poleaxed | OPEN.

So it's not about her desires, it's about their expression. Most people would be concerned that she's even thinking about this, but Hap's not most people. This is the price. He doesn't think like normal people do.

"Little things. Breaking my fingers. I could slam my head into the window. I don't wanna die, Hap. But I know if I fall at the right angle, I can shove my nose into my brain. Anybody can do it. It's not my fault people aren't creative."

"That's a myth," he tells her, lacking the resource of will to do so kindly or with any levity.

Hap reaches for his glasses, pulling them off along a hard-pressed sigh. He is mollified, very meagerly, by the fact that she only wants to hurt herself. Not take herself away from him and the study.

His gaze flickers down and is caught by the smudges on his glasses. The tiny, transparent streaks he's been staring right through. "Maybe this was a mistake."

She should feel panic at the idea that he's thinking about-- or genuinely threatening, it's hard to tell with academic types-- to take her above ground privileges away. Maybe her emotions have become dulled like her senses. She jogs in place, tries to keep healthy, but she knows she's atrophying. This is no different. No fear, no dread, no panic. Just a muted disappointment, resignation.

"There are things that aren't a myth." And she doesn't believe him, anyway. "I'm not a squeamish person, Hap, and I'm trying to work with you. Was the other one this nice about being let upstairs? I've never tried to escape up here."

She's heard about that, if only because they never fucking shut up about her down there.

It is his prerogative to measure her against Prairie, and only his. He's shared his work with Joan, his home, his humility. She can't have her. Prairie belongs to him. The concept of her. He had all of her, and he lost her to exactly this. Pathetic hubris.

Thoughtlessly, Hap gets to his feet. She thinks he won't take it all away? That she's too precious? Special? She's wrong.

"Up." Concurrent with the command, he seizes her arm in a vise-like grip. "Get up."

"Hey!" She has an instinctive response to being manhandled, and it's not going along with it. She's not some willowy waif, she's not a saint-to-be. She resists, trying to yank her arm from his grasp. "Use your words!" She struggles against him, oddly stung. She's never required manhandling. She's earned better treatment than this.

The bodies Hap handles have weight, not tension. Subjects haven't had the capacity to fight back in over a decade. He fumbles with her lack of compliance, tightening his hold in a harsh panic. An actual fight would be nasty and crude. (An actual fight, he might lose.)

Hap yanks her to him and then shoves her against the wall to still her. To put a stop to this. Her arms gripped hard in each hand, he crowds her in, chest to chest.

"That's enough, Joan."

Joan's barely an inch taller than him, by her estimation. When he presses her close, he really gets in her face. It's been months since she's touched another person, and it feels amazing, but not the kind of amazing you can melt into. It gets her blood up. He pushes her, and she pushes back.

She should punch him. She can't bring herself to punch him. She shoves instead, trying to throw him off, her hands on his chest.

"After all your big talk, you just wanna shove me around." If he hits her, she can hit him.

The closest he's come to someone else in as many months as he's known her is walking her up and down the stairs, cleaning her skin, plucking up and swiping back stuck strands of oily hair. Warmth and motion buffet him, unadulterated. Hap's heart gallops in shame and starvation. He's appalled by his behavior before she puts it to words, for once the more eloquent of the two of them. The guilt spirals — up.

"I don't—" He presses in, caging her. His temple rubs against hers. All he wants is for her to stop squirming. He holds, locked against her. He can feel his breath crashing off her skin, and hers pushing her fists into his chest. "I don't."

Joan can smell him with startling clarity, toothpaste and aftershave, and maybe the tiniest bit of salt sweat. She can feel his skull next to hers. He won't hit her, and for once she doesn't care. He smells like a man; in all her dreams, he just smelled like blood.

She does it before she has time to second guess it. It's abysmally stupid, nudging at his brow so she can angle their mouths into a kiss. She sucks his lower lip because she wants to, because she'll never get another chance. He's going to lock her back down in that glass coffin and never let her out again; she's going to die and this is the last time she'll touch anybody ever again.

