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

"It must be nice enough, if your family's kept it around. My dad keeps all the family stuff, it's mostly dark and heavy, the furniture. There's a lot of, um... scrimshaw?" She makes a face. "Grandpa Honeymead collected it, scrimshaw and ivory carvings and stuff like that."

She takes another drink of water and smiles, thinking about the second thing he said. "Well, maybe he sleeps better on the foam kind? Wouldn't that help with all the, you know, the noise? If he has a good night's sleep?" Her voice has a soft edge that it always gets when Benjy is brought up, the one she can't control because he really is innocent, he's probably the only innocent person in the whole Capitol.

Edited 2015-03-18 23:38 (UTC)

"If it makes a difference, I haven't heard it yet. Like I say, I don't think he can tell. When we were kids we tried to see how hard we had to pinch him for him to feel pain, and he could stand more than a normal person." Caddy had a fit about it. Jason was four.

He holds none of the sentimentality (the empathy) that Swann does for his brother. "Ivory's good stuff. Did you know that in the days before Panem it was outlawed? How's that for madness?"

She lets it go, knows it's best for now if she does. He won't allow her to give Benjy cake, there's no way he'll listen if she insists that it's nice anyway, to give him good mattresses and not just assume he's immune to normal levels of pain.

Swann reaches across the table so he'll hold her hand, her eyebrows arching. "Why? Did it used to be dangerous before, did we somehow change it and make it safe?"

He squeezes her hand. "I don't know. Apparently animals used to be endangered, we couldn't just engineer them. At least, that's what my brother - Quentin, not Benjy - said."

Strange to imagine, a world like that.

He gets up, still holding her hand. "Ready to go?"

"Uh-huh." She stands up too, lacing their fingers together and moving close to him. Her head is cocked thoughtfully, thinking about the idea of animals being hunted to death, instead of disappearing mysteriously like dinosaurs. "I suppose I understand that. It would be sad if all the elephants and whales and things disappeared just for little decorations. It must have been hard before we could engineer animals, making sure that they lasted and didn't all die out."

"I don't know. What I say is maybe if an animal was so weak it got put to better use being jewelry or clothing, maybe it didn't deserve to get revived. Maybe it'd be better just as an occasional surprise muttation for the Games." He shrugs as he takes her hand. "We do better than nature, I guess."

As usual, the tip for the waiter is pitiful, but he doesn't let Swann see what he puts on the check. He takes her back to the car, and leaning back against the car, he lifts her a bit so he can kiss her..

He opens the door to the backseat, rather than the passenger's.

"Don't say that, maybe it wasn't down to toughness. How can they defend themselves against guns and things like that?" Your lady has a soft spot for animals, Jason, maybe don't prod at it.

She wraps her arms around his neck and kisses him back, her toes brushing the ground as he holds her up just that little bit. He opens the back door and she arches her eyebrow, but gets in anyway, crawling across the seat to wait for him.

"Well, we haven't driven Districters to extinction yet, so they manage somehow."

He grins, because he's joking, really, and the orange light of the streetlamp makes his cheeks look rounder, his smile deeper and younger. He climbs in after her, closing and locking the door behind them, before meeting her lips with his. He pursues her like a teenage boy, made clumsy by the small space of the back of the car.

For a moment, he pauses, cradling her face and looking at her in the light of a Thursday night, the orange and blues casting new shadows on her face, making those dark eyes seem wide and pooling. He doesn't need to say he finds her beautiful. He probably would stop believing it if he did say it out loud. So he doesn't.

She touches his cheek, looks up at him with hooded eyes and a soft smile. She feels warm inside, like maybe she contains sunlight, and it's been a long time since she's felt anything like what she does around Jason, even for all his faults, even when they fight and she cries.

"What?" she asks softly, leaning her head into his hand.

"Nothing. Aren't I allowed to just look at you?"

He lowers his hand from her chin to her neck, the place where he stamps so many kisses on her like a cattle brand, then her collarbone that juts forward like a stick from a bird's nest. The shadows make it severe, but drape her lower body in a sort of mystery.

"Doesn't anyone do that anymore?"

She moves her hand to graze the back of his, where he's touching her, then slides it up his arm to grip his bicep. His sleeve rumples under her hand, and she rubs with her thumb where the fabric's gone taut.

"Look at me? No. No one really looks at me anymore."

I do. He leans in and kisses her again, feeling how every part of her is small (her teeth her tongue her nose her chin). His hand descends further, into the shadows, down to her thigh. Usually her thighs are covered in crinoline and no one sees how strong they are from yoga and her towering heels.

"Their loss."

She shifts, wraps her arms around his neck and pulls herself closer to him when he kisses her, the warmth inside her spreading into her limbs and face when he touches her thigh. He pulls back to speak and she stays close, so close that their faces are still touching, foreheads and noses.

"I don't care about them anymore."

"Good."

But it isn't enough. Some insecure, jealous, eternally-spurned part of him wants to make sure she never cares about someone else again. He wants her, exclusively, totally. He slips his hand up her thigh, lingering on the sensitive skin there, plucks at her underwear like a harp. He waits for her body to invite him.

"I care. About you." The words are clumsy and artless, hesitant. Possibly the first time he's combined them in that order to anyone.

The way her legs open to make room for him is reflexive, as if she doesn't notice it at all. Her eyes are fixed on his face, and maybe it's not poetry but the way he says it makes her breathing short, her heart pound.

"I know."

She strokes the back of his neck, into his hair, and tilts in to kiss him again, just for a moment.

"I... care about you too."

