my strangling fingers wrapped around tight
“The whats?” Scipio narrowed his eyes suspiciously, staring at the prone man as he rattled off a series of numbers and letters than meant absolutely nothing to him. “T80s?” He snorted. “Whatever the fuck that means, the only Terminators I’ve ever seen were like six eight and built like fucking tanks.” Probably a member of the Resistance would know better than he did what all models of terminators were out there, but Scipio felt like being contrary. Nothing about this situation made him feel friendly or helpful, given that he was being held hostage by a bitch-ass fucking soldier with a gun who’d just shot at him in the middle of open country. If he wanted to make things difficult, Scipio could give that back to him.
It took every bit of his self control not to start when he mentioned slitting throats, his face carefully neutral though he was suddenly over-conscious of the knives concealed in his clothes, six blades that he could get to in a second and the only reason he wore long sleeves. Scipio had practiced long and hard to be able to use his weapons and he was proud of them. They hadn’t been cheap either, two stolen and the other four bartered for in hard bargaining. Hard being used as a pun as much as it was an actuality. Dropping his gaze, Scipio curled his hands, his bitten-ragged nails scraping against his palms. He never cut them properly, waiting until they were bothering him to rip them off with his teeth, spitting the fragments out along with whatever dirt had accumulated underneath them.
When he looked up again, the man had cut away part of his pants, exposing ink. Biting his lip, Scipio leaned a little closer. He hated him, but god he loved tattoos. He didn’t remember when he’d gotten his first one. Three or four years ago, maybe longer. Along with his knives, his tattoos were the most expensive things he owned. It was pure vanity, with no purpose for survival at all, but since he’d gotten his first one, the outline of a bird on the back of his hand, Scipio had been hooked. It had happened by accident, really. Scipio didn’t even know the man who’d pulled him into bed was a tattoo artist when he fucked him, just that he had wandering hands and a dick he could barely fit into his throat, that he’d promised Scipio a good trade for the use of his body. He’d gotten one of his knives for it, a thin one that fit perfectly in his sleeve without being noticeable. While he was stretched out in the man’s bed his hand had been kidnapped from him, told not to wriggle.
From the moment the needle of the tattoo gun had pierced his skin, Scipio was as still as if he’d just come out of an orgasm, flattened and quiet against the bed. He hadn’t even minded the smirk he was given, the only noise he made in concession to the pain a slight whine. Later he’d learned there were places far less painful than the back of his hand to get a tattoo, but he’d known no better and at the time it had left him rutting against the bed, achingly hard and complaining from the moment it was finished until the man pushed back into him, laughing and calling him a slutty little masochist. He wasn’t. A masochist, that is, objectively Scipio was sure he could be called a slut. But there was something about the feeling of getting a tattoo that reminded him of the burn of being stretched open by a cock, something that got him high in the same way. So few people had ink that he couldn’t resist leaning closer, wanting to look at whatever it was that was obscured by blood and clothing.
As soon as the man’s gaze fixed on him again, Scipio sat back on his heels, glaring. Resentful but unwilling to let food go under any circumstances, he wolfed the jerky, dropping the package probably to be blown away by the wind before resuming his angry glower. “No, I get kidnapped by downed assholes every day, this was exactly what I was looking for.” He snorted. “Any more stupid questions?”
Apparently the answer to that question was yes, and Scipio rolled his eyes, making another noise of dislike.“Just ‘cause you were raised sucking on the Resistance’s cock doesn’t mean we all were,” he snapped.“I don’t care if you’re fighting for humanity or whatever, you’re still dicks.” Scipio shrugged. “So you think we’d all be better as you? Fine. I don’t give a fuck about anyone else, but I’m not getting penned up like fucking livestock to wait around while heroes like you crash their fucking planes until Skynet raids. You ever seen a nest of humans get raided?” He raised his eyebrows, leaning back a little, not enough to plant his hands against the heated sand. Mid-morning, that would be the farthest thing from comfortable. “I’m not getting wiped out in an anthill while you wave your fucking guns and tell us it’s for the greater good.” Part of him wondered why the man spoke so disdainfully of John Connor. Most of him didn’t care. John Connor wasn’t important to Scipio either. No one in the resistance was. They’d never been a part of his life, save that they always wanted to save him, never once thinking that Scipio might not want to be saved.
“You’re a fucking Acosta?” Scipio gave him an unimpressed look.. “No wonder you’re all up on the Resistance’s dick. I’ve heard you people on the radio and everything. You’ve really crawled balls deep up their ass, haven’t you?” He tucked himself close into his own body, sitting back on the sand with his shins and knees in front of him, like an impromptu armor. It wouldn’t do him any good if the man was to shoot at him at this close range, but at least it made him feel a little better. He could push back in an instant if he needed to.
Instead, he just gave Acosta a disgusted look. “And if your aim’s not that off and I have a fucking bullet between my shoulder blades? No thanks.” Scipio pulled one of his knives out of his old boot, the pair that laced up past his ankles, leather worn and tired but still good. He’d stolen them from a man who’d fucked him particularly viciously. Scipio stole from everyone, but it would be a lie to say he didn’t treat those who’d been unkind to him with particular hatred. The lure of being given supplies was enough to keep him in place even if he hadn’t been averse to getting shot. That didn’t mean he resented it any less, and Scipio glowered at him, more specifically at his tattoo. It was obscured by blood again, which was a pity, but that at least was something he liked. To occupy his hands, he began flipping his knife. Up and over. Up and over. Scipio couldn’t possibly say how many times he’d caught a knife by the blade instead of the hilt, his hands scarred by the shallow self-inflicted cuts. The payoff was that now he got it right every time. It was a silent message to people that just because he was small and slight didn’t mean he wasn’t dangerous.
