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

"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."

He almost asks if it's been a while since anyone's done that for her, but he doesn't want to know, wants to erase the men who came before him by the oblivion of ignorance. He wants to be the axle around which she rotates, a singularity out of time.

He no less out of breath when she kisses him, and his own chest is hawing for air when she releases him, and yet he wants to return to her like a boat captain longs to dock home.

"I'd say that was even better than dessert," he murmurs. He weaves a finger through her loosened braid.

She laughs, hard, something inside of her loosened by all of this, it's like riding high on her own emotions, and she's pretty sure that she wants to cry too, not from sadness but just as a release, but she doesn't, just runs her hands on his back, over his shirt. She's pretty sure they can't stay here much longer, that someone will come knocking at the window like they're teenagers, but she wishes they had more time.

"Should we go home?" she whispers, and there is a dark, thick, suggestive note in her voice, her eyes.

He wasn't expecting her to laugh, but that, too, feel like a success, like something only he can manage, and he gives her a last kiss before opening the door. He doesn't want them to crawl over the center console to get to the front seats, but he does wait for Swann to smooth her skirt and pull up her underwear.

"Sure. Let's do that." His own tone isn't saucy at all, because he can't tonight, because he's still exhausted from the migraine and that sort of energy isn't in him.

She has to fish around on the floor for her panties, quickly threading her legs through them and hooking them up over her hipbones before she pushes her dress down and crawls out after him. She wraps her arms around him from behind, head between his shoulders as she waits for him to open the front door -- she wants to be close to him, and she can read his tone enough to know that she's too tired for anything tonight.

She can only hope for the morning.

"Did you bring any other clothes from your house?" she asks gently, because he's worn the same thing two days in a row now, even if it had been laundered.

He pauses for a moment, milling over the question like if he thinks his way out of it, he'll have a better answer than the one he knows. Then he sighs. "No."

Which means either going home or going to work in the same thing for the third day. He might as well go in wearing a barrel.

She kisses the back of his neck, rises up on her toes to do it. "Just checking," she says. "I'll make a call when we get home, I'll take care of it." It's very matter-of-fact, the way she says it, because she knows people who can do this and it's selfish, she wants Jason to stay, can't bear to be parted from him right now.

The door opens and she climbs in, hair swinging.

He very nearly asks how, but he doesn't because he knows, like a child before a fire, that touching it will only hurt and shame him. So he doesn't; he just feels smaller on the inside, feels the triumph of the last ten minutes flit away.

He finds the silence grow awkward, but doesn't interject anything to fix it, instead stewing on how much he hates his clothing, his bank account, the scuffs on his shoes.

She doesn't understand his silence, how he hates to let her help with anything. She would do the same for someone with a bottomless wardrobe or wallet -- the problem has nothing to do with his ability to provide for himself, but rather the fact that what he does provide isn't in her closet. Swann knows that if he returns to his house, he won't come back to her tonight.

Fixing the problem is a solution to her problem.

"Are you angry?" she asks softly, looking at him, fingers tentatively reaching for him. "I just want you to stay with me. You can't stay if you don't have a change of clothes."

"I'm not angry." At least, not at her, and not any more than he usually is. He starts the car and rolls down the window slightly, so he can smoke. He can still taste her on his lips. "I know you're right."

It would never pass his lips to tell her that he's ashamed. There are some words that he's cognitively incapable of applying to himself, no matter how true they are at times. Ashamed. Depressed. Insecure. Just like his brother.

He'll accept entitled, angry, volatile, a violent, brutal jackass before any of those.

"I'll shower while you get that all sorted."

"Okay," she says, and looks out the window, letting her hand fall on the center console instead of his arm. He still seems upset and she doesn't know how to fix that, feels responsible even when she only wanted to help with something she saw as a very basic problem -- need clothes, get clothes. He did so much for her, and even her littlest efforts were met with resistance, as if accepting any of her help (love) was admitting a weakness.

"I'm fine," he says, more to reassure her than because he means it. He doesn't realize how volatile his moods are, how different the drive back if from when they came out here. It all seems to meld into a single experience, as if the discomfort now is bleeding from the present and tainting the past.

However, on the drive back he reaches for her again, her hand to twine his fingers with and hold. Sealing the good they had moments ago in their skin.

She squeezes his hand, glances back at him and smiles a little. Jason is hard to understand, a mystery at the best of times, but she feels like he's slowly becoming easier for her, the more they stay together, the closer they get. She strokes his hand with her thumb, rests her head back on the seat.

"Thank you."

"For what?"

Women, he thinks. Yesterday she was screaming at him and throwing a phone at his feet and today she loves him. Maybe it's not women, maybe it's people, inscrutable and mercurial - he doesn't see the hypocrisy in wondering about it, since he sees himself a sane, rational man.

Yeah, that war isn't over yet, don't get too comfy, Jason.

"For... you know."

She turns pink, can't bring herself to say it, quickly looks away and out the window. It's embarrassing, in some part of her mind, part that isn't connected to the side that let him go down on her in the back seat of a car.

"And for staying with me last night. And tonight."

"You asked me to." Before she muttered the word 'love', which he's left untouched like a child leaves suspect food on a plate. "Besides, I wanted to make sure you were alright. You have to admit it was a bit alarming."

She doesn't remember. Everything between vomiting and waking up at two in the afternoon is a haze, only clear enough for Swann to remember that she existed at all.

"Well, you didn't have to." She shrugs, more embarrassed now. "It's been a while since it was that bad."

"I chose to. It wasn't a problem. Kept me out of the house."

He gives her hand a squeeze and pulls into the parking space that has become his de facto over the last few weeks. He looks over at her, warming a little, smiling slightly. "Do you want me to carry you in this time, too?"

She laughs a little, holding his hand more tightly than he's holding hers, and shakes her head. "I think I'll be okay," she says, then lets go of him so she can unbuckle herself and get out of the car. She grabs at his hand again as soon as she can, so they can go upstairs together.

She lets him unlock the door.

That final wave of exhaustion hits about when he hits the bedroom, but he still has to shower, and so without word or fanfare he sheds his clothing and slips naked into her bathroom while she figures out the clothing situation for tomorrow. He puzzles over the fact that it only took one shower with her to make a solo one seem lonely.

He emerges about ten minutes later wrapped at the waist in a towel. Normally he's slightly shy about his body - he was a fat kid before and he doesn't have anything like Calendius Rey's ab implants now - but not so with Swann.

She's sitting lotus-style on the bed when he comes out, talking on the phone.

"Anthony, please. I think you can do it after everything I did for you. Yeah. Yeah, okay. Are you just sending an Avox? Yeah, all of it. Okay. Okay, thanks. Bye."

She hangs up and smiles at Jason, scoots forward on the bed to hold out her arms for him. "You look tired," she tells him quietly. A rack of clothing is coming, sent by a personal stylist who owes Swann the world for kick-starting his career and connecting him with A-level celebrities. She expects everything to be complete like always, every outfit perfect from the underwear to the belt to the shoes, and she figures he'll send enough to get Jason through a few more days.

"You wanna lie down?"

He finds himself in her arms without remembering actually taking the steps to cross the room. Time seems to fold up inside her, the moment away from her becoming less important. He extracts himself only after a moment of canoodling.

"I do." He helps himself to her closet, knowing that Eta put the pajamas he wears here away and laundered. He slips into them and crumbles onto the bed, making vague gestures at her to lay down beside him.

Flecks of the Heavens' Spat Out Spit [OPEN]

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