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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"I could still hear him if I put him in a closet. It'll have to be the basement." Jason coughs slightly and then takes another drag. He can't, won't cling to Peggy, won't reach out and grab for her to stay, and so it's a good thing that she doesn't need him to and can read the despondency in his body language and in the state of the house.

"Fine. Lay out whatever you want. I'm not very hungry. I don't care." Nothing seems to taste like anything in his mouth, and his stomach doesn't crave sustenance. It's as if that heavy layer of snow and ash, that melancholy and apathy, has covered up even his basest senses too. He's reached a state of inertia, where he naturally resists any attempt to move forward. "Careful with the fridge door, it falls off if you don't keep a hand on the top hinge. Silverware's in the...I don't know, to your left at hip-height. Dishes are above the sink."

The sink still holds the dishes from the last meal he and Caroline shared, although the remaining food on them is crusted and dried. They would have been done overnight but Jason fired all the servants before they got the chance.

Peggy starts laying out a modest meal of meat, bread, and cheese, which might as well have been the only three food groups in District 10. She doesn't bother with fancy settings or anything; she just puts things on plates, gives them both a knife and fork, and immediately moves to put the rest in the fridge.

She holds the upper hinge of the fridge door as she puts the food away, but she takes a moment to swing the door a little, frowning at the other hinges that are broken or ready to break. "That should be easy enough to fix. I don't suppose you have a toolbox lying around anywhere?"

She sits down to eat with him, beginning to take small bites to hopefully coax him into taking some of his own. She resolves to clean all the dishes herself after the meal before they attract bugs. She can clean up the dishes, fix the fridge door, and maybe make this place a little more livable.

"I don't know. Probably somewhere in the servant's shed." Jason shrugs, noncommittal. He's never laid a hand to fixing this place up, and it shows not just in the decayed bones of the building but in his own sort of hapless, apathetic expression.

He watches her eat, staring blankly at his own food, fondles the fork for a moment and then loses interest. It's stupid and nearly subconscious, this feeling that every meal he eats takes him one further away from the last one he shared with his mother, but it's there. Mealtimes were a tradition in the Compson family, a miserable, passive-aggressive tradition that Jason skipped out on plenty of times but still regarded with a sort of respect, still insisted on when he became the head of the household.

"I'm wondering how terrible a son it would make me to skip a funeral altogether."

"I'll check after dinner. If I find tools, I'll show you how to fix it so you'll know next time."

She watches him not eat. She wants to figure out how to get him to do it, but it's hard to make Jason do something he doesn't want to. Were it anyone else, she would start asking if they didn't like her cooking, and they would eat more to avoid offending her, but that was assuming the person had a modicum of manners. Jason did not have that.

The best she can probably hope for is that he'll eat some of it absently while they talk.

"Funerals aren't about what the dead would have wanted, Jason. They're about how the living want to respond to their passing." She eats slowly so she can give him time to pick at his own meal while still reminding him that they're supposed to be eating. "I don't believe it makes you a better or worse son if you decide you won't get anything out of a funeral." Normally, she would suggest he go to support the other mourners, but to be honest, there probably won't be many other mourners, and those that are there won't be mourning very hard. It's Benjy and Jason who have really lost something, and Jason probably won't be very helpful for Benjy.

"Won't matter. Won't be as many people using the fridge anyway. Maybe not anyone." Jason shrugs. "Unless we tape a shiny object to the handle so Ben plays with it."

He pushes his plate away and rests his elbows on the table, his head near in his arms.

"For Districters, maybe. Mother was an important woman in the Capitol in her day. There's going to be talk if I don't hold a funeral. There'll be consequences."

Jason knows his immunity from repercussions at his job stems from the influence his mother still held from a time long before Peggy came to the Capitol, from a time possibly before Jason was even born, but he can't think that far ahead now, can't think about the fact that he may lose his job on top of everything else. All he can think about now, with a seizing feeling like his heart's been grabbed in a vice, is the way the tabloids will swarm around, rip his personal life apart when it already feels like it's in someone else's hands.

A funeral, though. A funeral's going to be a nightmare. Capitolites will swarm around the Compson name and all try to carry off a piece of the tragedy for themselves, to somehow affix themselves to the new fashionable suffering, with questions and anecdotes (in large part fabricated) and tears and fawning. Caroline's body will have to be burned and then formed into a diamond to be added to the glittering collection on the mantle, a gem in a wreath of flowers whose price tag has to represent the dignity of a dying surname.

Peggy wouldn't understand; District funerals aren't a circus. If Districters celebrated every death they'd never stop partying.

