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In another world, there’s still the fall and the pit and the lions. There’s still blood, she still screams, there’s no reason to think she isn’t doomed.
But there’s a trap door nestled in the side of the pit – there had to be a way to contain the lions, and get them in, after all.
Word has travelled differently, efficiently, and a message has been passed on, so when Olivia falls, she has a reason to fight, and to survive, and she does, somehow.
---
Jacquelyn feels a tug against the door, pulls it open, flings scraps of fabric and raw meat through before slamming it shut. Olivia is covered in blood and barely able to stand – not unexpected. So she has to get her to the getaway vehicle when she’s not only terrified and in shock, she is also bleeding and in pain.
But she does. They get to the car, though there’s only so much that the VFD first aid kid that fits under a seat can do, especially when you need to be gone, so there’s a painkiller and something to staunch the worst of the bleeding, and not a sedative because the quiet moans of pain at least tell her that Olivia is still alive when she has no other way in that moment to tell.
They drive, and find the rendezvous point, Kit’s taxi standing out uncomfortably bright on the horizon. Kit torches Jacquelyn’s getaway car; Jacquelyn disinfects the worst of the wounds and places butterfly sutures in the hope it’ll stop anything from getting worse.
Kit drives, fast enough that it would be dangerous were they not on an endless stretch of empty road. Jacquelyn sits in the back, Olivia’s head in her lap, watching the burning carnival in the far-off horizon behind them as she holds a towel against the bite in Olivia’s shoulder. Olivia is half asleep, though unsurprisingly restless; it takes Jacquelyn a while to realise she’s been stroking her hair with her free hand.
It’s late at night when they arrive – a squat wooden cabin in the middle of a clearing in a forest, the path towards it narrow and winding. Beyond the trees, there’s ocean, but nobody would notice; they’re so deep within the trees that it may as well not be there.
There’s more first aid equipment than just a collection of sticking plasters and disinfectant wipes in the safehouse, so Kit finds that while Jacquelyn helps Olivia into a position that isn’t too uncomfortable, and which also actually facilitates wound cleaning.
In the half-dark of the taxi, Jacquelyn had only been able to do so much; under the lamp, she can actually see the extent of the damage. Lots of the scratches are reasonably shallow – lions starved to the point of malnutrition may be angry, but they are weaker, too. Some have clotted over. But there are deeper punctures from their claws at the ends of most of them, and the butterfly sutures are doing very little to help.
However, Jacquelyn’s major concern is the bite in Olivia’s shoulder. It isn’t deep, by some miracle, but it has done more than enough damage without the depth, with gaping punctures and missing skin. It needs stitches, and it needs to stop bleeding; had it been any closer to her neck, she may not have made it this far.
All throughout her examination, Olivia does not say a word.
Kit returns with a larger medical kit in one hand and a bottle of whiskey in the other. Jacquelyn isn’t shocked that that is as close as the safehouse gets to anaesthetic – she knows that hoping for more would have been in vain.
This time, the cleaning and disinfecting is far more methodical, without the pressure of being in a moving car in the half dark. There are eye drops as well, and Olivia takes out the unnatural yellow contacts before Kit gives her a very full glass of the whiskey.
When Kit pulls out a needle and thread, Olivia downs the rest of it, and quietly asks for another before they start.
In any other situation, it would almost look intimate. Jacquelyn sits facing Olivia, close enough to hold her against her chest, with Kit sat behind Olivia. Of course, Jacquelyn is there as less of a comfort and more of a solid barrier, holding Olivia still as Kit brandishes a needle.
Most of the wounds are small, only requiring a couple of stitches to hold them together. The bite in her shoulder and a particularly deep pair of claw marks just below her ribs require more; Kit works quickly and neatly, but it doesn’t make it hurt less. however, Olivia barely moves – after the first couple of stitches, she’s nearly silent, though Jacquelyn can feel her crying, her head cradled against Jacquelyn’s shoulder and neck. She runs her hand down her back, presses kisses to her hair – something in her gut tells her that it’s helping.
And when Kit suggests that one of them stays with her overnight, just in case she wakes up, it feels right to stay.
---
Olivia wakes the next morning in more pain than she can ever recall experiencing.
She’s in a bed in a room she’s never seen before, but the curtains are closed so she can’t see much of it. Next to her is a blonde woman, asleep on top of the blankets.
It comes back – Jacquelyn, the secretary at the bank who knew too much, whose face she has seen more than would have once made sense. Who was the other side of the trap door in the pit, who must have been on the other side of the message of what to do should the worst happen. Though beyond that it’s fuzzy, blurred over blood red in her mind’s eye.
