Author: grayglube
Title: Magic Words
Summary: She tells him he's dead but he never bothers to remember.
Rating: M
Warning(s)/Kinks: Language, sexual situations
Spoilers: Everything in all episodes if you haven't been up to date with your viewing.
Disclaimer: I don't own American Horror Story. Or Byron's "Darkness"
A/N: So yeah this story will probably end up being four parts, this is the second. Again parts with the speech italicized are flashbacks, there's a reason why the speech only in those parts are italicized and that's because Violet's thinking while she's remembering the conversations that have taken place. I know I have a few anons that read my stories and I want to thank you guys too, I'm glad you are liking what I'm writing and you're feedback and kind words make my day, no joke so thank you.
She was reading Goethe halfheartedly and lost in memories of the previous school year, it's only after the sting of embarrassment is old and inconsequential that she could smile at how horribly she mispronounced the name of the main characters, not to mention the author and how her teacher corrected her and the rest of the class silently basked in the idea that there were, in fact, some things even she didn't know.
It was an easy enough thing to scowl over for a moment but cast off upon reflection that the rest of her tenth grade class hadn't been able to get through Lord of the Flies without having an aneurysm and trying to find metaphors for jungle vines while remaining blissfully unaware that the whole book was a twisted parody on another.
"There's only one thing worth selling your soul for."
She'd told him after she'd snapped the book shut to lie down on her stomach and switch to reading NANA instead.
"Let me guess…eternal life. You know you'd get turned into one of those giant trees or a whale or something, that's how that goes with the devil."
She'd wondered if he knew the story of Faust and was making a joke reference or if he was just pulling things straight from his mind.
"Okay, no. Not 'worth'. There's only one thing with an even return to selling your soul."
"…I can't think of anything."
She smirked.
"Because you're a boy."
She'd turned a page and ignored his confused stare.
The brows of men by the despairing light wore an unearthly aspect, as by fits the flashes fell upon them; some lay down and hid their eyes and wept; and some did rest their chins upon their clenched hands, and smiled; and others hurried to and fro, and fed their funeral piles with fuel, and looked up with mad disquietude on the dull sky, the pall of a past world; and then again with curses cast them down upon the dust, and gnashed their teeth and howled:
'She was the Universe.'
He stares at the words knowing Violet's awake behind him in her cocoon of feather down and crocheted blankets and fleece pajamas.
"'Darkness.'"
"Last cigarette in a pack," she mumbles.
"What?"
"The poem. That's what it reminds me off."
He wants to know exactly what that means, he's not really a smoker so he doesn't understand himself but when he turns she's already covered her head with her blankets and rolled onto her stomach, her face probably turned the other way on the pillow.
Even that isn't enough to make him leave, he doesn't really know if he's supposed to, if the blankets over her head are a passive aggressive tactic to get him to take a hint.
"Hey."
She doesn't answer and he sits down on her bed giving the words written in chalk half a glance before tugging at her blankets. Her eyes are lazy and her mouth is puffing out warm, damp breaths half into her pillow. He watches her roll over onto her back and he tugs the blankets down further.
In the hazy, smoky light of her strung up five watt line of little lantern lights across the room he studies the shine of her skin stretching over the bony bulges of clavicle and rib because her top is open and the holiday pattern fleece bares it's frosty the snowman decals as mirror images onto the inside of the fabric.
"Tate."
Her hands reach up weakly to push hair from her face and throw the bulk of it over her pillow before flopping loosely on either side of her head, the too big pajama top catching up under her shoulders and the twist of her torso and he can see her delicate ribs rippling down her sides and a single wholly bared breast, cute and almost flat, a tiny gentle slope like her cheeks when they apple with an involuntary grin, and the pinkness of her nipple, soft and puffy and that's cute too. Like the sleepy smile on her sweet little mouth.
