WIP AMNESTY: Counting Time (part 2)
part 1
The house was quiet almost all of the next day-- almost too quiet, Link thought. A week ago, the silence might've been a relief, but now, just when he was getting sick of being on vacation and used to the idea of having a crazy mad-scientist-type chick living in his basement, it was unsettling at best and alarming at worst. If Link had ever met a woman capable of defending her own honor in unexpected and terrifying ways, he was pretty sure it was Violet Baudelaire. The only sign he'd seen that she was even still there was that someone had finished the jug of milk in the fridge before he'd come downstairs that morning.
He worked out for a couple of hours in the morning, showered, rummaged up a sandwich-- meaning to eat it in front of the television-- and had finished it by the time he'd adjusted the antennae well enough to discover that the only things on were soap opera reruns.
Downstairs, there was a sudden bang and a clatter.
"The hell with this," Link told the overwrought couple on the screen, and switched the TV off again to go see if he had some instant coffee and the makings of another sandwich.
He was especially cautious making his way down the basement stairs, just in case they were booby-trapped-- Link had seen all seven Bond movies, okay, he knew what was what-- but either they weren't, or his spectacular innate grace and balance kept him and the food he carried intact. Violet was kneeling on the floor, long skirt and all, drawing something Link couldn't see on an enormous sheet of paper that was pinned down around the edges by an odd assortment of household objects. She was lost in concentration, half her hair coming loose from the bun she usually wore it in, and didn't seem to have noticed him, so he cleared his throat. "Hey, um--"
"Hmm?" She turned around to look at him, startled, and Link nearly dropped the plate he was carrying in even greater surprise-- he hadn't noticed them from behind, but Violet was wearing a terrifyingly complicated-looking pair of goggles, with what looked to be a good half-dozen sets of lenses connected with about a thousand tiny levers and hinges.
"I brought you lunch," he said after a pause, offering it to her with a slight bow and a flourish to cover his surprise.
Violet flipped a switch next to her eye; all the lenses spun up and away from her face, which didn't actually make her look any saner but at least let Link see her eyes. "Thank you." She accepted the plate and mug with a thin polite smile, nothing at all like the way her face had lit up dancing with him last night, and Link was surprised to realize how uncomfortable he was with the thought that he was making her uncomfortable.
"So." Link cleared his throat, entirely unnecessarily, and peered down at the sheet of paper unrolled across the floor. It seemed to be an immensely complicated and detailed mechanical diagram, and wasn't a whole lot more informative than it had been from halfway up the basement stairs. "Everything okay? I thought I heard something."
Violet leaned back against the workbench-- had there been a workbench back there against the wall before she'd shown up? Link couldn't quite remember-- and tugged off her goggles, setting them aside. "It's kind of you to be concerned. There was an accident--" she nodded over towards the corner of the room where there was still machinery embedded in the wall and now, Link saw, a black scorch mark on the floor-- "but nothing important. These things happen." Link hadn't been imagining it-- there was a definite wary tinge to the way she was watching him. "Was there anything else you wanted?"
"I wanted." Link bounced on his toes a couple of times, slowly, making sure he knew exactly what he wanted to say before he said it. "I wanted to apologize," he went on carefully, "for what I did last night. I wasn't thinking, I didn't mean to make you this upset, I'm sorry." You were laughing, was what he wanted to say, and it does weird things to me when you laugh, but even in Link's head it sounded like a terrible excuse. Even if it was the best explanation he could find.
"So am I." Violet reached up and untied her hair, wrapping the ribbon around one hand and deftly knotting it all back up into a much neater but immensely complicated-looking roll at the back of her head; by all appearances, though, her attention was still wholly focused on Link. "It isn't that I dislike you, because I don't--"
"Oh, flattering," Link observed, before he could stop himself, but there was something not-quite-sincere in the grimace Violet gave him in response that made his gut ease up a little.
"I get it," she continued, and Link wondered if maybe she'd been planning what to say just as carefully as he had. "People these days are more casual about these things than I'm used to, that's fine, but I have somewhere to be. And even if I were interested in--" she gestured vaguely-- "an involvement with you, it really wouldn't be a good idea."
Oh, she had planned out what to say, hadn't she. Link still wasn't too solid on whether he believed in the whole time travel thing or not, but an I'm not interested was an I'm not interested, so he left it at that-- and then something clicked in his head, and he sat down hard on the bottom step and groaned. "Oh jeez, you're married, aren't you? You said before-- you mentioned you had a family and I forgot. Oh God, Violet, now I'm really sorry."
"What?" She laughed incredulously, and Link looked back up to find Violet staring at him in complete bewilderment. "I'm not married, Link. I'm not even-- well, I was engaged, but I don't think I have been for years." Link tried briefly to make sense of that and gave up very quickly. "I live with my brother and sisters. And we have a lot of aunts and uncles, but they come and go.."
"Your brother and sisters. And a lot of aunts and uncles, and you don't know whether you're engaged or not." Link propped his chin in his hand, and then thought better of it and sat up again-- he was twenty-six and had always had good skin anyway, but you never knew with acne. Better not to risk it.
"It's a long story." Violet glanced down at the floor. "He was a cartographer. An explorer." She undid and redid her hair again, mechanically, for no reason Link could discern. "And one day he went off exploring-- he wanted to circumnavigate the globe-- and no one's heard from him in years."
"I see," Link said faintly, wondering just how many feet he could cram into his mouth in a 24-hour span of time. "That's-- Christ, Violet, I shouldn't've asked that. I'm sorry. Again."
"It's how life goes." Violet shrugged, looking back up at him soberly. "People come and go, and you can't always do anything about it."
Oh, there was definitely a nice long story there somewhere, and Link made a note to ask sometime-- some other time, preferably, when they hadn't already gone well over their recommended dose of awkwardness for the day. "Speaking of making the best-- your coffee's gonna go cold," he pointed out in the meantime for lack of a safer topic, glancing over to where Violet had left it abandoned on the floor. "I'm not making you another cup if it does."
Violet looked at him, looked at the coffee and sandwich, and after a moment stepped over to pick them up and-- to Link's perpetual astonishment-- sat down sideways on the stair just above him, plate balanced in her lap. Link budged over against the wall to make room for her; he sure wasn't going to complain. "I needed this," she said halfway through the sandwich, sounding surprised at herself. "Thanks."
Link twisted around a little where he sat, letting him stretch his legs out over the floor and look up at Violet without straining his neck. "What're they like?"
"What're who like?" Violet blinked at him between sips of coffee.
"Your family." Link looked down, absently brushing at his jeans. "Your brother and sisters and aunts and uncles."
"Oh, I wouldn't even know where to start with the aunts and uncles." Violet seemed to relax; apparently Link had finally asked the right question. "But my younger brother Klaus is a librarian. And Sunny and Beatrice are the babies, they're eleven and eight--"
Link sat back a little further, propping his elbows behind him, and contemplated this new and unexpected phenomenon of Violet actually volunteering information about herself. The stairs were rickety and really not that comfortable, but-- as weird time-traveling mad scientist chicks went-- Violet was strangely comfortable, and for once he was content to sit and listen a while.
-------
Despite her continued affection for Link-- or, more accurately, because of it-- Violet was beginning to suspect that spending almost all her time in his house really wasn't the best of ideas. Two days after he had kissed her, she was down at the corner store buying that day's Globe and a MBTA map; the day after that she was on a bus with a neatly clipped want ad in her pocket.
"I don't know about this." The elderly man behind the counter eyed Violet dubiously-- she was wearing a blouse and jeans and boots, and felt underdressed if anything, but he didn't look terribly impressed. "Fixin' cars ain't a girl's job, miss, you might be better served asking 'round some of those big department stores downtown."
Violet groaned inwardly, fixed a placid smile on her face, and propped her elbows on the counter. "Tell you what, Mr. Patton, I'll make you a bet."
That got his attention, at least. "A bet, hey? What kind of bet?"
"The kind where you let me work on those cars back there for a day." Violet nodded at the dozen or so cars waiting for repairs behind him. "And when I have them all working like new by this evening, you give me a job."
He huffed out an incredulous breath. "And if you don't?"
"I'll pay the repair bills for all of them, plus ten percent." Violet wandered around the counter and back into the garage while he was thinking it over, though it didn't take him long at all. "Do you have a coverall I could borrow?"
She lost track of time for a while after that. Repairing things wasn't quite as interesting as inventing them to begin with, and she'd been able to deal with combustion engines quite easily since she was nine, but but there was an undeniable satisfaction to putting things right (and maybe making a little improvement or two, along the way). Mr. Patton followed her around suspiciously all evening, peering over her shoulder and taking cars for test runs around the parking lot when she'd finished with them and muttering darkly every time one proved to be running perfectly.
"Okay, I'll bite," he said sometime that evening, after Violet had slammed down the hood of the truck that was last in line. "You've got the job, though I still say you'd be better off downtown, and from the sound of it you're rolling in cash already. What good's this place to you, anyway?"
"I need to get out of the house more. And I'd make a terrible shopgirl." Violet unzipped her coverall and shrugged out of the top half.
"That's it? You're bored?" Patton snorted. "Then go shopping. Go dancing. Do whatever rich pretty girls are supposed to do these days."
Violet tapped her fingers absently on the hood of the truck. "Well, there is something else I could use a bit of help with."
