thecapitol | Flecks of the Heavens' Spat Out Spit [OPEN]

Entry tags:

Flecks of the Heavens' Spat Out Spit [OPEN]

WHO| Jason Compson and Open; Jason and Swann; Jason, Rick and Daryl
WHAT| Jason gets a migraine and is helpless; Jason beats an Avox; Jason gives Swann a gift; Rick and Daryl get the shotguns.
WHEN| Week 6
WHERE| D7 Suites; Swann's place
WARNINGS/NOTES| Avox abuse, migraines, general Jason awfulness. If you're going to tag the second prompt, please PP or PM me first so we can figure out where it's going and how far to take it, because Jason won't hesitate to put someone in jail.

I. Open

He knew he was going to have one of his headaches from the beginning of the morning, when every light seemed to have a ring radiating off of it and everything seemed to smell like rainwater. The one upside to the curse of these migraines is that he usually gets a few hours head start on them, with the feeling of deadly premonition, and so he spends most of the day trying to finish up everything as quickly as he can and clock out early. The calls to Sponsors and thank you cards to donors becomes a race against time, one which he sees himself losing too late to actually prevent disaster.

First he can't see, and then he can't move. Even breathing seems to put too much strain on him, and the throbbing, tightening hammering in his head gets worse with every exhale. The inside of his body feels like a live wire, sparking away inside his skull at camera-shutter speed. Nausea roils inside his throat and stomach, furling and unfurling like the tide.

When he opens his eyes the light is too bright, speckled with floating spots and halos, and he feels like the universe itself is trying to cram itself through his eyesockets and that his bones have made the opening too small to fit. So he keeps them shut and rolls over on the District Seven couch until he's facedown in a pillow, sweating slightly, trying not to whimper.

He has no hope of driving himself home, and even the idea of getting up seems a cruel joke. He tries twice, and both times a surge of nausea and a thunderclap of pain force him back down. So he lies there, hoping to whatever powers that be that his Tributes stick to their schedules and don't come bother him.

II. Open (please read note)

What started off as a strong Arena quickly loses those good odds as the District Seven Tributes die in the field and the District Suite gets repopulated. The worse it looks, the worse Jason's temper gets, until he's liable to throw something at the slightest provocation, which the Games video updates seem eager to supply him with. At least twice this week he's broken a glass, and yesterday smacked a table so hard that he has a ring of bruising around his finger like a wedding band.

With only Nick left in the Arena, Jason and Emily's chances are getting desperate, and the worst blow comes to Jason's ego when he realizes that no amount of fawning and flattery and networking seems to be enough to get Nick more supplies in the Arena. It stings to feel powerlessness, and to make it worse the only person willing to spot Nick a fire-starting kit's funds will only do it on condition that Jason go drinking with him - no sobriety allowed. Jason turns it down, but doesn't leave with his head held high so much as rankled and humiliated, and every ungrateful glance from his Tributes reminds him of how his family used to practically own this damn country and yet here he is, exposing his belly to anyone with money, helpless and inept and so, so frustrated with his life. Dressed in a suit he got from someone else's charity and supporting a home full of ingrates and lonely and with a fury as endless as the sky.

Whatever it is that set Jason off this time, it isn't sated just by smashing a piece of kitchenware. This time he backhands the Avox who rushes in to try and clean up the coffee mug he throws against the floor, sending them into the couch.

III. Swann

For someone who usually agonizes over every half-assi that goes to a necessary cause, Jason doesn't seem to mind spending money on Swann. He complains about it, at times, but it's more to go through the motions of complaining than because it actually bothers him. He buys her coffee when he can and tells her to save her money when they get lunch, getting sulky and defensive when she insists on splitting the tab. Sometimes he buys her a pastry on his way to pick her up for carpooling, although he doesn't let her eat it in the vehicle, and he has yet to ask her to help pay for fuel.

