Summary: Zara, the second 'Courier Six', traveled to the Divide and returned to the Mojave as someone else that couldn't even be called a shadow of her former self. This is a short tale of the affect Ulysses' had upon her, and how a lesson she had taught him long ago would return to repeat history upon a newborn New Vegas.
A/N: A revision for a one-shot that nobody asked for? Christmas has come early! LOL
Mentioning Christmas, a few years back I got the Unlimited Edition of New Vegas... and I still remember Lonesome Road affecting me the most of the 4 (although the other 3 messed with me hardcore, too). I loved it so much that the moment I finished it and returned to the Mojave, I wrote The Philosophy in a few hours!
Thank you to anyone who read this work, and don't be afraid to stop by my profile and see what other things I've written! This story will also be posted on Ao3 under "TheFaerieChild". If this piece is found under any other name or website that I've listed above (including fanfic) that means my work was STOLEN and I'd appreciate it if I was told immediately!
Happy reading, happy writing!
~Konfessionist signing out
Zara had come to the Divide, but as to why she felt the desire to go there—she couldn't find a single and true answer within herself. It wasn't an appetite to have questions satiated. It was something much more than that, going beyond her level of rationality; it was unreasonable curiosity, and trying to satisfy one's curiosity in the Wasteland was a very dangerous task. Practically suicidal.
She lost her courier boots when she was reborn in Goodsprings and she vowed never to put them on again. After killing Benny, she retired her adventurer's armor because her brain was tired of asking questions and she had gotten all the important answers by that point in time; she didn't need to go looking for herself anymore, when who she was as Courier Six seemed so inconsequential to who she was now, as just Zara. Now, she lived the life of a cautious scavenger with an allegiance to the New California Republic and a vow to fight with them at the Dam when the time came. She thought they were trying to do the right thing while House was a textbook megalomaniac that only fought for the Strip, constantly moving bottle caps around the chessboard where it best suited him, and Legion wouldn't stop until the landscape was red—charging at everything that moved with sharpened horns, like an angry bull that didn't know when to rest.
Zara thought she truly made her peace while living a quaint life in the Lucky 38 with her companions, where she didn't ask questions anymore, and didn't have the curiosity to go searching for anything; but something had been awakened inside her.
Something that was activated by the courier before her, and was stoked until it was absolutely restless.
Back when she was a fearless adventurer, she plundered the jewels of the Mojave in many places and outward; the crater of Big MT that crawled with rogue experiments of Old World doctors on a loop, tortured by their own machinations and ruined minds; the poisonous slums below the prized Sierra Madre casino, where the narrow streets had almost been her grave several times over; the canyons of Zion, which trembled with untouched nature and beauty, and the pacifistic tribe that almost convinced her to go with them as they left behind the painted walls of their people, alongside Joshua and Daniel... but no matter where she traversed, she was finding pieces of Him, and His presence, and the work of His hands when she really had no intention of looking for anything of Him.
Zara found His words on the lips of Johnson Nash in Primm; His voice in scattered holotapes within the Big MT crater, and a single question He asked the scientists that frightened them so badly they erased all memory of it; His hands within Father Elijah's madness, as He supplied to the former Elder the location of the Sierra Madre and it's many cursed treasures; His dreaded hair on the scalps of the White Legs in Zion, and how the fabled Burned Man expected a courier that wasn't her, but a courier that was once Legion brethren.
It was as if He was everywhere. His presence and influence was in reaches far beyond Zara, and she felt like she was unintentionally following a man she wasn't acquainted with but was still deeply connected to, somehow. She felt as if they were matched in wit, in spirit—in soul—when she didn't even know His name. He was like a phantom passing through doorways she had yet to travel through, and would only leave small traces of him behind... just enough to coax her into coming forward to meet him.
But then, she was finally close—too close—close enough to touch Him—and Zara knew it when a message was signaled to her Pip-Boy with the coordinates to the Great Divide, greeting her by her old name of Courier Six. A peculiar name signed off on the invite, and it was a name she didn't recognize, but still felt that immediate tug of connection to; it knotted the synapses in her brain, tugged on every nerve in her body with the pull of a beast, when it felt as if realization was all coming together in her splintered mind. The words and voice that asked frightening questions, and the supplying hands to Elijah, and the dreaded hair belonged to the name of Ulysses.
The phantom was no longer a phantom passing through doorways, but stood as solid as shadow and just as human in front of her.
That terrified her more than the ghost of him did.
An overwhelming desire to follow the coordinates washed over Zara, in that moment of seeing his name, like a tumultuous ocean of blackened waves, frothing furiously. It effectively drowned the cautionary scavenger that she was. She left for the Divide with the excuse of going back to Zion for peace before the battle at the Dam, with only Rex, Boone, and Lily demanding to go with her to keep her safe. She left alone.
