3Squick squicky-squick, squick squicky-squick, squick-squick—ky squee…
…Oh, hi there.
This is the result of a combination of two experimental self-challenges: to (a) write a believable IC crack-pairing using rarely-used characters; and (b) to write, at least within the ratings limits of FFnet (more-or-less), a squick-fic.
Rating: M. Hopefully I haven't ventured too far into the R-category, but I've honestly never written anything like this so…well.
Warnings: Violence, gore, sexual situations (albeit no actual sex), nudity, language. Also large amounts of Scarlet-bashing and, if you think about it, mild Barret-bashing. Oh, and a certain amount of chauvinist piggery, because it's in Barret's POV. Yup. I repeat: not for the fainthearted.
Pairing: (kinda) Barret x Scarlet. Heh, betcha you haven't seen too many of these…
Summary: Barret is pleasantly surprised to find Corel's executioner alive in the wreck of Proud Clod. Because Barret is not – notnotNOT – a nice man.
Disclaimer: Yeah right, like Squaresoft/Enix would be caught dead doing something like this.
Umm… enjoy? Or back out now?
Corel's Vengeance
or,
Clenching The Fist
—ox-oxo-xo—
The Missing Score's immaculately buffed titanium-alloy barrel, deceptively light as it sat in his left hand, glittered ominously in the dim light of a smoggy Midgar evening. To Barret Wallace, that glitter was the light of ten thousand Corellian souls, screaming for righteous vengeance. And his eyes, colour of the earth, burned like their razed homes.
The Missing Score. The last missing piece, to level Corel's score. The Ultimate.
Kinda funny that he came across it right after the bitch who led the attack that killed them was brought down in turn. Shit happens, I guess. Long as she's dead.
A gust of wind set the long stairwell rattling and swaying slightly around them. It flayed the sensitive skin surrounding his right armstump's prosthetic-mounting, exposed to allow a certain raised locking clamp to crack open the chain-mesh bag's padlock. (The bag lay crumpled off to the side now, its puropse served. He'd long ago stopped wondering who the fuck left these weapons round the place.) Barret couldn't exactly remember the last time he'd seen that stump without a weapon on the end of it.
Damn that Shinra.
His truncated limb itched for completion, and he was happy to oblige. Clicking the weapon into place felt like jarring a funny-bone. This time, the headrush of sheer potential, the sense that under the right conditions this weapon could blast a path into just about anything living under the sun – it was like nothing he'd ever felt.
He raised it to eye-level to better examine its fit, experimentally tensing his muscles as if clenching a fist he no longer possessed. It was fitted just right – a single bullet issued from the purple aperture with a gush of gunpowder and flame, punching a small hole through a steel girder over ten metres away, with only the slightest of jolts passed back up the arm. Shit, this was one sweet firearm. It was just a pity, the way it looked like a giant purple-and-silver—
But then, that was what it was for. And there was one more Shinra cat waiting up them stairs, just asking to get himself right and properly fucked.
Barret grinned, gaze turned upward toward their destination. His voice boomed out like the battle-cry it was eminently suited for. "I'm coming, Hojo!"
"…Wait."
"Huh?" Barret halted his renewed ascent, turning to glare down at the diminutive blond who had led AVALANCHE on and off over the past few weeks. "What's your damn problem?"
Cloud stared up at him, unmoved. "I wanna switch you out with Vincent. We took out Heidegger and Scarlet. You've got your revenge…" A spasm of pure, unadulterated rage ripped through the hulking ex-miner – he wasn't in that battle-party, he didn't even get to fire a shot at the whore! – and a shadow of guilt flitted across Cloud's visage. "But, Vincent joined us to face Hojo."
Valentine… Barret deflated. Young Spiky had a point; Scarlet and Heidegger had been waiting in ambush, so he'd really just been unlucky enough not to face them when they attacked. But there wasn't a doubt in the world that Hojo was waiting for them, up these stairs – and there was no way in hell that Vincent was gonna be put on the sidelines for this one. Ol' Vampy wouldn't just leave them to face Sephiroth without him – he'd probably put bullets through all their fucking brainpans on his way out.
Besides… Vengeance was what he was here for. And who was Barret Wallace to stand in the way of that?
"Yeah, all right."
Cloud placed a brief call to the gunslinger who was stationed with the others at the bottom of the stairs (unless of course he'd already decided to head up on his own initiative, which given the stakes in play here wasn't out of the question); Tifa stepped closer to give his arm a comforting squeeze.
Ah well. There was always Sephiroth.
