♥ applythepressure wrote Breakbone for aaronlisa ♥
Title: Breakbone
Author: applythepressure
Summary: He never thought about forgiveness because he never wanted it. Until her. Until Violet.
Spoilers/Warning/Triggers: Just minimal swearing, very mild sexual situations, and a crapload of angst.
Author Notes: Hello, my wonderful giftee! I hope you like it! It is canon, focusing on the theme of forgiveness and how Tate interacts with Violet while he has encounters with other residents of the house. I obviously take no credit for the song - it is “I Dreamed a Dream” from Les Misérables - or for the line from A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. Breakbone is another name for dengue fever, which causes very painful muscle aches and in extreme cases, hemorrhagic fever. I just think this disease actually describes Tate and Violet together - they love each other so much it physically hurts and become feverishly delirious with the sheer power of it, and the pain is so strong that it feels like they’re hemorrhaging all their emotions and sanity.
Breakbone
Tate Langdon never needed forgiveness.
When he was alive, he never asked for it, never thought about it, because the world was his, his alone to do with as he pleased, the people just his playthings to pick up, throw away, twist a limb or blow off a head, and the only right they had was to scream if they wanted as they accepted whatever he decided to do with them.
He never thought about forgiveness from the kids he killed that day, nice clean bullet holes in their flesh made soft by designer lotions and perfect by secret cosmetic surgeries their daddies would pay for out of their doctor and lawyer cash-stuffed pockets, and all he had on his mind as he shot those kids was that all that gave them power in this world - the strongest muscles on the football team, the brightest smile on the cheer squad, the smartest brain in even the AP classes, the most skillful hands with a makeup brush and hair dye - were now laughably powerless at the end of his barrel, unable to withstand the sheer blast of a tiny ball of metal at point blank range.
He never thought about forgiveness, never thought how it would feel or taste, never thought about what made other people crave it, never understood why people cared so much to have it, this foreign thing he saw no use for, this thing that provoked torrents of tears and laments and desperate pleas and hot, sweaty makeup sex.
He never thought about forgiveness because he never wanted it.
Until her.
Until Violet.
He is watching her again like he always does, he just can’t help himself when this is the only way he can feel close to her. He knows that she wants nothing to do with him, but he can’t take it anymore and opens his mouth to say all the things he has been thinking endlessly on loop since the night she sent him away - I love you, I need you, you are my light, you are my life - but of course, she’s smart and wields it just like he would an axe, blunt trauma and bruising blows right to the place where it would do the most damage.
“Don’t speak to me. Don’t move. Don’t breathe.”
He materializes in her room, gaping like a fish, mouth hanging open, tongue poised at the roof of his mouth, ready to spill out all those thoughts he keeps bundled up most of the time, but he will do anything she asks of him and slowly closes his lips.
She gets up from her bed and walks right past him to the door, hair sweeping behind her shoulders and her long skirt billowing with the force of her walk. He can easily see the tightness in her shoulders which he wishes he could smooth out with his firm hands, the firm set of her mouth which he longs to kiss into a smile, and probably the worst thing, the steady gaze of her eyes straight ahead at the door, no flicker to the side where he is standing, no shine to betray latent tears, no sparkle to show any presence of her past affection for him.
She pauses with her hand on the doorknob and he can see the knuckle white grip she has on the shiny metal.
“I don’t want you here. I don’t want you watching me. I don’t want you following me. If you really love me, you will let me go.”
“Vi -”
She whipped around to face him, tense and angry, no trace of forgiveness in her entire body, and he could feel the hope drain out of him for a fairytale reunion, of her running back into his arms despite his sins and them living in loving bliss until the end, whenever that may come.
“What did I say about speaking?”
He looked down at the floor, hoping she saw his apology in his body language since he couldn’t - and wouldn’t, since that was what she wanted - say the many sorrys he so desperately wished he could.
“I can’t forgive you, Tate. I tried, I tried so hard, I ripped my heart out with all my trying, but I just can’t. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
He never knew pain until that moment when he looked up to see her apologizing to him of all people, the fierce beauty apologizing to the ferocious beast, a parody, quite frankly a sick joke, of how it was supposed to be, of how they knew it should be - him, eyes wet and mouth quivering, begging her for forgiveness. He wondered if she knew that this twisted reversal would be the perfect way to hurt him, to force him to see his faults up so close and personal, and if this was one of her ways of exacting her pound of flesh. He searched her face to see if this apology was a tactic of revenge, but the only crack in her armor was the slight wavering of her voice when she came to that word they both knew he should be saying instead.
And as she closed the door behind her, despair overcame him and he just hoped she didn’t hear his agony.
He was in the kitchen getting a glass of whiskey - the previous owners of the house were very fond of their liquor, even more so when Hayden started chucking their throw pillows at them in the middle of the night just to fuck with them - when Moira walked in. He stopped trying to get the very last drop out of the dusty Maker’s Mark bottle and scrutinized her out of the corner of his eye.
He had an odd relationship with her - he, for one, never really saw her in her sex kitten mode, probably now because he only had eyes for Violet, but he didn’t remember even seeing her like that before Violet moved in. Maybe he thought it would be weird to lust after a lady that banged your dad and was murdered by your batshit mom. Anyway, they weren’t really chums like she and Vivien were, but they helped each other when the occasion calls for it. They were more like business associates that were able to act as a team and get the job done, but covering up his dirty secrets was the only thing unifying them and once the bleach had washed away all evidence of his indiscretions, they had no use for each other anymore. He certainly had no use for her subtle reprimands - he can still hear her snottily say “I think you should get over your compulsive need to please the ladies of this house” on his bad days - and she certainly had no use for his trigger happiness.
“Nothing is ever easy in this house, is it?”
He placed the bottle down gently and took a long, hearty swig of the dark liquid, savoring the way it burned down his throat because everyone knows there is a fine line between pain and pleasure and for someone as dark and twisted as him, that line is nonexistent.
“That’s what makes this place so much fun.”
He thought he saw a hint of a sad smirk on her face before she started cleaning the already spotless kitchen counters.
“You know, I thought this place was going to be my ticket out of here. I was going to make some money, buy a plane ticket, and go to New York. I wanted to be on Broadway. I wanted to see all those city lights in Times Square.”
He stayed quiet, not wanting to interrupt this rare show of intimacy towards him, since as much as they are indifferent towards each other most of the time, there are times where she is not just a temptress or an old hag and he is not just a psychopath with a penchant for guns, and they reach this place of quiet understanding and tolerance.
“I wanted to go to a place where I wasn’t seen as just a nice piece of ass or a cockteasing whore. I wanted to do something amazing, something memorable. I wanted to be remembered for something other than my body. But I guess we can’t get everything we want.”
He sighed, thinking of Violet - when is he not thinking about her? - and the sad truth of Moira’s words and the longing he could still hear in them couldn’t ring any more loudly. He took another big sip of his whiskey.
“No, I suppose we can’t.”
She gave him a melancholic smile before she walked over to the sink and started washing her cleaning rags. He watched her plunge her hands into the soapy water over and over, and for a split second, he thought he saw her as her young self, but she wasn’t in her sexy maid uniform, she was in a beautiful dress, hands clutched around a microphone rather than a dish cloth, singing a slow ballad about love and dreams lost.
“I dreamed a dream in time gone by, the hope was high and life worth living…”
He felt her place a hand on his shoulder and his eyes snapped back to her face, back to its old, papery self with the one clouded eye, and her lips quirked up a bit at his surprise and he was sure what he saw wasn’t an illusion.
“Many men aren’t able to see things as they really are, Tate. They are only able to see what they want to see. You saw me as I wish to be seen. Very few men can do that.”
He knew she was amused by the obvious confusion on his face.
“What - how was I able to do that? Why me?”
“That is something you have to figure out for yourself.”
