PSL: Quentin's Funeral

[whatisay]

Capitol funerals are oleaginous with wealth. Today they assemble to commemorate Quentin Compson not just with tears, but with commissioned oil paintings, fireworks, an orchestra playing some lugubrious dirge, with wines ages two hundred years and flowers genetically engineered to have the deceased's initials appearing naturally on each petal. The young man's body is no longer a matter of sodden, lifeless flesh but ash compressed into a shimmering jewel, set at the middle of a wreath of designer oleander at the base of a portrait picturing him more present than any who knew him ever saw him. The painted eyes look aware, like they're taking in every detail around them, while in life Quentin always seemed a step out of time, thinking of something else, half-listening to the conversation.

Jason, fifteen years old, hasn't seen his father sober since the older Jason went to identify the wax-white, water-bloated corpse in the mortuary. This Jason, in a new suit with a tag on the back of his shirt that itches his neck, had stayed home with his mother, listening to her mewl about how could this happen to her, how could Quentin have done this to her. He'd expected to feel something when his father came home, either relief or grief, because everyone was supposed to feel something when a sibling died, but the only emotion that had surfaced was a strange sort of unease that he'd quickly choked off with disgust that his father didn't even bother to come straight home, and instead arrived drunk.

"Did you drive like that?" Caroline had asked. "Did you want me to have to identify a body today too?"

The older Jason's drunk at the funeral, too, trying his best to stand still and not sway next to his black-clad wife and eight-months-pregnant daughter and her new husband. Benjamin's been left home; his crying would be "upsetting". Uncle Maury's had a few too; Jason's starting to suspect that maybe he's the only sober one, sharing company with Caddy's fetus. When the eulogy ends, having described a person Jason's certain never actually existed, there's a reception with pay-per-plate seating and photographers and fireworks in the background.

His mother pretends to faint from crying, although her face is dry, and calls for Jason, her 'last remaining son', to come help her. Jason slips outside just out of her eyesight, not wanting to engage, hoping she just assumes he didn't see or hear her while Maury props her back up. He heads round the back, slouching on a bench in sight of the parking lot, reconnoitering every half hour or so to see if things have died down. His nose, fresh from a rhinoplasty, is straight now, but there are fading bruises under each eye, covered by slight makeup. He undoes his tie and unbuttons his jacket, then finally just flings the latter off onto the lawn somewhere.

At some point his father goes to a microphone and starts rambling about the nature of time and his daughter's wedding and then Jason's just done, incapable of anything but disgust with everything here.

He heads back to the bench and picks up some pebbles, chucking them at the pigeons just to see if the birds will fly away.

Comments

everyone come bother cyrus, he's 13

[currupted]

He doesn't like it, he's decided. A funeral is a regular party where everyone thinks they have to talk quietly and there are enough adults around that trying to sneak a glass of wine would be pointless.

The suit he's in isn't one he picked out. They got it new for him a little while ago, but he's grown an inch since then, and there was no time to get it tailored before the funeral, so it's tight in the shoulders and short in the legs. Makeup can only do so much to hide his acne. He feels resentful of both these things.

He spent a few minutes looking at Quentin Compson, in his wreath of oleander. Trying to reconcile the person he'd known - or, well, frequently been in the vicinity of, always been too young to know - with the golf-ball sized gem nestled among the leaves. It all felt real and not-real at the same time - the jewel cold and hard and lifeless as a TV screen, putting a strange distance between the fact of the matter and its result.

It's not like watching a Tribute die, Portia Reagan told them on their way here. This is sad, and important. (She's dressed today in something subdued, that sparkles only when the light hits it instead of just sparkling anyway.) This is a dead citizen-- Cyrus, Stephen, listen to me. This is a dead citizen, and he was your friend's brother. (Jason isn't my friend, Cyrus chose not to say.) Think if your brother died. Think of how sad you would be.

Cyrus thinks about this, and it makes him feel uneasy; a heavy feeling in his stomach and a dull, directionless anger. It persists as he moves through the crowd with his hand on Stephen's shoulder, taking in Mrs. Compson's histrionics and everyone else's sympathy, from most to least genuine.

