thecapitol | I Cannot Decipher Conversation in Your Head [Closed]

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I Cannot Decipher Conversation in Your Head [Closed]

WHO| Jason Compson and Swann
WHAT| Yoga, kites and long drives.
WHEN| Sunday.
WHERE| Swann's place.
WARNINGS| Capitolite cluelessness. Shameless shipping and graphic sexual content.

He doesn't go to the cemetery with his mother, and that means that Benjamin gets out of having to go, too. Caroline whimpers and whines her way through the morning, talking about how lonely she'll be standing at the headstones of her husband and her eldest son, acting as if Jason's indifference to ritualized mourning is giving her physical pains. When Jason outright calls them psychosomatic, Caroline retires to her bedroom, making little mewling noises, and he sighs and insists that some Avoxes accompany her to the graves no matter what fight she puts up.

"I'm head of the house," he tells one of the few servants who still has her tongue, "no matter that she's my mother. She tries to shake you off, you follow and make sure she doesn't have a chance to blame me that she didn't get to grieving today."

By the time he gets to Swann's he's got the start of a headache and his mood has dipped below its baseline sullen and into fully cranky. He isn't late, but he would have liked to give himself a cushion of time, and instead he couldn't take the smoother, scenic route and had to near run a red and do his smoking while driving. As he'll supposedly be changing into new clothes as soon as he's here, he's looking relatively simple in dark jeans and his coat and a collared shirt. A flourish of embroidery on the cuffs speaks to opulence; the bad stitching on those same sleeves reveals that luxury to be an affect only. The kite is in a bag covered in tissue paper at his side.

He realizes he doesn't think Swann's seen him in casual clothing. He knows it likely won't matter soon, but he makes sure his hair is nice before he appears. He might as well keep up appearances around her, even if she knows better.

He rings the bell.

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"I usually like it, but I can turn it off if you want," she says, unfolding herself to lean over and gently adjust his head and neck. Her hands are delicate, using only enough strength to actually shift him. "That should feel a little better."

She's starting to realize that he might need actual correction in his poses, that she'll have to show him and then move him as necessary to get him to do it properly, particularly as they get more complicated than 'kneel and bend forward'.

Resuming her pose, she keeps talking and moving.

"Breathe in one more time, then, as you exhale, slowly rise up, keeping your hands on the mat, pushing down into your knuckles. Lengthen your spine, that's more important than straight legs. Imagine that your tailbone is tied to a chandelier. This is called downward-facing dog."

"I think silence might be a little better." His cheeks flush when she puts both her hands to the side of his face, fixing his position, but his eyes stay on the mat, the strange manufactured dunes and creases of rubbery material.

He takes a deep breath, then goes with what she's explaining. He's rarely straightened his spine - it's not a gesture that comes naturally to his body language - and doing so feels as if his form's being rearranged by some force beyond his own musculature. His blood seems to go scattershot, haphazard, as if it's no longer flowing through his veins but is pooling at random intervals.

"Alright. Tell me this one isn't supposed to feel comfortable."

Help, Swann. Help.

"Okay, okay."

She quickly stands and moves to help, hands on his hips to realign them and fix the pressure he's feeling. She moves his feet back slightly, widens his stance, then breaks away only long enough to turn down the music.

"Is that any better?" she asks, kneeling beside him and placing gently pressure on his sacrum, hands facing opposite ways. "Push down on your hands, don't try to hold all your weight in your back."

"Yeah. Better. Feels like all the blood's going to my head, though." He closes his eyes again, trying to get in tune with his body and not just her hands on him. He hears a little pop as something in his back realigns.

He tries breathing deep, not because he expects this is going to work but because he knows Swann wants him to try, will feed on that attempt like a hummingbird drinks sugarwater.

She straightens his neck, puts it in line with his spine. "Don't let your head hang, that's why it's happening. Your back is a line, keep it straight from the base of your skull to your tailbone."

Swann runs him through another few moments of breathing, then slowly lowers his hips downward. "Okay, we're going into a plank, a line from your neck to your heels" -- she supports his torso through the movement -- "and then bring your knees down so that you're on all fours. You're doing really, really well, Jason."

He straightens his neck and the pressure in his head seems to abate a little. He exhales deep again, then goes into that plant motion, a little surprised by how much it feels like a swoop. It's a relief to get his knees down, into a pose that doesn't feel like he has to focus on every line in his body to keep from looking like some ungainly disaster.

His blood, however, seems intent on continuing the trend of embarrassment, and it starts to collect.

"You don't have to lie to me." He looks up at her. "And what, you do a rep of forty?"

