No Good Deed

by Dearest_Solitude

Summary:

Ambushed on her first mission as a volunteer, Violet Baudelaire wakes up in a strange cabin to a man who already knows her name.

Chapter 1: Prologue

The assignment was supposed to be easy. It was her first real one, after all. She and Quigley were to deliver a package to an unknown volunteer waiting for them in the foothills of the Mortimer Mountains. Though the package's true importance was left undisclosed, Violet doubted they were given anything real. Still, she took it seriously. This was the first chance she had been given to prove herself as an asset to their organization.

Kit dropped them off in her taxi, about a day south of where they needed to go, at a small, dusty general store. Quigley had a map of the area, one he had made himself, which he spread out on the ground in the shade of the old building while Violet headed inside to buy some water bottles and snacks for the long walk ahead of them. She wished she would have known enough to come up with an invention ahead of time, but the details of their mission had not been given until they were in the taxi on the drive over. She had her spyglass though and her own version of a swiss army tool and some extra cash which she used to purchase four dingy looking umbrellas, two collapsible walking sticks, and a medium sized canvas tent alongside the water, trail mix, and beef jerky.

“What are those for?” Quigley asked when she arrived back outside, arms full.

She grinned at him, dropped her purchases onto the dusty asphalt, and tied back her hair with a black ribbon she had twisted around her wrist. “You’re not the only one with helpful talents here, Mister Cartographer.”

By the time Quigley decoded the note Kit left him and plotted the safest course to those coordinates, Violet had assembled her invention. It was a little bit messy and until it was tested she wouldn’t know how well it worked, but she was proud of her handiwork nonetheless. 

“Alright! Ready?” She did not want to linger any longer than necessary. Already, the general store cashier was watching them through the window suspiciously.

“Yep!” Quigley affirmed. “What did you make?” The invention fit almost entirely inside her backpack, which she tossed to him. He caught it and stumbled backwards. “Violet, this is heavy!”

“I know. That’s you’re going to carry it.” She winked and he rolled his eyes, hefting it up onto his shoulders. She gathered the rest of her supplies and slipped the tool into the many pockets of her overalls before reaching up to tug one of the backpack straps.

There was a low grinding, like two pieces of metal rubbing against each other, and nothing happened. Quigley raised his eyebrows at her, and her own brow furrowed. She yanked on the strap again, and with a whoosh, the top of the pack snapped open, flinging them into shade as a huge piece of canvas stretched over a large metal frame sprung free. Quigley let out a low whistle.

Violet gestured to a cord with a loop of leather tied to the end that fell down from the pointed end of the canvas contraption. “Put your wrist through there, please.”

Quigley did, still staring up at the huge piece of stretched canvas. It moved with his arm, which he swung back and forth, testing it’s range. 

“Pull it so it bends over,” she instructed, catching his arm and guiding it down. “It will give us some shade while we walk.” She paused. “Unless we plan on hitchhiking, but I think given the circumstances that might be inadvisable.”

Quigley agreed, and they started off down the side of the road, now partially protected from the sun’s harsh rays. “You know, I’m never going to get over it. How you can just whip stuff up like this.” He glanced at his compass, and readjusted slightly. “Though, we probably could have just used the umbrellas as they were. It may not have been as much shade, but it sure would’ve been a lot less heavy!”

Violet giggled and bumped her hip against his. She wouldn’t mind carrying it if he really didn’t want to, but the backpack would provide more shade if worse came to worst and she felt better knowing her friend had the extra protection. Not that he would need it. It was supposed to be an easy mission, after all.

When Quigley determined that they will not make it to the rendezvous point before sunset, he consulted his map and then Violet, telling her about an abandoned cabin right at the base of the foothills. He stayed there once before, when he explored the mountains the year prior. Her brother had been there too, he recalls.

Violet tried not to think about Klaus much. She knew what she was doing was the right thing, the noble thing, but it was hard not to miss her family. She had not seen Klaus in months, didn't even know where he was anymore. Last she heard he was working on something at the Hotel Denouement. Kit promised that if her first assignment was a success, they would go visit him and her toddler sister, Sunny, who she saw even less.

The cabin was shrouded in darkness, nestled between a grove of large coniferous trees, with thick branches covered in deep green needles. They talked as they approached, laughing quietly at each other’s quips, trying to lighten the tension they both felt scratching inside their chests. This was their first mistake.

“Violet, look out!”

She had approached the cabin first, not waiting as Quigley fit her invention back into the pack and folded up the map. The door was locked and she ducked her head, searching through her pocket for her lock picking tools when Quigley shouted and someone grabbed her around the middle. She screamed, lashing out with a leg and her elbow. Her foot caught the soft spot beneath their knee, and they grunted out “fuck!” as she was dropped to the needle carpeted ground. She scrambled back, pain radiating through her hip. Someone was shouting. She took a moment to glance around for Quigley.

This was mistake number two.

He was surrounded by three figures, all dressed in black. They were hiding in the shadows around the cabin, the dark backdrop of the mountain and the glare of the setting sun keeping them hidden. These weren’t vagrants protecting a cabin they’d settled, she realized. This was an ambush.

Quigley, like her, has some self defense training. He was putting it to use as best he could, but he was still one against three. The sun caught something and Violet realized with horror that one of them was holding a knife. 

She pushed up on her forearms, only to cry out as she was slammed back into the ground. She shouldn’t have gotten distracted, she should have gotten up right away, she hadn’t had an extra second to spare, she knew this! But the foot ground down into her spine viciously and she gasped, eyes welling. The pressure on her lungs was too much. She couldn’t breathe. Her head pounded and she tried to think, tried to recall any of her training.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw one of Quigley’s attackers lunge forward and he yelled, clapping a hand over his arm. The knife gleamed red. 

“Quigley!” she screamed. “The straps!”

Had it been anyone else, he might not have understood. He might have hesitated. But Quigley Quagmire knew Violet Baudelaire, so he did not, grabbing the backpack straps and yanking both of them with all of his strength. Two huge wings unfurled behind him, blocking for a moment the orange glow of the setting sun. His attackers gasped, pausing. Even the foot on her back seemed to falter. “What the fuck,” someone said.

“Your wrists go in the cuffs!” she shouted, and the foot on her back disappeared, replaced in an instant by a knee between her shoulder blades and a shiny black shoe centimeters from her nose. A hand clapped something across her mouth and she jerked away, snapping her teeth. The hand’s owner was not deterred.

“That’s enough out of you, sweetheart,” the black masked man—sounds like a man—growled.

Quigley heard her however, and slipped his hand through the cuffs. Violet’s invention worked, of course it did, the thick canvas stretched between the metal catching the wind and yanking Quigley upwards into the twilight sky. He was far from their reach in less than a second, too shocked to even scream.

“Fucking wings?” Someone shouted, incredulous. There was a volley of curses, some of which Violet had never heard before. She could not appreciate them though, because she could not focus on anything other than the heart beat in her ears and the way her lungs burned.

“Not a total loss,” she heard. “We got this one, at least.”

Then she passed out.

Notes:

Super excited to finally start posting this! I actually started it for whumptober 2020. Who knew my whumpy little one shot was going to turn into a ten chapter au? Not me! Hope you like it so far. Comments make my week <3

Chapter 2: Part One - Chapter One - Dollhouse

The bedroom Violet wakes in is beautiful in a vintage, rustic sort of way, like something out of a children’s book illustration. The bedframe is heavy dark wood, grain streaked and shiny with lacquer. Pale slats reveal the grey bottom of a bare mattress above her. Bright light streams through the white, embroidered curtains hanging over the window on the far wall, casting the room in warmth. The floor is scuffed hardwood, partly hidden by a worn, floral carpet. The two walls that form the corner the bunk bed is wedged into are slatted wooden panels, the other two painted the pale yellow color of fresh cream. A seemingly hand stitched quilt of multicolored triangles lays beneath her. Purple flowers wilt in a dented tin cup atop a lace doily on the side table beside the bed.

The flowers are violets. Violet’s hands and feet are bound individually to each of the bed posts with soft, thin rope. She has been dressed in an ill fitting blue and white dress, not the overalls and blouse she last remembers wearing. The houndstooth pattern leaves her head swimming and the snugness around her ribcage makes it difficult to draw breath. She is sick to her stomach.

“Good morning.”

In the silent room, the voice could be a gunshot, reverberating through her sluggish skull louder than it has any right. Her breath catches and she pulls her limbs into herself on instinct. The bed frame does not so much as shake. The knots tighten.

“Uh oh. Wouldn’t try that if I were you.” A pair of shiny black shoes swing into view from the bunk above her, tell-tale flecks of dried dirt speckling the soles. “Slip knots can be a little... finicky.” 

Violet scowls. She knows how dangerous slip knots can be, knows about all sorts of knots.

Someone drops to the floors, back to her as he stands, straightening his grey jacket over his shoulders and running a hand back through his hair. “The more you pull, the tighter they get. If you’re not careful, you’ll lose all the blood flow to those clever little hands of yours.” The man turns, leans down below the upper bunk so she can see him. He is not unhandsome, with his swept back salt-and-pepper hair, his stormy-blue eyes, and most notably one single eyebrow above them. He smiles with closed lips and reaches out, grazing her palm with the rough pads of his fingers. She flinches away. The cinch tightens further, cutting into her soft skin enough to sting. 

