♥ grayglube wrote 'Jungianism' for luvscharlie 1/3 ♥
Title: Jungianism 1/3
Author: grayglube
Summary: It's tragic. But the house is full of tragic things.
Spoilers/Warnings/Triggers: language, sexual content, consensual breathplay, violence, trigger mentions of sexual assault, small bit of gore-ish material, angest
Author's Notes: I had this idea that the theme of this was the different ways people hate each other and then somehow I was convinced it was about ways people love each other. But it's really not. It's about hating people. I told Jandy it felt like I was pulling a Tarantino with this fic. She told me she didn't think Tate would mind that at all. She's a funny lady and a terrific mod. It's a story in three parts. And like I said it's more a story about a theme than anything else. The quotes before each part are from Carl Jung, a famous psychoanalyst. I gave each pairing suggested in the prompt a go in a non-smut way. There is smut just for a pairing not suggested.
Jungianism 1/3
PART I:
I maintained that psychiatry, in the broadest sense, is a dialogue between the sick psyche and the psyche of the doctor, which is presumed to be 'normal.' It is a coming to terms between the sick personality and that of the therapist, both in principle equally subjective.
“Do you think she’s happy? Really?”
“She’s as happy as can expected after dealing with such traumatic events.”
“‘Traumatic events.’”
He tests the words on his tongue while moving to mimic the posture of the man sitting across from him on the other side of the uneven coffee table.
“…”
Ben Harmon suppresses the want to clench his teeth.
Tate goes on.
“When your relationship turned to shit with your wife did you think about how it was when it started? Or was it just little things all over the place? I get that.”
“Get what?”
The boy smirks knowingly.
“You wouldn’t really want to talk about it.”
Ben sighs and rolls his eyes before letting out a breath towards the ceiling.
“You’re performing, Tate," he mumbles around the filter of the cigarette he pushes between his lips.
“…”
Tate scowls.
“Go on," he goads with a plume of smoke because he can put on a performance to.
“It’s like post traumatic stress disorder, but…in my dick.”
“…”
“You must know what I mean.”
Leaning back into the chair he watches him for a reaction but Ben is used to this.
“I don’t think I do.”
“Really? Okay." Tate runs a hand through the curled fringe falling over his eyes and wets his mouth with a careful tongue tip. "Like guys who come back from Vietnam who hear firecrackers either duck under the table, right? Or they just go berserk. Like that, except in your dick.”
“…”
“But she’s more like sparkler than a firecracker…,”
“We’re not here to talk about her, Tate.”
“Oh, so we’ll just talk of her then, fine. That student you fucked and ruined your marriage with tried to fuck me yesterday and I thought ‘why not’…”
“Why?”
“I was feeling spiteful yesterday.”
“Because of what?”
“That would be talking about.”
The chiding tone of the boy who's a father's worst fear makes him want to break open his skull on the edge of the table.
“…”
“And I just couldn’t get it up because all that spiteful shit was still about her.”
“I understand.”
“But now, talking about…no of… the idea of my dick not ever being in any other girl but her, right now, has me pretty fucking hard, Doctor Harmon.”
“Go away, Tate”
______________________________________________________
They slip into old roles, and they all know they're playing at what they used to be, games just to pass the time. Or mark it with something definitive, moments they can make something tangible out of or intangible, some new task to perform or just something to think about later.
He can be Doctor Harmon and Tate can pretend he's a patient, his wife can be a real mother again and his daughter can brood over the inconsequential as if it's the most important thing to waste time on. That's all there is, time to waste, to fill, to make mundane with new habits, routines, diversions. It's all just a collection of performances, the ones they have all the time they need or want to prepare for, the roles they have always wanted to be in.
Maybe one day Tate will be Prince Charming and Violet will be some sunshine girl. Maybe he'll be the house's token violent psychopath. Maybe Vivien will be the new Nora. He could even be her Charles, some no darker than the real thing mirror to the patent tragic couple.
