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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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.

Her fists clench, then relax. Now it really is just lashing out. The anger in her gut cools. It's less personal when he says things she doesn't believe he really means. The jab at her food--he's eaten it before, and if he really found it disgusting, he would have made no secret of it. As for the painkillers?

"You won't take your own life, Jason. That would make you like your brother, and you're too proud for that." He may think about it. He may talk about it. She doesn't believe he'd actually do it.

(That was what she thought about Bucky.)

(Bucky didn't actually kill himself, though.)

Just in case, she'll make sure to throw away the painkillers the next chance she gets.

"I'll waste my time if that's what I choose to do." She won't leave unless he says he wants her gone. She has no right to stay in the house if he really doesn't want her there, but she will stay and suffer his abuse for as long as he needs her to. (And she'll remove any easy method to kill himself.)

"Maybe he was right!" Jason slams his palm down on the table, puffed up more by the anger he's tapping into than by physical strength or conviction, talking himself into believing this. It's not that Jason wants a respite from pain - that's too ambitious - it's that he wants some hope that someday something will be different. The idea that there's some reason behind existing in this bleak and frustrating and miserable existence. He thought too often it would get easier if his mother died, and yet here he is, feeling worse than ever.

The illusion of the peace of death is enough of a substitute for that for now.

"Maybe I should just put this wretched family out of its misery. Hell, I could give Ben some matches and he'd probably do it for me. Maybe Quentin was right that there isn't a damn thing worth sticking around for and I've been the sucker for sticking it out as long as I have."

He moves to leave the kitchen and head back upstairs to his mother's room.

"Death isn't peace, Jason. There is no escape in it." Her voice is hard, far harder than it normally is because there's a moment where the mask slips. She has seen death from every angle possible while remaining alive. She has slaughtered animals, watching their eyes roll in fear, as if they know their end is coming even when she blindfolds them. She has watched children die on the street, their stomachs distended and flies gathering on their skin. She has come dangerously close to starving herself. She's watched the life go out of a human's eyes as she crushed their neck, the opening mouths of melting bodies, the wild struggle to survive when there is no survival to be had. She has sat in the dirt, bleeding out slowly while a boy died against her back and a sword pinned them together, and she has listened to her own EKG flatlining as she threatened to sink into that final sleep during surgery.

She's even seen the slow death of the will to live. She's had to cup her own in her hands, blowing on it gently to keep it burning, feeding it with her own anger and need for revenge until it blazed again, belching toxic smoke to clog her lungs but fueling her nonetheless.

Peggy stands, brushing herself off and trails after Jason without bothering to reattach the fridge door. He may be running off to sleep again, in which case she'll leave him alone. After talking like this, though, she wants to make sure he doesn't hurt himself.

He should stop, should catch himself before dredging up painful memories for Peggy. But he's so locked into his own anger and indignity that he can't spare consideration for her, can't even for himself, servant to a force of fury he can't wriggle out from under. He just keeps going with it until he burns himself back down to numbness.

He doesn't go back to sleep. He goes up to his mother's room and slams the door behind him and starts knocking things around, first her cabinet with the medicine, not with purpose but simply grabbing things and tossing them aside. Then to the chair at her vanity and then the sheets of her bed, all to the floor, kicked around with impotent rage and incoherent grunts and snarls.

He doesn't have much energy in him. He hasn't eaten enough, hasn't slept well enough, doesn't have his jolt of nicotine or caffeine. He's winded in almost comedic time, and then he collapses down onto the mess of blankets on the floor, back to the bedframe.

"Peggy? Are you still there?"

Peggy follows because there's nothing else to do after he says things like what he did. She listens to him destroy the room, not quite daring to go inside lest he start throwing things at her. She's not afraid of him hurting her with brute force, but she is afraid of him getting a hold of something that can shatter and throwing that.

Before she has a chance to worry about him hurting himself in the fray, it's over. She would find it funny how quickly he burned himself out if it weren't so sad.

"I'm still here." She opens the door. It doesn't feel like she belongs in the dilapidated, ruined room. Caroline had loathed her, and it feels like her spirit is still there, yowling like the presence of a Districter burns her. Peggy pushes through the feeling, immediately sorting through the debris on the ground to gather up Caroline's medicine. After Jason talking like that, she's going to be flushing all the pills.

"Keep the bottles." He rests his forehead in his hands. There are enough of them to stock a pharmacy, all of Caroline's prescriptions and failed attempts to find a cure she could never commit to for a disease she could never identify. "Ben plays with them. His little- his graveyard outside."

He hiccups. It's not a sob, and it's almost funny, almost enough to bring the slightest cracked laugh to his lips. He looks at Peggy, his only friend who's never been in his bed, and he is broken and finally reaching out for the help she offered so unconditionally when she first arrived at the house.

"How do Districters raise their children?" he asks quietly, hoping somehow that he can find something Peggy wants to give him that will soothe the burn now, the wound ripped open not of Caroline's absence but of a whole life without a real mother, without the honest love necessary to keep a child happy and warm and formed into an adult who can find that love in themselves. He doesn't know what he wants from her, a lullaby or a hug or her to come stroke the hair on his head like she does when he's headaching. He would think the food downstairs that she brought, but the idea of eating at all sickens him.