His lips quirk. “Lose blood flow for too long and your hands might not be salvageable. And we don’t want that, do we?” His fingers draw down her wrist, over the rope and onto her arm, gooseflesh rising in its wake. She forces down her revulsion, as bitter as bile, and shakes her head. “Then you’d better not struggle, don’t you think, Violet?”

Her eyes snap up to his face and slide to the half dead flowers on the side table.

“How do you know my name?”

He glances over the flowers too. His hand leaves her arm and he plucks on the still decent blooms from the vase, spinning it slowly between two fingers. A ray of light from the window ignites the purple bloom, the color so vivid she can taste it. “I know far more than your name, Violet Baudelaire.” He reaches towards her and though she jerks her head away, tucks the flower behind her ear. His fingers are hot against the shell of her ear. “The eldest daughter of Beatrice and Bertrand Baudelaire. A brilliant inventress.” He paces the short length of the room and spins on his heels. At the clap of his hands, she flinches. “One of VFDs most promising neophytes. Too bad we couldn’t catch the other one. Quiglesworth, or whatever. Awfully smart, those wings.”

Quigley got away.

That alone distracts from any fear over the man’s knowledge of her or her organization. Relief swells, but is quickly stemmed by the amount of unknowns surrounding his escape. Did her invention work properly? She hadn’t had the time to test it! What if he fell? What if it took him too high? What if he crashed? What if he is stranded somewhere in the mountains freezing to death and it is all her fault?

Violet inhales through her nose, and exhales through pursed lips, settling into rationality. Her inventions always work. And Quigley is resourceful enough to have figured out how to land, or at the very least crash somewhere his fall would be softened. It is more important he wasn’t caught with her.

She stays silent,  she and the man watching each other. He shrugs. “There are still a few things I don’t know about you, but I’d be ever so grateful if you’d, uh, fill in the gaps, so to speak. How’s that sound?” He smiles, but the expression flickers when she fails again to answer. There is a danger to him, a cruelness in his languidity she recognizes but can’t pin down. Predatory—not inherent like a carnivore but calculated, like a man. “Not too chatty, are you? It’s funny, usually you volunteers never shut up.”

It clicks, a spark like striking flint. This man is a firestarter. Of course, how else could he know all this—about them, about her? She’s heard mentions of the schism that happened long before she was born, but she knows little about the other side of the organization, other than what their name so aptly suggests. And she has certainly never met one before.

She decides she will not tell him anything.

“What were you doing in the foothills?” he asks. “You and the other brat?” He ceases pacing beside the bed and ducks down over her, and she turns her head towards the wood paneled wall to the left. Her eyes trace the faded grain, searching for patterns. She finds a swirl of eye, follows it. He scoffs. “Okay, okay, you’re right. Let’s start slow.” The mattress squeaks beneath his weight as he shoves her body to the side with his hip, making room for himself. The rope tightens where it is tugged and the skirt of her dress crunches up over her thighs. The man’s eyes drag over the freshly revealed strip of skin. It's paler than the rest of her legs, a crisp but fading tanline where her shorts ended. “How old are you, Violet?”

“You know my name and all that about me, but you don’t know how old I am?” The instant the words are out, she snaps her jaw shut, heart pounding. She hadn’t meant to speak.

The man’s eyebrow rises and then relaxes in smug satisfaction, like she’s a stray dog he just tricked into sitting on command. “Nope. Enlighten me, won’t you?”

Her age is no secret. If he knows who she is already, it should be easy for him to find out. Maybe he is lying and he already knows.

She sets her jaw. She’d bite his hand if he was closer. “I’m sixteen.” Not quite, not until her birthday, still a month and a half away, but the idea of being older comforts her.

“Huh. Sixteen. All grown up.” He places his hand just above her knee and her skin prickles. “That wasn’t so hard, was it? How about another little question?”

Violet resolves not to entertain him any further when he asks, “What’s your favorite drink? Mine’s wine, but I’ll take whatever’s on hand.” As if in punctuation, he pulls a flask whose middle has been worn silver with use out of his pocket, and raises it to her in toast.

The question, so inconsequential, disarms her. “I like star anise tea,” she says. His hand is still on her knee, burning against her cool skin. It’s best to keep him placated, isn’t it? Such tiny details about herself are not confidential, though speaking them to him aloud leaves her strangely lightheaded.

The man nods, stands up. His back cracks as he stretches. Despite the fact that he kidnapped her and tied her to a bed and has no regard for her personal space, he is not what she expected a firestarter to be. Despite being a bit condescending, he has been friendly. Personable. She would have expected more threats or violence against her. Then again, there is time for that still.

“Last question for today,” he promises, the flask disappearing back into his pocket. “Did you build those wings yourself?”

The floor creaks beneath the carpet as he shifts on his feet, canting his hips. Violet can hear her own breath, her heart pulsing in the tips of her fingers. Like the other questions, he is asking about her directly. Unlike the other questions, this one relates to her mission, acknowledges their circumstances, however peripherally. Hadn’t he mentioned her being an inventor? Had he mentioned the wings? Is he testing her, to see if she is lying to him? 

“...I did."

His lips twitch, a hint of a smile. “Hm. They are pretty neat. Certainly didn’t expect the boy to fly away.” He reaches for her and the fear is squalding, splashing down from her head to the pit of her stomach—she shouldn't have answered, she should've kept quiet, she should’ve shut up!—but he tugs the rope at her wrist and her hand falls free. “You can get the rest yourself. The bathroom is the door on the right.” He waves, and heads for the other door. “Thanks for the answers. Nice meeting you, Violet.” It swings shut behind him before she can make out anything but darkness on the other side.

 

Violet wastes no time freeing herself. Her hands and feet tingle as she wiggles them around, watching her fingers go from stark white to bright, buzzing red. The thin rope leaves behind ugly dents in her skin, and she wonders how long she was passed out.

The stinging sensation of returning blood flow wanes, and she swings her feet over the side of the bed to stand. The room swirls around her, but settles as she takes some deep breaths. She doesn’t move, watching the door he left through. Surely he’s locked it. Surely she’s stuck here. She has to escape. She doesn’t know where she is. She doesn’t know what’s on the other side. She has to try. She’d be stupid to make a move with so much missing. She’d be stupid to sit around waiting.

Cowardice bursts like a sour grape between her teeth, and she heads to the second door, the one on the right. The bathroom handle has a lock, and though she is sure her captor has a key, the gesture is unexpected. The small bathroom is all white and cream colored, except the splash of pink tile behind the bathtub and a beige bath mat in the center of the floor. The sink basin sits atop an empty wooden cabinet. Everything is empty, from the tiny linen closet in the corner to the medicine cabinet hidden behind the mirror. It is clean and cheery and utterly unlived in, like somebody’s dollhouse. The skin on Violet’s arms prickles, fear creeping in.

She inspects herself in the mirror, only able to see from her hips upward, even backed up as far as she is able. Same blue eyes and wavy brown hair, same almost invisible spatter if freckles across her nose and cheekbones that appear each summer. Whoever changed her clothes left her her ribbon, tied around her neck like a choker with a neat bow in the back. She tugs it off, inspecting the soft charcoal velvet, and winds it around her wrist in its preferred placement.

The violet is still tucked behind her ear, and she yanks it out and crushes it in her hand, smearing purple across her palm.

The stiff cotton dress is fitted and a size or two too small. It is sleeveless, with faux pockets and black buttons over her breasts. Though the skirt, which ends just above her knees, has small slits on each side, it is tight. That will make it hard to run. She rolls her shoulders and finds the armholes cut into the soft flesh of her underarms. With a bit of craning, she determines the dress buttons up the back. That’ll be hard to get out of on her own. She can’t decide if the pressure on her ribs is why she’s having trouble breathing.

Violet stares at her reflection. Everything is quiet, all she can hear is the sound of her own heartbeat. Her stomach boils. The girl in the mirror stares back at her, unblinking, until Violet slams her eyes closed and yanks her skirt up over her hips.

A quick peek in the mirror reveals that yes, she is still wearing her own underwear, and they appear untouched. It is a cheap, cotton pair, unflattering, the kind that comes in a pack.

She breathes out. Next order of business, then.

Notes:

Sorry about the length, the first few chapters are pretty short. This was originally supposed to be a one shot, so I'm having a bit of trouble splitting this section up. Hope you enjoyed it! Comments make my day!

Chapter 3: Chapter Two - An Illustrated History of Torture

The room looks just as it had when she exits the bathroom. Violet checks the door the firestarter left through, unsurprised to find the handle doesn’t budge. She checks the window too, studies the tiny black keyhole in the middle of the center beam. Outside, verdant foliage crowds against the glass, blocking the world from sight. The leaves are deciduous, thin with tapered ends, not the pines she and Quigley had been ambushed in.

Stamping down the swell of panic in her chest, Violet breathes in and out through her nose. Quigley is excellent at tracking people. So is Kit. So are her parents. They’re going to find her, even if she’s been taken to the other side of the world. It’s only a matter of time.

Violet inspects the rest of the room with a trained eye. While the careful decoration appears welcoming, closer inspection reveals a more sinister underbelly. The bunk bed, side tables, and the burgundy armchair are all bolted to the floor. The mattresses on both levels are secured to the bed frame beneath the sheets and the rectangular mirror on the wall to the right of the door does not budge, not even when she tugs on it with both hands.

Dropping her arms to her side, Violet pauses as she catches sight of the light mottling of bruises over one side of her face. She touches her cheek, recalling the throb of bone against earth when she hit the ground. Her hand flexes into a fist. She turns away from her reflection.

