![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seriousficTitle: Before You Let It Go...
Fandom: DC comics
Rating: R
Word Count: 3,899
Acknowledgments: Thanks to Tracy and![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
lurkslikefox for betaing this.
Characters/Pairings: Scott/Barda
Previous Part: 2/6
Next Part: 4/6
Summary: Scott and Barda reach an impasse.
Barda didn’t sleep well without her exercises. If she wore herself out in battle or in training, she would be too exhausted to dream. But if she didn’t, the dreams came. She would go to battle without the heat of battle. And in her dreams, she couldn’t turn a blind eye to the blood and the fear of her enemies. It was all she could see.
This was because she didn’t believe in anti-life enough. Her faith was weak. She was weak. She punished herself in the morning, but it never made the dreams go away.
So, suspended in the thick gray amber between campaigns, she sat up at night and let the dreams stalk her.
Scott snorted and called out in his sleep. It was a bit of respite in the night. She rolled to the side of the bed closer to him and listened to his breathing. Amazing how even it was, how steady. She tried to match her breathing to his. In and out, in and out. She felt the echoes of war start to fade…
“Barda.”
She jolted to full wakefulness. Had he just said her name? What right did he have to say her name!?
Barda got out of bed, not bothering to dress, and knelt beside him. His hair was coming in thick, but he’d shaved his jaw bare. Such a contradictory man. She touched his hair. It was soft, like the fuzz on an alien fruit. She’d have thought it’d be bristly like a beard. Then she realized Scott was looking at her.
“Barda?” He sighed. “Not this dream again. It always ends before it gets interesting.”
“You think this is a dream?”
He looked her up and down, making Barda feel oddly warm. “I think it’s pretty obvious at this point.”
Barda sat back, amused. “So if this is your dream, what are you doing to do to me? Strangle me? Burn me? Bury me alive?”
He put a finger to her lips, and the impudence shocked her into silence. “By the Source, even in a fantasy you’re bloody-minded.”
And he grabbed her by the hair and pulled her down into a kiss.
For the first time in her long years of service to Darkseid, Barda had no idea what to do. She’d been with men, rough men, who knew how to leave her sore, but none of them had ever done this… mouth… thing... It didn’t hurt like sex was supposed to. It felt nice, like the light from the Tamaran sun and the taste from an Earth apple. Then he expertly twisted them so she was on her back and he was over her, the rug that they were wrapped up in the only thing keeping them from being skin against skin.
He laid on top of her, briefly stroking her hair before closing his fingers into a fist of self-restraint. “And this is usually the part where I wake up.”
Barda gave him a sleeper pinch, instantly rendering him unconscious.
***
Scott woke up to a cup of cold water being poured onto his head. He sat bolt upright and saw Barda, fully dressed (wait, why wouldn’t she be fully dressed?), holding a ceramic cup.
“I can’t sleep,” she announced.
“So I’m not allowed to sleep?”
“You’re my servant. Serve.”
“Wanna hear a bedtime story?” She glared at him. “Okay, how ‘bout some warm voodaun? That always makes me sleepy.”
“I will try some.”
Scott got up, grabbing his much-patched scavenger coat from where it hung on her exercise machine. “So that’s a definite no on the bedtime story?”
***
Without his union suit and outerwear, the coat seemed comically large on Scott. He deftly manuevered through her kitchen, mixing ingredients into a boiling cauldron. Barda watched him move. ”Scott, what do you do all day when I’m gone?”
“I cook, I tinker, I garden, I meditate, I read when I can find something to read.”
“Doesn’t sound very fulfilling.”
“It has its moments.” He ladled some of the stew into her bowl. “Careful, it’s hot.”
Barda took a sip.
“How is it?”
Barda licked her chops. “Don’t let this go to your head, but it’s the best thing I’ve ever tasted,” she stated.
“No frame of reference. And I’ve always believed in a healthy ego.”
She took another spoonful. “You were tossing and turning in your sleep.”
Scott sat across from her with his own bowl of voodaun. “News to me. I never remember my own dreams.”
Barda coughed.
“What was that?”
“What was what?”
“It sounded like you just said ‘liar’.”
“Why would I do that?”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t either.”
“Were you calling me a liar for saying I don’t remember my dreams?”
“Why would I do that?”
Scott took another spoonful of voodaun. Barda raised her bowl to her lips and slurped.
“Would you like to go out?”
“Out?”
“To the marketplace.”
“Why?”
“Maybe I don’t trust you here alone.”
“You trusted me before.”
“Maybe now I don’t.”
“Why?”
“You tell me.”
“Because I’m a liar?”
“There’s a chance.”
“But I’m not.”
“Get dressed.”
“I am dressed.”
“Get more dressed.”
***
The floating marketplace was easy to find. You just followed the frigates to the latest dump site, where the bounty of a dozen victories sat before being consumed for fuel in the fire-pits. The Lowlies arrived early to pick through the rubbish and sell treasure to the highest bidder. As a member of the Female Furies, Barda could simply take what she wanted. The scavengers offered them nasty stares for their imposition and while Scott tried to give them a consoling shrug, that just made them glare all the harder.
