American Horror Story - "Furnace Room Lullaby", Violet/Tate, M
Title: Furnace Room Lullaby - 1/?
Author: lindentree
Rating: M
Character(s:): Violet/Tate
Word Count: 4,056
Summary: "Nothing, not even light, can escape." A Violet/Tate AU mystery-horror murder ballad AU set in 1994.
Notes: Yes, this is yet another Violet/Tate AU set in 1994. The concept is done to death at this point, but I guess I just wanted to explore my own version, so I hope some of you out there are willing to humour me.
I don't want to give away too much about what's the same and what isn't. All you need to know for the purposes of this story is that Violet is a year younger than Tate, and the Harmons have just moved into the Murder House for the same reasons we were presented with in the pilot episode. Some scenes/sections of dialogue will be familiar in order to maintain character and highlight some parallel plotlines, but this is not a retelling of the story we saw in season 1. Short version: everything else will (hopefully) become clear along the way, so please bear with me and the mystery.
The title of the fic and the lyrics at the beginning of this chapter are taken from Neko Case's song "Furnace Room Lullaby."
***
I'm wrapped in the depths of these deeds that have made me;
I can't bring this sound from my head, though I try.
I can't seem to find my way up from the basement;
a demon holds my place on earth 'til I die.
Los Angeles was every bit as intolerable as Violet imagined it would be.
It was worse than she imagined, actually, and Violet prided herself on being able to imagine some pretty brutal shit. Her mind always veered downward to the worst case scenario. But this was worse than the worst case scenario.
It was high school, and she was the new girl. It was a nightmare.
Violet sighed, dabbing a wad of prison-grade toilet paper against the gash in her forehead. She'd had another run-in with the resident queen bee, Leah, and her little band of followers, and Violet had not escaped unscathed. It was only her third day at Westfield, and her third nasty encounter with them. They had taken an instant and intense dislike to her, and she still wasn't sure why. Their reasoning had been hard to discern, what with all the screaming when Violet spat in Leah's face.
She smirked, and then winced as she pulled the paper away from her forehead. She leaned over the sink and examined the wound more closely in the mirror. The bleeding seemed to be slowing; Violet had bled all down the side of her face and onto her sweater walking from the quad to the bathroom. When she first saw her reflection in the cracked mirror, she was taken aback. Head wounds bled so much; she looked downright ghoulish. No wonder everyone had given her a wide berth in the hallway.
Violet touched a curious finger to the wound, her eyes watering as a sharp pain skated down her nerves. When she pulled gently on the smooth skin of her forehead, the fragile clotting and scabbing her body was trying to do frayed apart, and fresh blood welled up.
Cool, she thought.
Giving her bloodied reflection one last look, she donned her burgundy hat and slung her bag across her body. She wasn't going to bother washing the blood out of her sweater. Then she'd just be damp and pathetic and humiliated. She'd rather let it dry brown and crusty on the fabric like a painted-on badge of honour that clearly said fuck you.
Pitching the bloodied toilet paper into the garbage can, Violet left the bathroom and wandered down the empty hallway in the direction of her American History class. She was already late, but who cared? Literally no one. Not even her parents cared; they barely noticed whether she went to school in the mornings. God forbid they take a breather from raking their failed marriage over the coals to take notice of something as insignificant as their daughter.
Not that Violet was willing to waste even an iota of brain power on them and their bullshit, of course.
Violet arrived at her classroom and paused outside the door. She could hear a deep voice droning like a hive of bees. It was the teacher, standing at the front of the room. She sighed. There was absolutely nothing worse than walking in late and having everyone stare at you. She wished she could be invisible, could just vaporize her way through the wall and find herself in a desk.
Better yet, she wished she could just vaporize herself right the fuck out of this dump.
Violet knocked tentatively and opened the door, poking her head in. The teacher paused in his lesson and looked up at her with a disapproving frown.
"Sorry I'm late," Violet mumbled half-heartedly.
The teacher reached for a sheet of paper on his desk and examined it for a moment before looking back up at her.
"You must be Violet Harmon," he said. "Transfer from... Boston, is that correct?"
