♥ ohyellowbird wrote 'Make War' for shootingstella 1/3 ♥
Title: Make War
Author: ohyellowbird
Summary: Dr. Violet Harmon's new patient is what you might call a game-changer. Or a psychopath. Both.
Spoilers/Warnings/ Triggers: Domestic abuse. Dub-con. Gore.
Author’s Note: Hey there! I hope you like this? It may stray from your prompt. A lot. But hopefully the fifteen thousand words will make up for that!
Make War 1/3
“Gabe. For the tenth time, I can’t do dinner tonight. Just reschedule, it’ll be fine,” Violet huffs into her mobile phone, chewing at the side of her thumb. It’s hot in her office even with the windows cracked and blinds shuttered. Summer is hell in Los Angeles, sticky, sweaty hell and her patience is barely there without the heat.
There’s a rumble of dissent on the other end of the line, and then nothing. Violet stares down at the main menu of her phone. “Fucker hung up on me!”
She considers chucking it, preferably out the window, but before she gets the chance to fully engage in a temper tantrum, she hears rather than sees, someone at her door. She sweeps the phone into the junk drawer of her desk instead and vows to ignore any and all calls until she can clock out for the day and pour herself a good, strong drink. Winding down, she glances back to the stranger.
Some guy in what looks to be his late twenties stands leant against the frame. He’s got both hands jammed into his pockets and a crooked smile and if Violet were a weaker woman she might go so far as to call him studly. Instead, she settles on an appropriate, “Who the fuck are you?”
Something must be funny because that stupid smile only widens to reveal two rows of perfect pearly whites, and pretty boy steps boldy into the room. “Is that how you treat your patients?” he tuts, clearly amused, and Violet, remembering a schedule change, has the sudden urge to crawl under her desk.
“Oh god - I mean. I’m so sorry, Mr...” she flails, mouth agape in horror, shuffling through the papers on her desk. “Langdon.”
By the time she’s retrieved the right file, he’s flopped down onto the leather couch and is bent forward, elbows on knees, to better watch her flounder.
“Call me Tate.”
Violet doesn’t really hear, just nods mechanically, pretends she isn’t in the middle of an itsy-bitsy meltdown. You just berated a new patient! she screams, hopefully inside of her own head, and reaches for the closest notepad. Maybe she tears off a few too many pieces, maybe she makes a mountain of crumpled yellow wads in the trash, but if she does, it’s only because this incident is the cherry on her shit sundae.
“You’re late,” is the next thing she says, because he is. And that’s why she mistook him for some creepy stranger - creepy, sexy stranger. It isn’t her fault, really.
Tate winces. “I know, sorry. The maid let me in.” He doesn’t sound sorry, but one look at his file tells Violet that, if he’s displaying sociopathic tendencies, he probably doesn’t feel remorse, so she accepts his faux apology with a trained smile and settles into the chair opposite him.
“It’s okay,” she says mildly, and just like that she’s back in doctor-patient mode, broad shoulders and dimples mostly forgotten.
Switching gears, something Violet will learn Tate is keen to do, he gives her a skeptical once over and snorts. “Aren’t you a little young to be a doctor?”
Violet bristles. “If you’re worried about my credentials I can assure you - “He shakes his head and motions for her to begin with her initial questionnaire.
Pad in lap, pen in hand, she nods. The rest of the session goes well. Tate tells her about his violent fantasies, surprisingly forthcoming with them, and Violet ping pongs between doling out sound advice and getting snagged on dark eyes and even darker ideas.
*****
Another insignificant battle, buildup to World War III, takes place in the middle of Violet’s kitchen later that night.
“What the hell, Gabe?!” she screams from her seat at the table, at four in the fucking morning.
Gabe is drunk. Stumbling, straight-out-of-a-movie drunk. He waves off her question with a flippant hand. “Sorry, lost track of time.”
Violet surges up from the table, jaw set, and circles the room to get up close, face to face. “Where were you?” she snarls, pent up anger threatening to boil over, jaw set, eyes burning.
Gabe laughs, laughs and throws up his hands in surrender. “Hey, whoa there. What is this, the, uh, German Inquisition, or whatever?”
All of Violet’s rage just wilt into a hum of annoyance at his idiocy and she sighs, deciding that spending the night screaming herself hoarse again just isn’t worth it. Another argument swept under the rug. She’s choking on dust bunnies.
“Spanish,” she mumbles, turning on him before he can make a stupid face and ask what she means.
She climbs the stairs alone and doesn’t fall into bed until the door is locked, until Gabe can’t stumble up after her and slink under the sheets to beg her forgiveness through sloppy sex. Tonight, he sits slumped against the closed door and rambles for a while, but she can’t make out what he’s saying, and even if she could, it wouldn’t be enough.
Staring wide-and-teary-eyed into the dark, pillow sandwiched between her hand and cheek, Violet spends hours wondering if, at this point, anything could be.
Violet followed Gabe to Los Angeles three years ago, back when she was young, hopeful, and idealistic about romance. He’d caught the acting bug and was chasing a dream. She hated the idea of moving, but she was in love, and if love was leaving the east coast, well then she was packing her bags.
Things were good at first. Her parents bought her Murder House - that’s what the bratty ginger twins next door called it - with hopes that she might settle down there. Following her father’s footsteps into psychiatry, Violet was able to finish her schooling in L.A., and with Gabe getting more and more parts, happily ever after started to seem not so far away.
But with enough time, everything changed.
They never saw each other. She was always cooped up in the office with patients and he was always on set or working parties. She’d eat dinner alone and wake up late to the sting of his breath on her face. Gabe slipped into alcoholism too easily. With Hollywood shelling out free booze and rejection at every turn, it wasn’t hard. More than once he’d come home smelling of perfume or with a pink-stained mouth, but she couldn’t leave him. She wouldn’t. Some foolish part of herself that still believed in happy endings wanted to pretend that all this was just a bump in the road, that things would get better, like before, like when they lived in Boston.
But better never came.
The empty side of the bed next to her is cold without Gabe there sweating out his liquor. She reaches a hand out to feel the cool sheets and falls asleep mentally running through her day, snagged over and over on rogue thoughts of her newest patient Tate.
*****
The second time Violet sees Tate, two weeks and one cancellation later, she doesn’t use the F word on contact or fall to pieces. But she still can’t quite get over how handsome he is. Dressed down in a button up shirt and blue jeans, hair a tangled mess of yellow, he looks like something out of a magazine, a cardboard cut out you’d see in stores at the mall that sold brands meant for skateboarding to bitchy preteens.
He’s the All-American Dream wrapped up in cotton and stripes, but inside he’s darkness. He spins stories that should make her stomach churn, about mowing down the kids he sees walking home after school and knifing women at the grocery store, about cutting a dog open straight down the middle just to see what it would look like. And all the while he’s got this look on his face, eyes sharp, smile sharp, expression cutting. He’s ecstatic about the idea of crushing some gay guy’s skull.
“He’s a fucking asshole,” Tate says, hands held out front of him and shaped in deadly parentheses. He’s pretending to strangle this “Patrick” character. It’s terrifying, or it would be if Violet wasn’t busy admiring the lunatic’s hands, long, slender fingers, nails bitten to the quick.
“You know, Tate, if I feel you intend to do actual harm to someone or yourself I have to -- “Tate puts a hand up at her practiced mantra. “I know, I know. Relax.”
His smile is disarming. Her voice falls away and she’s content to listen for the remainder of his session, surveying him through narrowed eyes and scribbling gibberish on her pad in some guise of therapy until their time runs out.
That night, Violet dreams of a head of blonde curls between her legs and of a large pair of hands closing around her throat.
*****
“I’ve jerked off thinking about you,” Tate says a few weeks later, like it’s just something she probably should know, and Violet very nearly spills coffee all down the front of her shirt.
“What?” she sputters, dabbing at her mouth with the back of her hand and placing the mug down where she can’t so easily scald her tits. It’s not that patients haven’t come on to her before; it’s just that they’ve never been, well, him.
Tate grins like he’s just won the lottery and leans forward on the couch, seated right at the edge of the cushion. Goaded on by her response, he wets his lips and, narrow-eyed, continues.
“Yeah, about you, sucking my cock or riding me right here on this couch.” His voice has dropped an octave, low and soft like silk. It’s horrible, terrible. Violet can feel a traitorous slickness between her thighs. She wants to say something, to reprimand his behavior or at least to comment on why he’d say such a thing, but when she opens her mouth, all that leaves her is a quiet yelp. What? No sex for two weeks has been rough. (But the bastard deserves it.)
Crossing and uncrossing her legs, Violet drops her gaze to the pad in her lap and pretends to write something that must look like little more than a scribble from where Tate’s sitting, which, fair enough. But he’s not watching her pen. He’s more interested in the flush that’s bloomed across her cheeks and where her patterned skirt has ridden up her thighs.
