and I'd choose you; in a hundred lifetimes, in a hundred worlds, in any version of reality, I'd find you and I'd choose you.
x
(murder house)
she has always had this thing for strange boys.
The ones that sit in the corner of the library by themselves and leaf through tiny hardback books, dart their eyes over the yellowed pages, sift their fingertips over the words. Ones that give no thought to the world around them because they are too lost in their own world to even begin caring about the one they're supposed to be caring about. It's exhausting if you tend to give it too much thought.
Tate is strange. I mean obviously. He gets turned on by haunted houses and dyes her roses black and downs enough prescription meds that he might as well be a damn pharmacologist. But if he is strange then she is fucking certifiable.
Violet smokes like a chimney and can literally feel her lungs closing up at the ripe age of sixteen. She feels the most whole with blood running down her forearms and she finds all those things in the jars in the basement sexy as hell. And she really cannot help the fact that she wants to find that blonde headed bastard in her bedroom every other day.
x
the first time he kisses her, her cardigan covered back is pressed up against the basement staircase, and she can count the tendrils of curls falling over his forehead he is that close and when his mouth finally reaches hers, she does the Mississippi beats in her mind, heart thundering upon her ribcage. When he pulls away and looks down the full foot of height he has on her, Tate grins and she thinks that as damned strange as he might be to the rest of the world, she only cares about theirs.
x
the newspaper clipping of who he used to be is harsh and glaring but she is super pissed because he looks so fucking innocent and beautiful that it makes her angry. The devil isn't supposed to be lovely, she whispers to herself, fingertips tightening around the neck of her stubbed out cigarette.
And you certainly aren't supposed to love him, Tate whispers back in her ear, his ivy ringed thumb teasing the swoop of her collarbone, cherub lips on her neck.
I don't love him, she thinks quietly. Then he smiles at her, that wonderful smile, and she whispers back to him, Oh but I do.
The grin only widens.
x
when she finds her body, whimpering into the cavern of his chest, there is some kind of sick fantasy romeo and Juliet playing out in her heartstrings, and why on earth would that even matter now. Tate just holds her close and doesn't say anything, but she can feel that even in death, he would never come nor go without her. That's something to be said. Fucked up? Maybe, but she will take it.
x
it isn't like eternity gets shortened with time and days and weeks and months and years. In fact it gets long as hell.
Longer the morning she kisses him goodbye in their old room with his hands wrapped around the base of some kid's throat. Violet really leans into that kiss, pushes her body onto his and though she is rotting corpse and stinking flesh and rattling bones, the way he makes her undead heart slam into her chest give her pause as she fades into the background of his cries and a darkened bedroom blurried with hot tears in her too golden eyes.
Love is a mess, she considers later on, sitting in the setting LA sun, another cigarette dangling precariously in her grip, embers dying on the sill of the concrete and his peat bog eyes ever watchful from the stained glass front door.
x
he waits and waits and waits and hopes one day, please fucking hell, one day that eternity will finally learn to get shorter. Or that she will learn how to love him again.
x
(coven)
from one look at this guy she can tell that he is way out of her league. For one thing she sauntered into this party with the head bitch in charge wearing a dress that she is sure she will have to cut Madison out of later on tonight. And for another thing, guys like that don't talk to girls like her.
But he does.
x
that moment in the pane of ice in the living room of that great new Orleans mansion was borderline gothically unnervingly romantic. She lies on her bed and remembers the way he grinned at her like she was the most lovely goddamn thing he had ever seen in his entire life.
Kyle. His name was Kyle. He had the most winning light up your face smile and baby ringlet curls of gold and deep buttered cocoa eyes that admired everything about her, the way that makes a girl giggle for hours after in the solace of her bedroom and share with her girlfriends.
Well Zoe doesn't have girlfriends, she has a coven. And she doesn't even have that moment because Madison tossed away Kyle like a piece of last week's garbage. She sighs into her comforter and peers around their shared quarters, all white except the slash of silver moon on their ceiling.
He really was something else.
x
I'm going to pay you back, Madison says with her hair cascading down her back, joint unlit in her left manicured hand and tart mouth winding around the bitter words. Let's make a manwich, she cracks, clicking open the door to the morgue and lighting a fuckton of tea light candles.
