Work Text:
Felicia comes off ice and hits the world like an unstoppable force does a movable object, decimating everything in sight.
But it doesn't start like that, does it? Nothing ever does.
Felicia comes off ice and watches behind a pane of glass as strangers cut loose the cinderblocks that have been hanging from her neck for years. A bullet to Nate's head and Shawn taken away, and at first she's horrified, pleading.
But selfishly, selfishly, as they leave and she realizes that they're not taking her yet, she is relieved. The ice reforms and her body slows, mind slipping into a dark night of oblivion, and waits.
When she comes off ice for the last time, she hardly knows what to do. More lamb than lion, she makes her way out of Vault 111 and steps into the Commonwealth as it is now, ruined and depleted. It is strange and wild and ruthless, every bit a wasteland rather than a home. Shaken, with nothing but a loaded pistol in her hand and vault suit on her back, Felicia explores.
It's not long before Raiders find her, armed and armored to the teeth. They do not mean well. They are many, and she is one. Felicia's fingers twitch around the trigger of her gun, and in her throat, her heart pulses.
Sink or swim. Fly or fall. Kill or be killed. These are the laws of the wasteland, and she better learn quick.
Something else inside her rises up and takes over, something cold and coiled tight, and from outside her body she watches herself raise the pistol, watches herself point it between the eyes of a raider charging her at top speed, watches herself squeeze the trigger without blinking.
The skull caves in and the first tendrils of satisfaction to come slips in around the shock. Felicia snaps back into her body as a spray of blood splatters against her face, and instead of flinching, she smiles. This is good. This is just. They were going to do her harm and Felicia, free of the burden of attempted humanity, can channel all the chill of a woman without love in her heart into violence.
She sprints forward and shoots the next raider in the chest, gun tucked beneath his ribs, and pulls the trigger one more time. It gets easier with every passing kill, even as they bludgeon her in the temple, even as they kick her while she's down and crack her ribs, even as she falls to pieces. She will reassemble. She will triumph. She has been hurt and will deliver a hurt in return. From the ground, Felicia shoots the last raider in the leg, crawling towards them and brings her elbow down on the damaged bone, listening to the sick crack with satisfaction.
Slowly, so slowly, she staggers to her feet, bleeding and wild. She stumbles to loot their corpses in desperate need of a Stimpack: a broken rib digging into her lung, a wrist badly sprained, her temple bleeding freely. She sticks it straight into her vein and sighs in relief as the pain abates. She inspects the carnage and wonders why she doesn't feel anything but victorious, wonders why they had come after her at all, wonders how long it's been for the world to be so thoroughly gone to shit.
She picks up their guns and straps a few to her back, takes their armor to protect herself, because it was clear that no one else was going to.
Felicia stumbles towards a cabin in the distance with single-minded determination. One step after the other. she plucks almost-familiar berries off of bushes, too afraid to eat them until she finds proof that they're not poisonous. She drinks water from a pool and grimaces at the taste and the radiation both, her pipboy's radiation dial ticking upwards with every mouthful.
It becomes a familiar feeling, nestling in the space between her lungs. Along the way, Felicia notes with clinical distance that the killing gets easier with every body that she drops. Not because she's grown more desensitized, since that's been there from the start, because she's getting better at the act.
She learns the hard way that reloading has to be done with steady hands. She learns that she has to hold her breath when aiming if she has any hope at all of landing a shot in the distance. She learns that pain is a way of life and immediate and inevitable, and that enduring it is the only way she will survive.
Felicia learns, and gets a little colder every day.
Still looking out of time and out of place, Felicia slams a cabinet door shut with a snarl, a single salisbury steak box in hand, tearing it open and eating the disgusting thing where she stands. The bodies have already been looted of the goods and valuables, and all that remains is the contents of their makeshift base. She drops to one knee next to an ammo cache and pulls a bobby pin out of her hair, listening carefully as the lock slowly clicks. It takes two, but it pops open and she collects a box of shotgun shells and fifty caliber bullets, tucking them into her bag.
Her husband is dead and her son is gone, the world is cruel and her heart is empty, but all the same, Felicia revels in is the fact that she's free. From a dormant chrysalis of domesticity and deference has emerged a creature embittered from years of polite silence and a searing rage kept stoked in her breast. No longer is she dying a slow, gurgling death, drowning beneath the surface of mediocrity. No longer does Felicia simply survive. She thrives, for no one's sake but her own. Vengeance on principle for what has been taken from her is a concern that is not yet immediate.
