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seriousficTitle: By The Blade Or By The Handle
Fandom: G.I. Joe (movieverse)
Rating: R
Word Count: 2,907
Characters/Pairings: Scarlett/Baroness
Author’s Notes: Takes place post-movie, with attendant spoilers.
Summary: Even knowing what she knows, Scarlett can’t trust the Baroness. That suits Ana just fine.
Scarlett suspected the General had a soft spot for Duke. It wasn’t that Duke got promoted over his talent or anything that could hurt GI Joe. But when Duke and Ripcord got in a barfight that deprived Taiwan of one of its pubs, Hawk just shook his head and cheered “Boys will be boys.” When Duke sabotaged a Cobra space station, Hawk laughed and said “I remember when I was that young.”
Scarlett chalked it up to the fact that not everyone could have an IQ of 213 and left them to their male bonding BS. It didn’t affect the mission and if she raised a fuss whenever someone was irrational, she’d have no friends.
There was just one problem, something she always felt compelled to speak out against but never did. Ana. The Baroness. Ripcord thought she was just sore about losing to her in that fight. That was before she realized that aside from his ten bad jokes, they had nothing to talk about. So they stopped talking.
Ana didn’t have that problem. She and Duke strolled across the flight deck like people weren’t dead because of her. She had free run of the USS Flagg, because she was Duke’s sweetheart, because he was Hawk’s protégé. Never mind the Joes who’d died, or the Eiffel Tower, or the bruises still yellowing on Scarlett’s body.
“It could’ve been you,” Heavy Duty pointed out, “if you’d had those things in your brain.”
Scarlett had studied the nanites. They might’ve given Rex a hold, but they hadn’t made the Baroness whisper those things in Scarlett’s ear while she pulled the chain tighter. She was throwing up a smokescreen and everyone was falling for it because everyone preferred to believe in damsels in distress instead of the darkness in people’s hearts.
“Are you sure you’re not a bit jealous?” General Hawk asked, after the seventy-fourth time she asked about the dangers of lax security protocols.
So Scarlett orbited Ana, like everything else seemed to revolve around her. She volunteered to take Ana from her cell and back, ready to defuse the bomb no one else would admit was ticking. That’s how she was alone with the Baroness after Ana’s evening of walking the deck, feeding the seagulls. And a goodnight kiss between the hero and his girl that made Scarlett want to revisit her initial opinion of emotions. It was on the walk back, leaving a whistling Duke in the night, that Scarlett noticed the Baroness slowing down.
“Keep moving,” she said, giving her a shove.
Ana gave her an odd look. “You don’t forgive me, do you?”
“No.”
“Good.” She walked back to her cell without another word.
Scarlett waved it off as Ana playing the martyr.
“If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you had a crush on her,” Breaker said later when he caught her watching Ana on the security camera.
“Just because I don’t want to date you doesn’t mean I’m a lesbian.”
“Tell that to Ripcord.” And he left her to watch the feed.
In a few more days, the dye had almost run from Ana’s hair, leaving it a ruin of blonde streaks tangled with black. Duke had gotten her contact lenses as well. Scarlett ignored the patient stare of Rex and the Gaelic curses of McCullen to open Ana’s cell.
“Duke wants some quality time,” she said.
“Now he does.” Ana put a bookmark in ‘The Aufbay Principle’. “Way back when, he wasn’t there for me. Especially not when I was kidnapped.”
“Are you looking for sympathy?”
“No. Understanding.”
“Keep looking, Baroness.”
Ana stood up, shoulders bowed with unexpected vulnerability. Scarlett could almost see how Duke parsed Ana and the Baroness as two people, instead of one with an excuse. “Why is it that you being so unforgiving makes me want your forgiveness that much more?”
“We always want what we can’t have. Come on, your date’s going to think you’ve gotten cold feet.”
Ana went, slow at first, then with a spring in her step and a loving smile for Duke. Hiding a third facet of the Baroness. Someone who wasn’t grateful to be rescued as much as resenting needing to be rescued. The thought that this midpoint between the damsel and the distress saw Scarlett as some kind of redeemer made the redhead flush. She wasn’t going to be part of the Baroness’s return to grace. She’d be the one who smacked her back down when she showed her true colors.
Which happened five days later.
It was one of those rare occasions when Scarlett had the exercise room all to herself. She had to finagle her schedule just right for that, while being open to bribing any unforeseen variables. But it was worth it. She could play her arias as loud as she wanted, read her journals, and work up a good sweat without being ogled by the seamen.
