Work Text:
For Jared, thinking about his life, as a whole, stepping back and taking in the whole messy tapestry, well—it’s an exercise he prefers to avoid.
That isn’t to say he’s ungrateful, nor that he’d call it on the whole bad. There are so many experiences he treasures, so many people he’s deeply thankful to have met, to have loved, so many bird songs listened to on so many sunny mornings he’d never want to forget, but. But.
There’s also been unimaginable pain, bone-deep humiliation, unthinkable betrayal. He knows the general beats of what has happened to him, can take certain memories out of the box, one at a time, and rehash them (kind of). But whenever he tries to do it all at once, to “fully experience his trauma,” to “be present in his pain” (as his therapist puts it), he can’t do it. It’s like staring at the sun, like trying to view the eclipse without the appropriate safety glasses. The clarity burns, and there’s no choice but to look away or experience devastation and destruction in the face of it. Jared thinks he’s quite good at doing what needs to be done, regardless of his personal comfort, but there’s certain thresholds his survival instincts won’t let him cross.
The story he tells himself is this: his memory is something best experienced like a package of sumptuous Godiva truffles. Just a little bit at a time—too much at once and he begins to feel quite sick.
The story his therapist tells him goes a little differently. This story contains a lot of phrases like “dissociation,” “complex post traumatic stress,” and comes with recommendations like “five sessions a week” and “sertraline.”
Jared is a functioning adult and knows what’s good for him and what isn’t, knows that his therapist is a trained professional and that her story is probably the correct one. But the vain part of himself, the part of himself that loves the luxury of Brooks Brothers sweaters and William Sonoma linens—that part of himself likes the chocolate box story better, guiltily. That part of himself insists on framing so much of what’s happened to him as love, just done wrong, rather than abuse, executed as intended.
There’s nothing wrong with liking to feel valued, Jared tells himself as he drives over to the hostel after a frantic pleading email from Richard about the investor meeting tomorrow. Sure, he’d had to cancel the dinner with Gloria he’d been looking forward to for a month, but the chocolate-box part of himself was shamefully satisfied that Richard always turned to him with these things. Golly, what an honor, Donald! he thinks as he pulls into the driveway and shuts off his Volt’s engine.
Upon knocking at the front door, he is greeted by a harried, unshaven-looking Richard, near-manic with stress about the impending presentation. Counterintuitively (shamefully), being confronted with Richard’s panic engenders a deep calm in Jared, one that settles within him like he’s just taken a deep inhale of lemongrass ginger hand soap. Sure, there’s always the uncomfortable thrum of ache at the thought of Richard being in pain—psychological or otherwise—but presiding over all is the flood of relief of being of use. Of not being so easily expendable. Of being needed.
So he sits there, next to Richard, and coaches him through essentially the same pitch deck they’ve used like, twenty times by now. A part of him knows that Richard should really have it down at this point, that it’s perhaps concerning that Pied Piper’s CEO hasn’t even begun to shake off performance jitters at this stage of the game. And a different part hopes and wishes and prays that Richard never shakes it off, never figures out how to function as a businessman, a leader, a founder, because if he does—what would Jared be for?
So he sits there, next to Richard, and the hostel is empty. The last time they were all there together, everyone had been drinking, and Gilfoyle of all people had pointed the neck of his beer bottle at Jared and said, “So are you ever going to tell us your deal? Like without all the bullshit?” and Jared both knew and did not know what he meant, so he hemmed and hawed and dithered until Erlich brought out his gravity bong and the conversation moved on. It’s not the first time someone has asked, not the first time Jared has wriggled out of answering.
He sits there, with Richard, and the hostel is empty, and he represses the urge to jiggle his knee in jubilation, because his jubilation is wrong.
By the time Richard has been placated enough to accept a cup of sleepytime tea and consider the possibility of going to bed, it’s late. Jared has therapy tomorrow, and he’s been procrastinating this week’s packet of worksheets, and he knows he’s going to have to stay up at least another hour or two to finish them and that he’ll be exhausted tomorrow. He knows his therapist will see the bags under his eyes and guess roughly what has kept him up. If he closes his eyes, he can already see the pucker of her mouth, tut-tut. He can already hear the silence stretching between them as he tries and fails yet again to honestly and simply recount, beginning to end, just what the first two or so decades of his life consisted of.
“Thanks for the help, man, seriously,” Richard says as he leads Jared to the door. For a second, Jared can feel Richard almost put his hand on the small of his back before aborting the gesture. A full-body shudder involuntarily passes through Jared, and there’s that other thing. The thing he’s been keeping from his therapist, like a child hiding a subpar report card. He knows what she’ll say, he knows he won’t listen. And is that so wrong? He likes the life he’s built for himself, the one that started when he quit Hooli a year or two ago, the one that’s being built in tandem with Pied Piper.
He likes his life—or at least, he likes it better than the one he left behind.