Scott trailed behind her, lugging the cart. “If you’re the one with Special Powers Training, how come I have to pull the cart?”
“Servant, remember?” Barda picked up a bookshelf. “Here. Reading material.”
“’Secrets of Oriental Massage’. How did you know?”
“Help me look for a capacitor that could fit my Mega-Rod.”
“Or some massage oil. Ooh, look, ‘Who’s Who on Krypton’.”
“Where?”
Scott gestured to empty space. “Last year’s edition.”
Conversation became briefly impossible as another frigate hit atmo. Its thrusters surged to overcome gravity until it briefly hovered above the dump site to vent its hold. The Lowlies ran for cover. Scott winced.
“Oh, yes, we’re sure to find something valuable so long as it isn’t too messed up by the fifty-foot drop.”
“If it can’t survive a fifty-foot drop, it’s worthless.”
“Could I survive a fifty-foot drop?”
“Yes.”
“What if I landed on my head?”
“You have a thick skull. And hair.” Barda thumped the mattress of a cot. “Good springs. Scott, what do you think?”
Scott didn’t answer. He was holding a scorched teddy bear in his hands, fingers drawing taut as a noose.
“That’d make a good present for Auralie,” Barda whispered in his ear.
Scott took one step back, then two, then three. All he could think of was the time-distant scent of burnt fur. “This belongs—to someone dead.” He threw the teddy bear as hard as he could. It bounced off Barda’s chest. “All of this belongs to people that your kind killed.”
“Our kind,” Barda said softly.
Scott walked back to Barda’s treader and sat in the back. Barda marched after, threw the cot in the back with him, and drove home.
***
As soon as they got back, Scott sat down on the floor with his legs gathered under him. Barda could tell he wasn’t meditating. She left him to his sulking as she put away the salvage. She set up the cot next to her own bed. It occurred to her to try pushing them together, as having them side by side didn’t look right. She ended up with the cot at the foot of her bed. She went back to the main room, where Scott’s limber body had bunched into an angry hive.
Barda sat down on the chair across from him, waiting for him to meet her stare. When his eyes stayed resolutely unfocused, she dragged the chair closer to him and grabbed his chin. Eye contact, when forced, was blisteringly defiant.
“You think I like fighting?”
“Yes.”
“Do you think I like killing?”
His furious cynicism died on his lips. “I’d… like to think not.”
“I hate this war. I hate being apart from… Auralie. But when it’s over…”
Scott stood up, momentarily towering over her. “It’ll never end. Not so long as there are men who would tell others how to live, and those who would say no man has that right. That’s like asking a cobra to lay down with a mongoose.”
Barda sprang up. “You self-righteous snob!”
“Snob?”
She poked him in the chest. “You think you’re better than any of us just because you believe what we don’t. What could be nicer than believing as everyone else does?”
He batted her finger away. “You don’t know me.”
“I know your kind. Tell me, is there any happiness in your defiance? Does it bring you satisfaction?”
He grabbed her face, fingers digging until they reached her cheekbones, jawline, like he was torn between hardening his grip into a choke or softening it into a caress. “You think I don’t doubt? You think there aren’t times I wish I could be like everyone else? I’m a mistake. Something zigged when it should have zagged and made me! I... I can’t do this anymore.”
He walked past her and out the door. At first she thought he was going to do some pruning, like he did sometimes when he was upset, but Scott just kept going out of the greenhouse.
Barda followed him, rolling her eyes. “You do know that if you keep walking, the bomb inside you will go off?”
He didn’t even look back. “I do know that, yes.”
“Don’t you care that you’re going to die?”
He didn’t stop, but he did slow down. “Why are you even alive?”
It was almost instinctual, the way Barda shot to attention. “To serve Darkseid!”
Scott built up speed. “And what do you get out of that? Does that make you happy?”
“It should!”
“But it doesn’t!”
She put on a burst of speed, caught up to him, grabbed his hand. Before she could decide how hard to hold him, he stopped for her.
“And escape is so much better? You keep trying to leave, you get caught, you get hurt, for nothing! …not even Darkseid.”
“One day I’ll get out. Out there. And then you’ll see. I’ll forget this place, I’ll forget I ever lived here,” he ripped his hand away from her, “and I’ll forget you!”
“Then do it!”
“I will!”
He kept walking, even as his chest grew warm, started beeping.
“You’re going to blow yourself up just to prove a point!” Barda yelled after him.
“Looks that way!”
“Idiot,” Barda muttered under her breath. She started after him. “I don’t suppose you care what happens to me!”
“You’re tough. You’ll survive.”
With a growl, Barda grabbed Scott and tossed him back toward the house. He landed in an acrobatic roll that brought him up caked with black dirt.
“Don’t get in my way!” He rushed her. She nimbly stepped aside, but only to spare him the pain of colliding with her, then hooked his arm and flipped him back. He sprang to his feet, a man possessed, and charged again. She met him head-on this time, quickly overpowering him and dragging him back toward the house.