Not everything in the room is pinned down. The woven carpet shifts when she drags it with her foot. The tin cup with the violets and the lace doily below it are free to move. A silver tray, two more tin cups, and a pitcher of cool water sit on a thin table near the door. They aren’t glued down but might as well be, for she’ll drink from the bathroom tap if she must at all.

The objects on the shelves are a mixed bag. The small pendulum clock on the top shelf is difficult to reach, but does not budge when she tries to lift it. It’s a curious clock, antique and lovely and broken. The little gold pendulum swings back and forth with a loud “tick, tick, tick” but the hands on the clock face don’t so much as twitch, stuck at just past 3:00. The picture frame on the second shelf is also glued down. Inside is a scrap of embroidery depicting an anatomical heart in different shades of red thread. Each part is identified by a number and sticked black line, and above it arcs the phrase, “Home is where your heart is.” Equally unsettling is the decorative plate in a stand beside it. Painted on its glazed surface is a dead magpie, black feathers like oil glimmering purple and blue where the light catches it. Its tiny head lolls to one side, painted eyes clouded, unseeing, a thin black arrow piercing through its neck. One wing is folded beneath it, the other extended up, as if it had been shot mid flight. Uneasiness uncurls in Violet, tickling the back of her throat as she stares at it, thinking of Quigley and the wings she made him.

The books on the shelf can move but none ease her nerves. Firestarters famously do not care for reading. Perplexed, Violet rises up on her tiptoes to look at the titles, but then she reads them and she understands and her stomach sinks. How to Raise Your IQ by Eating Gifted Children. Bards, Prongs, Points, Prickers, and Stickers; A Complete and Illustrated Catalogue of Antique Barbed Wire. Teach Your Wife to be a Widow. Those and other cruel titles sit above her like an audience. She plucks a short one with a red spine from the middle of the row and her tongue goes dry. “Medieval Punishments: An Illustrated History of Torture,” boasts the cover, along with four different creative examples. The spine cracks as she opens it, and her nose crunches at the thick, musty scent of mold.

The inside of the book is ruined. She is shocked cold as she flips through the pages, the words on each unreadable. Some sections are neat, each line crossed out in black ink by an unshaking hand. Others have been scribbled over, the harsh jerk of marker enough to crumple and tear. Only the pictures are left unscathed, intricately drawn devices Violet understands on sight. She shuts the books, teeth clenched, disgust tightening like a snake around her heart as her clever mind continues to untangle the mechanism of each awful design.

The other books are the same, pages painted over, glued together, sometimes scorched. She replaces them to their spot on the shelf, half wishing she hadn’t looked at all.

She finds nothing else of interest in the room. A yellow glass lamp descends from the center of the ceiling but she can’t reach it, not even while leaning out from the top bunk. Under the bed there is nothing but dust.

 

The firestarter leaves her alone. Violet does not sleep, but sits in the armchair facing the door and practicing knot tying with the thin ropes she woke up tied with. She works from the easiest knots she knows to the most difficult, and when those become tedious she invents a few of her own. When the sun goes down and she can no longer see, she starts over from the beginning and practices by touch alone.

By day two her fingers are blistered and sore and her eyelids are leaden, sliding closed on their own like those of a porcelain doll if she does not concentrate. To stay awake and to ward off boredom, she rereads the backs of all the books on the shelf, and again, she regrets it. She paces back and forth across the carpet, reciting anything she can think of under her breath. She counts up past one hundred thousand. She tries (and fails) to count back down by multiples of three. Her stomach rumbles incessantly. She hums Mozart's 14th symphony. She thinks about her mother. She yawns, trips over the edge of the rug, and falls on her hands and knees. The sky turns pink and the light fades. She heads into the bathroom and splashes her face with cold water.

When she returns, a silver tray sits on the floor in front of the door. She stills, muscles coiling, eyes darting around the room. She hadn’t heard a sound—not footsteps, not the door opening—but she is alone still, and she floats towards the tray like an old fashion cartoon, pulled along by the delicious scent of meat and spices. The smell comes from a bowl of something dark and rich and shiny and the chunk of fluffy bread beside it. Her stomach gurgles in protest as she picks the tray up, returns to the bathroom, and flushes the whole meal down the toilet. The feeling of the crackling crust beneath her fingers as she tears the bread to pieces nearly breaks her, but she turns up her nose and blinks away tears and—done. She leaves the empty bowl on the tray where she found it, and settles back into her chair, determined not to miss the firestarter a second time.

 

Violet wakes in that same armchair, and arches her neck like a cat, leaning back into the comforting scrape of fingernails through her hair with a yawn.

“Good morning, ” the firestarter says, and the comfort curdles. Violet scrambles from the chair, stumbling and falling to her knees on the carpet, mind blurred with sleep and discordant. “Careful,” he warns, and he stoops to pick up one piece of her knotted rope from the arm of the chair.

 As she catches her breath, the cold sensation of deja vu crawling up her spine, he turns the rope over in his hands. Her own hands run over her hair where he had been touching her, and she finds he’s left behind two thin braids that join together at the back of her head.

“You tied all these yourself?” he asks, turning her bowline knot over in his hands. He shakes his head. “Of course you did. What clever hands you have, Violet.” He drops the rope and steps out from behind the chair. She is on her feet in a second, determined not to let him have the upper hand again. “I have a few more questions for you, Baudelaire.” He moves towards the door, always facing her, and she turns with him, as to keep him in her sights. “Did you enjoy your dinner yesterday?”

Her eyes flick over to the place where the tray had been. It’s gone. She’s sure now that they’re surveillance is limited to the bedroom. 

Unless his question is a trick, and he knows she flushed the food away.

In the end she determines the best way to avoid any sort of trap was to avoid answering all together.

“Oh, but you did so well last time! It’s a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’!” He holds his hands up, cocking his head, his cool eyes imploring. “I’ll accept a nod.” When she keeps silent, he sighs and drops his hands, scuffing his shoe against the floor like a forlorn dog denied a tasty kitchen scrap. “Fine. Be that way.”

She does not give him any response to that either, standing in strained stillness like a corned doe. Her eyes dart between him and the bathroom with its surely futile lock.

He pretends not to notice, turning away. As she watches, he pours some water into one of the tin cups and drinks it all. She wonders if he is giving a show for her benefit, or if he is actually thirsty. How often do they watch her, to know she hasn’t drank from it yet? Her skin crawls. How long was he waiting for her to wake up, playing with her hair and who knows what else?

He runs a finger over the lip of the pitcher, and his gaze slides to her. “How old were you when they took you, Violet?”

Shock dumps over her head like icy water, her breath catching in her throat. The night of her induction will never leave her, not so long as she lives. Being kidnapped—the hands on her body, the cold night air, the mossy taste of the cloth she bit down on as the needle first pushed into the pale skin of her delicate ankle—isn’t something a person can soon forget. But the neophytes don’t talk about their inductions, an unwritten rule. The harrowing memory, almost sacred, is far too personal for casual conversation.

“Twelve,” she whispers.

The man glances back at her, and the first genuine emotion she has seen from him flickers across his face. It is gone before she can identify it.

“A little on the old side. I supposed being two of the most noble volunteers affords a few privileges with your children.” He spits the word ‘noble’ like a curse, and it takes Violet a second to realize he is talking about her parents.

Talking about them like he knows them.

Her mind stalls and she takes him in again, the bitter voice, the eyebrow, the never ending theatrics.

“You’re… Count Olaf.” Her voice is a quiet mix of reverence and fear.

The man blinks, and his face breaks into a blinding grin. “The one and only!” He sweeps into a bow so low the backs of his knuckles brush the floor and Violet stands stunned, staring. She might as well be meeting the bogeyman. She’s been captured by Count Olaf. She is talking to Count Olaf.

“Kit is my chaperone,” she blurts out. She knows they were engaged once, though Kit never speaks of him.

Count Olaf stiffens in his bow and straightens up with a jerk. He no longer smiles. “So. She is continuing the work of destroying children’s lives for the sake of a literature obsessed cult.” He snorts. “Good to know it wasn’t personal.”

The only sound is that of the clock ticking as they regard one another. Count Olaf crosses his arms, tapping his fingers one after the other. Something in their dynamic has changed again, and Violet wonders if she shouldn’t have identified him out loud. In giving him a name, she seems to have tipped him into some more predatory persona. When she breathes in to steady herself, the smell of wood rot and cheap cologne sticks in her throat. Count Olaf tilts his head.

“My colleagues and I would like to know exactly what you and the boy were doing near the mountains that day. And we would like to know exactly where your destination was.”

Colleagues? The black outfitted figures from the attack surface in Violet’s mind and she wonders if they are still nearby. It makes no sense to have so many people guarding a single neophyte, but it made no sense that she and Quigley were attacked in the first place. Either they’ve far overestimated her value, or she is missing some vital piece of information.

Violet thought she was prepared for anything, but training is not the same as the actuality of not knowing who might’ve touched her while she was sleeping. Of not knowing for what nefarious purpose she had been drugged and kidnapped and locked away. Her throat tightens, as though Count Olaf reached across the room and squeezed his fist around it. Be it from hunger or dehydration or exhaustion or the fact that she had been kidnapped by real life firestarters, who burn and kill and misplaced their moral compasses long ago, for the first time since waking up in a bed that was not her own, Violet is well and truly frightened. It seeps down through her goosepimpled skin, chilling the blood pumping through her pounding heart, freezing each fragile bone. This fear is, perhaps, why instead of staying silent she snaps, “You might as well stop asking me questions for I’m not telling anything to a- a contemptible firestarter like you!”