She’s dehydrated, and her head is throbbing, though it’s hardly the only part of her in pain. There’s a dull ache in her left knee, and a line of fire from her right shoulder down and across her torso. Despite this, she tries to readjust – it hurts, it’s futile, and Jacquelyn’s eyes dart open. She doesn’t have a chance to say anything before Jacquelyn is upright and fiddling with something on the bedside table. It’s water, and a blister of pills next to it.
She doesn’t pose it as a question – Olivia is getting no say in this matter – and instead is quietly murmuring you’ll be fine and lean up a little as she adjusts Olivia to lean back into the pillows. Then she passes her two of the pills – it’s just ibuprofen – and waits for Olivia’s vague cue to pass her the water. She swallows the pills, finishes the water as she realises how thirsty she is, and tries to readjust, tries to ignore the pain just for the few seconds it takes to lay down a little more.
And then Jacquelyn reaches over, and gently smooths Olivia’s hair back, out of the way of her now-closed eyes.
---
She sleeps for a while longer, and when she wakes, the curtains are open, and Jacquelyn is gone. She’s only been awake a moment when she sees Kit walk past and peer in – as though she’s been doing it all morning. Olivia realises that she probably has been.
She walks in, perches on the edge of the bed, and immediately reaches for the bandages on Olivia’s shoulder. Then she runs her fingers over the wound, seemingly content, before shifting the blanket to check on the rest of them.
If she twists her neck, Olivia can see a little of the damage – red scratches and deep bruises mottled purple and crimson. There are patches of stitches being revealed every time Kit peels back another bloodied bandage, checking the wounds before sticking down fresh bandages.
“Where else hurts?”
It would be easier to list off where didn’t hurt, but it’s her left leg that seems to stand out the most. She thinks she must have landed on it when she fell – but it isn’t as badly bruised as she expected, with only a few light scratches as compared to the dark red masses crossing her body, and Kit seems satisfied that it’s a sprained knee at worst. The fact that her leg isn’t sitting at an unnatural angle or covered in bandages makes Olivia think that it may not have been a priority last night, but she can’t recall much in her exhausted haze, so isn’t entirely sure.
She doesn’t get a chance to say anything before Kit disappears – but she returns within the minute holding a set of pyjamas, and helps her into them, helps her to walk into the living area without putting too much weight on her knee. There are three couches surrounding a low coffee table, so Kit guides her to one, helps her to position herself somewhat comfortably with the cushions.
There are papers covering the coffee table – from what Olivia can see, they’re mostly maps and architectural sketches, with a few lists. VFD eyes glare from the corners of the pages. She’ll need a new set of glasses before she can have a better look – hers were in Madame Lulu’s tent, underneath costume skirts in a trunk.
She’s distracted from the thoughts of the tent and the Baudelaires when Jacquelyn comes in and passes her a cup of tea. It’s strong, with far less sugar than she would have added, but it’s definitely all that she can stomach right now.
Jacquelyn notices her staring. “We think we know where Count Olaf is headed next.”
He has the children, she explains; the carnival was burnt to ashes, but the children were taken. She doesn’t say how she knows, or how it happened. As far as Olaf or anybody else there was concerned, Olivia was dead – they’d seen her fall in, and though she hadn’t noticed, Jacquelyn had thrown in a diversion. The wig, some scraps of fabric, chunks of raw meat. Anybody watching that would assume Olivia’s escape had failed. Had she had a stomach for food at the start of the conversation, she’d have lost it at that.
“We have a contact, but the actual communication is intermittent at best. We can try to guess Count Olaf’s plans, but you know how he can be. So this—” Jacquelyn gestures at the papers— “is all we can do for the moment.”
So they talk through what they know – having spent her time at the carnival uncomfortably close to Olaf and his associates, Olivia is able to fill in a couple of recent gaps. She assumes that the performers had joined them. They had seemed friendly, but all too easy to manipulate, and nobody had noticed them flee.
It’s been only a few hours since Kit checked over the collection of stitches and scratches covering her torso, but while Olivia speaks, Jacquelyn sits beside her with more disinfectant and fresh bandages.
Everything seems to have finally stopped bleeding, and Jacquelyn doesn’t say that there’s anything of concern, there’s nothing weeping from between the thick black stitches. The bruises are likely to get worse before they get better, but all things considered, she’s apparently doing well. The bandages are replaced again, and so is her pyjama shirt – a feat easier said than done, as her right shoulder is unsurprisingly in a lot of pain still.
