Author: grayglube

Title: Call of the Void

Summary: This is how they fall in love, for real, this time.

Rating: M

Warning(s)/Kinks: Language, sexual situations, drug use, triggery language related to rape, femslash, offensive language related to homosexuality, sexual assault.

Disclaimer: I don't own American Horror Story.

A/N: So this is a fic I have been trying to write for awhile, like with every fic I set out to do this and it just doesn't get there. To be completely honest I tried to write this like paceyourself would write a fic. Which takes work guys! Seriously. I love that girl's way with words, she's going to read that and be like 'ME?' because she's adorably humble but she writes like…I don't what, but something that knows how to write things that make me feel, god dammit, I'm a robot, and we are not supposed to feel. Just kidding. I'm not a robot. It's a post-finale that I think is a bit more plausible than my other post-finale fics. It's about Violet and Tate falling in love, again. They say some pretty horrible things to each other. This first part takes place over ten years; the scenes are not in order.

I.

Sometimes when she sleeps or moves like ghosts really do (through the wood and the pipes and the exhaled air of the people who still breathe) there's a blindness and a speed that empties her of everything but fear. It's what driving a car on a moonless night with no headlights and an overcast sky with no stars and no light (no light, no light), and not being able to stop or tell what's in front of you while rain slaps the blackness of a windshield you can't see out of must be like. She tries to find a word for it, settles between 'velocity' and 'vertigo' while finding nothing to take up the place between the two. Verticity. Velogo. It's like falling to the bottom of the sea, and she doesn't know why she thinks of it as falling instead of sinking. Settling on the inevitability of falling, the finality of it as why she comes to think of sea bottom as endless depth. Sinking is just floating in reverse, slow, soft. Falling is fear, that's why you have to wake up in dreams of falling because they say you die if you don't.

She remembers telling him that being around while the world moves along outside without them is being trapped in a windowless cell. She'd been talking about the house, but the house is just the prison and they've all got their assigned holes to crawl back in. His is the basement. She realizes, belatedly, that it's because it's Nora's too.

Basements don't really change all that much, scenery wise, or company wise, regardless of the decade.

She figures that most of them feel that way.

But then some of them have places they've made their own. Charles and his Frankenstein workbench. Beau and his attic. Her and the pantry.

Her father jokes and says it's the "captain's quarters", her mother had come in and upon mishearing it repeated "captive's quarters", and really, Violet thinks, what's the difference?

It's wood paneled and looks like the inside of something, like a ship really, not a house at all. A private hideaway. A sunk ship or something.

There're some old bed frames, an ugly lamp table with a busted leg, and a reupholstered mod couch that isn't very comfortable but better than sleeping on the floor. It's white canvas under the tan suede, and there's a brown, scabby stain that hasn't been completely buffed out.

She's got an afghan throw that she found in a sagging cardboard box, it still smells like must and mothballs a little and won't stretch over her completely unless she hooks her toes into it and pulls at it; it's stale but no less warm or soft.

There's a fixture next to the doorway that used to have a decorative ensconcement but bares just a solitary and plain light bulb now, it casts a sodium yellow glow on the small little cell she secludes herself in, and reading in the dimness hurts her eyes sometimes.

She keeps some books tucked under the uncomfortable couch along with a coffee mug she ashes into. It's a private little hermitage she keeps to during the daylight hours.

Late at night when she doesn't leave, it feels like the house is rocking her to sleep.

She's spent most of her time alone anyway. The time she spent with him surmounted to a footnote in the scope of her life, an epitaph to her virginal teenage years, the words on her metaphorical tombstone, or the 'Cause of Death' on a piece of paper that would get signed by some world weary medical examiner who would have gotten to hold her ruddy brown liver and plop the coils of her large and small bowel into a metal bowl before slitting her stomach open with fluorescents gleaming off the shiny sharpness of the scalpel and have thirty pills, give or take the ones in the drain trap of the master bath, cascade over his latex clad fingers with a wash of churned bile and stomach acid, if someone had ever found her corpse.

