Violet put pen to paper, her left hand trembling violently. Her heart pounded in her ears as she began to sign her life away. She had to be slow, careful - it had to be neat, believable.
Viole
"Oh, no, no, no, no, no." His smooth voice sounded harshly in her ear and she could feel his hot breath on her neck. "I knew you were thick, orphan, but I didn't know you were stupid enough to try this. Your right hand, please."
The ominous warning of his close proximity, his chin on her shoulder, his hand gripping her waist tightly, reminded Violet that she would never win. He had Sunny in a tower to be dropped at a single misstep on Violet's part. He had all the power.
Eyes clenching shut, Violet switched the pen to her proper hand.
Violet Baudelaire.
= The world is quiet here =
"Welcome home, Countess," said Olaf sarcastically, dragging her bruised wrist into his house with a smile.
The henchman who looked like neither a man nor a woman bowed to her as neither he nor she held the door open to the party inside. The grimy floors Violet and her siblings had spent hours scrubbing were sticky from wine sloshed around by her new husband's drunken accomplices.
Too drained to argue, Violet didn't bother disputing the title anymore. "Where are Klaus and Sunny?" She wanted nothing more than to see her siblings again, since as soon as the play was over Violet had been dragged away to court to ensure there would be no legal dispute about the marriage.
"Oh, the children have been sent to bed. I'm sure you'll see them in the morning."
Violet shook her hand out of his grip and began making her way to the staircase. Klaus was probably worried sick, and Sunny was likely to be traumatised from her time in the tower.
A hook stopped her in her tracks, and Olaf tugged her to his side violently. "You appear to misunderstand. The children are in bed. It's time to celebrate our union. You're the star of the show."
= The world is quiet here =
He drunk himself into a stupor, and Violet seized the chance to escape. Cheap wine had been flowing and Olaf was a dirty alcoholic - for the first time, Violet was actually relieved. Signing away her rights was one thing, but after the lewd comments made by his companions Violet was terrified for what might be expected from her.
Klaus and Sunny were both asleep, curled up together for comfort. Violet couldn't help but notice a large, red welt on her brother's face. He had tried to fight back.
Sighing, Violet lay down on the other side of Sunny, trying to get as comfortable as possible in her awkward gown. There was no point in waking her siblings. They all needed their sleep with the future so bleak and uncertain.
= The world is quiet here =
"Rise and shine, orphans."
Sunlight streamed uncomfortably into Violet's eyes, waking her from her fitful sleep. Klaus had a mournful look on his face as he stared at his sister, reminding Violet of yesterday's terrible events.
"You have a lot of work to do today. I need this house spotless by the time I get back, since it was your fault it got messed up."
Violet shared a glance with her siblings. "Where are you going?"
He smiled maliciously, smoothing back his ratted hair. "I've recently come in to a lot of money. I'm going shopping. Speaking of, actually, you'd better come with me, honey. Much as you love it, my Countess can't wear her wedding gown forever."
= The world is quiet here =
The outfit was horrendous. Violet didn't know what she'd been expecting - hoping - from a man of Olaf's tastes, but moth-eaten furs and knock-off monarchy style outfits weren't it. She guessed he was taking the title of Countess seriously... or using it to mock her.
Not that fashion was what really concerned Violet. It was more the fact that it was uncomfortable to bend down when scrubbing the floors, and worse, there was no ribbon in sight. Instead, there was a gaudy headscarf even more distracting than hair in the eyes.
Violet had never really though Olaf would put much thought into her once he had ehat he wanted, but the clothes proved otherwise. Someone had clearly spent time deciding what would be worst for Violet personally, before adding enough neon to garner wide berths and odd looks in the street. It was meant to isolate her.
= The world is quiet here =
Mr Poe came to visit as soon as he could. There was a lot of coughing, a lot of blustering, but in the end there was nothing he could do. Despite his promise to talk to his wife and involve the press on Violet's behalf, the girl in question knew her long-held suspicions to be confirmed. Adults were truly as helpless, useless, and hopeless as everyone else, possibly more, definitely with more lying.
= The world is quiet here =
"I want a divorce," Violet said once, with all the confidence of a girl who had spent the night reading legal books with Klaus.
Her husband snorted condescendingly. "As if. You think I'd let you run away with my fortune?"
"No, the girl admitted, steel in her eyes. "But I don't need the money; I'm still a minor, and apparently my siblings and I have a distant cousin willing to take us in. The Daily Punctilio did a feature."
Rolling his eyes, Count Olaf threw aside the photo album he'd been drawing beards in. "Stupid brats and their stupid ideas. I can't divorce you at the moment, because your stupid manager's wife has put the public in a frenzy. If we go to court now, you'll get everything and I'll get jail time. So why don't you shut up and make me some omlettes."
She brought the omlettes. He threw one at her head for taking too long. The next day, The Daily Punctilio reported that the loving cousin of the Baudelaires was dead from a venomous snake bite - Violet never brought up the idea of a divorce again.
