A/N: Sorry for the delay everyone! It was my birthday on Wednesday, so I had a busy (but fun!) week.

Also, I lied and this is actually going to be a three-part flashback because I have no self-control, apparently. Sorry! I know everyone's really looking forward to more Eric (and Godric) content. After the flashback is over, the next chapter will include Pam (Yay!) and possibly Godric as well.

Content Warnings: Mentions of drug abuse, alcoholism, and child neglect/abuse. Again, I don't condone either of Olive's parents' parenting styles.

All that said, I hope you enjoy the chapter!

Chapter 6: In the Beginning, Part II

Olive is nine years old, and she hates feeling afraid.

Roanoke, Virginia

11 years ago

The next day, Olive's father came to the apartment.

It was late afternoon on a Saturday, and Iris was downstairs dealing with her last client of the week (the shop was closed on Sundays, since business was usually slow then anyways; a lot of people were squeamish about doing occult stuff on the Lord's day, or whatever), so Olive was left to her own devices. She sat on the floor in front of the coffee table, half-heartedly flipping cards sideways out of the tarot deck, the way her mother had shown her that morning. She wasn't exactly enthusiastic about the process, but Iris had left her with instructions to "explore the cards" and "find a spread that works for you, sweetheart." Olive was supposed to show her mother the fruits of her labor that evening, and she wasn't looking forward to it. She sighed, idly turning a page in the book that was meant to help Olive assign meaning to the cards-though Iris insisted she'd get the best results if she tried to feel for the meaning instead.

Groaning, Olive scrapped the overly-complex spread of cards she'd been toying with. That obviously wasn't working. For the past couple of minutes, Olive hadn't even been paying attention to what cards she pulled. Clearly she wasn't feeling much of anything. Not that she really expected to.

Ugh. Maybe she could just fake it? Pick a simple spread, pull a couple cards, memorize their meanings, and regurgitate it to Iris later? She probably wouldn't fall for it (almost definitely wouldn't fall for it), but it was better than sitting here and pretending this was going to magically work.

Or sitting here half-fearing that it was going to magically work, for that matter.

Trying not to think about it too hard, Olive decided on a simple five-card spread that was supposed to show you the results of your current path (or something to that effect; these things were disgustingly subjective). The cards were supposed to symbolize the past, the present, the best to come, the worst to come, and what would come of staying on this path.

That seemed like it would be easy enough to falsify. Olive mixed the cards up, and started flipping. Iris was just going to have to live with it.

What was up with her anyway?

Flip.

Ever since she gave Olive her surprise four-month-early birthday gift, Iris had been acting super cagey. She was carrying the silver knife with her everywhere she went (Olive was pretty sure Iris had slept with it under her pillow last night)-

Flip.

-and when Olive had asked her about it, Iris had just smiled and told her not to worry.

Flip.

As if Olive could just not worry when her mother was acting incredibly suspicious with no discernible cause.

Flip.

And worse still, Olive still couldn't shake the feeling that-for some reason or another-Iris thought something bad was going to happen soon. Or. . . did Olive herself just have a feeling something bad was going to happen?

Flip.

Olive hesitated, hand hovering over the card she'd just revealed. A skeletal warrior riding on a pale horse stared back at her, flag waving in the air even as small figures lay prone beneath the animal's hooves.

It didn't have to mean anything bad, Olive reminded herself, swallowing nervously. It could be. . . change. New beginnings. And yet. . .

It didn't escape Olive's notice that this card had settled into the final position of the spread she had chosen. And it wasn't terribly reassuring to have the answer to the question "What will you find if you continue down this path?" be. . . Death.

A horrible foreboding feeling swelled in Olive's chest, and a chill ran down her spine. She shook herself, but the sensation of. . . wrongness remained, despite Olive's best efforts.

Ridiculous. Ten minutes ago she hadn't believed herself capable of a tarot reading, and that wasn't going to change just because one card gave her the heebie-jeebies! Though. . . maybe it wouldn't hurt to at least check what the other ones meant. Just in case?

