ah, shit. Please disregard my last ask. How about 42 for Ariadne chargestep?
42) things you said when you asked me to marry you
that video
fallen hero: fanfiction ~710 words Ariadne/Julia [chargestep]
You jolt awake, back already screaming in protest from having spent the night slumped over your desk. The movement jars the computer monitor back on reminding you what you’d spent the last day doing. One continuous mistake. You shouldn’t have done it. Shouldn’t have clicked on the first article, the second was incredibly unwise, and by the third you were out of excuses.
Marshal Charge of the Los Diablos Rangers gives stirring eulogy at the funeral of Ranger Anathema and local hero Sidestep
The video must have finished playing while you were out. How many times did you watch it last night? Search the mask of her face? Micro-analyze Steel’s stoicism as he stood behind her, a hand on her shoulder?
You press your palms against your eyes until you see stars. Nightmare mixes with memory. It’s gone. It’s over. It’s over. It’s over.
You swallow down the urge to watch the video again.
The rapping on the door is practically a welcome distraction in comparison. Spring to your feet, rub the sand out of your eyes, make sure you’re decent. Prepare yourself for a fight. You can’t tell who it is, which means two things, either it’s Julia Ortega dropping by like she told you she would yesterday, or the Special Directive have decided to try the polite method of kidnapping.
When you open the door you look marginally more presentable but Julia Ortega’s eyebrows still shoot upwards in concern. “Ari! You look like crap, what happened?”
“H-hi Julia.” She’s got a box in her hands, you don’t want to make her drop it but–
“Hey, can I come in?” She asks, voice soft. “I’ve got a box of mochi in my hands.”
Your face reddens and you hurriedly step back, “Yeah, sorry. Sorry. I’m just– uh, sorry.”
She shifts the box to one hand and sweeps you into a hug with the other as she walks in. You clutch at her hand as she walks into the kitchen, puts the box down on the kitchen table. Hands free she turns to you and hold you by the shoulders. “Now, what’s going on? I haven’t heard about Adrestia in the news lately. You aren’t planning something without tell me are you?”
You shake your head. “I just– I watched the video.”
Julia frowns at that. “Video? What video?”
“I shouldn’t have done it. I knew it was a bad idea. Stupid. I’m stu–”
Julia squeezes your shoulders. “Stop that. Ari, what video?”
You throat pinches. “The– the one of our– my– Anathema’s funeral.”
The expression on Julia’s face freezes for a moment. “Ah. That video.” The two of you walk each other to the couch. Sweets can wait for a moment. “I’m..” Julia looks about the room as if she’ll find the words hiding under the furniture. “You hadn’t seen it before?”
You shake your head before sliding down against her.
Julia rubs the back of her neck. “I’m sorry you had to see that. I was a pretty sorry mess–”
You wap her knee. “Stop that. Don’t…. don’t ever apologize for that.” You take her hand in yours, massage the knuckles of her fingers. “I’m the one who should apologize.”
“Ari? You don’t have–”
“If– if I had just been braver. Said something. Before all this started. Maybe I– maybe things wouldn’t have turned out like this.”
“I should have pushed harder. I…” Julia hesitates.
“You were afraid I’d run.”
“Yeah.”
“That’d I’d leave you behind again. To pick up the pieces, all over. again”
“You… you really listened to that video huh.”
“A dozen times at least.” You grip her hand hard, turning the skin over her knuckles white. “You didn’t abandon me, right? You just… thought I was… That I…”
“…yeah.”
“I’m not running. I won’t leave you– leave you behind. Not again. You look up at her, blinking the water out of your eyes. “I won’t.”
“…that’s a big promise, Ms. Becker.”
“You’re stuck with me Ortega. For better or worse.” You give a weak laugh, smile at her. “Probably worse, the way things are going.”
Julia shakes her head and wraps her free arm around your shoulders to pull you in closer. “You’re stuck with me too.”
hey qq: how does Logan feel about puns, particularly of the bad dad joke variety?