“Knock knock,” a familiar voice said, even more familiarly laden with sarcasm. Scarlett whirled around to see the Baroness—Ana coming through a hatch. She’d bleached her hair again, wore her dark-framed eyeglasses, lending her gray prison fatigues an unexpected regality.
Scarlett tensed, picking up a dumbbell. It wasn’t a crossbow, but she could do some damage with it.
“Relax,” Ana said, her voice pitched higher, her hands held up in a placating manner. “Just here for the exercise. There’s a guard right outside the door. And he’s packing a little more than a dumbbell.”
Scarlett looked past Ana to confirm it, then set the dumbbell down. “Duke pull some more strings?”
“Yes,” Ana said unashamedly, closing the hatch behind her. Her voice was relaxing back into the Baroness’s purr. Maybe she thought it would make Scarlett uncomfortable. She was right. “Wanna spot me?”
“I’ll do that just as soon as I get done with peace in the Middle East.”
“How about a sparring match then?”
All Scarlett had to do was tell the guard and Ana’d be back in her cell, where she belonged.
Five minutes later, they were on the mat, kendo sticks blazing between them. Ana hadn’t lost a step, in fact without the nanites clouding her mind she seemed even quicker, but Scarlett had been practicing nonstop since her defeat, pouring all her aggression, all her frustration into punching bags and training dummies.
“You’re attracted to me,” the Baroness said, a sultry whisper that curved up Scarlett’s back before landing on her ear.
Scarlett tried to pull back, but the kendo stick was everywhere, thudding into her thighs, her stomach, her shoulders. “You’re a terrorist and a traitor.” She snapped her stick up to deflect Ana’s, holding it at bay.
“That’s good. Keep that in mind. Keep telling yourself that.” She jammed her body against Scarlett’s, forcing her to the ground, then raised her kendo stick high.
In an instant, Scarlett had swept her legs out from under her, drawn a knife from her ankle holster, and brought it to Ana’s throat. They laid commingled on the mat, breathing hard. Ana’s eyes were dilated and Scarlett could smell her sweat, musty and thick, so unfit for such an elegant-looking woman.
“You’re hesitating,” Ana informed her smugly.
Then she was straddling Scarlett, the knife in her hand, held to Scarlett’s throat.
“You’d better keep that tongue still until I tell you to move it.”
“One word and that guard will be in here to fill you full of lead.”
“I know. But that’d spoil our fun, wouldn’t it?” Ana stuffed her blade in Scarlett’s mouth. The metallic taste covered her tongue, forcing all her attention on the Baroness. Ana smiled down at her serenely as her hand rested on Scarlett’s thigh, sweaty and bare below her gym shorts. She forced Scarlett’s leg up, her smile widening as she discovered just how flexible the redhead was, until she simply reached up and yanked Scarlett’s other knife out of her second ankle holster.
“You do believe in being prepared, don’t you?” Ana teased, slipping the first knife out of Scarlett’s mouth to tap her chin with.
“I’m going to give you a choice. You can put the knives down and we’ll pretend you didn’t just try to escape.”
“I’m not trying to escape. Where would I escape to?” With the tip of the knife she teased a lock of hair out of Scarlett’s ponytail and raised it to her nostrils, taking a deep whiff of the damp curl. “Everything I want is right here, firecrotch.”
As she felt the weight of one knife on her bottom lip, Scarlett felt the other scrape between her breasts, then dig in at the hem of her tanktop. She gasped as it slid upward, neatly cutting the garment in two. With the tip of the knife, Ana spread it, laying either half just over Scarlett’s breasts.
“Open it for me,” she said. “Slowly.”
Careful not to move fast enough to set off whatever psychosis Ana was suffering from, and more careful not to move fast enough to make Ana think she wanted this, Scarlett pulled open her sliced tanktop until it was hanging off her shoulders. Her breasts laid exposed, rising and lifting slowly, with deep breaths. Scarlett wasn’t frightened. She had a gut feeling that whatever Ana was doing, it wouldn’t hurt her. There was nothing scientific or rational about the belief; much like her continuing refusal to summon the guards, it just was.
Her dog tags lay between her breasts, and seeing them glinting in the artificial light made Scarlett suddenly realize how metal they were, how harsh and how cold they could be against her bare skin. Her smile as cold and as perversely exciting as a raging winter storm outside a window, Ana pressed the tip of her knife into a tag. She drilled into it, lazily rotating the blade back and forth like she was cracking a safe.