-------
It was an odd kind of relief to Link when Violet came home one evening and announced she'd gotten a job. A couple of weeks ago he would've been briefly suspicious of her motives, then just glad to have her out of his hair for part of the day; now he just figured it would do her some good to get out and about more, since it seemed she wouldn't be getting back to her family just yet. Plus, less time spent in his house meant less chance of property damage. The daily sight of a dark gaping hole where his stove had been-- Violet hadn't gotten around to replacing it yet-- was an excellent reminder of that.
Until the day she got cheerfully on the bus to Patton's Body Shop and didn't come home for three days.
There had been times when Violet was so wrapped up in her work, or Link in his own life, that they didn't see each other for a day or two, but even then there were traces of her presence around the house: food eaten or bought, books and magazines moved around in the living room, loose wires hanging out of the television that shouldn't have been. This time there was nothing-- well, there were still wires hanging out of the TV, but they'd been like that the last time Link had seen her. She hadn't been home at all.
On the morning of the second day, Link began to consider going to the police. Maybe they could look for Violet, or they already knew where she was, or they'd arrested her again for some failure or other to fit into modern society. But then he remembered the difficulty he'd had getting her out of jail the first time around, and hesitated; how the hell was he supposed to explain their relationship now?
On the evening of the third day, to his immense relief, the front door slammed and Violet dragged herself into the kitchen. Link, who had been trying to soothe his worry with a bowl of ice cream, gaped at her in shock. "Where have you been?"
"Tell you in a minute." Violet barely spared him a glance before slamming a cupboard open and retrieving a box of cereal and the largest bowl Link owned; she looked hollow and exhausted, her face badly bruised in a couple of places. He wondered if she really had gone around some bend or other.
"Violet. Seriously. What." It came out rather strangled; Link was still frozen in astonishment, a forgotten spoonful of ice cream dripping back into his bowl as he watched her pour herself an enormous bowl of cereal and milk.
She tried to tell him, but it was hard to make out the words around the cereal she was wolfing down.
It certainly couldn't've been what it sounded like, anyway; Link sucked the ice cream off his spoon while he convinced himself of that. "Sorry, what?"
"I said," Violet repeated between mouthfuls, "I got taken hostage during a bank robbery." She sounded mildly irritated; less so than if, say, she'd gotten stuck in an especially long line at the drugstore. "You know, if I were a bank robber, I'd plan for these things. They never seem to feed you properly."
Link's own spoon clattered into his bowl. "I was right the first time around," he concluded. "You're insane."
"I'm not making it up." Violet paused to look at him. She had one of the most impressive black eyes Link had ever seen outside of a movie screen. "I'm pretty sure it was even on the news."
"You broke my TV," Link reminded her, torn between relief, concern, and exasperation. "I didn't know where you were, you could've--" okay, probably she couldn't've. "I was worried."
"Oh." She flushed suddenly pink and went to find more food. "I forgot."
"Forgot what?" Link offered her his now-melting bowl of ice cream-- he didn't need it any more, anyway-- and she accepted gratefully.
"That you're not used to living with me." Violet dug into the ice cream with just as much enthusiasm, but she looked apologetic. "Getting arrested, getting in the middle of things-- this kind of thing happens to me all the time, Link. I'm just really unlucky, I guess." She shrugged. "My whole family's used to it, but I forgot you aren't. I'm sorry."
Something twisted in Link's gut as he tried to imagine living like that. He couldn't, really, but even the thought seemed pretty awful. "Don't be sorry, okay? I'm sorry I freaked out. I just want to know that you're okay."
Violet smiled, tired but genuine. "I'm fine. Honestly."
"Actually fine?" Link eyed her narrowly as he got up to rummage through the freezer. "Or I've-had-worse fine?"
Ice cream finished, Violet propped her chin on her fist and watched him. "Both. Well, mostly actually fine."
"Yeah, I can see that." Link knotted up half a dozen ice cubes in a plastic bag and handed it over. "And that's for your eye."
"Oh! Thanks." Violet pressed it to her face with a wince. "I'll fix the television tonight, if you want."
Link shook his head and leaned on the counter next to her. "I don't want. You look like you need a real dinner and sleep."
Violet pulled a bit of a face at him. "Well, aren't you bossy."
"Someone's gotta look after you in between kidnappings." Link shrugged as if it were no big thing-- though it was a big thing, both that Violet apparently got knocked around on a regular basis and that at some point she'd stopped minding. But he was just a dumb chorus boy with a crush; what was he supposed to do about it?
-------
She hadn't exactly had a choice in the matter, but Violet still wasn't used to working by herself; she was used to being one of four, part of a team. It was frustrating for her to have to do all her own research, and downright impossible for her to cook for herself-- but she could have worked around even that, even if Link hadn't been so accomodating. And-- well, she was doing just fine right now without any trained bats, but you never knew when they might come in handy. The real problem was that she missed her family; she wasn't lonely exactly, not living with someone as garrulous and bored as Link, but her family hadn't been split up for this long since Klaus had been fifteen and some enterprising kidnappers had mistaken him for the Crown Prince of Colorado. It just didn't feel right, somehow.
The answer, Violet told herself, was work: at the garage, on fixing her machine, on trying to research why she'd ended up in 1972 to begin with. The sooner she resolved these things, the sooner she could go home. The problem, of course, was that Link wouldn't let her work all the time; he still made a point once a day or so of bringing her food, or dragging her out of the house to see a movie or take a walk, and Violet could have turned him down, maybe should have, but almost never actually wanted to.
Not even when he chose to make an appearance by nearly but loudly tripping at the top of the basement stairs, cursing under his breath, and leaning out over the railing from a couple of steps down instead of actually joining her downstairs. "Hey. Violet?"
She wiped her hands down the front of her coverall and abandoned her current project-- which had nothing to do with time travel right now, anyway-- to peer back up at him. "Yes?"
Link leant out until the banister creaked alarmingly, craning his neck to see around the basement. Violet had hoped the racket she was making wouldn't carry upstairs; apparently she'd been wrong. "Violet, what the hell are you doing to my house now? It sounds like you're breaking furniture down here. And my basement door definitely is not supposed to open by itself."
"Nothing is broken." Violet folded her arms indignantly. "I had to bring something big down here, that's all. I can put the door back the way it was." All she'd done was install a catch in the dining room floor so the basement door could be opened hands-free-- hardly anything drastic.
"What is it?" Link ventured a few steps further down, eyeing her quizzically.
"Nothing," Violet said instantly. "Just a side project. Not remotely dangerous, I promise."
From where Link was now standing, however, it didn't take him long to spot what hadn't been there before-- an enormous ancient record player, big and bulky and looking (even to Violet) weirdly normal amongst the pieces of wrecked time machine scattered everywhere. "That's all?"
"Well." Violet coughed. "You said I couldn't look inside yours, so I went and found one in a pawnshop. It's mostly the speakers I'm interested in, anyway." She stopped fiddling with the screwdriver and shoved it in a pocket for the moment. She didn't exactly have anything to hide; she just had the niggling seed of an idea that she didn't quite want to mention yet.
"So I was wondering," Link said, appearing to suddenly remember something and making Violet blink in confusion. "I was thinking of having some people--" he made a gesture that Violet thought might have been meant to encompass a number of some kind-- "A couple of people I used to go to school with are in town, seems like a good idea to have a party. If you want to come? Or get safely out of the house, either way."
Violet tilted her head, lips pursed in thought. "Or I could just stay down here." Spending time with Link was one thing; having to fit in with an entire group of people who didn't know when she was from would be a different matter entirely.
"Oh no," Link folded his arms on the banister. Violet suspected he was pouting at her, and tried half-heartedly to glare him out of it, which only made him pout more. "It can't be healthy spending this much time down here. A few hours off won't kill you."
"I have work to do," Violet pointed out. "And I'm just not sure it'd be my kind of party."
Link shrugged. "What would be? For all you know it could be a tea party. With, I dunno, tinkly little music and everyone in fancy hats."
"Is it?" Violet eyed him incredulously.
"Well, no," he admitted, crestfallen, and waved her forward. "Here, c'mere, you've got something on your face."
She scrubbed automatically at her cheek with the sleeve of her coverall and found it no dirtier than it already had been. "Nice try."
"No, really, you've got oil or something, come here." Link grimaced, and Violet took two resigned steps forward so he could reach her over the railing. He produced a handkerchief from somewhere and leaned over the railing to rub intently at a spot on her jaw; she waited it out patiently and tried not to enjoy the brush of his fingers over her skin too much. "See?" he announced after a few seconds, and held the handkerchief up; sure enough, there was a smear of engine grease there.
"I see." Violet rubbed at her jaw again, absent-mindedly, and sighed. "Okay, I'll come to your party."
It was probably still a bad idea, but Link looked so genuinely delighted that it was awfully hard for her to actually regret it.
-------
Link came home from shopping, the day before the party, to find Violet slumped at the kitchen counter, head pillowed on her arms atop a pile of open magazines. At the thud of Link setting the grocery bags down, her head shot up. "Evening."
"Evening." Link leaned over to see what she'd been reading. "Man, what do you want with these? All they'll do is make you depressed."
Violet shoved the heels of her hands into her eyes. "I wish you'd warned me. I was just studying up for your party."
