Who: Hannah & Loren, then Violet & Tate. What: Saving Hannah by going through the door. Where: Passages hotel, then AHS door. When: Immediately after the masquerade. Warnings: Blood. Adorable brokenness.
Loren knew that it hadn't been him per se, but that did little to ease the crawl of anxiety in his chest once the sun had rose. Even someone with no memory knew the difference between a monster and a man.. but it still felt like his hands committing such atrocities. Just outside of the door he'd come to know as Tate's, he stood. Actually, it was more of a slump. His head ached and his mind whirled while he pressed his forehead against the faded, peeling wallpaper. His eyes were closed, and while it wasn't necessarily guilt that plagued him, it was difficult to shake certain images of blood away. His fingers curled into dual fists, and he kept them pinned to the wall while he breathed. In, one two. Out, one two. Despite everything, his breathing was even, his heart rate was normal. His body had long ago forgotten how to be horrified, now he wanted his mind to catch up.
The masked woman had saved Hannah’s life, and Hannah knew it. She’d spent most of the evening with one of the guests, a nurse, who had applied pressure until she disappeared at dawn, leaving Hannah alone and afraid. It had taken all the energy she had to crawl herself on over to her door, but she knew if she made it inside she wouldn’t go dying. She didn’t much want to die, not these days when she knew real well that Hell was waiting on the other side of being a corpse for her. She was sinning left and right, and there was no getting around that. By the time she rounded the corner on her door’s hallway, she was leaning heavy against the wall, blood smearing along it with every movement. She was dressed in one of her thick, flannel nightgowns, and the old scratchy-hair shift was layered under that. It was wet, soaked through and dripping, and though she was dry, there was still a cold dead look to her, like some dead fish just dragged out of the water. It wasn’t immediately real clear where the blood was from, but there was plenty of it.
His hands were slick with blood, and he wondered why that kind of thing didn't go away when he'd stormed out of the door. He'd left in such a rush that he didn't have time to question it until now. Tate's darkness had had it's fun tonight, but Loren was stronger than him in spirit and in mind, the ghost was a frightened child in so many ways that dictating which side of the door they should be on in this moment wasn't a difficulty. His hands smeared red prints down the wallpaper, and he wiped the rest on the front of his dark jeans, dirtying that charcoal denim into something a little more nightmarish.
The shuffling sound drew his attention and Loren glanced up with nervous eyes and a rough swallow just as the figure rounded the corner. "Christ, Hannah.." His exhale was all relief upon recognizing her, but it faded immediately when he saw the blood. It was impossible to miss, really. Beneath that red flag of warning, new details emerged. The way she was half slumped against the wall, how pale she was, those glazed eyes. He rushed closer and took her shoulders in his red, red hands.
"What happened?" His grip was tight, needing her to look at him, needing her to speak so that he could know how bad it was. He frisked her to feel out any wounds, but the heavy flannel was of little assistance. Was she the woman on the roof? Had he done this?
She was too far gone to notice the blood on his hands, especially at a distance, and she wouldn’t have thought him capable of hurting a fly, even if she had noticed. She was way too trusting by far, and without the sense God had given a fly, and that was when she wasn’t bleeding all over herself. She didn’t actually realize it was him until he said her name, and by the time those bloodstained hands were closing on her shoulders, she was giving up the battle to stay upright, knowing he would fix it all somehow. That was Hannah, trusting without question, putting herself entirely in the hands of someone not her.
In Hannah’s mind, Violet was all kinds of quiet, because Violet did notice the blood, and she noticed where he’d come from too, and if Hannah wasn’t so bad off she would have forced the girl to leave, just to spite him.
Hannah blinked her eyes when Loren went asking questions, because she just wanted to shut her eyes and get some sleep, but she forced herself to look at him. “Something bit me,” she said, because she remembered all them teeth. The water all over her, she didn’t explain that, but it wasn’t real important, not beyond the fact that she was soaked through, and that the hands on her shoulders could feel icy skin through the nightgown and shift. She didn’t need to say much else neither, because she tipped her head up to look at him, and the garish bite to her artery was all real jagged edges and a torn vein of throbbing red, the obscene pulse visible where the skin was missing.
“I thought going through the door might fix it,” she managed to explain, blood spurting with every word..
"Don't move," he said suddenly. Then, his hand was on her throat, tight enough to choke. Her wound had become glaringly obvious just then, and it was the only instinct he had. Despite his best grip on her, the blood was still coming. It seethed and bubbled between his fingers, tacky and spurting red against heroic intentions. "Don't talk!" His face was pale to mirror the horrified shock that Tate felt inside of him. The killer boy in his mind was begging, SAVE HER! YOU HAVE TO!, and it was followed by nonsensical sobbing over Violet. Loren swallowed hard as he tried to think. It shouldn't have been difficult to think, he'd always been so level of mind, but right now he was scared. His hands shook.
