thecapitol | Staffer's Retreat

Entry tags:

Staffer's Retreat

WHO| Every Escort, Stylist and Mentor. Any Capitolites or Peacekeepers who might have reason to oversee or visit.
WHAT| A professional retreat for the overworked, underpaid, and super underappreciated Tribute Care Teams.
WHERE| A chalet in District One, easily accessible by train.
WHEN| Before the next death roll.
WARNINGS| Typical Capitolites being entitled asshats.
NOTES| I've put up some subthreads for various activities, if you want to add more just do so under the appropriate day subheader!

Staffer's Retreat. Mandatory. The teams for each District are given a handful of days to prepare for the weekend, which, they're told, is going to be scheduled for a weekend with no big shake-ups in the Arena and perfect weather for outdoor activities. On Friday morning, they're taken by train to a small chalet tucked into a mountainside. A few inches of snow covers the ground but the sky is clear, reflected in the beautiful lake at the base of the mountain.

Until Sunday evening, their days will be packed with "professional development". The schedule looks something like this:

Friday:
Icebreakers
Trust Falls
Hypothetical Scenarios: How to Be the First Person Chosen for a Bomb Shelter
Three-Legged Race
Self-Care Hour: Mandatory Yoga
Dinner
Breaking Down Stereotypes Workshop

Saturday:
Mandatory Mentor Group Therapy: PTSD is Not An Excuse
Mandatory Escort/Stylist Workshop: Building Trust with Your Tributes
Mandatory Sexual Harassment Training: Focus on Tribute/Mentor and Tribute/Escort Relationships
Lunch
Capture-the-Flag
Group Lego-Building
Dinner
12am Karaoke

Sunday:
5:30am Continental Breakfast
Compliment Circle
Journal Hour
Farewells

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

People are willing to catch Swann, as endeared as they are to her hummingbird-style charms. Jason just happens to be the one standing right beneath her, shuffled somehow into position by the milling of the motley crowd. He catches by instinct, partially because it's human nature not to let someone fall and partially because it's animal nature not to let something crash down on top of you.

He wobbles slightly as he catches her - she's small enough that the people next to him move aside with an amused glance, aware that he won't need help - but he doesn't fall back. In a way her clothing makes it like he's catching a crumpled ball of tissue paper, with only her head and bony elbows shattering that illusion.

"You're more skirts than person, Honeymead." He lowers her slightly, trying to put her feet to the ground.

A little huff of breath escapes her when she's caught, held nearly bridal-style by only two arms, and she blinks at Jason, looking just as stunned as he had earlier.

That was quite the adrenaline rush, she feels like she needs a moment to process it.

"Only usually," she answers, delicately touching her feet to the ground as if she needs to verify it's really there before she lets go of him. She takes her arms off his and stands, straightening herself out and moving away to get her shoes.

"Thank you."

There's a snicker and a patter of applause in the crowd of Escorts, Staffers and Mentors, and someone - the exact identity will be lost to the annals of time, but Jason suspects it's the District Eleven Stylist - shouts "nice catch!". The joke is, apparently, that they all honestly thought he'd let her fall.

"You're welcome." He suspects that, unlike him, her surprise is more at who's catching her than the fact that she's been caught at all. There's a little bit of that old Compson chivalry in the way he sets her down, the kind that always suited his brother more than him, as if he's too gentlemanly to touch her any more than necessary but certain that until her feet are both solidly on the ground she'll tip over. It means his hands linger a second too long on her arms to make sure she's steady.

"Hope you didn't get hurt, because we've got about thirty more of these trust falls to sit through before lunch."

"I'm fine," she says, smiling at him, and rises up a few inches as she steps into her shoes. She only moves back to him, partially for lack of anywhere else to go.

Up close and still, she looks a little frail. Her makeup is as flawless as ever, but it can't hide the exhaustion etched around her eyes from where she hasn't slept properly since before the Crowning, the way her skin is a little dull from lack of food, the way her whole body seems to be coiled tight with tension.

But Swann hides anything that that could be bad, and so she deflects, expression as serene as if she'd gently woken from a nap instead of... fallen many feet through the air.

