Shame Can't Be the Home Where You Live [Open]

[whatisay]

WHO| Jason and semi-open
WHAT| Caroline Compson dies and Jason exists in the aftermath.
WHEN| At least a week prior to reaping for the mini-Arena.
WHERE| Compson Manor
WARNINGS| Death, grief, emotional repression.



Jason stops coming to work on Monday, with no more warning than a text to Swann saying can't drive you today and a text to Peggy home from work. After that he lets his phone battery run down, and the few messages that get in before it dies pile up in his voicemail or inbox. He doesn't contact his coworkers, nor does he cancel the meetings with Sponsors he was supposed to be present for.

The servants are all fired. Jason tells them to vacate the premises but they don't, for two main reasons: the first being that they doubt, validly, that Jason would keep Benjamin and the horses fed and cared for, even for a few days, and the second being that Jason doesn't even seem to notice that they're there. He grabs a whole pack of caps for his vaporizer and takes up a sort of vigil on the couch in the moldy, once-beautiful living room, and smokes, at first with a kind of furious intensity and then out of a mechanical inertia, as if it's easier to just keep refilling the cap and staying where he is than to get up and perform any of the many tasks that have laid themselves out at his feet.

When night falls he doesn't even get up to turn on the light, just sitting there on the couch until sleep ambushes him and then retreats in the morning. Freedom is a ball and chain that keeps him stuck here. A few times he feels something like a fist twisting in his gut and he gets up, paces, runs his hands through his hair (which has gotten greasy and lank), and actually putting his body in motion helps to release that tension. His eyes sting and so he smokes more and tries to sleep again, passing between waking and resting with little acknowledgment for when he crosses each border.

Outside the gate stays closed, accessible only by fingerprint or intercomming to the house. The potholes and rotten belongings in the yard stay where they are, leaving patches of brown, muddy, dead grass underneath them if removed. The whole building sags a bit, as if it were sighing.

Jason's out of work for five days.


-/-

In the news, there's an obituary with ebullient recitations of the virtues no one who knew Caroline would ever say she had. It goes on to say that she's survived by her one son, Jason, as if Benjamin were shuffled out of reality when he was corralled up on the property, excised from the collective memory of the public.

Comments

the evening of the third day

[cigne]

Swann sends text message after text message, probably long into the time after Jason's phone dies, and grows increasingly panicked as he doesn't answer. She gives him two days, two sickness and anxiety-filled days where she accomplishes basically nothing, and then she's alerted to the obituary.

On the third day, she and Eta cook. For hours and hours, until huge amounts of steaming, beautiful food and baked goods have been crafted and packaged into individual containers, which are then carefully packed into a wheeled steamer trunk, which building Avoxes load into Swann's car so that she can drive herself back into the old neighborhood.

She parks outside of the gate and hauls the trunk out, then marches directly up to the gate, wheeling it behind her. She buzzes the intercom and waits patiently for an answer.

[whatisay]

Jason's asleep when Swann rings the intercom, and at first he just rolls over on the couch and ignores it. His body hurts; his neck is stiff from the angle of the armrest, and he hasn't changed clothes since the weekend, and that emotion that took residency in his stomach has been replaced by a dull sort of hunger. The second time it rings, he groans and gets up, lighting his vaporizer before he's even off the couch.

Somewhere in the back yard, Benjy's howling even though there's a servant trying his best to entertain him. The servants live in a shed on the back lot, the final reason they haven't left, and given that it's better tended than the house Ben's been moved there for the while. He can smell the death in the house but can make no sense of it but that something's wrong.

Jason cracks his neck and leans against the wall, fumbling with the intercom with fingers clumsy from disinterest. Everything feels heavy. The house itself becomes more monstrous without another person in it, as if the silence itself has weight to bear down on him.

"Compson," Jason says. The video feed's been broken for years, and so he can't tell who it is. "Who is it and what do you want?"

[cigne]

She can distantly hear Benjy, and it just makes her fret more, wringing her hands and biting her lip until Jason answers, until she can hear his voice. She sighs audibly with relief, letting go of all her fears for just that one second, though there are still so many worries and questions that still linger around her mind.

"Jason, it's me. Please let me in," she responds gently, peering up toward the house through the gate. "Please."

[whatisay]

"Oh." Jason doesn't hit the button to let her in. "Well? You got what you wanted. Now I don't have to make any decisions between people."

He rests his head against the wall over the intercom and rubs at his eyes and nose with his fingertips. He gropes around in the dark for the light switch but can't find it (his family never upgraded to voice-command lights) and then gives up.