Scott pounded at her rigid back and shoulders, but she held fast. “Let go of me!”
“Then promise to stay with me!”
“No!”
She threw him against the door. “You are not saying no to me tonight!” She slapped her hand against the palm reader. The door rattled open, dumping Scott on his ass. He scurried back on his elbows and she stomped after him.
His back hit a chair and he used it to pull himself up, never taking his eyes off Barda. “Why do you even care? Because you were ordered to keep me alive? Because you think you can control me?”
“I’ve seen many men dead. None of them looked free.”
“Darkseid’s keeping me alive for some reason. Anyone else would’ve been executed by now for the shit I’ve pulled. If my death throws a wrench in his plans—it’s not like anyone’s gonna miss me. Hell, you’d probably be glad to have me out of your regulation-length hair.”
“I…” Barda bit the inside of her cheek. “You make a fine slave.”
“Glowing praise,” he said, full of bitter sarcasm.
Barda ratcheted her voice up stringently. “I’ll have no more talk of suicide! You die for Darkseid or not at all!”
There was something intoxicating about her rage, something that made Scott long to see who she really was past the breaking point. Maybe it was that, in her anger, this was the most emotional he’d ever seen her. He couldn’t back down, couldn’t apologize for scaring her and go back to their comfortable little routine. Not this time.
“’No more talk’?” Scott crossed his arms. “Apokolips can’t stop me from thinking. It can’t even stop me from running. So how are you gonna stop me from talking?”
Barda put her hands on her hips, near the Mega-Rod hanging at her side. “I’m not Apokolips. I am Big Barda.”
“Okay, Barda, how are you going to shut me up?” She advanced on him, but he didn’t move an inch. “You gonna hit me? Torture me? Rip my tongue out?”
“You’re just giving me ideas,” Barda growled, low and dangerous. She put her hand on his chest and kept walking, steadily pushing him back like a bulldozer.
Scott resisted just enough to make Barda begin to exert herself, turning it into a kind of dance. “Come on, then. Hit me. If you’ve got the guts.”
She shoved him against the wall, splayed hand pinning him there. Scott made himself tall as he could. He grabbed Barda by the back of her neck and forced her to crane her head down toward him, putting them roughly face to face. “What are you waiting for, huh!? Hit me!”
“You think I can’t shut you up?”
“Hit me!”
“You think I won’t!?”
“I don’t know!” Scott grabbed Barda’s hand and balled it into a fist for her, pulling it up close to his face, his lips. “I need to know.”
“I can shut you up.”
“Show me.”
“I can shut that pretty little mouth,” she enunciated mockingly, cracking the wall next to Scott’s head with her fist.
“I’m not scared of you. You can’t hurt me.” Boldly, Scott canted his head to the side and kissed Barda’s wrist. When he looked back at her eyes they were narrowed, incensed. She could feel his heart beating against her palm as rapidly as a jackhammer.
“I can shut you up,” she repeated, but her voice sounded smaller than before.
“Prove it.”
Barda grabbed his throat, as if to rip it out, and somehow instead pulled him against her. Her lips crushed against his. For a moment, they stood poised like that, breathing each other’s air. Then she jammed him against the wall, their tongues clashing. He writhed under her, not sure whether to escape or somehow reach out to this strange new side of Barda, but stopped when she reared back. On her face, it was clear that even she was shocked.
He put his hands on her body with nervous, needing passion, fingers wrapped around her waist to hold her steady as he kissed her. It was slower, more languid than Barda’s kiss, and when he pulled back he had absolutely no idea what part of the plan this was.
Belatedly, Barda broke her limp grip on his throat. Instead, her hands lowered down his body, for the first time noting the slender musculature instead of the scars. He still glared at her as she broke his belt, but this time there was something deeper beneath his defiance. His erection was long and thick and perfect. Barda ran her forefinger and middle finger down its length, making him shiver.
“Don’t run,” she said, stepping back to undo her armor with quick, steady hands. Only the way her eyes darted revealed her uncertainty. Scott froze, watching, feeling oddly voyeuristic at witnessing this private moment, even if he was part of it. Barda never really took off her armor.
There was a strong scent of iron that wafted off her when she was nude, a few traces of dried blood near her ribs. Self-consciously, she buckled the belt holding up her Mega-Rod across her naked hips. He stepped forward, not enjoying the way it made her wince, and touched her face. Her jaw worked, mulling. His fingers moved to her sable-black hair and she grabbed his arm by the wrist. His fingers apologetically closed. She brought his hand down and ran her lips across his knuckles.
“This will make you be quiet, make you stay with me…”
This isn’t about me Scott seemed to say, not even an accusation, as he pulled off his clothes and stood naked before her.
She brought his hand to her breast, watched it open and enfold the flesh there. He squeezed gingerly and she squeezed his wrist, encouraging him to go harder. His fingers bit into the globe, prompting a slow smile from her. His other hand explored her other breast. Barda put her hands on his narrow shoulders and waited for his next move.
