Rated M for dark themes and sexual content.
the far side of the moon
She walked down the hallway, taking another drag of her cigarette.
"Please, Violet, just talk to me. Please. I'm so sorry for everything."
She didn't change the pace of her steps.
He was broken because she wouldn't forgive him, but everyone else meant nothing to him. She had been outside the room and listened when her father put an end to his teary confusion and rejected his attempt at forgiveness. She had stood there, hidden from view when he finally confessed to everything he had done, atrocities committed before she was even born. It had been the worst, to know she had believed in him, that whatever glitched in him wasn't permanent. A chemical imbalance, how easy.
So she said nothing, while a familiar feeling twisted her insides, hearing his despair bounce back against the walls. When she closed her eyes she saw nothing but blood. It crept along the walls, flooding the hallways; the carnage grew at the thought of his body count.
"He asked me if I believed in God when he put the gun to my head. I said yes, but it wasn't true."
She swallowed the taste of blood in her mouth.
She felt Tate's presence during the days, invisible, in case she needed something, anything from him. He was never further away than the basement, attentive to any little sign from her. Little by little she had lost the ability to feel anything when he wasn't around, so she had got a new habit. Pain was better than nothing.
"Your man does love you, but he'll always be a monster."
At night, alone in her room in the darkness, she thought of him and finally broke through the numbness. She cried when she came against her hand, biting her lip, rolling around in restlessness, and tried to envision the boy she had once known. All she saw was a stranger with cold eyes, as if his face was burned on her retinas. She knew he would be there, and in those moments it felt so good, in a sadomasochistic way.
He was close, out of reach, keeping her company, watching her from the shadows without ever being able to touch her. He was drawn to her like a moth to a flame, enduring anything she put him through.
It hurt him and it hurt her too, and it felt good to be in control for a little while. Those late night shows were only theirs, and she had started moving the covers from her body. She could no longer if she was doing it for herself or for him, if she was punishing him or just trying to dull the loneliness, and her sense of reason was slipping from her grasp.
One time when she came down from her high, blinking tears from her eyes, she saw him standing there in the darkness. She had called for him, she realized, without thinking, and he had appeared. He wanted some reaction out of her, anything, anything but the dead indifference she had given him for the past seven years.
(And in truth, he knew just as well as she did, that this road went two ways.)
Violet looked at him, his hurt and apprehensive face, and herself spread out on the bed, her hands bloody and her thighs glistening because of him. Tingles spread through her body, the numbness had faded and she felt raw like an open wound when she found her voice. There was nothing to say, nothing to change the fact that he always came when she called for him.
"Go away."
.
Days floated into each other in a house where no one ever changed. Her parents doted over a baby that never grew a day older and repeated their fights over and over, Moira scrubbed away at the same stains that never faded and Nora cried in confusion after a baby. Violet knew every line of every song on her Ipod and had read every book in the house.
She used to cut, mostly because she knew he didn't want her to, but it healed within minutes. She had slit her own throat but only found herself blinking at the mirror with the same expression and soiled clothes. She had downed 52 pills and woke up slightly groggy an hour later. There really wasn't anything left.
She stayed clear of the basement, but it seemed to be following her around, as if the walls of the house were molding themselves around her, closing in on her until she was cornered.
"What's it like to fuck a psychopath?" Hayden said one day, appearing like a smug-faced mannequin leaning against the doorframe to her room. Her eyes, smudged black from the latest fights and sex with Ben, were as cold and amused as ever. "Is he gonna be your puppy on a leash forever? Travis drives me insane, but Tate won't even look at me. He's still saving himself for his little nightingale."
Violet turned a page in her book. She knew it by heart but she liked the pictures.
"I've always wanted to fuck someone who's as sick in the head as him. I'm tired of all these vanilla idiots." Hayden rolled her eyes.
Violet exhaled another puff of smoke, watching ash fall from the end of her cigarette onto the pages. Hayden wouldn't harm her even when Violet talked back to her, knowing both Ben and Tate would be after her later if she did.
There really was no point in caring. Even if Tate had drowned his sorrow by burying himself in Hayden or any other occupant in the house, Violet couldn't bring herself to evoke any sense of emotion. She wished she could get high, really high, to the point that the world blacked out and she started seeing aliens with cat faces, but her dead being wouldn't respond to that kind of stimulus even if she'd had a way to get her hands on some.