"I'm not lying," she says, staying low on the floor as she crawls back to her own mat into the proper position. "You are doing well. You've never done this before. But no, yoga isn't really about reps. It's about opening yourself up to feel more calm and peaceful."

She smiles at him, then keeps explaining. "This is called cat cows. You're going to arch your spine down first, and your neck back, then arch all the way up and bring your neck down, so your head follows the curve of your spine. So down and back, up and forward."

She demonstrates, her motions smooth and careful, and adds on, "Inhale on the down stretch, exhale on the up stretch."

He goes through the motion as she explains it, watching as her body length switches from convex to concave and back, like an eyelid opening and closing with blinks. The motion isn't intentionally sexual, but the arched back- it's as if his brain can't help but take her fluid motion and speed it up into a sort of fantasy-

"Can we go back to child's pose?" His face is turning red, moreso than it was when he was letting gravity flush his head with blood during the downward dog pose.

Swann opens her eyes and glances over at him.

"Oh. Okay, yeah, sure. Just sit back," she says, immediately folding into the proper pose. She wonders if he's feeling overexerted, or if he just really hates yoga. She imagines that maybe he's trying to be nice by making her go backwards, rather than just standing up and saying that it's all stupid.

He does, doing his best to stay in the pose while he tries to wrest his body back under his control. Tension appears as a crinkle at the corner of each of his eyes, between his brow.

"What about the mental side of this? How do you do that, the clearing the mind bit?"

"Go back to focusing on your breathing, and just let everything flow out of your body," she says. "Spread your hands on the mat, and imagine everything in your body and mind moving up, up through your spine and your arms and your hands, and then let all of it come out of this tips of your fingers and out of you, until you're empty and clean of all things that cloud your peace."

Even as she talks, her breathing becomes more steady and heavy, and she lets her eyes close.

Edited 2015-02-20 22:19 (UTC)

It all sounds like mumbo-jumbo to him, honestly, but he does as she says, spreading out his hands (unringed), his eyes closed, his breath forcefully measured. He imagines his skull as a vase of water, draining out slowly, but while he's sure Swann's has a smooth bottom his feels full of rocks and rusted metal that rear up out of the base.

In that moment he hates her, truly and fully, with a sort of unmitigable and inarticulate fury that comes from feeling controlled by someone who doesn't even know they're playing upon a piano's strings. But he tries to let tat go, imagines that coming out his fingertips and pooling across the floor in a languid and ugly puddle, tries to imagine himself a smooth basin.

He feels the uncomfortable physical reaction abate too, and he breathes a sigh of relief that goes deeper than any of the deep breaths Swann had his take earlier.

"Alright. Let's try it again."

Swann, meanwhile has found that place in her head where everything is okay, where there's no tension or panic or overwhelming anxiety that makes her shake involuntarily and cry. It took her nearly a year after her ill-fated attempt at death to find this place, endless sessions where she was sure she'd never get her true moment of peace.

It took practice, it took effort, like everything else in the world.

But when she sits up, she faces him, rearranging her legs into lotus position and resting her hands on her knees, head cocked to the side.

"Are you all right, Jason? We don't have to keep going if you hate it."

"I don't hate it. I don't. I'm fine."

He doesn't look nearly as at peace as Swann does, but the blush is starting to run back down his neck from his face. Unprompted, he tries to go into that downward dog pose that came after the first one, taking care to keep his head from hanging.

He wants to find that peace that he can see on her, that makes the muscles in her face go loose and her eyelashes fold gently over the curves of her eyes.

"How's this?"

"It's good," she says, reaching out to twist his hand, make sure that the line of his arm is correct, "but I think what you need right now is savasana. Corpse pose. I was saving it for the end, but I think it'll help you more than any other pose. Come on."

She shifts to lie down, feet shoulder-width apart, arms loose at her sides with her palms up. "Just don't arch your neck, keep your throat soft," she tells him, "and don't let your chest sink down. Keep your spine aligned."

Closing her eyes in the warmth of the sun through the glass doors, Swann focuses on her breathing, regulates, then starts to talk again.

"Everything is leaving you. The world is gone, it's flowing out of you until you can only feel peace. Even where the world wants to cling to you, remember that you are ice and it can only slide through your body until it's gone. Everything is calm. Everything is still. Have patience and let the stillness find you. You are not emptying the ocean, you are quieting it. Shanti... shanti... shanti."

And then she is quiet.

He lays back, staring at the ceiling because he can't seem to close his eyes as he undergoes this. When he does, he seems to feel as if he's there in the meat, right behind his eyes, acutely aware of the location of his existence and not happy with it. He feels trapped.