His head lowers completely to his arms. "I can't even afford to have her pressed, Peggy."

"Well, I'll fix it anyway. It's not like fridge doors are the only kind that break. You'll know for the next one."

Pushing away the plate isn't promising. She hopes that he can find it in himself to eat. If he doesn't, she supposes she'll just put the food he didn't have in the fixed fridge and heat it up for him tomorrow.

Jason is right: Peggy doesn't understand. How can she? She has lost many friends in the past, but they were all Districters. The Capitol doesn't care about the death of Districters. It won't throw a grand party for the funeral. Districters die, and then they are quietly mourned. In the Capitol, everything is about appearance. So, she supposes, is death.

"Then have someone you know arrange it. I'd offer myself, but I could never throw Capitolite events." She won't shame Jason by attempting to do something so important when she knows she will never be able to manage the extravagance required by the Capitol. She's just too practical, and what she considers opulent is dull and boring to them. That, and she doubts Caroline would have ever been able to stand for a Districter having any hand in her funeral. "How is Swann with event planning?" Surely, a Honeymead would know how to arrange a good funeral. She's not sure how happy Jason would be with allowing his girlfriend to help him, but considering how exhausted he seems, maybe he could let it slide.

At the news about the pressing, she finds herself sympathetic despite how utterly ridiculous the expense had always seemed to her. Bodies are meant to go back into the world, to be consumed by the sun and animals and earth, not to be placed on a mantelpiece to glimmer at generations upon generations. Even so, it's important to Jason, and this is the last thing he can do for Caroline and his family. She can be sympathetic to the feeling of having failed.

He looks so vulnerable and broken. Maybe she will get her hand bitten off for this, but she reaches over and touches his hand. It's a little thing he can pull away from without a word if he likes.

"Does the pressing have to happen immediately? Perhaps you can save her ashes while you evaluate the budget and save money for the process."

"Swann said she'd help me arrange it. I just have to be present." But that's the lion's share of the problem. He doesn't want to be around anyone, and that's why he's holed up in his home for a week, losing time and sleeping more than half the day. Even being around Peggy is testing his fortitude, and it's only by the grace of her tact that he hasn't left. That, and that standing up seems like a task his body is too tired for, lacking the necessary input from his brain.

It's for that reason, that exhaustion, that he doesn't remove his hand from under Peggy's. It's not because he finds any comfort in it. He can barely seem to feel it, with that layer of empty space between his skin and how much painfully smaller he is inside himself, unable to reach the surface. He can't seem to reach out enough to touch the person whose hand is on his, much less the friendship he hates to prize so much.

"It needs to happen before the funeral. I'll put it on the credit card. I'll make it work." God knows he's already racked up enough debt, mostly trying to keep Swann feeling pampered and loved without having to use words or actions to do it, as if she's a bird in a cage that he only needs to feed and display to consider his. It's only recently that he's managed to stop substituting gifts for affection, and at least part of it is because creditors have started calling.

He raises his head and blinks at her, eyes bleary and vacant. "I'm going to go back to sleep."

He's been sleeping all day.

Peggy resists the urge to sigh in relief, and there's a rush of gratitude for a woman she barely knows. At the very least, Swann is taking care of this and neither of them have to worry about the funeral happening.

Her stomach turns at the thought of him racking up more debt, but maybe he can sell this house now that there's nothing left in it. She knows that his heritage is here, so she won't suggest it (at least until after the grieving ended), but a smaller home would be much more manageable on his paycheck.

"Why don't you go back to sleep after we fix the fridge?"

Clearly, forcing him to eat is a lost cause, but maybe she can get him to help her start fixing the house. She can force him awake later for food again, but right now she's going to try to just get him to do something. "It won't take long. I just need you to show me where the tools are and hold it up while I work."

His eyes cut up to her, suddenly full of an anger that forebodes something purer and more intense behind that haze of apathy and grief, as if it's the prelude to a sort of biblical flood that's only just held back by a skein of thunderheads now. "Look, you've made your point that the appliances in this house aren't up to your standard. You don't need to keep rubbing it in."

He gets up and pulls his hand from hers. He kicks his chair back under the table, so it's not in the way, as if the kitchen isn't so huge as to make keeping the walkways clear unnecessary. "It doesn't need to be fixed right now, and I told you I'm not sure where the tools are."

And with that, he walks out of the kitchen, slamming the door behind him and going back to lie on the couch, face buried in the armrest.

"That wasn't what I..."