Today he shows up at her place with a large carrier in the back of his car, covered by a blanket, with a towel underneath it to protect the seats. Something inside is making scratching sounds. Jason looks a little frazzled, and shows up a few minutes late from a different route than he usually takes. He presses a button inside the car and the door opens for Swann.

"You coming, Honeymead?"

IV. Daryl and Rick

The rumors spread quickly after the Crowning, and all of them rub Jason the wrong way. A few photographs of him and Beth at the Crowning, him whispering into her ear, have made the rounds on tabloids, some of them even frontpage for the publications hungry enough to fabricate a scandal for readership. Jason's certain that he wouldn't ever touch a Tribute like that, but the fact that people are so eager to believe it of him leaves his pride feeling excoriated.

For his part, Jason doesn't treat Beth any differently, except for being a bit more stiff and cranky with her than he might have been before. But whispers swarm around them like a plague of mosquitoes, making a to-do out of something as simple as him Escorting her to a photoshoot with horses (A PONY FOR A PRICE?, a headline questions; another goes even more outrageous and wonders if Beth will say 'neigh' to marriage). He can only imagine the explanations she's making to the passel of Southerners who seem so eager to protect her.

Right now he's in the District Seven kitchen, glasses parked precariously on the tip of his nose as he writes by hand some math for the District budget. He's taken to putting most of his notes on his phone lately; he used to be able to leave writing around, but that was when most Tributes were entirely illiterate. His suit jacket hangs over the back of a chair and his shirt sleeves are pushed up to his elbows. A cup of coffee, long-cooled, sits beside him, and he occasionally asks his phone to answer some percentages questions for him.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Cyrus is in the irritating place of needing to find someone who's given him only a vague idea of where in the Tower they are. He doesn't make a habit of coming too near the District Suites or the various public spaces between them, unless he's looking for Stephen-- but, well. There are some things you can't just walk past, and a display like that is one of them.

He gives Jason a few feet of distance as he approaches, his expression the kind of neutral that implies disapproval he's not bothering to make overt. See if that outburst is over. He stops just short of the spreading puddle of coffee, keeping it off his shoes.

The Avox hardly knows what to do with itself. It's still on the floor with its back to the couch, staring at a smear of blood on its hand with dumb terror. "Get up," Cyrus tells it, without turning to look; he's looking at Jason, with an annoyed set to his mouth.

"You should consider punching a pillow next time," he says. "Still Tower property, but less expensive to replace."

If it were anyone else, he might not have stopped, might not have said anything; there's nothing wrong with striking Avoxes. It's not an atrocity so much as a distinct show of a lack of class - and Cyrus knows Jason's better-bred than that.

He doesn't hear Cyrus approach, and so he whips around with a startle when he hears that voice. His face is reddened, a flush going down to his neck, a few drops of blood sliding from the hand that bashed the Avox's lip in.

He feels like his insides are a crumpled up wad of paper, and then Cyrus comes in and strikes a match and sets them alight. To already feel hapless and stuck and then to have one of the Reagan brats come in, to so suddenly flash back to when they were children, to Cyrus, petulant and rigid, insisting on being respected despite his cracking voice and pocked face.

"Yeah? You want me to replace it, maybe you can introduce some legislation so your brother and I can get paid a decent goddamn wage. Nine Tributes, Reagan, and we're still at the same salary that we had when I was working for Ten."

The Avox gets up, and Jason raises his eyebrows and lurches towards it for a second, sending it skittering away from him, and then he folds his arms. He knows what Cyrus is saying, and yet he'll play stupid about it if it'll goad Cyrus into actually saying it out loud, letting Jason escalate it into a full fight.

"Besides, this whole Tower property should be replaced. It's awful. Plaid."

It adds something uglier to this, the memory Cyrus has of them as children. The stupid little power games they played among each other, the way they jockeyed for any recognition that didn't come relative to their age. It all settled out into something that should have been so concrete: Cyrus standing a step above, looking down with the power to pass this kind of judgment, and somehow it hasn't. Somehow it feels all too natural, that this should become an argument.

