thecapitol | I Cannot Decipher Conversation in Your Head [Closed]

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I Cannot Decipher Conversation in Your Head [Closed]

WHO| Jason Compson and Swann
WHAT| Yoga, kites and long drives.
WHEN| Sunday.
WHERE| Swann's place.
WARNINGS| Capitolite cluelessness. Shameless shipping and graphic sexual content.

He doesn't go to the cemetery with his mother, and that means that Benjamin gets out of having to go, too. Caroline whimpers and whines her way through the morning, talking about how lonely she'll be standing at the headstones of her husband and her eldest son, acting as if Jason's indifference to ritualized mourning is giving her physical pains. When Jason outright calls them psychosomatic, Caroline retires to her bedroom, making little mewling noises, and he sighs and insists that some Avoxes accompany her to the graves no matter what fight she puts up.

"I'm head of the house," he tells one of the few servants who still has her tongue, "no matter that she's my mother. She tries to shake you off, you follow and make sure she doesn't have a chance to blame me that she didn't get to grieving today."

By the time he gets to Swann's he's got the start of a headache and his mood has dipped below its baseline sullen and into fully cranky. He isn't late, but he would have liked to give himself a cushion of time, and instead he couldn't take the smoother, scenic route and had to near run a red and do his smoking while driving. As he'll supposedly be changing into new clothes as soon as he's here, he's looking relatively simple in dark jeans and his coat and a collared shirt. A flourish of embroidery on the cuffs speaks to opulence; the bad stitching on those same sleeves reveals that luxury to be an affect only. The kite is in a bag covered in tissue paper at his side.

He realizes he doesn't think Swann's seen him in casual clothing. He knows it likely won't matter soon, but he makes sure his hair is nice before he appears. He might as well keep up appearances around her, even if she knows better.

He rings the bell.

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"I'm not kicking you out of your own bedroom." Now Jason sounds, rather than just angry, as snapping as a dog at the end of a chain.

He makes a move for the door, for her, and he takes both her arms in his hands and holds her there so she can't keep walking away. He's been guilted this way before a hundred times, not by Swann but by his mother, getting the last word in by sacrificing the most and claiming it's a step up from whatever she's suffering from his words.

His face is ruddy with temper, his eyebrows pulled low over his eyes, his hands tight around her small upper arms. "Go and get back down on the bed. You want me to fuck you, I'll fuck you alright."

She's taken aback, because she wasn't trying to guilt him, she was trying to just go away and leave him alone and curl in on herself, and she usually does that in her craft closet anyway. She quakes in his hands for a few seconds, but his orders trigger whatever part of her mind likes being told what to do, likes having choices and responsibility taken away from her, and she obediently returns to the bed, sitting on the edge of it and looking up at him.

It's anger again, all that anger that animates him morning through night, that's taken the place in his soul that most people fill with life and love and energy. It's fuel all his own. It translates easily to lust now that it's been set ablaze by her arguments.

He artlessly undoes the buttons on his pajamas and tosses them aside before approaching her like someone might in a wrestling ring, not before a bed. He shoves her down, a hand on her face, pulling away at that slutty sheer nightie she's wearing until the strap at the shoulder breaks. It isn't the clumsy passion of before, but something violent inside him, something that wants not to have sex but to fuck her, hard, with all the ugliness the word entails. It's sex because he can't actually set the bed on fire is what it is.

Swann catches herself on her arms when he pushes her down, looks shocked but not hurt or upset, and doesn't fight him when he rips at her clothing, She frees her arm before the other strap breaks, and the nightie comes down over her hips easily -- it doesn't bother her that he's ripped her nightdress, she has a million others.

She doesn't say anything, just looks up at him, waiting.

He doesn't give her long to wait, and he's barely looking at her face, there beneath his hand, her mascara tears smeared across her cheeks. His hand trails down to her throat, and he holds down, not enough to choke her but enough to make it hard for her to breathe, to talk.

He shoves his pants down, finishes ripping her nightgown clear of her chest and bites one of her nipples.

"Where's the protection?"

She whines, arches up when he bites her, her eyes fluttering with his hand around her neck. She has flashes of other lovers, years back, holding her down and throwing her around and leaving bruises all over her, and it's almost a comfort to be back in a space where she at least has some idea of what to expect, where it's not all just a giant question mark for her.

"There," she squeaks out, pointing toward one of the bedside tables, a drawer where she's almost positive there's a few condoms among the loose jewelry, the phone chargers, scribbled notes on paper that have been balled up. "In there."

For a few moments he just stays there, watching her fight for breath, before he gets up with clumsy suddenness and goes where she's directed him. He nearly pulls the drawer out of the table as he rifles through it, made wild and angular by a fury beyond him. He breathes heavy, hot, making his beard feel humid and his head feel too small for everything inside it. He throws one of the condoms over to her.

"I want you to put it on," he says, advancing again, crawling up on the bed over her.

Wheezing, her eyes get a little watery, and she gasps when he lets go of her, inhaling deeply. She sits up to grab the condom, shifting onto her knees and tearing it open, and then she ducks down, because Swann learned to put condoms on with her mouth at some point or another. It's sort of a party trick, except that only a handful of people know about it.

"Okay," she says, popping back up, bizarrely attentive, like she's just waiting to hear what comes next.

He pushes her back down on the bed so she bounces a bit, then crawls up over her, surveying her face like he doesn't recognize her as Swann or maybe, even, as a person so much as a collection of shapes made from nose and cheekbones and chin and lips.

He spreads her legs fast enough he hears a benign pop in her hip, and with that he drives into her.

