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

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

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.

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She's pleased that he's at least putting food in his body, whether it's to appease her or because part of his stomach is aware of its own emptiness. All that matters is that he eats.

"Then what are you?" she asks lightly, resting her arm on the back of the sofa and then her head on her arm as she watches him eat. "You don't seem anything else, any other feeling. Only sad. Sad doesn't have to be crying and wailing. Sad can be a lot of things."

"Just tired. Angry, maybe. She chose a damn inconvenient time to die. I don't know." Jason runs his hands over his face and takes another sip of the water. "I'll be alright when I get back to work. I'm just..."

He sighs and sits back, wincing as the food in his previously barren stomach sends a pang through him. He doesn't have words and he's long since choked down any physical response to these sorts of emotions. "I should probably start looking for places for Ben."

"It makes sense to feel like that." Swann gently reaches to brush some of his hair behind his ear, long where he hasn't put any product in, and nods. "But don't go back to work just to have something to do. It'll make you crazy at the worst times, when you're with Sponsors."

He sits back and she tentatively scootches closer, unused to there being a distance like this between them. She expects he'll push her away if he can't stand her being close, but she hopes he won't. "I can make a list of some places," she tells him. "So you don't have to do all the research yourself."

"Well, according to everyone I was crazy already anyway. Maybe now I'll just get a little leeway to keep being the only sane man in the building." The idea of dealing with Sponsors makes him feel ill, and he winces again at the prospect. He can imagine the same tragedy theater there was when Father died. The condolences, the expectation of a certain dignified devastation, the way people will want to somehow latch onto the loss like lampreys.

He half-laughs quietly and doesn't push her away. He even leans in to her slightly. "I could leave him in a cardboard box on the side of the road. He probably wouldn't know the difference."

"They're all idiots. The people who matter know you're not crazy." She watches him wince and it makes her press her lips together, because she knows he's not ready to face the world yet. He wasn't even ready for her, and only let her in because she would have broken in otherwise.

She doesn't know when he'll be ready for the world again.

Closing the gap between them, she wraps her arms around his middle and lays her head on his shoulder with a sigh. "No, but you would. You'd regret it someday." She knows he wouldn't. "We'll find him somewhere that they'll take good care of him."

"Says you." After a pause, he wraps his arm around her waist and pulls her to him, too, turning the affection she shows him mutual even though his effort is a bit half-hearted. "I just don't want to send him anywhere too expensive. It's bad enough I'm stuck with him when everyone else in the family dies or runs off, but I'd rather he not bleed me dry over it."

He feels like he probably should feel something besides exhaustion and annoyance, but that's all he can skim from the top of whatever well he has deep inside.

"I'll need to call Maury at some point. Maybe I can foist the funeral expenses off on him."

Honestly, it's more than she expected, so Swann's satisfied, curling in the space between his body and his arm. She nods a little. "We'll figure it out. Somewhere good but not pricey. Maybe there's somewhere out in the country."

She strokes his side and then brushes her fingers through his hair again. "It's the least he could do," she says, and they both know that Maury won't pay for the funeral. "You can call him tomorrow, don't make yourself do it tonight."

"I wish she didn't have to have one. She'd crawl up out of her grave if I didn't. She'd-"

He pauses, losing that sentence midway as his throat chokes up for a second with what he refuses to call sadness. He takes a drag of the cigarette instead and another sip of water, then transfers the plate of lasagna to his lap so he can eat it without having to move Swann much.

"I'm going to have to run out the last of the savings on a circus she'll be too dead to appreciate, surrounded by people telling me really wish they'd visited in the last twenty years but got distracted or whatever." He sighs. "Maybe I'll be lucky and Maury will have had a stroke too."

She feels his moment of stiffness, but only strokes his side again, nodding. "I know. It's awful. But I'll be there, you don't have to do it all alone. Just... you know, pick a day. Have her pressed, and everything else is just decorations, you know? Flowers and food and stuff. You deal with Maury and the guest list, I'll get florists and caterers started. It just has to go step by step."

