Work Text:
Red. He thinks I’m angry. Or sexual.
s17e06
It was borderline religious.
s17e07
“All hail King John!” she throws at him across the room, mocking both in tone and countenance.
The fizzy liquid sloshes in her see-through plastic cup, almost spilling on Joanne’s top adorned with puffy sleeves. The music is blasting, too noisy, and unfairly skewed the winner’s way: the majority of the playlist your typical selection of Queen hits. No live recordings, no harmonies from Roger at the end.
“Everyone watch out for John!” she shouts his way as he’s crossing the room to where they’re standing in a small group: her, Nick and Sophie.
“Love your work,” he says, staring pointedly at her head. Joanne has found a paper crown in Alex’s dressing room earlier in the soirée and has spent the better part of the evening parading it around.
“No, John, I love your work,” she says right before taking a big gulp of her gin and tonic by the looks of it. Her voice is dancing on the very edge of sobriety as she slurs the words in that over-excited way the drunk do. In the way he can taste from where he’s standing.
“Catch!” Next thing he knows, she’s tossing the cup in his direction. Not even trying to obey, John follows the trajectory as it falls to the floor, thankfully empty.
With her hands free Joanne goes straight for the adornment on her head. A strand of her hair catches on the paper triangle, and she yanks it off with a lazy smile across her face. She’s so shiny, glitter and sweat and that unidentifiable fabric of her pants—
In the middle of the noise, to the cheers of Nick and Sophie in the background, she crowns him king.
“Oh you Englishmen, always a hard on for a crown,” Joanne scoffs as she secures the crown behind his ears.
He laughs at the centuries-old tension in that but cuts himself short. Joanne cocks her head in a way that makes him halt all movement: she’s making a point of looking at his mouth, and he knows. Nothing about her future action is real. He’s a warm body and she is drunk. He’s been on the other side of that too many times, and by Joanne’s side for the better part of the week. He knows now that that’s how she is: always flirting away, playing up the person closest to her in this very intense eager way.
John tells himself that even as she goes for his mouth like it’s the fountain of youth and she just spotted a wrinkle. As a betting man he’d have put good money on Joanne being a good kisser. She is.
Eyes open, John watches Nick and Sophie throw their hands up in the air and walk a few steps back. Joanne’s lips on his, he tries to quiet a part of him that’s suddenly very intent on stopping whatever’s happening right the fuck now. The thrill of making out in front of everyone outweighs the screaming, the embarrassment, the— Joanne licks into his mouth, and he realises then where he went wrong. His mouth’s on fire, the taste of liquor entering his bloodstream, making his blood boil.
John pushes her off him, goes for a gentle evasive manœuvre but can’t guarantee an outcome, what with how he’s too busy spotting the first signs of a cardiac arrest. He holds out a hand and tries not to get sidetracked by her exaggerated hurt expression. Can’t ignore the pointed looks from a few people in the room but hey, one thing at a time.
The liquor heavy on her breath, Joanne covers her mouth with the back of her hand and wipes the sweat off her upper lip, like that’s what’s stopped them. She studies him carefully. John keeps wishing for some portion of scripted banter to fall into his lap but can’t access a single word except for “please”.
In that perfect way only a relative stranger can, Joanne locks eyes with him and guesses, understanding melting into the perfect contours of her face. But then she’s always so much quicker than he is.
“I’ve got it,” she says to the room, so terrifyingly sure of herself. Joanne holds a hand out, and it’s not the one she wiped her mouth with. “Follow me.”
As her hand leads him by his wrist he wants to ask so many things of her, mainly that she take a shot and spit it out right into his mouth.
Joanne leads him down the corridor, to her empty dressing room— a dressing room that’s far bigger than his on account of what he doesn’t know. Certainly not points.
He closes the door behind him, and any other day he wouldn’t believe his luck. He’d be dancing for joy if not for the very real taste of alcohol in his mouth. He tries to refocus his attention on the next best thing: Joanne’s mouth is a minefield but her cunt—
“Here you go,” she offers him a bottle of water. John washes his mouth with it, and spits out in an empty tea mug she helpfully provides. “I really am sorry,” Joanne says in a small voice that sounds almost unnatural on her.
So he does what he imagines anyone would do when faced with Joanne and coming up short. He makes an offering. He kneels.
