Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“There must be something down here you can use,” Klaus said. He looked around the elevator shaft desperately, like there might be something he missed.

“If I can get back up to the penthouse, I can use one of Esme’s bobby pins to pick the lock. I’m sure she won’t miss one or two.” The gears of Violet’s mind were at work. She already had half of a plan. “Heat rises. I need to go back up to the penthouse.”

“You’re leaving?” Duncan’s voice shook with fear.

“We’re going to get you out, I promise.” She began directing Klaus to help her create their makeshift hot air balloon.

“Sunny and I should stay here with the Quagmires,” he said as he gathered up the handkerchief.

And here’s the thing. Violet knew they were running out of time. And Violet knew she would be right back. And Violet knew that the Quagmires were alone, and scared, and needed their friends more than ever.

And though every part of her screamed for her to disagree, to shut Klaus down and demand they stick together, she nodded.

The thing she didn’t know was just how many times she would think about this decision, replay the moment over and over in her mind, wishing she had said something else.

Klaus lifted Sunny out of the basket and they stood next to the cage that held their friends. This was where they were standing when the henchpeople found them while Violet searched the penthouse.

…

Violet arrived at the top of the ersatz elevator shaft with a singed suit and fingers that ached from holding her body weight as the basket tumbled the long way back down to the ground. She had only just made it into the living room when she heard voices. It was Esme and Olaf, and with a nauseating lurch she realized that Olaf wasn’t using his stupid “foreign” accent, which meant that Esme knew.

She hadn’t been tricked, she was complicit. This entire time, this entire fucking time, she’d been working with Count Olaf. What was their plan? Was Jerome in on it? She took a moment to be grateful that Klaus and Sunny had stayed below with the Quagmires – the farther they were away from Olaf and Esme, the safer they were.

Violet had just enough time to kick her brain back into gear and hide behind the curtains, the same curtains Olaf had hidden behind earlier, before they entered the room. Esme was monologuing about something entirely inane; Violet heard the phrase “relaxed pores” for the first and hopefully last time in her life. There was a thumping noise as something that Violet hoped was not Jerome falling to the floor.

She waited a few seconds, not daring to breathe, before she heard snoring. Okay, so if that was Jerome, he wasn’t dead. Just asleep, or unconscious. He probably ate or drank something that the henchpeople had given him; Violet could only hope that one day someone would listen to her advice.

Esme and Olaf didn’t stick around long. Violet assumed the business of kidnapping children and committing villainous crimes was a time consumptive one. Before they left, Violet could hear Esme say, “Oh darling, we just have to stop at that very in store down the street, I think it’s called Hot Topic? There’s a scarf I would literally strangle someone for.”

She began counting in her head when she heard the door closed. After twenty seconds, she ducked out from behind the curtain. Sure enough, Jerome was unceremoniously draped across the couch. She made a beeline for him.

“Jerome?” she asked, shaking his shoulder. Her voice came out as a harsh whisper; even though Count Olaf and Esme were gone, she couldn’t bring herself to be louder. He didn’t respond.

The penthouse doors loomed in her periphery. She turned her head to look at it, even as she kept shaking Jerome. The elevator was just beyond it; she had to get back down and warn her siblings, they had no idea how much danger they were in.

Her heart stuttered as she looked back at Jerome. She couldn’t wait for him to wake up.

She was doing this on her own.

Violet turned away from Jerome and the possibility of help from an adult. She all but sprinted to the bathroom she had inspected earlier. If she remembered correctly, and Violet always remembered correctly, there was a box of bobby pins there, just waiting for her.

If Violet hadn’t been terrified, if her siblings and friends weren’t in danger, she would have paid more attention to the tea set which sat on a tray next to the bath. In the back of her brain, it registered that there was a piece missing from the set. The sugar cubes sat on the tray like they had been placed there specifically to attract ants.

“That’s odd,” Violet mumbled, but she was already halfway out the door, bobby pins tucked into her blazer pocket.

She stopped back through the living room. She could use the rope of the chandelier to repel down the shaft. She had never done any repelling before, but it seemed that today was a day for expanding her horizons.

The rope felt unnervingly slick beneath her palms. She almost slipped twice – both times her heart flew into her throat and she had to take a couple seconds to recover, adrenaline coursing through her body and, though she might not admit it, tears forming in her eyes. By the time she reached the bottom, she was shaking.

So caught up in her fear, she hadn’t noticed that she couldn’t hear any voices on her descent. She fumbled with the spyglass to activate its flashlight function, her fingers trembling too much to do it smoothly. “Klaus –” she started, turning to the cage.

It was empty.

The entire room was empty.

Everyone was gone.

A second went by. Two. Three. She couldn’t comprehend what she was seeing – or rather, what she wasn’t. They couldn’t be gone.

It didn’t even occur to Violet to cry. That impulse was buried too far beneath her shock. She slowly spun in a circle, desperately looking around the elevator shaft like there might be something she missed.

I left them alone, and I’ve lost them, Violet thought.

