#the few ones we’ve seen from the sequel look SO good like hello…
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appreciation post for live action frankie’s wardrobe
#they got the best outfits its undeniable#there were a couple more i didnt include here just cuz i didnt have good enough pics of them#the few ones we’ve seen from the sequel look SO good like hello…#so hyped to see all their new fits#the cutest ever actually#ceci balagot#monster high the movie#monster high live action#monster high g3#frankie stein
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28 weeks later 2
28 WEEKS LATER 2 PROFESSIONAL
28 WEEKS LATER 2 SERIES
28 WEEKS LATER 2 TV
28 WEEKS LATER 2 FREE
If it is a direct sequel to 28 Days Later, here's where we left it.Īfter Jim, Selena and Hannah realised that the mansion was anything but a safe place (when is it ever?), Jim fought back and managed to kill all of Major West's men and even though West shoots Jim, a zombie takes care of the Major.Ĭut to 28 days later and we see the zombies seemingly dying of starvation, while the trio spot a jet and release their big banner saying, 'HELLO'. That makes us think it'll be closer to Annihilation than Ex Machina in terms of tone, but we'll have to wait and see. That's slightly impossible to predict, especially as Alex Garland said he came up with the idea after 'taking a trip'.
28 WEEKS LATER 2 PROFESSIONAL
Was she getting into professional shape for a return to the franchise? 28 Months Later plot: What will it be about? The actress who played Hannah, Megan Burns, hadn't acted since the release of the first film in 2002 – until 2018 when she appeared in a short film.
28 WEEKS LATER 2 FREE
Naomie Harris also has a free schedule after Bond 25 (AKA No Time To Die). In all, 28 Weeks Later improves upon 'Days' scares, story, characters, and plot to make for one exciting entry in the horror/sci-fi/drama genre.Cillian Murphy is making Peaky Blinders, but has space around that. And when you can't see where the terror is coming from in a horror film than you're in for something special. With a horror film, you expect there to be an ample amount of deaths, but the way in which Juan Carlos Fresnadillo directs the deaths is terrifyingly unexpected. Yeah, I'm looking at you every other horror film, it's cool to make them run.īut perhaps the biggest compliment I can give to the film is its utterly unpredictable. Adding to that experience are running zombies. That could lead to pacing and character issues, but with a non-stop action-horror, it actually works to the benefit of the experience. That partly because it's only 100 minutes long, but mostly because the film never takes a breath. Between school time, Odd and William keep themselves busy by entertaining people with their band Code: Earth which also includes Aelita, Brynja, Theo, Emmanuel, and Nicholas. All of which, do a wonderful job in roles that aren't necessarily flushed out. 28 WEEKS LATERLAST OF THE INFECTED DIE OUTHIROKI ISHIYAMA REPORTED MISSING,PRESUMED DEAD It’s been several months since the attack at the cottage and life has returned to normal. Not only do you have some nice lead turns from Robert Carlyle and Catherine McCormack, but you have Idris Elba, Rose Byrne, Jeremy Renner, and Imogen Poots before they became famous. I also found the cast to be quite impressive. So, in that way I like what the film tried to do. Usually we either see everything as the apocalypse is going down, or maybe several years later.
28 WEEKS LATER 2 SERIES
Implausible probably, but we've never really seen an apocalyptic series that attempts to go back and restart civilization from the same area. Of course, apparently it was a good idea for the military to reoccupy London and start building up a civilization again, even though it was the center of disaster only a half a year earlier. 28 Weeks Later picks up after London is deemed safe and virus free, as the undead have starved to death after the events of the previous film. Similar to how the Cloverfield films are related but not directly tied in, 28 Days Later is a prequel of sorts, but the characters and plot are entirely different. There's something so glorious about seeing the streets of London be a wasteland that only occupies a select few living and undead. Director: Daniel Boyle, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, Danny Boyle Genre: Horror, Horror/Suspense Movie/TV Title: 28 Days Later/28 Weeks Later Edition: 2-Disc Set. But there's something about the '28' series that really hits well for me. 28 Weeks Later is smartly realized by showing us a wide cast of.
28 WEEKS LATER 2 TV
The 21st century has been flooded with films and TV shows about zombie apocalypses, so it's difficult for any of them to stand out and feel completely fresh. A solid sequel that delivers more gore and thrills but less humanity and food for thought.
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For the kisses prompts - #22 for Malex please 🧡
And thank you so much for finding the planetary alinement sequel fic for me 🧡🧡🧡
22. kisses in the rain
Alex is on the phone with Forrest, who calls him periodically every couple of days to talk about what he's doing, and Alex usually pays attention, or pretends to pay attention, but today he can't stop looking out of the window, at the rolling clouds, lighting up with flashes of lightning, the thunder rolls loudly, shaking the very vibrations of his house.
He watches the next flash of lightning and counts the seconds between it and the loud thunder.
Still a few minutes away, he thinks.
He's startled out of his thoughts by a loud knock on his door, and he hears Forrest, sounding a little pissed off, like he's been trying to get his attention but Alex isn't responding.
He picks the phone up, takes it off speaker, and puts it to his ear, mouth open to speak, but then the banging on the door sounds again, and Isobel Evans' voice, of all people sounds out, loud enough that it would have probably been picked up by the speaker.
"Alex! I know you're in there. I don't care if you're balls deep in that Nazi obsessed blue haired twink, we need to talk!"
"I have to go," Alex says, and hangs the phone up on Forrest asking him what's going on, and winces slightly, before he shrugs and drops his phone back on the counter.
He gets up from the couch, reaching for his crutch, since he hadn't been expecting any visitors, and starts to make his way to the door.
Isobel, of course, doesn't have the decency to let him open the door. She opens his locked door, practically blasting it off its hinges and she stalks into the house, eyes finding Alex immediately.
"Where is he?" She demands, stalking forward, one hand aloft, eyes sharp, like she's getting ready to pry the information out of his head if he doesn't answer fast enough.
"Who?" Alex asks, because he's well versed in Isobel enough to know that if she was talking about Forrest it would be in a mocking tone, not one that is tinged with desperation.
"Michael," she says in an obvious tone, and just hearing his name makes Alex's heartbeat spike. "He's been missing for days, and he only did that whenever he was holed up with you."
Alex shakes his head, feeling anxiety and worry bleed into him, "I haven't seen Michael since he walked out of Pony during my set, making it very clear what he thought about my song."
Isobel gives him an incredulous look, but Alex isn't sure what part of his statement she's having trouble believing.
"Over the last year the most contact we've had was text messages when he needed information, so if he's fucked off somewhere it definitely wasn't with me."
Isobel shakes her head, and she looks more irritated than anything, "God save me from my fucking oblivious brothers."
She turns to look back at Alex, "Max is dying. His new heart is failing, and he's known the whole time, and just let us know a few weeks ago. Michael isn't taking it well, and I thought that he'd come to you, but I'm guessing he knows about the Nazi obsessed blue haired twink that periodically warms your bed-"
"He has a name, you know?" Alex says, interrupting her, but Isobel continues speaking like he hadn't spoken.
"-which would explain his dive into the negative spectrum of emotions when he had been feeling pretty hopeful and anticipating your arrival."
Alex blinks at her, feeling confused, "He was hopeful?"
Isobel shakes her head at him, "But I was wrong. I'm wasting my time, because he'd never come here after a rejection."
"Rejecti-?" Alex starts to ask, feeling even more lost than before, but Isobel just turns around and heads back out of his house without even a wave of goodbye.
The slamming of the door coincides with a rumble of thunder, making Alex jump a little.
He hears his phone ringing back where he left it, and he knows that it's going to be Forrest.
A small part of him wants him to go back and answer the phone and explain about ex sort of sisters-in-law who don't know how to wait for someone to open the door, but there is an increasingly louder part of him that is yelling at him that he knows exactly where Michael is, that instead of offering his sort of boyfriend, sort of not boyfriend, any explanations, he should go and demand one from Michael instead.
Alex nods his head sharply and then turns to head to his room. If he's going out into that storm that's brewing, he's going to need to prepare himself.
-
Alex finds Michael at their spot off the Desert View dirt road that leads from town to Fosters Ranch. The truck is hardly visible to the road, but Alex knows exactly where it is.
Alex doesn't pay too much attention as he carefully parks his car next to the truck, and he turns off the car without looking to make sure that Michael was there.
He clenches his hands around the steering wheel and breathes in deeply, and then breathes out slowly.
And then he shakes his head and tells himself to stop being nervous or scared or whatever he was being right now, it was just Michael.
Alex lets go of the steering wheel, and gets out of the car, closing the door with a slam that gets swallowed up by the thunder that sounds immediately after the flash of lightning.
Alex breathes in deeply and closes his eyes at the smell of ozone filling the air.
Alex loves thunderstorms and when it rains so hard the smell of it permeates everything. It makes him sad and melancholy, but also fills him with a mellow sort of happiness.
It's Michael, in a scent that Alex can find anywhere. It's not as good as the real thing, but it helped whenever Alex faltered during the last year.
He looks at the truck, searching for Michael, staring into the cab of the truck, and jumping a little when he finds him sitting on the tailgate.
He looks like he hasn't moved in a while, and he doesn't even twitch when the thunder crashes again.
Alex takes him in for a moment. His face is being covered by his hat, but his clothes looked nicer than anything that Alex has ever seen him wear. Even in the dim light, he can tell that his jeans have no holes, and the sweater he's wearing actually looks soft, and like it actually fits him.
It makes something warm and fuzzy curl in the pit of his stomach, that Michael is doing good, that he's happy and well. Well, he's not really happy right now, if Isobel is to be believed, but from the small, unasked for updates that Kyle gives him whenever they meet up for beers, he knows that Michael hasn't been miserable or drinking like a fish or getting into bar fights or dating anyone.
Alex shakes his head to get rid of the last thought, because he knows better than to hope for anything. If the last three years, since he came back to Roswell the first time have taught him anything, it was that Michael was over him, and Alex just needed to get over it.
Which was much easier said than done.
Alex had thought that he had been making steps towards that, but he could feel the tips of his fingers tingling just from proximity.
Maybe this was a mistake.
As soon as he thinks the words, Michael turns and looks at him. His lips are parted like he was going to speak, and then he seems to realize that Alex was the one standing there, and not Isobel or Max.
Their eyes lock, and Alex feels his heart skip several beats, before it starts racing, matching his quickening breaths.
Lightning flashes and thunder crashes as they look at each other, and Alex has a feeling like something mystical, something alien is about to happen.
Alex walks closer to the truck and Michael doesn't move or say anything, just continues to stare at him, eyes too big, like he's not sure that Alex is real.
Alex sits down next to him and the truck moving up and down with Alex's weight is what snaps Michael's gaze away from him.
"Hi," Alex says, and his voice comes out breathless and quivering, but he pushes forward anyway. "It's good to see you."
"What are you doing here, Alex?" Michael asks, the question falling out of his mouth almost as soon as Alex finishes speaking.
"Isobel came to see me," he says, and Michael scoffs, looking at Alex and quickly away. "She said you were missing, and she thought you were at my place, and it wasn't until she left that I realized I knew exactly where you were."
Michael shakes his head, scoffing again, as he turns to give Alex a sardonic look.
"That doesn't answer the question. What did Isobel let slip 'accidentally' that made you come all the way over here, when you haven't bothered with a hello since you've been back?"
Alex bristles immediately at the implications in his tone, getting defensive, "I don't owe you anything, Guerin."
"I'm not expecting anything from you, Manes," Michael drawls, a mean smirk on his mouth.
Alex scoffs, "Really? Because it sure seems like you were expecting something."
Michael looks away at that, but Alex is just gearing up.
"Which is the part of all of this that is confusing me. I understand you coming out here and wanting to be alone because your brother is dying, again," Michael flinches at the words, and Alex wants to reach out and comfort him somehow, but instead he keeps talking.
"What I don't understand is you being hopeful about us and taking me being with someone else as a rejection. Michael, you were the one who ended things between us. You pushed me away and reminded me at every turn that while I wasn't like my family, I also wasn't what you wanted."
Michael is looking at him now, eyes wet with tears, brow furrowed, and he's shaking his head a little, like Alex is speaking about something that he doesn't understand.
He doesn't say anything in the lull of Alex's flow of speech, so Alex keeps talking.
"I am sorry, you know," he says. "About the song. I wasn't expecting you to be there when I was performing it. I didn't mean to make you uncomfortable."
"What?" Michael asks, sounding disbelieving, and he fully turns, tilting his head up a little so that he can see Alex's face clearly. "Why would you think that I was uncomfortable?"
"You walked in while I was in the middle of singing, and you left the second you realized exactly what the song was about. In conjunction with the fact that you'd just gotten your heart broken, I know you weren't walking into the bar expecting a declaration of love, and I'm sorry that I-"
"Alex," Michael says in a low voice, lowering his head just a little. "Stop apologizing."