Thirty pairs of eyes focussed on her, and Violet wished desperately for this asshole to let her sit down already. She nodded.
"All right," he said. "I'll let the lateness slide this time, since you're new. Don't make it a habit. Your seat's over there." He pointed to a desk at the back of the class, the last one left unoccupied.
Without making eye contact with any of the slack-jawed morons gaping at her, she went to her desk and sat down, pulling out a notebook and a pen. Purely for appearances and for doodling, of course, as she did not plan on taking any notes.
Violet's mind drifted away, buoyed by the monotonous sound of the teacher's voice, her thoughts departing for pleasanter territory. She'd been zoned out for about ten minutes when she had the strangest sense that someone was staring at her. She blinked. The teacher was facing the blackboard, saying something about the early colonists of Virginia. Violet let her gaze wander around the classroom to find her classmates either bent over taking notes, or daydreaming like she had been. Why did it feel like someone was watching her?
As she turned to look at the row of desks next to her, by the window, she realised why. It was because someone was watching her.
She hadn't noticed him when she first sat down, but she couldn't help but notice him now.
The boy next to her was staring at her, his dark eyes both intense and placid somehow, like he found her fascinating but couldn't be bothered to say so, content instead to simply watch her. He didn't seem bothered at all that she had caught him staring, either. He had messy blond hair, and looked like he didn't make a habit of sleeping or bathing. His grunge clothes were too big for his wiry, boyish frame; he looked like a Kurt Cobain wannabe.
"What?" she mouthed at him.
His eyes dropped from her face, then, and when she followed the direction of his gaze, she realised that he was staring at her bared wrist where her long sleeve had bunched up on the desk.
He was looking right at the crooked row of fencepost scars that hatched their way up her arm.
Her face burning, Violet snatched her arm off the desk and into her lap. He looked up in surprise, as if he'd forgotten she was alive and hadn't expected her to move. Recovering, he smirked at her, and leaned over.
"You're doing it wrong," he whispered. "If you're trying to kill yourself, you have to cut vertically. They can't stitch that up."
Violet stared at him, trying to formulate a response to that.
"Mr. Langdon, we're discussing the disappearance of the colonists at Roanoke, but if you have something more interesting you'd like to talk about, by all means, share it with the class."
The boy looked up to the front of the room, and Violet's gaze followed. The teacher was glaring impatiently at them, his arms crossed over his chest. A few heads turned to crane their way.
Great, Violet thought, her eyes dropping to her desk. This asswipe is going to tell the entire classroom that the weird new girl is a suicidal basket case. Fantastic. Why not?
"I don't have anything to say," the boy mumbled. Violet glanced over to see him staring down at the notebook in front of him. The open page was covered in splotches of black ink, and it took a moment for Violet to see that they were doodles of birds in flight, their wings jagged and stark on the white paper.
"All right then," the teacher continued wearily, "if you don't mind, we'll get back to the lesson. Now, the Governor at this time was John White, and he -"
But Violet wasn't listening. She eyed the side of the boy's head, the unkempt hair falling in his eyes. He turned then and smiled at her, a manic sort of smile completely unlike the smirk he levelled at her earlier. But there was something behind it, something quiet and soft and dark that beckoned to her, and just like that she wanted to know everything about him.
Violet forced her face into its best disdainful sneer.
"Fuck off, creep," she mouthed, and turned away.
She didn't look at him again for the rest of the class.
***
Violet walked home from school the long way, winding her way through unfamiliar neighbourhoods while smoking and contemplating the likelihood of getting completely lost but somehow miraculously taken in by people who weren't self-absorbed assholes. When she found herself a block from home, she decided it was not to be, and turned her mind to figuring out which was actually worse - being stuck in her hellhole of a high school, or her hellhole of a home.
Given the way her parents had been since all the bullshit back in Boston, Violet had to declare it a stalemate.
Turning the corner onto her street, Violet exhaled a smoky sigh and flicked her cigarette into the hedge that lined their next door neighbour's yard.
"Mind where you're tossing your cigarette butts, young lady. My yew bushes are not a public trash receptacle."
