Vault Chapter 03 — Violet’s Tale: The Revelation

Curator’s note: This is the final act of Ren’s tragedy trilogy. If you haven’t read Jenny’s Tale and Screech’s Tale, please start there. This piece only makes sense – and only devastates properly – if you know where we’ve been.

Content warning: This analysis discusses domestic violence, child sexual abuse, and intergenerational trauma in explicit terms. Please take care of yourself.

The Performance: Moving Through Time and Space

Before we dive into the story, watch how Ren performs this. The video opens on a hospital bed – actual hospital beeping in the background, not added in post. Ren’s lying there with his acoustic guitar, playing a medieval-style riff with fingertapping that creates this sense of time unwinding.

Then he literally rewinds time by going down the guitar strings, and the story shifts backwards fourteen years.

He stands up, walks out of the hospital room into a corridor. The acoustics change naturally – you can hear it in his voice, the way the space responds. When he gets to “paint her black and blue,” he’s under a stairway and the echo makes the violence even more visceral. Then he knocks on a door and walks out onto Brighton streets, shifting from singing into speech and rap as he describes Violet’s abuse.

At the end, he fast-forwards time on the guitar, bringing us back to 2019, back to the streets where Jenny and Screech died.

It’s one continuous take. One journey through time, through spaces, through the architecture of trauma itself. And like the other two Tales, Ren plays every part: Violet, Stevie, the narrator, the doctor, all of it.

The form IS the content. We can’t escape. We have to witness the whole thing.

London City, 2005: Where It All Begins

“London City, far from pretty / 2-0-0-5 / A lady down in Paddington / Is fighting just to stay alive.”

We’re in a hospital. Rhythmic beeps. Blood-stained sheets. A woman is dying, and we don’t know why yet. The opening gives us location, date, and stakes – someone is “fighting just to stay alive” – but Ren immediately pulls back: “To set the scene we must rewind / The hands of time for Violet’s tale.”

This is 2005. Fourteen years before Jenny walked home tired on a London street. Fourteen years before Screech killed her and then died himself. This is the origin point, and we’re about to learn why that matters.

Violet Was a Silent Girl

“Violet was a silent girl / Grew up with violent starts / Her mother was a drinker / And her father was a bastard.”

That opening refrain – “Violet was a silent girl” – repeats throughout the song like a heartbeat. Silent. The Genius annotations confirm what Ren implies: Violet’s father raped and beat her throughout her childhood. Her mother knew and did nothing, drinking herself numb rather than protecting her daughter.

Victims of childhood sexual abuse are often silent, Ren tells us. The shame, the fear, the grooming – it all creates a kind of enforced muteness. Violet learned early that speaking up changed nothing, so she stayed quiet.

“Every night he’d tuck her tight / But never left the room / I’ll spare you of the things he did / I’m sure her mother knew.”

I spent thirty years as a mental health nurse, and that clinical restraint – “I’ll spare you of the things he did” – is devastating precisely because it trusts us to understand. Ren doesn’t need to be explicit. The pattern is clear: bedtime routine, father stays, abuse happens, mother knows, nobody intervenes.

That’s how it works. That’s how it happens in thousands of homes, behind closed doors, while neighbours and relatives look away.

Escape That Isn’t Escape

“Violet was a silent girl / She moved out at sixteen / A semi-detached council flat / Paid for by a welfare scheme.”

At sixteen, Violet escapes. Gets out of that house, gets her own place through social services. She’s stacking shelves at Tesco, building a life, trying to survive. And then she meets Stevie.

“She met a boy named Stevie / And he was a little prick.”

That line would be funny if it wasn’t so bleak. “A little prick” – understatement as dark humour, the way people talk about abusers after the fact. But Violet doesn’t see it coming:

“Violet was a silent girl / And Violet, she fell fast / See, Stevie was a wrongin’ / But he sure knew how to charm her.”