She will fight. Puns make her groan and cover her face and metaphorically roll away. Like she finds them funny but so bad.
Especially ones she doesn’t get straight away, and then a few minutes later, or maybe a couple of hours later, she manifests inside your house to smack you.
alrighty! so before I go and rb it, can you do 3-6,8,9,12,19,20,23,25,26,31-33?
Thank you so much for asking so many questions! I’ve answered 3 and 5 previously, but the rest were brand new! This is really long so I’m going to put it under a read more. Apologies for the angst train! Some of these ones ended up kind of fluffy tho!
4. Does your OC have nightmares? What do they contain?Dollie has had her fair share of nightmares. From watching Nate die again and again, to deathclaws, to strange blurry confusion of what the Institute might be like. She’s dreamt of losing her friends to swarms of ferals, she’s had several rough dreams in particular where she couldn’t move and had to watch Danse being overwhelmed by feral ghouls without being able to help him.
6. What would get your OC to make themselves disappear?Dollie does this from time to time. When she can’t process things or the Commonwealth gets to be too much she just drops off the map for a few days, sometimes weeks. If you know her well enough she’s usually at the Red Rocket or held up in Home Plate. She values her time alone because it lets her gather her thoughts and build herself back up to keep moving forward.
I can’t think of a situation where she’d disappear completely. During Blind Betrayal, she was ready to drop everything and go with Danse, and I think that’s the closest she gets to disappearing. Otherwise, her sense of responsibility is far too great for her to quit.
8. What is the closest your OC has come to death?Aside from a few instances of almost being drowned by a feral that was trying to tear off her face, being choked out by a raider, or deadly radiation poisoning, the closest Dollie has come to death was getting shot close range with a shot gun. She was sedated in sick bay on the Prydwen for several days. Recoup was rough.
She’s been close to death once pre-war, but that’s a story for another time.
9. What is the greatest sacrifice your OC could ever make? Under what circumstance would they make it?
The greatest sacrifice Dollie makes is Shaun. She makes the decision to let her biological son go in order to save the Commonwealth. It kills her, and in the end she can’t really come to terms with it so she just doesn’t. The Institute was going to leave the Commonwealth for dead, and there was no way she could let that happen. One life for many. Her choice practically made itself.
12. To what extent would your OC go to survive?When Shaun’s safety is still in question, there is literally nothing Dollie wouldn’t do to survive. She’ll do whatever it takes to get to him and make sure he’s safe. If she hadn’t run into Preston or Recon Squad Gladius when she did, it’s likely that her moral compass would have cracked and she would have made some darker choices. Seeing that morality was alive in the Wasteland so early on was very important for her mental well-being.
19. What is your OC’s preferred method of death?Dollie wouldn’t want something long suffering. She had to watch her mother’s violent battle with late stage cancer, and that’s not something she’d want to live through. She’d want something quick and clean. She wouldn’t want to die for nothing, also. If her death had purpose or was for something, that would be better. At most she’d want a few moments to tidy up, to tell the person she was with that she loved them, appreciated them, or thank them, and then she could try to be at peace with everything.
20. How does your OC sleep at night?For a long time after the vault, Dollie has a very intimate relationship with the ceiling. She doesn’t sleep for more than an hour or two at a time, and just lies there staring upward. She spends most of her first several months running on fumes and completely exhausted. She sleeps best when Danse is watching her back. She trusts his constant vigilance and his quick perception. She feels like when he’s there nothing bad is going to happen, which is definitely something you want to hold onto in the Wasteland.
After a while she becomes a lighter sleeper which helps her get more sleep, because she’s less worried about not waking up if something bad happens. She also has fewer nightmares, because she becomes kind of desensitized to them. When every waking moment is practically a nightmare, the nightmares aren’t so scary anymore.
