thecapitol | [closed]

Entry tags:

[closed]

Who| Roland Deschain and the Signless
What| slightly tipsy advice and funtimes
Where| between Capitol nightlife and the Tribute Center
When| around the end of the arena
Warnings/Notes| a teensy bit of alcohol use (obviously), possible brief memories of disembowelment, brief mention of someone having set a Capitolite on fire a little bit - nothing out of the ordinary for the Games is anticipated

The air is cold out here, and quiet for an odd moment before he catches the sound of young voices raised in laughter some distance down the street. Still quiet compared to the cloying press of people in that room they've just escaped, the people and the cloying press of their desires. "I'd forgotten how it was," he says, reaching up to tug at the ruff of fur sitting around his neck. The pink stuff in that glass he's still holding sloshes around as he does it but, of course, does not spill. Hand-eye coordination, a handy skill for any occasion.

"Diplomacy, I mean. Making nice. Has it always been that way?" He turns to look down at Signless, pressing his other hand between Signless' shoulder blades and leaving it there. "Good thing you brought me as your bit on the side, and not Psiionic. Last time a Capitolite put their hands on that many parts of me, he set them on fire." He blinks down at that familiar face for a moment. Was Signless one of the people he was supposed to avoid mentioning that to? Surely not. No, it's fine.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

It's a simple-enough outfit in terms of layers, it's just that the layers are the sort that all hook into each other because nobody in the Capitol can design clothing that makes any logical sense. Taking it off for that reason is much like solving a puzzle, but Signless isn't in any more rush to be rid of his clothes than Roland is to rid him of them.

"My 'dewey rose'," he supplies. "That one's come back into style lately. 'Weeping flower' too. I think it's the tattoos."

He can't really blame them with how those tattoos have crept over his body lately. They climb up his neck and over his shoulders now so really, it's the obvious choice to make, even if it sounds downright silly and would even if he wasn't drunk.

Lucky, then, that Roland is a fair hand at puzzles. This kind, anyway. Roland leans in, peering over Signless' shoulder to pull a loop of string carefully off a near-invisible button, and snorts. "There'll be no weeping tonight, I think. Unless these clothes they've put you in are even more complex than they look. Possible. You work on mine, hmm, and we'll see if we can't meet in the middle of all this."

Meeting in the middle sounds like the most sensible course of action. Signless trails his hands and their painted nails down Roland's back and around to his front, where they brush over that bare spot of skin. Even manicured and slightly-blunted as they are they're far sharper than human nails. He doesn't expect that to bother Roland much -- he's clawed Roland's back to shreds before. Roland knows all about his nails.

Relaxed as he is now, the noise that leaves Roland's lips is audible, stifled and brief but there, hanging between them. His body is turned half away from Signless' now, has at some point leaned back from him, and he knows without looking that his hand has darted out to try a grab at Signless' wrist. He stills himself, knows that if he does not he will try to break that wrist, knows that he came close to that anyway just now and the shame of it sends his jaw clenching, sends his eyes looking toward the wall over somewhere in front of him.

The beat of his heart is loud in his ears, he realizes, and his breath is loud, too. He takes a step back, his gaze sliding along the wall as he does it and not once going near the man in front of him. He opens his mouth, but the first thing he says ought to be an apology, oughtn't it? Roland tries to decide, tries to steel himself for that. It takes a moment.

The words 'what's wrong' make their way to the tip of Signless's tongue before his alcohol-addled brain puts two and two together and he no longer needs to ask. He pulls his hand back and curls his fingers, hiding his claws against his palm.

"I'm sorry," he murmurs. "I wasn't thinking."

Well. At least one of them's apologized.

Roland reaches out to try and grab Signless' wrist once more, but this time he wants to pull that hand closer. If Signless allows him to do it Roland's breath will be louder, a little, very deliberately even, and the muscles visible through this sorry excuse for a shirt will tense. "No, Signless, touch me where you like. It's I who ought to be apologizing. A gunslinger ought to know better than that. I know better."

"I shouldn't have done something that would make you think of that when the whole point of tonight was to distract us both," he insists, then gives his head a small shake. They had a mood cultivated and damn if he's not going to try and get it back, painful though this misstep has been.

Very slowly, deliberately, he spreads his palm over Roland's hip. He's careful not to touch his stomach because no matter what Roland says he doesn't really feel like inflicting more discomfort on him right now. It doesn't matter where he touches so long as he can touch.

"You deserve to enjoy this as much as I do."