The loneliness creeps in. Scampers really. Or skitters, like dry leaves escaping a meticulous pile under an oak beset by autumn chills and shorter days across wooden floors. It skitters in with a prolonged rasp and a chill that ebbs into her lungs when she pulls in a drag.

There's a feeling to loneliness in the time right before sunrise, when it's blue and there's still no orange and pink and purple plumage to the skyline horizon, when the world is muted sounds and a breeze like a sigh. The feeling is a perfect ache, minus the bitter and the out of your skin discomfort of sloth. It's being alone more than being lonely. She sits on the bricks and smokes running a palm over an arm's prickle of goosebumps.

Being alone or lonely puts an extra simple sort of exquisite slant on things. Everything thrums like it's waiting. It makes the coolness in the air feel good and the damp petchor scent heady. Worst, though, it makes the idle hope of him showing up and sitting next to her to facilitate her cigarette lighting so much better than before.

And just like that, when she sighs heavily, all shoulders and sweater, it feels like the chill is the breeze blowing away everything in her that's crumbled like ruins, like her ghost bones are so much dust and someone has left a window open somewhere inside of her.

She's blooming, unfolding inside herself. Inside that room. Outside at dusk, before a dawning sunrise of bleeding tropicana colors. In his absence. All alone she doesn't really need him. And it feels good, in a suffered sort of strangled joy, he aches but maybe so does she. Flowers can't bloom in the dark and that's all of what she stands in front of day after day, but inside she's everlasting light and he hopes whatever's growing in her creeps out of her like vines in the dark and ensnares him so that at least while she's making him die, strangled by those vines of hers, and causes him to rot away to scraps of flesh and bone he can at the very least poison the soil he seeps into and ruin all her pretty blooms, at least then they can wither away together.

She's turned him into something much worse than anything he was before. At least then, when he rampaged around shooting people and setting them on fire and snapping their necks, everything was done on conscious thought. It's her fault, really. It is. Because even those things hadn't scared her away. She's made of sterner stuff than that. Her fears draw from a different spring of darker waters. Waters with skins over the surface them from all the filth that hasn't settled in the silt. It's her fault if her light can't illuminate what's in the corners of his mind or soul through the holes he's pocked with from collar bone to navel. It's her fault. She's so used to being left alone that she can't stand him slipping back in, over and over, even after she flicks on the lights or shuts the closet door or checks under the bed. He's her bogeyman, he'll hide where she doesn't think to look and watch her from the foot of her bed after she's gone to sleep. He can't stop, he'll wait forever if he has to. The worst thing she ever taught him was patience.

He wants to be what she resorts to late at night, when whatever paths her aimless mental meanderings go down make her gut clench and her face hot and her sex plump and wet. He wants to be where all those paths end, where the idea begins, where she rubs herself across and on top of. He wants to leave his fingerprints on the squiggly meninges protected by hard cranium. Wants to bite into a lung and suck out her last breath.

Michael gives her band-aids for her booboos, they have little boy cartoon favorites on them. Cars with toothy mouths grin up at her from her scabbed knees.

She doesn't get it. She still bruises. Her cuts don't heal unless they go too deep.

There's a wry smile making her lips peel away from her teeth, it's funny how his son offers her something for them, something besides a disapproving coercement to stop making them, like He did, sucking at her wrist and licking the redness of her dead-life off his teeth.

Michael is seven and he's a lot like his father. You'd never know just by looking at them.

You'd never know anything about them at all.

He's got an old issue of homes and gardens, the final serving of dregs and backwash whiskey in a bottle left out after the party, a chill wind blowing through his sweater, burning his elbows and the backs of shoulders with the friction, and a repeating soundtrack of a country song countdown from a house that has a window open somewhere close by, it's funny. Reminds him of something he read by Keats. Books, and wine, and weather, and music. His reality is just a more dismal version of beautiful prose.

