I Don't Hate Mondays
-Insert generic 'I-don't-own-this'- PLEASE SEE AUTHOR'S NOTE
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CHAPTER 10: Taste the Blood, Broken Dreams; Lonely Times Indeed
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"In my life I have seen people walking to the sea just to find memories plagued by constant misery, their eyes cast down; fixed upon the ground…"
-Cage the Elephant, 'Shake Me Down'
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Violet was certain that her jaw had dropped in an almost cartoonish manner when those words left Tate's lips. She felt incredibly tempted to lift her hand to snap her mouth shut.
But that's impossible. She died in the 1920s for Christ's sake! And he told me he died in '94.
There is absolutely no way in hell that him being her child is possible… besides, isn't Thaddeus their kid?
Does this mean that he's even more of a cradle robber than I thought? Is he really an old man? Oh god, oh god, oh god, oh god, oh god…
"Well, she's not really my mother", Tate continued, scratching his head a bit. "She just took care of me while I was a kid and I was living here for the first time. Without her, I would've gone off the deep end way sooner than I did."
She breathed a deep sigh of relief, her racing heart and thoughts returning to their usual calm rate.
Well, he's still an older man technically. At least he's not old enough to be my great-grandfather.
That's not too comforting, silly girl, hissed the voice in the back of her mind. And he's got all of those other little problems for you to deal with. He's crazy. He's violent. He's manipulative. He's dead.
Dead.
"I told you to stop fucking with me", Violet huffed, shoving playfully at his shoulder, ignoring the whispers in her head. "You had me worried for a minute there."
He laughed, ruffling his hair while he rubbed at the back of his neck.
"Okay, okay, I'll lay off."
He looked back into her eyes.
"Would you like to go someplace with me tomorrow night? I have something I want to show you."
'"I thought you couldn't leave the house once you'd died."
This entire conversation was just a mess of confusion to Violet. It was one contradiction of fact after the other.
"Oh, Violet", he replied, laughing, eyes swimming with mischief more so than usual. "You should know better by now. There's always a way out."
"You might not like it, but it's always there", Tate continued. "It just so happens that my way out only last as long as Halloween does."
So the dead things from the House are allowed to run free for All Hallow's Eve. Interesting. And pretty much exactly like something out of a popular TV show.
Couldn't it be some more random date, like the fifteenth of March, or the third of July?
Really. Whoever came up with this whole concept could use a little deviation from the usual ghost stories.
Using every bit of her self-control to resist the almost necessary need to roll her eyes, she gave a single nod. "Fine. What did you have in mind?"
"I have something important to show you."
He looked like Christian Slater in his glory days of cult movies and too much hairspray, before the receding hairline and DUIs. The sly smile that started like a fox's grin. The promise of a revolution in a single expression.
He was Mark Hunter, inciting the masses to rise up and dance to the tune of their own rebellion while he plucked their strings as puppet master of a new generation of free thinkers.
He was J.D., the closest chaos could come to physical form in the body of a teenage boy, bewitching and twisting his way through life, dependent on the existence of anarchy and destruction.
He was Daniel Molloy, the embodiment of fleeting humanity's desperate struggle for immortality, willing to sacrifice anything to be remembered, if only for a moment.
Vivien and her refusal to watch anything released post 1999 has changed me way too much. Whether it's for better or for worse has yet to be determined…
Violet offered him her most devious smirk in return. "And what would that be?"
"I can't tell you", he leaned in close, his eyes locked onto her own. He could see the questions that lay behind them, but he was selfish and refused to give in. She was just as bad- she indulged his stubborn greed.
Tate smirked, those pale lips of his twisting into his absolutely favorite expression before swooping a scant few inches to capture Violet's own. It had become an almost practiced movement over the past few weeks that they had existed in this together-apart.
She knew better than to expect commitment from someone whose moods and actions were so frantic and scattered, let alone someone who had been caught in a state of limbo for the past two decades. Besides, she knew all too well the consequences of being roped into a serious relationship at her age. She'd overheard all too many giggling conversations consisting of little more than "So, last night I FINALLY hooked up with So-and-So at that party at That One Kid's house…"
It reminded her of her previous conversation with sweet innocent Addie, who could claim that she was far from virginal without even batting an eye.
Violet was then jolted out of her thoughts by the smooth caress of Tate's tongue against her lips. She could feel the blood pounding in her face as she attempted to wrestle her more inappropriate thoughts into submission without much success (his tongue was really, really distracting, okay?).
Besides, the lack of a label placed upon their- could she even call what they did a relationship? Pretty much all that went on between them was a bit of conversation, some kissing and a lot of confusion and fear. Not a solid base for a great love story.
Back to the point (god, he was way too good at this for her to focus properly), this way, she could live with plausible deniability both for Ben and her sakes. She didn't have to face the fact that here she was, playing Seven Minutes in Heaven with an apparition- he really did play that game too well- or confess that she was seeing her father's most disturbed patient romantically.
