would slip away in that moment. She cautiously traced a finger along the countless scars that marred it.
“No… I don’t think that’s in the stars for you and I. Not now, anyway. There is much blood to spill yet, mainly Benny’s. And more yet after that.”
“How much more?”
“Waves. Perhaps oceans, even. I’m yet to find out.”
“And when you do?”
“That is when I will remember who I once was. We should sleep, Verochka. It’s finally gotten late. Even for me.”
From Veronica’s grip the Courier slipped out, silently stalking away toward the door back into the Atomic Wrangler, like a wolf stalking away into the hills of the Mojave. And equally as unattainable.
I actually meant to explain more at the time when I posted this comic that showed some brief moments of Vannika’s childhood, but in essence I really, really love the method of telling a story via another story (esp. folktales or religious passages) and Vannika’s New Vegas storyline contains a lot of allegories to the fairytale of “Ivan Tsarevich and the Wolf” (also known as “Firebird”).
(rest is going under a cut because it’s long lol)
Although herself being born in the Mojave, Vannika’s parents are both (ethnically Ural Cossack) Russian immigrants, so she had a very strong Russian cultural influence growing up, which would include speaking exclusively Russian at home (or almost just in general, she lived in the middle of nowhere), and reading only Russian literature. This can be seen in the way she styles herself and in some of the ways she speaks, and the references she makes as Courier Six. Unfortunately, since her parents were also devout followers of the Eastern Orthodox religion and not very great parents, this meant that they pushed a lot of their conservative, misogynistic beliefs on Vannika.
Vannika’s parents, but especially her mother, Susana, had always wanted a son, and Susana was certain that she would be having a boy when she was pregnant with Vannika. When Vannika was inevitably born as a girl, Susana was devastated, and would often openly blame young Vannika for the post-pregnancy medical complications she sustained that would “prevent her from ever having the son she wanted”. While in her heart she did, I suppose, “love” Vannika, she also resented her and was subtly, emotionally abusive. Susana had planned on naming her child Ivan, like the titular character of many Russian folktales. This is also represented by how the diminutive for “Vannika” can be the same as the name “Ivan”, aka “Vanya”.
Internalizing the misogyny instilled in her by her parents, but also maybe just because, as a young girl, Vannika very much wished to become a prince when she grew up. She wanted to become the Ivan Tsarevich they had wanted so much for her to be, and not be subjected to the life of being a housewife and married off to the son of a family friend like they had pre-planned for her.
In her parents’ mind, there was no way Vannika could ever take over the butchery business they had worked so hard to build for themselves, they needed to guarantee that there would be a hard-working young man in the picture, and it seemed to them a beneficial move to merge families with the neighboring ranch.
This son of a family friend, Isaiah Proctor, was a kind boy. He’d never done any wrong, and he was always nice to Vannika when they were forced to hang out together, despite the fact that he also had no interest in having to eventually marry her. But to Vannika, he represented everything she feared for her own future; marrying someone she didn’t love, being relegated to the role of a quiet housewife, living forever on that lonely ranch in the middle of nowhere, under her parents’ thumb. He was Vannika’s very first sacrificial lamb.
One day, much like Ivan Tsarevich, Vannika finds herself at a crossroads.
“Ivan rode on and on until he reached a big stone standing in the middle of an open field. On the stone were the following words: "He who goes straight will be hungry and cold. He who passes to the right will be safe, but his horse shall die. He who passes to the left will be killed, but his horse will be safe."
Just like the hero she idolized, Vannika also chose to sacrifice another life in order to ensure her own survival. Without thinking, she pushes Isaiah to his death, off the edge of a cliff they stood before. But alas for poor Vannika Afanasyeva, life was neither kind nor easy towards her, and she would also “die” at that moment. The scared, timid girl she had been would be no longer, and from that moment on she’d start on the path to becoming the cold, cruel, selfish woman she would eventually grow up to be. In essence, at that moment, Ivan Tsarevich is devoured and replaced by the Wolf. But maybe, deep in her heart, she would always remember how she once longed to be Prince Ivan.
But if you know the tale of Ivan Tsarevich and the Wolf, you’d know that really, it’s the wolf who does everything, in the end, as Ivan always messes up and is the kind yet prodigal fool. Anything Vannika sets her mind to, she is able to complete. Retrieving the Firebird (aka the platinum chip)? Done. Bringing the golden horse to the king (destroying House’s bunker for Caesar)? Sure. Stealing the princess from the neighboring kingdom (blowing up the Brotherhood bunker after extracting info from Veronica)? Yes. And in the end, like the prince she had once dreamed of becoming, Vannika also receives half the “tsardom” by eventually becoming the Legate after the death of Caesar and her murder of Lanius.
And much like the wolf, and unlike Ivan, all the way through, there is never anyway there to ever help here. Every difficult thing she must endure, she endures alone, although sometimes that is due to her own fault at pushing the people around her away.
Thus, she chooses to keep wearing clothing from her own culture, and never really considers herself to be a part of the Legion, even long after she sacrifices her life thrice over for their causes. She only ever does so because their goals line up with her own (destroying the NCR), but no matter how much she furthers their causes she remains being viewed as an “outsider”, a foreign influence, all the way up until the end, which is something she really has no arguments against. “If I am, then so be it,” she thinks.
From the beginning of her own tale she has felt like an outsider despite always being in the very land she was born in. First, she was the third-culture daughter of immigrants, then a member of a dying religious cult (the Jackal Gang) being culled by the NCR, and finally the non-legionary who helped the Legion win Hoover Dam, stage a coup, and decide the fate of their civil war. She even takes on an Americanized version of her full name for some years (Vannika Volkov vs Vannika Afanasyeva Volkova) but it’s never really enough, and she eventually learns to accept that and embrace it. She was born and raised into a culture she can never have direct contact with and be part of, so all she can do it carry on its spirit. (She does get to rejoin her ethnic people in the Fallout: Alaska AU though, good for her)
And so, eventually, she finds herself at the wrong end of a sword held by the wrong person, finally the villain of her own fairytale. How did she get there, when once, she wanted only to be the prince, she wonders? But it’s far too late. She is no prince, but in fact, the hungry wolf. The enemy of all other folktales. And she has only herself to blame for bringing herself there. Thus, she at last accepts her own death, and the end of her tale.
And this is why, in a non-canon AU where she has children, she names them Ivan and Vasilisa, to basically pass on her generational “curse” to live out tales she was not made to belong in. To keep passing on her familial sins onto another generation.
(on a similar note, while it has nothing to do with Fallout at all, Vannika’s Cygnus 1985 AU backstory is a late Soviet retelling of Finist the Falcon)
i noticed a lanius employee of the month there. you know what i am going to ask.
Will Vannika ever get her Breakfast Vodka? Will Vulpes Inculta ever taste the glory of being employee of the month? How exactly is Lanius keeping that cat ear headband to stay on top of his helmet? The plot thickens.
I'm brave. Vulpes FOX maid costume. But the ideal is Vannika as the guest at a shitty maid cafe that Vulpes has to work at
*jingles into the court in my little jester outfit* Here you are, my liege. For you and the anon who spammed my inbox with "vulpes inculta cat maid costume" 8 times in a row. Anon, if you're out there...