"You don't need to be here."

[cigne]

Her eyes tear up, and it reflects in her voice, a waver and a note of thickness where she's choked up. "This isn't what I wanted, Jason. You know that. Please."

She wraps one hand around one of the gateposts, looking at the intercom, though the video feed stays black, so she has no idea what she's looking for. "You need someone. I told you that you don't have to go through things alone anymore. Jason, please, don't make me climb the fence. I will, you know I will."

[whatisay]

"Could have fooled me." There isn't even that usual vindictive, guilty pleasure in hurting her. Jason just feels choked - not blank, but filled up with some opaque substance that prevents him from feeling anything else, as if he were full of lead or smoke or sand. "I'm fine, Swann."

He doesn't snap at her that he doesn't need anyone, or that she'll have quite the time climbing the fence with how short her legs are so maybe she should try slipping between the slats instead, or any of that. It all burbles up to life in his throat but never makes it to his mouth.

"I just don't want a fight." He hits the button to open the gate and then slouches back to the couch, rather than going to the mezzanine to wait for her.

[cigne]

She wants to answer, wants to cry because she never wanted Caroline to die, only to stop holding Jason in chains. But maybe this is what it took, because she's only sad for Jason, not for the actual death of someone that she knew, however vaguely.

Before she can say a word, the gate opens and the intercom switches off, and Swann's left with an open mouth and no one to hear what she has to say.

She takes the handle of her trunk and begins to wheel it up the path to the house, carefully brushing away any tears that can spring up before she gets there. She reaches the drooping porch and lugs the trunk up the steps, then pauses at the door as she decides whether she should actually knock.

She doesn't. She gently turns the knob and enters, glancing down as the floor creaks under her. Closing the door behind herself, she looks around and tries to remember the layout of the house from twenty-odd years ago, when the Compsons still held parties. Eventually, she just takes a few more steps into the foyer and calls out, "Jason?"

[whatisay]

He considers not answering, not out of spite but simply because actually making the effort to raise his voice seems like a cruel task to ask of him, but eventually he manages. "Living room," he calls, sitting up and resting his forehead on the heel of his palm.

It used to be a beautiful house, but by now the damage is so deep that nothing short of a total renovation will bring it back to anything worth commentary aside from its size. It smells like decay. It smells like it's been given up on for years, with the immediately messes handled but any of the more intensive and gradual upkeep abandoned, shifted onto the shoulders of ghosts. There are no family portraits, aside from a painted one that sits above the fireplace, which hasn't been used in months. Quentin's jewel sits next to Jason's father's on the hearth, but both are covered in dust and the wreaths around them have shriveled and browned.

The last time Swann turned the corner into the living room was over twenty years ago, her in a pink outfit with a dyed fur stole, both of her parents making an appearance, the chandeliers filled with light instead of cobwebs.

[cigne]

The stench is almost overwhelming in the first few seconds, but Jason calls again and she forgets how unpleasant it is, how dusty and frightening neglected everything around her is, too filled with concern to have any other other thoughts. She drags her trunk behind her, following his voice more than her memory of the house.

She wears black this time, from the small, veiled fascinator pinned into her hair to her shoes, where black silk ribbons tie up her ankles like a dark ballerina. There's a sort of scurry toward him when he's in view, and she leaves her trunk at the entranceway in favor of crouching down to take his face in her hands, thumbs running along his cheeks.

"It'll be all right," she murmurs, and she doesn't sound at all sure, but she doesn't know what else to tell him. "I don't want you to do this alone."

The evening of the fourth day

[impaledqueen]

Peggy notices immediately that Jason isn't in. He sends her a text, though, so she quickly dismisses this as another migraine episode. She texts him back to ask if he needs ginger ale, but he doesn't reply to her, so she assumes that Caroline is taking care of it (no doubt while wining about how he should just take a painkiller and it'll clear right up). She wants to check on him just to make sure he's okay, but decides that having Caroline screech about him hanging around with filth probably won't help his migraine.

It's odd that he hasn't contacted any of his other coworkers about not coming to work, but if anyone asks her about it, she just says that he's not at work and he'll pick things up where he left off soon.

The second day is easily dismissed as a continued migraine. Sometimes, they just last multiple days. She texts him again to ask if he needs something, but he doesn't answer.

The third day is the day to begin getting concerned, because nothing but the worst migraines lasted this long. She tries to talk herself out of worrying by saying that he might just be recovering and he'll be back tomorrow, but she has a sinking feeling. He gets more texts that day. All of them are unanswered.