Ulysses was calling her to the Divide and she would allow her legs to carry her there—it felt as if he came as a trace of her past, and she hadn't cared about becoming reacquainted with such a thing until she saw his name. She didn't want to know what was there before Benny split her head in Goodsprings, after she returned the gesture by splitting his throat, but here she was—breaking her Number One Rule of never doing anything dangerous, especially for the sake of curiosity. It was a luxury she couldn't afford and didn't want to keep, but now she was watching from the shore of the blackened sea, the cautionary scavenger quietly allowing itself to be overthrown by the waves, as she ignored The Rule. She traveled to the Great Divide alone despite knowing that the way to him would be trying and unequivocally dangerous.
Zara didn't think that meeting one man would so utterly destroy her... but she wrongfully underestimated the type of man that Ulysses was. He was dangerous enough to obliterate the image she created of herself in the crime-filled Mojave; the path she walked was that of a paragon, a forgotten wastrel turned merciless angel, searing within her enemies a righteous light that they could never putrefy themselves of. The man single-handedly destroyed all pride she had in herself as he pried open her eyes and forced her to look upon the horrors of the Divide, make her witness and be nearly pulled apart by the hostility that she created in her past life. He devastated her to the point that she questioned her once unbreakable faith and unquestioning loyalty to the NCR to the point that she knew—she knew—they wouldn't be able to repair the Mojave. Ulysses ravaged her thoughts where she began asking questions that her mind had no business in asking again, knocking out from under her feet the very base that she built her moral character upon.
There was second guessing to absolutely everything she had accomplished since waking up in Goodsprings; her integrity, her choices, the bed where she laid her faith, and the tables where she cast her dice.
Ulysses was dangerous enough that he eradicated from her very bones everything that she was, is, and would be. Zara was too dangerous for even herself anymore because she was now a woman without purpose, direction, or hope digging child-like hands into anything to keep her afloat... she was an empty shell with an empty head and empty hands.
Zara was now nothing more than another fractured body that the Divide starvingly swallowed up to never spit back out—even after she and Ulysses said their pieces, and butted heads, and broke teeth and spilled blood on knives and knuckles and the heels of rifles, and he fell with his flag before the idol of his Armageddon. The Divide still left it's mark on her, biting down with all fangs and squeezing her down it's gullet, long after she retreated from it's stomach—back to New Vegas—back to the two-headed bear—back to her friends, her family—back to the people that blindly idolized her—it was still clamped down on her thoughts and lingering in her heart.
She once destroyed everything He had hoped for in the Great Divide, before her rebirth in Goodsprings. In return, in spite of His death, He still claimed victory over her. There was nothing left for her to take back.
That was until, one late evening, where she sat alone in the Lucky 38's cocktail lounge, with Ulysses' soiled duster in her drunk hands, that she came to realization in the constellation of stars that printed his Old World flag; New Vegas was still a young babe, wasn't it? Yet to have grown up and decide for itself what it would do for the Wasteland, and who it would foster a home for, and who it would protect and who it would rise against. The Mojave was still so young that it had chance to be given guidance, with the proper hands to nurture it and the proper heart to understand it, so it could be sculpted into something that would allow new beginnings if one was willing to let go.
There'd be no influence from the two-headed bear, or the raging bull, or anything else.
Ulysses, amidst his hatred, spoke of a lesson Zara taught him long ago—that even a single person could ultimately change history, even if there was no one around to record it. In his final words upon a holotape, he spoke of how this single person could build with the very same hands that it used to destroy. He detailed how history was also meant to repeat—to continue—like the snake devouring its tail, consuming in a never-ending cycle, because human nature didn't change and it was within human nature the need to build and the desire to destroy.
When Ulysses had destroyed her completely, his words were going to build her up again... and she was going to be much stronger this time around.
Ulysses' words were going to cause the heads of the NCR's bear to turn on each other, and bite and claw and wound one another until the beast would collapse and bleed out into the Mojave sand.
Ulysses' words were going to cause Caesar's bull to see so much red that it would blind itself with it's blood-thirst and charge right into her blade.
Ulysses' words were going to strangle the life Mr. House tried to breathe into New Vegas, and his emaciated corpse would decay as his Securitron army would fall. Benny's murder taught him nothing of what she was capable of bringing an end to.
When the dust of their defeats would finally settle from the winds that carried change, on the horizon would come marching an independent and mature New Vegas that proudly carried upon its back an Old World flag. New Vegas had hope. She would destroy it and then rebuild it upon the lesson that they taught each other, and learned, together.
Upon the day of the battle for Hoover Dam, Zara wore Ulysses' duster as she brandished the detonator for the Divide's remaining missiles, and hummed the haunting melody of Begin Again—and fought alone.