Your Fair Warning: This is a story I did not finish and do not intend to finish. It may be unedited, meaning there may be errors (spelling, grammatical, continuity, ect.). It also means it may cut off in the middle of a chapter, scene, even sentence. There is no conclusion here.
Cid reflects on his uncharacteristic attraction to Resident Freak Vincent Valentine after they suddenly but mutually decide to have weird sex together. What this fic wants to do, and all this fic wants to do, is describe how weird and off-putting Vincent Valentine is, and then posit that being weird and off-putting is sexy.
Mature. There isn't a sex scene, but there are dicks anyway.
Cid/Vincent. An old-school ship I always thought was neat but never got deeply into; the urge to write came on me during a replay of the game and I turned out this.
The writing here is decent, but it's both very short and very unfinished.
This, and MANY of the short (and even medium-length) fics on this website began in a word document I have kept for ten years entitled "contextless smut doc". The purpose of the document is to give myself the permission I need to just write the thing when I have the urge to write something smutty, gross, or questionable. There at time of writing about seventy entries in the contextless smut document.
And there’s a pretty unpleasant stretching twinge in his hips and the skin of his thighs where they protested the kind of twist he had just gotten himself in. It was just under the line of being truly painful—when he stood up, it probably would be. As it was now…
He got the damn cigarette lit. This one took a little while to catch; the box had been through hell along with everything else under his clothes, so that was understandable. Cid watched red blossom under the paper just to take up his attention. When the first finger of smoke curled up from one little crescent of burnt paper, though, he pulled it down to his lips and took a breath.
“I’ve never done that to a man before,” he says with smoke lifting away from his lips.
Vincent, who is again possessed of his preternatural stillness, doesn’t move a hair as he murmurs, “me either.” His voice sounds raw.
“Honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever even had the urge before,” he says, and it even sounds like he’s protesting too hard to himself. But brief self-reflection on his past reveals exactly no other times he got so fucking worked up about a guy getting into his personal space that he came on his thighs, so he’s being as honest as he can be.
“…Me either,” Vincent repeats, with just a hint of something in his words. Not doubt. Not suspicion. It’s dark, but not recrimination. Humor?
Turning something he wasn’t sure the size of in his head, Cid wordlessly passed the cigarette to Vincent. He still didn’t look at him. There was a few seconds of silence, then the barest rustle as Vincent’s arm rose from the cot and his thin fingers pinched the cigarette at its very edge. He picked it up and pulled it away.
Hands empty, one still floating in space between them, Cid said, “I don’t know what the fuck got into me.”
He didn’t mean to make it sound harsh, but the snorted laughter that might usually come with a statement like that just didn’t fucking come out of him. Vincent, however, couldn’t care less about his vocal tone. After a few quiet seconds of deliberation, and a waft of smoke in the air, he said, “…me either.”
Cid is compelled to finally take a look at Vincent when he reached back over to take his cigarette back. He should have by all sane measures been focused on how Vincent looked like someone had torn at his full suit of clothes in a single-minded, aggressive compulsion to get at his soft, vulnerable bits as fast as possible (fancy that). Weirdly, though, his eyes snap to Vincent’s face first, where his huge, bright eyes are almost glowing out of his head. The smoke drifts just above him, and his black hair is tangled like seaweed, on Cid’s pillow, over his face, sticking to his bottom lip, twining a little strand over his resting arm. His disarray mingles the gross pleasure of voyeuristic porn and the little stab of fear that accompanies seeing eyes staring at you on a dark road.
For fucks sake, Cid thinks to himself, reminded of how fucking himself Vincent Valentine is, and how fucking next-level ridiculous that self is. He takes the cigarette from Vincent and diverts his own eyes back to the ceiling for a minute, confused, comforted by the feeling of heavy smoke sinking into him.
“Huh,” he says, an absolutely adequate response to Vincent’s sentiment. Yeah, me either, go figure.
Despite himself, he can’t avoid staring back at Vincent again. The eyes in the dark—a tiny and incorrect part of him feels like it might, in fact, be dangerous to not keep an eye on Vincent right now. His glowing red eyes—his proximity—Cid doesn’t understand him right now. His eyes flicker down and up and down again as he lets himself actually take in the mess he just made of the man. Under his black clothes, his white skin is glowing like a geode, unevenly cut from his collarbone to his inner thighs, wherever Cid had managed to get just enough fabric off of him. He can see cuts on those snow-like thighs. He can see his dick and his (his) semen. He can see the—it’s—Like, it’s really—the autopsy scar. The three long harsh lines that meet just under his neck where he had been cut open and played with. He can see other scars besides, white and pink and purple, splattered like raindrops. He can see one of his nipples but not the other one, and basically, there’s no getting around the fact that it looks like someone fucking dug into this guy.
“Fix your damn pants,” he says.
Vincent doesn’t even do the normal human thing where he looks down to see the terrible job his pants are doing right now. He keeps staring at Cid, something uncomfortably—entire—about his wide-eyed, uncovered face. Like Cid can see too damn much of it right now. He had old acne scars, which he never noticed before. There’s a slight crookedness to his nose. There are a few beginner wrinkles, and there’s something goddamn compelling about the sunken, soft look of the tired skin that surrounds his strange eyes.
Vincent’s eyes are momentarily distracted by Cid’s cigarette. Cid moves to pass it over. “Don’t like what you see?” he asks, absolutely no recrimination, absolutely no guilt threaded into his voice. He takes the cig as casually as he asks, “or do you?”