Alex opens his mouth to speak, but stops when Michael reaches up and takes his hat off, tossing it to the side and ruffling a hand through his hair.
Without the hat, it's almost like a strip of armor that Michael had been wearing has come off, and he looks at Alex intently, "That's not why I left."
"Oh," Alex says, deflating. "Then why did you leave?"
Michael huffs out a humorless laugh, looking away.
"I thought I was doing what was best for us at the time. Maria had just broken up with me, and while I wasn't ready to jump into a relationship with you, I wanted things that I knew were selfish. And then I saw that Nazi obsessed blue haire-"
"So she got that from you?" Alex interrupts him, giving Michael an exasperated look.
Michael just shrugs unrepentant.
"I saw him there, watching you sing, and I just, I didn't think that in that moment, if given the choice, you'd pick me, not after everything that happened. So I left, because I wanted to give you the space to heal and to date whoever you wanted. But then I heard you were coming back home, and I don't know, I guess I couldn't stop myself from hoping that you were coming back for me."
Alex just stares at him, eyes wide, feeling like someone just turned his entire world upside down. He swallows hard, not really knowing how to respond.
"Michael, I-"
But Michael shakes his head, getting to his feet and standing in front of Alex.
"You don't owe me anything, remember?"
Alex just shuts his eyes, and inhales deeply.
After a couple of seconds where Michael just keeps staring at him, and the storm brews ever closer, thunder so loud and near that it reverberates through Alex's bones, he speaks again.
"I was ready, you know," he says, trying really hard to sound casual and failing. Alex opens his eyes to stare at him, but Michael is looking up at the sky, the flashes of lightning caught in his eyes.
"Or I thought that I was,” he continues, shaking his head and then looking back at Alex and jumping when he sees that Alex is looking at him. “I even went to meet you at the bus stop.”
“So that was you?” Alex proclaims, jumping down from the tailgate.
Michael looks embarrassed, cheeks flushed red, and it reminds him so much of the Michael that he fell in love with that he loses his breath for a moment.
“You noticed huh?” Michael says, making a face.
“I swore that I saw you through the bus window, but when I actually looked there was no one there, so I thought I just imagined it.”
“Well, when I saw your boyfriend there, I made myself scarce,” Michael says, a bitter tone to his voice, but he looks apologetic, so at least he’s self aware enough to know that he has nothing to actually be bitter about.
“Not my boyfriend,” Alex says automatically, and Michael just stares at him a bit incredulously.
Alex rolls his eyes and scoffs, “Like you’ve never had a booty call, Guerin.”
Michael raises both eyebrows at that, and gives Alex a mock shocked look, “I’m afraid I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
But he ruins the effect by smirking, and Alex can’t help it, he bursts out into laughter, the tension of the last couple of minutes draining out of him.
He’d thought maybe things between them would just be weird and stilted and painful, but so far it hasn’t felt anything like that. It felt easy.
Alex stops laughing and just grins at Michael, who is just staring at him with a look that Alex is very familiar with.
Alex’s smile dims a little as he continues to stare at Michael who breathes in deeply like he’s steeling himself for something.
“So, not your boyfriend, huh?” he says, taking a step forward.
Alex inhales sharply at the words, and licks his lips, shaking his head.
“So, if I kissed you right now, what would you do?”
Alex exhales a small disbelieving breath, his pulse racing and fingers tingling. Michael has never asked to kiss him before. He’s always just done it like he’s afraid that Alex will tell him no if he dares to ask.
Michael looks away, probably thinking that Alex meant that as a no, so Alex takes a step forward, and Michael freezes, eyes snapping back towards Alex.
“Why don’t you do it, and find out?”
Michael moves forward like he thinks that Alex is going to change his mind at any second, fingers pressed to Alex’s face as he tilts his head to the side and presses his mouth to Alex’s.
The move makes them stagger backwards a little, but Alex hardly notices as he pushes his fingers into Michael’s hair and holds on tight, keeping him close as he kisses him back.
The storm breaks at the same time, and the rain falls hard and cold, pelting them and soaking them almost immediately, but neither Alex or Michael care as they continue to kiss.
Michael digs his fingers harder into Alex’s jaw and kisses him harder, parting his lips and licking at Alex’s mouth. Alex wraps his arms around Michael’s shoulder, pulling himself in closer and opening his mouth to Michael’s.
Michael kisses him deep and just a little bit desperate, and Alex loses himself in it, thinking, this, this, this.
This is what he’s been missing. This is what’s always missing. Michael kisses him like Alex was created specifically for Michael to kiss. And Alex can’t help but surrender to the touch.
After what feels like forever and not long enough, Michael pulls away, panting heavily.
Alex blinks rapidly a few times, before he realizes that his vision is blurry because of the rain that is pouring down on top of them.
He looks up at the sky as lightning lights up the clouds and thunder rumbles, and he closes his eyes breathing in deep. Michael drops his forehead to Alex’s cheek, pressing his face along the side of Alex’s face and just breathing.
Alex just tightens his hold on Michael and breathes with him.
#malexprompts2021#this one came out longer than i was expecting#but oh well#im not tagging this as a cheating fic cause 🌳lex isnt exclusive which means alex can kiss whomever he wants#hope you like this!!#and sorry for the delay!!!
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Now or Never - 4
Summary: It’s been 10 years since they were juniors and lot’s has changed, but other things have stayed exactly the same. (Sequel to Lost or Found)
...
4 - Replay
...
Hailey pushed her door shut behind her, throwing her bags on her kitchen counter. She put away all the food she bought, grabbing a pen and a notebook and taking a seat at her bar. Hailey was a planner, she always had been, but it had gotten worse as she had gotten older. So, when she felt like things were out of her control, she sat down and made a list of everything she could. Today, it was meal planning.
She filled the whole page, listing each meal and all the ingredients that go with it, the cook time and how likely it was to end up as leftovers. Almost all of it were things that Hailey knew Jay loved, things that he hadn’t had in a long time.
She was grasping, she knew she was, but she was living in an eternal limbo. She was exhausted, she hadn’t slept in days, but she couldn’t dare slow down. She couldn’t dare let everything catch up to her. Hailey was running from years worth of demons coming back for her, and if she took a chance to breathe, she’d have to face them.
As she looked down at her finished list, she felt tears prickle her eyes. She dropped her head in her hands and pushed the pad and paper aside. She fought the urge to laugh, her boyfriend - the only man that she had ever loved and it seemed like she was ever going to love - was coming home, and she was making a meal plan.
What else was she supposed to do though? If the last four years had seemed foreign, then she was living on a different planet now. She had no idea what the next few days, weeks, months, had in store for her and she was terrified.
Her phone caught her eye on the counter, and she felt a small grin grace her face. She picked it up and dialed a familiar number. The line only rang once before they answered, “Hello?”
“Hey,” Hailey said, sighing out. There was something about her Aunt’s voice that had always calmed her.
“Hi sweetie, how are you?”
Hailey took a deep breath, with everything going on, she hadn’t had a chance to tell anyone about Jay’s highly anticipated homecoming. “Really great actually.” She said, finally. A smile gracing her face once again. Jay was coming home, no matter how many times she told herself, it still didn’t feel real.
It didn’t matter what they ate for dinner or what her apartment looked like, he was coming home to her, finally.
“Good, I’ve been thinking about you.” Her Aunt said.
“I have something to tell you.” Hailey drew out, barely able to contain her joyful laughter.
“Okay?”
Hailey squealed - an action reserved for her Aunt - and the words tumbled out of her mouth, “Jay’s unit was recovered, he’s being shipped home on Tuesday, Will and I are going to pick him up-”
“What?” Her Aunt asked, cutting her niece off.
Tears started to pool in Hailey’s eyes for what seemed like the hundredth time in days, “He’s coming home.”
“Oh my God,” Trudy said, her voice breaking. “Are you serious?”
“Yes!” Hailey laughed, the sound followed by Trudy’s own.
Trudy gasped, “Hailey, that’s wonderful. I’m so happy for you, both of you.”
“Me too.” She was so happy, she didn’t think it was possible be this happy. There were things that rivaled it: the first time Jay told her he loved her at the dance when they were sixteen, the day he came home from his first deployment, the day they she graduated college, the day of Adam and Kim’s wedding. She had had so many happy moments, but none of them measured up to what she was feeling right now. “I just can’t wait to see him.”
“Well I’d love to see him, and you too. So give me a call when you two are all settled in and we’ll make a plan.” Trudy and Randall have moved to Hilton Head Island a few years back after they both retired, Hailey saw them a few times a year. Including during the summer when all of them would drive down and stay with them for a week.
The two woman talked for a while, catching up, making plans, circling back around to the idea of Jay coming home several times. A smile stayed on Hailey’s face the whole time, despite anything going on in her life, Trudy seemed to always know what to say. That never changed.
Hailey barely had time to set her phone down before it started ringing again. This time it was Kim. “Hello?”
“Hailey.”
Hailey stood from her stool. “Kim, what’s wrong?”
“Hailey, I need you to come here like right now.” Hailey could hear her panic clearly, she was already grabbing her car keys and her purse.
“Okay, I’m on my way.” She stalled at the door. “Kim, what is going on?”
“Hailey...its Erin, she’s back.”
…
“Why on earth didn’t you all tell me?” Hailey asked, standing in Kim and Adam’s kitchen. “Don’t you think I had a right to know this? Especially with everything going on right now.” She ran her fingers through her hair, leaning against the counter.
After walking in and finding a crying Kim and a very stressed Adam, they showed Hailey the bathroom, Then spent the next 10 minutes explaining everything they had been keeping from her.
Kim took a step forward, “We found out right before Will called us, Jay seemed ore important.”
“Jay is more important! But this puts his life in danger, it puts all of our lives in danger.” Hailey said.
“You’re right, I’m sorry. We’re sorry.” Adam said, glancing between Hailey and his wife. “But more importantly, what are we going to do?”
Hailey nodded, beginning to pace. “Well, we learned a long time ago that calling the police was a bad idea, but,” she gestured to herself, “I think we are covered in that department. We could call Beth Sanders back, tell her what happened.”
“Hailey it says not to talk…” Adam says.
“We aren’t teenagers anymore Adam!” Hailey snaps, she pauses, takes a moment to catch her breath. She wasn’t a yeller or a fighter. “I-I’m sorry, I just. I don’t know, there isn’t a correct answer. Obviously she isn’t out of prison yet, we would know right?”
“Right.” Kim said, nodding.
Hailey pinched her nose, “Then someone must be working for her. Or she’s blackmailing someone like before, like what she did to Kelly.”
“Or she escaped.” Adam said, causing both Hailey and Kim to gape at him. “Think about it, it might not be in the media yet, hell maybe no one even knows.”
Kim rushed to the front door, making sure it was locked. It didn’t make that much of a different, but it gave her some peace of mind. Her hands were shaking, “Why would she appeal her case just to escape?”
“Maybe she just couldn’t take it anymore? She couldn’t wait for a parole hearing, so she escaped and decided missed her little playthings.” Adam said with disgust.
Hailey stared at the counter, tracing the granite veins, running every possible idea through her head. “Or she found out about Jay.” She said, her head snapping up. “Think about it. She’s been there for 10 years. She’s earned good behavior or she’s figured out how to sneak things. She could have seen a newspaper or seen the news, decided that a parole hearing would take too long and broke out. She’s always been crazy about him, it’s what started it all in the first place.”
Adam stood there in shock, Kim scoffed, “Hailey I hate to say it, but I think you’re right.”
“So he’s leaving a war zone and coming home to a new one,” Hailey, dropping her head in her hands on the counter. “Perfect.”
Kim rounded the counter, placing a hand on Hailey’s shoulder. “It’s gonna be okay, we’ll get through it. We’ve done it before.”
Hailey stands up, nodding, looking defeated. “I-how?” She asks, “We barely did the last time.”
“I honestly don’t know, but we will.” Kim looks to Adam for support.
He just shrugs, “We have too.”
“Yeah…” Hailey agrees, she squeezed the hand on her shoulder. “I gotta make some calls, can I use the guest room?” She asks.
“Of course.” Kim says, giving her a quick, but necessary hug.
Hailey makes her way into the guest bedroom, shutting the door behind her. She checks the entire room for bugs, checking behind photos and under pillows, really anywhere they could be. Then, she closes the blinds and dials a familiar number. They answer after just one ring. “Hello?”
“Garrett, hey, I need your help.”
...
An hour later, Hailey was sitting in her living room while Garrett paced around the room, a pained expression on his face. “So, you’re telling me that in high school, one of your best friends faked her own kidnapping and death, killed a random girl, blackmailed your classmate into breaking into yourself and choking you, locked you in a garage with a running car, shot Adam and then tried to kill you in basement, all because you stole her boyfriend?” He paused, turning to face her.
“You forgot stalking us and threatening us for 3 months but yeah, pretty much.” She said shrugging. “And actually she did all that because I “stole her friends,” I didn’t steal her boyfriend until after she locked me in a garage.”
