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

Entry tags:

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

"Poor Stig. I hope he didn't immediately fall down and crack his head open. At least Seven's getting away from his lazy obsession with plaid. Cassian's all about the florals right now, I'm a bit surprised he hasn't re-wallpapered the Suite out of his own pocket." Her fingers run along the hair behind his ear, the line where his bare skin begins, and she snorts. "Toxic sludge-colored leaves with hot pink flowers. Everywhere."

With her free hand, she rubs his shoulder a little. "And he loves you sooooo much, he might sneak into your house and redecorate there too," she teases. "Dress Ben up in painted leaves."

"I'm fairly certain Cassian won't dress anyone up like a marijuana leaf. He's more into ecstasy, so far as I can tell, anyway."

Jason laughs a little bit, quiet, half-hearted, trying to find that happy banter they usually have and cling onto it and feeling so exhausted with the effort.

"Maybe he could take inspiration from the mold and sell a brand new perfume scent."

"So just glowsticks and pacifiers then," Swann jokes, leaning down to press her lips to his forehead. She smiles and laughs when he keeps attempting humor, then sighs and lets her head rest on the sofa again. "Come on, we can go lie down. I'll rub your back if you want."

"Alright. I'm sleeping back home, though." He can't explain why, why he isn't running from that house as quickly as he can, why he feels the need to stay as if holding some sort of vigil, but he can't sleep here. He sits up and cracks his neck.

"I don't think that's go amiss. My back's killing me."

"Okay."

She's disappointed but doesn't push it, aware that something is going on and wondering if maybe it has something to do with the way he keeps going to stairs while half-asleep.

Swann stands and stretches, then reaches back for his hand to hold it as they go.

He takes her hand, linking their fingers.

"I feel like I just crawled out of a coffin. Jesus." He cracks his neck again, shuffling towards her bedroom. His steps are shorter than they usually are. He has that posture he does when he has a migraine, the old-man walk like footsteps themselves are bullets through his head.

"I'm going to burn that couch."

"Well, you should be sleeping in your bed," she chides lightly, guiding him toward the bed so that he'll lay out. "That kind of couch isn't meant to be slept on, you know that. You're going to end up with the spine of a fifty year old District 11 bean picker if you keep it up."

She grabs a pot of lotion, thick and soothing, scented like lavender because there's nothing that hasn't been tried to break Swann's incessant insomnia. "Come on, shirt off."

"I will. I'll sleep in the bed tonight. I promise." He pauses for a moment, then pulls off his shirt with the same shy sort of trust he gives to her and very few others. He lies facedown on her bed, turning his head on the pillow, taking in the smell of it.

"I'm going to smell like a greenhouse." He's teasing, but the weakness of his smile makes it hard to tell.

"You already smell like an herbal supplement store, so greenhouse is a step up." She smiles as she follows him on her knees, perching just over his thighs as she opens the lotion and rubs it on her hands. "Seriously, I get so many complaints about the smell when you come up to my Suite. They've stopped even trying."

She runs her hands firmly down his spine and then starts working into his muscles, where it's tense and knotted and she has to lean her meager weight into it. She bites her lip with focus, working downward from his shoulders.

"What? Eucalyptus and camphor smell fine. Maybe they should get their noses checked."

He's surprised at the strength she can put into it, as well as how much it hurts - not in a terrible way, but in a way that makes him realize that he's been tensing up for months and months, maybe years, with no reprieve. The muscles are knotted and stiff and swollen, and he exhales deeper than he has a long time when Swann gets up to his shoulders.

"I think it's the intensity of the smell. Your clothes all absorb that vapor, you know."

Swann uses her knuckles and the heels of her palms to dig into the hardest spots, kneading until they start loosening, relaxing. Each muscle gets worked on until it gives, even after her hands start to ache and her arms get tired, and she only stops to occasionally put some more lotion on her hands.

"Well, I can't help that. They should get over it."

He feels less like a body than like a skeleton wearing a puddle of flesh. He sighs and it seems to travel all the way through him, from his lungs to his fingertips and toes, and when he opens his eyes he realizes they're wet and teary, not from pain but some sort of release that came along with the relaxation.

"That's good. I don't think I have any muscles left to tend." He swallows and his throat is thick again, tight, painful.

She just snorts and keeps going, finishes at the small of his back and then gently slides off to lie on her side next to him, looking at him. Reaching out, she runs her fingers through his hair, nodding a little.

"Good. You needed it even more than I thought. You're not just going to go and knot yourself back up for another six months, are you?" She's underestimating how long it's been since he's had a professional massage and she knows it, because as standard as it is for the majority of Capitolites, Jason neglects himself more than most people she knows.

It takes him a moment to answer, during which he tries to swallow the tightness in his gorge down again, to clear his throat of that uncomfortable feeling. "I'd be lying if I said I wouldn't." He reaches up and wipes at his eyes as if it's nothing more than just sleep dust, then places a hand on her shoulder.

"Do you want me to give you one?"

Swann smiles at him even when she can see tears, see how hard it is to swallow. She knows what a massage can force out of people, because she's had those moments too, especially back when she was sequestered in her father's house while he sent up everything he could think of to try and make her happy again. A masseuse was just one of the attempts.

"Are you any good at it?" she teases, then leans forward to kiss his forehead. "You don't have to. You should just relax for now."

"I've never tried it before. I've watched servants do it for Mother, though." It's not as if those are memories are particularly strong in any way or another, but the word 'mother' is like a weight that brings that whole heavy grey curtain back down around him, that floods his head again with that sludgy malaise.