"Help! Somebody help us!" Loren shouted down the hallway while he kept his grip on Hannah, refusing to relent his hold. No life stirred down the length of the hallway, and although it had only been moments since he'd happened upon her, he knew that he had to get her out of the hotel now. Even so, part of him whispered that she was sure to die.
"Hold on," he whispered. "Just hold on." He kept one hand on her neck and wrenched his free arm out of the dark cotton of a long-sleeved t-shirt. As gingerly as possible, he fashioned the fabric around her throat. "Press down on that, right here, okay?" Taking her bloody fingers in his, Loren guided her hand to the covered wound. "I'm going to carry you, okay?" He tried to read her eyes, did she understand? "Okay, Hannah?"
Really, she’d agree to just about anything he said right then. He could tell her to chant to Jesus, and she’d try it. He could tell her to pray all her prayers to satan, and she’d do that too. There was just something about Loren that made her think he wouldn’t ever hurt her, and maybe she was being a plain naive fool, but she trusted him more than she trusted anyone the Priests told her about in the homilies. She watched him screaming, and she wanted to tell him that angels weren’t coming to help her, and that he shouldn’t go counting on it none, but he was hollering, and she let him. She just wound her fingers round his arm with almost no strength, and she held on while the world started narrowing real dark and real tight.
She watched him drag the shirt over his head with the thought that she should be paying attention to this real hard, to the fact that a man was taking off his shirt around her, but the world was going too dark for her to manage, and she just did what he said and tried to hold the shirt in place. It didn’t hurt, which should have worried her some, but it didn’t, and she just nodded when he said he was going to carry her. “I ain’t ever been carried by a boy,” she managed, sounding just as dreamy as she felt just then. “I’m pretty sure I’ll have to do a whole lot of penance on account of it, but I don’t mind none.”
In the dark, he was a different man. He was the shadow of a long ago monster, old scars gone pale and neglected muscle that withered into something a little more humane. His body no longer whispered of violence, even if the scars remembered it. The Daliesque skull tattoo on his arm was a dark secret in the dim hallway, lost among the almost-black smears of blood on his skin(only some of which was her's, and none of which was his.) He wanted to tell her not to speak, again, but wasn't sure if allowing her to lapse into silence was a good thing either.
Instead, he figured, he could talk to her. Loren lifted her into his arms like she weighed barely anything, and he turned in a rush for the stairs. He was determined to get her out of the hotel before calling the police. "That's right, you're going to have to a whole hell of a lot of penance, Hannah." He hoped that if she thought she was sinning, it would inspire her to stay alive so she could confess later.
She rested her head against his shoulder trustingly, glancing back toward the door as they left it behind. “Violet’s hollering about not dying through the door,” she said, thought it didn’t make a whole lot of sense to her just then, and she was pretty sure they were heading outside. “And she says did Tate do something last night,” she added, wondering how Loren would know. She hadn’t actually put two and two together, hadn’t actually seen him come out of the door. She’d gone to the party as herself, and she had no reason to think he hadn’t done the same. She sighed, real sleepy and feeling safe in his arms. “The thing I ran into, it had all kinds of teeth, and it dragged me into the water. A girl came, one in a mask, or else I’d be dead,” she rambled, her voice harder to understand the more she talked. She was feverish, and her skin was starting to go strikingly hot in his arms, and she sighed again. “I think you save me a whole lot,” she added, reaching up clammy-hot fingers and touching them to his cheek.
Loren was searching for the stairs, but hesitated when Hannah mentioned the door and not dying when through it. He wondered if Violet could be trusted, knowing that the girl had killed herself once already. Even if he didn't entirely trust her, Tate did, and the boy was all wild insistence that Violet would not kill another person. She was nothing like him. Loren peered back toward the door with an uncertain glance. "You believe her?" There was tension in his voice, he just didn't know which way to go. He was a man lost in too many ways. The shirt around Hannah's neck was already soaked through, and he could feel her going limp in his arms. She would probably bleed out before he got her out of the hotel. There just wasn't enough time. Going through the door would expose him, all of the lies, all of the secrets he'd kept about the boy in his head. Tate was crying, and it was a heartbroken sound that echoed like deja-vu. Not again, don't die on me, Violet.. don't die.. Loren raced for the door, not having the time required to debate on it any longer.