Violet stopped short to see a blond woman standing in the yard holding a pair of pinking shears, arms crossed over her chest.
"Sorry," she mumbled.
The woman didn't reply, shading her eyes with one hand and tilting her head. She examined Violet in silence for a long moment, and then a brilliant smile broke out across her face like a footlight illuminating a stage.
"You must be Violet," she said in a warmer tone than before, her voice all bourbon and branch water, like something out of Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood.
Violet nodded.
"Well don't be shy," said the woman. "We are neighbours, after all. I introduced myself to your lovely mother earlier. My name is Constance."
"Nice to meet you," Violet offered stiffly.
Constance came closer, her gaze dropping to Violet's feet and back up.
"Aren't you a pretty little thing," she said in a tone so smooth and bland that Violet wasn't sure whether she was being complimented or not. She gave an indifferent shrug.
"Hm," Constance said, tilting her head. "Not very sociable, I see. That's teenagers for you. My son's no better, holing himself up in that dark room of his all hours of the day and night. I tell him that fresh air is the best thing for him, that he ought to run track again, but does he listen to me? Of course not." She paused, rubbing her arms beneath their pastel sweater set. She smiled again, and standing so close, Violet could see the strain around her mouth. "Youth is wasted on the young, I suppose."
"I guess," Violet replied, anxious to continue up to the house.
"Well," Constance said, "you go on now and be a help to your mother. Moving house takes such a toll on a person."
Violet nodded and gave what she hoped was something approaching a friendly smile before turning away and walking around the side of the house and in the kitchen door.
Her mom was sitting at the kitchen island, flipping through a magazine. She looked up when Violet came in.
"Hey, honey," she said. "How was your day at schoo - is that blood?"
Violet stopped short, dismayed that her mom had seen. Maybe she should have tried to scrub the blood out at school, after all.
"What, this?" Violet said glibly, glancing down at the rusty brown bloodstains on her sweater. "That's always been there."
"Violet!" Vivien exclaimed, standing up and coming around the island. "Your face - what happened?"
Violet supposed she should have been moved or comforted by her mother's concern, but she wasn't. Instead she suddenly felt angry, blisteringly angry.
"You and dad's joke of a marriage fell apart," she snapped, "and you decided to move all of us across the entire country whether I liked it or not, and I had to start at a new high school in a new place full of assholes. That's what happened."
Vivien's face fell, and she took a step back, as though Violet had shoved her. She swallowed and took a deep breath before looking up at Violet again. "Honey, I know this move has been hard on you, but -"
"If this is gonna be some 'I hear that you're angry and I respect that' talk therapy bullshit you picked up from dad, I'm not interested."
Violet turned and walked out of the kitchen, ignoring her mother's shrill voice demanding that she come back. She passed by the closed doors of her father's office - he obviously had a patient with him. She sailed up the stairs and down the hallway to her bedroom, slamming the door behind her with a satisfying bang.
The anger and the gleeful rush of acting on it abandoned her as abruptly as it had taken hold. She looked around the room, watching the dust motes sway in the beams of afternoon sun that slanted in through the windows. She wandered over to the stereo her parents had bought her as a "we're sorry our family is circling the drain and our only solution is to drag you across the country" present. She pressed the play button, and the CD inside spun to life. The first angry strains of Hole's "Violet" came out of the speakers, and Violet cracked a half smile. She cranked the volume; her mom couldn't stand Hole.
Humming along, Violet went to her bed and knelt beside it, feeling around underneath it for the loose floorboard. Prying it up, she removed a brown leather men's shaving kit.
She thought it was kind of ironic, in a way - most kids would have a stash of drugs in there if they had a stash at all. Yet hers was filled with nothing but shaving supplies. It was funny, if you thought about it.
Of course she had drugs too. But that was beside the point.
Leaving the stereo playing, she left the room and headed to the bathroom. Closing the door behind her, she sat the shaving kit on the edge of the sink and opened it. She pondered its contents - a variety of sharp objects, some gauze and band-aids for the times she bled too much - and plucked out a razorblade. She held it up, admiring the way the soft afternoon light played on the edge of the blade. She scraped a fleck of dried blood off with her thumbnail, and wondered idly if one of these days she would cut herself and end up with some kind of freak infection or tetanus or something.