She glanced at the cards and shivered instinctively, an alarm blaring at the back of her mind. Yeah. She'd do that.

A knock at the door stopped Olive from following through on that plan. It was a strange sort of knock. Quick and quiet, as if the person on the other side was hoping they wouldn't receive a response. Stomach still churning, Olive padded over to the door on bare feet. She wanted to feel grateful for the distraction, but something stopped her. Hand on the doorknob, Olive hesitated. Something told her to check who it was.

Biting her lip, Olive dragged over the small footstool she kept by the door for just this purpose. She clambered up on top of it to peek out through the peephole, and promptly slumped with a gusty sigh, thunking her head against the door dully. The frightened feeling remained strong in her gut, but Olive pushed it away. It was probably just lingering from the weird moment with the tarot cards.

Her father wasn't a man worth being afraid of.

"You're not supposed to be here," Olive called through the door, frustrated, and watched him twitch. Indeed, her mother had kicked him out of the house last time he'd come knocking, and told him not to come back until he'd straightened himself out. That had been a few months ago, and Olive hadn't seen him since-which wasn't unusual even when he wasn't banished from the premises. It wasn't like he lived here or anything. Hadn't since Olive was. . . five? Six? She couldn't remember.

"Aw, c'mon kid," Olive's father cajoled from the hallway. "Don't make this a thing. I'm just looking for something, and I think it might be here, is all. Let me in and I can be out of here before your mama finishes."

Olive considered this. It didn't sound like a lie, exactly, though something about the statement had rubbed her the wrong way. But while Olive was sure her father didn't want to face Iris (he was a wuss like that), she was also sure that he'd wait out there for as long as he needed to, and might even stage a confrontation with her mother if he thought it would get him what he wanted.

Even through the peephole, Olive could tell that there was enough liquid courage-and who knew what else-running through his veins for him to do it.

Sighing, Olive hopped off the stool and kicked it off to the side again. She opened the door, but remained in the doorway, looking up at her father judgmentally. He was sweating profusely, his dark brown hair pasted to his forehead and nearly black with moisture. His skin looked red and somewhat swollen, and his eyes-green, like Olive's-were bloodshot, the pupils blown wide. He was shaking minutely, and he reeked of sweat and alcohol and some weird musky scent that Olive couldn't identify. She wrinkled her nose, not bothering to hide her disgust. "You look. . ." she began, before pausing. Well, the terms plastered, hopped up, and strung out came to mind, but Olive didn't think any of that needed to be said. ". . . extremely not good," she finished lamely. Even less good than normal, in fact. God, what was he on? Olive pursed her lips disdainfully, and reluctantly stepped aside to allow him into the apartment.

Now, Olive tried not to kid herself. She knew her mother did drugs. That Iris was probably an addict herself. But she also knew that behind her youthful, sometimes goofy exterior, her mother had a spine of steel and a will of iron. Iris didn't get high for recreational purposes, or to escape from the harsh realities of life. She detached herself from the world so that the Others who haunted her couldn't get enough of a foothold to drag themselves back to life, using her to do it. She did it for the benefit of those around her.

She did it for Olive.

And not once had her mother hurt Olive when she was under the influence. The only time Iris' hands had ever lashed out at her daughter was when someone Other had been controlling them.

None of that could be said for Olive's father.

Leon Clark was a strong, strapping young man-around 35 to Iris's 49-who was utterly emotionally unprepared to deal with most things that life threw at him. He drank and did drugs instead of facing any of his problems head on, and didn't bother trying to reign in the impulses that grew out of his addiction. He was so desperate for validation and direction that he was easily manipulated and taken in by strangers, or peer pressure. Leon was the type of person to fall for an email scam and end up wiring money to a "deposed Nigerian prince."

