thecapitol | I Cannot Decipher Conversation in Your Head [Closed]

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I Cannot Decipher Conversation in Your Head [Closed]

WHO| Jason Compson and Swann
WHAT| Yoga, kites and long drives.
WHEN| Sunday.
WHERE| Swann's place.
WARNINGS| Capitolite cluelessness. Shameless shipping and graphic sexual content.

He doesn't go to the cemetery with his mother, and that means that Benjamin gets out of having to go, too. Caroline whimpers and whines her way through the morning, talking about how lonely she'll be standing at the headstones of her husband and her eldest son, acting as if Jason's indifference to ritualized mourning is giving her physical pains. When Jason outright calls them psychosomatic, Caroline retires to her bedroom, making little mewling noises, and he sighs and insists that some Avoxes accompany her to the graves no matter what fight she puts up.

"I'm head of the house," he tells one of the few servants who still has her tongue, "no matter that she's my mother. She tries to shake you off, you follow and make sure she doesn't have a chance to blame me that she didn't get to grieving today."

By the time he gets to Swann's he's got the start of a headache and his mood has dipped below its baseline sullen and into fully cranky. He isn't late, but he would have liked to give himself a cushion of time, and instead he couldn't take the smoother, scenic route and had to near run a red and do his smoking while driving. As he'll supposedly be changing into new clothes as soon as he's here, he's looking relatively simple in dark jeans and his coat and a collared shirt. A flourish of embroidery on the cuffs speaks to opulence; the bad stitching on those same sleeves reveals that luxury to be an affect only. The kite is in a bag covered in tissue paper at his side.

He realizes he doesn't think Swann's seen him in casual clothing. He knows it likely won't matter soon, but he makes sure his hair is nice before he appears. He might as well keep up appearances around her, even if she knows better.

He rings the bell.

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He unbuttons her coat before he unbuttons his. He pulls the neckline of her shirt aside so he can see her collarbones, fine and delicate and birdlike, and so he can claim those too with that insatiable mouth that might eat her alive if that were a possibility.

Maybe it doesn't matter if anyone sees them - nature or people on the highway or God himself. Having covered her top with kisses, he starts to descend, to feel between her legs where she's damp through her panties, and then he stops.

"I don't have protection on me." He pulls his hand away.

It takes her a minute to blink back into reality, an agonizing moment marked with the stark contrast of his hand first being there and then not.

"Oh."

It's been years since she had a shot herself, and of course she's not carrying protection on her. She thinks vaguely that there might be some in a bedside drawer, a useless little inkling that drifts through her mind while she catches her breath and nods, since they're more than an hour away from her bedroom. She pushes up on her elbows.

"Well, that's... that's okay. We'll stop."

"We don't have to stop. We just don't have to go any further." But something about that moment seems gone, and when he moves in to kiss her again that desperate, territorial need isn't there anymore, and it seems rote, passionless, mechanical.

Sensing the futility of it, he sits back. "Button up." He zips up his own jacket.

"I guess we can't call ourselves just friends anymore, after that."

She tries, raises her hand back to his face, but then he sits back and so she sits up, buttoning her coat back up and straightening out her skirt as much as she can. She looks at her lap, idly wringing her fingers.

"I don't think I want to be just friends."

He doesn't know what to say to that, whether it would be presumptuous to remind her that he comes as a package deal with his family. He doesn't know what he wants her for, whether this sudden lust is something that will fade and that he wants them to return to their too-easy companionship. While he collects his thoughts, uncharacteristically taciturn, he pulls out his vaporizer and starts it up. The steam's barely visible with the way the wind dissipates it.

He closes his eyes as his blood cools, as the sweat he hadn't realized formed at the nape of his neck dries. He picks at his kite and starts to wind the string back up.

"I didn't mind the kissing."

Swann keeps watching her hands, which are starting to shake from nervousness the longer he takes to answer. She doesn't know that she can take rejection, not from him, not after that. And even when he speaks, it's non-committal and doesn't really offer her any relief.

She looks over at him, watches him with the kite.

"Please tell me what you want, Jason."

He nearly snaps. He nearly spits the words when I figure it out I'll let you know at her, but he doesn't, he just takes a long, deep drag from his cigarette and exhale it through his nose.

"I want to keep this as it is. Whatever this is. With- you here and carpooling and this, this sinful element too."

She looks a little hurt when he says that, slaps the moniker of sinful on it, when she doesn't feel like they've done anything wrong or bad. But maybe he does, thinks of it as a vice or something he should be repentant for. She watches him breathe out smoke, keeps her hands all twisted up together like knots.

"Are you angry?"

"No." At least, no more than he usually is, the slow and consumptive burn that has been a part of him for so long that he can't imagine being without it.

He sets the kite ream in his lap, then reaches over and untangles her hands, giving one of them a squeeze. It's his way to ask her not to go without having to say it.

He takes her hands and they stil steady slightly in his grasp, after all of this. She squeezes back and then pulls away to wrap her arms around his neck, more sad than anything else, her head resting on his shoulder. She sighs, searching for something to say, then just falls back on her default words, what she always says when she doesn't have anything else.

"I'm sorry."

"For what?" he says, automatically, even though he's well aware that when she says such things she doesn't need a reason for it. He rests his head atop hers and strokes her hair, curious and mechanical rather than gentle, as if he's not entirely sure how it is that they ended up here.