Eventually Stephen runs off with some friends, because he's eight and he doesn't really get what's going on. And Cyrus steps outside, because seeing Quentin glittering under all those lights and Mr. Compson swaying in front of the microphone and feeling acutely that gap in the line of Compson siblings brings the uneasiness back, and he doesn't like it.

He doesn't mean to find Jason. He just does. He almost goes back inside when he sees him. Instead, though, he watches him, with his hands in his pockets-- watches him throwing pebbles at the pigeons. The birds don't seem to give much of a shit. They hop away from the pebbles, maybe flutter their wings once or twice, but they won't get airborne.

"Your mother's looking for you," is what he says.

[whatisay]

"You don't say."

He wants to tell Cyrus that if he cares what Mother thinks, maybe he can go live with her, maybe he can go be the one who has to let her cry on him and fuss and wilt and whimper. The last few weeks - the appropriate amount of time to wait between a suicide and a funeral with enough bombast - have been spent in the vicinity of small, petty demands for aspirin, for tissues to cry into, for help to the couch, for someone to listen while she gluts the room with complaints about her husband's drinking.

By Monday Jason won't be in school any more. He'll start looking for work and a private tutor will get him ready to get a diploma that says more about how much it cost than it will about how much he's learned. And then that will be his life; his father's drunkenness, his mother's complaining, his brother's screaming, all stretching into the years ahead of him like a field into the horizon. He feels tired just thinking of it.

He's started leaving the gate open for Benjy to run around just to see if anyone will notice, if his father will emerge from his drunken stupor to hit him upside the head again or if his mother will decide to pull Jason down from the pedestal she's placed him on.

He looks over his shoulder at Cyrus, with the pockmarks and the ill-fitting clothes, thinking of the times that as a group they all stole drinks or snuck out of wherever the event was being hosted or just hid in one of the lounges and bitched about anything and everything. Cyrus is the closest to him in age, aside from China and her brother, who only show up to half the events. At the moment, with death hanging in the air around them like humidity, Jason has never felt like two years mattered more.

"They told you how he died, right? Or are you too young for that?"

The official story - the one that's already been blown wide open - was that Quentin was at a party and fell into the river, as teenagers tend to do when they start higher education, what with the drinks and the designer drugs and all that. Much less embarrassing than a suicide.

[currupted]

"They didn't tell me," Cyrus says. "But I know." Something defensive in that-- I am not too young. I found it out myself. He's not quite far enough into adolescence to pretend that he doesn't care, and he's never been good at deflecting slights. "He killed himself."

They hadn't intended him to know. He'd overheard it. His mother and father don't keep track of either of their sons; neither of them ever developed a parent's instinct for where their children are, or when they're not where they should be. They converse in the second-floor parlor at night after the Avoxes have made their last rounds, and sometimes Cyrus sits outside just in the shadow of the cracked door and listens, and they have never once noticed.

Can you imagine, he remembers Portia saying. To get that news. There was the soft clink of wineglasses on the glass tabletop. Julius replying, Don't know what they did to him in that house. To drive him to that. Tied a weight to his own feet and everything, I heard. An absent, musing tone, mildly disapproving, distant as though he were talking about something that'd happened on TV. Then Portia's soft sigh-- Think of the family.

Cyrus had understood that that didn't mean that Julius should think of Quentin's mother, or his father, or his siblings. No, she was talking about the family, about the greater intangible idea of Compson, now with a piece missing from it. An undammable hole from which dignity could flow out.

His mouth twists; he shifts in place. He feels like he should add something. His stomach feels heavy again. He hasn't eaten anything since he came (though there is food enough at this funeral to keep a District Twelve household alive for a month-- it is still, after all, a Capitol party), but it feels like a weight in him.

"...Sorry about your brother," he says, in the grudging monotone of a kid who thinks he knows what he should say, and thinks he might even kind of mean it, but doesn't want to be obvious about it.

