The people also yearn for your Russian Dally headcanons 🙏
the people are yearning quite a bit/aff
(also this may heavily feature my oc rusty whos dally’s baby brother by one year :) )
anywayyyyy their family is actually siberian! they just…don’t bother to correct anyone. even though it’s technically the asian region of russia, they don’t like assimilating with it much. it’s still russia, yes, but they don’t like calling themselves russian if that makes sense. they’ll always introduce themselves as siberian if they’re asked about it.
they primarily speak russian, as that is the most commonly spoken language in siberia. sometimes, dally confuses the letters sometimes since the russian alphabet and english alphabet are different, but some of the letters look the same (for example, B makes the v sound, Y makes the u sound, H makes the n sound, P makes the r sound…) so sometimes if he’s trying to read something, he’ll mess it up a little bit
russian was both his and rusty’s first language. dally’s english isn’t perfect—he still messes up sometimes, but he’s actually pretty good at it and got the hang of it as quickly as he could
so backstory time, his parents used to live in a more modest house. they weren’t rich, but they were certainly very well off. their dad was a bank manager and his mom owned a small bakery. dally actually knows how to cook very well because he remembers his mama taught him
his mom got brain cancer when he was maybe seven or eight and died when he was nine. his father spiralled and it got bad enough that dally and rusty had to live with their grandma because their dad would do a lot worse than just beat them. dally doesn’t talk about his dad. he usually shuts down when asked about it. he will not talk about it.
they lived with their grandma until dally were maybe eleven before they moved to maine in the united states. their grandma had immigrated to the united states when she was little, but decided to go back to siberia, so she knew minimal english and taught it to the both of them
she died when dally was twelve, and from then on, he was a street rat. him and rusty. they hitched a train to new york and lived there for a few months before it got too unsafe for them (it was the cold war era, they would’ve been snuffed out awful quick considering how alleged “communists” were treated back then) so they went to dallas, texas.
speaking of, dallas isn’t his real name. his actual name was demetrius he knew he needed to change his name to “fit in more” and since they were in dallas, texas, he chose dallas. rusty’s actual name was nikolai, and he kept it as his middle name because he wanted to feel connected to his older life, to a degree. dallas names him rusty because of his “rust coloured hair”. they chose winston cause of the cigarettes
it was winter when they moved to tulsa. rusty had caught pneumonia since the didn’t have anywhere warm to go. it was buck merrill who found them on the streets and took them in
buck is like a father figure to both of them, though they both have a different response. rusty clings to him while dally keeps trying to push him away because he’s scared
buck teaches them english. rusty’s not as good as dally, and he doesn’t talk much because he can never really “assimilate” enough to “get rid” of his accent, and he’s just living in fear of being excluded or anything because of his hometown. dally, meanwhile, has been practicing his new york accent endlessly and had finally gotten it down
dally joined the gang when he was fourteen. it was darry who brought him into the gang. him and rusty were dine n dashing at the restraint he worked at, and his boss, knowing he was a football player, told darry to run after them. he did and noticed this little fourteen year old boy with his baby brother who looked no ire than twelve, practically starving away…darry puts himself in their shoes. he’d do the same thing for his brothers. he lets them both go with a warning, but he sometimes leaves food out for them. he brings them to his house eventually and dally just kinda gets rolled into the gang
again, dally is a very good cook. well…not very good. very good in his own words. he just doesn’t bother with cleanliness. his mama taught him how to cook though
his accent slips out when he’s really upset or angry. he has a good hold of the new york accent, but he can’t help having his russian accent slip sometimes
oklahoma weather for them is unbearable. it’s 60 degrees out and dally’s sweating his ass off because he’s used to the cold and he gets cranky when it’s warm
he used to make friends with the stray cats back in siberia, so he kinda ends up being a cat magnet in america too
that’s kinda my russian dally lore haha, idk if you were looking for more random headcanons, these are more full of more, but yknow
