thecapitol | Came Upon Me Like a Hypnic Jerk When I Was Just About Settled [Closed]

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Came Upon Me Like a Hypnic Jerk When I Was Just About Settled [Closed]

WHO| Jason Compson and Swann Honeymead
WHAT| Jason sort-of apologizes for implying Swann's a whore.
WHERE| Tribute Center, Escort's parking spaces
WHEN| After their IC inbox fight.
WARNINGS| Just JC4 being JC4.

He gets the sugar cookies that are baked into circles and stars, not hearts. It's not that he doesn't think Swann would appreciate hearts - in fact, he thinks they'll fold themselves into her chosen fashion quite nicely - but he doesn't want to give the wrong impression. This whole damn situation seems to be a parade of wrong impressions and he needn't add to them.

The selection of cookies that aren't shaped like hearts are, given the time of year, limited, but they still have sprinkles and pink icing and he figures that's good enough. He gets them wrapped in pink-tinted plastic with a bow on top, not because he orders them that way but because that's how this shop likes to dispense them.

The bakery isn't far from the Tribute Center, but the walk back still feel as if it takes too long, because time to himself is limited these last few weeks. With one more Tribute down and a fresh one put straight into the Arena, Jason's overtime has scarcely let up. The dark circles under his eyes haven't disappeared in days and the product in his hair is at least as old as yesterday morning. Until he can get a full night's sleep he's trying to avoid any in-person interaction with Sponsors so they don't see that he looks harried, but he still has to be around to babysit his Tributes, and so he's slept on the couch in the District Seven Suite nearly as many nights as he's gone home. The migraine hasn't come yet, but he can feel it brewing like a storm, ready to unleash its torrential paroxysms any day now.

He's still angry, naturally, but that's the thing with women, you can't win a cold feud with them. Every time his phone rings - and it's often, given the nature of his job - he feels a fresh surge of impotent anger, wondering again what part of Swann Honeymead's business it is how he and his mother conduct their affairs. Wondering, again, why it is that Swann expects an apology when he's done nothing but explain how it is in the Compson household, only to have her accuse him of immaturity and other things that, accurate or not, are not her place to be treading.

But the truth is his allies in the Tribute Center, and in the world in general, are scarce on the ground, and what's worse, those stupid text messages have probably been his favorite part of the last few weeks. He misses his companion, flickering about the edges of his day like a candle or a bauble catching the light. It's almost mercenary to want to repair things between them just to have back the good. He's stubborn, but he also has a mind for business.

He parked next to her this morning, although he can't remember if it was out of serendipity or intentionally, since that was hours ago and exhaustion has made the days bleed together. He knows she'll be leaving soon enough this evening, and so he sets the stack of cookies on the front of her car and leans against his own, smoking his vaporizer.

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Normally, Swann is the one to show up with gifts. She's always the one who apologizes, tries to make up for it, begs for forgiveness. And ordinarily, she'd have been inclined to do it with Jason (gourmet coffee, a new silk tie, a vase of flowers he could give to his mother and make her happy), but honestly, she can't recall the last time she'd been so deeply hurt.

And Swann is someone who is pretty easily hurt, so that's saying something.

But she's spent night after night crying, occasionally unable to quell tears that spring up just when her phone buzzes. The little sleep she gets at night is restless and interrupted with stress dreams, and she goes so long without sleep that her Avox, an older woman who's been with the Honeymeads since before Swann's birth, insistently pushes herbal tea and then finally sleeping pills with worried eyes and the occasional note begging for Miss Honeymead to sleep.

It doesn't really work, but she has to keep going to Tribute Center every morning, the last place she really wants to be.

She fights the urge, refuses to bring in presents or go downstairs to heal the rift, specifically avoids any area that Jason might be. She stays cooped up in the District 8 Suites, alone except for Jolie, who stays in her workroom, and Joel, who refuses to speak to Swann anyway. But it's better than running into Jason one floor down, and so she stays in her space, lonely and unhappy.

She'd arrived earlier than nearly everyone else this morning, mostly because she can tick down in her mind exactly who needs food and water supplies and at what times. Jack needs food and Charles needs water and she wants to send Firo another blanket, so she has the orders in by seven AM, ensuring that they're the first sent out of the day. By the time she leaves, she's almost a zombie, heels clicking through the parking garage as she stares at her phone, reading a last-minute email from a Sponsor who wants something -- her brain won't really register the words, even as she rereads them over and over again.

