.
(and the scars that mark my body, they're silver and gold.)
(Yellow Flicker Beat-Lorde)
.
"How have you been?" Her father asks her quietly, his voice almost like cigarette smoke wavering in the space between them. "I've wanted to see how you were adjusting to the changes."
She tilts her head slightly at him, blissfully aware at the way he flinches at the sight of the black eye that looks impossibly black against her pale face. "Peachy." She drags the word out the way she wants to drag out a cigarette, desperately craving the feel of a white cancer stick against her lips. To feel smoke clinging to her skin. "Can I go now?"
"You've been distant, Violet. Is there anything we can do for you?" He looks so hesitant as he takes her hand, leaning forward in his seat to get closer to his wayward daughter.
She can feel Tate watching her almost. "I'm just tired, dad. My problem, not yours."
"I can help you."
She snorts, shaking her head. He believes so endlessly in his ability to fix everyone, that all it takes is his own genius touch and concern as if like magic. "I'd rather you didn't. I don't want you dissecting everything I feel, the way you do to mom. I'm not a frog that you get to cut open."
He sighs. "You haven't been going to school. Your mother is concerned, you know. I'm concerned. We just want what is best for you." His smile looks so brittle.
"If mom's so concerned, why isn't she here having this one on one with me." She rolled her eyes as she exhaled sharply. "No. She's obsessed with eating out brains and shit, all for the baby."
Her father's eyes flicker with confusion. "What do you mean?"
"Moira's cooking her organs and stuff."
There's confliction, she can see, spelled out across his face. Pursue that interesting topic or continue on solving the riddle that is Violet these days. (Has it been days, she wonders? Because it feels like an entire eternity is crushing her spine, tattooing itself across her lungs and heart. Existences are being stamped against her bare skin, leaving her tainted and ruined.)
Her father tries a new tactic. "That bruise looks nasty."
"You don't really care." She feels rage building and she welcomes the heat it brings. "You're just looking for your next fuck; because why the fuck do you care? This is your screw up family, isn't it? You don't really want to deal with this now, not when you have a new baby on the way. A baby that might not be fucked up like me."
He grabs her wrist hard, his hand hot against her sleeve. Violet flinched at the heat sinking through the fabric, pressing against the cuts on her skin. "Don't talk to me like that."
She cocks her head as she forces her eyes to go hard and voice not to waver. "You know, sometimes I think about how great it would be to hang myself. Blow my brains out. Maybe jump out from the attic."
"You don't actually mean that." He's on his feet now but so is she, already walking away from him.
"Maybe I do, maybe not."
The words sound so careless and she almost believes in them. Except, she would never want to do it like that. She wouldn't want to feel those crushing seconds moments before leaping out from the attic window, or feel the trigger right before pulling it.
She'd never want to hang herself from a noose for Tate to find.
He's waiting for her in her bedroom, eyes wide and watching her from his stomach on her bed. "How'd the chat go?"
"Dad's trying to make it seem like he's doing something." She shrugged, crossing her arms anxiously as she sinks down onto the floor. Violet wants desperately to slit her wrists and finally let go, but ever since the day Tate pulled her out of the rain her razors had gone missing. "Makes it seem like he cares or something."
"I care."
She swallows as she watches him slither off her bed and crawl towards her. "I know."
"Good. I'll always care."
He's not lying, which surprises her. People don't usually toss out casual vows like that these days and actually intend on them being honest. Tate has a habit of wearing his heart on his sleeve, she discovers. "I care about you." She doesn't look at him but she knows he is looking at her. "I want you to know that."
Violet falls a little more in love with him that day, sprawled out over her bedroom floor together with oversized mugs of earl grey tea as they flipped through Russian classics. Tate snorts sometimes in amusement, and she sinks into the blissfulness of pierced humanity stamped across each page. It takes her two hours to realize that the sky is still raining, the yard still looks like a muddy soup and she doesn't care because she feels something similar to contentedness.
Her music isn't quite so angry today, she questions. Tate flips through it idly, settling on some quiet and mournful violin music that simply flows from her speakers and fills the spaces between them. "Can it be like this forever?" She asks quietly as she rolls onto her back and looks up at the ceiling.
"I want it to be."
"Then that's good enough." Violet decides, and Tate takes her hand gently. "I want every day to be like this forever."
Tate slides closer to her, their tea mugs empty and forgotten next to the worn classics. "I used to want to be a bird and fly away. Just, leave this entire mess behind and stop being part of the living. Now, though, I never want to leave."
They're teenagers, and they're so incredibly over their heads that nothing really matters. Violet lives life on a wavering line, questioning if now is the moment that she'll actually take the plunge and finally bleed out. If her pain with tear her apart, agonizing misery eating her from the inside out.
She doesn't hurt so much anymore.
Violet kisses him hard and he doesn't hold back.