"Are you coddling me, to talk of 'deserving'?" Roland watches that hand on his hip as he asks it, aware of the way his breath is still a little too quick in his chest, his muscles a little too tense. He doesn't sound terribly pleased by the idea, and this is because he isn't. He also sounds genuinely curious, and this is because he is. One of the two of them is interested in distraction, tonight, and one of them isn't. Not anymore, at least. Not when he is a gunslinger, and he knows better. "I'm not going to run from it."

This feels like it's veering sideways and away from that nice, hazy warm place it had been heading. Even drunk Signless can hear the note of displeasure in Roland's voice, can feel how tense he is.

"I'm not trying to coddle you, but you shouldn't have to think about dying while we're pailing, and I wouldn't enjoy it much either."

It's that last part which does the most convincing to Roland and he watches Signless' face a moment, thinking on it. The gears of his mind are moving a little more leisurely than they typically would just now but they do move, and finally Roland slips his hand down over the one resting on his hip, spreads his own thin, tanned fingers between Signless' square grey ones. "Aye. Aye, you're right. Now is hardly the time, and we've hardly the mind for it. And I've barely got all this nonsense off you."

He reaches forward, taking a solid, steadying breath as he feels for the button he'd abandoned. He realizes too late this might be the wrong hand to do it with; those first two fingers can feel, yes, but only in that he can feel when they've hit something. Fine details he needs to watch the things to navigate. Doing this without leaning far enough in to see it is almost like learning to use that hand again the first time, after- after what? What was it that'd taken his fingers that first time?

Roland shakes his head sharply, trying to steady himself and focus. It's been a long while since he last had too much to drink and perhaps it'll be another long while before he does it again, now, now there's so much in his own damned mind he needs to be on guard against.

"I'd have you out of this," he says, and it's less a reassurance than an announcement, stating to the world in general - and to himself - that this is how it is going to be, nevermind how aware he is of his damn stomach now, nevermind how his breath tries to catch when he leans forward, too aware of any part of Signless' clothes which might brush against it when he does so. All of that is senseless, purposeless, and doesn't bear noticing.

There's more to this than can be so easily glossed-over but Signless is tired and not at his best and he welcomes moving things along perhaps more than he would otherwise because of it. They can talk about it later, can have a nice long discussion of exactly why the thought of Roland not enjoying himself ruins any enjoyment Signless might have. It's so odd to him to think that that isn't as intuitive to Roland as it is to him, that he'd see no issue in forcing himself to do something he doesn't want instead of just letting Signless know to avoid touching his stomach. It's not as though that's all that difficult to do.

But he sets those thoughts aside for later. For now he focuses on Roland's hands and what they're doing, on helping them where they lose their grip on buttons and ties. Working together it doesn't take them much longer to bare his upper body, his neck and shoulders and arms and their delicate floral tattoos. A cactus flower extends from one shoulder and nearly brushes over the space where his heart is. He hadn't asked for it to be put there but that's where it ought to be all the same.

"There. That's the hardest part done."

Roland nods, looking closely over the body bared out in front of him. He is not, perhaps, standing so close to Signless as he was before, his posture is set more tight and close, but his look is familiar nonetheless, the look of a man stepping back into a warm and comforting place after a long trip away. Roland may have taken a step back once Signless' clothes came down but he does reach out, half-brushing the backs of his fingers in light trails from the place Signless' nipples aren't, around the edges of that cactus flower and down to the place his belly button isn't, either.

"Too many fully grown men tonight tried to ask me about these. Your differences. How different it must be, spending so many nights with someone so exotic. What they were trying to ask me about was your cock, I'm sure, but even these - after so many nights with only you against me I'm not sure a human body would do me quite the same, should I take one of those into my bed in your stead."

Edited 2016-02-29 02:57 (UTC)

The difference between this and their first fumbling night is incredibly stark. Then their relationship was one of friends who had only been friends a very short time to begin with; they'd had no idea what to do with each other. He remembers how he'd worried that the strangeness of his body -- how 'exotic' it was -- would put Roland off completely. He's glad that it didn't. He's also glad for Roland's particularly ability to say incredibly romantic things as though he's stating simple fact, because it's recaptured a lot of the warmth that left the room with that accidental touch to his stomach.

"I hope you told them so. Considering how much they like to write about my body they deserve to be a little jealous that only you get to really know what it's like."