Garrett huffed, sitting down next to her. “Details.” He leaned back against the couch, running his hands over his eyes. “Hailey, I’m your partner, why didn’t you tell me any of this before now?”
“I don’t know,” Hailey said, running the past year through her mind. It wasn’t a light or funny story for when their bored on a stakeout, and wasn’t exactly something she spewed when she was drunk, it just never came up. It was one of those things that you shove down and hope it disappears. “They aren’t exactly fond memories.”
Garrett picked up his beer off the coffee table, taking a long drink. “Fair enough.” He looked over at his partner, her blonde hair pulled back into a ponytail like usual, an old academy sweatshirt covering her. On the surface she looked like the old Hailey, but he could see the pieces of hair falling out and how swollen her eyes were. She wasn’t the normal Hailey. “Hailey, I-I’m sorry you had to go through that, especially that young. No one deserves that,”
Hailey gave him a soft smile, nodding her head and dropping her gaze to her lap. She knew he meant well, but the look on his face was one of the main reasons that she never told anyone about her past. She was a big girl, she didn’t need anyones pity. “Thanks, that means a lot. But, I’ve come to terms with it all. I thought I had moved on, but, the bitch is back, and I need a plan.” She stood up, grabbing her laptop off the sofa table across the room. “Jay is coming home and Kim and Adam want a baby, and Kev and Vanessa want to get married, and dammit Erin is not going to ruin everything again.”
She sat back down on the couch next to him, and Garret smiled at her, he admired her more than anyone else in the world, even more now. “Then we’ll stop her.” He tried not to think about the way his chest tightened when she said Jay’s name, it wasn’t fair to either of them. She deserved to be happy, he just thought that eventually it would be him to make her just that, and he wasn’t sure he was ready to give up on that.
“I have no idea how.” She logged in to her computer, completely unaware of the way her partner was looking at her. “First we need to find out if she’s actually still in prison.” Garrett scooted a little closer to her, so he could see the screen.
Hailey looked frustrated as she typed aggressively, it wasn’t really getting them anywhere. “Hailey,” Garret said, grabbing her attention. “You are the strongest person I have ever met, if anyone can figure this out, it’s you.” He said, watching as her tough guy facade finally fell before him. “I’m lucky that I get to call you my partner.”
She eyed him, his honestly and heartfelt-ness coming out of left-field. They usually never talked like this. But, she let it go. Chalking the comment up to the many lines they had already crossed during the evening, she was bound to feel a little strange. “Thanks, me too.”
The rest of the evening was spent deep in thought, developing several different ways things could go wrong and how to fix them. Somehow they ended up sprawled out on her couch, Garrett sound asleep and Hailey wide awake, eyes darting between him and the floor. She had finally let someone else in, and she had this horrid feeling that it would come back to bit her in the ass. It would come back for both of them.
…
A/N: Holy crap, it has been SO LONG since I have updated this story. I’m so sorry you all, it’s been an absolutely crazy few months and I am happy to say that I have finally found the inspiration to write again. I’ve decided that I will update this story every Wednesday, so hopefully the accountability will keep me on track. Thank you so so much for reading. Have a great night <3
P.S. like always, comment to be added to the taglist!
@lissethsrojas @puckluck28 @fuckyeahkillianemma @ruzek-halstead @thebigapocalypsewolf @karihighman @anotheronechicagobog @snowwhite013 @tracysupton @angelsjedi @anniesardors @carissalizz @joy-meathiel @alkadri-layal @number2chicagopdfan @stephanie708
#hailey upton#jay halstead#upstead#kim burgess#adam ruzek#burzek#kevin atwater#vanessa rojas#rowater#upstead au#burzek au#chicago pd#one chicago#trudy platt#hank voight
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The Green-Eyed Monster
This is a sequel to Water Seeks Its Own Level, although you probably don’t have to read that one for this one to make sense. It’s set a few months after the events of that story. I originally intended to write for someone new but I am just totally smitten with Eddie. He called me back to him.
Pairing: Eddie Kingston x OFC
Word count: 3,836
Content advisory: a healthy dose of smut and cursing
“Son of a bitch!” You jerk your hand back, wincing in pain and you smack the side of the toaster oven, as if it’s the appliance’s fault you haven’t yet figured out that food coming out of the oven is hot. To make things worse, you actually feel a little guilty for taking your anger out on the inanimate object. You’re in a bad mood. The toaster oven is just the latest thing to make your day worse.
You run some cold water on your hand before you go back for another attempt at removing the leftover pizza slice that you don’t even want but you figure you should eat something because you’ve poured a couple of beer down your gullet and if you don’t eat something, you’re going to get a headache.
So you gnaw joylessly at your pizza slice, trying not to notice that reheating it has not made it taste fresher than the three days it’s been in your refrigerator. None of this would have happened, of course, if you’d just gone out with the rest of the crew like you’d assumed you would. There was a Korean barbecue place that a few of the AEW gang had heard good things about and finally someone had taken it upon themselves to get a side room reserved so that you could all go together and have a good time. You’d been looking forward to it.
But earlier in the day, you’d found out that the group that was going included Eddie, along with his new so-called family: the Butcher, the Blade, and the Bunny, also known as Andy, Braxton, and Allie. It shouldn’t have bothered you. They’d known each other a long time. You knew them all well. They’d all been bugging you to come along whenever they were going out together, or at least they had until recently.
As things too often did for you, it came down to Eddie. After he’d shown up in AEW, the two of you had rekindled the fuck-buddy thing you’d had going when you were both on the indies. The problem was that now you weren’t just hooking up when you happened to be on the same tour or show: you were together every week, living in the same city, working the same schedule. So your casual, no-strings-attached thing had become a very frequent thing. It had become a leaving stuff in each other’s apartments thing. It had become a casual understanding of at least one night of the weekend together thing.
What it hadn’t become was a relationship, at least not in the articulated, public, monogamous sense. You didn’t have anyone else in your life. You didn’t want anyone else in your life. You’d spent years telling yourself that Eddie was just someone you could go to for a good time in the sack, and even though you were aware that he always stirred up feelings in you that went beyond a fallback booty call, you kept telling yourself that was all it was.
Now that the two of you were actually stable in terms of work and living space, though, you’d started to wonder if maybe you did want things to be a bit more stable with Eddie as well. Although you’d never discussed your status, you didn’t have anyone else in your life and you didn’t want anyone else in your life. Even though you were surrounded by beautiful people at work, people who had their shit far more together than Eddie Kingston ever would, it was like they didn’t really exist. You didn’t say that to him because you didn’t want to risk embarrassing yourself. If it was going to happen, it would come out naturally, by which you meant that he’d have to get around to bringing it up.
Things had been fine until recently, until Eddie had taken it upon himself to reunite Braxton with his estranged wife Allie, the Bunny, so that they could have each other’s backs. At least, that’s what he said he was doing. But it actually seemed that Allie was spending most of her time with Eddie. He was the one on television calling her “the beautiful Bunny” and taking credit for wooing her back to the fold. He convinced her to join them. He was the one she seemed loyal to. Even backstage, when the four of them were around each other, Allie always seemed to be hanging off Eddie’s arm, laughing extra loudly at his jokes, and insisting that he come along wherever she was going. It made your blood boil.
You didn’t say anything because it wasn’t like you had reason to think that Eddie wasn’t going to have anyone else in his life. And you were even sure if he did, because cuckolding his friend right in front of his face would be bold even for him. You’d gone out with the group of them a couple of times but you’d felt nauseous from jealousy, watching him talk about how great it was that they were all working together again.
So you’d ended up begging off and just spending time with Eddie when you could be alone. More recently, you’d just started avoiding him because thinking that he was leaving your bed to have a quick shower and then run off to another woman had you crying your eyes out on several occasions. You never said anything, you just stopped returning his texts and stayed clear of him at work. And after a while, he’d stopped messaging and trying to talk to you. Things were over.
You throw the remainder of the pizza in the garbage. Thinking about everything that’s happened in this weird, hopeless thing with him makes you feel rejected and miserable all over again. You miss him. A lot. But now it’s pretty clear that he doesn’t want anything more with you, that he wants to keep things open, and you know you can’t deal with that.
The doorbell cuts through the fog of frustration and self-pity, startling you so much that you give a little yelp. You old place had one of those systems when the bell was hooked up to your phone but this one had a buzzer that sounded like an aircraft engine and you didn’t feel like you were ever going to get used to it.
“Hello?” You mumble, hoping that it isn’t another homeless person looking to sleep in the hallway downstairs.
“It’s me, can I come up?”
He doesn’t even have to say his name because you’d know that almost cartoonish accent anywhere. It figures that he’d just show up unannounced after eleven, like nothing had been weird between you. Maybe for him, things hadn’t been weird at all.
“Yeah, sure.” You press the release to open the front door and wait, pacing a little and trying to stay calm until you hear a knock on your door.
And when you open it, there’s Eddie, his face and jacket sprinkled with rain, sporting a fresh-looking bruise on his left eye that he turns to try to hide it.
“We haven’t hung out in a while,” he grunts, his eyes a little suspicious and resentful.
“True. Guess we’ve both been busy.”
You motion for him to come inside, quietly pleased that he remembers to take his boots off. You reach over to take his jacket so that you can hang it up and he looks almost offended.
“I know where it goes,” he snaps, opening the closet and putting it on a hanger himself.
You grip his jaw and turn his face so that you can get a better look at the damaged eye.
“What happened?”
He steps back, pouting like a child who’s been caught doing something he knows he isn’t supposed to.
“We went out to a bar after the restaurant. Archer offered to buy me a drink, and I said I wanted to buy him a drink. I guess it got out of hand.”
“Two friends try to buy a round at the bar turns into a fistfight. That is so you.”
You can’t help but laugh at your own joke because it is such an Eddie thing but he doesn’t seem amused.
“You got something I can put on this?” He grumbles.
“I have a couple of ice packs in the freezer. Come on.”
He follows you over to the open kitchen with its little breakfast counter while you start lifting frozen entrees out of the way to find the artificial ice.
“So how come you didn’t come to dinner?”
“I don’t know,” you lie. “My stomach was a bit upset and I probably wouldn’t have been much fun.”
He gives a low cackle. “You just don’t like it when you can’t have me all to yourself.”
You pause from digging through the back of the freezer to shoot him a scornful look.
“You just want me there so you can have a larger audience,” you retort, standing and producing the ice pack.
“Who said I wanted you there?”
You slap the cold pack into his cheek, giving a cruel little smile when he winces at the impact.
“Thank god you never decided to become a nurse,” he growls.
You can feel his eyes digging into you, searching for an opening. He knows all your fault lines so well, but he knows that there’s something going on with you that he hasn’t seen before. Your body twists under his scrutiny, trying to make it less obvious that you’re avoiding meeting his gaze.
“So what’s up with you anyway?” he asks, still studying you too closely for comfort.
“Not much. I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine with me.”
“What?” You finally look back at him, eyes wide with fake surprise. “Did I say something that made you think I was pissed at you? Did I do something to get you pissed off?”
“Come on. You know what I mean. You barely talk to me at work, you never go out if you think I’m gonna be there. You won’t answer when I message you, or it’s two words long like I’m annoying you. I thought things were going ok with us for once.”
“They were. They are,” you counter desperately.
He places the ice pack on the counter and arches his brows at you. When you reach to remove it, he grabs your wrist and pulls you between his body and the counter, shaking his head as he presses it hard against yours.
His hands graze down to your hips and under your shorts, gripping both of your ass cheeks hard and you feel yourself melt against him, as you always do. You incline your head forward until your lips are against his, your arms winding around his neck, and you let yourself fall into the kiss you’d told yourself you were going to avoid. Everything that Eddie does with that mouth of his is magic and every second you spend locked in that embrace, you get drawn further in.
“I missed this,” he growls softly, giving a hard squeeze for emphasis.
It’s almost painful to pull yourself back from what you want so much but if you don’t extricate yourself now, you’ll be going crazy over him forever, so you force yourself to do it.
You try to pivot a little but he has you locked in place.
“Please, just let me put the cold pack back in the fridge.”
“No,” he whispers, giving you an evil little smile before nipping at the skin of your neck. “That’s gonna stay right there and melt and make a mess until you tell me what’s going on with you.”
“That’s not fair!” You whine, trying fruitlessly to reach back so you can at least throw the stupid in thing in the sink.
“Kinda seems like the Princess has decided she’s too good for me again.”
His lips lock onto the base of your throat and you main loudly. He’s doing it on purpose, tweaking your sensitive spots with his caresses and his words.
“You know that’s not true, Eddie.”
“I don’t know. I thought maybe you were afraid someone might find out that I was your dirty little secret.”
“It’s not that, I don’t give a fuck who knows.”
That draws a guttural laugh from him and the sound makes your stomach flip. You don’t offer any resistance when he eases your tank top over your head and trails kisses down the center of your chest.