Twisting her neck a little, she stretches to kiss his cheek. Swann is good at planning, at organizing. It's what she can offer, to lighten his load by arranging for things to be done so that Jason doesn't have to.

"Alright. That'll help." It seems insurmountable. It seems like a thousand tiny tasks that even Swann's help won't be enough to overcome. He rubs his temple and starts eating again, slowly and automatically, still not tasting any of it. "Thanks."

He lets that last word hang a bit, as if he needs the silence after it to prove that he said it.

"You know, she came downstairs at about ten complaining of a headache, and I told her to go back to sleep and that maybe a migraine would serve her right for...whatever it was I was mad at her about. And I woke up because a servant was banging on my bedroom door telling me she was dead."

"You're welcome."

She stays silent until he speaks again, her fingers running slowly along his ribs, lost in her own thoughts. She'll absorb the costs of everything she can, of course, and with Jason so stressed, she can't imagine he'll be up to a fight over it if she can do it on the sly. He starts talking and she looks at him, listening.

"You couldn't have known. She always complained about aches and pains, what's a headache on top of it? There's nothing you could have done, even if you'd sat by her side all night." Her voice is soft and quiet, and she only wants to make him feel better, despite not knowing if there's anything she can say to lessen the... whatever feeling it is that he's having. She's not sure if it's guilt. "She spent twenty years being as sick as she could be, Jason. It was just another day."

"I know."

He does, really, and it's true that there's a fine line between guilt and the feeling that he somehow could have changed something and had his life in the comfortable, if miserable, status quo he was so familiar with, and that he's mostly falling into the latter category. It's not remorse, really, but the feeling that he's on a speeding train that has just passed a fork and is watching the parallel track branch away into the distance.

On one track, the familiar and typical days stretching forward into forever, into a smoggy dusty horizon, and then on this one he isn't even sure the train is still going or what the destination would be if it were. He's completely lost, moving forward only because time can't help but march on, not from any effort of his own.

"I just always figured it would be some sort of cancer or liver failure, something I'd have to drive her to all the time, and I thought maybe I'd get lucky and it'd be Alzheimer's and she'd forget who I was and I could ship her off to a home the first chance I got. It never occurred to me it'd be so sudden."

She snuggles into his shoulder, arms tightening slightly around him, and she's had that lost feeling before. Swann's hadn't come from death, of course, but from years of severe depression, an endless road that there's no stopping the car from careening down, like there's a brick on the accelerator.

"Maybe it's better this way. Maybe it's better than having to watch her go slowly, get worse and worse. She didn't suffer, this way. It was just over, like blinking." Swann latches onto the positive to save herself from sinking, to help try and haul Jason back to the surface as well, even when she knows it's not enough. It's not a life preserver, it's just a piece of debris to cling to while he treads water.

Stretching to kiss his cheek again, she puts her hand on his chest, over his heart.

"Maybe."

Jason feels almost cheated, to have had the slow decline taken from him, the chance at a slightly more miserable daily routine. It's an easy way to miss her. Anger, a sense of injustice and opportunity missed, always has come to Jason more easily than loss and sorrow.

His own depression has always been different than Swann's because he always existed within a structure, a structure he hated but a structure nonetheless. He had obligations and a role in his household and people, roadblocks, to organize his life around. Caroline's death has ripped the foundation out from under that structure, and it's caved itself in.

His heart feels sluggish in his chest. He tightens his arm around her for a moment. Outside Ben makes some noise, inarticulate and loud in the silence around them.

"Now you can see why I didn't want you to come visit." He takes another bite. "Doesn't matter anymore."

She runs her hand back and forth over his chest, resettling her head on his shoulder as he moves to eat. It makes her happy that he's eating, makes her feel useful and, more importantly, satisfies her need to make sure he's all right. To ensure his health over her own.

Swann shrugs lightly. "It doesn't bother me," she says, and it's only partly a lie. The smell bothered her, at first. "It's not like I love you for your house." She's glad she came, glad she made sure that Ben was taken care of and that Jason at least got up and functioned a little bit. The showering and eating is a good start.

"Are you going to stay here?"

