It's About Holding and Being Held [Closed]

[whatisay]

WHO| Jason and Peggy Carter; Jason and Swann
WHAT| Jason is Peggy's support system, sad as that is; Swann gives Jason 'I'm sorry Leo called you crazy' cuddles
WHEN| After the Binding Plot and Jason's network post.
WHERE| D7 Suite; D8 Suite
WARNINGS| Shit might get deep in either thread. References to bidding, child abuse, alcoholism, suicide and mental illness may abound.

I. Peggy

Jason works late more often than most Escorts, not from any sort of work ethic so much as because he often prefers the workplace to home - since he's started regularly dating Swann and carpooling with her, the overnights have decreased some because he has a more pleasant third option. But sometimes he can still be found late at night, camped out in the District Seven Suite like an ill-tempered gargoyle, feet on the coffee table and suit jacket flung over the back of the couch. He's managed to secure a week of food for each of his Tributes come the next Arena, well before the theme is even announced, and that small victory has soothed his frazzled nerves.

It's about two in the morning, and given that he's imposed a strict schedule for all his Tributes that involves morning exercises and primping, it's dead quiet. Jason's decided it's not worth the hour's drive home just to get two hours of sleep and then come back, so he's drifting off on the couch, his notepad on his lap, his glasses fallen so far down his nose that he can't possibly looking through them, his head tilting back and then jerking forward again in a vain attempt to stave off sleep.

II. Swann

Jason expected pushback from his network post; he craved it, almost. He's not quite aware enough of his own behavior to realize that instigating fights is his way of shoring up his victimhood's fortress, of refilling his tank of martyrdom which gets him out of bed in the morning, but he did know he was looking to pick a fight. And he got a few of them - but also took some injury from one, from a comment which slipped past his defenses and lit up the inside of his head like dynamite. He finishes the conversation and shoves his communicator into his pants even before forgetting to turn it off (it will shut down automatically in thirty seconds).

He's so angry that for a moment he can't see, that even after his vision returns he feels uncoordinated, like his neurological impulses aren't moving muscles so much as setting off tiny explosions. After pacing around the Suite living room for a moment, he heads to the elevator, accidentally hits the button for the wrong floor before he manages to hit the right one, and resents that an elevator door can't slam. Instead he rests his forehead against the wall and waits to arrive at the District Eight floor.

He just hopes, for their sakes, that it's not Joel or Jack he runs into first, that he finds Swann almost immediately upon arriving.

Comments

[cigne]

Swann had to very quickly turn her communicator off to avoid his rant -- she didn't necessarily disagree with everything he was saying (and she didn't agree with everything either), but she absolutely knew the fallout was not anything she wanted to be involved with. Other than the occasional masochistic peek at the goings-on in the post, she's been absent from it entirely.

In her Suite, she's mostly alone; she thinks one or two Tributes might be lurking in their rooms and Jolie in her workroom, but she has the common areas to herself for now. She's tucked neatly in the corner of the sofa, working on some notes while the television plays on mute. The elevator dings and she glances over her shoulder from habit, expecting one of her charges, but being surprised with Jason instead.

"Hi," she calls, not getting up just yet. "You okay?"

[whatisay]

"We're going for a drive." Jason doesn't bother to ask her, doesn't say 'please', just states it as if he's delivering a message from a higher power. His voice alone should tell Swann that he's not okay; it's thick and harsh like he's vomiting up the words rather than saying them. "Now."

He's actually shaking with anger, flushed to the ears, hands reflexively clenching and unclenching as he imagines them around Leonidas' throat.

[cigne]

She blinks. Not so much at the order as at his appearance and behavior, and she's sure it somehow goes back to his ill-advised speech on the network, and she's not sure she even wants to know what happened.

But Swann is nothing if not submissive and obedient, and so she closes her notebook, slipping it into her work bag before rising and heading to where he is.

"All right." Her voice is soft, soothing, and she stops for bottles of water before she meets him with her hand outstretched. "Drink some water, you're going to give yourself a headache."

[whatisay]

He takes her hand and one of the water bottles, slugging it back because he knows she's right, that even if this doesn't set off a migraine it'll make his head pound. A little vein on his forehead is throbbing away in time with his elevated heart rate. He grips her hand tight.