The Avox goes ignored, for the moment, invisible as it was the moment before Jason struck it. Let it stand there and bleed; it knows well enough to keep it off the carpet.

"Your District, maybe." Cyrus pretends he isn't going to be goaded, tips his head back to look down his nose and leans back as though he's leaning out of the argument completely. "Here's a thought: If you don't want to pay to replace what you broke, don't break it in the first place. Hit your own Avoxes."

Jason, by contrast, holds onto that old power like a dog worrying a hide, knowing that the only standing he has over Cyrus is that he's older, no, that he was older by two years back when they were children. That there was a time when he was slightly ahead of Cyrus' starting line.

"I didn't realize that there was such a soft spot for traitors in Snow's cabinet." He gestures at the Avox. His lips blanch a little. "It's got a cut lip. It's not like I broke its arm or anything."

He takes a seat back on the couch, slouching, sprawling, eyes narrowed and outfit clashing with the tacky flannel decor.

"What are you up here for, Cyrus? I don't recall sending for a lecture on tablemanners."

"And someone's going to have to clean up after it." Cleaning up after an Avox - that's an embarrassment. He lets the first part of that, that soft spot for traitors, go, with just a tightening of his jaw, a narrowing of his eyes that would have looked more natural on him fifteen years go.

He looks again at the Avox-- surreptitiously catching a dribble of blood on its sleeve, staring dead-eyed at nothing. "Go back to your quarters," Cyrus tells it. "Don't take the main elevator." The fewer people see what happened here, the better. It's tabloid-worthy, if not outright scandal.

(Watching out for other people's reputations - Cyrus has been doing it for Stephen for so long, he doesn't even think about it anymore, just finds what needs smoothing and smooths it.)

Cyrus doesn't sit when Jason does. He stays where he is, only shifts in place, glances down at his feet, at the coffee stain an inch away from his shoes and back up at Jason. "I had an appointment," he says. He's not such an unusual sight up here, between his doings in the Center and his visits to Stephen. "That's where I was headed. Before I was called away to babysit."

"Right. It's almost like we have an entire basement full of them to handle that sort of matter." He gestures with a half-relaxed knuckle at the Avox. "Send another one up to fix the mess."

As if to make a point, Jason puts his feet on the coffee table, next to the relatively few notes he's made on headshots of his remaining Tributes and sticky notes. The words on them are abbreviated near to the point of incomprehensibility, but he doesn't like Tributes to be privy to his thought processes, and unlike the old offerings these Tributes can read. A few of the notes, however - ones with big X's practically carved rather than drawn in, a mat of black spiral that looks nearly like he was trying to unjam a pen, the words COMPLETE IDIOT in blunt, tidy capitals - are in no way subtle.

Jason raises his eyebrows, looking po-faced and innocent for a moment. "I hope you're not talking about babysitting me, given that your brother's the one who sleeps with his own charges."

It's not so much a threat as a way to remind Cyrus about exactly who else is on the playing field.

It catches Cyrus off-guard. A flash of real anger flits over his face-- harsh, involuntary, tight-lipped and narrow-eyed.

He knows Jason's just trying to get a rise out of him, just trying to bring Cyrus down to his level, but it doesn't stop the sharp sensation in Cyrus' chest, the hot, protective, furious thing that wakes whenever someone has the gall to remind him what people say about Stephen, what everyone's heard he's done.

"At least they like him," he bites back in a voice that's level, but seconds too late-- he had to master himself to get this far, and it shows, both in the pause and the lopsided nature of his smile, teeth clenched just a little too tight. (The Avox has scurried away unnoticed, and there's no change in his behavior to indicate he thinks this conversation has become any more private than it was.)

Jason doesn't even hide the sort of satisfied glint to his eyes, and he's struck with a rather sudden memory of a game of truth or dare way back in their adolescence, one where Cyrus was pressured into mixing a concoction of all of the table leftovers in a blender and drinking it. This is like that, in a way, forcing someone to eat poison while you smile at them over the dinner table, your fork clenched so tightly in your fist that it leaves red prints across your palm.

