thecapitol | Still Coming Out of Your Mother Upside Down [Closed]

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Still Coming Out of Your Mother Upside Down [Closed]

WHO| JSwann Derulo
WHAT| Jason and Swann plot Joel's demise; Swann brings Jason home to daddy
WHEN| After IC inbox thread; later in the week.
WHERE| D8 Suite; Swann's place
WARNINGS| Typical Jason Compson awfulness. About forty tags after CakeGate, smut happens.

I.

He can feel his pulse in his neck. One as acquainted with rage as Jason comes to appreciate the different gradients of it, the difference between the blinding, maddened and desperate fury that drove him up here after the argument with Leo to the territorial concern that brings him up now. He takes the stairs instead of the elevator, since it's only one floor, and when he gets up to the eighth he tucks his phone into his workbag.

"Swann?" He takes a step into the Suite, finds her about as upset and fuming from the encounter with Joel as he figured. "Let's take a drive and figure out what to do."

It isn't the barked order he gave last time, just a steady, stern, reasonable voice.

II.

It's not that Jason's nervous about meeting Swann's father because he anticipates any great blow to his esteem; he's simply chainsmoking his way over to her place because he knows that anything less than a success will send her into another of her self-indulgent spirals of candy-bingeing and weeping. She never reminds him more of his mother than then, and it tends to kill any chemistry between them, make Jason spend more nights just going straight home after dropping her off, and that in turns fuels the decline. It's only when she decides to get peppy again that they return to normal, because God knows Jason is never the one to proactively try to improve things.

He's wearing the one suit he owns that didn't come from Swann and still looks respectable, a little outdated, but Swann told him over text message that Ilar wouldn't mind, that he would just be happy for company. He's had his car cleaned and detailed even though he knows Ilar won't see it, but it's a sort of psychological preen that turns his usual strident attitude into one more closely approaching confidence. He waits outside, smoking his camphor and leaning against the hood of the car.

waiting in lot. come on down, he texts.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

There's none of the passion there usually is when they shower together; instead, it's not unlike how they treat each other after she's been sick or he's had a migraine. Both of them are numb, tired, robotic, but he pulls her to him and holds her under the hot water against his chest.

"What's wrong with us?" he asks, more rhetorically than anything else.

She closes her eyes, wraps her arms around his waist. He speaks and she's quiet for a moment, then snorts, just a little, suddenly struck with just how bad it is for them, individually and together.

"What isn't?" she answers. "What does it matter? Neither of us was meant for... for those pretty relationships where everything is all perfect and sweet. It isn't who we are."

"I don't understand why it can't be easy." Why can't it ever be easy? Jason was raised knowing he was a Compson, that that meant something, and then sometime in his teenage years he realized how much of a lie that was and that he was never meant for the leisurely life that his parents promised for him. And in the years following that he's started to believe it might be less circumstance and something inherently wrong with-

-he refuses to believe it's something wrong with him, so the answer is that that easy life never really existed, that he was lied to.

He holds her close, brings her head to his shoulder, inhales and exhales the steam around them. He's not really going to apologize, and he doubts she is either. But this, he feels, is closer than that.

There are tears on her nose, mixed in with the water, and she blinks at the wall while her fingers dig into his back, his side. Clutching him, letting her hair get plastered down to his skin by the shower.

Because we're fucked up. We were fucked up kids and now we're fucked up adults, all of us, thanks to our parents, and who knows if it'll ever get any better.

"I don't know."

For a moment he pulls her tight enough to cling, as if he'll never let her go, like he's trapping a bird in his hands. The spasm moves through his muscles, arms and hands, and he shakes slightly, gripping her hair.

His brain barely knows it, but his body and soul do, that they're doomed, that their entire generation is mired neck-deep in the sins of their parents and none of them know what to do about it. That it goes deeper than politics, that it's the poison in every card signed by Viatrix' assistant Swann got instead of a visit from her mother, in every time Jason was told to shut up or get beaten rather than keep crying for Damuddy, in the smell of alcohol and prescription pills and dripping, swollen, diseased opulence that permeated their childhoods.

"We should take a vacation."

