thecapitol | Honesty, Could It Be the Trigger That Makes Us Answer All at Once? [Closed]

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Honesty, Could It Be the Trigger That Makes Us Answer All at Once? [Closed]

WHO| Jason and Swann
WHAT| Jason meets Swann's dad, part two: shotgun edition.
WHEN| After the crowning
WHERE| Ilar Honeymead's place
WARNINGS| General Capitolite awfulness.

This time, there won't be cake-throwing. Jason's confident about that, at least. The rest is a different story; he and Swann have been bickering plenty lately, and it seems a coin-flip whether they'll be wildly in love throughout the day or snapping at each other, unable to contain their pettiness and annoyance. He hopes today's one of the former, because if it's the latter then dinner with Ilar is going to be a sham at best and a complete disaster at worst.

They've said some things in the last few weeks that cut deeper than they should have, never for any reason that they could trace back. Jason will forget why they were fighting with each other and only the slammed doors and cruel words that ended the fight. They're a mystery him, and the resolution always tends to be the worst prize ever.

But the good times are still some of the best days he's had in years, and that makes the bickering all the more terrifying. He doesn't want to lose resting his face in her hair while she sleeps three nights a week, or taking their Sunday and having Eta pack them food and going to a lookout point, or gossiping about their Tributes and co-workers over lunch every day. He feels wired to self-destruct, as if he can't help but snipe and snap at her, by some uncontrollable impulse that he has to repair by returning to her over and over with gifts and apologies that are becoming, with each passing week, more verbalized.

It's in this state of disequilibrium that he picks her up tonight, and unlike the last time they drove to Ilar's now Jason looks more visibly nervous, pressing his lips together and exhaling through his nose far more than necessary. He holds off on smoking because he doesn't want to get the smell on him before Ilar meets him, but he keeps clicking his teeth, up until they start to drive up into Ilar's palatial driveway.

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Draining his glass, Ilar nods. "That's a valid answer. Frankly, I like that better than the boys who've come in here spouting about how they're gonna marry her and have babies and whatever else." He waves his hand. "No one should be that certain of things 'less they have the ring in their pocket."

He again holds back, doesn't say what Swann has said in the past, that too many men look at her as their ticket to power and prestige and one of the biggest companies in Panem. Everyone in the Capitol knows that the Honeymead company only gets handed down through blood, and that makes Swann the only ticket in.

"You love her?"

"No babies in the immediate future," Jason says quickly. Ever, he thinks. He'll never raise another child and he didn't want the one he got saddled with.

"I-I don't know." It's a question he's asked himself a hundred times in the last few months, maybe even more. Every time he falls asleep, whether he's with Swann or without. Every surge of emotion, anger or sadness or happiness, carries that question on it like a crest of foam. And he knows the answer but not how to accept, not how to own it. "I think I do."

"Nah, that's not what I meant," Ilar chuckles, smiling and waving his hand. "That's up to y'all, though it'd certainly be good for Swannie to have someone she can pass the company down to. If and when you want to, you two can make those decisions."

He nods, takes another sip of his brandy. "I can respect that. Just wonderin', that's all. It's not the easiest thing to figure out, I certainly remember trying to suss it out for myself." There's another pause for another puff of his cigar, which Ilar looks at for a moment before turning his gaze back to Jason. "I just want you to understand that I'm trustin' you here, son. I've got everything in the damn world I could ever ask for, but that little girl is the only thing I'd fight for. She's been through enough, she doesn't need any more trouble in her life. Make sense?"

"I understand." Ilar's the last sort of person Jason wants to fight against. There's picking fights and then there's stepping on land mines, and Jason's certain that getting on the bad side of one of the most powerful people in Panem falls into the latter category.

Besides, if Jason's going to have to fight anyone over Swann, it'll be against his own worst instincts, the paranoia and volatility and anhedonic frustration.

"I don't have any bad intentions for your daughter. I know saying it's the furthest thing from proving it, but it's the truth." He takes another puff from the cigar, trying to settle into the chair instead of sitting ramrod and vigilant.

"I believe you." Ilar seems sure, his voice calm and final, another nod accompanying it, and then he chuckles. "I suppose I'm just an overprotective old man now. Always thought I'd have a couple more kids and it'd get spread out over it, but Swann wound up gettin' it all on her shoulders, along with everything else. I just want her to be happy, but that's like askin' for the moon in her case. So I have to be careful, watch out for her. And that's all I expect outta other men in her life. It's the proper thing to do, take care of her."