"Only me, hm?" Roland watches the back of his hand trace its way down low over Signless' stomach and then across where it sits against the waist of his pants. He moves closer, tensing, moving to press himself against Signless very slowly, as if he's got to figure out all over again how to do it. It involves approaching that other body from the side first, his hip bone nudging up against Signless' waist.

"That isn't how you trolls usually do things, is it?" Roland's watching himself move, frowning, but his eyes flick back up a couple times to meet those red ones when he speaks. He wouldn't be speaking, after all, if he wasn't genuinely interested in the topic. "How are things going with your friend, by the way? Your Psiionic?"

By the way, as if the question is incidental, unrelated. As if any connection drawn between the two questions will be purely a product of the Signless' own mind. It will, of course.

Edited 2016-03-09 17:11 (UTC)

He honestly hadn't expected Roland to bring Psii up and thinking on it now he doesn't know why he didn't. Of course Roland would. Roland is just as in love with the idea of love as Signless is, in his own quiet strange way.

"Well. But he already knew my body before Panem." Don't think he doesn't know exactly what you're really asking, Roland. The context then was different but even when they were best friends and only best friends they kept very few secrets from each other.

"Hmmm?" It's his second hm in five minutes and there's a distinctly interested tone to it, because without that last little clarification said out loud there is absolutely an implication there. An implication that is interesting enough to Roland to stop his frustration at his own mind, at least for a moment. His body stills against Signless', his hand settling in its familiar place right below one of those marks on Signless' sides and his thumb beginning an absent path along its edge.

"But no longer?" If Signless was trying to relax Roland, he hasn't quite succeeded. But if he was trying to distract him, yes, Signless has done quite well. Roland's gaze is very focused, very present, about as far being distant and stolen by memory as it is possible to be. This isn't gossip, of course. Every time one of them picks up one of the Capitol's magazines before sleeping and begins to read it aloud, Roland has made his feelings on gossip very clear. This isn't gossip, what he's asking. It is important.

It is important, so tell. Roland Deschain needs these deets.

"We, ah--" And is that 'ah' because of the hand on his side or simple stumbling over words? Hard to tell. "It changes day to day, what we are, but we've pailed, yes." Hopefully Roland's heard that slang enough by now to know what it means even through the haze of alcohol.

"Should have said you're the only human."

Gosh, Roland. Persnickety.

A corner of Roland's mouth twitches up for a second, appreciating Signless' words, before he looks down again at their bodies. He has nearly found a way to do this which feels like that familiar comfort, the two of them fitted together, and nearly is all he can manage while keeping the front of him clear so it will have to be good enough. He has a suspicion that the feeling of skin against skin wouldn't give him so much trouble as skin against claws, wouldn't put him back in that room pulling the boy's blade down him to watch his own guts spill out, but a suspicion is not a certainty and he is done with losing control of himself, done with it, and so he pushes the whole issue away to a familiar locked up corner of his mind and drags his other hand up Signless' back, letting his blunt human fingernails drag into that thick, inhuman skin in a trail that leads upward.

"Not for long, according to your friends out there. A few asked me about that Leonidas fellow." Roland gives Signless a knowing look, brief, eyebrows raised, and his first hand stops tracing circles on Signless' side and flattens out, scraping his fingernails across that too and pressing down in one quick movement.

He arches into those hands in exactly the way Roland must have known he would, completely unable to answer the question Roland just halfway asked because it's very hard to make words at the moment. Between the alcohol and the sensations clouding his brain he just doesn't have enough thought left for forming coherent sentences.

It's that, perhaps, that clues him in to the fact that Roland isn't particularly bothered by any of it. Not that he thought Roland would be, but he might worry about it all the same in the way he always worries about his lovers being happy. As it is Roland seems more to be asking just to ask than asking because the answer genuinely concerns him, so he can wait for that answer until Signless gets his ability to speak back.

"Leonidas -- that's just rumors. We're friends, but anything more and he'd be in trouble. You know there's a rule about that."

Roland does not wait for the answer so much as watches for it; watches for something, anyway, watches Signless as the pleasure runs through him. He's seen the same look on Signless' face many times, many times seen him move in exactly this way, and every time Roland watches the Signless as he watches him now, unblinking and intent. "Aye. That's why the rumor, I think. Karkat's told me a little about these people's love stories, the ones that don't involve us."

The hand on Signless' side brushes down, slow and idle, toward his waistband. His head ducks down - the angle's nearly awkward, doing it while keeping the front of him from brushing anything, but it's doable - and settles near Signless' hair, smelling the creams and lotions with which the people of the Capitol demand their people's hair be perfumed. He'd rather settle himself near Signless' neck instead, that comfortable space between his head and shoulder, but there are a few things in Roland's life which can not be overcome by sheer will and that foot of height difference between his small concrete brick of a lover and himself is one of them.

