Disclaimer: All characters, again, are not my property. They are the sole property of Daniel Handler/Lemony Snicket.
Author's Note: The reason why I haven't been shitting out chapters as fast is because I find it hard to write within the notes I have provided myself with. School starts, evidently, in a day, and I hope to really finish this story before I get all lazy again. The sole of my right foot has a fin gash from the other day, when someone's fins popped up and sliced my foot while I was pumping a wave. Surf was shitty that day, and stupid me, I had to stay out for another two hours. It was still bleeding as I limped to my truck.
To Nny11: Yes, he is quite the drunk. Writers and avid readers tend to be. Ha ha. I'm sure you know.
Chapter Six:
Improbable
"For the first time Desdemona tasted the flavor of his mouth, and the only sisterly thing she did during their lovemaking was to come up for air, once, to say, 'Bad boy. You've done this before.' But Lefty only kept repeating, 'Not like this, not like this…'"
"Lefty couldn't pinpoint the moment he'd begun to have thoughts about his sister."
-"Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides"
So that's where he found her, albeit reluctantly, outside, dying her lips purple with the stains of red wine still present from dinner.
Stars scattered gaily overhead, basking merrily under the watchful orbits of comets. The meager light given off by the few lamplights flickered as if ashamed of the magnificent night above. A light wind caressed the tendrils of hair not already clasped by her fingers.
It had rained earlier, but neither one could pinpoint exactly when.
Perhaps it had been the time between Klaus staring with disbelief and desire at his lovely sister and her refusal to meet his gaze. But that didn't help anything at all: it described all thirty two minutes and sixteen seconds, or however long it took for the estranged siblings to sniff each other out and recognize that same blood that could never, ever, be broken.
Not even all the inventions or books in the world can really do or say otherwise.
The ribbon was not up in her hair, strangely, and he wondered what intricate turns tonight could take. His own bare feet splashed and slipped in the wet mud, but he amazingly regained balance to reach her. Considering how much he had drank, this feat seemed quite admirable.
Yet he almost lost his balance when he finally did reach her. Her half-lidded eyes, still determined and strong, shoved him with such incredible force that it took all his might to plunge through the higher power and approach her.
"May I sit?" He felt like a little boy again, stolen from his house and taken to live with the villainous Count Olaf. Her eyes were dried, but her "little" brother wasn't fooled.
"Go ahead," she said.
And they sat together, side by side, just silently staring at anything else but themselves. Violet picked aimlessly at the grass, forcing her mind on other things, like building a new grass-cutter or finishing her latest invention, a talking toy dragon for James that could dance and clean up his room simultaneously. Since she was sober, she had better luck at keeping her head straight and mouth shut.
Klaus, on the other hand, was not so lucky.
"Did you have a good dinner?" His voice had a slight sarcastic tone to it. Violet could not help but stop picking at the grass, her insides starting to boil and bubble. She still refused to look at him though, being the level-headed one in the family.
She merely nodded.
"I don't care much for roast," he trudged on, now babbling coherently. "It's nothing compared to-"
"Strawberries," she murmured.
"She said, 'When you think of me, think of a food you love very much.'"
"Well, why don't you?" Her voice wavered without her permission.
"Because when I eat strawberries, I always think of you."
And she blushed when he smiled because they remembered the time when Violet got caught in a thorn patch in an effort to reach the strawberries she knew her brother desperately wanted. It was his birthday and she came home scratched and bleeding but sporting a proud grin and two buckets of gleaming red strawberries.
And Klaus' eighth birthday was by far the best birthday he had ever had.
Until his ninth, of course, when Violet came home with three buckets.
"Ah, you remembered," he said, raising up an eyebrow in suggestion. She pointedly turned her head away. Her bare shoulder protruded from the mirage of lace and buttons intricately lining her dress. Klaus suddenly found he had an increasingly harder time looking away.
"I don't make it a point to," she replied flatly. "You are my brother, after all. It's simply a practical application of knowledge."
"Ever the inventor."
"Ever the scholar."