He kisses the crown of her head.

"I did this," she answers, closing her eyes against the tear that well up in them because she feels guilty. "I made it all confusing and I shouldn't have."

Her arms tighten around him and she breathes in roughly, trying not to let her feelings get the better of her, not to give in to the way her stomach is curling in on itself.

"Don't go taking all the credit. I kissed you back." He sounds as grumpy as she sounds nervous, and his arms tighten around her like she's a siren trying to escape a sailor's clutches. Someone looking for afar might imagine he's trying to comfort her, rather than control the raging insecurity that slops over the brim of her.

"We can continue with what we have. All of this. It doesn't need a term but it's more than friends."

It makes her laugh a little, thick and still full of the tears in the back of her throat, and when she sniffles and looks up at him, it's clear she's just got the leftover tears waiting to dissapate.

She thinks it's strange that he knows without being told what she needs when she feels like this. That she needs him to nearly crush away all the pressure inside her, with his arms or his hands. She never told him that.

"Okay."

There's another beat before she says another else, like she's hesitant to ask, but does anyway. "Do you have to go home tonight?" She only wants him at her side, warm next to her so she can sleep instead of blowing the afternoon up in her head, nitpicking every word and movement until it's altogether different than what actually happened.

He exhales deep from his nose again, steam pooling over his upper lip and over the whorl of her hair like a cartoon bull's. He's aware of his age, suddenly, knows she was right when she told him he's thirty-five and shouldn't be beholden to his mother's whims.

She knows he's not working, knows which of the Tributes are his and none of them are dead yet. He knows that when he eventually does get home it'll be another round of that guilt that doesn't actually make him feel remorse so much as rage at the impunity of it all. He wraps his arms a little tighter around Swann.

"I can try and come up with an excuse."

"Thank you," she murmurs, closing her eyes again and holding tight to him, cheek pressed to the soft wool of his coat. She imagines them in her big bed, comfortable together, actually sleeping, and sighs. Then another thought hits her, and she smirks a little, her voice coy and teasing when she asks.

"Does this mean you're my Valentine now?"

He goes back to winding up the ream of kite. The blue-fabric diamond skips and jerks across the base of the hill up to him, and when he's done retrieving his he starts on hers.

"No. Because it's past Valentine's Day," he says, but he's smiling, as if amused by his own inability to admit fault to her.

She snorts and presses her face to his shoulder before perching her chin on it to watch his face while he takes care of the kites, her eyelids low with contentment. "You're my Valentine anyway."

Swann waits until he's done before moving one hand to his face, fingers soft on his skin as she cranes up to kiss him, lazily now that she's more relaxed.

"Well. You can think that." He's still teasing, but with a sort of warmth that only his mockery towards Swann holds. It's not the cruel indifference he shows others.

He kisses her back, comfortable with her mouth, her easy breath, the body language that's both doll-like and womanly all at once. The softness of her fingers makes his stubble feel more pronounced.

"Do you want to keep flying the kites?"

Her thumb runs over his cheekbone, and the smell of his cigarettes encircles her more intensely, fills her nostrils with its odd, herbal scent. "I'm getting hungry," she answers, resting her chin on his shoulder again. "Lunch?"

At the very least, she's starting to want the blankets, although she's loathe to untangle herself and get them.

He's surprised that she's the first between them to suggest food, but he finds that as he left the house before breakfast to be served, he's ready for something besides coffee and smoke too.

"Alright. I won't say no. You don't suppose Eta's made that winter cake again, has she?"

"Did you already eat all the cake she sent home with you?"

Swann smiles and touches his cheek again, then gently unwinds herself from around him and goes to retrieve the basket from the car. She honestly doesn't know what Eta's packed up for them, although she supposes winter cake is just as likely as anything else. Grabbing up the blankets too, Swann returns to Jason and spreads one of them out, so that they don't have to sit on the cold ground.

"Ben got it. One of the servants stole it out from under my nose."

Jason sounds much angrier about that than he has a right to over stolen cake, either because it was fed to his brother or because it was from Swann and that was something he wanted his family to have no claim to at all. Even the new winter cake that Eta has packed, having observed how much Jason liked it, doesn't heal the wound so much as patch it.

Still, this may be the lunch he's been most excited for in a long time.

"Make sure you get some too. I might take it all if given half a chance."

She can't find it in herself to be the least bit upset that Ben got the cake. Perhaps their mother, perhaps the servants stealing it and eating it amongst themselves, but not over Ben. Kneeling on the blanket, she takes some grapes out of the basket, and a bottle of soda, then curls up next to Jason.

"I can have it any time I want. You can have the cake. I'll make sure you get more."

Swann makes a note to send enough for Ben, too. She knows that he causes Jason just as much stress as anyone else, but she can never let go of the fact that it isn't his fault, that he shouldn't be punished for it. Maybe she'll have Eta pack up leftover cupcakes, too.

"I'll keep it at the Tribute Center next time. At least it'll be safe until some of mine come back."

It's as if he knows what Swann's up to and planning to thwart her out of some stubborn attempt to keep her out of his family's business. He doesn't have much, but he feels like he has that, at least, the little shell of privacy he's cultivated.

He takes some of the leftovers - a tupperware of meat in a rich, spicy sauce - and takes a bite with a fork. As with most of Eta's cooking, it's delicious. After a moment he holds a piece of it out on the fork for Swann to eat.

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