It all began about six months after Gabriel and his family ran away from the Murder House, as they'd begun to refer to it like more of an affectionate nickname than the omen it used to be.

To say Tate was going crazy (crazier, really, than his usual condition) was a giant understatement. Ever since Violet's goodbye, he'd been good on his promise of not appearing anymore. He hadn't. Granted, he'd watched her on a few occasions, fewer and further between as time went by. But not a word was uttered, not an object was moved, and as much as he knew it was the best thing to do, it was corroding him. Even more so when the new family moved in, and not even the Harmons had the heart to scare them away.

The Littman family was comprised of a recently widowed father and his four children, the oldest of whom was eleven and in a wheelchair. Even Moira didn't bother to show herself as anything other than an old woman to the dad. Even the twins didn't play pranks. These were five people who were lost, desperate for a way out, not unlike anyone else who already inhabited that house. But maybe they could get what they wanted. They deserved their fair chance.

Violet had taken a liking to the family, especially the younger child - Holly Littman, three years old, learning to read and write, and doing some pretty amazing progress already. Pretending to be a neighbor, the blonde would spend hours playing with her when the father was away at work, and - mind you - she'd tell stories.

Tate thinks it really began with the stories.

Violet was never one for fairytales, and even if she were, the younger girl had heard about Cinderella and Snow White and Peter Pan a thousand times. No, these stories were better. The first time Holly sat on Violet's lap after lunch for a brand new tale, Tate had walked into the kitchen completely by accident, but he didn't dare to leave. Curiosity took the best of him, and to this day he can't see that as a mistake.

"Once upon a time, there was a beautiful girl who was in college. She was a real good student, like you. All straight A's. But there was a problem..." The girl took a dramatic pause, and Holly's eyes widened with interest. "She fell in love. She fell in love with her teacher!"

Tate recognized the story almost immediately, and for the first time since she'd ordered him to leave, he smiled. It was Hayden. Violet was actually making Hayden's life into a story one can tell a child - and, amazingly, it had a happy ending. Tate was caught by the tale, almost as much as Holly was. When the teenager's sweet voice led them both to the part about how Hayden realized her teacher was happy, and soon found someone much better suited for her, there was a grin on the boy's face.

If she had told Hayden's story, surely there'd be others. Moira. Lawrence. Nora. Beau. Maybe even her own. Maybe... Maybe his.

How would she paint him? How would she make his story a happy one, one worth telling? Was he even worth remembering, after all?

From that day on, story time became his solace. Sometimes it was more than three weeks before the next story came, sometimes there were two on the same day. Tate would monitor naptimes - the tales were more commonly told before those - and generally hang around wherever the two girls were together, while the three older children were away at school. Violet had talked to them on a few occasions, but it was Holly she had a connection with, and Tate suspected she wouldn't tell those stories to anyone but her.

He made sure to make himself as scarce as possible, even if he was invisible to his deceased beloved. Being close was breaking a promise. Being close was hurting her again. Most of the time, he settled for being in the adjacent room; close enough to hear it if a story were to come up, not close enough for anything else. Any other ghost in the room didn't seem to mind as long as he kept quiet.

It was a comforting routine. In a way, he was getting his fix. Seeing her was enough. Listening was enough. He didn't need closeness, or even an acknowledgement of his presence. It was enough, and if he went too long without it, he'd start to get antsy.

Violet would never offer a story - it was the little brunette who demanded them. When Tate heard those words, his nearly immediate reaction was to sit down wherever was available; the floor, the corner of the bed, a nearby chair or counter. It didn't matter. It mattered that Violet would pick up the rapidly growing girl, set her down on her lap, and begin to give a happy alternate life to another member of the strange little family they'd made for themselves.

She'd get emotional sometimes. The story of her father was full of pauses with no dramatic content at all, instrad filled with very suspicious swallows and the quietest sniffles she could manage as she gave him a beautiful life with his perfect family in a completely normal suburban house. Vivien's tale began to be told once, but morphed into a slightly adapted version of Legally Blonde, and Holly was too young to have seen the movie or care too much. It worked, anyway, and the suffering redhead became a bubbly lawyer before Violet could let the tears in her eyes fall over.

In those occasions, Tate's impulse to reach out - touch, hold, caress her, anything - was almost overwhelming. Almost. He breathed hard and fast and paced around the room and hovered over the two huddled orphans, but didn't touch them. Not the child, not the teenager. He'd made a promise, one that he was already breaking anyway. No need to break more. No need to break her more.