She moved the knife in Scarlett’s mouth to the far side of her cheek so she could talk. “Say you want me.”
“I want you to do a HALO jump without a parachute.” Scarlett smiled, pinching her mouth against the blade painfully. “Does that count?”
The Baroness pulled Scarlett’s cheek a little tauter, flooding her mouth with blood. “Why do you say these things? Is it some perverse kind of trust? Just because Duke’s in love with me, you think I won’t kill you? Do you think a man who’s best friends with Ripcord is some excellent judge of character?”
Scarlett tasted blood. “I don’t trust you.”
“You shouldn’t,” the Baroness smiled as she laid down atop Scarlett, her prison fatigues scratching against Scarlett’s bare skin, her hard nipples. Her forearm rested across Scarlett’s throat as she drew the bloody length of the blade out from between her lips. She held it in the arm that was dangerously close to cutting off Scarlett’s air supply as she raised the second knife high over their heads. “I can’t be trusted. I’m compromised. Dangerous. I’m not some lost little girl who’s gonna be fine just because Prince Charming kissed it better. If the nanites told me to, I would kill everyone on this ship and enjoy it. That’s what it was like when I did McCullen’s bidding. One big orgasm. It was addictive, you know. It felt so good, so right. Like this.”
Then her forehead was against Scarlett’s, almost close enough to taste the blood filling her mouth. Scarlett felt the second knife’s point dig into her chest, over her heart, just hard enough to indent the skin.
“You know, in a state of sexual arousal, pain can be interpreted by the body as intensely pleasurable,” the Baroness whispered against Scarlett’s mouth as her blade traveled, tweaking a nipple.
Scarlett gritted her teeth and tried to stay focused. She was torn between wondering where the other Joes were and hoping they stayed there.
The Baroness moved the knife lower, over the drawstring of Scarlett’s shorts, until the tip was running over the dampness in the fabric over her crotch. Scarlett had to resist the urge to arch into it.
“Would that make this an act of mercy, I wonder?” The blade slid under her waistband, the flat of the blade brushing her clit, so cold, so… good.
The knife went back to her mouth and Scarlett tasted her arousal with a sharp metal tang as the Baroness entered her, one finger, then two fingers, licking her lips like she was feeding off the tiny moans Scarlett was making. Scarlett couldn’t help herself from jerking and fucking against those fingers, all slender and long, any more than she could stop herself from licking the long hard blade dripping with her juices. The only thing she wanted more than another finger was to mash her crotch against that snide smile, make that wicked tongue disappear between her legs and let Ana smell nothing but her flesh as she came all over that pretty fucking face that everyone else fell for.
The Baroness gave her another finger. That was really the most she could hope for.
It didn’t take long for her to come. Too many years spent pretending this wasn’t who she was, what she needed, and as soon as she admitted it, it was like someone took their finger out of a dyke. Or put three in. Dumb joke. Scarlett still laughed as she climaxed.
No longer able to be asexual or heterosexual, no longer bothering to be. All those long years of not asking, not telling, and in a split-second she was right back in Germany or California or the DMZ, with a woman whose name she didn’t know and whose face she wouldn’t remember, because all that mattered was the rush, the climb, the release. Not scientific. Not logical. Messy and emotional and real and as she pulled up her gym shorts, she knew she wouldn’t have it any other way.
The fact that she just got fucked by one of Cobra’s top operatives, retired, sort of, was only slightly more confusing than the fact that she had a libido. And that it liked being fingered by women. Damn. Goddamn.
The Baroness was still looking at her, glasses askew, hair a mess, fatigues sweated through. They stared at each other from across the mat, Scarlett struggling to hold in emotion, Ana not even pretending she was feeling any, the knife cold and merciless between them. It took a long moment for Scarlett to force her mind back on track, away from the G.I. Dyke jokes she knew she’d face if this ever got out, the god-awful cliché of the butch woman harboring Sapphic urges, the sudden wish that she’d gotten to know Cover Girl better before Zartan’s knife ended that. And then there was only one thing she could think to say.
“Why’d you do it?” Scarlett asked, when she could talk without her voice shaking.
“Because I wanted to,” the Baroness said, neither loving or hating, just a dry monotone. Like it was the most horrible thing in the world to admit.
