Chapter Text
Bruised, broken, and utterly alone, Violet enters the Last Chance General Store.
The door slams behind her with a heavy crack. Wind whistles through a bullet hole in the glass, splintered and glinting as a spider’s web. Inside, the place is dim and yellowed. The overhead lights remain unlit despite the setting sun, sinking like a stone behind the Mortmain Mountains. Sunset casts the place in deep blues and golds, sparking on dim metal, sinking into black like the bottom of the sea. Like a ship going down. Like drowning.
Exhausted, hardly seeing, Violet glances around the store. Her eyes pass over stacks of magazines, sleeping bags, canned foods, bags of coffee. Linger longingly on a collection of soaps covered in vellum and wrapped in glitzy twine. It is only the second time she has set foot inside the Last Chance, but the smell (untreated lumber, hard candies, bags of spices set too long in the sun - ) is a welcome hint of familiarity.
“Hello?” Her voice warbles into the deep darkness between the aisles. Hearing it makes her flinch, gone so long without another voice that she hardly recognizes her own, let alone this new weight to it - reedy, wounded. A shadow of herself.
To her side, the checkout counter is vacant. Only a small lamp rests beside the cash register, the bulb dim and brown as a beer bottle. She expects the same man as last time (kind face, stern jaw, workworn hands) to rise from behind the counter with a magazine folded in his grip, or to call a greeting from between the dark aisles. Nothing comes.
Violet inches slowly closer to the counter, shirking away from the unwavering darkness. Her body aches with every movement and the hollow pangs of hunger in her gut have returned on sight of so much canned food and wrapped sweets and bright tins of fruits in sugar water. With one last anxious glance around the store, she presses the call bell sitting ready at the counter. It rings sharp and high. A summons.
No shuffle of movement. No answering voice.
Wind whistles through the shattered glass in the door.
Violet tears herself away from the soft, warm light at the counter and, before she can convince herself to flee, hurries between the aisles. She stares straight ahead, avoiding glancing to the bright packages of tempting sweets, even as her fists shake with hunger and want.
The telegram is exactly as she remembers it - small slip of bronzed metal, worn pad of the button covered in black wax, long wire running like a leak out the back and through the wall. It is exact and precise and completely to her memory.
What is not familiar is the sign set crookedly atop it, written in thick marker on torn cardboard: OUT OF ORDER. TELEPHONE BOOTH OUT BACK.
The word SORRY had been written then struck through.
Violet sighs, refusing to bend to the despair pressing like headache behind her eyes. Instead, she reaches into the pocket of her tattered dress, grown grey with grime, and takes her last quarter in hand. During her hard trek down from the mountains, she had taken to traveling with the coin in her mouth, tucked beneath her tongue, too afraid of it tumbling free from her pocket.
She had spit it out just before arriving to the Last Chance, embarrassed of the scrutiny she might encounter if the owner had seen her spit a coin into her palm as payment for whatever goods she might pick.
Telling herself she will return it later, Violet swipes a copy of The Daily Punctilio as she exits the store and stomps down the front steps. Weary, she crosses to the back of the property, finding a battered red telephone booth with a single flickering light inside. High grasses have grown in dense clusters around it, and the door sticks as Violet shoulders it open.
Inside, the booth is humid and dingy. A dirt floor rises to cracked glass panes, splinters catching the last golden specks of sunset. The phone hangs off its hook, swaying softly in the grass. Violet picks it up gently, as if accepting a precious gift.
She taps the tab and presses the phone softly to her ear, relieved and sickened to hear the flat droll of the dial tone.
With a grimace, Violet flips the newspaper in her hand, examining the very front page. A large monochrome photograph catches her eye first - a brand new theatre in the middle of the city covered with lights. A man stands tipping his hat to the photographer as he poses on the sidewalk before the front doors. Violet recognizes a pair of shiny eyes, smug and bright, before her gaze cuts away to read the title: N EW THEATRE NAMED IN HONOR OF LOCAL ACTOR.
New construction , she reads, skimming. Grand entrance hall. Tours and refreshments provided to public on opening evening. Party to follow. For all questions and inquiries, please call the box office at -
With shaking hands and grubby fingers, Violet inserts her last quarter and slowly, carefully dials the number.
A peppy, feminine voice answers on the second ring. “Count Olaf’s Theatre for the Criminally Talented! How can I help you this evening?”
“Hi,” Violet breathes, knees suddenly weak with relief. This feeling is so momentarily overwhelming, her empty stomach heaves and her heartbeat spikes. She sways on her feet, dizzy, bracing her free hand on the wall. “I was just wondering - is the grand opening tonight?”
