you're too young & eager to love

I have to work an extra long shift today thanks to the mall enforcing Holiday Hours. 9-30 to 7:30. Technically, my boss should have split the day between two coordinators - but she didn't. Go figure.

Anyway, it's only 11:30 and I'm bored. So, I wrote some fanfiction. Woo! With a female character I don't even like. Whaaat? I smuggled in the male character that's fascinating me though. I'm clever like that.

-


Violet likes the house and its inhabitants.

The realitor had mentioned murder over sweetened tea, and she knew she couldn't leave. Every room here is filled with stories, most of them ending in macabre death. She finds the scratches of fingernails in a back closet of a room on the second floor, and she chooses it for her own. A place where she spends a few solitary moments, curling her limbs close, and smoking the cigarettes she steals from her father. She hasn't stolen any of his razors in a while, but the red marks on the insides of her arms linger angrily. It's suitable. Not much ever goes away in this house, not completely.

-

Tate talks to her, sneaking up with the darkness.

He's been dead for a while. A few years, at least. So he's dead and a killer (school massacre, firing a shotgun at students after a morning of cocaine rails) but he kisses her until she thinks he feels alive. It's more than pathetic, she knows, to be such a cliche - a teenaged girl just struggling with herself and her fucked up family, resorting to pills and pain when the going gets tough, and now she's in love with a ghost.

Her father is a psychiatrist; he would tell her that delusions, after stressful ordeals like almost being knifed to death, are perfectly normal.

Violet doesn't feel like she's ever been normal, though. Maybe something's broken in her. Maybe she hates too much, everyone and everything.

Tate crawls beneath the covers with her, his blonde hair mussed, and his fingers toy with hers restlessly. He talks about love and wishes they were birds.

-

He leaves (disappears, decides he no longer wants to be seen) and she thinks about lives unlived.

It makes her want to cry, fills her legs with tight, panicked energy so she kicks her feet back and forth like a child. Chews on the fingers of her right hand.

When she falls back into her bed, the sheets smell like bones and wet earth.