She eats some toast, and manages to move a little, but it isn’t long after dark that Olivia finds herself drifting off on the couch. She goes back to bed, falls asleep laying on her side, with her right arm draped over a pillow to keep herself from rolling. And she sleeps solidly, and deeply, and when she wakes in the morning to see Jacquelyn asleep next to her, she can’t ignore the rush of warmth that courses through her.
---
It’s another three days before they hear anything.
Kit manages to find a pair of glasses that fit Olivia’s prescription, so she finds herself examining old books about former VFD headquarters, seeing if there is anything they may have repeated – hidden rooms and passageways and the like. That particular area of VFD’s history is one of the less disturbing ones that she finds. It has a far darker history than she had been previously led to believe.
But still, the Baudelaires are the priority right now, even if it sometimes feels as though Olivia is making a deal with the devil.
Her scratches are healing, and her bruises are less black than before, so that feels like progress. There’s still pain, but there are less of the sharp bursts when she moves, and she isn’t worried about moving in the night and waking up unable to move at all. She hasn’t said this, though – she’s grown comfortable falling asleep next to Jacquelyn.
Jacquelyn won’t say anything either, but she’s grown comfortable with that particular arrangement too.
On the second day of nothing, Kit had left, saying she had to sort some things out, she’ll be back when she’s done. She returns on the evening of the third day, with food and the news that the two older Baudelaire siblings have vanished. Cut adrift from the car, lost to somewhere in the mountains, and that’s all the informant knows. And then she leaves again, promises to be back by morning, don’t do anything rash, she’ll know more by then and then they can do something.
They go to bed, not entirely expecting to sleep. Olivia stares into the darkness where Jacquelyn is settling, waits a moment, and then shifts over, curling into her side, wrapping an arm around her. Jacquelyn pauses a moment, before readjusting, her own arm around Olivia’s back, and she shifts in closer.
They wake up still intertwined.
---
Kit returns just before midday, with a car that seems to be a recent acquisition. Jacquelyn is prepared for something she has no idea about – they’ll fine-tune the plan in the car. Kit sums it up for Olivia as best she can – they know roughly where the elder Baudelaires should be, they know that Sunny is with Olaf and his troupe, they’re seeing what they can do.
And so they leave, not even half an hour after Kit returned. As they leave, Olivia grabs Jacquelyn’s hand.
Her mind is saying a thousand things at once, her heart is racing, and all she can do is whisper Good luck before she lets go. Anything else feels like a curse more than a well-wish.
She watches them leave, and has a flash of an image, of a more meaningful goodbye. But the last time she kissed somebody goodbye, they didn’t come back.
She tries to ignore those thoughts as they persist.
There’s little else to do. They might be in touch, but just as easily she won’t hear a word until they come back. There’s a phone, but it hasn’t been used since she arrived – she doesn’t even know if it’s connected, and she has no reason to use it, nobody to be in contact with.
And Olivia is left alone. There’s little that she can do to be helpful, and as inviting as indiscriminately reading her way through the VFD library sounds, she’d rather do something that will be immediately useful if Jacquelyn and Kit come back.
When they come back. she forces herself away from an alternative in which they don’t. There are a lot of alternatives that she doesn’t want to think about, but they hover in her mind nonetheless.
She cooks, enough for a few meals, she only lets herself into the library to see if there’s a recipe book somewhere, so that she can force herself to focus on something. There’s a laundry room tucked in a back corner of the cabin, so she washes everything she can find. When she finds a skirt identical to the one she had worn as Madame Lulu, she’s overcome with the urge to burn it; instead, she stuffs it out of sight.
It’s the first night since arriving during which she has slept alone. She had never considered herself someone to struggle with it, and she never struggled before, but despite the short space of time, she’s grown accustomed to falling asleep next to another person. Her knee is throbbing after spending too much time standing, but everything else is hurting as much as she’s grown to expect; she finds the ibuprofen, falls asleep after too long in the company of her own thoughts.
She wakes in the middle of the night with her heart racing and sweat running down her brow, remembering nothing of her dreams but hot, wet breath and the feeling of suffocation. Waking up doesn’t quite feel like reality – she feels as though a part of her is still in her nightmare. She doubts she’ll get back to sleep, but she’s slept so little and so poorly that the thought of staying awake is hardly one to contemplate.
She tosses and turns, winces when she throws herself into a particularly awkward position. But when she grabs a pillow, and hugs it to herself, it seems to work, and she doesn’t dream again.
---
When she wakes to the room bathed in sunlight, she realises that she’d fallen asleep curled into Jacquelyn’s pillow – it still smells of her.
The safe house is well-maintained despite its desertion, so she spends a couple of hours in the library, finally allowing herself this one thing. There isn’t any real order to the collection – books are on spindly side tables, and upside down on their shelves, with authors on the same topics scattered across the room.