—ox-oxo-xo—
Clomp. Clomp. Clomp. The metal stairs shuddered under the weight of Barret's plodding descent. Up stairs, down stairs, up, down… sometimes he really hated this gig. Below him, a distant flash of red coalesced into the red-cloaked form of Vincent Valentine as he rounded the next landing. Crimson orbs flickered methodically, observing and measuring all avenues of potential surprise attack; their fiery blaze was the only outward signal of his long-banked fury, poised to roar to life (literally, in Vincent's case). The ex-Turk absently nodded to him as he made to head past—
—only to freeze, gauntlet snaking out to latch almost painfully onto Barret's left bicep.
"What the FUCK is your—" Barret stopped. Vincent wasn't looking at him – no, he was looking off to where the wreckage of the Proud Clod, 'Gya-haa-haa and Kya-haa-haa's' last invention, still smouldered in the distance. "What is it, Vincent?"
"…Do you see movement?"
Barret squinted off in the direction of the wreck. From this far off, he couldn't make out all that much; he wasn't proud to admit it, but he was getting a little short-sighted as he got older. But… there was something, the tiniest hint of something that didn't look like it was just flickering flame or billowing smoke.
"…Yeah, I think I do. Could just be smoke though… What do you see?" Vincent released his arm, point made; Barret fumbled round in one of the pockets of his jacket for the case which he kept for when shit like this came up. He dug it out, and cracked it open… and blinked. The gunslinger's kid-gloved shooting-hand hovered before his face – holding out HIS glasses!
"What the fuck?" Barret snatched them away, glaring down at the smaller man.
Vincent mimed dipping his hand into a pocket, and then gestured down at the others below – specifically, Yuffie.
"…Figures. Thievin' little brat." But hell, at least she tended to return what she stole now, even if she usually gave whatever it was to Vincent instead of back to its rightful owner. (Barret refused to speculate on why that was the case. Some things, he was happier not knowing.) He put on the glasses, giving the Proud Clod a more thorough look-over. "It's…"
Human, he could see it now. There was definitely someone moving round in there… Rescue forces, maybe, trying to dig out the Shinra execs? Well, they were shit outta luck then – Cait Sith had told him how easy that thing was to take down. Those fuckers were dead…
…Right?
"Someone wearing red…" Vincent noted, something almost like amusement bubbling in the depths of his cracked-leather voice.
Or not? He adjusted the glasses to bring them into exactly the right focus, and- There! A twitching blob of red!
"Shit, it's that no-good Scarlet crackwhore! We better get Cloud and—" Again, Vincent's claw lashed out to pin Barret in place. "Huh?"
Vincent's gaze, deceptively bland now despite the hellish flames burning within those blood-red eyes, bore into his own. "…From the way she's moving, I suspect she's severely injured. Maybe you can deal with her alone?"
Silence, utter silence, as Vincent's point registered.
"… Ya know, Vince… You're all right."
Vincent smirked and headed on up. Barret grinned and headed on down. Each to their own.
—ox-oxo-xo—
He stood alone, now, before the smoking ruin of the Proud Clod. Glowing, misshapen lumps of metallic armour-casing were scattered haphazardly round the main body's wreck, the final fall of which had partially collapsed the path under its gigantic mass. Spears of wire jutted from some pieces, occasionally sparking with residual electric charge. Barret looked upon it all with almost a sense of awe – lookit what AVALANCHE can do when it gets riled up! Even if Vincent was wrong and it wasn't Scarlet they saw moving, he was still glad to have seen the fruits of her labour.
For one thing, it was something he wouldn't have to lie about if he did find her. His comrades were people he was proud to fight with, but this was something he wanted to do alone. And in a sense, he had come down to check the anti-WEAPON mech out anyway. ('Sides, they weren't stupid. Well, maybe except for Yuffie.)
The first one he found was General Heidegger, head of the Department of Public Security Maintenance, sprawled behind one of those casings. The fat motherfucka who ordered the Turks around. The one who gave Tseng and Reno and those other Turk shitheads the order to drop the Sector 7 Plate, on Wedge and Biggs and Jessie and everyone else unlucky enough to be stuck in the slum when a thousand-ton chunk of steel crushed them like they were nothing. The Proud Clod's dying throes must have thrown him clear of the wreckage for him to have made it that far away from it – he couldn't have made it out any further, not the way his neck was twisted.
Better to make sure, though. Barret walked over and put a bullet through his face. Then another one through where his heart probably was, assuming he had one under all that flab. And then one more in his ass, just for the hell of it. Heidegger never twitched.
Then he looked up, and saw her.
Yup. It was Scarlet all right. Head swimming, vision almost as red as her signature dress, he walked over, closer to the big wreck, to stare down at her.
