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.

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"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?"

"Yeah. Sure. I'll text." He doesn't know that he'll come back, doesn't know that he feels any better now than when he first got here except for the physical relaxation. He feels empty again, only only devoid of value, not content, his body still heavy and full of that dark water.

It's a darkness they both know well.

He gives her hand a squeeze and lingers as his fingers leave hers.

She doesn't feel much better either, maybe only relieved at having seen him, that he looks slightly better than yesterday. "Okay," she says, nodding, and knows she'll sleep tonight because she feels emotionally exhausted. She's not sure if he's going to work tomorrow, if he can handle it, and she doesn't ask.

"Bye," she murmurs, when their hands finally separate, and hugs her knees to her chest as she watches him leave the room. Eta's gone to sleep, but his jacket and shoes are out, ready for him, along with a thermos of homemade soup, the note upon which reads, "RED LENTIL SOUP. WARM IN MICROWAVE. EAT AND SEEK COMFORT IN THE CYCLE OF LIFE."

It's an old District tradition, not that either Jason or Swann would know that, but Eta tries to help where she can.

"Thank you," Jason says, and it's to the only Avox he's ever said such a thing to. He looks at the note and laughs to himself, mirthlessly, quiet. He'll seek comfort in the fact that they'll all die eventually, that he and Swann will reach that peaceful blackness when their trials here are done.

He slips into the shoes and jacket and heads home, driving slowly, and when he gets back to the manor he tells Peggy he's going to sleep and curls up in his bed with the door closed and locked. He sends Swann a text.

got home. good night.

Swann turns out the light when Jason leaves, but can't sleep until she either hears something from him or just passes out. She holds her phone, face bathed in the light of the screen as she idly entertains herself with some inane game she downloaded just to play while waiting for Sponsors to arrive to their meetings.

She sighs and smiles a little, sends her answer and then lets her phone lie on the pillow next to her, a replacement for Jason's head. It only takes a few minutes for her to fall asleep, her arms stretched out in front of her like a ragdoll.

<3 good night

The next morning is where Jason has to decide whether or not he's actually taking the entire week off work, or coming back for a Friday. When he wakes up, for about ten minutes he honestly convinces himself that he's going to come in to work, and he showers and shaves and puts the product in his hair - and then partway through getting dressed he stops as suddenly as if someone's cut his gasline, and ten minutes later up in his mother's bedroom, sitting on the chair in the corner, watching the sun lance in on an unmade bed and smelling camphor so strong even he registers it.

No one made the bed when they carried his mother out. He should probably start cleaning up the room, and he looks and fumbles around, knowing his mother had more possessions than the rest of the household combined, glancing over baubles and medical supplies and magazines. A hologram frame next to her bed still shows pictures of the family in rotation, none of Caddy, most of Caroline herself in younger years. Her clock still reads the time. Her wardrobe would have fit a woman much larger than her and Jason realizes the only clothes that still were her size was nightrobes and pajamas.

i'll come over tonight, he texts Swann, but he doesn't eat breakfast this time and instead stays home again, rooting through the closet methodically and apathetically.

Swann wakes as normal, is completely dressed and ready to go before she realizes that she doesn't know whether she should be expecting Jason to pick her up, whether he's even out of bed. She waits until she can't any longer, calls a car and climbs in the backseat with her pets. Her hands are shaking with worry.

He texts her and she calms down just a little, enough to function and text him back, ok. please eat something. <3 you, then set her phone in her lap and look out the window until she's dropped off at work, where she spends another day sequestered in the Escort Suite. She only leaves when it's most necessary, when someone calls for her, but she looks so wound up that she's pretty much left alone.

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