They stood there for long minutes as Scott worked away at her breasts, experimenting with turning the nipples into tiny bullets. Barda kept her mouth clenched and a tight lid on the sounds that he provoked, flying around unvoiced deep in her gut. He stepped closer to her, close enough for his cock to brush against her thigh with an electric recognition. She actually leaned down, but he pulled away and instead licked the curve of her breast from areola to collarbone, then again, lower, to leave her nipple shining with dew. It felt so good that she couldn’t contain the hot burst of breath that forced its way out her mouth.
“Enough. That’s enough!” She forced him down on his back, going to the carpet with him like a wrestling takedown. “This isn’t… don’t get the wrong idea! I hate you!” she said, swinging a leg over his waist. Slowly, she lowered herself onto his cock. He threw his head back, mouth open, panting, with every inch.
His hands latched onto her waist, then, as the tension passed, began to slide around her hips in slow, easy circles. It felt good, just holding him inside her as his hands sorted through her. She watched his Adam’s Apple climb up and down, his chest expand and crease, his eyes shut, as if he were savoring the supple pressure. She didn’t even know she was grinning until Scott saw it and smiled back.
“Shut up!” Barda worked herself up and down, driving him into a paroxysm of quick, shallow breaths. His hands, which had locked onto her lower back, broke and moved hungrily up her body. They reached her breasts, tugged hard at her nipples, and she let loose a betraying moan that never seemed to end.
Her Mega-Rod swung wildly across her muscular thigh as she rode him, clinging desperately to the distance between them. “I hate you! I’m going to rip off your—faster—make you—yes!—so good—kill you!”
He tried to sit up, but she shoved him back down and kept her hand locked on his chest. Source, how could she never have noticed how hard his muscles were and how good they felt when they were covered in sweat? “You bastard! How dare you make me feel this way! I should—should… what are you doing to me?”
There was heat gathering inside her, at her very core, rising and surging like lava. Scott’s hands returned to her hips and his muscles bulged as he moved her, guided her, rolling her against him. Barda felt a blush rising in her cheeks, heard something roaring in her ears. She pitched forward, catching herself against the wall, and her fingers dug into the rock up to the knuckles as lightning struck her.
She stopped moving. Her chest heaved as she tried to regain her breath. Bent double over Scott, hair hanging down in sweaty ringlets, she looked him in the eye. “What was that?”
“From here, it looked like an orgasm.”
Barda bit her lip. “I want another one.”
He cupped her face with dexterous fingers and sucked her down into a kiss without fear, one that lasted long after he had rolled on top of her and begun thrusting into her, at first insultingly slow, then more forceful as she urged him on with callused hands on his bare back. The carpet rubbed her ass raw, but it was a small price to pay to feel him pistoning inside her. The kiss was the only thing that stayed gentle, moving to her cheeks and chin and neck in worship, so she made it rougher. Her nails cut into the back of his neck as her tongue invaded his mouth. It wasn’t lost on her that this made his thrusting speed up, slam down harder on her.
She threw her head back, cracking the floor. Her teeth gritted. It was too much. She had to let it out or she’d die. “Scott,” she said, forcing it down to a whisper. “Scott, yes…”
He had lost himself in her breasts, teeth and tongue working their own sort of magic. Like he had with the synthetic flesh, healing her. She could see the sweat darkening his fine hair, ran a hand through it. Source, it felt good. She let her hand keep going, down his neck, over the rigid dorsal muscles and down his spine to the small of his back. There she could urge him deeper, faster, more. But more than that, she wanted to see those brown eyes staring into her with the same love and devotion she’d been blind to all these months.
“Scott!” she cried, louder, and he looked up at her. “You…” She gave up on words, went back to kissing him. Didn’t even mind that it was tender and loving and weak. It was perfect. Every muscle in her body was tensed like a loaded gun. She’d never felt this wet before, so powerless and yet so powerful. “Say something, Scott. Say anything. I want to hear your voice.”
“Barda,” he began, every syllable infused with want and love enough to make her come, make her his.
She couldn’t keep a hand on him without hurting him, so instead she brought her fists hammering down to their sides, shaking the entire house. Scott hardly noticed as he came inside her, because Barda was making this sound, this cooing-humming-trilling sound of sheer pleasure, and it was his whole world. He felt, for one glorious moment, all his chains unshackled and all his oppression lost, and he was with Barda. By some miracle of will he held himself up as Barda’s hands fell flaxen to the pockmarked floor.
He looked into her eyes, noticing all the untold mysteries kept within, and said “I love you.”
Next part.
Fandom: DC comics
Rating: R
Word Count: 3,899
Acknowledgments: Thanks to Tracy and
lurkslikefox for betaing this.Characters/Pairings: Scott/Barda
Previous Part: 2/6
Next Part: 4/6
Summary: Scott and Barda reach an impasse.
Barda didn’t sleep well without her exercises. If she wore herself out in battle or in training, she would be too exhausted to dream. But if she didn’t, the dreams came. She would go to battle without the heat of battle. And in her dreams, she couldn’t turn a blind eye to the blood and the fear of her enemies. It was all she could see.