That took Scarlett aback. Was Ana ashamed of this? Could she not control herself, some lingering after-effect of the nanites? Or was it just the desire to dominate, to take, to possess, was so abhorrent to the woman she’d once been? Finally, Scarlett figured out the logical question. “What’d they do to you?”
“They changed me,” Ana said, sitting up. She dropped one knife, and Scarlett knew she should’ve snatched it up, but Ana was clutching the other one in both hands and the tip was angled down, only 90 odd degrees from pointing at her heart where it wanted to go. “I don’t know what I am anymore. I don’t know what to feel or think. I don’t know if this is me talking anymore. I was their plaything, their experiment, and the only thing I have left that I’m sure is really me is the nightmare that I’ll hurt someone. Again. So you have to promise me you’ll end it if it comes to that. Because the others won’t. They’ll try to save me. They’ll die for me. And I won’t have that.” She held the knife out to Scarlett. “Swear it.”
Scarlett took the knife. “I swear.”
Ana nodded. She took off her glasses to reveal eyes wet with tears. “Thank you. You know, if things had been different… if someone had made the right choice, just one of us… you and I could’ve been friends.”
“Or something more.” That was as much as Scarlett could venture. The thought of sleeping with a woman was frightening and intoxicating enough. Actually being in a relationship with one… she got up, forced down the thought of candlelit dinners and waking up to the face of someone she loved, and threw a bathrobe over her new vest.
Ana stood up, put her glasses back on. “Maybe. I think McCullen might’ve asked for that, the lesbian thing. All men dream about two women at once, right? As long as it made him happy…”
The knife was heavy in Scarlett’s hand as she wrapped her arms around Ana, at first awkwardly, then pulling them tighter together until Ana’s chin was resting on her shoulder, tears landing on her back as she sobbed.
And to Scarlett, the world seemed a much bigger, much more complicated, much more terrible and much more wonderful place than her textbooks had ever suggested.
Fandom: G.I. Joe (movieverse)
Rating: R
Word Count: 2,907
Characters/Pairings: Scarlett/Baroness
Author’s Notes: Takes place post-movie, with attendant spoilers.
Summary: Even knowing what she knows, Scarlett can’t trust the Baroness. That suits Ana just fine.
Scarlett suspected the General had a soft spot for Duke. It wasn’t that Duke got promoted over his talent or anything that could hurt GI Joe. But when Duke and Ripcord got in a barfight that deprived Taiwan of one of its pubs, Hawk just shook his head and cheered “Boys will be boys.” When Duke sabotaged a Cobra space station, Hawk laughed and said “I remember when I was that young.”
Scarlett chalked it up to the fact that not everyone could have an IQ of 213 and left them to their male bonding BS. It didn’t affect the mission and if she raised a fuss whenever someone was irrational, she’d have no friends.
There was just one problem, something she always felt compelled to speak out against but never did. Ana. The Baroness. Ripcord thought she was just sore about losing to her in that fight. That was before she realized that aside from his ten bad jokes, they had nothing to talk about. So they stopped talking.
Ana didn’t have that problem. She and Duke strolled across the flight deck like people weren’t dead because of her. She had free run of the USS Flagg, because she was Duke’s sweetheart, because he was Hawk’s protégé. Never mind the Joes who’d died, or the Eiffel Tower, or the bruises still yellowing on Scarlett’s body.
“It could’ve been you,” Heavy Duty pointed out, “if you’d had those things in your brain.”
Scarlett had studied the nanites. They might’ve given Rex a hold, but they hadn’t made the Baroness whisper those things in Scarlett’s ear while she pulled the chain tighter. She was throwing up a smokescreen and everyone was falling for it because everyone preferred to believe in damsels in distress instead of the darkness in people’s hearts.
“Are you sure you’re not a bit jealous?” General Hawk asked, after the seventy-fourth time she asked about the dangers of lax security protocols.
So Scarlett orbited Ana, like everything else seemed to revolve around her. She volunteered to take Ana from her cell and back, ready to defuse the bomb no one else would admit was ticking. That’s how she was alone with the Baroness after Ana’s evening of walking the deck, feeding the seagulls. And a goodnight kiss between the hero and his girl that made Scarlett want to revisit her initial opinion of emotions. It was on the walk back, leaving a whistling Duke in the night, that Scarlett noticed the Baroness slowing down.
“Keep moving,” she said, giving her a shove.
Ana gave her an odd look. “You don’t forgive me, do you?”
“No.”
“Good.” She walked back to her cell without another word.