Cid gives him one more, slower look. He lets it be—appraising—the sort of shit he trained out of himself in his early 20s. Rude to do to a lady you don’t know—not really wrong right now. The scars, the thin, pallid skin, how he can see his flat chest rise and sink with his breaths—his wet sex on his thigh, the little core of muscle over his stomach, with the knot of thick dark hair keeping the skin warm. Tiny bruises, like the shade of leaves, just now coloring where Cid was rough with him.
Cid feels a pang.
“I fucking do, though,” he groused, turning his head away to lay flat on his back again. Why lie to him with them like this? “Doesn’t make the ‘cents’ it takes to buy a soda, considering you’re about as close to a real beauty as I am, so don’t even ask me why it is because I don’t fucking know. Anyway, fix your damn pants.”
Cid does not see, but feels, Vincent choosing to take another long drag out of his cigarette. “Fix yours.”
“Oh. Fuck—” Cid’s shoulders jolt, he looks down at himself, and he emphatically does NOT like what he sees.
--
Cid has never had this EXACT experience but he can roll with it. He had a girlfriend in his mid-20s—doomed relationship from the start, she was too ambitious to stick around with him, foxy, clever, and a little mean—who did an excellent lady in the streets, slut in the sheets (pardon his language) shtick. She could be almost little a smiling doll when they went around in public, and he wouldn’t get anything but a little warm glow in his chest about her quirked smile or her colored eyelids, but in private, she could put sex into anything she did.
Vincent wasn’t like that but he was ‘like’ that. Or, maybe, Cid’s experience was similar. The point was that he had been slowly getting himself worried that he would just be carrying a torch for Vince now, distracted by him, thinking about him, making the group feel weird, forgetting---forgetting Vince. Like if he suddenly discovered Vincent, the Vince he had known would disappear.
It really was not like that. When Cid lumbered into the Highwind’s miniscule makeshift kitchen/diner late in the morning to claim his sovereign right to the grittiest, grimiest, oldest dregs of coffee in the coffee pot, Vincent was standing by the wall, listening to Cait Sith tell him what must have been a long, involved story about—from what he heard—ShinRa office politics. And when Cid, probably looking like his soul was still in bed, looked at Vincent, and Vincent looked at him, he didn’t feel anything.
In his body. He felt, in his heart, a sentiment like there he is, that motherfucker, what a tool, with a certain amount of camaraderie. But there were no jimmies rustled or torches lit. Cid made a noise, Vincent nodded, Cait used words to tell him good morning, and Cid got his coffee.
For the better part of the next week, he was mostly not attracted to Vincent. To be clear, he was at no point distinctly unattracted to him. It’s just that Vincent is Vincent and he knows this guy and he hasn’t suddenly become different. He’s still a goddamn supernatural weirdo haunting the rear end of their missions, floating awkwardly in space, weighed down by his fucking assault rifle, that he thumbed neurotically under the trigger (not on the trigger, which would be a deal breaker). He was still the absolute looney toon who spat out stuff like ‘we’ll teach them pain’ at minor inconveniences, slipped awkwardly under doorframes too low for him, and clearly, visually disassociated when Tifa and Barrett socialized with locals too hard.
It was fucking Vince. You had to bully him into eating dinner at nights. He told Cid to eff off and leave his line of sight open and Cid told him to eff off and let him work and together they so spectacularly failed to kill 1 Marlboro that Cloud did it for them. He wouldn’t sleep at night and sometimes actually fell over asleep in the afternoon, when he could have fucking slept at night.
So, Vince had gone absolutely nowhere and changed not at all. But sometimes.
The first time it happened again, it was because Vincent was taking a shot at an avian monster, really far away from their position. The other watched him with bated, hopeful breath; could he actually get the shot? Time slipped by slow and quiet as his gloved hand squeezed so slowly on the trigger that it creaked like an old tree. The bird of prey’s wings dipped to catch the rays of the setting sun—and it was suddenly dropping out of the sky, and Cid’s ears were ringing with the sound of gunfire.
Vincent’s arms and shoulders momentarily tensed as he cleared his bolt of the spent bullet casing. It pinged against the rock. As it did, a crooked, privately smile crept up on his face and was just as swiftly tucked away, as his luminous eyes watched his prey fall.
Cid’s core turned hot and twinged as the echo of the shot hit and bounced off of the cliffs. He walked it off, mostly, but he could see it, the mean, satisfied little grin that momentarily twisted Vincent’s face.
So, he still couldn’t find any obvious men-admiring history in his past as he turned old memories over in his mind, and he was pretty sure he wasn’t a guy who liked guys in general. There was this one guy that made him feel fucking raw when he made the right face, but he had seen way more depraved shit than that.
--
Honestly, it DOES make him feel unsteady if he outright thinks ‘I never thought I’d be here, but there’s this guy…’ to himself. But it’s frustrating that it even worries him. He feels more reduced by the discomfort than by the discomforting thing itself.
He had to ask himself, if one of his crew told him, with a few beers in his stomach and a stupid look on his face, “I really never thought I was like this, I’ve had girlfriends, never felt this way before, but there’s this guy that just turns me sideways,” would he act like this? Would he scorn him?
No, why the hell would he? It’s a man’s own business and there’s nothing wrong with it.
He can keep his balking to himself.
--
Besides, ‘some guy?’ It’s not ‘some guy.’ It’s Vincent.
--