A/N : Bragation : (Je réponds en anglais, histoire de pas trop dénoter) Thank you so much! It's so incredibly nice to read something like this. I actually wrote it in French first, but thought that I would be a tad more attractive if I translated it. Turns out my first review is from a fellow French and in French, sweet irony. In any case, I'm really happy you got my point. The whole story really revolves around nobility and villainy, at least Cassandre's perception of the two values, and her rather complicate story with both of them. I hope you'll enjoy what follows, and have a good reading!

The world was never quiet

Lie 4 : I won't become one of them.

The first times of my father's search were as static as its lasts months were hectic. I was supposed to be dead, Jacques wasn't supposed to be investigating anything, and we were completely paralyzed. We spent more time waiting for the Volunteer Factual Dispatches than we spent working to find my father, and it grated on my nerves.

That being said, I must admit that my notebook quickly got filled with more clues than beginnings of novels that wouldn't know any follow-up – I was reading through them, the other day, and realized I had forgotten half of them. It wasn't for lack of writing, but I couldn't focus on one single idea. They rushed in my mind at the same speed as my anxieties.

And I watched days, weeks flying without any progress, without any news. All I saw was Jacques talking to the phone, coming and going, offering a smile or a few words when he had the time, all that over and over again in random order. I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown when he came back with the look of someone who at last found something. But I wasn't in the mood of listening: I was fingering the fountain pen I borrowed him.

"Cassandre I have news about your father," he told me with such enthusiasm that I doubted it was even him. "The man with a beard but no hair vanished, but his fellows were seen in the hinterlands.

- Great. Always wanted to see the hinterlands.

- Wait, I'm not done." He was confusing my complete lack of spring for unbounded impatience. "Your father didn't follow them, their convoy was stopped by Volunteers. He's been transferred to someone else and I think I know who this someone is."

He handed me a picture. I barely looked at it. He already did the same things a few times: blurry pictures, expanded until it was only dots and pixels, purportedly representing my father. But every each times something was wrong. A mole, a moustache, a bowler hat – my father hated bowler hats and never wore any, probably because of some VFD codes, a gait or some manners that just didn't fit him.

"Look!

- I've had enough of your false hopes, Jacques," I sighed, weary to the bones. "Every times you think you found something big, it's nothing but a dead-end.

- Not this time, I'm sure of that. I took into account everything you said and I'm…

- And what? Even if it's true and you indeed found my father, what are we going to do?" I raised my eyes to him. I was cruel, unfairly cruel. But I needed to. "Stay here and hope that one of your friends will find him of us? That's not what you promised me."

Well, he didn't exactly promise me anything. But when I met him, I imagined myself living some sort adventure, something worthy of a book, something grand. It wasn't even only about my father – it was about what my life had turned to. I was trapped. Some evenings, I even wished I'd stayed in those flames he took me from, if I were to live like this.

And I don't delude myself: I'm not altruistic. I'm not really empathic and I never rush to help people. My father said he would find me, and he still hadn't. Without me realizing it and without me wanting it, I had started to resent this man who gave me his genetic pool but of whom I knew nothing. Later on, he would blame me for my propensity to lie and deceive, but he still was the first to lie and deceive me my whole life.

Jacques looked at me with incredulous eyes, as if he couldn't understand how a young girl like could be anything but ecstatic when given the opportunity to find her father. He still held the photograph, as if he still hoped I would do as if I said nothing. I didn't.

"Cassandre… Things are…

- Complicated. I know that," I retorted, shaking my head. "But there's no way I stay here any longer. You go out, you meet people. Why wouldn't I do the same?

- You're dead." His voice was soft. He was trying not to rush me. "You can't be seen.

- Then disguise me. My father's notebook talks about disguises."

His look darkened and he sighed. A tired sigh, the kind you breathe when you know you've lost but still hope to find a way out. Jacques knew he couldn't stop me from doing what I wanted. And I knew he wasn't even going to try.

It was a rather fascinating sight to watch Jacques going from the fiercest determination to the most tired weariness, as if he suddenly got emptied of energy and strength to fight with me, against me, against the world. He was en extraordinary man, a man with a noble heart and even nobler intentions, but he was almost literally crushed by the world. By VFD. By me, at some point – I finished him off. Not a day goes by when I do not remember the way he looked at me, the way he had to smile without moving his lips. His eyes did the talking. When I close mine, I can see them. And it's as sweet as painful – as beautiful as it is terrifying.