On the fourth day, she knows something is very wrong. It's only by chance that she comes across the obituaries. She immediately feels sick.

Caroline is dead. The bitch, forever screaming in her house and martyring herself as is Compson tradition, is dead. Jason's north star is dead.

Peggy calls out of work for the first time in years. She goes directly to her apartment and cooks. Food. Jason will not feed himself or Benjy. He will try to survive on smoke. She knows him.

She arrives at the Compson mansion not long before sundown, weighed by food that was all neatly wrapped and placed in a bag that she can effortlessly carry on her back despite its weight. If there are a few changes of clothes and toiletries buried at the bottom, that's no one's business but her own.

She presses the intercom button. "Jason, it's Peggy. Open the gate." She's ready to wave over a servant to let her in if she must, if only to make sure Jason hasn't hurt Benjy or himself at some point in the last day.

[whatisay]

Jason should have known Peggy would eventually come. He should have expected it, but planning ahead has never been a strong suit of his on a good day, and right now even considering what's left in the fridge of the food Swann brought or how much his pay's going to be docked is a task beyond him, much less contemplating human interaction.

He doesn't feel sad. There have been no tears, and in a turn of events that even surprise him, no temper fits aside from firing the servants before he even called the coroner Sunday night. He feels adrift, unmoored, as if each minute of time is wearing away at some exterior shell that will let disaster in when it gets thin and frail enough.

The gravity around which he arranged his life in enclosed, obsessive orbit has vanished, leaving that diligent collection of stars to collapse in on themselves.

He gets up from the couch, which smells like mold and has been his bed for the last few days, not for any reason he could put a name to, and without turning on the lights hits the intercom button. He's better off than he was yesterday thanks to Swann's meal and a fresh set of clothes, but other than that he's as vacant and detached and untended as he was the day before. As lost. "I'm fine, Peggy. I just forgot to text."

But he hits the button to open the gate anyway, because he knows she'll jump over it if he keeps her out too long. The women in his life all have a sort of bullheaded perseverance to them that he can't help but resent right now. Standing feels difficult and tiring, and so he sits down at the kitchen table, in view of the front door, but doesn't head to open it for her.

[impaledqueen]

"That wasn't what I asked you, Jason."

It's good that he buzzes her in, because she was already looking at the fence and gauging how hard it would be to jump. She readjusts her bag before walking over the destroyed lawn to the front door. As long as she's known Jason, it has always looked like his house was a dying animal. Covered in mange, disease, and unfattened flesh depressing slowly around sagging bones. It feels like she can hear the building's dying wheeze right now.

She opens the front door without his help. Inside, without the sound of Caroline's yelling, it really feels like she's inside something dying. She scans the area, taking note of the sagging, rotting wood and growing dust and dirt accumulating.

When she sees Jason, she walks to the kitchen, putting her bag down on the counter. "I heard about what happened." She had heard about Caroline. Typically in District 10, it's considered rude to talk to a grieving party without allowing them to talk first to pick the topic of conversation, but this isn't District 10 and Jason isn't a normal grieving party. He's going to need more than space.

[whatisay]

"You didn't ask me anything," Jason says, although he's sure she doesn't hear it, either because his finger's already off the com button or because she's already walked through the gate. It's just that need to finish the conversation, to come out a little bit ahead somehow.

Despite having spent at least half of the last few days asleep, Jason looks as if the very act of existing has left him exhausted. Falling naturally, without product, his hair's in his eyes, which have impressive dark circles under them. He reeks of the camphor and eucalyptus cigarettes, which have gone from his usual scent to something nearly pungent and cloying in their saturation. He shaved yesterday, but there's stubble shadowing all across his jaw and neck, turning it a sort of purple in the dim kitchen light.

He looks at Peggy with a sort of wariness unusual to their relationship, but he's unused to being this vulnerable. He doesn't even recognize the position he's in, only knows it's different than their usual baring of wounds.

"We all knew she was going to go sooner rather than later anyway," he says blandly. Ben, out in the backyard with one of the servants Jason still hasn't made good on kicking off property, makes some noise and Jason doesn't react to it. "I just thought it'd be something she could milk more attention out of than a stroke."

He'd told her she was going back to bed, that maybe having an honest-to-God migraine would show her not to tell him to get rid of his with aspirin and water, when she complained of a headache that night.

[impaledqueen]

"Just because you knew it was going to happen doesn't mean it doesn't affect you."