There's a look that settles over his face (appears is what it really does, since it's always been under everything else), like whatever guise he was wearing before that moment evaporated into the ether and what's there is what's left, what's solid. He breathes through his nose, hard and his cheeks get sharper for a brief almost instant, his eyes slit and he stares at you out from under them, sometimes he'll roll them, he moves his head like a cobra rising does, chin down but rising all the same. It's a look Chad or Hayden is usually on the receiving end of, but he used to get it other times too. When he'd push her back towards the bed, but there'd be a smile and all she'd want was to know was what all that darkness tasted like. The kind inside of him, the kind he was made of. She saw it and she let it eat all her light. It sounds like an innuendo and she sort of means it to be.

She dreams about it sometimes.

She decides to stop sleeping.

The little boy looks at him and says, "You're my dad."

"Yes."

He grins, like he's solved the mystery. "I live with grandma because you're dead."

"Yes."

"I killed my mom." Tate can say a lot of things, tell the kid it's not really his fault. But if he blames it on himself instead it's the same as saying that the kid shouldn't be alive and like it or not the little boy is his little boy. He feels things he hadn't thought he'd feel.

He has a kid. "You wanted to come out," is what he settles with when the kid starts shifting around and dancing in place for an answer, all fidgety hands and postural sway.

"Why don't you visit me?"

"Because I'm bad."

Tate knows he shouldn't be around, but in a sick way he wants to be. His dad wasn't around even when he was stuck hanging in the house of the living dead for forever. Constance ignored him, Hugo abandoned him.

Vivien's abandoned this kid in favor of her cuter, smaller, less malevolent offspring and he's been ignoring him because it just makes him think about Violet and how he hasn't seen her, really seen her, in years now.

He can see history repeating, he was ten once too, and lately with nothing else in his eternal entrapment promising any sort of relief from boredom, or pain, he decides to pretend like he cares, like the kid does matter, to him at least. He knows what it's like for the only person to care about what you do being Constance.

"I've been bad too," Michael admits.

"You shouldn't come over here, it's dangerous. There are other bad people here."

People who would kill for a cute little kid of their own, and then where would he be? Stuck in the house, around to remind everyone about the sins of his father and eternity looks longer every day.

"You can't leave; I have to come visit you."

Eventually Tate starts looking forward to the visits.

Violet likes talking to Patrick, where Chad's all vinegar and piss and sass he's cheap beer, tasteless conversation and snark. It started when she'd decided to stop sleeping, starting instead to wander aimlessly. She thinks the night she ran into Pat outside he'd been crying, but it had been dark and he denied it at the time when she asked.

It's weird but she'd felt like crying too, then. Maybe because it was an excuse to do so if someone else was. But she didn't. She offered him a cigarette and she guesses friendship is just that easy sometimes.

She guesses the reason she favors one gay gal pal over the other is simply because Chad's a snope and she's always been more of a sweep it under the rug kind of girl. Violet knows that when someone goes looking for something wrong they're probably going to find it. Been there, done that and died.

She's also got a never-gonna-happen, never-want-to-happen sort of attraction she's keeps to herself regarding Pat.

He calls her a fag hag one day and she suggests they have their own sitcom. She says they could name it "Sassy and Surly."

It's New Year's Eve, her second post-demise and third overall, and they're out in the gazebo smoking stolen cigars.

"You look really out of place trying to smoke that."

"You don't with that in your mouth."

"Almost had your dad in my mouth."

"Eww."

"It's a five year goal, at this point it's gone long-term work in progress."

"Shut up."

"I was trying to do it by the Royal wedding so I could have a 'Blow Big Ben' theme going on when they showed it on television."

She doesn't talk about Tate but Patrick is more than happy to talk about Chad.

"He couldn't be happy without grand gestures. Maybe he could and I just couldn't figure out how to do without grand gestures," Pat shrugs and looks at her.

"You're lucky. You've never had to wake up knowing that once the person you're sleeping next to wakes up that the first thing they'll do when they roll over and see you is latch onto some resentment they have from before you went to sleep to pick at until it bleeds, until you get out of bed and slam the door or yell. You've never had to be in a relationship where the only right thing to do in that situation is let the person shit on you and then beg for a treat."

