Two-Hands | Tomb Raider Cross-over, Tag: Pfangirl

Revy spat and roughly wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. The black leather on her gloves rubbed her lips until they stung but she could still taste the Russian's blood on them. She spat again. Bastard had better not have had some fucking disease. That would be just like life, to punish her with AIDS for killing some sicko kiddie fiddler who thought he could get away with not paying the delivery boys.

"Jesus."

She spat a third time, and her mouth started to taste like her own again; cigarette smoke and the slight acidic stink from not having eaten breakfast. She was dying to light one up to calm her nerves, but business first. Instead, she kicked the corpse for good measure before pulling out her phone. She kept the small mobile wedged beside the barrel of the gun in the left side of her holster. She was covered in gore, and had to brush sticky skull fragments off her tits as she reached for it. She grimaced.

Flick. Dials.

"Hey Revy."

"Dutch." She said, thickly.

"Uh oh. I don't like the sound of that."

"Covered in this asshole's brains. It was either him or me, gimme a fucking break, boss."

"Alright, Revy. Let me guess, he didn't have any dough on him?"

"No Dutchy, just heat."

She spat again, this time on the corpse. Her jaw had been dislocated when the piece of shit had tried to uppercut her with the barrel of his shotgun. The same shotgun she had used to decorate the walls of this shitty storeroom with his insides. Luckily, in her line of work she'd had to click her jaw back into place before, and it was one of those things that only became easier. She rubbed her mouth again, it made her jaw ache terribly but the pain kept her sharp. She heard Dutch suck heavily on his own fag on the other end of the line and then blow it out slowly, contemplatively.

"Ok, Two-Hands. Had a bad feeling about this job anyway, left an ass taste in my mouth. Burn the goods. I'm not going to try find another buyer."

Click.

Usually, she would have argued. There was always another buyer. But even just thinking about this shit made her skin crawl. Those fucking Chinese and ex-Soviets got their rocks off in some pretty disturbing ways, the porn in these boxes was unbelievably twisted and savage. She hissed with spectacular sarcasm.

"Gee, boss, with what exactly do you want me to burn down this Filthy. Fucking. Hole?"

She needed something to drink that would burn the taste and stench of this fucker's insides out of her throat. Then she could use the rest to burn the goods as well as the steaming sack of shit and blood beneath her boot. She could really use a little fucking Captain in her right now. She struck the pose, digging the heel of one boot into the carnage in front of her, stuck her hands on her hips and threw her head back to cackle at the image.

"Got a little Captain in you, shit-for-brains?! Hahaha HAH!"

Her laughter sounded tinny, shrill and small in the close, empty room. She sounded like a fucking loser and her jawline twinged painfully as she cawed. As suddenly as her mirth had taken her it was gone, like a cruel, selfish lover; fucking her dry and then fucking off.

"Fuck. Fuck! FUCK!" She rasped, suddenly overcome with self-pity. She pulled out one of the cutlasses and shot what was left of the man's skull to pieces, screaming wordlessly and hoarsely at him.

When the weapon was spent, she walked over to where she had tossed the shotgun earlier. Cracking it open she found a single unspent shell. Working quietly now, her jaw was clenched shut and hard resolve darkened her features. She ripped open the boxes of old cassettes and disks; strewing a steadily growing pyre over the man's corpse with spools of the magnetic tape, cardboard and other combustible trash in the storeroom.

It was fitting that this asshole would burn beneath a pile of his own vile filth. When she was done, she opened the shell over the pile and sprinkled the contents over it. Then she leaned in the doorway, lighting a smoke; some illegal, untaxed shit that Rock had got his hands on. She sucked in a lungful of the acrid tobacco and felt her edginess abate a little. She flicked the match at the pile and hung around long enough to make sure the fire caught properly. When she could smell cooking flesh, she walked out into the cold sunshine closing the shitty little prefab storage container's door almost all the way behind her.

Allowing the little air in was enough to feed the flames until the whole thing burnt to ground later, leaving nothing but stinking ashes.

When she got back to the dump of a hotel where they had set up base for their dealings in Mongolia, it was already dark and starting to snow. She found no one. Rock and Dutch must have gone out for a drink, without her, the fucking douchebags. In a sulky rage, she kicked the piece of shit plastic table in the living room flying.

She went into the kitchen and opened the cheap little bar fridge. She was starving, having not eaten since the day before. Inside was only warm beer and rum, (Bacardi, at least, Dutch knew how she felt about anything else) and some of Rock's dried goji berries. With a frown, she reluctantly pulled out the goji berries and tipped the half-empty packet into her mouth. She chewed on the raisiny little berries for while before swallowing, with a grimace. Fucking Rock was a freak; they were nasty.

She then slouched back into the living room, flopped down on one of the thread-bare couches and took a swig on the rum and swished it around her mouth gingerly; her jaw was starting to swell and the joint was getting stiff. She pulled the cutlasses out and put one on the floor beside her and the other behind one of the couch cushions. Then she swallowed down half the bottle, before passing out; more from the fatigue than the booze.

"Revy." Dutch's voice, coming from somewhere overhead.

"Whaaa..." She muffled back. She opened her eyes to little slits and looked up Dutch, a dark shadow in the pre-dawn grey light. She hated the cold sunlight in this fucking country. This whole place was a frozen shit-lolly. She wanted to go back to to suffocating heat of Roanopur.

"Get up, Two-Hands. We got another job."

"Wha-fuck?" Shit. She was not in the mood to work today. Her jaw ached, her mouth tasted like shit, and her head was about to split in two.