"A little too much, by what I hear."

Cyrus may have well as pointed out that zebras have stripes. So? Jason doesn't care if his Tributes like him so long as he can corral them into some semblance of cooperative behavior. Another Avox, one from Stig's room, emerges and starts to clean up the shattered mug, and Jason flags it down to get him another cup.

"Glass houses, you know? Maybe before you elect yourself my babysitter you should make sure your brother's been taken care of."

"...We're not talking about Stephen." Leaving Stephen out of things is a delicate skill, one Cyrus has been practicing since childhood and elevated to an art form in the past ten years. He's getting some control over his voice back, too, the only open sign of agitation the way he picks at the knuckle of his forefinger with a thumbnail. "You listen too much to rumors, Jason. My brother doesn't need to be taken care of."

This is not something Cyrus actually believes. The emphasis on my is slight, but pointed - If you want to put our family embarrassments up side by side, Compson, I think you know who'll come out ahead. He lets that hang a second.

"Anyway-- what you or any other Escort does behind closed doors is none of my concern." Another lie, but quicker. He's falling back on his position, finding something like professional distance or some near mockery of it to move them away from Stephen. "But to strike an Avox in public, under the cameras, where anyone could see you-- you think that looks good for District Seven?"

"You brought up babysitting. My mind just went to the nearest thing."

Cyrus may let the threat hang, but Jason learned long ago how to cut his losses with his siblings. Unlike Cyrus, he has nothing invested anymore in salvaging their reputations. They're lost causes, jokes that Jason's dismissed to the public, the cheap shot that no longer rankles him on the surface. He's inoculated because he takes no pride in them and acts as if blood is the only association he holds to them. He doesn't pretend his siblings were something they weren't.

Cyrus and Stephen, close even from childhood, could never pretend that the only thing they shared was a surname.

"I guess no one told me about the sea change in public opinion regarding Avoxes." He settles further into the couch, then pulls out his cigarette, looking damn near impudent with it. Anyone walking in might forget that Cyrus and his cohorts run this country, from the way Jason's refusing to maintain anything approaching proper posture. He feigns innocence. "Do you think the Sponsors are going to start a boycott on donations until we give the Avoxes employment status?"

Edited 2015-03-12 05:45 (UTC)

If you have to tell someone to straighten up and respect you, then you've already lost. Pulling rank would look petulant, and Cyrus knows it. He might be able to get away with it with someone he didn't know so well, someone who didn't know him before he took Julius' seat on the cabinet, but he has no illusions that Jason Compson would respond well to a Remember who you're talking to.

It grates. It's an easy thing to get used to, respect.

"It's not about the Avox." You act like an idiot, I'll treat you like an idiot. "I just thought you might appreciate the reminder that not everyone's willing to excuse that kind of outburst." It would have much been the same if he'd knocked over a piece of expensive furniture, or flung a vase against a wall - it's not the act itself, but the lack of control it implies. "There's a kind of stupid that sells. That isn't it."

"You think I don't know that? You think I'm not aware that some people around here get a little flighty when people's tempers rise?" He flicks on his cigarette and takes a long drag, then gets up, walks over to Cyrus with that insolent swagger, exhaling a plume of smoke that spreads like a cloud over his lips and breastbone.

"Lucky for me I'm not selling myself, and I'm not about to call one of my allies in this world 'stupid'. That's something I let politicians do."

He knows it's a gamble, but he also stands on a different axis from Cyrus. He doesn't believe that the position Cyrus has carefully cultivated and protected stands on stone so much as sand, the same loose terrain that fell out from under the Compsons. Maybe - probably - Cyrus doesn't feel that the chain of Capitolite children, the ones who grew into angry and flighty and resentful adults, are going to be the only ones he can find common ground with. But Jason does. Jason sees the end coming like a storm, or like one of his migraines, with inexplicable and yet incontrovertible certainty.