When she looks up, Jason's presence startles her and she nearly falls, almost dropping the tote that carries several heavy binders of information. Her heart pounds and she gasps for air, closing her eye for a moment.

"For Snow's sake, Jason."

There's a sort of ugly satisfaction in seeing that she's as exhausted as he is, but it doesn't occur to him that this is something beyond the rote stress of her work that's left such an impression on her. He doesn't realize that he's done this to her, that the puffiness to her eyes and the little lines at the corner of her mouth are his handiwork more than the job's.

"What? Aren't I allowed to have a cigarette outside my own car?"

The prickliness isn't feigned; for a good moment he considers that this has all been a mistake and that he should just get into his vehicle and gun it, later denying all knowledge of the sprinkly cookies on her hood. But he doesn't, and it's possibly because he's just too tired to make the effort of a getaway. Jason has no great reputation for tenacity.

"Jesus, Swann. When's the last time you ate?"

He exhales scented steam from his nose, waiting for her to see the gift he's left upon her car.

"But you're just lurking around --"

Swann cuts herself off with a sigh, like she knows it's futile to try and explain why he scared her, and that she can't vocalize the real reasons it was so startling anyway. She brushes her hair out of her face and moves forward, setting her bag on the hood of her car to rummage through it for her keys.

"I'm fine," she lies, having not eaten anything more substantial than the occasional yogurt in a week, then picks up the cookies, turning the bag over in her hand a few times as she fishes out a key ring that's surprisingly devoid of cutesy keychains -- only one designer key fob in pink leather hanging off a ring of keys that seems like too many for someone as small as she is. Car key, house key, staff keys for restricted Tower doors, keys to the Honeymead mansion, more keys that she uses so rarely, she herself barely knows what they go to.

One might be for the shoe closet, she thinks

"What is this?"

"Cookies, I'm guessing. Why, did they sell me cardboard instead?"

If he was expecting instant forgiveness, he's disappointed. He taps off his cigarette and tucks it into the new suit Jolie's made for him, one that's nice enough that it makes him feel even shabbier on other days. Looking sharp one day seems to cast the rest of the days in shadow.

Still, he tries to lean forward, tries to make out her face in the cruel lighting of the parking garage, tries to glean some meaning out of it.

She just looks at the cookies for another long moment, and she feels herself welling up with tears. Of what, she's not entirely sure -- is it still hurt? Relief? Or just frustration? Maybe it's just the lack of sleep on top of everything else.

"I mean why?" She looks up at him, eyes only slightly damp, her expression tired and wary, like she doesn't quite know whether or not this is something she can trust. Maybe he wants to poison her. It's always sort of hard to tell with Jason.

The garage makes all the lines of her face harder, more severe and set-in, the long shadows of her lashes making her cheeks dark.

He very nearly snaps at her that if she's going to make him explain doing a nice thing, maybe he just shouldn't do it at all, but he knows that'll be entirely counterproductive and so he just swallows.

"Because I thought you might like them."

He gestures a knuckle at them. "And the sprinkles, the colors, they reminded me of a dress you wore a few weeks back."

It's like déjà vu of when he asked her to dance at the Crowning, only this time, she's so tired that she just nods and starts crying, sniffling and wiping at her face. The tears are more the culmination of a lot of things, versus him scaring or intimidating or upsetting her, and she sort of feels like she could collapse on the ground right now in exhaustion.

"Thank you." It's barely a whisper, and she tucks the cookies into her bag, wiping again at the side of her nose before she looks back at him, smiling weakly. "Sorry I'm crying. I'm just... really tired right now. That's all."

He reacts with the same sort of petrification that he did the first time she went all weeping willow on him, a mixture of confusion and annoyance and haplessness. "If I knew they'd be making you cry I might have rethought the matter..."

He isn't sure about the gesture he makes next, hopes that the fact that he scared her or the fact that they're in a lot doesn't add a sinister edge to his next motion. He reaches forward and takes her shoulder, then embraces her in a light, stiff hug.

"No, it's not you!" she insists through her tears, halfway laughing at his expression. She can't help it, she's just so tired and had been so broken up over all of this and now here he is with cookies and it's the last thing she ever expected.