"The Volunteers learn to dress up and pose as someone else for years," he tried. "You're not trained.

- Then train me. Do it quicker, I'm sure I can foul this…" I grabbed the picture and admired it. "Count Olaf.

- Olaf is a villain of the worst kind. He's not some foul following the Arsonists, and he knows how to dress up better than anyone.

- I count on you for teaching me how to dress up better than he does."

I discovered only later that it was this exact sentence that convinced him to help me. Rather, the determination I had put inside. But all that mattered was that he nodded and gestured me to follow him in the room he used as a storage place. There was a trunk amongst his suitcases, and I wasn't allowed to touch it. When he opened it, I realized why: it was full of costumes, sundry disguises, make up and blushes of weird colours. They were also hairpieces, a wooden leg, wax and tweezers, everything you would need to disguise the worst wolf into the softer lamb – or softer idiot.

He explained to me the basis of VFD disguises, namely three steps. Put make up on or warp your face, in a word, make yourself unrecognizable, never use the same disguise twice and alter or modify your voice. I deduced a fourth one from my experience with Volunteers and Arsonists, that is the most grotesque or pitiful the disguise, the better. As far as I'm concerned, I never managed to apply this rule correctly.

Anyway. He gave me piles of clothes that apparently used to belong to his sister, but were supposed to fit me. In the list of Jacques' various talents, his eye was probably the most important and it included his aesthetic eye. He gave me a burgundy suit, oval glasses without correction and put a platinum blond wig on my head. He taught me, while he did it, to put make up so that I looked ten years older, and more importantly, so that I no longer looked like my father.

Once my transformation done, I wasn't Cassandre Dupin anymore but Andrea Creta, a shady journalist of twenty-five seeking money and adventure from the man Jacques called Count Olaf.

"Don't talk about VFD," he recommended as I was doing my make up for the firth time. "Don't talk about the sugar bowl, your house's fire and don't…

- Jacques, I get it. I don't talk about anything that could make him suspicious." I sighed. "How am I supposed to get information about my father if I can't even talk about it?

- Spy on him. If you do what he asks, he'll lower his guard and will talk more freely. He's an infamous alcoholic, just get him…"

He bluntly stopped, doubtful. Disturbed. Back then it greatly annoyed me. Jacques' doubt regarding my abilities hurt me and got under my skin – I wasn't a child, I didn't need to be protected. But I was a child and I needed to be protected. Do you know any kid of nineteen that would agree, though?

"Cassandre, I don't know. I really don't. You're young, your father…

- My father has been abducted," I retorted. "His opinion does not matter.

- It does. Your father wouldn't want you to take such risks to find him. You don't know who you're talking about.

- Because you know? If you did, you would have found my father."

He shook his head and accepted his defeat. Again. I was unfair, I was cruel but that's all I was able to be. I needed to act and he didn't want to let me. He could just mind his own business, I didn't ask anything from him. Nothing. At all.

If anyone had told me that Jacques would soon become the only man in my life – well, the only one other than my father, I would have died laughing. He was but an adult unable to do anything and unwilling to see what I could do. People change. And I wasn't, and still am not, an exception to this rule. Quite the contrary.

"Promise me something, Cassandre.

- Name it," I whined. "As long as I can go.

- Don't let him woo you. Others than you got their fingers burnt.

- Jacques…

- Promise me."

Ha, all these promises I made. I was piling them, not realizing that I wouldn't be able to keep so many conflicting promises. I couldn't save my father, the Baudelaire, make sure they were fine, protect the sugar bowl and still be a naïve and innocent child all at once. Can you blame a child of nineteen for believing she would never change? So I promised, because I didn't have the choice, because I didn't understand the scope of this promise and maybe mainly because I was writhing in anticipation.

"I promise I won't become one of them. Satisfied?

- As long as you keep this promise," he sighed with a distant voice. "Fine. I get it, you want to go. Be careful. Leave me notes in one those dead drops."

He handed me a list of places that I stuffed in my notebook without reading it. He smiled and, quite clumsily, hugged me, perhaps more for himself than for me. I put a hand on his shoulder and let him do it, more because I had to than by will. I wanted to go and if it meant handling a worried guy's guilt, so be it.

When he released me, he wished me luck and tell me where I was supposed to go. He called a taxi and asked him to wait around the nearest park and finally let me go. I waved at him, threw my back on my shoulder and left smiling. God, how stupid I was. I didn't have the slightest idea I had just step on a slippery slope I would never be able to leave. Or climb back.