Disclaimer: Always, darling, not mine. A Series of Unfortunate Events belongs to Daniel Handler/Lemony Snicket.
Author's Note: Nny11, This story is mostly for personal satisfaction. However, it's nice to see that someone else is as sick as me. And I'm really spewing out the chapters, yeah? Again, sorry if this is crap. I don't believe in beta readers. But I love baby piggies.
Chapter Two:
Seven-ten
"September seventeenth?"
The newspaper rustled nosily as it fell to the table.
"September seventeenth?" he repeated.
He threw a wayward glance at her retreating figure, carefully noting the hastily made apron knot and her comparably stiff posture. He noticed how jittery she seemed today, catching her with a different utensil in her hand every time he glanced her way. Before she turned her back on him (for some strange reason, he'd hardly seen anything besides it today), she had been holding a coffee pot in one hand and a spoon in the other. He lifted the mug to his lips, his eyes never leaving the back of her.
From his experience, Thursdays were never worth waking up to.
He'd practically screamed when he woke up in the morning, the sunlight blaring through every nook and cranny of their bedroom. Suspiciously enough, he vaguely remembered shutting the blinds the night prior.
'As if waking up with a massive hangover wasn't bad enough.' To add further insult to injury, his only memory of the previous night consisted of passing out on the living room couch, leaving Isadora in the bedroom by herself. He supposed that sometime during the night he found his own way back to the bed, but by then Isadora was fast asleep.
The memory, however, is far worse. He remembers feeling the elating sense of relief at seeing her sleeping, untouched body, and could not feel any guiltier.
As he pushed the forming, darker thoughts from his mind, he was aware of only one thing.
Fucking Thursdays.
His lips moved atop the rim of the coffee mug.
"Is it a date I'm obligated to remember?" He winced at the bitterness; she forgot the cream again. 'Probably on purpose,' he thought.
"A birthday, perhaps? A funeral to attend to?"
He didn't need to see her face to know what she was doing, because as she rolled her eyes, he smirked, drumming his fingers up and down the checkered boxes in his crossword.
"Klaus, don't even try to be difficult. I swear my migraines are returning, and I certainly do not need you to aggravate me further."
He ignored her, going off on his own tangent. "I suppose today could be your brother's funeral, considering he hasn't yet returned my screwdrivers and completely exhausted my supply of two by fours. In fact, therein lies a great possibility of a funeral-"
"Ha. Ha. Klaus, you are utterly moronic. If you don't remember…" She muttered under her breath, 'since there's a great probability that you were drunk when I did tell you', "I invited Sunny to come and have dinner with us." She cast a quick glance over at him to gauge his response.
To her relief, he was too busy glaring down at his coffee mug to notice any difference in her words. She attempted a stricter tone. "Did you just hear anything I might have said?"
Guiltily, he snapped his head up from the intriguing liquid-"So intense, yet so horrible"-and focused his attention again to the back of her head.
"I most certainly did," he lied.
"Then what did I say?"
"Err…something about me finding you terribly attractive and that youlookincrediblysexyinthatdress?"
She resisted the urge to laugh-'Be serious, Isadora'-and retorted, "Nice try, Baudelaire. Any more wise-cracks you want to suspect me to?"
"No ma'am."
"Good. I was just saying that I invited your sister Sunny to come and have dinner with us tonight." She punched in the timer for the oven, adding, "And she might stay over for a couple of nights."
"Oh, that's fine…" Wait. He snapped his head up with an incredulous look settling on his face.
"Staying over for a couple of nights?"
She purposely started to season the roast. Her arms looked ghostly pallid in the morning light.
"How on earth did you manage that?"
The silence that followed deafened her ears. The house, previously splattered with sunlight, seemed to be experiencing overcast, all the clouds now hanging heavily in the sky. For a long time the only sound happened to be the ominous tinkling of salt and pepper shakers and even that relied heavily on glass containment.
"Isadora…" She could feel the heat of his eyes boring holes into her back. She shivered, even though no wind passed through the open kitchen window. But like it or not, she knew, she had to go through with this. She swiveled around, the roast temporarily abandoned.
The shot of bourbon also appeared to have helped.
"All right, so I talked to your sister for a while! I convinced her to let Sunny stay for a week or so! I mean, Klaus, we never get to see her that often, and she's growing so fast…I just want to let her know that her family is still there for her!"
She was lying through her teeth, and she knew it. The problem was, did he?
Klaus, on the other hand, was too busy fighting down unwanted memories to hear the subtle wavering tone underlying her voice-which was otherwise admirably stable-and the slight flaring of her nostrils.
"Klaus?" Her voice snapped him back to reality. He stared up at her for a second.
His expression was completely unreadable.
Thankfully, though, the second, being 1/60th of a minute, quickly passed, and his face brightened once again as if nothing had ever happened.
"Excellent!" he exclaimed, rising up in one continuous motion. He walked over to his girlfriend, wrapping his arms around her and kissing her cheek.
"You always think of everything, Izzy", he murmured, lips grazing her ear. She blushed, and he left as quickly as he had entered, muttering something about a broken heater and socket wrenches.
As the footfalls disappeared, so did her feigned courage. She sighed, an increasingly common action, and continued salting the roast, her mind drifting to other things.