"Forbidden love is part of it, of course. I've never met a people with whom that isn't popular," he goes on, slipping his hand below Signless' pants and settling it atop his hip, letting it sit there, comfortable, while his thumb rubs along Signless' skin. "More, though, they want to see you sunk into life in this city, more than you already are. They want him to show you how to love it as they love it, to need it as they do. That, or they'd like to take you in hand and lead you there themselves. I imagine you've seen a little to that effect, men wanting to take you under their wing. Women too, I suppose."

There isn't a second between the end of that sentence and the moment when Roland's teeth close gently on the edge of one of those long ears. Sorry, Signless. He'd go for your neck, if he felt like bending that far down. This is what you get.

Edited 2016-04-05 21:54 (UTC)

At least Signless has avoided smelling like anything too ridiculous. He's settled into something that smells of spices and herbs, something where he might be able to almost give the illusion he just spent a very long day in the kitchen instead of pushing a particular button in the shower. It's better than the Capitolites who smell of things like bubblegum or cotton candy.

"You've been reading the magazines agaaaaaah..." His other ear, the one not being held still by Roland's teeth, twitches and then flattens back. In another situation it might be a sign of anger or of warning, but here it's a sign of pleasure and one Roland no-doubt knows to look for. Signless's ears have a language all their own.

"I'm sure that's... I'm sure that's part of it. They want to see the deluded offworlder learn to behave like a proper Capitolite. As if I haven't been doing my level best to do that already."

Going out, getting drunk, having tipsy sex? That seems pretty Capitolite to him. The serious conversation he's handling at the same time, less so, but that's a part of their relationship he's loath to give up. That he can talk with Roland about most anything at most any time is part of what he likes about him in the first place.

Roland makes a satisfied noise far back in his throat, watching the Signless' other ear. He does know that body language, and knows it quite well. Roland lets his teeth stay there a moment, firm but careful, then lets go and leans back only far enough to look at him.

"Mayhap I have been," he says, his voice low and steady, as intent as the eyes which do not leave Signless' face. "I've been reading other things, too. Would you like to act even more a proper Capitolite? They have quite a few suggestions as to what a man who looks like you ought to do in your bed. Mr. Bachman especially."

You were thinking about serious conversations, Signless? Well, have some more. Roland is quite serious. Look at this face. Roland's asking seriously. He's helping.

Edited 2016-04-14 16:09 (UTC)

Oh, yes, this is deadly serious subject matter. You can tell how seriously Signless is taking it by the way he snorts and lifts a hand to half-cover his mouth while he laughs.

"Oh? I'm sorry to say I can't spontaneously generate any blushing petals for you, but if there's something else you want to try I'd be open to hearing it."

One corner of Roland's mouth twitches up while he watches Signless, pleased at the rare occasion when he manages to make a joke that someone else recognizes as such - rarer, when he makes one which that someone else actually likes.

"You," he says, the hint of a smile disappearing into a look with a lot more intent in it. Whatever it was that might have been lost in the near-argument the two of them had a few minutes ago is back now. "What I want is you."

He leans toward Signless, wanting to walk him back against the nearest wall. "Petals or no, you'll tell me how you'd place the two of us once we get there."

That's as much of a suggestion as any of Roland's statements are. It could be taken as one, but what it mostly is is a prediction, Roland doing his part to make sure the two of them know how things are going to be.

Close as they are to it already it doesn't take long for Signless's back to hit that wall. He's always rather liked it when Roland gets like this; it isn't serious, per se, but it is a certain sort of shift in the mood of the room. Intent really is the right word. Focused.

It's hard to be perfectly focused right now with the way his brain's still pleasantly fuzzy, but all the same he knows what Roland wants. He wants a direction, a suggestion, because Roland Deschain is the particular sort of man for whom sex is like a dance and he's only confident when he has steps to follow. He had them memorized for human women but he's had to learn a whole new set for his alien lover, and that often means he defers to Signless to tell him what he ought to be doing. Which is fine. Signless is good at using his words and asking for what he wants.

"I wonder, with me against the wall like this, if you could hold me up..."

Off the ground, he means.

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if this thread wasn't nsfw before it is now, hello anyone who's reading this, why are you here

they're here for the dingle obvs

ah yes, the irresistable dingle dangle

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