He could barely take care of himself, let alone anyone else, let alone a child, so he'd had a very minimal role in Olive's upbringing. And what role he had had. . . hadn't been very pleasant. Leon was a rather uncontrollable, paranoid drunk, and alcohol was his vice of choice. When he was sober-or at least, not completely smashed-he wasn't a violent man by any stretch of the imagination. Problem was, he wasn't sober very often, unequipped as he was to deal with the world around him.

If Leon had one redeeming characteristic, it was that he certainly didn't think he was better than anyone else-which was good, since he so obviously wasn't. But he had no prejudices that Olive knew of, and he was either very sure of his masculinity or-more likely-was aware enough of his faults not to think of such things, because he certainly didn't mind a woman taking charge, or playing second fiddle to her. How could he, when he'd once been in a relationship with a woman like Iris? And they had been in a relationship, Olive knew, even if they'd not necessarily been in love. It was more like they'd been. . . fascinated with each other. In a number of ways.

Gross.

They'd met, Olive knew, only a few months before her. . . conception (Olive was almost 10, okay? She knew where babies came from). To hear Iris tell it, she herself had been in her late 30s, already a hurricane of a woman with a strong personality and sense of self. Leon had been 24, already a budding alcoholic like his own father before him, and unsure of who he was or who he wanted to be. They had fallen in with one another easily, Leon enamoured with Iris's spirit, confidence, and beauty, and Iris enthralled by Leon's youth and vigour-and by something he did with his tongue. Whatever that meant. Olive didn't really want to know.

But Leon had admired Iris so much that he picked up a number of her bad habits during their time together. And while Iris made the difficult decision to drop drugs completely while she was pregnant with Olive, Leon-at that point-was only spiraling deeper and deeper into addiction.

Olive didn't have all the details, but she thought that her mother might feel guilty about how things had gone between the two of them, and that was why she let Leon come crawling back more often than not. Leon had been mesmerized by her, genuinely interested in Iris (and Olive sensed the feeling hadn't been entirely mutual, not on an intellectual or emotional level anyway), and she had. . . well there was no other way to put it really. Iris had been a bad influence on him.

And look at him now.

Olive stood by the door, arms crossed, and watched her father dig through the kitchen drawers. The utensils clattered together noisily as he pushed them about, and Olive glanced out the open doorway a little nervously, eyeing the stairs that led to the shop on the lower level, where Iris was. She pulled the door shut, and leaned back against it.

Leon practically vibrated as he searched the apartment, that's how hard he was shaking. But the closer Olive looked, the more she realized that he wasn't quivering with weakness, but something like an abundance of energy. His movements weren't steady, but they were sure. Purposeful, if a bit frantic. He seemed. . . oddly focused. Oddly intent, oddly strong for someone who looked like he was at the tail end of a high on something pretty serious. Whatever he'd taken, Olive didn't recognize its effects.

Leon crossed from the kitchen to the living room without stumbling once, and Olive's gut churned sharply. "C'mon, c'mon," he muttered, voice almost too low for Olive to hear. Almost unconsciously, she stepped a little closer, watching Leon lift books off the shelves with manic energy, checking beneath them and behind them for whatever he was looking for. The longer he searched without success, the more agitated he became. "Gotta be here somewhere. Christ, she'll be pissed if I don't find it."

A klaxon bell started going off in the back of Olive's mind at that remark, and she figured he hadn't meant for her to hear that. For some reason, though Olive knew nothing about the unnamed woman, the thought of whoever Leon was referring to filled Olive with dread, with the feeling of eyes and breath on the back of her neck. The sense that she was being hunted.

Olive swallowed, and cleared her throat. "Um, maybe I can help, if you tell me what you're looking for," she offered, suddenly desperate to see Leon out of the apartment. "I'm pretty good at finding things."

"Yeah, I remember that much," Leon said, voice tight and uncharacteristically irritated. He was breathing harshly, and as Olive hovered anxiously off to the side, he pulled a small, decorative chest off of a shelf and dug through it violently, upending it after a moment when he didn't immediately find what he was looking for.