He peers at a picture of her on the wall near the fireplace, old and from her childhood, where she beams at the camera with a missing front tooth. She has her arms around the neck of someone's dog, a great dane twice her size, but she seems ecstatic about it.

"She's special."

"I'd toast to that. She's the only woman I've ever met who's- who's like this." he doesn't know, entirely, what that means. She's the only person he feels not only understands him, but that he wants understanding from. She's the only one he very well might love. The only person who feels like a harbor in a sandstorm that never seems to relent.

"I just want her to be happy, too. Sometimes I almost thinks she is, when we're together, but most of the time I don't know. Most of the time I can't tell at all."

Ilar laughs, deep and pleasant, and holds his glass up in toast before taking a long drink. "She's always been a funny little girl, ever since she could stand on her own. Always leapin' in headfirst, goin' a hundred percent. Believes the best of everyone until they prove her otherwise, and then she cries 'cause they did. But she won't blink to take for her and hers, know that? I didn't have anything to do with those TV shows she used to have, other than signin' off on 'em. She plotted and planned and did it all herself, she was going to be on top if she had to die tryin'."

He sighs.

"I guess she learned to pretend too well. She wants to make everyone else happy first, and I think maybe I caused that. Couldn't help showin' her off, how perfect she was. Is, still, but I can't carry her around anymore. So she always had a smile and it never went away, maybe even when it should have."

Polishing off his drink, Ilar's faced entirely toward the fire, his brow knit as he smokes his cigar thoughtfully.

"But from what I can tell, whatever it is that's gonna make her happy, it's in you somewhere."

Jason listens, trying to square what Ilar's telling him with his own memory of Swann as a child, some moments caught in time - Quentin's funeral, times when he pushed her around and doesn't remember why, only that he was so angry as a child, angry all the time and grew into an angry man - knowing he never really saw Swann back then, only a collection of his immediate impressions as a child.

He can't remember how she broke through those impressions as an adult. He remembers her trying one of his cigarettes, sleeping in his bed at the retreat, offering to teach him yoga, and at some point she became a whole person to him, one who holds everything Ilar says about her.

Jason bites his lower lip for a moment. "Does she tell you that?"

A silent Avox steps out of the shadows with another brandy for Ilar, which he takes and looks at for a moment, still thoughtful. "Girls don't exactly go runnin' to their daddies for boyfriend talk, now do they? And Swannie's mama, well, they don't have that kind of relationship. The only person in the world she really talks to can't tell us what she says, or wouldn't, in any case. Eta might have been my Avox to start, but she was Swann's from the moment they met."

He's hardly heartbroken over it. If anything, he's glad she had someone who could be there, who loves her as much as he does. That he can trust.

"What she does tell me is that she loves you. She loves everyone, though, so I never take it that serious. But then she starts talkin' about you, just where you two went to lunch, or what you did on the weekend, and it sounds like there's no one else in the whole world that matters, just you. Like you give her the stars every damn time you look at her. So whatever it is that you got, well, that's what she wants."

Jason nods, and he understands the words but not the sentiment. Like Ilar, he's incapable of pinning down what that 'whatever it is' is, not necessarily from low self-esteem but from low esteem of humanity as a whole. The whole of personhood is blanketed in this unhappiness he lives with, that covers them up like snow until there's nothing he can see and no identifying features, nothing to grab onto and pull people to his lonely level. Swann's is the first hand to rise above that surface.

"You know that Compsons have never made good decisions. I just-" He pauses, drinks some of his water and stares at the glow of his cigar as he drags air through the embers. "This is the first decision I've made that's meant anything at all."

And Ilar doesn't seem to think any less of not knowing what it is that Jason has, because it's less a matter of understanding what Jason holds within himself than not understanding what Swann wants in the first place. She's always mystified Ilar on many levels; he's not able to understand the darkness that lurks inside her, doesn't know what she looks for to fix it, only knows that she's never seemed to find it before now.

"From what I remember, you didn't get a whole hell of a lotta chances to make many of your own decisions anyway. Seventeen with all those people relyin' on you? A baby to help raise? Don't think there aren't people who didn't notice, and I'm not blowin' smoke up your ass." He punctuates it with another puff of his cigar. "Just because you got faults, well, that doesn't erase what you've done right."

Sighing, Ilar clears his throat, makes a few noises of effort as he readjusts himself in his seat. "But you finally got the room to make this choice on your own, and maybe I'm biased, but it's the same choice I'd make. Trust me, son, the woman you choose to keep at your side, that's an important call to make. Real important. And I can't think of anyone better than Swannie."