This is the pattern of intergenerational trauma playing out in real time. Violet grew up learning that love looks like control, that intimacy involves violation, that the people who “care” for you also hurt you. So when Stevie comes along – charming, attentive, probably love-bombing her at first – she falls fast because this feels familiar.

And then the abuse starts.

“Every night he’d tuck her tight / But never left the room / History repeats itself / He’d paint her black and blue and, ah.”

That callback to her father – “every night he’d tuck her tight / but never left the room” – is gutting. The exact same language. The exact same pattern. Violet escaped her father’s house only to recreate the same dynamic with a boyfriend who batters her.

This isn’t weakness. This isn’t “choosing badly.” This is what trauma does: it creates grooves in the brain, patterns of attachment, neural pathways that make the familiar feel safe even when the familiar is violence.

The Beating: Clinical Precision

“Violet, why you always so quiet? / On her bedroom door and he’s irate / He’s been drinking and smoking, he’s up late / And he stands by her bedside, she shakes.”

Watch the performance here. Ren’s voice shifts – he’s not singing anymore, he’s speaking, half-rapping, delivering this in real time like it’s happening now. The urgency builds. Stevie’s drunk, high, standing over Violet as she pretends to sleep.

“You fucking slut, I know you’re up / And he pinches her eyelids and folds them up / Violet, why you lying to me, Violet?”

The violence escalates in seconds. She won’t respond, so he forces her eyes open. Demands she speak. And when she stays silent – because what can she say that won’t make it worse? – things turn brutal:

“That’s the sound of his fists when they fall like a crashing pilot / Hit like hailstones / One to the collarbone, full force, full-blown / Blood splat, bone crack, knick-knack-paddy-whack / One to the jaw and a tooth spat, detached.”

This is where Ren’s language becomes almost forensic. “Fist connects and disconnects the bone / A quick deflect to misdirect the blow / But nonetheless, his punches met her throat.”

These aren’t random images. These are specific injuries described with clinical accuracy. Collarbone fracture. Mandible trauma with dental avulsion. Attempted deflection (defensive wounds). Blunt force trauma to the throat. If you’ve worked in emergency departments or acute care, you recognise this pattern immediately: sustained assault, multiple impact sites, life-threatening force.

And Ren delivers it in rhythm – “knick-knack-paddy-whack” – like a children’s rhyme, which makes it even more horrifying. The singsong cadence against the brutal content creates cognitive dissonance that sticks in your head.

Stevie beats Violet nearly to death. And here’s the detail that reframes everything: Violet was nine months pregnant.

Paddington Hospital, 2005

“London City, far from pretty / 2-0-0-5 / A lady rushed to Paddington / Is fighting just to stay alive.”

We’re back at the hospital, but now we know how she got there. The doctor is “in a state of shock” because of what he sees: a woman beaten so badly she’s dying, and she’s full-term pregnant.

“See Violet, she was pregnant / Poor Violet, she was nine months gone.”

Nine months. She was about to give birth when Stevie beat her to death. And in her final moments, Violet breaks her silence:

“Turning to the doctor / Violet broke her silence and she cried / ‘If I’m to die right here tonight / Please let my baby stay alive.'”

After a lifetime of silence – enforced by her father, reinforced by Stevie, learned as survival – Violet finally speaks. Not to save herself. To save her child.

The doctor calls for a surgeon. Emergency C-section. Violet’s world “turned to black / The curtains closed / The lights went dim.”

She dies on that table. But her babies live.

The Revelation: Two Twins, One Street Apart

“In London City, far from pretty / 2-0-0-5 / A lady down in Paddington / Just lost the fight to stay alive / A tragedy or a miracle / It happened on these very streets / Two twins are lying side by side / A girl named Jenny / And a boy named Screech.”

There it is. The whole trilogy recontextualised in four lines.

Jenny and Screech weren’t random strangers who crossed paths on a violent night. They were twins, born from their mother’s murder, delivered via emergency C-section as Violet died. Presumably separated at birth – into foster care, adoption, different systems – never knowing each other existed.

