Disclaimer: I think you all know where I'm going with this...
-O-0-o-0-O-
CHAPTER 16: Like I Missed the Ultimate Truth While Thinking Your Dimples Look Cool
-O-0-o-0-O-
"In the corners, in the cracks; I rub my eyes, hoping to see the air dance and hoping to feel the rise. Dusty grey messengers scamper across the floor, but not for me.
-Mice, 'My Toys Like Me.'
-O-0-o-0-O-
They weren't nearly as bad as Tate had made them out to be.
The ghosts of The House had once been human; beating hearts, warm flesh, souls and all. Of course, none of that had followed them into the afterlife. The House really did like to take.
Great big greedy thing.
But it did give back, in its own, if slightly twisted and disturbing way.
It gave a place to exist for people it knew would never make it to Heaven. None of the people who chose The House could ever go anywhere but down.
A downwards spiral into madness and ruin, six feet under, the ninth circle of Hell; it's all the same…
So instead, The House chose them.
She never really understood the implications of that until she became one of them. A part of The House. Because that's what they were.
Now you're a part of something bigger than just your own sad little life. Well, what it used to be, once.
Violet liked to think of them as manifestations of what The House's personality would be like if it was a person. Childishness. Desperation. Fragility. Obsession. Devotion. Mourning. Addiction. Betrayal.
Before she died, she thought bitterly, she would've been naivety. Now, however, she mused, she was something very different. She hadn't quite decided what yet.
Tate. Tate would be rage. He would be destruction. He would be darkness.
The thought made her stomach convulse, as if to force her admission of how blind she'd really been from the very core of her being. As if it might actually do her some good to cleanse herself of everything that she'd once been before in order to see with clear eyes.
She pondered the idea of it; of growing into everything that The House had carefully nurtured in her through its inhabitants, their actions and her experiences there.
A small smile grew on her face. That wouldn't be so bad.
It would sure as hell make eternity a whole fucking lot more interesting.
Besides, she might be more likely to fit in here than at any school she'd ever attended. God knew that that stupid fucking valley girl wouldn't crucify her socially or physically in here. No, The House would keep her safe, as would all of the others who existed within its walls.
She'd stricken up a quick friendship with Maria and consequently Gladys, bonding over their unfortunate experiences with knives and bathtubs alike. They were mostly accompanied by Chad, who joined them for cigarettes on the back porch while they all bitched about men and the happenings surrounding them.
Violet didn't quite like him per say, but he was tolerable enough to spend a few hours with here and there, intermingled with good company. He was too worried about what his ex-lover thought. It reminded her of her relationship with the monster who'd made a fool of her and torn at her heartstrings. Too invested in something that could never work out in the end. Too weak to accept the truth and move on.
One humid afternoon, when the sky was bleak with clouds and the air was heavy, she puffed away at the pack of cigarettes that she'd taken from Ben's office.
Not your father. Dead things don't have parents, or a family. They just have everything that got dragged down with them.
Settling beside her in a pair of flannel pajamas, her uniform folded away for a more sinister occasion, Maria wrapped her arms around her folded legs and seemed to soak in the silence.
"I heard that bitch screaming about what you did to her the other week."
It was hard to keep track of time when you were dead. Honestly, Violet couldn't even remember if it had been a month or a day since Vivien had been taken away by the men in white suits.
She scoffed. "That was nothing. Besides, everyone knows that it'll just grow back in like, a minute tops."
"Actually, it's generally closer to four, but I don't think you've ever had a Van Gogh done on you before", Maria corrected, smirking and toeing a pebble around with her bare foot.
Violet shrugged, shaking another cigarette from her case. "Too bad for her. There are worse things to have happen to you."
Maria chuckled. "Yeah, because having your ear ripped off by a bloodthirsty teenager gnawing at your face is so much fun."
"Beats sitting around trying to worm your way into a married guy's pants. Especially after he built a gazebo over your rotting corpse."
"Mm. There is that."