She rolls smoke around in her mouth while he's leaning over the railing to peer up at the stars. His voice is softer and quieter when he starts speaking again.

"It's awful. I could have been happy, he could have too but we just held onto all the bullshit because we'd like to yell at each other better than talk and figure out the little things that could make the other happy. We kept getting sidetracked, we never got around to really trying to make each other happy."

What she wants to ask is, 'Do you think you'll ever try again,' but she stops herself because she's a coward who's afraid he'd turn around and ask the same of her.

Because for herself the answer is a loud and resounding 'no,' but for some reason she doesn't want his to be. She wonders if a part of herself still holds out for happy endings when it comes to other people, wonders if she's made out for all that herself.

The woman is all highbrow pretentiousness and long coral pink nails. She doesn't like him, he doesn't need three guesses as to why.

"I didn't kill her."

They both know who he's talking about.

"No, but you played a part."

"I've changed."

Billie-Dean scoffs. "Not telling lies does not mean you've changed, it just means you've stopped hiding. What you are scares people. It scares your mother and it scared Addie and it scared her enough to want to die to get away from you."

"So why are you here?"

"This house is a part of that boy."

"What boy."

"Your son."

"So what?"

"I'm not going to be of any help to your mother."

"What does she need help with?"

"He killed his nanny, he's three."

"I know how old he is."

"Do you know what he's capable of?"

"Apparently, so far, second degree murder of Hispanic child care providers who don't let him eat cookies for lunch."

"It's in his nature."

"I'm on the nurture side of the argument myself. I learned it from my mother; you know she murdered my dad? She fed him to the dogs in the basement; one started shitting blood because it had eaten a couple of his teeth. They ended up tearing apart his intestines, it was pretty gross, you know? Death by canines. Kind of ironic."

"Seven year itch?"

It's what he'd asked her one day, with a sharp grin from the top of the stairs. She hadn't realized she'd been watching until he'd pointed it out.

But Pat just dropped down a few steps with the hollow thud of his expensive runner sneakers with tacky neon yellow tread curling up over the black mesh sounded loudly on the wooden staircase. He'd leaned against the banister and watched Moira scrub the baseboards.

She asked him what he saw. He replied with a laconic 'same.'

She told him it was because he was a sex maniac and thought everyone else was too. He told her it was because she was undersexed.

Chad had something to say about Moira a few months later as the weather got warmer, "Is out little flower having her spring awakening?"

She'd been rolling solo minus Her Majesty Chad's horrible hubby. It was then that she realized when Moira looked back at her from leaning over the kitchen island to showcase the curved lace edge of her underwear while retrieving dishes that the redhead looked the way she did to her when she was around her. On purpose.

And everyone knew.

"You're drunk," Violet sneered after ignoring the way the other woman sashayed from the room. Chad snorted.

"Yeah, drunk. Not blind."

"…"

She had a lot of things she could say but she was trying to stop her verbal purging as of late.

He took a sip of white wine and pulled the cracker he'd been about to chew on away from his mouth, tilted his head and made a clicking sound against the back of his teeth, "Don't bite your tongue on my account."

"No thanks."

"Leave her alone. Have another drink, darling."

Pat swept in, indignant and irritated.

"Oooh, someone else has found a new girlfriend. Funny. She goes gay as soon as you decide to stick that dick somewhere you haven't since highschool. And with someone who wasn't even out of it yet, how Dolores Haze and Humbert Humbert. Patrick Patrick, has a nice ring to it."

"That's enough."

The kitchen was going to go nuclear from all the bitch hormones flaring in the space between the two men. Pat rolled his eyes and stalked out, before she went Violet made a point to get in at least one dig, "And that's why you are always stuck drinking alone in the kitchen because you can't control yourself and what comes out of your mouth."

"We're not so different kid."

"Don't call me 'kid'."

