Vixen Writes

Rage, anger, that feeling of pure emotion that makes your entire body shake in a way you’ve never experienced before. Oh how that emotion makes you feel...alive.

Until it doesnt.

You feel it more often than you like to admit. That anger is always simmering just below the surface. The smallest things seem to set it off. You wield your rage like a sword though you have no training in controlling your strikes. Yet, after it's all over, and the feeling dissipates, you just feel...empty.

There’s a void left once the crimson wears off. Your body feels heavy and your soul heavier. Rage demands so much from you and leaves you with nothing. You start realizing maybe it isn’t worth it. Perhaps all that anger is what is slowly killing you.

You’ve felt it for awhile. It's a nagging feeling that you just can’t put your hand on. You snap at someone and feel that high for a shorter and shorter amount of time. Then you feel almost nothing. You just feel heavy.

So you start working on hiding that anger. Every time you feel it welling up more, you take those waves and shove them into a jar. That jar is locked up in the recesses of your soul where you willingly chose to ignore it. 

At first, it's easy. It's so simple to bite your tongue and shove the anger into jars. Those jars get locked away. It was so easy.

Until it wasn’t. 

People started noticing that without your crimson rage, you just weren’t you. You were quiet. You withdrew from people, a little bit at first and then suddenly, you realized people were avoiding you. It hurt. You questioned them.

“You just aren’t yourself. Like, it's nice that you aren’t snapping at everyone, but you just aren’t you.” 

“You just seemed really depressed lately.”

Depressed. Was that the word for the emptiness you felt after you let loose? Or was it something else? You were still as active as you could be. Sure, you felt empty but it wasn’t like the other symptoms you felt online. So you changed again. You replaced that rage with happiness as much as you could. For awhile, you felt lighter and people were coming around again. 

Then, one night, you found yourself out at a restaurant, sitting at the bar just trying to enjoy a drink or five. Someone you haven't seen since you started suppressing your rage sees you there. They come and sit and you talk. It's a nice conversation.

Until it isn’t. 

They point out how fake you are. How this happiness is obviously just a facade. They tell you that you haven’t actually changed. They go on and on. You feel it building. You feel it welling. You see the crimson on the edge of your vision. This time, you don’t stop it. 

You rage in a beautiful way. You strike out at them with words sharper than any sword. You tear them down piece by piece. You watch them shrink away because your voice hasn’t raised. In fact, your tone is even and cool. There is no yelling. There is no scene made. The bartender even asks if you’d like another in the middle of it all. You reply yes with a smile and he just nods. No one is the wiser minus the one who pushed you to this. 

Then, it's all over. They apologize and look down at the beer you ordered for them when the bartender came by earlier. You can almost feel how uncomfortable they are but they aren’t sure how to leave. 

From the corner of your eye, you swear you see a man grinning from ear to ear with a familiar crimson glint in his eyes. You don’t question it. You are too busy reveling in how you feel, how light everything seems and for the first time in a long time, you think maybe you’ve gotten control over that rage. You finally know how to wield it and strike precisely. 

[[ this was written on 12/13/19 and posted today on my website vixenwrites.rockywoodinc.com and here ]] It was never meant to get this far.

How many times had it gotten that far? Too many if she was being honest with herself. 

So many times she found herself in the same sort of spiral. They’d meet. He’d make her laugh. She’d touch his hand and sparks would fly. It wasn’t always this way but more often than not, it was. They would hang out more, get to know each other, and then she’d wake up and it had been fifteen years and they’d been married for ten of it. Only, it was always around this time that they’d start to notice. She tried so hard to make them not notice but it always happened. Her skin didn’t wrinkle. Her hair didn’t gray. From all those years of laughing, she should have laugh lines that reminded her of the good times when she saw them in the mirror. Only she never saw them. All she ever saw was the sun-kissed skin of a person she barely knew anymore. 

Every time, she broke their hearts, left them shattered, and moved on with her life. Oh she had tried to avoid this, to avoid them, but something always brought her back to where they were. Those years in the mountains had done nothing for her. All it had taught her was that isolation drove her mad. It made her do things she wasn’t proud of.

Now, once more, she found herself in a backwoods country bar where country music played at a reasonable volume. That always surprised her. These little places were more about the beer and the game on TV than loud music and dancing like the clubs downtown. She honestly preferred these places. The quieter, the better. It usually meant the men here were just looking to escape their wives for a few hours but they still went home, loyal as the dogs that lived on their property.