It is not an overly offensive thing to say, and far tamer than what he deserves, but Violet claps a hand over her mouth all the same. A muscle in Count Olaf’s jaw twitches, and he takes a step forward with a look in his eyes so dark for a moment Violet is sure he is going to kill her right there. But he pivots, faces the shelves next to the bathroom door. “You have quite an interesting collection in here,” he says, eyes flitting over the books. “But when I found out you were an inventor, I thought one in particular might be of interest.”

His long fingers ghost across the spines, before, with a click of his tongue, he removes a short book with a red spine. The lump that grows in Violet’s throat makes it impossible to breathe. Count Olaf flips the book over in his hand, a slight smile playing over his lips as he surveys the only words left unscathed. Violet spent a good amount of time the previous day scouring over the books to pass time. She knows what it says.

“The brank,” he begins, and part of her is surprised he can read at all. “May be described simply as an iron framework which was on the head, closing it in a kind of cage.” For every step he takes toward her, she takes one away, until the back of her head bumps against the wooden frame of the top bunk. She stands frozen as he stops just in front of her.

“It had in front a plate of iron, which, either sharpened or covered with spikes, was so situated as to be placed in the mouth of the victim, and if she attempted to move her tongue in any way whatever, it was certain to be shockingly injured.” He pauses to raise his eyebrow at Violet, as if they were two friends conversing about the surprising yet ultimately uninteresting results of a sports game neither of them had any particular stake in and not a thinly veiled threat of violence against her person. “She thus suffered for telling her mind to some petty tyrant in office, or speaking plainly to a wrong-doer, or for taking to task a lazy, and perhaps drunken husband.” His smiling lips twitch once more as he stares down at her where she quivers in front of him, arms crossed over her chest, as if they could possibly prevent anything he intended to do to her. “Interesting invention, don’t you think?” he asks.

She shakes her head.

“No?” His icy eyes narrow mirthfully. “Do you think you could make such a thing? With those clever hands of yours?”

“No.” She forces the word past the painful tightness in her throat and off of her dry tongue.

“No,” he repeats, shaking his head in patronizing disappointment. “Pity.” The hardcover book hits her square in the temple and her skull cracks against the beam behind her. She crumples to the floor, head throbbing. Above her, he taps the book against the palm of his free hand, as though daring her to stand again. Violet does not try to do so, just stares at his shiny black shoes, willing away her tears. “Here's a do-gooder lesson for you,” he says, slapping the book against his palm a final time. “When a pretty girl has nothing nice to say, she shouldn’t speak at all.”

Notes:

Believe it or not, all books mentioned are real. Comments and kudos make my day <3

Chapter 4: Chapter Three - Good to Your Mother

Left alone again, Violet’s boredom grows, sucks at the back of her calves like a needy child. “We’ll tie knots today,” she tells it. “We’ll reread the books.” But it wails and moans and opens up beneath her, as sticky as quicksand and swallows her whole. 

She drinks water from the bathroom sink, but, though they somehow continue to appear without her notice, she does not touch the meals. Her will is string thin. She cannot falter, cannot bear to eat a single spoonful or it will crumble. So she eats nothing. Her head aches all the time, though she suspects it is from the hunger and not the bruise. The discomfort in her stomach has moved past the ache and the cramps to deep, inescapable itching.

Still, as difficult as it is, ignoring her meals is the best way she can think of to illustrate her displeasure to her captors. 

She uses her ribbon—an old, ratty black one embroidered with the nickname her father used to call her—to tie her hair back and help her concentrate on escaping but her hunger and exhaustion make it impossible to come up with anything viable using the few materials she has. 

When the sun goes down and she loses her light, she goes to sleep in the bathtub, having stolen the bedding off the bed to make a little nest. She locks the door, though she doubts it does her much good.

In the soft wood of the beams beneath the top bunk, she scratches a tally mark each morning with her finger nail. They line up fast—three, five, seven—and each one weighs on her. It is so lonely, her confinement. She speaks to herself sometimes, soft enough for just herself to hear, to make sure she still can. She thinks of her parents and Klaus all the time. And Sunny, though she barely got the chance to know her baby sister, as busy as she was.

She thinks about Quigley, too, and Kit, and all of VFD, and hopes each day she will be rescued.

The sun is not quite risen, the room lit by the yellow glow of fluorescence from the bathroom and the pale pink shine through the leaves crowding the window when Violet hears a low shuffle by the door. She had already woken and was in the process of scratching a crossed line through the second group of tallies, marking her tenth day. Count Olaf had not visited her for seven days, and though she loathed to admit it, she began to hope he would come by again, if only to torment her. The boredom of solitude was eating her alive. She longed to hear a voice other than her own.

A click at the door has her slipping off the bed and onto her feet, hands balled at her sides. With her gaunt face, greasy hair, and burning eyes she imagines she looks something like a feral cat. If she had fur, it would have been standing on end. 

Confinement gave her plenty of time to organize her thoughts and she is prepared to answer a few of Count Olaf’s questions (with answers enough to satisfy his curiosity without giving away any true secrets) and ask him some questions of her own.

But it is not the Count standing there when the door swings open. Violet takes a step back as a different man ducks through the doorway, glancing behind him before quietly closing the door, His eyes land on her and widen.

“Violet Baudelaire?”

He is taller than Count Olaf, and lankier too, though his broad shoulders fill out his sharp black suit well enough. His slicked back hair gleams like an oil spill in the early light.

“You’re… a Denouement?”

Violet met the Denouement twins once before, as a little girl when her father took Klaus and her to visit Hotel Denouement. This man looks the same as she remembers, from the impeccable shine of his shoes to the stylish mustache curling beneath his nose. A slight wrinkling across his forehead is the only thing to denote any time passed at all.

“Young lady, have you been good to your mother?” he asks, hand fidgeting in his pocket.

“The question is, has she been good to me,” Violet responds, easy as breathing.

“Oh, Violet, I’m so glad you are alright.” He approaches her in three long strides and Violet, shocked and relieved, lets him. “I’m Frank. I’m here to rescue you,” he says, grasping her hand. His skin is warm and the sensation makes her whole arm tingle.

Overwhelmed, she nods.

“I—” His brow furrows as he lifts her hand up, looking her over. “You… haven’t they been feeding you?”

The dress, which had been too small at first, now hangs off her pale frame. Ten days without eating have reduced her to a wisp of herself. The bones of her joints protrude, bulbous and awkward, and her limp, dark hair seems to drip down around her. She’s seen her waifish reflection in the mirror. She looks like one of the abandoned dogs they put on posters begging for donations:  bruised, ribs visible, and those big, painful eyes.

She shrugs. The shock of his arrival is wearing off, though the reality of her impending rescue has not quite sunk in. “They bring meals but I don’t…I don’t eat them,” she tells him, her voice a quiet rasp. Her throat has been aching for days. “Don’t wanna be drugged.”

He stares at her for a second, unblinking, and nods. “That makes sense. That’s exactly the sort of thing a Baudelaire would be stubborn enough to do.” He takes stock of the room’s cheerful, ravaged interior as she tries to decide whether or not she should thank him. “How did you end up here?”

Violet tries to pull her hand back, but his grip does not loosen. “I was with Quigley on a mission and we were ambushed. In- in the foothills. He had—I made an invention and he used it to fly away. Did he…” she remembers the red knife from that night and her chest constricts. “Is he alright?”

Frank shifts in place and fear swells in her. “I’m not sure,” he admits, and her exhale is like a whimper. “I haven’t heard any bad news, at least.”

Violet quells her disappointment. He is right. No news isn’t bad news. “We should go. We need to go before they notice you’re here,” Violet says, looking at the door. They’re always watching her, they’ll know he’s here soon if they don’t already. “How did you find me? Is anyone else with you?”

She moves for the door but Frank doesn’t, and she is stuck at arm’s length. She can hear her heartbeat.

“Never mind that,” he says. “What was your mission in the foothills?”

Violet frowns. Her brain is a muddled bog of hunger and exhaustion and she is trapped beneath its foggy surface. Something isn’t right, like a shadow overhead she cannot make out through the haze. She just wants to go home. “I don’t… Can’t we discuss it when we are some place safer?” She tugs at her arm again, and his grip tightens around her wrist.

“Answer the question, Violet.”

“We were delivering a package. For Kit,” she says, voice low.

“I know,” Frank snaps. His grip becomes painful and blood pounds in her wrist. “But where were you delivering the package to? ”

The unexplainable tightness in her chest combined with the roll of her stomach makes white pulse across her eyes. This is all wrong. Frank should know as much as she does. Frank would not be prioritizing these useless questions over helping her escape. Frank would not waste time lingering here.

But Frank has an identical twin. One who, like Count Olaf, would be very interested in Violet’s failure of a mission.

She wretches herself out of his grip so hard she crashes to the floor, the rug scrunching up beneath her. The impact against her hip and shoulder stun her for a second before she scrambles back, until her back bumps against the wall beneath the window. Her skirt crumbles up around the crook of her hips, her legs crossing over each other as she pulls them up close to her chest. Her heart pounds.

The man’s expression melts from badly maintained sympathy into apathetic amusement. Straightening his shoulders, he pulls out a box of cigarettes. Holding on between his lips, he lights it with a shiny gold lighter, and takes a deep inhale.

“What gave it away?” Ernest asks.

