CHAPTER TWENTY
far away from you

"HERE," Sam says, sitting down next to Violet on the sand as she watches the others knock a volleyball around, kicking up sand and screaming fouls. In his hands, the black sketchbook was a talisman, a relic of something that could've been but never will be. Luka's sketchbook. The one she'd turned over his room for in search of, but never found. All this time it'd been here, on the beach, where Sam and Luka had buried their pasts in the sand and let the tides wash away. "I took it from his room the day he was taken. I thought he wasn't coming back, and I'd just lost the other half of me. I should've given you this much earlier, but I just... I didn't know how to let go."

After training with the vampires, Sage and Violet followed the wolves back to La Push on their skateboards as the sun began to set, casting a purple tint over the sky. They weren't as fast, and Kit had to slow herself down, separate herself from her pack to stay with the two girls so they weren't lagging behind alone, but they'd gotten there in time for the dinner that Emily had packed into four gigantic baskets—a feast for the wolves—and carried down to the beach. Jared had brought along a volleyball he'd found in the house, as well as a net (the full set-up nobody knew Sam or Emily owned), and challenged Paul to a game. The entire walk to the beach, they'd been talking about which sports they'd staked dominion in back in high school, and whilst Jared had the swimming pool, Paul abstained from team sports and preferred boxing, Embry and Kit dominated the soccer field, Quil was a baseball fanatic, Seth's place was in the tennis court, and Jacob only really liked basketball, nobody claimed their expertise at volleyball. That was when Paul had started boasting about his killer serves.

All the while, as they began their little scrimmage on the beach, next to the waves lapping at the shore, Sage was engaged in conversation with Emily about starting a business with her baking, and Violet had sat down next to the picnic to watch the wolves tumble and roughhouse with each other. They'd extended their offer to Violet, who declined, knowing that she was both deficient in any form of sport that involved a ball and wasn't about to make a fool out of herself anytime soon, and that their heightened strength lent them a brutal advantage, which meant she'd just be a drag on someone's team anyway.

And so, she'd been sitting by herself, helping the wolves keep score. Every once in awhile, she yelled the numbers back to them.

"Violet! What's the score!" Embry yelled.

"Eight-fifteen!"

Kit smacked the back of Quil's head. "Goddammit, Quil, stop trying to catch the ball when it's going out!"

Violet turned back to Sam.

Taking it from him with tentative movements, Violet brushes her hand over the cardboard cover, felt the grit of years of hard work in the scratched surface scored by nights of frustration and oily fingerprints. She didn't dare open it, for fear of what it might unleash. Violet had never been afraid of the things that were twined inside Luka's mind, but she was afraid of what it might provoke in the dark and twisted labyrinth of hers. The wind cutting through the beach flutters the edge of a piece of paper sticking out of the sketchbook, wedged in the middle of it.

Gingerly, she gave the paper a tug, and out tumbled a drawing, unmistakably, Sam's profile. Much younger, with softened edges, and longer hair, smudged with age and Sam's careless fingerprints. Under the drawing, Luka had written: Blessed be the boys time can't capture. For the love of my life; ours is the beach.

Something violent and mangled lodged in Violet's throat. There was the urge to cry and the subsequent urge to set the ocean aflame in a blinding rage.

"Even though I have Emily now, and I'll never trade my life for another moment," Sam said, "he's still a piece of me. Not just a footnote in this story, but something vital. Like an organ. I'll never forget him, and nothing can take that from me."

Violet exhaled slowly through her nose. "That's where our biggest difference lies, Sam. You've moved on, but I'd kill to have my old life back."

"People heal at different rates," Sam said, shrugging. "Maybe having this part of him would help."

"What if I don't want to move on?"

He picked up a handful of sand, and they watched the fine grains sift and slip through the gaps between his fingers. In a blink, his hand was empty. Violet shifted, stuffed down the discomfort. Her time was running out. Compared to these monsters, these wolves and vampires, these immortal entities, her life was nothing but a grain of sand in their beach. Though she was never freaked out about the idea of death, Violet could see the gaping abyss at the end of the tunnel, and it clawed at her heart, this notion that when her time came, the world would keep spinning, and these monsters would keep living, and she would fade from memory like footprints in the sand. Kit would find a way to move on. Graves crumbled over time. Nothing was permanent.

"Just give it time."

Violet opened her mouth to retort, but the sound of her phone ringing snagged her attention. Annoyed, Violet picked up without checking who was calling. "Yes?"