There’s no awkward pause, no fictitious oh on her end. And why would she be surprised? He isn’t. That’s pretty much what John expected from himself when cornered in a room with a threat of relapse.
John moves to undo her Zara pants after asking ”May I?” in a voice that’s borrowed, a voice that betrays no real intention. He keeps thinking that there must exist a secret third door between eating her out and battling it out with sobriety.
He looks up at where she’s nodding her drunken consent. Walking in, she has turned on the light, ie a solitary lightbulb in the stark middle of a ceiling, and from where he’s sitting it is now directly behind her. She’s been shiny this whole week but not like this: flawless, beautiful, and without weakness. Winning. What with how often, how easily it has been him, he didn’t expect—
A hand in his hair. Slowly, she tugs at the edges of the paper crown and lets it fall to the floor. Just as slow, John finally manages to undo the intricate buttons on buttons on buttons on her pants, and pushes them down her thighs.
Her hand travels from where it was tracing circles on his scalp to his cheek to his mouth. A finger pries his teeth open, and pushes in, onto his tongue. “Brilliant,” she says. Makes him wonder if it’s just that, a comment on his obedience, or if he too is looking so very shiny to her.
Her finger’s heavy on the flat of his tongue when she pushes in. He almost chokes on it but at least it distracts.
He places a hand on her thigh. The light tremble of muscle there, the sharp intake of breath like she might really want this— or want him, has been wanting— maybe not all their respective nonsense was nonsense.
He hooks a finger inside her underwear which makes her buck her hips into him; makes her reconsider her hand. She removes her finger from his mouth, and John can’t tear himself from the way her eyes light up at the string of spit there.
With her hand now squarely over his shoulder, she’s finding purchase, making him shiver or cold or ticklish, he isn’t sure.
“Be a gentleman and throw me a cushion,” he asks. His voice catches on her words but it doesn’t disrupt the delivery. Earns him a chuckle from above.
He’s working the audience of one over here. Make her laugh and she’ll forgive the way he won’t make her come, not on the first try anyway.
A ball of fabric hits him right in the face: instead of providing a cushion, she’s taken off her top. The gigantic puffy sleeves are gone like a mirage at the weight of his knees. He’ll take it though. He’ll take anything that separates him from rock bottom.
He drags her underwear down her thighs. Her mouth opens and so does his.
Joanne starts saying things like “I knew you’d be good at this” and “You’re gorgeous from this angle” and, and. It makes him go numb. Objectively though, it doesn’t hold a lot of sway coming from a woman who wrote her own Wikipedia entry. The inherent untrustworthiness of it: how easy it must be for her to edit things out. He must look mad out of his mind, borderline religious, but that she doesn’t mention.
She’s a flirt, too easy with her compliments, too sure of herself, so smart and so drunk, who knows how much of anything can be attributed to an attraction or even interest. John would settle for morbid curiosity. He’d be happy to keep on not knowing, doesn’t even know why it should matter.
His jaw works at her cunt, the point of his nose and chin flush against her. The weight of her, the taste, makes him wrap both hands around her hips, and it’s there of all things that she makes the first moan he would genuinely think is true.
“Jesus,” she adds, joining in on the religious motifs, tracing a line from his shoulder up his neck to the back of his head where she presses him closer into herself.
He grows bolder under her hand and reaches out. The tips of his fingers spreading her, feeling both his spit and her there. The voice above him turns pleading.
That, he wants to see.
John brings his hand back down and sits back on his heels. Looks up.
Joanne looks flushed, over-exerted, a wrinkle on her forehead like she’s been solving cryptic crosswords while he considered his fingering repertoire. There’s some biting of the lip, on his end as well as hers, just like yawning: contagious.
Her top under him, she’s standing there in a bra, bracelets, and golden hoops. A necklace splits her throat down the middle, and from that throat another "Jesus. Look at the state of you."
Finally, he’s going to be hearing about how his eyes look insane and his forehead is too big, his teeth too small or too yellow, and that for such a clever mouth, he’s actually been doing a pretty shit job.
Finally, her unfocused eyes seem to zero in on him. But she doesn’t say a word, just keeps looking, and it makes for something that he forgets all about her alcohol levels. Maintaining this insane instance of eye contact he pulls his rings off his right hand, slow and steady. Inhale (hers), exhale (also hers: John hasn’t been breathing). He drops the rings on the floor, in the general vicinity of his knees, hopefully.