This was because she didn’t believe in anti-life enough. Her faith was weak. She was weak. She punished herself in the morning, but it never made the dreams go away.
So, suspended in the thick gray amber between campaigns, she sat up at night and let the dreams stalk her.
Scott snorted and called out in his sleep. It was a bit of respite in the night. She rolled to the side of the bed closer to him and listened to his breathing. Amazing how even it was, how steady. She tried to match her breathing to his. In and out, in and out. She felt the echoes of war start to fade…
“Barda.”
She jolted to full wakefulness. Had he just said her name? What right did he have to say her name!?
Barda got out of bed, not bothering to dress, and knelt beside him. His hair was coming in thick, but he’d shaved his jaw bare. Such a contradictory man. She touched his hair. It was soft, like the fuzz on an alien fruit. She’d have thought it’d be bristly like a beard. Then she realized Scott was looking at her.
“Barda?” He sighed. “Not this dream again. It always ends before it gets interesting.”
“You think this is a dream?”
He looked her up and down, making Barda feel oddly warm. “I think it’s pretty obvious at this point.”
Barda sat back, amused. “So if this is your dream, what are you doing to do to me? Strangle me? Burn me? Bury me alive?”
He put a finger to her lips, and the impudence shocked her into silence. “By the Source, even in a fantasy you’re bloody-minded.”
And he grabbed her by the hair and pulled her down into a kiss.
For the first time in her long years of service to Darkseid, Barda had no idea what to do. She’d been with men, rough men, who knew how to leave her sore, but none of them had ever done this… mouth… thing... It didn’t hurt like sex was supposed to. It felt nice, like the light from the Tamaran sun and the taste from an Earth apple. Then he expertly twisted them so she was on her back and he was over her, the rug that they were wrapped up in the only thing keeping them from being skin against skin.
He laid on top of her, briefly stroking her hair before closing his fingers into a fist of self-restraint. “And this is usually the part where I wake up.”
Barda gave him a sleeper pinch, instantly rendering him unconscious.
***
Scott woke up to a cup of cold water being poured onto his head. He sat bolt upright and saw Barda, fully dressed (wait, why wouldn’t she be fully dressed?), holding a ceramic cup.
“I can’t sleep,” she announced.
“So I’m not allowed to sleep?”
“You’re my servant. Serve.”
“Wanna hear a bedtime story?” She glared at him. “Okay, how ‘bout some warm voodaun? That always makes me sleepy.”
“I will try some.”
Scott got up, grabbing his much-patched scavenger coat from where it hung on her exercise machine. “So that’s a definite no on the bedtime story?”
***
Without his union suit and outerwear, the coat seemed comically large on Scott. He deftly manuevered through her kitchen, mixing ingredients into a boiling cauldron. Barda watched him move. ”Scott, what do you do all day when I’m gone?”
“I cook, I tinker, I garden, I meditate, I read when I can find something to read.”
“Doesn’t sound very fulfilling.”
“It has its moments.” He ladled some of the stew into her bowl. “Careful, it’s hot.”
Barda took a sip.
“How is it?”
Barda licked her chops. “Don’t let this go to your head, but it’s the best thing I’ve ever tasted,” she stated.
“No frame of reference. And I’ve always believed in a healthy ego.”
She took another spoonful. “You were tossing and turning in your sleep.”
Scott sat across from her with his own bowl of voodaun. “News to me. I never remember my own dreams.”
Barda coughed.
“What was that?”
“What was what?”
“It sounded like you just said ‘liar’.”
“Why would I do that?”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t either.”
“Were you calling me a liar for saying I don’t remember my dreams?”
“Why would I do that?”
Scott took another spoonful of voodaun. Barda raised her bowl to her lips and slurped.
“Would you like to go out?”
“Out?”
“To the marketplace.”
“Why?”
“Maybe I don’t trust you here alone.”
“You trusted me before.”
“Maybe now I don’t.”
“Why?”
“You tell me.”
“Because I’m a liar?”
“There’s a chance.”
“But I’m not.”
“Get dressed.”
“I am dressed.”
“Get more dressed.”
***
The floating marketplace was easy to find. You just followed the frigates to the latest dump site, where the bounty of a dozen victories sat before being consumed for fuel in the fire-pits. The Lowlies arrived early to pick through the rubbish and sell treasure to the highest bidder. As a member of the Female Furies, Barda could simply take what she wanted. The scavengers offered them nasty stares for their imposition and while Scott tried to give them a consoling shrug, that just made them glare all the harder.
Scott trailed behind her, lugging the cart. “If you’re the one with Special Powers Training, how come I have to pull the cart?”
“Servant, remember?” Barda picked up a bookshelf. “Here. Reading material.”
“’Secrets of Oriental Massage’. How did you know?”
“Help me look for a capacitor that could fit my Mega-Rod.”
“Or some massage oil. Ooh, look, ‘Who’s Who on Krypton’.”
“Where?”
Scott gestured to empty space. “Last year’s edition.”
Conversation became briefly impossible as another frigate hit atmo. Its thrusters surged to overcome gravity until it briefly hovered above the dump site to vent its hold. The Lowlies ran for cover. Scott winced.
