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

[whatisay]

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.

Comments

[whatisay]

"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."

[impaledqueen]

"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."

[whatisay]

"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."

[impaledqueen]

"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.

[whatisay]

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.