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

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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

"Okay." He gets up, bent like he's trying to put off taking his face from here as long as possible, and steps into the hallway to make the call. He's still sensitive to light (he feels like his eyeballs are being squeezed inside a fist when he flicks the switch on), but the phone call goes well enough, words coming out and being received at a normal volume. He doesn't give details, just lies and says that Swann was awful sick last night and said he should call her out if he didn't hear otherwise from her.

He returns to her with Marcel, held out like an infant that's wet itself and screaming, even though the dog is perfectly well-behaved. He sets the dog next to Swann's face, and Marcel begins to lick in enthusiastic concern at his master.

She lies in the dark, waiting for him, her eyes eventually falling shut as she can't keep them open anymore. The door opens again and she doesn't manage to look at Jason before Marcel is licking at her.

She groans, "Baby... no, Marcel...", then weakly pushes him back a bit, so that he just lies at her side instead, wagging his tail and letting his tongue loll out with happiness, glancing from Jason to Swann as she rests her hand on his head and rubs with her thumb.

"Should I take him out? I thought you might miss him..." But then Marcel settles into a fluffy ball beside her side and Jason figures it's okay. He slips back into bed next to Swann, planning on draining the time before he has to leave work for all it's worth.

"I'm feeling nearly back to normal. You?" He doesn't mention the fight they had. Doesn't want to, doesn't need to. It hangs in the air like humidity. He gets his cigarette and puts in a camphor.

She struggles to roll over, but accomplishes it, pressing her face to his shoulder, buried in his neck. Marcel lets out a little sigh and lays his head down, still and small in the space between their knees.

"Tired," she mumbles. "Hate this."

He rubs the back of her neck with his thumb. He thinks it strange, that when his mother takes sick he only wants to avoid her, but right now he can't bear to leave Swann.

"How long until you're better?"

"Tomorrow, probably. It usually takes a day or so."

Her stomach doesn't ache and churn anymore, but she feels lethargic and vaguely queasy, in a way that she knows means she can't eat anything today. At least not until the evening, when the painkillers have worked their way out of her system and she perks up just a bit.

She drapes one heavy arm over him, not inclined to move it any time soon.

"I'll be back tonight. I have to stop by my place to make sure my mother doesn't assume I've been kidnapped, but I'll sleep here tonight." He leaves that open, the chance to reject him, to wrench open the fight they had. Maybe if she does, he'll just go home and they can end it here. He'll send a nasty text that'll keep her out of work for long enough for him to find something else.

But she doesn't seem inclined to move her arm.

"You didn't even snore."

"Don't stay late at work."

It's said muffled into his neck. Even if she wanted to fight right now, wanted to force him to face the issue, she has no energy whatsoever -- it's like she's only barely clinging to consciousness because he's with her. There's no doubt that if he weren't present, she'd still be in that coma-like state that morphling brings.

"It's like being dead, that stuff."

"Sounds tempting." He's serious, and that's why he'll never try it. If he could, he thinks he'd spend the rest of his life that way. He rubs her shoulder, kisses her forehead, claims her over and over again with affection he shows no one else.

"You going to sleep all day?"

Swann hates it. It's a double-edged sword -- if you're taking it for pain, there's the caveat of still being alive. Being dead and feeling dead are two entirely different things, and she sort of understands the addiction that runs rampant in the Districts, living in that space where you occupy both life and death at the same time, never taking enough to die but never letting yourself be clean enough to live, either.

She nuzzles against him, fingers curling against his back, soaking up his attention and tenderness like a dry sponge at a faucet.

"Probably. Might try to send some emails out later, if I feel any better."

"Alright."

He hits her intercom and tells Eta to get him something to eat and some coffee, feeling the emptiness in his stomach pressing down on the little energy he has. His mother will know when he comes home tonight, will know because of the way he moves gingerly and exhausted through the day in the wake of an attack. She'll fuss and worry herself. He'll be spending the next few days assuaging and soothing no matter where he stays, and Swann's the better option. Still, the idea of the next few days makes him want to run away to the Districts, and he very well may work late.

And he needs to text Lorraine, although he has no idea what he'll say. Maybe tell her to be discreet. Maybe say he'll visit soon. Maybe say he'll never see her again.

"Go back to sleep. I'll get ready for work."

There's something very needy in the noise that Swann makes, at the idea of him leaving her alone, taking away all the warmth and kindness that he can seemingly only give freely in the early hours of the morning. She knows they'll both feel better by the evening -- or she will, at least. Jason's head, she assumes, will depend on how his day goes in the Tower.

