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He's wearing the one suit he owns that didn't come from Swann and still looks respectable, a little outdated, but Swann told him over text message that Ilar wouldn't mind, that he would just be happy for company.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

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She lets herself find some measure of reassurance in his words, even though she's afraid to trust them fully. She's afraid and yet she still falls backward from her cliff into his ocean every time he offers so much as a single drop of affection.

"What are you scared of? I'll never leave you. I've never left anyone in my life."

"It's not that."

Jason's not sure what it is that so terrifies him about commitment to anything but the pit of a family he keeps throwing his life into. It's a fear so deep and formless that trying to articulate it is like trying to catch fog in his hands.

"I'm- I'm afraid you want more than what we have, and I like what we have, and I don't know that I can give you more. Just...I don't know that I can. At least not until Mother's dead."

She frowns and fights back tears, which has gotten easier, and looks at her knees. Her toes curl and she squeezes his hand without really meaning to do it.

"I won't make you do anything you can't or don't want to do," she finally settles on saying, because truth be told, she doesn't entirely know what she wants to begin with. She knows she wants to be with Jason, she wants to feel like they're real and official, wants to consume all of his time, but she's never thought about it much further than that. She's certainly not ever thought about the things she supposes she should have, marriage and children and whatever else, because they aren't things she's ever aimed for.

A wedding could be fun. She thinks she might want a wedding more than a marriage.

"I don't... I just want us."

"That's what I want too." What they have is Jason's ideal for the moment - companionship, intimacy, closeness and yet they both still have their separate spheres, their private lives to return to in the few hours a week they aren't at each others' sides. He doesn't know if he'd want them to be closer.

He leans over the center console and kisses her. "Come on now. Don't cry."

"I want for us to stop fighting." Her forehead is wrinkled with thought, concentration. "I want... I mean, I understand why you have to stay. With them. I do. But I can't sleep when you aren't here."

She has to be plied with tea and pills and hours of Eta stroking her hair and humming songs from when Swann was a child.

"I'm trying not to. The peer reviews, everyone called me a baby, basically. I wish I wasn't like this."

"How did you sleep before we started dating?" He strokes her hair, then makes sure it's still in place. He sighs and rests against the steering wheel again. "I don't sleep well when you're gone, but at least I can."

He snorts a bit. "I'm sure your reviews were nicer than mine. At least you're not getting send to psych."

"Eta has teas and pills for sleep, I always took those if I hadn't already been drinking. I take them now, sometimes, when you aren't here." She leaves her shoes on the floor and draws her feet up on the seat, a little ball of a human. "You were the first time in years that I could just sleep without anything else."

Swann looks at him and sighs. "That's an overreaction. People wrote you nasty reviews for personal reasons, they weren't impartial."

"If I could be at your place all the time, I would be." He squeezes her shoulder, massaging her muscle and bone with his hand. It isn't true - he'd take his occasional time alone because he still wants to keep up those barriers, those that would be healthy boundaries in one person but are defensive firewalls for him.

"No kidding. I can't believe how unprofessional some of our coworkers are."

Well, it's not that Swann is particularly keen to have Jason at her side every single waking moment with no time apart, simply because it would probably kill her, but rather that she wants him to sleep in her bed every night, beside her. Well, underneath her, really. She nods and leans her head toward him, placated by at least the words.

"I don't really feel like it was a productive exercise. I'd rather have just had a regular review."

"I think they were trying to suss out traitors. Too bad our coworkers are just whores, I'd have liked to get some reward money." He rolls his eyes and shakes his head, stroking her shoulder. "Alright. We need to go to work."

He starts the car.

"The only ones that anyone would give up are the people no one likes anyway, and none of them do anything to be turned in for." She keeps frowning. She's pretty sure there are things afoot with more than one of their coworkers, serious things, but she doesn't know anything for sure, or even have more than an odd feeling about some people.

Swann squeezes his hand again as he starts the car, and looks back out the window. "I missed you."

"Right." Jason laughs. "Stig's too stupid to get involved in rebellion. Even the Rebels aren't stupid enough to hire him, only Training Center HR."

He leans over and gives her another kiss, this one on her forehead. "I did too."

"Well, to be fair, they hired him before the accident."

She sighs when he kisses her, and her grip tightens on his hand again. "I guess your mother expects you home again tonight, now that you've been there for a week straight."

"A shame it didn't kill him." Jason sighs and smiles, planting kisses across her face, her cheek, then the top of her head, glad to have reached that happy balance with her again, that refuge from the world that they share having reopened just to them.

"Actually, I think that'll mean I can pretend to have another late Sponsor meeting tonight without her calling the Peacekeepers over it."

"Don't say that. I know you liked him more than you let on. He did whatever you said without a fight. Much better than Cassian." She smirks a little, and lets her eyelids lower like a contented cat under his physical affection, something she hadn't known she was so addicted to until she didn't have it at all.

"Tell her you have a few of them in a row. One night isn't enough."

The noise Jason makes makes it very clear just what he thinks of Cassian. It's as if his vocal cords have figured out how to roll their eyes.

"It's better when I spring them. Otherwise she actually has time to try and verify that I'm-" he almost says 'sneaking around' but then catches himself before he uses words that have set Swann off before- "lying to her."

"As long as you stay."

Swann doesn't point out that she can't see how Caroline could do any kind of verification, that she doesn't even know who would take a call from the batty old woman. She still doesn't even see why it matters, because surely his mother must have figured it out, somewhere in the back of her head, that it was probably a woman keeping Jason out and not his job.

But she doesn't say a word, only leans in kiss him.

"You know she started texting Jolie when I didn't come home on time a few months back? It's like she has empty nest syndrome if I'm gone more than a day."

He kisses her back, then turns his attention to the road and pulling out of the driveway.

Swann chokes a little before laughing, hard, caught so off-guard by this revelation that she can only react in the most natural way possible.

"Oh my god, Jason. Your mom is buddying up to Jolie? Be careful, Jolie might seduce her and then you'll have a brand new stepdaddy!"

"Don't even joke about that," Jason says, at first joking, then repeating more seriously, "really, don't joke about that."

His mother may be many things that Jason hates, but he can never shake a certain possessive attitude about her. As much as he is wholly hers she's also his, under his thumb, trapped in that house and reliant on him, the two of them in a sick symbiosis to prop up their malformed, undergrown senses of worth.

She rolls her eyes a little, because while she understands that reaction if she had named anyone else, to be that serious about Jolie? It's ridiculous, and she has to call it out.

"Jason, you have to loosen up a little. Of everyone in the Capitol, Jolie is probably the last one you need to be serious about in this conversation. Well, second last. Cassian's the last one."

He frowns at her, not glaring, not snapping, not shutting down in his usual manner of turning his anger on her, but clearly not pleased. "A man's allowed to defend his mother's name. You know that."

And then, to top off the mixed messages, he adds, "besides, Stig's the last one."

"No one is threatening your mother's name, and you know that," she presses gently, so that he can start to learn that he can't let every tiny thing light his fuse. "I was making a joke about Jolie."

She snorts and takes a sip of her coffee. "Really, you think Cassian ranks higher than Stig?"

Jason scowls out the window, but he doesn't turn it on Swann, not so soon after they've mended fences. He does take a turn a bit hard, though.

"I didn't say he ranked much higher."

She decides the best way to deal with his pouting is to not acknowledge it at all, like one might ignore a child's temper tantrum. Surely he'll stop if he figures out it doesn't get a response, right?

"No no, I get that, I just want to know your reasoning."

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