He doesn't even wait until the elevator door is closed before he starts ranting.

"Leonidas Cora, why we don't deport him is entirely beyond me, why we bother letting his useless gimp ass take up a spot in the Tribute Center when he never even competed in the Games, I say we should just send him back to the damn stone mines he crawled out of, he doesn't know how to speak to his better, he's going off about how I'm the one touched in the head, like he has any idea what he's talking about-" Jason pauses to take another drink, hands moving about animatedly as he vents.

[cigne]

Her fingers slowly turn white in his grasp, but she doesn't pull away, just sips at her own bottle of water.

When he starts ranting, she watches him, not entirely sure what he's talking about, and she has to take a moment before she catches the actual catalyst to his rage, what Leonidas said to him that set him off so badly. It actually makes her angry too, although Swann's anger is perpetually buried under all the sweetness inside of her, and she has a more pressing desire to take care of Jason than express her unhappiness.

"It's all right, Jason," she murmurs, reaching to catch him, wrapping her arms around his waist even though it puts her at risk of accidentally getting whacked in the head. "He's just a Districter, don't even listen to him. Everyone knows he's only here because the people in charge of Two begged on his behalf. He doesn't know anything and no one takes him seriously."

[whatisay]

"It's not all right," he huffs, but he relaxes a little bit into her arms, just enough to stop vibrating with abject fury. "He brought my family into it. He shouldn't even have permission to speak about anyone's family, much less mine, and you know, if we were back in the Districts I could slit his throat and no one would look sideways at it but here I'd lose my job for backhanding him-"

He makes a gesture like backhanding someone, wishes for it to be at Leo and instead just clips his fingers on the edge of the wall painfully.

"Jesus. There's no justice in the world."

[cigne]

"There isn't," she agrees, resting her cheek on his sternum, and running her thumb over the small of his back. It's easier to hold him and just agree than it is to do anything else, and she's really on his side, because it was wrong of Leonidas to bring the Compsons into it. Even the Capitolites who mock them have the decency to do it behind Jason's back.

The elevator carries them to the parking garage, and she only shifts to walk with one arm wrapped around him from the side, refusing to let him go.

"Do you want me to have Daddy call in favors and get him deported? I don't know who's in charge of that now, or I'd let you go them yourself."

[whatisay]

She'll be able to feel his heart hammering, his blood pulsing, him nearly feverish with anger. He rubs his hand over his pained fingernails and then they head towards the car, him barely thinking to shorten his strides so she can keep up.

"No. No, I don't need your father to manage it for me, I'll find a way to handle it myself." Probably by burning through his anger until it's nothing more than a scorchmark inside him in the shape of a grudge. He flicks his car key and opens the door for her. "I just- where does he get off?"

[cigne]

She scurries along next to him, three little paces for every one of his. "I was just offering," she says softly, because she understands his desire to be independent, but she can't see how it's bad to let someone help you with trickier things like this. And it was all the better because it wasn't so directly linked to Jason if her father dropped a hint that he was dissatisfied with an unqualified Districter in the same building as his daughter.

"He thinks he's a big-shot because they let him come here. That's why he needs to be put back in his place." Swann takes her seat and buckles up, waiting for Jason to round the car and get in the other side.

[whatisay]

"He does. I'll find a way. I'll get that District scum cleaned up." He's starting to pack it away, shove it off into one of those grudges where he will fantasize about taking vengeance but never actually follow through with it. The daydream will become more satisfying than action. So it is when Jason's rage is stymied.

He gets in the car and grips the wheel, pulls them out of the lot with that precision he never seems to have anywhere else. He hipchecks tables and chairs regularly but has never even clipped anything with the car.

"'Screwed up in the head'. I'm not the District cripple pretending to be a Mentor. I'm not screwed up in the head and everyone knows it."

[cigne]

Swann curls in her seat to watch him, twisted so that her whole upper body is faced towards him. She puts her hand on the center console, but it's habit more than anything else, built up by weeks now of constantly holding hands.

"You're not anything in the head. You're perfectly normal." She agrees in that calm, supportive tone, letting him get it out while she bolsters his ideas and statements. "Only a delusional person would devote their lives to pretending they're anything special when they're such a public failure."

