His lack of acknowledgement, she thought, should have been exactly what she wanted. The less she had to confront the reality that she was having to share sleeping quarters with him the better. And yet...

Why did it make her so angry? Why did her whole being feel at war with itself? She propped herself up against her pillow and felt sick to her stomach, either from frustration or anticipation, she wasn't altogether sure. Her skin felt like it was on fire, like every inch of it was screaming and clawing at her not to do it and yet there she was, leaning across the bed until her head had encroached onto his pillow. Could he sense her there? If her rapidly beating heart wasn't announcing her then surely he could feel the heat she was convinced was radiating from her like a funeral pyre.

"I hate you." The words came out in a hasty mumble and for once weren't the ones she'd wanted. She couldn't exactly announce that she didn't mean it though, she felt adamantly that she did mean it but it just wasn't the sentiment she'd been intending to express at that precise moment. "Don't ignore me." Still not what she wanted but she wasn't going to try a third time to assemble a sentence. She placed a hot, clammy hand on his upper arm and inched ever so slightly closer but doing so made the sick feeling return so she stopped and wished for a quick and dignified death.

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There were a handful of things Tiberius might have expected from Antigone. Among them were fits of varying levels of severity, any number of insolent comments, or a myriad of petty gestures such as the blanket-stealing move she'd just attempted. This, however, was nowhere near the list of possibilities that had occurred to him. The hair on the back of his neck bristled as he felt her hot breath close behind him, and the touch of her arm a half-second later made him stiffen immediately. What was she doing? What was the endgame, here? He wanted to look at her for some sort of hint as to what was going on in her head, but he didn't want to move and dislodge the hand from where she'd placed it. What if this was some sort of trap to get him to turn around, and she'd have her wand at his throat when he did? Besides, he knew that her features would be impossible to read in the darkness of the room. He wasn't a good reader of facial expressions even at the best of times, and Antigone had a habit of making so little sense with her moods that he would be entirely devoid of any context clues to figure out what she was thinking.

Was she trying to get a rise out of him? She should have known better than to have tried to bait him with a phrase like I hate you; he was hardly invested enough in how she felt about him to care. If she was trying to start a fight, though, why here and now? And why reach over and put her hand on his arm like this?

He had no idea what to think. Without turning his head to look at her, he said stiffly, "A moment ago you didn't want to be touched."

  

"Shut up!" The words came out like a knee-jerk reaction and louder than she'd expected. Regret, regret, regret. What was she doing? If she just edged back from whence she came she could hopefully erase it from her memory or at the very least focus on falling asleep and hope she awoke thinking it an unpleasant sort of dream.

Except she couldn't bring herself to move. She tightened her grip on his arm, letting her nails dig in. She couldn't verbally communicate what was on her mind because she was flat out refusing to let herself think about it. Had he tried to see inside her mind it wouldn't have made much more sense than he was currently getting out of her.

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The following 1 user Likes Antigone Lestrange's post:1 user Likes Antigone Lestrange's post
   Elladora Black

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Don't ignore her, but shut up? Tiberius wasn't sure what she wanted from him, but he was now perplexed enough to act on his confusion. He was still suspicious of her intentions, however, and so reached to grab his wand from the bedside table. It couldn't hurt to be armed. With a muttered spell he cast a soft light from his wand tip, then turned to his other side, shaking her hand off of his arm as he moved. He peered at her quizzically in the glow of the wand light. He wasn't sure that he wanted to outright ask her what she was on about, but even if he had, he wouldn't have known what words to even use.

  

To her immense displeasure, he lit his wand and turned towards her. She had no idea what sort of revealing information her face was broadcasting at present but she was sure there was at least an abnormal amount of pink in her face and she was loathe to let him see it.

"No!" She threw herself across him, her hand reaching out for his wand hand with the intention of dislodging it from his hand by force somehow.

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She hadn't had a wand pointed at him, and she didn't look as though she intended to launch into him with her teeth, or anything, which was a good sign. She did, however, seem quite opposed to his having his wand in his hand. He was too startled by her sudden movement to do anything more than grunt loudly as he jerked his arm back, attempting to keep the wand out of her range entirely — or, failing that, have the proper positioning to wrestle it away from her grasp. In moving his arm over so hastily, however, he'd ended up rolling onto his back, which brought Antigone down on top of him in a rather undignified sprawl.

  

Not only had she failed to send his wand across the room where it couldn't expose her discomfort, but now she was unceremoniously draped across him and she would probably never be able to look him in the face again. Except she accidentally did, shooting him a furtive glance which she immediately regretted. Once she fixed her eyes on his, she couldn't seem to dislodge them despite finding every millisecond deeply uncomfortable.
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He'd expected her to do one of two things, upon finding herself atop him; she could either recoil from the contact and get back over to her side of the bed, or else she might take advantage of the situation to try and get into a position of power and wrest his wand away from him. He was not prepared for the middle ground between the two, and he was rather baffled when she simply froze, staring at him like an animal caught in a trap. She looked like she didn't enjoy being draped across him, but it wasn't as though he had put her there, or as though he was keeping her there.

