bye_felicia | want to see it all give me more

There's little enough for Victra to do in this city that she finds herself falling into a respectable but rather boring routine. Every morning she exercises: runs through the whole city, swims through the ocean to the farthest buoy, goes to the gym and shames muscle-bound men who think they can out-lift her. She practices with her razor until her muscles start to ache. She sees Jesse; she sees Lincoln. She tries to read something but usually fails. She works on the movie when she's scheduled. And she drinks every night. It leaves a lot of down time, during which she finds herself at loose ends.

Today, she takes the long way back to her apartment. Her razor's curled around her arm like an overlarge bracelet and there's still a light sheen of sweat on her. She feels good, from the endorphins exercise has given her. She hears a rumble before she sees the bike, a low roar that breaks through the relative monotony of the city around her. She likes that. She turns her head and sees the speed and grace with which the bike and its rider move, weaving through other cars, the street.

By chance, the woman on the bike seems to be headed for the shop just in front of Victra and she slides into the driveway with a sharp turn. Victra grins.

"Nice bike."

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For a minute she thinks Victra might say no, and that would have been fine. Raven finds it relatively easy to talk to anybody, but she knows it's not the same for everybody. She has nowhere to be though and she'd like to get to know Victra. She trusts Lincoln's judgement in most things, and more than that, she's glad he's found somebody. She hadn't thought he would, for a time.

She follows her inside, smiling in thanks as she holds the door open, and makes her way to the counter to order. It amuses her a little, that Lincoln has ended up with a woman also from space. Before the Sky People had crashed to Earth he hadn't known a thing about it, and now she suspects he's heard more about space than most.

"I miss it," she says, and there's a wistful sort of look on her face that doesn't appear when she's talking about anything else. "We never fought in it, though. Didn't do a lot of fighting at all until we got to the Ground, to be honest."

Her brow lifts in mild surprise. She feels more of it, interest and wariness, inside but she doesn't let it show. It's nothing but her training keeping it in, her belief that she has to hide her feelings before they're used against her in some way. She isn't suspicious of Raven, but there's a lot that she doesn't know about her and Lincoln's world. There's too much to know, in some ways.

"You're not a Grounder," Victra says. Since she only knows Lincoln, she only knows Grounders. She knows of Mountain Men and others, but Victra knows that's no equivalent to actually knowing a person. She knows not to make assumptions even if she trusts Lincoln to be straight with her and even handed.

"But you made friends with Lincoln back home? Or mostly here?"

Raven turns with an amused smile at that. Back home there would be no mistaking her for Skaikru, but Darrow strips all of that away. Lincoln is bigger and stronger and covered in more tattoos than Raven is, but in Darrow he dresses the same way she does, speaks the same language. "No," Raven agrees, shaking her head. "They called us the Sky People. Skaikru."

She's talked to Lincoln a little more lately about what that meant for him, how it had been to watch them fall from the sky. In all the time they'd spent on the Ground, she'd never really stopped to think about how it must have been on the other side. She wonders for a moment what Lincoln might have told Victra, but she knows that whatever they'd done to each other once, it's behind them. She's still thankful that they've managed to come as far as they have, but he's the closest thing she has to family, now.

"We were friends back home," she says. "But everything was always so crazy... I guess Darrow's let us become a lot closer." They get to spend more time together here, less of it looking over their shoulders and trying not to die. She loves Clarke and Bellamy and she's grateful that they're here, but Lincoln has become something of a rock, for her.

She frowns slightly, with interest, at the odd name. It strikes her as odd, at least. It has the inflection of something foreign but clearly is based off of something English. It's passing interesting to her how language develops, how names develop. Skaikru makes her think of the Obsidians, how Golds are like Gods, how they come from the sky and they have to rise up, climb up to reach them. Did the Grounders think of the Sky People in that way, gods? Or just Others. It's something to ask him later.

She nods slightly. "Crazy sounds like a good word for it," she says. From what she knows, from the relative chaos of their world -- compared to the ordered Society -- she can easily imagine relationships being jostled and ruined by shifting loyalties and changes in leadership. And death.

"Not that things are crazy here. Just a different brand. Having a common enemy in Hatchimals breeds a strange kind of camaraderie."

Raven smiles at that, laughing a little. She remembers the Hatchimals well, remembers how she and Molly had barricaded themselves inside City Hall and hoped to wait it out. For the most part, Raven refuses to let her leg slow her down, but there are times that Darrow throws things at her and she can't help but admit she's not as fast as she used to be. She's still here though, managed to fight off the Hatchimals and everything else.

"It's a crazy I can handle, at least," she agrees, nodding. There are plenty of crazy things in Darrow, but at least most of them she can deal with. She knows she's stronger than most people give her credit for, and that's part of why she loves Lincoln. He's always believed in her, always known she could handle just about anything, even after what happened with Murphy.

"Is that how you met?" she asks, glancing up at her with a teasing smile. "Camaraderie against Hatchimals?"

She snorts and shakes her head. "No, though I think someone hates me less because we did fight together against the furballs, so that's something." Victra isn't sure what to think of Valkryie, or what Valkyrie thinks of her, but their last conversation had at least been respectful and somewhat pleasant, free from shots fired against each other.

"He found me when I first arrived." Victra doesn't mention the details of how she had arrived, the blood on her hands, the emotional wreck that she had been. That's a story she's only shared with one person, Lincoln, and even then the details were scant and the story not fully fleshed out.

"I was rude and angry and he was calm and honest. I despise liars. I like to think I know when people are telling me the truth, because of that. Even when the truth is completely unbelievable."

Raven smiles at that, nodding. Lincoln might be a lot of things, but he's definitely not a liar. She's never known him to be that way. Even when he was the only one who knew the truth about the antidote that could save Finn, even when she was torturing him and he had no reason to tell her the truth, he'd still never lied to her. There aren't many people she can say that about, and it's one of the things she finds so incredible about him.

"Well, you don't have to worry about that with Lincoln," she replies, though she gets the feeling Victra already knows as much. "I remember when I first showed up here I thought everyone was lying." She hadn't thought any of it was possible, and it could too easily have been another trap of the Mountain Men. It wasn't until she got outside Semele's and saw the sky and the city that she truly believed what she was being told, and even then she'd still kept waiting to wake up back home.

Raven taps her fingernails on the edge of her coffee cup, thinking for a moment of Diana and the way she'd been able to coerce the truth out of Raven with that whip of hers. She hadn't needed to - Raven hadn't ever lied to her - but it had been the only way she would accept that anything about Darrow was real. "Unbelievable is pretty relative, here. There's not a lot I think people lie about anymore. What's the point, when the truth is more bizarre than any lie anyone could come up with?"

want to see it all give me more

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