She gently patted him before going off to dust some bookshelves, leaving him staring after her with an empty bottle and too many questions.
He really tried to not follow her, he really did, Boy Scout’s honor, but he caved and he was back again in her room watching her sleep, her soft breathing the only sound in the dark room. They all knew ghosts didn’t really need to sleep, but sometimes the reality of them being dead and stuck in a house forever got too much and they all did things they didn’t need to just to have some semblance of normalcy and connection to their former humanity. He rationalizes his inability to sleep as proof that he didn’t have any even when he was alive.
He was just staring at her, and he knew it would seem creepy to everyone else in the house, but he quite frankly didn’t give a fuck about what they thought. He barely gets to see her face at all anymore, and he never gets to see it when it’s not scrunched up in anger or sadness. He wants to remember her happy and laughing, or panting and lustful, or peaceful and content, and he finally gets to see that side of her when she is sleeping, when her sorrow cannot touch her, and he wouldn’t give that up for anything.
Suddenly she moved, just a slight shift, and he froze, praying she wouldn’t wake up and see him because he is breaking yet another promise to her and he can’t bear to push her away even more.
“Tate…”
She called his name in a strangled voice, and he felt his heart break all over again and he wanted nothing more than to wrap his arms around her and kiss away all her pain.
“No!”
She was thrashing now, clawing viciously at her sheets, fists bunched tightly, and he just knew she was reliving the moment she found out he was dead and a murderer and a rapist and everything she didn’t want in a guy.
“Don’t…not true…Tate…Tate…”
God, he felt so helpless, helpless to comfort the girl he still loved so much because he was the reason for all her sadness in the first place, and he couldn’t take any of his horrible sins back.
“NO!”
He couldn’t take it anymore and rushed over to her, gripping her hand and pleading with her loudly to wake up. Her hand was squeezing his harshly, but he welcomed the pain and the feel of her skin back on his, even if only for a moment.
“Vi, Vi, come back to me! Vi, please!”
She stopped moving and her eyes opened slowly, trying to focus on him, and narrowing into slits when they did. She wrenched her hand out of his and scooted back to the headboard of the bed, bringing her knees up to her chest, and he knew she was haphazardly throwing up barriers against him.
“Why are you here?”
Her voice was hard and tense, and he knew it was because she didn’t want him to speak to her - their last encounter made that fact painfully clear - but she knew she had to let him to find out what happened. He likened it to getting a shot - you don’t want to do it because you know it’s going to hurt, but it sure beats getting the flu and being sick as a dog for a week. Right now, she was between a rock and a very, very hard place, but her need to know if she did anything that she would construe as a betrayal to herself, some crack in her armor he can exploit or a temperature spike in the ice around her feelings for him, outweighed her desire to just send him away and drive herself mad with what ifs.
“You were having a nightmare. I woke you up.”
“What did I say?”
“You kept saying my name. And you were crying. I thought you needed me.”
The silence between them seemed to stretch for eons.
“Please, just go.”
“Vi, I -”
He scooted towards her and reached over to caress her face, but she put her hand out to stop him before he got any closer. He could see her tears wetting the pillow, an ugly, misshapen scar on the cotton, mockingly reminding him that he is the cause of its twin on her heart.
“I don’t think I can bear it if you say anything else.”
He nodded silently, and withdrew his hand even though every nerve in his body was screaming at him to touch her, just one more time, just enough to keep going through this hell of his own creation. He got up from her bed and picked up her comforter, which had been kicked to the ground during her nightmare. Disregarding the look of shock and suspicion on her face, he smoothed the blanket out and loosely tucked it around her before leaving.
When he came back later to check on her, she had wrapped herself in it.
He couldn’t help but think that she was like a sleeping butterfly, beautiful and utterly fragile, just waiting to emerge from the dark world of its cocoon.
He also couldn’t help but hope that their relationship would maybe be like a butterfly too.
He was in the backyard, reading one of his favorite books - Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison - in the gazebo. He connected with the protagonist even when he was alive because he did feel like no one saw the real him. His bitch of a mother only saw what she wanted to see, which was a track star and stellar student with normal empathetic tendencies instead of a deadbeat psychopath who traded his Bs for some grade-A coke. Larry was just like his mother, only with less of a clue. His sister and brother, while he dearly loved them, couldn’t see him fully purely because they just did not have the capacity too; he thinks now that maybe that was a good thing because he did not want to taint their innocence with his darkness. His peers at Westfield definitely didn’t give him a passing glance until he forced them to in a big way with his guns. He definitely feels connected with the narrator even more so now that he is dead - considering he can actually be invisible - and that nothing else has really changed. Suddenly a sharp voice cut through his musings, a voice he had sincerely hoped to never hear again because it reminded him of decisions he wished he had never made.
“Tate.”
Vivien.
The mother of the love of his life and of his child, the poor woman he had raped and terrorized, the woman that could have happily been his mother-in-law one day if he had done some things differently.
What he would give to turn back time and tell his past self to just stop, fucking think for a second, and not shoot himself in the foot, metaphorically, of course.
“You need to stay away from my daughter.”
He put his book down to see her with the Band-Aid bundle of joy swaddled in a blue blanket and asleep in her arms. Her hair was done up in a messy ponytail, and her blouse was rippling slightly in the wind. He marveled at how her eyes became hard just like Violet’s, with a small narrowing and a dangerous flashing, and resolved to be careful with his words since it is often like mother, like daughter, and he has no doubt Vivien can be just as cruel as Violet, especially to him.
“I have been.”
“Don’t fucking lie to me. She’s been crying all day. You did something to her.”
“I swear. I didn’t.”
“I don’t believe you because all you do is lie. You are a psychopath, Tate. You break lives. You hurt people and it means nothing to you. She will never forgive you, just like I will never forgive you for what you did to me and my family, so you need to stop trying to win her back. She will never move on if you don’t leave her alone. Haven’t you done enough to her?”
She was breathing hard, shaking with both personal and motherly rage, clutching tightly to her baby like he was her shield against his evilness, and he suspected that she had been waiting to say that to him for a good long time.
“I really am sorry for what I did to you.”
She opened her mouth to protest, probably with a rush of accusations that he is still lying, that he is incapable of feeling sorry, but he kept going because he knows if he doesn’t get what he wants to say out now, he never will.
“I truly am sorry, Vivien. I’m not expecting you to believe me. I’m not expecting you to forgive me. I have no right to ask or demand your forgiveness because if I learned anything from Violet, it is that forgiveness must be freely given.”
He looked at Vivien, who seemed stunned into silence. He took a deep breath before he continued because he knew that his next few sentences would not go over well, but they had to be said.
“But don’t pretend to speak for Violet. Whether or not she forgives me is her choice alone. I hope you will support whatever decision she does make, but you should know I will wait for her forever regardless because I love her and that will never change. ”
He disappeared before Vivien could respond.
He was lost in his daydream of naked Violet touching herself when he heard laughter from the backyard. As much as he was loathe to stop, it sounded like Violet and he will always take real Violet over imaginary Violet, because even though he could control the outcome of his fantasy Violet - her forgiving him, her fucking him savagely, her laying in his arms at night, her telling him she loved him - it could never compare to having the real thing, even if it was at a distance.
He went to the attic window to see what was happening, but as soon as he did, he really, really fucking wished he didn’t.
Violet and Travis were having a fucking picnic.
And he was tickling her gently.
And she was letting him!
God, the fucking look on her face, dimples crinkled, mouth open, eyes shining. She looked so happy, so nothing like the girl that he woke up from a nightmare not so many nights ago.
What hurt the most was that he could have been the one down there, he should have been the one down there and he most definitely should have been the one making her happy. But he was stuck in the attic with only his hand for company and she was flirting with bolts-for-brains who thought Nickelback was the new Nirvana.