Jason doesn't really scare Swann, at least not physically, and so she only sniffles a little against his shoulder before she hugs him back. She gives significantly better hugs than he does, so she's not stiff at all. Her face is almost exactly level with his collar, and he smells like all the odd herbal vapors he smokes, layered over and over so deeply that she's sure he's been in this shirt since at least yesterday.

Their reconciliation remains mostly unspoken. Later, Jason will tell himself that he hugged her because she was crying, not because he missed her. He'll tell himself that her squeeze was cloying and that he didn't want to linger in the scent of her hair, smelling the cupcake shampoo she still found time to use.

"You'll be able to get home safe, won't you? You're not about to fall asleep at the wheel?" Outright asking her if she needs a ride home seems beyond his capability, by the lets that concern hang there in the air, open-ended, tentative. He finds he wants her to accept even though it's already well last suppertime and her silly animal will get pink hairs all over his car seats, the car he protects fiercely because it's the only piece of earth he has that's truly his and it isn't even nailed down. It's his haven, his illusory freedom and independence, even though the light glinting off the other cars on the street gives him auras and the fastidiously-preserved new car smell hurts his head.

Swann is hesitant to let him go, like maybe human contact is actually grounding her in some way. She took this job to be around people and now she is alone all the time, because Jolie is busy and Joel is hateful, and that really only left the Avoxes, didn't it?

"Will you come to dinner?" she asks, not saying that she maybe could use a ride, that having the weight lifted made her almost woozy. "Eta keeps making too much, I know she would like it if she could stop collecting leftovers."

He wasn't expecting her to not only take him up on his offer, but add on to it, so he pauses for a moment to consider, face inscrutable.

He imagines his mother, sitting with Ben and his servant and the Avoxes around a dinner table, setting a plate aside for him, imagines the whimpering and guilting he'll get, imagines her making herself ill with fretting, and he viciously revels in it. The hell with her; Swann's right. He's in his thirties, and he shouldn't be beholden to nagging.

And he's curious to see her home, to see if architecture can contain the same flickering spirit Swann's body does. If it's all decoration or something inside that.

"If that's what you want, then I'd be much obliged." He opens his car door for her - it's unlocked by a button-fob on his own, equally-nightmarish keyring. "You may want to move the seat up. Last person who sat in it was Ben."

And Benjy's got a good foot and then some over Swann. Jason wouldn't have even had him in the car if it weren't for a doctor's appointment.

Edited 2015-02-12 23:02 (UTC)

She waits for his answer, somewhere between jittery and actually passing out on the hood of the car from fatigue, but immediately perks up when he speaks, her smile widening.

"You'll like it, Eta is a really good cook."

It's a promise she can stand behind, at least, having known her Avox for her whole life, a sweet woman Avoxed at a time when whole families were taken as punishment for one person's treason, many years before Swann or Jason or practically anyone they knew was ever born.

She only has one Avox because she only needs one, Eta, the paragon of everything a servant should ever be.

In the car, Swann sets her tote and Marcel's carrier at her feet before reaching to adjust the seat, which takes her a moment because her arms are too short to easily reach the buttons. But by the time Jason sits in the driver's seat, she's fully adjusted and waiting for him.

The car is one of those lavishly expensive ones, one from a time when the Compsons held a higher station, and the fact that nearly two decades later it seems new speaks to the care Jason takes with it. It's got all the frippery, the heated seats, fancy radio, readouts of exactly how much electricity it'll take to get to any given place.

"You comfortable? You can sleep on the way there, I know the way to our neighborhood."

The Compsons may be broke but they've stubbornly refused to move, and that means they're in the same gated community as most of the other old money families, not that they see much of each other now that Caroline doesn't host or get invited places and the acres of land between the Compsons and everyone else have been sold off and converted into a golf course.

For the first time in a long time, Jason's looking forward to dinner as something besides a way to curb physical hunger.

Edited 2015-02-13 00:55 (UTC)

"Oh, I don't live with Dad, I only go home once every couple of weeks," she tells him, sure that he's seen her car at her father's house, usually for days on end, as she's very attached to her father. "I live at the Clarus, you know the building with the gold pillars lining the front? It's not very far from the neighborhood though, only a mile or so. It's closer to here, anyway."

The truth was that she'd bought in when the television money was still flowing, when she felt independent and important and wanted away from her father's dark, traditional taste in interior design.

"I'd invite you to his house, I know that's easier, but I think he's in negotiations until next week. He usually doesn't get home until the middle of the night during those."