There was a moment of silence, punctuated by the flip and click of Violet's zippo lighter touching flame to the end of the cigarette.
"He's been hanging around, you know."
She froze at the words that Maria spoke.
All she could think of was Tate. Hovering, invisible. Stalking. Like she was a doe, and he was the one holding the hunting rifle.
It was all too accurate a metaphor after all of the old newspaper articles that she'd pulled off of the internet after she wised up. It was funny, really. She'd never known that he was a varsity track star. Or a potential mass murderer.
He never got that far, remember? He sniffed one too many before he could pull the trigger.
That would be like him. Watching from what really wasn't a distance, observing her soul decay from the inside out, much as her body was very slowly doing in some god-forsaken tomb in some nowhere cemetery, six feet under and sealed in concrete and embalming fluid stagnating in her veins and arteries.
The worst part is, I never even wanted to get buried. I wanted to be cremated. Burned up into charcoal and ash.
'It's better to burn out than to fade away.'
"I mean, after he finally caved and had your mother taken into psychiatric custody- how embarrassing that must be, for a freaking psychiatrist, to have to commit his own wife?"
Violet breathed (several) sighs of relief that it was her father, and not her murdering psychopath ex. Until she realized what Maria had just said.
"Hanging around doing what?"
Maria turned to face her, an odd mixture of amusement and confusion visible in her features.
"You didn't know? He's trying to solve your murder."
-O-0-o-0-O-
Could a ghost even get drunk?
Violet had become determined to find the answer- by downing everything even remotely alcoholic within The House.
She died about a third of the way through the wine cellar that she didn't know they had, burgundy running from her nose and mouth. So she tried again after waking frustratingly sober a few minutes later in a pool of fetid bodily fluids and Pinot Noir.
Oddly enough, it was the mouthwash that did her in.
She somehow managed to gag down about a liter of peppermint-scented bacteria-eradicating crap used the keep peoples' mouths from becoming walking, talking petri dishes. And she didn't even puke, much to her own surprise.
So she'd figured that if that was good enough, cough syrup wouldn't be too bad. After all, it had codeine in it, how bad could it be? Could it really hurt?
It sure as hell stung on the way down. It felt as if her throat was made of stained glass, and the Buckley's going through it was molten lead. It would hold her together, but it stung like a bitch while it did.
'Dutch courage', they called it.
Well, the Dutch must've either been raging alcoholics or really, really smart, because Violet had found her courage. It took several dozen bottles, but she found it.
That place in-between.
She was smiling when He found her.
He, with a capital 'H'. Like The House, only not.
The House was a world of its own, a heaven for bad things and people who knew better than to be good. The House was something unique, born from things that were wrong; something new.
Where The House was everything, He was everything's shadow.
He built The House. Not with his own hands, that would be too righteous. Too good.
Because The House was built on lies and false intentions.
Charles Montgomery was nothing more than the instigator. The House built itself.
"There are pills for that, you know."
Violet Harmon continued to smile as she stared at the ceiling of his lab and swayed to music that wasn't there.
"I've had enough pills for one death, thanks", she replied, giggling. She could feel the blue of her dying stick to her lips, the black of crusted blood making her hands stiff.
Or is it just rigor mortis?
The (not very) careful combination of cough syrup and Listerine was making her feel something close to mortal. That made her laugh, because she was eternal and nothing could ever change that.
"You're not sane."
He said it in a very quiet, very neutral voice. As if He was commenting on the weather or asking if she had cut her hair.
"Is anyone here really all there?"
"There is so much wrong with that sentence, my dear."
She turned to look him in the eye, both of which were glazed in madness. His gloved hands were speckled with drying gore.
"I can help fix it, you know", He continued, a grin which exposed his teeth glinting at her in the low light spreading like butter on hot toast. "I can make it all go away."
She couldn't deny it, she was intrigued. Interested.
Something to shake things up, then? Spring cleaning for the mind? Clear the boredom away like cobwebs to a broom?