Edited 2015-03-19 04:00 (UTC)

He slides his fingers in, not the vengeful surge of their former trysts but something smooth, purposeful, nearly guided by a supernatural calm. He does it as he kisses her again, presses into her, and he feels her mouth on his and his fingers, wet now and alive inside her, climbing his way up her slick terrain.

He wants to set her alight with the pleasure no other man could give her. He wants to obliterate every memory she has of any man that came before him, to annihilate a future where he doesn't exist as her only partner. He deepens the kiss, pulls her into his mouth for a moment, and then (hunched in the back of the car, cramped and not caring) separates from her and lowers his head. His hand emerges to push back her dress and he breathes in the damp smell of her.

She moans against his mouth, shifts to pull her legs up and wriggle out of her panties, all the while still kissing him. It's a long moment before she can realize, feel, the difference in his movements, the way it isn't rushed or cursory just so that she's ready enough. It makes her brow furrow, her grip on him tightening.

And then he pulls away and she is transfixed as he moves down, because even the mere movement is almost foreign to her, something she has seen only a handful of times throughout her relationships, the men she has allowed into her bed, and every time has seemed more like an obligation than anything else, until she pushes them away and silently condones a rejection of her own satisfaction because it seems like an inconvenience.

She's shaking again.

Likewise, Jason isn't terribly experienced at this either. Lorraine guided it through him once, because she knew what she was doing and he was only barely not a virgin when he met her, but he hasn't done it to anyone else and has made no effort to learn. Still, some parts are instinct, some common sense.

First he kisses her there, then deeper, as if he's engaging with a mouth instead of the walls of her labia, tongue curling with curiosity, twitching tentatively. He begins to massage her with his tongue, holding on to her side with his hand.

Swann's hips jerk and she gasps, swallowing hard as she lets her head fall back so she can blink at the ceiling of the car. She feels hyper-aware of every inch of herself, the insides of her thighs where his stubble scrapes pleasantly on her skin, her side where he holds her, his fingers pressing into the flesh under her dress.

There's a moment where he moves his tongue slightly in one way and it makes her squeak, hands flying up to cover her mouth as her eyes squeeze shut. She bites two fingers and gropes for his hand, feeling like she needs to touch him, somehow ground herself so that she doesn't open her eyes and find him gone, blinked out of existence.

The way she moves encourages him, gives him that rush of impending success that pushes him to increase his efforts. He pushes more, using that muscle that's been recruited more for snide remarks and yelling than it ever has for giving pleasure. He breathes her in, feeling his lungs fill with her sweat, her scent.

The hand on her stomach moves again and anchors against her buttocks, pulling her to him, and the free one grabs hers, holding and squeezing with faintly distracted verve.

Her knuckles are white, the way she grips at his hand, and then he is holding her and moving her and she sucks in what feels like far too little air. Her hips rock up against his face and she can feel sweat dripping down from her knee, sliding along her calf.

"Oh my god." She chokes it out, the hand she'd been biting now pressing against the door, bracing herself and forcing them closer all at once. "Ja-- Jason, god, fuck..."

She fades out in a moan, a whimper, everything hushed like she's afraid to be loud.

"Be loud," he says, because he wants that scream, wants her to call his name and his alone as he takes her to the brink and over the edge. Those are the only words he spares because he's intently focused on his work here, finding in him an enthusiasm he hasn't felt in a long time, a challenge he actually feels like rising to instead of shirking from.

(His leg is cramping from the strange pose he's holding, his knee screaming in protest, but that can wait, it can all wait.)

He increases in pace just a little.

She's let go of his hand, that arm thrown over her face so that her brow and the bridge of her nose are pressed into the crook of her elbow, her fingers curled tight into a fist. Every word seems drawn out of the pit of her stomach, except it's only his name, repeated over and over until it's just one long string of the same two syllables, growing slowly in volume.

jasonjasonjasonjasonjasonjasonja--

Swann is never loud, exactly, almost like maybe she doesn't even know how to be, but she's not soft either, abruptly cutting herself off with a cry that ends because she doesn't have enough air in her lungs for it to continue. Her knees lock hard and it travels up from there, an intense quivering that works up through her hips and seems to concentrate in her belly, making her shoulders arch up from the seat. There's an immediate sort of pleasant soreness in muscles she's forgotten she even has, and when she suddenly isn't so stiff, she gasps in air and pants it back out with groans that come from somewhere low inside her.

Her hands move to the back of her neck, arms forming triangles at her sides, and she opens her eyes again as her body slowly works its way back to normalcy, the waves calming down like when the tide goes out and the crests become lower and lower. She goes slack, still catching her breath, and her eyelids are low, suddenly too worn out to keep them fully raised.

There's a soft noise that's almost as if she tried to call his name again and then just stopped and sighed.

He can tell when she finishes, because it's as if her entire body is a rubber band that's just gone slack. Everything, the tight walls and the straining thighs and the air-starved lungs, goes loose and jellyish, and he gives her a final courtesy stroke as if licking his plate.

He pulls away, a smug, secretive smile on his face, leaving her once again wreathed in the shadows of the dark and no longer so easily mapped by smell, by taste, by touch. And then he pulls close to her face again, giving her a kiss that tastes a bit like herself on her lips, and runs his hand through her hair.

Her calling his name still echoes inside his body, like a caged bird throwing itself at the inside of his ribs, and he loves it.

Her breathing is still quick, still a little rough, but she kisses back hard, holds at his face, her fingers pressing into his scalp. She kisses him like he himsed is oxygen, like she can get everything she needs out of his mouth. Her braid goes loose between his fingers, but she doesn't notice, just moves her arms and holds him down to her, knees still on either side of him. She only pulls away when the need to breathe becomes almost desperate, her lungs aching.

"Oh my god, Jason."

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[cw: things gonna get raunchy]

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