“I wonder what you’d taste like, what kind of sounds you’d make, if your toes would push at my sides when I was fucking you too hard.” He doesn’t stop until Violet pulls herself together long enough to ask, her voice sounding pathetically weak, that he leave.
He does, but not without a wounded glance back. Emotion flits through his features and then it’s gone just as quickly. She’s surprised. She thought his attempts at flirting had been just another game, a test to see how far he could push her. She shakes her head to clear it and uncurls the fists she’d unknowingly been clenching. He’s a patient, she reminds herself.
But Violet spends the rest of the session remembering that face and being plagued his same, deplorable curiosities.
*****
Gabe doesn’t come home that night. She wakes up to a voicemail, but wipes it from her phone without bothering to listen, and cries in the shower.
If she doesn’t seem put together at work, none of her patients notice. They rattle on unaware, about hopes and dreams and fears and whatever bullshit they wouldn’t want to tell their family or friends. And she listens, because it’s her job, but she’s finding more and more that she doesn’t really care. Chad worries his boyfriend is cheating, Nora is terrified she’ll never have a baby, they’re all the same. They’re fucking hopeless. Everyone is.
This goes on for weeks and weeks, an endless cycle of woe-is-me spiced with the occasional drunken argument with Gabe. Tate’s sessions are her only reprieve. He still talks about murder, about taking people somewhere clean, out of this filthy world, but he hasn’t mentioned any of his sexual fantasies since that first time. Violet knows she should be proud of him, for showing restraint and for understanding that it had made her uncomfortable, but she can still hear that heated tone of his voice and, behind closed eyes, she can almost see what he had described.
*****
“And there are these voices...” If he’s trying to sound embarrassed to reveal that he thinks “people” are whispering to him in his head, it’s superficial. Violet just nods.
“I see. And what are these voices telling you to do?”
Tate shrugs. “Stuff. Murder and Mayhem, you know the deal.” There’s a fresh hole in his jeans, ripped at the knee. He keeps picking at the edges, pulling loose threads and winding them around his finger until the tip goes red. Violet watches, caught up in the simple act until she catches herself and looks back to her clipboard, ashamed.
“So...” She wants to ask, or more precisely, her sex drive wants to ask, about his sexual fantasies, but she doesn’t, just moves down a mental list to the practices he should be doing to suppress these violent urges and replace them with more appropriate behavior. “Are you keeping a journal, like I’d asked?”
Tate snorts. “No.”
“Well,” It takes a moment to rein in her irritation at his dismissal. “If you were keeping one, what kind of things would you be putting in it? Hobbies, distractions, thoughts?” She gives a few examples, reactions to sports or movies, a review of his day, but the whole time Tate’s just watching her with the beginnings of a smile, his eyes unreadable.
His gaze is penetrating, leaves her feeling naked, like he knows, like he just knows that she brought herself off last night thinking about his hands all over her, restless and attentive in a way Gabe has never been.
He looks to be teetering between two things, lower lip pulled between his teeth, but then Violet shifts under the sudden heat of his gaze and, like that, some decision has been made. Tate’s mouth slips into that familiar, teasing grin and a moment later, he’s crossed the room to sit at the edge of the coffee table, knees spread around Violet’s crossed legs, close, too close.
Violet draws in a sharp breath because Jesus, how does a person move like that? Quick and dangerous, like the swoop of a hawk, and yeah, she knows that makes her prey. For her part, she doesn’t fold under his stare, meets it directly despite the messy tremble of her pulse.
“Tate?”
Tate rewards her with a flash of teeth, and then he’s leaning forward into the space between them, hands covering her knees, sliding up the tops of her thighs as he moves in, slow, like he might frighten her. Violet is terrified. Unprofessional! Unprofessional! sounds like an internal alarm, but then there are fingers edging under the hem of her skirt and curving around the creases where thighs meets pelvis and it takes every last stitch of resolve to not melt into Tate’s burning touch.
“I think about this,” he confesses, thumbs pushing into the insides of Violet’s hips, face inches away. He smells clean, like cheap shampoo and soap, but like something else too, musky like a boy, cigarettes, and with bitter breath that makes her wonder if he’s a user. That suspicion alone should be enough to have her sending him out the door, which just goes to show how far gone she is. “I wonder if what I say ever gets you wet. I think it does, I think you like hearing me talk about blood, the smell, the taste, what it feels like when it’s dried under my fingernails.”
Violet is helpless in that moment, left watching the way Tate’s mouth works around each filthy word. She knows what has to happen. She has to tell him to leave, that she no longer feels comfortable treating him but that she’ll make other arrangements for him, some referrals for where he could go next. But Violet doesn’t say a thing. When she thinks she might have mustered the strength, Tate’s fingers sink between her legs to rub loose circles over the crotch of her tights and the whole world of right and wrong just falls out from under her feet.
“I bet you’ve got a cute pussy,” he says, and now his lips are right at her ear. His other hand is pressed into the cushion at the outside of her thigh for balance and he’s got the pad of his middle finger squared up with what would be her clit if she weren’t wearing anything underneath that skirt.
Violet makes an unintelligible sound, something like a squeak, and closes her eyes to the feel of his mouth sucking a red mark at the hinge of her jaw. Everything goes quiet and for some small amount of time, maybe a minute or so, she doesn’t stop him. She keeps her hands folded in her lap until they’re not, until they’re curled into the front of Tate’s shirt, and he continues coaxing her into madness with fingers grinding against the wet spot of her tights.
Then there’s the faint sound of ripping and a low, unsteady, “oh fuck, Dr. Harmon,” being muffled in the side of her throat. Violet’s brain kicks back online with a jolt.
“Tate!” she huffs, and it sounds more like a groan at first, but with enough pressure on his chest, he relents, pulling back to look at her with blown pupils, face flushed a pretty pink.
She can’t meet his eyes. When she tells him, “I think you should leave,” in as stern a voice as she can manage with an unbearable pressure between her legs, it’s more to the couch than the heavy-breathing boy. He wavers in front of her, bent slightly still, but when she doesn’t meet his eyes, he complies. Dragging a hand through his hair, he leaves without another word.
Violet spends the rest of the afternoon beating herself up about what transpired during Tate’s session. She could lose her license over this, nearly a decade of schooling wasted on some sinister kid and a bullshit hickey. What this would do to Gabe if he found out is at the back of her mind, but it’s there, and when she hears a key in the lock that night, she makes sure she’s got her hair flipped over the right shoulder before greeting him with a guilt-fueled kiss.
I’m going to try harder,” he says with a watery smile, hands cupping her face. The bruise on her neck throbs.
“Me too.”
Never again, she promises herself, and if there’s a tiny voice that frowns at that, well then she doesn’t care to listen.
*****
Tate skips out on his next two appointments. She doesn’t see him for three weeks. And when he does finally show up for a session, they don’t talk about what happened. It’s the big, job killing elephant in the room.
“You look tired,” she says neutrally from across the room. He does. There are half moons etched below each of his eyes and his hair, usually a tangled mess, is hidden beneath a faded black beanie. The stubble on his face is more than a shade. A part of her wants to rub a palm over its rasp.
Tate shrugs, quiet, too quiet.
“So, how have you been?”
He makes a noncommittal noise, but when the silence stretches on, takes a slow breath. “My brother died, last week.”
Any lingering sexual tension Violet had been feeling disappears. Her face goes soft. “Oh Tate, I’m so sorry. If you’d like to talk about anything -- “
“He was murdered.” His tone doesn’t bear questioning. Hands balled into fists at his sides, he speaks through a clenched jaw. “My cocksucker of a mother fucking forgot him, left him at some ghetto park, and some guys jumped him. He went to the hospital in an ambulance and ended up in a body bag.” It’s like every word is being punched out of him, like he’d be more comfortable talking about pushing out a kitten’s eyeballs with his thumbs than family. And if that’s true, well then maybe there’s a reason Tate’s so fucked up. If only he would go into it.
Well, with a little trained prodding, he does.
Violet just listens quietly as Tate talks, about what Beau was like, about how sweet he really was despite what people thought, how good. About how his mother never liked Beau, about how she kept him locked away at home like Addie. His voice shivers, like maybe he’s falling apart, but that same glint he gets is still there in his eyes, bright and furious. And just when Violet thinks he might threaten to kill those “motherfuckers,” he stands.
“I’ve gotta go,” he says with a sad smile, and before she can ask why, he’s gone, out the door on long legs and leaving behind only the faint scent of cigarettes.
She’s never seen him shaken up like that, alight with genuine emotion. Sure, he could smile and frown, fit his face into a hundred different molds, but rarely could she glimpse any humanity in him. A part of her wonders if it’s a good sign, if she’s finally getting to him, but it’s that same hopeful, naive shade that still wants to work things out with Gabe.
Cranking open the window to light up, always anxious for a smoke after sessions with Tate, something she should analyze, Violet flips through mystery boy’s background check and says a little prayer for Beau.
*****
Gabe calls to say that he’ll be home early, asks Violet if she’d like to have dinner at home. Sat in the bath, cell phone trapped between her ear and shoulder and with no other obligations, she agrees.
