Warning: Incest – if you don't like it, that's totally cool, just don't read, okay?
Tate & Violet, Rated – M
A/N: This chapter was previously right in the middle of Chapter 10, like a flashback. But I cut it into its own chapter due to length. It made the previous chapter drag, I thought. i don't know how I feel about it standing on its own though. I thought about not posting it at all, but that seemed like a waste. So anyway, thanks for reading, hope you like it!
Disclaimer – I do not own American Horror Story. Only the idea for this fic is mine.
Tumblr: avermillionvermiciousknid & drollicpixiefanfic
Halloween – Part 2
Summer, 1998
"And they want you to what?"
"They want to pay me to water their plants while they're away," she repeated, annoyed. Why was it such a difficult concept for her brother?
"The fags?" he sneered.
"That's not cool, Tate."
"What, do you like them or something?" She shrugged, not the answer he wanted. "You're always around them."
"They just think I'm some silly neighborhood girl. And, I don't know, it's nice to have living people in the house again. You know, heat, cable, food, smokes, a stocked liquor cabinet?"
Blood rushed, his heart pounded, it was like he was deaf, blind, to anything but her. His focus was unnerving. "So, I'm not enough for you anymore?"
"What?" her head spun around, gaze locking on his angry black eyes, "What are you talking about? Because I fucking want to watch MTV?"
"You're tired of me," he growled, "of us."
"You're being ridiculous." He glared back menacingly. "It's Halloween money, Tate," she told him, tossing her book aside, rolling her eyes as her bare toes bumped his Chucks. "We can buy some weed or coke, whatever we want," she stressed. "We can go shopping at Goodwill," Violet grinned, getting up onto her knees and crawling toward him, looking like the cat that got the cream. And then she was sat in his lap, right on his dick, and Tate had a hard time arguing with her. She was so warm, soft, the heat of her pressed right up against his ragged jeans. "Please," she mumbled against his lips, his hand on her hip, the other winding through her hair.
"What about The Dead Breakfast Club?"
"You think they'll be out again?" she frowned.
He lifted one shoulder. Exhaling through her nose Violet mused, "You think you leave all that high school shit, the bitches, behind when you fucking die. But no. They have to use their sorry excuse of an afterlife to haunt yours on the best night of the year."
Violet and Tate did not venture out every Halloween. Their first they hadn't realized it was a possibility until late in the night, only able to torment Constance at her new house, right next door, before the sun rose, calling them home. The second, their classmates from Westfield High cornered them, demanding answers, bloody and foul, more like zombies than apparitions. They weren't ghosts, specters, in the same sense that Violet and her brother were. They didn't have eternity to live out as a spirit, just that one night a year. And they used it to hunt down the Langdon's. Tate had screamed, hollered, at them. Violet had just stared. But when the kids tried to follow them inside they were barred, like an invisible forcefield keeping other ghouls from the premises and she breathed a sigh of relief. The third year was a repeat of the second. The fourth, they stayed home, Tate sulking, Violet sucking a violent brilliant bruise into the meat of his neck until he rolled her onto her back and forgot all about the day supposedly being spoiled.
Halloween, 1998
"Fuck me," Violet groaned, Kyle and Chloe closing in from the left, Stephanie and the bleeding boys to the right, Leah directly in front. "You know, this is bullshit!" They stared with their haunted eyes and gore smattered faces. Red burbled out of Leah's neck as the geek with half a face dribbled on his shirt. The daylight only made their wounds worse, terrifying, and his sister shuddered in revulsion.
Violet knew that she and her brother were pale, deathly and sallow, their skin losing the luster of life with their passing, but there was something infinitely more eerie about those kids. Strolling down the street, in public, their ghastly wounds on display. Hadn't they ever learned to hide them, how to repair themselves, look like they once had? Maybe having only one day a year to roam free made that more difficult. Maybe they liked the attention, the effect.
Her aversion, disgust, at their small horror show, must have been painted clearly across her face. Lips curled, head tilted back and away. "See something you don't like, bitch?" Leah growled, baring her teeth. "You think I want to look like this?" Her chest was soaked through with blood, purple black tissue exposed to the cool air. "Why don't you talk to your fucking brother about it? Why he used a shotgun to tear me open. Why he watched me die."
Tate took his sister's hand and yanked, tugging her into the street, away from the crowd gathering around them. They were just leaving the record store, a bag full of used vinyl and CDs in hand. Violet clutched her satchel to her chest, their supply of coke, weed, pills, too precious to risk losing to the mob of ghouls. A large plastic sack from the thrift store knocked her brother's leg as they walked.