She stayed in her room for months at a time and avoided the other occupants; everyone were stuck on an endless loop and this was the first time in years that Hayden had torn herself away from her constant war against Violet's parents to acknowledge her presence.
When Hayden had left her room, Violet shut her book and put it on the nightstand. He would read it later.
.
Halloween was the worst time of the year. Her parents were always busy with Chad and Patrick and Hayden who created a worse ruckus than usual, trying to steal her baby brother away, and the Dead Breakfast Club came back. Violet ignored them while they told her their stories and hovered threateningly around her. They couldn't get more of a reaction out of her than her dad's mistress. She was not really there, not able to waste a shred of emotion on any of them.
"Did he finally kill you? How cute is that. Romeo and Juliet."
One of the perks of being a ghost teenager was the ability to banish her parents or any unwelcome guests from her room by uttering two simple words. Yet, the patterns of the housemates never broke, and her parents were too occupied with themselves, like they always had been, to keep her company or sympathize.
After yet another exhausting Halloween night Violet sat with her knees pulled up to her chest and wanted to die all over again. All the drama in the house couldn't reach her, she was comfortably numb to it, but she could never wander too far away from him. She guessed this was the loop she was in.
The sunlight cast a bleak pattern over the floorboards when everyone who had been outside returned. She had stayed in the house, not wanting to experience the feeling of having to come back. She hugged her knees to her chest and followed the sun's movement on the sky by how the shadows on the floor moved.
She thought of her own death.
She remembered the moment she broke. She remembered lying in the bath tub with him, feeling cold, but the water running across her skin no longer had any temperature. She was floating freely, like she was underwater, in an endless soft ocean. Her pulse was slow in her ears, and she no longer felt her own breathing. His voice had brought her back, pulling her to the surface, making her find her way back. She had turned around to feel Tate press kisses against her soaked hair, crying into her neck, and she cried with him too when she slowly came around.
She had cried because of what she had become, someone who still loved him despite knowing what he had done. She had cried over the boy without a pulse that sat beside her and because she would be all alone in that terrible moment if he wasn't there. It wasn't very flattering, how his first words to her had been to instruct her to cut vertically and lock her door, and only weeks later he would do anything to make sure she lived. But he had been too late.
He had been taking care of her ever since they first met, protecting her when no one else was. While her parents had left her to herself in their neglect, he had tried to save her, kept her company, always been there. She remembered how he had licked her cuts, and with her blood on his lips made her promise not to do it again. But such things did not matter to her now, in an afterlife so dull where not even suicide could do anything.
She remembered the terror when she found out about what she had done to herself, the look in his eyes, his eyes that knew too much and were grieving for her. Not for those fifteen students, or the couple or countless other lives he had taken. Only for her.
.
The day after Halloween were intense. Alone in her room, away from all the drama, Violet undressed for the night. She had tried to keep some kind of routine, a pretense of living. Some weeks she wouldn't bother at all, but it felt real. The house had been unoccupied for years and she had her room all to herself.
Tonight the loneliness was harder than usual to take, and she needed his presence again, if only so she could ignore him. Her parents were in their room making up again, the maid was cleaning, Hayden was in the basement with various other occupants.
She hated the mirror image of herself, always had. She used to cover the mirror up but it was often uncovered when she returned to her room, and it reminded her of her fate. She was barely sixteen years old; she would never be older.
She would always look like a girl, never a woman, younger than her years, short and thin. Her eyes were too childishly wide and her lips too plain. Her body was without curves, still in development, and she would never change. Her body would never change an inch from what it was today. Her hair would never grow out if she cut it. Some of the scars on her wrists never faded; if she cut new ones they turned pink and the skin closed together but she would always be a living scar of those years before she died.
She stared herself down in the mirror, pulling her long sleeves up and revealing her wrists. Looking deep into her own eyes, she tried to find some recognition there, something of herself that felt real.
There was nothing. She closed her eyes from her useless state of being.
It took her a while to pick up on his presence, apprehensive as always in case she would tell him to go. He was watching her from the far end of the wall. A wave of guilt hit her; had she become like her parents after all? Using people to feel better for a short while.
"Come here, Tate."
After a few moments heard him shuffle and approach her. She hated the hesitation in his movements.