[whatisay]

He's not shaking anymore, and breathing less ferociously as they get to the freeway, where he can just go and not feel encumbered by traffic. Road rage can be a real problem.

He breathes deep, reaching over and taking her hand, holding it tight. "How many other people are out there thinking that I'm the one that's crazy?"

[cigne]

She patiently strokes the side of his hand with her thumb, shaking her head. "No one, Jason. No one thinks you're crazy. I promise." Sociopathic, maybe. Or depressed with severe anger management issues. But not crazy.

There's not much else she can say, so she just squeezes his hand and watches him. She has no idea where he's taking her, but she's not worried. She feels relaxed, even, with him behind the wheel.

[CW references to bidding]

[impaledqueen]

The capture (and probable death) of Steve Rogers hit her far harder than she had thought it would. It just made raw the old wounds regarding her own Steve. And then she had an appointment with a bidder not long afterwards. It's not a wonder that her nightmares have been terrible tonight.

Jason's probably back home asleep in bed, but she takes a gamble. She leaves her room with a bathrobe over her pajamas. She has no makeup and her scarf is only haphazardly wrapped around his neck, if only because it feels weird to be without it even if there's no one around. The dark circles and hollows in her cheeks are visible without any makeup, and her knuckles are raw from pushing herself to the edge in the gym without the protective equipment she probably should have been wearing.

She walks down to District Seven on quiet, bare feet. When she gets to the common area, she sees Jason, as suspected, on the couch with his notes. She crosses her arms over her chest and just tilts her head, watching him to see if he's really asleep or just dozing. She doesn't want to wake him up if he's asleep, mostly because that would mean she really does need him right now and she doesn't want to admit it.

[whatisay]

The sound of the elevator ding penetrates that shroud of sleep. It doesn't cut through immediately, but after a few seconds it coalesces in his head into an awareness that someone's there with him, and he opens his eyes and sits up and pushes his glasses back onto his nose.

"Peggy." He knows immediately what the problem is, because they've done this before, thirty, forty, however many times over the few years they worked together - it oddly feels like an equivalent trade with the amount of times she's made sure he gets home safe with his twice-a-month headaches. He breathes deep and brushes at his eyes with his fingertips, then gets to his feet.

She always looks like a ghost like this, the harsh edges of her personality made thin and brittle. It's enough to believe that she actually did die in the Arena, and the Peggy who still exists is just a revenant. Very few people remember Peggy from before the Arena - and more than that, from before she started getting bid on - but Jason does. Jason worked with her. Closely. She was his first Victor.

"You look like hell." He should chew her out about how this isn't his job, about how maybe she should go hunt down Holly Day, but whether he does or not he's already moving to the kitchen next to the elevator to boil water to get them some tea or cocoa to calm down.

[impaledqueen]

"Of course I do. I'm not wearing makeup." There was once a time when she barely knew how to use a brush. Makeup had been a luxury, and her family had been too poor for frivolities. Besides, before the arena, she had still been beautiful without even a dash of concealer, and she'd been happy. Then the stylists painted her face and scrubbed her scars and calluses away, and suddenly, everyone was an enemy. Even after the games, that didn't stop. Everyone was an enemy who resented or feared her, or else they were one of the precious few friends who didn't know how to save her. The makeup became her armor. Paint herself every day to look beautiful and perfect, and underneath the blush and foundation, it feels like her real face is rotting away until she's only painting a bare skull.

It also probably doesn't help that she has a bruise on her jaw, about the size of a fist. Whether she got it from sparring or her client, she'd prefer not to say.

She feels herself relax when he doesn't throw her out. Instead, he's standing up and putting on a kettle. She instinctively starts pulling at her scarf, a nervous habit she picked up a long time ago, but it's so poorly tied that it just slides off, leaving her scar bare. She decides to just twist it in her hands. "You're hard at work, I see." Far too late to be working, but what would be the point in scolding him when she had stayed up late doing her job plenty of times as well?

[whatisay]

"It shows." It's blunt, not even nasty, just a flat statement, a kernel of truth. Jason straightens out his shirt and pours the water, sets it to a low flame so the fire doesn't cause scalding noises at the bottom of the kettle.