[whatisay]

Jason shrugs a bit. There's no concept of being in a better place now in the Capitol, because what place could be better than the Capitol? Their entire world hinges on the belief that they live in the best of all possible worlds, in a well-earned heaven. In the background, he can hear his father get cut off mid-speech, in the middle of the word sarcophagus, which probably three quarters of the audience don't know the meaning of.

He's tired, he realizes, tired from work he hasn't even done yet, in a way that sleep and leisure will never touch.

"Like I say," Jason says, adopting a verbal tic he won't realize he has until he's well older, the I say, the I said, the listen-to-me-without-making-me-fight-for-it, the I-am-not-my-father-brothers-family-I-am-I-I-am-just-I, "he probably had the right idea."

Because Jason knows what the Reagans are too polite to say in public. He looks at Cyrus with his zits and his unshaved ankles and he knows he's supposed to be looking at a new superior now, that somehow Quentin didn't just weight himself down into the river but dragged the rest of them down with him, as easily as if they were in a chain gang.

"This whole funeral would make any sensible person sick. He'd have hated it." Jason pauses for a moment, realizing he doesn't give a sweet goddamn what Quentin would have liked, that maybe he never even knew his brother enough to know what he's want for a funeral, and then amends his statement, lacing the words with the vitriol that would overwhelm the flowers and dinner and orchestra but will never be strong enough for the stammering drunk and the pregnant slut and the hypochondriac and parasite in there. It's not that Quentin would have hated the bombast because that's all rote, that's every Capitolite funeral. It's that he would have hated the mess that was left of the honorable name.

"I hate it."

He glances at the portion of the bench he's not sprawling over. "You smoke?"

[currupted]

He steps closer and sits down, one shoulder turned a little away from Jason. It makes his pants hike up a little further. Great.

He hesitates before he replies-- not because he's afraid he might be not be allowed to smoke, but because he can't decide what answer Jason's looking for, and he wants to say the right thing. (On most teenagers his age, it would be out of a simple desire to fit in; Cyrus Reagan grew up under cameras and in front of microphones, and there is an instinctive consideration of his actions in his every movement that most teenagers do not have.)

"...No," he allows. "But if you're going to..." A shrug. I guess I could. If that's what Jason's asking.

He doesn't know what to do with He probably had the right idea.

Maybe that's what bothers him so much about it. That they're without Quentin now. Forever. They are so infrequently without anything - they are all used to things immediately replaceable, servants all silent and interchangeable, possessions that can be lost or broken and put back in place as though they were never gone. He didn't know a thing about Quentin except that he was Jason's weird, distant older brother, but something in him feels-- frustrated? angry? indignant, maybe-- that he could take himself away from them just like that, and have the gall not to be so easy to replace.

Cyrus doesn't have these thoughts in exactly this way. But he thinks of what it would be like to be without an entire person-- without one of his friends, or his mother, or his father, or Stephen. He imagines Stephen as a very small jewel, glittering in the middle of a bouquet of flowers, and has to swallow hard around the sudden sharp, bitter taste in his mouth.

"I hate it too," he says. Not just to agree, but because it's true. "I didn't even want to come." (Like it was just another party their parents dragged them along to.)

[whatisay]

"Oh. So you didn't bring your own," Jason says, having invited to commiserate but not to share. He has a vaporizer he got from Maury, snuck under his mother's nose and hidden in the lining of his vest. He glances over each shoulder and pulls it out, lights it up. It smells strong, and it'll cling to his clothes, but at this point he doesn't care if his parents notice - maybe it'll be better if they do. "I guess you can have a hit off mine, but don't put your mouth on it. I don't want to catch your zits if they're contagious."

There's no request there, just the command of a kid who's bigger than Cyrus and has, at times, backed up his preferences to the younger kids with hitting or kicking, or with petty little vengeances later. If Cyrus puts his lips on the vaporizer he'll be walking away with a fat one, Jason's saying.

