thecapitol | Anger and No One Can Heal It [Closed]

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Anger and No One Can Heal It [Closed]

WHO| Jason and Swann
WHAT| Jason finally sees a doctor about those headaches.
WHEN| Forward-dated a bit, after the staff reviews.
WHERE| Swann's place.
WARNINGS| Typical Jason awfulness, painkiller shenanigans.

The day he receives a notice from the human resources department that he'll need a doctor's note about his migraines before he takes any more sick days, Jason proves the second part of the notice (that he needs to enroll in an anger management course) entirely correct. He shoves an Avox over a table and slams a door so hard the lock on it breaks when it bounces back and hits him in the shoulder, and then he calls Swann. At first, he's so angry and upset she has to tell him to slow down and talk to her in person, because she can barely understand him over the phone.

"-bad enough I have to have these headaches in the first place, now I have to get proof, as if I'm faking them, and they want me to see someone for anger when maybe they shouldn't be doing things damn bound to get me worked up-"

A few days later, Swann's got him set up with an appointment with someone (a delicate operation that requires all of her tact and skill that makes her a good Escort), and Jason's demeanor's only barely improved. He's spending the night at her house, although he's anxious and distressed enough that he doesn't sleep. At about four a.m., Swann is sleeping, sprawled across him, while he just sits in her bed smoking and glowering at the wall and fidgeting.

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Squirming and giggling, overwhelmed with his affection and her happiness, Swann runs her hands along his cheek, his shoulder, his chest, wherever she can reach.

"I'll have to hide the cherrypicker, then. You'll just stay here, stuck with me, allll night."

"Oh no. What will I do?" He pulls her mouth to his, kissing her deep and with his tongue, feeling as if he's not totally in his body and that he's been wrapped, nerve by nerve, in a sort of warm softness. He sighs so deeply he wonders if she could sink into him and then he lets her go, flopping against the back of the couch.

"Call work for me. Tell them I'm dead and I'm never coming in again."

Edited 2015-06-26 03:26 (UTC)

"You'll have to suffer," she coos, squinting from how big she's smiling. Everything is so nice right now, and she clings to him as they kiss, holding his face and the side of his neck, stroking at his hair, fingers combing through it.

"Aw, but your Tributes will miss you so much." She's teasing, and untangles herself just enough to grab her phone and text the right people, let them know the gist of it -- jason on medication, can't come in. needs caring for and can't leave my place.

Luckily, they'd had to go through management to get the doctor's note, so it's not totally out of the blue. Frankly, there are probably several people who are just pleased he's medicated.

"Let Mother know, too. She doesn't even know I went to the doctor today." He takes a few more bites of the tomato tart and curls back up on the couch with her, eyes unfocused and licking at his lips. He grasps for Swann again.

"You know, I tell you more than I've told anyone in my entire life."

"I'll tell her in a little while." She has no desire to contact Jason's mother, doesn't even know what kind of lie to cook up yet. She wonders if maybe it would be easier to contact one of their servants and let them break the news.

Looking up at him, she runs her fingertips on his cheekbone, along his hairline, down his jaw, like she's examining him. "I kind of figured. I tell you everything, I want you to know everything."

"The longer we wait the more text messages she's going to send. I can see it now, where are you, I know you don't love me but you could at least respect me enough not to worry me, I'll be dead soon anyway it doesn't matter..." He closes his eyes as Swann runs her fingers over him, completely and unreluctantly helpless to her.

"I don't need to know everything. I don't tell you everything. But I tell you more than I tell anyone else or ever have." He knows better than to say 'even more than I tell Lorraine', but just barely. The medication is doing a number on his inhibitions.

"At least she'll think you're actually busy."

And maybe the worry will give her a heart attack. Swann can only hope.

"Well, no, I mean I don't tell you every little tiny detail of my life, but the big things. The important things." She leans her head against him, stroking his face idly. "Things no one else knows."

"Aren't I?" He smiles a bit and wraps his arms around her as much as he can. "I'm going to have to...divulge and divulge to make us even then, won't I? So you have something more to blackmail me with than that I'm afraid of doctors."

She stretches her neck up and presses her forehead to his, letting her legs drape over his so that her feet are on his opposite side. "Mm, sounds like you will. You better give me some juicy secrets to file away."

