Disclaimer: A Series of Unfortunate Events belongs to Lemony Snicket/Daniel Handler and not me.

Author's Note: It seems quite pointless right now, but trust me, the whole purpose of this story is based upon my curiosity as to how unfortunate orphans are when they have no villain to run from anymore. Imperfect and three dimensional, quite unlike the characters in the books.

Nny11: You're quite right, and one of the worst things in the world is a depressing drunk. And incest and kids…I wonder how everyone is able to manage? Thinking of another sex scene, I almost rear-ended some guy in front of me. Wonderful. Stopped literally an inch from the bumper.

Michelina: Very uber hot. Now continue writing, you awesome monger. Rainbow: Haha, thank you. In my opinion, I think my story is the only one where it has relatively nothing to do with Olaf but everything to do with him also. Suffice to say, quite sad. At least you made me feel better. Goth: Of course you are. You silly person. Dull as a Coat Hanger: I was going to dedicate this chapter to you, but then I thought you might want a sexier or more emotional chapter.

Chapter Eight:

Corrosion

She was in the tedious process of straightening her hair when a very flushed silhouette appeared and swayed, panting slightly, in the doorway of the attic. One hand shot out to grip the side and her bowed head bobbed up and down, golden silk obstructed the view of her face.

Her hands full with dark hair, and mouth muffled by ribbon, Violet mumbled through her clenched teeth, slim eyebrows shooting up in surprise.

"Sunny?"

Tying her mussed hair with one hand, she removed the ribbon from her mouth trickily, which involved switching the ribbon to her right hand, while her left hand craftily spun the mass of hair upwards. Violet therefore removed the ribbon from her mouth, "What on earth?"

She attempted to move towards her younger sister but stopped as Sunny lifted up a defiant forefinger, while catching her breath on bent knees.

"Hold," she gasped. "On."

Minutes, though it seemed more like seconds, passed, and Violet was acutely aware of the sensitive skin on her inner arm pricking. She drifted her eyes from her curiously excited sister and focused them on the rafters.

The dust floated like pinpricks and tiny boats sailing by the tip of her nose to weaving between each long eyelash on a never-ending breeze. The lace adorning her dress moved with her legs, and she felt strangely aware of the fabric tickling her thighs. A faint blush rose to her exposed collarbone, but the cool air balanced it out right away.

Sunny finally spoke for the effect, darting her curious eyes around the attic and ignoring her sister in the process. "It's freezing," she simply stated, her voice echoing in the wooden expanses. Her eyes went wide in awe as she spied the makeshift lab, a little out of the way in the right hand corner of the attic.

"You brought the burner up here?" she asked incredulously.

Violet only nodded as her face contorted in a pressing way. Sunny tore her eyes from the unordinary lab, and caught her sister's queried face.

The sunlight poured through the single window present in the attic, and Sunny watched as the partial light poured onto her older sister, as if lighting her from the outside in. A firefly, Sunny thought fondly, could not hold a quintessential candle to her beautiful sister.

Ever since she had been a little child, Sunny had, in the quaint ways of young girls, idolized and marveled her lovely older sister, wishing sometimes, albeit enviously, that she would grow up to look exactly like Violet. Unselfish and placated, Violet Baudelaire's apparent physical aesthetics were emphasized by her dutiful attentions to her younger siblings, something so unusual in the world that even Sunny couldn't fathom it later when she started making friends her own age.

She remembered falling asleep to her brother's "fairy tales"; all coincidental really, as he substituted the character's appearances to fit his siblings'. For instance, Sunny would always be the pretty little girl in distress, always being chased after by evil wolves or tricked by drunken tyrants. Klaus would be the wandering sage, and Violet, darling Violet, would always be the beautiful princess. The Quagmires and others would also appear, from time to time as various knights and so forth, but by the time she had turned five, the roles in the stories had taken different, wider turns. First turn: the Quagmires weren't present in the stories anymore. Not that it made much of a difference, but it seemed that they had never existed in their "fairy tale" world. Lastly and most strangely, Sunny found herself falling to sleep to her brother's soothing voice, in which Klaus acted the knight in shining armor and Violet, the beautiful, unchanged princess. If she could remember, and she could, she would remember nodding off and watching her brother and sister share soft glances from her half-lidded eyes. She remembered thinking that even though her brother was reciting the story to her, he meant it to Violet, growing soft-eyed and melting at her shy glances and "accidental" touches. But even that was not the most important thing he changed about those wayward fairy tales.