Violet lifted her other arm and shook her sleeve out of the way, turning her arm up to observe the row of scars. Some of them were new and pink, still raw-looking. Others had been there for a long time now. Years, actually.
She took a deep breath and settled into this familiar routine, her heart thudding and a sweet buzzing in her ears. She found a place midway up her arm to cut, drawing the blade across her skin. Her flesh opened and blood welled to the surface, and Violet stared down at the wound, feeling around inside herself to see whether she was calmer or sadder or happier or just nothing, nothing at all.
As a sluggish trickle of blood dripped down her arm to the white porcelain sink below, Violet knew that it was still just nothing.
Eventually she let her sleeve fall back down to cover her arm. She would have wiped the blood off first except her sweater was already probably ruined from the day's carnage, so what did it matter?
Violet dropped the razorblade back into the shaving kit and caught sight of the last two joints her friend Chelsea had sent along with her when she left Boston. "For the road," Chelsea had said, nodding solemnly as she pressed them into Violet's hand.
One of the joints seemed as good a way to spend her evening as anything else she could think of, so she picked up the shaving kit and headed back to her bedroom, led there by Courtney Love's voice.
Violet had closed the door and was halfway to her bed when she stopped and did a double take.
There was a boy standing by her stereo, perusing the haphazard stack of CDs beside it. Not just any boy, but the boy from her history class.
"You've got good taste in music," he said without looking up from his examination. He had Radiohead's Pablo Honey in his hand, and was reading the back.
"How did you get in here?" Violet choked, completely taken aback by his intrusion into a place her parents barely dared enter. Not to mention his baffling nonchalance.
He glanced over at her. "I was looking for the bathroom."
"What -?"
"I'm one of your dad's patients," he said, turning slowly to face her. His blasé attitude disappeared, and his eyes were intent. "I should have introduced myself in class. My name's Tate."
"Violet," she replied, still stunned.
"I know," he said. He regarded her for a long moment, and Violet began to feel less affronted and more uncomfortable. "Why do you cut yourself?"
Violet gaped at him. What the fuck was wrong with this guy? It was bad enough that he knew about it; why did he want to talk about it?
"Here, look," Tate said, taking a step closer to her. He shoved up the sleeve of his left arm, holding his wrist out to her. It was covered with a ladder of scars - some healed and puckered, some pink and scabbed - just like hers, but rougher, nastier. More violent.
Violet didn't know what to say. She'd never met anyone like her before. Or, at least, not someone like her who was willing to show her that. She swallowed and lifted her eyes to meet his. He was watching her expectantly, waiting to see how she would respond.
"Um," she said finally, her throat dry, "when did you start?"
"When I was a kid. I'm not sure when exactly," he replied. His tone was calm, almost cheerful. He pointed to a particularly nasty scar halfway up his forearm. "This one was from when my dad left."
Violet pulled at her own sleeve, revealing the bloody cut she'd just made. "First week of school," she said, by way of explanation.
Tate nodded. "That place is the worst," he said. He turned away, idly examining her bookshelves and the art she'd hung on her walls. It wasn't much to look at; she hadn't bothered to decorate much yet. Violet blew out a breath and sat down on the rag rug on her floor; standing there staring at him was making her feel awkward.
"This whole place is the worst," she said, mostly to fill the silence. "I hate everyone. Everybody's so fake, with all their bougie designer bullshit. The east coast is so much cooler. At least in Boston we had actual weather."
"I love it when the leaves change," Tate said.
"Me too!" Violet replied, delighted. It was one of the things she already missed about Boston; the weather in LA was way too warm and sunny for October, and all the non-native trees were the same washed-out dusty grey-green, like they couldn't get enough water.
"Why'd you move here?" Tate asked, his attention turning to the blank chalkboard on her wall. He found a piece of chalk on the ledge and weighed it in his hand.
