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He's wearing the one suit he owns that didn't come from Swann and still looks respectable, a little outdated, but Swann told him over text message that Ilar wouldn't mind, that he would just be happy for company.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

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.

"No, I know you're not, but... but it feels like that. You know, that you'd rather keep her happy than even let her know about me. I just... never mind."

Swann squirms uncomfortably, because she knows she's not wrong to feel like this, she knows it, but that he'll be angry and unable to see it from her point of view, how it feels to be hidden away when most mothers in the Capitol would be dying to have their sons even meet the Honeymead heiress.

It's a nauseating combination of the unfamiliar and the humiliating, and she doesn't like it at all.

"What good would it do for her to know about you? She'd make me miserable, she'd make you miserable, and she'd make herself sick. Trust me."

And Jason would always end up choosing his mother, because he can't help but return to her, no matter how he hates her, no matter how miserable she makes him. Because when he was a child she sewed her threads into the fibers of his brain, because it would take years to detox from the poison he eagerly lapped up when he was little.

He turns the water off and gets her a towel, wrapping her up in it.

She lets him wrap her up, still frowning, and gingerly steps out of the tub to put her slippers back on. She clutches the towel around her and doesn't really look at him still, just glances in the mirror at her dripping hair and still slightly puffy face.

"I just want to feel important," she says quietly. "Like you want me. Never mind."

She leaves the bathroom, still cocooned in the towel, and goes to sit on the edge of the bed and dry her hair off some.

"I do want you. Is letting her ruin my life over it the only thing that'll convince you?" He grabs a towel and follows her out, taking a seat next to her, covered to his waist in plush and cotton.

"Look, we'll go out tomorrow and I'll get you a necklace or something. To show I want you. That'll convince you, won't it?"

She looks away and wipes at her eyes with the back of her wrist, frustrated on top of feeling tired and unhappy. "I don't want another present, that's all I ever get! 'Sorry I haven't been home in a year, here's a locket', 'Sorry I didn't come to your talent show, here's a dollhouse', 'Sorry I backhanded you, here's a purse', 'Sorry we've been fighting, here's dog toys', that's all anyone gives me! And then it's over, that's it."

Sniffling, Swann draws herself up in a ball, arms wrapped around her knees. "Is that all there is to loving people? Presents? I don't even know, it's been like that since I was born."

"That's not-" He reaches over and takes her hand, pulling it away from wiping her face so he can reach and do it for her. He brushes his thumb over her teeth. "That's not what I mean. Stop doing that, comparing me to your exes or your mother. Stop it."

Because he knows that isn't all there is to loving someone, but it's the wax seal upon a relationship. The caulk between bricks. It's the tool by which he can measure and control the volatile flame and know it to be real.

"Come here." He tries to pull her into his arms.

Swann lets him pull her, until she's curled practically in his lap, still sniffling even when the tears stem themselves. She's shaking, just from being so wound up, so upset.

"I just want to feel like I matter to someone. Like I'm not something you buy."

But then again, she's not sure she would know how to process love except in the form of gifts. The only person to ever love her without them was Eta.

"You matter to me."

It takes a while for Jason to say it, during which he holds her close, dries her hair with the towel with a strange, awkward, artless tenderness, a desire not to even irritate her scalp at all. It's like the words need to percolate on his tongue and then be loosed, one by one, as doves from a cage.

"I could stop buying you things," he adds.

The way he dries her hair calms her down some, until she's resting her head against his chest, eyes closed, sniffling now only because her nose is still running a bit. Before he speaks, the rhythm of his breath is lulling her into a doze, but she nuzzles against his skin in response, placing her hand on his chest.

"I don't need things," she mumbles. "They're nice but I'd rather just... be with you, you know? When we're lying here together, that means more than any necklace or anything ever did. It's better."

She pauses and glances up at him, towards his face. "Pascal is still the best present I ever got, though. Tied with Marcel."

"I know it." He sighs and lets the towel fall to the side of the bed, laying back so she's atop him. "But I can't be here all the time. We have lives to live. I have obligations."

He has to spend at least half the week with his mother. It feels like an irrevocable condition.

"But I'm here as much as I can be because I want to be here too."

She has some difficulty coming up with a response to him that doesn't sound whiny or spoiled, because she wants to be a bigger part of his life, wants to consume him the way he does her, and she knows he won't give her that. That she'll always be second place.

Swann stretches out some when he lies back, closing her eyes again to focus on the sounds of his body functioning, his heartbeat and breathing and stomach grumbling along. She touches his chest again, lets her fingernails drag on his skin.

"Would you be here more if you could?"

Think of it this way, Swann: Caroline's old and will die soon!

He sighs, ghosting his fingernails over her shoulderblades then stroking her tangled half-dried hair again. "I wouldn't ever leave if I could."

And it's true. Swann's bed is the place he could come to die, to end all future interactions and bury the past ones and simply exist until he exists no more. It is the ground which he seeks to return to.

Goosebumps rise on her skin in the wake of his fingernails and she exhales hard, relaxing some as she lets her own hand snake lower on his stomach, dipping below where his towel is tied.

"When we go on vacation, we can sleep in as late as we want," she says quietly. "And we'll stay in bed until the afternoon."

"Alright." Swann's arms are the moratorium on the nagging obligations that drag Jason through each day. He suddenly takes in breath, somehow surprised at her daring even though he should well have known that that was where her hand was going. The gasp turns into a bit of a pleased noise.

"You have the energy for that tonight?"

She doesn't intend to be pushy if he's not up for it (no pun intended), but he's not actively batting her away, and that's good enough for the moment. Stretching a bit, Swann nuzzles into the side of his neck, sighing as she pushes his towel away with her wrist.

"We don't have to, if you're too tired."

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