Rage and deep sadness overwhelmed him at once, and he didn’t know if he was going to cry or break things first.
So he decided to do both.
“Looks like our resident Romeo is moping, how original.”
Hayden sauntered into the living room where he was laying on the couch, staring at the ceiling out of a combination of sheer boredom and crushing melancholy. For one thing, when you’re stuck in the same couple thousand square feet with a bunch of other wackos and your murder victims for 364 days a year, it unfortunately limits your fun rather severely. For another, being stuck in the same place while the love of your life is playing house with a fucking pretty boy of all people really gets you down. Since the day he saw her from the attic, he has caught her with Travis playing cards and Scrabble, eating and watching TV together, and snuggling on the very couch he was now laying on, which had sent him into a rage that ended up with him trying anything to block out the pain, even becoming Charles’s lab rat for a few hours. He perversely hoped that his scent would overpower whatever smell Travis left behind so when she did lay down on it again, all she would inhale would be him.
He screwed his eyes together, hoping that through some magical stroke of good luck or some benevolent favor from a deity, the she-bitch would be banished and he could sulk in peace.
“Still heartbroken over your lady love?”
Fuck, she’s still here. Well, it wasn’t like he ever had good luck when he was alive, and he is sure his sins preclude him from ever being in any deity’s good graces.
“What do you want, Hayden?”
She flopped down in the chair across from him, the same one Ben still sits in when he plays therapist to any ghost having a particularly bad day, and he thought that she was taking a little too much pleasure in pretending to be his own special shrink.
“Oh, I don’t want anything from you. I don’t want your love because all of the love you have is for Violet. I do still want your dick sometimes, but I know you’ll never give it to me, so why should I bother? I don’t want your pathetic mood swings and crying spells because they give me a migraine. I don’t -”
“Enough, you little bitch!”
“Uh oh, lover boy is getting cranky.”
He swung his legs over the sides of the couch and gave her a nasty look as he got up, which she returned with a dismissive scoff.
“Is your only purpose here to taunt me?”
“Should I have another one? This one is so much fun!”
“Well, playtime’s over. Go away.”
He smiled a little at her indignant shriek from the basement.
He laid back down on the couch, mulling over what just happened. It is weird for Hayden to seek him out - ever since he shoved her off his crotch when she tried to seduce him in the basement, they usually made it a habit to stay away from each other. She must have been feeling quite bored or spiteful to mock him like that. He figured she was freshly stinging from another rejection from Ben, who was too obsessed with his second chance with his wife and their perpetual baby to even spare her a second glance now. Considering the fact that Ben has turned his back on his previous manwhoring days, she consistently failed in her mission to get back into Ben’s heart and pants, but damned if she didn’t try, and he had a feeling she would keep trying because she didn’t have anyone else in his house. Ben was the only person who tied her here, and now that he is gone - figuratively, of course - she has no one to turn to, and this fucking place would drive you batshit bonkers even if you had an army of therapists, friends, and loving support at the ready.
He sighed.
They weren’t so different, Hayden and him, and maybe that was why he didn’t like her. They both were in love with people who refused to reciprocate even if they felt the same way, they don’t take not getting their way well, and they usually relieve stress through some good old fashioned slash-and-kill. He had no desire to be friends with her - if he did, or worse, sleep with her, that would permanently remove any chance he had for Violet to forgive him - but he did understand her, understood her rage, which only thinly covered up her sorrow and sense of betrayal, and most definitely understood her pain at being abandoned by the one person you thought would never leave you. He took a modicum of comfort in the fact that he wasn’t the only one who felt utterly alone. And he took even more comfort in the fact that no matter how bad he felt or thought that he had it, she had it worse because he knew that he may have another chance with Violet whereas she knew, without a doubt, that Ben was never and will never be hers.
On second thought, maybe he should be a little nicer to her.
“Want to play some cards?”
“I thought I told you I don’t want to speak to you.”
He shuffled nervously under her sharp gaze, but he just couldn’t bear to let her go off giggling and chatting and cuddling with Travis without putting up some sort of a fight. God, just the thought of them doing all the things she used to do with him - only with him - made him sick to his stomach. He had to show her that he wouldn’t let her go so easily, not when she meant so much to him, and he would show her how much he still cared in whatever way he could.
“You don’t have to talk to me if you don’t want to.”
She looked at him suspiciously, like she couldn’t believe that he didn’t have ulterior motives, and he couldn’t really say that he didn’t, just that his ulterior motives were really for good this time.
“Okay. But I don’t want you to talk.”
As she turned to get the cards from her desk, he let a small smile play on his lips.
“Where’s my precious boy?”
He groaned when he heard the disgustingly saccharine voice that still played an active role in his nightmares.
What is she doing here?
The click-click-click of his mother’s heels on the wood floors was getting increasingly louder and he had half a mind to seek refuge in the basement until she gave up and left. However, that would only mean she would keep coming back and Lord knows he did not want that.
“Tate? Tate? Darling, your mother is here to see you.”
He snorted because she made it sound so innocent when he knew she was really there to give him a beating, verbal or otherwise, for some other horror he unleashed on the physical world, and then to find Travis to soothe the frustrations left behind by the last clueless man she had ensnared in her web. She was a black widow, sucking every last drop from her trusting victim’s neck, callously seeking out someone new even before the light in his eyes has gone out.
Might as well get this over with, quick and fast like ripping off a Band-Aid.
“What do you want, Constance?”
She whipped around to face him, and he took pleasure in the quick flash of fear in her eyes before she reverted to her caring mother sham.
He was struck by the thought that she had wanted to be an actress, and before everything went to absolute shit, he loved watching her pretend to be the characters on whatever TV show was their favorite at the time. She was quite good at hiding her real ugliness, too good, actually, to the point where she could have everyone but him fooled, and he was happy that she had never made it to Hollywood because he had a feeling that she would have left disaster in her wake.
“It is rude to call your mother by her given name, you know.”
“You don’t deserve the title.”
She inhaled sharply, and he could see her true self fighting to get to the surface, like a shimmering in a mirage, a glitch in the Matrix - which he watched once when the TV service was still on after yet another set of owners had fled the property, and he had thought about it for a good while afterwards, wondering if maybe the house was like the Matrix in some way, trapping its residents in a space-time that wasn’t actually real, and they were just waiting for The One to let them out - which let you know what you were looking at really wasn’t real.
“Tate -”
“What are you doing here? What do you want?”
God, even this little bit of interaction was giving him a headache.
“Can’t I just come over to see my son?”
He laughed bitterly, leveling her fake hurt gaze with a menacing one of his own.
“Please, stop pretending to be such a saint. You can’t believe that I would fall for that little shtick of yours. You always have other reasons. So spit them out so I can spit them back at you and leave.”
She huffed haughtily, still holding the same proud, stuck-up Virginian virgin image she loved to portray of herself, and reached up to fix her already perfect hair.
“Tsk, tsk, Tate, you ought to have better manners and show respect to your mother. I thought I raised you better than that.”
“If you could call what you did raising.”
“That’s enough!”
Her abrupt screech echoed through the empty halls and her hands smacked down hard on her thighs in anger - ah, here is the real Constance - and Tate applauded himself on getting her worked up enough to drop the lovey-dovey familial bullshit.
There were few things he liked more that calling his excuse of a mother out on her hypocrisy.
“I won’t ask you again. Why are you here?”
“I came” - she took a breath to steady herself - “to ask you to see your son.”
“No.”
God, that was the last thing he wanted to do, being confronted with the thing that lost him everything he had wanted and pretending to be one big jolly family. He’d rather got shot by the SWAT team twenty times over again.
“But if you just -”
“No.”
“You don’t even -”
“No, Constance. I never want to see him.”
“You’re cruel, denying your son the chance to know you.”
“I don’t care. He will never be my son.”