"Where are you?"

Violet's blood turned to slush.

On the other end of the line, her father's voice sounded tense, wired with a livid urgency, finality stamped into his tone like a falling guillotine blade thudded against the board. In the madness, she'd forgotten about the curfew imposed at the beginning of her return, the agreement they'd made that sealed their contract-based relationship. Violet shut her eyes. Somehow, she'd let the time slip away. How was he going to trust her again?

"I'm with Kit and Sage—"

"I don't care," her father seethed. "Aaron's coming to pick you up. When you get home, we'll talk." Before Violet had a chance to defend herself, his next words killed the retort lined up on her tongue: "I expected more from you, Violet."

Her heart hit the floor of her ribcage like a stone.

With that, he hung up and Violet shut her eyes, pocketed her phone and dug the heels of her palms into her eyes, the stress eating at her one wound at a time. "Shit."

Sam frowned. "Everything okay?"

"Everything's fine," Violet said, through gritted teeth, flashing Sam a smile that would put politicians to shame as she picked herself off the ground, her body going numb as her mind kicked into autopilot, trying not to succumb to the nerves blazing beneath her skin. The scars under her sleeve prickled. "I need to go. Thanks for the sketchbook."

"Hey, where you going, Vi?" Kit called, lifting a brow, the smile on her face fading like a sunset when she caught Violet's stony expression.

Violet avoided the curious looks. Avoided Paul's pressing gaze, and Sage's questioning glance, the worry scrawled across Kit's face, as she shouted above the crashing waves, shoving her feet back into her shoes, not caring that the sand still clung to her clothes, slinging her backpack over her shoulder and tucking her board under her elbow: "Home. My dad needs me. I'll see you another time."

With that, she sprinted down the beach, past the dunes, down the beaten dirt road behind Sam's house, just as her phone rang again, and she saw Aaron's car pulling up to the Lahotes' driveway. Pity crossed his expression as Violet slid into the backseat, buckling in and letting her head fall back against the headrest with a defeated thump that sounded like something nuclear clicking into its bomb cradle. Fingers digging into the bearings of her skateboard, wedged between her bouncing knees, hard enough to shred the skin, Violet swallowed down the lump lodged in her throat, shut her eyes and counted down in her head. For now, the iron voice remained silent, kept at bay. She hadn't paid much attention to it, but its absence left a desolate gap in her thoughts, like a strip of land in the earth scorched into infertility, a place where nothing grew and no birds sang. A place in the four walls her skull where once, monsters ran and a darkness seeped into the spaces between her thoughts like blood in the floorboards.

Just moments ago, she could feel it, her paranoia pronounced, but dialled down to a murmur around the wolves. Now it was silent. Now, the monster was outside of her cranium. She could hear her own heart beating like a timer ticking down.

"Just tell me," Violet said, eyes snapping open, dilated in the headlights flashing through the windshield as Aaron put the car in reverse and peeled out of the Lahotes' driveway. In the rearview mirror, she caught his concerned gaze. "How bad is it?"

Aaron shook his head. "Maybe try not to rile him up so much tonight."

All of a sudden, the stretch of road between the freeway on La Push and Forks seemed to run dry. Violet's chest deflated like a balloon with all the air sucked out of it. When Aaron killed the engine in the driveway of her home, Violet sat in the car for a second, the silence of the dying vehicle hammering in her ears. Nerves iced her spine. She wasn't used to this. Around her father, she'd always been rigid and closed-off, not because he hit her or anything like that, but because what he could do would hurt her more than a slap.

Aaron stayed in the driver's seat as Violet remembered how to breathe, found the notch in her throat and undid the knots slowly. Her limbs refused to cooperate, even as her brain screened every possible angle she could play to appeal to her father's rare proclivity for leniency.

"Better not keep him waiting, kid," Aaron said, his voice going soft, losing the edge of professionalism he always maintained around the Korchaks. And Violet's blood flashed hot. "I'll be right outside that door."

The offer was sweet, but it didn't reassure her any. Granted, Aaron was right about one thing. Re-evaluating her relationship with her father thus far would get her nowhere. It'd only cost her more time. Time he would be counting down with his eye trained on his precious wristwatch, time he would use amassing an argument that would have her locked outside of Forks. Time she could be using to plant her feet into the ground. And it was with this last thought that Violet found her edge, and, with mechanical movements, got out of the car and made her way up to the house, an estranged whine ringing in her ears as she steeled herself for the fallout.

