CRAWLING KING SNAKE

Fire lit in Carrot Cake’s eyes as she white knuckled her tomahawk, her pistols abandoned at her hip. She clamped her jaw tightly, hard enough for her teeth to ache. “Don’t FUCKING —“ She didn’t dare back down from Vince, instead tearing his mask off his crown and tossing it aside. “—TALK TO ME LIKE THAT.” The bleariness of Vince’s eyes were made more apparent by the vibrant blue warpaint smeared around them and she wanted to clock him in the face. She wanted to kick him in the balls, she wanted to grab him by his hair and drag him to her level. “You’re a disgrace! How dare you fuckin’ show up and talk to me like that! Why the fuck you’d get drunk out here! You wanna die or somethin’? You look like a goddamn fuckhead!”

Carrot Cake started to swim when she shoved closer to Vince, prompting him to blink away the seesaw a few times. His nose wrinkled--either out of annoyance or amusement, even he didn’t know. 

Two words

Carrot Cake scrunched up her round little nose, glaring into Vince’s skin.

“Fuck you, Deadwyler,” She hissed between her teeth, grinning. She pushed Vince away from her with a smile, squeezing his bicep as he recovered. “Alright, get lost before I change my mind and chain you down here.” Carrot Cake didn’t need Vince. In fact, she didn’t need any man, but that didn’t stop her from worrying when two hours became three. She refused to wait by the gates like some delicate waif waiting for her husband to return — Rather, she worked to keep her mind busy. She was helping heave chunks of brahmin meat to a shabby smokehouse when a familiar girl approached: Lolly, an arms dealer who occasionally worked the gates.

“Shitfaced?” Cake snarled when she heard the news. “Are you kidding me?”

She dropped the brahmin meat carelessly onto a cluttered counter as she turned sharply and strode out of the smokehouse. She passed her guards at the gate, immediately sizing up Vince when she caught him in her sight. “The hell are you on, Vincent?”

As he stumbled into view, Vince cut a striking figure against the blue mist enveloping the mall. He strode through the midnight, all wiry muscle, dressed top to bottom in black aside from his mask and the three shiny new dogtags resting on top of his leather jacket. Bright blue swirls of Celtic warpaint adorned the cheeks under the hockey mask’s round, dead eyes, framing a spoked wheel drawn in the middle of the forehead.

At the sound of Carrot Cake’s voice, Vince hastily yanked the mask up to his forehead, his eyes bright with the cocktail of gin and amusement. Miss O’Malley clattered to the ground and left a red smear as she rolled. Hands balled into fists, Deadwyler cocked his head back and roared, “BRONWEEEEEN!”

If she was mad at him—and that was obviously no “if” at all—it was lost on Vince. He ambled over to his love with his arms outstretched and a careless smile spread over his face. “Miss me? Hey, how ‘bout a little kiss, gorgeous.” Vince stopped short, looking Cake up and down with wide eyes. A beat passed and it almost seemed as though he realized she was angry. “God damn,” he finally said, airing out his stupidity, “you are stunning. Fuckin’ knockout. I love you so much, babe, you know that?”

Carrot Cake caught onto Vince’s expression immediately. “You’re so full of it.” She huffed, allowing him to loudly kiss her forehead. “Blue violence balls?” Carrot Cake rolled her eyes as obviously as possible. “Pssh, I’m not worried about that.” She smacked Vince’s crotch with her palm, getting a good grab before wiping her hand on the side of his shirt. She didn’t try to hide her smile. “Christ, you act like I ain’t allowed to do anything ‘cause’a Bean.”

That last sentence was punctuated with a huff that deflated into a few seconds of genuine quiet. “Don’t … Don’t stay out too long, yeah?” Carrot Cake didn’t quite let Vince go yet, still close to his chest. She pressed the crown of her head into his collarbone, looking down at the space between them, and most importantly, her stomach. “Just a few hours. I worry after, ah, a few hours.”

Vince watched Cake push the top of her head against his chest with a concerned furrow of his brow. With a deep exhale, he brought his hands up along her back and smoothed little circles over her shoulders. A few quiet moments passed.