There's a rush of adolescent thrill, because her eyes have closed and there's a thickness in his throat and his chest feels hollow with someone throwing dice inside his ribcage. And he thinks about touching her, until he realizes he can and suddenly he's nervous, anxious, his heart practically palpitating over being able to reach out and smooth his fingertips down her skin.
She stretches and there's her other breast slipping free of fabric to play peek-a-boo. Her eyes unlid by half and she smiles, tired, sloppy, and then wide and her body jerks like she's falling in a dream.
"Tate."
And she's only realizing, belatedly that he's actually sitting on her bed looking at her and she's bemused by it, giddy over it because she's too tired to notice she doesn't have her filter in place to keep a lid on the parts of her that are like every other dopey teenage girl, parts that really really like him around and think he's cute or whatever girls think about boys they like.
He grins.
Her eyes half-lid and she rolls back onto her stomach folding her arms under her chest and stretching a hand across her collarbone and one under the press of her stomach, fingers curling out from under her ribs.
The pajamas are too big and the elastic waist of them is across the swell of her ass baring pastel colored cotton at him, and her panties, as if at odds with her choice of sleepwear are tiny, clinging to firm cheeks he can see half of because of the perfect combination of one size too big and one size too small.
His hand smoothes under the fleece and runs the slope of her spine a curve of fever heat and he frowns at how warm her skin is, her scapula fits into his palm like the grip of a semi-automatic and she curves up into his hand with a soft exhale that moves her hair on the pillowcase.
He can't tell if she's fallen asleep or not, if she even knows he's there on her bed anymore but he knows she's too comfortable to move or do anything, to broach any protest, to stop him. He doesn't know exactly how much he can get away with doing before she opens her eyes again like she's dream falling but he wants to find out.
His knuckles trace the elastic edge of her panties and he runs a finger along the curve it's settled red into the swell of her ass underneath, idly he wonders if she's damp with want between her legs, he'll stop there he decides firmly, even if she doesn't wake up.
There's the widening gap of fleece from skin and his palm open on the back of her thigh before his fingers slide inward and in-between her legs and then it's like he's the one falling out of flight in a dream, her skin is too hot and his hand is out of her pants like he's burned himself, and he rolls her over onto her shoulders and back hard and fast enough to wake her up and have her arms and hands moving to push at him and her mouth voicing protests to being awake.
"Hey, wake up. Look at me."
His hands are on her burning cheeks and his thumbs on her chapped lips, gentle and soft.
"What?"
She weakly tries to push his arm away when it shadows her face and his palm flattens on her brow as his other hand is pushing hair off her face.
"I wanna go back to sleep."
She turns out of his hands and puts her face in the pillow.
"Hey, you're really warm."
"I'm sick. Let me sleep, get off my blankets, I'm cold."
He pulls them out of her hands when she reaches down blindly for them. She rips them back viciously and curls them into her fists which she puts under her body to keep him from getting to them.
She mumbles something into her pillow that sounds suspiciously like 'asshole,' and he smiles.
The wild birds shrieked and, terrified, did flutter on the ground, and flap their useless wings; the wildest brutes came tame and tremulous; and vipers crawled and twined themselves among the multitude, hissing, but stingless—they were slain for food.
The second time was less planned than the first and she thinks that that's where things went badly. It was impulsive and done just to be done, it hadn't seemed like a good idea but it hadn't seemed like a bad one either. It just happened.
He'd thrown rocks again and climbed through her window.
"How Shakespearean."
She told him in the midst of putting shirts on hangers.
"We're a regular patented tragic couple."
"Are we?"
"A regular Romeo and Juliet."
"'Romeo and Juliet' isn't a tragedy."
"Romantic tragedy, my mistake. Forgot you like specific terminology."
"It's a comedy, Shakespeare was an atheist."
At least she believed he was, she liked the popular unpopular opinion.
He'd been silent for so long a moment that she'd looked up to find him staring at her with a look she hadn't been able to place in the set of his mouth and the clench of his jaw.