Once upon a time, she could carry stacks of books that obscured her sightline without breaking a sweat, but that becomes difficult when it hurts to lift her arm, hurts to stand for too long. She hopes she isn’t stuck here long enough to have time to reorganise the shelves, as satisfying as it would be in another life.
Instead, she shelves the loose books, makes sure that titles are visible, keeps an eye out for duplicates. And she sets aside a few books – on engineering, on literature, even a few fairly new looking books on child rearing that had been left on the desk. They might come in useful for the guests she hopes to see soon.
She nearly jumps out of her skin when she hears the phone ring.
The voice identifies itself as Larry – an associate of Jacquelyn and Kit, though she does remember him from the school, carrying the book that had been the catalyst for this.
He seems to be about as informed about Kit and Jacquelyn’s mission as she is, and all he can ask is, “Are you okay?”
“I’ve been better.” A half-truth seems like the best option.
“They’ll be fine. They’re good at what they do, they’re probably already on their way back.”
Jacques was good at what he did, too, murmurs a voice in the back of her head. She’s been trying not to think about that, and trying to ignore the voice.
Larry bids her well, she bids him the same, and hangs up. She can’t keep herself still, so tries to find something to do. There’s an untouched third bedroom, with beds already made, so she opens the windows, and sets a few of the books she’d found on a table, hoping that this won’t jinx the arrival of the children who will read them. She then makes a cup of tea, adds sugar, but when she tastes it, she realises that she’s somehow already grown used to the less sweet tea that Jacquelyn tends to make.
When she goes to sleep, she doesn’t even tell herself that she can fall asleep otherwise, and buries her face in Jacquelyn’s pillow.
---
It’s not quite dawn when she wakes to hear the front door open, and multiple sets of footsteps.
They’ve found Violet and Klaus, who have clearly spent the past few days very much lost and alone. The children don’t even protest when Kit leads them to the third bedroom – Olivia suspects that any protestations were aired in the hours in the car. But they both pause, wide-eyed at seeing Olivia alive, before following Kit.
There’s an echo of two bedroom doors closing, leaving Olivia and Jacquelyn alone by the still-open door. Olivia closes it, reaches for Jacquelyn’s hand, and stops herself. Instead, she asks, “Do you want a cup of tea?”
A moment later, she returns to the living room, with two cups of steaming tea – which seems to be the limit of weight that her right arm can take without any pain beyond the usual persistent ache, despite her best attempts to pretend otherwise.
Jacquelyn has already changed out of the clothes she’s spent two days in, but she doesn’t look remotely ready to sleep. She nurses her tea, quietly talks through what had happened, backtracking and correcting herself, trying to get the story straight as she tells it.
She’d driven the final stretch, with Violet and Klaus desperately trying to explain what had happened at the carnival, what had happened since. Sunny is still with the troupe, but they don’t know where, though it’s something that Larry and Kit have both been working on. Meanwhile, the two children had spent the spanning days in the bottom of the mountains alone, trying not to get too lost, but trying not to let Olaf or any of his associates know where they were, despite trying to find them themselves.
It had been a smoke signal from a briefly lit campfire that had alerted an associate, and they had passed this on to Kit – three repetitions of “the world is quiet here”, before the smoke had stopped. The associate had then tried to track the children until Kit and Jacquelyn arrived, and it had taken them another day. And as much as they’d have preferred to find all three of the children, it was safer for everybody to get the two of them to the safehouse and make plans to find Sunny from there.
As Jacquelyn spoke, they’d been sat sideways on the couch, facing each other, legs pressed together. Olivia had been leaning against the back, her hand on Jacquelyn’s knee, her thumb tracing circles.
So Olivia leans closer, close enough to feel Jacquelyn’s breath on her face. And she feels her relax, and lean in closer too.
And the unwarranted thoughts come swirling back, but the sense of dread, of this being a last opportunity, a last chance, has vanished. In her mind there are words hovering – she’d spent the days worrying, utterly failing to distract herself from the fear, but she’d spent them thinking of this, too – but there’ll be time later, for those to be said. And they’re close, and it’s peaceful, and it’s just them. There’ll be time later to think, too.
So instead Olivia closes the distance, and softly kisses her.
---
It’s over before she gets a chance to react, but when she feels Olivia pull away, Jacquelyn can’t help the smile spreading across her face. She sees Olivia relax, sees her reach forward so that their fingers can intertwine.
She feels as though she could live in the brush of their lips and the touch of their fingertips forever. When she leans in, kissing Olivia again and cradling her cheek with her free hand, she lets the moment linger.