She gasped, but he soldiered on, hoping that what he said next would forever deprive Constance of the idea that he would want Michael in his life.
“All I care about is Violet. She means everything to me. He is the product of the bad decisions I made that cost me her love. I want nothing to do with him, ever. And if you don’t want a world of hurt coming to you, you will never try any bullshit like this again.”
He reveled in the shocked look on her face.
“Now get out of my sight.”
She tried to plead with him, he could see it in her eyes, but when he met her with nothing but hardened determination, and when she saw that there was no weakness to exploit, no way to coerce him into acquiescing, she harrumphed and started walking away.
“Oh, and Constance?”
She turned, and he almost laughed at the look of hope on her face. Clearly, she still doesn’t know, or more likely, refuses to know him at all.
“Never come back. It might just be your last time if you do.”
This time he did laugh as he walked away with her staring back at him in utter disbelief.
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing.”
He went to sit down next to her on the blanket she had laid out in the backyard. It was an extraordinarily beautiful day, sun shining, bird singing, all that jazz, and he didn’t want to let it pass him by - he needed every bit of happiness he could get, storing it like a squirrel stores nuts for the long hard winter, and it looks like she had the same idea.
He started playing with a stray thread and remembered that this was the blanket he had seen her and Travis having a picnic on that day in the attic. A short burst of fury ran through him, but it abated when he looked down at Violet, her eyes closed and her dress hunched up to her thighs, milky white and smooth, and her arms thrown above her head. It was impossible for him to ever stay mad at her.
“Do you mind if I stay?”
She cracked one eye open at him and let out a deep sigh.
“I guess not.”
He lay down next to her, being careful to be as close as he could be without touching her, and opened the book he brought - A Tale of Two Cities by Dickens - and started reading. He only got through the first couple pages before he felt like someone was watching him. When he looked back over at her, both her eyes were open, staring intently at him. He felt his breath get taken away - she hadn’t looked at him, really looked at him, like that in ages.
“What?”
“Read to me.”
“But I thought you didn’t want me to speak to you.”
He wanted to kick himself.
“Never mind what I said before. Do what I’m saying now.”
“Okay.”
He’d do anything she’d ask, both of them knew that. He turned back to the beginning of the book and started again, watching her mouth the words with him out of the corner of his eye.
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…”
He couldn’t help thinking that maybe, just maybe, they were heading back, little by little, towards the best of times.
“Where’s my baby? I want my baby, I just want my baby…”
He was in the basement, though he usually stays away from that part of the house now - too many bad memories to count were made within these dank walls, both by him and by others, and he feels like he could be pulled away by them to a dark place that he didn’t want to go. But for some reason today, he felt compelled to go down there and now he knew why.
Nora.
Her sobbing pierced through the dusty air and as much as he hated her - and a part of him did hate her, because of her need for a baby, he lost Violet, the one person who actually meant something to him - there was another part of him that cherished the small moments of motherly kindness she showed him as a child and even another part that desperately wished they could make new moments like that again.
But they can’t, because she’s gone off and lost her mind and doesn’t know which way is up or down anymore, she’s forgotten that she is dead, and the only thing he can count on from her is her wailing about her baby, the baby she wasn’t willing to take care of, but she can’t even remember that once she finally got the baby, she didn’t want it, so she keeps wailing and wailing on and on, like a broken record, until someone, usually Hayden, snaps her neck to give all of them, including her, some peace.
For a person who wasn’t supposed to feel anything, all of this made him feel unbearably sad.
“Hey, Nora.”
She looked up at him in confusion and he knew that she wasn’t in this reality where they were ghosts and stuck in this house, doomed by the evil her sick husband created when he brought back Thaddeus from the bits and pieces in that cursed box. He wasn’t sure where she was, maybe back in the 20s when she was disillusioned with Charles and angry at the perceived downgrade of her life, maybe back in her childhood when she was obviously spoiled rotten with material things and also with an abundance of love. She seems to skip to different points in her life, and he never knows where he will find her.
“Who are you? What are you - do you have my baby?”
“It’s Tate, Nora. Remember me? You took care of me sometimes when I was a kid.”
“Tate?”
She reached out to touch his face, mapping it with her hands like a blind person would do, and he searched her eyes for something, anything, any sign that would tell him if she knew who he was.
There was nothing.
“Do you have my baby?”
“No, Nora. I’m sorry.”
Her face crumbled and she looked so like the time she initially asked him for a baby, so sad, so helpless, so alone, that he had to bite back a sob of his own.
“Oh.”
And she turned back to the empty cradle and he could tell he had lost her.
He made sure he had climbed all of the stairs before he started crying.
He was in the attic, playing with Beau, when he heard something he couldn’t believe.
Tate.
Violet was summoning him. She hadn’t summoned him since they were still together, after she found out she was dead but before she discovered all his sins, a blissful, idyllic time that he replayed in his mind over and over. His heart leapt into his throat - what does it mean? He couldn’t bring himself to squash the hope bubbling up in his chest. But almost instantaneously that new found hope was replaced by cold fear, because what if she is in trouble? Thoughts of her battered, stabbed body, courtesy of Hayden or those fuckers who tried to kill her á la Gladys, ran rampant through his mind and he could feel his breathing speed up, but his lungs close down, and even though he didn’t need oxygen, the rush of adrenaline feels even more potent when you’re dead because what’s the worst that can happen if you fight?
You’re already dead.
Tate.
Oh no.
Tate.
He immediately appeared in her room to find her lounging on her bed, seemingly unharmed, and he breathed a big sigh of relief.
But then he noticed that she was wearing only a thin dress, and it made certain parts of his anatomy stir to life, and he really, really hoped she didn’t notice, think of Constance, think of Larry, gross.
“Hello, Tate.”
His eyes snapped to hers and she gave him a soft smile in return before getting off the bed and walking towards him.
“Violet -”
If he had been the typical asshole teenage boy, the amount of longing in his voice would have embarrassed him, but he couldn’t find it in himself to give a fuck when she was looking at him like that, like she wanted to be back in his arms again.
“Come here.”
He closed the space between them, walking towards her as if he were in a trance, unless they were almost touching, and he reached out hesitantly to caress her face, and this time, unlike that time now long ago when he awoke her from her nightmare, she let him.
She must have seen the question in his eyes, but she let him stumble over his words, all different emotions crashing on his face, a little smirk showing that she took pleasure in his shock at her unexpected behavior, a contrast to her eyes all big and innocent, and the heady mixture of pure and vicious Vi was fucking with his both of his heads.
“But, Vi, what -?”
“I said before that I tried to forgive you, but I couldn’t.”
She reached up to cover his hand with hers before continuing.
“I thought about us a lot. I cried every day, I couldn’t sleep, or if I did, I had nightmares. I tried to bury what we had by turning to Travis.”
He growled at hearing his name, but she calmed him by nuzzling into his hand slightly.
“It didn’t work. The thought of kissing him made me sick. All I could think about when I was with him was you. I just couldn’t do it anymore.”
She looked back up into his eyes and it was as if they were seeing each other for the first time again.
“So I decided to see if I wanted to try again.”
“And?”
He wanted to kick himself for sounding so overeager and maybe ruining their moment, but she just smiled.
“I’d like to try again.”
For the Gift I Want to Receive:
1. Please List Preferred Characters and/or Pairings:
Tate/Violet, Tate, Violet, Hayden, Vivien, Constance, Nora, Moira.
2. Squicks or characters/pairings you do not want in your gift: Bodily fluids (aside from blood)
3. Possible Scenarios/Themes/Lines to incorporate:
Redemption, betrayal, forgiveness. If the author doesn't want to focus on Tate/Violet, I'd love to see something focusing on Tate and the women of the Murder House (specifically the mother figures)
4. Youtube link a SONG to describe the overall theme you would like:
Ghost (le weekend remix) by Depeche Mode
Author: applythepressure
Summary: He never thought about forgiveness because he never wanted it. Until her. Until Violet.
