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

"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.

There is an immediate, visible relaxation when he sets her on the bed, like she might actually melt into a puddle at any moment. She doesn't care about a pillow versus a blanket, and just slides her arm under the blanket to support her head, her breathing slowing down already.

By the time he comes back, she is very nearly asleep, and just mumbles something incoherent at him, probably an agreement to not throw up in bed. The pillow on her back only relaxes her more, and she falls into a hard sleep for the first time since she got this job, a sleep that feels more like death than anything.

She is definitely not dead, though. It only takes her about twenty minutes to roll in her sleep and stretch out, flinging one arm over the pillow and then Jason, all her hair tangling around her face and neck from turning.

The loud snoring will come later.

Out of stubbornness more than anything, Jason refuses to relinquish the bed. He flings her arm back at her (not hard enough to wake her, it seems) and all but digs into the bed, nestling his face into the blanket and dimly thinking of how he hopes she stays on her side.

Not for lack of wealth, but perhaps out of some misguided attempt to bond the children, his parents had their kids sleep in the same beds together throughout most of their childhood. It was only after Jason reached puberty that he and Quentin stopped sleeping back-to-back, tucked under separate blankets, in the same room as Caddy and Benjy strangely spooned. Oddly, Swann's weight in the bed relaxes Jason a little, and he exhales deeper than he has for the last few weeks. For a few hours, they sleep, both of them snoring, him gently and hers almost vengefully loud.

Still, it seems like no time at all has passed when Jason's phone goes off with the plain, pre-set alarm. He groans and rummages across the nightstand to turn it off. The dawn is just barely lighting the sky up with its fleeting lavender.

By the time the alarm goes off, Swann most likely has managed to throw her limbs over him again, in a way that indicates just how unused to sharing a bed she is. It has been nearly three years since anyone dared to get close enough to her tainted name to actually sleep in the same bed, and her arm and leg seem determined to sprawl, regardless of what's in the way.

The alarm makes her stir, though, rolling back to the wall and curling into a ball before covering her head with the blanket and returning to sleep. It's not late enough to be awake, the noise must have been a mistake, and it's gone now anyway.

For a split second, he thinks the arm wrapped around his waist is Lorraine. When, a moment later, reality sinks in, he tells himself it's because of the strange chalet that doesn't feel like his bedroom and the fact that he so rarely sleeps next to someone. He picks her arm off of him and slides his legs out from under hers, standing and feeling the exhaustion and the kinks of sharing a bed settle into his spine.

He pulls the blanket off her head.

"Up, Swann. It's mandatory." He sounds about as pleased about it as she looks. For the two-odd hours of sleep, the rings under his eyes are darker. He slips on his glasses and they only seem to magnify it. "You want food, you're going to have to get up and come to the table, hangover or not."

He doesn't turn on the light. The rising sun is enough, making the entire room feel like the inside of a clamshell or a thunderhead. He dips his fingertips into the unused glass and spritzes some lukewarm water on his face, getting droplets on his lenses.

"'m not hungry," she whines, curling into a tighter ball and then burrowing her upper body under the blanket that had served as her pillow, until everything from her ribcage up is covered again. Without Jason's weight on the bed too, the mattress lacks the heavy feeling that had made it so comfortable all night, and the cold has doubled since he took the blanket away too.

"No one can make us eat, come back." She's mumbling, wanting only to extend how everything had been for another hour or two. Wanting to go back to the place where she could sleep, even if she had to be sick and share a bed with someone who didn't want her there anyway.

But it was sleep, and not dropping from exhaustion halfway through writing a thank you note to a Sponsor. Jason won't be willing to let her sleep curled in the corner of his bed if he's not here, and so he has to come back and sleep with her.

"You don't have anything in your stomach, I know that for a fact." He prods her shoulder. "Get up, Swann. I don't want to have to drag you out of the bed, and don't think I won't."

He has to admit that he wants to lay down beside her, let her body heat keep the bed warm rather than face the cool morning air. They could rest a little longer - who would miss them? Is anyone really going to come looking for him if he doesn't show up for powdered eggs and concentrated orange juice?

He sits down on the bed next to her. He looks at the number dripping by in red digital readout on the alarm clock.

And he lays back down. "One more hour," he murmurs. No one will miss them.

He's asleep again before he even has a chance to pull the blanket up - or set the alarm.

(no subject)

cigne - 2015-02-10 05:01 (UTC) - Expand

(no subject)

whatisay - 2015-02-10 05:29 (UTC) - Expand

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Staffer's Retreat

no subject

no subject

/timeskip after your tag?

yep

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

(no subject)

(no subject)