But halfway through sautéing the veggies, Violet gets distracted. She’d left the T.V. on in the other room for some background noise just in time for the start of the six o'clock news.
Dressed in just a tank top and panties, she nearly trips over herself speeding into the family room to catch the tail end of the lead anchor’s sentence.
“... found dead just outside a park in South Central.”
Of course right then, with her heart dragging against the front of her chest, the door swings open. “Violet!”
Violet’s head snaps in Gabe’s direction. “Shh!” she hisses, turning back to the television, watching the news cut to an on-location shot of a battered park at dusk. A woman with perfectly styled hair and a tailored pantsuit looking ridiculously out of place amongst the urban backdrop clears her throat and puts on a cheap smile.
“Thank you, Elizabeth. Yes, the bodies of eight young men were found an hour ago. Nearby residents complained of hearing gunshots at the local basketball courts. Gang violence is suspected, but -- “
Tate?
Right at the brink of a meltdown, she blinks at the dark screen for a moment before realizing that Gabe is standing at her side, remote in hand.
“No 'Hello honey, how was work?' What the fuck, Violet?” he snarls, and it’s obvious that he’s gone, rolling, spun, all of the above.
Violet takes one look at the empty blackness of his eyes and attempts to push past him, not in the mood, but then he’s got a hand on her arm. “Let me go,” she says, trying to yank free. He gets like this, volatile. And some days she tiptoes around his swinging moods, but with the very likely possibility that her patient might have murdered a handful of men tonight, she’s got too much on her plate for that bullshit.
Gabe’s grip grows tight, cruel, her skin haloed white around where his fingertips are pressed hard.
“Moira tells me you have a new patient,” he says out of the blue, but she won’t meet his eyes. She’s staring at where he’s holding her, trying to pry at his fingers until he’s got that hand too, wrist shackled easily.
“What are you talking about?”
“Some blonde guy, tall. Real fucked in the head, she says.”
“Tate?”
“Is that his name?”
Violet laughs bitterly, gives Gabe her meanest smile. “Yeah. And he’s not new. I’ve been treating him for months. Now, let. Me. Go.”
He still doesn’t release her. If anything, his grip grows more vice-like, his expression dark. There’s a dead calm in the house. It’s stifling, leaves her paralyzed, held under the weight of this so wrong relationship. “You’re fucking him, aren’t you?”
And now she can smell it, the whiskey on his breath, a hint of perfume too, he must have started early to be home already. It’s too much to process. She can’t deal.
“Fuck off!” she screams, and tears free from his grip to leap up the stairs. She takes them two, three at a time and doesn’t stop running until she’s got both the bedroom and bathroom doors bolted shut.
Smoke fills the kitchen downstairs and the fire alarm chirps, but Violet doesn’t move. She stays there on the bathroom rug, sat against the side of the tub hugging her knees. For a few minutes she cries, clutches at her sore arm and babbles on under her breath about wishing he was dead, about wanting to kill him herself.
When she’s fresh out of sadness, Violet spreads out on the cool tile and wonders about what she’d heard on the news. Surely it was just a coincidence, right? South Central was notorious for gang violence. Tate couldn’t have been the cause. But would it be so bad if he was? a new part of her muses. This new part has had more and more to say as of late. It’d been birthed by Gabe’s alcoholism and cruelty, but had not bloomed until she’d begun treating Tate. More and more, she is beginning to agree with him, and it’s scaring her. People are shit, some worse than others. And those worse than worse, rapists and abusers, killers, whoever took Beau’s life, those people deserved to die.
Hours later, long after Gabe’s left again, the car’s exhaust loud even from the second story, Violet falls asleep there on the rug. She dreams of Gabe, but he’s so pale, and of Tate.
*****
Tate misses his next session. And the next. She doesn’t see him for weeks. It’s startling how much his absence bothers her. That snip of news runs on an endless reel through her head. Panic laps at her, her fingers itch to dial the number for the LAPD and turn him in, but for some reason, maybe because she’s losing touch with reality and her morals and just about everything else, she never calls.
Things level out with Gabe. He fills up Violet’s voicemail with empty apologies that won’t wash away the bruises on her arm, and she doesn’t hide anymore when he comes home. She doesn’t know why she doesn’t just leave. Maybe because he’s all she’s got out here. Making friends had never been easy for Violet. She had Moira and her patients, and nothing else. She knows that that makes her weak, but she’s beginning to wonder if she’s a lot of other things too, if maybe her and Tate Langdon aren’t so different after all.
One night, when Gabe’s passed out in the den, she wanders in and makes those same parentheses with her hands like Tate had months ago. Are my hands too small? she thinks sadly, flexing her fingers, remembering what he’d looked like in her dream, so pale and still. Then he makes a sound in his sleep and it’s like someone’s poured ice water all down her back. She takes a sharp breath and leaves the room, spends half of an hour washing her hands and face, staring into the mirror and seeing someone new.
*****
Up at midnight reading a book one night, Violet’s heart nearly leaps from her chest. There’s a sudden, frantic knocking at the front door. It’s raining outside, the first drizzle of Fall. She can’t get up from the couch fast enough, book flying from her lap, and into the foyer. Gabe’s upstairs with a bottle of Jack, supposedly reading over his lines, so who the fuck --?
The door’s unlocked and he’s inside before she knows what’s happening.
“Tate?”
He’s soaking, hair and clothes heavy, dripping everywhere. It’s then that she remembers she’s in a holey old t-shirt and sleep shorts, but there isn’t time to be embarrassed. Something’s wrong. He doesn’t look well. Every movement is cagey on edge. On instinct, she reaches for his elbow, and he jerks out of range, eyes wide and more than a little crazy. For a minute she wonders if he’s gone like Gabe gets sometimes, if this is a drug thing, but there’s a cramp in her stomach that tells her it’s worse.
“I fucked up,” he keeps saying in a haunted whisper. Violet gapes at him, still reeling, but has enough sense to lead him into the kitchen. She tries to get him to sit, but he shakes his head, waves her out of his way with shaking hands and peels out of his hoodie. It splats against the floor, and now Violet understands.
“Oh my god...”
He’s hurt. Among the expanse of tanned lean muscle that Violet can’t help but admire, there is a large gash cut into his sternum. It’s oozing a thick stream of blood down the center of his chest, deep enough to need stitches, skin separated, edges peeling back. She stares and stares, watches a thick tear of blood roll down into his navel.
“What happened? You need to go to the hospital. Let me get the phone, I’ll call 911.” Violet’s a ball of nerves, calmed only by the sheer amount of adrenaline pulsing through her veins. She hovers for a moment, wanting to help but not knowing how, and then darts for the cordless phone. She’s got it in her grip and turned on when Tate bats it clear out of her hands.
“Don’t,” he pleads. “I can’t go there.” She looks at him strangely, but then she gets it. Holy shit.
Bending to retrieve the phone and place it carefully back in its cradle, Violet moves instead for her sewing kit, wondering all the while why she hasn’t just called the cops and been done with it. She’s got a patient here at midnight, crazy-eyed and bleeding all over her kitchen. A line has definitely been crossed.
When Violet returns, Tate has found the paper towels and is in the process of mopping up his front.
“What did you do, Tate?” she asks cautiously, taking a handful of towels to cleanse his wound. This time he doesn’t recoil, just breathes as slow as he can and dips his head. Being this close to him, half naked no less, should make her antsy, but she can think about that later. Right now she’s got to worry about stitching up a madman, and possibly sending them both off to a mental ward after. Not exactly on her top 10 list of things to do to a painfully attractive lunatic after midnight.
Tate sighs, looking too pale, and pushes the hair out of his eyes. “It’s probably better you don’t know.”
Violet suppresses the urge to roll her eyes, mostly because he might be right, and works on threading a needle.
“Black okay?” she says with a tired laugh, borderline hysterical, as she misses, misses, misses, the eye. Tate smiles at that and nods, moving to sit at the edge of the table.
When she’s got the needle threaded and iodine dabbed over the stab wound - if that’s what it is - the actual stitches don’t take long. Violet’s squeamish at first, but each stitch gets easier. Tate holds still the whole while, breathing shallowly, watching her work the tiny spear into his flesh over and over. It’s strangely intimate, but something she’d never thought she’d be doing to a maybe-murderer at one in the morning, but not the worst thing she’s ever been through, not even this week.
“All done,” she grins, feeling a little smug. She cuts the thread and knots it off neatly, chucking the needle and the rest of the spool, the entire kit in the end. The less evidence the better, she figures. Collecting the paper towels, she tosses those too into the trash, making sure to bury them beneath other things to keep from raising suspicion.
What even is my life, she wonders with a breathless laugh, washing her hands in the sink and hoping that Tate doesn’t have AIDS or something.
“Thank you.”
Tate’s voice is suddenly right at her ear. Any tremble it had carried before is gone, low and smooth like she remembers from weeks ago. It sends a secret thrill up the rungs of her spine. She spins to face him and is met with a crooked row of stitches and warm bare skin.
