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                        Black Valentine

                       by Chris Willmore

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My very first Plot? What Plot? yaoi tale! Written in an entirely
spontaneous and unplanned fashion, at one sitting. ^_^ Feedback
welcome.

              BlackJack created by Osamu Tezuka.
           FF7 characters copyright Square software.

                         * * * * *

The scalpel slid smoothly along the edge of the boy's left
shoulder.  Every few inches he would grunt, but the surgeon's
hand was skilled, his pace was slow, and the sedated youth did
not awaken.

Blackjack dabbed at the excess blood with a sterile handkerchief
and took the opportunity to look at what was left of his patient.
Most of his clothes had been singed by the attack; only his fire-
proof cloak and a few metal buckles remained intact.  The boy's
shirt was torn to shreds at mid-chest.  Criss-crossed scars
marked the place where a hole had been blown in his heart, a
vacuum patched not long ago by Shinra's magic and a young guard's
life.

But... The doctor squinted.  There was something in between the
chest and burnt cloth.  A pacemaker lead, perhaps?  He dipped the
spent gauze back into a jar of sterile solution and reached
towards the boundary between the shirt and the open patch of
skin.

Something stopped him.  A slight movement of the chest, the
barest intake of breath...  And then all was still.  Blackjack's
hand wavered in mid-motion.  It was almost as if...  He shook his
head. No, he COULDN'T be holding his breath.  It was shallow
enough as it was, and the boy wasn't even conscious.  His
professional manner moved all irrelevant thoughts aside, and
BlackJack placed his hand upon his patient's chest.

It was warmer than he had expected it.  His own fingertips felt
cool even to the half-conscious youth, who shivered and then
relaxed.

So he HAD been holding his breath, thought the doctor, filing the
fact away for later analysis.

The singed cloth would have partially bonded with the skin, and
Blackjack wished to minimise the pain involved.  His field
anaesthetics were weak compared to those of Shinra medics, and
there was no telling for how long they would work on one of their
creations.

He pressed down against the sternum and massaged it gently.  His
fingers moved in a widening spiral pattern, gradually inserting
themselves between the dry fabric and the sweat-soaked skin and
peeling them apart a millimetre at at time.  The doctor found
himself soothed by the exercise; the flesh felt warm and firm and
yet melted claylike at his touch.  His thoughts wandered to other
problems, other patients, and it came as a surprise to find that
he had freed his object of inquiry.

He shook his head and blamed his mental wanderings on the
previous day's exercise.

Now, what was his prize? He held it to the light.  A cheap white
image projector, stained with blood.  And not the boy's, either.
These were older marks.  Other than that... He turned it around.
A brand, his name - 'Vincent Valentine' - and inside...

First things first.  Now that he knew it was no danger to his
patient's life, it was his task to reattach the arm.

If arm it could be called.  A rough prosthetic cast in bronze and
ending in a claw resembling more an eagle's talons than a human
hand.  Its mundane usefulness aside, the metal limb radiated
power and was, BlackJack admitted, admirably suited to the boy's
own awesome figure.

The previous surgeon had cauterised the nerves, an unenviable
task which the present one would gladly do without.  Right now
the boy looked calm, and peaceful but for a permanent frown.  It
would be a pity to see tears on those cheeks, to have that mouth
open wide in pain, that head toss back and his long black hair
rustle as he broke the silence that so suited him and screamed in
pain while his nerve endings were burnt into WHY am I THINKING
THIS?

Blackjack forced himself to concentrate on the operation.  Simple
enough; too simple - he'd have to trick himself into devoting his
entire mind to it.  See the holes, there, in the bone? That's
where the pegs in the arm's socket go, and here all you have to
do is link the graft with the opening, and press HERE for the
stitching mechanism to activate WHERE is that power supply, oh
THERE, now switch it on and...

Done.  Too quickly, it was done.  Now there was nothing to do but
sit back, and wait, and watch.  He had been paid in advance, and
it would be irresponsible to leave a modified soldier
anaesthesized.  There was no telling what reactions might be had
to even the most innocuous of sedatives.

The doctor found himself a chair, poured himself a glass of gin
and tried to ignore the body before him.

He couldn't.

Cloak, skin, cloth, hair, and an odd neck-wrap that included the
forehead, for some reason.  The boy... what was his name?
Blackjack glanced at the salvaged projection box.  Vincent.
Either Vincent or the Shinra tailor had a buckle fetish.  Well...
there were worse things, he supposed.  It could have been a
preference for puce faux-leopard skin.

Was that the gin speaking?  Blackjack glanced at his empty glass
and wondered how many more he'd downed before bothering to look.
Might be.

It was odd... He scrutinized the burn pattern - or lack thereof.
The kind of blast he'd been in... a chemical explosion, artillery
fire...  The doctor fingered the scar that ran across his face.
A similar incident years ago had killed his mother, marred his
face, stained his hair and sealed his fate.  But this boy...

Fate looked Vincent over, it would seem, for though the clothes
were charred his skin was unblemished save for a thin layer of
grime.

Was that Shinra's doing? He wouldn't put it at all past them to
develop a supersoldier then deliberately attack it to see how
well it fared.

How old was he?  The doctor walked over and looked at the face.
His breathing was ragged, but stable, and a bit of spittle was
slipping out of the corner of his mouth.  Blackjack knelt and
dabbed at it with his shirt cuff.

He could have sworn that Vincent smiled.