But Jacquelyn needs to rest, and so she follows Olivia back to their bedroom, never letting go. And so they go to bed, lay facing each other, kiss in the soft light of dawn, and drift to sleep.
---
Jacquelyn wakes up to Olivia’s heartbeat in her ear. She’d have sworn that the past twenty-four hours weren’t real, if Olivia wasn’t holding her quite so tightly and quite so close, playing with her hair all the while.
She’s awake now, exhausted but awake, so shifts herself in Olivia’s arms. She’s not yet awake enough for words, but her kiss to say good morning lasts far longer than she’d planned.
They get up, and she showers; Olivia hands her a cup of tea as soon as she opens the bathroom door. She’s barely sure of how to approach this, and Olivia is clearly unsure too, but amidst the chaos of recent months, it’s assuring to have this one thing, whatever it is, whatever it will become.
Kit is already awake, and clearly has been for a while – Jacquelyn has never known a person to sleep so little and still be functional. She’s working her way through a book on infant development in the first twelve months, with a nearly empty cup of tea that Jacquelyn assumes is stone cold. There’s another next to her that has clouds of steam rising from it; Kit will inevitably leave it until it’s cooler than a temperature that anybody else would consider drinkable.
Olivia has a pile of books on the coffee table, and has neatened the loose sheets of notes and maps into a few manila folders in a stack. She sits back down, with Jacquelyn next to her, and Kit puts her book down.
“Olaf’s troupe is moving.” Kit holds up the message received from the seldom-used telegraph machine. “Some of his associates have left already, and more are likely to. Sunny is safe, but that’s all I know about her for now.”
“So we’re waiting?” Jacquelyn hates the inactivity, hates feeling useless and unable to help, and she knows that she isn’t the only person in the room feeling that way.
Kit shrugs. “Only until we know for certain what’s next.”
Any further chance for conversation is interrupted by the sounds of the Baudelaires’ bedroom door opening, and the two children warily making their way through the house. They both seem to relax at the sight of adults who are not trying to murder them, though they still look quite wary as they perch on the edge of the couch. Kit mumbles something about making tea and almost runs for the kitchen, well aware of the conversation about to take place.
They don’t wait. “How did you survive?” Violet’s question almost sounds rehearsed, and Jacquelyn suspects that the children have already discussed what they want to ask – she doubts that they’ve slept much, either.
Olivia gives the short version, staring at the books on the table, keeping her tone as neutral as possible – she doesn’t mention losing a terrifying amount of blood, or the scars covering too much of her body. But she does say that Jacquelyn and Kit have hidden her, until she no longer needs to stay dead. It saves Jacquelyn having to explain the identical plan for the children themselves.
Klaus elects to speak next: “Why didn’t you tell us about the trap door?”
“I wasn’t going to let you fall in that pit.”
“But what if we had?” Violet is angrier, less patient than Klaus.
Olivia takes a deep breath, steadies herself, still doesn’t make eye contact. “In that moment, Count Olaf wanted me dead more than you. If the last thing I had done was get you out of that pit, it would have been worth it.”
And Jacquelyn remembers Olivia’s scream, and pulling her through the door, and the sounds of lions behind them as they tried to make it through the tunnel. She can’t help but be grateful that she knew from the start that Olivia had not wound up in the belly of the beast.
Kit chooses that moment to return, holding cups of tea of a colour and temperature that is fit for human consumption, at least in comparison to her own preferences. She’s noticed the weight in the air, and changes the subject – Jacquelyn knew that the Baudelaires were intelligent, but she’s still surprised by how resourceful they can be, and talking about it distracts them, even if it doesn’t entirely relax them.
But for the moment, they are as dead to Count Olaf as Olivia is, and there is little to be done for Sunny with that resourcefulness, not when they are stuck with hiding as their only safe option.
---
The children have been shown around the house, and they’re settled in the living room with books – Klaus is working through The Incomplete History Of Secret Organisations with a notebook at his side; Violet has several books on VFD’s firefighting history and related inventions.
Kit takes their distraction as an opportunity to pull Jacquelyn and Olivia aside, allegedly to check on Olivia’s stitches, which is enough of an excuse for them to sit in what Jacquelyn has come to think of as their bedroom with the door locked.
She does, in fact, need to check on Olivia’s stitches; there are scissors and tweezers sat on the bedside table when they walk in. They sit together on the bed, echoing the position they’d been in to put the stitches in, though Jacquelyn doubts that Olivia recalls much of that.