By the time Loren turned for the door, Hannah’s eyes had already drifted closed, and her pulse was going all thready, Her breathing was more death rattle than breath, and while she was muttering words, they weren’t anything intelligible. She wasn’t sure if she believed Violet, but she didn’t managed to say as much. She just tightened her fingers on Loren’s nape as things became dark and scary. “I can’t see,” she managed through the rattle, Violet gone all quiet and almost nothing in her mind as things started to shut down. Her heated skin went even hotter, clammier, and she whimpered before she became an even heavier weight in his arms. He only had seconds to get through, that much was obvious.
Loren crashed against the solid stand of their door, jarring the heavy oak with his shoulder because there just didn't seem to be time to put her down first so that he could open it properly. It was still unlocked from his coming through only minutes ago, and the weight of his body was enough to dislodge its unique beauty from the frame. A gap opened, thin and sunlight stained. It glowed like a lighthouse beacon in the dim light of the hotel's hallway. It was a warm, California afternoon on the other side. Sunbeams leaking through epic windows, lighting up all of the dust that floated on the air in an old hallway with a wooden floor. Loren tumbled a second later, not walking, but falling with Hannah right on through to the other side.
Hannah barely noticed the fall, she was so far gone, and there was one last rattle in her chest before she changed, before Violet came to life with a gasp. It wasn’t pain, because pain was something that didn’t come the way it had once. Even when she cut herself now, she had to remember what it felt like to make the pain well with the blood. She sat back, scooting away from him on the old wood and varnish, scoot, scoot, until she was Converse sneakers and a bloodied mess against a Tiffany-lit wall. The gaping wound on her neck knit itself as she sat there, the jagged edges smoothing and smoothing until there was only perfect, blood-stained skin left in its place. She watched him, blond, familiar, so handsome that he still made her heart flip over when she saw him, and she dragged in a breath of dust and strength. Her knees were up to her chest, legging clad beneath a floral dress, and the strands of her long hair stuck to the blood from the memory of the wound at her throat. She was actually scared, but not of him, and it kept her quiet as she watched to see what he did.
Loren fell, but it was Tate that hit the floor. Rough on his knees, spilling Violet out of his bloody arms and onto the floor of the hallway outside the bedroom. It had once been his bedroom, and after he'd died, it was her's, and now that she was dead, he imagined that somebody new would sleep in it soon. The Harmon's furniture all remained, and he imagined it was because the real estate found it easier to sell a house that was decorated. Decorated with pretty things was probably better than decorated with ghosts, but.. win some, lose some. Tate was hunched over in denim that had it's knees torn out, a style that had yet to rekindle since the mid-nineties. His t-shirt was striped cotton in red and black, a pale thermal beneath with it's textured, white sleeves showing through. Those sleeves were mottled with red. So were his hands, blood seeped onto the floor from where his fingers curled. There was even some blood in his hair. That Cobain blond, overgrown with angelic curls. He glanced up at her as she scooted away, away from him until she was against the wall. His dark eyes watched her from beneath a fall of blond, waiting for the yelling or the crying or the i hate you's to begin. It felt a little like a gunslinger showdown, and when Violet didn't say anything, he crept closer at a slow crawl.
“What did you do?” Violet whispered as he crawled, taking note of all the bloodied spots that dotted him. He looked like an angel, even covered in gore, and she remembered how she’d thought she’d totally lucked out when her dad started seeing him as a patient. He was hot, and he was sweet, and he liked her - saw her. He totally wasn’t grossed out by the things she liked, and she kind of dug the fact that he tried to stop her from doing things to hurt herself, which no one else had ever really tried to do. She’d thought life was perfect, and even knowing what she knew now, it was so hard to turn him away. She still had Hannah’s fear in her mind, all wound around her like some bad homework assignment, and she was shivering with the fear of dying all over again. She didn’t want to be stuck in this house, but she didn’t want to be gone entirely either, and that was a new realization, and it kept her from screaming at him to go away. “What did you do?” she repeated, wondering if he’d been the thing in the water. She wanted him to get close enough to pummel him with her fists, and she wanted him to get close enough so that she could hold onto him, and that was the problem with Tate - she wanted to cling to him and make him hurt, and she wanted to do it at the same time, so he’d feel just like she felt every single day.
"Nothing," he answered in that adorable puppy confusion that pled Don't be mad . He was apprehensive in the fiery display of her accusations, and Tate wavered between the eternal want of her and the horrible awareness of her abject hatred of him. "I don't know, Violet." His dark eyes were cast in a gleam of such beautiful tears. "Something happened on the roof." He crawled closer. So innocent, so lost. The handsome angel reaching for her with gore glossed hands..
