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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"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."

Paired next to each other, they look like an exercise in minimalism and filigree. She gritters and shines and he becomes something of her elongated shadow, especially when he puts the dark coat on.

"I'm glad." The slightest smile crosses his face, that smirk becoming genuine for a flickering moment. The kite isn't complicated, just fabric and some light piping and ribbon, something he figured out how to slap together quickly as a kid for some spending money. "It should fly. I checked the weather and there'll be enough wind. You got a place in mind?"

She grabs a coat of her own, soft ivory wool with buttons that may or may not actually be carved from real ivory, and reaches for his hand with hers. The other holds her kite as if she fears it might fly away on its own at any given moment.

"I don't know what a good place would be." She looks a little vexed, brows knit together with thought. "What's good for it? Hills? Rooftops?"

"I was talking about taking you to that lookout point earlier. There's a bare hillside that'll probably be good for getting some wind." He glances at her shoes and finishes his coffee, leaving it on the counter for Eta. He takes the bag with his own kite in it.

"If you don't mind riding in my car again. And you might want to put on shoes you won't break your ankle in."

"Of course I don't mind." She looks down at her shoes, then quickly thinks about her shoe closet. "Wait, come with me, tell me what's good to wear."

She doesn't wait for much of an answer, just grabs at his sleeve and heads for her bedroom. She places the kite down gently on her bed, then opens one of the two sets of double doors. Inside are dozens and dozens of lighted cubbies, each holding its own pair of shoes, perfectly positioned as if for a photoshoot. Most of them are stilettos of some variety, and others are high wedges, but pairs of cutesy flats appear every so often (the vast majority seem to look like animals or have saccharine patterns on them). There are no sneakers or shoes that might be for comfort over appearance.

Swann looks at Jason expectantly. "Do any of these work?"

Jason almost worries that if he touches them, the shoes will explode into, he doesn't know, fairy dust or powdered sugar or shards of glass. They all look so delicate, brand new, a far cry from his work shoes that have seen better days. It's as if she replaces each set the instant they get the slightest scuff.

He takes a pair of flats with kittens on the toes and hands them to her. "Probably this. We'll just be walking over some rocks, and I don't want you snapping or spraining anything if I can help it."

It freaks him out when she cries, okay.

She takes the shoes and steps out of her heels, immediately shrinking roughly three inches. She puts on the flats and smiles up at him, then goes to get her kite from her enormous, round bed, where it sits like a precious treasure.

"Are we ready? Should I have Eta pack us lunch? I should have her pack us lunch." She doesn't wait for an answer, heads for an intercom panel on the wall and announces into it, "Eta, can you pack us up a lunch? Thank you!"

It's easy to forget how small she is without her shoes, but since he just saw her barefoot and in yoga clothes, he only peripherally notices that she's now only just to his shoulder.

"I'm ready when you are. I have the whole day off. Unless one of my idiot Tributes gets eaten by a prehistoric ground sloth, I don't have anywhere to be."

"Well now you're just being negative. They could die of good, old-fashioned freezing."

Swann smirks at him, then carries her kite out into the apartment, where Eta's waiting with a basket. It's all nicely packed up leftovers from the past few days, along with fruit and dessert and bottles of soda. Swann takes the basket from Eta (who then offers a few folded up blankets to Jason), and then heads for the door.

"I think that should be everything we need, right?"

He laughs, and it's a strange bark, as if it took him entirely by surprise that she could be that cynical.

"Looks fine." He opens the front door for her, taking the basket with one hand and then clicking the fob on his keychain. His car chirps at him from the garage. "No eating in the car, by the way. Benjy did that once and got yogurt on the front seat. I had to beat the hell out of him."

Once he takes the basket, she takes the blankets and holds them to her chest along with the kite, following behind him even though she stepped out before him. Her tiny legs just can't meet his strides.

"Well... I'm sure he didn't mean it."

Her voice is soft and cautious, as she's no longer willing to directly talk about his family. If 'buy your mom flowers' made him snap at her, she can't imagine what sort of reaction 'maybe don't beat your brother with the intelligence of a toddler' would get.

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