They were born just enough generations down the line for everything to be wrong, all of them, born into families who'd spent endless lifetimes breeding only amongst themselves, dominating the whole world with their iron fists, since before Snow was president, since before Panem was Panem. Families that stayed on their personal Olympus for so long that they'd forgotten what made them gods in the first place, until it was all blood and virtue, not luck as to whose name you were born with.

Selfishness bred in by two centuries of wealth, of inability to be demolished. Children plagued by family trees with branches crossed over each other a dozen times -- Swann is among the luckiest, to have one parent of fresh blood, brought into the cycle by marriage only. It didn't help much, but she'd escaped some of the most unlucky traits, the ones that required extensive plastic surgery, diseases that needed medical management and were inescapable when everyone in your family had carried the gene for three generations.

All of it, swept under rugs that cost more than cars, hidden in boxes studded with jewels, and safes built into walls and floors.

Swann quivers in his grasp, presses her face to his skin before looking up.

"Where?"

"I don't know. Anywhere. Somewhere that isn't here." He looks back down at her, and it's as if his eyes, now empty of anger, are completely hollow in their darkness. There's no soul inside them, unless 'soul' is the term used for the putty that holds together the tangle of neuroses and dysfunctions and anxieties that make up a Capitolite.

He finally pulls away from her and picks up some soap, rubbing it between his palms, one over the other, like he's petting something soft and warm. When he has a lather he reaches over and wipes her cheeks, the remains of her mascara and the scaliness where she cried.

His eyes are hollow and hers are distant, like somewhere the awareness got lost inside her head and never made it to her face. She doesn't say anything for a while, at least not until he comes back and cleans her face, and then she gently clutches his wrists, the spark dimly returning to her irises for just a moment.

"Let's go to Seven," she murmurs. "They have cabins, built high up in the mountains, and no one can bother you. You can see everything from up there, I saw it on TV. We'll take the animals, Eta can send food with us."

"Alright." His hands stop, and he wonders if she can feel that he still has that slight dull tremble, the way his pulse seems to still hammer away up into his palm. He leaves them there in hers and lowers his head enough to kiss her forehead, the line of her hair.

The problem with vacations is that they're temporary, but Swann and Jason have always been much more skilled at running from their problems than addressing them.

"I can get a few days off, provided none of mine win. And honestly, they won't."

It resonates through her cheeks, his pulse, and she sighs when he kisses her forehead, blinking. Stepping forward, she wraps her arms around him again, lays her cheek against his sternum.

"They could, they're not that bad. If one of yours wins, we'll go for longer, you'll have the bonus."

Swann actually thinks it's more likely that one of Jason's would win than one of her own. Jack and Firo will try but fail, Joel won't try to do anything except hide away like a hibernating bear, and Clint will sacrifice himself for one of his buddies. Maxwell too.

At least Dorian is likely to try, and Ruffnut is exactly the kind of idiot who could possibly luck her way into a victory.

"In the cabins, they have whole walls made of windows, to overlook all the mountains and trees for miles, and it's the first thing you see when you wake up. It looks like a painting. And it's dark enough at night to see stars."

In the Capitol, you're lucky if you can even see the moon. The only time Swann can remember seeing stars in her whole life was once when there were severe rains in Five and a landslide sent the power out for about fifteen minutes. She hadn't even known what she was seeing when she looked out the window -- she was seven years old.

Edited 2015-06-06 18:52 (UTC)

"They're pretty bad. Have you seen the purple one I got?"

He doesn't tell her that if he gets that bonus, it's going to have to go straight into paying off the debt he's accumulated showering her with the gifts he uses as a proxy for words and sentiment. It's such a far-off idea that any of them will win that it doesn't really matter.

"Alright. Let's do that. As soon as we have time off..."

He holds her close, rubbing soap into her shoulder, ignoring that they've been in here long enough that the bottoms of their toes are starting to wrinkle. The water never goes cold in the Capitol.

Swann can't help laughing a little over the mental image of 'the purple one', the oddest and ugliest Tribute that the Capitol had seen in quite some time. At least people had some idea what the other non-human Tributes were supposed to be -- the one that Jason got stuck with resembles nothing so much as a giant raisin in clothing.

"Better you than me," she teases. "I think that thing could eat me in one bite."

She lets him clean her for a moment, then reaches for shampoo, to start massaging it into his hair and get out all the frosting and cake.