But then the house is full of those: Him and Vivien, Him and Hayden, Charles and Nora, Chad and Patrick, Constance and whatever man she comes across, Tate and Violet.
Murders and suicides and children who never live up to their parents' ideals (or live at all) really wreck havoc on the healthiness of one's relationship with the person they promise to love forever, the person they love right then, the person they thought they loved, the person they can't help but love.
______________________________________________________
“You never knew for sure did you?
“Never knew what for sure?”
“If we’d had sex. We did, a lot.”
“I’m sure.”
“You’re mocking me.”
“Maybe not as many times as you’ve had sex with your wife but then again I’m a lot younger than you, in terms of living years. Being stuck in this house with nothing to do but jerk off most days when there’s no electricity, no water, no food, no people, it just makes you appreciate actually doing it with another person, so maybe not a lot of sex but better sex than you or your wife were having, for sure.”
“Sex doesn’t make a relationship.”
“It’s a vital part of it.”
“But it’s not the focal point of the ones that last.”
“So…was I her fling?”
“Maybe she felt like she was lacking something with the absence of a stern parental presence at a crucial time in her life, maybe she was looking to replace that loss with something temporary until issues out of her control involving that parental presence was resolved.”
“So she was just trying to fill a void you guys left?”
“…”
“I think she was happy I could fill more than that for her.”
There's a look that passes between them and then the boy is gone without ever needing those two magic words being uttered to do so.
_______________________________________________
“Don’t worry I didn’t hurt her, physically you know. I’m not like that.”
“Does it excite you to talk about these things?”
“You should tell me to go away or I will start talking about ‘these’ things.”
“Do you feel as if I have a right to know about your sexual relationship with my daughter?”
“No. But you do. So let’s talk. No issue is too personal or too embarrassing, this is a safe place to discuss my feelings and views and opinions.”
“Do you enjoy this, Tate?”
“Enjoy what exactly?”
“Seeing how far you can push? How much you’ll be able to get in before I give in and break your skull open on the table.”
“I just want to see if we’ve got a boundary.”
“We do and you’re coming pretty close to it.”
“We do? Even after I raped your wife and fell in love with your daughter we have boundaries?”
“You don’t scare me, Tate.”
“You don’t really scare me either, to be honest.”
“But there are boundaries.”
“Maybe, but don’t lie to yourself Doctor Harmon, this is an honest space right? You wish I’d cross it, wish you could, because you could ask all those questions you can’t ask your wife or your daughter.”
“And what are ‘those’ questions?”
“Whether you’re wife came, whether you’re daughter still has sex with me.”
“And the answers to those questions?”
“Your wife did and you’re daughter doesn't.”
______________________________________________________
"Do you want to know about it?"
"..."
"Her first time."
"Not particularly, no."
"Well it's kind of hard to talk about the important life altering shit when I have to avoid the majority of them because they happen to deal with her too."
"Don't push things."
"So we can talk about it?"
"Talk about your first time."
"Same time."
"..."
Tate clicks his tongue against his teeth at the raised eyebrow and tightlipped scowl Doctor Harmon’s face contorts into.
“Oh, yeah…no we didn’t do it that early. Violet’s not a slut or an idiot, god! You think we did it then? That soon?”
There’s tense silence filled with something violent from the other side of the table.
“I don’t consider what I did to your wife the quintessential ‘first time’, she thought I was you so there’s some grey area you know?”
"But the time that I think of as the first time was satisfying."
"I hear it's supposed to be."
"It's instinctual; do you know what I mean?"
"What is?"
"Never mind."
"Tell me."
"Have you ever been with someone and they look up at you like you're their whole world while you're inside them like?"
"Tate."
"Sorry."
"..."
"And it's a lot of mess, sex. You know?"
"Comes with the territory."
"Have you ever taken someone's virginity? Very messy, bloody."
"What type of reaction are you trying to get out of me, Tate?"
"She wouldn't let me lick her afterwards, but I tried. And as for a reaction from you, I was hoping for a violent one."
