#gabriel.ulysses

[echthr0s]

#promptroulette

🥀 Has your OC ever been hurt by someone they love? Ever been betrayed? Abused? Attacked? Give me the angst! (if you’d like, write a short drabble about it!) (source)

It was fine, at first. Or, it seemed fine. They buried Gideon (once called "of the Grave", now returned to it, as was always intended) where he'd dropped, not even ten miles outside of Vegas, and they kept walking towards the rising sun.

They were quiet, those days. Gabriel ranged away from the path to hunt game, but he did not crow in victory when his arrows found their mark, as he once did. He simply stood and stared at the kill, sometimes for so long that the buzzards would cry their impatience and the flies would contemplate settling in for the long haul.

Ulysses… well, Ulysses just walked.

They slept in the heat of the day, backs to each other, and ate in silence in the long shadows of late afternoon, and then they'd walk. They could have stopped at a ranch, done some work, taken a couple of mules, and hoofed it that way to the next ranch, trading steeds every few dozen miles. They could have, but the savage gnawing in the pits of their bodies compelled them to walk, even as it ached, even as the exhaustion made shambling ghosts of them.

It was fine. Or, it seemed fine. And then Gabriel made the mistake of speaking.

(read the rest on AO3)

[echthr0s]

I get so in a tizzy about Gabriel and Ulysses because it's just so hard-won; the garden that blooms between these two hearts that were thought barren is riotous and complex and flourishes beyond reason or expectation and is 1000% unkillable

like Noah and Preston basically fall into step with each other as soon as they meet. it's easy, it's gentle, it's like coming home after a long journey. but for Gabriel and Ulysses it's hacking at tough brambly underbrush with a machete and falling into snake pits and clawing up vines until they meet in a clearing they have carved out with their own hands, and then they have to build their home from the ground up, and Gabriel had no knowledge of building and certainly not of building together, and Ulysses could only see a future of flames for anything he built, but they did it anyway. they couldn't even say why they did, why they went through all of this for each other. but they came to understand, deeply, over time

the thing about Gabriel was that this was never supposed to happen to him. I wanted him to find serenity in his particularly prickly way of existing, not to be softened by anyone else. I didn't want him to ever feel forced into being palatable in order to be loved -- because as the person Gabriel is modelled after, it's very hard not to subconsciously operate under the social pressure that this is how it works. so I figured aside from being subject to Noah's completely unflappable and unconditional love, Gabriel would probably remain solitary. he doesn't want to be annoyingly attached to anyone anyway. it's fine.

I had sent Lone Wanderer Gabriel to Vegas for Courier Gideon, who would then accompany him back East and they'd find Sole Survivor Noah and that would be how all my Wastelanders meet each other. and then Gideon revealed that he dies in the Mojave. he never goes East. what? but if that's the case, what happens to Gabriel? and what happens to Ulysses, who was supposed to go with them?

ah. the story is a living one, and it reveals its clever machinations, little by little. so it is that Gabriel does not stop being particularly prickly (or bitey or murder-y) and Ulysses doesn't want him to. Ulysses is also prickly and sullen and withdrawing and prone to melancholy and quick to assume malice and quick to draw blood (figuratively, in contrast to Gabriel's literally). they see each other clearly and know what it means. they make space for each other and find that this paradoxically brings them closer to each other. hand in unloveable hand they find out what they need, deep down, and what they've been denied, and how awful it was that they'd been denied, and how hard it is to come back from that, and how hard it is to exist at all, and how good it feels to be prickly and broken and held.

and isn't that what I actually want for Gabriel? for all of us?