That's about as far into her thought process as she gets before the gentle vibration and the heat of the seat make her drift off against the window. Near narcoleptic tendencies are common for her, nowadays.

Edited 2015-02-13 01:17 (UTC)

"That's well enough. I know where the Clarus is." He puts on his glasses.

They drive in silence; even if Jason were the type to listen to the radio when he's traveling, he wouldn't want to wake Swann, who seems perfectly at rest. She isn't elegant when she sleeps, and he appreciates that, because he thinks he'd feel lied to if she didn't snuffle a little or have her mouth hang open like a doorknocker. People are untrustworthy, women more than that, and a woman who has mastered that sheen of effortlessness most of all; flaws are, if not charming, disarming.

Jason's accustomed himself to driving as smoothly as possible for when he has to travel with his headaches, and as such his slick braking and gentle turns don't do anything to wake her. Eventually, they pull up to an ostentatious building with gold pillars and flowers.

"Swann." His voice isn't the gentle murmur of a lover, but the authoritative pronouncement of someone trying to get someone's attention in a board room, perhaps. "This is the place, isn't it?"

"Uh?"

She wakes up easily and takes a second to get her bearings, blinking. "Oh, there, the garage. Space twenty-seven is mine, hold on."

Fumbling with her keys, she presses one of the black fobs, a simple one with only one button, and the garage gate opens smoothly to let the car in. Swann gathers up all her things on the way to the parking spot (marked S. HONEYMEAD on the back wall, big enough to practically be a garage itself), and gets out when he stops, peering into her dog's carrier before heading for the elevator that's already opening for them, triggered by a motion sensor.

It takes them directly into her condo, where Swann perks up more, handing the waiting Eta her bags and coat before grabbing at Jason's sleeve and pulling him behind her, barely giving him time to shed his own coat and jacket.

"Come on, the food is already out!"

Marcel, soon freed from his carrier, sniffs at Jason's feet before trotting primly off to the kitchen for his own dinner.

It amazes him how quickly she goes from uncoordinated and unconscious to full of energy again. He imagines she has a light switch inside her head that she can turn on and off, the same way he imagines he has an alter ego he slips into when he's dealing with Sponsors he has to be obsequious to.

Swann's home is simultaneously exactly what he imagined and so much more. He thinks it's what it would be like to live inside a wedding cake. Everything is white or pink and lacy, dripping in pearls or made of porcelain. He's surprised it doesn't glitter.

He's a little surprised, too, to see that Eta is an Avox - since Swann was using her first name, he just presumed she was one of the paid underclass. His Avoxes are all interchangeable; he has their names on file but he and everyone he knows makes it a point to never use them.

He follows her obediently, taking in the sights and scents of her abode, and he realizes it's been years since he was in someone else's home for anything but a big party like Oceana's. Sometimes he forgets they aren't all like his.

It's probably not healthy, given her current state and how little she's been eating. But part of it is years of being in front of a camera -- no one at home cared if you were tired or sick or upset. You just had to smile and throw out as much energy as you can.

Swann only treats Eta specially, and only because of her history with the family; besides the nannies, Eta practically raised Swann, fed her and clothed her and rocked her when she cried at night, had remained ever loyal to the Honeymeads since Ilar was just a young man. The Avoxes at the Tower might as well be anonymous, receiving only the basic niceness that Swann shows to everyone (she can't imagine being mean to the Avoxes for no reason).

The table has six chairs and might as well be set for six people, given the amount of beautiful, freshly cooked food atop the table. Only the fact that there's a single glass out indicates that this was just for Swann, and she quickly grabs a second glass from the sideboard and sets it at the place across from her own.

Letting go of Jason's arm, she slips out of her shoes, leaving them near the door, and then heads for the table. "Let's see, that's minestrone, and... oh, roast chicken in here. I think that's a beet salad over there, and there's some potatoes, she always pan-fries them because she knows I'll eat them. Bread in that basket, aaaaaand..."

She glances over her shoulder, to where a truly beautiful cake, topped with nuts, sits on exactly the kind of fancy cake stand one would expect, given this decor.

"There it is. Eta's winter cake."

"Your Avox's- Eta's work here makes me wonder what I'm paying our servants for." It feels wrong to give a name to an Avox, but Jason tries to rationalize it by Eta's age, thinking she must have been from that time when she might have just been related to a traitor rather than being one herself. God knows he can relate to being screwed over from a relative's follies.