"I think we'll take a break from our talks, Tate."
"Boundaries, right?"
Tate scowls and slams the door on his way out of the room.
______________________________________________________
He records their sessions together because his daughter has always been a bit of a cross between Nancy Drew and some noir movie Bogart portrayal, part junior girl detective, part cigarette and silly hat.
And he has no doubt that what’s said about her will not please her and won’t affirm some teenage dream that Tate Langdon loves her. Love is not what they had or have or might find.
Tate Langdon wants to feel it and pretends he does and may convince himself he loves things and people but he can’t because love for psychopaths doesn’t provoke some sort of higher emotional response. It’s merely a want associated with a person instead of a thing even then that isn’t right since the difference between people and things for psychopaths is that one can talk and feel pain and think and the other can’t. Love is just a want for a thing that’s more entertaining than a toy or an activity.
His daughter does feel it but she pretends that the person or the thing that she feels it for matters. Violet’s sociopathic tendencies outweigh her psychopathic, she may acknowledge that people and things are different but her own motives and wants mean that she finds it simple to allocate people and things onto and into levels, niches, of what matters to her and what doesn’t matter to her, she’s self-centered and cruel and would probably feel more loss over the destruction of her favorite Zippo lighter than she does over her mother’s rape.
The little tapes with secrets coded in on their films stretched across tiny plastic wheels will just about do the job, everything else she can piece together herself so in the end she tears herself apart just to get to the parts that are made up of Tate Langdon, pull them out and burn them and leave the people who really love her to put her back together the way she used to be.
Before everything.
Before Tate Langdon and the house and the dead baby brother and the parents that didn’t think they loved each other anymore and the nasty little habits of smoking and self mutilation she picked up along the way.
He can’t lie and say he knows it will work, but he hopes.
Really, he does.
Because if it should happen not to work he’s getting to the point where a whole happy family may not be what he needs, may not be what works. Maybe some parts are defective or just too similar.
He’s not an idiot.
He is not an idiot.
His daughter is more like him than her mother.
And he just happens to be a lot like the boy he’s been sitting opposite of for these past few months or years or decades at this point.
He’s a little drunk when he starts thinking: A is C and B is C, A and B are both C, C is psychopathy and about what happens if Violet is A or B and then the entirety of the logical equation shifts from equaling to adding up. If suddenly A is C and B is C becomes A plus B then C is a bit more shared psychopathy than a plainer variation.
His world becomes a bit more complicated with a happy family where the family he wants has a little psycho in it. His daughter just happened to turn out to be more of a little psycho than his first dead son ever got a chance to stay alive to become and his second dead son will never grow up to be because his second dead son won’t ever grow up at all.
He’s pouring another drink while he’s trying to decide if his happy family would be happy enough one way and not the other.
He’s sufficiently drunk while he tries to figure out what exactly those ways are.
Eventually, while still sufficiently drunk, he decides that what it really comes down to is how much his daughter resembles him.
______________________________________________________
He's never really wanted to talk to Doctor Harmon, not the first time they had started their sessions together, not now, but he does because he knows how lacking viable forms of entertainment are in the years the house goes uninhabited. He's also aware of just how meticulous her father is in filing all their clandestine "talk to me" sessions.
Really, the good doctor might as well hand his daughter the box himself with a ribbon on it for her birthday.
She's been a good girl for years; as good as a person can be when they exile themselves into self made hermit-hood.
So when he steals into her room at night and spies the tape recorder on the floor next to her bed it's not really a surprise.
And when he comes back the next to find her with her hand working furiously down the front of her underwear it's an expected outcome.
She doesn't know he's there because he doesn't announce his presence, which is something he knows backtracks all the not so nonexistent progress he's been making in his sessions, but it feels so much like déjà vu that he can't quite bring himself to come out and say boo.
It feels like before when she didn't know he existed in the dark corners of her creepy bedroom, the one he still thought of as his until she came and made it smell like Marlboro lights and lily of the valley and under the covers orgasms.