"I forget, sorry. Rambo."

He's just relocated to the attic, a few days of solitude and then Ben's mistress just showed up. As it was she'd been coming up to play with his brother. He asks her why and she tells him it's because Beau gets lonely. After a moment she tells him that Violet is lonely too.

When he questions why she's telling him something he already knows she just shrugs, rolls the ball back to Beau and tells him that maybe she was wrong, that maybe Violet will take him back. One day.

It irritates him, talking about Violet to other people, like they have any idea what it was like between them. Like they understand. They don't know shit. He tells her that his problems are nothing like her problems with Dr. Harmon, that Ben never loved her, and won't.

She tells him that telling her that is cruel and she doesn't dispute the truth in the statement.

But, Hayden doesn't let it go so easily it turns out. She says, "But you know...the problem with her now is that she's comfortable being lonely. She likes it. She likes not being around you. Likes how it feels."

Travis taught the girls how to make themselves pretty, Hayden's been teaching them little things they'll never need, like multiplication or the names of plants and different bugs. Travis and Hayden, 'who would have thought?'

Despite her poking him full of holes and him giving her a red smile they seem to do well together. Friends with benefits or some shit like that.

The girls wander upstairs one day and find her. They ask her if she wants to play princesses with them. What could she say besides yes? Nothing that wouldn't make them cry, so she says yes and they say she can be Sleeping Beauty since Cinderella and Snow White are already taken. They offer her Tinkerbelle too but Sleeping Beauty holds a certain kind of irony for her.

When they find they don't have anything princess dress worthy to dress her in they spend their time making her up into something little girl pretty that involves bright lipstick, barrettes with flowers on them, and shoes she can't walk down the stairs in.

"My toes will get dirty," she tells the littlest sister after she's strapped her feet into a huge pair of platform sandals made to look like a throwback to disco.

"Get the socks!" Angie screams, her sister winces and scowls. "You have pretty feet," Angie tells her with a goofy kid smile.

"Stupid!" Margaret flaps the socks around and tosses them at her sister, "Feet cannot be pretty."

"Can to! Pretty feet, pretty feet," Angie singsongs back raises Violet's foot to her sister's face, pulling Violet almost off the chair to rub her sole across Margaret's cheek.

"Get 'em offa meeeee!"

"Angie, Margaret! That's enough."

Lorraine stands smoldering in the open doorway.

"Sorry mom." Big sis says.

"Sorry." Little sis echoes.

"Come on."

"But…," Lorraine levels Margaret with a clear and cloudy eyed look that leaves the little girl faltering a bit before picking her tentative explanation up again, "But we were going to play with Violet."

"We were gonna dress her up," Angie explains.

"Not now, later. Come on."

"Ugh, fine." Margaret stalks out all little girl sass and sway, Lorraine swats her on the arm as she walks past. Angie looks like she might cry, Violet catches her wrist and smiles, "I'll come down later, okay?" Angie smiles back and skitters out of the room.

"You will not." Lorraine tells her after the girls aren't around to hear her.

"What?"

"He finally went to the attic, I don't want him back in the basement. He follows you like a dog. I won't have him around my girls."

"…"

"I'm sorry."

"Go away, Lorraine."

Left alone Violet wonders how many other things he can ruin, even when he isn't around.

A new family moves in. He has thoughts he's not proud of. Thoughts of sneaking into the yuppies daughter's bedroom at night to get someone's attention. Some night when the girl has gone to sleep he wonders if Violet would get jealous. He decides not to risk it if jealousy turns out to not be the way to work things.

Any temptation of watching the training version of a Barbie scientist doll, all blonde with big glasses, a push up bra and a prep school education is stunted by the realization that watching her take a shower or masturbate or dance around in her underwear is that it isn't her he really wants to watch do those things.

He does however move into the attic where he can hear her play music and laugh with friends and curse over homework assignments or what's on television because he can pretend the first girl to inhabit the room never left.

Moira comes and goes, leaving advice and the smell of Lysol in her wake.