Tonight, however, she found herself approached by a young man. He looked to be in his mid-twenties or maybe he just had a baby face half hidden under that cowboy hat. 

“Howdy ma’am.” He started off, a sweet Southern accent sending a soft chill up her spine. She had always had a weakness for accents, no matter what kind.

“Hello.”

“You doin’ well tonight?”

She looked over at him again as she put her bottle to her lips and took a swig from it. There was something…different…about this one but she just couldn’t put her finger on it. So very few men were this direct with her. It was meant to be that way. She was to be an object of affection, of lust and carnal need, yet this one didn’t seem to mind that. Perhaps he liked the hint of danger she put off. 

“Or it could be that I just happen to know what you are and what you want.” He spoke softer now, his voice barely audible to her above the music.

Her entire body froze. Wide eyes looked at him and she swallowed hard, the only thing her body seemed capable of doing for what seemed like forever. “I’m sorry, what?” She finally managed to spit out. 

His smirk seemed to be a mile long on his young face. “I don’t meet many of your kind but I love it when I do. Come along Little One. Let’s go play.”

[[ reposted from my website: vixenwrites.rockywoodinc.com ]]

No one was born a raider.

Some fell into it after farming just didn’t feel right. Others hit the Jet and they had to get their next fix somehow. Cam, on the other hand, chose that life. She wanted nothing more than to be a rowdy raider who was living life the right way.

See, Cam was always rebellious. From the time she could toddle around the farm until she was nearly sixteen, she was getting into trouble in one way or another. She would steal from her siblings and her parents and fight anyone who dared to get in her way. Even the Brahmin were terrified of her when she was growing up.

It was almost that time of the year when Diamond City put lights up for whatever reason. Cam never really understood it. DC had enough lights. She could see them every night from the Combat Zone if she was staying there. Unlike most raiders, Cam was sort of a wanderer. She moved from place to place trying to find her next adventure. Now, the dark haired raider found herself sitting at the Power Noodle in Diamond City as she tried to enjoy a nice noodle cup from Takahashi himself.

“You usually don’t see raiders in DC.”

The sudden voice of someone else caused Cam to jump. She cursed mentally. Being in DC always made her let her guard down a little too much. The city was pretty secure after all unless someone thought you were a synth. She looked over from where she had been deeply staring into her noodle to see a man sitting next to her.

He was taller than her but most people were. His skin was peppered with dirt. The tan suit he wore didn’t seem to fit him comfortably. He wasn’t used to it. Cam understood that feeling. She was dressed in road leathers and regular armor instead of her raider armor. The only thing that gave away she was a raider was her unconventional haircut and the black tattooed line that went from one side of her face to the other, laying underneath her eyes and across her nose. Looking up a bit more, Cam met his gaze. There it was. A smirk pulled at the corner of her mouth. He definitely was a raider too. She could see it in his eyes.

“You don’t,” she said with a shrug, “but some of us get hungry for something other than Cram.”

“Aw come on! Cram is like…the best!” He said with a grin which caused Cam to snicker.

“Oh yeah. Definitely the best of the irradiated shit we eat.”

The man sat on the stool next to her. Takahashi looked at him “Nan-ni shimasho-ka?”

“Uh…”

“Yes.” Cam said which caused Takahashi to make the stranger a noodle cup.

“You really do come here a lot don’t you?” He asked as he grabbed a pair of chopsticks from the countertop nearby and began stirring the noodles.

“Yeah. I do. I like it here but, well, its the Commonwealth.” Cam replied with a shrug. She had lived in the Commonwealth her entire life. She was born here. It was all she really knew.

He hummed slightly. It was an odd noise for Cam to hear. Usually when she was talking to another raider, they weren’t this well spoken. Then again, most of her friends were typically high on some kind of drug. Sometimes she wondered if she was the only raider who wasn’t addicted to that stuff.

“Well… Maybe you should come to Nuka World.” He stated as he began to get up. Cam noticed he hadn’t even really touched his noodles. She watched him reach into his pocket and pull out some kind of paper. He slid it towards her and smiled a bit. “We’d love to have you.” The man winked at her and she felt her face flush.

He left without saying anything else. Cam picked up the paper and looked at it. It was an old, ratty promotional piece on Nuka World. She held it in one hand while she finished eating her noodles with the other.