“So tell me,” he insists, twisting a nipple hard between his fingers, “why I haven’t been getting any of this.”
“Why does it have to be something wrong with me? You’re the one with your new faction or family or whatever, making all sorts of plans and wooing Allie to join you.”
He lifts his head and as soon as you see the smirk on his face, you know you’re done for.
“Wooing Allie?”
“I don’t know what you call it. You got her to ditch what she was doing and go back with you guys.”
“I call it talking to my friend’s wife and making her work things out with him. That’s not what most people would call ‘wooing’, princess.”
“Whatever, I just meant that you’ve been busy so maybe I’m the one who should feel neglected.”
You fold your arms in front of your chest because the only thing worse than trying to salvage your stupid comment is trying to do it half naked while he gives you that amused look.
“I don’t believe it. You’re fucking jealous.”
“No,” you whine.
“Oh yes you are. You think there’s something going on with me and Allie.”
“I guess it seems like you have a bit of a thing for her, at least. You’re always talking about how beautiful she is and all that.”
“Princess, has anyone explained to you that not everything you see in wrestling is real?”
“It doesn’t matter. I just said that you’d been busy and-“
He kisses you again, little ripples of laughter coming out as he does. You return the kiss, diving in and hoping that you can just shut him up and make him forget what you’ve said, and to shut yourself up before you say anything worse.
“I like this,” he chuckles. “You’re jealous because you think I’m hot for someone else.”
“Fuck off, I never said that.”
The two of you continue kissing, more passionately and hungrier than before, but the next time he pulls back to catch his breath, he goes back to his new favourite subject.
“I am never letting you live this one down.”
“You can leave any time, you smug asshole.”
He chuckles again, his hand sliding under your clothes, between your legs. He buries his face against you, his lips pressed against your ear as he drags one finger, ever so lightly, from the back of your slit all the way up to your throbbing little nub, repeating the gesture and using his hip to hold you still and stop you from thrusting against him to get more friction. He just keeps up with that ghost of a touch, humming with pleasure the more he can feel your frustration.
“You want me to go? Really? Because it feels like maybe you’re not so sure.”
You just whimper in need, while at the same time trying to force the desire you’re feeling out of your body.
He lightly strokes and taps at your clit as he whispers to you, “I like that you’re jealous. But you need to tell me these things, not deprive both of us, ya silly brat.”
His attention then shifts, two thick fingers swirling at your entrance while the two of you bite and lick at each other. You hold out as long as you can, which isn’t long at all, before begging.
“Don’t do that. Stop teasing.”
“Well what do you want me to do?” he rasps, grinning as you thrust against him, trying to force some more pressure.
“Fuck me. Stop talking and fuck me through the mattress and into the goddamned floor.”
He lifts you up by your thighs, smiling when you wrap your arms around him to secure yourself as he carries you to your bed. As he places you down, he removes the rest of your clothing in one smooth movement before discarding his own. You kiss playfully for a moment before you tap his thigh.
“Get up here,” you order.
And he is most happy to oblige, kneeling over your body and letting you take his thick cock in hand, easing the swollen tip past your lips, sucking and licking while you slowly move your hand along his shaft, occasionally letting your thumb flick delicately along the seam, relishing the yelps this gesture never fails to elicit from him.
“So you want that even if I’ve been giving it to another woman?”
You growl but the vibrations only increase his pleasure and he starts to thrust a little, pushing himself further into your mouth and throat.
“Aw, don’t worry,” he purrs, “I’ll always have some use for you.”
At that, you punch him hard in the hip and rake your nails down his ass. He eases down your body, sparkling, mischievous eyes meeting yours. It’s like there’s nothing else in the whole world for you but you know better than to say so.
“You know what you need to do, Kingston? You need to shut the fuck up.” You push on his shoulders to direct him where you want him to go, and while he takes his time getting there, the journey involves him working his way down your body, like he’s worshipping you.
“This what you want?” he asks, licking at your soaked flesh.
“Mm-hmm.” You squirm in anticipation, suspecting that he might try to draw this out longer, so when he dives in and starts fucking you with his tongue, lips and teeth, you let out a loud moan and clench at the bedsheet with both fists. You’re already so close.”
“Lucky for you I have such good stamina,” he hisses. “So I can handle all of these women I’m fucking.”
“You’re still talking,” you groan. “Why are you still talking?”
He gives a harsh bite on the inside of your thigh. “Look at me.”
You glare down at him but immediately feel a little unnerved by the deadly serious look in his eyes.
“You know damn well there aren’t any other women. I haven’t fucked another woman, haven’t kissed- hell I haven’t even beat off thinking about another woman in months. So let me enjoy this for a few hours until you go back to thinking you’re too good for me.”
With that he goes right back at it, letting you feel the full skill of that constantly moving mouth. You let yourself go, feeling for the first time in ages like you have exactly what you want, what you need, right here in your bed doing everything to make you happy. Your whole body trembles in ecstasy, the tide rising steadily within you, your whines and moans growing ever louder.
“I love you.”
It slips out so naturally that you almost don’t notice that you’ve said it until he pulls back.
“I’m sorry, what was that?”
“Get back down there!” You push his head but he shakes you off and now you’re aware you have a problem.
“Oh no, I want you to repeat what you just said.”
“I don’t remember,” you whine.
“Sure you do.” He moves to his side next to you, running his fingers over your skin so that you stay worked up, frustrated, and desperate.
“I fucking hate you.”
“No,” he scolds, “that wasn’t what you said.”
You exhale in exasperation.
“Let me get you started. You said ‘I’... come on, repeat after me.”
“What makes you think I even meant it?”
“Well you have to tell me whether you did or not, don’t you, princess?”
His finger traces a curved line between your hip bones that only accentuates your overwhelming, unmet need.
“I’m not hearing anything,” he coos, flicking his tongue over your nipple.
“Fine!” you roar, hitting your breaking point. “I said that I love you, and yeah, I meant it.”
Grinning, he moves back down your body.
“Now was that so hard?” he asks just as he buries his face between your legs again.
You’d love to give a sharp retort but the second he’s giving you what you want, every other thought leaves your mind. You are one pulsating nerve waiting for release and he is expertly guiding you there. Within minutes you’re screaming his name, tears leaking from your eyes as you come down from the best orgasm you think you’ve ever had.
By the time you can open your eyes, he’s hovering over you, the tip of his cock throbbing against the lips of your pussy.
“Say it again.”
You groan a little and push against him but it doesn’t work.
“Say it again and look at me this time.”
His incredible eyes bear down on you and it’s very different than before. This time, you can’t hide the truth of it behind sarcasm and annoyance. This time he can see into you. You’re vulnerable.
“Come on.” He prods at your face with his nose and lips before once again locking you with that killer stare. “Let me hear you.”
“I love you,” you stammer, trying to read his reaction and more than a little afraid of what that might be.
He moans a little and pushes himself part way inside you, rocking his hips slowly.
“Again,” he rasps.
“Don’t be like this. I said it. I said it twice. What the hell do you want?”
He grabs a handful of your hair and thrusts his face even closer to yours. “Five years. Five fucking years I’ve been waiting for you to come around. So I want to get the most out of this that I can.”
“Eddie Kingston, I love you.”
He lifts one of your legs over his shoulder and thrusts into you harder.
“Are you going to say it back?”
“Sure,” he laughs. “When I feel like it.”
He pounds into you with increased vigor, laughing more when he sees your face contort somewhere between fury and ecstasy, your pussy contracting involuntarily around him.
“You are such a bastard,” you yell, fighting the second orgasm that’s about to overtake you.
The phrase is barely past your lips when your whole body spasms, pulling him right along with you.
“Yeah, you’re right,” he pants after a couple of minutes. “I am a bastard. But you finally managed to figure out I’m the bastard you want.”
You can’t help but laugh, wondering if he really did know ages before you did that you were in love with him, or if he was just hopeful. You run your hands over the back of his head and pull on his earlobe a little with your teeth.
“God help me,” you whisper.
#eddie kingston fanfic#eddie kingston imagine#aew fanfiction#aew imagine#wrestling fanfiction#wayward wrestle writing
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It’s probably going to take a while for Jamie Dornan to shake off his association with Christian Grey, the billionaire entrepreneur with aberrant sexual tastes. Fifty Shades of Grey (2015) was a blockbuster film based on a bestselling book, which made more than £1 billion, had two questionable sequels, and some fairly terrible reviews. There will, Dornan says, be nothing like it again.
“At the time, I was asked if I was scared of being typecast – as what? As a BDSM-loving billionaire? I think that’s a one-off. Nothing close to that has come my way again – I’ve barely worn a suit since.”
Walking on Rodborough Common, in Gloucestershire, Dornan is friendly and funny. He says good morning to passers-by and hello to their dogs. He has an insouciant take on life and laughs easily – look up his appearance on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, when he and Fallon took it in turns to read the most lurid lines from Fifty Shades of Grey in different accents. In short, he is good at being teased.
This is lucky, because inevitably he has taken his fair share of flak. “I’m well used to it. You know what really helps? I’m from a place where taking the mickey out of each other is our common currency. It’s how we communicate – it’s how we show affection. So if you’re from Belfast and you give a load of s---, like I do to my mates – if you can’t take it back, you end up a bit screwed. But I’ve always been able to give s--- and take s---, so I’m sort of armed for it.”
But what Dornan is known for could be about to change. His new film, Belfast, is a semi-autobiographical story written and directed by Kenneth Branagh, about the start of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Set in 1969, it tells of the sacrifice made by a family who leave the community they love as it becomes overwhelmed by sectarian violence, with an incredible performance from 11-year-old Jude Hill as Buddy (a stand-in for the young Branagh). The film – starring Judi Dench, Ciaran Hinds and Caitriona Balfe, with a score by Van Morrison – has attracted huge accolades at festivals, a growing Oscar buzz, and is up for seven Golden Globes, including a best supporting actor nomination for Dornan himself.
'Where I'm from, taking the mickey out of each other is our common currency. It’s how we show affection': Jamie Dornan as Pa with Jude Hill as Buddy in Kenneth Branagh's autobiographical film Belfast CREDIT: © 2021 Focus Features, LLC.
The 39-year-old Dornan plays Pa, Buddy’s father. It is his most profound role yet, and one that he hopes will define him. “It’s a different take on that part of the world than we’ve seen before – not to detract from what Jim Sheridan did with In the Name of the Father or what Steve McQueen did with Hunger – they’ve all got their place, and they’re great. But this is just seeing it through a different lens.
“As someone who’s from Northern Ireland, I think it’s really important to constantly offer up a different perception of what it’s like – it’s not all men in masks doing bad things. I’ve travelled the world for 20 years trying to explain to people that it’s a great place.”
It was lockdown, says Dornan, that finally gave Branagh “the space to realise his 50-year plan” of writing this movie. In the end, the script only took him a few months. (“It’s been in his head for years,” says Dornan.) In November, the film premiered in Belfast, the city in the suburbs of which Dornan grew up. “It was a very special occasion – nothing could top that. We really wanted it to resonate with people from home – and it did.”
Tonight also sees the first episode of The Tourist, a BBC thriller series written by Jack and Harry Williams (responsible for television hits such as The Missing), set in the outback of Australia. Dornan plays a man who loses his memory after a car crash caused by a menacing HGV – in a fantastically good opening sequence reminiscent of Spielberg’s Duel. The atmosphere of the series is strangely comic and somewhat surreal. “Just when you’ve cracked the tone you’ll be thrown off the scent, and there’s a lot of humour to it, which comes at the darkest moments – but that’s what life is like,” says Dornan.
“It’s a strange thing to end the year with all this positivity,” he continues quietly, “with so much praise for Belfast and a lot of good talk about The Tourist – because on many levels it’s been the worst year of my life, and the hardest.”
'I haven't been typecast as a BDSM-loving billionaire': Jamie Dornan in the new BBC thriller, The Tourist CREDIT: Ian Routledge
In March 2021, when Dornan was still in quarantine in Australia having just arrived for The Tourist’s five-month shoot, he received the news that his much-loved father had died of Covid. Jim Dornan was an obstetrician and gynaecologist who had just taken on a professorship in the Middle East, and his son was stuck in a hotel in Adelaide, grieving and unable to travel.
Grief is such a profound and complicated emotion and Dornan is clearly still in its throes; the family has not even had a funeral yet. Jamie was very close to his father, but had not seen him for 18 months before his death, due to the complications of lockdown and his filming schedules, and he is distraught that his father never got to see him in Belfast; he had imbued the role of Pa with so much of him.
“Truly, you could search far and wide and it would be very hard to find something negative to say about my dad. He was a beacon of positivity – that is my overriding takeaway. His kindness, his willingness to talk to anybody and everybody – he used to say, you treat the person who cleans the court the same as you treat the judge. Dad had time for everybody.
“I’ve tried to take that into my own life. We’re talking about a professor of medicine here, an insanely intelligent man. He was so positive – he would say, this has happened, how do we move forward and get something good out of this?”