“Uh, you’re welcome, just. Don’t ever, ever do this again.” She gestures to all of him with a weak smile, and he doesn’t look so homicidal anymore, thank Christ.
He breathes a laugh and reaches out to tuck a stray lock of hair behind Violet’s ear, thumb tracing down the curve of her jaw, touch exceedingly gentle. It’s unfair how her body responds.
A whirlwind of emotions that she can’t even begin to untangle or process, Violet lifts her lashes to meet those black eyes and, hesitant, places a palm flat against the front of Tate’s ribs, well away from his wound. Any hope for rationalization is gone. She is left working on instinct alone.
Tate looks like he wants to say something, rolls his lips between his teeth, Violet’s chin held between his thumb and forefinger, but in the end he remains silent. With so much to say, so much to explain, maybe he can’t prioritize - she gets that. Instead, the corners of his lips quirk up into some semblance of a smile, but it’s almost hesitant, and then, oh, his mouth is on hers.
Their first kiss is nothing like she thought it would be and of course she’s thought about it; she’s only human. It’s just a simple press at first, warm and surprisingly gentle. He traps her against the counter with a hand at its edge, but doesn’t push otherwise. He smells like copper and rainwater and something she doesn’t want to name. And, something inside Violet, something that’s been frayed for so long, finally snaps. Gabe is just up the stairs, awake, but after months of pent up want, unethical, primal want, she simply can’t deny herself any longer. With a heavy sigh, Violet pushes up onto her tippy-toes and curves a hand around the back of Tate’s neck.
“You’re a psychopath,” she breathes fondly against his lips, and her own slide open to suck at his mouth, fingers tangling into the hairs at the base of his skull.
Tate laughs, a rumble she can feel where their chests are pressed close, and angles his hips forwards. “Is that your official diagnosis?”
It is actually, but with what’s happening, who knows, maybe she’s one too; the moment his tongue sinks into her mouth, slow and filthy, she’s lost forever.
Wary of his stitches, Violet hops up onto the kitchen counter and reels Tate in. He spreads her knees with his hands and reaches out for her waist, seeming so fragile in his grip.
“Christ, Dr. Harmon,” he groans, finding the hem of her shirt. She cringes at the formalities and makes a mental note to tell him her actual name later, later, then disentangles herself from him just long enough to be disrobed, reveling in the noise he makes when he discovers she hadn’t been wearing a bra. His hands are restless and greedy when she stretches for him. His thumbs flick at her nipples, tease them into tight little buds, and then his mouth is there, leaving her to clutch at his shoulders and writhe up into empty air.
She looks to the doorway every few minutes, wondering if Gabe’s asleep yet, but with Tate... it’s absurd, but she feels safe. Even if Gabe were to find them here, like this, she doesn’t think for a minute that Tate would let him hurt her. And even though she maybe she shouldn’t, Violet takes comfort in that. Tate might leave bruises like Gabe can, but they couldn’t be more different.
His tongue and teeth drive her into madness.
“Tate,” she whines, bucking against the fleeting pressure of his fingers where she needs them most. He grins against the space between her breasts, but a moment later, he’s got her shorts and panties rolled down her legs and in a heap on the floor. He tugs her forward until she’s teetering at the edge of the counter and she reaches for him, but he shakes his head.
“I want to see you,” he says, voice uneven, a rough rasp, and parts her thighs when she lets him. Hands hooked under her knees to keep her open, he just looks. Violet wants to squirm under the heat of his gaze, but she holds firm, toes curling and uncurling, waiting for him to touch.
Tate swallows, releases a stunted breath, and steps back into her, hand sinking between her legs to cup her bare sex.
“Perfect,” he purrs into her ear, and slips a finger inside.
She keens, digs her heels into the dimples of his back and arches prettily. And then she remembers. Gabe. Eyes wide, she cups a hand over her mouth, but doesn’t stop grinding into Tate’s palm.
“What is it? Is someone here?” he asks, adding a second finger, pumping into her with long, slow thrusts, not enough.
He doesn’t know, she realizes with a shock, but simply nods without clarifying who. He might stop if he knew, and she can’t have that. She’ll burn up from the inside out if he leaves now.
Tate takes his time working her open, burns a trail of wet kisses down the side of her throat and out onto the round of her shoulder, teeth scraping over the soft muscle.
“Need you,” Violet huffs when he’s filling her with three fingers and hard against the curve of her ass. He nods, and then she’s empty. They both scrabble drunkenly at the fastenings of his jeans, and soon enough he’s got them shoved down his thighs and his cock bobs free, heavy between his legs. Violet’s stomach constricts. A moment later there’s a condom wrapper torn between his teeth and he’s got it rolled on, holding himself firm at the base to keep from falling apart already.
“Now, now, now,” she growls, not bothering to look back to the doorway again. Legs hooked over his arms, around his waist, she’s able to watch him line up their bodies and, sweet fucking Christ, push inside. Inch by inch he fills her, stretches her. It’s a pleasant burn that tears from them a mutual groan; they’re seeing stars. Violet clutches at his shoulders, digs her nails in deep to keep quiet.
Once Tate is buried to the root, he gathers her in his arms and walks them to the kitchen table. Laying her back along the smooth top, he stands between her thighs and just looks down on her sprawled out for him. A heated expression crosses his face, something more than lust, but like every other emotion, it’s gone before she can be sure that it was real.
“Wait,” she says, wanting to know what that was, just dazed enough to imagine he might answer her.
He pulls out slow, to the tip. “I can’t,” he breathes, honest, so far gone, and sinks back inside, the drag of her insides delicious.
She groans, eyes rolling back, and he huffs out a strained noise, brows pinched together with the effort of restraining himself. “Oh fuck, you’re so tight for me, so fucking good.”
Violet can only whimper in response and walk her feet up his chest. The change of angle has fireworks bursting behind closed lids. He holds the tops of her thighs to keep her still and begins snapping against her, driving deeper, harder, faster. Violet wants to worry about his stitches, but she can’t, she’s more animal than girl right now. One little hand slips down her flat tummy to play between her legs, to circle her clit in time with his thrusts.
This is what falling down the rabbit hole looks like, sounds like, feels like.
“Wonderland,” she sighs, and it doesn’t make any sense at all, but Tate still pops his hips against her and whispers,
“Yeah, you are,” in a desperate rasp.
The table’s legs squeak back and forth across the tile floor, surely loud enough to wake anyone sleeping upstairs, but with Tate fucking into her, bringing her right to the edge, she couldn’t care less.
Hips bucking against the backs of her thighs, he folds over to cover Violet then, elbows propped at either side of her head. Her muscles flutter warningly around his cock, and he kisses her, sloppy and uncoordinated, but she doesn’t mind. A few more thrusts and she’s blissing out with a cry, arching up into Tate’s chest and shaking all over. The pulse of her orgasm brings him off moments later. Hands clamped around the insides of her knees, he comes too, has to bite into his cheek to keep from shouting.
Violet pushes at Tate’s shoulders when he slumps against her, to keep his gash from pressing into her skin. But it’s too late. They’re both smeared red, streaked with the blood seeped from his wound. But like most everything else, she doesn’t care. Legs limp over the edge of the table, she breathes easy under his weight, cards her fingers through damp curls and just basks in the afterglow. Tate draws abstract designs in her sides, cheek to her breast, both of them sleepy and spent.
They lie like that for a few minutes, content to be quiet and close, but then there’s a creak at the top of the stairs and everything is ruined.
“Violet?”
Her heart skips a beat, or three. Maybe altogether. Hyper-terrified, she looks down at Tate and... he looks almost wounded, betrayed.
“Yeah?” she calls back, and it’s awful how quickly he scrambles to put himself back together, leaving her skin cold where he’d just been.
“Everything okay?”
Violet releases a breath. He isn’t coming down. “Yeah.”
There’s a sound like the shift of someone’s weight and then footsteps that grow quiet and faraway.
She folds up to sit then, so far beyond embarrassed, and watches as Tate pulls on his damp hoodie and tosses the condom. His face is unreadable again, a blank mask. It’s almost worse than the look of hurt she’d seen before, or thought she saw.
“Tate...” she starts, but he doesn’t want to hear it. He puts up a hand to stop her.
“Don’t.” Fully clothed, he walks up to where she’s perched and sweeps in to kiss the apple of her cheek. “Thanks for everything,” he says, and then he’s gone.
When the door clicks closed, Violet pushes away from the table to get dressed.
She rubs mechanically at her front with a washcloth from the sink for a minute, cleaning away any last hints of blood. There’s so much to process, but she’s spinning, detached, out of orbit. Tomorrow, she’ll worry about everything tomorrow.
Clean again in only this one small way, Violet shuts off all the lights and trudges up the stairs still smelling of sweat and Tate. She falls into bed beside Gabe without guilt, and dreams of needles and thread and of messy-perfect kisses.