She was banged up, badly – so badly she might not survive her injuries anyway; if she didn't get medical attention pretty quick, she was probably a goner. Her left arm was mangled, broken in at least two places; her left leg sported a long gash running almost from knee to ankle, still trailing blood despite the half-healing she'd likely managed with a potion or something. A jagged piece of shrapnel was lodged in her left side, just under the ribcage – no way to know how deep it was stuck in, but it must have been nasty if she had decided to leave it where it was. All that, added to the collection of cuts and scrapes and burns…yeah, the head of Shinra's Department of Weapons Development was probably feeling real sorry for herself…
Scarlet was crawling away from her failed creation, head down, at an agonisingly slow pace. By the blood-trail left behind her, she'd managed to get maybe ten metres. A fair clip, considering – not, of course, that Barret was in any mind to do that. Instead he just watched as she crawled blindly on, wet breath sobbing and spluttering like a death-rattle in her throat, slithering forward by one arm and one leg like a maimed insect and leaving a smeared trail like one too, all the way over to him.
Her hand, scrabbling for purchase on the cracked road before her, came to rest on Barret's massive boot. She paused. Tilted her head to look up. Flinched back, groaning as the involuntary motion jogged her many injuries.
It was, at the same time, one of the most grotesque and beautiful sights he's ever seen. He braced himself, grinning for all he was worth, and pointed the business end of his newest gunarm at the Scarlet Bitch…
"…Please… I beg…you…"
She was trying to sit up, and eventually managed it by using her right arm as a prop. Barret just kept watching, gunbarrel trained on her all the way as she struggled to her knees, her shredded red silk dress slipping from cream-coloured shoulders (probably as seductively as she could manage) as she wobbled upright. His eyeline dipped down for a long moment, gravedirt-eyes filled with an emotion that Scarlet probably mistook for lechery, given the hope that seemed to lurk in her own ice-blue gaze when his rose to meet it.
"Spare me…please… I'm begging you…for my life…I'll… do anything…please…" She brought her hand up to fondle an exposed breast, heedless of the smears of blood she left in the wake of her careless kneading. "…Anything you want…!"
Scarlet, on her knees, broken and bloody, pleading to Barret Wallace for her life like the Shinra scum she was. Tits out, feeling herself up and claiming she'd 'do anything' like the no-good company whore she'd always been but always never-quite-denied she was.
He'd had fantasies about this…
His grin widened. "Anything, huh?"
"Please…anything!" She licked her lips, balancing herself carefully on parted, lacerated knees with an barely-hidden wince as she reached for the fly of his pants with the trembling, bloodstained fingers of one hand, the other hand hanging tangled somehow in a snarl of black lace at the inner junction of her thigh. "I'll…be yours…yours alone, to do with as you command…"
He'd been dreaming of a moment like this for four years…!
"For my life…I'll be…" His fly was down, and her hand was fumbling at the buttonflap on his boxers. "…I'll be your…whore…!" Her hand wrapped around him, chill with blood loss and still slicked with her own coagulating blood. "Your slave… Anything you want…"
Not every night, no, not even close. It wasn't as bad as it could have been; he'd known that ever since he found his best friend's infant daughter miraculously unscathed, in the ashes of their home. He had Marlene, even if his own hands (hand!) were too drenched in blood to hold her as she deserved. But every so often, visions of a perfect vengeance would assail him in his rest, taunting him with its sheer impossibility. And here it was before him, unexpected, unasked, but here anyway. The perfect vengeance. The perfect settling of the score.
It started in too many ways to count. But it always…
"…Anything…" She was a real expert with that hand of hers when she needed to be; the object of her attentions sluggishly began to respond as she fed it through his boxers and his fly. She licked her lips again, still looking up at him through her lash extensions. He reached down with his left hand, fingers callused from reloading ammunition instead of swinging a pickaxe dropping, caressing her chin to form a gentle grip on her lower jaw. "If only…you spare me…"
Always…
"Please… I'll be yours…" she whispered, and her jaw unhinged like a snake's and nestled in his hand, and she leaned in moist and eager and…
…ended the same way.
His gun. Her mouth. Clench the fist.
From this kinda range, probably not even Sephiroth would walk off this one. And for all her weapons of mass destruction, Scarlet was not even near to being in Sephiroth's league. The first five vertebrae of her spine shattered and commingled with her liquefied brain stem, the churned, foaming mass exiting the jagged four-inch hole at the top of her neck in a high-velocity spray of gore. Scarlet's body slackened and went limp, held up by nothing but Barret's iron grip on her jaw – and the Missing Score's barrel, which had filled her mouth in a way the stupid, vicious whore probably hadn't been expecting.
A twist and a shove sent her corpse sprawling with a wet, boneless thump and a tinny metallic clatter before him. He gazed down at the body, mad rictus relaxing to scarred slackness, and tears sprang to his eyes at last.