"If you want me to," he says, to either the massage or the suggestion that he just relax. He lets her direct him, having lost his own sense of direction for the while, for the last few days and however long into the future.

"It's okay," she says, and lets that sentence hold the double meaning, that he doesn't need to rub her back, and that it's going to be okay, eventually. That she'll be there until it is.

Scooting closer, she sighs and holds his head to her chest, stroking one hand lightly down his back, soothing this time. She doesn't know when he'll want to leave, and she doesn't want to ask, doesn't want to open the door herself, even when it stings that much less to know the circumstances.

If Jason were capable of picturing the future, if that were ever a skill he cultivated, he would realize how correct she is, how the grief and conflicted emotions that so weigh him down now will lighten over the coming weeks, months, years. But he can hardly picture the next day, cannot imagine ever not feeling like this even though he knew differently not even days ago, believes this to be the state he's always been in because he never knew a period of time happy enough to look back on as a guiding light.

He puts an arm around her waist, lying there with her, silent for a while except for the sound of breathing between the two of them.

"What do you think there is after death?" he asks quietly, not even thinking of his mother so much as the two of them, of what she must have thought when she overdosed on pills.

Swann rides on waves of hoping for happiness, not memories of it, because even at her happiest, she wasn't all that happy. Dark clouds have always hung over her, ever since she was a little girl, and they've never parted to let the sun more than peek through. But she figures the sun must be out there, since other people are happy, and she can be too, if she tries hard enough, finds the right keys to unlock that barrier.

Jason parts the clouds, not all the way, but more than anyone or anything else has in a long time.

She sighs and thinks for a moment, not sure if he'll really want to hear what she thinks. "I think there's peace," she answers, just as soft. "There's nothing and it's peace. Like when you're in a pitch black room to go to sleep, except the sun is never going to come wake you and take it all away. I know we must have something that makes us human, souls. That's what gets the peace, the darkness. The soul in your diamond."

"It sounds nice." It's an elaboration, an expansion on what Jason suspects from death, that it's nothingness, that it's an end. He never developed his concept enough to make it feel like peace so much as just the antithesis to all of this stress and misery.

His fingertips stroke her waist gently, the fabric of her pajamas. He doesn't say anything for a while. He thinks about how some people imagine seeing their loved ones in the afterlife, and how that thought sickens him, and how much more pleasant it is to think of nothing at all.

And then to think of his mother, there, and to realize again that the only ally he ever had throughout his whole miserable childhood, the person who arranged his life to circle hers, is lost to that void.

"I wish I were dead, Swann. I've wished that for such a long time."

She cradles the back of his head in the silence, thinks about how much time she's spent pondering. She loves diamonds, has spent a lifetime being fascinated with their sparkle, starting before her memories even formed. Diamonds have been a part of her world since she was still in a bassinet, and one of her earliest memories is of her grandmother's diamond, kept out of reach. It's held in case in her father's house, set as the main jewel in a brooch, and she would often look at it.

She'd cried once to Eta, as a child after her grandfather's death, that she wanted to be a diamond too, that it wasn't fair.

Swann's spent most of her life since then hovering somewhere between wanting to be a diamond and wanting to hold it off, longing both for the peace and the happiness, never sure which is the better option.

"I know," she whispers, and there's tears in her voice because of the familiar twist in her heart over the same wish. "You wish for it once and it never quite goes away, even at the best of times. But something makes you keep going, same as me."

He raises his head to look at Swann (his own diamond, the new gravity around which he's trying to fall into orbit), to meet her eyes, the tears in hers and the sting in his when he looks at her honestly and without barriers. All of him is one great wound, bared to Swann, sensitive and infected and sick.

He remembers wondering, after Quentin died and people started to call his older brother a victim of sickness, of a diseased mind, 'something not quite right upstairs', why he assumed that everyone lived with the same unhappiness and anger. That's when he understood, at fifteen, to feel isolated.

"It's not that I keep going. It's that I don't know how to stop." He lowers his face again and rests it against her chest.

She looks back at him and sees a whole universe, one filled with stars familiar to her own and planets she can't understand. But mostly it's darkness and blackness and emptiness, same as hers, and she wants their voids to be one, combined and brightened by each other's sunlight, radiating dimly but there all the same.

"That's as much of a something as anything else." Her fingers trace along his hairline, his neck, and she closes her eyes. "You can stop your car by crashing into a tree or you can try to drift into a snowbank, but either way, the brakes still aren't working, right?"

She's tried both.

"No. They aren't working," he whispers, tightening his embrace around her to cling like a drowning man, understanding in some animal way now that it's their injuries and sadness that bind them as much as it's the fleeting moments of happiness they share. They understand each other in a way no one else ever will, maybe ever could. They strike a chord in harmony, and though it's minor at least it isn't dissonant.

He can feel her heartbeat echoing through his skull, and his blood seems to syncopate with it, in rhythm but not in match.

After a moment he releases her, and moving with all the speed of a beached whale he sits up. "I should go home now."

Swann holds him tighter too, unconsciously mimicking him, seeking to save herself as much as she wants to save him. They aren't mirror images, they're puzzle pieces, made to fit together to complete something, even if it's just a picture of nothingness. There's a strong possibility that it is, that they aren't supposed to build together but to be demolished together, and she doesn't mind, could never care as long as it's both of them together.

"Okay," she murmurs, sitting up too, looking at him. She's teary but not desperate, and it's not even for him so much as for both of them. How much they both need gravity. She reaches for his hand though. "Promise me you'll sleep in bed? And that you'll eat something in the morning?"

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