Her eyes search his face as he looks at her, and there's still neediness there, but it's not a neediness for reassurance so much as to please him, trying to see if he's angry at her or if she's doing things right.

The pop makes her wince slightly, biting her lip, but she breathes out with a groan and an arch and her arms reaching up for him, if only to anchor herself.

He bears down. For the most part, his eyes are closed, his face next to hers but breathing into the pillow, his hips thrusting without practiced rhythm. He breathes, hot and furious, next to her ear, saying nothing. No sweet words, no curses, no dirty talk, just breath like crashing tides.

Finally, he raises his head and kisses her again, on the mouth, exorcised of whatever it was that so plagued him earlier. And equally finally, he says her name again, and it breaks with that keening sound that it did the first time they had sex hours ago, that desire.

"Swann," he says, as if naming his cure, or like a man in the desert might speak the word 'water'.

She winds up locked around him, arms and one leg, holding on mostly, breathing hard and moaning and knitting her brow except for when she turns her face a bit more toward him.

He kisses her and she grabs back at his face, hungrily following him only he says her name and she makes such a small noise that it might as well not be there at all, but she stares up at him like he's the only thing in the whole world. One hand moves to the back of his head and threads her fingers in his hair, still a bit damp from the shower.

If he met her eyes, he would see that total adoration and it would chill him to the core. It might stop him then and there, make him fearful or turn him off or somehow strike him like lightning in the middle of the act, but instead he's watching her cheeks flush red and he doesn't realize the way she's looking at him.

He doesn't cry out as he picks up the pace, jerking and huffing for breath, nor when he climaxes, kissing her and biting her lower lip. His whole body shudders, seemingly starting from the stomach, and his hips act out some kind of echo, but the deed is done. He pulls out from her and then lies, breathing heavily, on her chest, keeping only just from crushing her tiny birdish body.

He finishes and she whimpers against his mouth, hand splayed on his back like she's trying to brace him somehow, so that he doesn't rattle himself right off of her and the bed. She's not much closer to release than she was before, when he was in the shower, but it's so secondary that it doesn't register to her, not with him on her chest, warm and solid.

Stretching her neck a little, a momentary arch, she sighs and closes her eyes, still holding him against her, with barely even a shift to accommodate his weight atop her.

For a few serendipitous moments, their bodies are in perfect rhythm as they breathe. He curls slightly, bring an arm around to cradle her head, resting his own on the pillow. His fingers twine with her hair again.

"Feeling better now?" he murmurs. "Or have I made you cry again?"

"You didn't make me cry again," she answers softly, turning her head to look at him for a second before closing her eyes once more. She feels comfortable again, secure with his arms around her, and she wants to stay this way, doesn't want anything to change.

Change is bad, she's sure of it now.

She lets her legs fall into a less awkward position, hips moving back into place where they aren't sore from being spread open and held there by his body. Her toes curl into the sheet and she swallows idly, feeling better.

He can tell by feeling her body that she's more at ease, now that the curling is more something a cat would do than that fetal, hunched child look. He doesn't snuggle, but he does lay with her, nestled in a way.

"I'm starving. Let's see if your Avox did her job and left something at the door for us." He wonders for a moment how many times Eta's had to stop, overhearing something in Swann's room, but it isn't as if he considers an Avox an eavesdropper - it's idle curiosity, not shame or suspicion, like wondering how often a smoke alarm goes off after having a toaster make a conflagration.

Swann is loathe to move at all, even if she's sure that there's a tray at the door and her own stomach is starting to feel the effects of not having eaten in so long. But she obediently gets up and opens the door to pick up what Eta's left, a large tray with a bowl of pasta, bread and two glasses of water. Jason's cigarette is in its own little silver dish.

She brings it in and places it on the bedside table next to him before crawling back into bed.

Whatever tension was between seems laid to rest now, because it's passed through him like a ghost and because Swann won't do anything to revive it, and as such he finds his appetite is fully hungry. He sits up, patting for her to join him at the side of the bed from where she is in the pillows.

"We're going to be eating out of the same bowl like housecats," he says, although he's amused rather than annoyed at that fact. Maybe it helps that Eta knew to bring water.

She moves across the bed to where he indicated, resting her head on his shoulder as she looks at the tray. She reaches for bread first, her way of trying to make sure her stomach is calm enough to take real food, too.

"It's a big bowl." There are two forks, and Swann's not sure if Eta was trying to facilitate romance or if there just wasn't enough room on the tray for two bowls. "I don't think it should be cold."

He leans into her a little bit, closing the last of the distance between them until it seems like they're both the same figure, a lump of human-colored clay. He takes a drink of water and they're close enough that Swann should be able to feel him swallow it.

From this position, he can't see the bruise he left on her neck, the red mark on the inside of her nose from his thumb.

"Would it cheer you up if we fed each other?"

That makes her smile, nuzzle against his neck for a moment as she nods. "That would be nice," she tells him, "but I'm fine. I want you to be happy."

She doesn't say it with any particular emphasis of him, but rather the way that she puts everyone's happiness above her own. It's second nature to her, and she reaches out with some of the bread for him.

He takes the bread, making a small sound of approval as he chews on it, and then wraps some pasta around the fork and pushes it towards her mouth.

"Just a little. I won't fit you to bursting."

Swann takes the bite, leaning back against him as she chews and swallows it, and it's probably good he wants to feed her, or else she's likely to not eat anything besides a slice of bread. The pasta is delicious, like everything Eta makes, even if it's cooled a little from sitting in the hall.

"Mm, try it."

"Make me." He exhales over her neck, letting his breath play like incense over her, and squeezes her waist to pull her a little closer.

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