Violet shakes, glaring at him. The parts of her that collided with the floor throb and she rubs her shoulder, still scowling at him. She can’t believe she fell for his terrible act. She just wants to go home.

“Well, I never was much of an actor,” he says, and she shrinks back as he approaches, dropping to a crouch in front of her. The smoke makes her throat itch. “God, you look terrible. It’s a good thing I came to visit. As far as I know, no one has noticed you haven’t been eating.” He stands with a grin not directed at her. “Olaf is going to be furious, you being his little pet project and all.”

Violet’s stomach rolls. Why do they care so much about a package two neophytes were delivering? Why were they keeping her in this strange room? Why had they left her alone for so many days? Why Count Olaf?

“Are they looking for me?” is all she asks. There are rumors about Ernest and Kit. Violet never approved, understood, or even believed them, but Kit did have a proclivity for firestarters and spent an awful lot of time at Hotel Denouement. If it is true, maybe Ernest will take pity on her. She isn’t asking for much—just a slip of hope to hold on to. Kit must’ve talked about her, he must have some sympathy. She cannot reconcile her chaperone dating someone monstrous. 

Ernest holds his cigarette between two fingers and blows a puff of smoke into the air. It unravels between them, catching the growing morning light.

“If they are, they’re doing a very good job of hiding it.”

That doesn’t mean anything, why would a volunteer let a firestarter know about their business anyway, but his apathy and his words and the whole debacle of the morning crash down, snapping the little self control remaining within her, and her face crumples. Hot tears drip down her cheeks faster than she can wipe them away and her chest convulses with swallowed sobs. She’s furious at her lack of self control, for revealing her emotions when she has been taught for so long not to, but she’s been taught so many things and none of them have been any help at all and they’ve left her here all alone with these horrible men and a piece of information significantly more important than she was lead to believe. 

A folded, white handkerchief lands on the floor by her feet. “I’m going to get Olaf,” Ernest says, unmoved. “You should pull yourself together.”

 

Violet does not, as he puts it, pull herself together. As soon as Ernest leaves, she scoots backwards until she is cradled between the armchair and the wall. The protection that comes from the cramped space offers a small scrap of comfort. If anyone tries to grab her, at least she’ll be able to get a few good kicks in first. So she hunches up there and sobs into her skirt so hard it is painful.

When Count Olaf bursts through the door, his hair sticks up, mussed and lopsided, and his shirt is half tucked in beneath his jacket. Violet stares down at her knees and pretends he isn’t there. She isn’t sure she can handle his patronizing tone nor his condescending gaze. 

He does not bother closing the door behind him, and Ernest leans against the doorway, watching with detached curiosity, cigarette still in hand.

Grabbing the handkerchief from where it lies, Count Olaf kneels in front of her. “Why are you crying?”

“I-I wanna go home,” she sobs. Snot drips down her top lip and she wipes it away with a vicious swipe of her hand. Olaf regards her with icy eyes.

“And where would that be?”

Violet blinks up at him. The question makes no sense, but his gaze on her is unwavering as he continues. “It’s not living out of bags in the back of Kit Snicket’s car, is it? Not at Caligari Carnival, or wherever else she had you training before now. And not at your parents house, where they sold their precious eldest daughter to an organization they knew would send her out to fight villains like me. So where is the home you want to return to, Violet?”

His voice is low and steady, not the theatrical dramatism she has come to expect from him. As genuine as they are cruel, words squeeze around her heart like a cold fist and she is too shocked to cry. 

Where does she want to go? Home is… someplace away from here. Someplace safe.

She imagines herself again, with Kit or with her parents, tries to alight the warmth of safety, and tries to summon the security of those who care for her. Of those who should care for her. Instead: emptiness. All she can recall is the fear and pain of her cheek against the carpet of pine needles and Olaf’s foot against her back.

She never resented her parents for letting VFD take her, or Kit for the training she’d been through. It had been her choice, after all. She was a volunteer. And yet…

Olaf tilts his head with a click of his tongue and Violet flinches as he reaches with the handkerchief to wipe off her face. His touch is soft, distressingly maternal as he cleans her up with soothing, circular motions. “You’re just a child, and they sent you out here all alone, knowing full well we were after you and you want to go back to them? Do you think they’ll protect you? No. They’ll dress your wounds and tell you how sorry they feel and give you a useless speech about the greater good to make themselves feel better and then they will send you off again. Back to me, like a gift.” He runs a hand through her greasy hair. “And poor little Violet, well, I don’t think you’ll ever quite trust them again.”

A ragged breath cracks from the back of her throat and she begins to cry once more. She’s been wondering—not much else to do in this little prison—how much Kit and the others knew about her mission. How much they kept from her. It was her first time—how could they send her out to do something so dangerous without telling her? It was supposed to be an easy mission. They said it was an easy mission!

Olaf reaches past her bent legs into the little nook she has shoved herself into and pulls her forward by the shoulders. She lets him, sobbing as he hugs her to his chest. He smells of smoke and pine and kerosene, and she hears his heartbeat through the dark green tweed of his jacket. He rubs his palm up and down her spine until her skin no longer feels like her own, allowing her to cry for a generous amount of time before he pushes her away.

“Go and take a shower,” he says as she wipes her eyes. “You smell awful and you look worse. I’ll find some food you’ll be able to stomach. Regardless of how much you want to, it is actually quite important that you don’t die yet.”

Smears of light flutter about the room, light shining through the foliage outside. Violet gets to her feet on shaking legs, tugging up the sleeve of her dress that slipped off her shoulder. She sniffs. The upset drains from her and for the first time in many days, she is at peace.

She locks the bathroom door behind her, the door serving her from Count Olaf’s excogitative gaze. After removing the heap of her bedding from the bathtub and shoving it in front of the door, she undresses. A gaunt girl with circles beneath her eyes as dark as bruises looks back at her from the mirror, and emotion swells in her chest. She looks away from the stranger. The water from the rusted silver shower spout won’t get hot no matter how far she turns the handle but it runs clear, so after folding up her dress and setting it atop the closed toilet lid, she braces herself and steps over the bathtub rim.

Goosebumps erupt over her skin almost as fast as the adrenaline that flushes through her system at the shock of freezing water. Her heart races. She’s more awake than she has been all week.

The white plastic shower curtain, criss-crossed with a pattern of little red flowers, crinkles when she pulls it closed. Then she is alone with the hypnotic sound of rushing water and her empty mind. She cleans her body and her hair with a smooth bar of white soap from the corner of the shower, using her fingers to claw through the snags of her hair. Long brown strands fall as she works, whirling away down the drain.

When her fingers grow numb and stiff and her exhaustion has returned, she shuts the water off. She planned to use her blankets to dry off, but she pulls back the curtain to find the bedding and her clothes are both gone. In their place is a stack of folded clothing and a pale green towel.

The door is still locked. Aside from the irregular drips from the showerhead, the bathroom is silent. Violet swallows and steps out onto the slick tile, reaching for the towel. It is soft and brand new and she hugs it around her trembling body, closing her eyes for just a moment.

Notes:

You'll have to suspend your disbelief about the starvation thing. If anyone is stubborn enough to mount a starvation protest, it'd be a fifteen year old girl. Hope you enjoyed this chapter! I am so excited I finally get to introduce Ernest to you all!

Kudos make my day and comments make my week <3 thank you all for being patient with my slow updates.

Chapter 5: Chapter Four - Roadkill

Notes:

Thank you for your patience on this unexpected multi-year hiatus! I've actually finished writing this fic, so I will update as fast as I can edit each chapter. I have been looking forward to posting this particular chapter since 2021, so I do I hope you enjoy :)

TW for (internal) discussion of rape

Count Olaf waits in the bedroom for Violet. The sheets and blankets are thrown haphazardly across their assigned mattress, and he sits with his back against the wall, long legs extended and crossed at the ankle. His neck ducks forward so all of him fits beneath the bunk, and he holds a small journal in his hands, scribbling furiously. 

The idea of Count Olaf, the most notorious firestarter she knows of, writing, is as absurd to her as if she had just caught a dog writing in his place.

“Took you long enough!” He smiles at her, teeth bared viciously, and sets his book aside. “Come here, girl.”

She obliges him, shuffling over to the bed. He gestures in a “come hither” fashion, so she climbs up onto the mussed quilt, making sure to mind her head as she scoots to sit beside him. The wall presses into the notches of her spine, forcing her to sit straight as Olaf inspects her.

“The clothes would fit if you hadn’t gone on a secret hunger strike,” he says, eyes lingering on the way the shirt falls across her breasts. 

Violet crosses her arms, stares down at her feet and the spider web of blue-green veins running across the tops of them. 

The clothing left for her consisted of a pair of blue linen shorts, a white, short sleeved blouse, and matching underwear set in seafoam green, delicate and lacy and altogether too sophisticated for her. The cups of the bra gape, catching the thin fabric of the shirt in awkward divots above her breasts. The shorts have slipped from her waist to the widest point of her hips and she fights the urge to shimmy them up again, twisting her hands in her lap.

Count Olaf leans over the endboard and grabs a wooden tray from the seat of the chair with a long arm. On it sits a steamy glass—a real one, not like the tin cups from before—filled about half way with an opaque brown liquid.

He holds it out to her. “You are going to drink all of this right now. In front of me.”

The hairiness in Violet’s stomach feels nothing like hunger any longer, just an endless, gnawing itch . She glances at the cup, and then at him. The thought of drinking it sends a cramp spinning through her abdomen, and she knows, just as she has known every day since her kidnapping, that she should not ingest anything from the hands of the enemy. 

