A/N : Sorry for my late update, with Christmas and my exams I completely forgot to even long on my account. In any case, I hope your holidays are going well and I wish you a very happy new year!

The world was never quiet

Lie 14 : You're really bad at this game

I don't know how many days passed before I was able to sit alone. Lemony drove the whole day while I was comatose. My wound was too deep for me to switch from lying to siting, or, even worse, standing, alone. I have to admit Lemony Snicket was an exceptional carer. I didn't have to ask for his help – I wouldn't have asked anyway, better be dead than pitiful. He just opened the car's door and bended so that I could cling onto his shoulder.

Even when I managed to move without need of his help or support, I still was too weak to wander in the hinterlands, since that's roughly where we were. He told me the Baudelaire had somehow followed Olaf. Caligari Carnival. That's where they went. Some sort of monster circus lost in the middle of nowhere. Lemony went there almost everyday. He watched over the Baudelaire – and Olaf, obviously.

His car ended up in what looked like a mountain refuge. Without the mountain, of course. But it had every characteristics of a mountain refuge… Without the mountain. There were cooking devices, a bathroom, beds, but we were too careful to sleep in such a poorly secured place. As if a car was secure, I know.

I hadn't showered for a while – an eternity to me. Even if I cleaned my wound every day and replace the bandages at the same time, I felt dirty. I needed a shower. More exactly, I had to shower. Say what you want, that I was stupid to put myself under a jet of water even though I had a barely closed up wound on my stomach, that I should have waited for my not-so-guardian-nor-so-angel to come back. I don't care – there is much worse you can say about me anyway. The fact remains that I grabbed a "clean" towel in the boot and went to the refuge. I held onto everything I would, from furniture to wall, including doors.

You don't need to know every details of my undressing, you know the basics. The small broken mirror of the bathroom, when I turned to him, reflected something I would've preferred not to see. I hadn't seen my face in a great while. I never had time to waste looking at myself with Jacques and, since Jacques… Well, let's say I hadn't come across any real bathroom.

Before it all begun, this awful series of awfulness, I remember I was a pretty girl. That's what people said, anyway. A pretty girl of eighteen, her whole life ahead of her. An angel face. Big eyes, big light purple eyes, though it was a faded purple, almost grey. Long brown hair, a bit ashy too. But a smile, a huge smile, which made up for the lack of vivid colours on this lovely face.

What I saw in front of me wasn't a lovely face. It wasn't lovely at all – there wasn't anything lovely in it. Eyes still big, but ate up by even bigger dark circles. Cheeks grown hollow with fatigue and weariness. Protruding cheekbones. Dry, hideous lips. And what used to be a harmonious body now looked too thin, almost grotesque. Not to mention the scars that covered a skin that should have been smooth. I wasn't even truly sure it was me, in this mirror. But after all, flesh eventually shows the wickedness inside.

For lack of understanding anything of this reflection, I turned away and entered the shower. I don't know what happened in this shower, if it was the hot water, this damned reflection or if my conscience finally slapped me in the face like a broken rubber band. All I know is that it took a few minutes for me to sit against the wall and cry. As if I'd never stop. As if it was the last thing I would ever do – cry, for everything I didn't have the time, the right of the strength to cry for.

Water still ran on my hair. It dangled on each sides of my life and almost made me believe it was only water on my face. I was cold but as often happens, it wasn't the air around me that was cold. Huddle up in a corner, I felt my wound screaming its pain – I would have screamed in pain if I hadn't been already sobbing like a lost girl. That I was. That I still am. What I'd seen, permitted, what I was suddenly appeared to me and I couldn't accept it.

I said countless of times in this tale that I didn't know how, why or when some events unfolded. Well, I don't know why Lemony came back early. And I don't know how he knew I was in the bathroom. I never asked – it didn't sound important. I didn't hear him enter, and I didn't hear him opening the shower's door either. I didn't see anything. My vision was blurry, dark. I don't even know if I felt anything but this horrible, terrible hollowness. And cold.

He sat next to me, under the running water. He had already taken away his pants and jumper. His shirt got soaked almost immediately but he didn't say anything for a long, very long moment. He didn't even look at me. He was looking at the void in front of us. Void made of a tiled wall, immensely and sadly white. And while he was quiet, so completely quiet and so completely motionless, my shoulders jolted at the pace of my sobs and I wanted to scream. My mind screamed. It revolved, for the first time since the beginning of these horrors. I was blinded by the urgency of the situation. I was running and never stopping, like my father told me to. And now I had nothing to run after, now I'd stopped, I was recovering my eyesight. And it was painful, so goddamned painful.