( Make War 2/3 )
( Make War 3/3 )
Author: ohyellowbird
Summary: Dr. Violet Harmon's new patient is what you might call a game-changer. Or a psychopath. Both.
Spoilers/Warnings/ Triggers: Domestic abuse. Dub-con. Gore.
Author’s Note: Hey there! I hope you like this? It may stray from your prompt. A lot. But hopefully the fifteen thousand words will make up for that!
Make War 1/3
“Gabe. For the tenth time, I can’t do dinner tonight. Just reschedule, it’ll be fine,” Violet huffs into her mobile phone, chewing at the side of her thumb. It’s hot in her office even with the windows cracked and blinds shuttered. Summer is hell in Los Angeles, sticky, sweaty hell and her patience is barely there without the heat.
There’s a rumble of dissent on the other end of the line, and then nothing. Violet stares down at the main menu of her phone. “Fucker hung up on me!”
She considers chucking it, preferably out the window, but before she gets the chance to fully engage in a temper tantrum, she hears rather than sees, someone at her door. She sweeps the phone into the junk drawer of her desk instead and vows to ignore any and all calls until she can clock out for the day and pour herself a good, strong drink. Winding down, she glances back to the stranger.
Some guy in what looks to be his late twenties stands leant against the frame. He’s got both hands jammed into his pockets and a crooked smile and if Violet were a weaker woman she might go so far as to call him studly. Instead, she settles on an appropriate, “Who the fuck are you?”
Something must be funny because that stupid smile only widens to reveal two rows of perfect pearly whites, and pretty boy steps boldy into the room. “Is that how you treat your patients?” he tuts, clearly amused, and Violet, remembering a schedule change, has the sudden urge to crawl under her desk.
“Oh god - I mean. I’m so sorry, Mr...” she flails, mouth agape in horror, shuffling through the papers on her desk. “Langdon.”
By the time she’s retrieved the right file, he’s flopped down onto the leather couch and is bent forward, elbows on knees, to better watch her flounder.
“Call me Tate.”
Violet doesn’t really hear, just nods mechanically, pretends she isn’t in the middle of an itsy-bitsy meltdown. You just berated a new patient! she screams, hopefully inside of her own head, and reaches for the closest notepad. Maybe she tears off a few too many pieces, maybe she makes a mountain of crumpled yellow wads in the trash, but if she does, it’s only because this incident is the cherry on her shit sundae.
“You’re late,” is the next thing she says, because he is. And that’s why she mistook him for some creepy stranger - creepy, sexy stranger. It isn’t her fault, really.
Tate winces. “I know, sorry. The maid let me in.” He doesn’t sound sorry, but one look at his file tells Violet that, if he’s displaying sociopathic tendencies, he probably doesn’t feel remorse, so she accepts his faux apology with a trained smile and settles into the chair opposite him.
“It’s okay,” she says mildly, and just like that she’s back in doctor-patient mode, broad shoulders and dimples mostly forgotten.
Switching gears, something Violet will learn Tate is keen to do, he gives her a skeptical once over and snorts. “Aren’t you a little young to be a doctor?”
Violet bristles. “If you’re worried about my credentials I can assure you - “He shakes his head and motions for her to begin with her initial questionnaire.
Pad in lap, pen in hand, she nods. The rest of the session goes well. Tate tells her about his violent fantasies, surprisingly forthcoming with them, and Violet ping pongs between doling out sound advice and getting snagged on dark eyes and even darker ideas.
*****
Another insignificant battle, buildup to World War III, takes place in the middle of Violet’s kitchen later that night.
“What the hell, Gabe?!” she screams from her seat at the table, at four in the fucking morning.
Gabe is drunk. Stumbling, straight-out-of-a-movie drunk. He waves off her question with a flippant hand. “Sorry, lost track of time.”
Violet surges up from the table, jaw set, and circles the room to get up close, face to face. “Where were you?” she snarls, pent up anger threatening to boil over, jaw set, eyes burning.
Gabe laughs, laughs and throws up his hands in surrender. “Hey, whoa there. What is this, the, uh, German Inquisition, or whatever?”
All of Violet’s rage just wilt into a hum of annoyance at his idiocy and she sighs, deciding that spending the night screaming herself hoarse again just isn’t worth it. Another argument swept under the rug. She’s choking on dust bunnies.
“Spanish,” she mumbles, turning on him before he can make a stupid face and ask what she means.
She climbs the stairs alone and doesn’t fall into bed until the door is locked, until Gabe can’t stumble up after her and slink under the sheets to beg her forgiveness through sloppy sex. Tonight, he sits slumped against the closed door and rambles for a while, but she can’t make out what he’s saying, and even if she could, it wouldn’t be enough.
Staring wide-and-teary-eyed into the dark, pillow sandwiched between her hand and cheek, Violet spends hours wondering if, at this point, anything could be.
Violet followed Gabe to Los Angeles three years ago, back when she was young, hopeful, and idealistic about romance. He’d caught the acting bug and was chasing a dream. She hated the idea of moving, but she was in love, and if love was leaving the east coast, well then she was packing her bags.
Things were good at first. Her parents bought her Murder House - that’s what the bratty ginger twins next door called it - with hopes that she might settle down there. Following her father’s footsteps into psychiatry, Violet was able to finish her schooling in L.A., and with Gabe getting more and more parts, happily ever after started to seem not so far away.
But with enough time, everything changed.
They never saw each other. She was always cooped up in the office with patients and he was always on set or working parties. She’d eat dinner alone and wake up late to the sting of his breath on her face. Gabe slipped into alcoholism too easily. With Hollywood shelling out free booze and rejection at every turn, it wasn’t hard. More than once he’d come home smelling of perfume or with a pink-stained mouth, but she couldn’t leave him. She wouldn’t. Some foolish part of herself that still believed in happy endings wanted to pretend that all this was just a bump in the road, that things would get better, like before, like when they lived in Boston.
But better never came.
The empty side of the bed next to her is cold without Gabe there sweating out his liquor. She reaches a hand out to feel the cool sheets and falls asleep mentally running through her day, snagged over and over on rogue thoughts of her newest patient Tate.
*****
The second time Violet sees Tate, two weeks and one cancellation later, she doesn’t use the F word on contact or fall to pieces. But she still can’t quite get over how handsome he is. Dressed down in a button up shirt and blue jeans, hair a tangled mess of yellow, he looks like something out of a magazine, a cardboard cut out you’d see in stores at the mall that sold brands meant for skateboarding to bitchy preteens.
He’s the All-American Dream wrapped up in cotton and stripes, but inside he’s darkness. He spins stories that should make her stomach churn, about mowing down the kids he sees walking home after school and knifing women at the grocery store, about cutting a dog open straight down the middle just to see what it would look like. And all the while he’s got this look on his face, eyes sharp, smile sharp, expression cutting. He’s ecstatic about the idea of crushing some gay guy’s skull.
“He’s a fucking asshole,” Tate says, hands held out front of him and shaped in deadly parentheses. He’s pretending to strangle this “Patrick” character. It’s terrifying, or it would be if Violet wasn’t busy admiring the lunatic’s hands, long, slender fingers, nails bitten to the quick.
“You know, Tate, if I feel you intend to do actual harm to someone or yourself I have to -- “Tate puts a hand up at her practiced mantra. “I know, I know. Relax.”
His smile is disarming. Her voice falls away and she’s content to listen for the remainder of his session, surveying him through narrowed eyes and scribbling gibberish on her pad in some guise of therapy until their time runs out.
That night, Violet dreams of a head of blonde curls between her legs and of a large pair of hands closing around her throat.
*****
“I’ve jerked off thinking about you,” Tate says a few weeks later, like it’s just something she probably should know, and Violet very nearly spills coffee all down the front of her shirt.
“What?” she sputters, dabbing at her mouth with the back of her hand and placing the mug down where she can’t so easily scald her tits. It’s not that patients haven’t come on to her before; it’s just that they’ve never been, well, him.
Tate grins like he’s just won the lottery and leans forward on the couch, seated right at the edge of the cushion. Goaded on by her response, he wets his lips and, narrow-eyed, continues.
“Yeah, about you, sucking my cock or riding me right here on this couch.” His voice has dropped an octave, low and soft like silk. It’s horrible, terrible. Violet can feel a traitorous slickness between her thighs. She wants to say something, to reprimand his behavior or at least to comment on why he’d say such a thing, but when she opens her mouth, all that leaves her is a quiet yelp. What? No sex for two weeks has been rough. (But the bastard deserves it.)
Crossing and uncrossing her legs, Violet drops her gaze to the pad in her lap and pretends to write something that must look like little more than a scribble from where Tate’s sitting, which, fair enough. But he’s not watching her pen. He’s more interested in the flush that’s bloomed across her cheeks and where her patterned skirt has ridden up her thighs.
“I wonder what you’d taste like, what kind of sounds you’d make, if your toes would push at my sides when I was fucking you too hard.” He doesn’t stop until Violet pulls herself together long enough to ask, her voice sounding pathetically weak, that he leave.