And fourteen years later, they end up on the same London streets. One street apart. Jenny walks home tired. Screech, high and desperate, demands her money. She freezes. He kills her. Then he’s killed by police.

Two twins, born from violence, shaped by trauma and separation, destroying each other without ever knowing they shared a mother. Dying one street apart from where they were born.

That’s not just tragedy. That’s Greek tragedy on a Sophoclean level – the kind where fate and circumstance and generational curse all converge to destroy everyone involved.

The Intergenerational Trauma Cycle

Let me put my clinical hat on for a moment, because this trilogy is a textbook case of how trauma perpetuates across generations:

Generation 1: Violet’s father
Abuses his daughter sexually and physically. Her mother enables through inaction and substance abuse. Violet learns: abuse is normal, silence is survival, love involves violation.

Generation 2: Violet
Escapes her father but recreates the dynamic with Stevie. Gets pregnant. Dies from domestic violence while trying to protect her unborn children. Her final act is breaking silence to save them.

Generation 3: Jenny and Screech
Born into trauma (literally delivered from their mother’s body during her murder). Separated at birth. Presumably raised in care systems or unstable placements. Jenny grows up exhausted, trapped in repetitive poverty. Screech becomes a street kid at fourteen – “out of his brain,” carrying a knife, partnered with criminals, betrayed by everyone he trusts. Neither knows the other exists.

Then they meet once, for about ninety seconds, and it ends with both of them dead.

The trauma Violet’s father inflicted didn’t stop with Violet. It killed her, and then it killed her children, and it damaged Officer Richard who had to shoot a fourteen-year-old boy, and it ripples outward into every person who loved any of these people.

That’s how generational trauma works. It doesn’t stay contained. It metastasises.

Nature, Nurture, and the Cruelest Irony

Here’s what destroys me about this trilogy: Jenny and Screech had the same DNA. Identical genetic material. But completely different environments – different placements, different experiences, different survival strategies.

Jenny became someone who walked the same route a thousand times, dragging her feet, wanting escape but unable to find it. Silent, like her mother. Trapped by repetition.

Screech became someone quick on his feet, aggressive, armed, “out of his brain” on drugs to numb whatever he was feeling. Violence as currency. Streets as identity.

Different adaptations to the same inherited trauma. And those adaptations led them to the same corner, the same night, and mutual destruction.

Violet’s last act was saving them. She broke her silence – the only time in the whole song – to beg the doctor to let her babies live. And they did live. For fourteen years. And then they killed each other, never knowing they were siblings.

That’s the cruelest irony in the entire trilogy. Violet succeeded. Her children survived. And it didn’t matter.

Why This Feels Like Greek Tragedy

In Oedipus Rex, the hero tries to escape a prophecy and ends up fulfilling it through his attempts to avoid it. In the Oresteia, the sins of the father curse the entire family line until the cycle is finally broken by divine intervention.

Violet’s Tale has that same architecture. The curse isn’t literal – it’s trauma, poverty, systems failure, and chance. But it operates like fate nonetheless.

Violet tried to escape her father. She ended up with Stevie, who was the same. She tried to save her children. They ended up dead anyway, casualties of the same streets, the same poverty, the same violence that killed her.

No gods intervene. No divine mercy. Just two bodies lying one street apart, and an officer who has to live with what he had to do, and a story that asks us: how many Violets are out there right now? How many Jennys and Screeches are growing up in the wake of violence, heading toward each other without knowing it?

Ren doesn’t give us answers. He gives us witness. He makes us sit with the horror and the waste and the sheer preventability of it all.

Because here’s the thing: none of this was inevitable on an individual level. Violet could have had intervention as a child. She could have had support when she left home. She could have had refuge when Stevie started hitting her. Jenny and Screech could have been raised together, or at least told they had a sibling. Screech could have had the support systems that stop fourteen-year-olds from carrying knives.