It's true. In a way, dating Swann is the first independent decision Jason's ever made as an adult. The first one that mattered, not where to get breakfast or what type of charge to give his car or whether to visit District Eleven for a week, but one that involved making a conscious choice to continue something that made him happy, free of consideration for his family for the most part.

Ilar's right. Jason hasn't had a hell of a lot of choices to make in his life; at least, none he could take. He could walk away from his mother, but that was never even in the room, much less on the table.

He feigns a bit of a smile. "You might be the first person who actually has noticed. But this isn't- this ain't a decision I regret any."

(Ilar's genteel affectation makes Jason's all the more pronounced by proximity.)

"Good. Shouldn't be one you regret, save that for overeatin' and fashion." Ilar pats his knee again and then hoists himself out of his chair, taking a last puff before stubbing his cigar out in the ashtray. "I like you, son. You got more to you than most people think, and in this city, that's a good thing. Let 'em believe the worst."

He waits for Jason to stand and then wraps his large arm over Jason's shoulders, walking alongside him but also leading him. "We should go find Swannie, she's liable to have given up on us and fallen asleep by now. Big meals always do knock her right out."

"I figure they'd believe the worst of me whether I fought it or not. Comes with the family name." Jason's shoulders are stiff under Ilar's arm, if only because he's so rarely touched except by Swann. It's a motion that shouldn't surprise him but does. He follows Ilar's lead.

"I'll make sure she gets home safe if she has." Really, he wouldn't be surprised if Swann were sitting up nervously awaiting Ilar's response like it were a verdict for a capital case.

"Every name's got its baggage, good and bad," Ilar says, sweeping his arm toward some of the pictures that line the hall, big oil portraits of Honeymead family members, each with its own gleaming golden name plaque. "There's rumors and accomplishments and everythin' else for every single family in the Capitol. Nothin' to even spare a thought about."

It's not an incredibly long walk, though it's long enough to easily feel that one is entering an entirely separate wing of the house, but Ilar and Swann seem to have neighboring wings. Her hallways are just as filled with antiques and paintings, though the wallpaper turns light once they enter the massive double doors, peach and cream stripes with gold flowers. The paintings are of lighter subjects as well, more art than history, dotting the walls with ballerinas and angels and flowers and animals.

Though there are clearly several rooms leading off the hallway (a playroom, an office of sorts probably meant for studying, a nanny's room once occupied by Eta rather than any nanny), Swann's is at the end of it, another set of giant double doors leading into it. One of the doors is open, and Ilar doesn't seem to mind Jason following as he gives a cursory knock and calls out for Swann.

"Swannie, babydoll, you in here?" he asks, walking in, and they enter what might as well be an entire apartment, big and airy and baby pink, delineated into separate areas by breezy white curtains. There's a sitting area with chairs, huge and soft looking, and Swann's computer and phone have been abandoned here in the low lamplight. Through the first set of curtains is a play area, dominated by a massive, ornate dollhouse and shelves upon shelves of dolls, and it's only through the second set of curtains that they find Swann, asleep in a bed ten times larger than any child could need, making even the full-grown Swann look tiny by comparison. The window is open for a breeze, and the canopy curtains gently sway around the bedposts.

It's easy to see how even her childhood bedroom lacks many signs of childhood.

She makes a tired noise and sits up, swiping at her eyes. "I just fell asleep," she says, and it's a bit whiny even through the yawn that follows. Her skirt crinkles at she shifts. "Are you two done?"

Jason can't help but wonder if the Compson Manor would retain a similar glory, though darker, more warlike, if it were actually maintained, if even in his childhood it had really been tended to with love instead of obligation. Swann's wing looks as if it were being kept perfect to maintain Swann's presence even in her absence more than because cleaning and repairing comes with owning a building.

"Yeah. I figure we did all the talking that needed to be done. Didn't even need a shotgun." Jason peers out from behind Swann, feeling a flush of comfort at the sight of her sleeping, of realizing she probably knew this was going to go alright all along. "You want me to carry you all the way down to the car?"

He glances at Ilar. "She knows I can."

When Swann walks through her old rooms, it's obvious that she's still comfortable here, despite not having occupied the quarters for more than a week in years. It's almost as if the wing is just an extension of her apartment, somewhere she has every right and reason to be, not just a preserved memory, but an active living space.