Basically they're just waving their hands and cursing in latin a whole bunch and then bam, beautiful golden boy pops up like toast. Zoe smiles, feels the pull of her mouth, and then reshapes it into a grimace as he beats the security guard to a living pulp.
x
alright, she really needs to lower her expectations because let's be real here, she just rose a guy from the dead that she kinda maybe might care for just a little bit. Madison snorts quietly into her coffee cup the next morning when it gets brought up at the breakfast table. Not that she cares.
Kyle can't speak, he can't make words form yet his mouth so lovingly cradles the short gasps of air and his eyes burrow in hers and he grabs onto her for dear life and she figures that maybe she will go back to her too white bedroom and lay on her down comforter and smile just a twitch.
x
okay, so she may have fucked up dropping him off at home when he can't like talk or do basic human functions by himself, but when she slides back over to the ninth ward and finds him coated in dried coppery crimson, she blanches a bit. He doesn't know and that's not his fault. She has to find him and bring him home.
x
he looks fucking terrified to be chained inside cordelia's damn backyard garden and she can't really blame him because there are some plants out there that scare the living hell out of her when she doesn't have a metal cuff around her ankle. He looks little and childish and lost and when she reveals that gun from behind her back and he begins to cry, she immediately tosses the blessed thing over her shoulder.
The words almost fall from her mouth because of the way he is clutching her like dear life and the horror in his eyes matches that in her own. Kyle's face challenges her even though she understands that he wants to say something.
Don't do it. Love me.
So she does.
x
after a soup filled temper tantrum and flying index cards with his fingers wrapped around her thigh holding her in place, the echoing inside of her ribcage quickens as he leans in and traces his free hand over the slope of her nose and the arch of her brow, the slip of her lips and the apples in her cheeks. Everything he says sounds like forever and don't leave cause I promise I'll be good, without even a sheet of air between his frenzied out of focus mouth.
Zoe had thought she understood what eternity felt like and love and all that other harlequin bullshit with another boy that had dark hair and light eyes and knew her because he could often finish her sentences with his mouth, but damn all holy hell he didn't see her like this.
x
threesomes are weird. And I fucking hate Madison, she scripts in her slanted cursive. Zoe doesn't make eye contact with either of them for four days.
Madison doesn't give a rip, continues to chain smoke like a crazy person. Kyle watches her intently from the corner of their bedroom, never looks at Madison with a second glance. She tries to ignore the flutter in her smile.
x
really he looks like an overgrown child sitting on her bed surprised joy clouding his handsome features as she plunks headphones over his ears. He laughs and ignores Madison, leaving his hand on Zoe's thigh, pulling her back when she tries to leave the room.
Zoe thinks of all the unlikely pairs and knows that this fucked up shit falls to the top of the whole world's list because zombie boy and witch girl and death rising and coven wars is not some fairytale bullshit from a book that anyone has written. Hell, romeo and Juliet still managed to get married in all the damage. Not that they were ever a fairytale or something, not that they are a fairytale or something.
x
outside the universe is literally falling to fucking pieces and he is perched on her snow white comforter listening to a five year old's playbook, but the moment she shoves him away for the final time, she gets those words he has been working on so hard and diligently and it makes her heart spin in its chest because she can remember a time before witch hunter and politics and living corpses when she wore a too tight dress and stood on a staircase with the rail hard against her naked back and his easy chuckle rumbling in the stout holes of his chest.
Don't tell me, you've got a boyfriend, and he had covered his eyes and peeked out and she had giggled and tucked it away for later so she could recall that moment one day and Kyle decided that time was just now.
She can see the kid white streaked in his mass of sunny curls and the length of his eyelashes kissing the lids beneath, how difficultly his bee stung lips furl into sounds and noise and she savors them as they free forth like water from a dam. He grins and she remembers and she can hear his heart slamming like a goddamn hummingbird and then he perfectly, incandescently stutters out those words: I …love…you, he smiles like the boy that he once was, just head over fucking heels with her since that moment in that great new Orleans mansion with fruit punch and frat shirts and ice windows.
Zoe thinks she has never heard anything more beautiful in her entire existence.
I love you too. She never thinks twice.
x
the storybooks forget them in the end. Star crossed lover and all that jazz are so overdone. Who picks these pairings that always consume the other in death anyhow.
Somewhere in some world, they're all fucking laughing. These violent delights have violent ends in which they kiss, they consume. Yes, they consume, fucking everything.