Hannah hadn’t been on the roof, and that meant he couldn’t have been the nightmare in the lake, which made Violet feel kinda better at least. She watched him crawl closer, but she didn’t move away, and when he came close enough to touch she had to decide whether to let him. Or, maybe, whether to do it herself. Violet knew he’d never let anyone else hurt her, but she knew he’d keep doing this over and over again, and she wasn’t even totally sure if he could stop himself. “What happened on the roof, Tate?” she asked, not yelling, not even sounding pissed off. She didn’t actually trust him to tell her the whole truth, but she kept wanting to trust him. He just kept screwing it up, and she was kinda sure he was going to do it now too, but part of her wanted to give him the chance. The other part of her wanted to just curl up against him until everything went back to how it had been before, but she knew that wouldn’t work, even if she wanted it to.
"I hurt somebody." The admission came softly, but not because he was ashamed of it. Mostly it seemed that the words were only occurring to him, the memory forcing itself back into the Rubik's cube of his psyche. Yes, he'd hurt somebody. Well, two people to be precise, but only one applied to the truth. "I liked her, she seemed nice." This was all explained with those sorrowful poetic eyes gone a little wide, eyebrows drawn up into an expression of utter endearment and admiration when Violet didn't cower away from him. She didn't tell him to go away so he slid his hands onto her shoulders. Then, he moved his arms around her for a tentative embrace, something he'd missed far too much. The house seemed stark and quiet except for them, although Tate knew that they weren't quite alone. Ghosts just didn't make a lot of noise.
Violet knew she should shove him off when he said he’d hurt someone, but she was too messed up by the night before to wield that small bit of strength she usually drew on to keep him at bay. Because she knew that if he touched her, she wouldn’t be able to shove him off; she wasn’t that strong. When his arms closed around her, she folded like a wet towel, and her arms went around him. She held him tighter than he held her, scooting forward into the safety of that blood-stick embrace, and she hated herself for it. She knew she’d make them both pay when this was over, but she was scared, and she needed him, and she cupped his angel-blond curls and hid beneath his chin. “How bad?” she asked. “How bad was it, Tate?” Would people come for him? Because no matter what he did, she knew she wouldn’t let them get him. It was a realization she didn’t need right then, but she could still feel Hannah drawing her last breath, and she was too raw to avoid truths.
"I didn't mean to." The words came out rough, tasting like stale razor steel and it made his throat clench when he buried his lips in her hair. That beautiful, deep dirty blond that anybody else might have called brown. He nuzzled his mouth against her crown, and his lips were wet against the drying patches of blood there, he didn't mind tasting them. Tate repeated himself over and over, emotion making his voice strain. "Why would I do that? Why would I do that, Violet?" He hated to tell her the truth, because he knew that it hurt her.. but he also didn't want to lie to her anymore. Every secret he'd ever kept from her was only to spare her, anyway.. and maybe to spare himself in her eyes. Especially that incident with her mother. "I didn't kill her," he finally said, dropping his chin in a searching kiss for one of Violet's cheeks, or more if she'd let him. Then, suddenly, Tate pulled back to look at her. He cupped her cheeks so that she'd look at him too. How could his eyes be so compassionate? How could the devil be so beautiful? "You can't tell Hannah that I'm in Loren's head, you can't.. what if she stays away from him. Or away from the door? What if I can't find you?"
Violet believed that he didn’t mean to hurt whoever he had hurt; she did believe that. It was like all that other stuff he did, that he didn’t understand, and she closed her eyes when he nuzzled her crown. They were so screwed, she realized. “I don’t know, Tate. What did you do?” she asked again, but she was already thinking of her mother, and all that anger was bubbling up in her chest again, the edges of it razors digging into her heart like they had when she’d found out what he’d done. “What if they come here?” she asked, which wasn’t a promise not to tell Hannah, but it was her big concern. It was one thing for her to hate him, because she loved him too, and she’d never make him go away for ever. But what if someone came who did? “If Hannah died, if I went away, you’d go after whoever did it,” she said knowing as he cupped her cheeks, because she knew it, she totally knew that. “What if whoever you hurt has someone like that, Tate? What if they come here?” She sighed then. “Hannah trusts Loren. She won’t stay away from him unless I make her do it.” Something in her tone said that was part of the plan, or it had been until just then. Now, now she didn’t know what to do about anything. She didn’t kiss him, but her gaze dropped to his lips, and she wished they could go back to how it was when they first had sex.