"Key word: party. Not a test." He reached over and flipped one of the magazines shut, by way of making a point. "If you're really worried, I can hang around tomorrow night and prompt you on stuff you don't know. You don't have to sweat it like this."
"Klaus could do this," Violet mourned, and then dropped her head back onto her arms. "No offense."
Link folded his own arms on the counter and tilted his head level with hers. "Are you okay? You don't look so great."
Violet's shoulders lifted in a half-hearted shrug. "I've gotten used to living here," she explained dully. "My life is calmer now than it has been in a long time. And that isn't saying a lot."
"So what's the problem?" Link frowned, not following.
"People--" Violet's mouth twisted in resignation. "They're still people. And for all the horrible people I've known, none of them ever had hydrogen bombs. I thought it was better here, but it's not. It's the same everywhere." Pause. "Everywhen, really."
Link felt a spark of unexpected defensiveness on behalf of his native era. "Oh, come on. It's not that bad."
"No?" Violet eyed him doubtfully.
"Well, okay, yeah. It is that bad. But things do get better." Link thought of the Corny Collins Show, but he wouldn't have known where to begin explaining that; he needed a quicker example. "Like the bomb, right? When I was a kid, everyone was scared shitless of it. We used to have bomb drills in school all the time. And now-- well, okay, we still might get nuked. But we probably won't."
The corners of Violet's mouth twitched upwards. "That's a terrible example."
Link sighed. "Yeah, yeah it was. But you get the idea."
She was looking a little better, at any rate; it was progress. "Do you really believe that, though?"
"What, that people get better?" Link slid an arm around Violet to tuck a piece of hair behind her ear and squeeze her shoulder, and was unreasonably delighted when she leaned into the brief hug. "It takes a while, and it's hard to tell sometimes, but, uh, yeah. I really do think so."
"Thanks. I needed to hear that." Violet smiled over at him, thin but real, and her hand slid lightly down his back. For a long moment they were leaning in alarmingly close together; then she pulled hastily free and slid off her stool.
Link cleared his throat. "You could thank me by helping put this food away."
"Fair enough." Violet still looked a little distracted, but she shoved the pile of magazines away and got to her feet to help out, and just like that things felt normal again. Link wasn't really sure when normal had grown to include her, come to think of it, but he didn't really mind.
-------
By the time Violet made it downstairs the night of the party, things were more or less set up; she'd helped him shop and even get the hi-fi set up, but then she'd vanished upstairs for an ungodly amount of time even by Link's standards, leaving him with two hours to sort out the food and drinks and hi-fi system and then fuss over them endlessly for lack of anything better to do.
With fifteen minutes or so to go, though, Violet appeared suddenly in the living room door. "Hey. How's it going?"
"Ready, I think." Link sent a record going and crossed the room to meet her. "And here I thought maybe you'd decided not to come after all."
"What, and let you down?" Violet smiled, though she was squinting at him a bit oddly. "That's a nice shirt. It's very . . . green."
"Matches your eyes," Link said cheerfully, and-- no, wait, in hindsight that had really been a dumb thing to say.
Her smile faded a bit more towards suspicion. "On purpose?"
"Nope. Just happy coincidence." He looked down at the shirt, fidgeting a bit with the top button on his vest.
Violet harrumphed. "Well, at least you look-- I don't know about normal, but you look like you. How about me?" She spread her hands. "Think I can pass for modern?"
"Turn around." Link offered her his hand; Violet took it with no apparent hesitation and twirled neatly under his arm, though the gesture hadn't really been necessary. "You look lovely."
"Why, thank you." She smiled and tilted her head expectantly. "But that's not what I asked."
Link remembered, belatedly, to remove his hand from hers. God, he really needed to get a hold on himself. "You look fine, seriously. Tonight's gonna go fine."
"If it doesn't, I'm blaming you for inviting me." Before Violet could go on, the doorbell rang, and she nodded towards the front door. "Want me to--"
"Nah, it's my house and I'm done in here anyway." Link shrugged.
As it turned out, to get to the front door Link had to go past Violet anyway, so they ended up answering the door together-- and found waiting there Penny and Seaweed Stubbs. A real blast from the past, though the fact that they hadn't seen each other for years didn't stop Penny from launching herself at him and nearly knocking him over.
"Um," he said after a minute, patting her back. "Penny, I can't breathe--"
"Oops, sorry." She let go of him and stepped back. "It's been a while, is all."
"Yeah, well, I've been busy." Busy avoiding Tracy, maybe, a little, but there was no way Link was admitting to that. "Hey-- guys, here." He looked around for Violet, who was hovering awkwardly a couple of steps back, and waved her forward encouragingly. "This is Violet-- she's, uh, a friend and she's staying here right now. Violet, this is Penny and Seaweed, we went to high school together."
"Your friend?" Seaweed echoed with something suspiciously like a smirk, but he offered Violet his hand. "Pleasure to meet you."
"His friend," Violet confirmed, and shook it firmly. "Pleasure to meet you, too-- and you," she added, beaming at Penny.
"Hi," said Penny-- enthusiastically enough, but looking at Violet with a weirdly thoughtful expression. "And what do you do?"
Violet looked startled. "Me? I'm a mechanic. I work at a repair place over in Hyde Park."
"Really! That's so neat." Penny pursed her lips, shrugging her coat off and folding it over her arm as she looked around. "I guess we're the first ones here, huh? It's so quiet-- I didn't know this was a sad occasion."
"It's not," said Link immediately and indignantly, but then he realized that Violet had frozen in place and was staring at Penny as if she'd said something entirely different and alarming. Link glanced over at Seaweed, wondering what he'd missed, but the other man just looked back and shrugged.
After a long awkward pause, Violet shrugged as if nothing odd had happened at all. "It's a peaceful neighborhood. The world is pretty quiet here."
"Um," Link tried, feeling uncomfortable for no reason he could identify. "Can I get you guys' coats? I'll just hang them up in the hall for you."
By the time he got back to the front door more people were showing up, and then Link had to juggle sixteen guests who needed to be greeted and introduced to everyone else and fed and provided with alcohol, not to mention keeping the music going in the living room. It was a long time until he managed to get into the kitchen, which was relatively empty, and provide himself with a drink he expected to sorely need; he'd nearly forgotten about Penny and Violet being so weird with each other.
At least, until Seaweed found him there. "Your friend--" he was still putting extra emphasis on the word, just to annoy Link-- "is trying to steal my wife."
"She what?" Link followed Seaweed's line of sight into the dining room, where Penny and Violet were huddled together in a corner talking quietly-- and looked like they'd been settled in for some time. "What the hell are they up to?"
"Search me." Seaweed grabbed a bottle of beer and hopped up to sit on the kitchen counter. "Who is she, anyway? Seriously." He propped the neck of the bottle against the edge of the counter and slammed his hand down on the cap, popping it off neatly, and took a swallow.
Link groaned. "She's a friend, she's stuck in Boston for a while, so I said I'd do her a favor and save her some hotel bills. She's living in my guest room. That's it."
"Okay, fine, if you insist." Seaweed held up his free hand in surrender. "I'm just saying, you saying you live with a woman who looks like that--"
"Shut up," Link told him, not at all bitterly, and swatted his shoulder.
Seaweed pulled a face at him. "Fine, shutting up."
Link considered a moment, then shoved some bottles out of the way and hopped up to sit next to Seaweed. "So," he began, looking for a topic at least marginally less humiliating. "How's folks in Baltimore? How's your sister?"
"Inez? Way classier than you'll ever be, same as always." Seaweed shrugged and took another sip of his beer. "Seriously? I think Inez is in North Dakota right now. She's good, we're good, everyone's good."
Link methodically added another shot of vodka to his screwdriver. "How's Tracy?"
Seaweed pursed his lips. "Having a passionate affair with my mother-in-law."
"What." Link spluttered into his drink; he felt dumb for letting Seaweed needle him, but it always seemed to work anyway.
"Oh, come on, we both know Prudence would have an aneurysm at the very idea." Seaweed looked awfully pleased with himself, nonetheless.
Link swatted him again. "Really, how is she?"
"Like I said, fine. " Seaweed glanced over at Link. "Has it occurred to you to, I don't know, call her?"
Link bit thoughtfully at the rim of his plastic cup. "Oh, yeah, I bet that'd go over great."
"Worth a try," Seaweed pointed out. "And in the meantime, like hell are you catching me getting in the middle of whatever you two aren't doing any more."
"Yeah, I don't blame you." Link swirled his drink around a bit and then downed it in a single long gulp. He really wasn't doing so great at keeping the conversation hopeful. "Hey, are you growing your hair out?"
"Now you notice." Seaweed preened slightly, running a hand over his still-short but undeniable afro. "Like it?"
"Yeah, I do." Link tilted his head. "And I'm supposed to be throwing a party here, so what say we go get your wife and my housemate and save them from themselves?"
They both twisted around to look into the dining room; sure enough, Penny and Violet were still talking in their corner and looking altogether more solemn than the occasion deserved. "Past time we rescued them," Seaweed concluded, and pushed to his feet. "Got any cider? Penny loves it."
"There's hard cider in the fridge." Link waved in its general direction distractedly. He didn't know what Violet liked, so he made another screwdriver. Everyone liked screwdrivers, right?
He trailed after Seaweed into the dining room with the drink in hand, and Penny and Violet looked up at them in surprise. "Well, hi," Penny said cheerfully-- even more cheerfully, once she'd accepted the cider bottle from Seaweed. "Did you miss us?"