"All of that pesky suffering. Heartbreak. Betrayal. All of those silly bits of doubt that cling to you. I can fix it", He kept speaking, as if He had to convince her to do something drastic; something, anything at all.
"Sure, why not?"
She reminded herself of the devil on her own shoulder. Her Id.
She wasn't really sure that her superego had even been alive long enough to open its eyes before her ego decided that it was enough for itself. She couldn't really remember having a conscience.
You know, even as a kid, I never liked Jiminy Cricket. Too much of a nag. If Pinocchio had half a brain, he'd have squashed him the second he started talking and gone off and done any bad thing that caught his eye.
Because who the fuck takes life advice from a talking bug?
"After all, I only lived once."
-O-0-o-0-O-
Huffing anesthetic reminded her of when she had wasted her winter break of last year getting her wisdom teeth out.
Wisdom. Heh. Funny concept, for a girl who went and got herself murdered before she got her freaking driver's license.
She'd gone to the appointment by bus, since Vivien and Ben had gone to see for a check-up on the baby. She remembered not eating that morning because dentists made her queasy, with their rubber-glove smell and cold metal hooks.
She didn't remember anything after the injection of sedative.
Forty minutes and four teeth less later, she'd stumbled into the elevator with stitches in her gums and gauze in her cheeks, clutching at the pack the assistant had given her to use until the bleeding stopped. She'd spent the way down laughing at her reflection in the mirrored walls, pointing at the chipmunk staring back at her.
In the end, she took the wrong bus and ended up in downtown Boston, wandering through Quincy Market and weaving through the levels of the comic book store.
When the Novocaine wore off, she'd crumpled in on herself in a bus shelter and spent the next three hours willing herself to suck it up and find a fucking Drug Mart where she could trade her prescription in for some proper painkillers.
When she finally got herself home at eleven o'clock at night, she was confronted with the scene of her parents desperately mourning a child that had never drawn breath.
After that, she'd stopped smiling and her family just wasn't anymore.
This had felt like those dreamlike hours frittered away wandering alone, where nothing was happening, there was no moment, there was only her in the world. This had felt like the last truly good experience in her life.
This was Nowhere. Nothing mattered here.
Violet floated. She breezed through the living room without acknowledging Chad, who was having a heated argument with Patrick. There was no yelling. There wasn't an angry couple aggressively gesturing at one another, going red in the face.
She drifted into the front entrance, where Ben stood, tears in his eyes and his expression frozen between pain and disbelief. He wasn't muttering about 'impossible' and 'this can't be real' as she moved past without a care, her fingertips purple and her blood dripping from her pale wrists behind her. There was no tremor in the fingers he brought up to his cheek to wipe away the evidence of his crying. There was no man fallen to his knees with a grey face and arms outstretched.
She moved over the stairs, where the twins Troy and Brian sat with their legs hanging between the rungs, grinning like Cheshire cats.
She danced down the hallway, past a hissing Hayden.
There was no one, there was nothing but her.
She made her way into her room.
"Hello, Violet."
There wasn't her murderer, standing by her bed, eyes unreadable.
-O-0-o-0-O-
I AM SO SORRY. I really have no other excuse for taking so freaking long to get this out other than writer's block D:
Thankfully, I was struck with sudden inspiration, even if this chapter is mostly filler. However, postings may be meager throughout this semester too, because I'm stuck taking eight classes, and I work two days a week _
IS ANYONE ELSE READY FOR AHS TO JUST RELEASE SOME TRAILERS FOR FREAKSHOW YET?
Well, some actual trailers, because that 'Admit One' thing didn't really get me all super excited for the next season, which hopefully, will include more of the creep factor, because let's be honest, last season sort of strayed a bit from the path. (I was sooo hoping that the fallen angel one was real, because it was just... yes. All the yes.)
jandjsalmon: Ohohhohhhh... you just wait for next chapter ;D
Guest: Here ya go :3
Fingers crossed, I might be able to get another chapter out soon...
Merida, out