It was when Tate's hands began to wander that Violet allowed her busy head to take a brief vacation from all of that self-realization.
He wasn't going for her chest or anything- she almost sighed in disappointment at that- but his fingers were moving at her stomach in some attempt to caress or-
Shrieking with laughter, she broke away from him, twisting in an effort to escape his touch.
"Stop it Tate! I'm ticklish!" she finally managed, gasping words between spurts of tittering giggles. He only renewed his assault with vigor, stopping only when she pleaded for mercy. They both collapsed onto the ground, breathing heavily, for once not simply out of breath from kissing.
They lay on the cold, pitted concrete, ignoring the dust and dirt, his hand in her once-tied up hair, now tangled in a mess, her head resting on the hollow between his shoulder and his chest. It seemed to stretch on forever as they remained silent; her hand placed against his unbeating heart while he fixed his gaze on the wooden beams dressed in cobwebs that composed the ceiling.
It would've been a sweet, romantic moment, but it wasn't. It couldn't be. Not while she stared in awed horror at his unmoving chest and he dreamt of guns left to rust under a floorboard with his eyes still wide open.
His mind wandered back to the day he died, the guilt rising in his throat like heavy, bitter bile drug deep from the dark corners of his mind.
But should you even really feel guilty, psycho? You wimp. You pussy. You didn't even go through with it in the end. Maybe that's why you feel guilty. You feel guilty that not-so-deep-down, you still wanna do it.
Go on, psycho. Make my nonexistence.
He grit his teeth and bit down on a soft, fleshy bit of pink from inside of his mouth in a superhuman effort not to scream in frustrated desperation.
I swear to god, if I could blow my brains out and stay dead for once, I'd do, just so I wouldn't have to deal with the fucking reminder of every wrong thing I've ever done being rehashed every five seconds.
Inhaling the musty air of the basement and allowing it to trickle from the exposed thin gaps between his teeth, he willed himself into not lunging for the first relatively sharp object within proximity and subsequently carving the voice out of his head.
Their fragile almost nonexistent illusion of peace shattered like a stained glass mural being broken by an uncaring bare fist. A red ball rolled into view.
Violet sat up abruptly, not even bothering to cry out in pain as Tate's hand took too long to disentangle itself from her locks, pulling at the roots of her hair. Ice raced through her veins for a fleeting second before she remembered that she was here with Tate. Nothing could hurt her when he was around. Nothing but him.
"Hey, Thaddeus", he mumbled in a rough-sounding voice, reaching one long arm out to roll the ball right back to where it came from. There was no verbal response, as usual; only the ball rolling back towards them.
"Look, I'll come find you tomorrow and you'll get your surprise", Tate said quietly, trying with all of his self-control to restrain the heavy thoughts he'd been having not moments ago. He needed Violet to be kept safely apart from that part of himself.
To his immense relief, she nodded, pulling herself to her feet before he could rise and offer his hand as he always did.
"See you soon", Violet whispered, pressing her mouth to his yet again in farewell, their kiss little more than a peck. Then, she waved wearily towards the shadowed doorway she knew Nora's child hid, eagerly awaiting the return of his toy and turned, quietly making her way up the stairs, pausing only to wince at the creak of a wooden step.
Once she returned to her room, Violet glanced at the alarm clock by her bed, the numbers boasting '5:47', as if it was proud that she would only have an hour and a half of sleep at best, flopping down on her back onto her mattress.
Her fingers reached up, pressing delicately against her lips.
She could still taste his blood on her tongue.
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Ben had lit himself a cigarette as Tate, in an act of uncommon benevolence, brought the coffee that he had purchased for the both of them with the five dollar bill he had found between the cushions of the living room couch. Hypocrite. Giving your daughter shit for something that you do too.
"Wow", he said with a hint of disgust, sitting down. "There're so many flavors. I don't even know what half of them are."
Of course he didn't know. He hadn't gone out to buy coffee in over two decades. Besides, it wasn't like he would ever want a 'venti half-caff double espresso shot mocha latte with soy and no whip' like the woman in an unflattering hot pink sweat suit two spots ahead of him in the line ordered. Consumer-tailored overpriced crap.
He then looked up, noticing how Ben seemed to be fixated on a little girl in a witch costume. With a wry grin, he commented, "She reminds you of Violet, doesn't she?"
Smoke obscured his view a little before clearing, having escaped from Ben's nostrils. He appeared to be caught up in some distant memory of a simpler life; a life before he fucked everything (and that student of his) up. "She always had to be scary. My fierce little girl."
Yeah, sure Freud, reminisce about the daughter whose life you basically ruined and hope that deep down inside, she doesn't hate you nearly as much as you know you should hate yourself.
Tate smiled to himself. Not Ben's 'fierce little girl'. His fearless beautiful woman.
He ignored him as he continued on, spouting some sentimental crap about his wife and how different Violet was that probably wasn't worth shit in the end.
