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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"You're picking her," Swann sighs as Eta steps in. She scrawls on her pad and then hands it to Jason to read while she intervenes with Swann, taking her head in her lap and stroking her messy, tangled up hair. As Swann told him, Eta can most certainly hum, and it's some kind of melody that Swann's never heard from anyone else. "Eta," she murmurs, and all Eta can do is keep stroking her hair, rubbing her back.

TOO MUCH HAPPENING. SHE GOT SCARED.
EVERYTHING IS ALL RIGHT.

"I am not," he snaps, not out of anger so much as exhaustion. "Stop making this about choosing between you both. I don't make you choose between me or your father."

He rests his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands, rubbing at his temples for a moment before he reads Eta's note. He asks her advice, because she knows Swann best, because for the intents and purposes of this moment she's barely an Avox.

"Should I stay a few hours or should I just go now?"

Swann whines, but she's too tired to make the coherent argument that she's also never had to make that choice, because she isn't subservient to her father. Eta's working at distracting her anyway, and she's nodding off, lulled by the song and Eta's hands.

Glancing up at him, Eta nods and gently waves one hand toward the door, not in a disrespectful way, but to signal that he can leave, because Swann will be asleep momentarily anyway. Unless Jason wants to sit in the corner and watch her, there's not any particular reason to stay.

It's a perversion of the usual order, Jason being dismissed, however politely, by an Avox. He doesn't even register it at the moment.

"I'll stay until she's asleep." Even though he slept for something like fourteen hours the night before, he feels as if it was two. He wants nothing more than to go home, tell his mother he's still alive and she can stop filling up his voicemail box and then lie facedown on the bed.

He just sits on the bed, hand moving slightly over Swann's shoulder until Swann falls asleep. Then he sighs and groans when he realizes he still needs to talk to security about getting the boot off his car.

"I don't know what she tells you," he says to Eta. "I'm not that awful to her. I swear. She's just so damn sensitive."

It doesn't take Swann long to pass out entirely, at which point Eta lets out a breath and gently moves her to lie on the pillow. She requests her pad back and flips to a new page, brow knitting as she writes, more carefully this time, now that Swann's asleep and Eta can actually go back to taking care of the house.

SWANN IS SPECIAL. DELICATE. AFRAID OF BEING ABANDONED.
YOU SHOULD GET SOME SLEEP, MR. COMPSON.
THEY REMOVED THE BOOT.

The fact that Eta is communicating with him at all is a huge sign of her personal trust in him -- it's been nearly thirty years now since anyone has had her 'tuned up', so to speak, and in the huge mass of Avoxes made in the years following the war, the brainwashing was hardly as effective as it is now. There were too many bodies, whole families, occasionally whole neighborhoods to get through. No one was going to waste time making sure a timid teenage girl who hadn't done anything anyway was truly erased. There were bigger fish to fry.

Eta is about as much an Avox as any paid servant, at this point, save for not having a tongue. The Honeymeads made that choice and have kept her safe, because they trusted in her. And now she trusts in Jason, because Swann does, because Swann has made it clear that Jason is different from any of the others. That she doesn't intend to be without him ever again.

If Jason turns them in... well, Swann will be safe because of her name, and Eta's lived a full life.

IS THERE ANYTHING ELSE I CAN DO FOR YOU, MR. COMPSON?

"Thank God," he says when he reads Eta's comment about the boot. One less thing for him to worry about in one of the more stressful days he's had in an extremely stressful month. Since the staff reviews he's felt he's been spiraling, falling downwards through a canopy and grasping at anything that felt like a solid branch to slow his fall. He wishes he could stay he feels like he isn't still in a freefall, but he's certain that rock bottom is a way down below.

"No. Thank you, Eta." In a few days he'll realize how unusual this situation is, think that he should not have thanked her or even used his name, and he'll take it out on the nearest mute around him, which will probably be the District Seven floor-cleaner. But for the moment he's just grateful that someone, anyone, knows how to handle this situation.

He wouldn't ever actually turn her in, no matter how angry he gets at Swann, because he may as well put a bullet in Swann's head if he does that.

He gives Swann a last kiss, grabs his work bag and, shuffling with exhaustion, goes home.

Swann sleeps soundly through the night, sedative coursing through her veins. She wakes up before Jason arrives, mostly because she needs to stumble to use the bathroom after twelve hours of sleep, and when she comes back, she curls in a ball under her covers. She blinks at the dim light around the curtains, half-dozing again, and yawns.

Jason arrives slept but not rested, his sleep interrupted time and again through the night by the kind of listless unsettling he feels when he's stressed. The good news is that the drugs are entirely out of his system, and he feels entirely lucid. The dark circles under his eyes seem stamped on, and in the pre-dawn light he looks almost corpse-like.