He nods a little bit as Cyrus says that, almost saying think of how much I didn't want to come but not, because what's the use of saying it? It's evident. Then he drags, and it's clearly the unpracticed breath of a child because he coughs hard on it and barely takes any in, but stubbornly he takes two and then hands it to Cyrus.

When he talks again his voice is a little rougher. Unlike Cyrus', his has already changed. In ten years people will look back and consider his rhinoplasty the last transformation from ugly duckling to acceptable adult, while he'll look back at this summer as an entirely different kind of bend in the road.

"I don't think I'd come if it was your brother's funeral. I don't think anyone could make me come to another funeral."

ten year old swann

[cigne]

Swann is among the youngest people at the funeral. She wouldn't be here, if she had her way, but with her mother again gone from the Capitol, it's up to her to help her father represent the Honeymead name here. She's spent the better part of the morning being shoved into a black dress so big that she can barely move around -- it's more of an adult's dress shrunk down than anything else, with delicately stitched ivory and gold flowers, and silk ribbons corseting her in tightly on the back. A tiny black hat sits atop an artfully-made nest of platinum hair, though she's pushed away the veil that had originally covered her eyes.

If not for the fact that she's only just four feet tall, she could easily be mistaken for a grown-up.

But she's not, and that fact alone has gained her the opportunity to sneak out and go fish her doll from the limousine, taking it to the lawn and plopping down in a huge puff of dark organza to play, all alone, because she was supposed to be sad and it didn't seem very mournful if she invited Stephen or someone else along.

Her little gloves are cast off in the grass to better pick dandelions and braid them into her doll's hair, and she's not terribly aware of Jason huffing around until the pebbles start landing and the pigeons coo with displeasure at the interruption.

She looks up at him.

[whatisay]

He can hear Father inside, yammering away about the nature of death in what Jason's sure his father considers a deep and poignant speech but what sounds to everyone else as eloquent and sober as a belch. Jason picks up a bigger rock and throws it at one of the pigeons, missing but sending the bird skittering away with that back-and-forth bob that birds have.

Jason's never liked his family, but in the last few months he's come to learn what it's like to be embarrassed of them. Not just of Benjamin, wall-eyed and loud and stupid, but of the name, not of a garish decorating choice but of the whole house.

He throws another rock and one of the birds flaps a few feet towards Swann, and when Jason's eyes follow it, they meet hers. Suddenly he feels flooded with shame, not of his action but of everything around them, as if the new suit and the orchestra in the background and the dim sounds of his father's pontificating are conspiring to make him tiny and weak, crushed like trash in a compressor, and Swann's eyes are the last piece.

"You're getting too old to play with dolls."

[cigne]

She's too young to understand really what's happening inside, the way that Mr. Compson is rambling on and unstable. He uses too many big words anyway, so all she knows is that it makes her uncomfortable, in a way that she'll grow up to understand is pity more than anything else.

The bird pecks around within a yard of her, taking her to be of threat, but she doesn't watch it like she ordinarily might, keeping her dark eyes locked on Jason's. She lets the doll settle in her skirt, between her legs that lead to black, glittering ballet flats on the end of white-stockinged legs, just peeking out of the hem of her enormous skirt. Her head cocks a bit as she keeps looking at him, refuses to break eye contact.

"There's no rule about that. I can play with her if I want. And anyway, there isn't anyone else I can play with."

[whatisay]

"You can go play with Stephen and Jennifer and the other little kids. Why, do they just not want to play with you?"

Jason gets up - he's already as tall as he's going to get, and as he walks over to Swann he all but towers. He walks away from her, though, over to another curb and picks up some more rocks. "Did you get kicked out of the little kids club?"

[cigne]

"I just don't think it's very nice to run around and play games at a funeral. Besides, Cyrus never lets Stephen play alone."

Cyrus is too old and too serious now, not inclined to spend time with the smaller children but not willing to let Stephen go his own way, either.

Swann watches after Jason, the toes of her shoes idly tapping each other, and folds her hands in her lap, as she's been taught to do when she doesn't have anything else to occupy them.