“Oh, yes, we’re sure to find something valuable so long as it isn’t too messed up by the fifty-foot drop.”
“If it can’t survive a fifty-foot drop, it’s worthless.”
“Could I survive a fifty-foot drop?”
“Yes.”
“What if I landed on my head?”
“You have a thick skull. And hair.” Barda thumped the mattress of a cot. “Good springs. Scott, what do you think?”
Scott didn’t answer. He was holding a scorched teddy bear in his hands, fingers drawing taut as a noose.
“That’d make a good present for Auralie,” Barda whispered in his ear.
Scott took one step back, then two, then three. All he could think of was the time-distant scent of burnt fur. “This belongs—to someone dead.” He threw the teddy bear as hard as he could. It bounced off Barda’s chest. “All of this belongs to people that your kind killed.”
“Our kind,” Barda said softly.
Scott walked back to Barda’s treader and sat in the back. Barda marched after, threw the cot in the back with him, and drove home.
***
As soon as they got back, Scott sat down on the floor with his legs gathered under him. Barda could tell he wasn’t meditating. She left him to his sulking as she put away the salvage. She set up the cot next to her own bed. It occurred to her to try pushing them together, as having them side by side didn’t look right. She ended up with the cot at the foot of her bed. She went back to the main room, where Scott’s limber body had bunched into an angry hive.
Barda sat down on the chair across from him, waiting for him to meet her stare. When his eyes stayed resolutely unfocused, she dragged the chair closer to him and grabbed his chin. Eye contact, when forced, was blisteringly defiant.
“You think I like fighting?”
“Yes.”
“Do you think I like killing?”
His furious cynicism died on his lips. “I’d… like to think not.”
“I hate this war. I hate being apart from… Auralie. But when it’s over…”
Scott stood up, momentarily towering over her. “It’ll never end. Not so long as there are men who would tell others how to live, and those who would say no man has that right. That’s like asking a cobra to lay down with a mongoose.”
Barda sprang up. “You self-righteous snob!”
“Snob?”
She poked him in the chest. “You think you’re better than any of us just because you believe what we don’t. What could be nicer than believing as everyone else does?”
He batted her finger away. “You don’t know me.”
“I know your kind. Tell me, is there any happiness in your defiance? Does it bring you satisfaction?”
He grabbed her face, fingers digging until they reached her cheekbones, jawline, like he was torn between hardening his grip into a choke or softening it into a caress. “You think I don’t doubt? You think there aren’t times I wish I could be like everyone else? I’m a mistake. Something zigged when it should have zagged and made me! I... I can’t do this anymore.”
He walked past her and out the door. At first she thought he was going to do some pruning, like he did sometimes when he was upset, but Scott just kept going out of the greenhouse.
Barda followed him, rolling her eyes. “You do know that if you keep walking, the bomb inside you will go off?”
He didn’t even look back. “I do know that, yes.”
“Don’t you care that you’re going to die?”
He didn’t stop, but he did slow down. “Why are you even alive?”
It was almost instinctual, the way Barda shot to attention. “To serve Darkseid!”
Scott built up speed. “And what do you get out of that? Does that make you happy?”
“It should!”
“But it doesn’t!”
She put on a burst of speed, caught up to him, grabbed his hand. Before she could decide how hard to hold him, he stopped for her.
“And escape is so much better? You keep trying to leave, you get caught, you get hurt, for nothing! …not even Darkseid.”
“One day I’ll get out. Out there. And then you’ll see. I’ll forget this place, I’ll forget I ever lived here,” he ripped his hand away from her, “and I’ll forget you!”
“Then do it!”
“I will!”
He kept walking, even as his chest grew warm, started beeping.
“You’re going to blow yourself up just to prove a point!” Barda yelled after him.
“Looks that way!”
“Idiot,” Barda muttered under her breath. She started after him. “I don’t suppose you care what happens to me!”
“You’re tough. You’ll survive.”
With a growl, Barda grabbed Scott and tossed him back toward the house. He landed in an acrobatic roll that brought him up caked with black dirt.
“Don’t get in my way!” He rushed her. She nimbly stepped aside, but only to spare him the pain of colliding with her, then hooked his arm and flipped him back. He sprang to his feet, a man possessed, and charged again. She met him head-on this time, quickly overpowering him and dragging him back toward the house.
Scott pounded at her rigid back and shoulders, but she held fast. “Let go of me!”
“Then promise to stay with me!”
“No!”
She threw him against the door. “You are not saying no to me tonight!” She slapped her hand against the palm reader. The door rattled open, dumping Scott on his ass. He scurried back on his elbows and she stomped after him.
His back hit a chair and he used it to pull himself up, never taking his eyes off Barda. “Why do you even care? Because you were ordered to keep me alive? Because you think you can control me?”
“I’ve seen many men dead. None of them looked free.”
“Darkseid’s keeping me alive for some reason. Anyone else would’ve been executed by now for the shit I’ve pulled. If my death throws a wrench in his plans—it’s not like anyone’s gonna miss me. Hell, you’d probably be glad to have me out of your regulation-length hair.”
