"You happened to me.
You were as deep down as I've ever been.
You were inside me like my pulse."
― Marilyn Hacker
Violet drank when she thought Sunny couldn't see.
Just enough to blunt her senses, soften the razor sharp edges of their lives into something more manageable. A touch softer was all she needed.
Drank with single minded focus. The exact dosage calculated by her own growing resistance to the gin and moonshine in comparison to the emptiness of her stomach on that particular day.
Horribly intimate with the line between too much and not enough.
Violet pretended not to drink. Sunny pretended not to know.
It was a habit they'd acquired four years earlier, ever since they'd lost Klaus. Lost him, put him down, couldn't find him again.
The night that still came back fractured and panic laced. Screams amid the fire, smoke in her lungs, Violet's hand tightly closed around hers and Klaus just beyond sight, obscured by the billows of smoke, the buffets of ash. They'd heard him calling, clawed towards him just as quickly as Sunny's dislocated shoulder allowed.
In the end, it wasn't fast enough.
When morning dawned, the two sisters were without their brother, dazed and covered in soot.
He was alive, that they knew. A trail of footsteps, scuffed like he'd been dragged, like he'd fought tooth and nail every step of the way.
Violet and Sunny vowed not to rest until they found him.
And four years passed.
It was an unfairly cold day and Sunny recognized the whiff of gin on the air. Frost concealed the world outside and the two girls huddled around the fireplace that Violet had somehow managed to make cheery despite it being functioned from a missing chunk in the wall.
Sunny was there when it all went wrong.
Violet coughed.
Sunny pushed her nose closer to the book she was reading, eyes steadfast on the blurred words.
Because it was just the burn of liquor, she knew. Violet had swallowed too much at once, overeager because soon it would be their fourth Christmas without Klaus and winters were especially brutal.
Everything happened very quickly after that, snap shots like a camera shuttering.
The coughing that turned into choking, the blue lips that followed, red burst veins amidst the rolling white of her eyes.
The pure frantic chaos when Violet's lungs burned for air and none came.
It took longer than it should have for Sunny to realize that it wasn't the gin.
By that time, Violet's fingers had managed to snag onto Sunny's arms, digging in bruises, her lips stretched into a silent scream for help.
Sunny pressed on her sister's stomach. Once and then harder. When nothing happened, she shoved her fingers down Violet's throat, sobbing, trying to find the thing lodged there.
Nothing. Violet's movements went clumsy and jerky.
A small sane part of Sunny's mind recalled Klaus talking about a tracheotomy before, glasses perched on the edge of his nose, a medical journal in his lap.
Never further than an arm's length from a weapon, Sunny fumbled for the knife that sat on the table, pushed her sister down, cursing at how her hands shook. It took until Violet's eyes were bloodshot through and through, until the knife broke the skin of her throat. Violet didn't seem to notice.
And then Sunny pushed further. Until there was a slight give. Until she hit Violet's windpipe.
The sound of a desperate inhale, the sound of a drowning man allowed air, and Sunny went boneless with relief. A chant of it worked, it worked, it worked replaced the horror.
She couldn't seem to stop crying.
Violet's eyes meet hers, one more flutter of lashes and then she went horribly still. Nothing Sunny did made her move.
Not the screaming or the begging. Not when she pressed her lips against Violet's, tried to feed her air, to force it back into her lungs by sheer will.
Sunny sat beside her the whole night shaking, hands covered in her sister's blood.
There was nothing in her throat. But there had been poison deep inside her body.
Things get blurry.
Sunny doesn't know how she managed to carry Violet outside. Her sister was slender but she still stood a head taller than Sunny and both girls had been living on stale bread and canned food for months.
She does remember how it felt when Violet's blood seeped into her shirt, how pieces of herself vanished at the spreading wetness.
Sunny blinks and her sister is laying on a pallet of wood, somewhere outside, can't remember where. The night has deepened and the sun has robbed any semblance of life. Nights like these, Violet liked best. Cold enough to wear that lumpy purple scarf that Klaus had knit her years and years ago.
Before Sunny could remember. Before the fires.
She gets lost in her head, trying to fathom reality, to shift it into something quantifiable. Your sister is dead. Violet is dead. The mantra fails to take. Sunny only comes back because there's something hot in her hand that stings, that makes her hiss and jerk away.
She blinks and Violet goes up in flames.
It wasn't supposed to happen like this. Just like their parents.
She watches and watches and stands too close to the flames and tries to convince herself that Violet would want this. Watches the flames and lets the world turn quiet around her.
It's been a week or a month, Sunny doesn't care to keep track but she wakes up one morning, showers until her skin is rubbed red and raw, stuffs her meager belonging in Violet's bag and closes the door behind her.
Forces herself to look once more at the pile of ashes where Violet had been, nothing left but a slight indent on the earth where the fire had simmered awhile, burning away the wood and staining the dirt.
Sunny goes to find Klaus.
Just a few nights before Violet died, she had stumbled on something that made the past few years fall away, eyes alight with hope. A needle in the haystack. Could be Klaus. Could be a sign.