"It isn't very nice of you, to throw rocks at the birds. They didn't do anything."

[whatisay]

In response, Jason whips another rock at the birds, this one harder and faster. He lacks the aim to make it land, but the bird flaps away, panicked.

"I didn't do anything either, and I've got to suffer through this funeral. Life not very nice." It's petulant, small, and yet he gives it all the gravitas that an angsty fifteen year-old can manage.

"Quentin's lucky. He doesn't have to be alive for all this."

Deckard Shaw| OTA

[omnomgrenades]

[OOC: It's your friendly neighborhood Wyatt/Wesker/Maxwell mun, gently voice-testing a possible AU for Capitol shenanigans. Come at him, my lovelies!]

Shaw didn't know the Compsons. Not personally, not professionally. He was aware of them only in that way one was of a family too large, too long in history, to be ignored. Like pieces of the landscape, as much as the mountains the city had dug itself into. He paid their scandals no more attention than the city did the towering snowcaps.

They paid their taxes, they kept their noses clean, and their names off his desk, and he could give a shit who was fucking whom. How much they drank. How a man had ended up dead so young.

He was only there, a shadow beneath one of the specially ordered trees, to work.

Being back in the Capitol after a long assignment felt a bit like putting on a too old suit. Too tight in the shoulders, too short in the cuffs... He'd outgrown it, and no amount of pretending was going to suddenly make it fit.

But the money helped. The doing helped.

In the shade he listened with one ear to the elder Compson's speech - with all that slurring he had no hope of hiding - and to the low bitching of his fellow security with the other, the little silver earpiece flashing as his head tracked slowly over the crowd. Watching hands. Following eyes.

Judging. Waiting.

Re: Deckard Shaw| OTA

[whatisay]

They don't have to rely on mere Peacekeepers. The Compsons can afford to hire not just a security team for their events, but one that's staffed with actual Capitol citizens, the best of the best to make sure no one makes off with their fine china or, in this case, the sparkling stone that once was their eldest son. It seems fitting that the jewel of his father's eye eventually became an actual gem, when studiousness and obedience were no longer hard enough edges to protect him from the world.

Jason finally comes back from tormenting pigeons, his tie still loose and his shirt sleeves pulled up, his hands stuffed into his pockets. The nosejob, barely-healed, makes it look like he's been crying, which couldn't be more of a lie. He hasn't shed a tear in years.

He pauses, standing next to Shaw, hearing his father's speech in stereo from the way the sound travels in the air and the tinny recitation from Shaw's earpiece. The younger Jason is clearly still a boy - the cuts on his throat from learning to shave are barely covered - but he already looks like the man he'll become, consciously separate from his father not so much in facial features but in demeanor. It's highlighted by the clear discomfort he feels at his father's ramble, the abject humiliation making his neck flush red combined with a sort of disgust, that usual teenage need to distance themselves from their parentage amped up by shame.

"Aren't you going to stop him?" he asks Shaw.

[omnomgrenades]

His eyes moved, a quick flick beneath dark lenses, though his head was still canted slightly toward the crowd. He recognized Jason from the preparatory file, though he noted distantly, that the photo tacked to the thick sheaf of papers had been pre-construction. (A bit of sloppy work that, but he supposed that was the difference, wasn't it? The paygrade in action.)

His gaze moved to the stage, watching the older Compson sway to and fro like a snake-charmer, the podium an unimpressed cobra.

"I could." It's a honest answer, if brisk. He could have said that he was security, not babysitting, but the Compsons were signing the checks, and while Jason wasn't the oldest, he was, at the moment, the most coherent. "If watching him try and resist is a better option than just letting him get it out."

[whatisay]

Jason almost snaps something back, because security is supposed to protect the Compsons, not just the useless jewel sitting in a wreath, the older brother protected from all the disaster around him by death and ash and hard diamond surfaces. But he doesn't, because Shaw's right.

Jason's shaking a little, out of a kind of fury that doesn't fit his body and can't fit inside him, not at Shaw but in general. He feels like he's about to be ill. His head seems to want to explode.