He's a mess. She has never seen him like this, not even during the worst of his migraines. It feels like he might be dying with the house, like Caroline was the heartbeat of the Compson family and it can't survive without her.

She opens her mouth to ask where Benjy is, if only because she worries about his safety, but she hears him making noise outside so she lets her breath out without a word. He's safe enough for now. It'd probably be best for him to be put somewhere equipped to handle him, though.

The vapor is too thick in the room. It makes a smell that is usually associated with familiarity and comfort to her into something sickening. If he is allowed to, Jason will waste away in this house just like Caroline.

Peggy's never been one to take this kind of thing lying down.

"I brought you food." She opens her bag and starts to take out the various trays and tupperware containers of her cooking, mostly meals primarily made from meat and other homemade animal products. "This should last us for a couple days." She doesn't bother asking if she can stay over. He probably doesn't have the energy to refuse her anyway, and he needs someone around who can call him out when he's letting himself go.

She starts walking around the kitchen, opening curtains and windows to let air in and dissipate some of the vapor. "What do you plan on doing with Benjy?"

[whatisay]

"Well, it doesn't. And Swann already brought me something." He glances at the fridge. Swann's the only reason he's eaten or showered at all since Sunday, a little before midnight, since a servant slammed their fists on his door to tell him that they'd called an ambulance and Caroline wasn't breathing, that they couldn't find a pulse.

Benjy makes noises outside again, and this time Jason looks over his shoulder, although not at anything in particular, just turning his head the way an animal does when they hear something. "I don't know. Sell him at a yard sale, maybe."

He feels a glimmer of anger at her, of impotent pride being undercut, that she's looking as suitable as she always does and is walking into a home a Districter would turn up their nose at, one so rotted and unloved that the former glory of the place has turned into some sort of cosmic joke. He hates her in that instant, for making him feel that way even without saying a word.

"What do you mean 'last us'?" he says, and there's a territorial snarl in his upper lip. That wariness turns into the kind of self-destructive fear that leads trapped animals to snap at their rescuers.

[impaledqueen]

Okay, maybe he does have energy to push back. For once, she's having trouble predicting Jason. Usually, she can at least hazard a guess at how he'll respond to everything, but now, he's broken in ways she's never seen him before. He's like an animal, stuck in a fence for so long that its flesh has been cut by the boards and it only bites at humans that try to help. If he acts like an animal, maybe he'll do better to be treated like one, though she'll never admit she's drawn the comparison in her head. When dealing with an angry, scared animal, it's best to stay calm and establish that you're not a threat as much as possible.

"Well, I thought maybe I could stay for a short while." She'd assure him that he doesn't have to play host to her, but let's be honest: Jason wouldn't feel obligated even in the best of circumstances. She turns to face him, keeping her face calm and her voice even. "If you don't want me to, you can say so."

Benjy's noise, at least, doesn't feel as different as Jason's. At least that much is preserved. "I can at least look into finding somewhere to put Benjy." She doesn't expect Jason to keep Benjy around for a moment, and if he's left to his own devices, Benjy's going into the cheapest institution he can find. Peggy can at least find something that's cheap and decent.

[whatisay]

"Why in God's name would you want to?" He says, exhaling a plume of smoke and gesturing at the dilapidated kitchen around them like somockery of a showman presenting a circus. It's not a flat rejection, which would act against the need for company so deep, so vital to self-preservation that he can't even acknowledge its existence; it's not an acceptance, which would shatter that last bit of pride that he clings to as the last competent Compson, the end of a line older than Panem itself, that's had madness and violence sewn and braided into its DNA since before the war.

But he does need help, much as he won't admit it. He hadn't realized until yesterday that says had passed since Caroline's death. His body hurts and he's developed a cough from sleeping on the moldy couch and smoking so much. A human being in free fall grabs by instinct at people, in this case Peggy, one of if not his best friend, jutting into the passage of the fall like, if not a net, then at least a handhold.

"I have somewhere for him. There's a basement downstairs. We can lock him in there," Jason says, not serious but sounding too flat for humor, the last of his kindness towards Benjy having died with their mutual mother. Swann suggested finding a place for Ben, but for the moment her attention has been moved towards helping arrange the funeral, which fits with her skill set and seems more pressing so long as servants are squatting on the grounds tending to him. Jason turns his attention from Peggy to the tabletop, then rests his face in his hands.

day two, mid-day -- let me know if him getting through the gate like this is all right, can change

[capitolprivilege]

Stephen's not sure he wants to do this.