Spoilers/Warning/Triggers: Just minimal swearing, very mild sexual situations, and a crapload of angst.
Author Notes: Hello, my wonderful giftee! I hope you like it! It is canon, focusing on the theme of forgiveness and how Tate interacts with Violet while he has encounters with other residents of the house. I obviously take no credit for the song - it is “I Dreamed a Dream” from Les Misérables - or for the line from A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. Breakbone is another name for dengue fever, which causes very painful muscle aches and in extreme cases, hemorrhagic fever. I just think this disease actually describes Tate and Violet together - they love each other so much it physically hurts and become feverishly delirious with the sheer power of it, and the pain is so strong that it feels like they’re hemorrhaging all their emotions and sanity.
Breakbone
Tate Langdon never needed forgiveness.
When he was alive, he never asked for it, never thought about it, because the world was his, his alone to do with as he pleased, the people just his playthings to pick up, throw away, twist a limb or blow off a head, and the only right they had was to scream if they wanted as they accepted whatever he decided to do with them.
He never thought about forgiveness from the kids he killed that day, nice clean bullet holes in their flesh made soft by designer lotions and perfect by secret cosmetic surgeries their daddies would pay for out of their doctor and lawyer cash-stuffed pockets, and all he had on his mind as he shot those kids was that all that gave them power in this world - the strongest muscles on the football team, the brightest smile on the cheer squad, the smartest brain in even the AP classes, the most skillful hands with a makeup brush and hair dye - were now laughably powerless at the end of his barrel, unable to withstand the sheer blast of a tiny ball of metal at point blank range.
He never thought about forgiveness, never thought how it would feel or taste, never thought about what made other people crave it, never understood why people cared so much to have it, this foreign thing he saw no use for, this thing that provoked torrents of tears and laments and desperate pleas and hot, sweaty makeup sex.
He never thought about forgiveness because he never wanted it.
Until her.
Until Violet.
He is watching her again like he always does, he just can’t help himself when this is the only way he can feel close to her. He knows that she wants nothing to do with him, but he can’t take it anymore and opens his mouth to say all the things he has been thinking endlessly on loop since the night she sent him away - I love you, I need you, you are my light, you are my life - but of course, she’s smart and wields it just like he would an axe, blunt trauma and bruising blows right to the place where it would do the most damage.
“Don’t speak to me. Don’t move. Don’t breathe.”
He materializes in her room, gaping like a fish, mouth hanging open, tongue poised at the roof of his mouth, ready to spill out all those thoughts he keeps bundled up most of the time, but he will do anything she asks of him and slowly closes his lips.
She gets up from her bed and walks right past him to the door, hair sweeping behind her shoulders and her long skirt billowing with the force of her walk. He can easily see the tightness in her shoulders which he wishes he could smooth out with his firm hands, the firm set of her mouth which he longs to kiss into a smile, and probably the worst thing, the steady gaze of her eyes straight ahead at the door, no flicker to the side where he is standing, no shine to betray latent tears, no sparkle to show any presence of her past affection for him.
She pauses with her hand on the doorknob and he can see the knuckle white grip she has on the shiny metal.
“I don’t want you here. I don’t want you watching me. I don’t want you following me. If you really love me, you will let me go.”
“Vi -”
She whipped around to face him, tense and angry, no trace of forgiveness in her entire body, and he could feel the hope drain out of him for a fairytale reunion, of her running back into his arms despite his sins and them living in loving bliss until the end, whenever that may come.
“What did I say about speaking?”
He looked down at the floor, hoping she saw his apology in his body language since he couldn’t - and wouldn’t, since that was what she wanted - say the many sorrys he so desperately wished he could.
“I can’t forgive you, Tate. I tried, I tried so hard, I ripped my heart out with all my trying, but I just can’t. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
He never knew pain until that moment when he looked up to see her apologizing to him of all people, the fierce beauty apologizing to the ferocious beast, a parody, quite frankly a sick joke, of how it was supposed to be, of how they knew it should be - him, eyes wet and mouth quivering, begging her for forgiveness. He wondered if she knew that this twisted reversal would be the perfect way to hurt him, to force him to see his faults up so close and personal, and if this was one of her ways of exacting her pound of flesh. He searched her face to see if this apology was a tactic of revenge, but the only crack in her armor was the slight wavering of her voice when she came to that word they both knew he should be saying instead.
And as she closed the door behind her, despair overcame him and he just hoped she didn’t hear his agony.
He was in the kitchen getting a glass of whiskey - the previous owners of the house were very fond of their liquor, even more so when Hayden started chucking their throw pillows at them in the middle of the night just to fuck with them - when Moira walked in. He stopped trying to get the very last drop out of the dusty Maker’s Mark bottle and scrutinized her out of the corner of his eye.
He had an odd relationship with her - he, for one, never really saw her in her sex kitten mode, probably now because he only had eyes for Violet, but he didn’t remember even seeing her like that before Violet moved in. Maybe he thought it would be weird to lust after a lady that banged your dad and was murdered by your batshit mom. Anyway, they weren’t really chums like she and Vivien were, but they helped each other when the occasion calls for it. They were more like business associates that were able to act as a team and get the job done, but covering up his dirty secrets was the only thing unifying them and once the bleach had washed away all evidence of his indiscretions, they had no use for each other anymore. He certainly had no use for her subtle reprimands - he can still hear her snottily say “I think you should get over your compulsive need to please the ladies of this house” on his bad days - and she certainly had no use for his trigger happiness.
“Nothing is ever easy in this house, is it?”
He placed the bottle down gently and took a long, hearty swig of the dark liquid, savoring the way it burned down his throat because everyone knows there is a fine line between pain and pleasure and for someone as dark and twisted as him, that line is nonexistent.
“That’s what makes this place so much fun.”
He thought he saw a hint of a sad smirk on her face before she started cleaning the already spotless kitchen counters.
“You know, I thought this place was going to be my ticket out of here. I was going to make some money, buy a plane ticket, and go to New York. I wanted to be on Broadway. I wanted to see all those city lights in Times Square.”
He stayed quiet, not wanting to interrupt this rare show of intimacy towards him, since as much as they are indifferent towards each other most of the time, there are times where she is not just a temptress or an old hag and he is not just a psychopath with a penchant for guns, and they reach this place of quiet understanding and tolerance.
“I wanted to go to a place where I wasn’t seen as just a nice piece of ass or a cockteasing whore. I wanted to do something amazing, something memorable. I wanted to be remembered for something other than my body. But I guess we can’t get everything we want.”
He sighed, thinking of Violet - when is he not thinking about her? - and the sad truth of Moira’s words and the longing he could still hear in them couldn’t ring any more loudly. He took another big sip of his whiskey.
“No, I suppose we can’t.”
She gave him a melancholic smile before she walked over to the sink and started washing her cleaning rags. He watched her plunge her hands into the soapy water over and over, and for a split second, he thought he saw her as her young self, but she wasn’t in her sexy maid uniform, she was in a beautiful dress, hands clutched around a microphone rather than a dish cloth, singing a slow ballad about love and dreams lost.
“I dreamed a dream in time gone by, the hope was high and life worth living…”
He felt her place a hand on his shoulder and his eyes snapped back to her face, back to its old, papery self with the one clouded eye, and her lips quirked up a bit at his surprise and he was sure what he saw wasn’t an illusion.
“Many men aren’t able to see things as they really are, Tate. They are only able to see what they want to see. You saw me as I wish to be seen. Very few men can do that.”
He knew she was amused by the obvious confusion on his face.
“What - how was I able to do that? Why me?”
“That is something you have to figure out for yourself.”