"It's not so bad. There are going to be a lot of interesting activities this weekend! Did you read the itinerary?"

"You sure about that? You look a little piqued." And he's surprised by that; it's the same sort of exhaustion he's accustomed to seeing in his mother year-round, or in himself in the days following his terrible headaches. It's not something he's ever expected to see in Swann, who always seems to have had the health and energy of ten women. He looks at her serene expression with a skeptical one of his own, leaning over her a bit as if intentionally looking for the lie so he can expose her fraudulence.

"I did." He needn't elaborate on his feelings for that. It's clear enough in his tone that the only thing he's looking forward to is after the farewells. "

"No no, I'm all right." And it's a lie, but she beams through it, her lips rose colored and stretched a little tightly as she straightens her tiny hat. "Just a little stressful, you know? New job and Tributes to take care off and having to stay clued into all of them. I've only had one come back so far, so I still have seven out there, I hope they're doing okay while I'm here, I'm really worried they might need something, and there's no one to watch them and make sure..."

Swann is letting her high-strung nature and utter lack of recent self-care get the best of her, and she catches herself before she can ramble too much, although she's wringing her hands uncontrollably, staring into the distance near Jason's shoulder. She snaps back to reality, all smiles again, and touches his forearm lightly.

"But it's fine. I think the lego building exercise sounds fun! Don't you?"

"Easy there, Swann. You don't need to give me an alibi." He makes a 'simmer down' gesture with his hand. Granted, it's all the same as the concerns running through his head, although with Swann it's about her Tributes' well-being and with Jason it's more about their chances at winning.

"I think it sounds like a nightmare. Maybe I'll be blessed with a headache and get to sit it out."

And just to annoy her, out of a sense of camaraderie more than anything, out of a desire to stay the focus of her attention instead of letting her stare off and hold him like a damn grounding rod, with the slightest smirk, he reaches over and pushes her hat, tipping it to an odd angle on her head.

Edited 2015-02-09 20:28 (UTC)

"Jason!"

It's somewhere between a squeal and a whine, as the hat is pinned to her head and he messes up her hair as he pushes it to the side. She pouts as she reaches up to try and salvage it, only to wind up removing it completely and letting her hair down, bottom lip pushed out.

"It won't be a nightmare, you just never look at the bright side of things."

"It looked better that way. Now it just looks like a mess." He shrugs, but there's a hint of amusement there around his eyes. He pulls out his glasses and holds them to the sunlight so the lenses will darken before putting them on.

"I'm just being realistic. You think all these egos clashing are going to be able to agree long enough to build anything more complicated than a block? Someone's going to hoard all the legos to themselves and we're going to be replacing the columns with tubes of Oceana's makeup before the hour's over."

"You messed it up!"

She's still pouting as she watches him hold up his glasses -- her own vision was corrected by lasers many, many years ago, so long ago that she can't even remember what it was like to not have perfect eyesight. Glasses were never a part of the equation.

"Well, maybe we can build a town," she thinks out loud. "Everyone can have their own building and that way we also still work together while making a single thing. Oh, you can help me build the town hall, Jason!"

He doesn't help her build the town hall. The lego building is just about the disaster he predicts, and it somehow ends with him getting a cut on his forehead from someone throwing their construction at him as if they were all in kindergarten. Throughout the karaoke, Jason stays sober, annoyed, and festooned with a small bandage over one temple, one with a little gold sticker that the coordinators here gave him that says 'go get 'em tiger'.

By the time they're allowed to leave and go back to their bedrooms, it's well past midnight and Jason's exhausted. He falls asleep with his shoes on, curled slightly around a downy pillow, having forgotten to brush his teeth and with his vaporizer not only hanging from his mouth but still on. Were it a real cigarette, it would be a fire hazard, but instead it just runs out its cap and stays warm against his cheek.

He wakes up suddenly when he hears a timid knock at his door. For an instant he assumes it's time for the godawful journal hour or whatever's planned, but no, his phone alarm has another three hours to go. He groans and takes a drag of plain heated air from his vaporizer before shutting it off and setting it on the nightstand with his glasses.