He rings to be let in.

Eta buzzes him in and takes his things in the entranceway, placing them in the coat closet so that Jason can head back to Swann. She's got her eyes closed now, though she peeks at the clock every so often, and by the time he makes it in, she's trying to find a comfortable position, twisting and turning under the blankets so that she mostly resembles a writhing lump with blonde hair.

"Can I join you?" He doesn't rush to her, doesn't have the same uninhibited need to be near her as he usually does. Instead he's wary, either of setting her off or breaking her, he isn't sure. He watches her writhe and takes a step forward.

"Jason?"

She sounds tired, not unsure. She peeks over the edge of the blanket at him, squinting and yawning, then nods and holds out one hand for him, as if he could take it from across the room. Her fingers wave in the air, and her arm shakes a little.

"Right here." He kicks off his shoes and crawls into bed with her, knowing he has a few hours. He plants kisses - one, two, three - to the back of her neck and then spoons around her, ignoring her grasping hand, smelling the two-days unshowered on her and not minding it at all.

As tired as she is, it's like an odd time leap, where first he's across the room, and then he's wrapped around her, and she sighs happily, settling back against him. Her head fits neatly under his chin, and her hair is a little greasy but mostly messy, and she smells like faded perfume and shampoo and just herself.

"How do you feel?" He doesn't know if it was the same medicine she took the last time they had a fight so bad it sickened her. He pulls his arm around her and links his foot over her shin. He applies himself to her like a protective shell.

"I'm okay." She's not exactly at her peak right now, but she's not as bad as she'd be on morphling. She can move and communicate, she's just drowsy still. Swann can feel his heart beating against her back, and she clutches at his arm around her, hand wrapped around his wrist.

He gives her the slightest squeeze, kissing the base of her skull again, lips in her hair, so deeply in love with her and so blind as to how to best show it when it seems everything they do turns to squabbling.

"How much do you remember from last night?"

She squirms and rolls until she's facing him, until she can bury her face in his chest and inhale the smell of him, like she's trying to inflate a balloon inside herself.

"Um... I remember being in the elevator," she says, mumbling, thinking about it with her brow furrowed. After the elevator, everything seems to get fuzzy, choppy, and then it's gone until now.

"Yesterday morning or yesterday evening?" It makes a hell of a difference, and Jason hopes she means the first but knows she likely means the second. He rubs his hand over her back, over her shirt and then slipping under it, feeling each bone that juts from her tiny back.

"You scared me."

"The evening." But even those memories aren't the clearest -- she's only perfectly clear until the point where she left to go to the garage. But she remembers most of the fight, of the ride up. His hand makes her sigh, makes her shoulderblades shift as she tightens her grip on him.

"It was just a panic attack."

For an instant, his heart constricts, wondering if she's forgotten that he said he loved her so he can somehow strike it from the record of history by forgetting it himself. It's as if he's made a fatal blunder in pledging his heart that he's trying a second too late to pull back. His whole body seems to stiffen in a sort of terror.

"I've never seen one so bad. I wasn't wrong to be scared, when I couldn't seem to get through to you at all."

Oh no, she remembers that, precisely because it had been so unexpected, but she's also not dumb enough to bring it up and make him talk about it. She's good at holding things close to her heart and never letting go.

Swann doesn't have much of an answer. Her panic attacks usually aren't so bad, don't drive her to the point that she's locked in her own mind and disassociated from her own body. But between how worked up she'd already been and her overwhelming fear of him leaving her, it was like her brain had flicked back into a primal mode just to keep itself from exploding.

"It's not usually like that."

"I wasn't going to leave you," he whispers. "Not for any longer than a few hours."

He tips her chin up and kisses her, deep and soft, knitting his fingers into the hair on the side of her head. When they break, he rests his forehead against hers, nose to nose, quiet and enraptured.

She lets him kiss her, submits more than reciprocates, and winds her legs around his until they're knotted up, ankles all pressed together. He looks at her and she looks back, blinking slowly and whispering too.

"I don't want you to leave at all."

"I know. I don't want to leave either." He sighs and settles deeper into the blankets, into their tangling, him and her. "But Swann, you can't keep asking me to choose between you and Mother. Please. You can't."

Because Jason knows who he has to choose, whom he will always choose because he's been wearing those shackles so long they've fused to him, because he's complicit always in keeping them on.

Her jaw tenses, and she tilts her head back down, until her forehead touches his chest, presses against his shirt. The slightest quiver runs through her body, along her sides, like she's swallowed down something horrible.

"Because you won't pick me," she whispers, and it's distant, far away inside her. "Nothing I do is ever going to be good enough. I know."

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/timeskip to morning?

yep

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