Vince brought the camp voice back out again. "Ooh, gurl, did I step on your painted toes?" He raised his eyebrow at Bryce again, smirking slightly. "I love how you don't even try to deny it. You got it baaaad, honey!" Obviously the two of them wouldn't be able to have kids or anything, but even the thought of that was cute for Vince to picture. He had to stop, though; it would only upset him in the long run.

He actually did a double take at Bryce's question, looking surprised. How did he not know what a China shop was?! But then, of course, they both came from extremely different worlds. "Well, it's a place that sold delicate plates and stuff. Things that broke easily. Hence why a bull in one would be such a bad idea." He chuckled. Hopefully Bryce would understand why he'd made the comparison in the first place.

"Yeah. Probably best to get rid of the dead deer sti-...oh..." Vince laughed and playfully pushed Bryce away. "What kind of bastard do you think I am? I'm offended!" He looked the stag over, then tutted. "I don't play with things nearly that dirty!"

"Yeah, well... She's one hell of a woman, okay? Never met anyone else quite like her." Bryce knew it wasn't much of a defense, but it was really all he could muster, although he did have to stop himself from extolling her virtues for the next... Well, he could go on for a while. "But its whatever. She ain't interested." That came out with a painful air of finality, needing a subject change before he started getting genuinely upset over the whole thing.

He considered Vince's explanation of a china shop for a moment before nodding softly. "Ohhh, okay, yeah. I gotcha.... Man, people were weird before the war, huh? Like... Why make something that's gonna break like that? Seems like a waste to me..." Mostly, he was just thinking aloud, but he would listen to input if Vince had it to give. The pre-war world still made no sense to him, but a little perspective might change things.

Bryce's face broke out in a wicked grin at the reaction, clearly enjoying every second of it. "I am not dirty! I just wanna love you, Vinny! Why won't you let me love you?!" He was back doing the deer's voice, waggling its head around a bit for extra flair. "Gimmie a kiss, Vinny! C'mon!" He nudged the deer's head a little closer to Vince's face, grinning like an utter madman right now, eyes lit up with all the glee of a small child.

"I know, Bryce. I know." Vince felt for the other. It must be a really awkward, and frankly, quite shitty, situation to be in. He'd had a crush on a girl in his kindergarten class when he was little, but she wasn't interested. Sure, it wasn't exactly the same, seeing as one was just a little kid crush and the other was so much more than that, but he at least had some kind of experience, so he could sympathise? Right? Truth be told, he hadn't felt that way about anybody for a very long time. It was weird.

"Yeah. I guess it would be strange to someone who hadn't experienced it." He regarded Bryce for a few moments, having forgotten, somehow, just how young he was. "My mum had some China plates she would get out every Christmas..." He drifted off, leaving out how he was never allowed to eat at the table, and, more often than not, had said China thrown at him. "They were supposed to be for special occasions and stuff." He shrugged.

Bryce's shenanigans with the deer, though, lifted Vince's spirits again. Vince laughed and slapped the deer away. "Oh, no! You foul beast! I shan't kiss you!" He pranced - actually pranced - through the forest for a few metres, then turned and swatted again. "Oh, you utter beast!"

The talk of china plates and Christmas put Bryce into a bit of a weird mood. "Oh, okay..." he nodded softly, falling quiet for a moment. "We didn't do anything like that when I was a kid. Dad didn't really care for it, I guess. Fuck, I didn't even really know what Christmas was until Ryan told me." He chuckled softly, trying to be casual about it, but... Man, it seemed like they were just hitting all the sore spots today, huh?

The deer shenanigans, on the other hand, was just plain fun! He gave chase after Vince with a laugh, calling all sorts of vaguely lewd things in the deer's voice. "Don't you play hard to get now, Vinny! Give us a kiss, you sexy hunk of man meat!" The voice just kept getting higher and higher as he fought harder and harder to not crack up and completely loose it laughing. There was no doubt he'd needed something like this; just goofing off with someone else, not a single care in the world. Even if it was only for a few moments. The reprieve was more than welcome. 

Bitterness rose up in Vince like acid. His top lip curled slightly. It wasn't Bryce's fault, of course. He wasn't the one who'd mentioned Christmas. He, Vince, had done, like some kind of nostalgic idiot. Nostalgia wasn't his friend; it never had been. "I fucking hated Christmas." It never let up, even around the holidays. If anything it got worse; all that drink, he supposed. Drinking and merriment and gift giving. It was a dizzy daydream he'd had once. He calmed himself with a sigh. "Sorry..." He glanced at Bryce, genuinely looking sorry.

"No! Back, beast! Back I say!" Vince swatted again, struggling to hold his bag on his shoulder and carry his crossbow, but he managed it somehow. He pranced through the forest again. "How dare you attack my decent sensibilities!" He ducked behind a tree, but popped his head out a few moments later and pranced again, ducking behind another tree.