Dornan’s mother, Lorna, died of pancreatic cancer when he was 16. Later, his father told him, “Don’t let this be the thing that defines you.”
'No paparazzi or any of that c--p': Jamie Dornan and his family left London for a Gloucestershire village CREDIT: Andrew Crowley
“Sure,” says Dornan. “You wear it, and it shapes you, and colours you forever, to lose your mother at such a young age, and life will never be the same again – but you can’t lead with it. I am probably a much stronger person as a result. I was young and naive and I had to grow up really fast. I had to find a strength and resilience that I didn’t know I had.”
Another thing he inherited from his dad, he says, is that he never gets hangovers. “Despite being the last man to leave the party and the first up in the morning,” his father seemed immune. Dornan, too, should have a hangover today, having stayed up late last night with friends knocking back tequila. You’d think he might at least be worn out from being so good-looking. But instead he seems fresh and springy, as we take our walk on the common, “beautiful even on a s---- day like today”, with its lovely views of the Stroud valley.
He and his wife, the composer and musician Amelia Warner, moved here several years ago after falling in love with the area. “We used to come pretending we needed to get away from the stresses of London, even though we didn’t even have kids and life was not that stressful.” When they did have children, they had an excuse to move permanently, and three years ago, they bought the house they live in now, on the edge of a village. “There’s two pubs and a postbox – it’s not a metropolis. Everyone leaves you to it, no one is that interested in what you do – no paparazzi or any of that c--p.”
They have three children: Dulcie, 8, Elva, 5, and Alberta, 3. I wonder whether he’d make a film like Fifty Shades of Grey now, when there’s his daughters to consider?
“I can be a real cynic, and if it wasn’t me in the film, it’d be different. As my girls get older, will they have to field some awkward questions? Yeah! But will it have a damaging effect on them or my relationship with them? No.”
'I’ve barely worn a suit since': Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson in Sam Taylor Johnson's 2015 adaptation of EL James's erotic bestseller Fifty Shades of Grey CREDIT: Alamy
Dornan got the Fifty Shades role on the strength of the 2013 series The Fall, which made his name and won him a Bafta nomination. He was convincingly creepy as Paul Spector, a social worker who was simultaneously a loving father and a sadistic serial killer, being hunted down by DSI Stella Gibson (Gillian Anderson). Before he took up acting, Dornan spent seven years as a model (having dropped out of a business studies degree at Teesside University), lolling about in campaigns for Calvin Klein, Dior and Armani. It is hard to imagine him modelling, given the fact that he’s just told me he has an abnormal amount of adrenalin, and finds it impossibly hard to keep still (“I can’t have a day where I don’t move – I just get really wriggly – I have to do lots of exercise”). But he managed. “I just looked sad and thought about the money.”
Clearly, Dornan does not take himself too seriously – which is just as well, since he’s made his fair share of badly-received films. There was 2020’s Wild Mountain Thyme, described by one critic as an “execrable romcom that’s almost surreal in its unashamed awfulness”. Dornan sticks up for it (“I had one of the most incredible experiences of my life on that set, working with brilliant people like Emily Blunt and Christopher Walken, John Hamm…”), but admits that it had its flaws. “It has an oddness that I think if you just gave yourself to it, you would enjoy. But there were also some very silly moments that were Oirish with a capital O.”
He has also made some exuberant choices (such as last year’s Kristen Wiig comedy Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar) and some wonderful films – such as Matthew Heineman’s A Private War, about the journalist Marie Colvin, and Sean Ellis’s Anthropoid, based on a true story about Czech resistance fighters, with his good friend Cillian Murphy. One thing he learnt from Murphy (“I hate to give him any credit, but he won’t read the Telegraph”) is how to focus on the experience of filming and stop worrying about whether people will like it. “To just seize the day, enjoy the chance to work with all these cool, talented, creative people – and whatever the fallout is, however it’s received or does at the bloody box office, is totally out of your control – so put the work in and enjoy it.”
We’ve finished our loop of the common and Dornan has to rush off. He has a lot on – a few days on the west coast of Ireland, and then he and his family are going to Los Angeles for the American premiere of Belfast. There will be a lot to celebrate. It’s lucky that he doesn’t get hangovers.
Remember… (about The Tourist) just when you’ve cracked the tone you’ll be thrown off the scent, and there’s a lot of humour to it, which comes at the darkest moments – but that’s what life is like. — Jamie Dornan
#Tait rhymes with hat#Good times#BelfastMovie#Interview#The Daily Telegraph#1 January 2022#Belfast#Worldwide 2022#Twitter
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Here are so many amazing bottom Louis fics that were posted or completed during the month of November. We hope you enjoy this list. Happy reading!
1) Work Me Breathless | Explicit | 1678 words
Note: this is the sequel to this fic.
Louis visits Harry at work after the doctor got a new promotion. They christen his new office...
Louis leaves a little breathless.
2) Skeletons In My Closet | Not Rated | 2051 words
Basically soft core porn. Harry decided to treat Louis on Halloween.
3) Looks Like We Made It, Look How Far We’ve Come, My Baby | Teen & Up | 2161 words
Louis and Harry are going to officially move in together, they’ve chosen the house and everything is ready, they just need to wait a few months before the owner gives them the keys.
So what’s the problem, you may ask. Well, they’ve been arguing for days and Louis is honestly considering strangling his alpha with one his ridiculously ugly designer scarf. Okay, not really. But he’s going to lose it soon if they don’t stop fighting.
4) Little Devil | Explicit | 2241 words
The pair had just finished taking a round of shots when the one and only Harry Styles saunters over, clapping Niall on the back to say hello. “Louis,” he drawls out, not even trying to hide the fact that he’s raking his eyes over the smaller boy. “You know this is a costume party, right?” Louis rolls his eyes, starting to ramble on about how he is in a costume and what a nit Harry is when he gets it. Harry is saying Louis is a devil.
“And what are you supposed to be Styles? An angel, really?”
“It’s a costume Lou, ’s not supposed to be real,” he says with a smirk, sliding past Louis but stopping long enough to whisper, “I can assure you, I’m no angel baby.”
5) After the Lilo Kiss | Explicit | 2477 words
"I guess I need to show you who you belong to, hmm baby boy?" he growled in my ear while choking me with his other hand.
6) Oh So Thankful | Explicit | 3034 words
Or the one where Louis and Harry both stay at college for Thanksgiving break, and decide to spend the holiday together.
7) Tell Me What You Want (What You Need) | Mature | 3246 words
Louis didn’t plan on getting laid tonight. When he invited Harry over the day before, it was completely innocent. Just two lads hanging out. He still doesn’t plan on it, no matter how hard he’s getting as Harry’s fingernails start scraping over his nipples lightly every time they pass.
8) Calling Out For Someone To Hold Tonight | Not Rated | 3819 words
Harry’s straight. Louis isnt. They still manage to fall in love.
9) Your Love Delights My Soul | Explicit | 4186 words
"Alpha..." Louis moaned against Harry's lips, chasing the friction against his thigh.
"You are my one and only," Harry bit his jaw, "And you know it quite well. Pretty sure I remind you every night, but you have to rile me, have to make me angry. Why, Omega?"
10) Life and Death | Explicit | 4122 words
In which Louis is Life and Harry is Death.
11) When You Turn Off The Lights | Explicit | 4305 words
Gothie Louis/Normie Harry.
12) On My Mind All The Time, Say You're Mine | Explicit | 9261 words
Note: This fic was written for the Bottom Louis Fic Fest. Check out the full collection here.
“Dude, we’re inside, and it’s night time. Those don’t look as cool as you think they do.” Louis could kick himself, he sounded so stupid, but it certainly got the guy’s attention.
It was at that unfortunate moment that he noticed several other things about this hot asshole, that he hadn’t noticed just staring from afar. First, when Louis spoke to him, his gaze was kind of unfocused behind his sunglasses, and secondly, that he had a red and white cane folded up under his arm.
“I’m… Blind,” the man chuckled, awkwardly.
Louis wanted to melt into a puddle out of pure embarrassment.
“I— am so sorry. I have to go.”
“Hey, wait, wait,” the man soothed, grabbing at Louis’ shoulders before he could get away.
“I’m sorry,” Louis repeated, looking down at his shoes.
“It’s alright,” He cackled. “I get it a lot. More than you know.”
13) Let's Break The Internet | Explicit | 9505 words
Note: This fic was written for the Bottom Louis Fic Fest. Check out the full collection here. Please note that the pairing for this fic is Louis/OMC.
The one where Louis is an Only Fans baby.
14) With the Certainty Of Tides | Mature | 13980 words
“Love you,” Louis whispered in the dark. He didn’t know what time it was or where the light had gone, he knew that he was in Harry’s arms, basking in the afterglow of all their love and he’d be a fool to not tell Harry that. As if Harry didn’t know.
“Love you,” was whispered back, as if Louis didn’t know. They confessed to each other as if it was their first time saying it, raw and painful, and listened to it the very same way, but they knew those words to be the only ones true.
With all the certainty of the tides, with all the light from the sun, with all the steady beats of their hearts, they were deftly in love, in secret and so loudly. They were brave and fearless and strong and hopelessly devoted in every sense of their breaths.
“We made it, baby,” Harry mumbled, bringing their lips into a final kiss, sweet and soft and the color of pink. They already knew that, didn’t fight tooth and nail and argued through every petty year and bleed their hearts into the words they sang and on their skin for them to have not made it home.
They were home.
15) A Moment In Time | Explicit | 14004 words
The one where Harry and Louis used to be together, until they weren’t, but with a twist of fate and a bit of magic, could this be their chance to find forever in each other’s arms?
16) I'm Still A Little Bit Yours | Mature | 14921 words
“Harry?” Louis asked to the empty apartment. "What the hell?" He sat up on the bed, his comforter pooling around his waist. The place wasn’t big enough to lose someone. Harry must have left in the middle of the night. And then he felt it. The new twinge of pain in his already bruised heart. He forcefully threw his upper body back and grunted in frustration. Then he looked over to the bedside table and noticed a note under the cup of cold chamomile tea he never got around to drinking.
He reached over and there were only two words scrawled on the otherwise blank page, “I’m sorry.”
He was so damn stupid! He curled up on his side sobbing and trembling. He covered his face with the comforter, tears soaking his pillow, as he begged his body to go back to sleep.
17) I Couldn't Face A Life Without Your Lights | Mature | 15538 words
Louis and Harry are college students who haven't been the same in the past two years.
18) Practice In Pencil, Seal It In Pen | Explicit | 16486 words
Note: This fic was written for the Bottom Louis Fic Fest. Check out the full collection here.
Harry is in love with Louis but he doesn't know.
19) Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down) | Not Rated | 16683 words
Note: This fic was written for the Bottom Louis Fic Fest. Check out the full collection here.
The one where Harry wants a little more in the bedroom and has a habit of putting his foot in his mouth.
20) The Animals, The Animals | Not Rated | 16721 words
Admittedly, it’s not the first time Louis Tomlinson finds himself in handcuffs.
The difference this time is these handcuffs are attached to a year long sentence. Not just that, but a year long sentence sharing a cell with a possibly mute 19 year old with dark eyes and even darker secrets.
21) Colder Weather | Mature | 19103 words
When Harry comes around, it’s the coldest time of year. Louis, for once, just wants Harry to take him away from colder weather.
22) Across the Grey, Salty Sea | Explicit | 19968 words
Note: This fic was written for the Bottom Louis Fic Fest. Check out the full collection here.
Prompt 212: Alex from Dunkirk and French escort/prostitute Louis who ends up in Alex’s quarters more nights than not. Alex gives him his dog tag to wear maybe just a lot of smut and dirty talk with Louis being a pretty princess.
23) Blinded By The Sparks | Explicit | 22205 words
Note: This fic was written for the Bottom Louis Fic Fest. Check out the full collection here.
Harry is a scammer who drifts from casino to casino. Louis is the new waiter who wants in on the scam.
24) Rainbow Bloom | Mature | 22711 words
Note: This fic was written for the Bottom Louis Fic Fest. Check out the full collection here.
Louis is in denial. Louis has been in denial for far too long. Then Harry enters his life and everything changes.
25) What A Sight For Sore Eyes | Not Rated | 24216 words
Louis’ playing Danny in their uni’s production of Grease. They’re missing a Sandy, and Harry’s sort of been in love with Louis for a year.
Everything else just kind of happens.
26) MISSING | Mature | 26950 words
Louis brothers report Louis missing after they can’t get hold of him for 24hours
Harry Styles and Charlie Stone, detectives of the teenage homicide and missing persons division, are long time friends of the Tomlinson's and take the case.
27) Even The Best Laid Plans | Explicit | 25175 words
Louis wants to have sex with someone and decides Harry is the perfect alpha for the job.
28) Sunflowers, Sunshine, And You | Explicit | 28778 words
Sunshine county is small but mighty and Harry takes pride in knowing nearly each and every person that lives inside of it. For nearly eleven years now he’s been sheriff, and not one of them he’s ever regretted settling down here.