"Hey!" Olive cried out, discomfort momentarily forgotten as she rushed forward to gather the many carefully labeled polaroid photographs that had fallen from the chest and scattered across the floor. She looked up at her father with confused anger, stomach twisting. What had gotten into him?

Leon grunted in frustration, and without warning, he whirled towards the couch in a flurry of motion. "Where is it!" he snapped viciously, seizing the cushion-which was in truth a mattress, folded in half when the pull-out bed was in its couch configuration-and tearing it furiously from the futon. The sheet that Olive and Iris wrapped around the couch every morning to keep it free of crumbs must have caught on the springs beneath the frame, because a huge strip of it ripped free with a horrendous shredding noise as Leon tossed the cushion away, a hunted look on his face. Though the mattress must have been pretty heavy, he made the action look effortless.

Olive yelped, instinctively ducking to avoid the mattress as it flew past her and diving forward to catch the lamp it had clipped before the ceramic base could shatter against the floor. "Dad!" she exclaimed, something deep inside her reminding her to keep her voice down at the last second. Somehow, she knew that a confrontation between her mother and father wouldn't end well. His head snapped towards her, eyes wild, and Olive met his green gaze with her own, heart pounding. She hesitated to say she was afraid, because though Leon had behaved erratically and even hit her in the past, Olive had never really considered him a threat before. He was just so. . . suggestible. Easily distracted, easily directed. This kind of single-minded intensity was beyond unusual for him. And the horrible feeling in Olive's gut, the alarm bell ringing in her hindbrain, the awful surety that something was incredibly wrong, that something was going to go wrong. . . none of that would go away. No matter how hard Olive tried to ignore it. Her hands trembled faintly as she slid the lamp back up onto the side table.

After a moment, something in Leon's eyes shifted. He didn't soften exactly, but he seemed to become aware that he was scaring her a little, and he also seemed to regret that. Olive would know her father's regretful look anywhere; she'd seen it often enough. He glanced around the apartment, at the open drawers and cabinets in the kitchen, the knocked-over books and trinkets, the pictures scattered over the floor-many of which included him (that's why they'd been in a box instead of on display).

He looked at the mattress and the torn sheet.

He looked at Olive, and grit his teeth. "'M sorry, O," he said, and the nickname made Olive jolt in surprise. Leon hadn't called her that in years. Yet another thread of unease stirred around her heart. "I didn't. . . I didn't mean to freak you out, or nothin'."

Olive believed that, but only because she was pretty sure he hadn't been thinking at her at all, for a moment there. "What are you looking for?" she asked again, instead of commenting on that. And why is it so important? she added mentally.

Leon cleared his throat a little awkwardly, hands and arms still twitching with excess energy even as he raised one to swipe the sweat off of his face. "Ah, well," he began, "your mama used to have this huge old dagger. 'Bout yea big," Leon described, placing his shaky hands about ten or eleven inches apart. "Real fancy lookin'." He paused briefly. "Made out of silver."

Something in Olive's instincts clamored for attention at the word "silver." That was why Leon wanted the dagger, she knew. The material was important. It could be that he just wanted to pawn it, get some quick cash. That would fit with what she knew of her father. But something about that explanation just didn't feel right. "Yeah, I remember," Olive said, careful not to let her thoughts show. Though even if she broadcasted them on her face, Leon probably wouldn't notice. "Why do you need it?" Because Olive had seen that knife just last night, when Iris had taken it down off the wall for the first time she could remember. And she had seen it this morning, when Iris had tucked it into a billowing sleeve and taken it downstairs with her to her appointments.

Leon hesitated for a split second, and Olive resisted the urge to narrow her eyes. That he'd probably pick up on. "I told a friend of mine about it," he said eventually. "She was pretty interested. Wanted me to show it to her."