"Sure it does." Swann's used words like 'love' before, and usually Jason can handle them, but now it feels like swallowing cold oil. He exhales deep.

"I don't know. Maybe. Maybe I could sell the land and have the building bulldozed." That's a lot of work, though, and right now it feels like too much, and so he doesn't think about it too hard. "She just- God I'm left with everything to handle. I always am, I don't know why I expected any different. I'm so angry, Swann."

She looks at him, a little surprised that he's opened up at all, but pleased all the same. She understands why he would be angry, understands because she spent many of her formative years filling in for her mother, being her surrogate for the public, for her father's sake. Taking care of a life that wasn't Swann's to take care of, from the time she was too young to even be taking care of herself.

Reaching for his hand, she twines their fingers together, lets her nose graze the line of his jaw. "I know. But I'm here. I'll help you get through it all, figure everything out. Whatever you need, however long you want to take. We just go day by day for now, one thing at a time. Today, all we need to do is get food in you."

"There's nothing to get through," he insists again, like he could banish the momentousness of the situation by just refusing to acknowledge its gravity. "I just need a few days off work, and the funeral, and sending Ben somewhere. A little time to just be angry and get things done."

Just practical things, which leave no room for mourning, either for his mother or the childhood he never really had.

He gives her hand a squeeze and picks at the salad. "I'm not going to lock myself up being sickly for twenty years, Swann. I promise."

"It's still stuff to get through, there are a lot of things that need to be done." She says it gently, but she can think of a long list just from having been through a few rooms of the house. Even if Jason wants to demolish the house, it can't simply be done overnight -- all of these things take planning and work and meetings. "It's a process, it can't all be done by the end of the week."

She sighs. "I know. I just want you to know it's okay, to take as long as you need. It might not be over in a few days. That's all I mean."

"I can't afford to take forever off, unless I really do leave Ben by the side of the road." Jason keeps trying to push away from the idea that there's anything happening besides the practical inconveniences. He's busy and irritated and stressed out and overwhelmed, that's understandable. Respectable, even.

The way his throat tightens again and his eyes sting and his head spins a bit is nothing but the product of all the smoking and bad sleep and not eating. He starts to arrange his tower of logic to protect himself again.

"Maybe I could just burn it down."

"No, but I mean, you'll still need to meet with lawyers and realtors and whoever else, you know?" She runs her fingers through his hair, feeling in his arms the way he tenses, stiffens, and hooks her ankle around his. "Ben will be taken care of, you'll just have details to wrap up over the next few weeks. That's all."

"Don't say that," she says quietly when he gets dark. "It's all going to be all right. It will. I promise."

"Right. It'll be alright." He sighs again and pulls her close.

"It'd be kind of freeing, just burning it." He doesn't tell Swann that in his fantasies about it, he doesn't leave the house, just sits here on the couch while the whole place fills with smoke and collapses. "Make it look like an accident, get the insurance claim for it."

She wouldn't judge him if he told her, would probably relate to that thought more than the idea of burning it for insurance money. But she won't push him either, even if she suspects that there's not only greed in that thought train.

"The land is probably worth more if it's not burnt up. Sink a couple thousand assi into renovations and this place could sell for a fortune." She says it all distantly, curled up to him, then shifts and straddles his lap facing him, her knees sinking into the moldy velvet sofa. Her arms wrap around his neck and she just hugs him, holds onto him, their chests pressed together.

"Maybe."

He doesn't look at her as she pulls herself on to him, but he does hold her close - tightly, tight enough that she can feel that tremble in his arms and shoulders, the way his heart starts racing as he remembers that time in the past that he cried into her neck, inarticulate and damaged and beyond eloquent expression.

"I'm alright, Swann. I promise." He's telling himself more than her.

Her face presses into the crook of his neck, her head resting on her own bicep, and his tremble shakes both of them, his heart pounding against his ribs so hard that she can feel it over her own. She blinks slowly and her fingertips run along his shoulderblade idly.

"I know. I'm here anyway." It's whispered, and they both know he's not all right, and they both know she won't push it out of him, will let him bottle it up until he explodes if he prefers. "I'm here."

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fucked up capitol babies ;_;

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