He knows the road names like the back of his hand, knows the people and the animals and the way the world works here. In all of the time he’s been here, not a thing has changed.
So, all things considered, when he starts seeing a beat up pickup truck roaming through town with plates he’s never seen before, Harry, to be frank, jumps on that like a fly on fresh dog shit.
29) Blue Songs Are Like Tattoos | Explicit | 30739 words
“Good morning, University of California, you’re listening to KALX 90.7 FM Berkeley, this is DJ Harry Styles. If the owner of the tapes I’ve been finding around the studio doesn’t come forward and introduce himself, I’m going to continue tossing them straight in the trash!”
or the DJ Harry and Rockstar Louis fic.
30) Sweet Like Honey | Explicit | 33117 words
Note: This fic was written for the Bottom Louis Fic Fest. Check out the full collection here.
Harry and Louis need money and they find an unconventional solution in the form of PornHub. It’s not supposed to be a big deal.
31) When Our Worlds They Fall Apart | Explicit | 42228 words
Note: This fic was written for the Bottom Louis Fic Fest. Check out the full collection here.
Harry put his hand over his heart as if Louis had wounded him. “You’re so harsh, my liege! Perhaps you need to relieve some tension…” He let his voice trail off suggestively.
“The day I ask YOU to relieve tension is the day I lose all my wits and join the Imperials,” Louis said. “It will never happen”
Prompt 325: Star Wars AU with Harry as Han Solo and Louis as Leia.
32) Somewhere In Between | Explicit | 42765 words
Note: This fic was written for the Bottom Louis Fic Fest. Check out the full collection here.
Louis wakes up early. He brushes his teeth and can only stomach a piece of toast for breakfast, dressing quickly and heading for the car. He pulls into the parking lot of the Department of Dominance and Submission just as they’re unlocking the doors. It takes him all of an hour in the uncomfortable chairs to fill out the paperwork to the best and most accurate of his ability, handing it over to the receptionist as soon as he’s finished and wiping his sweaty palms on his business trousers.
There’s a high chance that within ten to fifteen business days, Louis will be matched with a dominant.
Shit.
33) Spoonful of Sugar | Explicit | 42900 words
Note: This fic was written for the Bottom Louis Fic Fest. Check out the full collection here. This fic is also a sequel to this fic.
Louis Tomlinson cares for his family above all else, a fact that’s led him on a twisted path peddling drugs to support them. Just as he’s made the decision to jump ship, Louis gets snared between the two largest crime syndicates in the city. To keep his family safe he’s forced to trust the man that failed to keep his promise two years ago, the resident drug lord he’s unknowingly been working for, Harry Styles.
34) Breakable Heaven | Explicit | 44594 words
Note: This fic was written for the Bottom Louis Fic Fest. Check out the full collection here.
“What do you think?” Louis gets captured by Harry’s green eyes, unable to look away or even take a breath.
“I think you’re the most magnificent creature I’ve ever met.”
“You must not have met many creatures then.”
Harry’s eyes glance downward to Louis’ lips and his tongue darts out to wet his own. “None like you.”
35) You're The Habit That I Can't Break | Not Rated | 44940 words
When Louis crosses paths with a green eyed stranger in prison, he learns that some habits aren't so bad.
36) Fine Line (The Story of Us) | Not Rated | 46191 words
Walking through Harry's album Fine Line. Each chapter reflects a song off the album.
Harry knew he was a lucky guy, really he did. He knew that in the cosmic pulling of straws he had pulled the long one and basically won the lottery. With a number one debut album, millions of adoring fans, and many a celebrity praising his work Harry should feel happier. He should be skipping instead of walking, singing instead of talking, and grinning from ear to ear. Maybe he was ungrateful. Maybe he was numb to it all. Or maybe he had a big, ocean-sized crush on his best friend.
37) Tastes Like Summer, Smiles Like May | Explicit | 47519 words
Note: This fic was written for the Bottom Louis Fic Fest. Check out the full collection here.
A cold prince, an alpha with nothing left to lose and a kingdom with a secret.
38) A Silent Whisper (That's Left Unsaid) | Explicit | 50842 words
Note: This fic was written for the Bottom Louis Fic Fest. Check out the full collection here.
A Fake Relationship & Exes to Lovers AU ft a failed proposal ten years ago, an oblivious Harry, an overworked Louis, Zayn as the protective best friend, a meddling aunt and a lot of talks about weddings and rings.
39) Lost And Found | Explicit | 51736 words
Where Louis is just looking for his dog but finds love along the way.
40) Don't You Know That I'm a Moon in Daylight? | Explicit | 58770 words
Note: This fic was written for the Bottom Louis Fic Fest. Check out the full collection here.
Prompt 79: Louis and Harry fell in love in the 18th century, Louis wanted Harry to convert him into a vampire, but he ended up resenting Harry for it. Fast forward to our modern days, they haven’t seen each other since then, but one day they meet again through a mutual friend. Harry was bitter for a long time, but he accepted that being angry wouldn't erase the fact that Louis was the love of his life. He wanted to court and spoil Louis like in their original time period, but Louis avoided him every time Harry tried to reconnect. Happy ending!
41) The Guesthouse | Explicit | 61951 words
Louis has a secret that could break him. With every trip to the Guesthouse, with every fuck he offers himself up for, he gets a piece of the freedom back that he's lost.
Seven nights a year he goes to the exclusive sex club; every day he fights to keep that little bit of information to himself.
And there's another thing - his unwavering and pointless obsession with his bandmate.
There's the Guesthouse, and then there's Harry, and Louis works tirelessly to keep the two apart. Soon, very soon now, he won't be able to.
42) My Friend Lost A Bet | Mature | 74965 words
The one where Louis ends up on the list of potential fake-boyfriends for Harry Styles because Stan really sucks at football bets.
43) In A Sea Of Mist | Explicit | 126725 words
Note: This fic was written for the Bottom Louis Fic Fest. Check out the full collection here.
A Greek Mythology/Camp Half-Blood AU where Harry is lost, the road to peace is a wretched one, and somehow, through a mist of confusion and regrets, Louis seems to be the only thing that makes sense and everything Harry needs.
Check out our other fic rec lists by category here and by title here.
You can find other monthly roundup fic rec lists here.
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Day 21: Prinxiety (pt 2)
@tsshipmonth2020
Day 21: Combine two soulmate prompts. (This will make sense soon, I promise.)
It’s the sequel you’ve all been waiting for! This is the second part to day 16 (read that first!!!!!), and y’all finally get to see what happened to Virgil! Please heed the trigger warnings below.
TRIGGER/content WARNINGS!! Anxiety, food mention, crappy foster system/group homes, implied past abuse, religious guilt/negative view of religion, homophobia, conversion therapy/abuse, starvation, sneaking medication (antipsychotics/side effects), electrocution, seizure, ambulance. I’m sorry.
Word count: 3.8k
Unlike most kids in the foster system, Virgil didn’t know his birthday. He knew it was sometime in December, but that didn’t do much. Technically, birthdays weren’t really a huge thing anyways, not when the group home he rarely left was awfully underfunded, and a party came second to little things like working sinks and clothes without holes. Even still, all the other kids at least got a little cupcake and a half hearted birthday song on their special day, and his festivities were pushed onto Christmas. He didn’t get a weak excuse for a celebration, because the other kids ‘found it unfair’ that he got that and Christmas in the same month. To prevent an upheaval, the workers told him that he’d just have to be happy with what he got.
But it wasn’t fair, because some kids got Easter and a birthday, or Halloween and a birthday, or New Years and a birthday, and poor Virgil didn’t. The fact of the matter was, they plain didn’t like him. The other kids didn’t like that he got extra free time because of his anxiety, or was allowed to leave the table when they weren’t, and they especially didn’t like he was the youngest of the bunch. The youngest had the highest chance of getting adopted, it was just facts, so they had seemingly decided that if his stay here would be the shortest, it would be the most tortured.
It wasn’t the shortest stay, though. With his barrage of anxiety related issues and group-home-toughened demeanor, no foster home wanted to deal with him. He was snarky, ran away, regularly got in fights with the biological children of the parents, and was promptly labeled a problem child. Eventually, it was deemed easier for him to just stay in a group home until he outgrew the system, since he seemed set to escape every other place. Virgil tried to pretend it didn’t hurt as much as it did; it was his fault, after all. As he watched all his older tormentors grow out of a crooked system, he resigned himself to the same fate. After all, he was almost sixteen now, and he knew his chances were out. So he stayed stuck in his group home, lashing out at his caretakers and therapists, refusing to eat unless it was alone in his room (technically, three kids slept in there, but he so rarely left it, and they wanted to avoid him, it was unofficially deemed his room), and listening to music on his phone.
He’d been given the phone on his fifteenth birthday, a gift from one of his caretakers. It was the cheapest piece of crap he’d ever seen, glitched out every other minute and needed to be charged at least three times a day, but it was a phone nonetheless. Granted, he had no one to text. But he had access to a computer, a totally one hundred percent legal music downloading website, and a strong sense of determination, so he’d soon filled the phone’s entire measly storage with all the music he could cram on the thing.
That’s what he was doing on the night of December 18th, listening to his “Emo Playlist” on a pair of $4 Dollar Store earbuds, laying on his bed and finding shapes in his popcorn ceiling as the moon shone through the window. In the bunk beds across the room from him, his two other roommates were fast asleep, but he couldn’t follow suit. It was sadly normal for Virgil to have sleepless nights where no matter what, his anxious brain just wouldn’t shut off, and it just felt like one of those nights. His hands shook and his eyelids flinched every few seconds for no reason, so he turned the music just a little bit louder and tried to calm his breathing.
It was just past 1 am when his life changed forever.
He was on the fourth cycle of his playlist, eyes no more heavy than hours before and just as flinchy. It was just entering the “existential crisis” time of the night where he started questioning reality, and he was about to give in and start letting his mind drift to darker places, when a song distinctly not his began to play in the midst of a song switch.
How can you miss someone you’ve never met?
Because I need you now but I don’t know you yet,
But can you find me soon, because I’m in my head,
Yeah, I need you now but I don’t know you yet.
He froze, eyes suddenly wide open, and yanked the earbuds out of his ears. The song continued; not in his headphones, but in his head. It didn’t take an idiot to realize that it was his soulmate, responding, and as an afterthought, Virgil suddenly identified that today was probably his birthday. Both amazing revelations, but one was slightly more time sensitive.
Desperately scrolling through his playlists as the song stopped after the chorus, he tried to find a song that would be an adequate introduction to this new person. When his eyes landed on a song from his Adele phase (he didn’t talk about that time) that he hadn’t had the energy to delete yet, he simultaneously groaned and grinned. Subtly meme-y, heartfelt like the song his soulmate had played, a decent greeting. He tapped play.
Hello,
It’s me.
He hoped his soulmate had the same sense of humor of him and had actually given a laugh, since he was trying to stifle laughter behind his sleeve to avoid waking the sleeping kids. He paused after the first verse, since he didn’t really want to remember that phase of his life more than he had to, and waited for the other to play the next song. Hopefully they could work out some sort of rhythm, play songs back and forth. He for sure wouldn’t be able to sleep now.
(The next song his soulmate played was an almost atrocious obviously-musical-theatre song that almost made Virgil hit his head against the wall, so he retaliated with a favorite of his, the most ear assaulting screamo he could find on his playlist.)
The clock had just passed four in the morning when there was a small pause in the routine, before his soulmate played a children’s lullaby. It definitely wasn’t something you’d listen to in everyday life, so Virgil could only assume it was the other’s way of indicating that they had to sleep. As if I’m going to let you go that easily, Virgil smirked, opening YouTube and begging that the video he’d chosen would play without an ad.
It did, filling his crackling, cheap earbuds with the opening chorus of Baby Shark. Fight fire with fire, he decided, chuckling to himself as he turned off the song just before the ‘mommy shark’ verse. Silence filled his head and he mentally wished the other a good night, turning onto his stomach and screaming into his pillow, grinning madly.
Eight months later, their new way of life was deeply imbedded into him; getting woken up at asscrack o’clock in the morning by a worker who wanted to be there as much as he did, and either playing his morning playlist to get himself slightly more ready to face another monotonous day or waiting in silence until his soulmate woke up and played their own music. He’d begrudgingly started to even enjoy the showtunes. Everyone around the home had noticed his gradual shift in attitude, and he couldn’t help the natural smiles that pulled at his cheeks when a new song played out of nowhere. It got to the point where his therapist noticed his lifted mood, and the other kids stopped avoiding him and, unknown to Virgil, his social workers decided that he was ready to try another foster home.
That’s why, eight months later, there was a knock on his bedroom door and his main worker poked in her head, asking him to come downstairs. He’d been playing music for his soulmate, so he silently apologized and joined her at the dining room table, giving her a half hearted smile.