And so he tries to treat Shaw like a servant. "Come help me find my jacket."

[omnomgrenades]

At 15, Jason was more than old enough to know that while they were all citizens, equality was not the same for all. But at 25, Shaw was old enough to no better than to assume anything at face value. (A few years in the districts, a few knives behind smiles, and one grew out of that sort of thing real quick.)

Almost as if he hadn't heard the request, he reached up to touch the piece of plastic and metal in his ear, murmuring to someone only he could hear in a low, tumbling voice like shockwaves bounding of the lowest ribs of in his chest.

"Send one of the service staff by my position. Mr. Compson the IV has requested some assistance."

Security and service might have both started with the same letter, but they weren't the same thing. And neither was he.

[whatisay]

Jason sees red, like a flash from a lighthouse in the corner of his vision, because he's only now beginning to understand what this sort of powerlessness feels like. He always knew helplessness a little bit, trying to get his father's attention, trying to argue his way out of getting a whipping, to keep up with his older siblings and to be constantly excluded, but the current impotence is something far deeper and more damning to dignity. He knows, on some level that he can't quite process or articulate yet, that his family has fallen.

"You can tell them what to do, you know. All you have to say is that they should find a jacket."

He folds his arms, hearing still his father's drunken words in the background like jeers.

18 year old Trey woo

[reallynow]

It might not be a party, but it's still an event. As such, the Pierces have some involvement in the arrangements. They do what they always do, serve drinks and food, play music and schedule the course of the wake. Trey, being eighteen and useless in most every other regard, is the designated drink bitch. Events like this need a kinder touch, Avoxes are unseemly and lack the warmth that a bitter and disinterested teen provides. Everything about him screams I don't want to be here from the dour look on his face with the bare minimum amount of eyeliner to his feet that fidget when he isn't been waved over to help with something.

No amount of but Maaaa gets Trey out of this. Not when this is one of his first few forays into the life his parents have ideally carved out for him. He found himself in a particular doghouse when he said he'd rather die than serve fancy juice to little brats, so he wanders out with his stupid tray with his ego a little deflated.

He isn't really paying particular attention to anyone who might want a drink, his attention is on people coming and going in their most fashionable black gowns and suits with their respectable fascinators. If you want a drink, you'll have to wake him up from the day dream.

[currupted]

Cyrus' suit is not a fashion triumph. It's nicely cut, of course, and beautifully tailored, but for someone a couple inches shorter than he is. There's only so good any article of clothing can look on a thirteen-year-old whose limbs are all too long for him, anyway. All in all: Not really worth a second look.

"What do you have?" he asks as he walks up, more bored than actively interested. He doesn't bother with a greeting, because the help is the help no matter how many parties their parents have put together for your parents.

He assumes it's all juice, served up in little crystal glasses to make the children feel more like they're drinking with the grown-ups. The little kids might find it exciting, but he finds it infantile and, frankly, a little degrading. Still - maybe there's something more interesting among all the little fake cocktails, something he isn't technically supposed to have.

[reallynow]

One day, Cyrus will grow up to be a truly handsome man and Trey will kick himself for not having predicted it sooner. Right now, he's pretty standard for a teenager. Nothing much to ogle, particularly not for an 18 year old who is finally kicking aside the awkward growing period of their life. Shit is pretty cash, if he does say so himself.

In fact, before he notices Cyrus approach, he's admiring the reflection of his freshly plucked eyebrows in a glass. He straightens his shoulders just a little when he's spoken to, if only because he recognises the voice of someone small and stupidly important.

That doesn't mean his lips don't curl up into a smirk at the question, because he knows exactly what Cyrus wants and he isn't about to just give it to him. "For you? Juice." He lowers the tray for his perusal. "Apple and ginger, pineapple, coconut and mint or cashew, vanilla and agave." He rattles off the flavours like it's ingrained into his very soul, not bothering to make them sound interesting. It's juice, let's be honest.