By habit he moves to serve the meal, the way he always does at home, but Swann's already at it, and so he helps himself to a little of everything, making sure not to take the lion's share because this is Swann's home and not his.

It's his first sit-down meal in a long while that isn't across from a Sponsor he's trying to wine and dine, or next to Benjy drooling on the placemat and listening to his mother invent new maladies to justify her lethargy. Sometimes Jason imagines coming home to an empty manor and eating in the dining room alone, at peace.

This is better than eating alone. It reminds him of the last time he went out to dinner with Lorraine, listening to her gossip about all the other women she knew. It's not that Swann's like that, it's just- companionship.

"You got any rituals before we start eating?"

"She always liked to cook, even before I was born," Swann smiles, taking a surprisingly small amount of food given how much is on the table. Besides the fact that she's just too small to eat that much, the stress of everything has wreaked havoc on her stomach, making it hard for her to take in more than a few bites of anything. "How do you think Dad got so big and round? It was that cake."

Beaming at him from across the table, she cocks her head to the side, curious. "Like what? Do you do something? I will be so happy if you tell me you sing a special dinner song before you eat."

"And somehow you ended up the size you are. I'm sure there's people out there who would love to know your secret." Then again, looking at her plate and how it's about a third of his, it's not much of a secret.

"Nothing so enjoyable. Mother just tried to instate a moment of silence after Quentin died that lasted a few years. I just wondered if you ever did something similar." He's aware that it's not the best conversation for the dinner table, especially when she's trying to be frivolous, and so he tries to redirect it by taking a spoonful of the soup. "I may need to get a hold of Eta's recipe for this."

"I usually eat a lot more than this!" she insists, taking a bite of a potato. "I just can't eat that much when there's a lot going on, my stomach gets all tied up in knots. It was always really bad during sweeps, once they put me on an IV. That was toward the end of my show."

She doesn't seem upset to talk about her downfall; she says it more like it's simply a part of her life that's done now. Similarly, she doesn't notice that he's talking about his dead brother, other than to nod like perhaps she understands at least the sentiment behind Mrs. Compson's idea.

"I'll get it for you, before you leave. I don't know, I usually eat alone, ever since I can remember. Dad would work late and Viatrix would be off somewhere, so my nanny or Eta would feed me, and then when I grew up, usually my exes would only come to dinner a few nights a week, or they wouldn't get home until after dinner."

Swann smiles at him. "It's nice, to have someone here."

"I'm sure if you said that some of our Tributes, they'd complain about how there are children starving in District Twelve." He gestures at her plate with his spoon. "So eat up. Do it for the children."

Those Capitol-child table manners are still there; Jason uses all the right spoons and aside from his usual the-hell-with-it posture, is the picture of a gentleman.

"Ever since I became head of the household I like having everyone eat at the same time. It's more efficient, for one, and it keeps Mother pleased." And it used to be a bit of a power-play, too; Jason knew Miss Quentin hated it, and so he insisted. Now it's just habit.

"I still think it's strange you don't have beaus coming by." Your name isn't that tarnished, you're not a Compson or anything.

Swann snorts and takes a bite of chicken, although she knows that she'll be okay eating the amount she's served herself, that it won't make her sick in the middle of the night if she wakes up in a cold sweat again.

They almost mirror each other with their ingrained manners, except Swann sits up completely straight -- if she slouches, she's likely to wind up halfway under the table anyway.

"Oh, but I think that's sort of nice, family dinners. We did it at holidays, and sometimes when his work wasn't too busy, my father would get home in time to eat with me. We go out more, for lunch and stuff, now that he's slowed down some at the office."

She shrugs as she spears salad on her fork. "I guess I never really went out looking for any, after the last one. For a while, I wasn't really in the right place for it anyway, and then it just... didn't seem so important, to find a man. I figure they're always out there if I want one."

"It is nice." Or it would be, if his family were anything close to normal. "The doctors say it's good for Ben, although I can't say I've seen any improvement. He might have added a few extra grunts into his vocabulary."

As long as it isn't bellowing or crying, it's somewhat tolerable. He finishes off the soup and goes to the potatoes and chicken, not outright complimenting them but clearly enjoying what he's eating.

"Can't say there are many options out there. People in the Capitol are disappointing, I find. I guess I always thought growing up that someday I'd be impressed by people, and I was just waiting to find out how, and then it never seemed to happen."