"No, no, no," Stephanie waltzed around them. "You're not going anywhere. Not until we've all had a nice little chat." Violet grimaced, trying to avoid looking at the girl's grisly head wound. But the goth knew, painted black mouth opening, showing her pink tongue, such a contrast to the rest of her, a portrait in washed out grays. "Do you believe in god?" she demanded.
"I don't," Violet looked to her brother, unsure.
"That's what he asked me. Before he blew the side of my fucking face off."
"Tate."
"Violet," her brother responded, wrapping his free arm around her, holding her close.
"You are deeply, deeply disturbed," Stephanie told them, shaking her head, revolted.
"Stupid slut," Kyle hissed.
"Hey!" Tate thundered.
"We all saw the pictures, Tate." Leah sneered.
"You took the pictures," Violet retorted, gripping her brother's arm in a white knuckled grasp.
"Somebody put this bitch down," Stephanie spat.
Kevin and Amir hung back, glaring. Violet barely recognized them. If she hadn't come face to face with their corpses on Halloween's past she might not even have known them, that they went to Westfield with she and her brother. Obviously they had suffered the fate of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. And a hint of guilt tugged at her guts. But years earlier she had let that go, knowing that the past was the past, she couldn't change what happened to them. Explaining, apologizing, feeling sorry, wouldn't give them their lives, their futures back. It only angered Tate. And she had forgiven him, almost the moment she heard, knew, what he had done. Because he had done it for her. Had died for her. To protect her. And when you loved someone unconditionally, utterly and completely, as she loved her brother, you looked past their sins. The blood on his hands was the not the sum of Tate's existence. And while it wasn't what she wanted for him, for her, for anyone, they all had to accept their fate. Make the best of it.
"You know," Kyle sighed, "I'm actually a little surprised. The two of you, out here. Deciding to leave Mommy's little safe house. Maybe we're losing our edge," he smirked meanly, the bullet hole in his forehead oozing, pulsing.
"Fuck you guys."
"Fuck us?" Chloe spat, her cheerleading uniform stained with blood, pulp, viscera, chunks of a worthless heart. "Why'd you do it, Tate?"
"Come on, Violet," her brother commanded, his jaw locked, gaze black and frozen over.
"Just leave us alone," Violet called over her shoulder as their former classmate's watched them go, their stares as dead as they were.
"Why do they have to try and ruin everything?" Tate bent forward, snorted a two inch line of powder, rubbed his nose, cleared his throat. Violet was doing one for every two of his, downing a bourbon and coke, trying to sooth her brother's aching soul. "Didn't they do enough to us," he paused, staring into her eyes meaningfully and emphasized, "to you, back then?"
"Shhh," her small hands ran through his hair, rays of autumn sunshine filtering in through the grimy attic windows. Her brother's head bumped her palm, needy, like a cat looking for affection. "But you know, at this rate you are going to, literally, blow through our entire stash of coke." He grinned slyly, momentarily distracted. Violet sighed, "And they haven't ruined anything, Tate. We're here, we're together. And it's Halloween! We should find costumes. We could at least ring the doorbell downstairs and get some candy. Or," she smiled, "we could just steal it! Remember how we used to do that when we were kids? Whenever fucking stupid people left a whole bowl outside with a note saying to take just one?"
Her brother's lips lifted further and she knew she was improving his mood. Violet bounced, hair falling into her face. Tate brushed if back and away, his mouth hovering over hers, pupils blown wide, breath hot. "Okay. Get a costume and meet me in the basement. Ten minutes."
She nearly clapped with giddy joy but held herself in check. It felt like there was starlight in her eyes, like she could hear the mice in the woodwork, like her brain was ticking, like a clock, time flying through her, around her. "What are you going to do?" she asked.
"It's a surprise," he replied seriously and then was gone. An empty space, a vacuum in the dust mote, where her brother had been.
"Tate," she called out to him, dressed in nothing but a ragged dirty slip, her hair mussed into knots, black eye liner and smeared red lipstick. His dick's reaction was immediate, raging against its latex prison. His own personal Courtney Love, floating like some ethereal grunge goddess down the stairs and into his arms. "Tate?" she asked again, sounding more unsure. Violet had never liked the basement, the domain of Nora and Charles, of Thaddeus. Not even when they were kids and he had wanted to play.
Her brother observed her from the shadows, hanging back, all but his eyes hidden by the mask, the suit. He was sweating balls, but it would be worth it to see her reaction, to explain where he had found it.