Who WAS the youth?  The doctor walked to the table where he'd
left the projector.  Maybe THAT would be a clue.  He took his
place in a lotus position next to his patient.  Before activating
the projector, he ran a finger tentatively along the seam between
the shoulder and the metal arm.  The nanos had done their work;
the melding of flesh and machinery was near-perfect.

"Let's see who you are."

The controls were standard enough.  Pop, flip, switch, on.

The result was quite surprising.  Of all the things that Vincent
could be carrying upon his person, historical lectures on genetic
engineering were not on the top of the list.  Current methods
would perhaps be understandable, and industrial espionage could
explain the why's of the attack on his person, but this material
had to be... Blackjack thought back to his university days.  It
had to be at least thirty years old.  In fact, the lecturer was
quite familiar to him.  She'd been important for a time and then
had simply stopped producing original work, on a whim, it seemed.
What was her name again? Lucia? Larissa?

"Lu... Lucrecia..."

That's right. Lu-

Blackjack started.  He looked at Vincent.  The boy's mouth was
half-open, as were his eyes, but his pupils were glassed over and
it was not altogether clear that he was viewing the same world as
his physician.

"Lucrecia..."

The doctor took Vincent's chin in his left hand and raised it.
Pupils incredibly dilated, lips trembling, cheeks -

And that's when Vincent took control.  He drew the doctor's head
against his with his claw, pressing against the back of his skull
with a pressure that it would have been foolish to resist.  At
first he kept his lips tight against each other and his lips
clenched, but the feel of Vincent's human hand against his cheek
proved his undoing.

The slightest brush of Vincent's palm and fingers against the
side of his head sent a shiver along his back, relaxing him for
just enough to drop his guard for a decisive instant.  The hand
he propped himself up with dropped into the midst of the boy's
long tangled hair; his body fell on Vincent's own - chest to
chest, legs entwined, and his lips, responding to the urgings of
his senses parted neatly to encase those of Valentine.

At least they no longer cried 'Lucrecia'.  It was clear who it
was that drugged Vincent imagined he held.  Less clear were the
thoughts in the doctor's mind, even to himself.  The encounter
began with shock and fear, and all his mind was white; only
instinct drove him and his higher processes had given up and gone
to sleep.  But now, there were clear images.  Not of his lost
loves, not of his hoped-for passions, but of the boy beneath and
next to him.  A musky odor came from his hair and the place
between his chin and lips.  It filled the doctor's being with its
immediacy and masculinity.   More than once he tried to capture
it.  To taste it, eat it, make it his own. He allowed his tongue
to wander beneath Vincent's lower lip, he ran his hands through
the boy's unwashed hair and brought them to their enjoined
mouths, but all was only to find himself teased.  That scent was
a scent only, the olfactory essence of Valentine, and not to be
tasted.  For that, there were other methods of satisfaction.

Blackjack held the back of Vincent's head in a tight grip, in
imiation of the metal claw's hold on his own scalp.  Their mouths
were pressed and nearly fused together, the space between them as
large as could be humanly made.  The two explored each other
fully.  Tongues joined, slid against each other and combatted
playfully before allowing passage to what lay behind.  What did
Valentine think of when they played at this, wondered the doctor,
for the boy's ritual movements were as complicated as his own.
In Blackjack's own mind it was a ritual of courting and
permission, a playful teasing in which one tongue pressed another
back to show that it still had control moments before giving in
entirely and allowing full exploration of the unknown inside.
Valentine had stroked his cheek from the outside, and now the
doctor did so from the inside.  The sides of his mouth were soft,
and womb-warm.  The feel of Vincent's teeth and of his tongue
inside against the roof of his own mouth, the movement and the
shifting sent shivers along his spine, tremblings that spread the
excitement to the rest of him.

Vincent hungrily explored the rest of the doctor's body, moving
his human hand along his back and legs.  Blackjack, too,
explored. He took his free hand, placing it between their chests
and giving the twain a mutual massage with the calcultated
expertise only a surgeon could provide.  Fingertips pressed
downwards and knuckles upwards; the rhythmic pressure made the
doctor's breath catch in his chest, and he could tell it had the
same effect on the boy beneath him, for Vincent's breaths now
puffed in ragged, short bursts from his nostrils and through his
mouth into BlackJack's own.

Their pace sped up.  The initial warmth built itself into a
fever, legs wrapped and turned and tossed while arms grabbed
anything that they could fold around.  Three hands wandered like
so many pale tarantulas, and always the two mouth-bound worms
probed and pushed under the constant pressure from the claw.

At long last, it was not enough.  They needed more; it had been
ages since their conscious minds had surrendered to the primal
and instinctive beacon of the unconscious, and their ancestral
animals stomped and thundered, demanding a completion.

The claw left Blackjack's head.  Four digits retracted, leaving
only the sharp index talon extended.  It slid carefully along the
white/black part of Blackjack's hair and when it reached his
shirt collar, began to cut.  The doctor did not resist, but only
focused on exploring Vincent's neck and upper chest with his now
unencumbered mouth.  The claw continued tearing the shirt neatly
in two.  Valentine's human hand reached hungrily for the doctor's
back and slid easily along its moist, sweat-lubricated surface,
down his trousers and towards the place where all stories such as
these must eventually arrive.

Vincent's eyes burst into full awareness.  His right arm
stiffened and his eybrows knit themselves into a 'V'.

"You're not Lucrecia."

The last thing BlackJack saw in life were the copper tips of
Vincent's claws diving into his face.  And his last thought?

It had been worth it.

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                  End Black Valentine
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