The next time around there was also a simple salvation, a "happily ever after" at the end.

Sunny had lived her whole life with childlike confidence and hope. She knew then what she knew now, after the death of a despicable guardian and awry plans, that one just needs reassurance, the love, to keep living. And that was all that really mattered, when it all came down to it.

"Sunny?"

The young girl shook her head as she snapped back to reality. Right, she thought. Dinner.

"Sorry," she apologized, the corner of her mouth widening into a smile. At the sight of her older sister's insistent stare, she continued. "Izzy wants to know if you wanted to eat out sometime, you know, somewhere fancy."

"Somewhere fancy?" Violet's brow shot up again, this time in disbelief. "And how could she afford such a place?"

Sunny rolled her eyes, eliciting a "harumph" from Violet. Honestly, her sister could be so practical.

"Izzy's a job, you know."

"Excuse me?"

"She's a poet, so obviously she sells her work and whatnot. All the Quagmires got rich that way. Even Klaus-"

"I know what your brother does, you don't need to constantly remind me," Violet snapped, perhaps a little bit too quickly.

Another flush replaced the one she extinguished before, but this time it refused to seep away with the weather and lingered on her face, giving Violet a sensually adept look. Sunny smiled a little, despite herself, and watched as her sister floundered uncomfortably under her suggestive smirk.

Sunny could see the tops of Violet's breasts, the hastily drawn corset doing nothing but emphasizing the cleavage in the middle. The curves bobbed like lazy jellyfish in the sub-aquatic sea that was the attic. Although quite envious, she took her time in extending her forefinger and smile as Violet's gaze drifted past her finger to her own loose effects, pun not intended.

Sunny managed to suppress a laugh and the sentence, "I know who'd appreciate those" as her older sister snapped her head up to glare at her.

"Oh, just shut up, Sunny," she said, exasperated. Her hands automatically moved behind her back to tighten the strings.

At Sunny's exposed tongue she slowly allowed herself to smirk.

"'Izzy's a job', indeed. If only Aunt Josephine could hear you now."

She straightened her posture and exclaimed in a terribly exaggerated but hilarious way, "Grammar, dear Sunny. Mind your grammars."

Then they both giggled, causing more dust to float lazily upwards, the dust apparently ignoring the fact that two giggling girls rudely disturbed their rest. The partially ajar window allowed some breeze to float through, also causing the tip of Sunny's fair nose to change a particular red color. Amidst all the jokes, however, Violet did find time (she always did) to point out obvious facts with older sister mentality and common sense. So even if they did laugh, Violet always bore the burden of having to be the composed sister once everything naturally ended.

But she always found a nice, lenient way to do things.

Violet smiled, tendrils escaping from her ribbon as she smoothed her skirt down further.

"You're cold," she stated, quite mock stern. "Down you go, young lady."

She gestured to the door, tentatively lifting her brow in impatience. Sunny dragged her reluctant feet across the hard wood floor, pouting.

"And you're mean," she retorted, sending her tongue flying out of her mouth instantly. As she neared the doorway, however, she swiveled on one heel and turned her head to her sister. Her cheeks were tinted pink like her nose from the cold, but warmth radiated from her mischievous grin.

"Does that mean you're coming?" she asked, batting her eyelashes for innocent effect. Violet groaned as if completely annoyed, but her small smile also contradicted it.

"If I must," she drawled in an actor's voice, reminiscent of her short-lived child acting career, her eyes lighting up at Sunny's toothy smile.

Sunny imagined her sister, fourteen again, set in white lace and peering up with fathoms of unrecognizable brown from under a veil. Her sister's lips moved as her eyebrow mischievously arched in subtle nostalgia.

"If I absolutely must."

"I never should have come outside… Fucking freezing…"

Klaus Baudelaire grumbled to himself as his nephew slammed the ball clear across the frozen field. He supposed he was exaggerating a tad when he thought of the adjective 'frozen', but quickly banished that thought as yet another wind sliced its icy knife on the now numb surface of his cheek. He kept his hands in his trouser pockets for warmth, though highly doubting that such thin fabric that could barely hide an erection could possibly shield his hands from winter weather.