"Death's funny to you?"
"Juliet was a dumbass."
She told him moving to her closet to hang shirts in the prearranged color order she had going on to satisfy her laundry day OCD compulsion.
"Dying for someone isn't hard to do, it's the easiest thing there is. Living for someone is hard. Existing for someone is hard."
He had been watching the back of her head she knew and when she closed her closet and turned back he'd turned his eyes to the wall to act like he hadn't been.
"Oblivion is bullshit, and at the end of the day Romeo and Juliet are just dead. Death isn't romantic."
"Can't you just take it as they get to be together forever and it's really a happy ending?"
"No."
His head had snapped back and his eyes drew up to meet hers, hard and challenging.
"I can't. When you're dead you're dead."
"What if you're not?"
It was then that she'd toyed with the idea that he knew he was dead, again. That maybe he'd snapped out of his own oblivion ghost funk he'd put himself in.
"Death as in…oblivion, not as circle of life feeding the worms and the earth and the air and the sea type of thing."
"So what if you die and there's something after?"
"Then you exist. Just differently."
She's shrugged and sat on her bed.
"Like reincarnation?"
He sat down to and propped himself up on his elbows and took in her room with careful consideration.
"Sure, why not. Limbo or heaven or hell or ghosts, there's a lot of options for existence, hence why oblivion is such a cop out."
"How do you know they're nonexistent after they die?"
"There's no Romeo and Juliet part deux."
"Lame."
She rolled her eyes and he smirked sideways at her. It had given her the urge to crawl over on top of him, she gave in and threw a leg over her hips and sat up, looking down at him.
"Shakespeare wrote a play about fairies and another about a wizard if he wrote Romeo and Juliet knowing they'd exist together after death then he would have clarified."
"Do you like Shakespeare?"
He'd stretched out his index finger to trace the curve of muscle above her knee over and over again without any real interest; she pretended he was only trying to act like having her on top of him did nothing to raise his blood pressure. It did, he hadn't fooled her then, he was a boy and she was a girl and she'd been sitting in his lap and she'd waited for something to pop up and say hello.
"I read it when I was little, probably missed a lot of what he was saying. I'd probably like it more now if I ever reread it."
"What's your favorite play?"
He looked up at her from under his fringe and his hand got bold enough to smooth over her thigh in a gentle caress, firm but nothing racy enough to not be on daytime television.
"I want to say Titus Andronicus because they eat people and there's 'defiled forever' tropes going on all over the place but really my favorite is Julius Caesar."
"Why?"
"Because it's the ultimate moment of do or don't."
"There is no try."
He'd laughed at his own joke.
She'd leaned in to see if he would lean back and avoid her mouth, he didn't and she smiled before speaking and letting their breathing comingle and pick up.
"No one cares that Brutus has agonized over the choice, just that he has done it or that maybe he wouldn't."
"That doesn't answer the question."
She'd felt his chest rise hard against her own and felt his fingers press into her leg.
"It just makes you realize that actions are the only thing that matter," she ran her fingers over his jaw and pushed his hair back with her other hand, she'd watched the blue of his eyes thin with the widening of his pupils.
"Cause and effect matter, words don't," she pulled a hand away and pressed it over his that had lain on the bed, looked at it and watched her fingers slide into the gaps between his own.
"Because words can be truth or lies but actions are real and there's truth in them because people only care about what they know," she picked up his hand in hers and licked a line over his knuckles and relished his lungs bellowing against the inside of her chest hard enough to flutter into hers.
"What's real, what's unambiguous, what they see as solid ground is truth," her other hand had pressed on top of his other and dragged it under her skirt to hold her hip.
"Actions already done are solid ground. It never matters why you do something, what motivates you, what forces your hand. Reality and action is truth because it's tangible and fantasy and thought is a lie because it's intangible."
"That's deep." His eyes had been glazed and dreamy and it seemed so thrilling to her to get them looking like they had.