But family is family, and while Jason is someone Stephen has developed a sharp personal dislike of, for many reasons, and someone who Stephen prefers to avoid with remarkable surreptitiousness, it feels wrong not making an appearance.

Especially now that his time's been freed up.

A servant buzzes him onto the grounds, lets him in the door, and shows him in to where Jason is. Stephen steps inside and waves the smoke out of his face, coughing.

"God, Jason, are you trying to suffocate yourself?"

[whatisay]

"The hell are you doing here?" Despite expecting no one to come to the house, Jason doesn't seem all that startled to see someone besides Ben or a servant in here. He should be, because he fired all the servants (although they're still lurking around, tending to things they know the master of the house won't, including his brother's care) and the gate has a lock, but it's not even that he reasons that a remaining servant wouldn't say no to a Reagan so much as he doesn't even think of it at all. Stephen wasn't here, and now he is, and any question as to why requires too much energy to muster.

Jason is still in the rumpled clothes he was wearing two days ago, his hair free of product and his face uncovered by the makeup that hides the perpetual dark circles. He looks a little bit like hell, and he didn't even get beat up in a back alley.

"You can crack a window if your lungs can't handle it." Jason exhales another plume of smoke, not in a showy way but tiredly, blandly, like Stephen doesn't even register as important enough to put on the usual airs for or like no one would merit them at this point. "Anyway. Glad to see District Eleven didn't lay too much hurt on you."

[capitolprivilege]

That window's opening, absolutely, the pane of glass sliding nearly noiselessly into its recess in the wall.

"I'm letting oxygen into your house. That's what I'm doing."

He turns away from the window and drops the pack of plastic bottles he's been carrying down by where Jason's sitting. They're mealshakes, basically -- enough nutrients to live on, easy to consume. He brought you Capitol Soylent, Jason. But since it's the Capitol and, with few exceptions, they don't hate themselves, it's not disgusting.

"And doing my part to make sure you don't starve."

[whatisay]

Jason snorts. "Are you sure this place isn't drafty enough to do that for you?"

He leans forward and looks at the plastic bottles, lip curling in disgust not at the contents of the packages but at the symbol of them, of pity, of charity. Unbidden, memories of fucking sympathy casseroles and flowers after his father's funeral twenty years ago blossom up in his head.

"Why would I starve?" Jason doesn't even really realize how he isn't even surviving right now, has smothered basic instincts under a heavy layer of inarticulate, denied grief. "Do you just need someone to baby now that you don't have a bunch of squalling Tributes?"

[capitolprivilege]

Stephen regards him coolly, calmly, for a moment.

"I want you to sit there for a moment and try to remember the last time you ate. You don't have to tell me. I'm just reminding you. Unless you've somehow evolved the ability to live on smoke and grudges -- and if anyone could, it'd be you -- I call that starving."

[whatisay]

He avoids eye contact with Stephen, lacking the usual pissy verve.

"Eight o'clock," Jason says quickly, snippily. It's technically accurate, but it's also been two days since that eight o'clock dinner.

"Why not just send an Avox or something? I mean, just because you have free time on your hands..." Jason waves a hand, then lets out another plume of smoke. "I saw your comments to the network. Didn't know you had it in you."

[capitolprivilege]

"Uh huh."

The lack of eye contact tells Stephen all he needs to know. Jason realizes it's been two days, even if Stephen doesn't know the specifics.

"Please, like you'd listen to an Avox," Stephen says dismissively. "I guess I could have done that and saved myself the time and headache, if this had been a meaningless gesture, meant to make me feel better, that I could then immediately forget about." He cracks one of the bottles open with a click and holds it by the neck out to Jason. "Here. Get half of this down, and then we can talk about my resignation all you want." Jason clearly wants to, and Stephen can take a bit of gloating at his own expense if it means Jason's stomach isn't working on empty air and stale smoke.

[whatisay]

Of course Jason wants to. It's something to talk about besides the state of this decaying house, the disabled little brother outside, the dead mother lingering at the corner of every sentence - it's something Jason can get properly fired up over, Tributes and their inanities, the way the whole world is going to pot, the comforting anger instead of grief. A good rant never hurt anyone, and that fantasy world of exaggerated injustices is preferable to real life.

Real life is wreckage, shrapnel flung out from where the gravity holding it all together gave out.

He takes the shake and eyes it suspiciously. "If you're poisoning me, I'm not sure whether to hate you or thank you for sparing me from planning the funeral."

He takes a gulp that hurts on the way down his throat and winces. "You have to give me specifics, though."