But the thought of bearing it alone until he comes back, even if she's sleeping it off, makes her terribly unhappy. She has Marcel, but it's not the same at all.

Eta appears shortly with coffee and Swann's standard breakfast fare, yogurt and fruit and a muffin that looks sweet but is probably somehow deceptively healthy. The tray is left, and Swann raises her head a bit before the Avox can exist all the way.

"Eta, get a spare key, give it to Jason before he leaves, please."

Jason digs into the food with a hunger that makes him nearly uncouth. It's only when the food is in front of him that he really realizes how much energy has been sapped from him. He puts off the coffee until he has a cushion of breakfast inside him but that's about all the rationing out he can manage.

Between chewing and wiping at his mouth with a napkin, he raises an eyebrow at Swann.

"Do you want me to keep the key after this?"

She burrows into the pillows while he eats, Marcel getting up and moving to fill the spot where Jason was lying before. He noses at her arm until she blindly holds her hand out for him to come and get scratched behind the ears.

"Yeah," she says, looking over at him for a moment before flopping back into the pillow. "You might as well. Unless you don't want it."

He doesn't give her an answer to that, but he does give her a final kiss before he gets dressed in the clothes Eta has laundered and heads out the door.

He's gone late, only sending Swann a text well after suppertime with at medic. i'll live. He doesn't respond to any other texts, either because he's busy or spiteful or because he doesn't want to explain why his phone keeps going off while dining with his mother. When he finally does get back to Swann's place, he lets himself in and throws his coat on the ground before making his way to her room.

There's a bandage on his cheek, and he all but bellyflops onto her bed. Underneath the fresh bandage are four stitches over a laceration like coiled spikes around barbed wire.

By the time Jason returns, Swann is well enough to be sitting up in bed. She'd remained calm when he seemed to take so long coming back, when she knew he should be off work, and she didn't text him at all, not wanting to draw any further comparisons to his mother, which was something he always seemed eager to spit at.

But no one can receive a text message that vague and not be concerned, not try to get more information. She'd shot back a few messages -- what happened?, followed by Jason?, with the follow up of Jason??? Jason please. She accepted after the third that he wasn't going to respond, for whatever reason, and she had to quickly pop several prescription antacids to keep herself from falling back into sickness.

She's scouring news sites for any possibly relevant articles when he falls onto the bed. She reaches for him with concern, her brow knit deeply, her hands open to cradle his jaw so she can see his cheek.

"Oh my god, Jason, what happened to you?!"

"Linden Lockwhatever happened to me, the District Six Mentor. Attacked me with a piece of glass and then claimed that he doesn't remember doing it because he's a traumatized little lamb or whatever his excuse was."

He gets up so he's sitting next to her in bed. He lets her take his face and examine the injury. "Four goddamn stitches. Four. The medic said it would heal without a scar but had the District brat pushed it a little further I'd have had a cut jugular."

And being the way he is, Jason hadn't let the medic numb the area before putting the stitches in, hadn't agreed to take antibiotics, had only agreed to an antibacterial cream.

"They're giving him a single night in prison. What I say, it's goddamn anarchy out there."

"He's only getting one night? I don't care that he's a Mentor, that's not right, I'm going to Jennifer and that new head of security tomorrow about this. They'd give me longer than that if I cut you up!"

She squirms from under the covers, curls up at his side and fusses over him, more for her own benefit than his, because it makes her feel minimally useful after not having been there for him when it first happened. She holds his face and runs her thumbs over the places far enough away that they won't hurt him, and tucks herself under his arm, head resting on his shoulder.

"My poor baby, this is ridiculous. It better not scar. I'll call my girl, the one who does my skin, in the morning and have her come to the Tower to look at it."

"No, you won't be doing that. I can handle it myself. I'll be bringing my complaint to Jennifer personally."

He rankles a bit, not from the fussing but from the words 'poor baby', from the implication that he needs her to fight this battle for him. It flushes him with indignation, which gets turned on her not because she deserves it but because she's just presented a convenient target.

Still, he doesn't move. He lets her tuck herself next to him, assuming that their earlier fight has been killed and buried. He still hasn't contacted Lorraine, although he did delete her text messages and pictures.

"I'll see your girl, though." He rubs a thumb over her cheek, saying without words that her skin is always nice, always smooth and flawless.

She barely seems to notice that he bristles at her words, and it could be that she halfway expected it, or that she just doesn't care when she has something bigger to worry about, or even just that she doesn't take offense because she didn't mean it the way he's taken it.