She trails off because he won't listen no matter what she says. Maybe she's handling this the wrong way. Maybe there's no right way to handle it. Maybe he would just get angry at her no matter what she did because that is how Jason Compson deals with problems.

But she can hardly ask anyone else for advice, so she'll just stay and do her best no matter what abuse he throws at her. He's her friend and she won't let him waste away.

For now, she'll let him sleep. She'll put away the food, look around the house, find the tools, and check on Benjy.

She's probably going to be here for a while. She has her work cut out for her, but Peggy Carter has never been a woman to give up.

He sleeps for a few hours, dozing more than actually unconscious up until the end. His body aches, his ribs feeling as if they're collapsing in on themselves from all the time spent horizontal. He runs out of caps for his cigarettes and just inhales plain heated air when he's awake enough to do that.

Eventually he slips under long enough to dream, and the images are chaotic, disjointed, less like bubbles from his subconscious and more like sounds and drafts cutting in from the outside world. He sits bolt upright and runs.

His feet pound up the stairs, and he throws the door to his mother's bedroom open and-

-and he finishes waking up. He sways slightly in the doorway of the empty bedroom, catching his breath, feeling the air dead and lifeless around him. Then he turns and leaves, rubbing his eyes, and stands at the top of the stairs when he sees Peggy.

"You're still here," he says quietly.

Peggy hears the sudden rush of activity, far too loud in a house that feels like it's sucking out any life from within its walls. She rushes to the stairs, ready to run up to investigate, but then she sees Jason at the top of the stairs.

He looks like a ghost up there. For a moment, she wonders if he died on the couch, and his spirit is just haunting the house like he did in life, too busy being miserable to notice that it's time for him go now.

Then he speaks. She shakes off the notion and rests her hand on her hip. Her hair is pulled back and her sleeves rolled from going around the house to clean and repair various things, but she has the same calm, collected air she would have in her greatest finery. "Yes, I am."

She's not leaving unless he tells her point blank that he wants her gone. Even if he lashes out at her, she's dealt with worse. She's here because he's her friend.

"Did you hear..." But he stops, doesn't ask the question because he knows she'll say 'no', that she'll relegate that fabrication of his sick dreaming to a fantasy while some part of him still wants to believe it's real. That there's something up here besides an empty bedroom.

He descends the stair case, taking unconscious care to avoid the steps that have become sagging and rotten or have holes in the runner, ready to snag an unsuspecting foot. His hands are shaking slightly, and his eyes are red and puffy, although that's from smoking and sleeping rather than crying. He hasn't shed a tear yet. Maybe, he thinks, he never will.

It's a bizarre reversal, Peggy holding herself so regal while Jason slinks and ghosts. It's against everything their world stands for. Everything the world his mother believed in stood for, as if she tucked it into her pocket and took it into death with her.

"Did you fix the fridge or did you still want my help with that?"

Peggy hopes that he hasn't begun to hallucinate. If he turns out to be hallucinating, she's not sure what she'll do, because there are no doctors she can trust to have his interests at heart and no one would listen to a Districter anyway. But one half-asleep episode of wandering around doesn't an illness make, so she'll put it aside for now.

Jason looks a mess, but Peggy won't say so. He knows that he's a mess right now. He doesn't need to be reminded. It's encouraging that he's not going right back to the couch to sleep again.

"It's a two-person job," she says, even though she could probably do it by herself if she was creative. "Do you have any time?"

Dare she hope that he might help her fix something?

It takes him a moment to realize what she just said, what she's talking about even though he's the one who opened the topic. Thoughts seem to drop off in the middle of his head, falling away into oblivion. He shudders violently for a moment, imagining his mother's hand rearing up inside his head and snatching away a sentiment mid-sentence.

"I have to go to work," he says, but realizes that he doesn't have his phone or his watch on him. He grabs at his pockets for a moment before glancing down at the grandfather clock down the hall, mentally subtracting three from the number it says. Two a.m. He doesn't have to be at work at all.

He gropes at his empty pockets for a moment more and then gives up. "Fine. As long as you don't need me to figure it out. My head's a little cloudy right now."

Even though it's his own home and he knows exactly where the fridge is, he waits for her to lead him.

She chews the inside of her cheek, trying to figure out how to tell him the time, but he figures it out himself. She finds herself wondering if this was the way she looked after her family and friends died--wandering aimlessly in a house, chasing sounds that weren't there, thinking of obligations only in the small hours of the morning. She wouldn't know because there weren't many people forcing their company on her like she is doing to Jason. There's no one to ask.

"Don't worry. There's very little to figure out. I just need your hands, not your mind." It's just a matter of fixing a hinge. She's done it before a million times. When you live in the Districts, you take care of what you have. You rarely get anything new.