It's after her sixth Thanksgiving in the Murder House that Moira finds her. The holiday had not gone well, mostly because she'd pulled some scare tactics during the lush little dinner the living had cooked up. Moira was serving the turkey.

Afterwards, in the kitchen, the old maid threatened to disembowel her with a carving knife if she persisted with knocking cranberry sauce and gravy onto the carpet.

Moira found her again when everyone had gone to bed, slightly drunk and more than a bit wary of the house and the things that could be making it groan and growl late at night.

"Violet, you need to stop this. Or at least not bother with anything besides what you're doing. Don't poison everything around you because you're bored."

"I thought it'd make me feel better. Making him feel worse."

And she knows Moira knows. Knows who she went to see. Knows what she went looking for. Knows what she got out of it.

"It never works out that way."

"I don't feel anything, not really."

"Violet…"

"Stop it. Lorraine does it. You do it. Make other people feel how you feel, I'm not allowed to be angry or scared? I'm not allowed to have that? I'm dead, what else do I fucking have?"

It's like a thread snapping.

You see what you want to see.

Violet doesn't want to see or speak to someone 'holier than thou' anymore.

Moira leaves all smirks and garters where there used to be disapproving frowns and orthopedics.

Halloween happens. And it's awful.

Five years.

It's the one thing they don't talk about, the one thing they don't bring up or drag into the space between them that they fill up with bitter accusations and harsh words when they actually get back to talking, or arguing, years later.

She doesn't bring it up because it was already tainted with so much when it happened that throwing more dirt at it would only bury it, she doesn't want to bury it.

Dead things get buried.

What's between them hasn't died, nothing dies for real in the Murder House.

He doesn't bring it up because he knows that she thinks of it as a mistake, he isn't going to make it a bigger one, won't dig around in the wound just to make it sting more because he loves her.

But because they can't bury it they can't forget it.

She'd found him in the attic and admitted that she was lonely. She won't ever admit it but he knows when she asked him not to send her away she was begging that he wouldn't.

He knew she hadn't had enough pulls off the bottle of Rum in the liquor cabinet to be considered the least bit drunk but he'd acted like she had been, just in case that's what she wanted.

But she wasn't and he knew.

And she vehemently denied being drunk even when he told her she was, trying to be noble.

She'd climbed into his lap and begged him not to send her away with her lips pressing into his neck, telling him she was so lonely, telling him she didn't want to make herself cum that night, that she wanted him to do it, adding the reminder that it didn't have to be him if he told her no.

He winced when she threw back at him the promise he made that it'd be them together, always, forever. Winced when she asked him if that was a lie too.

When he didn't kiss her back she whined like a dying animal and pulled back before swooping in, bruising his mouth with her tongue and her teeth.

He told her he couldn't do it, lied really. She called bullshit like she always did, does, and whispered that she knew what he feels like when he's hard behind his jeans. She put her hands between them and pawed him while smiling bitterly with how right she was.

But he had tried.

And when he still didn't kiss her back she stood up and stripped off her clothes, crawled on top of him, and he didn't stop her from undressing him too.

For all her bravado she sunk down on him, filling herself up, looking like every bit the inexperienced girl she still was, still is. He almost cried, rolling them over to give her what she wanted that she didn't know how to take herself. He made it easier for her to blame him later, if they'd ever talked about later.

It was him that moved inside of her and touched her because she hadn't gotten the hang of it, them together like that, how to go about it. He wondered if maybe she just didn't want to forget, in case she ever did forgive him, in case this was the way one day they would be making up for years of absence and anger.

He kissed her back and she swung a leg around his hips and turned them over.

There was something so far away about her then. It wasn't so sweetly suffocating without her chest pressed up against his and her flat belly swelling against his when she took a breath and her arms around his shoulders. Her eyes were closed and his were open and he was watching her small breasts jostle just a bit and her hot, hot, hot little cunt eat up his cock but she was listening to him breathe to her ass slap against the tops of his thighs.