"Come out, come out, where ever you are," she sing-songed, turning her back to him and providing the perfect opportunity. Coming up behind her, Tate grabbed Violet's arm, swung her until her back hit the railing, clamping a hand over her mouth, grunting, and doing everything in his power to hold back the fit of giggles threatening to overtake him. But he couldn't do it, her shocked face, wide eyes and open mouth were too much and he shattered the moment, informing her that it was in fact him inside the suit, and completely dispelling her fear. "You asshole," she shoved him brutally, barely knocking him back a foot. Tate's hands came up to drag the hood over his damp hair, his grin sinful.
"I scared you," he whispered, lips on the shell of her ear.
"No, you didn't." She paused, took a moment to study him, the black second skin, "Where the hell did you get this thing?" Tate glanced up at the ceiling, to the first floor. "Oh my god," Violet smirked, all teeth and joyful spite, "those two? You have got to be kidding me."
"Looks like Chad finally found out about JungleJim4322." His sister reached out to run her palm down his latex covered chest while he leaned in, mouth descending on hers, his gloved fingers sliding up her thigh, finding her sweet bare pussy uncovered. Her breath stuttered as she pushed down against his questing digits. "I really didn't scare you?"
Violet's eyes fluttered closed. "I said no."
Tate cocked his head, shaking hair out of his eyes. He didn't believe her for a second but there were more pressing matters to attend to than proving Violet wrong. "Are you wet for it?" He asked, lips latching onto her pulse point, sucking, tongue rasping down the tendons of her neck.
"Mmm," she hummed. "Wouldn't you like to know." The tip of one finger traced the seam of her sex, slipping effortlessly inside, gliding along her snatch.
"I think you are," he groaned before there was the sound of a loud crash above them, voices raised, screams and shouts. In the blink of an eye and with a devil's grin, Tate vanished, leaving his sister to squawk. Her thighs rubbed together but the friction created by his glove covered fingers was gone. With a sigh, burning between her legs, she followed him up, taking the slow way, plodding up the stairs, cursing her brother.
He was stood at the far end of the dining room, shoulders hunched, tipped forward. The two men were having it out over and around the large wooden table, decorations, pumpkins, piled high on the surface. Tate's eyes were wild, his hair a tangled mess, the sneer on his face sinister and calculated. He had been waiting for a moment just such as that one. Violet knew it though she had tried to ignore it, his need for violence, the urges, the void left when there was no one to hurt, to punish, but the already dead.
The ever increasing arguments, barely suppressed fury, had had them all on edge, the ghosts, the four walls they lived in, breathing, pulsing. The house had Chad and Patrick in its grasp, draining the hope, the happiness, the very life, out of their very existence. In the end their home always got what it wanted, the darkness, the vile things people secreted away, it fed off them. And when it had stolen enough of what was good in you, when you were left a husk, a shade, you snapped. And it appeared the men before them had done just that. The cheating, the financial problems, the stress, the postponing of children and babies again and again, it had all become too much to bear.
Violet propped herself against the sideboard watching her brother with a mixture of trepidation and fascination. "Tate," she warned as he pulled the mask back down over his face, drawing the zipper down tooth by tooth, seemingly unable to hear her.
It wasn't that Violet wanted Tate to hurt Chad or Patrick, it was that she knew not to get in his way, between him and what he wanted, when he was like that. Driven by madness, fueled with drugs, amped up and desperate to let loose. So, with a small sad sigh of acquiescence, Violet picked up a candy apple and settled in for the show, unwilling to turn her back on what was happening. If she could do nothing to prevent it, she could at least serve as witness.
Her brother appeared seemingly out of no where, stalking forward, malice in his bones, his stride, shoulders broad, absolutely lethal, leaving the two men stunned. Chad was flipped over the table before he could utter a single syllable while Patrick cursed, thundered. He was knocked unconscious with the fire poker, Tate introducing the object to his skull.
Violet, with little else to do, thoroughly enjoyed the candied apple. It had been years since she had had one. Probably since she was a very young girl and her father was still around. As for the rest of it, it made her sick to her stomach. She frowned as Tate thrust Chad's head into the bucket filled with water and floating fruit, red and green bobbing up around his ears as he thrashed, until he was still.
Patrick groaned across the room and Violet tried to grab her brother's arm, attempting to calm him, silently urging him to let the other man leave but it was no good, Tate was too far gone, in his element, unable to come out of his trance until he was done and some sort of justice had been served. The blond was beaten to death, his face a mass of bloody flesh and bone, his ribs broken, leg snapped at an odd angle.
And when he returned to himself, panting, Violet wrapped herself up in him, held him, reaching up to remove the horrible blank face he wore. Underneath, Tate was pale, gaunt, eyes haunted, circled in red, purple.