She gestures for him to follow her before walking to the kitchen. She has already found the tools, and they're laid neatly on the table (she had to clean them up a little). "It's just the hinge that needs replacing. It's simple enough."

"Alright. Alright, sure, good. I can manage that." He'd probably try harder at the front of being somewhat put together for someone else, but this is Peggy. Peggy, who's stroked his aching head when he's been too sick and weak to even open his eyes. Peggy, whom he's yanked down from the exercise mat and gotten a bloody nose for his trouble. Peggy, whose sweat-soaked sheets he's had changed and who has driven him home, taking all the turns very slowly so as not to exacerbate his pain.

He follows her, only aware he's alive by the weight of his feet (still in shoes, he never took them off in the last two days) making the boards under him creak down the hall. Somewhere upstairs, Ben rolls around on his bed and that creaks, too, audible even down here in the kitchen.

Jason's mostly quiet as he helps her get the door on the fridge set up, resting on the bridge of his foot so it's even while she fixes the thing. He chews his tongue, then his lower lip, staring dully at her through the instructions. He fantasizes about burning this place down.

"It wasn't like this after my father died," he finally says. "I don't know what's wrong."

She narrates what she does for him. It's under the pretense that he'll need to do it later and she wants him to know what she does--both of those things are true, but she knows he's not paying attention, so it's a moot point. Instead, she fills up space with human noises, noises that can't be made by ghosts. Her voice, her presence, solid and real because they both need a reminder that there is life in this house even if it feels like the building itself is trying to suck it all out.

Then he speaks, and it's not a monosyllabic noise or a shallow complaint or a half-hearted jibe. She keeps working, unafraid of a little grease or the rust. It's the rust that's causing the most trouble. She needs to replace the screws completely, and to take them out very carefully. "You were closer to your mother, Jason. You're responding to her death differently because you felt differently about her."

Peggy wipes down her hand in a rag. It's original purpose seems to have been forgotten even by the house, so she will give it new purpose. "I know your relationship with her was... complicated. And I know it wasn't always good. But it was always important. There isn't shame in mourning her."

Caroline was a wretched, awful person, but Peggy is convinced Jason loved her in a twisted Compson way. She knows that it hurts him to not have her there, and that it shakes him to the core. Peggy is here to give him the support he needs, even if he doesn't ask for it. Even if he doesn't want to admit there's any reason to need it in the first place.

Something about what Peggy says is right, and yet it sounds like she's talking about entirely different people, not Jason and Caroline Compson. He can't imagine what he had with his mother to be as important or simple enough to fit or fill up a word like 'relationship'. It simply was. And it no longer is.

Or it should no longer be.

It's strange, that he remembers so clearly when his father died while here he doesn't even know that time's passing. He can't imagine that in a week from now he'll remember any details from this moment. When his father died he remembers feeling as if he swallowed a cloud of sour vapor, one that lingered at the base of his skull and down his stomach, in the back of his throat, the contents of which he didn't like and didn't particularly care to identity. Now he feels like his whole body is that vapor, his eyes and fingertips and lungs and knees.

"I don't have time to respond like this." She finishes taking the screws out and she's barely away from the refrigerator door when he's overcome with a violent burst of anger. He shoves the door aside, kicks it - it slams to the floor and leaves a nasty mark across the scuffed hardwood. "Now I'll just- I'll have the whole extended family clawing at my doorway for the will and inheritance and they've never been on my side, not even for an instant. Now it's just me and- God, this damn nightmare of a house-"

The air from the fridge chills him, and he shudders hard enough to nearly convulse.

The suddenness of his burst of temper makes her start, but it's not shocking when the fridge door slams against the ground. She had been waiting for him to lash out physically at something. The fact that it took this long is the surprising part.

"It doesn't matter if you have time or not. You'll respond the way you respond." She learned that a long time ago. She picks up the door again, barely sparing the scratched hardwood a glance. The floor was ruined long before Jason got his hands on it. She never quite understood why scratches on the floor are such a big deal for Capitolites, but even while they are, there's no salvaging the floor short of putting a carpet over it.

Instead, she checks the door for damage. Any damage seems mostly superficial, she notes.

"You're not alone, Jason," she says quietly. He has her. He has Swann. He has the few people who have come to care for him despite his shortcomings, and they're around to support him. "You can divert your family's attention to a lawyer in charge of taking care of the will."