“Sure is, young lady. It started about an hour ago, so you’ve got plenty of time to stop by and check the place out if you’re interested. Care to hear our list of upcoming shows and classes?”
“No thank you,” Violet says hurriedly, unsure of how long her quarter will last. “Actually I was hoping Count Olaf might be there. I need to speak with him. I’m - ” Revulsion stoppers her throat like a clogged drain. After several moments, she forces, “I’m his adoptive daughter. Violet Baudelaire.”
“Oh, certainly! Even tonight, we’ve had several women calling, wanting to know where the Count’s private dressing room is and if he accepts congratulatory flowers, but I can see this is quite different from all that. Give me one moment sweetheart, and I’ll get him on the phone for you.”
“Thank you,” Violet says, even though the woman has already set down the phone. There’s a squeak of a closing door, and nearly two minutes of silence in which Violet kicks around the trash beneath her feet and picks at a peeling, faded sticker stuck crooked near the grimy keypad.
The returning squeak of the opening door nearly makes her gasp. Even though she is completely alone at the Last Chance, she straightens up, shoulders back, eyes ahead.
She hears Olaf hum as he takes a seat and slowly raises the phone.
“He- llo ?” He answers sardonically and even through the distance, his voice makes goosebumps race up her back and a shiver rack her shoulders.
“Olaf. It’s...” Violet says, relieved and ruined. She is so ashamed, she cannot bring herself to say her name. “Me.”
“Violet Baudelaire,” he slurs, deeply amused. “To what do I owe the outrageous pleasure? Calling to congratulate me?”
There’s alcohol in his voice, so apparent she can almost smell it through the receiver. Violet imagines red wine on his lips, then celebratory champagne. She wonders what type of drunk he is most often. Around others. Alone. She wonders what he looks like at this very moment cradling the phone, sat crooked in the box office chair, a drink in his hand, eyes hazy and sparkling.
“Can you - ” She starts, then loses her nerve against a wave of deep shame. Her lip wobbles traitorously. So exhausted she can hardly stand, she leans her forehead softly against the shattered wall of the telephone booth. The glass crackles and holds. Even before she speaks, she can feel that her voice will break and she hates herself for it. “Can you come get me?”
“Come get you,” he repeats dully, in a voice that invites no argument or joke. There’s a threat there, too. A promise of violence in response to wasted time.
“Yes.” Although she had planned this conversation very meticulously during her hike down the mountains, her speech feels useless and flimsy and very far away. She does not know what else to say, or how to voice the aching defeat she feels, or the empty, weary surrender. “Klaus and Sunny are gone. And I’ve tried but I can’t - can’t survive here. In the Hinterlands.”
“You’re in the Hinterlands. And you want me to come and get you.” He repeats carefully. The alcohol is gone from his voice and instead Olaf sounds clear and sober, and this is all the more terrifying.
“Yes. At the Last Chance.” Violet mutters, soft. She glances to the store itself, all peeling paint and bleak, empty windows, as if Olaf might walk around the corner and open his arms to her. “Please. Please come get me.”
“Why?” He sneers. “How do I know you’re even worth the gas, Baudelaire?”
“Olaf,” Violet begs, working so hard to keep from crying, her throat closes painfully, and her voice is high and pinched. Her hope is plummeting. “You know you’ve always… liked me. Preferred me. Wanted me.”
It’s humiliating to say aloud. To acknowledge a weakness neither of them had ever voiced. Even now, she feels the shadowy memory of his touch on her - fingernails catching up her spine in her wedding dress, blade pressed to her thigh beneath the table at Monty’s, and his eyes always on her as if it was only a matter of time, a running of the clock, before she would become his.
“And? What of it?” Olaf demands, unimpressed. “It’s going to take a lot more than that to have me at your beck and call.”
“I’m all alone. I’m tired. I’m hungry. I -” she sucks in a breath, holds it until her chest stings. “I don’t have anywhere else to go.”
Please show me mercy, she thinks, eyes screwed shut against budding tears. Please do not hurt me. Please let me stay.
Then, when he does not answer, “I need you.”
There’s a pause. She cannot even hear him breathing. In the background, there’s a cheer, the clink of glass on glass, a riotous roar of laughter and shouting. Distantly, several voices toast, “To Olaf!”
“I’ll be there soon.” He decides with a growl. “Wait for me.”
“I have been. I’ll be here.”
Thank you, she thinks, and does not say it.
He hangs up first, and Violet is left shivering in the telephone booth. She sits on the floor amidst the trash, head tilted back to rest against the cold glass, and through her haze of tears, she stares at the empty dirt road and waits.