He does, but not without a wounded glance back. Emotion flits through his features and then it’s gone just as quickly. She’s surprised. She thought his attempts at flirting had been just another game, a test to see how far he could push her. She shakes her head to clear it and uncurls the fists she’d unknowingly been clenching. He’s a patient, she reminds herself.
But Violet spends the rest of the session remembering that face and being plagued his same, deplorable curiosities.
*****
Gabe doesn’t come home that night. She wakes up to a voicemail, but wipes it from her phone without bothering to listen, and cries in the shower.
If she doesn’t seem put together at work, none of her patients notice. They rattle on unaware, about hopes and dreams and fears and whatever bullshit they wouldn’t want to tell their family or friends. And she listens, because it’s her job, but she’s finding more and more that she doesn’t really care. Chad worries his boyfriend is cheating, Nora is terrified she’ll never have a baby, they’re all the same. They’re fucking hopeless. Everyone is.
This goes on for weeks and weeks, an endless cycle of woe-is-me spiced with the occasional drunken argument with Gabe. Tate’s sessions are her only reprieve. He still talks about murder, about taking people somewhere clean, out of this filthy world, but he hasn’t mentioned any of his sexual fantasies since that first time. Violet knows she should be proud of him, for showing restraint and for understanding that it had made her uncomfortable, but she can still hear that heated tone of his voice and, behind closed eyes, she can almost see what he had described.
*****
“And there are these voices...” If he’s trying to sound embarrassed to reveal that he thinks “people” are whispering to him in his head, it’s superficial. Violet just nods.
“I see. And what are these voices telling you to do?”
Tate shrugs. “Stuff. Murder and Mayhem, you know the deal.” There’s a fresh hole in his jeans, ripped at the knee. He keeps picking at the edges, pulling loose threads and winding them around his finger until the tip goes red. Violet watches, caught up in the simple act until she catches herself and looks back to her clipboard, ashamed.
“So...” She wants to ask, or more precisely, her sex drive wants to ask, about his sexual fantasies, but she doesn’t, just moves down a mental list to the practices he should be doing to suppress these violent urges and replace them with more appropriate behavior. “Are you keeping a journal, like I’d asked?”
Tate snorts. “No.”
“Well,” It takes a moment to rein in her irritation at his dismissal. “If you were keeping one, what kind of things would you be putting in it? Hobbies, distractions, thoughts?” She gives a few examples, reactions to sports or movies, a review of his day, but the whole time Tate’s just watching her with the beginnings of a smile, his eyes unreadable.
His gaze is penetrating, leaves her feeling naked, like he knows, like he just knows that she brought herself off last night thinking about his hands all over her, restless and attentive in a way Gabe has never been.
He looks to be teetering between two things, lower lip pulled between his teeth, but then Violet shifts under the sudden heat of his gaze and, like that, some decision has been made. Tate’s mouth slips into that familiar, teasing grin and a moment later, he’s crossed the room to sit at the edge of the coffee table, knees spread around Violet’s crossed legs, close, too close.
Violet draws in a sharp breath because Jesus, how does a person move like that? Quick and dangerous, like the swoop of a hawk, and yeah, she knows that makes her prey. For her part, she doesn’t fold under his stare, meets it directly despite the messy tremble of her pulse.
“Tate?”
Tate rewards her with a flash of teeth, and then he’s leaning forward into the space between them, hands covering her knees, sliding up the tops of her thighs as he moves in, slow, like he might frighten her. Violet is terrified. Unprofessional! Unprofessional! sounds like an internal alarm, but then there are fingers edging under the hem of her skirt and curving around the creases where thighs meets pelvis and it takes every last stitch of resolve to not melt into Tate’s burning touch.
“I think about this,” he confesses, thumbs pushing into the insides of Violet’s hips, face inches away. He smells clean, like cheap shampoo and soap, but like something else too, musky like a boy, cigarettes, and with bitter breath that makes her wonder if he’s a user. That suspicion alone should be enough to have her sending him out the door, which just goes to show how far gone she is. “I wonder if what I say ever gets you wet. I think it does, I think you like hearing me talk about blood, the smell, the taste, what it feels like when it’s dried under my fingernails.”
Violet is helpless in that moment, left watching the way Tate’s mouth works around each filthy word. She knows what has to happen. She has to tell him to leave, that she no longer feels comfortable treating him but that she’ll make other arrangements for him, some referrals for where he could go next. But Violet doesn’t say a thing. When she thinks she might have mustered the strength, Tate’s fingers sink between her legs to rub loose circles over the crotch of her tights and the whole world of right and wrong just falls out from under her feet.
“I bet you’ve got a cute pussy,” he says, and now his lips are right at her ear. His other hand is pressed into the cushion at the outside of her thigh for balance and he’s got the pad of his middle finger squared up with what would be her clit if she weren’t wearing anything underneath that skirt.
Violet makes an unintelligible sound, something like a squeak, and closes her eyes to the feel of his mouth sucking a red mark at the hinge of her jaw. Everything goes quiet and for some small amount of time, maybe a minute or so, she doesn’t stop him. She keeps her hands folded in her lap until they’re not, until they’re curled into the front of Tate’s shirt, and he continues coaxing her into madness with fingers grinding against the wet spot of her tights.
Then there’s the faint sound of ripping and a low, unsteady, “oh fuck, Dr. Harmon,” being muffled in the side of her throat. Violet’s brain kicks back online with a jolt.
“Tate!” she huffs, and it sounds more like a groan at first, but with enough pressure on his chest, he relents, pulling back to look at her with blown pupils, face flushed a pretty pink.
She can’t meet his eyes. When she tells him, “I think you should leave,” in as stern a voice as she can manage with an unbearable pressure between her legs, it’s more to the couch than the heavy-breathing boy. He wavers in front of her, bent slightly still, but when she doesn’t meet his eyes, he complies. Dragging a hand through his hair, he leaves without another word.
Violet spends the rest of the afternoon beating herself up about what transpired during Tate’s session. She could lose her license over this, nearly a decade of schooling wasted on some sinister kid and a bullshit hickey. What this would do to Gabe if he found out is at the back of her mind, but it’s there, and when she hears a key in the lock that night, she makes sure she’s got her hair flipped over the right shoulder before greeting him with a guilt-fueled kiss.
I’m going to try harder,” he says with a watery smile, hands cupping her face. The bruise on her neck throbs.
“Me too.”
Never again, she promises herself, and if there’s a tiny voice that frowns at that, well then she doesn’t care to listen.
*****
Tate skips out on his next two appointments. She doesn’t see him for three weeks. And when he does finally show up for a session, they don’t talk about what happened. It’s the big, job killing elephant in the room.
“You look tired,” she says neutrally from across the room. He does. There are half moons etched below each of his eyes and his hair, usually a tangled mess, is hidden beneath a faded black beanie. The stubble on his face is more than a shade. A part of her wants to rub a palm over its rasp.
Tate shrugs, quiet, too quiet.
“So, how have you been?”
He makes a noncommittal noise, but when the silence stretches on, takes a slow breath. “My brother died, last week.”
Any lingering sexual tension Violet had been feeling disappears. Her face goes soft. “Oh Tate, I’m so sorry. If you’d like to talk about anything -- “
“He was murdered.” His tone doesn’t bear questioning. Hands balled into fists at his sides, he speaks through a clenched jaw. “My cocksucker of a mother fucking forgot him, left him at some ghetto park, and some guys jumped him. He went to the hospital in an ambulance and ended up in a body bag.” It’s like every word is being punched out of him, like he’d be more comfortable talking about pushing out a kitten’s eyeballs with his thumbs than family. And if that’s true, well then maybe there’s a reason Tate’s so fucked up. If only he would go into it.
Well, with a little trained prodding, he does.
Violet just listens quietly as Tate talks, about what Beau was like, about how sweet he really was despite what people thought, how good. About how his mother never liked Beau, about how she kept him locked away at home like Addie. His voice shivers, like maybe he’s falling apart, but that same glint he gets is still there in his eyes, bright and furious. And just when Violet thinks he might threaten to kill those “motherfuckers,” he stands.
“I’ve gotta go,” he says with a sad smile, and before she can ask why, he’s gone, out the door on long legs and leaving behind only the faint scent of cigarettes.
She’s never seen him shaken up like that, alight with genuine emotion. Sure, he could smile and frown, fit his face into a hundred different molds, but rarely could she glimpse any humanity in him. A part of her wonders if it’s a good sign, if she’s finally getting to him, but it’s that same hopeful, naive shade that still wants to work things out with Gabe.
Cranking open the window to light up, always anxious for a smoke after sessions with Tate, something she should analyze, Violet flips through mystery boy’s background check and says a little prayer for Beau.
*****
Gabe calls to say that he’ll be home early, asks Violet if she’d like to have dinner at home. Sat in the bath, cell phone trapped between her ear and shoulder and with no other obligations, she agrees.