"Thanks."
He'd smiled and she'd frowned, the moment died between them and he'd given a little laugh. It bothered her and made her irritated so she rolled off and lay on her back to stare at the ceiling and berate herself that he was an absolute idiot at the worst possible times.
"No, really. You're right. I get your whole Romeo and Juliet thing now."
"People like happy endings, you know? That's why Romeo and Juliet is made into this big love story with the perfect ending. In order to have a perfect ending it has to be a love story and a tragedy. If it's a comedy it's an ending that's unsatisfying and messy and too much like real life to be fun to read."
"But you like Shakespeare. Right?"
"I don't like normal things, remember?"
"Normal is neat, generic."
"Freak of nature is where it's at, baby."
"How freaky?"
She'd grinned and rolled over onto her side to appreciate the way he waggled his eyebrows and smirked down at her.
"Way to be a guy."
She acknowledged with a sarcastic head shake and eyebrow raise of her own.
"You don't like girls, do you?"
"No!"
"Then why shouldn't I act like a guy?"
The honest tone made her pause and consider him for a moment, she'd tried to figure out is he was screwing with her to be a jerk or if he was being naturally cute and boyish.
"You don't have to remind me you have a dick, is what I meant. The innuendo is a little superfluous."
"What's wrong with innuendo?"
"It's like an added layer of bullshit to wade through."
"Specific terminology then?"
"More like explicit dialogues."
"Did you just ask me to talk dirty to you?"
And the moment between her mind trying to come up with an answer and the asking was filled with unrestrained word vomiting on her part.
And then she told him.
And showed him the proof.
And then he left.
And suddenly in the span of somewhere between eight to ten minutes everything went to shit.
And she was left feeling like an absolute moron.
She came down the basement stairs like a hurricane giving him just enough space and ground treaded to be able to disappear if he wanted to, but only if he was willing to let her see him do it, he didn't and they stood in the basement with enough space between them to hold all their conjoined bullshit.
"Fuck you."
She'd hissed at his back.
"I'm sorry."
"What a cop out."
She sneered and he'd turned looking angry.
"Didn't know you were such a coward."
He'd challenged.
"I'm a coward?"
"Are you deaf?"
"Just clarifying since you're demented and tend to forget shit."
"You're a bitch."
"I'd rather be a big bitch than a little bitch."
She'd wanted to get the last word in so she'd turned to go up the stairs.
"You're the one running away because you're scared, so that makes you a fucking liar too."
But he'd hit a nerve so she'd swung back around with the banister rolling under her palm and leaving a splinter in its absence when she lunged down with a stomping thud to the cement floor three stairs below like some monster dropping in to say boo.
"This isn't running away, this isn't fear, it's self preservation. But I guess since you're dead self preservation doesn't really come into play anymore."
"Do I look like a ghost?"
"Do dead people have to look like ghosts?"
"…"
He scoffed.
"Just because you're dead doesn't mean you don't exist."
"…"
"And being dead doesn't absolve you of the bad shit you've done."
"I'm not asking for forgiveness."
But his head had been bowed and his eyes narrowed with spite and insolence like a child who knew they were wrong but wanted to argue their way to being right.
"What's the 'I'm sorry' for then?"
"…"
"And being dead isn't your get out of jail free card for being a shithead. If you want someone to feel sorry for you try your mom because you won't get it from me. I'm not a fucking shoulder to cry on."
"I know."
She'd thrown up her hands and slapped them against the side of her thighs to belay her aggravation.
"Then stop looking for sympathy. You're dead, what the fuck have you got left to worry about? What rules are you worried about breaking? What the fuck else can happen?"
She'd wondered to herself if he'd realized they were arguing about arguing that she was saying it didn't matter and he was saying it did and it was the worst possible reversal they could set into play.
"I'm a bad person."
"Yeah, so?"
"Being dead doesn't change that."
"Annnnd?"