Scarlett waved it off as Ana playing the martyr.
“If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you had a crush on her,” Breaker said later when he caught her watching Ana on the security camera.
“Just because I don’t want to date you doesn’t mean I’m a lesbian.”
“Tell that to Ripcord.” And he left her to watch the feed.
In a few more days, the dye had almost run from Ana’s hair, leaving it a ruin of blonde streaks tangled with black. Duke had gotten her contact lenses as well. Scarlett ignored the patient stare of Rex and the Gaelic curses of McCullen to open Ana’s cell.
“Duke wants some quality time,” she said.
“Now he does.” Ana put a bookmark in ‘The Aufbay Principle’. “Way back when, he wasn’t there for me. Especially not when I was kidnapped.”
“Are you looking for sympathy?”
“No. Understanding.”
“Keep looking, Baroness.”
Ana stood up, shoulders bowed with unexpected vulnerability. Scarlett could almost see how Duke parsed Ana and the Baroness as two people, instead of one with an excuse. “Why is it that you being so unforgiving makes me want your forgiveness that much more?”
“We always want what we can’t have. Come on, your date’s going to think you’ve gotten cold feet.”
Ana went, slow at first, then with a spring in her step and a loving smile for Duke. Hiding a third facet of the Baroness. Someone who wasn’t grateful to be rescued as much as resenting needing to be rescued. The thought that this midpoint between the damsel and the distress saw Scarlett as some kind of redeemer made the redhead flush. She wasn’t going to be part of the Baroness’s return to grace. She’d be the one who smacked her back down when she showed her true colors.
Which happened five days later.
It was one of those rare occasions when Scarlett had the exercise room all to herself. She had to finagle her schedule just right for that, while being open to bribing any unforeseen variables. But it was worth it. She could play her arias as loud as she wanted, read her journals, and work up a good sweat without being ogled by the seamen.
“Knock knock,” a familiar voice said, even more familiarly laden with sarcasm. Scarlett whirled around to see the Baroness—Ana coming through a hatch. She’d bleached her hair again, wore her dark-framed eyeglasses, lending her gray prison fatigues an unexpected regality.
Scarlett tensed, picking up a dumbbell. It wasn’t a crossbow, but she could do some damage with it.
“Relax,” Ana said, her voice pitched higher, her hands held up in a placating manner. “Just here for the exercise. There’s a guard right outside the door. And he’s packing a little more than a dumbbell.”
Scarlett looked past Ana to confirm it, then set the dumbbell down. “Duke pull some more strings?”
“Yes,” Ana said unashamedly, closing the hatch behind her. Her voice was relaxing back into the Baroness’s purr. Maybe she thought it would make Scarlett uncomfortable. She was right. “Wanna spot me?”
“I’ll do that just as soon as I get done with peace in the Middle East.”
“How about a sparring match then?”
All Scarlett had to do was tell the guard and Ana’d be back in her cell, where she belonged.
Five minutes later, they were on the mat, kendo sticks blazing between them. Ana hadn’t lost a step, in fact without the nanites clouding her mind she seemed even quicker, but Scarlett had been practicing nonstop since her defeat, pouring all her aggression, all her frustration into punching bags and training dummies.
“You’re attracted to me,” the Baroness said, a sultry whisper that curved up Scarlett’s back before landing on her ear.
Scarlett tried to pull back, but the kendo stick was everywhere, thudding into her thighs, her stomach, her shoulders. “You’re a terrorist and a traitor.” She snapped her stick up to deflect Ana’s, holding it at bay.
“That’s good. Keep that in mind. Keep telling yourself that.” She jammed her body against Scarlett’s, forcing her to the ground, then raised her kendo stick high.
In an instant, Scarlett had swept her legs out from under her, drawn a knife from her ankle holster, and brought it to Ana’s throat. They laid commingled on the mat, breathing hard. Ana’s eyes were dilated and Scarlett could smell her sweat, musty and thick, so unfit for such an elegant-looking woman.
“You’re hesitating,” Ana informed her smugly.
Then she was straddling Scarlett, the knife in her hand, held to Scarlett’s throat.
“You’d better keep that tongue still until I tell you to move it.”
“One word and that guard will be in here to fill you full of lead.”