“Virgil, we’ve found a new home for you. A foster home that specializes in… harder to place cases. They’ve opened their doors to you, and we’re hoping to get you into a trial period there within the next week.”
At first, Virgil vehemently refused. No. He didn’t want to go back to foster homes, not after… everything he went to in the first few. The ones that hurt him, the ones that were more densely crowded than group homes, the ones that turned him into the angry shell he was before he had met a sign of a possibly happy future. He didn’t want to lose the progress he’d made.
But Bev looked so hopeful, so pleadingly at him, that he gave in after three days of denying. He said goodbye to the kids he’d unfortunately grown attached to, threw his few belongings into a black garbage bag, and got into his worker’s car for the first time in years. Just rebuckling that seatbelt caused a shudder to run up his spine.
------1 month later------
“Virgil, what are you doing? Do you have earbuds in? We’ve made it abundantly clear that you are not to have technology at the table.”
Virgil fought every urge in his body to roll his eyes, flicking his hair behind his ears to show they were empty. It had gotten long and shaggy, just reaching his jaw in the back. “No earbuds. My soulmate’s listening to music, and it’s catchy.” Frankly, he was surprised he hadn’t been caught bopping along to silence before by the stiflers.
They were nice enough, a woman and a man and their two biological children, but they were too religious for Virgil’s liking. He’d never had qualms with religion before, but he had grown tired of spending Saturdays and Sundays (his only days off from their homeschool regime) in a church, surrounded by older people singing repetitive songs and being yelled at by a guy on the pulpit. Faking being sick only worked so many times before they refused to listen to his excuses. They also insisted he go to a specialized youth group on Tuesdays, but that was easy enough to escape. He just waved by and booked it to the closest 7/11 when they left, making sure he was back at the church by the time it was over and made up some bullshit about the gathering. Jameson, the attendant at the gas station, was becoming the closest friend he’d ever had.
“Your soulmate?” One of the children asked around a bite of toast, spitting a decent amount onto Virgil’s sleeve.
“Like daddy and I, Mariam.” The woman explained briefly, not bothering to chastise her about speaking with her mouth full.
“Yeah.” Unlike most of the kids at his old group home, he wasn’t warming up to theirs. They were too spoiled, too bratty. One had even bit him in his first week here and he was still bitter about it.
“When did you connect with yours, Virgil?” The question wasn’t asked kindly, more for the sake of being polite, and he assumed if he didn’t answer in an equally polite tone, they’d probably make him paint a fence or something.
He knew they cared about his bond about as much as he did about theirs. Which was approximately none. The mom took her children’s empty plates and placed them in the sink, Virgil quickly following suit. No use losing more computer time because he didn’t clean his plate.
“Last December. I didn’t even know it was my birthday, and they started playing music out of nowhere. It was pretty cool.” He finished rinsing off his plate and was confused at the sudden stillness in the room.
“‘They’?” The mom asked, giving her husband what she must have believed to be a subtle glance.
“Uhm… yeah?” Virgil said slowly, “I’m bisexual. So I’m not sure if my partner’s a guy or a girl or… something in between. So… they?”
He stared with rising anxiety as the two parents had a silent interaction over the kitchen island, before the dad stood up. “Kids, plates in the sink and then go get ready for church. Virgil, you too.”
There was minimal whining as the younger ones did as they were asked, racing each other up the stairs. Virgil followed, slower, listening to hushed beginnings of a conversation, unable to fight the feeling that he’d just royally fucked up.
------------------------
“Virgil, may we speak with you for a moment?”
He froze, slowly turning from where he’d been half way up the stairs. They’d just wrapped up lessons for the day (Virgil never thought he’d miss an actual school building before, but alas) and the kids had been excused, leaving just him and the parents behind. It had been almost a week since the incident, and a part of him had been hoping they’d just drop it. There wasn’t much they could do, anyways; if their religion conflicted so badly with his sexuality, the worst they would do is send him back to the home anyways. In all honesty, he kind of hoped they would. He was sick of being here, and it was better for his record if he didn’t run.
Not that it mattered much anymore. He was almost aged out of the system anyways.
He took a cautious seat back at the dining room table, which they had just cleared from classes. The mom sat back in her chair, eyeing him carefully, as the dad began to speak.
“We spoke with our pastor the other day, and we think it would be best if we put you in therapy.”
“I don’t…” He’d stopped regular therapy at the group home almost a month before coming here, and he couldn’t imagine why he’d need to go back. He definitely wasn’t happy here, but he didn’t figure a grumpy mood was enough to warrant counseling. “I don’t understand.”
“After… what you told us? About your… urges-”
“Urges.” He couldn’t help his own disgusted tone. Of course they were homophobic.
“Yes. Our pastor suggested we try conversion therapy.”
Virgil scoffed, but he couldn’t ignore the way his heart started pounding, “Right. As if you could ever get my social workers to approve that. Ward of the state, remember?” He tapped his chest a couple times.
“Fortunately, we already talked to your social worker, Virgil. We had it approved just this morning.” The man finally stopped, as if waiting for a response.
Virgil’s eyes grew wide as he looked frantically between the two of them, the woman quickly avoiding eye contact. That wasn’t normal.
“There’s no way in hell that you-”
“Profanity, Virgil!” The man barked and Virgil shrank back in his chair, impulsively ducking to avoid a fist that didn’t come. They hadn’t hit him so far, but old habits die hard. “We’ve already signed you up. Your first session is tomorrow. First thing’s first-” He stood up, reaching a hand out to a still-shaking Virgil, “Hand over your phone.”
-------------------------
His hair was short now. Shorter than he could ever remember it being. He missed his bangs, he missed the tiny boosts of confidence it gave him when the rest of his appearance disgusted him. Now there was nothing for his hands to run through. There was no style to it, just an electric razor in the hands of his silent foster mother. He should have fought it, he really should have, but he was shaking far too much to try to move.
He didn’t like hands so near his throat.
------------------------
Surely, his social worker didn’t approve of this. The only explanation Virgil could possibly rationalize was they’d lied about the purpose of the therapy, or the method, or something. But any type of change in a foster kid's life had to go through about a million different levels to get approved, so how the hell were they getting away with this?
It wasn’t too bad. A lot of it was using religious guilt, something Virgil did not have much of, saying he was immoral and inhumane. The rest of it was just his new therapist trying to dig into his supposed ‘trauma’ that made him ‘this way’, as if there was something that caused it. They talked a lot about his old foster homes, and his therapist seemed positive something there had to be the root to everything. It made his blood boil.
It didn’t help that they still hadn’t given his phone back, and they confined him to his room when he wasn’t doing school work at the kitchen table. He could hear the way his soulmate was losing morale, the longer he didn’t respond. The songs were darker, and were few and far between. They still refused to play songs on what he’d called ‘his days’.
--------------------
His ‘therapy’ had ended hours ago, and yet he couldn’t stop twitching. Every time he closed his eyes in a vain attempt to sleep, it was like the electrodes were attached to him again. The images they’d shown him flashed before his eyes, of men kissing, holding hands, and were quickly followed by the sharp sting of electric shocks. He couldn’t close his eyes without flinching violently, no music to calm his nerves.
Virgil didn’t sleep that night.
----------------------
He held to the music like an anchor, soaking in every rare song his soulmate played like a sponge. It was his only relief from the hunger pangs in his stomach, reminding him that he hadn’t been allowed to eat at all in the day leading up to another therapy session. Apparently they wanted to put him on some kind of medication, try to increase the intensity of his sessions. It was getting to the point where Virgil was tempted to pretend it was working just to make them stop.
He missed his soulmate.
----------------------
No. He’d said no to the drugs. They wanted to put him on anti-psychotics, claiming he was severely mentally ill, and he’d downright refused. There was no way in hell he was going on anti-psychotics. Finally, after days of their demanding being met with stubbornness, they’d given in.
That had been a month ago. Maybe. Time had gotten kind of funny, like in that limbo between Christmas and New Years, or in the depths of summer break. It had been a while, for sure. They still fed him so rarely a growling stomach was more common than a full one, claiming it was part of his new therapy. He couldn’t help wonder why he was gaining weight, though. He’d been underweight for a majority of his life, thanks to a constantly overworking metabolism and genetics, along with the nasty food they served at group homes that he gladly avoided, but he was starting to fill out slightly. His ribs were barely showing.
That would be a symptom of being on antipsychotics, he knew from previous research. But he wasn’t on them, so why…?
He took another sip of his apple juice his foster mom had brought him, trying to focus on his homework. Had apple juice always tasted that bitter?
-----------------------
They’d gone too far this time, Virgil knew that much. Curse his stubbornness, his inability to just lie and go along with it. He could have just claimed the conversion therapy was working, ‘oh golly, I’m healed!’, and go on with his life, finally talk to his fucking social worker, but no. He wasn’t capable of that.
They’d shown him more pictures, shocking him more frequently, refusing to stop the session even as tears streamed down his face. It just hurt so bad. Then he remembered a shout (maybe his own?), blinding pain, and the next thing he knew, he was in his foster dad’s car. He said he’d had a seizure, but he was okay now, so they were heading home. A cup of water was forced down his throat and he was laid down in bed, commanded to rest. He was so confused, but also so tired, so he let his eyes drift shut.
Just before he lost consciousness for the second time that day, he heard a soft melody drift through his mind as his soulmate played another song. It had been so long since the last time he’d heard them play music… despite his exhaustion, he fell asleep with a smile on his face.
--------------------
The days had been a bit of a blur since his seizure. It was probably because his brain had done the human equivalent to ‘Have you tried turning it off and back on again?’, but even that was hazy in his mind. All he wanted to do was sleep, to rest, to not have to do the school work that they were still shoving down his throat. From where he was laying motionless in his bed, he watched the slowly setting sun dip below the horizon.
There was a knock at the door downstairs. Virgil flinched from the noise, triggering a series of twitches down his spine and into his limbs. People were talking downstairs. He could distinctly hear the voice of his foster parents, but the others were unfamiliar. They were getting louder, near shouting, and there were pounding footsteps echoing up the stairs and down his hallway.
He couldn’t even find the energy to be scared as his door was thrown open and a man’s voice shouted, “He’s in here!”. A flurry of people stormed into the room, the ones in the lead dressed in blue.
Clambering, people shifting to make space, a woman holding his hand. She was asking him questions as they loaded him into a stretcher and he tried his best to answer, but he was just so tired. His name was said multiple times, as well as the names of his foster parents, but it was hazy, so hazy…
“We were just trying to help, I didn’t want this to happen, I don’t-”
“Quiet, woman!”
She raised her voice but it was growing farther away. Virgil realized with a start that he was looking at the sky, bumping along on the gravel path, the bright lights of an ambulance flashing across his vision.
The husband shouted again, trying to silence his wife. That was the last thing Virgil heard as the doors slammed shut, and he finally allowed his eyes to close.
Part 3 HERE
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#lywrites#tsshipmonth2020#prinxiety#roman sanders#virgil sanders#abuse tw#conversion therapy tw#ts soulmate au#sanders sides fanfiction#sanderssides#sanderssidesfanfiction#sanderssidesau#sanders sides au#sanders sides
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Beyond Lovers || Chp. 24
{More Than Friends Sequel}
Chairman!Jaehyun AU x CEO!Reader AU
Summary: You find yourself falling deeper and deeper in love with the former CEO after overcoming your fear of love. Although there were rough patches, both of you are now stronger than ever. However, you realize that maintaining a relationship and a company at the same time can be very difficult, especially if someone is out to destroy the both of you.
Warning: The vengeance we’ve all been waiting for?
Masterlist
{ Previous / Next }
Credits to rightful owner for this amazing gif
———
1 day ago
Drumming his fingers along the smooth leather steering wheel, Yuta kept watch for any movements on the quiet streets. Soon enough, he spotted his arrogant step-cousin drive up to the gate of her house. Quickly, he got out of his car dashing in front of the moving vehicle. The car came to an immediate stop as the screeching of tires can be heard.
The window to the driver’s seat rolled down and Emily stuck her head out in shock, “Are you fucking crazy?! I could’ve killed you!”
Yuta paid no mind to the risk and gave her a cold smirk, “Why hello my dearest cousin.”
She rolled her eyes, “Don’t ‘hello’ me. I have an important day ahead of me and I have no time to waste by talking to a psychotic sore loser like you.”
Smiling with his arms crossed, he asked, “And what game did I lose?”
“Oh don’t act like you don’t know dear Nakamoto. Weren’t you just begging me over text to give up?” She looked into Yuta's eyes with a wicked smile, “Don’t worry I won’t.”
“Emily. Don’t you fucking dare.”
With her arms crossed, she scoffed and looked him dead in the eye, “Who’s going to stop me?”
His arms shot up to grab her arm over the opened window, “Don’t you even-”
“Even what? Take over SM? Are you scared because you know daddy’s going to make me the heir of YG once I take over this shabby company too?”