Violet frowned, making an inarticulate sound of disdain. "My parents' marriage was bottoming out and they thought coming here would be a great 'fresh start.'" She paused. Tate was leaning over, writing something on her chalkboard that she couldn't see. She stared at his sweater-covered back, wondering how much she should say, how much she wanted him to know. "My dad had an affair with one of his students, and my mom found out. Like she literally caught him in the act."
Tate turned around to look at her. "That's horrible," he said, sombre. "If you love someone you should never hurt them. Never."
"Right?" Violet replied. "And the worst part is that six months ago, my mom had this brutal miscarriage. The baby was like seven months old and we had to have this macabre funeral. Have you ever seen a baby coffin?"
Tate's eyes didn't leave her as he came over, crouching down to sit cross-legged before her, taking her hand in his and running his fingers gently over the scars on her wrist.
"I'm sorry," he said, so sincere that Violet again found herself unsure how to respond. After a moment, she pulled her hand away and stood, walking to the stereo, which had fallen silent.
"Do you want to listen to The Smiths?" she asked, opening the jewel case for The Queen Is Dead and glancing back over her shoulder at Tate. He sat watching her, picking at the fraying sleeve of his sweater.
"Got any Nirvana?" he asked, perking up.
Violet smirked. "Why doesn't it surprise me than you're a Cobain fan?"
"'Cause you're a smart -"
"What are you doing in here?"
Violet turned to see her dad standing in the doorway, glaring down at Tate.
"We're just listening to music, dad," she replied, bewildered.
"You need to leave, Tate," Ben said, not looking at Violet. "You shouldn't be in here and I think you know that."
Grudgingly, Tate got to his feet as Violet looked on, mortified. He walked to the doorway and stopped in front of Ben.
"What's that thing you say I'm afraid of?" he asked, his voice so soft Violet almost couldn't hear his words. "Fear of rejection?"
Ben said nothing, and Tate walked out, disappearing down the hallway in the direction of the stairs. As he stomped downstairs, Ben turned to Violet.
"Stay away from him," he said, his voice inviting no argument. Violet bristled.
"Dad, nothing even happ -"
"You heard me!"
"Okay, then I guess you're going to have to transfer me to a different history class. Or a different high school," Violet snapped.
"What?"
"He goes to Westfield," Violet replied. On her father's blank look, she elaborated. "My high school? The place I'm forced to go every day? The state prison for adolescents?"
"Oh," Ben breathed, his anger dissipating as his frown deepened.
Violet rolled her eyes. Of course he hadn't connected that they went to the same school. Bitterly, she wondered how a person with such shitty observational skills could make a living as a psychiatrist.
"Oh my god, don't worry about your precious professional integrity. It's not like it matters," she said with a huff. "What am I gonna do, tell everyone at school that he comes over to my house for his weekly head-shrink and electroshock therapy? What the fuck for? Everyone already thinks I'm a freak."
"No, I don't think you would tell anyone. But I am concerned about the two of you spending time together. Tate's..." he broke off, rubbing his eyes.
"Tate's what?" Violet pressed. "And don't feed me some bullshit about how he's dangerous or something. Unless you're trying to tell me that you're treating violent psychopaths in our house, which, that sounds like a great idea, dad."
Ben gave her an exasperated look. "Just stay away from him, all right?"
Violet sighed and rolled her eyes, sick of the conversation. "I'll do what I can. But I can't help it that we go to the same school."
"Okay," her father agreed. He stood there, continuing to watch her with a worried expression.
Uncomfortable under the scrutiny, Violet frowned at him. "Any other draconian laws you need to lay down, or can I do my homework now?"
Ben held his hands up in a conciliatory gesture. "Dinner'll be ready in about an hour," he said. "Your mom and I expect you to emerge from your cave for once to come eat with us, so we'll see you then." He turned and left the room, closing the door behind him.
Violet stared at the closed door for a moment before heaving a deep sigh and glancing over at her chalkboard. On it, in tidy block letters, Tate had written the word TAINT. Violet eyed it for a beat, puzzled, and then pulled the joint out of her pocket, where she'd shoved it upon discovering Tate in her bedroom.
She was going to need something to get her through a family dinner.