( Jungianism 2/3 )
( Jungianism 3/3 )
Author: grayglube
Summary: It's tragic. But the house is full of tragic things.
Spoilers/Warnings/Triggers: language, sexual content, consensual breathplay, violence, trigger mentions of sexual assault, small bit of gore-ish material, angest
Author's Notes: I had this idea that the theme of this was the different ways people hate each other and then somehow I was convinced it was about ways people love each other. But it's really not. It's about hating people. I told Jandy it felt like I was pulling a Tarantino with this fic. She told me she didn't think Tate would mind that at all. She's a funny lady and a terrific mod. It's a story in three parts. And like I said it's more a story about a theme than anything else. The quotes before each part are from Carl Jung, a famous psychoanalyst. I gave each pairing suggested in the prompt a go in a non-smut way. There is smut just for a pairing not suggested.
Jungianism 1/3
PART I:
I maintained that psychiatry, in the broadest sense, is a dialogue between the sick psyche and the psyche of the doctor, which is presumed to be 'normal.' It is a coming to terms between the sick personality and that of the therapist, both in principle equally subjective.
“Do you think she’s happy? Really?”
“She’s as happy as can expected after dealing with such traumatic events.”
“‘Traumatic events.’”
He tests the words on his tongue while moving to mimic the posture of the man sitting across from him on the other side of the uneven coffee table.
“…”
Ben Harmon suppresses the want to clench his teeth.
Tate goes on.
“When your relationship turned to shit with your wife did you think about how it was when it started? Or was it just little things all over the place? I get that.”
“Get what?”
The boy smirks knowingly.
“You wouldn’t really want to talk about it.”
Ben sighs and rolls his eyes before letting out a breath towards the ceiling.
“You’re performing, Tate," he mumbles around the filter of the cigarette he pushes between his lips.
“…”
Tate scowls.
“Go on," he goads with a plume of smoke because he can put on a performance to.
“It’s like post traumatic stress disorder, but…in my dick.”
“…”
“You must know what I mean.”
Leaning back into the chair he watches him for a reaction but Ben is used to this.
“I don’t think I do.”
“Really? Okay." Tate runs a hand through the curled fringe falling over his eyes and wets his mouth with a careful tongue tip. "Like guys who come back from Vietnam who hear firecrackers either duck under the table, right? Or they just go berserk. Like that, except in your dick.”
“…”
“But she’s more like sparkler than a firecracker…,”
“We’re not here to talk about her, Tate.”
“Oh, so we’ll just talk of her then, fine. That student you fucked and ruined your marriage with tried to fuck me yesterday and I thought ‘why not’…”
“Why?”
“I was feeling spiteful yesterday.”
“Because of what?”
“That would be talking about.”
The chiding tone of the boy who's a father's worst fear makes him want to break open his skull on the edge of the table.
“…”
“And I just couldn’t get it up because all that spiteful shit was still about her.”
“I understand.”
“But now, talking about…no of… the idea of my dick not ever being in any other girl but her, right now, has me pretty fucking hard, Doctor Harmon.”
“Go away, Tate”
______________________________________________________
They slip into old roles, and they all know they're playing at what they used to be, games just to pass the time. Or mark it with something definitive, moments they can make something tangible out of or intangible, some new task to perform or just something to think about later.
He can be Doctor Harmon and Tate can pretend he's a patient, his wife can be a real mother again and his daughter can brood over the inconsequential as if it's the most important thing to waste time on. That's all there is, time to waste, to fill, to make mundane with new habits, routines, diversions. It's all just a collection of performances, the ones they have all the time they need or want to prepare for, the roles they have always wanted to be in.
Maybe one day Tate will be Prince Charming and Violet will be some sunshine girl. Maybe he'll be the house's token violent psychopath. Maybe Vivien will be the new Nora. He could even be her Charles, some no darker than the real thing mirror to the patent tragic couple.
But then the house is full of those: Him and Vivien, Him and Hayden, Charles and Nora, Chad and Patrick, Constance and whatever man she comes across, Tate and Violet.