Bryce didn't say a single word as he watched the reaction of the man before him, face simply softening in sympathy. It seemed as though everyone had their demons, and the type of wounds that cut so deep the scars would never fade. "Its okay," he assured him softly, giving his shoulder a gentle pat.

"Oh baby, I'm gonna do so much more than that to those sensibilities!" As time went on, the 'deer' seemed to just get more and more lewd, and Bryce seemed quite content with chasing the idiot through the trees. As they went, the terrain was growing more and more familiar, seemingly right in line with the dull ache starting up in his shoulders, though he didn't seem to mind much. This was more fun than he'd had in a while.

Soon enough though, he began to catch scent of the ever-present fires that marked Bosler as home. "Okay, loverboy. Where we puttin' yer new girlfriend at?" He didn't mean to cut the merriment short, but the dull ache had begun to turn into a bit of a throb, and he wanted to dispose of the extra weight as quickly as possible now.

Vince was relieved when he wasn't immediately probed with questions. Everyone in Bosler seemed content with the story he'd given them about his life up to the point he'd arrived, but people he'd met before that hadn't been. He may or may not have left a string of bodies out of sheer annoyance than anything else. But nobody needed to know about that.

"My poor sensibilities!" He continued pratting about between the trees, but it definitely trailed off the closer they got to camp. His arm was seizing up carrying the crossbow the way he was, and he could only imagine how Bryce's shoulders and back were feeling. "Just dump him in there." He gestured at his 'gutting shack' that was coming into view. It was pretty damn cool inside thanks to a little air system he'd rigged up, so he didn't have to worry about returning to a bunch of maggots crawling through his kill. Still, they'd have to be relatively quick.

He dropped his bag and crossbow by the side of the beat up shack - which he had lovingly christened Chateux du Matthews - and rolled his shoulders.

Bryce glanced over to where Vince pointed, and nodded before heading for the little structure to dump off the animal. From the second he nudged the door open with his foot, he was hit with the stench of death and gore, feeling it bubble up just a hint of hunger in his stomach. He set the carcass down as gently as he could, not wanting to bruise the meat and cause it to spoil, and groaned loudly at the sudden relief. "Oh man, that shit's heavy!" he laughed softly, hanging around inside the shack for a moment to simply enjoy the cooler air before emerging and shutting the door carefully behind him.

"Well, I know where I'm hanging out when summer hits!" he announced with a grin as he approached Vince, stretching out his arms as best he could to work out the tension just a little. "That shit's impressive, man! How'd you get it that cool in there?" To some, it might not have been much, but to someone like Bryce to whom air conditioning was an entirely foreign concept, it was utterly mind blowing.

Vince took his canteen out of his bag again and took a few swigs. When Bryce emerged from his shack he offered it to him as well. He chuckled at the other's comment and looked at the little hut he'd banged together. Well, truth be told, it was nothing more than a glorified shed that had already been there, but he'd made his own modifications over the years. "It's pretty simple, really. Just taking advantage of the air flow. It's a fucking hell hole in the height of summer though, when there's no breeze, y'know? I'm hoping to get a wind turbine going. I found an electric fan last year and I wanna find out if it still works." It probably didn't, but there was no harm in trying.

"Shall we get going again, then?" He asked, throwing his bag back over his shoulder, shortly followed by his crossbow. "I wanna get back and gut that bad boy." He gave Bryce a smirk.

Bryce gratefully took the canteen, taking a few small sips at first before taking a proper drink and handing it back. "Either way, man. Shit's impressive! And you might be able to sort something out with Milo. I'm sure he'd happily give ya a battery or two, and help you rig something up to get the fan going to keep the food cool." It was unreliable with the nasty overcast weather they typically got, but he'd traded enough cheap little solar panels with the Raiders to know they generated at least a little bit of power for Bosler. If it was enough to keep a fan going, he wasn't sure. The guy wasn't an electrical engineer! ...not that he even knew what that was...

"Oh, you naughty, naughty man!" he gasped, camping up his voice as much as the deep rumble would allow for, and laughed softly. "Yeah, let's get going... Oh! Actually, hold on! Lemmie grab some stuff real quick. No sense in only one of us being able to take out the critters." When Vince was ready, he made his way back to the Avarus Nest, stepping inside the rundown building briefly and coming back out with a knife nearly as long as his forearm strapped to his leg, and a decently sized slingshot meant for small game. No, it couldn't kill anything bigger than a rabbit or perhaps a fox on its own, but he was an alarmingly good shot with the thing, and all he really needed was to incapacitate larger game for long enough to finish it off with the knife. "Alright, let's blow this pop stand!" ...not that he knew what that was either...