“I know. But that’d spoil our fun, wouldn’t it?” Ana stuffed her blade in Scarlett’s mouth. The metallic taste covered her tongue, forcing all her attention on the Baroness. Ana smiled down at her serenely as her hand rested on Scarlett’s thigh, sweaty and bare below her gym shorts. She forced Scarlett’s leg up, her smile widening as she discovered just how flexible the redhead was, until she simply reached up and yanked Scarlett’s other knife out of her second ankle holster.
“You do believe in being prepared, don’t you?” Ana teased, slipping the first knife out of Scarlett’s mouth to tap her chin with.
“I’m going to give you a choice. You can put the knives down and we’ll pretend you didn’t just try to escape.”
“I’m not trying to escape. Where would I escape to?” With the tip of the knife she teased a lock of hair out of Scarlett’s ponytail and raised it to her nostrils, taking a deep whiff of the damp curl. “Everything I want is right here, firecrotch.”
As she felt the weight of one knife on her bottom lip, Scarlett felt the other scrape between her breasts, then dig in at the hem of her tanktop. She gasped as it slid upward, neatly cutting the garment in two. With the tip of the knife, Ana spread it, laying either half just over Scarlett’s breasts.
“Open it for me,” she said. “Slowly.”
Careful not to move fast enough to set off whatever psychosis Ana was suffering from, and more careful not to move fast enough to make Ana think she wanted this, Scarlett pulled open her sliced tanktop until it was hanging off her shoulders. Her breasts laid exposed, rising and lifting slowly, with deep breaths. Scarlett wasn’t frightened. She had a gut feeling that whatever Ana was doing, it wouldn’t hurt her. There was nothing scientific or rational about the belief; much like her continuing refusal to summon the guards, it just was.
Her dog tags lay between her breasts, and seeing them glinting in the artificial light made Scarlett suddenly realize how metal they were, how harsh and how cold they could be against her bare skin. Her smile as cold and as perversely exciting as a raging winter storm outside a window, Ana pressed the tip of her knife into a tag. She drilled into it, lazily rotating the blade back and forth like she was cracking a safe.
She moved the knife in Scarlett’s mouth to the far side of her cheek so she could talk. “Say you want me.”
“I want you to do a HALO jump without a parachute.” Scarlett smiled, pinching her mouth against the blade painfully. “Does that count?”
The Baroness pulled Scarlett’s cheek a little tauter, flooding her mouth with blood. “Why do you say these things? Is it some perverse kind of trust? Just because Duke’s in love with me, you think I won’t kill you? Do you think a man who’s best friends with Ripcord is some excellent judge of character?”
Scarlett tasted blood. “I don’t trust you.”
“You shouldn’t,” the Baroness smiled as she laid down atop Scarlett, her prison fatigues scratching against Scarlett’s bare skin, her hard nipples. Her forearm rested across Scarlett’s throat as she drew the bloody length of the blade out from between her lips. She held it in the arm that was dangerously close to cutting off Scarlett’s air supply as she raised the second knife high over their heads. “I can’t be trusted. I’m compromised. Dangerous. I’m not some lost little girl who’s gonna be fine just because Prince Charming kissed it better. If the nanites told me to, I would kill everyone on this ship and enjoy it. That’s what it was like when I did McCullen’s bidding. One big orgasm. It was addictive, you know. It felt so good, so right. Like this.”
Then her forehead was against Scarlett’s, almost close enough to taste the blood filling her mouth. Scarlett felt the second knife’s point dig into her chest, over her heart, just hard enough to indent the skin.
“You know, in a state of sexual arousal, pain can be interpreted by the body as intensely pleasurable,” the Baroness whispered against Scarlett’s mouth as her blade traveled, tweaking a nipple.
Scarlett gritted her teeth and tried to stay focused. She was torn between wondering where the other Joes were and hoping they stayed there.
The Baroness moved the knife lower, over the drawstring of Scarlett’s shorts, until the tip was running over the dampness in the fabric over her crotch. Scarlett had to resist the urge to arch into it.
“Would that make this an act of mercy, I wonder?” The blade slid under her waistband, the flat of the blade brushing her clit, so cold, so… good.
The knife went back to her mouth and Scarlett tasted her arousal with a sharp metal tang as the Baroness entered her, one finger, then two fingers, licking her lips like she was feeding off the tiny moans Scarlett was making. Scarlett couldn’t help herself from jerking and fucking against those fingers, all slender and long, any more than she could stop herself from licking the long hard blade dripping with her juices. The only thing she wanted more than another finger was to mash her crotch against that snide smile, make that wicked tongue disappear between her legs and let Ana smell nothing but her flesh as she came all over that pretty fucking face that everyone else fell for.