"But I appreciate knowing who isn't going to be subtle about treating me like a child. That's real helpful." Jason raises an eyebrow and blows a smoke ring, not at Cyrus but at a glancing angle.

Cyrus doesn't step back. He leans back, almost imperceptibly, tips his head back the smallest bit further and waves the smoke out of the air between them with a quick, impatient gesture. The smell is sharp and distinctive and sticks in his nose, hangs in the air around them.

His teeth are clenched now, and the muscles in his neck are tense. It rubs like sandpaper against his pride, to be so claimed as an ally. What have you done to deserve it? something in Cyrus snarls in return-- What have you ever done for me?

"If it bothers you to be treated like a child, then maybe you shouldn't act like one," he says, and he doesn't bother disguising his disdain this time, doesn't bother pretending to be diplomatic. "Most of us grew out of playing with Avoxes." (Playing with Avoxes is the easiest euphemism for what they used to do when they were children-- what limits they used to test, the orders they'd dare each other to give and the reactions they'd try to drag, with laughter or humiliation or pain, from those blank, frightened faces.)

He puts his hand out and snatches at the smoke ring, and doesn't watch it burst apart between his fingers and snake away into the air. "As a politician, I'd be inclined to reconsider as an ally someone so prone to losing control in public."

"Hitting an Avox is hardly losing control. If I didn't have any control, there's a much longer list of things I'd hit than Avoxes."

Jason watches with sour amusement as Cyrus dissipates the ring. He can hear his own pulse inside his ear, as if his heart had been relocated into the base of his skull, but he keeps that violent anger to his tongue alone.

"Since I'm not a politician, you're not under any obligation to take this under consideration, but-" Jason leans in and lowers his voice; the two of them, Cyrus reclining and Jason pressing, look like magnets with like poles, repelling each other. "Get your own house in order before you come traipsing into mine."

Jason's dominion is small, unimpressive, not a whole country but a single floor on the Tribute Center and a run-down mansion that's already known as "the old Compson place" even though it's still populated. Not a government bureau and a stack of legislation but a paltry reparation, a consolation prize for having been born to a name that could no longer purchase victory. But it's his, and here he is tyrant.

"Your house?" There's something incredulous in that, something derisive. "Your house is in disrepair. Your house, as it stands, is ill-conceived, ill-structured, and the greatest breeding ground for District malcontent in all of Panem. Your house has been my headache to deal with for close to a year now, and you're not making it any easier for me."

His voice is low, almost too low for surveillance devices to catch, which means that Cyrus is angry enough not to want anyone listening to know how angry he is. Good thing Jason's so close - Cyrus doesn't have to step forward to speak directly into his face, close enough to smell that foul cigarette on his breath, to spit every syllable with careful and dangerous deliberation.

"Change is coming, Compson," he says, low and steely and significant. "As a politician-- I think it might be time to break yourself of a few habits."

Edited 2015-03-21 02:01 (UTC)

Jason doesn't bother to lower his voice, knowing exactly what Cyrus is doing. Let people watching put together through context exactly what's happening. Let them puzzle over the whispered words of a dignified politician and the lowly Escort who provoked such a reaction.

"Don't blame the carpenter when the architect's at fault, Cyrus. I didn't make this mess." He waves the cigarette between his fingers. His body language is casual, but his face is pulled with the sort of tightness of a clenched fist, of violence implied but not realized.

"And if you're going to threaten my job, maybe have something that affects my performance? Not just 'broke an Avox'."

"I don't know which of us is to blame for this mess." Who us is, exactly, is unclear-- whether he's talking about his fellow Ministers, his fellow unwilling hangers-on of the Tributes, or even some group to which he and Jason belong, tied together by history and prestige and distant, much-diluted blood. "But some of us are more dedicated than others to cleaning it up."

He's acutely aware of what this must look like from outside. What the cameras must be catching. He's grown up thinking of this, of always picturing himself from the point of view of the invisible third party that follows them all around. That feels to him like a loss of control, and he resents Jason for it, for making him appear in a way he didn't intend to.