He didn't want to tell her what he'd done, Tate was already trying to forget. He was burying it in that loaded cemetery of secrets where he buried all those kinds of things. "I cut her," he admitted sadly. It was the confession of a child, no regret, only a hesitation over what the punishment might be. "It wasn't me, Violet." He said this to ease her worries over whether somebody would come looking for him. "I was different, I couldn't stop." He'd never really known when to stop, but even Tate could tell the difference. He hadn't been entirely himself on the roof, he'd been all darkness. Consumed by evil. "Loren is going to find who did this," Tate explained with a drop of some fingers along Violet's neck. The wound was gone, but her skin was still smeared in Hannah's blood. "What bit her?"
I cut her. That didn’t sound so bad and, god help her, Violet wanted to believe it just then, so she did. He sounded sad, and that’s what made it so completely hard with Tate, because he always sounded sad, and he always wanted to stop doing the bad things he did; she believed him about that, and she curled in closer, willing to just let him hold her this time, just for a little while before making him go. “I don’t think it was totally us - or them - or whatever. Hannah isn’t normally that non-God, not unless I push her really hard. It was like pure them or something - or you.” Which didn’t mean he was all bad. If she thought he was all bad, she would have an easier time staying away from him, turning him away. She closed her eyes, and she tucked her knees to the side and used his chest as a place to rest her head, a pillow after a long night in hell. “It was something really bad. It had teeth, and it dragged her under and almost drowned her, and then it bit her. Someone helped, or we’d be dead.” She paused, fingers winding in the ends of his shirt. “I don’t want to disappear, Tate,” she said helplessly, because she almost had, right?
"You won't, Violet." In this he could assure her. They were already dead, who was to say that they actually could disappear. Although it did bring to question where the others in the house were lately. Where was Moira, or even Hayden? They seemed to have just vanished. He tried to think of what else Loren might want to know. "What was Hannah wearing at the party?" He did not see her as being some kind of creature. Tate wanted to soothe her, and he wanted to be soothed by her. Even if they were both bloodied, and even if she was still hating him, this felt like the good times to Tate. Or as close to it as he expected to ever get again. Maybe he was in Hell; getting a small taste of paradise and then knowing you might never have it again. Still, in Violet's arms right now, Hell wasn't so bad. He clutched her with no sign of letting go, or letting her disappear. "Can we go to bed?" He didn't mean anything by the suggestion, he just wanted to hold her some more and forget everything that had happened tonight.
“I almost did,” she corrected, but she unwound herself from him, and for a moment she looked toward the door like she might leave. She should. Her mom and dad would totally tell her to, if they were there. But they weren’t there. They’d disappeared, and she only had him, and she turned away from the bedroom door and moved toward the bed. “But only to sleep,” she said as she walked, but she wasn’t strong enough just then to deny him this, and she wanted to hide in his arms like the teenage girl she was. It was either that or finding a razor to make the night’s hurt well in lines on her arms, and she was kinda tired of bleeding all over herself for one evening. She crawled onto the bed, and she waited for him to climb over the iron footboard, as he’d always done. “She was dressed like one of those stupid ballerinas,” she said of Hannah, her voice showing just how unimpressed she was with pretty much everything Hannah stood for. “A white tutu and some cream sweater thing,” she explained, and she reached out her arms for him.
He lingered at the foot of her bed, awaiting her permission. He'd always done that, and always would. The motion of her hand brought him climbing over, and Tate slid down alongside her. He had his back to her because he was uncertain of whether or not she would allow him to hold her. He wished she would, but he wouldn't rush her. Not tonight. "I love you, Violet." He whispered it against the pillow, and the words were so honest that they burned.
She didn’t repeat the phrase, and she stubbornly stayed where she was and screwed her eyes shut. She began to drift off to sleep almost instantly, within seconds, and a nightmare started only seconds after that. Water in her lungs and she couldn’t escape, and she turned over instinctively in her sleep and slid an arm over his waist. She pressed her cheek between his shoulderblades, and the nightmare receded. He was a terror, a murderer, a rapist, a fallen angel with blond curls, and yet she felt safer with him than with anyone ever. She sighed in her sleep, clung tighter, and then her breathing went deep and quiet, safe.
It took Tate a long time to fall asleep. Violet's silence was hurtful, but he endured it. He listened to her breathing, noting the the pace as she slipped off the sleep, the strange hitch and panicky sounds as a nightmare came on, and then the eventual lull back to even, deep breathing when it relieved her. He shifted only after he was certain she was fully unconscious, certainly too exhausted to wake. He rolled over to face her, keeping her arm around his waist while tightening his own around her's. He guided her cheek against his chest and closed his eyes against her hair. The darkness of their bedroom enveloped them, and before Tate fell asleep, he whispered it again. "I love you."