He shakes his head. He almost says she's the only person in the Capitol besides his mother to text him about something other than business. He figures she can guess that he doesn't have friends and never seems to crave them.

"I bet he really likes it, though, even if he can't say it. I'm sure it's helped him a lot. Maybe he'll be able to thank you one day."

She can only be optimistic. She knows that Jason can't seem to see it that way, but Ben (didn't they used to call him something else? A nickname, maybe Benny) was innocent of any real wrong-doing, wasn't he? Swann remembered him always being that way, remembered when Jason when young and pug-nosed and mean, and would tell her to go away and play with Ben who was always howling.

"I think people here can be very... image-focused," she says delicately, pausing to chew her salad and take a drink of water. "Like all that matters is who's the prettiest or most popular right now, and they're quick to drop each other. They forget you here, look right through you as if you've never met."

Swann's been through years of it. The last time she saw an ex, it was like she'd ceased to exist. Where there used to be posters and billboards of her face plastered across the city, they easily came down the moment she wasn't the girl to watch.

"It's hard, to keep people's interest."

"Maybe. It'll be overdue, I think, but like I say, he is flesh and blood." Even if he'd be better off among professionals. Jason sighs and takes a bite of chicken that, for all its juiciness, suddenly tastes ashy in his mouth.

In a way, it's a bond between them that the other Escorts can't understand. They've both seen how quickly the current will turn against them, how eager the people here are to eat their own. They've both been victims of the mistakes of others.

"I would that I couldn't." It's the opposite, for him. Even years out of the game, living quietly on the family land, he couldn't go into town without hearing the whispers without that societal judgment hovering above him like a vulture. And now there's too much interest in him - not in what he says, but in the raggediness of his suits, in the fact that he doesn't drink, in anything people can latch onto to gossip and have a scapegoat family to mock. The Compsons, there to make everyone else look better by comparison.

"Maybe they only look at you when they want to see something that makes them feel superior. They don't look at you anymore because you're harder for them to place under their feet."

Edited 2015-02-13 05:04 (UTC)

She sets her fork down, her food halfway done anyway, and chuckles wryly, looking off the side for a moment, at a crystal statue she once won at some awards show.

"Then why do we stay?" There's something vaguely rhetorical to her tone, like she knows that there wouldn't ever be a really satisfactory answer anyway. "There's no real reason either of us couldn't just leave the Capitol. My mother's always going on about the resorts in Four, I could go live on the beach. You could go and stay with your... your friend. It would probably be better than the way they look at us, right?"

Shaking her head, she stands and goes to get the cake.

"At least it's something to get through the hard times on."

"I can't leave. Someone's got to keep together what there is left."

His voice sounds flat and lifeless, but something about him - not about his face, but maybe in his eyes or the lean of his body - is radiating that yearning to believe her. That maybe there's an escape, that he could stop believing the lie his mother shoved down his throat since childhood, that he eagerly swallowed because it let him feel important.

"Besides, the Districts wreak havoc on my allergies," he says, trying to laugh at himself.

He finishes up his plate, having eaten more so much more than Swann did in as much time and yet having hardly dented the lavish display Eta had put out.

"Would you like me to serve you a piece? Promise I won't make it too big."

Swann's smile is sad, but it quickly brightens as she brings the cake and server, sets the cake stand down in a clearing on the table. She hands him the serving knife and sets out dessert plates -- she's the kind of girl whose china is all pristine and matching and everything gets replaced with a different set as soon as anything chips -- then sits back down, straightening out her skirts.

"Eta's cake is the best you'll ever eat. Promise."

"Maybe I'm going to hold you to that." He teases, and possibly for the first time Swann's seen it he's actually smiling as he does so. He waves the little serving knife at her.

It's not like when he smiles at parties, trying to butter up Sponsors or network with his coworkers. It's not cruel and knifelike, or conscious, like he's remembering how to do it by reciting the right muscles to use in his head. It's almost as if it's against his better judgment.

He passes her a plate with a medium-sized slice on it, larger than she would have served herself.

She feels like she could burst with happiness, like she's proven everyone wrong and that there is a good, happy man lurking under all that anger and sullenness and pouting, she just had to find out how to get to him.

"And what do you mean by that?" she jokes back, taking her plate and setting it on the table, savoring that first forkful that she knows is coming, all sweet potato spice cake and candied pecans and marshmallow frosting. "Are you going to hunt me down if you ever taste a better cake?"