"You father was a rigorous man," he finally said with a distant voice. "Word which here means that he was strict about every aspects of his life. He was strict about VFD's precepts. He was strict about our methods. He was strict about the schism. He was strict enough to kill your mother, because she strictly went too far. He was strict enough, I believe, to disown you because you had strictly overstepped the strict limits of his strict morality."

My hiccoughs didn't stop. Not just yet. But my mind, still cold and terrifying, focused on Lemony's soothing voice. I slowly loosened my arms' grip around my legs. But I didn't calm down. I didn't understand where he was going – not just yet. It an actor's problem. They always use convoluted ways to reach a very simple end. And as a very complicated man, Lemony was trying to reach the very simple end of comforting me. God, how strange it sounds. How strange it looks, written on this piece of paper. How strange it is to imagine Lemony Snicket's convoluted mind fully focused on the odd task of comforting a quasi-stranger. A naked quasi-stranger under a burning shower in a mountain refuge that'd lost its mountain.

"My brother," he continued with the same voice. "Was a noble heart. And like every noble hearts, he never understood how much the darkness of this world could taint even the purest hearts. Maybe he didn't want to understand it. We separated in the same circumstances or so as you. Except I was falsely accused.

- Why… Why are you…

- My brother was looking for me. You knew that. He was looking for me because he wanted to understand, to try to understand. He would have done the same with you, given the time.

- Why do you say that?"

I turned my head, this time. I looked pitiful, drenched and probably reddened by the heat and my tears, hair dripping like a mop on my hollow cheeks, my dark circles and my scars. He turned his head too and stared at me for a long, long time. I didn't understand. I didn't understand why he tried to find me excuse for having caused two noble hearts' death, one of them being his brother. His own brother! It didn't make any sense. I couldn't give it any sense.

But I wasn't sobbing anymore. My shoulders still jolted a bit, tears still ran across my face, but I wasn't in a quasi-hysterical state anymore. His plan was working, even if I didn't know it yet. My despair was turning into frustration of not knowing what he was doing.

"Are… Really trying…

- I'm not absolving you from everything you did," he cut, frowning. "You killed a man, burnt a building and let a hospital turn to ashes. You helped a criminal getting away with every villainy he committed. And you didn't save my brother.

- Now I feel much better," I let out with a broken voice. "You're really bad at this game.

- But your father wasn't a perfect man. My brother wasn't either. Their death didn't make them better than they were. Your father is still a stubborn and dangerously strict man. My brother is still a stupidly naïve and noble man. You didn't change anything about that."

It didn't make any sense. I don't think it was supposed to make any, in fact. But I understood what he meant because he wasn't bad at this game. He knew what he was saying and I understood him… Well. What I have done was vile. But I never ceased, since the very beginning, to put every people I'd destroyed on a pedestal. And I got myself deeper in the deepest abyss there was, the abyss where those who slayed angels were supposed to be. But they were no angels. My father had rejected me after everything I'd done to save him. Jacques refused to listen to me.

Jacques… Not a single day goes by when I do not regret. Regret what? Everything, absolutely everything. I can't stop repeating those moments I lived with him, trying to find the exact moment where I could have chosen differently, where a step aside would have changed everything. And I know where this step was. I insisted. I stormed. I screamed. I got what I wanted: being involved in this godforsaken organization that is VFD. And I paid the higher price – he paid the higher price. And I know, I know now, that the man I'll forever love is no longer Jacques Snicket, the investigator who got me out of my house's ashes. I changed him, my mind changed him, in a far better man than me, far batter than himself. Because it was easier to see him as a good man, and I as a bad woman. If it wasn't the case, why did he reject me?

"He wouldn't have forgiven me.

- Given the time, he would have begged for your forgiveness." He shook his head, disillusioned. Disillusioned and sad, as if childhood memories suddenly came back to his mind. "He would have blamed himself for what he did to you, so much he would have spent his life looking for you. His death does not change what he did. He refused to let you help him.

- I have blood on my hands…

- We all have. He had, every self-proclaimed noble hearts of VDF have because they didn't do anything. As for me…"

As for him, even if he didn't have blood on his hands as literally as I did, he spelt some. Indirectly, perhaps. But still it was blood. And it didn't wash away. He didn't continue, though. His kind of silence, if you don't know yet, seldom needs to be explained.

I sighed. I was still crying, but my head felt comfortably numb. Silent. I only realized water was still running when he stopped it. And I only heard drips falling on the tiles, plic, ploc, and his breathing. I closed my eyes and leaned my head on his shoulder. He didn't move for a while, then he just put his arm around my shoulder. His drenched shirt stuck on his chest and looked plasticized. We stayed like this for very, very long minutes that ended up being tens, dozens of minutes. He didn't say anything. Neither did I. All I knew was that it felt like the curtain had fallen again and I was blinded. And it felt good.

