Hail To The Queen

I'm sure you've guessed this but this blog is now archived. If you want to keep in contact please feel free to message me and I'll give you my Skype.

If you want to keep RPing I do rp on skype and will likely go back to RPNation under the name IrradiatedWarden.

Thanks.

Pickman chuckles softly at her response, but immediately goes quiet as she lines up her shot, not wanting to break her concentration. His eyes go back out to the target, watching. Just moments later, he drops dead in a single shot, just as he had expected. He turns to look at Victoria again, smiling, about to compliment her shot when she speaks. 

He pauses, thinking, the nods. “Good point. Come on.” He straightens up, dusting the dirt off his suit. “I assume they heard the shot so depending on what kind of person they are, they’ll have either ran or came to investigate. The latter is easiest, but the former gives us a fun chase.” He looks around, listening, trying to find out what the other person had done. 

Victoria straightened as well, casually slinging her rifle back so it rested easily on her form. She’d be lying if she said her heart wasn’t beating a little faster, blood warming in her veins. The idea of a chase, well, that made it all the better.

“Either way I think we should move. If they’re running we’ll have an easier time catching them, and if they’re coming to investigate, well, I’d rather not be an easy target.”

“Well…” He inhaled the tension that caked the air, it filled up his lungs, it almost overflowed in his windpipe so it felt too bothersome to breathe; but he couldn’t admit to that, he felt, because he tried too, much too hard to keep up this steel exterior of a man that barely broke down even at the slightest inconvenience. No, he had a reputation to hold… It was an awkward question, one he didn’t know exactly how to answer, it was impossible to know how the EXACT income could come out when the possibilities & paths were endless; maybe he was the forgiving type, maybe he held grudges locked tight in an iron fist. He didn’t want to give Vicky the wrong idea & wind up hurting her even more than she already was… It was a difficult question, everything was difficult. “If it were me, yes, I’d forgive them—because I’m a fool. A fool in love. They could tear out my entire arm & I’d still love them… maybe that’s foolish, maybe you’d just leave, maybe you’d kill them, maybe you’d pity me. But I, personally, can never hate the most important person in my life because without them it feels impossible to breathe. How much do you love this guy, Vicky?”

He was right. The answer was foolish, and she couldn’t stop the knee jerk reaction that it was weak. It was weak to care, weak to give second chances. And Victoria, she was never weak.

She laughed, a whisper of a sound, careless in its sorrow.

“I don’t know.” She felt like she should have wept with that admission, made a dramatic declaration, but such theatrics were for people who didn’t look in the mirror and know exactly how broken they were. And Victoria, she knew every crack in her ivory facade.

i know you from everywhere

Yep! Once upon a time I attempted to have an art/personal blog under the URL irradiatedwarden, and I’m pretty sure that was my handle for rpNation 5ever ago

“So I’ve seen first hand,” Pickman responds easily, taking his eyes off the target - a lone raider, who had wandered out too far from his gang - to look at his companion. “But please, go on, I wouldn’t mind another demonstration of your skills.” He was in a good mood, as he tended to be during his and Victoria’s outings like this. He had grown so accustomed to being alone that he had forgotten how much he enjoyed other’s company. “As I said, it’ll be a difficult shot, with the bits of hanging cloths and scrap obscuring him when he moves, but I have no doubt you’ll make it look easy.”

Victoria flashed a smile at him that was just as confident as it was dangerous. “Keep saying sweet things like that and I might just blush.”

The almost playful atmosphere around her melted away when she turned her attention to the scope on her rifle. It had been a while since she’d hunted someone like this, but the familiarity of it had returned to her all too easily. She watched her target move, his image disappearing between old fabric and forgotten bits of junk, and the world seemed to melt away. She watched him stop and raise a hand to his mouth to call out, and Victoria released her breath.

The man dropped from her sight, blood spilling from the gaping wound in the side of his neck. She frowned, almost pouting. It wasn’t quite what she had been aiming for, but she supposed the end result was ultimately the same.

She pulled back from her scope, brushing the stray hairs from her braid back out of her face. A sigh escaped her, a content sound.

For her sake, Vince huffed a laugh. “C’mon, Fisk. You’ve taught me more about using my feminine wiles than I’ll ever get to use. Don’t sell yourself short, babe.” Once he had turned to fetch the liquor, the forced smile on his face shifted into a worried frown.

Vince returned with the neck of a vodka bottle in one hand and a pair of plastic glasses pinched in the other. Wordlessly he seated himself next to Victoria and poured each of them two finger’s worth of vodka. “Sorry about the glassware. All my nice glasses got cigarette ashes in ‘em–my, uh. Ma came by recently.” He handed Victoria her cup and took a sip from his own, stifling the cringe that came with the taste of straight vodka. 

A beat passed, and Vince found he couldn’t stay off the subject. “Will you at least tell me what he looked like?”

The mention of his mother made Victoria blink. The fact that he did, in fact, have parents had never crossed her mind. The fact that they would bother to come visit left her with a sensation she opted not to dig too much into.

Taking the cup, Victoria lowered her beer and took a moment to take a swig. A long swig.

She didn’t bother hiding her reaction to the burn, eyes closing tightly in a wince but for a beat.

Victoria’s hand on his arm brought Vince out of his anger–gradually at first, then with the loose promise of revenge later the boil settled into a simmer. He tucked his tongue into his bottom lip. It was tempting not to let it go, to insist that Victoria pointed him right to her attacker and let him unleash hell, but the tenderness in her touch and the rawness of her voice stopped Vince in his tracks.

Vince brought his hand up to cover Victoria’s and exhaled. Later, he reminded himself, later, later. He only barely managed to resist fantasizing about what he would do to the guy later. 

“Fine. But only because you told me to.” He rubbed at his jaw–the clenching was hard enough that it actually ached a bit. “I’ll get the bottle opener. Got liquor, too, you know.”

“Liquor is always appreciated, and I think we could both use some right about now.”

She let her hand linger under his for a moment before finally pulling away. Adjusting the beer on her eye, she managed a weak but thankful smile. Already she could feel the fear starting to slowly simmer away, being replaced with shame.

She stepped back from him, moving to make herself comfortable on Vince’s couch.

Vince’s jaw clenched. His mind raced with the possibilities of how that encounter might have ended if Victoria hadn’t been armed–if she hadn’t been able to fight back at all. What was the guy trying to get? What would he have taken, had he had the chance?

Vince’s gaze darted from Victoria’s bruise, to her eyes, to the gun on his coffee table, and back to her black eye again. “What alley?” he asked shortly. “Where?”

She saw the look in his eyes, his gaze flicking to the gun, the way his jaw clenched. Her hand reached out for his arm before she could stop it, and her touch was so tender not even she was prepared for it.

“Hey,” She almost sounded like another person, like someone who died years ago, “don’t worry about it, not right now. Let’s just relax for a bit, have a beer, and then we can worry about getting revenge later. I’m...still kind of shaken up about it, if I’m being honest.”