[currupted]

And Cyrus is only half-listening, not with any real attention. He's looking over the glasses, but it's obvious in his expression, the way he draws a little closer, that he's just waiting for Trey to finish talking. This is not an uncommon transaction, what he's about to undertake; but normally it's one of the older kids trying to pull it off. There's a script. He knows about half of it.

"Not any of those," he says, and glances over his shoulder in the direction of the bar. "Anyway, not on their own." Better to mix it, for maximum presumed innocence-- only an idiot would try to walk around the funeral carrying a whole bottle of something. (Well. An idiot, or Mr. Compson.)

He looks at Trey, trying both to look appropriately in command, and to gauge how effective the attempt is. "What else do you have?"

[whatisay]

Jason's humiliated enough. He wonders if he might be able to feel something like grief if shame weren't eclipsing everything inside him, watching his mother catch the vapors and his dad, having finished venting his gin-soaked spleen into the microphone, sit back down at the table. There's an awkward silence, with only the hum of the microphone in the background, while people wonder how to respond to the incoherent, slurred lecture from the father of the deceased, and then the attendees mercifully rev up their conversation again to talk about fashion and television.

"Hey. You." He hails Trey down, not bothering to give him a second look even though he's seen this teenager a handful of times in his life, serving plates or setting up pallets of food, and gestures to his own father, who is getting up from the table he's at now and tottering towards the bar again. "Intercept him and give him something virgin, alright?"

The last thing Jason wants if for this funeral to end with his father passed out or vomiting. He stays at Trey's elbow, like he's going to make sure the operation goes smoothly.

"We shouldn't even allow him out in public anymore," he says under his breath. "We should just lock him in the yard with the retard."

[reallynow]

There isn't a lot Trey knows personally about Jason. He knows bits and pieces about his family from the gossip he's been picking up on, particularly since that train is gaining more and more momentum lately. You tend to overhear a lot when you're young and short petite and handing out drinks to people who don't look you in the eye. It's pretty easy to dehumanise people who dehumanise you, it's easy to viciously rip their lives apart by buying into rumors and getting into gossip. Even so, he feels bad for Jason. It's partly from the secondhand embarrassment and partly from a similar age group, but it's there.

Were it anyone else, he'd probably have milked a bribe out of a job like this, but considering it's a Compson funeral they're already paying his pocket money. "Seriously?" He can't help asking, but he shuts his trap quickly. He could argue, but realistically the guy is so drunk he probably won't even notice.

"Alright, sir. You got it." He slips the sir in to at least compensate for some of the casualness in his tone. Approaching the older man with his new shadow but acting as if it's perfectly normal to have Jason hovering around him.

The muttering earns a sincere laugh from Trey, and it's an obnoxious enough sound to make him cover his mouth as apologetically as possible. "It's not like he'd know the difference between that and a party, right? Just play music." He suggests, glancing at Jason with a raised brow. "Are you going to follow me the whole way there?"

[whatisay]

"Seriously. It's bad enough having one family member drowned." The official story is that Quentin fell off the bridge at his prestigious school during a party, and there have been a few fluff pieces in the newspapers about the dangers of teenage drug use since then, but it's an open secret that the eldest Compson sibling tied weights to his feet and drowned himself. That the suicide note was addressed not to his family but to his roommate. "You can't breathe liquor any easier than you can water."

The careful rearrangement within the Compson household has already been set into motion, Jason sliding in to fill the space once occupied by his sister, only he's controlling where she was organized, paranoid where she was attuned. Jason hovers. Even when he gets the message from Trey to back off for a little bit, he still hangs at the periphery of Trey's vision before going back to a full-on stalk.

That gets something of an ugly snort out of Jason, like he isn't supposed to laugh at his own father like that but he didn't catch the laugh on the way out quick enough to kill it. It doesn't make Trey likable, really - it's just like realizing that your box of cereal has knock-knock jokes printed on the inside label, that the person catering your food is also a humor-dispenser.

"Someone's got to make sure things get done right around here."