Then, just when the world was about to fall out from under her feet, a speck of something resembling hope. Not quite hope because calling it that felt too much like getting her hopes up. The entrance to a secret passageway.

“I haven’t lost them yet,” Violet told herself like if she said it forcefully enough she might make it true.

She gripped the spyglass, squared her shoulders, and entered the tunnels.

Chapter Text

The tunnel was dark, lit only by flickering bulbs mounted along the walls. Even in her panic, Violet was itching to fix them. That seemed like a much easier goal than fixing everything else in her life.

Signs, half visible, promised to direct her to a dozen different places if she followed them. Her heart ached to see one that said Montgomery, and something about the name Snicket seemed familiar. It felt like something she had read in a book, or maybe someone her parents had mentioned offhandedly some time ago.

Her heart was thundering in her chest. The tunnels were labyrinthine, stretching on forever, and damp and claustrophobic and she had no idea where to go. Her siblings and the Quagmires could have been taken anywhere; her mind raced through the calculations against her will, charting out the number of different turns possible, any number of them taking her in a wildly different direction than where she needed to go.

She turned left at the sign that read HINTERLANDS, her feet carrying her forward more out of a fear of stagnation than out of confidence. Did she still have her chalk? She could use that to mark the turns she had taken, like she had in the penthouse –

There was a ladder. A ladder leading up to a trapdoor with a very familiar eye.

Everything went still; even the blood rushing in her ears seemed to quiet.

She ran to it. Hope bubbled up in her against her will – would it really be this easy? Could they be right there? Her brain ran a mile a minute as she reached for a rung. Even if Olaf and Esme were still out shopping, she would have to figure out a way to get past all the henchpeople. She could use the spyglass’s heat mechanism as a weapon, maybe.

The ladder was short, only a couple steps to the top. With a yet again shaking hand – damn, some part of her thought, I just got them to stop – she slowly pushed open the trapdoor.

She expected some place dark, something gloomy. She expected the faces of Klaus and Sunny and Isadora and Duncan, equally happy to see her as she was to see them. Or she expected the faces of the henchpeople staring down at her, ready to kidnap her as well. To be honest, she wouldn’t have been surprised to see Olaf and Esme waiting for her.

But she didn’t expect the ash. It blanketed the top of the trapdoor and the ground below her, covering her in a thick layer reminiscent of new snow. She coughed as she pushed the hatch open enough for her to crawl through.

When Violet was little – well, littler – she became fixated on an optical illusion book her father had given her. It was a short thing, something he had snagged at some tacky gift shop or other. It was comprised entirely of nonsensical looking images, garish masses of colors and patterns that she couldn’t make heads or tails of. She sat for hours, staring so intently her eyes would burn, waiting for the illusion to kick in. Bertrand had found her in the living room, laughed warmly, and told her to put her face close to the page and slowly pull away. She did so, and suddenly the loud pattern sprang into a marvelous three dimensional image. Everything clicked into place, and the confusing and dissonant details made sense in a way they previously hadn’t. The picture fell into place.

When she first came up out of the trapdoor, she didn’t know what she was looking at. She was in the ruins of a burned house, obviously. The ceiling was entirely gone, most of the walls too; of the furniture, only charred bits remained. She was standing in front of what had once been some grand bay windows –

Grand bay windows.

The picture fell into place.

This was her house.

Or what was left of it anyway.

Voices echoed behind her, and Violet felt fear course through her. This was the moment where she would meet Olaf or Esme or the henchpeople and she would have to make a stand for her siblings and her friends. She expected to have to fight or run or yell.

She did not expect to hear, in a voice so soft and gentle, her own name.

Violet turned around to see two people and a taxi cab. One of them she recognized, a woman with glasses and a kind face full of worry.

“Olivia Caliban!”

Violet rushed toward her. She did not know Olivia particularly well, but Olivia had been by far the kindest adult she had encountered since Uncle Monty took her and her siblings to see a very strange movie. Violet almost hugged her. She wanted, no, not wanted, desperately needed, an adult to hold her and tell her everything would be alright. She was fourteen and had lost more than she thought she could ever find again.

The problem was that adults kept telling her everything would be alright when they didn’t mean it or were not capable of making everything alright.

Violet stopped herself before she could hug Olivia.

“Violet, I am so happy to see you. Are you alright? Where are Klaus and Sunny?”

“They’re….” Violet almost couldn’t say it. “Gone. Olaf took them.”

“Violet Baudelaire, my name is Jacques Snicket. I was once a friend of your brave and noble parents, and I will do everything in my power to help you.”

Violet finally looked at the man next to Olivia. He was tall, with a moustache and eyes that seemed calculating in a much kinder way than Olaf’s cold, dangerous ones. More intriguingly, the name Snicket had reappeared like a bad penny. She didn’t know if she trusted him, but she trusted Olivia, and more than that she wanted answers. Her home and the name Snicket and Esme’s penthouse and Olaf and his stupid acting troupe were all tangled together. Violet was an inventor. She wanted to take it all apart to figure out how, and maybe, just maybe, put a better version of it back together.

“Where do we start?” she said.