A/N: My first SoUE fiction, and based purely on the film which I saw tonight, so please forgive any discrepancies in regards to the books.I have a nasty feeling that I may have a new obsession developing in the form of Klaus. I pity the boy, I really do – I have a nasty habit of torturing my favourite characters. :D
You know something I've realised? My life is at odds with the world. There are only so many foul, dastardly and just simply downright unfortunate events that can befall someone in a lifetime before they die - either through their own, intentional machinations and lack of will to continue living in their very own Greek tragedy, or the inability to escape that final, deadly occurrence - and I figure that my time is up. Hell, if I've calculated right, my time was up right about the hour of that nasty incident with the leeches.
I think fate is laughing at me. Christ, it's got to the stage where I'm laughing at myself.
Let me tell you a story. It's about a twelve year old boy, the middle child of two adoring parents with two sisters - one an inventor, the other a biter - who he loved with all his heart. This boy liked to read. He read a lot, and almost every word he consumed, he remembered. He thought he was clever; he thought he was special.
He was a very foolish boy.
When his parents were killed in a fire - skin scalding, burning, blistering and turning black with the heat - he thought he could cope. He thought he was now the man of the burnt out shell of a house, and it was his duty and no one else's to look after and care for his sisters. Wherever they were sent, they would still be a family - no one would be able to prevent that. The boy would make sure of it.
But he hadn't been expecting his dear Count Olaf - either his third cousin four times removed, or a fourth cousin three times removed - and his insane murderous scheming. He hadn't taken that into account at all. But even then, with his sisters with him and his wide knowledge of the world around him learnt through dry, crisp pages, he hadn't truly thought that they would die. It was an impossibility. All stories have happy endings and good always triumphs over evil.
Foolish boy.
Even when his fourteen year old sister was being forced to marry a man quadruple her age and trying very hard to kill her, and his younger sister had been dangling from a metal cage forty feet above the soggy ground, and he himself had been dressed up as a camel and being chased by a man with a hook for a hand, he still hadn't given up hope. Not completely. And when he solved the mystery of his parents' death and managed to foil the Count's devious plans, sending the loathsome man to rot in prison, he honest to God thought he had succeeded. He thought the Baudelaire orphans had a chance at life. He thought they had won.
Looking around me at the dank, dark, solid stone walls, slimy and covered with pungent green fungus, I knew the boy had been wrong. Straining my arms behind my back to relieve the burning ache in shoulders forced for too long into unnatural contortions, I felt the cold, heavy cuffs dig further into my wrist bones, cutting into the flesh and making me wince, the manacles clanking softly in the gloom. Oh yes, I thought, swallowing back the bile rising in my throat, the boy had been very wrong.
Because what the boy had failed to realise was that he was only twelve years old, and in a world of adults, children never won. And that was what he was: a small, incompetent, naïve, little boy, who thought he knew the ways of the world because he had read books on philosophy, evolution, law, crime, etiquette, psychology, travel… The list was endless, and they had all been useless in the end.
Because Olaf had escaped.
It seemed only another implausibility in what felt like a lifetime of discrepancies, but the truth was there for all to see and it was damned hard to ignore, present circumstances being taken into account. And he had chased us, the Baudelaire orphans, with more motive now than just the greedy lust for gold, dogging our footsteps from unrelated relative to unrelated relative with even more vigour than he had done before, one desire burning stronger in his twisted, malformed mind than any of the fires he had murderously started.
Revenge.
And this is where my story stops. For the stupid, foolish boy realised at last that he had failed his sisters irretrievably, and he hated himself for the knowledge it brought. They were all going to die, no books or inventions capable of stopping the Count's intentions forever, and the boy knew that the next unfortunate event could very well be their last. Or Violet's last. Or Sunny's. And he knew that he would rather die than let that happen.
So this twelve year old set out with false courage and bravery to find Olaf, one small scrap of thought his only hope at defeating the madman forever. For he knew that out of the three of them, Olaf hated him the most - blaming him for his hard fall from the grace of society, blaming him for ruining his plans of marrying Violet and receiving the Baudelaire fortune, blaming him because he was a twisted fiend who could never find fault in himself, blaming him because he saw the small, foolish boy as a threat, which seems entirely laughable now.
What was the boy's plan? I don't think even he knew entirely. Perhaps it was to drop the Count down a deep, deep well, with no hope of rescue. Perhaps it was to give him back to the police. Perhaps it was to push him off a cliff, though where he would find a cliff to do so was beyond him.
It seems inevitable that the foolish boy would be captured, doesn't it? Only this particularly stupid boy would be so foolhardy as to leave his sisters completely without protection. Only this boy would give their mortal enemy the chance he needed to be victorious.
I leant my aching head back against the hard, sturdy, wooden frame of the chair I was attached to, blinking back the hot tears that were threatening to fall, thinking of the note I had left back at the house and the small spyglass I had attached it to. Of course when Violet read it, she would come after me. It was in her nature and she loved me, though I couldn't for the hell of it figure out why. She would put herself in danger for me, and she would die needlessly and it would kill me.
My head jerked back up as the door at the top of a small flight of stairs opened, the sallow light thickly coating my undesirable surroundings, glinting off the slime and the rivulets of water trailing down the walls, making me squint as a dark figure stood posed in the doorway.
Of course, it could only be one man.
Olaf strutted down the steps, legs raised proud and ridiculously high, eyes shining cruelly black, gold thread glittering distractingly on his waistcoat. He came to a sudden stop directly in front of me, his clothes swirling with the desired dramatical effect around him, his smile viciously cold as he clasped his hands together in front of him.
"Klaus, my dear, dear boy," he exclaimed, his words coated thickly with false concern. "I'm so glad to see that you've woken up at last. I was so worried that my friend may have hit you a little too hard."
Reaching out a long fingered, bony hand, he caressed the side of my head in a parody of tenderness, pain shooting up unmercifully at his touch, enveloping me, making my vision swim nauseatingly and a harsh gasp to escape my clenched throat. Bringing his fingers up to the light, he rubbed the crumbling, wet, reddish brown substance between his fingers, his eyes greedily consuming the sight of my blood, glee etched cruelly into his features. Then he looked back to me, his eyes catching my own.
"I'm so glad you could join me, dear, sweet boy," he said softly, his eyes deadly. "I've been wanting to have a little chat with you for such a long while now, Klaus, but you and your siblings have proven to be quite resilient. You simply cannot imagine my thrill at finally having you here, alone and so… so unprotected."
He grinned and I shut my eyes tightly, my heart beating furiously in my chest and a high ringing in my ears, cursing the foolish boy for being so irrevocably stupid. Who would have thought that the final – and undoubtedly fatal – unfortunate event to befall me would be entirely my own fault?
I had damned us all.
A/N: I hope you enjoyed. I don't know whether this will be a standalone or a multichaptered effort, but if there is enough interest I will certainly try my best at expanding on it.