"I don't have that many. The gossip mill has most of my life on lock anyway." He tilts his chin forward to kiss her again, their foreheads still pressed together. "Did I tell you Quentin claimed Miss Quentin was his child? He was the reason that damn rumor started, he started it himself."

Not exactly pleasant conversation, but discretion seems a bit wavery now with being so stoned.

"They don't know everything. It's private here, no cameras or microphones." She means, of course, in the bedroom and bathroom, where her family influence had easily gotten a privacy petition approved -- the living room is still fair game, which means someone, somewhere in the Capitol, has watched Jason choke the shit out of Swann Honeymead with a tie.

She gently starts to pull him down, letting her weight do most of the work, so they can lie down on the sofa instead of sit huddled together. "Why would he do that? I know he was... you know, a bit unbalanced, but that's an odd thing to lie about."

"You had a petition approved...?" Even for the Capitol elite, actually getting approval for a private room is difficult - the Compsons only have the dining room in their manor, and that was approved back when Jason the Second was a general. There's no way they'd get it now.

He lies on his back, her mostly atop him. "I don't know. Maybe he was telling the truth. We never did have her paternity verified. I didn't know him that well, really, for a brother, since he and Caddy hated me from the start..."

He wraps his finger with a lock of her hair. "Thank God I never felt like a part of that family."

"Yeah, Daddy put it in, I don't think he liked the idea of people watching me sleep or whatever. Honeymead Manor has a few private rooms too. Daddy's bedroom and bathroom, his office, my old rooms." She smiles and whispers, low to avoid pickups. "Don't tell, but I think Daddy threatens to shut things down if they don't do what he wants."

She has no real proof of that, but losing major media is a disaster worth sacrificing a few rooms to an old and respectable family with no history of treason. And the Honeymeads are known in certain circles for their velvet threats, never direct, always genteel, but razor wire dangerous and deadly serious.

"I don't think he was her father. They were close but that doesn't seem right, you know? And really, I think most people would consider it more acceptable than the actual story, so I can't see your family telling the worse one."

Swann idly strokes his chest, resting her cheek on his sternum. "What about your mother?"

Jason grins, thinking for a moment of what it would be like with all the media down, and in his hazy state it seems like the Capitol would be quiet, each man and woman an island for once. In reality, it would be like when Eva cut the security cameras, absolute mayhem, but he doesn't think about that for now.

"We didn't tell anyone anything. That was all that scumbag backstabber Herbert. He was going to get me a job as a Gamemaker, you know. How's that for something no one knows about me..." He closes his eyes.

"Mother...it's complicated." Somehow just the thought of her darkens his mood a bit, as if a blob of ink is blooming in his chest, something black and internal and inscrutable. "God knows she's told me I'm not a Compson often enough for me to believe it. I'm like her, she says, but I don't think she's right. Pure Bascomb. Not like there's a damn thing in that family line worth holding onto either."

But it's true, he is just like his mother. The same behaviors characterize them both, both in action and in the smaller things, the same facial expressions and cadences to their voices, as if the two of them are tied together at the shadow.

"You'd be a good Gamemaker," she tells him softly, reaching for his hand to twine their fingers together. "I wish your family had been... I don't know, closer to the others. Someone else could have helped you."

Swann only holds his hand, lets her eyes close too, and listens to his heart in his chest. She never really knew the Bascombs, only that Jason has an uncle somewhere, or had one, and she thinks that was the last one except for Jason's mother. Swann doesn't even know what the Bascombs did, she just knows it's a name that gets tossed around every so often.

"Well, you're sort of the only one left. For both lines. You can make your own self, if you want."

If you leave them.

"It's like Mother and Father forgot that we had to keep making a living after Quentin died. Cut ourselves off from everyone. I didn't want to get pulled out of school, you know. I had friends there. Hard to believe, I know, but..."

Oh, Maury. If there's anyone who Jason's racking up more credit card debt for than Swann, it's Uncle Maury, that lazy, parasitic, lecherous drunk living out at a resort in District Four. Probably shamelessly flirting with Swann's mother. "Who the hell leaves a seventeen year-old in charge of an entire family, I say."

He exhales deep. "Not that it matters. I can make it on my own. I've lasted this long with all of them on my shoulders."

"I remember when you told me you had to leave school. Do you remember that? I asked you about your friends, and I knew you were sad even though you pretended not to be."

She sighs and squeezes his fingers, vaguely recalling that day outside of the funeral home, a mourning that was more of a party than anything else, with Quentin's diamond shining in the middle of it all.

