Disclaimer: All the characters and some of the memories belong to a Mr. Daniel Handler/Lemony Snicket. They do not belong to me.
Author's Note (Written in techni-ANGER!): I am so pissed off. A federal appeals court ruled against Kamehameha schools. Those bastards. Half my family is part native Hawaiian and now my own nephew will have increased competition to get into one of the best schools in the nation. Those fucking bastards.
On a lighter note, oh my yes, Nny11. A sad burrito indeed. And hell, your reviews are the shiznit. They are quite comforting in a dwindling fandom. Meef. I was also sorely tempted to use the Family Guy line in this piece: "Well…it's time for me to hit the old dusty trail…" But then I realized it made me no better than anyone else.
Chapter Five:
Backwards
Drinking for eleven/that's just what I do/When I'm not with you/My heart goes to bed
End of the bar/that's just where I'll be/Don't try and come find me
'Cause I'm already dead
-"Drinking for Eleven"
Her legs were burning.
The tears streamed down her face and she tried her hardest not to make the normal choking sounds that usually came with exposing your empowering, hidden sadness. The mantra that repeated insistedly, and in the voice of a very young girl, kept on whispering to her, "Not in front of them. Be strong. Be strong."
Be strong.
Oh, how she desperately wanted to. Instead, here she was, running again.
She paused her plight into the yard, her legs collapsing, ivory, under the uncovered moonlight. Her hands caught her fall but just barely, a naked knee slamming into the wet ground with force. Mud and uprooted weeds splattered like watercolor paints around an alabaster angel as she fell forward into her palms. She slipped on the bare soles of her feet, before just giving up and settling down in the pungent wetness. Her dress bloomed outwards in the mud, and, should anyone be watching, they would liken her to an angel that had just lost her wings.
"Invent something, you stupid girl," she hissed to herself. "Invent anything."
Unfortunately, she couldn't.
She had left her ribbon with her son.
And there was no raw materials, no anything to even suggest an invention to quell her thoughts or diminish the feelings that she thought that she had gotten rid of so long ago.
Nothing.
Violet clutched her stomach and rocked back and forth, something she hadn't done in a long time. It was an attempt to shallow all the forbidden thoughts and deep desires that engraved themselves, long ago, into her brain. It was either that she didn't clutch hard enough or rock fast enough because the memories came, they came just the same.
"None of us knows how to cook," Klaus said.
"That's true," Violet said. "I knew how to repair those windows, and how to clean the chimney, because those sorts of things interest me. But I don't know how to cook anything except toast."
"And sometimes you burn the toast," Klaus said, and they smiled.
She gasped as her mind transformed to the foggy outline of bleak days and unhappy events. There they all stood (Sunny just barely) like lighthouse beams of relief slicing through a nighttime sea.
"Violet, we don't know where we are, do we?"
She searched his face to almost no avail. He remained stoic, all the features in his face appearing to freeze like the incomprehensible apathy the world routinely showed them.
She bit her lip, fighting back her flighty fingers that twitched in ribbon. "No, Klaus. We do not."
He was quiet for a minute, just like the world for once.
"Violet?"
She stopped fussing with the ribbon just enough to peer at her younger brother. Olaf could be anywhere in the distance; they didn't have much time before they had to move again.
"Yes, Klaus?"
He mumbled something incoherent, his cheeks turning faintly pink. She smiled; she knew it wasn't the wind.
"What?" she prodded, soothing like a big sister should be.
"I said 'I thank you'."
She squeezed his hand, knowing he had trouble doing so since he was given the burden of carrying Sunny. Even the saccharine sunset before them couldn't rival their glow: the glow that one exudes simply by surviving, the glow that one exhales simply by loving, and the glow that one relives over and over again, simply just by being.
Violet, the inventor, did not need to build a warmth sensor or love gauge just to feel the glow.
She peeked a glance at her brother, the sugary rays bouncing off his glass lenses and kept smiling.
He had said, 'I love you'.
Violet's large, once curious, eyes brimmed with hot liquid. Her vision blurred, and before she knew it, she was crying. All twenty-five years of unshed tears.
'Be strong,' the little girl whispered again. 'Be strong.'
Inside, the lamps flickered on and off, the howling wind outside somehow twisting the electric wires. Sunny had finally pacified the child, who stopped his wailing just as she shouted, "Wok!" in frustration, a single word that meant something like, "She's coming back, you bratty kid. She just needs to be alone. Go bother your Uncle Klaus."
Speaking of Uncle Klaus…she glared at her older brother, sipping slowly from his wineglass. Well, technically it was Violet's wineglass, but it appeared that no one really cared. He kept on glancing over at the boy, like drinking in front of him might scar him for life but needing the alcohol anyway.
"Nargh," she mumbled, throwing her blonde head in her hands. Her siblings could be so difficult.