She gently patted him before going off to dust some bookshelves, leaving him staring after her with an empty bottle and too many questions.
He really tried to not follow her, he really did, Boy Scout’s honor, but he caved and he was back again in her room watching her sleep, her soft breathing the only sound in the dark room. They all knew ghosts didn’t really need to sleep, but sometimes the reality of them being dead and stuck in a house forever got too much and they all did things they didn’t need to just to have some semblance of normalcy and connection to their former humanity. He rationalizes his inability to sleep as proof that he didn’t have any even when he was alive.
He was just staring at her, and he knew it would seem creepy to everyone else in the house, but he quite frankly didn’t give a fuck about what they thought. He barely gets to see her face at all anymore, and he never gets to see it when it’s not scrunched up in anger or sadness. He wants to remember her happy and laughing, or panting and lustful, or peaceful and content, and he finally gets to see that side of her when she is sleeping, when her sorrow cannot touch her, and he wouldn’t give that up for anything.
Suddenly she moved, just a slight shift, and he froze, praying she wouldn’t wake up and see him because he is breaking yet another promise to her and he can’t bear to push her away even more.
“Tate…”
She called his name in a strangled voice, and he felt his heart break all over again and he wanted nothing more than to wrap his arms around her and kiss away all her pain.
“No!”
She was thrashing now, clawing viciously at her sheets, fists bunched tightly, and he just knew she was reliving the moment she found out he was dead and a murderer and a rapist and everything she didn’t want in a guy.
“Don’t…not true…Tate…Tate…”
God, he felt so helpless, helpless to comfort the girl he still loved so much because he was the reason for all her sadness in the first place, and he couldn’t take any of his horrible sins back.
“NO!”
He couldn’t take it anymore and rushed over to her, gripping her hand and pleading with her loudly to wake up. Her hand was squeezing his harshly, but he welcomed the pain and the feel of her skin back on his, even if only for a moment.
“Vi, Vi, come back to me! Vi, please!”
She stopped moving and her eyes opened slowly, trying to focus on him, and narrowing into slits when they did. She wrenched her hand out of his and scooted back to the headboard of the bed, bringing her knees up to her chest, and he knew she was haphazardly throwing up barriers against him.
“Why are you here?”
Her voice was hard and tense, and he knew it was because she didn’t want him to speak to her - their last encounter made that fact painfully clear - but she knew she had to let him to find out what happened. He likened it to getting a shot - you don’t want to do it because you know it’s going to hurt, but it sure beats getting the flu and being sick as a dog for a week. Right now, she was between a rock and a very, very hard place, but her need to know if she did anything that she would construe as a betrayal to herself, some crack in her armor he can exploit or a temperature spike in the ice around her feelings for him, outweighed her desire to just send him away and drive herself mad with what ifs.
“You were having a nightmare. I woke you up.”
“What did I say?”
“You kept saying my name. And you were crying. I thought you needed me.”
The silence between them seemed to stretch for eons.
“Please, just go.”
“Vi, I -”
He scooted towards her and reached over to caress her face, but she put her hand out to stop him before he got any closer. He could see her tears wetting the pillow, an ugly, misshapen scar on the cotton, mockingly reminding him that he is the cause of its twin on her heart.
“I don’t think I can bear it if you say anything else.”
He nodded silently, and withdrew his hand even though every nerve in his body was screaming at him to touch her, just one more time, just enough to keep going through this hell of his own creation. He got up from her bed and picked up her comforter, which had been kicked to the ground during her nightmare. Disregarding the look of shock and suspicion on her face, he smoothed the blanket out and loosely tucked it around her before leaving.
When he came back later to check on her, she had wrapped herself in it.
He couldn’t help but think that she was like a sleeping butterfly, beautiful and utterly fragile, just waiting to emerge from the dark world of its cocoon.
He also couldn’t help but hope that their relationship would maybe be like a butterfly too.
He was in the backyard, reading one of his favorite books - Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison - in the gazebo. He connected with the protagonist even when he was alive because he did feel like no one saw the real him. His bitch of a mother only saw what she wanted to see, which was a track star and stellar student with normal empathetic tendencies instead of a deadbeat psychopath who traded his Bs for some grade-A coke. Larry was just like his mother, only with less of a clue. His sister and brother, while he dearly loved them, couldn’t see him fully purely because they just did not have the capacity too; he thinks now that maybe that was a good thing because he did not want to taint their innocence with his darkness. His peers at Westfield definitely didn’t give him a passing glance until he forced them to in a big way with his guns. He definitely feels connected with the narrator even more so now that he is dead - considering he can actually be invisible - and that nothing else has really changed. Suddenly a sharp voice cut through his musings, a voice he had sincerely hoped to never hear again because it reminded him of decisions he wished he had never made.
“Tate.”
Vivien.
The mother of the love of his life and of his child, the poor woman he had raped and terrorized, the woman that could have happily been his mother-in-law one day if he had done some things differently.
What he would give to turn back time and tell his past self to just stop, fucking think for a second, and not shoot himself in the foot, metaphorically, of course.
“You need to stay away from my daughter.”
He put his book down to see her with the Band-Aid bundle of joy swaddled in a blue blanket and asleep in her arms. Her hair was done up in a messy ponytail, and her blouse was rippling slightly in the wind. He marveled at how her eyes became hard just like Violet’s, with a small narrowing and a dangerous flashing, and resolved to be careful with his words since it is often like mother, like daughter, and he has no doubt Vivien can be just as cruel as Violet, especially to him.
“I have been.”
“Don’t fucking lie to me. She’s been crying all day. You did something to her.”
“I swear. I didn’t.”
“I don’t believe you because all you do is lie. You are a psychopath, Tate. You break lives. You hurt people and it means nothing to you. She will never forgive you, just like I will never forgive you for what you did to me and my family, so you need to stop trying to win her back. She will never move on if you don’t leave her alone. Haven’t you done enough to her?”
She was breathing hard, shaking with both personal and motherly rage, clutching tightly to her baby like he was her shield against his evilness, and he suspected that she had been waiting to say that to him for a good long time.
“I really am sorry for what I did to you.”
She opened her mouth to protest, probably with a rush of accusations that he is still lying, that he is incapable of feeling sorry, but he kept going because he knows if he doesn’t get what he wants to say out now, he never will.
“I truly am sorry, Vivien. I’m not expecting you to believe me. I’m not expecting you to forgive me. I have no right to ask or demand your forgiveness because if I learned anything from Violet, it is that forgiveness must be freely given.”
He looked at Vivien, who seemed stunned into silence. He took a deep breath before he continued because he knew that his next few sentences would not go over well, but they had to be said.
“But don’t pretend to speak for Violet. Whether or not she forgives me is her choice alone. I hope you will support whatever decision she does make, but you should know I will wait for her forever regardless because I love her and that will never change. ”
He disappeared before Vivien could respond.
He was lost in his daydream of naked Violet touching herself when he heard laughter from the backyard. As much as he was loathe to stop, it sounded like Violet and he will always take real Violet over imaginary Violet, because even though he could control the outcome of his fantasy Violet - her forgiving him, her fucking him savagely, her laying in his arms at night, her telling him she loved him - it could never compare to having the real thing, even if it was at a distance.
He went to the attic window to see what was happening, but as soon as he did, he really, really fucking wished he didn’t.
Violet and Travis were having a fucking picnic.
And he was tickling her gently.
And she was letting him!
God, the fucking look on her face, dimples crinkled, mouth open, eyes shining. She looked so happy, so nothing like the girl that he woke up from a nightmare not so many nights ago.
What hurt the most was that he could have been the one down there, he should have been the one down there and he most definitely should have been the one making her happy. But he was stuck in the attic with only his hand for company and she was flirting with bolts-for-brains who thought Nickelback was the new Nirvana.
Rage and deep sadness overwhelmed him at once, and he didn’t know if he was going to cry or break things first.