Val shot him a suspicious look, eyes narrowed. How could someone walk around this ignorant and still be alive? Was he stupid? Val had met a lot of different types of people in his time in the Resistance’s service, but he’d never met a stupid person. Stupidity wouldn’t be suffered in times like these, although Val had no idea what that even meant anymore. He could barely remember a time when the world wasn’t this way, with the sand and forests swallowing the cities and towns back, androids and robots walking the Earth and humans being executed left and right. There was a constant struggle for food and clean water, and just to make it to the next day. Val knew he was lucky, in a way. The Resistance was better equipped at keeping people alive than empty, crumbling towns.
There were issues with the Resistance, of course, but Val wasn’t blinded by loyalty to follow them without question. There was a difference between John Connor and the Resistance, and Val only trusted one of them without too many questions. He had met him a few times before but never spent long in his presence, but the man gave off an air of leadership and confidence, and unwavering optimism in the face of certain death. That probably had something to due with the fact that Skynet had captured him and Val and the others had been sent to retrieve him by his left lieutenant. Val had found that ,when faced down with an unstoppable killing machine, he tended to look on the brighter side of things. Sometimes the brighter side of things was clean water and sometimes it was the nearest warm mouth around his dick, but beggars couldn’t be choosers. Val doubted that John Connor was thinking about men sucking him off, considering he was married with a child on the way, but he had a sort of hope in him that he couldn’t deny was infectious.
Val’s faith in John Connor was what had kept him in the Resistance, but it didn’t make him happy to be part of it. Half the time he resented the way that Connor could manipulate people into joining, into staying and fighting what felt like a dying cause sometimes. Most of the time, if he were honest to himself. But it had kept him educated, and although he understood why the kid wouldn’t know all of the series of Terminators, he didn’t understand how he could not know what the fuck they were. Even when they didn’t know their official names, there was always some nickname that floated around the masses and into the nomads travelling around and just trying to survive. He may not understand why the hell anyone wouldn’t want to join the Resistance, but he knew that people had to be aware and educated on what the new line of machine was being produced from whichever machine-operated factory.
“You’re a fucking idiot,” he said, shaking his head as he glanced down back at his leg, letting the kid eat in peace. His leg hurt, he wanted to be back in his room with a book or an old CD player, and instead he was out in the warming desert with an idiot boy who was eating his food. Val didn’t mind the latter so much, but if his unit didn’t come to collect him soon and he was forced to make a run for it, he’d need all the supplies he could get his hands on. He was just hoping that his unit came before then. He’d hate to rely on someone who clearly would rather put a knife in his shoulders than stick around.
Val rolled his eyes. “Because the Resistance is the fucking evil monsters. Of course. It’s not like Skynet is the bad guy here at all. It’s the Resistance, who protects and fights and feeds and keeps safe idiots like you whocan’t fight.” His lip peeled up, as he shook his head again, one hand pressed to the side of his thigh as he looked at the kid. “You talk about the compounds like they’re prisons. They’re safe houses, where you can live in – gee, I don’t know – safety. Has the Resistance wiped out most of the humans? Has the Resistance done anything other than try to protect you?” Val didn’t want for an answer. He just snort and pushed a bloody hand through his hair, pushing it out of his eyes. “No. It hasn’t. So shut the fuck up. There’s no reason to be mouthing off about the Resistance when you’re just a selfish little prat who’s going to end up dead because you wouldn’t just suck it up and go to them.”
There was a smear of blood across his forehead from a cut on his palm, but Val didn’t care. He was getting worked up all over again, right when he was winding down and letting his blood pressure drop. Staying calm was an issue for his when he was an invalid dependent on some miscreant boy who was flicking his knife all over the place. Val gave him a sour look, pressing his tongue against the backs of his teeth, fighting the urge to start grinding them together. He was loyal. He was a loyal man to the Resistance and the urge to protect its name was odd and new, and Val had the urge to reach out and smack the boy across the back of the head like a mother would to a child. He doubted he’d get away unscathed it he did, but the urge lingered all the same. “Do you think there’s something wrong with my name?” he asked, taking a deep breath and holding it, counting back from ten before exhaling. “Because there’s sure as fuck nothing wrong with my Goddamn name.”
There were some people who didn’t have family names. Val understood that, saw the way people looked at the others when they didn’t have a name of their own. He hadn’t understood that part of it all, the way people somehow thought that having a word tacked onto the end of your name meant you were somehow better than someone else. He knew a young girl in his precious compound who Rachael had been fond of. Julia with blue eyes. That was what everyone had called her, even though she was so many things other than that. It was better than what the older women called her behind her back. Orphan Julia. Humans were gossipy little creatures no matter the day and age, apparently, and no matter if there were people dying or not. Somehow Julia had been less of a person because she had no parents or last name. Val had thought it stupid until Rachael had reminded him that the only reason people didn’t say the same about him was because he had family he could call his own. Most of his family had survived the initial attack by Skynet and had survived through the years, and he had a surname to prove it. It was stupid, but it worked in Val’s favour.
“I have a better shot than that,” he said with a snort, grabbing his bottle of water and uncapping it once again, taking another swig and swishing it over and under his tongue before spitting it out onto the ground beside him, on the opposite side of the boy. He turned back to look at him, eyebrows hitching up. “The cocks I’ve been sucking made sure of it.”