Klaus, on the other hand, watched the boy play around with the various chinaware and silverware, building a makeshift bird out of paper napkins. He didn't even notice as Isadora disappeared, rubbing her temples and saying something about making a call to her brother. The paper successfully piled up without falling and the young boy grinned proudly to himself. It didn't even vaguely resemble a bird, but Klaus couldn't help but smile at that.
His shoulders slumped in unconscious relaxation, all while keeping his eyes on the boy.
He was so much like his mother.
The Viper was brilliant, too, and as the children looked at one another, they saw their own tears and the way they shone.
"You're brilliant," Violet murmured to Klaus, "reading up on the Mamba du Mal."
"You're brilliant," Klaus murmured back, "getting the evidence out of Stephano's suitcase."
"Brilliant!" Sunny said again, and Violet and Klaus gave their baby sister a hug.
"Bwrah!" James exclaimed, snapping Klaus from his unwanted daydream. "I did it, Uncle Klaus!" The boy looked up expectantly at him, startling Klaus a bit, who was wondering at the moment, how and when exactly had the boy come up so close without him noticing. Feigning eagerness, Klaus took one look at the said "bird".
It looked nothing like one, and Klaus had read about millions of birds.
"How…" The top "wing" flopped over like a withered erection. "Improbable."
James grinned, his amazingly white teeth shining.
"That means 'Super', right, Uncle Klaus?"
Klaus threw the boy a smile, vowing to buy the boy some books to read one day. "Sure, James. Sure."
He ruffled the boy's hair. He was suddenly aware, however, of eyes and glanced to his side. Sure enough, Sunny and Isadora, who was now back in the kitchen, had been watching them intently. There was something unreadable in his girlfriend's eyes, but Sunny seemed to be smirking.
Uncomfortable, he shifted in his chair and drew his hand back. At the sight of James' disappointed face, however, Klaus said, "Hey, Buddy, can you do your Uncle a favor?"
His face instantly brightened. "Sure," he chirped.
"Do you know how to make a 'James' Drink'?" The boy shook his head.
"What's a 'James' Drink'?"
"Why, it's a drink named after you, of course. Let's see…two shots of dark rum," he paused, quickly scanning his vast brain for liquor information, "One shot of spiced rum…" He allowed himself to smile at Sunny's shocked reaction. "One shot bourbon and one shot scotch whiskey." He gestured to Isadora who was still standing at the door with a strange expression on her face. "Izzy will show you how. You can pour it yourself, though."
James quickly ran to Isadora, tugging on her sleeve. She turned in the direction of the liquor cabinet (living room, far east) but not before shooting a knowing look at Klaus, which was so incomprehensible that it even left him confused.
He didn't dwell on it, though. He never usually did.
Violet knelt at Klaus's side, giving him a hug to try to make him feel better. Sunny crawled over to his glasses, picked them up, and brought them over to him.
Klaus began to sob, not so much from the pain but from the rage at the terrible situation they were in.
Violet and Sunny cried with him, and they continued weeping as they washed the dishes, and as they blew out the candles in the dining room, and as they changed out of their clothes and lay down to go to sleep, Klaus in the bed, Violet on the floor, Sunny on her little cushion of curtains.
The moonlight shone through the window, and if anyone had looked into the Baudelaire orphans' bedroom, they would have seen three children crying quietly all night long.
"Wow. That sure was fast."
James grinned at the compliment, his tiny hands clutching the glass with outstretched arms. "I'm improbably fast," he elaborated.
Klaus smiled as he took the cup from James' hands.
"What else can you make?" he implored, his eyes twinkling mischievously.
The boy straightened up as Isadora came up behind him and put her hands on his shoulders. Klaus ignored the look she was still shooting him, and tilted his head to the boy's.
James only proudly smiled back.
"Toast."
"None of us knows how to cook," Klaus said.
"That's true," Violet said. "I knew how to repair those windows, and how to clean the chimney, because those sorts of things interest me. But I don't know how to cook anything except toast."
"And sometimes you burn the toast," Klaus said, and they smiled.
"Klaus!" He snapped the focus off his drink. "Klaus!"
Sunny studied him carefully, her blonde hair ethereal under the kitchen lights. "Are you all right?"
He gave a half-hearted smile. "I'm just exhausted from all this excitement." Sunny immediately jumped at the chance.
"Well then. I think that means that James," she gestured to the little boy, "and Izzy and I should probably be getting ready for bed soon." She softly smiled at Isadora, and Isadora couldn't deciper the shadows in her usually bright eyes. "Don't you find?"
Isadora complied, now averting her gaze so that it only faced the stairs. As they all started to ascend the stairs, however, Sunny said the strangest thing.
"Nobody's perfect," to no one in particular and they disappeared into darkness upstairs.
Klaus just sat there for a while, dumbfounded, to say the least.
But after "a while", he found himself walking to his back door.
"And sometimes you burn the toast," Klaus said, and they smiled.
Klaus said, and they smiled.
they smiled.