So he decided to do both.
“Looks like our resident Romeo is moping, how original.”
Hayden sauntered into the living room where he was laying on the couch, staring at the ceiling out of a combination of sheer boredom and crushing melancholy. For one thing, when you’re stuck in the same couple thousand square feet with a bunch of other wackos and your murder victims for 364 days a year, it unfortunately limits your fun rather severely. For another, being stuck in the same place while the love of your life is playing house with a fucking pretty boy of all people really gets you down. Since the day he saw her from the attic, he has caught her with Travis playing cards and Scrabble, eating and watching TV together, and snuggling on the very couch he was now laying on, which had sent him into a rage that ended up with him trying anything to block out the pain, even becoming Charles’s lab rat for a few hours. He perversely hoped that his scent would overpower whatever smell Travis left behind so when she did lay down on it again, all she would inhale would be him.
He screwed his eyes together, hoping that through some magical stroke of good luck or some benevolent favor from a deity, the she-bitch would be banished and he could sulk in peace.
“Still heartbroken over your lady love?”
Fuck, she’s still here. Well, it wasn’t like he ever had good luck when he was alive, and he is sure his sins preclude him from ever being in any deity’s good graces.
“What do you want, Hayden?”
She flopped down in the chair across from him, the same one Ben still sits in when he plays therapist to any ghost having a particularly bad day, and he thought that she was taking a little too much pleasure in pretending to be his own special shrink.
“Oh, I don’t want anything from you. I don’t want your love because all of the love you have is for Violet. I do still want your dick sometimes, but I know you’ll never give it to me, so why should I bother? I don’t want your pathetic mood swings and crying spells because they give me a migraine. I don’t -”
“Enough, you little bitch!”
“Uh oh, lover boy is getting cranky.”
He swung his legs over the sides of the couch and gave her a nasty look as he got up, which she returned with a dismissive scoff.
“Is your only purpose here to taunt me?”
“Should I have another one? This one is so much fun!”
“Well, playtime’s over. Go away.”
He smiled a little at her indignant shriek from the basement.
He laid back down on the couch, mulling over what just happened. It is weird for Hayden to seek him out - ever since he shoved her off his crotch when she tried to seduce him in the basement, they usually made it a habit to stay away from each other. She must have been feeling quite bored or spiteful to mock him like that. He figured she was freshly stinging from another rejection from Ben, who was too obsessed with his second chance with his wife and their perpetual baby to even spare her a second glance now. Considering the fact that Ben has turned his back on his previous manwhoring days, she consistently failed in her mission to get back into Ben’s heart and pants, but damned if she didn’t try, and he had a feeling she would keep trying because she didn’t have anyone else in his house. Ben was the only person who tied her here, and now that he is gone - figuratively, of course - she has no one to turn to, and this fucking place would drive you batshit bonkers even if you had an army of therapists, friends, and loving support at the ready.
He sighed.
They weren’t so different, Hayden and him, and maybe that was why he didn’t like her. They both were in love with people who refused to reciprocate even if they felt the same way, they don’t take not getting their way well, and they usually relieve stress through some good old fashioned slash-and-kill. He had no desire to be friends with her - if he did, or worse, sleep with her, that would permanently remove any chance he had for Violet to forgive him - but he did understand her, understood her rage, which only thinly covered up her sorrow and sense of betrayal, and most definitely understood her pain at being abandoned by the one person you thought would never leave you. He took a modicum of comfort in the fact that he wasn’t the only one who felt utterly alone. And he took even more comfort in the fact that no matter how bad he felt or thought that he had it, she had it worse because he knew that he may have another chance with Violet whereas she knew, without a doubt, that Ben was never and will never be hers.
On second thought, maybe he should be a little nicer to her.
“Want to play some cards?”
“I thought I told you I don’t want to speak to you.”
He shuffled nervously under her sharp gaze, but he just couldn’t bear to let her go off giggling and chatting and cuddling with Travis without putting up some sort of a fight. God, just the thought of them doing all the things she used to do with him - only with him - made him sick to his stomach. He had to show her that he wouldn’t let her go so easily, not when she meant so much to him, and he would show her how much he still cared in whatever way he could.
“You don’t have to talk to me if you don’t want to.”
She looked at him suspiciously, like she couldn’t believe that he didn’t have ulterior motives, and he couldn’t really say that he didn’t, just that his ulterior motives were really for good this time.
“Okay. But I don’t want you to talk.”
As she turned to get the cards from her desk, he let a small smile play on his lips.
“Where’s my precious boy?”
He groaned when he heard the disgustingly saccharine voice that still played an active role in his nightmares.
What is she doing here?
The click-click-click of his mother’s heels on the wood floors was getting increasingly louder and he had half a mind to seek refuge in the basement until she gave up and left. However, that would only mean she would keep coming back and Lord knows he did not want that.
“Tate? Tate? Darling, your mother is here to see you.”
He snorted because she made it sound so innocent when he knew she was really there to give him a beating, verbal or otherwise, for some other horror he unleashed on the physical world, and then to find Travis to soothe the frustrations left behind by the last clueless man she had ensnared in her web. She was a black widow, sucking every last drop from her trusting victim’s neck, callously seeking out someone new even before the light in his eyes has gone out.
Might as well get this over with, quick and fast like ripping off a Band-Aid.
“What do you want, Constance?”
She whipped around to face him, and he took pleasure in the quick flash of fear in her eyes before she reverted to her caring mother sham.
He was struck by the thought that she had wanted to be an actress, and before everything went to absolute shit, he loved watching her pretend to be the characters on whatever TV show was their favorite at the time. She was quite good at hiding her real ugliness, too good, actually, to the point where she could have everyone but him fooled, and he was happy that she had never made it to Hollywood because he had a feeling that she would have left disaster in her wake.
“It is rude to call your mother by her given name, you know.”
“You don’t deserve the title.”
She inhaled sharply, and he could see her true self fighting to get to the surface, like a shimmering in a mirage, a glitch in the Matrix - which he watched once when the TV service was still on after yet another set of owners had fled the property, and he had thought about it for a good while afterwards, wondering if maybe the house was like the Matrix in some way, trapping its residents in a space-time that wasn’t actually real, and they were just waiting for The One to let them out - which let you know what you were looking at really wasn’t real.
“Tate -”
“What are you doing here? What do you want?”
God, even this little bit of interaction was giving him a headache.
“Can’t I just come over to see my son?”
He laughed bitterly, leveling her fake hurt gaze with a menacing one of his own.
“Please, stop pretending to be such a saint. You can’t believe that I would fall for that little shtick of yours. You always have other reasons. So spit them out so I can spit them back at you and leave.”
She huffed haughtily, still holding the same proud, stuck-up Virginian virgin image she loved to portray of herself, and reached up to fix her already perfect hair.
“Tsk, tsk, Tate, you ought to have better manners and show respect to your mother. I thought I raised you better than that.”
“If you could call what you did raising.”
“That’s enough!”
Her abrupt screech echoed through the empty halls and her hands smacked down hard on her thighs in anger - ah, here is the real Constance - and Tate applauded himself on getting her worked up enough to drop the lovey-dovey familial bullshit.
There were few things he liked more that calling his excuse of a mother out on her hypocrisy.
“I won’t ask you again. Why are you here?”
“I came” - she took a breath to steady herself - “to ask you to see your son.”
“No.”
God, that was the last thing he wanted to do, being confronted with the thing that lost him everything he had wanted and pretending to be one big jolly family. He’d rather got shot by the SWAT team twenty times over again.
“But if you just -”
“No.”
“You don’t even -”
“No, Constance. I never want to see him.”
“You’re cruel, denying your son the chance to know you.”
“I don’t care. He will never be my son.”