"You were the only one strong enough. You are the only one. They're all lucky for you. Benjy's the only one with an excuse, the others are all just leeches."

"I remember that. I made you cry." Wouldn't be the last time, either. He feels as if he remembers every minute of that funeral, every awful minute as he felt the world start to peel away around the Compsons, as he learned that his version of adulthood would not be independence but responsibility, that the leash around his neck would never go slack. Two years later it was proven. He squeezes her fingers back.

"Don't say that about my mother." He doesn't sound angry, just concerned, uncomfortable. "She always says how lucky she is that I'm the one left anyway. She's the only one who ever defended me in that house."

"She's made you spend almost twenty years supporting her so that she doesn't have to leave the house." If that's not a leech, Swann doesn't know what is, particularly when Jason was already supporting a handicapped man and an infant -- the older Compsons were lazy and selfish, and that was it, as far as Swann's concerned.

She rubs the back of his hand with her thumb and stays silent for a while. "Don't you think it's odd that she set you apart?" she finally asks, thoughtfully. "I don't... I mean, I don't have any brothers or sisters. Is that normal, to pick one and treat them differently?"

"She can't leave the house. She's sickly." He knows she isn't, that it's all in her head and that which she doesn't believe is a ploy to control people, that even here away from her she controls him like a hand behind his head, but he's grown up with it. He can't distinguish what's real and what matters and what's bizarre. It's written into the very architecture of his mind, now, has been since childhood, a cathedral of load-bearing beams.

"I don't see what else she could do, with Father and Caddy and Quentin and even Ben always working against us. I wasn't even old enough to know it and she was protecting me from them."

"The doctors can't find anything wrong with her. I think at least one thing would actually show up on a scan, you know?"

But she knows Jason and doctors, has spent a whole morning dealing with it, and so Swann isn't eager to push that point much more. Especially when she knows that Jason knows his mother isn't really sick, that she's making it all up for pity and dominance.

Swann focuses on the other argument instead, forehead wrinkled with thought, little lines between her eyebrows. "Well, I don't think Ben could work against a kitten, let alone you. But I don't understand, what you mean about working against you?"

"What do they know? She's the one who has to live in that body." Even with his eyes still closed, he seems to glare into the air, something tightening in his jaw and forehead for a moment.

"You remember what it was like when we were children?" The three Compson children - Ben stayed home almost always - at gatherings, like stepping stones with each two years younger than the one before. Caddy, who seemed effusively loving to everyone, the one who would sneak out to where the adults were talking to show off her new dress or a trick she'd learned, greeting even people she didn't know with kindness and enthusiasm. But she never held such feelings for Jason, and neither of them ever knew which came first, Jason's cruelty or Caddy's spurning. He just remembers always feeling locked out of something everyone else had, playing by himself, his solitary state made all the more obvious by the closeness Caddy and Quentin shared.

"Um, kind of."

Swann was too young, too far removed in age to remember more than basic traits about Quentin and Caddy. She can recall their faces, how Caddy was sweet and pretty and always had something nice to say. But everything else is a blur, foggy at best, and then by the time she was old enough to remember, Quentin and Caddy were off on their own, too old to be left with the children and preteens at parties.

"I just remember them being close."

"I was never a part of that. Caddy treated everyone kindly but me. When everyone talks about how sweet and wonderful she was it's like they're talking about an entirely different person. And Quentin just did whatever she wanted, like he was on a leash. And then she showed her true colors and I could have told them, I say all along I could have told them..."

Sometimes, when it was just him and Quentin, they got along alright. Quentin made things with Jason, the two of them with paper and popsicle sticks and pipe cleaners making 'bows and arrows' and 'swords'. But Caddy had a tendency to dominate anything she was a part of, of becoming the leader (Jason thought dictator) of whatever game they were playing.

"Now look at what she did to all of us."

She doesn't say anything, doesn't respond, because she doesn't know how to. It doesn't really seem like anything except childish sibling rivalry to her, she doesn't really think that Caddy was an evil mastermind out to get Jason from childhood. And in the same vein, she hardly thinks Caddy set out to get pregnant, could never have known what Quentin would do. But Jason doesn't want to hear that, Swann knows it, and so she keeps quiet instead, stroking his hand as she holds it.

"I love you," she murmurs instead, because it's something to say, something to give him when he never lets her give him anything else.

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