Her shoulder has become less stiff, so Olivia can pull off her right sleeve without struggling quite as much. Any modesty was abandoned in favour of medical treatment, but Jacquelyn catches her eye as Olivia places her blouse next to her, and Olivia smirks.
It’s barely a split second before her eyes widen in shock as Kit starts to dab at a smaller stitched wound with antiseptic. Jacquelyn adjusts, so that Olivia can lean in against her shoulder; it’s easier for Kit that way, it’s nothing to do with the need for human contact, for the unignorable urge to hold Olivia and never let her go.
She rests her head against Olivia’s as Kit starts to talk about the plan thus far to find Sunny, the little that there is to it, despite another telegraph having come that morning. The white-faced women are gone, as are the hook-handed man and the henchperson, and the informant is adamant that Sunny is safe, but refuses to give more information.
All the while, Kit does not break her focus on Olivia’s injuries. She works slowly, checks that the wounds are healed over completely before even tugging at the stitches, layering more antiseptic on each wound before moving on to the next. She pauses for a moment at the punctures below Olivia’s ribs, before leaving them; she doesn’t even touch the bite in her shoulder.
For somebody who once pulled out her own infected tooth with pliers, Kit is surprisingly methodical in her medical care.
Jacquelyn doesn’t want to move just yet when Kit has finished, so instead wraps her arm around Olivia’s back, and hugs her a little closer as Kit checks the bedding for any loose threads. Olivia doesn’t seem to want to move either, and instead hugs Jacquelyn back.
Kit definitely notices, but she doesn’t say a word, and leaves them alone, closing the door behind her. So they stay, in that moment, in the peace of each other’s arms.
---
There’s no news for the rest of the day, and Olivia can tell that it’s consuming the children. They’ve barely spoken since their conversation that morning, and instead, they work methodically through the books they’ve found in silence, until muttering their half-hearted goodnights when they nearly fall asleep in the pages.
Jacquelyn is fading as well, though she refuses to admit it; it’s clear to Olivia in the lack of focus in her eyes, and in the absence of resistance when Olivia suggests that they sleep, too.
By the time they are curled around each other in the darkness, Jacquelyn is nearly asleep. Olivia kisses her goodnight, feels her tilt slightly into the kiss, enough for their noses to brush, and then feels her relax completely into the pillow.
She can’t ignore the feeling of guilt, that she has let this become a priority, when so much else is going on. But still, she watches Jacquelyn as she falls asleep in the softest beam of moonlight, watches her expression relax and her lips part, and in that moment, she is content. She wishes it could have been different, wishes they could be lying intertwined in any other circumstances.
In that moment, Olivia realises that she has fallen in love.
---
The next morning, Olivia wakes with a start – sleeping next to somebody isn’t enough to completely assuage the dreams about the past few months. There’s still the sensation of falling and of blood, of fear in the eyes of children and of having no way to stop it.
Except they are able to do something, an act that her unconscious mind had been unwilling to remember.
The safehouse is quiet again, with only the soundtrack of pages turning and cups clinking against wood to mark the passage of the hours. Kit anxiously stares in the direction of the phone; Olivia finds herself watching the children again, though neither of them pays any of the adults any attention. She doesn’t blame them for being hesitant to trust them, as it has been so long since they have had an adult they could trust. But they’re wary in even eating food until they see somebody else eat it first.
The lack of activity is starting to drive Olivia mad. She’d walked out of the library, followed Jacques to his death, and kept fighting until she faced her own. And now, nothing, but to sit and wait for somebody else to do something.
The Baudelaires seem to be feeling the same – they’ve spent so long running and fighting, and now they’re expected to do neither, to wait for the adults to fix it when the adults in the past have only made it worse. Olivia can only hope that they are able to do something soon, for the children’s sake far more than her own.
The sun sets, they eat, they go to bed, ending the day of nothingness. Olivia lays in bed, doubting that she’ll sleep much tonight, or at any point soon, not with everything and nothing happening.
Jacquelyn lays close, close enough for their foreheads to touch, for words to pass between them at barely a whisper. And the words that have been building inside of Olivia’s mind tumble out, filling the air between them. I’m scared. For them. For us. For you.
Jacquelyn pulls her closer, kisses her forehead, her nose, the corner of her mouth. She doesn’t voice false assurances or pretend that everything will be okay; they don’t know that, there’s no sense in lying.
But maybe, if they voice their hopes of an end to all of this, they might be able to bring it to pass, if they don’t curse themselves out of any hope of peace instead.
And Jacquelyn kisses her again, lets it linger. Olivia feels her own lips part, and they don’t talk again, though it’s a while until they finally fall asleep, still inextricably close.