There was a time when he would look at Peggy's scar and stare, but either he's gotten used to it or bored of it, because now he hardly notices it. It's grotesque but commonplace, like the decay of his home, the rotting floorboards, the broken boarded window, the stains from leaks along the walls and ceiling, like the city they live in parading brats to a slaughter so they can keep the entertainment business running. Jason used to watch the Games, but then he worked in the industry, and any interest he had in them fell aside.

Instead his eyes just flick to the bruise, and they narrow in the dark as he squints through tiredness to make it out, and then he realizes where she must have gotten it and he becomes numb to that, too.

"Someone's got to. It's not like I can trust the Stylist to do anything right." Jason leans against the counter, curling his fingers over the corner of the polished granite. "I've got the first week of food covered for all of the Tributes I have, unless the Gamemakers decide to throw another one at me unannounced. Maybe mine can stop milling around looking for grubs and try to actually win this thing."

He pauses, dark eyes drifting from her bruise to her haunted eyes. He fumbles for his cigarette in his breastpocket only to realize that his jacket's on the other side of the room, but then finds his cigarette tucked behind his ear, saving him the trip. "But you don't really want to talk about that right now."

[impaledqueen]

"Mmm."

He's right on all counts. She doesn't really want to talk about preparations for the games and all the horror shows on her face. That's why she doesn't leave the room without spending so much time putting herself together during the daylight hours. In the night, it feels more like she can take the mask off, because there's no one there to see her face.

"Do you remember Steve? He was a friend of mine. The one Bucky volunteered in place of."

She never talks about Steve and Bucky. Their loss had utterly devastated her, possibly more than the games themselves did, but how she brings them up because they're all she can think about.

And that makes her feel weak. Her arms stay tightly crossed over her chest because otherwise she would be hugging herself, and she hates how vulnerable that makes her look, how vulnerable she already looks, she already is. She hates it so much.

[whatisay]

"Sure. Skinny little guy, sent you notes in the Arena."

It's not often that Jason remembers such details about the Arenas - he worked for District Ten for a little over a decade, starting when he was just seventeen, and for the most part the fallen Tributes, their names, their families, all pass through him like water through cloth. He would have forgotten Peggy, too, had it not been for the fact that she won. Her victory secured the facts, caught them for him before he could slough them away. He remembers Bucky's year, too.

"Sit down, for God's sake, you're making me nervous." He jerks his head towards the couch, so they can sit across from each other, and then turns his attention back to the boiling water. There are no Avoxes here tonight. Jason avoids them when he can help it, and they do eat into the budget for the Suite, which he watches like a hawk - and so after midnight they're sent home. He takes small drags as he watches the water.

"Why, you having dreams about your friend back in the District again?" Because that's what dreams are about, aren't they? They're about loss, when they're about anything at all.

[impaledqueen]

"Yes, that was him." Skinny and asthmatic with so many health problems that he should have died long before the Capitol got to him.

Normally, she'd give Jason a snarky comment about ordering her around, but instead, she just drifted towards the couch and sat on the edge. She was positioned as though she were prepared to stand and fade into thin air at any moment. Maybe she was. Who knew?

"I'm afraid I was." She swept a hand through her hair. It just makes her appearance more rumpled, and for a moment, she resembles the scared little girl who had been shuffled onto the train to the Capitol on that fateful Reaping all those years ago. "I met him when we were very young. One time, an older boy was picking on me and Steve got ready to go and fight him, even though he was about half the boy's size. I beat the boy up myself and then pinched Steve's arm to teach him I could take care of myself."

She doesn't know if she's told this story since he died. Certainly not to any Capitolites. "One of the tributes here was some kind of counterpart of his, except bigger and more healthy. The Capitol is going to kill him." Like they killed her Steve.

[whatisay]

"They might Avox him."

Jason doesn't look at her for a few moments; she's asking him to sympathize with her for feeling for a traitor to his country, and as far as he's concerned she might as well be asking him to sympathize for treason in general. It's not that Jason's patriotic, far from. He just knows better, thinks that anyone who gets cause in sedition is a fool for having attempted it, and there's nothing he can abide less than idiocy.