After her previous violent reaction to his turning over, though, he wasn't sure he wanted to just shove her away. Instead, he took advantage of the quiet to ask, "What are you doing?" It might have been a question, but his tone was a mixture between a demand and an accusation. His patience with her game, whatever it was, had worn thin.

  

It was overwhelming and she was at a complete loss for what to do. She was hyper aware of ever inch of where her body made contact with his own and that was making it nigh on impossible to remain fixedly in denial. However, this didn't solve the dilemma of what she was even supposed to do with that knowledge. It wasn't until he finally spoke that her mind lurched back into action.

His words reminded her immediately of the night of her last birthday and suddenly she felt master of herself once more. Hadn't she had the same reaction to him that night, said the same words? Was it not the same but with roles reversed? Thinking of him as bewildered, and perhaps even alarmed, gave her conviction.

Placing her hands either side of him on the mattress, she pushed herself up and off of him; a smirk twisted her lips as she took in her new vantage point. "What, indeed." She felt her resolve waver but persisted in flinging her leg over him. It had been closer to a year than not since he'd last visited her bed but she thought she remembered well enough what he usually did. Acting quickly before she could give him a chance to throw her off and thus spoil the moment, she pinned his arms down as best she could and placed most of her weight behind her arms. It was oddly satisfying. "Does this make you angry?"

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She was on him before he knew what was happening, and although Antigone had never been particularly strong she was able to put a surprising amount of force into pinning his arms down when she put her entire body weight behind the gesture. At first he thought that she was trying to wrestle him into a more submissive posture, and would probably be attempting to divest him of his wand momentarily, but then as she spoke he realized that he had misjudged her intentions. Not that her words alone would have given it away, but the placement of her leg was a strong indicator; no man could have a woman straddle him and have his mind not go to sexual matters.

Although Tiberius saw to his own needs on a regular basis, he had a very strict and traditional view of when intercourse ought to occur between a husband and wife. His visits to Antigone's bedroom had been as regular as necessary, as brief as possible, and occurred only when there was some potential benefit. There was no point in subjecting her to something she did not enjoy (from all appearances, at any rate) when he could just as easily take his sensual attentions to some two-bit whore with the same result (or a better result, honestly; although one might not believe from watching their relationship that Tiberius had any amount of respect for his wife, he allotted her considerably more protections in this particular area than he did the average prostitute, and he did tend to find sex more enjoyable and less of a chore when he didn't have to concern himself with things like whether or not he might be leaving bruises).

Antigone must have had some endgame here, and she had gotten it into her head that attempting to seduce him — however hamfistedly — would soften him up and make him more amenable to whatever it was she wanted, he thought. Either that, or she was hoping to distract him from something. She could not possibly be trying to initiate sex just for the sake of it.

He stiffened beneath her, but did not attempt to throw her off. He still had his wand in one hand and could easily send her flying should he need to, but for now he was hoping he might be able to talk her out of this ill-conceived charade by letting her know how fruitless her efforts would be.

"I don't know what you think you're doing," he said coolly and evenly, glaring up at her in the dim light from his wand. "You're useless to me, as a wife."

  

Her smirk vanished leaving her regarding him with nothing but contempt. "I don't see you getting rid of me," she spat. It was only the certainty that he was saying it with the sole purpose of irritating her that kept her from feeling the sort of deep mortification that would prompt her to lose her temper in a particularly ugly fashion. "If I'm so useless that makes you a sentimental fool." She leaned in closer to him. "You're fond of me and you don't like it at all."

Tig leaned in even closer which wasn't the most comfortable position for her upper arms but that was unimportant. "Admit it," she hissed against his ear, "Tiberius." Antigone wasn't exactly trying to seduce him, at least she didn't consider that to be the case; she just wanted to taunt him and brushing her lips just below his ear seemed like a solid move.

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Apparently he was now to blame for not throwing her across the room when she'd first reached to touch him. Had he known that this lack of violent opposition would be used as evidence against him later, perhaps he might have reconsidered the more measured approach he'd tried to take to deescalating the situation. Antigone, it was clear, had no intention of deescalating anything.

He bristled immediately at the accusation that he was fond of her, even though he knew she was only saying as much to rile him. They had been over the practical reasons for keeping her in the picture once her womb had dried up. In fact, Antigone had suggested many of those reasons when she had been arguing for her life in the aftermath of the defective birth. She knew that emotion had not played any part in his decision — or at least, not a part that either of them had ever admitted to — and so she was clearly only trying to goad him into some sort of a reaction, but given everything else that had happened in the very short time since he had entered the room, he was inclined to rise to the bait. She hadn't given his patience much time to recover, and he was already shorter tempered than he might otherwise be due to the hour. He really had just wanted to get the hell to sleep, and now they were doing this.