Her hands were all over his chest and stomach and her nails pressed shallow crescents into his skin, the tops of her thighs were damp and warm under his hands when he rubbed them, she swallowed and her insides clenched, greedy.

As much as he tried he wasn't really there, wasn't able to get to the point where he could really get off, he wasn't sure if it was because she wasn't moving how he needed her too or if because his mind just couldn't stop telling him how fucked up, how awful, how ruined he'd made things.

How much he'd ruined her, enough to have her not speak to him for five years and then show up asking for this.

She'd arched and keened, rubbing against him, her head lolling forward and her shoulders sagging, breathing hard through an orgasm, looking at him when she was done, looking at him with a silent accusation since he was still hard inside of her.

And he knew what it was she wanted to say, wanted to ask. Ask him if he hadn't finished because she wasn't good enough, he didn't like her, didn't love her anymore.

She hadn't liked herself so much then, felt guilty and awful and she'd wanted him to feel it too. When she leaned down and pulled off of him he closed his eyes, waiting for her to go, to leave again. But she didn't and he'd murmured half-hearted denials and refusals when she kissed her way down, down, down.

He guesses the reason she pushed her fingers in his mouth was so he wouldn't be able to tell her no when she licked the head of cock, sucked kisses into it, gagged around it when she tried to swallow too much of him.

And her mouth tasted like him, later. Later when they were on their backs staring at the ceiling and she reached over after enough time had gone by to stroke him until he was hard again.

He'd grabbed her wrist but she just forced his hand down between her legs and told him she wasn't ready to leave yet, that she wanted more, that he had to do it again.

And he did. Pressed her back against the hardwood and pushed open her legs with his hands under hers knees, and he'd been so deep inside of her she'd squeaked at the end of every gasp with every thrust.

She'd been about to cum again, right fucking there, and in his head was the unwanted image of her mother making the same face, he wanted to throw up but his dick twitched and he'd pulsed out inside of her, dying a little bit, he didn't know he was sobbing into her sweaty shoulder until she told him to stop and to shut the fuck up.

And he hates her a little bit for that. That she couldn't, wouldn't comfort him when he needed it most.

She's still wearing the stolen cotton candy colored sandals high enough the drop kick a horse in the mouth and socks with bows. They picked out a dress for her, canary yellow gingham with white buttons down the front and cap sleeves; she put it on after Lorraine came to collect them. The clip Angie put in her hair started digging at her scalp, she took that off.

Everything about it implies jail bait but she's lacking in the Lolita vibe somehow, she can't figure out how. She's still all angles but things fit different lately, she thinks she's getting older but then sometimes she realizes she's still an eternal sweet sixteen.

She's still in the living girl's bedroom, it's a perfect day outside, but her mood has made staying inside to grumble and chain-smoke much more appealing that lounging on the lawn and staring at clouds.

Moira is standing in the doorway when she looks up from last month's issue of Cosmopolitan,"Here to bust me for being on Blondie's bed?"

"No."

Violet frowns down at the glossy pages, "Then what do you want?"

"To apologize," Moira says and that catches her attention enough to actually look at the redhead. "You're lonely. I thought you were just horny. But if you were you could have gone to someone else, someone who doesn't understand it."

Despite what she's saying there's a way in which she says things that sets Violet's teeth on edge, it sounds like she's reading from a script that's boring her.

"Just leave me alone," she scowls and goes back to reading sex tips inspired by some dumb movie. Moira's heels click and the bed dips when she kneels at the foot of it, all prowl about to pounce. "I do understand, Violet."

"No, you don't."

She takes her magazine out of her hands and tosses it onto the floor, Violet has something to say about manners but Moira's curling forward into her space, her tongue darting out to make her red lips shiny.

"You want to be able to touch someone again, to have them touch you, to comfort you; it's as much about forgetting for a little while as it is about feeling good. I had done that once, it didn't turn out very well. Can I kiss you?"

