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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Well, Swann can see a difference between them and Maury, because in their plan, Ben is still provided for, taken care of. He's not robbed blind and left in the cold -- it's just redistributing money that would otherwise sit locked in an account for the rest of time. And Jason may not care about Ben, but she knows he cares just enough to want to protect him from someone as terrible as Maury swooping in.

Or at least he hates Maury enough to want to protect Ben. Whatever, same difference.

"Okay, so we get someone to appraise the good stuff, then toss out whatever's left over. So that's a bunch of solutions planned out." It always makes Swann feel better to have a course of action, steps she can follow. She's gotten a lot accomplished in this short time that way.

She looks thoughtful, if in a sad way, and kisses his fingers again. "I know. Do you think it matters? You know, that we're the last ones?" She knows it matters, at least on her end, that if they don't run away like they promised, she'll have to have children, because she can't sell the company. And she's not opposed to children but it scares her, because she knows she has something dark inside her and she would never want to curse a child with that weight. "Sometimes it feels like I'm disappointing Daddy, that I don't have any kids."

We are talking about a man who seriously considered leaving his brother by the side of the road in a box all week.

He nods, not as enthused about all the moving forward as she is but glad that she's at least settled into something. Her comfort buoys his up just a bit, and he's clinging to just about anything these days. "I'll want to rummage through everything before an appraisal man comes in. I know my grandfather had some materials I'll need to destroy or catalog with the government so they don't end up in a showroom somewhere."

Not that he actually plans on destroying them; there's a certain value, not even just practical but prideful, in having a bargaining chip for a shaky, hazy future.

"I want to believe it only matters if we let it," he says after a moment, because he knows that that's just a fantasy. It'll always matter who they are, all the names and deeds and heritages they carry on their shoulders, twined in their choked, polluted DNA, tucked into every wrinkle on the brain. "I'm never having children. I already raised one and you know how that turned out. Maybe that'll be what your father needs to decide he doesn't like me after all."

Hating Maury more than Ben still counts, it's already been said. Also, Ben is a huge guy, where was Jason even going to get a box that size without buying a new refrigerator?

"I'll schedule for next week, that should be enough time to get everything gathered up," she says, nodding, and it makes perfect sense to her, because every Capitol family with even a modicum of power in their family's history, even generations back, has things like that, things that even the servant class will cling to until absolutely forced to trade it for money or influence. Swann doesn't even know the extent of her family's documents and bits of evidence that have been hidden away in safes and secret cubbies around the family home.

She looks out the window with her brow knit, frowning, turning it all over in her head. "Don't you think there's a difference between raising someone else's child and raising your own?" she finally asks, and it's not that she's so determined to change his mind on actually having children so much as simply being willing say it's a possibility. Because her father will harangue her over it when he thinks the two of them are serious enough, will guilt her and put his weight into her until she relents and finds someone to marry and have at least one child with.

No one cares who you love as long as appearances are kept up. If she needs to live two lives, she can.

Who says he wouldn't use the refrigerator?

Jason feels his guts tighten when she's silent for that moment, when she doesn't agree with him instantly. He wants to jump in and talk over the silence, to erase her chance to disagree with a barrage of explanations, his tower of logic and reason.

"Do you think there is? My parents raised their own children and we all ended up disasters. I raised someone else's kids and she grew up into a worthless little bitch of a girl. What I say it doesn't matter. There's nothing worth bringing a kid into anyway."

But he knows, deep down, that she wouldn't stand up to her father for him any more than he would his mother.

It still necessitates spending money for a new refrigerator, which we all know Jason is way too cheap to do while he still has a functioning one.

"You didn't want to raise Quentin," Swann points out softly. "It wasn't like you were acting as a father to her. You took care of her, but you can't say it was the same as really raising her. I don't know. It just seems like something we're supposed to do, keep the bloodlines going. Not you and me specifically, all of us, I mean. Even the servants. Without our people having kids, Panem will just keep filling with more and more Districter blood, until eventually that's all that left."

She lets her forehead rest on the window, where the glass is cool and comfortable.

"I guess it's just complicated."

He could just eat dry ramen for the rest of his time at home. That's not a completely absurd possibility.

"It's simple enough to me." Where Swann's soft, Jason's voice gets hard, desperate, an exaggeration of surety to cover the cracks of uncertainty. "A few kids aren't going to outnumber all the Districters breeding like rabbits anyway. Besides, no child of mine would have a damn chance. There's too much bad blood in my family."

He chews on his tongue.

"Don't you think I'm right?" he asks.

"I'm not going to make you have kids or anything, Jason," she says instead of answering him directly. And she wouldn't, would never try to trick or trap him, though she'd also never get rid of a child if they happened to have an accident. Swann sighs and closes her eyes, tries not to feel overwhelmed by her conflicting emotions on this subject.

"It's not like it matters right now anyway."

"I'd be lucky if any kid of mine wasn't born with three heads or half a brain or something," he mutters, kneading his fingers into his scalp. "It doesn't matter now anyway. You're right. Marriage isn't even on the table."

There's a pause as he realizes that he's chewing long and hard on his own foot, smacking Swann's heart around carelessly.

"Right now, I mean."

In that pause, she blinks at him, feeling like he just socked her in the face, and she looks profoundly hurt. She doesn't cry, doesn't say anything at all, just glances at him with that pained expression and then turns back to the window, curling up tightly in her seat.

"Of course," she answers distantly, because she knows as well as he does that he doesn't mean it, that he doesn't want to marry her. Ever.

"Don't be like that. You know what I mean." Jason feels like the floor's sinking down beneath him, like he's suddenly taken a step off a stair and found no ground. "We haven't even been together a year, Swann."

He feels panic - not like hers, not fearful but listless, angry - rising in his throat.