Tate stood behind her, so close her chest started aching again.
"Violet –"
"Touch me."
He slowly lifted her bare wrists, exposing them to the light. His hands ran smoothly over them, thumbs caressing the scars gently, and for a moment she saw herself the way he saw her. Glowing in the light, a ghost girl without a smile, silky hair falling down her back.
Their eyes met in the mirror, and his looked lighter than usual. They had always been good at communicating through eye contact; something about the way he looked at her used to make her feel like she could peer into him and tell him exactly what she needed. He would provide whatever it was, the best he could.
Violet slowly turned around, met his gaze. Songs they used to listen to echoed in her head, everything they used to have.
She rested her hands on his waist and she wanted him to take her right there and then, she wanted to forget everything like her parents did in their constant on-and off relationship and their fighting and make-up sex and all the other occupants in this evil house.
She felt his confusion when she leaned up and kissed him, one hand tangling in his messy hair. He slowly adjusted to the surprise, responding softly with his lips against hers, a soft breath leaving him.
It would have been so much easier if he could only respond in the same way but he stiffened when she let her hands run down his body. She was lonely, and he was there.
He had been watching her almost every day. He was always there in her peripheral vision, he was always there in case she changed her mind or if any of the ghosts posed a threat to her, she felt him as close as if he was inside her again. She could feel him when she went to sleep and when she woke up – a habit she had kept for some kind of normalcy, but she didn't need it. Her existence was one long day that never ended.
He could at least give her this.
Violet deepened the kiss, feeling his hand on the low of her back and the same old reactions rushed through her. Her body knew him just as well as she had before, every touch was familiar, but he was tense. He wanted to get into her mind, to be close and talk again, but she couldn't give him that. Not yet, not now, maybe never.
She still could not forgive him, but this was unbearable.
His dark eyes clouded with confusion when she slipped out of her cardigan. When she was alive she would have withdrawn, hurt at his doubt, but now they were both dead and stuck here forever in an endless charade of pretending and she couldn't keep it up any longer.
"I thought you didn't want to be with me."
"I need space. But I need you too."
"Violet, I –"
"Only this." Her hands tightened around his shirt, looking up at him. "Just give me this one thing, Tate."
"I love you," he said, but she pulled him to the bed. She looked him deep in the eyes as she let her hands move to his hips. "I want to feel something again." That was all, nothing more and nothing less.
"I would do anything for you." He lifted his hand to stroke her hair, but she leaned in to kiss him, almost angry at his tenderness.
"Then hurt me."
She hated herself when he wrapped his arms around her and lowered her down onto the bed, before undoing his pants and removing all last layers of clothing. Entangling with him she felt tears start to run down her face and he anxiously stroked them away, afraid that he hurt her when he entered her. She tightened her arms around him and buried her face into his shoulder, crying for the enormous chasm between them and everything that could not be said or excused, and the need to crawl inside his skin and stay there forever.
She wanted more, to be taken and split open. Entwined together, with him so deep inside it felt like they were one being, rocking into her, Violet couldn't stop the tears. She buried her nails into his skin and he groaned in response. There was nothing she could say to him, so she wrapped her thighs harder around his hips.
He hugged her to her chest, feeling her body mold to his and she was unreal, she was something so brittle yet diamond hard. If she used him, he was more than happy to be there for her. He would always be, whenever she needed him, it was a purpose he had come to accept since the first time he saw her.
"Make me feel more," she said, urging him on.
She didn't feel okay until he took her hard, pushing into her until her entire body trembled and she came apart. She scratched at him, feeling him deep in her very core, she let him drive away the thoughts and the madness. For a few intense moments they were as close as they could be, they were in perfect symbiosis once again. Rocking into each other, panting, gasping for breath, until they came together and she felt his release fill her up, warm and sticky, and spill down her thighs together with her own.
For a moment they just held on to each other with white knuckles, breathing in the aftermath. After she fell down on the covers with him they laid still, looking at each other.
(It wasn't forgiving and it wasn't forgetting, but it was something.)
She touched his face and his skin felt real, as if he was still breathing, living. She dozed off with her head next to his. In her mind, hazy and tired, they were alone in the world and there was nothing left but the two of them in the vast space.
(And maybe, maybe, there was such a thing as pretending, that they could start over.)
Fin.
Feedback and reviews are appreciated.