Murders and suicides and children who never live up to their parents' ideals (or live at all) really wreck havoc on the healthiness of one's relationship with the person they promise to love forever, the person they love right then, the person they thought they loved, the person they can't help but love.
______________________________________________________
“You never knew for sure did you?
“Never knew what for sure?”
“If we’d had sex. We did, a lot.”
“I’m sure.”
“You’re mocking me.”
“Maybe not as many times as you’ve had sex with your wife but then again I’m a lot younger than you, in terms of living years. Being stuck in this house with nothing to do but jerk off most days when there’s no electricity, no water, no food, no people, it just makes you appreciate actually doing it with another person, so maybe not a lot of sex but better sex than you or your wife were having, for sure.”
“Sex doesn’t make a relationship.”
“It’s a vital part of it.”
“But it’s not the focal point of the ones that last.”
“So…was I her fling?”
“Maybe she felt like she was lacking something with the absence of a stern parental presence at a crucial time in her life, maybe she was looking to replace that loss with something temporary until issues out of her control involving that parental presence was resolved.”
“So she was just trying to fill a void you guys left?”
“…”
“I think she was happy I could fill more than that for her.”
There's a look that passes between them and then the boy is gone without ever needing those two magic words being uttered to do so.
_______________________________________________
“Don’t worry I didn’t hurt her, physically you know. I’m not like that.”
“Does it excite you to talk about these things?”
“You should tell me to go away or I will start talking about ‘these’ things.”
“Do you feel as if I have a right to know about your sexual relationship with my daughter?”
“No. But you do. So let’s talk. No issue is too personal or too embarrassing, this is a safe place to discuss my feelings and views and opinions.”
“Do you enjoy this, Tate?”
“Enjoy what exactly?”
“Seeing how far you can push? How much you’ll be able to get in before I give in and break your skull open on the table.”
“I just want to see if we’ve got a boundary.”
“We do and you’re coming pretty close to it.”
“We do? Even after I raped your wife and fell in love with your daughter we have boundaries?”
“You don’t scare me, Tate.”
“You don’t really scare me either, to be honest.”
“But there are boundaries.”
“Maybe, but don’t lie to yourself Doctor Harmon, this is an honest space right? You wish I’d cross it, wish you could, because you could ask all those questions you can’t ask your wife or your daughter.”
“And what are ‘those’ questions?”
“Whether you’re wife came, whether you’re daughter still has sex with me.”
“And the answers to those questions?”
“Your wife did and you’re daughter doesn't.”
______________________________________________________
"Do you want to know about it?"
"..."
"Her first time."
"Not particularly, no."
"Well it's kind of hard to talk about the important life altering shit when I have to avoid the majority of them because they happen to deal with her too."
"Don't push things."
"So we can talk about it?"
"Talk about your first time."
"Same time."
"..."
Tate clicks his tongue against his teeth at the raised eyebrow and tightlipped scowl Doctor Harmon’s face contorts into.
“Oh, yeah…no we didn’t do it that early. Violet’s not a slut or an idiot, god! You think we did it then? That soon?”
There’s tense silence filled with something violent from the other side of the table.
“I don’t consider what I did to your wife the quintessential ‘first time’, she thought I was you so there’s some grey area you know?”
"But the time that I think of as the first time was satisfying."
"I hear it's supposed to be."
"It's instinctual; do you know what I mean?"
"What is?"
"Never mind."
"Tell me."
"Have you ever been with someone and they look up at you like you're their whole world while you're inside them like?"
"Tate."
"Sorry."
"..."
"And it's a lot of mess, sex. You know?"
"Comes with the territory."
"Have you ever taken someone's virginity? Very messy, bloody."
"What type of reaction are you trying to get out of me, Tate?"
"She wouldn't let me lick her afterwards, but I tried. And as for a reaction from you, I was hoping for a violent one."
"I think we'll take a break from our talks, Tate."
"Boundaries, right?"