A chill ran down Olive's spine. Goosebumps pimpled across her skin as the hairs on her arms and the back of her neck rose. Her instincts shrieked for about half a second, every alarm going off and every red flag rising, before the buzzing in her ears drowned them out. After a few moments, all Olive could hear was her own pulse pounding in her skull.

None of that had been a lie. Leon didn't know the extent of Olive's. . . abilities, but even he hadn't been dense enough not to notice that Olive could always tell when people lied to her. Especially with the number of lies he'd try to tell her. So in this moment, when deception was obviously critical for some reason, he didn't lie.

But the truth was somehow worse than any lie he could have told. Olive didn't know why. There was nothing frightening about Leon's words at face value. But something in her reacted viscerally to them anyway, and Olive knew, beyond a shadow of doubt, that she never wanted to meet her father's new friend.

"Sorry," Olive said after only a scant pause. "I haven't seen that thing in a couple months at least. I think Mom might have sold it after we were short on rent in April."

Good thing her ability to detect lies didn't stop Olive from telling them.

By some miracle, Olive managed to get the apartment cleaned up by the time Iris came upstairs (she even replaced the torn sheet with a fresh one). Guiltily, Olive avoided mentioning her father's visit, despite her instincts hollering at her to fess up.

Without Leon there with his weird energy and intensity, talking about his weird scary friend, Olive's worries seemed a lot sillier. Less immediate, and a lot more ridiculous. What, she was gonna be scared of her dad, the most pathetic man on the planet, just because she got a funny feeling in her tummy when he talked about his new lady friend? Iris might believe that Olive was a little bit psychic, but Olive couldn't see how her instincts could always be right, especially when they were warning her about such random stuff. She'd almost gone into a panic over a bunch of cards this morning, for God's sake! That hysteria had probably just carried over into her interaction with Leon, since he was acting so weird. That was all. She was just overreacting.

Still. . . Olive wasn't going to forget the terror that had nearly overcome her when Leon had mentioned his friend, or the feeling of being watched, being hunted. And nor, she admitted grudgingly, would she be forgetting the dread, the anxious anticipation that she had felt when she turned over the Death card. Change, she reminded herself. New beginnings. It was one card in a reading she hadn't been really trying at, in a discipline she wasn't sure she believed in. It was a dumb thing to worry about.

But when Olive glanced over her shoulder from where she was washing dishes in the kitchen, she found Iris staring down at the tarot spread she had left on the coffee table when she went to let Leon into the apartment. There was a harsh frown on her face, a worried furrow between her brows, and she was biting her lip. Iris looked a little concerned, a little angry, and under that. . . under that she looked a little scared.

A/N: What's this? I said that Olive's father is a vampire, but he seems to be human here. . . any ideas as to what's going on/what will happen next?

Also, here's the tarot spread Olive creates this chapter, and some relevant meanings for all who are interested.

Past-6 of Cups: familiarity, happy memories, representing Olive's happy past with Iris

Present-3 of Swords: heartbreak, suffering, grief

Best to come-Queen of Wands: courage, determination, and joy, representing the woman Olive will grow to be

Worst to come-The Hermit, reversed: loneliness, isolation, representing the life Olive will lead/led prior to meeting Eric

If you continue on this path-Death: end of cycle, change, metamorphosis, representing (among other things to come next chapter) the changes Olive will go through, up to and including eventually become in a vampire

I'm no tarot expert, but neither is Olive.

As always, thank you for reading and let me know what you think!

EDIT 08/03/20: Sorry guys but I'm not sure I'm going to be able to update this week like planned. I have to get my wisdom teeth removed this week and I don't think anyone wants me to write/edit/upload stories while I'm drugged to the gills. I'm going to try my best to get something up before my surgery, since this chapter is already kind of late (it really doesn't want to be written), but I'm not sure you should really expect it. I'll try to get back on schedule as soon as possible, and sorry again for the delay (especially since I know we're at a juicy part of the story)!