The sound of the front door closing behind her sounded like bombs falling over land.

"Dad?" Violet called, her voice echoing down the marble foyer as she searched the first floor for her father. She hated the fragility of it, how much it sounded one prod away from shattering.

She found him in his study, staring out at the window. When the door shut behind her, and the click of her footsteps against the marble floor resounded in the room, the broad plains of his back drew tighter, sharper. He was still in his formal work clothes, a white dress shirt and black dress pants. He must've been waiting for her, and judging by how late it was, Violet had missed dinner with him. She'd forgotten to call ahead. Forgotten to remind him that he still had one daughter with him.

"You're late."

"I forgot the time, I'm sorry—"

"You forgot?" Her father hissed, turning to face her, eyes flashing as he pinned her with a furious glower. "We agreed, Violet, that your stay in Forks was conditional. That you would follow the terms and conditions I'd set. I thought I raised you to be better."

"You didn't raise me," Violet snapped, the words flying out of her mouth before she could stop them. She'd realised her mistake immediately, when her father's jaw ticked and ire darkened his expression, but by then, it was too late, and Violet's resolve to keep her mouth shut and take her punishment had dispersed, melted away into a molten fury so pure and purifying that she felt nothing but its searing heat tearing through her veins. No going back now. Eyes narrowing, teeth bared and ready to go for the jugular, Violet dug her heels into the ground and faced her father down. "Luka raised me. Aaron raised me. The nannies raised me. The maids raised me. I raised me. All you did was send me far away and chase my mother and my sister out of the house. You've done nothing except try to erase me—why? All because I made the family name look bad? Because I looked crazy to all those reporters? Because you couldn't stand the sight of me when I wasn't perfect or sharp anymore? Because I saw what I saw and all I did was tell the truth? You've done nothing but push me away. Not once have you asked me how I was, or who my friends were, or what I wanted. Fine, I've accepted that. You're a busy man, and I understand that, so I don't ask for more. But don't tell me that you expect better."

Although her voice came out steady as a spear slicing through the air, although her livid tone could spark a blazing inferno razing through the house, scorching her father's expensive, classic study to cinders, Violet's hands shook so violently she had to clench her fingers into tight fists.

Violet didn't know what was happening to her. Maybe it was the knowledge that Victoria was in town, that Luka was alive—in a sense—and she was going to rip his heart from his chest, that she was doomed to watch the person she loved most in the world slip away for a second time, and that it'd be all her fault all over again, that seemed to tug at the seams of her once-perfectly stitched countenance. Slowly, she was unravelling. Slowly, it was all coming apart and her composure had begun to chip away, lose its lustre and edge. She was a stone with a crack that'd started deep inside, unnoticeable on the surface until the cracks begun to spread outward, fissuring from the inside, until it could barely hold itself together anymore. She was slipping, and nobody could tell. One tap away from shattering.

Her father's face was a fortress of ice and steel, impenetrable, an imposing figure unshakeable as a pillar. Violet's rage simmered in her bones, but the words were in the open, bullets glancing off of her father's solid walls. Hardly making a dent.

Clicking his tongue, her father flicked his gaze to the clock on his antique wooden desk. "You're being immature, Violet. Don't be so short-sighted. I sent you away to save your mental health. You were schizophrenic, erratic, and your condition would've only worsened if you stayed in Forks. I sent you to California because I care. If I hadn't, I'd have let you stay here. Your delusions would've consumed you. You would've been ruined if you'd stayed."

"You're doing it again," Violet said, a hysterical laugh bubbling out from her chest.

She could taste her incinerating rage, metallic and acrid, like she'd bitten down too hard on her tongue. She threw her hands up in exasperation. Desperation clawed at her chest, and Violet wanted nothing more than to seize her father by the shoulders and shake him so hard until his head popped out so she could scream everything she needed him to hear, everything she'd been wanting to tell him, the truth, plain and raw and unfiltered by diplomacy, down the tunnel of his spine so they'd transmute to every inch of his body. So he'd listen, for once. But the cold, unforgiving fact was this: short of threatening her father at gunpoint, there was nothing she could do to make him understand. And Violet was tired of trying to manipulate the battlefield—the way she'd grown up doing, the way she'd always been doing, when approaching her father—to level with him. She was tired of talking to her father in angles and strategy. She was tired of seeing this house like a chessboard. She just wanted to say her piece and have him digest her words without having to resort to politics.