But she is exhausted.

“I am not making a suggestion, Violet.”

Violet takes the glass in shaking hands, warmth spreading through her palms. It’s too cloudy to be tea. The familiar scent of garlic confirms this hypothesis, and she takes a small sip.

Maybe it is because starvation gnaws at her, or maybe it really is the best broth in the world, but Violet’s eyes well up with tears as she gulps down the rest in two mouthfuls. It burns down her throat, warming, ember-like in her stomach, and Violet looks at Count Olaf again to find him already shaking his head at her.

“No more for now. Someone will bring you another glass later.” He sighs. “You’ve made a lot of extra work for everyone, don’t you know?” He watches her with a glint in his eye that makes the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. When he takes the glass from her, his hand brushes hers, and she closes in on herself, pulling up her legs and crossing her arms. Wet hair dangles down around her face like a curtain, making it even more difficult for the gears of her tired mind to grind out anything useful.

“What were you doing with all your food, anyways?” Count Olaf asks. “If you’d just left it alone this never would have happened. I could’ve made you eat much sooner! It’s a crime to let such a pretty girl waste away, after all.”

Violet shrinks further into herself. The pleasant warmth from the broth already faded and her stomach gurgles, pulsing with discomfort. 

“I flushed them,” Violet mutters. Against her better judgement, she adds, “If you hadn’t left me alone in here so long, maybe you would’ve noticed sooner.”

Olaf’s lips twitch. “I was…” he pauses, tracing a finger around the rim of the glass. “Occupied. But don’t worry, my pet.” He swings an arm up around her shoulders, and she stiffens, breath catching in her throat. “I’m back now, so you don’t have to worry about being lonely any longer.”

I wasn’t lonely, Violet wants to insist, but he would hear the lie in it. She doesn’t relax, but she doesn’t pull away from him, either. Gently, she flexes her hands and then her feet, finding them both stiff. 

Mornings are always chilly, and seasonally-inappropriate outfit provides no warmth. Violet yawns. She usually naps in the morning, crawling back to sleep after scratching her daily tally mark and flushing her breakfast. All she has is time to kill and she’s just so tired. 

She tries to ignore the bitter, smoky smell of Olaf beside her, and the way the warmth of him seeps up into her. The events of the day roll over in her mind, although they all feel awfully far away. She licks her dry lips, and sets her jaw.

“Is Kit a firestarter?” she asks, and Olaf jerks beside her, letting out an astonished laugh.

“Is- Is Kit Snicket a firestarter?” her parrots back, flabbergasted. “No! Why on earth would you think so?”

“Don’t laugh,” she huffs. “I know she was- she was engaged to you. And now everyone says she’s dating Ernest.” Violet’s tongue is heavy in her mouth. She has filed away all her emotions on this subject, examines just the facts. “She’s my chaperone and she sent Quigley and me, inexperienced neophytes, on a mission she said would be easy and we were ambushed. I’m not stupid, I know whatever is in that package is far more important than she implied. Or why else would- why would—” she nods at Olaf, but can’t look at him. “And, well, if she isn’t then— then—”

“Then I’m right and every adult that you have ever trusted has treated you like you are expendable?” Olaf finishes, in a soft voice that makes him sound like understands exactly what she’s going through. 

Violet clenches her jaw furiously. “My parents didn’t—”

“If your parents ‘didn’t’ then how come I found your pretty little self tromping through the foothills instead of doodling hearts in a notebook by flashlight or whatever teenage girls do?”

Violet had never attended highschool. This year would’ve been her second. Many neophytes, like her brother and Duncan and Isadora, attended Prufrock, but Kit felt that Violet would do well with a more hands-on approach. Everyone always talked about how much potential she had, the eldest daughter of B. & B. Joining her chaperone had been the obvious choice, expected by all, but privately the sacrifice stung.

“You don’t know anything,” she whispers, resting her chin atop her knees.

“I know I would never treat you like you were expendable,” he purrs, voice brushing over her neck like a caress. “I would teach you how to use those big eyes of yours, and how to spit further than all the other little girls. I’d teach you how to burn,” he strokes his fingers over her arm and her skin prickles, a feeling she cannot name settling inside her chest. “But I wouldn’t send you into the hands of the enemy like a lamb to slaughter.” He leans closer, and his breath crawls across her cheek. “Poor, poor Violet. Lost little lamb.” His lips touch her ear and a terrifying spark, electric and bright, zips down her spine. 

With a gasp, she jerks away, to leap from the bed and glare from a safe distance or lock herself in the bathroom until he leaves her alone. 

Only, instead, she crashes onto her side, the cheap springs of the mattress creaking with alarm. She rolls onto her back, but her movements are slow and sluggish. She’s been feeling it all along, in her fingers, in her mind, since- since—

Her eyes land on the glass sitting on the tray. Count Olaf follows her horrified glance. “Oh, Violet. You knew. You must’ve known,” he says with false sympathy that makes her face burn. The sensation is fleeting, for she pales as he climbs over her, knees on either side of her hips. Her heart pounds against her ribcage as she raises her arms to— she doesn’t know what, but it doesn’t matter because he pins them down beside her head with little resistance. Her wet hair sticks to the backs of her hands.

“Wh.. what’d you do t’ me,” she slurs. Panic sharpens her vision and she finds herself picking over the details of her captor’s face; the pockmark scars on his cheeks, the white hairs peppered amongst the grey, the flecks of yellow and green around his blown out pupils. The way he looks so hungry.

He grins wolfishly. “Don’t worry, little lamb. It’s nothing permanent.” He lets go of one wrist, testing, and when she doesn’t move he sits back onto her thighs. 

No amount of training, VFD or otherwise, could have prepared her for the hopeless horror that comes with being unable to move one’s own body. Violet can’t so much as wiggle a finger or even speak any longer. Through no control of her own, her eyes stare up at the tally marked beam above her.

He’s going to rape me, she thinks, and wonders, sickened, if being knocked out would be better than paralysis. One one hand, she’ll know what happens to her this way. On the other hand, she’ll know what happens to her this way. Bile burns in her throat.

At least—she notes,  heart sinking— this  isn’t much of  a surprise. Firestarters are murders, it makes sense they’re rapists, too. She should have expected that much. Maybe it would’ve been better if he’d done it right away, in that case, gotten it over with. Then there would be no strange feelings, no confusing conversations, no hugging her while she cried.

In an impartial, distant way, she wonders if she has begun to develop Stolkholm syndrome. The thought disappears when Olaf grabs her upper arms and props her up against the pillows at the headboard.

“Comfy?” he asks, still grinning. She can see him now, see the maniacal shade his face has taken. She can see herself, too, her arms, torso, and legs, all stretching away from her towards the end of the bed, and decides that being knocked out is the choice she’d prefer. He’s going to make her watch. The realization sinks to her stomach, sour as curdled milk. 

She’d rather die than watch.

In a moment of selfishness she instantly regrets, Violet wishes Quiglety had been the one to be captured instead of her. That she had flown away on the wings she made, that she was back with Kit, or dead in the mountains, or anywhere but here.

He didn’t abandon you, says a small voice in her head. He had no idea what your invention did.

I didn’t mean it, Violet thinks in reply. It’s a lie, and she hates herself for it. 

Count Olaf, oblivious to her internal conversation, picks up her hand in his, marveling at it. Gone is his suave, in-control persona as he wiggles her unresponsive arm with deranged glee.

“Look at you,” he remarks, and as she watches, hooks his thumb inside hers and his fingers over the back of her forearm. As his grip tightens, her wrist bends, forcing her thumb parallel to her arm, then further, until it pressing against her own soft flesh. “You’re so… bendable. I’ve never seen you this relaxed.”

He’s barely seen her at all, merely two prior instances (or three, if before and after her shower are to count separately) but she can no longer speak to point that out. He releases her hand, massaging his thumb into her palm hard enough it hurts before dropping her arm. It flops beside her. His strange expression strangles her. Excitement twists his face into an unreal mask. Violet suspects it’s the most authentic expression he has shown her yet.

His fingers brush against her cheek, the backs of his knuckles caressing her lips as he pulls his hand in a smile-like crescent across her face. The rough tweed of his slacks burns where it rubs against her bare thighs. Her stomach heaves. One of his hands twists in her hair now, the other braced against the mattress beside her neck. As Olaf’s exploratory fingers prod and comb and trace, Violet's chest caves, crumpling inward like tissue paper. He is looking into her eyes at someone else, too lost in his head to notice the tears streaming down her bright red cheeks. Only when the pain of panic forces a wheeze between her teeth does he blink, pulling back from her.

Confusion flits across his face, but he understands in a moment. He sits back, careful to duck his head and avoid the bare beams above them. 

“One day, Violet, and probably one day soon, I am going to have you.”

She wheezes again. Her head swims. She can’t tell if it is from the drugs or the panic attack.

“I’m not going to force myself on you. I won’t have to because you are going to want it. Do you understand me?” His fingers circle over the silver button of her shorts, more like a promise than a threat. “You are going to want me and I, generous host that I am, will oblige. Maybe you’ll hate yourself after—hell, maybe even before!—but you are going to ask me to fuck you, with you big babydoll eyes and your pretty pouty lips, and I am going to give you pleasure that you will never forget.”

