Anger and No One Can Heal It [Closed]

[whatisay]

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.

Comments

[whatisay]

"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.

[cigne]

"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.

[whatisay]

"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.

[cigne]

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.

[whatisay]

"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.

[cigne]

"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.

[whatisay]

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?"

[cigne]

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.

[whatisay]

"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."

[cigne]

"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."

[whatisay]

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."

[cigne]

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."

[whatisay]

"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.

[cigne]

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."

[whatisay]

"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.

[cigne]

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."

[whatisay]

"She's my mother," he says, and there's a pained sound in his voice that sounds deeper than any groan from his migraines. "If I was you is take that as permission to not try so hard for something it's not fair for you to ask of me. It's not a matter of you being good enough. That doesn't even factor. So don't beat yourself up about it, alright?"

He tries to warm her with his hands on her sides, but he feels clumsy and she feels locked away. He swallows and touches the tip of his nose to her forehead.

[cigne]

"And you're an adult."

It slips out before she can stop it, and she winces, hard enough that he can probably feel it. But it doesn't change the fact that she still means it, because as an adult, it's one's right to move on, to make their own choices. Swann adores her father with all of her heart, but she knows where he fits in her priorities, and his life doesn't come before her own, not unless he's in the midst of an emergency.

She wants to curl into herself and cry, but she finds herself too empty to even do that. Instead, she only lies there, one hand clenched loosely in the fabric of his shirt.

[whatisay]

"I'm still her son," he says, believing with all his heart that somehow that is an argument against Swann's aphorism. He doesn't glare at her, doesn't cut her with his voice, but he does hold onto that sentiment like a security blanket. Caroline's life has always been in a state of emergency, or at least she acts like it, and as such Jason can never draw the line at where too much control is overbearing.

"She'll die eventually anyway," he says, foreshadowing the next log.

[cigne]

"We'll all die someday," Swann answers, and it sounds hollow, like it's come from deep inside her brain and echoed around a bit before it comes out of her mouth. Part of her hasn't come all the way back, the part that still fixates on death and how simple it would be to end all of her stress and anxiety forever. She'll snap out of it eventually, but the dark place inside her that festers even now, it clings to her like an invisible blanket.

Jason's affection makes it fade back some.

"We'll all be diamonds."

[whatisay]

"If we're lucky," Jason says. Death has a different meaning to Jason, because it's never really felt like a possibility, as if on some subconscious level he feels cursed to a long and miserable life. Death is like the treat on the table he's reached for only to find that Quentin and his father snatched it up for themselves and gorged on it. It's something other people get to have, that release, that freedom that the idea of cessation provides him.

He kisses her because it feels like something alive and vibrant and outside of that half-life they both seem to occupy in most of their days. He kisses her deep and hard.

[cigne]

Death has been, for Swann, not a possibility but an option, one path down a fork in the road she has to walk every day. The skies that way are a sort of comforting dark, the kind of clouds that exist during summer rains when you're comfortable inside, in bed, looking out the window. The other path has an unbearably bright sky over it, and every day she has to push herself just that little bit to walk that way, and she has to push harder when Jason isn't with her.

She makes a soft noise against his mouth, moving her hand to his head, fingers in his hair. Her eyes close and she's distantly surprised, but that falls away easily, absorbed by his breath and his tongue against hers.

[whatisay]

He pulls her in, feeling the sleepiness of the pre-morning hours burning away as his heart picks up its pace. That anxiety from yesterday, that idea that he might lose her, converts itself to urgency, to a sort of desperate passion. He pulls her tongue into his, feeling her back arch under his hand.

"I'm so sorry about yesterday," he whispers in a single breath, before kissing her again.

[cigne]

She moans, curling her fingers against his scalp, breathing hard and shaking along with her fluttering heart as he speaks. He kisses her again and she lets go of him to fumble with the buttons of her pajama top, getting them undone as quickly as she can before wrapping herself back around him, shirt still on but hanging open.

"I'm sorry too, I shouldn't have hit you," she answers the next time they break for air, blinking at him with wide, dilated eyes and then pushing his head back to hers.

[whatisay]

"I probably had it coming." He tugs with his teeth at her lower lip, pressing his kiss messy and rough against her mouth and chin, and his his hand ventures between her legs to palm at her. He lowers his head soon, too, squirming down in the bed to plant wet kisses upon her now-exposed nipples.