"How long til it's a Tribute, Jason?" he asks, still low, still quick. "How long until there's not an Avox around whose nose you can break, or a vase to fling across the room, or a table to overturn? Run us out of Avoxes, who cares-- but if you're about to tell me you wouldn't strike a Tribute, I'll tell you before you open your mouth that I don't believe you."

"Sure, if you say so. But I haven't hit a Tribute yet, and until I do you can't pull me up on a hypothetical." He slides his hands back into his pockets, and the cigarette sticks up from between his knuckles over the fold of pant fabric.

Two temperatures compete for his weather. There's one part of him, cold and satisfied, thinking that while he may not have beaten Cyrus here at the very least he's navigating him into a corner. In a boxing match, Cyrus would be taking heavy swings but up against the ropes. Jason defends himself with that same slippery indifference, those parting shots even as he turns aside.

The other is white hot rage that blanches Jason's lips against his face, not just at the indignity of Cyrus' lecture but at how blithely Cyrus defends this entire rotten system - no, how he simply sloughs off blame. Jason pictures them all trapped in a coffin, choking on pungent fumes, Cyrus insisting that everyone's breathing up all the fresh air and that he doesn't share any disproportionate fault.

"Just so you know, the Escort health plan doesn't handle anger management. Maybe that could be your great contribution to Tribute-Capitol relations, if you're so concerned about their safety?"

Cyrus makes a derisive sound, and steps back. He's gathering himself, like someone might gather a handful of coins-- knowing for all his care that some pieces will slip out of his fingers. His anger is still there, in the ugly pull at the corner of his mouth and the crease between his eyebrows. It feels like a concession.

"...You know, there must be a thousand jobs in the Capitol you could have that aren't this one," he says. It's a verbal step back - he might be speaking about Jason instead of to him. It is openly condescending. "Forget anger management-- why the hell did you decide to do this? Why did you bother coming back to it? Were there not enough excuses to overturn the furniture at home? Why?"

There's plenty of their crowd that flocked to the Games, growing up. Escorts and liaisons, even a Gamemaker or two. The rest, though-- they had the grace to act, at least, like they wanted it.

A muscle in Jason's neck tightens like a noose. It's his mother, of course - she got him this job and he wouldn't outright disobey her by leaving it, wouldn't risk the security that comes from knowing her name will keep him from getting fired. He'll stay trapped in this spiderweb because the alternative is a plummet into oblivion.

But his face is better at detaching from that rage than the rest of his body, so he smiles and tilts his head to the side. "I don't get paid to overturn furniture at home."

He waves the hand with the cigarette again. "Anyway. You were leaving?"

Cyrus looks at him hard for a long moment. Leans back on his heels, straightens his jacket. Thinks, for a second, about the many years that have brought them to this place.

They aren't children anymore, but he wonders if something in him-- if something in both of them-- always will be when it comes to each other. He wonders if he'll ever be able to look at Jason Compson and not see every year of him that he remembers-- small and trailing behind his older siblings and sniffling, gawky and belligerent and crooked-nosed, always older than Cyrus and therefore the more powerful, until quite suddenly he wasn't. It still makes Cyrus feel off-balance, somehow-- he can pull rank on almost anyone in the Capitol, but what can he do with someone who remembers him across so much time?

Well-- he remembers this, too, that the only way to win against Jason Compson, in most instances, is not to play.

"Sure. Like you said - I'm not here to babysit."

There's no point in pretending, at this point, that he isn't bothered. And so he gives Jason a parting nod - more for the cameras than for him - and turns on his heel to go.

"Make sure the Avox gets up all that blood," he says over his shoulder, from the doorway. "Clashes with the plaid."

A stupid, adolescent parting shot, spoken even as he's getting himself out of earshot. He'll take it.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Flecks of the Heavens' Spat Out Spit [OPEN]

II.

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