Myrna…Dyne, Eleanor…everyone… This is for you.
"Return to the Planet, you fucking murderous bitch."
Which reminded him… sometimes dead bodies disappeared when they were near Mako, right? And with that Sister Ray up there getting ready to fire again, who knew how long that body'd still be there?
Well, no time like the present. And she had done him the favour of getting his cock out.
And this…is for ME.
It was getting late now, and turning a little chilly out on the Plate. Barret's urine steamed a little as it splashed over her face, washing away little flecks of dried blood and soot along with one of her eyelash extensions. His aim lingered at her gaping mouth for a bit, dislodging dozens of gummed-up shards of her broken teeth (he hadn't been gentle about jamming that Missing Score in there), then dipped to hose down the tits that he'd secretly quite liked to daydream about until four years ago. He noted in passing the tiny little pistol that had spilled from Scarlet's left hand – which musta been where that clatter had come from when he dropped her – and wondered idly if she coulda lifted the ruin of that arm for long enough to shoot him with it.
Yup, that was Scarlet to the end. Whoring herself out for just long enough to size your back up for the dagger.
"If yer shake it more than twice, you're playing with it…"
Barret snorted. As if he'd do that kinda shit – pissing on her corpse was one thing, but he'd be damned if he was gonna play with himself over it. He had some morals. Tucking himself away, Barret turned to glare at a grinning Cid.
"Ya got somethin' to say, then say it!"
Cid Highwind scratched the back of his neck. "Heh, I ain't sayin' shit! Hell, if Lard-ass Palmer was in there, you can bet I'd be pissing on his stinkin' corpse…" He looked down at the half-stripped body of the latest dead Shinra exec. "This bitch led the force that took out yer hometown, huh?"
"Yeah."
"Then she had it coming. Good riddance to her." Cid nonchalantly hawked and spat, the soggy projectile glancing off a bared nipple to run down and join the other body of noisome fluid pooled between her breasts. "Pity though. She had a nice rack on her." A thought occurred to the pilot, who suddenly burst out laughing. "Hey, there's an idea. How about we get Tifa out here? I bet she wouldn't mind stickin' the ol' shitkickers in a few times for good luck…"
Barret shrugged unenthusiastically, digging a couple stray chips of Scarlet's teeth out from under the gunarm's foreski— ahem, outer barrel. He couldn't say he was dancing for joy at the thought. Tifa… For all her own rage, Tifa Lockheart was still pretty innocent in the larger scale of things, though you'd never hear her admit it. She wasn't ruthless like he was, not really. (She wasn't a killer like he was, whispered the sick little inner voice that wished he had jacked off over Scarlet's carcass.)
Naw, it was best she didn't know about it. The bitch was dead, he'd made sure of that. It was all the others really needed to know.
Cid fidgeted. "We done here?"
"Yeah, we done."
They walked away.
—ox-oxo-xo—
It was a brief reunion that night, a transitory triumph. The Mako Cannon had been stopped, Shinra decapitated – but now the path to the Northern Crater was open, and the impending confrontation with Sephiroth hung over them like a six-foot katana…or the big red Meteor that WAS hanging over them. As they headed back onto the airship, Cloud already had that look on his face, the one he got when gearing up for a big motivational speech.
On the way into the cockpit, Vincent stopped Barret with a light tap on the arm.
"…Scarlet?"
Barret grinned, a lazy, sated kind of smirk that woulda done Yuffie proud and might even have matched Red's if his teeth were fangs. "I got mine. You?"
Vincent's smile was a tiny, subdued thing, pulling at the corner of his mouth for a moment. But it was still a smile. "…Me too."
Barret thumped his shoulder with a clenched fist on the way past.
—ox-oxo-xo—
That night, as he sat in a comfy armchair while little Marlene dozed in her bed, he slept. And he dreamed of Corel's dead, howling with righteous anger as they tore Scarlet's spirit to pieces.
And he slept soundly.
…See? I warned you. (Could've perhaps added dubcon to the warnings, but I think it only looked like it, and even then only because I tend to write suspense by reflex.)
It may interest those of you who have actually just read all that, to know that this was the least squick-filled of the directions I could've taken it. Suffice to say, I couldn't have posted the others on this site (though if you want to try getting away with it, then by all means be my guest).
Now, as for reviews and/or favourites…? They would be appreciated. They really would. But, well…who'd publicly admit to having read this? So if you have the time and inclination, feel free to drop me a PM and tell me how well I did at judging the rating. I would especially appreciate the courtesy of an explanatory review/PM if you're going try to get it banned.
Thank you for reading, and pleasant dreams. (runs away)