Lifting a brow, her father regarded her with a look that a parent gave their child whenever they threw a tantrum over something minuscule and tiresome. "Doing what? Tell me what I'm doing, Violet, because I don't understand why it's so hard for you to understand."

Violet could've killed him. Sure, he was her father, and, deep down, Violet knew that every daughter must love their father, but she could've come unhinged from her body and slashed him to pieces there and then in a fit of blind rage. She could see it. All that blood, his face contorted in shock and pain, his mouth open in a scream. A part of her itched to do it. Just so she could see his composure compromised. For once. Just so she could see a flicker of something human break through that cold mask. Prove to herself that her father wasn't just a machine with skin.

Communication with her father was beyond hope. Violet knew that the best option was to fall silent, let him do whatever he wanted, because he was no longer hearing and will never hear her no matter how she spoke.

All her life, Violet had wanted to find a meaning or myth or a language that was hers, rather than one which tried to control her, but all she'd done was mould herself in her father's image in a subconscious effort to appeal to him, to prove to herself that he could show an iota of tenderness towards her that other fathers seemed to show their own daughters. But not hers. No, never hers. Because language was communal and there was no community between them. There hadn't been, for a long time.

All Violet had was the iron voice; her father's voice, a messed-up language of her own invention which wasn't quite language. She didn't know when it began, or which of her memories to trust, and which to believe. All her memories had calcified inside her brain, bones forming full skeletons locked away in the closets she'd set aflame to sever herself from sentiment—but the smokestacks kept on bleeding ghosts. Distorted apparitions of her past, merging with her nightmares.

What would it take for him to listen? What would it take for him to finally see her point of view?

"You hear the words I say, but you're not listening to me," Violet said, hating her her voice cracked on the last word. Hating how that meant, to her father, that she was weak, that her sense of self was a broken as the tone she'd spoken the word me with.

Her father's lips thinned. "If I listened to and acted on every request my children posed, we'd be living in ruin. You are a child. You are seventeen and you don't know what you want. But I am your father, and I know what's best for you. And, maybe, Forks isn't what's best for you anymore. I apologise for my lapse in judgement."

Something deep inside Violet snapped. The last seam.

It took only a second for the rest of Violet to splinter apart.

"If you send me back to California, I'll fucking kill myself!" Violet screamed, the words tearing out of her throat, something wet and hot brimming in her eyes. The sound echoed throughout the room, a dissonant reverb that turned the air glacial and ripped a hole in the fabric of reality. She felt raw, like an exposed nerve, a wild animal cornered with no other defense but to tear its way out of the attack. Vicious and wild and maniacal with nothing but teeth and sheer desperation. The blow was low, and Violet would've never let it slip through her teeth, because it would've only cemented the decision with more evidence of her insanity, and her father would've packed her up in a box and sent her away in an instant. Had her locked out of Forks for good.

But something in her father's eyes shattered.

The reaction was visceral. It didn't take long for the rest of it to slip off. For her outburst to drive home one last assault. For that one line out of the fusillade to strike a weak point in her father's defense. For the cracks to spread outward. For that mask to crumble to pieces.

Finally, her father didn't look like the untouchable Titan he'd made himself to be anymore. His shoulders slumped, and his Adam's apple bobbed, and his eyes took on a glassy sheen.

Violet didn't know if what she was seeing was real. Couldn't believe it for a second. She dug a fingernail into the heel of her palm, felt the pinch. But the mirage before her didn't dissipate.

Right before her was a man who was her father, but also not.

Right before her was the man under all that armour, defeated and isolated and in excruciating pain for everything that he'd fought so hard to keep and still lost. For everything he didn't see coming, had no hope to anticipate for, and had to singlehandedly take the weight of the disaster when it all came crashing down on him anyway. Right before her was a man she did not recognise, who slumped against the desk, like she'd just stabbed him in the heart.

And in this moment, in all the progress she'd just unwittingly made, Violet didn't feel like a champion. Didn't feel horrible or triumphant or satisfied. Just numb. All she could think was:

Finally.

Her father looked at his hands, those hands that'd saved so many lives but couldn't save the one that mattered to him most, and swallowed.

"I've already lost one child. I will not lose another. I can't."

Violet blinked, averting her gaze. She didn't know how to look at her father when he was like this. Those words leaking from his mouth like a plea, something soft and broken and soaked in pain. Short of an altar or a confessional, this was a man on his knees, begging for absolution. So unfamiliar, so powerless, so human.

All she could do was stand there, speechless.