The Baroness gave her another finger. That was really the most she could hope for.
It didn’t take long for her to come. Too many years spent pretending this wasn’t who she was, what she needed, and as soon as she admitted it, it was like someone took their finger out of a dyke. Or put three in. Dumb joke. Scarlett still laughed as she climaxed.
No longer able to be asexual or heterosexual, no longer bothering to be. All those long years of not asking, not telling, and in a split-second she was right back in Germany or California or the DMZ, with a woman whose name she didn’t know and whose face she wouldn’t remember, because all that mattered was the rush, the climb, the release. Not scientific. Not logical. Messy and emotional and real and as she pulled up her gym shorts, she knew she wouldn’t have it any other way.
The fact that she just got fucked by one of Cobra’s top operatives, retired, sort of, was only slightly more confusing than the fact that she had a libido. And that it liked being fingered by women. Damn. Goddamn.
The Baroness was still looking at her, glasses askew, hair a mess, fatigues sweated through. They stared at each other from across the mat, Scarlett struggling to hold in emotion, Ana not even pretending she was feeling any, the knife cold and merciless between them. It took a long moment for Scarlett to force her mind back on track, away from the G.I. Dyke jokes she knew she’d face if this ever got out, the god-awful cliché of the butch woman harboring Sapphic urges, the sudden wish that she’d gotten to know Cover Girl better before Zartan’s knife ended that. And then there was only one thing she could think to say.
“Why’d you do it?” Scarlett asked, when she could talk without her voice shaking.
“Because I wanted to,” the Baroness said, neither loving or hating, just a dry monotone. Like it was the most horrible thing in the world to admit.
That took Scarlett aback. Was Ana ashamed of this? Could she not control herself, some lingering after-effect of the nanites? Or was it just the desire to dominate, to take, to possess, was so abhorrent to the woman she’d once been? Finally, Scarlett figured out the logical question. “What’d they do to you?”
“They changed me,” Ana said, sitting up. She dropped one knife, and Scarlett knew she should’ve snatched it up, but Ana was clutching the other one in both hands and the tip was angled down, only 90 odd degrees from pointing at her heart where it wanted to go. “I don’t know what I am anymore. I don’t know what to feel or think. I don’t know if this is me talking anymore. I was their plaything, their experiment, and the only thing I have left that I’m sure is really me is the nightmare that I’ll hurt someone. Again. So you have to promise me you’ll end it if it comes to that. Because the others won’t. They’ll try to save me. They’ll die for me. And I won’t have that.” She held the knife out to Scarlett. “Swear it.”
Scarlett took the knife. “I swear.”
Ana nodded. She took off her glasses to reveal eyes wet with tears. “Thank you. You know, if things had been different… if someone had made the right choice, just one of us… you and I could’ve been friends.”
“Or something more.” That was as much as Scarlett could venture. The thought of sleeping with a woman was frightening and intoxicating enough. Actually being in a relationship with one… she got up, forced down the thought of candlelit dinners and waking up to the face of someone she loved, and threw a bathrobe over her new vest.
Ana stood up, put her glasses back on. “Maybe. I think McCullen might’ve asked for that, the lesbian thing. All men dream about two women at once, right? As long as it made him happy…”
The knife was heavy in Scarlett’s hand as she wrapped her arms around Ana, at first awkwardly, then pulling them tighter together until Ana’s chin was resting on her shoulder, tears landing on her back as she sobbed.
And to Scarlett, the world seemed a much bigger, much more complicated, much more terrible and much more wonderful place than her textbooks had ever suggested.
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no subject
Date: 2009-08-12 03:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-12 06:01 pm (UTC)Umm... wow. Like, yeah... wow. *fans self* That was hot.
And the end was... God, why couldn't the movie have included a scene like this? I need a sequel now, dammit! And this needs to be in there. For reals, yo.
Anyghey, ace work, mate! Hope you write more soon. :)
no subject
Date: 2009-08-12 07:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-12 10:08 pm (UTC)Scarlett ignored the patient stare of Rex and the Gaelic curses of McCullen to open Ana’s cell.
Thank you. You have no idea how badly it pissed me off over that entire Celtic business. I thought I was going to burst a blood vessel, especially for that shit to be coming out of someone as intellegent as Scarlett.
no subject
Date: 2009-08-15 05:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-27 08:08 pm (UTC)