= The world is quiet here =
True to his word, Count Olaf sent her siblings away. When he was drunk he liked to throw knives at Sunny's head, so Violet offered a public statement claiming to love her husband in recompense for Klaus taking their sister to an orphanage.
Violet was the eldest. It was her responsibility to look after her soblings, just as she'd promised her parents. If that meant seeing Klaus' betrayed face in the window of the bus taking him to whatever awful orphanage Olaf chose, that was okay with Violet. Wherever it was, it was safer than with her.
= The world is quiet here =
One evening, Count Olaf decided drunkeness was more satisfying that being sober. Wine flowed, and Violet tried to hotwire a car even as her hair fell into her eyes.
It turned out that that was the one performance the Count had ever managed to convince anyone of. Unmistakably sober ears heard the gears as they rehearsed their newest play, and unmistakably sober hands dragged the fourteen year old back inside, before anyone could see.
By the next morning, every book in Justice Strauss' library on mechanics had been burned to a crisp.
= The world is quiet here =
He wouldn't stay in one place forever. Violet didn't know why, but he began using her fortune to take them to random places. He was looking for something. She didn't know what. A part of her wanted to know, to find it before him and hide it away forever. A larger part was realistic.
That is until he brought her to her house. He always took her with him, wherever he went, for fear someone would rescue her. The locations seemed random. An apartment in a fashionable area of town; a decaying house on the edge of a cliff; an underwater cave filled with poisonous spores; a hospital, and finally, the ruins of the Baudelaire home. This was what sparked a fire in Violet. Whatever he was looking for was related to her parents.
Justice Strauss had a large library, and it soon became Violet's haven. She searched for anything, anything to do with the fire, the strange locations, the mysterious VFD she'd heard mentioned a few times. There was nothing. It was times like this she wished Klaus were here.
In the end, she tried the one place she was truly afraid of. While Count Olaf slept, Violet crept into his room and searched under the piles of mouldy clothing. All she found was the photo album he'd been doodling in the other day, which for some reason had a picture of her mother, dressed as a dragonfly. She looked beautiful, exactly as Violet remembered her and she couldn't understand why the caption could be so cruel.
Despite my best efforts, Beatrice still lives. Can someone please kill the bloody cat?
If she'd turned the page, perhaps Violet would have seen an image with her father clasping the shoulder of a man wearing a VFD jacket and a nametag reading Jaques, holding onto what looked like a sugar bowl. She may have even read enough of the captions to understand some of the mystery surrounding the deaths of her parents. But Violet never had that chance, because Count Olaf woke up.
She went to breakfast the next morning with a scar.
= The world is quiet here =
One year after the marriage, police investigations stopped. Violet was sixteen; surely if she wanted to end the marriage she would have gone to the police. What a beautiful couple.
To be honest, Violet wasn't sure how binding the marriage was. Olaf had never touched her - "who would want to sleep with such an arrogant little brat? Pretty faces can't make up for total disgustingness", according to most of the troupe members -, and in the past that would be cause for a case that they weren't married, look at Henry VIII, but the modern marriage laws were more complicated. Every spare moment was spent with books from Justice Strauss' library, figuring out a way to annul the marriage and be free.
Then Count Olaf had a bad night. He had got drunk once again, this time becoming weepy rather than rambunctious. Violet had happened to catch his eye, looking "like her uppity mother who never wanted him" and she ended the evening in tears and shame.
Her husband barely remembered a thing.
= The world is quiet here =
A broken bottle of glass was all it took. Blood seeped across the kitchen floor, and Violet took grim satisfaction in the fact that it would stain.
The ringing in her ears grew louder, and for the first time in a year, Violet could hear nothing. No yells, no snores, no curses, no weeping, no scheming, no insults. Just the sound of silence.
As tears filled the edges of Violet's eyes and she gripped the edges of the table to steady herself, red slowly spread, and the world finally became quiet.
A/N: I've read a few Series of Unfortunate Events fics where Olaf and Violet fall in love. I'm honestly disgusted. He's a grown man and is holding Violet - a fourteen year old - prisoner in order to marry her and steal her fortune. While I will admit that occasionally there appear to be moments of chemistry (I absolutely adore the Netflix adaption of The Hostile Hospital), the fact remains that this is not a couple to find cute. It would be abusive and any romantic feelings on Violet's part would likely be a result of Stockholm Syndrome. Any romantic feelings on Olaf's part would be paedophilia, plain and simple. This may conceivably fit his character in a rapey way, but when I read things in which he honestly falls in love with Violet, it ruins things for me. Count Olaf is not a good man. Yeah, he may be troubled, but it is not up to his fourteen year old victim to soothe his psychological issues and teach him how to be a good man. It's not her duty to fix him. So, I wrote my own fanfiction oneshot to create what I think would actually happen if Olaf managed to succeed in marrying Violet.