whatisay | PSL: Quentin's Funeral

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PSL: Quentin's Funeral

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.

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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.

Edited 2015-04-08 02:20 (UTC)

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."

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."

"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?"

"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."

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."

It takes her a moment to get up in her giant dress, but she manages and leaves her doll in the grass to rush over to him and... well, she can't do very much, because he has five years and nearly two feet on her, but she intends to defend these pigeons that she didn't even really care about until he started being mean to them.

"Stop it! Leave them alone, they're just birds!" She sounds a bit like she might cry, and in lieu of being able to stop Jason, she runs toward the birds to scare them away to safety.

When she turns back to him, she's teary-eyed. "You're being so mean, Jason. It's only one day for you, but Quentin fell down and now he'll be gone forever. He would be sad for you!"

She's too young to have heard the truth, anything but a simplified tale of a boy who fell in a river and drowned.

"You're so stupid, Swann." He picks up another rock and turns it over in his hands, glaring at her, like he's considering how much trouble he'd get in if he threw it at her head. Not whether it would be right or wrong to do so, but whether he'd get caught. He might do it, too, if not for the security guard within earshot.

"You're such a little kid. You don't even know how Quentin died. He killed himself because he couldn't wait to get away from all this and he left me to clean up the mess."

Jason, who was never cut out to be the good son who could listen to his father's lectures, who never had the patience or sensitivity to mind Benjy, who feels like he's lost this fight before he's even started to have it. He envies Quentin, thinking, in some perverse way, that he's angry that Quentin thought of suicide first.

Swann looks back at him for a moment, at that hate and anger, then flops back down in the grass and starts crying, her fall cushioned by the mass of fabric. She wipes her eyes with her hands, and it becomes clear that not only has she been dressed as an adult, she's had makeup applied too, makeup that smears when she rubs, erasing the little porcelain doll look that someone took all that time to create.

"You're so mean!" she repeats, bawling and sniffling. "Why can't you be any nicer?"

Any other day, he might take some sick pride in reducing someone to tears so easily, but it's a funeral and all he's heard for the last few weeks is sobbing and simpering, and at this moment he hates it. He hates her tears and her smeared makeup and her big poof of dress.

"Shut up. My brother's dead. I'm allowed to be mean at a funeral." He can't believe he's arguing with a ten year-old, but he stays there, standing rooted to the edge of the grass.

She didn't even want to come here. She wanted to stay home with Eta and make cookies and play with her new dollhouse, and yet here she is, being treated like it's her fault that someone she barely knew died, that Jason is angry.

"I didn't do it!" Swann rips up handfuls of grass in her tantrum, fear and sadness and unhappiness and anger all mixed together. "I never did anything to you! Didn't... didn't anyone teach you manners, Jason Compson?!"

"Yeah," he says with a laugh, and then gestures to the dinner back in the building. "The drunk and the weeping willow in there. We Compsons have great manners."

He laughs again, only it's sad, weightless, hopeless, and then all the fight seems to go out of him. He slumps and it appears that whatever invisible strings were holding him up go slack.

"Whatever." He drags his feet and walks back to the bench.

She sniffles and whimpers and sits there for a while longer, until she's not crying as much anymore, then gets back up and shuffles to her doll, her skirt tripping her up once on the walk. She collects her doll and her gloves and sits back down to where she had been initially, a few yards from Jason.

"Quentin was nice. Caddy is nice. Only you're mean, so it's you, not your family."

Swann isn't looking at him, her gaze instead fixed on her doll, where she's carefully weaving the little yellow flowers into the blonde fake hair.

"Caddy's a slut and Quentin's dead," Jason says, but it's dull, the words more vitriolic than his tone. He collapses back down on the bench, listening to his father continue to slur on.

After a moment he closes his eyes, not to sleep but in an attempt not to cry, not from grief or sorrow but from anger at the injustice of it all.

"Quentin was still nice before," she tells him. She doesn't know what 'slut' means, and so it's hard to have a retort, but it doesn't change the fact that Caddy is nice, always has been.

He's quiet for long enough that she dares to peek back over at him with a frown. She knows that face, the way his eyelids are pushed together just a little too hard, the way his lips press closed too tightly and narrow. She knows it because she has it herself, often, but also because she's seen it on other people, on grown-ups. On her father, during her mother's rare visits back home, after they yell in his office and then her mother stomps away to a different wing of the house.

That look makes her stomach churn, and so she can only do the same thing she does for her father: she moves to sit at Jason's feet. Though she usually puts her head on her father's knee, she doesn't dare touch Jason, just sits close and speaks quietly.

"It's okay."

"No. It's not." Jason manages to quell the tears stinging at his eyes and opens them, face set with a firmness that overcompensates for the moment of weakness. It's like all the ugliness, all the viciousness of his features has circled around him in a protective wreath.