But despite all popular opinions, he does know when to hold his tongue, and there's a slim handful of people for whom he'll do just that. Peggy's one. He watches the kettle, ready to turn it off before it starts to squeal and the loud noise creeps into the vulnerable parts of Peggy's mind. Most Mentors don't like loud noises during these spells.

"You know that it's just a face and a name they share, right? I mean, you know how this all works."

[impaledqueen]

"I know. That's all it is. It's still hard to see his face again." She will later appreciate the sensitivity with which Jason is dealing with this, at least for his standards. "And to hear him. He sounds the same. He even talks the same way."

She leans down and buries her face in her hands. She doesn't know what to do with herself. "He did this to himself. I never even spoke to him, he did this to himself, and I still feel like this." She takes a deep, shaky breath. "They're both here. It's like the dead have come back for me."

And it makes her think about things. Think about what Steve would think about her, lying back and taking what was given for her for the sake of information. Think about what Bucky probably thinks of her, after so many years of never speaking to each other, after he's probably long found out how she got her information.

"Damn it all to hell, they both sound the same." And she hates how much she wants to talk to them.

[whatisay]

Jason doesn't say anything while she lets it out, even as he can tell her thoughts are careening back and forth. He turns the fire off on the kettle and exhales vapor through his nose, enough to leave the slightest traces of droplets on the stubble on his upper lip.

"Tea or cocoa?" he asks, and when she decides (or after long enough without) he puts the proper one in one of the mugs and some of his herbal tea in the other. He brings the mugs over to the coffee table and sets them down gently. He sits, ankle over knee, that casual sprawl that always marked that he's neither happy with his job nor interested enough in pretending to be professional. But he's listening, watching her with those dark tired eyes that have perpetual circles under them.

"It's just your memory getting jogged. Everything you don't want to think about, all that shit you're burying from back in the Districts," because of course Jason would think that she wants to forget the District more than her time in the Capitol, "it's all just bubbling back up again. But it'll go back under. Always does."

[impaledqueen]

"Tea, please."

The issue is that he's not entirely wrong. She does want to forget the District. She wants to forget being happy together with people she cared about. She wants to forget the Reaping and the way most people avoided her after she came back. She wants to forget how much she loved Steve and Bucky, and how suddenly they were taken away from her. She wants to forget how she felt after they were both gone, Steve disappeared and Bucky apparently having committed suicide (and the questions, the horrible questions that raised in her, whether or not he had killed himself because Steve was all he really cared about and no one else mattered, if she didn't matter), and she wants to forget the crushing loneliness she was left with when she was left without friends or family to look out for her when she was just seventeen.

At the same time, she wants to hold onto those memories more than anything, because they're what shape her, and they're what sustains her through all the indignities of the Capitol.

"It just... reminds me how much I miss them." She had loved them so dearly. She still loves Bucky, even though he may hate her for all she knows. She reaches out for her mug of tea with a murmured thanks before taking a sip. It burns her tongue, but the pain is welcome. "And now I'm dreaming about them again." Horrible dreams. Dreams of violence and accusations and furious betrayal. Like they blamed her for everything that happened. Everything was fine before she was Reaped. "But Steve's going to die or be Avoxed, now, so I guess it will calm down. The Bucky here doesn't resemble mine nearly as much." Still the same face and voice, but his demeanor is completely different. Similar enough to be comforting, far enough away to keep her from wanting to cry.

[whatisay]

Seventeen is, unbeknownst to them - or known on some subconscious level, one unspoken between them, the kind communicated with looks and gestures rather than words - an arc age for each of them, both of them isolated and on their own, Peggy adrift from everyone who ever loved her and Jason stepping up as the head of his family as they face a bright new future like cavedwellers, slinking back into the shadows.

He wouldn't know what it's like to miss someone like that, but he can understand wanting to forget. Jason holds the mug of hot tea in both hands, cradling it, using his tongue and lips to readjust his cigarette.

He doesn't know what to say to her, but he knows what her issues are, and it's because they've known each other for so long that he ventures to ask the next thing.

"Is Holly keeping you from being bid on regularly?"