"After the Crowning. It'll be just us, it's never just us..."

"She looks like a dried wad of chewed gum," Jason says, sighing and half-laughing at the teasing. "I wonder if I could get her to do some guest appearances on a children's show. Maybe as an anti-drug PSA."

He leans his head close to her, whispering in a funny voice in her ear. "Don't try crystal meth. Don't try it even once."

And he rests his head against her hands as they work through it. The frosting has already dried, the crumbs of cake hardened a bit and then swollen back up and crumbled from the water.

She squirms and grimaces when he whispers like that, his voice tickling her ear, her nose wrinkled up with laughter. "Use Dorian as the 'before'. Show what happens!"

Fingers working through the patches of hard frosting, Swann bites her lip a bit with focus. "Okay, rinse," she tells him quietly, leaning his head back a bit towards the water.

Jason snorts and leans his head back, letting the water take the sugar and glop out of his hair and scruff.

"Not even once," he murmurs again, still in that silly voice. "We could bring Joel along. Make it a whole show, Gritta and the Grump."

Her fingers keep running through his hair, pushing out the crumbs and the lather, until the water runs clean and the gunk seems to be all gone.

"Oh, that's gold. Joel can be a rebellious Districter who's a grump because he doesn't accept President Snow's love..." It's a pretty brilliant idea, and Swann knows she can sell it. Plus it'll make Joel miserable, which is a huge benefit.

Smiling a little, she brings Jason's head back forward and rises on her toes to kiss him.

"And he can be the one who gets punished in all the Aesops as the bad example. Just, you know, kids' stuff." He kisses her back, burying down the fight from earlier under their shared contempt for their Tributes. At least, so far as he sees it. "Like green slime or feathers or being thrown in the ball pit."

If they can't get Joel's transferred out, they can make him wish he were, Jason thinks.

"Cover him in glitter, it'll never get out of his beard."

She holds his cheeks as they kiss, then opens her eyes and looks at him through her eyelashes. She lets her fingers trail down his neck and chest, their noses touching. "Feel clean?"

"But then it'll get all over the District Suite. And then it'll get all over me." He kisses her again, then rinses his hair one last time. He holds her close, rocking her slightly.

He pauses before he asks, because he needs to, because it won't stop beating through his blood until he does.

"Did you mean what you said?"

"I hate to tell to be the one to tell you this, but spending this much time with me means you're already infected with the glitter curse."

She's quiet, closing her eyes as she rests against him, listening to his heart beat in his chest and his breathing and the water hitting their skin.

He speaks and Swann looks up at him, her brow knit. Part of her is inclined to ask for specification, because there were definitely some parts that she was dead serious about, but she knows what he's hung up on, and of course it's the ridiculous shit that she said just to be awful, the way he says terrible things to her just because he can.

"No. You know I don't think that."

"What, have you been banging Stephen on the side?" He smiles, for a moment happy before that misery settles back in, the way it always does.

"I didn't mean what I said either. About your life and driving the car..." He sighs and kisses her forehead, as if he could wash away that concerned pucker there between her brows.

She's still frowning, even after he kisses her, even after he gets as close to an apology as she expects. She looks down, straight ahead, at the notch in his sternum, above her fingertips.

"It's just not fair."

He frowns back - it looks more natural on his face, those lines around his nose and under his lip coming naturally even through the eternal youth of Capitol skin treatments and leisure.

"What isn't?"

The way she's not looking at his face is distinct, enough so that he's really looking more at the top of her head than anything else -- when she's in bare feet, he has nearly a foot on her.

It takes her a minute to answer, to overcome her fear of his anger even enough to just tell the truth. "I don't want you to leave your mother behind or anything," she mumbles miserably, "but I don't... I don't like feeling this way. Like you're ashamed of me."

"If you feel that way, it's the way you're seeing it. I'm not ashamed of you. I've got a long, long list of things I'd be ashamed of before I got to you."

Including, at times, himself, although his defensive self-justifying usually protects him from that. But he is, deep down, if for the wrong reasons; ashamed of the menial, hopeless job he holds, ashamed of his family, ashamed that he can't salvage any of it, ashamed that he's miserable and doesn't know why and doesn't know how to fix it.

But not of Swann. Not now, at least.

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