"You don't have anyone dead in your family. You don't know. You can't know." The only scandal with the Honeymeads has been occasional and oft-quashed allegations that Viatrix is unfaithful.

She turns her head and looks up at him, seems to see through his expression like she'd see through a pane of glass. Her face is calm and placid now, serene even, and she blinks.

"My grandpa died."

It's the closest she's been to a death in her life, but she was six and left away from the funeral, put in a room with Eta to watch her. She was kept away from even the other children, treated like a little doll in mourning, brought out only to be held by her father so that he could show how sad they all were.

It took a while before anyone bothered to actually explain to her that Grandpa Honeymead wasn't coming back.

"Even if... even if Quentin did do that to himself, he was... he was just sad. You have to be sad to do that. It's not anyone's fault, so it'll be okay later. People don't hurt forever when they lose other people."

"Your grandpa was old. That's different. People aren't going to cast your family out because your grandpa died."

Because that's what Jason's grieving for, not for Quentin, really, but for the life he had up until Caddy got herself knocked up. God knows it wasn't perfect, but it wasn't like the door had been blown off the house for the whole world to judge them.

The whole world is speculating, it seems, on what's going on in the Compson house. His parents are giving them good reason to talk about it all. Jason wants all the onlookers to drop dead and mind their own business.

"They're pulling me out of school."

Her head cocks a bit to the side. Even this young, she understands some of the different politics and standings between the families of their circle, but she doesn't understand enough to see how this would make the Compsons persona non grata. Of course, she also doesn't know about the rushed wedding, the vaguely suspicious circumstances, doesn't understand the implications of the elder Compsons' behaviors.

"Why?" Her tone is innocent, the way only a young child's can be. "You have to finish. It's important."

"I'll get tutored into getting my diploma. Mother wants me around the house more."

Sometimes Mother claims it's because she needs someone to pick up the slack because the Avoxes all got returned to the warehouse, untrustable. Sometimes it's because she can't bear to let Jason out of her sight for fear he might get taken from her too. Sometimes it's so she has someone at her beck and call that she can feel dignified crying on.

"They want to spare me the embarrassment, I'm guessing. Being the brother of a suicide."

"Why is that embarrassing? You didn't do anything."

But then again, Swann doesn't really understand someone's parent wanting them around more, either. Even when her mother is home, the two almost never interact, and with her father burying himself in work, Swann is generally left to her own devices with only her nannies and her Avox around to even notice her.

"What about your friends at school?"

"Maybe not me, but for all of us. The family, that is. Now everyone's wondering what it is we're like behind closed doors to drive Quentin to off himself and they're treating us like we're contagious." He finds he doesn't mind explaining it to Swann, talking out the logic behind it like he's untangling it in his own head. He's still bitter, still hateful, but talking is easier than letting it build up pressure and get confused in his head.

"They'll live." Jason's never really had close friends in school. Acquaintances, and the boys he hangs out with and used to manage their kite-making club for, but he's never had the sort of intimacy most people have with their friends. Even before he became a sullen teenager, he was isolated, always playing on his own.

He's still not being very nice, but the anger is no longer directed at her, and it's enough to keep Swann talking, even if she still doesn't comprehend a lot of it.

"Why did your family have to do anything to him? Maybe he was just sad inside. Sometimes I get really scared about things that aren't scary, and my daddy said that sometimes, people just feel a certain way. If things make me scared, maybe things made Quentin sad. Maybe he just didn't want to be sad anymore."

She's looking back down at her doll by the end of it, tightening the braids to make sure that the flowers don't fall out. She's been told a million times that dandelions are weeds, that if she's going to pick flowers, wouldn't she rather have the nice ones? But Swann has never understood why being a weed was supposed to make dandelions any less pretty or nice.

"Won't you be lonely?"

"It doesn't even matter if he didn't do anything. Everyone's going to look at us like we're zoo animals. They're going to see Quentin not being there more than they'll see any of us." A Quentin-shaped hole in the universe, sucking in people's views like a black hole. Maybe they'll make a pit stop on Caddy's protruding belly on the way, he thinks.

He shrugs. He hasn't thought about it that way, is angrier at the way people will think of him and his parents than he is about missing anyone.

"I don't care about them anyway."

She goes quiet, her brow knitting as she taps her toes together again, thinking hard. It's not easy for her to understand that transfer of blame, or why Jason is so sure about how people will treat them. She thinks that people would be nicer because of their loss.

"You're not... you're not zoo animals. Quentin was sad, that's all. And you're still here, and Caddy. And she's going to have a baby soon, and people will think about that instead, people like babies."

Turning her gaze back on him, she looks concerned, about him. "So you're just going to stay in your house all the time?"

ten year old swann

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welp so much for this turning sweet ;A;

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