Maybe it’s the inherent messiness of this week on a loop, a huis clos ambiance, applauding the same people days on end, striving for a point’s edge. The psychedelic patterns on the walls closing in.
He’d been expecting it, has studied the impact on Lou’s behaviour for instance. That moment of clarity upon seeing the envelope, the way his brain would stop talking under the weight of a single purpose.
He knows for a fact Joanne hadn’t binged sixteen series in one go, though, again: what kind of maniac would? She might have been thrown.
He remembers watching her, at the house, red jumpsuit, red mouth, and a mind that went quicker than his but in an opposite direction. Only getting an explanation for any of it months after the damage was done. Like what she’s done with the roses or the thought process behind her lying down flat against the ground, or a few minutes before that, when Joanne’d said she’d be “happy to receive.” There, his brain short-circuited between the task, the logistics of being a team player, a secret second task, and the way words kept pouring out of all of them, after, even when he forgot all about the envelope.
It kinda short-circuits now as well. Under her hands, nails tracing intricate patterns into his scalp, he feels full with this horrible feeling that threatens to unspool from his mouth, gutting his belly, melting his eyeballs. He suddenly remembers he talks for a living. He wants to play with her words, to get to the world she’s been creating, where he’s kneeling and she’s impatient. Rumble off about that. See what that does to her.
The wave of openings is washed right off his mouth at the inhale. What would he even say. Even if they were being charitable, this doesn’t look like the start of anything except for a third act of his addiction.
Mercifully, haphazardly, Joanne presses her thighs together effectively trapping his hand against her. Needy. His face now completely masked by taut legs, his fingers curl inside her, spreading her on his knuckles.
Joanne makes a sound like a start of a word, a name, maybe, and what with how self-centred and exuberant she is, chances are it’s her own. But on a small chance it isn’t, there’s a part of him that kinda wants to witness it up close. She’s on the very edge of herself, and he likes seeing people like that: getting entirely lost only to be found later. To be found but not found out, there’s a skill he’s still hoping to learn. His palms tingle with curiosity: what else he can take here. How much more.
After everything he’s won so far he can only begin to guess at the shade of greed that pushes him to stand up.
Well, no. He doesn’t need to guess because he knows exactly what pushed him off his knees. You win once you think you’ve got luck and a grisly trophy, but you keep winning and you think you’ve been made king. Which. He had, so—
She snaps him right out of it. Her thumb catching on his lip, she wipes his mouth for him with an uncomplicated complicity. Me, you. Where’s the line. What more is there to take indeed.
“You are a weird little guy, aren’t you?” she says, her hand slithering down his chest. When it’s almost between his legs, she grabs at his hip instead. He’s still working at her; at this angle, it feels like he's fighting her body for space. There is almost nothing separating their bodies, certainly not enough for their arms to cross and settle. Joanne lets go of his hip, and again, gets closer to where his dick’s tenting his pants.
Her hand hovers, the heat of it right there, but she won’t touch him. Maybe she’s waiting for him to thrust into her hand. Maybe she’d give him everything he’d ask if he’d only ask.
He does, he gives in. He’d do anything for her to touch him.
“Please,” he says, his body swaying into hers.
“Please?” She echos, her tone vicious, the word itself suddenly unkind. Too eager. He’d like to have it back. Instead, John presses his mouth to her tits, licks off every drop of sweat pooling there.
It must be doing something for her because Joanne rolls her hips into him, and— It hardly takes anything at all. Pressure, if that.
His hand goes limp inside her. Absent-mindedly he wonders if he thought he’d just stumble across one of Alex’s spare suits or something.
Joanne tears herself away from him and moves to sit down. She leans back in her chair, long legs straight and unbent before her. He watches her quick clever hands as she works herself into a state.
His knees are goners, his throat is parched. He leans over her to get to the water.
Her fingers keep at it, even as her voice goes up a pitch. His eyes are glued to her hand then, her hand, and then her mouth. The heat there. The chemical reaction on the inside of her cheeks, the back of her teeth, her tongue he wants to taste again. His one dry hand settles on the armrest, keeping him close.
Joanne sees him looking, what with how he isn’t trying to hide it, and goes for his mouth again. Again, he jumps away from her as far as his hands allow.
“Got it,” she says and puts herself elsewhere: brings her mouth to his neck, and bites.