"Oddly, yeah, we did." Link offered the cup in his hand to Violet, who thanked him quietly and took a deep swallow. It seemed to go over well with her, anyway. "And as your host," he went on, "I'm worried you aren't having enough fun."
"We were wondering," Seaweed clarified, "if you lovely ladies would care to dance."
Violet glanced guiltily up at Link, then back to Seaweed. "I don't really know how," she said sheepishly.
Penny gaped between them. "Link, you're slacking off in your old age."
"I tried to teach her," Link defended himself. "It, uh. It didn't take." He wasn't about to elaborate that he'd enjoyed the first lesson far too much to ever give her another.
"Well, it's not Violet's fault you're a terrible teacher." Seaweed offered her a winning smile and his hand, and after a moment Violet took it and let him pull her to her feet. "Come on, let a guy with real moves show you how it's done."
"Can't hurt, I suppose." Violet looked back over her shoulder at Link as Seaweed dragged her out of the room; he shrugged helplessly, and she grinned.
Penny had gotten to her feet as well, and now she reached over and took Link's hand. "Want to dance? For old times' sake."
"Always." Link forced his attention from Violet back to Penny, and together they went back out into the noise and bustle of the living room.
-------
It was late, extremely late, by the time they'd gotten everyone shooed out of the house-- not that Violet was complaining, really. She'd expected pretty much more of what 1972 had proven to be already-- a half-comprehensible, cheerful cacophony-- and she'd gotten it, but she hadn't expected to enjoy it this much.
Of course, she also hadn't expected to find Patricia Pingleton's granddaughter here, either; that was just an unexpected bonus. A potentially very useful bonus, though Violet wasn't sure what to make of her yet. On her way out the door, though, Penny had scribbled something on a napkin and tucked it quickly into Violet's hand when Link wasn't looking, and Violet in turn had slipped it into her skirt pocket to worry about tomorrow when she wasn't under the influence of something.
And now most of the downstairs lights were out and she was sitting on one end of the couch, feeling warm and a little fuzzy around the edges and guiltily glad that the music had been turned off, and Link was rattling around in the refrigerator doing something Violet couldn't be bothered to turn around to see.
"Nice friends you have," she observed, for the sake of having something to say.
Something clinked behind her, the tap ran for a few seconds, and shortly afterwards Link wandered into the living room as if by accident and set a glass of ice water down precariously close to the edge of the side table at the other end of the room. "Told you." He sat down hard, appearing to have already forgotten about his glass of water, and tilted slowly and inevitably sideways until he was lying on his back smirking up at her with his legs hooked over the sofa arm. "Aren't you glad you came out of your cave?"
Violet tried to come up with a retort and concluded, tiredly, that she might actually have lost on that point. If he wanted to insult his own basement, so be it. "Yes," she conceded. "Yes, I am."
"Good," Link said firmly.
It sounded like he was about to go on, and Violet looked down at him expectantly, but instead he trailed off into silence and his eyes drifted shut. Apparently he had every intention of dozing off right there next to her, which meant it was probably a good idea for Violet to go upstairs to her own room, but first-- because she had been tempted for weeks now-- she reached down and prodded his hair with a cautious finger. Even after hours of dancing it was still more or less in place, and there was something distinctly unnatural, and a little unnerving, about the way it sprang back into shape.
"Hey," Link blurted, eyes still closed, and Violet pulled her hand back guiltily. "Violet?"
"Yes?" She bent her head to look down at him better; the only light was from the kitchen door behind them. "I'm still here."
"'mglad," he mumbled.
Violet felt a sudden fierce surge of fondness that she tried, without much success, to shove back down. "Link, I think it's time you went to bed."
He shifted next to her, stretching his legs out lazily and then letting them flop back over the sofa arm. "D'you remember the first time you fell in love?"
"What?" It was such a complete non sequitur, when Violet had been half-steeling herself for an attempt at innuendo if anything, that it took her a good few seconds to understand what he'd said and form a response. "Of course I do."
"And you kissed on television, in front of everyone--"
"It was a mountain."
Link half-opened his eyes to stare up at her. His eyebrows did something rather strange in the process, but Violet wasn't quite sober enough to figure out what. "No it wasn't, it was a TV studio. And we were sixteen--"
She shook her head. "No, we were sixteen, and it was definitely a mountaintop." Something had gone horribly wrong with this conversation, somewhere.
"It was television," he insisted.
Violet frowned down at him. "I think I know what happened. I was there."
Link's mouth twisted incredulously. "What, when I was sixteen?"
"No, when I was sixteen," she said patiently. "I was old when you were sixteen. Will be. I think."
"Stop that." Something rather like horror flashed across Link's face, and he swatted Violet's arm lightly; she realized rather belatedly that she had been stroking his hair, and decided to keep doing it out of spite. "That's creepy, Vi, stop talking like that. I'm trying to talk about myself here."
"Okay." She wrinkled her nose a little at his impromptu shortening of her name, but it didn't seem worth complaining about. "Go right ahead."
"The point is," Link went on, and then paused for several seconds, looking confused, "you were sixteen-- I was sixteen-- someone was, and you're in love and you kiss in front of God and everyone and it's amazing, isn't it? It's like as long as you're together you can do anything. And then."
Violet shifted, twisting a little so she could tuck her feet up under her and lean back into the corner of the sofa. "And then?"
"And then," Link went on with exaggerated gravity, "everything goes to hell."
"Mm." Violet nodded, slowly, and thought of a sail vanishing over the horizon. "I remember that."
He shifted again next to her, restlessly. "What happened?"
"I don't know," Violet answered, which was true enough no matter who they were talking about. "You tell me."
There was a brief pause, and then "Elvis," Link said bitterly. "Elvis happened."
Violet stared, as much out of bewilderment as out of concern at the unhappy tone creeping into his voice. "What's an elvis?"
"Oh, get out of here." Link shook his head, making Violet's fingers skitter from his hair to the warm skin of his cheek; the night was advanced enough, she noted vaguely, that his jaw was just a little rough with stubble. "Everyone knows who Elvis is. He's Elvis."
That, too, went in the file of things Violet didn't feel up to arguing right now. "And what did he ever do to you?"
"President," Link said, not terribly helpfully. "Tracy was gonna be President, when we were kids. Probably still is, knowing her."
"You make even less sense when you're drunk, you know that?" Violet felt fairly safe in saying so; she was pretty certain Link wasn't actually listening to her at this point. "I didn't know that was possible."
"Then be quiet and listen," Link told her, with no hint of corresponding impatience whatsoever. "I make perfect sense-- mmm, you're warm," he went on, and scooted up a little bit to rest his head against Violet's shin.
At least one of them, Violet figured, was going to feel horribly embarrassed about this the next morning; since it was already inevitable, she reasoned, she might as well indulge herself just a little beforehand. "Okay, I'll be quiet," she promised.
"Well, good." Link nodded in acknowledgement, hair catching briefly against her skirt. "Now. As I was saying. Tracy was gonna be President, is gonna be president, and I was gonna be the King."
By now Violet was thoroughly lost, and only slightly because she was distractedly stroking his arm. Link was clearly unhappy; the least she could do was offer a little comfort, and the fact that for some reason she really enjoyed touching him had nothing to do with it. "Of what? Maryland?"
Link hushed her vehemently. "King," he repeated, with careful emphasis. "The King, Vi, Elvis. Who wouldn't've wanted to grow up to be him? No one," he answered himself, before Violet could guess it herself. "Definitely not me."
"So Tracy is going to be President," Violet reminded him patiently, trying her best to make sense of the problem through her growing fatigue, "and you were going to be King. And then what happened?"
"And then--" Link made an utterly senseless gesture with one hand. "And then it turned out my kind of ambition and her kind of ambition, they don't go together so well in the long run. Not the kind of going-together that goes with getting hitched. Not that it matters," he went on, muscles suddenly tense under Violet's hand, "cause here I am, past twenty-five and still no one knows who I am."
"I'm sorry," Violet offered hesitantly, still not quite keeping up but starting to get the gist now. "But you're doing all right, aren't you? You're getting plenty of work in a job you love." The idea of stability was an idle dream for her all by itself; the thought of wanting more was nigh on incomprehensible.
"Yeah, that's where talent gets you. Doing all right." Link sounded distinctly bitter now. "You know where the money is, Vi? Drugs. You shoot some shit and smash up some hotel rooms and kill yourself and wham, front page news. Hendrix is dead, Morrison is dead, everyone knows Elvis is on his way out, look at 'em-- living goddamn legends. Wish someone had told me sooner."
It took Violet a good few seconds to work out what he'd said and be fittingly alarmed by it. "Oh, come on, you don't mean that."
Link let out a long, slow sigh, and the tension in his shoulder seemed to flow out with it. "No," he agreed after a minute, more subdued. "No, I don't."
"You're tired," Violet pointed out, not entirely reassured, and touched his cheek. "We should both get some sleep."
"Sleep sounds good." Link's eyes were already drifting shut, now he'd said what he had to say. "That's you, Vi, genius girl, always right. Should have a comic book about you." He tilted his head and kissed her fingers, lightly, and then settled down again.