But systematically, societally, this happens over and over. The same patterns. The same failures. The same tragedies playing out in slightly different variations.

And that’s what makes Violet’s Tale feel less like fiction and more like documentary. Ren’s not making this up. He’s just showing us what happens when we look away.

The Performance, Revisited

Now that you know the story, watch the performance again. Ren starts on that hospital bed in 2005, at Violet’s death. He rewinds time – literally goes down the guitar strings – and walks us through her life. Under the stairway, his voice echoes as he describes Stevie’s violence, the architecture amplifying the brutality.

Then he walks out onto Brighton streets and fast-forwards fourteen years, bringing us back to 2019, back to Jenny and Screech.

The whole trilogy is a circle. It starts with death (Jenny’s Tale), moves through death (Screech’s Tale), and reveals that it all began with death (Violet’s Tale). Born from violence, killed by violence, one street apart from where they entered the world.

Ren performs all of this in one take. No cuts. No escape. Just like the people trapped in these cycles – they don’t get to edit their lives, don’t get second takes, don’t get the luxury of looking away.

And neither do we.

Two Twins Are Lying Side by Side

“A girl named Jenny / And a boy named Screech.”

That’s where Violet’s Tale ends. Not with “it’s such a shame” – that was Screech’s Tale. This ends with the revelation itself, spoken plainly, no commentary needed. Two names we already know. Two deaths we’ve already witnessed. Now we understand they were connected from the very beginning.

Ren doesn’t editorialize. He doesn’t tell us how to feel. He just gives us the information and trusts it will land. And it does. Because now we have to go back through everything we’ve seen – Jenny’s exhaustion, Screech’s desperation, their brief terrible meeting – knowing they were twins who never knew each other existed.

The tragedy isn’t just that they died. It’s that they were born from their mother’s murder, separated, shaped by systems and poverty and inherited trauma, and ended up destroying each other on the same streets where they entered the world.

Violet tried to save them. She broke her silence – the only time in her entire life – to beg the doctor to let her babies live. And they did live. For fourteen years. Then they met once, for ninety seconds, and mutual destruction followed.

That’s Shakespeare. That’s Greek tragedy. That’s Ren showing us how violence perpetuates across generations, and trusting us to sit with the horror rather than reaching for easy answers.

Two twins lying side by side. A girl named Jenny. And a boy named Screech.

Further Reading: Understanding the Cycles

If Violet’s Tale affected you – and it should – you’re not alone in wanting to understand these patterns better. The cycle of abuse, the intergenerational transmission of trauma, and the systems that fail people like Violet aren’t abstract concepts. They’re documented, studied, and tragically common.

For anyone wanting to go deeper:

Further Reading: Understanding the Cycles

If Violet’s Tale affected you – and it should – you’re not alone in wanting to understand these patterns better. The cycle of abuse, the intergenerational transmission of trauma, and the systems that fail people like Violet aren’t abstract concepts. They’re documented, studied, and tragically common.

For anyone wanting to go deeper:

The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk is the definitive text on trauma and how it lives in the body across generations. Van der Kolk explains the neuroscience behind why Violet recreated her father’s abuse with Stevie, and why Jenny and Screech ended up shaped by violence they never consciously remembered.

Why Does He Do That? by Lundy Bancroft offers clear-eyed insight into abuser psychology, written by someone who worked with violent men for decades. If you’ve ever wondered why Stevie charmed Violet before destroying her, or why abusers follow such predictable patterns, Bancroft explains the mechanics without excusing the behaviour.

It Didn’t Start with You by Mark Wolynn explores how trauma gets passed down through families – sometimes even when the details are never spoken aloud. The idea that Jenny and Screech carried their mother’s trauma despite never knowing her isn’t mystical; it’s biological and well-documented.

These aren’t light reads, but they’re valuable ones. Especially if Ren’s trilogy made you want to understand not just the story, but the reality it reflects.

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