The pounding in Violet’s head makes it hard to focus on Olaf as he removes his body from hers, scooting down to sit beside the baseboard again. He lifts one of her feet, gentle as can be, to rest upon his lap.

Violet’s wheezing is an ugly noise. She can’t move her jaw and the sound forces itself past her teeth and tongue by the clenching force of her throat alone. It hurts, radiating through her chest and head. It is not a sound a person is meant to make.

Once, when she was younger, Kit hit a deer with the taxi. It hadn’t died upon impact, but had lain in the middle of the road, twitching. In the minute or so before Kit put the creature out of its misery, it made a haunting sound just like the one coming from Violet.

Goosebumps erupt on her skin as Olaf massages his thumb over the eye on her ankle, pressing tight circles against the protruding bone beneath. “You got so skinny,” he mutters, and picks up a long rod from the tray the empty broth glass sat on. He fiddles with it, out of sight, and then with a pleased hum, presses the rod against her ankle. He steadies it against the thumb of his other hand, whose fingers scratch out across the bridge of her foot.

It’s not a rod at all. It’s a needle. It stings as he pushes it tenderly into her skin, just above where she knows the VFD insignia to be.

No. No.

But Violet can do nothing but wheeze, shed silent tears, and let panic warp the room around her as her mind rushes through an unending loop of panicked memories, wishes, and pleas. Olaf’s work continues steadily as he presses the black, ink coated needle into her skin again and again, erasing the mark that tethers her to her organization the same way he’d erased the words within the books on the shelf across the room.

It doesn’t hurt much, just a sting. The first tattoo hurt far more. But panic swallows her, and she flounders incoherently against the black tar flooding her mind and lungs. Every visceral heartbeat pulses in the tips of her fingers and the ends of toes. She doesn’t even notice when he sets the needle down, humming under his breath. 

“There!” he decalres, and she barely hears it over the still ugly sound of her breathing. “All finished.” He swipes his thumb over the tender skin, admiring his handiwork, and when satisfied, lifts her leg and scoots off the bed. The room is darker now, the light from the window cool and dim. “You’re welcome,” he says, and her eyes flicker over to his grinning face. She wishes she could knock out each and every one of his yellow teeth with the heel of her foot.

By the time Violet’s mobility returns, the room has been black for a while. It starts slowly—her eyes, an itch in her fingers, a wiggle of her nose—but all she does is roll awkwardly to her side and curl into a ball. She is sluggish still, and exhausted beyond exhaustion. The day has simply been too much, from Ernest to the food to the horrible tattoo—she cries quietly, hating herself and hating Count Olaf and Ernest and Kit and Quigley and even her parents. When she does fall asleep, her dreams are steeped in ink and faces she recognizes but cannot place.

“Young lady, have you been good to your mother?”

“Oh yes. One of VFDs most promising young neophytes. Can you invent your way out of this one, too?”

“It’s a simple mission, you’ll do fine. Just watch out for enemies in the dark.”

“It had in front a plate of iron, which, either sharpened or covered with spikes, was so situated as to be placed in the mouth of the victim, and if she attempted to move her tongue in any way whatever, it was certain to be shockingly injured. Shockingly injured, hm? Doesn’t that sound fun?”

“The question is, has she been good to me?”

Notes:

Comments make my week! <3

Chapter 6: Part Two - Chapter Five - Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?

Violet wakes, sitting groggily, hunched to avoid the mattress above her. Her head pounds and her muscles ache and the realization that she has to live another day stuck in the cheerful mockery that is her prison hits her like a fist to the solar plexus.

She pulls her leg up , folding it over her thigh so she can see the damage, and her vision blurs.

Her VFD insignia is entirely gone. In it's place sits a crooked rectangle, and below it, a simple signature, "O.", about the size of her pinky nail. Tears prick her eyes and she grits her teeth, stretching her leg away. The removal of the tattoo doesn't actually remove her from VFD, of course, but she feels vulnerable, stripped bare in a way she hadn't before. On sight, she is not longer a volunteer. Just Violet Baudelaire, captive and alone.

Thankfully, it is not Olaf who brings her things to drink throughout the day, but a man in a long coat with hooks instead of hands. He introduces himself as Fernald and is friendly enough, though Violet, still exhausted and despondent, doesn't speak to him.

It takes about a week for her captors to bring her anything more substantial than juice or broth. Fernald, Olaf, and occasionally Ernest take turns, like she is an item on the household chore chart. Maybe they have a one of those little whiteboards on the refrigerator: "Has Violet been fed today?"

For the first few days she stays petulant, refusing to speak or so much as look them in their eyes. She's so lonely, though, the black blankness on her ankle always itching. She can't ever replace her insignia, she realizes. Not in its traditional spot, anyway.

She decides she'll talk to Fernald, as he is the least offensive to her pride. Fire-starters cannot be trusted, but he is more genuine than Olaf and less impersonal than Ernest.

"If you bring me some supplies, I bet I could make you some really amazing prosthetics," Violet says one day, from her perch on the armchair. A lose spring is poking her butt, and she shifts, trying to get comfortable. She has ripped all the pages out of "Teach Your Wife to Be a Widow," and has been folding them methodically into paper cranes all day. Her father taught her when she was younger. She can't exactly remember, and many pages were sacrificed before she recalled how to do it correctly, but now she sits surrounded by a flock of a hundred or so birds.

"Really? You think you could?" Fernald asks. He is balancing a tray on his hooks, and it shakes with every step. On it rests uneasily a mug of broth and a plastic packet of crackers.

"Of course! I'd simply need a stocked toolbox, some wire, and whatever scrap metal you have lying around."

He seems to actually consider it for a moment as he sets the tray down on the small table near the door. Violet's hands pause in their folding, and he blinks, brows scrunching in thought.

"I hope you're not actually thinking of giving her anything. She's just trying to escape."

Ernest stands in the doorway. He is staring out the window, watching the leaves rustling outside. They've begun their autumn transformation, vibrant yellow and orange creeping in from the edges. Little brown spots of mold appear on some as well. Violet tries not to think about what the change in seasons means. She's lost track of time, but her birthday has most certainly passed. Sweet sixteen indeed.

Fernald sniffs, offended. "I'm not stupid! I wasn't going to give her a thing!" He storms past Ernest with a huff. Ernest raises an eyebrow at Violet.

"How's that ankle, Miss Baudelaire?"

She glares at the floor, already tired of his presence. Her ankle is healing well, the initial redness already faded. Count Olaf did a good job. Perhaps he had experience on the other end of an induction, too.

"Silent treatment is not the punishment you think it is," Ernest says, pulling a slender cigarette from his breast pocket. He never seems to be without one. His silver lighter clicks, and a thin line of smoke begins to pour up from the end of his cigarette. He inhales. Violet looks down at her birds. He exhales.

"He hates it," she mutters.

Ernest smiles. He is too condescending to be truly conspiratorial, but he enjoys seeing Count Olaf irritated. At the end of the day, his amusement at his colleague's misfortunes exist parallel to his amusement at Violet's own misfortune.

He picks up the tray from where Fernald left it, and holds it out to her. She sighs, and brushes the paper cranes off her lap before taking it from him. He watches her without a word, until the broth and crackers are both gone, before taking her tray and his leave. At first, their watching her made her uncomfortable, a prickly feeling burning the back of her neck, but she has since grown used to the presence of their eyes. They comment on things she does when they aren't in the room, so she knows they watch her even when she can't see them. She isn't sure how. That should make her angrier than it does, but the monotony of living the same empty day again and again has crept into every facet of her, leaving only numbness in its wake.

 

"So, are you ready to tell us where the package went?"

Violet sits on her bed, hunched, legs dangling. She isn't sure when she started thinking of it that way. Her bed. The tiny part of her that is still Violet Baudelaire, Inventor and Volunteer, is sickened by her resignation. But Violet Baudelaire, prisoner and teenage girl, is too tired to care.

The leaves outside have long since turned brown and fallen. They rest now beneath a sheet of pristine snow, brittle corpses erased by the passing weeks. Violet tries not to find the metaphor in it.

Count Olaf asks her about that accursed package every morning. Where were they delivering it, where did the boy take it, who were they supposed to meet? Strangely, she is offered no reward or punishment to encourage an answer. He does not seem to expect any real information from their talks. Violet can't help but remember what Ernest said when he found her starving. "Pet Project." Perhaps she is more of a hobby to Count Olaf than anything else. "VFD's most promising neophyte," he had once called her. Now she just rots in a room.

"I don't know where it went." She watches soft snowflakes flutter away beyond the window, back lit by a dimming purple sky, ignoring the repetitive scrape of Olaf's fingers through her hair.

"Where were you supposed to bring it?"

"I don't know."

"Who were you bringing it to?"

"I don't know."

"Where'd that boy go?"

"I don't know."

"Oh yes, you're just perfectly innocent, aren't you? Do you know anything, Violet?"

"I don't—" His quests registers and she snaps her mouth shut.

He snorts and scratches his chin. He's never been clean shaven, but now he's grown considerably more facial hair than when they first met. His hair is longer too, enough so that he sometimes ties it back. It's a good look on him.

Violet doesn't keep tallies anymore. The little white marks mock her when she wakes up each more, over a hundred of them. It's been a few weeks since she stopped keeping track. Some days she regrets it, scratches tally after tally until her fingernails are bloody. But she doesn't know how long she's been stuck in this room anymore. She tells herself it doesn't matter.

"Do you like your new clothes?"