"Link--" Violet began hopelessly, breath catching at the easy affection, but there was no answer; he was already dozing off, head warm and heavy against her leg.
part 3 | part 4
The house was quiet almost all of the next day-- almost too quiet, Link thought. A week ago, the silence might've been a relief, but now, just when he was getting sick of being on vacation and used to the idea of having a crazy mad-scientist-type chick living in his basement, it was unsettling at best and alarming at worst. If Link had ever met a woman capable of defending her own honor in unexpected and terrifying ways, he was pretty sure it was Violet Baudelaire. The only sign he'd seen that she was even still there was that someone had finished the jug of milk in the fridge before he'd come downstairs that morning.
He worked out for a couple of hours in the morning, showered, rummaged up a sandwich-- meaning to eat it in front of the television-- and had finished it by the time he'd adjusted the antennae well enough to discover that the only things on were soap opera reruns.
Downstairs, there was a sudden bang and a clatter.
"The hell with this," Link told the overwrought couple on the screen, and switched the TV off again to go see if he had some instant coffee and the makings of another sandwich.
He was especially cautious making his way down the basement stairs, just in case they were booby-trapped-- Link had seen all seven Bond movies, okay, he knew what was what-- but either they weren't, or his spectacular innate grace and balance kept him and the food he carried intact. Violet was kneeling on the floor, long skirt and all, drawing something Link couldn't see on an enormous sheet of paper that was pinned down around the edges by an odd assortment of household objects. She was lost in concentration, half her hair coming loose from the bun she usually wore it in, and didn't seem to have noticed him, so he cleared his throat. "Hey, um--"
"Hmm?" She turned around to look at him, startled, and Link nearly dropped the plate he was carrying in even greater surprise-- he hadn't noticed them from behind, but Violet was wearing a terrifyingly complicated-looking pair of goggles, with what looked to be a good half-dozen sets of lenses connected with about a thousand tiny levers and hinges.
"I brought you lunch," he said after a pause, offering it to her with a slight bow and a flourish to cover his surprise.
Violet flipped a switch next to her eye; all the lenses spun up and away from her face, which didn't actually make her look any saner but at least let Link see her eyes. "Thank you." She accepted the plate and mug with a thin polite smile, nothing at all like the way her face had lit up dancing with him last night, and Link was surprised to realize how uncomfortable he was with the thought that he was making her uncomfortable.
"So." Link cleared his throat, entirely unnecessarily, and peered down at the sheet of paper unrolled across the floor. It seemed to be an immensely complicated and detailed mechanical diagram, and wasn't a whole lot more informative than it had been from halfway up the basement stairs. "Everything okay? I thought I heard something."
Violet leaned back against the workbench-- had there been a workbench back there against the wall before she'd shown up? Link couldn't quite remember-- and tugged off her goggles, setting them aside. "It's kind of you to be concerned. There was an accident--" she nodded over towards the corner of the room where there was still machinery embedded in the wall and now, Link saw, a black scorch mark on the floor-- "but nothing important. These things happen." Link hadn't been imagining it-- there was a definite wary tinge to the way she was watching him. "Was there anything else you wanted?"
"I wanted." Link bounced on his toes a couple of times, slowly, making sure he knew exactly what he wanted to say before he said it. "I wanted to apologize," he went on carefully, "for what I did last night. I wasn't thinking, I didn't mean to make you this upset, I'm sorry." You were laughing, was what he wanted to say, and it does weird things to me when you laugh, but even in Link's head it sounded like a terrible excuse. Even if it was the best explanation he could find.
"So am I." Violet reached up and untied her hair, wrapping the ribbon around one hand and deftly knotting it all back up into a much neater but immensely complicated-looking roll at the back of her head; by all appearances, though, her attention was still wholly focused on Link. "It isn't that I dislike you, because I don't--"
"Oh, flattering," Link observed, before he could stop himself, but there was something not-quite-sincere in the grimace Violet gave him in response that made his gut ease up a little.
"I get it," she continued, and Link wondered if maybe she'd been planning what to say just as carefully as he had. "People these days are more casual about these things than I'm used to, that's fine, but I have somewhere to be. And even if I were interested in--" she gestured vaguely-- "an involvement with you, it really wouldn't be a good idea."
Oh, she had planned out what to say, hadn't she. Link still wasn't too solid on whether he believed in the whole time travel thing or not, but an I'm not interested was an I'm not interested, so he left it at that-- and then something clicked in his head, and he sat down hard on the bottom step and groaned. "Oh jeez, you're married, aren't you? You said before-- you mentioned you had a family and I forgot. Oh God, Violet, now I'm really sorry."
"What?" She laughed incredulously, and Link looked back up to find Violet staring at him in complete bewilderment. "I'm not married, Link. I'm not even-- well, I was engaged, but I don't think I have been for years." Link tried briefly to make sense of that and gave up very quickly. "I live with my brother and sisters. And we have a lot of aunts and uncles, but they come and go.."
"Your brother and sisters. And a lot of aunts and uncles, and you don't know whether you're engaged or not." Link propped his chin in his hand, and then thought better of it and sat up again-- he was twenty-six and had always had good skin anyway, but you never knew with acne. Better not to risk it.
"It's a long story." Violet glanced down at the floor. "He was a cartographer. An explorer." She undid and redid her hair again, mechanically, for no reason Link could discern. "And one day he went off exploring-- he wanted to circumnavigate the globe-- and no one's heard from him in years."
"I see," Link said faintly, wondering just how many feet he could cram into his mouth in a 24-hour span of time. "That's-- Christ, Violet, I shouldn't've asked that. I'm sorry. Again."
"It's how life goes." Violet shrugged, looking back up at him soberly. "People come and go, and you can't always do anything about it."
Oh, there was definitely a nice long story there somewhere, and Link made a note to ask sometime-- some other time, preferably, when they hadn't already gone well over their recommended dose of awkwardness for the day. "Speaking of making the best-- your coffee's gonna go cold," he pointed out in the meantime for lack of a safer topic, glancing over to where Violet had left it abandoned on the floor. "I'm not making you another cup if it does."
Violet looked at him, looked at the coffee and sandwich, and after a moment stepped over to pick them up and-- to Link's perpetual astonishment-- sat down sideways on the stair just above him, plate balanced in her lap. Link budged over against the wall to make room for her; he sure wasn't going to complain. "I needed this," she said halfway through the sandwich, sounding surprised at herself. "Thanks."
Link twisted around a little where he sat, letting him stretch his legs out over the floor and look up at Violet without straining his neck. "What're they like?"
"What're who like?" Violet blinked at him between sips of coffee.
"Your family." Link looked down, absently brushing at his jeans. "Your brother and sisters and aunts and uncles."
"Oh, I wouldn't even know where to start with the aunts and uncles." Violet seemed to relax; apparently Link had finally asked the right question. "But my younger brother Klaus is a librarian. And Sunny and Beatrice are the babies, they're eleven and eight--"
Link sat back a little further, propping his elbows behind him, and contemplated this new and unexpected phenomenon of Violet actually volunteering information about herself. The stairs were rickety and really not that comfortable, but-- as weird time-traveling mad scientist chicks went-- Violet was strangely comfortable, and for once he was content to sit and listen a while.
-------
Despite her continued affection for Link-- or, more accurately, because of it-- Violet was beginning to suspect that spending almost all her time in his house really wasn't the best of ideas. Two days after he had kissed her, she was down at the corner store buying that day's Globe and a MBTA map; the day after that she was on a bus with a neatly clipped want ad in her pocket.
"I don't know about this." The elderly man behind the counter eyed Violet dubiously-- she was wearing a blouse and jeans and boots, and felt underdressed if anything, but he didn't look terribly impressed. "Fixin' cars ain't a girl's job, miss, you might be better served asking 'round some of those big department stores downtown."
Violet groaned inwardly, fixed a placid smile on her face, and propped her elbows on the counter. "Tell you what, Mr. Patton, I'll make you a bet."
That got his attention, at least. "A bet, hey? What kind of bet?"
"The kind where you let me work on those cars back there for a day." Violet nodded at the dozen or so cars waiting for repairs behind him. "And when I have them all working like new by this evening, you give me a job."
He huffed out an incredulous breath. "And if you don't?"
"I'll pay the repair bills for all of them, plus ten percent." Violet wandered around the counter and back into the garage while he was thinking it over, though it didn't take him long at all. "Do you have a coverall I could borrow?"
She lost track of time for a while after that. Repairing things wasn't quite as interesting as inventing them to begin with, and she'd been able to deal with combustion engines quite easily since she was nine, but but there was an undeniable satisfaction to putting things right (and maybe making a little improvement or two, along the way). Mr. Patton followed her around suspiciously all evening, peering over her shoulder and taking cars for test runs around the parking lot when she'd finished with them and muttering darkly every time one proved to be running perfectly.
"Okay, I'll bite," he said sometime that evening, after Violet had slammed down the hood of the truck that was last in line. "You've got the job, though I still say you'd be better off downtown, and from the sound of it you're rolling in cash already. What good's this place to you, anyway?"
"I need to get out of the house more. And I'd make a terrible shopgirl." Violet unzipped her coverall and shrugged out of the top half.
"That's it? You're bored?" Patton snorted. "Then go shopping. Go dancing. Do whatever rich pretty girls are supposed to do these days."
Violet tapped her fingers absently on the hood of the truck. "Well, there is something else I could use a bit of help with."