All she could do was look down at her hands, helpless. She supposed he felt like that too. But she didn't know what to do. Whether to reach out and touch him, or to turn around and let him salvage his pride. Her father was a man built by his unshaken and unshakeable dignity, and seeing him like this made her stomach twist. Suddenly, she didn't know what to do with her hands. She felt so far removed from her body the sensation was unbearable.

—WASN'T THIS WHAT YOU WANTED?—

Violet flinched. The iron voice in her head took on a mocking tone. This time, it sounded nothing like her father. It sounded more feminine, more sultry, more poisonous, and left a cold, slick feeling in her skull, like a snake had just slithered past her and brushed up against her brain.

It sounded like Victoria.

Her muscles locked up on instinct. She pursed her lips, all the rage pooling in her body had solidified into rock. All that was left was the stone-hard reality that she'd been so caught up in herself that she'd never once given thought to how her father was dealing with all of this.

Her father had always been strong, had always been a figure of power and someone who commanded respect, yes, but he was still a person with feelings. And he was still a father who'd lost a son, whose wife had split away and taken his youngest daughter away from him.

And the only family he had left was threatening to do the same.

Guilt ate at Violet's gut, a rot she began to taste as bile singed the back of her throat. Suddenly, her backpack weighed a ton, as though the knowledge that Luka's sketchbook was in there added an extra chip on her shoulder.

She opened her mouth, started to say something, but thought better of it. She still couldn't look at him.

Without another word, without a glance over her shoulder, Violet turned and walked out.

☾

THAT NIGHT, she locks the bathroom door behind her and though she feels the tension in her chest loosen until she can finally breathe easy again, Violet is still numb. 

She sees herself in fragments. Hands reaching for the edge of the mirror. Like clockwork the world drops dead as the cabinet door swings open to reveal the little medicine shelf behind the mirror and she's cracking open the old retainer box—slotted between half-empty bottles of pills—like a clam. Five razorblades sit in their battered, blue plastic shell, glinting like silver pearls, perfect little shards of destruction.

Her mind is static as she takes a blade. you need this you need this you need this. one last time, i promise. no more after this. just for the release. just to make it all go away, it's what you want, isn't it? for the quiet. to kill whatever's boiling in your head.

She prodded the sharp tip to her wrist. One jerking movement. One slash. Drawing blood. All the familiar motions of self-destruction. Just one nudge of the blade to shatter porcelain skin.

So why couldn't she bring herself to do it even if the urge was there?

Perhaps that was the problem. It takes only so little for the wires holding her sanity together to spring apart. One touch and she's already unravelling. Pathetic.

Everything was spiralling out of her hands, pieces of broken hourglass slipping through her fingers. The world tilting on its axis. In the moment, nothing breathed. The universe was displaced and soon, everything would come crumbling down around her. All because she couldn't stop herself, because she let go. She could feel it now, this impending doom, this nuclear meltdown at her core.

Could feel it as the air turned to ice, as the second hand in her clock pounds out its metronome booming in her ears, the fluttering tandem of her heartbeat fluttering against her flesh. She felt it in the aching of her joints, the twisting in her guts, the walls of her cramped bathroom slowly closing in as her heart stuttered and choked. Felt it in the harsh sting of the razor against her skin as she gripped it until her knuckles blanched, the prickling scars on her arm, a graveyard of grief and personal ghosts.

For an endless moment, she stares at her razors. At the damage they'd caused, and the damage they would do. At her body, her arms, a desecrated disaster site.

—HAVEN'T YOU DONE ENOUGH?—

Her hands began to shake so horribly she could feel the bite of the razor pricking her skin, but couldn't hold it steady enough to make a straight line on the empty stretch of skin on her arm.

A curse slips past her lips, clumsy as her fingers as it makes the first divot, just breaking the skin, just barely drawing a bead of blood gathering at the tip of the razor.

Violet let out an exhale. But it didn't stabilise her trembling hands. She couldn't get the image of her father—the shell, the defeat, the pain—out of her head. It stung in her vision, like an after-burn.

With a frustrated cry, Violet turned and dumped her razors in the bin.

She couldn't let Victoria win. She couldn't let Victoria hurt her or her family anymore. She couldn't let Victoria kept taking and taking and taking from her. This time, it was Violet's turn.

Starting with this.

AUTHOR'S NOTE.
Oooooo some Emotion from her father
sorry there's no paul but this was important
as per ur request my child elysianfieId