Month after month, Tate listened intently as everyone got their happy ending, if only in the imagination of the two unlikely companions. Moira became an actress, starring the most successful one-woman show in town, where she'd play both a grandma and her granddaughter. The twins grew up to work with the Weasley twins in their prank shop, and Tate was glad that Holly needed an explanation about that part, because so did he. Even the exterminator who had been hired to get rid of the bugs - ironically, the ones crawling all over Violet's own dead body - got his story, this time being transported into a video game to annihilate the Big Evil Bug of Doom.

The boy was keeping track, even making a list. He couldn't help but become more and more restless as the names were crossed out, and the girl began to run out of people to save in fiction; only two of the names remained now.

After nonchalantly refusing once or twice, Violet finally gave in and sat down with Holly to tell a pretty version of her own life - Tate was curled up in a corner of the room when she reached the part where the "sad little girl with the dark inside her" took the "magic pills that would make her disappear". In the story, the pills made the dark disappear instead, and the girl was happy. She lived to be a hundred, with tiny grandma glasses over the tip of her nose.

Tate was sobbing by the end. That's what should have happened. If she'd never met him, she wouldn't have taken the pills. Maybe she'd be happy now. Maybe he'd watch her grow up and grow old and be a hundred. Instead, she was stuck in a murder house, and she was sad forever.

Through the thick curtain of tears in his eyes, the boy saw Violet excuse herself under the pretense of having to pee really bad, but he didn't think even Holly was fooled. And so he pressed his ear up against the bathroom door, and unbeknownst to her, they cried together.

After that, there was only one story left untold.

It came almost a month later, five days before Christmas, according to the Littman's countdown - a green felt rectangle with red velcro numbers and "days til X-mas" painted in the father's clumsy handwriting. That day, after having lunch and a good shower, Holly attached the big red number five above the words, then turned to her babysitter with an expectant smile.

"Violet… I want."

"You want what?" The blonde asked teasingly, pretending she didn't know. She did, of course. And Tate did, too. The moment he heard the youngest Littman's sing-song voice hinting at the words, he practically jumped to his feet, and he was sitting across from the pair before they even sat down properly.

It was a few minutes before Violet had Holly on her lap, sitting on the living room couch, and Tate could swear his heart had never thumped this hard, even when he was alive.

"Alright. Once upon a time, there was a crazy, evil queen. She had three children, but she was mean to them. Very, very mean."

Tate arched an eyebrow. This wasn't what he'd been expecting. Although, maybe…

"One of her children was a lovely princess, the other was a very sweet prince, but they were both forbidden from leaving the castle. The other prince was allowed to go out, but he… He got the evil from his mom."

Violet's voice faltered a bit at this, and Tate's chest began to feel tighter. Granted, it was nothing new. It was nothing new, but it hurt.

It hurt more when she went on, in almost excruciating detail, about how the prince went on to commit all kinds of atrocities. The villagers, one by one, killed with his sword. The house of a working man, set on fire. A damsel in distress, robbed instead of rescued. Every bad deed of his, every murder, rape, theft, everything read back to him like a death sentence, spoken in a language a child could understand.

What was worse about the story wasn't even the tale itself. Tate knew all of it, he'd relived it all so many times, he was almost immune to the pain by now. The worst about it was the crystal-clear pain in the storyteller's voice, the sorrow she felt at having no choice but to depict him as the biggest evil. He was. Who could blame her? Who could even say she was wrong?

And yet she seemed on the verge of tears by the time a second character in the story was introduced – a peasant girl, in her words, "dumber than a sleepy elephant". The peasant girl who fell in love with the evil prince when he made her believe he was just another boy. The stupid peasant girl who still loved him after she discovered the truth.

It was a competition now – there was no telling whose undead cheeks were more thoroughly covered in tears. Holly didn't seem to find it strange; she, too, cried a lot when she told sad stories. All she did was place her pudgy little hand on Violet's cheek, and the action brought a tiny, reluctant smile to the girl's face, even as some more tears rolled down onto the tiny fingers.

"I'm okay. It's just a sad story, alright? It's sad because… Because the peasant girl knew what was right. And she couldn't be with someone who was evil, could she?"

Violet's voice was choked, and by that time, Tate's body was trembling slightly as he held his knees to his chest. Fuck.

"No! He'd be evil to her!"

"Exactly. T-that's why she told him to go away. She told him to go away so hard, he stopped bothering the kingdom."

Holly's chubby arms wrapped around the blonde's neck, the little face resting on the pale, skinny shoulder.