She wraps her arms around her legs, and she almost wants to laugh at his furious backpedaling, but she doesn't. She feels oddly numb, like hearing him say it out loud dimmed all of her many emotions, and she sighs. "I didn't say anything about marriage, Jason. You did."

Swann feels like hellfire's about to start raining down on her, courtesy of Jason being upset, but she can't resist pointing it out. That he was the one who jumped there, had his mind already made up on the subject, and she's not desperate enough to believe his attempt at fixing it. He doesn't want a family, not of any kind, and nothing she says will change his mind or matter to him.

It's a painful moment of clarity, like sunlight catching on all her sparkling fairy dust to expose it as just regular old filth floating through the air, reminding her that she's made up everything good to protect herself.

"It just- it was relevant to the conversation, because one usually leads to the other, so long as you're not some slut like my sister-" Unable to just fire away at Swann, he snipes at the ghosts of people who aren't here, spitting the anxiety he's funneling into rage at phantoms.

"Look, I didn't mean it like that and you know it. Don't do this to me right now, alright, Swann? Not right now. Please." His knuckles go white against the steering wheel. "Anytime but now."

His mother hasn't even been dead a week, and as far as he's concerned that gives him a free pass to lash out a little - not necessarily because it's justified but because he can't handle having the another person who loves him yanked away, dangled out of his reach, another corner of his foundation caving in.

She can only sigh again, more heavily, and she's starting to get a headache, pulsing behind her eye. It's like a rock and a hard place, because she's certain that even just acquiescing won't satisfy him, that she has to agree that he didn't mean it and that they won't get married, and she'll have to go back to building up her sugar cube castle around herself, just waiting for him to come kick it down again.

"I'm not doing anything." She says it calmly, almost dull, and rubs at the corner of her eye, pushing hard at the bone under her skin. "It's fine. I don't know why we're still thinking about it. No kids, no marriage, whatever. It's fine. We're both too busy anyway."

He's not waiting for her to agree. He already realizes that any mission to get them both on the same page about their future needs to be aborted quickly. Now it's a matter of doing damage control.

"No, I mean the shutting down and being sad. Please, Swann. I didn't mean it. I was just running my mouth. These are things we can talk about in a few years. Don't shut down on me right now." He started out this morning feeling alive for the first time in a week, ready to go fly kites with her and not spend the entire day holed up in his decaying house staring at the vapor trails of his cigarette against a water-stained wall.

He's not the type to plead, but he's already relinquished pride to her a hundred times.

"Please, Swann."

He's frustrating her, because she doesn't know how to just let it go, snap back to how it was when he's just popped all of her stupid little bubble dreams, things she knew were false hopes but kept around herself anyway, because they made her happy. Because they fortify the walls she builds to try and protect herself.

"I'm not... can I just have a minute, Jason?" she asks, squeezing her eyes shut for a moment. "I know you didn't mean it, but I kind of just need to recoup, okay? That's all."

"Right. A minute. Do you want me to pull the car over and just wait or- or what?" It toes the line between honestly curious and snide, because he's frustrated but wants to defuse this all somehow. "If I didn't mean it that should be enough to just...sort yourself back out."

He rubs at the bridge of his nose and then at his temple.

"Just drive. I'll feel better when we get there."

She'll never understand him, never understand how a man who's so perpetually upset and angry at everything can be so bad at empathizing when other people have those same feelings. How he doesn't get that she can't just instantly flick back like a switch right now.

That would be his persecution complex getting in the way. It's hard to put yourself in others' shoes when you're convinced all those other people are somehow colluding against you - even Swann.

"Alright. Fine. Feel better."

It's less a suggestion than nearly a command. He takes a deep, shaky breath and chews at his tongue. They continue in silence until they reach that part of the mountain on which they first kissed, where they'll fly the kites now.

She sighs, exhales hard, and leans her head back against the glass, eyes closed so she can try and clear her mind. By the time they reach their spot, she feels better, if not a hundred percent, and she straightens back up to look at him. She's not exactly smiling, but she doesn't look unhappy either.

"All right!"

He doesn't ask if she's feeling better, maybe out of some fear that that'll just start the whole thing over again. Maybe it's so he can stew without clearing it up. He gets out of the car and opens her door and then the back, so he can get the kites.

"I thought the weather would be better."

"It's not bad," she says as she gets out, squinting at him as she digs for sunglasses in her purse. She opens the other back door and then the carrier door, letting Marcel and Pascal hop out of the car; they run about fifty feet away and then start rolling around in the grass.

Swann reaches for her kite, flashes him a smile. "And it's still early."

"No, but it's not good either. Unless you were really jonesing for overcast and dreary." He tries to latch back onto that good, nearly manic mood from earlier, that dissociation from the heavy sad frustrated meat of his body. It isn't easy. It's like his mother's death has run up and caught him again.

Pascal starts clawing up a tree and Marcel retrieves a small stick he wants Swann to throw. Jason takes it from him and tosses it aside, and Marcel fetches it, bumping against Jason's ankles for more attention.

"At least it's not hot from the sun." She's trying to be positive, more for him than for herself, because she's tired, drained from days of trying to heal a wound that's too big, one that needs stitches when she only has the smallest size of bandaid. She can only smile at him again.

Swann takes her kite and runs with it, bodily lifted when it catches the wind, and then it's in the air, sailing above her and glinting gold in the sunlight that weakly creeps through the clouds.

He watches her go, hands in his pockets, not a dark but a vacant expression on his face. His eyes follow that kite climbing up into the clouds.

He thinks of going with that kite, up into the air, free from all of mortal suffering, and something in him lightens again. He realizes, not consciously but on some level beneath thinking, that he has so much less to tie him here than he used to.

The slightest smile comes to his face, and he goes out with his own kite to join Swann.

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

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