This takes place 15 years after the season one finale. Not Mary-Sue fic or Tate sympathizing, but this storyline came to me yesterday and I couldn't resist. Heavily inspired by the song "Ghost" by Emilie Autumn. I am not a part of the Tate fangirl mob, but I do appreciate how he is written as an interesting character. I also appreciate Evan Peters' dimples.

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Did you know that sometimes it frightens me when you say my name and I can't see you? Will you ever learn to materialize before you speak, impetuous boy? If that's what you really are.

When Briony sees him for the first time she thinks that he is a hallucination. It wouldn't be the first time that she saw something that wasn't there - God knows her doctor insisted that it wasn't a side effect of her medication, and looked at her like she was a nutcase when she suggested the idea. Things got worse after she got diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease. It didn't help the stress when her mother pulled her out of school and made them move to Los Fucking Angeles. Her mom swears that it wasn't because she was ashamed, but Briony sees the look on her mother's face when one of her fits start.

Her specific case of Parkinson's isn't bad, Elizabeth, Dr. Singh tells her mother, she got lucky.Briony wants to kick him in the teeth when he says shit like that. Sure, her spine's doing okay right now, but it'll get worse as she gets older. She'll lose motor control, and probably won't be able to get around on her own by the time she's forty. Really lucky, right? Briony hates her hands, her giveaway. She hates how frail they look; how they always shiver and twitch and need to move.

Briony knows she isn't crazy, but hopes that she is just for the moment. Because there is someone standing in the doorway of her bedroom and he doesn't seem to be going away. She squeezes her eyes shut and pretends that she is asleep. The air is still and her blanket feels thick and heavy above her. Her leg is twitching as bad as her hands, and she can him breathing at the door.

"Hey,"

Briony jumps but doesn't open her eyes. The voice was that of a teenaged boy, soft and piercing and as real as she is. She thinks that if he is an hallucination, she wishes he would go away. And if he is a real and a murderer, she wishes that he would just kill her and get it over with. Briony takes uneven, shallow breaths. After what feels like hours later, she opens her eye just a bit and peers at the door.

He's gone.

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The next morning Briony doesn't tell her mother about what she saw, because she knows that she wouldn't believe her. Briony isn't sure that she would believe herself.

By the time Briony is up, around 9:50, her mother has already finished her first glass of wine of the day and is cooking one of those horrible spicy smelling recipes from her cookbook, the one she had published when Briony was only a baby. 'Hot Mama by Elizabeth Kenney' had been aimed at single mothers who wanted to cook cheap, exotic meals. It had been a smash success, and even landed on the New York Times Best Seller List.

After they moved from Pennsylvania to Los Angeles, it was the cookbook that gave them the funds to purchase the house. It was the ten times the size of the old one, and gave Briony a creepy-crawly feeling the moment she first walked in. But her mother had fallen in love with it, and raved on the phone to her friends about the deal she'd found, gloating about the hardwood floors and the maid that came with the price. But Briony didn't give a shit about hardwood floors, and the maid (with her staring, milky eye) gave her the creepy-crawlies, too.

As Briony watched her mother cooking and contemplated the boy she had seen last night, The maid Moria came up behind her. She was good at that, sneaking up on people. Briony swore that her feet didn't even touch the floor when she walked, the way she didn't seem to make a noise. "Would you like a glass of orange juice?" The older woman asked.

Briony jumped, she hadn't gotten much sleep after the incident last night and it had made her nerves worse than ever. And the twitching, too. Her leg was vibrating against her chair, and her fingers were twitching in her lap. "No, thank you." She answered, clearly her throat and trying not to stare at Moria too much.

"Come now, certainly there's something I can do. The two of you make such little mess, I've had hardly any work at all." Moira said, tapping at the tabletop with her pearly, oval fingernails. Her mother didn't reply, focused on whatever food that she had sizzling in the pan. It smelled like curry but looked like chicken stir-fry. Briony shifted under her gaze, there was just something about Moira that made Briony uncomfortable.

"Don't worry about it." Briony said. And as her mother stepped out of the room, muttering about peppers, she continued speaking. "Just out of curiosity, were all of the doors and windows locked last night?"

Moira nodded, pressing an absent-minded hand to her hair and finding a stray scarlet lock that had loosened from a pin. She fixed it immediately with her unnerving, nimble hands. Briony wondered how she got her hair to be so red, whether she dyed it or not. It had to be artificial, no one had hair that red. "Certainly. Why, did you feel a draft?"

"Something like that. I thought I heard something. It was nothing, I guess." Briony said, and regretted mentioning it in the first place. Briony's hand was twitching worse than ever. Moira noticed it and looked down at it, curiously. Briony tried to say something else, change the subject, but she just couldn't get the words out. Something about this house was making her tremors worse than ever.

She turned and walked up the stairs, towards her room. Haunted. Briony thought, and the word echoed around in her mind and banged against her eardrums. The house is haunted.

Moira watches her as she leaves.

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