"Did the peasant girl love the evil prince forever?"

"Forever and ever."

"And was she sad?"

"Forever and ever…"

And that's when it happened.

He'd been holding it in so well up until now. Even when he was sobbing so hard he could barely breathe, Tate had been able to hide perfectly. Until now.

Now Violet looked over the child's shoulder and saw nothing…

But she heard a whimper.

It didn't really take a genius to figure out the rest.

"Holly, why don't we get you down for your nap?" Violet whispered hurriedly, and the tiny one did nothing but agree. Still holding onto her guardian's neck, she let herself be carried to bed, and it was a matter of minutes until Tate heard the three words that made him break down all over again.

"You still here?"

So of course he appeared. Huddled on the floor, crying too hard to form proper sentences, but he was there. And she sat beside him – not touching, but near him, enough to stretch out a hand and touch his blond locks with hesitant fingers.

"J-just today. P-pl-please…"

"Here..."

And before he knew it, she'd guided his head down to rest on her thigh, and her hand was stroking his hair soothingly, and they were both crying like small children, bodies shaking at the same rhythm.

It had been almost a half hour when Violet put an end to it. Forcing herself to swallow back her tears – it seemed like it would have gone on forever if they both had let it – she pulled away only to lift him up, and rest his face on her shoulder. Tate went limp in the girl's arms; that touch, those hands – just being around her by her own choice… It felt like the redemption he needed. The salvation he'd been begging for. He knew it was temporary, maybe for just a few more minutes, but it was enough; it was more than he deserved already.

"We have until Holly wakes up. Then I'm telling you to go away and you're not coming back. Okay?"

Her voice was sweet, in spite of everything. It only made him cling tighter, wanting to enjoy it more fully – the light fingertips trailing on his back, the other arm firmly wrapped around his waist, the smell of her hair, all the clichés that seemed to make sense at once.

"Relax. Nobody's leaving until she wakes up. Talk to me." She whispered, eyes closed tight as she nestled against him.

It took him a moment to catch a steady enough breath, but he spoke.

"I… I think I can… I think I can c-come up with a p-plan."

"What do you mean? A plan for what?"

"For m-me. For us, actually."

He pulled away, hands taking both of hers as his lips curved into a smile. He couldn't believe it – the plan was there all along! He hadn't seen it, but it was there. It'd be hell, but it'd be for the best, and if there was someone who needed to pay Hell a visit, his name was Tate Langdon.

"Okay, tell me."

"I've killed… Thirty-two people total. And there's that thing I did to your mom." He brushed his tears away, eyes never leaving hers, even as the smaller pair turned to stone again. Probably not the best line to open with, moron.

"Just hear me out, Vi. There's a point to it. What if… Well, what if I pay for it? All of it?"

"How?"

"I'll tell you what I did. How I did it. I remember now, your dad has been helping me and- and I remember every bit of it. I'll tell you, and you can do it to me. I'm dead anyway, so why not? Or you can have someone else do it, if you feel like that'd be better. Thirty-two murders and a rape, Vi. That's a lot of shit to pay for. It's more than time already."

There was a deranged, almost eager edge to his voice, and the truth is, he was. He needed it.

"It's not just the victims." She replied coldly, eyes narrowing. "It's their families. It's their futures. It's everything. Are you prepared to pay for that, too?"

"Yes."

Silence. Violet's brow was furrowed, head tilted to the side, her expression as confused as if he were a creature from another planet.

And then she rose to her feet, yanking her hands out of his like they were on fire, and they might as well have been; the flames rapidly spreading to her heart.

"Are you seriously telling me you want to be fucking tortured to make up for what you did?"

Down on the floor, eyes brimming with tears again, Tate could do nothing but shrug.

"Yeah."

"I don't know if I'll forgive you. Even after all of it. Even ever."

"I know."

"You're crazy. You're a psycho."

"Preaching to the choir."

"And if I say yes to this, there's no backing out for you, ever."

He nodded solemnly, eyes wide and eager for her veredict.

"Tomorrow."

A/N: Hey! Thank you for reading. This was an idea that popped into my head at school, and it'll be sad. It'll be angsty. It'll be sadistic. Read at your own discretion :) Also, it'll be short. I'm thinking somewhere in the neighborhood of five chapters, maybe a little more, maybe a little less. But please, please let me know what you think! I'll try to update soon enough. And for the readers of Stay, don't worry. I'm working on that, too. Just… A little more slowly.