"There's nothing to respond to! She's been practically dead since I was old enough to walk, now she just can't whine about it at me!" Jason paces, two quick lines back and forth, rubbing his hand over his face as if that could bring feeling back to it. There are glimmers of painful lucidity through the fog in his head, when he realizes how much of his life has been spent in slavish devotion to a hypochondriac who couldn't leave the house, who used him as her hand and arm and also the neck around which she clenched her fist.

(Dimly, Jason thinks that it speaks greatly to Peggy's control that she didn't go into a blind panic at the sudden movement, like some Mentors do, their nerves always eroded down to the thinnest fibers.)

He stops, leaning over the kitchen table, exhausted for no reason other than that the anger rushed in and through him like nausea, leaving him wasted in the wake. The days of not eating deadens his limbs and gut.

"I'm always alone, Peggy. I always have been, even since I was a kid."

"If you were truly alone, you wouldn't be talking to anyone right now." Under normal circumstances, there'd be some chiding to her voice, a little verbal kick to get him to stop feeling sorry for himself, but she cuts him slack. She's not going to scold him for fixating on loneliness when his mother hasn't even been dead a week.

Peggy keeps tight control of her feelings. Being here, in the dead house with Jason's roiling rage and sudden outbursts, reminds her painfully of her own response to her grief eight years ago. It reminds her of how easily she could have allowed herself to rot in her own house, a house given to her by the Capitol as a reminder of when everything started going wrong.

But she can't focus on that. She bites hr feelings, swallows them, hides them under the iron control she developed the day she decided she was going to burn the Capitol to the ground or die trying.

"You still need to adjust to her not being here anymore. That will take time."

"You don't count," he says, vicious because he wants to be vicious, because it feels good to shoulder off some of that hurt onto someone else instead of keep it to himself. And vicious because on some level he truly believes it, not because Peggy's a Districter but also because it feels like nothing will ever undo the stunted growth of a lonely, isolated boyhood, no amount of the patience and love that Peggy has supplied a hundred times over.

Unbidden, he remembers him and his siblings lying awake in their two beds, listening to their parents go at it in the room above them. His mother, hissing loud enough to be heard through the floor (sometimes he suspects she was exactly that loud on purpose): "just let me leave and take Jason with me and with any luck he'll forget he ever had any other family, we can be happy if we get away from you, always conspiring against us, just let me take him and go away, all I've ever wanted to do is protect them but it's obvious that Candance and Quentin are too far gone for me to help them-"

That might be the hardest thing to part with, the fantasy that maybe his mother would someday take him somewhere away from this, whatever it is, to somewhere where he was happy. He's never gotten to be happy, and now she's taken that chance from him in her rigor mortis grip.

He finds the cigarette in his pocket and tries to click it on, but it's out of charge as well as vapor. "Shit," he mutters, chucking it aside so it clicks and clatters into the sink. "You don't have to be here, Peggy. Go do something useful with your time. You're not helping. Nothing helps."

It bites into her when he says that. You don't count. No, she doesn't count, does she? She never counts here in the Capitol. No matter how many parties she attends or hard times she sees people through or sacrifices she makes, she never counts. She's just entertainment. Just a pretty face. Just another Districter.

She doesn't hear him telling her that his heart is too calcified for anyone to keep him company. She just hears that she's not really his friend, can never be his friend no matter how much she cares about him because she was born in the wrong kind of family.

Molten anger and hurt twists in her throat, wanting to be released, wanting to lash out at him, but she swallows it. He's saying hurtful things because that's what Jason does when he's upset. He's said worse things before, but somehow, here in a house reeking of death, it cuts deeper.

She hides the sting in her eyes and the angry flush in her face by bending over the fridge door, picking at invisible pieces of rust and shaking them out of the screw holes.

"I'm not here because I have to be." Maybe she's not helping. Maybe she can't help. But she wants to try, even if he does hurt her and she gets angry about it.

"Then you're wasting your time."

He sees the way her face flushes when she turns away, can read all her tells because he's known her so many years, because they've both come to know what subtle cues they telegraph to each other about whatever mood or panic or obsession is coming next. And it feels good. There's a sick rush of relief in his chest, not pleasure but a slacking of all that tight, heavy weight dragging him down, but then it snaps back to tension and leaves him grappling for a way to hold on to that vindictive thrill.

"Go home, Peggy. Bring your Districter food to someone who won't gag on it. I'll just go find out if Mother's painkillers were worth half the money I spent on them."

He doesn't know entirely why he's saying it, whether it's an honest intent or sarcasm or just something, anything he can say to scare and hurt her and drag her into this same hole he's in.

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

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[cw: suicide talk]

[cw: suicide talk]

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