But halfway through sautéing the veggies, Violet gets distracted. She’d left the T.V. on in the other room for some background noise just in time for the start of the six o'clock news.
Dressed in just a tank top and panties, she nearly trips over herself speeding into the family room to catch the tail end of the lead anchor’s sentence.
“... found dead just outside a park in South Central.”
Of course right then, with her heart dragging against the front of her chest, the door swings open. “Violet!”
Violet’s head snaps in Gabe’s direction. “Shh!” she hisses, turning back to the television, watching the news cut to an on-location shot of a battered park at dusk. A woman with perfectly styled hair and a tailored pantsuit looking ridiculously out of place amongst the urban backdrop clears her throat and puts on a cheap smile.
“Thank you, Elizabeth. Yes, the bodies of eight young men were found an hour ago. Nearby residents complained of hearing gunshots at the local basketball courts. Gang violence is suspected, but -- “
Tate?
Right at the brink of a meltdown, she blinks at the dark screen for a moment before realizing that Gabe is standing at her side, remote in hand.
“No 'Hello honey, how was work?' What the fuck, Violet?” he snarls, and it’s obvious that he’s gone, rolling, spun, all of the above.
Violet takes one look at the empty blackness of his eyes and attempts to push past him, not in the mood, but then he’s got a hand on her arm. “Let me go,” she says, trying to yank free. He gets like this, volatile. And some days she tiptoes around his swinging moods, but with the very likely possibility that her patient might have murdered a handful of men tonight, she’s got too much on her plate for that bullshit.
Gabe’s grip grows tight, cruel, her skin haloed white around where his fingertips are pressed hard.
“Moira tells me you have a new patient,” he says out of the blue, but she won’t meet his eyes. She’s staring at where he’s holding her, trying to pry at his fingers until he’s got that hand too, wrist shackled easily.
“What are you talking about?”
“Some blonde guy, tall. Real fucked in the head, she says.”
“Tate?”
“Is that his name?”
Violet laughs bitterly, gives Gabe her meanest smile. “Yeah. And he’s not new. I’ve been treating him for months. Now, let. Me. Go.”
He still doesn’t release her. If anything, his grip grows more vice-like, his expression dark. There’s a dead calm in the house. It’s stifling, leaves her paralyzed, held under the weight of this so wrong relationship. “You’re fucking him, aren’t you?”
And now she can smell it, the whiskey on his breath, a hint of perfume too, he must have started early to be home already. It’s too much to process. She can’t deal.
“Fuck off!” she screams, and tears free from his grip to leap up the stairs. She takes them two, three at a time and doesn’t stop running until she’s got both the bedroom and bathroom doors bolted shut.
Smoke fills the kitchen downstairs and the fire alarm chirps, but Violet doesn’t move. She stays there on the bathroom rug, sat against the side of the tub hugging her knees. For a few minutes she cries, clutches at her sore arm and babbles on under her breath about wishing he was dead, about wanting to kill him herself.
When she’s fresh out of sadness, Violet spreads out on the cool tile and wonders about what she’d heard on the news. Surely it was just a coincidence, right? South Central was notorious for gang violence. Tate couldn’t have been the cause. But would it be so bad if he was? a new part of her muses. This new part has had more and more to say as of late. It’d been birthed by Gabe’s alcoholism and cruelty, but had not bloomed until she’d begun treating Tate. More and more, she is beginning to agree with him, and it’s scaring her. People are shit, some worse than others. And those worse than worse, rapists and abusers, killers, whoever took Beau’s life, those people deserved to die.
Hours later, long after Gabe’s left again, the car’s exhaust loud even from the second story, Violet falls asleep there on the rug. She dreams of Gabe, but he’s so pale, and of Tate.
*****
Tate misses his next session. And the next. She doesn’t see him for weeks. It’s startling how much his absence bothers her. That snip of news runs on an endless reel through her head. Panic laps at her, her fingers itch to dial the number for the LAPD and turn him in, but for some reason, maybe because she’s losing touch with reality and her morals and just about everything else, she never calls.
Things level out with Gabe. He fills up Violet’s voicemail with empty apologies that won’t wash away the bruises on her arm, and she doesn’t hide anymore when he comes home. She doesn’t know why she doesn’t just leave. Maybe because he’s all she’s got out here. Making friends had never been easy for Violet. She had Moira and her patients, and nothing else. She knows that that makes her weak, but she’s beginning to wonder if she’s a lot of other things too, if maybe her and Tate Langdon aren’t so different after all.
One night, when Gabe’s passed out in the den, she wanders in and makes those same parentheses with her hands like Tate had months ago. Are my hands too small? she thinks sadly, flexing her fingers, remembering what he’d looked like in her dream, so pale and still. Then he makes a sound in his sleep and it’s like someone’s poured ice water all down her back. She takes a sharp breath and leaves the room, spends half of an hour washing her hands and face, staring into the mirror and seeing someone new.
*****
Up at midnight reading a book one night, Violet’s heart nearly leaps from her chest. There’s a sudden, frantic knocking at the front door. It’s raining outside, the first drizzle of Fall. She can’t get up from the couch fast enough, book flying from her lap, and into the foyer. Gabe’s upstairs with a bottle of Jack, supposedly reading over his lines, so who the fuck --?
The door’s unlocked and he’s inside before she knows what’s happening.
“Tate?”
He’s soaking, hair and clothes heavy, dripping everywhere. It’s then that she remembers she’s in a holey old t-shirt and sleep shorts, but there isn’t time to be embarrassed. Something’s wrong. He doesn’t look well. Every movement is cagey on edge. On instinct, she reaches for his elbow, and he jerks out of range, eyes wide and more than a little crazy. For a minute she wonders if he’s gone like Gabe gets sometimes, if this is a drug thing, but there’s a cramp in her stomach that tells her it’s worse.
“I fucked up,” he keeps saying in a haunted whisper. Violet gapes at him, still reeling, but has enough sense to lead him into the kitchen. She tries to get him to sit, but he shakes his head, waves her out of his way with shaking hands and peels out of his hoodie. It splats against the floor, and now Violet understands.
“Oh my god...”
He’s hurt. Among the expanse of tanned lean muscle that Violet can’t help but admire, there is a large gash cut into his sternum. It’s oozing a thick stream of blood down the center of his chest, deep enough to need stitches, skin separated, edges peeling back. She stares and stares, watches a thick tear of blood roll down into his navel.
“What happened? You need to go to the hospital. Let me get the phone, I’ll call 911.” Violet’s a ball of nerves, calmed only by the sheer amount of adrenaline pulsing through her veins. She hovers for a moment, wanting to help but not knowing how, and then darts for the cordless phone. She’s got it in her grip and turned on when Tate bats it clear out of her hands.
“Don’t,” he pleads. “I can’t go there.” She looks at him strangely, but then she gets it. Holy shit.
Bending to retrieve the phone and place it carefully back in its cradle, Violet moves instead for her sewing kit, wondering all the while why she hasn’t just called the cops and been done with it. She’s got a patient here at midnight, crazy-eyed and bleeding all over her kitchen. A line has definitely been crossed.
When Violet returns, Tate has found the paper towels and is in the process of mopping up his front.
“What did you do, Tate?” she asks cautiously, taking a handful of towels to cleanse his wound. This time he doesn’t recoil, just breathes as slow as he can and dips his head. Being this close to him, half naked no less, should make her antsy, but she can think about that later. Right now she’s got to worry about stitching up a madman, and possibly sending them both off to a mental ward after. Not exactly on her top 10 list of things to do to a painfully attractive lunatic after midnight.
Tate sighs, looking too pale, and pushes the hair out of his eyes. “It’s probably better you don’t know.”
Violet suppresses the urge to roll her eyes, mostly because he might be right, and works on threading a needle.
“Black okay?” she says with a tired laugh, borderline hysterical, as she misses, misses, misses, the eye. Tate smiles at that and nods, moving to sit at the edge of the table.
When she’s got the needle threaded and iodine dabbed over the stab wound - if that’s what it is - the actual stitches don’t take long. Violet’s squeamish at first, but each stitch gets easier. Tate holds still the whole while, breathing shallowly, watching her work the tiny spear into his flesh over and over. It’s strangely intimate, but something she’d never thought she’d be doing to a maybe-murderer at one in the morning, but not the worst thing she’s ever been through, not even this week.
“All done,” she grins, feeling a little smug. She cuts the thread and knots it off neatly, chucking the needle and the rest of the spool, the entire kit in the end. The less evidence the better, she figures. Collecting the paper towels, she tosses those too into the trash, making sure to bury them beneath other things to keep from raising suspicion.
What even is my life, she wonders with a breathless laugh, washing her hands in the sink and hoping that Tate doesn’t have AIDS or something.
“Thank you.”
Tate’s voice is suddenly right at her ear. Any tremble it had carried before is gone, low and smooth like she remembers from weeks ago. It sends a secret thrill up the rungs of her spine. She spins to face him and is met with a crooked row of stitches and warm bare skin.