23. Would your OC be considered good or bad by an outsider?I firmly believe that Dollie would be considered good. Despite all of her troubles she goes out of her way to make the Commonwealth a better place with the Minutemen. She doesn’t ask for anything in return from her settlements, and her help is not conditional. While some people would be very wary of that and slow to trust, she proves herself with unwavering kindness. She’s very patient and doesn’t force people to join the Minutemen’s cause. Even if they didn’t want to, she’d still offer help.
25. What does your OC love most, and what would they do to keep it?Dollie always wanted a quiet life with little conflict. That life became a very idyllic dream after the bombs and the vault. But when she met Preston and the settlers, she found a scrap of that dream still alive. So in a literal sense, Dollie is fighting to make the Commonwealth a safer, more peaceful place. With the help of the Minutemen she hopes to make her dream a reality for everyone in the Commonwealth.
26. Has your OC ever had unrequieted feelings of any kind for someone?That’s the fun of a slow burn isn’t it? After Nate’s death she’s very hung up on him, and has a lot of trouble recognizing her feelings. Once she realizes she’s falling for someone else she feels an incredible amount of shame and guilt. She keeps those feelings to herself, not just because of the guilt, but because of who the person is. Falling in love with Paladin Danse is honestly a mixed bag. He’s an incredible person, he makes her laugh, makes her feel safe, they share a lot of the same values, and he has an incredible way of getting through the toughest walls she’s built around herself. There’s never an elephant in the room with Danse. He addresses problems as they arise, and she’s never had someone like that. She has literally never felt closer to anyone in her life. But he’s her commanding officer. And his first love will always be the Brotherhood of Steel. Even if he reciprocated her feelings, he’d never put his place in the Brotherhood in jeopardy. She also doesn’t want to lose his friendship, so she doesn’t act on her feelings.
Another unrequieted emotion she harbored was resentment. She felt a lot of resentment toward Nate because he had a comfy life before he willingly joined the military. His family had immense wealth, his parents had top notch health care, all around he led a privileged life. He also had very harsh stances on certain topics, like addiction and mental health, that Dollie saw as coming directly from his life of privilege. However, Nate changed a lot after his time in Anchorage. He became a much more open minded person and definitely wanted to do things without his parent’s help. Nate and Dollie’s relationship was getting stronger every day. She was opening up to him, at a glacial pace, but he was still the first person she ever let into her life.
31. Would your OC torture?No. I can’t think of an instance when Dollie would ever allow torture to occur on her watch. As someone who studied government and history so closely, she believes that all things said under acts of torture are void in a court of law because they come from fear. This belief holds true in the Wasteland. She believes that torture is completely useless and is nothing but cruelty. It serves no purpose.
32. Does your OC hate? To what extent?Dollie had never truly hated anyone until Kellogg. Watching helplessly as he destroyed her entire world definitely cemented him into her memory. She loathed him completely and felt no sympathy for him. That hatred led her to Diamond City and to finding Valentine. That hatred led her to Fort Hagen where Kellogg met his fate. All in all, Dollie’s hatred has to be justified. She doesn’t hate for no reason, and she doesn’t hate over petty things. She deeply loathes some people, but so far, the only person she’s hated (other than a healthy dose of self-hatred) was Kellogg.
33. How does your OC let out anger?Dollie is a bottler. She bottles up her emotions until they explode. She can harbor massive amounts of anger before she finally snaps. The last straw is typically an unlucky raider who pushes one too many buttons. There has been an instance of her taking that anger out on other people, namely Danse, when he really didn’t deserve it, but after that she went out of her way to apologize for the behavior. Before the war she didn’t “get” angry. Meaning she bottled it up even worse and didn’t talk about it. Sometimes she’d vent to her sister on the phone, but she didn’t have a real outlet. She put some of that to use in court, but otherwise she kind of became a ticking time bomb. Post war, if she gets too mad she’ll just let out a snarl, fight some raiders, and feel better.