He cracks open the door, expecting an Avox with a message or someone looking for the wrong room to canoodle with another staffer.

"Swann? The hell are you doing up?"

Swann, to her credit, had tried really hard to unite several people in building something, before everyone lost their minds and she just collected a bunch of pink legos and went to sit in a corner where she made a small, pink lego cat to calm herself down.

At karaoke, the bartender had offered her something called a "Kiss of Light" with a wink, and she giggled and drank it while she watched the terribly embarrassing show by her colleagues. A second one came her way without her asking for it, and she drank that too, but she felt light-headed and warm and loose, and everything seemed to be swaying just a little bit.

Somewhere in the back of her mind, she remembered that she hadn't eaten anything since Friday evening, when she managed a few bites of pasta salad.

She went to her room and struggled through cleaning her face and brushing her teeth and changing into her pajamas, but then all she could think about was the fact that she needed to send Jack more water, and that Firo probably had Sponsor donations rotting in his account, and she laid in bed for a moment, tearing up, staring at the ceiling.

So she went to find the only person she thought might sit with her (and who would also be alone, since she was pretty sure Jolie was not).

"Um," she says, squinting at him, her vision a little wobbly still, her stomach churning as it rebels against only containing alcohol. "Can I... I want to come in."

He considers closing the door on her and going back to sleep. He's only had a handful of hours over the last week, between work and this nightmarish retreat, and the three more he could get now and breakfast. There are rings under his eyes and the faint lines at the corner of his mouth are deeper today than they were yesterday.

He realizes that he's never seen Swann without her makeup as an adult. She looks more like the spry little ten year-old he knew before the scandal, the year before she discovered makeup and starting dressing herself up like a clown with huge false lashes and swatches of navy eyeshadow. She seems even more childlike in her bare feet, a head shorter than him.

"People are going to talk about you, coming to men in the middle of the night like this." And talk about him, too, if they realize this is his room. He opens the door and takes her by the wrist, pulling her inside, grateful there's no one in the hallway to see them. He all but drags her over to the bed and sits her down on it, not trusting her not to tip over. He recognizes the queasy look on her face, the roving eyes that can't seem to hold the world still. It doesn't dredge up anything pleasant, just memories of his father in his nightshirt and the slap of the sideboard door and the front door being left unlocked.

"Jesus, Swann. How much have you had tonight?"

Without her makeup, Swann is very obviously just as sleep-deprived, if not more, and all the dewiness of her skin that makes her seem brighter and more awake is gone, because it's been coming from a bottle recently, hiding the patches over her cheekbones that seem flaky and dull.

She looks like a real person, instead of a doll.

Jason pulls her and she nearly falls just on the trip to the bed, the whole room spinning around her as they move so quickly. She leans against the footboard, eyes closing just so that she can stop feeling dizzy.

"Only two," she whines, wanting to protest his tone. "And they were little drinks, like... like little."

"That's what everyone says." He takes a seat next to her, rubbing at his temples with his fingers and thumb for a moment until a jolt of soreness where the bandage is bids him to stop. He thinks back on the day before, the minimal meals they've had while rushed from activity to activity.

In the dim light - nothing but the hallway light creeping under the door and stars that they can't see from the Capitol city and a full moon - he can see Swann wince and close her eyes, swallow. The blonde hair looks white in this lighting, making her seem old and frail in spite of the youthfulness of her features. It highlights her cheekbones and collarbones.

He wonders why, dizzy and vulnerable, she decided on him to take care of her. Nothing about him exactly screams nurturing, and he always imagines women would seek the help of men with more of a reputation for being moral. Not for having a temper.

"Do you need help to the bathroom? I don't want you sick on my bed."

"It's true," she mumbles, looking miserable for once in her life, as his weight sinking on the mattress makes her lean the other way, toward him, aimlessly, although she's sort of falling backward as well. "Little ones, they were orangey."

She makes a small noise and nods, opening her eyes to look at him with big dark eyes. "I don't feel good, Jason."