She opened her eyes a little wider, watching Rock move around to the table she had kicked flying the previous night, bringing it over to her and righting it up in front of her. Dutch had moved over to another couch and sat down in it. She swung up to a seated position, and nearly hurled when her head swam and her jaw seemed to want to rip itself off her face under the power of gravity.

Rock disappeared to the kitchen. Dutch ripped a can of beer out of a six-pack and threw it at her; she was so dizzy she almost didn't catch it. Almost. Dutch raised an eyebrow; even with a hangover Revy's reflexes were as fast and vicious as a pissed off little mongoose. He cracked open a beer for himself, taking a long swallow before looking at her again.

"You look like shit. You let a rookie beat you up?"

"Go suck a cock, boss." She said softly, thickly, dejected. Her jaw joint had swollen even more over night and she couldn't open her mouth very wide.

"Where the fuck were you assholes last night?" She said, flashing him an angry look, opening her beer, before taking a grateful sip. The bubbly liquid was deliciously cool, and brought lubrication and feeling back into her numb tongue.

"Pass me another. You go bar-hopping without me?"

Dutch threw her another can, which she held in her hand, propped her elbow on her knee and then gingerly rested her chin on top of the ice-cold tin. It provided a little relief.

"Yeah. Mongolia's cheerful night-life was too inviting not to turn down."

She snorted. The people in this town were as dull-eyed as reptiles; surly and hard looking. Jesus, even the few children she had seen looked as grey and glass-eyed as the militaristic surrounding buildings. These fucking ex-commie villages, where life was always hard and frozen and depressing. The only pub had been closed when they first came into town, but it looked cold and uninviting anyway.

Rock had been heating something up in the microwave and came back to the table with it. He placed a bowl of some sort of ramen before her, before sitting down next to her, with his own bowl. It steamed in the cool air, and smelled deliciously salty.

"I don't want fucking soup, Rock. Jesus, Dutch, when are we going somewhere they sell pizza?"

Dutch sighed. And Rock glanced at her sideways, blowing on then slurping up some noodles before speaking.

"Whoosh - Shlooop. We were meeting with a prospective client. Apparently this village is sitting on some ancient underground vault. Possibly filled with artefacts from the Mongol Empire, somehow. Also, whooosh - shlooop, I dont think you'll be able to chew with that fat jaw any time soon."

Revy flicked a spoonful of the hot ramen at his face and he howled. Then she blew on a spoonful of her own and swallowed. It was wonderfully warm and oily and salty and suddenly her stomach growled, awake.

"Tastes like shit." She mumbled before diving in and sucking the stuff down so fast her tongue was seared. While she slurped away like a savage, Rock scowled at her and Dutch went on.

"Our client thinks himself a descendent of Ghengis Khan and is keen to get first dibs on whatever is down there. Unfortunately, the government has brought in an outside contractor, an archaeologist, to go down there and evaluate and retrieve the most valuable artefacts – if any – first."

Revvy came up for air, wiping ramen dribble off her chin, to take a long swig of beer. She looked down at her near empty bowl.

"S... what? We go down there and bump off some cranky old academic fart and his entourage of budding young farts on a field trip? Sounds easy enough. You gonna eat that, Rock?"

Rock rolled his eyes and sighed, but gave her his bowl anyway. She took it without thanking him and carried on as though she were a starving animal. Dutch grinned.

"Her entourage. An English woman. She will have the help of some Mongolian special forces, footmen really, to provide escort and guarantee her safety. Probably guarantee she doesn't get any ideas about helping herself to anything shiny down there too."

"Hah! Even easier. Some toff bitch from the isles and a bunch of Mongols! Might even be fun. We get to help ourselves to whatever the client doesn't want?"

"Oh yeah. And we will be getting paid well for this. Client heads up a Chinese triad."

That made her pause. Working with the triad was sometimes tricky, they took failure on your part very personally. Ah fuck it. Failure was unlikely and the payoff might be huge. Then Rock interrupted her happy thoughts.

"The, uh, archaeologist. She's no stuffy professor. Ever heard of Lara Croft? The Tomb Raider?"

Revy choked up laughing.

"The fucking Tomb Raider?! Wahahaha! Fuck! What kind of fucking title is that?" She snorted some ramen into her nose and giggled and then cackled. Then she noticed neither Dutch nor Rock were laughing.

"What?"

Dutch smiled at her, his teeth brilliantly white in that dark face.

"Really Revy. You never heard of Lady Croft and the whole Yamatai thing? It was on the news a few years back, some whelp college girl practically taking out an entire island of military and some kind of tribal race on her own. Nearly killed her."

Rock picked up were Dutch left off. Sipping on his beer first, he looked at her seriously while talking to her. It made her furious when he spoke to her like this. Felt too much like a lecture. She had to use all restraint not to punch him in his sincere, sweet face. Ugh.

"She's apparently unpredictable, a real loose cannon. She crops up in the news from time to time, found some artefact or another in some godforsaken hole or another. She beat the shit out of some reporter a once. I don't think we should expect this to be easy. And the Mongolian government knows the Triad has got eyes on these tombs. They'll be expecting trouble."

She shrugged and wiggled her jaw a little. Manageable.

"Ah whatever. I've dealt with stupid bitch hard-cases before." She pulled each cutlass out and checked their magazines in turn.

"Bring on the crazy Lady from England. When do we move?"

Benny walked in from one of the bedrooms, yawning and dragging his fingers through his hair.

"Tonight. Throw me a cold one, Dutch?"