Not that he had such traitorous body afflictions, to be sure.

'Liar,' he instantly thought to himself as he trudged through minuscule snowdrifts, 'You fucking liar.'

The drawn-out late afternoon sky stroke chords in his chest strings, tightening them as he looked up, releasing them as he looked down. He literally found himself unable to breathe at times, not only in awe of the beauty before him, but of beauty, he realized sadly, after him.

The dreams plagued him consistently.

A rude awakening, if one might be so freaking poetic. He often woke up, drenched in sweat and bone hard, thrusting his pelvis up to the shadows that lurked even during the night. The mere memory of her, of her smooth skin flushing the saccharine colors of sunset, of the breath she exhaled, a little bit of her escaping into the warm recesses of his mouth: her sadness, reminiscent of tangy Italian sauce and his name, Klaus Klaus Klaus, like he wasn't digging his nails into her back and thrusting harder and harder and harder.

He could not even try to pinpoint the exact nature of his desire, of his need. There were torn pages, tons of stacked books hidden in his roughly constructed library, one book in particular that tried to define the circumstances surrounding his need, but usually it was all to no avail.

He did not want to acknowledge what Isadora's glances accused him of. He ignored all the accusing three letter words, all coincidentally grouped in many different texts, from R: Religious suppositions to the Ms: Medical studies. The words, like his dreams, plagued him day and night and even he could see the hypocrisy and tragic humor in his situation.

Books, he realized sardonically, his ultimate love and ultimate downfall.

Tragedy, Violet would say, that being one of her favorite words, What an unfortunate tragedy.

"Did you see that, Uncle Klaus? It went waaaaay over there!"

Klaus peered through the skeleton bodies of the patch of trees lining the yard's outskirts, only to see his nephew fearlessly plowing beyond the trees. Beyond the trees lay the backyard, and in all its uprooted and frost rotted glory, the stagnant mud puddle, now biding time in a new form of brown ice.

Here the flat ground ended and the rocky terrain abruptly started. To the west of the mud puddle protruded the spiky hats of mountains, only visible on clear summer days, specifically when the temperature hits slightly above average and the oceans, to the east, are calm and when no whitecaps are visibly seen. The mountains, as he often mused to himself, decided when they wanted to be seen and when they couldn't be bothered.

'Spoiled bastards,' he always thought.

"Shoot!"

James' voice echoed in its child-like way from beyond the bushes and the cold. "Uncle Klaus? Can you please come?"

His mouth barely moved, cumulus puffs of exhalation his only physical evidence of speech.

"Sure, kid, I'm coming." He reluctantly lifted his boots in the accustomed manner of walking. The iced ground seemed sticky beneath his practical combat boots. Klaus inhaled in the lower temperature through his nostrils, bubbles of frost erupting in his lungs like some type of menthol ecstatic.

The boy knelt, a few inches and less, away from Klaus' approaching figure.

So fragile, Klaus noted. The young boy looked just about to take flight and vanish into a dozen paper napkins, aimless pieces floating around in the blueberry sky. The curve of his cheek, the puckered dimple just diagonally above the corner of his mouth…everything, every bone structure, every subdued molecule reeked of Violet and, he supposed, hollowed stings following the train of thought, of him.

And what a fantastic uncle he turned out to be.

The boy suddenly turned his head, oblivious to his uncle's morbid fascination. He continued smiling, even in the thickening mist. Klaus felt the knife twist further into his gut.

And then he probably felt something akin to sadness, staring into the crown of the boy's hair. But he didn't really dwell on it.

"Uncle Klaus, look what I found! I think it's one of those arrowhead things from that one book!"

He gestured merrily to the half-covered stone in the frost and leaves. Klaus, in turn, gingerly picked it up with his nimble fingers, examining its sides and polished waves in the waning sunlight.

The tip was pointed, and it was shaped like a tiny spade from those decks of cards.

"An arrowhead, hmm?"

Light glinted off of it like a beacon in a desolated lake. The edges were dull but serrated, and the tiny thing hardly fit on the tip of his thumb. Klaus tossed it several times in the air before catching it mid-flight, and with a grin, offered the arrowhead to James.

