Still Coming Out of Your Mother Upside Down [Closed]

[whatisay]

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He's wearing the one suit he owns that didn't come from Swann and still looks respectable, a little outdated, but Swann told him over text message that Ilar wouldn't mind, that he would just be happy for company.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

Comments

[cigne]

Swann switches the music off and knits her brow as she stares down at her phone, the frozen screen where she's pressed pause. She doesn't understand how he can't have good memories with music, surely there was something good in his life at some point that happened to have music.

"Eta used to sing me to sleep." Well, hum is probably a better word, but Swann doesn't think of it that way. "Did anyone ever do that for you? Your mother or your grandmother?"

Her money is on his grandmother, if anyone. She can't imagine Caroline doing much besides bitching that a child being awake is making her ill or something.

[whatisay]

Jason thinks of that, one corner of his mouth pinched slightly, before he responds a bit quietly.

"My grandmother used to. But I don't really remember her." Her presence is a void in his mind, a hole patched together with other people's stories about how he was a brat for years afterwards, that it took him far too long to get over it, and not images or memories but just this idea of someone warm and comforting who no longer even has a face he would recognize. Loss without a script.

"I didn't realize Eta still had her vocal cords. I thought she was from the generation where they took those too." It's obvious that Swann's closeness to Eta is beyond abnormal; it'd be outright illegal if someone reported if, if she weren't a Honeymead. But somehow Jason doesn't necessarily see it as bad, even as relationships with Avoxes usually make him feel ill.

[cigne]

"I'm sorry. I wish you could." Swann doesn't really remember her grandmother either, and her grandfather had been loving and pleasant but distant, much like her father. She's had almost no contact with her mother's side of the family in her entire life.

"I don't know, really. There's a lot I don't know about Eta, since she could never tell me. But I know she can hum." Even as a Honeymead, it's something that's required her father's influence to keep her safe from repercussion, mostly when she was much younger. But Ilar had never been able to stop it, couldn't take away genuine love from a child who was abandoned by her mother and used essentially as a prop for her most of her life. She'd had a full staff by four, a whole team of nannies, and Eta was supposed to simply be her personal Avox. But small children seek to bond, and Eta was always there, Eta was tasked with all of the basic care, and soon, Swann had attached completely to her, was often inconsolable without her.

And Ilar was afraid to take it away, to end it. And so he had to protect them both. It meant Eta didn't go for Avox 'tune-ups', didn't suffer much of the indignity of other Avoxes. It was terribly illegal, but harmless as far as he could see, and who was he to force his daughter to give up the only constant in her life? To sacrifice when she was already so fragile, even before her age was in the double digits?

So Eta became an open secret, with everyone of influence turning the other way for the sake of a delicate little girl who grew up to be an even more delicate woman.

Swann rubs her thumb over Jason's hand and sighs, leaning her head back against the headrest.

[whatisay]

"Maybe it's better I don't. Mother says I was never the same after Damuddy died. You can't miss someone you don't remember, right?" He shrugs again, giving her hand a squeeze, then pulling it over so that their linked hands rest on his thigh. Even her hands are small, every part of her in miniature.

"It's weird to think of them having lives worth talking about before they were Avoxed. All we know about most of them is that they were traitors, but if that were the case for Eta your father never would have let her be your nanny, would he?"

[cigne]

"Of course you can. You can remember the feelings they gave you, like how you felt warm or safe or happy. I can remember being really little and feeling sad or happy." Her thumb slides over and she rubs it against his thigh, the small space she can cover. Her expression is soft, though. "But like you said, maybe it's better."

Swann's brows knit a little when Jason brings that up, and she shakes her head. "No, I know this. It was her brother, and this was back close enough to the war that they were still taking whole families. I don't know what he did or anything else, just that she didn't do anything herself. She was young, maybe still even a teenager. I know that because Grandpa Honeymead once showed me a picture that she was in the background of, close to when she first came to us. And he was kind of paranoid, so he always read the Avox files when he needed a new one, that's how I know about her brother. Most of the other Avoxes from back then are dead now, I think she's one of the last ones from that time."

Not that she's ever verified any of these facts herself, but Swann trusts everything her father and grandfather told her. What reason did she have to doubt them?

[whatisay]

"Right. Maybe." He looks bothered, some tension that isn't just his usual irritability and apathy playing across his face. That whole in his memory is filled with something that hurts to access. "I just remember I got whipped with the belt when I cried when she died. That's the only thing I remember about her."

He takes the turn that brings them onto the main street.

"They don't make Avoxes like they used to, I say. Now you know they're all traitors, and they might end up in the Arena and get their tongues put back. I wonder what she'd tell you, Eta, if she had that back." He suspects Swann already knows.

[cigne]

"That's stupid, you're supposed to cry when people pass away. Your mother's never stopped crying over Quentin. I wish you had a better memory of her."

She rests her head against the window and watches cars pass, watches the street get busier, though it's still early and there aren't many people out. "A lot of things, I think," she says softly, and doesn't elaborate.

[whatisay]

"Try telling that to my father. I'm sure he'd have been more pleased if I'd downed a fifth of whiskey to get over it." It's one of Jason's first memories, from that time period where his brain was just getting old enough to store things permanently. "Five's old enough to know when to hush up."

He waits for her to expound, and when she doesn't just raises his eyebrows. "Yeah? Like?"

[cigne]

Swann pulls her legs into her seat, under her skirt, and keeps watching the scenery, looking distant and thoughtful and sad. She shrugs, because she doesn't really want to think about everything that Eta would say if she could, everything that's been stuck in her head for thirty years of being Swann's lifeline.

"She's been with me my whole life. I can't imagine that she doesn't have a billion things to say."

[whatisay]

For an instant, Jason's jealous of Eta, of Eta being there for those twenty years between the time Jason saw Swann at Quentin's funeral and the time they met again in the Tribute Center. It's not a good feeling. He grits his teeth.

He pulls into the employee's lot and hops out the car, nearly tripping over the seatbelt as it retracts. "Alright. Last day before the weekend. Then we'll go kiting tomorrow."

[cigne]

It's not something to be jealous of, two decades of caring for a lonely, perpetually anxious girl with no self-esteem and suicidal inclinations. Jason had missed the partying, the abusive relationships, the scandal and its aftermath.

Swann doesn't know that there's anything worth remembering in those twenty years except her time in front of the camera.

She gets out the car much more gracefully, then meets Jason when he rounds the car, taking his hand. "Okay. I want to put more ribbon on my kite, can we do that?"

[whatisay]

It's easy to imagine that the last twenty years were nothing but bliss for everyone else when Jason's so mired in how miserable they were for him. It's easy to think any change would have made them better.

"Sure. I'll pick some up during lunch today. What color?" He pulls her close and kisses her, then starts walking towards the door with her hand in his and his other in his pocket.

[cigne]

She squeezes his hand and holds the strap of her bag with the other. "Gold," she decides on, "and pink. Like a dusty pink, unless you're still too much of a boy to buy pink."

[whatisay]

"It's been what, twenty-three years? I've grown up since then." He holds the door for her. "I'll get you gold."

[cigne]

"How do you not explode into flames of manly shame when you walk into my place?" she teases, bumping him with her hip as they enter the elevator and she reaches out to press the buttons for Seven and Eight. "Text me later?"

/wrap

[whatisay]

"If I don't text you I'll find you for lunch."

He heads into the District Seven Suite relieved to have finally settled the bones between them, at least for now.