---
Kit wakes them in the middle of the night to tell them that Olaf is dead.
Olivia was asleep, her face buried in the crook of Jacquelyn’s neck, and she’s barely awake before Jacquelyn is climbing out of bed and dressing in the darkness while Kit talks, her voice shaking, as she sits on the foot of the bed.
Larry had called, and Kit had been sleeping lightly enough to wake on the phone’s first ring. He didn’t say where he called from; she didn’t ask. The VFD headquarters are ash, and what was left of the acting troupe have scattered. Olaf’s body was left in a courtyard, a harpoon still hanging from his chest, and she wants to see for herself that it is really him this time.
Previous reports of Count Olaf’s death have been greatly exaggerated, after all.
At one point, Olivia tries to get out of bed, but Kit glares at her until she lays back down. The news of Olaf’s death may have come from a source more reliable than most, but that does not make it the end of the ordeal, and they are still entirely missing a child.
They turn to leave, but Jacquelyn hesitates – and then she kneels next to the bed, kisses Olivia on the lips, and whispers I’ll see you soon in her ear. And then she pulls the covers over Olivia’s shoulders, briefly smooths Olivia’s hair back, and they leave.
Olivia can hear Kit’s whispers before the door shuts behind them, but can’t make out the words, and she’s already drifting off to an uneasy sleep before their footsteps fade away.
---
The Baudelaires are more relaxed, knowing that something is being done, even if they can’t help. They’re awake before Olivia, with empty tea cups and plates on the dining table in front of them, and she’s glad to see that their faces aren’t lined with quite as much worry, or with the exhaustion they had arrived with.
There’s a note on the table, too: Sunny is safe. Kit and I will be back soon. J.
Olivia makes more tea, asks them about the books and oddments they’re surrounded by. Violet has procured a tool kit from some unknown corner of the house, and is examining its contents, with a broken wind-up alarm clock to one side; Klaus has a Dickens omnibus and a book of French poetry. They both seem set on distracting themselves, but she’s happy to help them persist with their distraction, if it means they aren’t worrying.
She makes them lunch, finding tomatoes and olives and pasta in a cupboard, and then makes twice as much as they need for one meal, not entirely on purpose. They eat in the living room, the dining room table having no room left in which to dine. The children don’t say a word between them before collecting the dishes; she thanks them, and leaves them, as they seem happy to have something productive to do.
Her knee is starting to hurt again – she sits with the copy of The Incomplete History Of Secret Organisations that Klaus seems to be finished with, and begins to work through it herself, from cover to cover instead of digging for something that might be useful. There are notes written in the margins in writing she doesn’t recognise, though when she finds references to the sugar bowl that had been the cause of too much chaos, nothing is clarified.
It isn’t distracting her, either. She closes it, and instead reads the first novel she finds in the library, letting it while the hours away for her.
---
It’s late at night when the phone rings, but none of them are sleeping. Klaus is most of the way through the second pile of books he pulled out that afternoon; Violet is doing something to the boiler that is giving Olivia only mild cause for concern.
Jacquelyn is on the other end, speaking quietly and quickly. “He’s dead, he’s definitely dead, some of his henchmen are too, and we know where the rest are. We think we know where Sunny is, but don’t tell the Baudelaires, we aren’t certain.”
Olivia keeps her voice quiet, tries to give nothing away. “Will you be long?”
“I don’t know. We don’t want to come back without her.”
“Stay safe.” There’s more she wants to say, but not the time to say it.
Jacquelyn pauses, and when she speaks again, her voice is even quieter. “I miss you.” Then, before Olivia can say even a word in response, all she can hear is the dial tone.
So she hangs up, and steels herself to tell Violet and Klaus that Count Olaf is dead, prepares for any number of reactions.
She does not expect their silence.
---
Not a word is spoken the entire day beyond the necessary – and Olivia can see the children watching the door, listening for a car, waiting for the phone to ring. She’s waiting, too, and trying not to let the anxiety it causes come across to them.
The children barely eat, though they drink the endless amounts of tea that seem to be the only helpful thing Olivia can find to do. She tries not to crowd them, just replaces empty tea cups as they avoid eye contact, their focuses intent on books and gears, and their notepads filled with nigh-illegible notes. They go to bed having said barely a dozen words between them, but when she walks past their bedroom on her way to her own, Olivia can hear them talking, and can hear them stop as she walks past.
Somehow, the cold silence of the day doesn’t leach into her dreams, and there is nothing until she wakes in the dark, having rolled onto her right shoulder and stayed there for far too long. She sits up, finds the blister of pills and the glass of water on the bedside table, and hopes that she doesn’t repeat it.
