Gold Saucer

He bound his hair carefully in the headband. The knot was difficult to tie securely, but he managed.

He wouldn't be Vincent Valentine if he couldn't manage.

He stared at his surroundings. He hated them. This damned place had been designed for escape, for money-making, for merriment.

He had no interest in letting the Saucer con him into giving up countless thousands of gil, he could not escape his life. He was not a merry person.

Gold Saucer was not an escape, it was a prison. A torture. It was useless to him, and he loathed it.

Hate just wasn't the right word. Hate implied an active need to destroy, an active... Well, MORE than just intense dislike. HATE led you to destroy things. Loathing led you to avoid them.

And if he could have, he would have avoided the Saucer.

"Excuse me, miss," an old man rasped as he brushed against and past Vincent.

Had Vincent been anybody else, ire would have filled him. But he had studied his features too long and too well not to know the truth.

Slender, long haired, delicate of frame and face. It would be easy for a man whose vision was naturally failing him to mistake Vincent for a woman if that worsening sight caught only the briefest of glimpses.

Hell, the cloak had probably looked like a dress.

He sighed and kept moving. The boots and the Death Penalty were what kept him from truly seeming delicate, he knew, and he was more than glad of them when he began to notice the individual faces in the crowd.

There were always thugs. Always.

Thugs were an inescapable part of life. They would take the delicate facial structure, the fine bones, his general THINNESS for weakness. They would see that fragile-looking beauty as something to be devoured, as a delicious delicacy to be tormented and mugged.

And while he didn't mind being mistaken for a woman, his four mental companions did.

He tuned them out with ease born of long practice, until they each of them returned to that buzzing sound they'd been before they had assumed physical form.

He passed one of the many unlit alleys in the Saucer. Whatever executives that had designed the Gold Saucer FairGrounds had known that they couldn't, SHOULDN'T light up every inch of the place. So they'd left random alleys unlit.

The unlit alleys were usually congregation spots for junkies, vagrants, and other riffraff.

He hadn't quite gotten a step beyond the alley before something snatched at his ankle.

He tried to kick it away, but the hand slid up from his ankle to his knee. From his knee to his thigh. Not just grabbing, but touching. No, not touching, CARESSING. He tried to move away, thrown slightly off his mental keel at this new method of attack.

But whoever it was held him fast, hands sliding all over his lower body. Two fingers slid beyond the waistband of his pants, cold against his skin. Two icy pinpricks that made him feel feverishly warm.

What, exactly, did this person want?

Those fingers locked on the fabric of the waistband. Locked, and jerked. He stumbled forward, into the alley.

Locked, and jerked. He continued to move forwards.

The fingers released his pants. Two small hands slid around his waist, tugging.

A word, murmured in a voice too soft and muffled to hear properly.

Something jolted against his body, thundering down his spine, temporarily shutting down his legs. He couldn't lock his knees.

That one word sent him to his knees on the pavement. Something oozed onto the knees of his pants, but he was panting too hard from the exertion of trying to stand on mildly electrocuted legs to care.

He heard a rustle of fabric, a scent in the air shifted, and an oddly familiar scent moved towards him. He could dimly see in the darkness that something was standing, was moving.

Moments later, he saw nothing more, because something soft and cloth and dark and familiar-smelling slid over his eyes, tied firmly behind his head.

Vincent could think of very few purposes for such actions.

He wasn't particularly fond of any of them.

Lips closed against his, soft and warm and sweet. His mouth opened, not quite against his will, but certainly without his insistence that it do so.

Whoever this was tasted of cotton candy, rum and chocolate ice cream. And strawberry preserves of some sort.

Their tongue invaded his mouth, filling him with something soft and sweet and— and— and— He groaned.

Whoever this person was, they were remarkably well-groomed for a hobo. In fact, he doubted that this person was a hobo (or even a vagrant) at all.

He pulled away. "Who—?"

His captor gave no reply save a deeper kiss, a kiss in which his lips parted even more eagerly. A kiss that seemed to steal his breath from his mouth, a kiss that left him feeling feverish and shaky.

"Hn," the other person said.

"Mm," he replied.

Their lips grazed his again, gnawing on him. They traced lower along his body, trailing across his jaw.

Something tugged at the cloak. He heard fabric shifting, buckles unbuckling, and the slither-slide sound of somebody moving the cloak. He felt the cloak move from him. In a rush of wind, it was gone to who-knew where.

Vincent opened his mouth to protest, but those cotton-candy-tasting lips stopped any words he might have said.

He leaned into the silencing kiss, wanting more.

The buttons on his shirt popped open, tiny hands tracing along his chest.

He groaned again as those tiny little hands— sexy little hands, even though he couldn't see them. He wanted to take them in his mouth and suck on those little fingers— began to slide even further down along his body.

He heard his pants zipper slide open, felt thumb and forefinger undoing the button. Amazing how anticipation of something he couldn't even see turned him on.

He threw his head back and groaned as the stranger's hands pulled down his pants just enough, his boxers joining them.

That groan became a choked gasp as a hot, wet mouth slid around his length. That gasp became a groan again, no, a moan. And then it went from beyond any of that to just simple "don't stop" noises.

He begged.

He begged in a voice that rasped from his throat, needy and lustful and clearly the voice of a madman.

The stranger didn't stop. Teeth scraped against his shaft, fingernails scraped against his balls, scratching lightly. He hardened in the stranger's mouth, threw his head back, groan-screamed.

A tongue, velvety and warm, flicked against the head of his cock. It tickled against his foreskin, teasing the skin-flap, twitching across him.

He made noises in the back of his throat, no longer bothering to tell the stranger not to stop. Not unless the stranger spoke whatever language his demons had apparently taught him.

He arched backwards, his backside slamming into the alley wall (he'd forgotten that was there. How did a Turk go about forgetting things like that?) and moaned.

The stranger teased him, mouth and teeth and tongue moving and hot and wet and—

He gasped, unable to retain control, lost himself in the stranger's mouth.

Surprisingly, (s)he swallowed.

And then (s)he slid him out of her mouth, leaving him weak-kneed and shaking and pale and with a throbbing, burning headache.

Another murmured word from his very interesting stranger.

And, as he sank to a sitting position with his back against the wall, he passed out.

He woke groggy, his pants still around his knees, and felt vaguely horrified. Grogginess, he knew, was one of Sleepel's after-effects. And the Sleepel spell probably hadn't come from the hobo who was standing over him, peering.

A hobo. Staring at him.

He blinked, jerked his pants up, zipping and buttoning them and blushing a cherry red.

He checked his pockets automatically. And then realized that he couldn't find his wallet. He checked his arm guards and weapon.

No Materia.

The hobo pointed to the wall behind him.

There, spray painted in bright orange paint, were two letters.

"YK."

EL FIN.