Probably not, but probably not, Violet had told Sunny over and over like she was the one who was in danger of getting her hopes crushed.
Sunny bought a train ticket and made her way from city to city, always looking over her shoulder, always sleeping with that stupid knife under her pillow, always bolting the door. When one trail went cold, she found another.
She made her way south, following the directions Violet had scribbled on a piece of paper, tracing her finger over her sister's angled handwriting.
Days passed and then weeks and months followed at a steady unordinary way. Sunny looked for traces of Klaus everywhere. Sometimes she thought she saw him. In crowded bookstores, walking by a cafe window, in foggy cemeteries. Time went slanted, tumbling downhill and Sunny knew she was losing more and more. It was all slipping away.
Sunny couldn't remember the last time she spoke with another person. She still talked to Violet, still saw her sister clear as day, pressed against her shoulder, walking just a little ahead. Violet always liked to lead and Sunny was fine with following. It was what she'd done her entire life anyway. Follow Violet and Klaus. Lost without them.
Violet didn't talk back most of the time but that was okay. Sunny could live with that.
Ten months after Violet, Sunny tracked her brother down to a run down house. Old and bowed but sturdy, almost pleasant if you didn't look at it too close.
They had been in places worse than this but Sunny still had a difficult time imagining her brother living here, out in the middle of the woods, in the middle of nowhere.
Until she crawled in through a window she wrenched open and saw all the books. Couldn't help but smile because it was so like Klaus. Piles and piles, spines of red and black leather spilled across every surface.
Notes scribbled on the walls, pressed there with tacks. Most with his sisters' names on them. He'd been looking for them just as tirelessly. Sunny felt warm, a little of the weight around her shoulders fell away.
She sat and waited, watched the shadows appeared and disappear along the far wall, hands clenched tight in her lap to disguise their shaking. Sat there and didn't realize when she'd fallen asleep.
Sunny was torn away from her nightmares with a violent jerk, sweat cooling over her body, neck sore from her position against the wall. Ran through the checklist she'd perfected when things got bad, when her mind tried to take control of her body- deep breaths, finding colors, pinched the skin on her arm until her nails left bloody imprints. Fending off panic came with a steep learning curve but Sunny had found what worked and what didn't.
She counted to twenty and stood.
Daylight streamed through the windows, illuminating the room covered in dust. Everything in sight. Shelves and bottles and books and the blankets on the floor covered in a thick layer of dust.
Sunny couldn't breathe for awhile. Thought back to Violet's end, wondered if she might share the same fate. It might even be poetic.
Klaus was long gone and she had been a blind fool to actually let herself hope that this time, she'd found him.
A hot rush through her veins and the world fractured.
Sunny grabbed the closest thing, a book that Klaus had touched, Klaus had read, and threw it as hard as she could. Sound of shattering glass and her scream mingled, echoed in the room, but there was no one to hear. No one to see.
It took awhile for the rage to dampen, for the need to destroy something, anything, to fade and shame crawl in and take its place. Sunny stepped around the glass, found a little broom to brush it into a small pile, crawled back out through the window.
It had started to rain, just a little, slight mist and she found the book a few feet away, rubbed the mud off its pages, muttering a quiet sorry, tucked it under her arm to protect it. Klaus treated his books like children, wouldn't even dog ear them. When he came back for the books, he'd be upset.
She raised her eyes to the sky and let the rain cool her face. When she started to shiver, when she turned to go back inside, she noticed a small trail footprints. Almost hidden by the tall grass that had grown around it but packed earth brown and muddy. Sunny followed it without thought. Because no doubt Klaus had walked it thinking about her and Violet.
At the end of the trail was a grave. On the cross above the small mound of dirt, her brother's name was scrawled.
Sunny stood there, that little book under her arm, no one around for miles and miles and laughed. Because there was no way her road ended with Klaus' grave that she had only found by mistake. Because this was fake. Her brother knew he was being followed. Faking his death was a very Klaus thing to do.
Klaus was clever. Would have found a way out. Wouldn't leave her alone.
But she needed to be sure. That itching at the back of her mind wouldn't leave her alone until she knew for sure. She would dig up the grave and see that nothing was there and then she'd go find her brother.
Sunny found a broken shovel nearby. Probably left by Klaus when he dug the grave before he left again. He'd have wanted to make it look authentic.
Sunny sighed, mildly annoyed that her brother was putting her to work without being there for her to yell at, and began to dig. It was worse when the rain began to fall in earnest. And she was soaked by the time the shovel connected with something hard. Something that sent a jolt down her arm.
There were bones. There was a smell that rose up that made her gag. Rotting flesh and she wondered distantly where Klaus had managed to find a body.
She tried not to look, not to see, but in the end, it was impossible, her eyes drawn to the things that would end up destroying her.
There was Klaus' necklace- their mother's wedding band that he'd wore around his neck. The one thing he never took off.
For all the danger they faced, for all the times they shared breath with death, Sunny hadn't seen this coming.
Even after Violet.
She never expected to be the last Baudelaire.