"I'm fucking nuts and dead and you're too fucked up to give a shit."
There was something hilarious in the way the whole discussion turned out, played out as some trite little squabble that they went along with because the only way they knew how to confront a problem was with a confrontation with angry words and tones that would have gotten a kid smacked in the mouth.
"Why should I? I'm not dead, you are. Score one me. What the fuck can you do? You're dead, Tate."
"You think a dead person can't kill someone?"
The admission made her flounder and she knew that beneath all the bullshit that she should be scared, and she had been, was, a little, but it didn't matter. Fear had always shown up with friends, need and want, or anger and pride, sometimes teenage lust and teenage idiocy.
"You think a dead person can't suffer?"
"I could kill you."
She sneered.
"You think I'm kidding?"
He took a step and it was for show.
Even if it hadn't been she wouldn't have moved.
"It'd be easy."
He'd crowded her space, close enough to touch her, for her to touch him.
"So goddamn easy."
But she hadn't liked him treating her like she should think she was prey, she took the step he'd been about to forward.
"I'd re-kill you worse."
He froze.
She studied the feeling that bloomed like blood in water in her chest, he froze because he'd been bluffing and she hadn't been.
"Wanna test that theory?"
"What? You wanna kill me? Can you? You can't even fuck me, ghost boy."
"Don't remember trying to."
"Oh, yeah. That's right, I tried, you didn't. Guess modern pharmaceuticals are potent enough to work on phantom dick."
"…"
"And I guess being dead doesn't mean shit since it changes shit, you're still just as scared of things as when you were alive. You're so fucking dumb, that's like going to sleep and thinking everything will have just worked itself out by the time you wake up."
"Is there a point you're trying to make?"
The mood changed instantly, the volatile had hardened into the tangible and they weren't just throwing barbs at each other that were blustering attempts of pushing the other too far.
"Make a fucking effort, your dead not comatose, fix your shit and work it out. I'm not going to bother otherwise, why should I? I'm alive and have to take of my problems, you think being dead means you have no responsibility, nothing to answer for? You're a child, and you're weak, and right now you're not worth my time."
"What?"
He looked at her as if she'd started to rattle off the number sequence of pi. She crossed her arms and leaned forward to get close and have to crane her neck up to glare at him, feeling as pugnacious as she must have looked.
"You're being lazy, I don't like that. Man up. Do something. If you wanna wallow in your angst go ahead but I've got shit to do. Go find someone else to haunt if you don't feel like growing up."
"Violet."
"You heard me. Fuck off."
She turned fast and hard enough to send her hair whipping into his face.
"Wait. What are you trying to say?"
She'd paused on the stairs and looked over her shoulder.
"I fucking like you, and when you act like I shouldn't it's like saying you hated doing the things you did and that means you're lying when you tell me you like me."
"I do."
He nodded in affirmation of his words.
"Then own it or bail, Tate. If you weren't 'fucked up' you wouldn't have been around that night and I'd be dead in my fucking bathtub, but I'm not."
"Because I made sure they couldn't hurt you."
"Yeah. Whatever that means."
"…"
"You kill them?"
"One of them."
"And made sure the other two got dead?"
"Yeah."
"Good."
"Good?"
She hung her head and shook it before she dropped down the stairs and recrossed her arms.
"Yeah, why wouldn't it be? You see that's the problem, I don't think you get it. Do or don't, Tate. That's all it's about, doesn't matter how or why, just do it or don't. Stop worrying about whether or not you're going to do something that will scare me."
"Because you're not scared of anything, right?"
"Yeah, exactly. Are we good now?"
"Yeah, we're fine a regular Caspar and Wendy."
"Good."
And War, which for a moment was no more, did glut himself again: a meal was brought with blood, and each sate sullenly apart gorging himself in gloom: no love was left;
She was standing in front of the stove with her sweater stretched open above the slanted oven door, he might have been worried but it was electric not gas and she seemed particularly unconcerned as she hunched over the wafting heat with a book open on the unused stove.