The mud was now lapping up to his trousers, a chilly moistness creeping up his leg. She felt it too, you know, the wetness.
They stopped trying to litter the air with superfluous conversation, though, for a minute or two. It was one of those silences when one could actually feel the other groping for nameless words in an attempt to recreate the next batch of sentences into something much more meaningful.
Questions, more often than not, are commonly used to fill the inevitable space. And scholarly Klaus Baudelaire could have read every single book in the world, and still not know the answers to some lingering questions such as,
"And James?"
Startled but trying hard not to show it, Violet angled her chin to a place where the moonlight couldn't reach her eyes. That action was enough to convince Klaus Baudelaire of the painful truth. It was as if an anchor slammed into the fragile beams of his stomach, and he felt himself swaying forward.
"Oh," he simply said, disgust clearly evident in his voice. He felt the bile rise, like an elevator shaft, up and down his throat, tasting of acid and alcohol. There were images he thought he'd never recall, ever again, but still they swarmed like bees, or Lacrhymose leeches, around the repressed memory of his childhood.
Images concerning a horrid fiend accosting the teenage version of his older sister, her unblemished legs thrashing in the dusty confines of a tower, screaming for her brother that apparently, arrived too late. It was the night of Violet's eighteenth birthday, when Count Olaf thought he had won, until he saw the boy's finger on the trigger, the tarnished metal reflecting the hate in his eyes, and the simple solace of sound.
Brother and sister embraced then, and promised to live happily ever after.
That's when, two weeks later, Klaus Baudelaire stumbled upon discarded clothes and the phrase, "No such thing."
Alcohol is a funny thing. Apparently, when ingested into the bloodstream, it does more than just swirl around, unnoticed, introducing themselves to the red blood cells. Truth serum is a more aptly named title, along with dissolution, a familiar little noun that nicely sums up the state of emotions, hidden or not, when paired with the equation of alcohol.
Heaven knows that Olaf drank enough of it, quite enough to kidnap unfortunate orphans again and again, without considering the circumstances or what imminent unpleasantness awaited him in whatever conscience he might have, should someone catch him at it.
Alcohol, Violet mused, simply meant exemplifying stupidity or causing it.
"So he's either a Count or a fucking Quagmire," Klaus sneered, slurring the words together. The first one, apparently, couldn't be helped, but the second one set his organs on fire.
"Don't swear, Klaus."
"Oh, don't remember?" he mimicked a saccharine sweet voice. "I thought you remembered everything."
"Klaus, don't-"
"What? Be like this? Violet, dear, did you ever think that the reason I'm like this is all because of you?" His voice dropped dangerously, and she flinched as his cold fingers fluttered on the expanse of her bare shoulder. Her breathing quickened, and she felt her pulse jump up at his single touch. They were bathed in darkness and moonlight and mud, all good friends of the eldest Baudelaires, always pointedly looking away or figuratively positioning a finger to invisible lips, always saying something like, "We won't tell" when they come across a far from sibling love.
"Look at us, trying to be normal," he sneered, the alcohol (or was it?) blurring his vision.
It had been far too long, and he was far too gone.
His thin lips traced the shell outline of her concave ear. "Look at me," he ordered. His breath reeked of alcohol. That's precisely when she realized that he was sitting far too close to her.
She shook her head. "No. Klaus, stop." She stiffened and pulled away from him, drawing her dress over her bare shoulder.
"Look at me, goddamnit!" She couldn't.
He was tearing her apart.
"Look at me!"
He grabbed her shoulders, exposing them bare again, and yanked her body toward him, so that she was forced to meet his eyes.
They were the same color and shape as her own.
"You tell me, you tell me that I don't matter!" This strange man, filled to the brim with the scent of alcohol and forced happiness, suddenly changed and transformed his shape back into the form of her little brother, a little bit older than sixteen, helplessly watching as the love of his child life writhed under the sweat and bones of someone else.