-------
It was an odd kind of relief to Link when Violet came home one evening and announced she'd gotten a job. A couple of weeks ago he would've been briefly suspicious of her motives, then just glad to have her out of his hair for part of the day; now he just figured it would do her some good to get out and about more, since it seemed she wouldn't be getting back to her family just yet. Plus, less time spent in his house meant less chance of property damage. The daily sight of a dark gaping hole where his stove had been-- Violet hadn't gotten around to replacing it yet-- was an excellent reminder of that.
Until the day she got cheerfully on the bus to Patton's Body Shop and didn't come home for three days.
There had been times when Violet was so wrapped up in her work, or Link in his own life, that they didn't see each other for a day or two, but even then there were traces of her presence around the house: food eaten or bought, books and magazines moved around in the living room, loose wires hanging out of the television that shouldn't have been. This time there was nothing-- well, there were still wires hanging out of the TV, but they'd been like that the last time Link had seen her. She hadn't been home at all.
On the morning of the second day, Link began to consider going to the police. Maybe they could look for Violet, or they already knew where she was, or they'd arrested her again for some failure or other to fit into modern society. But then he remembered the difficulty he'd had getting her out of jail the first time around, and hesitated; how the hell was he supposed to explain their relationship now?
On the evening of the third day, to his immense relief, the front door slammed and Violet dragged herself into the kitchen. Link, who had been trying to soothe his worry with a bowl of ice cream, gaped at her in shock. "Where have you been?"
"Tell you in a minute." Violet barely spared him a glance before slamming a cupboard open and retrieving a box of cereal and the largest bowl Link owned; she looked hollow and exhausted, her face badly bruised in a couple of places. He wondered if she really had gone around some bend or other.
"Violet. Seriously. What." It came out rather strangled; Link was still frozen in astonishment, a forgotten spoonful of ice cream dripping back into his bowl as he watched her pour herself an enormous bowl of cereal and milk.
She tried to tell him, but it was hard to make out the words around the cereal she was wolfing down.
It certainly couldn't've been what it sounded like, anyway; Link sucked the ice cream off his spoon while he convinced himself of that. "Sorry, what?"
"I said," Violet repeated between mouthfuls, "I got taken hostage during a bank robbery." She sounded mildly irritated; less so than if, say, she'd gotten stuck in an especially long line at the drugstore. "You know, if I were a bank robber, I'd plan for these things. They never seem to feed you properly."
Link's own spoon clattered into his bowl. "I was right the first time around," he concluded. "You're insane."
"I'm not making it up." Violet paused to look at him. She had one of the most impressive black eyes Link had ever seen outside of a movie screen. "I'm pretty sure it was even on the news."
"You broke my TV," Link reminded her, torn between relief, concern, and exasperation. "I didn't know where you were, you could've--" okay, probably she couldn't've. "I was worried."
"Oh." She flushed suddenly pink and went to find more food. "I forgot."
"Forgot what?" Link offered her his now-melting bowl of ice cream-- he didn't need it any more, anyway-- and she accepted gratefully.
"That you're not used to living with me." Violet dug into the ice cream with just as much enthusiasm, but she looked apologetic. "Getting arrested, getting in the middle of things-- this kind of thing happens to me all the time, Link. I'm just really unlucky, I guess." She shrugged. "My whole family's used to it, but I forgot you aren't. I'm sorry."
Something twisted in Link's gut as he tried to imagine living like that. He couldn't, really, but even the thought seemed pretty awful. "Don't be sorry, okay? I'm sorry I freaked out. I just want to know that you're okay."
Violet smiled, tired but genuine. "I'm fine. Honestly."
"Actually fine?" Link eyed her narrowly as he got up to rummage through the freezer. "Or I've-had-worse fine?"
Ice cream finished, Violet propped her chin on her fist and watched him. "Both. Well, mostly actually fine."
"Yeah, I can see that." Link knotted up half a dozen ice cubes in a plastic bag and handed it over. "And that's for your eye."
"Oh! Thanks." Violet pressed it to her face with a wince. "I'll fix the television tonight, if you want."
Link shook his head and leaned on the counter next to her. "I don't want. You look like you need a real dinner and sleep."
Violet pulled a bit of a face at him. "Well, aren't you bossy."
"Someone's gotta look after you in between kidnappings." Link shrugged as if it were no big thing-- though it was a big thing, both that Violet apparently got knocked around on a regular basis and that at some point she'd stopped minding. But he was just a dumb chorus boy with a crush; what was he supposed to do about it?
-------
She hadn't exactly had a choice in the matter, but Violet still wasn't used to working by herself; she was used to being one of four, part of a team. It was frustrating for her to have to do all her own research, and downright impossible for her to cook for herself-- but she could have worked around even that, even if Link hadn't been so accomodating. And-- well, she was doing just fine right now without any trained bats, but you never knew when they might come in handy. The real problem was that she missed her family; she wasn't lonely exactly, not living with someone as garrulous and bored as Link, but her family hadn't been split up for this long since Klaus had been fifteen and some enterprising kidnappers had mistaken him for the Crown Prince of Colorado. It just didn't feel right, somehow.
The answer, Violet told herself, was work: at the garage, on fixing her machine, on trying to research why she'd ended up in 1972 to begin with. The sooner she resolved these things, the sooner she could go home. The problem, of course, was that Link wouldn't let her work all the time; he still made a point once a day or so of bringing her food, or dragging her out of the house to see a movie or take a walk, and Violet could have turned him down, maybe should have, but almost never actually wanted to.
Not even when he chose to make an appearance by nearly but loudly tripping at the top of the basement stairs, cursing under his breath, and leaning out over the railing from a couple of steps down instead of actually joining her downstairs. "Hey. Violet?"
She wiped her hands down the front of her coverall and abandoned her current project-- which had nothing to do with time travel right now, anyway-- to peer back up at him. "Yes?"
Link leant out until the banister creaked alarmingly, craning his neck to see around the basement. Violet had hoped the racket she was making wouldn't carry upstairs; apparently she'd been wrong. "Violet, what the hell are you doing to my house now? It sounds like you're breaking furniture down here. And my basement door definitely is not supposed to open by itself."
"Nothing is broken." Violet folded her arms indignantly. "I had to bring something big down here, that's all. I can put the door back the way it was." All she'd done was install a catch in the dining room floor so the basement door could be opened hands-free-- hardly anything drastic.
"What is it?" Link ventured a few steps further down, eyeing her quizzically.
"Nothing," Violet said instantly. "Just a side project. Not remotely dangerous, I promise."
From where Link was now standing, however, it didn't take him long to spot what hadn't been there before-- an enormous ancient record player, big and bulky and looking (even to Violet) weirdly normal amongst the pieces of wrecked time machine scattered everywhere. "That's all?"
"Well." Violet coughed. "You said I couldn't look inside yours, so I went and found one in a pawnshop. It's mostly the speakers I'm interested in, anyway." She stopped fiddling with the screwdriver and shoved it in a pocket for the moment. She didn't exactly have anything to hide; she just had the niggling seed of an idea that she didn't quite want to mention yet.
"So I was wondering," Link said, appearing to suddenly remember something and making Violet blink in confusion. "I was thinking of having some people--" he made a gesture that Violet thought might have been meant to encompass a number of some kind-- "A couple of people I used to go to school with are in town, seems like a good idea to have a party. If you want to come? Or get safely out of the house, either way."
Violet tilted her head, lips pursed in thought. "Or I could just stay down here." Spending time with Link was one thing; having to fit in with an entire group of people who didn't know when she was from would be a different matter entirely.
"Oh no," Link folded his arms on the banister. Violet suspected he was pouting at her, and tried half-heartedly to glare him out of it, which only made him pout more. "It can't be healthy spending this much time down here. A few hours off won't kill you."
"I have work to do," Violet pointed out. "And I'm just not sure it'd be my kind of party."
Link shrugged. "What would be? For all you know it could be a tea party. With, I dunno, tinkly little music and everyone in fancy hats."
"Is it?" Violet eyed him incredulously.
"Well, no," he admitted, crestfallen, and waved her forward. "Here, c'mere, you've got something on your face."
She scrubbed automatically at her cheek with the sleeve of her coverall and found it no dirtier than it already had been. "Nice try."
"No, really, you've got oil or something, come here." Link grimaced, and Violet took two resigned steps forward so he could reach her over the railing. He produced a handkerchief from somewhere and leaned over the railing to rub intently at a spot on her jaw; she waited it out patiently and tried not to enjoy the brush of his fingers over her skin too much. "See?" he announced after a few seconds, and held the handkerchief up; sure enough, there was a smear of engine grease there.
"I see." Violet rubbed at her jaw again, absent-mindedly, and sighed. "Okay, I'll come to your party."
It was probably still a bad idea, but Link looked so genuinely delighted that it was awfully hard for her to actually regret it.
-------
Link came home from shopping, the day before the party, to find Violet slumped at the kitchen counter, head pillowed on her arms atop a pile of open magazines. At the thud of Link setting the grocery bags down, her head shot up. "Evening."
"Evening." Link leaned over to see what she'd been reading. "Man, what do you want with these? All they'll do is make you depressed."
Violet shoved the heels of her hands into her eyes. "I wish you'd warned me. I was just studying up for your party."
"Key word: party. Not a test." He reached over and flipped one of the magazines shut, by way of making a point. "If you're really worried, I can hang around tomorrow night and prompt you on stuff you don't know. You don't have to sweat it like this."