"What are you doing?"
"Sweating."
"That doesn't work."
Truthfully he didn't have a clue how to get off a cold besides suffering or sleeping through it. She looked worse than the night before, and she was still wearing the same pajamas and bedraggled hair from when he'd seen her last.
"I know, I had a dream."
He waited for an explanation but none came and she seemed more interested in her book than him, it stung a little but he shrugged it off.
All earth was one thought—and that was death, immediate and inglorious; and the pang of famine fed upon all entrails—men died, and their bones were tombless as their flesh;
"You said the reason why I couldn't think of anything with an even soul return was because I was a boy."
"Yeah."
"I thought of something."
"Did you?"
"The Devil's love."
"You know why nobody trades their soul for it?"
"Why?"
"Because he's absolutely irredeemable, no matter what he says or what he does he's always going to be the Devil. And people have this thing about how they think of love and they have no clue what it's really supposed to be like."
"What is love like really?"
"A fairytale. A real one. Not the type of fairytale people think of now, because that's not what a fairytale really is. Fairytales aren't sweet or nice, they're about change and pain and need…, or greed that ruins everything, which you let ruin everything."
"…"
"And if that's what normal love is then imagine what the Devil's would do to a person."
"Would you sell your soul for it?"
"I don't believe in the Devil, Tate."
"What do you believe in?"
"I believe that love isn't about you and another person and the rest of the fucking world, just you and someone else and having them already be what you want."
"Irredeemable people need love too."
"People think they need love, they don't. They just want it. And if you want something bad enough it doesn't matter if it ruins everything. And if it does ruin everything and you still want it then that's true love, you know?"
The meager by the meager were devoured, even dogs assailed their masters, all save one, and he was faithful to a corpse, and kept the birds and beasts and famished men at bay, till hunger clung them, or the dropping dead lowered their lank jaws; himself sought no food, but with a piteous and perpetual moan, and a quick desolate cry, licking the hand which answered not with a caress—he died.
A/N: I know not I can't be the only person in the world who has mistakenly pronounced Goethe exactly how it looks, for the record it's pronounced Gur-Tah. And also obviously she's reading Faust, which is pronounced rhyming with 'oust,' the devil's name in which is 'Mephistopheles' which is another name worthy of mispronouncing as Meh-Fist-Toe-Fell-Es, instead of how it should be said Mess-stop-poh-lease. German and Latin you silly languages you. The Lord of the Flies reference made about it being a parody/response novel is true, the author of Lord of the Flies (William Golding) wrote it in disagreement of "Coral Island" which he read as a boy which takes an entirely different and more idealistic view on what happens to boys stuck on islands. I think Violet would definitely be one of those kids in class that everyone just gets really pissed off by because they're equal measures smart and snark and it's like a holiday when they make a mistake on something. And NANA is a manga about sex, drugs, and rock and roll with a couple that's as fond of Sid and Nancy as Violate is of Kurt and Courtney.
Self pimping my forum "AHS Gift Fic" go check it out for a surprise some of you may have not been expecting, myself and a few other writers in the fandom are going to be doing a promotion for fic writers in this fandom and rewarding you guys with fic! Like a lottery, the idea is that every 25th new fic in this fandom will get a gift fic. Also pretty sure we are going to be doing nominations and a "Best of AHS Fandom" sort of thing where everyone and anyone can nominate fic for categories and then vote on winners who will receive…wait for it...fic written by someone on the writing staff. No set start dates yet but I'm thinking later this month.
And some fic pimping: "It's your eyes" by Miss Gypsy Willow which is an absolutely AMAZING AU that is engrossing all the way to the end and an absolute stellar piece of writing and "Playing the Game" by Salazar-Tipton which is setting itself up to be a fantastic WIP which I can't wait to read the next chapter of. Both are great fic that I enjoyed reading, go check them out.