I break this story's temporality way too much, but it's a suitable time to tell you something. I'm asking you to accept a fast-forward that brings us almost a year afterward. You'll understand why I ask you this mental effort. Almost a year, then, in a motel on the edge of the city.

I never counted the days. I never marked the anniversary – a week, a month, six months. But I don't know why, this night, I woke up and I knew. It'd been a year to the day since Jacques' death. My eyes wide opened, I stare at the void, the night all around me and I stood up. I walked to the kitchen, filled a tall glass with whisky and drank it. Silently. And I cried. I do cry a lot in this part, I know – you see the point now? I don't have to write chapters and chapters of whining. Anyway. I cried. Silently, at least that's what I think. Light woke up Lemony and drew his attention. At least that's what I believe.

What a scene he came across, when he entered the kitchen. It was in every respect worthy of the one he came across, in the bathroom. Cassandre Dupin, licensed arsonist (even more licensed than back in the bathroom) and occasional murderer (technically condemned for it), a glass that used to be full to the brim with alcohol in the hand, tears disforming my face, naked under one of his shirts (my nakedness is turning into a gimmick, isn't it?). But it didn't mean much, given how long it looked on me. He took my glass and put it on the counter. He didn't ask why. He already knew. Didn't he?

He stayed there in silence, close, and watched me cry. I always managed to never have him see me cry until then. But I didn't care if he was there. I didn't care if he saw me. It physically hurt, just like it felt almost physically cold under this goddamned shower. It felt like my whole body was burning, twisting, screaming when it obviously was as healthy as can be. Contrary to my mind. As if I finally got a grasp of my situation but, yet again, I couldn't really. I still can't. When my sobs calmed down, Lemony handed me a cigarette. We smoked, still silent, until my broken voice ripped the silence apart.

"Does it hurt? Do you miss her this bad?

- Sometimes I do.

- Why is it so painful? It's been so long, I already forget him…

- Because you loved him. And I loved her," he smiled. One of those ghostly and rare smiles Lemony seldom granted me. "And because they're gone."

Gone. This word is enough to make me cry, even now, even as I'm writing by a candle that soon will be gone too, hidden in an old closet in an old hotel burnt a few months ago. Especially now, in fact. I nodded and finished my cigarette. So did he. I didn't wait for me to run away – I took shelter against him, in his arms. I didn't cry. I just held myself against him, and he held me against him in return.

This chapter is already sappy enough, but I will make no bones about it: I know how lucky I am to have you, Lemony. This is the point of this fast-forward. I know I would be dead without you. Somehow. And even if it's not love between us, I don't know how to say it differently. I love you. Since the very beginning – the bathroom, perhaps. Not like Jacques. Not like Beatrice. I love you like a castaway loves the fisherman who saved him from a likely drowning. I love you like someone who fears darkness loves the light. I love you like a mad woman loves he who can appease her, and that's what I am. And it hurts. But it keeps me alive. Much like this evening when you kept me alive.

"I wished I never met him. I wish I could forget him.

- I know.

- Do something," I begged. "Please, do something.

- There's nothing to be done, Cassandre."

And he softly caressed my hair, softly cradled me, softy kissed me and softly took me back to bed. He put my head on his shoulder and his hand on my waist and waited for me to fall asleep. He stayed up all night, made sure I wasn't going to swallow some poison or razor. And I fell asleep in his arms at daybreak, still curled up against him.

Haaa Cassandre Dupin, this woman who keeps on saying she's still madly in love with Jacques Snicket and ends up in his brother's arms. Judge me, others did. I judge myself everyday. But here is what I digressed: the bathroom episode set off a series of events that led to this precise moment, even if it didn't lead to such intimacy since he only wrapped me in a towel and redid my bandages. Before that, Lemony was a stranger to me. A vaguely scornful stranger, the living proof I had sunken extremely low (he was a fugitive after all). Some ally, at most. He changed things in his clumsy manner, with his soaked shirt and his complicated speeches. He became some sort of a reflection of myself. Something that made up for the dead thing I found when I looked at myself. Something that closes my eyes when I can't look. I'm not saying it's brave. But it is what it is.

Anyway. When I woke up, I wasn't in his arms anymore. He was gone – he often leaves in the middle of the night. On his stead, on the pillow, I found a piece of paper and, on this piece of paper, his muddled and packed in writing.

"We are ships without tillers, sailing boats without sails caught in the storm.

We sail side-by-side, rim-by-rim, we have the same destination,

But never quite the same path."

And he was right. Like always.