Felicia's mind is a flurry of new facts and new habits, but when she reaches for the knowledge all she gets is white noise in return. Instincts are what drive her, and the specifics on the how and why are as opaque to her as lead.
Jump but don't look, shoot but don't think, be a harbinger of violence and don't ask why-- but most importantly, never, ever stop. Like a shipwreck's debris, Felicia runs through the Commonwealth unbound and directionless, without expectations or burdens or hopes or dreams. She is empty, but she is her own person.
Isn't that worth the sacrifice of the last vestiges of her humanity?
She's used plenty of Stims but the rest of the chems sit in her pack, unused. While she'd always casually partaken in a few Mentats here and there, things are different now, and she's got no tests to study for, no need to hone her focus on numbers and math. But when faced with overwhelming odds, Felicia reaches for a Stim and instead pulls out a little syringe labeled Psycho, and she bites her tongue.
Felicia has always been herself, and this means succumbing to something that can alter the processes of her mind. It means admitting she is not enough, but what's the shame in that when it is one versus many?
The needle slides so sweetly into her vein, and the grin forms on her face, unbidden. A hysterical, wild laugh echoes out through the ruined buildings as she launches herself at the super mutant closest to her, swinging her crowbar so hard at the fist holding a grenade she breaks it. The bones snap as the grenade drops to the ground, rolling down the hill as the creature snarls in rage, back turned to her to watch it go. Felicia crawls up his huge green frame till she can wrap her thighs around his neck and twists, snapping it with ease, and it feels so good. Better than usual. Better than anything.
She switches to her shotgun and loads it with shells so sweetly, bullets colliding with her armor but never quite making it through, and with a thirst unquenched Felicia stumbles forward, chest heaving, and blows the kneecaps off of two mutants on the second floor, blasting their heads into a thousand pieces with a smile. Destroy. Ruin. Destroy. Fury. Destroy. Win.
Felicia slides out of the haze and everything is not just dead, but brutalized. She hurts unspeakably, and it takes two Stims and a full meal to recover any sense of self, washing the red off in a filthy pond. Why had she waited so long?
As she learns the power of chems, she learns the power of her arsenal, too. Sitting alone in a garage in the dead of night, Felicia disassembles every stolen gun until she knows what makes it go and what makes it catch. She repeats the process ad nauseam until she can do it both ways with her eyes closed. It takes days and weeks but it becomes second nature, and then she can augment them and make them better. The armor, too, is improved with crude hammering and ugly stitching, pockets sewn into the sides and metal fixed on top of leather. She changes out of her vault suit and into raider rags, covering her scarred face with a gas mask, losing her identity in a way that is only fitting.
One afternoon, a nearby cabin explodes and catches her attention. In it Felicia finds a corpse and a chemistry station, and she laughs, kicking him out of the side and rifles through compounds and supplies for something usable. There's scribbled notes in his pocket that somehow survived, and with its help she mixes up Psycho and Jet in vials and syringes with meticulous care. Felicia covers the guy with the blanket off his bed and goes on her way, recipe for her favorite chems tucked into a pocket.
From that point forward, drugs flow through Felicia's veins as readily as blood. She rations Med-X more strictly than her food, and learns to combine her regulars, and Psychojet becomes a new favorite. She uses Buffout whenever she's out of bullets and in need of raw power and little else. Mentats, as it turns out, actually do have a use, giving her an edge when sniping from a distance, her hands deathly still.
Bit by bit, she's loses every bit of that the thin veneer of humanity she'd cultivated all those years ago. In the dog eat dog world of the Commonwealth, Felicia insists on being the one with the very last meal. Eye for an eye is inefficient: one eye for both, one eye for the hands, the other for the heart.
It does not go unnoticed: over months, her reputation spreads across the wasteland like a rippling tide, trickling from trader to farmer and raider to gunner, with whispered rumors and disbelieving sneers.
It, they say, is a force of nature that clears out bases of any hostiles with a meticulous touch. It, they say, is a loner that only strikes at night. It, they say, will maim, kill, and steal anything it wants indiscriminately. It, they say, does not discriminate between hostiles and friendlies, putting down raiders and farmers alike.
It is a monster, and she is it.