She gasped, but he soldiered on, hoping that what he said next would forever deprive Constance of the idea that he would want Michael in his life.
“All I care about is Violet. She means everything to me. He is the product of the bad decisions I made that cost me her love. I want nothing to do with him, ever. And if you don’t want a world of hurt coming to you, you will never try any bullshit like this again.”
He reveled in the shocked look on her face.
“Now get out of my sight.”
She tried to plead with him, he could see it in her eyes, but when he met her with nothing but hardened determination, and when she saw that there was no weakness to exploit, no way to coerce him into acquiescing, she harrumphed and started walking away.
“Oh, and Constance?”
She turned, and he almost laughed at the look of hope on her face. Clearly, she still doesn’t know, or more likely, refuses to know him at all.
“Never come back. It might just be your last time if you do.”
This time he did laugh as he walked away with her staring back at him in utter disbelief.
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing.”
He went to sit down next to her on the blanket she had laid out in the backyard. It was an extraordinarily beautiful day, sun shining, bird singing, all that jazz, and he didn’t want to let it pass him by - he needed every bit of happiness he could get, storing it like a squirrel stores nuts for the long hard winter, and it looks like she had the same idea.
He started playing with a stray thread and remembered that this was the blanket he had seen her and Travis having a picnic on that day in the attic. A short burst of fury ran through him, but it abated when he looked down at Violet, her eyes closed and her dress hunched up to her thighs, milky white and smooth, and her arms thrown above her head. It was impossible for him to ever stay mad at her.
“Do you mind if I stay?”
She cracked one eye open at him and let out a deep sigh.
“I guess not.”
He lay down next to her, being careful to be as close as he could be without touching her, and opened the book he brought - A Tale of Two Cities by Dickens - and started reading. He only got through the first couple pages before he felt like someone was watching him. When he looked back over at her, both her eyes were open, staring intently at him. He felt his breath get taken away - she hadn’t looked at him, really looked at him, like that in ages.
“What?”
“Read to me.”
“But I thought you didn’t want me to speak to you.”
He wanted to kick himself.
“Never mind what I said before. Do what I’m saying now.”
“Okay.”
He’d do anything she’d ask, both of them knew that. He turned back to the beginning of the book and started again, watching her mouth the words with him out of the corner of his eye.
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…”
He couldn’t help thinking that maybe, just maybe, they were heading back, little by little, towards the best of times.
“Where’s my baby? I want my baby, I just want my baby…”
He was in the basement, though he usually stays away from that part of the house now - too many bad memories to count were made within these dank walls, both by him and by others, and he feels like he could be pulled away by them to a dark place that he didn’t want to go. But for some reason today, he felt compelled to go down there and now he knew why.
Nora.
Her sobbing pierced through the dusty air and as much as he hated her - and a part of him did hate her, because of her need for a baby, he lost Violet, the one person who actually meant something to him - there was another part of him that cherished the small moments of motherly kindness she showed him as a child and even another part that desperately wished they could make new moments like that again.
But they can’t, because she’s gone off and lost her mind and doesn’t know which way is up or down anymore, she’s forgotten that she is dead, and the only thing he can count on from her is her wailing about her baby, the baby she wasn’t willing to take care of, but she can’t even remember that once she finally got the baby, she didn’t want it, so she keeps wailing and wailing on and on, like a broken record, until someone, usually Hayden, snaps her neck to give all of them, including her, some peace.
For a person who wasn’t supposed to feel anything, all of this made him feel unbearably sad.
“Hey, Nora.”
She looked up at him in confusion and he knew that she wasn’t in this reality where they were ghosts and stuck in this house, doomed by the evil her sick husband created when he brought back Thaddeus from the bits and pieces in that cursed box. He wasn’t sure where she was, maybe back in the 20s when she was disillusioned with Charles and angry at the perceived downgrade of her life, maybe back in her childhood when she was obviously spoiled rotten with material things and also with an abundance of love. She seems to skip to different points in her life, and he never knows where he will find her.
“Who are you? What are you - do you have my baby?”
“It’s Tate, Nora. Remember me? You took care of me sometimes when I was a kid.”
“Tate?”
She reached out to touch his face, mapping it with her hands like a blind person would do, and he searched her eyes for something, anything, any sign that would tell him if she knew who he was.
There was nothing.
“Do you have my baby?”
“No, Nora. I’m sorry.”
Her face crumbled and she looked so like the time she initially asked him for a baby, so sad, so helpless, so alone, that he had to bite back a sob of his own.
“Oh.”
And she turned back to the empty cradle and he could tell he had lost her.
He made sure he had climbed all of the stairs before he started crying.
He was in the attic, playing with Beau, when he heard something he couldn’t believe.
Tate.
Violet was summoning him. She hadn’t summoned him since they were still together, after she found out she was dead but before she discovered all his sins, a blissful, idyllic time that he replayed in his mind over and over. His heart leapt into his throat - what does it mean? He couldn’t bring himself to squash the hope bubbling up in his chest. But almost instantaneously that new found hope was replaced by cold fear, because what if she is in trouble? Thoughts of her battered, stabbed body, courtesy of Hayden or those fuckers who tried to kill her á la Gladys, ran rampant through his mind and he could feel his breathing speed up, but his lungs close down, and even though he didn’t need oxygen, the rush of adrenaline feels even more potent when you’re dead because what’s the worst that can happen if you fight?
You’re already dead.
Tate.
Oh no.
Tate.
He immediately appeared in her room to find her lounging on her bed, seemingly unharmed, and he breathed a big sigh of relief.
But then he noticed that she was wearing only a thin dress, and it made certain parts of his anatomy stir to life, and he really, really hoped she didn’t notice, think of Constance, think of Larry, gross.
“Hello, Tate.”
His eyes snapped to hers and she gave him a soft smile in return before getting off the bed and walking towards him.
“Violet -”
If he had been the typical asshole teenage boy, the amount of longing in his voice would have embarrassed him, but he couldn’t find it in himself to give a fuck when she was looking at him like that, like she wanted to be back in his arms again.
“Come here.”
He closed the space between them, walking towards her as if he were in a trance, unless they were almost touching, and he reached out hesitantly to caress her face, and this time, unlike that time now long ago when he awoke her from her nightmare, she let him.
She must have seen the question in his eyes, but she let him stumble over his words, all different emotions crashing on his face, a little smirk showing that she took pleasure in his shock at her unexpected behavior, a contrast to her eyes all big and innocent, and the heady mixture of pure and vicious Vi was fucking with his both of his heads.
“But, Vi, what -?”
“I said before that I tried to forgive you, but I couldn’t.”
She reached up to cover his hand with hers before continuing.
“I thought about us a lot. I cried every day, I couldn’t sleep, or if I did, I had nightmares. I tried to bury what we had by turning to Travis.”
He growled at hearing his name, but she calmed him by nuzzling into his hand slightly.
“It didn’t work. The thought of kissing him made me sick. All I could think about when I was with him was you. I just couldn’t do it anymore.”
She looked back up into his eyes and it was as if they were seeing each other for the first time again.
“So I decided to see if I wanted to try again.”
“And?”
He wanted to kick himself for sounding so overeager and maybe ruining their moment, but she just smiled.
“I’d like to try again.”
For the Gift I Want to Receive:
1. Please List Preferred Characters and/or Pairings:
Tate/Violet, Tate, Violet, Hayden, Vivien, Constance, Nora, Moira.
2. Squicks or characters/pairings you do not want in your gift: Bodily fluids (aside from blood)
3. Possible Scenarios/Themes/Lines to incorporate:
Redemption, betrayal, forgiveness. If the author doesn't want to focus on Tate/Violet, I'd love to see something focusing on Tate and the women of the Murder House (specifically the mother figures)
4. Youtube link a SONG to describe the overall theme you would like:
Ghost (le weekend remix) by Depeche Mode
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