“Red. Hey.” Vince cupped Carrot Cake’s cheeks and lifted her face up towards him. He gave her a soft smile. “Don’t get all fuckin’ vulnerable with me, kid. You never know when I might decide to stab you in the back.” His grin broadened across his face until it was more mischief than sweetness and, snickering, Vince pantomimed a few stabs between Cake’s shoulder blades. 

“Thirtyyyy eightttt,” Carrot Cake repeated in a mocking tone as Vince pulled her close. She put her face in the crook of his neck, not bothering to smooth her tangled hair that was puffed out dramatically from Vince’s tousling.

“Vicky licked your mask clean, y’know,” Carrot Cake said into his skin. “Now you ain’t gonna be as scary — stupid mutt.”

She stepped back, running her hand up the side of his head with the heavy handedness he had showed her. Unlike her hair, his fell back into place.

“Just make your first kill dirty,” She knotted one of her petite fingers around a lock of Vincent’s hair. “And when you’re done with that, can you at least get someone with my ‘hawk? I can get her for you.”

He did it without thinking: Vince’s face collapsed into a deep grimace at the mention of that fuckin’ tomahawk that he briskly tried to cover up as a forced smile. “Gee, I would, Red--I really would, but think how Miss O’Malley would feel.” Vince knocked one shoulder to gesture to what he affectionately referred to as his “firstborn”...at least before this whole pregnancy thing came up. “Mary an’ Joseph, talk about the other woman!”

Plus--not that he dared say this to Cake--Vince really, really hated the ‘hawk. It seemed like every time he had struggled with finishing one of his first twenty kills by hand, Clementine reminded him that he “should’a picked the ‘hawk, moe.” Cake seemed to love that damned thing, but...

Carrot Cake would have smacked him if he didn’t grab her hand as gently as he did. She stewed in her emotions as she drummed her nails over his shirt, faintly feeling his heart beat underneath her hand. She scanned Vince’s face to see if his perceived lying would be obvious in his expression: it wasn’t. Maybe he was being honest. “‘Course Bean’s yours, stupid! You think I’m putting out for just any old crusty man that comes my way?” She moved her hand from her back to lightly slap Vince’s cheek. “You think I’m a slut or somethin’? I’m only interested in fucking you.”

That last part drifted into a mumble as she spoke, her eyes flickering down to the space between the two of them. She let a few long moments pass before she rubbed her hand in a small circle over Vince’s chest. “Anyways. Jeez — You can go out and raise hell if it matters that much to you. I’ll trust you, but I don’t wanna see you coming back in a bag ‘cause you decided to go bother the Serpents again.” At that notion, Carrot Cake snatched a chain around Vince’s neck, pulling it up until she could see the prized dog tags. She let them fall into her hand, moving one aside: Jester. Vince was always proud of how he almost knocked Jester’s head clean off. She looked at another: Rocket. That guy was huge. He could have broken Vince in half if he had moved fast enough. Carrot Cake couldn’t help but smile at how daring Vince was. “What’s your count now? 37?”

“Eight,” Vince corrected her with a self-satisfied smirk and no hint of hesitation. “Thirty-eight. Always underestimating me, Red.” With a few chiding clicks of his tongue, he shifted Carrot Cake into his arms and--slowly, carefully, as if she would buck him like a wild horse--pulled her into him. The two of them had once stood fairly flush against each other. A four-month-old bump now prevented that.

“It hurts that you still can’t trust me after all…

“Still can’t trust you?”

Carrot Cake put one of her hands against the back of her hips to ease up the soreness that accompanied being 4 months pregnant with this asshole’s kid. She narrowed her eyes, twisting her mouth to the side.

“No shit I can’t trust you, Deadwyler, you ran off one time already. What’s keepin’ you around?” Before Vince could speak, she raised her free hand to stop him. “And don’t say it’s because you love me or because you love Bean.” @vinnysouther

“C’mon, don’t be like that, Red...” Vince opened his arms to hold Carrot Cake around the hips and was rebuffed by her hand in his face. So instead, he raised both hands to his shoulders and punctuated that with a resigned shake of his head.

“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.

“Remind me, when we have more of a chance, that I still need to show you how to make a sour mix for whisky. If you learn anything from me, that should be it.”

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.