Tiberius rolled his shoulder into hers with as much strength as he could muster from his prone position, though he had to drop his wand to do so. His priority at the moment was to get her off of him and keep her off, and if he needed to wrestle his way to be straddling her in order to keep her down, he would. "Alright, Antigone," he said, more loudly than necessary. He used his wife's name like a piece of profanity. "If you're determined to act the part of a whore, I can treat you like one. Are you ready for that? Would you like to see how fond of you I am?"

  

A wolfish grin started to spread across her face as she recognized the signs of anger in him. Considering all that he had ever done to her when at the height of fury, she should want to keep him calm and pacified but that was not the case. There was something about him in a blinding rage that delighted her and it wasn't just the knowledge that she'd baited him there, it was something more. She trusted him with her life and to an extent she trusted him with her physical well-being, but there was still an element of risk and she was happy to barter fleeting discomfort for the exhilaration of being the subject of his wrath.

Tig gave little to no resistance when he threw his weight against her and was, to her own surprise, pleased by the development. "By all means, show me how devoted you are." She persisted in grinning, both because she was amused and she liked to think it would irritate him further.

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The sheets tangled in a whirl around them as the roles were reversed, and Tiberius climbed atop his wife. He thought she would struggle, and took a stance to prevent her doing so as much as possible: his knees on the outsides of her legs, his shins angled in to pin her thighs in place with his body weight. He would have anchored her arms down, too, except that his hands were busy violently tearing off what thin layers of clothing she did still have on. He couldn't really see what he was doing, since the only light in the room was still his wand, and it had fallen to the floor when he'd dropped it. He wasn't being careful. He hoped he damaged something. He hoped this was her favorite nightgown, and that it would be unsalvageable once he discarded it onto the floor by the bed.

"Worthless harlot," he said viciously as he removed his own underthings and hiked the night shirt up over his hips. He was surprised to find that he was already fully erect, his head bobbing ridiculously against his stomach as he shifted to kick his underclothes away. When had that happened? He hoped he hadn't started stiffening while she'd been on top of him, and hoped even more that if he had, she hadn't been paying enough attention to notice the difference through the thin layers of clothing that had separated them. The idea that she had attempted to seduce him and it had worked was mortifying.

But it could just have easily had occurred since then, he told himself. It wasn't as though it took a good deal of time. That was what he would choose to believe — that it was the idea of taking advantage of her, of dominating her, that had done this to him.

Tiberius wet his index finger against his tongue and shoved it roughly down against her — not for her comfort or pleasure, but rather to ease his imminent passage there — and discovered a hint of wet between her legs already. That had never happened before, and it confused him, but not enough to make him halt his efforts.

He pushed into her with all the force he could manage, as deep as he could. He wondered if it hurt, particularly since he wasn't sure how well that particular area had healed after her last attempted birth. He hoped it did hurt. He wanted to hurt her.

  

The loss of her nightgown would have been inconsequential had she packed a spare, but that was an observation she'd only make a good while later. She could feel the start of an adrenaline rush and then shortly afterwards, that strange discomfort in the pit of her stomach again as she watched him proceed to remove his own clothing.

She felt heady and slightly detached from everything, at least until he slammed against her so violently that she couldn't hold back the gasp of surprise. It might have hurt, it might have hurt a lot, but she couldn't tell as of yet. Expecting him to hold her down at any moment, she took the opportunity to fling her arm over him with the intent of trying to pin him to her, although she made a point of angling her nails so that they scratched at him. She felt a compulsion to draw him in close, to press him to her like a coveted possession, to smother him with her very being.

"I'm not convinced." She hissed it as close to his ear as she could, hoping he'd catch the derision she was aiming at him. Tig felt immune to all consequences winding him up even more might have. She felt so above it all that he could have tried smothering her with a pillow and she would likely have laughed herself to her last breath.

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Tiberius wasn't sure whether they were grappling or fucking, or some combination of both. She wasn't wriggling her body beneath him, which he assumed would have been part and parcel to whatever else she was doing had she really been trying to escape or even resist. Her nails had dug into the skin on his back like claws, however, which was hardly what he would have called an intimate gesture. He couldn't see where she'd raked her fingers against him, but he would be surprised if she hadn't left a mark.

"Arrogant bitch," he muttered irately, as he thrust into her once again. He moved his left arm up and attempted to knock hers away from him, then dug his fingers into her wild blond hair. Once he had a proper fistful of it he tugged, attempting to pin her head down against the pillow so that she couldn't try to do any of the damned whispering in his ear any more.

"You'll regret this," he warned, reaching for her wrist with his other hand to try and secure her free hand before she took out the claws on that one, too. "Maybe I'll leave some marks on you," he threatened, continuing to pound himself into her whenever the opportunity arose. "Is that what you want?"