She resolved right then and there to hide the rest of their coke from him, at least for a little while.
Tate was staring, a lost little boy. "I'm sorry, Violet," he eventually sniffed, glancing around the room at the destruction he had wrought. "I didn't mean it. I just, I don't," he trailed off, lip trembling.
She touched his face, thumb tracing one dark brow. "It's okay." A part if her, older and yet younger at the same time, felt like crying, curling up in a ball, clutching her brother to her, and never letting go. But the reasonable, mature, already dead for too many years and seen too much, part of her, spurred her into action. "Come on," she breathed, hand smoothing Tate's hair back from his face, "help me get them downstairs. I have a plan."
And that was how Violet Langdon became a murderer.
They dumped the bodies in the basement, limbs akimbo, blood seeping into the cement. She stared down at them, pensive, her brother just behind. Sighing, she ran her hands along her arms in an attempt to ward off a chill she knew had nothing to do with temperature, and said, "Get me the gun."
"Violet..."
"Tate," she turned to eye him sternly, "get me their fucking gun." He did as he was told, without hesitation or another word.
She pumped three bullets into Patrick's still chest as her brother stood over Chad, gazing down at his placid face, hair wet and plastered to his head. A cough startled them both, the dark headed man twitching, spitting water. Tate stepped back, eyes widening. But when Chad saw the girl his expression of fear turned to one of worry. "Violet," he gasped, pained. The gun in her hand was still pointed at his lover. He was dead, Chad knew, but he so wanted to be with him, to touch him, hold him, one last time. He reached, brain telling his body what to do but unable to make his muscles listen. The man was barely able to open his fingers, stretch them. There was still more than a foot between he and Patrick.
"It's okay, Chad." Violet told him earnestly. "Tate and I are going to make it all better. Now you and Patrick can be together. Forever." She attempted to smile but the expression felt wrong on her face, twisted, brittle somehow. So she gave up trying to explain, to herself, to the man suffering on the cold floor, and put the gun in his hand. Violet wrapped his limp fingers around the trigger and brought it to his temple. It took one shot to end a life, watching his tense shoulders go loose, his body melting into the floor beneath him as blood pooled in a halo around his head.
"It's kind of romantic, isn't it?" her brother asked, voice hopeful, as she lead him away from the scene. Upstairs, Violet stripped him out of the ridiculous suit, deciding then and there to throw it in the trash, and washed him in the tub. There would only be hot water for so much longer, she sighed. When she was tucked in beside him in the downy bed of the guest room, his lips on her breast, his cock deep inside her, he mumbled "I love you," over and over, like a benediction, a prayer. An apology. Even though, deep down, Violet knew he wasn't sorry, would never, could never, be sorry for what he had done. Not unless he had hurt her. And, at least in Tate's mind, killing a pair of pseudo friends was no great loss because she always had him. The one person she truly needed, loved. And now, Violet thought with a smile, Chad would have his, forever and for always too.
Things did not work out quite like she had hoped. Patrick and Chad's happily ever after had more to do with ever after than happiness and Violet discovered there was perhaps more girlish naiveté to her than she had ever suspected.
Chad never did forgive her for her part in his death, not that she blamed him. But they did come to an understanding. And over time a grudging respect for the younger girl grew within him. She put up with a lot of shit and though she was never far from that psychopath, the little fuck who drowned him, she knew what she was about. She was her own woman. And a woman she was, he belatedly realized. Probably only ten years younger than himself in reality, belied by her looks, her eternal youth. And sometimes, in the darkest, most hidden places inside of him, Chad thanked her for what she did. Because he would never grow old, never lose his hard won, hard worked for looks. And he would never lose Patrick. Even if they did both resemble bitter hags more often than not.
Patrick, for his part, was more angry with Chad than the boy who killed him, the girl who stood by, hint of a smile on her candy coated lips and let it happen. It was his husband's fault that he was trapped in the house, caught in a lie, enduring a loveless relationship for all eternity. Because Chad just couldn't let him go, refused to see the problems in their relationship and face them head on. Patrick had taken his first steps on the path to freedom and had been cut down at the knees. As for the other residents of the house, unless they wanted to fuck him, the muscular blond had little use for them, barely registered their existence. Sometimes, Violet wasn't even sure he knew he was dead, walking around the house in a perpetual fog.
Tate just wanted him, both of them, to stay the fuck away from his sister. She was his, not theirs. And just because they were all dead did not mean that they would be sharing.
And Violet rolled her eyes, kissing her brother's cheek, lighting another cigarette, asking, "Want to play Scrabble?"