Earlier
Violet covered a yawn with her hand, giving her head a shake in a bid to try and stay awake and alert. She was working the night shift on reception at Sunnydale General Hospital; she did this 3 nights a week to earn some cash to put towards putting herself though college. And if she was being entirely honest with herself, for more shoes and costume jewellery she didn't really need. Excitement had been a bit thin on the ground in her life recently what with school, work and sleep she had barely had time for any of the college freedom and craziness she had spent countless nights dreaming of back at high school. She missed high school, something she wouldn't have thought possible only a couple of years ago. She'd had her tight knit group of friends, they'd shared laughs and drunken nights, falling in love with music, films, books, each other and now they were scattered across the country at various colleges.
Violet picked the glittering and strange parts of pop culture and hoarded them like a magpie will anything that shines. She'd been drawn to the kitsch and the alternative, dark underbelly of life ever since she could remember. Devouring book after book of ghost stories by torch light under the covers of her bed at night, daydreaming and exploring her grandmothers dusty attic as a child the things she found shaped the person she became - her dads old punk records, grandmothers's costume jewellery, brightly coloured scarves in which she could pretend she was a princess, a warrior woman, or a beautiful Romany mystic like her grandmother.
Her grandmother had died when Violet was 10, but not before teaching her Violca much about her family history. Her mother told Violet what she had said; 'Violca has a big heart, I worry it may be taken advantage of. This girls soft heart will do the world a great service one day I hope'. This played on Violets mind sometimes as grandmother Tsura had been a gifted seer. Violet felt so much of others pain that sometimes it would almost immobilise her, and she felt like an iceberg within a frozen sea of feelings. Her first love had let her down so badly, had made her love herself fiercely, too fiercely to let anyone else into her heart ever since. She wanted to do good in the world, but sometimes she just felt like being bad, and sometimes she was just numb. Getting drunk and crashing her car, cheating, stealing and general run of the mill rebellion had punctuated her teenage years. But then she'd give her last $10 to a homeless man, she'd protest and rage at injustice. Violet knew she was a contradiction in terms, she wasn't bad but she wasn't all good either. 'Without judgement, with warmth - that is what you must be. You will bring balance' her grandmother had told her. When she'd asked what this meant Tsura had only said 'You'll know, when the time is right, you will know my little Violca and you will see what others won't'. Violet was 23, and she still did not know what this meant. She wanted to do so many things, she was scared she would never get to do any of them, that she would never reach her potential or find out what her grandmother had meant. She was worried she would let her down, or that she already had.
It sometimes hardly seemed a coincidence she had ended up in Sunnydale with its strange goings on and creatures of the night. Oh yeah, she knew about them alright - stories mostly, but she'd seen few demons. She suddenly realised she had been staring into space for at least 20 minutes uninterrupted. It was a slow night at the hospital - something which happened more often that you'd think on the Hellmouth. Violet was hoping for some work to do, someone to chat to. Anything to interrupt the internal monologue that threatened to shift her into a lonely, depressive funk for the remainder or the night. As she heard the deranged giggle and saw the dark haired woman with yellow eyes and flowing oxblood red skirts float through the E.R waiting room towards her, Violet remembered that in Sunnydale you should always be careful what you wish for.