James smiled back, his cheeks doughy gobs of glee, and snatched the thing from his uncle. Klaus stood up from his crouching position and ruffled his nephew's dark hair.

"It's an arrowhead," he confirmed, nodding his head seriously, "And you must treat it like one."

James tilted his head quizzically. "How do you treat it like an arrowhead?"

"Throw it to me."

James obeyed, extending his arm back and releasing the tiny stone from his palm. It pivoted and spiraled awkwardly in the winter atmosphere, and James stared upwards at the seemingly endless sky. It looked to him that the arrowhead would almost touch the fading sun, even eclipse it, perhaps, by the suggestion of it. As a result of flying it up into the air, all the light bounced off its shiny surface and proceeded to scatter to the environment around, from the glints of frost lining the weeds to the mirror-like leather coverings of their boots.

It seemed to James that the world had transformed into his mother's kaleidoscope, all stars and falling light. It seemed to Klaus (and even though as a boy he had witnessed this sort of thing so many times) the same, with the exception of the whole kaleidoscope and stars bit.

Seeing the rush of emotions flit across James' awed face, Klaus felt the guilt he experienced earlier fade away, like a trick of the light, and into the frost lining the weeds.

Klaus then reached out and expertly caught the spinning arrowhead. It landed flat on the skin of his tough palm, the tip pointing coincidentally towards his wrist.

At James' disappointed face, he laughed, the most genuine and heartfelt laugh he had ever heard himself do for the longest time. It surprised him, but brightened his nephew. Klaus peered at him through soft eyes and hard lenses, observing the strange boy before him.

He smiled.

"Catch," he said, and threw the arrowhead toward James.

They played that game for an hour or two and until the night sky overwhelmed the afternoon, into some sort of intricate mix of evening and daytime. Klaus spoke hesitantly first.

"All right, James. Time to head inside." He laughed as the boy pouted.

"Time to head inside, come on," he shouted, the corners of his mouth stretching upwards so hard that his jaw hurt. "And don't make too much of a fuss."

James crossed his arms and continued pouting.

"Well, at least make an effort!"

James continued to pout.

"Any effort!" Klaus ran a hand through his hair, sighing. He looked at James incredulously.

"You really are like your mother, aren't you? Insolent little-"

"Baudebrat?"

Violet walked slowly toward them, her eyes at the ground as she dodged the wet and partially frozen blades of grass. The hem of her dress grazed the tops of her knees, and the bare skin between her boots and her dress softly peeked out from between the two fabric comparisons. His eyes drifted up to the top of her corset in an unconscious action only to find her right hand pressed against what would have been exposed to her brother…what he had ran his lips over, the delicate skin. He traveled further up with his eyes, and was startled to see her own eyes following his ascent up her body.

The winter wind spiraled around her body, around his body, and the quiet world, Klaus and Violet both thought, started up its music again.

She instantly regretted arriving there, but stopped short as she saw the reason and her eyes grew soft again.

She was suddenly attacked by two small arms encircling the bare skin of her knees, his head nuzzling her dressed thighs, and Klaus could see her smile, if only for a moment.

"Baby," she whispered, her left hand stroking her son's head. He responded to her caress by staring up at her. His sharp teeth gleamed in the soft evening light.

"Will you stay with me and Uncle Klaus?" The arms around her legs constricted tighter. "Please?" he asked, burying his face into her dress.

Violet bent down slightly and cupped her son's cheek in her palm. Klaus' shivered, unsure of everything and anything but the fact that he was just watching Violet become an older sister and a mother again.

"For a little while, my darling," she cooed after a silence. Klaus warily watched her as if she were some sort of snake specimen in their late Uncle Monty's research facilities.

She still hadn't forgiven him yet, and perhaps he knew already that she still hadn't forgiven herself either.

But as he watched her dress and familiar ribbon float around the evening's beginning breeze, he couldn't help not thinking for once. Violet had been staring either at her son or straight outwards into the horizon. The silence lingered on for a few minutes until James spoke.

"We found an arrowhead," he exclaimed happily.

"Really?" Violet feigned enthusiasm and smiled. "What color was it?"

"Brown," Klaus interjected.

The sky above them, like the world, continuously moved as the colors started to fade into a deeper blue.