"I never knew daylight could be so violent."
No Light, No Light by Florence + The Machine
Violet stood silently over the crib containing the two newborn babies; a boy and a girl. Nathan and Grace— and both would have been beautiful babies, beautiful twins, but Nathan was cursed as all the previous children borne in this house had been cursed.
"Brain damage," the doctors had calmly explained to her hysterical mother, "But he'll be alright."
Grace was unmarred, and Vivien had named her for her good luck— what a beautiful baby Grace was, beautiful and untainted.
Nathan began crying, and Violet picked him up into her arms and shushed him, not wanting her parents to wake up. They deserved the sleep, after all they had been through.
Grace simply stared at her with those big doe-brown eyes and didn't make a sound as her brother's hiccupping sobs died.
Violet stared at her little sister, fascinated by those familiar eyes that were nothing like her father's and looked everything like Tate's.
A familiar pang stabbed at her heart and she pushed her fellow ghost out of her mind. God, Tate.
When she first found out she was dead, she had been horrified, devastated. She had meant to commit suicide to get away from the world, not be stuck in this damn house for the rest of eternity. But the one comforting thought was that at least she had Tate.
Until her father had regained consciousness and started screaming around the house for his daughter, and she had raced to get to him before he accidentally got Tate's attention instead.
And, so soon after setting her gaze on her poor dead body, she learned from her crying father that her boyfriend—the man she was now forced to spend all eternity with—was her mother's rapist and the father of one of the babies.
And that was even before she addressed the issue of her death.
"Daddy," she had sobbed into his pressed shirt, "Daddy I'm so, so sorry," she cried.
"Shh baby, it's okay, you didn't know. It'll be okay. We'll get out of this damned house and it'll be okay," he tried to comfort her through his own sorrow, and she only cried harder.
"I can't leave," she cried, and Ben pulled away to study her face.
"We can Violet, and we will— all of us— your mother, me, you, and the babies," he told her sternly, and she shook her head. Then told him the truth.
His sound of disbelief was the worst, the broken laugh that escaped his lips and the mournful choke of anguish as she explained the full situation to him.
For whatever reason, Tate had stayed away for the duration of that conversation, choosing only to appear to her weeks later with red-rimmed eyes and a not-good-enough apology that fell on deaf ears.
"My mother!" Violet had shrieked at him, "You impregnated my mother! You raped her!"
And he had begged for her forgiveness, explained, half-sobbing himself, that it was all for Nora, poor Nora who had lost her baby in life and wanted her own in death.
So Violet stayed away from the other ghosts of the house as well in a self-imposed exile. She avoided Tate entirely, Moira when she could get away with it, and categorized Nora as just as much of a bitch as Hayden was.
She learned to only stay around her parents— around a heavily pregnant mother who never noticed that her daughter never left the house and always seemed to pop up when Vivien needed her, and a father who was still coming to terms with the facts of his daughter's death and future child's paternity.
Neither Ben nor Violet told Vivien the truth about Violet: it was too dangerous, Ben had agreed with Violet, to say anything so close to the birth of the twins.
And now the twins were here, and Violet busied herself with taking care of them when her parents were unable to.
Tate called for her, sometimes. His whispers would carry across the house and echo against the walls. The reverberations of his voice prickled her skin like the hot breath of his mouth, and she shuddered.
What a goddamn tragedy this romance was turning out to be.
She ignored his summons every time.