"Klaus could do this," Violet mourned, and then dropped her head back onto her arms. "No offense."
Link folded his own arms on the counter and tilted his head level with hers. "Are you okay? You don't look so great."
Violet's shoulders lifted in a half-hearted shrug. "I've gotten used to living here," she explained dully. "My life is calmer now than it has been in a long time. And that isn't saying a lot."
"So what's the problem?" Link frowned, not following.
"People--" Violet's mouth twisted in resignation. "They're still people. And for all the horrible people I've known, none of them ever had hydrogen bombs. I thought it was better here, but it's not. It's the same everywhere." Pause. "Everywhen, really."
Link felt a spark of unexpected defensiveness on behalf of his native era. "Oh, come on. It's not that bad."
"No?" Violet eyed him doubtfully.
"Well, okay, yeah. It is that bad. But things do get better." Link thought of the Corny Collins Show, but he wouldn't have known where to begin explaining that; he needed a quicker example. "Like the bomb, right? When I was a kid, everyone was scared shitless of it. We used to have bomb drills in school all the time. And now-- well, okay, we still might get nuked. But we probably won't."
The corners of Violet's mouth twitched upwards. "That's a terrible example."
Link sighed. "Yeah, yeah it was. But you get the idea."
She was looking a little better, at any rate; it was progress. "Do you really believe that, though?"
"What, that people get better?" Link slid an arm around Violet to tuck a piece of hair behind her ear and squeeze her shoulder, and was unreasonably delighted when she leaned into the brief hug. "It takes a while, and it's hard to tell sometimes, but, uh, yeah. I really do think so."
"Thanks. I needed to hear that." Violet smiled over at him, thin but real, and her hand slid lightly down his back. For a long moment they were leaning in alarmingly close together; then she pulled hastily free and slid off her stool.
Link cleared his throat. "You could thank me by helping put this food away."
"Fair enough." Violet still looked a little distracted, but she shoved the pile of magazines away and got to her feet to help out, and just like that things felt normal again. Link wasn't really sure when normal had grown to include her, come to think of it, but he didn't really mind.
-------
By the time Violet made it downstairs the night of the party, things were more or less set up; she'd helped him shop and even get the hi-fi set up, but then she'd vanished upstairs for an ungodly amount of time even by Link's standards, leaving him with two hours to sort out the food and drinks and hi-fi system and then fuss over them endlessly for lack of anything better to do.
With fifteen minutes or so to go, though, Violet appeared suddenly in the living room door. "Hey. How's it going?"
"Ready, I think." Link sent a record going and crossed the room to meet her. "And here I thought maybe you'd decided not to come after all."
"What, and let you down?" Violet smiled, though she was squinting at him a bit oddly. "That's a nice shirt. It's very . . . green."
"Matches your eyes," Link said cheerfully, and-- no, wait, in hindsight that had really been a dumb thing to say.
Her smile faded a bit more towards suspicion. "On purpose?"
"Nope. Just happy coincidence." He looked down at the shirt, fidgeting a bit with the top button on his vest.
Violet harrumphed. "Well, at least you look-- I don't know about normal, but you look like you. How about me?" She spread her hands. "Think I can pass for modern?"
"Turn around." Link offered her his hand; Violet took it with no apparent hesitation and twirled neatly under his arm, though the gesture hadn't really been necessary. "You look lovely."
"Why, thank you." She smiled and tilted her head expectantly. "But that's not what I asked."
Link remembered, belatedly, to remove his hand from hers. God, he really needed to get a hold on himself. "You look fine, seriously. Tonight's gonna go fine."
"If it doesn't, I'm blaming you for inviting me." Before Violet could go on, the doorbell rang, and she nodded towards the front door. "Want me to--"
"Nah, it's my house and I'm done in here anyway." Link shrugged.
As it turned out, to get to the front door Link had to go past Violet anyway, so they ended up answering the door together-- and found waiting there Penny and Seaweed Stubbs. A real blast from the past, though the fact that they hadn't seen each other for years didn't stop Penny from launching herself at him and nearly knocking him over.
"Um," he said after a minute, patting her back. "Penny, I can't breathe--"
"Oops, sorry." She let go of him and stepped back. "It's been a while, is all."
"Yeah, well, I've been busy." Busy avoiding Tracy, maybe, a little, but there was no way Link was admitting to that. "Hey-- guys, here." He looked around for Violet, who was hovering awkwardly a couple of steps back, and waved her forward encouragingly. "This is Violet-- she's, uh, a friend and she's staying here right now. Violet, this is Penny and Seaweed, we went to high school together."
"Your friend?" Seaweed echoed with something suspiciously like a smirk, but he offered Violet his hand. "Pleasure to meet you."
"His friend," Violet confirmed, and shook it firmly. "Pleasure to meet you, too-- and you," she added, beaming at Penny.
"Hi," said Penny-- enthusiastically enough, but looking at Violet with a weirdly thoughtful expression. "And what do you do?"
Violet looked startled. "Me? I'm a mechanic. I work at a repair place over in Hyde Park."
"Really! That's so neat." Penny pursed her lips, shrugging her coat off and folding it over her arm as she looked around. "I guess we're the first ones here, huh? It's so quiet-- I didn't know this was a sad occasion."
"It's not," said Link immediately and indignantly, but then he realized that Violet had frozen in place and was staring at Penny as if she'd said something entirely different and alarming. Link glanced over at Seaweed, wondering what he'd missed, but the other man just looked back and shrugged.
After a long awkward pause, Violet shrugged as if nothing odd had happened at all. "It's a peaceful neighborhood. The world is pretty quiet here."
"Um," Link tried, feeling uncomfortable for no reason he could identify. "Can I get you guys' coats? I'll just hang them up in the hall for you."
By the time he got back to the front door more people were showing up, and then Link had to juggle sixteen guests who needed to be greeted and introduced to everyone else and fed and provided with alcohol, not to mention keeping the music going in the living room. It was a long time until he managed to get into the kitchen, which was relatively empty, and provide himself with a drink he expected to sorely need; he'd nearly forgotten about Penny and Violet being so weird with each other.
At least, until Seaweed found him there. "Your friend--" he was still putting extra emphasis on the word, just to annoy Link-- "is trying to steal my wife."
"She what?" Link followed Seaweed's line of sight into the dining room, where Penny and Violet were huddled together in a corner talking quietly-- and looked like they'd been settled in for some time. "What the hell are they up to?"
"Search me." Seaweed grabbed a bottle of beer and hopped up to sit on the kitchen counter. "Who is she, anyway? Seriously." He propped the neck of the bottle against the edge of the counter and slammed his hand down on the cap, popping it off neatly, and took a swallow.
Link groaned. "She's a friend, she's stuck in Boston for a while, so I said I'd do her a favor and save her some hotel bills. She's living in my guest room. That's it."
"Okay, fine, if you insist." Seaweed held up his free hand in surrender. "I'm just saying, you saying you live with a woman who looks like that--"
"Shut up," Link told him, not at all bitterly, and swatted his shoulder.
Seaweed pulled a face at him. "Fine, shutting up."
Link considered a moment, then shoved some bottles out of the way and hopped up to sit next to Seaweed. "So," he began, looking for a topic at least marginally less humiliating. "How's folks in Baltimore? How's your sister?"
"Inez? Way classier than you'll ever be, same as always." Seaweed shrugged and took another sip of his beer. "Seriously? I think Inez is in North Dakota right now. She's good, we're good, everyone's good."
Link methodically added another shot of vodka to his screwdriver. "How's Tracy?"
Seaweed pursed his lips. "Having a passionate affair with my mother-in-law."
"What." Link spluttered into his drink; he felt dumb for letting Seaweed needle him, but it always seemed to work anyway.
"Oh, come on, we both know Prudence would have an aneurysm at the very idea." Seaweed looked awfully pleased with himself, nonetheless.
Link swatted him again. "Really, how is she?"
"Like I said, fine. " Seaweed glanced over at Link. "Has it occurred to you to, I don't know, call her?"
Link bit thoughtfully at the rim of his plastic cup. "Oh, yeah, I bet that'd go over great."
"Worth a try," Seaweed pointed out. "And in the meantime, like hell are you catching me getting in the middle of whatever you two aren't doing any more."
"Yeah, I don't blame you." Link swirled his drink around a bit and then downed it in a single long gulp. He really wasn't doing so great at keeping the conversation hopeful. "Hey, are you growing your hair out?"
"Now you notice." Seaweed preened slightly, running a hand over his still-short but undeniable afro. "Like it?"
"Yeah, I do." Link tilted his head. "And I'm supposed to be throwing a party here, so what say we go get your wife and my housemate and save them from themselves?"
They both twisted around to look into the dining room; sure enough, Penny and Violet were still talking in their corner and looking altogether more solemn than the occasion deserved. "Past time we rescued them," Seaweed concluded, and pushed to his feet. "Got any cider? Penny loves it."
"There's hard cider in the fridge." Link waved in its general direction distractedly. He didn't know what Violet liked, so he made another screwdriver. Everyone liked screwdrivers, right?
He trailed after Seaweed into the dining room with the drink in hand, and Penny and Violet looked up at them in surprise. "Well, hi," Penny said cheerfully-- even more cheerfully, once she'd accepted the cider bottle from Seaweed. "Did you miss us?"