"The thing is, I was a troubled kid too. Like you, Tate. I didn't hold out too much hope for myself. Not many other people did either. It was a total shock to everyone, including myself when I became a doctor. But somehow, I was given this… amazing gift of family."
He looked ready to cry as he took a final drag from his half-finished cigarette, throwing the rest away carelessly to the side.
Tate opened his mouth, ready to tell him that no, he was not like him at all; that hope was all too foreign a concept for him to grasp, let alone hold out for. He wanted to hiss venomous words and say that he didn't have a future, there was no room for 'what do I want to be when I get older'. He'd decided that for himself seventeen years ago as he loaded his guns and sat there in wait of the end. He wanted to tell him that he'd had a family; one so fucked up that they'd offed his brother and father in cold blood and left him to rot with his stagnant thoughts of mass homicide and flashy suicide.
But instead, he reached out, placing a hand on Harmon's wrist, wincing internally as he did so. The last thing he felt like doing was consoling the man who had made his Violet so unhappy and felt the need to poke and prod at his own still-healing wounds.
"It's going to be okay, Doc."
"I-I'm sorry, Tate." The following 'Oh God' was breathed out as he wiped away a tear.
Geezus. This is worse than some soap opera on crack. It makes me want to die all over again.
With a rattling sigh, Harmon pressed his hands to his face and then let them fall. Taking a sip of his lukewarm coffee, he looked straight into Tate's eyes, a feat he wouldn't ever have done on any other day.
"So, how are you feeling today?"
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Her parents were fighting again.
Usually, she'd just huff, stick in her earphones and lose herself in the music, but today was different.
Today, she could hear them over the mellow sound of Billy Corgan's voice. Today, they were arguing again, and Ben was producing nothing more than lie after lie. Today, Vivien had taken the initiative and called him on his bullshit. Today, she was done taking his crap.
Then, silence.
It lasted a grand total of ten minutes before Violet heard more shouting and something breaking. But it was when Vivien started screaming that she dropped everything and rushed down the stairs, a flash of fear that yet another murder-cult break in was occurring.
As she paused halfway down the stairs, she realized that it was that god-forsaken baby that her parents had insisted on having despite the gruesome miscarriage only months before and the fact that it wasn't going to save anything, let alone their marriage. Besides, she'd heard her mother asking Ben to leave only moments before she doubled over in pain.
Violet asked the required 'what's going on?' to which Ben replied with the expected 'we're going to the hospital, don't open the door'.
Then they left, leaving her alone behind them, worried about the sprog that was slowly taking her place in their lives. One day, she would be blotted out of the family portrait they kept in the living room and their new little miracle would be photoshopped in.
She knew all too well that she should have long ago given up on caring. But that was the worst part. She couldn't help herself, and there wasn't anything she could do about it either. She would be forced to allow herself to fade away, becoming no better than the ghosts and tortured souls that roamed this house.
The hate in her had grown exponentially, and she no longer restrained herself to quietly resenting that fetus' existence. No, she could finally admit to herself that she hated the thing, and hoped that it didn't last the car trip to the L.A. General.
It was cruel, sure. It was twisted, of course. But it was true.
As Violet felt all of that burning resentment build up in her, she felt it all dissolve into self-loathing just as quickly. She wasn't their hope that their marriage would hold together. They left her alone, knowing all too well what she would do in their absence.
That was perhaps just as bad as her hate for her unborn sibling.
They knew that she hacked herself to pieces behind the unlocked bathroom door. How could they not? They just refused to acknowledge it; to acknowledge that she was tearing at the seams, a product of their toxic relationship and neglect. Hell, she came home with a split lip and cut eyebrow and they left her to patch herself up alone.
Alone.
Violet bolted for the bathroom. This time, she locked the door.
This time, she didn't want anyone stopping her. Not even a little bit.
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I'm sorry that it's been so long, I've been battling a nasty case of writer's block with a spork. It wasn't very effective.
Anyways, I finally got my laptop (yes!) and transferred everything, so that means possibly more updates now :D But I also have college now, so that's an empty promise, so I won't make it.
To make up for having abandoned you all for so long, I can promise that the chapter that you dirty-minded people are all waiting for will come soon. Very soon.
Also, I wanted to ask this, because I don't know if it will bother any of you:
I have a habit of recycling bits of failed stories that I've given up on into my newer stories, and I was considering using a bit of something I wrote a few years ago in this one. The reason why I'm mentioning this is because I wrote that part when I was in a very dark place and it might be unsettling to some of you.
So, opinions on that?
Okay, down to the usual.
Readers: Love you, couldn't do this without you :D
Favorites/Alerts: Yes, I am alive! And I love you guys too xD Hope you like this chapter.
jandjsalmon: Thanks, I just felt that her role in Tate's childhood was kind of just passed over in the show after it was briefly introduced. I thought that Nora deserved a little more credit :P
That's all, folks (for now)
(sorry if you actually read the whole author's note, it was really long, but I needed those things said.)
Peace out,
Merida