Those had been unexpected. Count Olaf finally got sick of looking at her in the same skimpy blouse and shorts, it seemed. Or maybe it had more to do with her constant shivering as the temperatures began to drop. Either way, she woke one day to three plaid dresses and a two piece flannel pajama set. She changed into the pajamas right away.

"Thank you," she said.

"You're welcome, but that isn't what I asked you," Olaf says, watching her intently.

Violet pulls her knees up to her chest. The pajamas are far warmer than the blouse and shorts had been. For what must be the first time in days, she isn't shivering and she can feel the ends of her fingers and her toes. She does wish he had brought her some socks of slippers, too, but she doesn't dare ask him for them. "They're really very comfortable."

Olaf nods, then grabs her face in his hand, jerking towards him. She cries out. "I asked," he repeats, "Did you like them?"

She nods vigorously as his grip grows tighter, smushing her cheeks. "Yesh! I did, I do!"

"Good girl." He lets her go and she hugs her knees to her chest again, ignoring her smarting face and pounding heart. He leaves soon after, bored of their one sided conversation, and Violet falls back against the bed where he had sat, shaking.

Something is wrong with her, has been for a while. For as much as she hates Olaf, she thinks of him first thing when she wakes up each morning. He brings her her meals most days now, He's usually the only one who stops to talk to her. He is definitely the only one to ever touch her.

The room is dim now, cool blue as the sun disappears, and she burrows beneath the quilt on the bed, hands on her face where he grabbed her. She closes her eyes. Her body aches.

"Oh, Violet, you knew. You must've known," she remembers him saying, the sick lilt of his voice raising goosebumps on her arms. She rubs her fingers across her chapped lips, the other hand trailing down her neck. She recalls the weight of him on top of her, the mattress indenting where his knees pressed down beside her hips. She is so cold and he was so warm.

She pauses, scooting into a more upright position, shoulders cradled by the pillows beneath her. Her fingers find the first button on her pajamas and pop it open. The pajamas are deep red with brown buttons and black ribbons stitched around the cuffs.

"Comfy?" When Olaf grins, it's all teeth, too many teeth. They are sharper than they should be. His eyes glint. He looks at her like he wants to eat her whole. Behind her eyelids, she can see her body stretched out beneath his. Her stomach churns. She undoes two more buttons.

She remembers him lifting her limp hand and playing with it, bending her wrist so far she thought it would snap. She imagines his face, the way it had twisted in glee.

The feeling of his hands in her hair, on her face, is much more recent, and the memories blend in her mind. One hand finishes the buttons as she squeezes her cheeks with the other, softly at first, and harder as she imitates him. Her free hand finds her breast and she bites her lip, squeezing her eyes closed tighter. In her head, Olaf pushes up her blouse easily. His expression is that same deranged awe as he draws his hands over her ribs, pinching her delicate skin.

"Well isn't that darling!" he exclaims as her nipples harden to his touch. Beneath the blanket, her own hands continue. She hasn't done this in many months, but her body is familiar.

"I've seen you watching me, Violet," Imaginary Olaf taunts, going so far as to lean down and lick her nipples teasingly. She whimpers, shakes her head, pressing back against the pillows. Her sits back, drawing one hand between her breasts, down past her stomach. "Shhh, that's right. Pretty girls should be seen and not heard." He traces lazy circles around the silver button of her shorts before unbuttoning it. Every hair on her body stands on end. She could be sick with want. She can't move. She can't do anything but watch as he slides the shorts down her legs, watching her with his beautiful eyes, sneering with his beautiful mouth.

Her own hand dips beneath her waist band, the other still circling across her breasts. Her whole body buzzes like a live wire, but she lies still beneath the quilt.

"I've been waiting for this since I first saw you, all tied up and helpless in this bed, trying so hard not to panic," Olaf says, cupping her through the thin black fabric of her panties. His hand burns. She's already so wet, her fingers have no problem slipping between her folds. She imagines Olaf's smug expression as he sees this, the way his eyes light up. "Poor little lamb. Seems like you've been waiting for this too."

She has been, in a way. Even though she's barely started, she feels like she is almost there. Her body thrums. Her fantasy grows less coherent as she rubs her fingers against her clit in tight circles, biting down on her lip to keep from moaning. She can hear Olaf's voice, low and dark and dripping with desire, and she imagines the things he would do to her drug-relaxed body. He could push her legs all the way up next to her head, or flip her over and pull her hips into the air, forcing her back to arch painfully. Every scenario is focused on her, on him forcing pleasure on her. Even in her fantasy she steers clear of things she doesn't know, like how he looks naked or what he might feel like inside of her. It would be an invasion of his privacy, somehow, and she doesn't dare. Instead, she focuses on the weight of his hands, of her hands, and the awful encouragement he would give at each jerk of her hips and each hitch of her breath.

She reaches climax quickly—her body needs the release. Her hips arch off the bed and she can't quite stifle the moan that rips from the back of her mouth, too loud for the otherwise silent room. In the fading afterglow, she imagines his expression going gentle, him leaning forward to kiss her cheek and cradle her supine body, whispering in her ear, "That's it, Violet. Good girl."

Then all she can hear is her own unsteady breaths and the ticking of the clock on the shelf across the room. She jerks her hands away from herself, dizzy. She's burning up. She's nauseated. She's going to throw up.

Mind spinning, she stumbles from the bed, ignoring the shock of icy air as she sprints to the bathroom where she heaves into the toilet.

Though she can taste bile, nothing comes up. She sits back on her heels, knuckles white where she grasps the porcelain toilet seat. Why would she do that? Think that? She heaves again. It's sick, she's sick, how could she?

Violet stands and glances at herself in the mirror. The yellow light bulb sallows her skin, deepening the dark shadows beneath her dull eyes. She is pale, her face devoid of blood, and Violet, hateful and desperate, rakes her nails down her cheeks, leaving bloody trails behind. Her rib cage shrinks around her lungs and she stares hatefully at her reflection, panting softly.

I have to get out of here. I can't stay here any longer.

She wanders unsteady back into the bedroom. She has thought about escaping before, but there was really nothing she can do. The room is meant for keeping prisoners, and her captors are careful not to leave her with anything she can use. Aside from the books, the decor is all glued or bolted down. She could take the bedding off the bed if she wanted, but the window is locked shut and she has not even a pin to pick it with.

The clock ticks and ticks and the hands don't change and she sinks to the floor beside the bed, cradling her head in her hands. How could she do that? How could she imagine those horrible things? No matter how she considered it, that had been all her.

Using the bed frame for support, she climbed to her feet again, desperate for distraction. Tick, tick, tick. The same ravaged books sit on the shelf, the same dying bird, the embroidered "home is where the heart is." She pulls the red book from the shelf, utterly miserable, and looks over the back. Tick, tick, tick. The passage is long since memorized. If the punishment for something as small as speaking out of turn was to lacerate a woman's tongue with a violent muzzle, what sort of horror was in store for a girl who pleasured herself to the thought of being raped by the man who kidnapped her?

She stifled a sob, long nails sinking into the soft cover. Tick, tick, tick. Her skin crawls, too tight and itchy all over. The usually soft flannel is scratchy and rough and there is that constant tick tick tick tick tickticktickticktick—

"AGH!" She hurls the book at the stupid, noisy, unmoving clock with all her might and it shatters on impact, pieces of wood and glass and mechanism cascading down across the floor.

Violet blinks, shocked. The four, intricately carved clock feet still stand on the shelf where they have always been secured, but the rest of the decimated object lies littered around her feet. She can't believe her eyes. How, in all the unfortunate time of her residence here, had she never tried brute force?

Unspooling the ever-dutiful ribbon from her wrist, Violet, for the first time in many months, ties up her hair. Her mind whirs as she sorts deftly through the debris, ideas upon ideas spilling over each other at each newly inspected piece.

Though her time in captivity has left her skills a little rusty, Violet is able to make quick work of her new materials, sitting criss-crossed in blessed silence. She does not hesitate when finished, does not look twice at the door or the chair or the bed as she rushes to the window and throws aside the curtains, pushing herself high with one knee on the window ledge. The minuscule keyhole waits patiently as she holds up her invention with shaking hands.

Shaped like a miniature fishing rod (sans wire), it is made of bits of interlocking metal. She twists some gears at the base of the things and another piece of metal extends, un-nesting like a slender telescope, into the hole. Violet holds her breath and continues to turn the gears slowly, listening as the lock clicks once, twice, three times. The metal piece retracts again, and the gears spin to a stop. Trembling, she sets the invention to the side and drops down from the window ledge, grasping the bottom of the window with both hands. She tugs upwards and when it doesn't budge she almost bursts into tears. But then, with a low squeak, it gives, jerking upwards. Cold, fresh air hits her face and sways forward, disbelieving.

A laugh bubbled up in her. It worked. It worked, it worked, it worked! She tears away from her new portal, dashing toward the bed. Her excitement gives her the burst of strength she needs, and she yanks the sheets off the bed in one great motion. Escaping through the window on a rope of knotted sheets feels too cliche to possibly be a good idea, but she is too excited doesn't care as she ties them together and anchors them to the bedpost closest to the window.

With no time to waste, she gives it an experimental yank, and clambers up onto the window ledge. The ground looks closer than it did all those months of waiting inside, and she does not hesitate to swing herself over the side, wrapping her ankles around the taught sheet and sliding off the ledge all together. She scrambles down, glancing both ways as she does, and drops the remaining few feet to the ground.

Notes:

Hope you enjoyed this one! Comments make my week :)