Outside, the clouds had not lessened and she couldn't help thinking of them as a foreboding prediction of things to come.
Upstairs the showerhead sputtered nosily, running the noise down to the living room, where the music player had been set to "low" and all the words drowned out by the ghost of water. Isadora lolled her head back, the couch unmoving to the beat of her quickened heart.
Overhead, the wooden ceiling remained faintly polished, yet remnants of mold had found their way through cracks in the walls, most likely made by stubborn rains and winter weather. Sometimes, when it leaked, Klaus liked to set buckets under the cascading droplets, the sound resounding ten times louder throughout the house because of the metal. During a particular stormy season when resulting buckets were strewn across the floor, Isadora felt that she might go mad.
She imagined the unfathomable action of rain and buckets had something to do with the noise produced, but she couldn't be too sure. The noise practically drove her crazy; she could not really entertain the fact that her boyfriend actually enjoyed it. She wondered if the same noise she found impossible and downright irritating appealed to his sense of relaxation, and amused herself with the thought.
'Why not?', she thought, her mind speaking in Shakespearean tongues, 'We all have strange vices. We all have secrets.'
She couldn't continue with her train of thought for long, though. The water noise increased upstairs and suddenly she felt quite unsafe.
'What will he do when he sees…if they're here…that I lied-' An onslaught of slight nausea quickly silenced the thought.
Consciously, her heartbeat quickened and she moaned to no one in particular, "Waiting is akin to suffering."
While thinking of a word that rhymed with "suffering" however, Isadora thought she heard the faintest knock. Raising her head, her eyes lingered on the wooden door roughly nine feet diagonal from her sitting position. The knock repeated again, and she stood up, quite certain it was not the wind.
She arrived at the door quickly enough, but hesitated a bit as she stood in front of it. She wiped her clammy hands on her dress, shaking her head roughly, chastising her betraying body.
'Why are you shaking? There's nothing to be afraid of. This isn't Count Olaf. This isn't a social worker coming to tell you that your triplet brother is dead. This isn't anything. There's nothing to be afraid of.'
She slowly twisted the knob, watching her reflection in the brass intently, checking for signs of excessive melodrama and expressive decay. The cold breeze greeted her, once again, as she stepped out, barefooted, onto the welcome mat.
The silhouetted trees bristled like bones against the chilled air, and the pathway before her glimmered an ivory white, caused by the illumination of brightened street lamps. So night had finally fallen around the grounds of the inconspicuous residence. She swallowed, an unconscious gesture to shove down her anxiety.
It worked.
She squinted her eyes, but only for a slight second as a familiar shadow came into view.
The light glinted off her blonde strands and bounced, star-like, creating a looping halo. Even in the half-light/dark night, the hair shimmered almost unnaturally. The very sight of her seemed, if just for a minute, to banish all the creatures of the night; her presence a faint glow under the shadows of oak trees.
The girl before her smiled toothily, slight gaps between her teeth apparent, but nonetheless comforting.
"Oh, Sunny!"
Her words spilled out of her lips like the tears she furiously kept at bay, ever threatening to unload. Her arms reached out before she knew it, and embraced the girl where she stood. The top of her head reached Isadora's chin, but she couldn't find herself to let go just yet.
Sunny giggled into her curls. "Missed you too, Izzy," she murmured, her sweet voice muffled.
Only when finally stepping back to marvel how tall Sunny had grown did Isadora see the figures (one crouching to the other) behind Sunny.
The walls of her heart tightened but she forced herself to look.
She peered closer, rubbing her arms where goosebumps now formed. The wind whipped the dress around her thighs and she involuntarily shuddered.
The boy seemed to be tugging on a woman's hand and she, in turn, seemed to be chastising him softly. The words Isadora felt unable to understand or detect (the wind had sole control over her hearing) but still the woman's mouth moved with invisible air. The night loomed, ever wondering, closer as a lamplight flickered slowly, on and off.
And as if she was aware of eyes, the girl-no, woman-lifted her face from the height of the boy's and angled her face towards Isadora's.
Isadora Quagmire experienced, for the first time in her life, a curious feeling akin to shoving your own head in a bucket of rainwater and holding it there.
In short, she felt like drowning.
The mothy lamplights silhouetted the woman's lashes, so that spiders appeared to be resting on her sharp cheekbones, nursing a smattering of light freckles. Her jaw was set in a stubborn line of indigence, her large lips challenging, grim. The facial features that really did Isadora in, however, were the woman's eyes, which were so empty and full of sorrow that both smoke and fire reflected, like burning houses, outwards and up.
The familiarity was not at all comforting.
Sometimes she'd see those eyes, late at night, when he thought that everyone, including the cat, was asleep. Those were the same eyes, she knew, she knew, that Klaus himself masked, as they both pretended not to think too deep.
And yet here they were, unburied and unhidden and perhaps punishment.
Her face was so disarming, and yet so molested, that Isadora didn't know whether to smile or cry.
At that extended moment of eternity, Sunny decided to tilt her face to Isadora, an action that broke the initial spell. All feeling finally returned to her frozen limbs, from the tip of her nose to the soles of her bare feet.
At the sight of her quizzical look, Isadora Quagmire found her voice again.
The night, inconceivable.
"Violet."
The familiar ribbon, tied around the child's neck, fluttered in eloquent response.