He tries to figure what she means about being ice, but he can only imagine himself as hot metal, malleable enough to be dented but not to shatter. And when she stops speaking, there's only quiet and the near-muted new age music, and his palms have a heartbeat in them.

He lays like that, staring at the ceiling and feeling oddly like he could cry now if he were the type for crying, until Swann speaks again.

They lie that way for several minutes, then Swann pulls her knees to her chest and rolls to her side, facing him. She looks absolutely serene, perfectly calm and centered, and she blinks languidly at him, like she's still coming back into her own head.

"Hey."

She murmurs it, able to see that he hasn't found any of the peace she was hoping to be able to give him. It's obvious in his face, the tension that never seems to leave his neck and shoulders, so thick that its weight is visible to her.

"You don't like this, do you?"

"I don't hate it."

But no, he isn't going to outright spare her feelings and say he likes it. Maybe it's something that takes time and practice, time and practice he isn't committing himself to giving.

He rolls over onto his side and looks bad at her, seeming tired and tense as he always is, any calmness just a sheen over that anger and unhappiness that his flesh and bone are wrapped around.

"How much time did you set aside for this?"

She almost wants to cry, to see that he is still so unhappy, that she was unable to be of any help when he wanted her to be. She wants to just lie on the floor in the sun and hold him until whatever it is that weighs on him abates some.

Instead, she reaches out and takes his hand, letting both of them rest on the carpet between the two mats, and she smiles.

"I didn't know I was supposed to write up a schedule. I figured you'd either walk out after two minutes, or you'd want to do it all day. We can stop."

"Whatever you want." If she's enjoying bringing herself inner peace, he isn't going to stop her; at the very least it gets him out of the house for a while, and it's still many, many hours until the sunset he wants to take her to see.

He lets her take his hand, and then gradually turns his over so that they're palm to palm.

"We can keep doing this, or we can take the kites out. I just don't think I'll be reaching enlightenment any time soon."

"You made them?"

Her smiles widens, lights up her eyes, and she laces her fingers with his out of instinct and so that she can squeeze his hand with excitement. She could have bought a kite at any time, of course, but when everyone else had them as children and Jason wouldn't make her the one she wanted, she had sort of just given up on the idea, and then it fell so far out of her mind that she'd never bothered.

Something about the idea of doing it now, so many years later, is terribly gratifying. Like hitting a missed milestone.

"I want to fly kites."

Edited 2015-02-21 06:52 (UTC)

"Well, I made one. The other I had some servants turn up the basement for. It's old but it should still work." When he talks to Swann there's a tint of optimism in his voice that isn't usually there, as if he's putting effort into not sounding as dour and apathetic as he usually does. As if he's opening up the possibility that occasionally, some things go right.

He sits up, grimacing a little as even the slight amount of stretching and exercise has used parts of his body he's neglected for a long time.

"I'll have to change back out of these pants."

"We have time. If it doesn't work, we'll just make another one."

She sits up too, watching him until she's satisfied he didn't pull something or damage himself. She hadn't thought to do a few minutes of warm-up, simply because the poses they'd done were so easy, but maybe she was wrong.

"I'm shocked," she teases, then rises and stretches, arms pulled behind her arched back. "I'll go change too, meet you in the living room? If you want coffee, there should be some waiting, Eta's bound to have figured out we might want some."

Swann bounces toward the door, smiling over her shoulder, then disappears, heading for her own room to get dressed.

Switching back into his jeans and shirt isn't difficult at all, and by the time Swann returns in her bubbly outfit Jason's at the kitchen counter with his yoga clothes in a folded pile next to him, drinking some black coffee.

He pushes the bag with the folded kites over to her across the rose-quartz countertop. There's a trace of a smile on his face, a sort of expectant look like he's anticipating being able to feel successful and smug in just a moment. The yoga may not have cleared his head but the hot coffee just might, and seeing Swann saunter in in her crinoline and heels doesn't really hurt.

"Tell me if it's not decent enough for you. I'm out of practice with making these."

Embroidered silver deer line the hem of her skirt, shimmering slightly against the navy silk. She has a metallic gray cardigan with sapphire buttons at the cuffs, and there are mink puffballs on the toes of her shoes. Her hair is still in a ponytail, although it's been brushed out and redone, slightly more styled this time. There are rings on her fingers that shine when she reaches for the bag.

"I don't know that I'd know a decent kite from a bad one," she tells him, pulling one kite out and gently unfolding it, as if afraid she might somehow break it. It makes her beam as she runs her fingertips over it, then holds it up, imagining how it might look against the sky.

"I love it."

that's a gift

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