"Tell me that I don't matter and that you love everyone else but me!" She closed her eyes, her nostrils flaring as she tried in vain to keep from crying, right then, at that moment, and from smelling the alcohol that infested her brother, and herself for causing it. Klaus, don't you understand, why can't you understand,
"I have to be the older sister!"
The words tumbled blindly out of her mouth and her eyes widened, as she realized slowly what she had never meant to say out loud. It was as if time itself had quivered and stopped its ejaculation into life.
She had to be the older sister. She had to carry the burden of responsibility. She had to endure, if only, for them, her siblings. She had to stay strong. Even if it meant running away from her heart.
She turned to Klaus, expecting him to understand, as a brother should. She finally gathered the courage to look at him.
"You don't ma-"
And Klaus Baudelaire bent down and kissed his older sister on the lips.
Very hard.
He rolled on top of her, shoving her down in the mud, which splattered with every shift of his body. He groaned as she bit fiercely on his bottom lip, her lower teeth gleaming in the darkness. He returned the favor, nipping her large lower lip, until she gasped in pain or surprise. The dress was practically caked with drying mud, although, in a dress so black and a night so dark, nothing was readily noticeable.
He knew her body so well, so well, that even as she tried in vain to keep silent, something would happen that caused her to arch up more into him. Their legs were tangled together, like the gnarled roots of a family tree, and she found the same skin of her hand descending down her body, fluttering on the glistening silver hooks of a corset.
She felt her body slip every time her brother bit her, and his desperate eyes burned, like the grass secretions, into her heated skin.
And only when she heard the water heater turn on did she shove her brother off of her body and gear her hand back, like the interior of many discarded inventions, and slap her brother clear across the face.
For some reason, in this strange darkness, she witnessed the change of color, slightly forming, on his left cheek. His face just stayed there, at that position, as if suspended in time. Her hand stung with the force of the slap, but all she could feel was the heat radiating from her brother's profile.
He struck my brother! Look at him!
Her shaky hands floated up to her own face as she opened her mouth in horror and shame.
With that movement, Klaus, without turning his head, reached out and grabbed her delicate wrists. When he did finally turn his head, she felt her heart pummel sixty feet down. His eyes were devoid, glassy things that showed no sign of normal emergence, even when confronted by the sight of houses burning and sisters running. That familiar numbness.
His fingers tightened their grip, and she cried out in pain.
Thankfully, but perhaps not, the screen door connecting the outside to the inside slid open, emitting that common noise that one usually hears, of rust and force. He let her wrists go, as if the slender joints were not wrists at all, but scalding irons, and she, freed, stumbled backward with her hands.
Isadora stepped out, clad in lavender evening lingerie, peering through the darkness and finally asking something like, "Are you coming in? It's quite late out" and, "Do get some rest, please. Fighting can wait until later."
But even her voice cracked and even her sleepy eyes widened when a blur of lace and mud ran past her, leaving a sticky trail of dirt footprints on the tiled floor. The crying, though, she would not hear until later.
Slowly but surely, her boyfriend entered her sight, a slow moving silhouette in the distance. His hair had traces of dirt and twigs embedded in the tendrils, a bruise was forming under his left cheekbone, and his glasses were splattered with mud.
"Oh my god," she lifted a finger to his bruised, purple bottom lip. "What happened?"
He flinched at the gentle touch and her concerned, heart-breaking, unreadable expression.
"Nothing," he murmured, pulling her closer to him reassuringly. "Nothing."
Hours later, and deeper into the night, Sunny and James lay frightfully awake. Her sister and his mother thrashed, the covers billowing off her body like abandoned ghosts. Their ears twitched with the sounds of nightmares and semi-intelligible phrases, her bruised lips muttering things like "I'm sorry" and "You do matter, you do". James huddled closer to his mother, hoping to dispel her dismal dreams and whatever fright or secret bothered her, bothered his beautiful mother, for a total of five years.
One story down and two rooms, including a bathroom, to the left, Isadora Quagmire jotted down notes in some inconspicuous black notebook under a flashlight, glanced over her fitfully turning boyfriend, and wondered if she had heard all the right words.