“Uh, you’re welcome, just. Don’t ever, ever do this again.” She gestures to all of him with a weak smile, and he doesn’t look so homicidal anymore, thank Christ.
He breathes a laugh and reaches out to tuck a stray lock of hair behind Violet’s ear, thumb tracing down the curve of her jaw, touch exceedingly gentle. It’s unfair how her body responds.
A whirlwind of emotions that she can’t even begin to untangle or process, Violet lifts her lashes to meet those black eyes and, hesitant, places a palm flat against the front of Tate’s ribs, well away from his wound. Any hope for rationalization is gone. She is left working on instinct alone.
Tate looks like he wants to say something, rolls his lips between his teeth, Violet’s chin held between his thumb and forefinger, but in the end he remains silent. With so much to say, so much to explain, maybe he can’t prioritize - she gets that. Instead, the corners of his lips quirk up into some semblance of a smile, but it’s almost hesitant, and then, oh, his mouth is on hers.
Their first kiss is nothing like she thought it would be and of course she’s thought about it; she’s only human. It’s just a simple press at first, warm and surprisingly gentle. He traps her against the counter with a hand at its edge, but doesn’t push otherwise. He smells like copper and rainwater and something she doesn’t want to name. And, something inside Violet, something that’s been frayed for so long, finally snaps. Gabe is just up the stairs, awake, but after months of pent up want, unethical, primal want, she simply can’t deny herself any longer. With a heavy sigh, Violet pushes up onto her tippy-toes and curves a hand around the back of Tate’s neck.
“You’re a psychopath,” she breathes fondly against his lips, and her own slide open to suck at his mouth, fingers tangling into the hairs at the base of his skull.
Tate laughs, a rumble she can feel where their chests are pressed close, and angles his hips forwards. “Is that your official diagnosis?”
It is actually, but with what’s happening, who knows, maybe she’s one too; the moment his tongue sinks into her mouth, slow and filthy, she’s lost forever.
Wary of his stitches, Violet hops up onto the kitchen counter and reels Tate in. He spreads her knees with his hands and reaches out for her waist, seeming so fragile in his grip.
“Christ, Dr. Harmon,” he groans, finding the hem of her shirt. She cringes at the formalities and makes a mental note to tell him her actual name later, later, then disentangles herself from him just long enough to be disrobed, reveling in the noise he makes when he discovers she hadn’t been wearing a bra. His hands are restless and greedy when she stretches for him. His thumbs flick at her nipples, tease them into tight little buds, and then his mouth is there, leaving her to clutch at his shoulders and writhe up into empty air.
She looks to the doorway every few minutes, wondering if Gabe’s asleep yet, but with Tate... it’s absurd, but she feels safe. Even if Gabe were to find them here, like this, she doesn’t think for a minute that Tate would let him hurt her. And even though she maybe she shouldn’t, Violet takes comfort in that. Tate might leave bruises like Gabe can, but they couldn’t be more different.
His tongue and teeth drive her into madness.
“Tate,” she whines, bucking against the fleeting pressure of his fingers where she needs them most. He grins against the space between her breasts, but a moment later, he’s got her shorts and panties rolled down her legs and in a heap on the floor. He tugs her forward until she’s teetering at the edge of the counter and she reaches for him, but he shakes his head.
“I want to see you,” he says, voice uneven, a rough rasp, and parts her thighs when she lets him. Hands hooked under her knees to keep her open, he just looks. Violet wants to squirm under the heat of his gaze, but she holds firm, toes curling and uncurling, waiting for him to touch.
Tate swallows, releases a stunted breath, and steps back into her, hand sinking between her legs to cup her bare sex.
“Perfect,” he purrs into her ear, and slips a finger inside.
She keens, digs her heels into the dimples of his back and arches prettily. And then she remembers. Gabe. Eyes wide, she cups a hand over her mouth, but doesn’t stop grinding into Tate’s palm.
“What is it? Is someone here?” he asks, adding a second finger, pumping into her with long, slow thrusts, not enough.
He doesn’t know, she realizes with a shock, but simply nods without clarifying who. He might stop if he knew, and she can’t have that. She’ll burn up from the inside out if he leaves now.
Tate takes his time working her open, burns a trail of wet kisses down the side of her throat and out onto the round of her shoulder, teeth scraping over the soft muscle.
“Need you,” Violet huffs when he’s filling her with three fingers and hard against the curve of her ass. He nods, and then she’s empty. They both scrabble drunkenly at the fastenings of his jeans, and soon enough he’s got them shoved down his thighs and his cock bobs free, heavy between his legs. Violet’s stomach constricts. A moment later there’s a condom wrapper torn between his teeth and he’s got it rolled on, holding himself firm at the base to keep from falling apart already.
“Now, now, now,” she growls, not bothering to look back to the doorway again. Legs hooked over his arms, around his waist, she’s able to watch him line up their bodies and, sweet fucking Christ, push inside. Inch by inch he fills her, stretches her. It’s a pleasant burn that tears from them a mutual groan; they’re seeing stars. Violet clutches at his shoulders, digs her nails in deep to keep quiet.
Once Tate is buried to the root, he gathers her in his arms and walks them to the kitchen table. Laying her back along the smooth top, he stands between her thighs and just looks down on her sprawled out for him. A heated expression crosses his face, something more than lust, but like every other emotion, it’s gone before she can be sure that it was real.
“Wait,” she says, wanting to know what that was, just dazed enough to imagine he might answer her.
He pulls out slow, to the tip. “I can’t,” he breathes, honest, so far gone, and sinks back inside, the drag of her insides delicious.
She groans, eyes rolling back, and he huffs out a strained noise, brows pinched together with the effort of restraining himself. “Oh fuck, you’re so tight for me, so fucking good.”
Violet can only whimper in response and walk her feet up his chest. The change of angle has fireworks bursting behind closed lids. He holds the tops of her thighs to keep her still and begins snapping against her, driving deeper, harder, faster. Violet wants to worry about his stitches, but she can’t, she’s more animal than girl right now. One little hand slips down her flat tummy to play between her legs, to circle her clit in time with his thrusts.
This is what falling down the rabbit hole looks like, sounds like, feels like.
“Wonderland,” she sighs, and it doesn’t make any sense at all, but Tate still pops his hips against her and whispers,
“Yeah, you are,” in a desperate rasp.
The table’s legs squeak back and forth across the tile floor, surely loud enough to wake anyone sleeping upstairs, but with Tate fucking into her, bringing her right to the edge, she couldn’t care less.
Hips bucking against the backs of her thighs, he folds over to cover Violet then, elbows propped at either side of her head. Her muscles flutter warningly around his cock, and he kisses her, sloppy and uncoordinated, but she doesn’t mind. A few more thrusts and she’s blissing out with a cry, arching up into Tate’s chest and shaking all over. The pulse of her orgasm brings him off moments later. Hands clamped around the insides of her knees, he comes too, has to bite into his cheek to keep from shouting.
Violet pushes at Tate’s shoulders when he slumps against her, to keep his gash from pressing into her skin. But it’s too late. They’re both smeared red, streaked with the blood seeped from his wound. But like most everything else, she doesn’t care. Legs limp over the edge of the table, she breathes easy under his weight, cards her fingers through damp curls and just basks in the afterglow. Tate draws abstract designs in her sides, cheek to her breast, both of them sleepy and spent.
They lie like that for a few minutes, content to be quiet and close, but then there’s a creak at the top of the stairs and everything is ruined.
“Violet?”
Her heart skips a beat, or three. Maybe altogether. Hyper-terrified, she looks down at Tate and... he looks almost wounded, betrayed.
“Yeah?” she calls back, and it’s awful how quickly he scrambles to put himself back together, leaving her skin cold where he’d just been.
“Everything okay?”
Violet releases a breath. He isn’t coming down. “Yeah.”
There’s a sound like the shift of someone’s weight and then footsteps that grow quiet and faraway.
She folds up to sit then, so far beyond embarrassed, and watches as Tate pulls on his damp hoodie and tosses the condom. His face is unreadable again, a blank mask. It’s almost worse than the look of hurt she’d seen before, or thought she saw.
“Tate...” she starts, but he doesn’t want to hear it. He puts up a hand to stop her.
“Don’t.” Fully clothed, he walks up to where she’s perched and sweeps in to kiss the apple of her cheek. “Thanks for everything,” he says, and then he’s gone.
When the door clicks closed, Violet pushes away from the table to get dressed.
She rubs mechanically at her front with a washcloth from the sink for a minute, cleaning away any last hints of blood. There’s so much to process, but she’s spinning, detached, out of orbit. Tomorrow, she’ll worry about everything tomorrow.
Clean again in only this one small way, Violet shuts off all the lights and trudges up the stairs still smelling of sweat and Tate. She falls into bed beside Gabe without guilt, and dreams of needles and thread and of messy-perfect kisses.
( Make War 2/3 )
( Make War 3/3 )