“I…” Barda bit the inside of her cheek. “You make a fine slave.”
“Glowing praise,” he said, full of bitter sarcasm.
Barda ratcheted her voice up stringently. “I’ll have no more talk of suicide! You die for Darkseid or not at all!”
There was something intoxicating about her rage, something that made Scott long to see who she really was past the breaking point. Maybe it was that, in her anger, this was the most emotional he’d ever seen her. He couldn’t back down, couldn’t apologize for scaring her and go back to their comfortable little routine. Not this time.
“’No more talk’?” Scott crossed his arms. “Apokolips can’t stop me from thinking. It can’t even stop me from running. So how are you gonna stop me from talking?”
Barda put her hands on her hips, near the Mega-Rod hanging at her side. “I’m not Apokolips. I am Big Barda.”
“Okay, Barda, how are you going to shut me up?” She advanced on him, but he didn’t move an inch. “You gonna hit me? Torture me? Rip my tongue out?”
“You’re just giving me ideas,” Barda growled, low and dangerous. She put her hand on his chest and kept walking, steadily pushing him back like a bulldozer.
Scott resisted just enough to make Barda begin to exert herself, turning it into a kind of dance. “Come on, then. Hit me. If you’ve got the guts.”
She shoved him against the wall, splayed hand pinning him there. Scott made himself tall as he could. He grabbed Barda by the back of her neck and forced her to crane her head down toward him, putting them roughly face to face. “What are you waiting for, huh!? Hit me!”
“You think I can’t shut you up?”
“Hit me!”
“You think I won’t!?”
“I don’t know!” Scott grabbed Barda’s hand and balled it into a fist for her, pulling it up close to his face, his lips. “I need to know.”
“I can shut you up.”
“Show me.”
“I can shut that pretty little mouth,” she enunciated mockingly, cracking the wall next to Scott’s head with her fist.
“I’m not scared of you. You can’t hurt me.” Boldly, Scott canted his head to the side and kissed Barda’s wrist. When he looked back at her eyes they were narrowed, incensed. She could feel his heart beating against her palm as rapidly as a jackhammer.
“I can shut you up,” she repeated, but her voice sounded smaller than before.
“Prove it.”
Barda grabbed his throat, as if to rip it out, and somehow instead pulled him against her. Her lips crushed against his. For a moment, they stood poised like that, breathing each other’s air. Then she jammed him against the wall, their tongues clashing. He writhed under her, not sure whether to escape or somehow reach out to this strange new side of Barda, but stopped when she reared back. On her face, it was clear that even she was shocked.
He put his hands on her body with nervous, needing passion, fingers wrapped around her waist to hold her steady as he kissed her. It was slower, more languid than Barda’s kiss, and when he pulled back he had absolutely no idea what part of the plan this was.
Belatedly, Barda broke her limp grip on his throat. Instead, her hands lowered down his body, for the first time noting the slender musculature instead of the scars. He still glared at her as she broke his belt, but this time there was something deeper beneath his defiance. His erection was long and thick and perfect. Barda ran her forefinger and middle finger down its length, making him shiver.
“Don’t run,” she said, stepping back to undo her armor with quick, steady hands. Only the way her eyes darted revealed her uncertainty. Scott froze, watching, feeling oddly voyeuristic at witnessing this private moment, even if he was part of it. Barda never really took off her armor.
There was a strong scent of iron that wafted off her when she was nude, a few traces of dried blood near her ribs. Self-consciously, she buckled the belt holding up her Mega-Rod across her naked hips. He stepped forward, not enjoying the way it made her wince, and touched her face. Her jaw worked, mulling. His fingers moved to her sable-black hair and she grabbed his arm by the wrist. His fingers apologetically closed. She brought his hand down and ran her lips across his knuckles.
“This will make you be quiet, make you stay with me…”
This isn’t about me Scott seemed to say, not even an accusation, as he pulled off his clothes and stood naked before her.
She brought his hand to her breast, watched it open and enfold the flesh there. He squeezed gingerly and she squeezed his wrist, encouraging him to go harder. His fingers bit into the globe, prompting a slow smile from her. His other hand explored her other breast. Barda put her hands on his narrow shoulders and waited for his next move.
They stood there for long minutes as Scott worked away at her breasts, experimenting with turning the nipples into tiny bullets. Barda kept her mouth clenched and a tight lid on the sounds that he provoked, flying around unvoiced deep in her gut. He stepped closer to her, close enough for his cock to brush against her thigh with an electric recognition. She actually leaned down, but he pulled away and instead licked the curve of her breast from areola to collarbone, then again, lower, to leave her nipple shining with dew. It felt so good that she couldn’t contain the hot burst of breath that forced its way out her mouth.
“Enough. That’s enough!” She forced him down on his back, going to the carpet with him like a wrestling takedown. “This isn’t… don’t get the wrong idea! I hate you!” she said, swinging a leg over his waist. Slowly, she lowered herself onto his cock. He threw his head back, mouth open, panting, with every inch.