It might as well be a kiss.

Stale, caked-on sweat, bulk soap, soybean meal and ground wheat. She smells like all of them. That hammer of a cogent thought swings purposefully wide of the nail in his heart that is Prairie, and breaks something less vital.

The tug on his lip hitches his blood and rips a grunt out of him. Hap steadies himself on her jaw, blanching her pale skin under his thumb and fingers. His brow is balanced against Joan's. His eyes and breath bore into her; he pulls back to free space over which his gaze can stumble. Her mouth, her hair stuck to her neck, her flesh in the ferocity of his grip.

Hap eases it. His hand slides skittishly down the length of her throat before he looks into her eyes again. Simmering. His fingers curl round the back of her neck. He kisses her decisively, his temperance fueled by resentment, his passion by jealousy.

She is, for a moment, terrified. The worst thing he could do isn't to hit her, break a bone or open her skin. He could treat her with gentleness, and he doesn't; she will be grateful for the rest of her short life.

She deepens the kiss, because she doesn't know how not to. This feels like having a purpose, more than sticky tape on her skin or documented dreams. Kissing him feels like she means something, and she drinks it in, her tongue flicking against his. She runs her hand through his hair, because he won't be quick enough to stop her. She doesn't think he'll like it. She doesn't think he'll like anything she ever does genuinely, and suspects he'll hate her for falsehoods. He doesn't really like her at all, and that's comfortable. She'd be disgusted by love, so she kisses his hating mouth instead.

Her hand skitters to his hip, and she fumbles for his fly. He won't like this either.

Hap groans into her mouth. He resolves not to be the man who may or may not have actually made her laugh this afternoon, all the way down in her stone prison. He won't feel any ease with Joan or act with all his knowledge of her. He'll pretend to be ignorant of what can be salvaged from such a wretched, hard woman, and deny her the cloak of worship only he has the privilege to wrap her in. She used to fuck a lot, she said. So they'll fuck.

His hate is freeflowing, overrunning. It can't direct him to do anything. His instincts are blind want. To fist his hand in her hair and bare her throat, and leave her hand to get at his cock while he pulls her pulse onto his tongue and traps it with his teeth.

She whines when he pulls her head back, when his teeth skim her throat. This is good, better than she could have hoped for. He's acting like he wants her, and she appreciates the effort it has to take. If she could thank him without looking weak, she would, but that's impossible.

She finds his cock, jerking it roughly, blindly. Her breath hiccups in her throat. Her free hand grabs at his back, desperate.

A twitch of blood and muscle, hips rolling into her touch. There's a sweetness to her urgency that, with the ruthlessness of a whip crack, strips his desire of compromise. Hap can feel it in her hands. Her honesty.

Her gratitude.

Hap pulls back enough to grab at the hem of her shirt and roll it up. He expects her to release him and raise her arms to help him get it off. The electrodes on her temple will come loose or tumble off; he'll scrape off the rest with blunt nails before palming her breast.

She likes that he reaches for her shirt, likes that he wants to touch her tits. She can always tell that sex is going to be better than average if a guy actually pays attention to her chest. She feels heat pool in her gut when he touches her, and it makes her breath hitch. It would take a massive lack of interest in reading others to miss the fact that her nipples are sensitive.

"Your shirt too," she mumbles against his mouth. Her hand pulls at the fabric, trying to unbutton his shirt one-handed. "Please."

It bothers him that he can't tell if anywhere he touches her is inherently sensitive or if it's down to the contact he's denied her. It bothers him that he won't know unless they do this again and again, which they can't. He won't. He won't.

His thumb circles her nipple, lips catching and missing hers as she tells him what she wants, then makes it into a request. Acquiescing, he takes over her attempt to undress him and quickly pops button after button until his shirt hangs open. Hap likes it when his partners take his clothes off for him but the heat is building too fast. She might catch it at his elbows as he slips it off, shucking it sharply from his wrists.