And it's amazing how easy she is to calm down. It's been a long time since someone's kissed her, since she's felt giddy about it before it even happens. Violet nods and Moira's red lips are pressed soft against her chapped ones.

The inside of her mouth is hot and her tongue is sliding over hers and it feels good. It's welcome and easy and comforting in all the ways making out is supposed to be. It starts off feeling lazy and then evolves into something slow and filthy. A promise. An invitation.

"I don't know if he's in here or not sometimes," she admits against Moira's mouth, she feels her smile against her cheek, "He's not. But he might be outside the door. He does that. Do you really want to hear this?"

"No."

And with that she's pressed into the pillows and the mattress and Moira's got hands running down the front of her body, Violet can feel the edges of her nails through the thin cotton, they trace the shape of her small breasts.

"These are bigger."

"What?"

"Still pretty small. Not as small, though."

"Sometimes I feel so old," Violet admits. Sometimes she thinks that she's older than she used to be, but when she starts looking at her reflection her face is the same as it's always been. Like her new found maturity and burgeoning womanhood is hiding from her, what a joke, she thinks.

"Older, not old. There's a difference."

"Thought I was imagining it, not so hard to believe hanging out with you."

"Maybe it's what you want."

"Not all the time."

"Nobody wants the same thing all the time."

"Yeah, that's why you're here right?"

"I thought you wanted this."

She does.

She's still wearing the dress, unbuttoned and opened, and the socks when Moira goes down between her thighs, and she's squirming on the bed, trying to breathe and forgetting how at the same time. Her vocabulary shrinks to just a few syllables and her cunt throbs.

By the time Moira leaves the room her nipples ache from teeth pulling on them and there's sweat dripping down the back of her neck.

It smells like lily of the valley perfume and orgasms in the room.

There are scratches from long nails on her ass when she checks in the mirror and a bruise sucked into her neck. Her hairs a mess and she looks completely fucked out.

She'd come thinking about him watching, at the time it seemed erotic, now it just seems disgusting and hollow. She buttons her dress back up, puts on her underwear, and smokes while staring at herself in the mirror.

She sees them sometimes, sitting in the den with after dinner drinks. Charles stoned out of his mind and Nora sloppily drunk. They seem at ease, at first, but give it enough time and there's always the echo of shattering crystal and once in every long while a resounding smack.

One night, after ten, (she remembers thinking that they were starting early this time), there's one word too many from Nora and the chair Charles is sitting in thunders back as he stands.

He lunges.

Nora's head cracks off the fireplace mantel and she's bleeding all over the hardwood, head wounds are messy like that.

And then things are quiet. Charles pours a drink and waits. His wife comes back around. Disoriented and docile. She cries, softly. She asks where the baby is. Charles, for once is coming out of a stupor instead of into one. He says they'll make one.

Violet's listening on the stairs while Nora confusedly keeps asking and Charles starts getting edgy. Her stomach turns over in her belly when she knows what's going on in the den. And maybe Nora is used to this sort of thing every once in awhile, a husband taking what husbands of her time take from their wives, maybe Charles is still high.

But Nora wails and Violet's in the room and stabbing Charles in the neck with a forsaken dessert fork over and over again until there's not enough larynx for him to so much as hiss at her.

Nora cries and smacks her and soon enough Charles is coming back to the world of the living dead and Violet has had just enough to phase back upstairs, she sits down in the hallway and cries.

He walks in on them. It's their fault; they're fucking in the kitchen. Ben Harmon's got his loving wife holding onto the kitchen counter like the lap bar on a jerky amusement park ride.

They don't see him.

He hears Ben tell his wife that he loves her and the same from her not a beat later.

Sometimes he wonders how on earth she didn't know it wasn't Ben sooner.

He can remember walking in on them in the kitchen once before, when they first moved in, except they hadn't been fucking then. Instead, he had heard Ben tell his wife that she'd have to forgive him once day.

He holding out hope because as it turned out Vivien did, and Violet is a lot more like her mom than she'd care to admit.

A/N: I hope this makes up for my absence.