"I wouldn't know what they are." It's all the same to him. It's all this poison that makes him sick without even putting it to his lips, for reasons he can't actually put a name to.

He reaches over to help her up, then, seeing the look on her face, decides he doesn't want to risk wasting time and actually lifts her. He carries her, letting her head rest against his shoulder, wincing a bit at the strain her meager weight puts on his back.

Swann groans and sighs when he picks her up and carries her, cheek settling on his shoulder, her eye closing again. He's warm through his clothes and it makes her feel a little overheated, when added to how she's already flushed and hot from all the alcohol in her system.

It takes all her strength to not retch on his back -- she forces it to stay in her throat until they're in the bathroom.

He feels her body tighten and he decides, rather unsympathetically, that he's in no mood to let her ruin the work shirt he fell asleep in. He sets her down in front of the sink, making sure her feet are on the ground before he grabs her hair and pulls it away from her face.

So much for getting her all the way to the toilet. He gathers up that mane of blonde hair into a fist and rests his hand between her shoulderblades.

Really, it doesn't matter that she's in front of the sink -- what she immediately starts vomiting up is entirely liquid. It is, at first, orange-tinted, exactly as she said, but then it runs clear as her stomach empties and there's nothing left to come up except pure acid that burns her throat and makes her eyes water until tears run down her cheeks just from the overflow.

When it's over, she leans her cheek on the cool porcelain of the sink, the weight of his hand pleasant on her back that way.

Her face is like a damn cherry tomato and the tears dribbling down hang from her chin. He keeps his hand there until the heaving stops, then he rubs her shoulder, just a little bit, letting her waist rest in the crook of his arm so she doesn't slide down to her knees and fall to the floor.

He remembers one of the servants doing this for his father a few times. Normally his father was contained in his inebriation, but after Quentin offed himself things went downhill quickly. Jason mostly would walk past the bathroom and keep walking, pretending he hadn't seen or heard anything, and Caroline would stay firmly in her bed, refusing to deign to affection when her husband had brought it on himself.

He runs the sink, first to wash away the vomit and then switching to warmer water she can rinse her mouth out with.

"You got it all out of your system?"

She catches her breath while he runs the sink, just letting him rub her shoulder and support her, and by the time the water cleans the sink, she's reaching out to catch it in her hands and drink like she's been in the desert for a week.

"Uh-huh," she says, still filling her hands and pouring the water into her mouth, cooling her throat. It still hurts when she swallows, but she eventually stops, resting against his arm again, head leaning back to his shoulder now that she's got it all out and the world isn't spinning anywhere near as much.

She's warm enough that if he didn't know how much alcohol was in her system, he'd think she was running a fever. Holding her up with one arm, he uses the other to fill a glass and set it on the counter. He'll come back for it in a minute.

"Do you need me to carry you back, too?" He sighs, ready to pick her up if she's too weak to walk.

Swann knows he doesn't really want to carry her, but her knees feel wobbly, and she's sure she'd be on the floor if he wasn't behind her. She kind of wants to sink to the floor anyway, where she's sure it's nice and cool.

"Not if you don't want to."

"Doesn't make much of a difference to me." He doesn't really have the patience to walk her slowly, like a little old grandma across the room. He bends over and, with an arm to her knees, lifts her up again.

He pauses by the footboard of his bed, caught in a decision. He can't very well set her on the floor. His mother didn't raise him that way. There's selfishness and then there's being low-class. Finally, he sets her down on the bed, rolling her on her side and against the wall so that she'll stay there. He doesn't leave her with much of a pillow, but he does bunch up a blanket to keep her neck crooked at a comfortable angle.

He goes to the restroom, uses the toilet, washes his hands and the last splatters of vomit from the counter, and returns with a glass of water. The alarm clock next to the bed shines some unholy number in red at him. He sets the water on the nightstand and climbs into the bed, taking care not to touch Swann any more than necessary, placing a pillow between their backs.

"You feel sick, you wake me up immediately." He doesn't know if she's still awake, but he hopes that either she's expelled everything or that she hears him.

Staffer's Retreat

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/timeskip after your tag?

yep

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