"It seems that I've been held in some dreaming state, a tourist in a waking world, never quite awake. No kiss, no gentle world could wake me from this slumber, until I realized that it was you who held me under."

One day she had a nightmare. She was walking through slime-grey stone, wormed rimmed corridors in the basement, walking towards a black smooth figure that shined off sterile fluorescent lights contrasting against the ceiling and did nothing but breathe, calling a name she forgot, needing him. There was a room and an operating table and she was afraid, but she wasn't afraid, because it was a threatening figure that he cut but he wasn't dangerous, he wouldn't hurt her. Hewon't no he won'the won't- Danger didn't have the same electric-blue pleasurable rush that anticipation flowed with so this definitely wasn't dangerous, not at all. She was wearing a vintage lace dress, moth-eaten and off-white like the ceiling, and the table was cold as she got on top of it, but he was still standing right next to her and she wasn't afraid, why would she be? Her eyelids were closed but twitching with the light from fluorescent explosions overhead, and all she saw was red and black red red red black, and she knew that she would have to risk the blindness to see him one last time, because there was a mysterious, twitching trust there, and he was always so tender, just like a lover, just like right now, moving together, dolphin-skin against flower petals and hips and fingernails marring a perfect onyx mirror, the dress shoved up underneath her chest, and an insurmountable pressure and nothing but blindness from the explosion clenching in her stomach and racing speeding light overhead, nothing but a supernova of light.

So much light…

And then she realized that he was kneeling between her thighs, and there was a dim chirping bird in the back of her mind calling for her to run, but there was nothing in the air that told her of danger, so she relaxed and dazed in a hazy golden glow inside of her head, floating in a haze in the middle of a desert with a final desperate sunset and a skeletal cowboy in the distance on the craigs (tate), peaceful, until she felt a scalpel pierce her skin and blood flow down her legs and she wondered what he was doing, she usually didn't cut her thighs unless her parents were extra-vigilant. She caressed his smooth dark head and felt the knife slash straight axis into her, it didn't hurt, and the bird in its cage was screeching in terror and beating its wings, and she felt his hand travel up her body. The knife had vanished and he was standing up over her, with his hand on her heart, and she reached up and kissed him and it felt absolutely the same as kissing Tate and suddenly she couldn't breathe, he had his snaking hands around her throat and she was drowning in air and dust and the light from overhead was blinding, and she screamed and fought and thrashed, bruising herself on the table but he only said that he loved her. Too little oxygen means too little brain function, and while she was running from him and into a dark garden with scythe-plants she saw that he was Tate, saw him underneath his mask and suit and she realized that it all felt right, the perilous absence of guilt, the sweetmeat-tender connection that they had was right because it was always him and it was always going to be him, and his hand was tightening around her throat and saying that he loved her and that they'd be together and oh violet it'll be okay we'll be together forever I love you I love you and she found herself in her room and blinded by darkness instead of light, instead of her dream, covered in sweat and too terrified to sleep.

"No more dreaming of the dead as if death itself were undone. No more calling like a crow for a boy, for a body in the garden."

She had never been one to discount the power of dreams. They were messages sent from heaven, hell, the afterlife, alternate dimensions, from anywhere really, but they were ways of communicating truths that fragile human minds made of china couldn't understand written out or heard or seen in the blinding light of day. She knew how to interpret her dreams, been doing it ever since she was a child, listening to herself, and she knew enough to know that this was a warning because she had plead beyond pleading to him in the basement and he didn't even falter in suffocating her, in choking her life out, in blinding her with smoky-grey darkness, the look of devotion on his face heartbreaking and infinitely disgusting simultaneously. She knew he was a ticking time bomb and she was his trigger, and there wasn't any safety on her, so she had to navigate him (blind) in dark waters, keeping him away from obstacles and scouting for the hidden ones. She had always trusted her dreams before anything else, so why was this one so hard to believe in? He was always so kind to her, so sweet, so devoted, but he could turn to red rages in a lightning flash, and as much as she understood she didn't know what was buried underneath the churning waters of his mind, drowned underneath dark dank (blind) rivers with whistles on the water. He was too volatile. She needed to go. She should go.

"No more dreaming like a girl, so in love, so in love. No more dreaming like a girl, so in love, so in love. No more dreaming like a girl, so in love with the wrong world."

Tate was curled around her body in his sleep like ivy up a tower, and the only thing she wanted to do was shove him away but she was afraid for him to go, and she hated it. She was so sad and alone and guilty and he was there to comfort her, but for how long? They were moving too fast, he was growing possessive and he was brooding and intense and her mother was gone and everything was snap snap snapping into little pieces and what a shitty thing to do to your mom.

Her mother had said that there had been a rapist in the rubber suit from the attic. Tate had "attacked" her in the basement in the rubber suit. After her dad threw it out. Tate was dead and didn't know it.

And it was like there was lightning in her bones, racing itself up and down the femurs and tibias and phalanges and she was thrashing and flailing and her eyes were leaping open, staring at more light more light more light. She was filled with light and the house was speaking and showing her just what exactly had happened, and she knew everything he had done. He wanted to keep her here with him forever because he loved her but you don't do this fucking shit to the people you love oh my god he raped my mom why did you do this- and he meant well, he really and truly did, but it was too much for her to handle and she was crying and crying and crying and he was awake, trying to hold her, and she was fighting him off but he won, and he stroked her hair and we'll be okay, won't we vi, we'll be okay, and she decided to leave- there was nothing stopping her now. The trust was gone and it had left without a goodbye or a glance, and she decided that there wasn't anything worth staying in the house for anymore. She loved him too much to mitigate this- he wasn't an angel, she knew that. But despite all of his good intentions she couldn't stay for him anymore, she could hardly stand to feel his breath on the top of her head, and she felt she might explode soon with red-hot blinding rage, so she decided to sleep and deal with the whole fucking mess in the morning.

"The state of mind of ghosts may be similar to that of someone in a delirium or high fever: a disconnection of the will and inability to distinguish between reality and dream." – The Occult by Colin Wilson

The lack of morning sunlight made the situation all too real, and it was a heavy weight on her tiny little shoulders, and she had absolutely no idea about what to think anymore, no ability to compartmentalize, to rationalize insult and injury, and there wasn't a damn thing she could do about any of the whole fucking situation. She felt like she was in a waking dream, walking dead, drained, tired, depressed and longing for a lullaby to wipe the whole slate clean. She looked down at him and he was so calm and so peaceful and she wanted to grab the serenity from his face and smash it into smithereens and then cut him with the shards. But she loved him. She didn't know what to do, numb and frail and tired, and she was angry at herself because she isn't afraid but she is and she's not some fucking emotional cripple like him but she can't do anything.

But you can go.

"There was a revolver in the drawer and she saw it. She picked it up and she smiled and then she went outside… I never saw her again."

A Few Things: This is pretty fragmented and stream-of-consciousness and I know it's another huge run-on sentence and it doesn't really make much sense and the grammar is probably atrocious but anyway... Tate is Rubber Man, damn, it sucks but it's to be expected. I am really confused right now because I can't emotionally ground any of these characters since they're all floating in a giant plothole courtesy of Ryan Murphy and he just has to go and fuck everything up. If you do review, could you tell me what you think of Violet's characterization? I don't really think I got her right, and giant thank-you's to all who reviewed "Carillon", and I do not own "Blinding" by Florence + the Machine (this is Violet's theme song, I swear) since the entire "Lungs" album is pretty much perfect.