"'s okay," she says, scooting to the edge of the bed, to where a little step-stool sits, because even as an adult, she's too small to climb into a bed this size without it (though, to be fair, a lot of women would be too small). She slides back into her shoes and goes over to the two of them, wrapping her arms around Jason's middle and resting against his side.

Ilar shifts to kiss the crown of her head and then push them forward by putting his hand on the small of Swann's back, guiding. "Don't be makin' him carry you like you're one of those pampered little pets of yours, Swannie," he chides lightly, teasing, handing her her phone as they walk by it. "You're gonna give him a bad back. He ain't old enough for that, girl, give the man a chance to age like the rest of us."

As they walk back down the hall, they're joined by Lebuinus the butler, who swoops in seamless and murmurs something to Ilar before swiftly disappearing again.

"All right, Swannie girl," he says as they reach the front staircase and start to head down. "Seems I got an important call on the line, so I won't make y'all wait around for me to get off the phone. You two get on outta here now, I'll see you soon. Your mama might be comin' home for winter fashion shows, she hasn't decided yet, but that'll be in a few weeks, so maybe then, all right?"

She pulls away from Jason when they reach the landing and hugs her father around the neck, kissing his cheek before he kisses her forehead, then offers his hand to Jason. "So good to get to talk to you, son."

Jason casts a concerned glance at Swann when Ilar mentions Viatrix, and gives her an almost imperceptible squeeze. Her mother is almost as sore a spot as his is, just in an entirely different way. Viatrix is absence where Caroline is smothering, suffocating presence, a hole in the heart versus phlegm in the lungs.

But the moment passes, and Swann kisses her father goodnight, and Jason shakes his hand. "Likewise."

He waits for the signal to leave, and does so, arm around Swann's shoulders the entire time because he's tall enough that he can't really keep it around her waist comfortable while they walk. When they get to the car he opens the door for her.

"That went alright."

Neither Swann nor Ilar seem terribly concerned about Viatrix, actually, and really it's just that they both know she's not coming back until Christmas, when she has to be seen at the right parties for two weeks, if she can stand it that long. Your mama might be comin' home is a mantra Swann's been hearing and her father's been saying for twenty-five years.

At this point, it's more for Ilar than it is for Swann.

She squeezes Jason's hand back anyway, and gets in the car when he opens the door, turning her head to smile at him. "Yeah! Daddy really likes you."

"It makes me wonder what other people you've brought to the house before me," Jason says, both serious and in a sort of self-deprecating humor. He goes around the car and gets in, smiling at her. He didn't realize until now how anxious he had been about this meeting, about the prospect of losing that person that too often it seems that he's trying to throw away.

He closes his door and reaches for her hand, so that they can drive to her home the same way they always do, touching.

"No one good enough," she says vaguely, and doesn't elaborate that her father always likes the boyfriends she's brought home, that the problems start afterward. That her father has the same long temper she does, but when the fuse burns down, his explosions are exponentially worse.

That there are people who've disappeared after she cried to her father, showed up with a black eye or had to have the doctor come set a broken jaw.

Swann smiles back at him, beams really, and squeezes his hand tightly.

"Well. If there were anyone my mother would approve of, anyone at all, I wouldn't be surprised if it were you. And it's no fault of yours that she gets jealous if I even meet with lady Sponsors for my work."

He could fight his mother on this, probably, could take a stand, but the very idea is anathema to his understanding of the relationship he and his mother have. He bucks her authority by going behind her back. He always has, smuggling his niece to see her mother or using his mother's money to get this car.

He smiles back at her.

Swann covers her mouth a little, snorts and glances away so that she doesn't seem too tickled.

"Your mother really can be weird," she says, and there's something oddly fond in her voice, like maybe she's too happy to be hateful or jealous toward Caroline right now, can only find humor in her odd obsession with her own son.

Raising their hands to her mouth, she kisses Jason's knuckle. "I love you."

"What's more weird is how used to it I am."

He doesn't return the sentiment out loud. He already has, once, and the echoes of it continue to ring in his ears like cathedral bells. Instead he leans over and kisses her on the cheek.

"I hope your father doesn't mind if I deflower his daughter again in the back of this car."

It's the one part of that night that remains clear, them standing in the garage, him reassuring her, before every goes black and fuzzy again. She never lets it go.

"Probably he'd mind if he heard you put it like that," she laughs, "and he'd appreciate it if we waited until we were somewhere more private. But that's all.

Swann's still smiling at him when she lets go of his hand and shifts in her seat to squirm out of her underwear, which she tucks into the glovebox with a self-satisfied pat on the leather once it's closed.

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