Don't get too far ahead of yourself, Swann.

"I won't have to," he says, taking a seat again. "I'll just tell you I've tasted a better cake, but I'll never share the recipe. You'll spend the rest of your life not knowing and it'll drive you crazy."

He pauses dramatically and takes a bite of the cake, closing his eyes to savor it. He doesn't want to out and praise it, because that almost feels like losing some sort of wager, so he just hedges with "but it might take me a long time to find one."

It's kind of her thing.

She watches him take that first bite, knows exactly how good it is, then chews her own forkful with a milder expression of the bliss it always brings, the crunch of the pecans and the perfect sweetness of the brown sugar in the outer frosting.

"You can't have this recipe," she taunts, waving her fork at him. "You want more cake, you'll just have to come back."

"Is that an invitation?"

It's a question entirely devoid of slyness, almost charming in its honest surprise if it weren't also tempered by his usual skepticism. He takes another bite of cake, tempted to add on an are you sure you won't catch the Compson misfortune plague? to the question but then again, Swann's already had her fall from grace.

Her Swann dive, as it were.

"Of course."

She's still beaming, always smiling, although it cools some as she thinks through his reaction a little more, fork frozen in mid-air like she's forgotten there's cake a few inches from her face.

"I mean, if you want to. You don't have to, if you didn't have a good time."

He pauses, unsure if it's because he wants to make Swann wait for his answer or if he himself is uncertain. "I think I'd like that. You have a point about it being closer to work than my place."

As if that's the only reason he'd be coming here, convenience. Admitting anything more, especially out loud, seems beyond him for the moment.

"But I'm going to request this cake every time."

Swann laughs, covers her mouth at his afterthought.

"You're going to wind up like my father. And you haven't even had her butterscotch pie yet!"

Plus, Jason will probably need a break from cake anyway, because he's most likely getting nearly everything on the table wrapped up to take home. The Honeymeads don't let guests leave empty-handed.

"Better your father than mine. I'll look forward to the butterscotch pie."

He looks at the way she's picking at her cake, having barely made a dent in her slice.

"You're sure you're not going to eat any more than that?"

She eats the bite on her fork, and another, which basically finishes off the first tier of the slice. Head tilted to the side, she smiles at him indulgently.

"I'm okay, Jason. Really."

"If you say so. Maybe I'm more like my mother than I thought." He snuffs, almost laughing at himself, almost.

"Do you have coffee or anything? The drive home's still about a half hour."

"You say it like it's so terrible to actually care about someone's well-being."

Her smile is gentle, and she pushes some hair behind her ear, standing up (although she's really not much taller than she was sitting) and tidying up the table a little, stacking plates and glasses to make things easier for Eta.

"Oh, of course. Here, you go sit down in the living room, I'll make coffee while Eta cleans up in here. She'll make sure you have some cake to take home."

But seriously, pretty much this whole spread is leaving with Jason. Eat up, Compsons.

"I just don't see the good it does." He gets up, having finished a sizable portion of the cake.

"I can make it my..." But hey, she's offering, and so he lets that slide. He gets up, contentedly full and yet feeling wrung out as an old rag from the last few days at work, and ventures into the sugarpuff den that is her living room. The couch is soft enough to sink into, as if it were some fluffy organ and not made of cushion and wood.

He doesn't intend to fall asleep. It just happens that one moment he's watching lights sparkle off the rose quartz chandelier and the next his eyes are closed, his mouth slightly open as he breathes heavily through it. His natural sprawl spreads a little, one arm over the back of the couch, knees wide.

In her bare feet, Swann doesn't make any noise when she crosses over the plush carpeting of the apartment, carrying a tray that holds two small mugs and a china coffee pot that's steaming slightly.

"Oh," she says quietly, upon finding Jason, and sets the tray down on the table, careful not to make any noise and wake him.

She considers this for a moment, then figures it would be mean to wake him up when he's obviously tired, even if she only wants to take his shoes off and make him lie down properly. But since that doesn't seem to be an option, she takes a blanket from the back of a chair, one that's obscenely soft and fluffy, just as ivory as everything else in the room, and gently drapes it over him.

"Good night, Jason," she whispers, flicking out the light, then heads for her bedroom.

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Came Upon Me Like a Hypnic Jerk When I Was Just About Settled [Closed]

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