His hands latched onto her waist, then, as the tension passed, began to slide around her hips in slow, easy circles. It felt good, just holding him inside her as his hands sorted through her. She watched his Adam’s Apple climb up and down, his chest expand and crease, his eyes shut, as if he were savoring the supple pressure. She didn’t even know she was grinning until Scott saw it and smiled back.
“Shut up!” Barda worked herself up and down, driving him into a paroxysm of quick, shallow breaths. His hands, which had locked onto her lower back, broke and moved hungrily up her body. They reached her breasts, tugged hard at her nipples, and she let loose a betraying moan that never seemed to end.
Her Mega-Rod swung wildly across her muscular thigh as she rode him, clinging desperately to the distance between them. “I hate you! I’m going to rip off your—faster—make you—yes!—so good—kill you!”
He tried to sit up, but she shoved him back down and kept her hand locked on his chest. Source, how could she never have noticed how hard his muscles were and how good they felt when they were covered in sweat? “You bastard! How dare you make me feel this way! I should—should… what are you doing to me?”
There was heat gathering inside her, at her very core, rising and surging like lava. Scott’s hands returned to her hips and his muscles bulged as he moved her, guided her, rolling her against him. Barda felt a blush rising in her cheeks, heard something roaring in her ears. She pitched forward, catching herself against the wall, and her fingers dug into the rock up to the knuckles as lightning struck her.
She stopped moving. Her chest heaved as she tried to regain her breath. Bent double over Scott, hair hanging down in sweaty ringlets, she looked him in the eye. “What was that?”
“From here, it looked like an orgasm.”
Barda bit her lip. “I want another one.”
He cupped her face with dexterous fingers and sucked her down into a kiss without fear, one that lasted long after he had rolled on top of her and begun thrusting into her, at first insultingly slow, then more forceful as she urged him on with callused hands on his bare back. The carpet rubbed her ass raw, but it was a small price to pay to feel him pistoning inside her. The kiss was the only thing that stayed gentle, moving to her cheeks and chin and neck in worship, so she made it rougher. Her nails cut into the back of his neck as her tongue invaded his mouth. It wasn’t lost on her that this made his thrusting speed up, slam down harder on her.
She threw her head back, cracking the floor. Her teeth gritted. It was too much. She had to let it out or she’d die. “Scott,” she said, forcing it down to a whisper. “Scott, yes…”
He had lost himself in her breasts, teeth and tongue working their own sort of magic. Like he had with the synthetic flesh, healing her. She could see the sweat darkening his fine hair, ran a hand through it. Source, it felt good. She let her hand keep going, down his neck, over the rigid dorsal muscles and down his spine to the small of his back. There she could urge him deeper, faster, more. But more than that, she wanted to see those brown eyes staring into her with the same love and devotion she’d been blind to all these months.
“Scott!” she cried, louder, and he looked up at her. “You…” She gave up on words, went back to kissing him. Didn’t even mind that it was tender and loving and weak. It was perfect. Every muscle in her body was tensed like a loaded gun. She’d never felt this wet before, so powerless and yet so powerful. “Say something, Scott. Say anything. I want to hear your voice.”
“Barda,” he began, every syllable infused with want and love enough to make her come, make her his.
She couldn’t keep a hand on him without hurting him, so instead she brought her fists hammering down to their sides, shaking the entire house. Scott hardly noticed as he came inside her, because Barda was making this sound, this cooing-humming-trilling sound of sheer pleasure, and it was his whole world. He felt, for one glorious moment, all his chains unshackled and all his oppression lost, and he was with Barda. By some miracle of will he held himself up as Barda’s hands fell flaxen to the pockmarked floor.
He looked into her eyes, noticing all the untold mysteries kept within, and said “I love you.”
Next part.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-01-26 09:11 pm (UTC)YowZA!
no subject
Date: 2009-01-26 10:51 pm (UTC)“What was that?”
“From here, it looked like an orgasm.”
Barda bit her lip. “I want another one.”
LOL!! Loved this! =D
no subject
Date: 2009-01-26 11:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-02 06:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-27 12:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-02 06:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-28 05:16 pm (UTC)unf.
whoa.
This is is so sweet in a Scott/Barda way. I love how Scott keeps pushing her and pushing her; if I'm reading things right, he's not even quite sure why. Seeing Barda's POV about being a Fury is also fascinating. As a newbie, you get the sense that they're all just killing machines and this doesn't seem to be the case, at least not to Barda. It really makes you think about what goes on in the minds of soldiers in RL tyrannical regimes.
Can't wait for more!
no subject
Date: 2009-02-02 06:04 pm (UTC)It's one of those things that really interests me about Fourth World, because obviously that isn't something Jack Kirby was going to incorporate into his work, but it's just kinda there and it really makes you wonder what it would be like to leave behind everything you know and believe in for love... which makes for good fic, incidentally/hopefully :)
no subject
Date: 2009-02-03 02:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-01 09:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-02 06:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-19 08:26 am (UTC)This line for the win! And the lulz! :D