She watches his hands, watches their dexterity, scrambles to help him take off his clothes. He's well built, lean but not wiry, cut but not steroidal. There's some appreciable body hair. She wants to rub her face in it. She wants to do all kinds of things they aren't going to. She'll be lucky if she comes, considering.

She'd rather not consider. She pants against his lips, her hips tilting, grinding against his hip. Her hand spiders over his chest, his back, while she jerks him off. "What do you want? Like this?"

Edited (her whats) 2024-08-17 21:18 (UTC)

His hand roams her chest, planes of uncushioned muscle. His other maps the barely-there curve of her waist, the relief of her ribcage an open accusation of neglect. His counter, and his answer, is to seize her wrist and yank her hand out of his trousers.

Arm winding around her back, Hap slips down her body to hitch her leg up over his hip and lift her remaining foot off the ground. He carries her to the bed where he sets her down none-too-gently on her back. On his knees, he stays close in retreat to lavish her swallow flesh with his mouth. A nip at her collarbone, her sternum, the breast his hand had ignored. He unfastens her jeans as his lips close around her nipple, tongue teasing.

"Oh-" And then her back hits the bed. That's good, that's better than she could have asked for. She was expecting her head to be shoved down and- she can't think about anything with his mouth on her like this, with his hand at her fly.

Her hips buck into his hand, and the slight suggestion of friction makes her feel sensitive all over. She can feel herself trembling. It isn't because of nerves-- she doesn't feel nervous, just desperate. Just fucking pathetic. But if they stopped now, she'd feel worse.

Button loose, fly unzipped, Hap lowers himself to an elbow as he delves inside her pants. They're overworn, loose enough that he can maneuver almost freely.

Hap sucks as his fingers trace her lips through her underwear. He didn't mean to slide his hand in over them, but he didn't mean not to, either. Now he wonders if he can make he come through them, finding her clit as his tongue flicks across her nipple, poised between his teeth.

Edited (and I did mean to hit post comment ) 2024-08-17 21:52 (UTC)

She sucks in her breath, going very still. After going so long without real touch, she feels overstimulated. Her knees shake with the effort of keeping her legs open; she can feel how wet she is now that the cooled air of the room hits her thin panties. Her hips buck almost without her permission, and then she does it a second time just to make it seem like it was on purpose. A third because it feels good. She groans.

"You wanna tease me?" Her voice is strained.

"Stop asking me what I want," he murmurs along her chest, raising up to lick into her mouth. His body rests flush against hers, though he has the vestiges of genuine care not to pin her with his weight. Panties soaked, Hap slicks his fingers along her slit then assaults her clit with rapid strokes.

What he wants is unravel her, but untangling the knot of thorns that is Joan Dority would be long and taxing work. He can settle for taking her apart; brute forcing it the way she does a conversation. That's her cadence, isn't it? If he thought she was trembling from fear, he'd stop.

"Okay, I want you to f-fuck-" Words fail her at this point. She grabs at his back, scraping at the skin as her hips jut into his hand. Her face is buried in the crook of her neck as she gets closer. "Oh God, oh God-"

It's the touch that undoes her, having his body so near. She comes under a crashing wave of shame, her teeth in his shoulder, biting too hard to cover a whine.

Her teeth tear a curse out of him. His hand fists in the bedding underneath them, the nudge of his hard-on against her hip coiling tight the muscles in his thighs. His nose drags across her cheek as he rolls slightly onto her to raise himself off. With haste, he tugs free the last of her clothes, then pushes down and discards his as well.

Hap kneels again on the mattress, planning to fuck her on his side. But position is her prerogative, now he's wrung some of his satisfaction out alongside hers, and he'll give her what she wants, however she wants it.

In another life, Joan liked to be experimental. Now, Joan feels like a skeleton, somehow uglier than the creature she was before. She wants to be greedy, because she'll never do this again. Joan crawls onto the bed more fully, getting on her hands and knees. She looks over her shoulder at him, curious. Is he a kinder lover than he is a man?

"I like it like this."

cw violence mention, suicidal thoughts, etc.

cw him

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