She misses having Jacquelyn to fall asleep against, finds herself thinking that as she drifts off again. She dreams of her, of the touch of her lips and her fingers, and wakes acutely aware of the race of her own pulse, and the warm flush rushing her, stark against the coolness of the bed.
---
It’s early evening when Olivia hears an engine in the distance, and peeks out of a window to see Kit’s car approach.
She’s worried as to who she will see emerge from the car, but she waits, and sees Violet and Klaus waiting too. At the sound of footsteps and Kit’s voice, she opens the door, and Jacquelyn walks in, followed by Kit – carrying Sunny on one hip.
Olivia leaves as Kit is made the middle of a group hug, the siblings unwilling to wait even a second longer than they have to for that. There’s tea to be made, and privacy to be given.
Jacquelyn follows her into the kitchen, and doesn’t wait a moment before pulling her in to kiss her. Olivia leans in as close as she physically can, pulls her closer, and they don’t break apart until the kettle whistles. They don’t speak, not yet, and just hold each other instead.
When they return to the others with the tea, Sunny is settled between Violet and Klaus, looking absurdly awake for a child who has been through so much in a short space of time. Violet and Klaus are both smiling broadly, in a way that Olivia doubts that they’ve had reason to for a while.
Kit, however, looks exhausted, and is leaning back into the couch, looking in danger of spilling her tea on her stomach as she rests it there. She’s clearly intent on sleeping as soon as possible, as she’s drinking her tea while it’s still hot – a rarity. But she’s smiling as she watches the siblings together, in their own world. And when she sees Jacquelyn leaning into Olivia’s side, she smiles again.
The Baudelaires are too distracted to ask questions, and Kit and Jacquelyn too tired to answer them, so goodnights are murmured early, and the children are left to reunite alone.
Jacquelyn falls asleep almost instantly, and Olivia is just glad to have her there. She doesn’t want to spend another night without her by her side.
---
It’s the feeling of fingers running softly through her hair that first registers as Jacquelyn wakes, her head resting on Olivia’s stomach.
She doesn’t move, not at first; she’s warm, she’s comfortable, she’s not sat in a car as Kit drives. She’s almost lulled back to sleep by the sound of Olivia turning pages in her book, but she feels Olivia’s fingers stop. She puts her book down, murmurs, “Good morning,”, and only then does Jacquelyn open her eyes.
And they’re awake, though neither of them feels particularly compelled to leave the bed just yet, and so they don’t.
---
Despite some distractions, Jacquelyn and Olivia are the first out of bed, and over tea, Jacquelyn tries to map out the past few days.
There was a note left by the body, giving an address; four hours’ drive found them on the doorstep of a henchperson who seemed happy to be rid of their boss. They knew where Sunny was – and had known that the troupe was crumbling from the inside, so were only too happy to help it to collapse.
They slept in another VFD safehouse that night, one with a phone and beds and little else. Jacquelyn had called Larry that night, told him that the body was still there. She still isn’t sure what became of it, and after Kit’s reaction to seeing it, she didn’t want to make her stay.
And then they drove for most of the day, to find the house where a man with hooks for hands answered the door, holding a child contentedly chewing a wooden spoon into a new shape. The man always knew he was on borrowed time, but insisted on a final meal together before he had to say goodbye.
From there, they drove, stopping as little as possible, trying to get back as soon as they could.
The story is repeated over the morning – Kit adds her own details, and Violet and Klaus contribute Sunny’s side of events. There’s still more to do, with Hector and the Quagmires somewhere high and unknown, and no immediate place for the Baudelaires to go.
But they’re safe. The day is cold but the sun is shining, and Jacquelyn can see that none of them want to be trapped in the safehouse for any longer, when there is no danger pursuing them.
So Jacquelyn suggests the beach.
---
They pack sandwiches, and flasks of tea, and leave the house when the sun is high in the sky. The forest still surrounds them when they can hear the distant crash of waves, and Jacquelyn sees the surprise in Olivia’s eyes.
The last time Olivia had been out of the forest, she was bleeding, unconscious in Jacquelyn’s lap. She wouldn’t have noticed the ocean when they drove past it. It feels longer ago, but it’s scarcely been two weeks – Olivia still winces when she moves her right arm the wrong way, still limps a little.
Kit sits in the sand, propping a book open on her knee. Jacquelyn settles nearby, and Olivia next to her, taking her hand and leaning in to kiss her cheek, before cuddling in against the wind.
And Jacquelyn watches as Olivia shields her eyes from the sun, squinting as she watches the children skip stones on the water. She sees her grin, and in that moment, she knows that she is in love.