"Oddly, yeah, we did." Link offered the cup in his hand to Violet, who thanked him quietly and took a deep swallow. It seemed to go over well with her, anyway. "And as your host," he went on, "I'm worried you aren't having enough fun."
"We were wondering," Seaweed clarified, "if you lovely ladies would care to dance."
Violet glanced guiltily up at Link, then back to Seaweed. "I don't really know how," she said sheepishly.
Penny gaped between them. "Link, you're slacking off in your old age."
"I tried to teach her," Link defended himself. "It, uh. It didn't take." He wasn't about to elaborate that he'd enjoyed the first lesson far too much to ever give her another.
"Well, it's not Violet's fault you're a terrible teacher." Seaweed offered her a winning smile and his hand, and after a moment Violet took it and let him pull her to her feet. "Come on, let a guy with real moves show you how it's done."
"Can't hurt, I suppose." Violet looked back over her shoulder at Link as Seaweed dragged her out of the room; he shrugged helplessly, and she grinned.
Penny had gotten to her feet as well, and now she reached over and took Link's hand. "Want to dance? For old times' sake."
"Always." Link forced his attention from Violet back to Penny, and together they went back out into the noise and bustle of the living room.
-------
It was late, extremely late, by the time they'd gotten everyone shooed out of the house-- not that Violet was complaining, really. She'd expected pretty much more of what 1972 had proven to be already-- a half-comprehensible, cheerful cacophony-- and she'd gotten it, but she hadn't expected to enjoy it this much.
Of course, she also hadn't expected to find Patricia Pingleton's granddaughter here, either; that was just an unexpected bonus. A potentially very useful bonus, though Violet wasn't sure what to make of her yet. On her way out the door, though, Penny had scribbled something on a napkin and tucked it quickly into Violet's hand when Link wasn't looking, and Violet in turn had slipped it into her skirt pocket to worry about tomorrow when she wasn't under the influence of something.
And now most of the downstairs lights were out and she was sitting on one end of the couch, feeling warm and a little fuzzy around the edges and guiltily glad that the music had been turned off, and Link was rattling around in the refrigerator doing something Violet couldn't be bothered to turn around to see.
"Nice friends you have," she observed, for the sake of having something to say.
Something clinked behind her, the tap ran for a few seconds, and shortly afterwards Link wandered into the living room as if by accident and set a glass of ice water down precariously close to the edge of the side table at the other end of the room. "Told you." He sat down hard, appearing to have already forgotten about his glass of water, and tilted slowly and inevitably sideways until he was lying on his back smirking up at her with his legs hooked over the sofa arm. "Aren't you glad you came out of your cave?"
Violet tried to come up with a retort and concluded, tiredly, that she might actually have lost on that point. If he wanted to insult his own basement, so be it. "Yes," she conceded. "Yes, I am."
"Good," Link said firmly.
It sounded like he was about to go on, and Violet looked down at him expectantly, but instead he trailed off into silence and his eyes drifted shut. Apparently he had every intention of dozing off right there next to her, which meant it was probably a good idea for Violet to go upstairs to her own room, but first-- because she had been tempted for weeks now-- she reached down and prodded his hair with a cautious finger. Even after hours of dancing it was still more or less in place, and there was something distinctly unnatural, and a little unnerving, about the way it sprang back into shape.
"Hey," Link blurted, eyes still closed, and Violet pulled her hand back guiltily. "Violet?"
"Yes?" She bent her head to look down at him better; the only light was from the kitchen door behind them. "I'm still here."
"'mglad," he mumbled.
Violet felt a sudden fierce surge of fondness that she tried, without much success, to shove back down. "Link, I think it's time you went to bed."
He shifted next to her, stretching his legs out lazily and then letting them flop back over the sofa arm. "D'you remember the first time you fell in love?"
"What?" It was such a complete non sequitur, when Violet had been half-steeling herself for an attempt at innuendo if anything, that it took her a good few seconds to understand what he'd said and form a response. "Of course I do."
"And you kissed on television, in front of everyone--"
"It was a mountain."
Link half-opened his eyes to stare up at her. His eyebrows did something rather strange in the process, but Violet wasn't quite sober enough to figure out what. "No it wasn't, it was a TV studio. And we were sixteen--"
She shook her head. "No, we were sixteen, and it was definitely a mountaintop." Something had gone horribly wrong with this conversation, somewhere.
"It was television," he insisted.
Violet frowned down at him. "I think I know what happened. I was there."
Link's mouth twisted incredulously. "What, when I was sixteen?"
"No, when I was sixteen," she said patiently. "I was old when you were sixteen. Will be. I think."
"Stop that." Something rather like horror flashed across Link's face, and he swatted Violet's arm lightly; she realized rather belatedly that she had been stroking his hair, and decided to keep doing it out of spite. "That's creepy, Vi, stop talking like that. I'm trying to talk about myself here."
"Okay." She wrinkled her nose a little at his impromptu shortening of her name, but it didn't seem worth complaining about. "Go right ahead."
"The point is," Link went on, and then paused for several seconds, looking confused, "you were sixteen-- I was sixteen-- someone was, and you're in love and you kiss in front of God and everyone and it's amazing, isn't it? It's like as long as you're together you can do anything. And then."
Violet shifted, twisting a little so she could tuck her feet up under her and lean back into the corner of the sofa. "And then?"
"And then," Link went on with exaggerated gravity, "everything goes to hell."
"Mm." Violet nodded, slowly, and thought of a sail vanishing over the horizon. "I remember that."
He shifted again next to her, restlessly. "What happened?"
"I don't know," Violet answered, which was true enough no matter who they were talking about. "You tell me."
There was a brief pause, and then "Elvis," Link said bitterly. "Elvis happened."
Violet stared, as much out of bewilderment as out of concern at the unhappy tone creeping into his voice. "What's an elvis?"
"Oh, get out of here." Link shook his head, making Violet's fingers skitter from his hair to the warm skin of his cheek; the night was advanced enough, she noted vaguely, that his jaw was just a little rough with stubble. "Everyone knows who Elvis is. He's Elvis."
That, too, went in the file of things Violet didn't feel up to arguing right now. "And what did he ever do to you?"
"President," Link said, not terribly helpfully. "Tracy was gonna be President, when we were kids. Probably still is, knowing her."
"You make even less sense when you're drunk, you know that?" Violet felt fairly safe in saying so; she was pretty certain Link wasn't actually listening to her at this point. "I didn't know that was possible."
"Then be quiet and listen," Link told her, with no hint of corresponding impatience whatsoever. "I make perfect sense-- mmm, you're warm," he went on, and scooted up a little bit to rest his head against Violet's shin.
At least one of them, Violet figured, was going to feel horribly embarrassed about this the next morning; since it was already inevitable, she reasoned, she might as well indulge herself just a little beforehand. "Okay, I'll be quiet," she promised.
"Well, good." Link nodded in acknowledgement, hair catching briefly against her skirt. "Now. As I was saying. Tracy was gonna be President, is gonna be president, and I was gonna be the King."
By now Violet was thoroughly lost, and only slightly because she was distractedly stroking his arm. Link was clearly unhappy; the least she could do was offer a little comfort, and the fact that for some reason she really enjoyed touching him had nothing to do with it. "Of what? Maryland?"
Link hushed her vehemently. "King," he repeated, with careful emphasis. "The King, Vi, Elvis. Who wouldn't've wanted to grow up to be him? No one," he answered himself, before Violet could guess it herself. "Definitely not me."
"So Tracy is going to be President," Violet reminded him patiently, trying her best to make sense of the problem through her growing fatigue, "and you were going to be King. And then what happened?"
"And then--" Link made an utterly senseless gesture with one hand. "And then it turned out my kind of ambition and her kind of ambition, they don't go together so well in the long run. Not the kind of going-together that goes with getting hitched. Not that it matters," he went on, muscles suddenly tense under Violet's hand, "cause here I am, past twenty-five and still no one knows who I am."
"I'm sorry," Violet offered hesitantly, still not quite keeping up but starting to get the gist now. "But you're doing all right, aren't you? You're getting plenty of work in a job you love." The idea of stability was an idle dream for her all by itself; the thought of wanting more was nigh on incomprehensible.
"Yeah, that's where talent gets you. Doing all right." Link sounded distinctly bitter now. "You know where the money is, Vi? Drugs. You shoot some shit and smash up some hotel rooms and kill yourself and wham, front page news. Hendrix is dead, Morrison is dead, everyone knows Elvis is on his way out, look at 'em-- living goddamn legends. Wish someone had told me sooner."
It took Violet a good few seconds to work out what he'd said and be fittingly alarmed by it. "Oh, come on, you don't mean that."
Link let out a long, slow sigh, and the tension in his shoulder seemed to flow out with it. "No," he agreed after a minute, more subdued. "No, I don't."
"You're tired," Violet pointed out, not entirely reassured, and touched his cheek. "We should both get some sleep."
"Sleep sounds good." Link's eyes were already drifting shut, now he'd said what he had to say. "That's you, Vi, genius girl, always right. Should have a comic book about you." He tilted his head and kissed her fingers, lightly, and then settled down again.
"Link--" Violet began hopelessly, breath catching at the easy affection, but there was no answer; he was already dozing off, head warm and heavy against her leg.
part 3 | part 4