Tate scowls and slams the door on his way out of the room.
______________________________________________________
He records their sessions together because his daughter has always been a bit of a cross between Nancy Drew and some noir movie Bogart portrayal, part junior girl detective, part cigarette and silly hat.
And he has no doubt that what’s said about her will not please her and won’t affirm some teenage dream that Tate Langdon loves her. Love is not what they had or have or might find.
Tate Langdon wants to feel it and pretends he does and may convince himself he loves things and people but he can’t because love for psychopaths doesn’t provoke some sort of higher emotional response. It’s merely a want associated with a person instead of a thing even then that isn’t right since the difference between people and things for psychopaths is that one can talk and feel pain and think and the other can’t. Love is just a want for a thing that’s more entertaining than a toy or an activity.
His daughter does feel it but she pretends that the person or the thing that she feels it for matters. Violet’s sociopathic tendencies outweigh her psychopathic, she may acknowledge that people and things are different but her own motives and wants mean that she finds it simple to allocate people and things onto and into levels, niches, of what matters to her and what doesn’t matter to her, she’s self-centered and cruel and would probably feel more loss over the destruction of her favorite Zippo lighter than she does over her mother’s rape.
The little tapes with secrets coded in on their films stretched across tiny plastic wheels will just about do the job, everything else she can piece together herself so in the end she tears herself apart just to get to the parts that are made up of Tate Langdon, pull them out and burn them and leave the people who really love her to put her back together the way she used to be.
Before everything.
Before Tate Langdon and the house and the dead baby brother and the parents that didn’t think they loved each other anymore and the nasty little habits of smoking and self mutilation she picked up along the way.
He can’t lie and say he knows it will work, but he hopes.
Really, he does.
Because if it should happen not to work he’s getting to the point where a whole happy family may not be what he needs, may not be what works. Maybe some parts are defective or just too similar.
He’s not an idiot.
He is not an idiot.
His daughter is more like him than her mother.
And he just happens to be a lot like the boy he’s been sitting opposite of for these past few months or years or decades at this point.
He’s a little drunk when he starts thinking: A is C and B is C, A and B are both C, C is psychopathy and about what happens if Violet is A or B and then the entirety of the logical equation shifts from equaling to adding up. If suddenly A is C and B is C becomes A plus B then C is a bit more shared psychopathy than a plainer variation.
His world becomes a bit more complicated with a happy family where the family he wants has a little psycho in it. His daughter just happened to turn out to be more of a little psycho than his first dead son ever got a chance to stay alive to become and his second dead son will never grow up to be because his second dead son won’t ever grow up at all.
He’s pouring another drink while he’s trying to decide if his happy family would be happy enough one way and not the other.
He’s sufficiently drunk while he tries to figure out what exactly those ways are.
Eventually, while still sufficiently drunk, he decides that what it really comes down to is how much his daughter resembles him.
______________________________________________________
He's never really wanted to talk to Doctor Harmon, not the first time they had started their sessions together, not now, but he does because he knows how lacking viable forms of entertainment are in the years the house goes uninhabited. He's also aware of just how meticulous her father is in filing all their clandestine "talk to me" sessions.
Really, the good doctor might as well hand his daughter the box himself with a ribbon on it for her birthday.
She's been a good girl for years; as good as a person can be when they exile themselves into self made hermit-hood.
So when he steals into her room at night and spies the tape recorder on the floor next to her bed it's not really a surprise.
And when he comes back the next to find her with her hand working furiously down the front of her underwear it's an expected outcome.
She doesn't know he's there because he doesn't announce his presence, which is something he knows backtracks all the not so nonexistent progress he's been making in his sessions, but it feels so much like déjà vu that he can't quite bring himself to come out and say boo.
It feels like before when she didn't know he existed in the dark corners of her creepy bedroom, the one he still thought of as his until she came and made it smell like Marlboro lights and lily of the valley and under the covers orgasms.
( Jungianism 2/3 )
( Jungianism 3/3 )