The fight isn't dead, but Swann knows how to lose a battle if it means winning the war. Given time to calm down, to collect herself, she knows she can fall back on other tactics.

No matter what anyone thought, Swann hadn't relied on her father to put her on top of the network. She did it herself, with craft, and she could do it again with Jason as her network and Lorraine as her competition.

Her arms lock around his waist, and she slides her hand down his side, closing her eyes. "He just attacked you?"

"We already had our voices raised because he got angry at me for striking an Avox. He started spewing all kinds of shit about how I'm an embarrassment to my family name and-" Jason feels his temper flaring again, feels the blood pounding in his temples that still feel tender from yesterday, and pauses, takes a breath, untangles her arm, and gets up off the bed to pace.

"They shouldn't be allowed to talk to us, Districters. I don't care if they win the Games. We might as well cut all their tongues out too, then at least they wouldn't be crashing our security grids or spitting up bile at natural-born Citizens." He hipchecks the bed as he paces, stumbles. Catches himself on his hand.

He stops and takes the bandage off, revealing the wound to Swann. "Here, see. Four stitches. Four goddamn stitches."

She has questions, many of them, but she knows better than to interject with them, especially given that the biggest one (why was Jason hitting an Avox in public, let alone outside of the Suite?) would trigger the switch that she's learned is always waiting inside of him, the one that seems to want to feel like everyone is against him.

Watching him pace, Swann crawls to the edge of the bed after him, watching, listening attentively. He has to catch himself and she reaches for him reflexively, on instinct, nodding even with the things she disagrees with. She gasps at the wound, her eyes wide and fraught with worry, her hands still outstretched.

"Jason!" It's pure shock at the state of his face, the nasty black marks sealing the skin together. "Who even handed down that weak punishment? Even if they're not willing to Avox a Mentor, he should at least be shipped back out to Six! And whoever decided that one night was enough should be shipped out, too!"

She can't say anything stronger, is still too much herself to let anything truly nasty come out of her mouth, even though she's wracked with horror that a Districter dared touch one of them. Was nothing sacred anymore, didn't the laws mean anything?

"I got a badge number. I'll be filing an official complaint about it tomorrow. We give these damn bottomfeeders a chance at a better life and they throw it in our faces, they act like they aren't here by our own generosity, and I say I wouldn't be letting them forget that they're from the Districts if it were up to me-"

He rambles on, looking near-manic, as if the sense of injustice is a jolt of electricity to his usually depleted battery. He looks at Swann with wild eyes that seem wider to take in all of her shock and agreement, like a lake reflecting the moon, swallowing up the light. He sits back down on the bed, leaning forward so she can inspect the injury, see that it's well-stitched and clean because he doesn't trust the medic at the Tribute Center to have done a decent job of it. It doesn't matter that Swann doesn't have a background in first aid; he trusts her more.

"This whole country's gone to hell, what I say. No one wants to say it, but they all know that we're going under and some of us have just been unlucky enough to get our feet wet first. Maybe this'll show them, maybe if they realize that Mentors can go around cutting up Citizen faces we'll get some actual laws enforced around here."

But he's already starting to tire, the outrage a poor substitute for passion, for a sustainable argument. He sighs and grits his teeth and clenches his fists but knows that come tomorrow he won't want to put the effort into making a visible fit, won't want to invite more investigation into his family for the sake of some publicity.

"How do you feel?"

She only lets him go, lets him rant, keeps nodding and sending back that silent agreement that's less about his ideas and anger so much as it is about him, that she is agreeing because he is Jason and he's been actually hurt and it is more important to support him than it is to insert logic and reason into the situation.

"Shh, shh," she murmurs, holding his face again, looking at the wound. It looks well-enough cared for, as far as she can tell, but the ugly state of it makes her shake a little, her hands and shoulders. She leans in too, presses her lips first to his forehead and then to his unharmed cheek, creeping closer to get rid of the distance between them.

"Better. I had a piece of toast earlier, a whole slice. We'll be okay, both of us."

He relaxes a bit into her hands, into her kisses that he missed this morning, when she was too drugged to return the affection he desperately showered her with. "It looks alright? I don't want it scarring."

He reaches up and takes her hand in his, rubbing a thumb over her slender wrist, closing his eyes. The distance between them wanes and then vanishes as he pulls her closer. "Alright. I don't suppose you're well enough to go get a light dinner."

He feels a bit like a caged animal, all anger and anxiety with no outlet, and wants to at least walk or drive a while.

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