Keep the bottles. She could do that. Flush the medication and give the bottles to Ben. Maybe she could find some marbles to fill them up with so he could use them as rattles or take them out to play. Ben would like that, especially if she found shiny marbles.

She's concentrating on making sure she has all the prescription bottles when Jason makes that noise. The question surprises her. Maybe it shouldn't. It's too much to hope that Jason might actually think that Districters have some practices that are of value, but he might be recognizing that other people didn't have the childhood he did.

She feels him softening. He could turn again on a dime, but she hopes he's worn himself out. She makes sure all the bottles are in her pockets before approaching him slowly, trying to get a sense of what he needs from her. Maybe what he needs, she can't give.

"I can't speak for all Districts. My parents raised me with a lot of love. There was tough love there, but it all came from the same place. They made sure I learned at school and did my chores, and they would give up half of their food so I could eat more. Then they would bundle me up and sing me to sleep." She settles next to him, still keeping an eye on his reactions. "That's how most of my friends' parents raised them. Sometimes they would be stern, but it was always about love."

"All my life up until I was a teenager I thought we were just being raised as any other children," he says. Doesn't make any sudden movement, just sits there across from her running his hands over his forehead. "I thought it was normal for a father to hate a kid. Mother told me she's the only one who'd ever care about me and I believed her."

He still believes her. Even in the grave, Caroline whispers to him that he's only ever going to have her to back him up, to care for him, to protect him and to provide any validation, and her influence has cheapened any positive relationship he's had outside her. She is the sun and Swann and Peggy are stars, unable to provide the requisite sunlight in Caroline's absence.

He wants to cry, but he's too tired to cry. That seems like taking a running leap when he can barely lift his feet to trudge forward.

Finally he just rests his head against Peggy's shoulder. He's exhausted, mentally, physically. He feels as if he's the very dregs of a life, the skim, the miniscus at the center of the bottom.

"I don't know why I'm not just relieved she's gone. She sure as hell never bundled me up and sang to me."

"She was your mother."

To Peggy, it's just that simple. The Capitol hardly has a monopoly on bad parents; she's seen plenty of them in District 10 as well. Even if parents are bad, it still affects their children when they die. Maybe not everyone will cry over their parents' graves, but everyone is affected.

Peggy wraps her arms around his shoulders and leans her head on his, like she can bundle him up herself. She can't do much for him, but she can be there in a way no one else was when she faced this grief.

"She hurt you, but she was still your mother."

"Right."

He crumples next to her, resting his head on her shoulder, too tired even to keep his neck stiff. He sighs and lets her hold him. He shakes and realizes how she doesn't smell like Capitolites, how the very essence of her is somehow different and earthier (and knows that since he hasn't showered in days any repugnance he could hold for that would be hypocrisy).

"I don't know who I am without her." He's always existed in some sort of opposition to the other members of his family, as if they were an arrangement of cards held together by gravity and mutual pressure - he was the scapegoat through childhood, the good son through adulthood as antithesis to his deceased brother and errant sister. Now it's just him and Ben, and Jason doesn't even see Ben as a person enough to establish juxtaposition.

"I shouldn't have yelled at you."

"You're Jason Compson. You're stubborn and judgmental and proud and good at what you do. You're my friend."

And he feels so small in her arms right now. She smooths his hair like she does when he has a migraine, and for a moment, it feels a little like she's holding a child rather than a grown man. Is that so awful, though? She became a child again after her mother died, crying in an empty house and not sure what to do next.

"Beyond that? I know you'll figure it out." Caroline Compson may have defined Jason's life up until now. Maybe she will continue to define his life posthumously. That said, she thinks he's too stubborn to not keep going and eventually fashion an identity for himself.

The apology--that's an apology, even if there's no 'sorry'--is the most shocking part of all. Has he ever apologized to her? About anything? (Of course, his gruff gifts or gestures when he knows he's done wrong don't really count. They never come with words.) She squeezes his shoulder gently. "It's okay." She can put up with the yelling.

He makes that sound again, that half dry-sob hiccup, and nods. He doesn't believe he'll figure it out, but upon examination, he doesn't know he won't, either. The grey fog that's always composed his future is merely black now, equally impenetrable and obscure, portending nothing. He used to at least expect that each day would just be a tired repetition of the one that came before it, like he was sitting at the center of a long, unimpressive and relatively uniform tapestry. Now he feels that he's come to the edge of it, and he doesn't know what lies beyond that.

"I need to shower," he murmurs, as if the weight of the last three days having barely moved, just sleeping until he was sore and not eating, has suddenly settled into his bones. He moves his head, reluctantly away from her gentle hand, the comfort that stirs something unremembered in his heart, not his head. He gets up and seems like a scarecrow coming to life after some sort of curse, light and stiff and fragile.

The next few days will be more productive. They'll clean, they'll repair what they can. Jason will pull himself out of the worst of his grief like a calf pulls itself from a birth canal. He runs his hands over his face and finds himself shaking.

"You can sleep in Quentin's room." Funny. Miss Quentin won't even know her grandmother's dead.

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

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[cw: suicide talk]

[cw: suicide talk]

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