Yuta let out a sigh and loosened his grip around her arm. “You know what?” He continued with an exhausted voice, “I give up. You’ll never listen anyway. You just do what you want and see what you want. There’s no stopping you anyways. There never was…”
Emily gave him a sly smile at his words as if she won the unspoken war of nerves. That was until he suddenly gave her a cold smile that sent shivers down her entire body. In a chilling tone, Yuta stared at her and warned, “But every action has its consequences my dear cousin.”
Emily feigned indifference and rolled her windows back up, driving into her house driveway.
Yuta watched with pity as she disappeared into the front door. You always put up an act with everyone just to win a petty competition. It’s what your father raised you to be and there’s no way I can change you. Once this is all over, I hope you will learn to truly be yourself without having to worry whether your father will approve or not.
~~~
The building that started it all. You thought to yourself as you stared at the large building in front of you. You’ve seen the SM building countless times, but today felt different. And oddly enough, you don’t hate it. There was a time you’ve walked in with regret, fearing you’ll have to face your feelings for the man you had a one-night stand with. There was also another time you’ve walked in feeling anger and resentment coursing through your body, ready to meet the person who terrorized your boyfriend’s former position. This time, however, you felt none of those negative feelings. You were instead glad to be back as the person who will claim what’s rightfully yours and Jaehyun’s. This building held as much happiness as it did sadness, and you weren’t going to let some ungrateful chick take that away.
Stepping through the sliding glass doors, you strode in your pointed heels to the lobby desk with Mark by your side. The workers were shocked to see the two of you as you greeted them with a smile. “Wendy, Jisoo. Nice to see you’re still working just as diligently.”
“Y/n… Mark... W-what are you doing here?”
You playfully retorted, “You’re not going to call the security on us are you?”
The two women looked flabbergasted, unsure of whether they should carry out their duty or stay loyal to their former boss’s girlfriend. You chuckled and placed a hand on one of their shoulders. “I’m joking. Lighten up girls!” Taking out your id badge, the girls relaxed their bodies once they saw ‘Conference Attendee’ written on it. You analyzed their behaviors and scoffed, “I don’t know who took away the wit from my front desk girls, but I’ll be sure to bring it back,” you thought for a second as you placed a finger underneath your chin, “in about one hour…” They looked confused by your statement but you simply shared a knowing smile with Mark before scanning your id and passing the heavily-secured entrance.
As soon as you got in the elevator, you and Mark were met with Taeyong and his secretary. Although you have seen him many times, you were still stunned by the power his look held. He dressed in a dark navy blue suit with his hair parted and slicked to the right, much different than when you first met him as a casually dressed barista.
“Mr. Kim, please take the next elevator,” Taeyong firmly told his secretary before the elevator doors closed.
You chuckled slightly, “You know if anyone else did that, it would be extremely rude. But how do you still sound like a gentleman doing that?”
“It’s because I know how to treat my employees properly, and in return, I gain respect.”
You nodded over dramatically, “Wow. So sexy.”
He laughed and slouched a bit from his previous demeanor, “Ok stop teasing me y/n. You know it’s my job to maintain a serious image.”
Taeyong turned to stare at you oddly as you softly nodded, “What’s got you in such a cheery mood? I know everyone else right now is as nervous as I am.” He gestured towards Mark, “Look at this poor boy. He looks like he’s about to take the SAT without studying at all.” Mark responded with a glare as you laughed.
Tilting your head to the side, you tried to find the right words to explain to him. Taeyong cocked an eyebrow, expectantly waiting for a reply. Letting out a chuckle you asked, “Remember when I told you Emily laced my drink with food poisoning?”
He crossed his arms and turned toward you, “How can I ever forget? Jaehyun even had her arrested.” You laughed as Taeyong continued with a furrowed eyebrows, “Did the chairman ever find out?”
You scoffed, “If he did, do you think she’ll be able to attend this board meeting?”
Taeyong gave you an “oh right” as he slowly nodded his head. You chuckled and continued, “But that’s even better for us because now we can finally put this battle to its end. I felt so weak and clueless when I first met Jaehyun. I let Emily poison me, threaten my boyfriend, and even let her get in between my relationship. But you, Jaemin, and even Yuta showed me what it can be to stand up for myself. Frankly, I never thought about my future. I just lived according to what my brother wanted. I always thought that would be the only way to not feel like a disappointment. My exact thoughts were: I disappointed my parents and was abandoned, I don’t want my brother to think I’m a disappointment too.”
Your gaze met Taeyong’s and you saw a look of pity. Chuckling, you told him, “You don’t have to look at me like that.” With a genuine smile on your face, you assured, “I’m not the same person I once was. Jaehyun changed my perspective on life. I guess he showed me what it really felt to be strong, to own up to the world.”
Taeyong mirrored your smile, knowing very well that you were more than capable of handling anything. As the elevator doors opened, you gave him an imperturbable look. “Today isn’t any different.”
~~~
One by one, the shareholders of SM and other crucial directors started to fill the room. A few journalists sat at the side of the packed room, ready to announce to the media anything they find intriguing, or more so, scandalous. A few people gave you odd glances, wondering what NCT’s CEO was doing at SM’s board meeting, especially seated at the very front of the room. You paid no mind to them as you waited for the main characters of today’s show.
Annoyance filled your body as a fuming Emily caught your eye. She marched up to you with anger and looked down at your seated figure, “What the fuck do you think you’re doing here?”
She radiated negative energy and her impulsive statement caught the attention of other directors and even the reporters. You gave her a sly smirk, “Better keep your anger caged missy.” You glanced around the room and left your gaze lingering a second longer on the vigilant journalists then back to Emily. With a hint of mockery, you told her, “It won’t do you anything good to act like a snarling bitch in front of your VIPs, am I right?”
She looked around and saw the glances she was receiving. Taking a deep breath, she glared at you and left. Swallowing her pride, she took a seat at her assigned chair on the opposite side from you. The seat adjacent to hers was empty, waiting for the chairman to claim its place.
A few minutes later, you felt a tap on your shoulder, and you were met with a bright smile. You reciprocate the gesture as Jaemin sits in between you and Taeyong. As the remaining guests filed into the room, you checked your watch: 10 minutes, 20 minutes, to 30 minutes. It’s been exactly half an hour since you sat down and still, the chairman was nowhere to be found.
You looked at Jaemin and he gave you a slight nod of assurance. Glancing around the room, you can see the people around you were starting to get confused and impatient. However, a smirk appeared on your lips as the door swung open.
One of the directors was about to announce the rescheduling of the meeting but immediately stopped in his tracks. Quickly and nervously, he bowed to the elder and retreated back to his seat. As the chairman announced the start of the meeting through the microphone stand, you saw Emily sit up a little straighter than before.
“Thank you everyone for being patient with this old man.” He spoke firmly into the mic even as he was joking. The other attendees forced a laugh as he continued. “However, I will make this meeting short and concise.”
“As you all know, rumors have been speculating around the media about SM’s position of chief executive officer. I am here today to tell you that it is true.”
Emily’s eyes lit up as her father finished the statement. You saw her give you a cold smile but you brushed it off, waiting for the rest of his announcement.
“It is true,” the chairman cleared his throat, “that SM will no longer have Nakamoto Yuta as it’s CEO.”
Whispers and murmurs could be heard from the back as the reporters discussed amongst themselves. The chairman gave you a look of uneasiness as you stared back ushering him to continue with your eyes.
“However, my daughter, Emily Ahn will not hold the position to this title.” With that announcement, you saw Emily’s shocked gaze at her father as the shareholders and directors started to whisper amongst themselves as well.
The chairman ushered the secretary to turn off the lights as a projector screen lit up the room. “My main goal today is to share with you all the changes that will be taking place in this company the minute we walk out this room. Prior to my appearance at this meeting, I had a discussion with my lawyer to transfer my shares.” He then looked to the projected screen, “As you can all see on this chart, I no longer hold any amount of the shares in this company. What you see on this chart are the current shareholders and the percentage of shares they hold.”
The people in the room burned holes onto the screen, looking to see if, by chance, the chairman would’ve transferred his shares to them. But once they have thoroughly read the chart, they were left speechless. Emily stood out among the rest of the crowd as you, Taeyong, and Jaemin shared a knowing look with each other.
“As of today, the Chief Executive Officer of Starship, A Cup of Coffee, and NCT will be the top shareholders of SM Management.”
The sounds of the secretary furiously typing onto his laptop can be heard as he tried to keep up with the constant announcements. You saw some questioning looks from the shareholders and directors as Emily carried fire in her eyes. You felt her glare never leaving your side. A brave shareholder suddenly spoke up, “Mr. Ahn, with all due respect, I don’t see how any of this makes sense!” A group of shareholders and directors chimed in to agree but stopped immediately once the chairman cleared his throat in a loud manner.
“As you are all very well aware, Starship Enterprises is a major benefactor to SM Management and Lee Taeyong is a major key figure in the promotions of this company. As for-” Before he could continue his justification, Emily screeched out in anger, “As for NCT?! You can’t tell me you’re serious! What have they ever done that could be of use to this company?! They are just some dumpster start-up business that can’t even raise their stocks up!!”
Everyone’s eyes were on Emily now. The journalists smirking as Emily’s rage gave them exactly what they needed. The chairman kept a cool facade as he sighed out, “NCT has been and will continue to be the biggest contributor towards SM Management’s success. It seems my words aren’t enough to convince everyone,” his stare went towards Emily as if to warn her not to cause a scene, but she only reciprocated her father’s intense gaze. “So, I will let the person in question explain.”
Standing up confidently, you turned towards your audience. With your best smile, you rectified, “I’m not the person in question, per se, but I will tell you this today so all misunderstandings are cleared.” Everyone in the room turned towards you waiting for your response to clear up their confusion and anger. “I am the current CEO of NCT, but what has established the growing success of this company has nothing to do with me.” You gave them a shrug and an innocent smile, bathing in Emily’s anger. Continuing to speak, you started to move slowly around the room as if you were targeting your prey, “However, doesn’t one person come to mind when speaking of SM Management’s success? Who has built this company with his blood, sweat, and tears? Who was it that gave you all a high-paying job at this well-known management so you won’t have to crawl back to your family in shame?” You looked directly into the eyes of the directors as they look down in discomfort. You then turned your gaze towards the shareholders and said without remorse, “And do you think the company shares would have any value at all without his hard work in refining this management?” You let out a little laugh at their speechless figures and turned, stopping right next to Emily, “And do you, Miss Ahn, remember how many times this person has left you off the hook for fraud and even harassment?” Defeated, Emily dropped back down to her seat and stayed speechless like the others.
You turned toward the secretary in charge of meeting notes and told him, “Please make sure you get down every word of what I’m about to say. This will be the highlight of this meeting.” He gave you a questioning look but quickly nodded the moment you raised your eyebrow at him, warning him to question you any further. “SM Management has managed to become this successful because Jung Jaehyun was capable of handling this company with his brain and with his heart. If anyone wants to refute this claim then I guess we will be able to see who the traitors of this company are. Hence, the chairman is simply disconnecting his traces on this company because he knows who the real benefactor of SM Management is. Jaemin, Taeyong, and I are fully aware of this and are committed to restoring this company to its former glory.” You paused for a second as you glanced at your phone buzzing in the pocket of your blazer. You smiled and continued, “And if this doesn’t ease your concerns, I believe these two particular people will be able to help with that.”
The projector screen closed as the lights turned back on. Right on queue, the door to the conference room clicked open. Everyone’s eyes widened with shock as Yuta and Jaehyun appeared before the attendees. Yuta wore a sly smirk on his face while Jaehyun held a stone-cold look that could kill. Their crisp suits and slick, gelled hair perfectly accessorized their intimidating persona. A small smile crept up onto your face while Emily, on the other hand, had shaking pupils. The journalists sat up straighter and furiously scribbled all over their notes.
The two men stood side by side at the front of the room capturing everyone’s attention. Yuta spoke first with his firm but laid-back tone, “Clearly, all of you in this room must be taken aback by the changes in shares and the confirmation of my absence. I will tell you all right now that I, myself, have decided to leave from my title as SM Management’s Chief Executive Officer. And not because Miss Ahn over here,” Yuta turned toward the speechless woman next to the chairman and smugly said, “but because this title does not belong to me. However, before I leave my position there is one proposal I am here for. I, along with Ms. y/l/n, have recently flown to discuss with our Japanese investors to have SM Management merge with NCT as a cooperative branch.”
At this rate, the secretary seemed exhausted as he tried to keep up with the news of the meeting. Murmurs can be heard all over the room but everyone settled down the moment Jaehyun moved an inch. He spoke with a powerful yet calm voice, “If this proposal carries over, I, as chairman of NCT, will be handling all deals within both companies. I am sure the directors here at SM Management are capable enough to know whether or not the company will be in good hands. I also believe that the shareholders will understand the benefit and high possibility for the shares to sky-rocket once this merge has been made.”
The shareholders and directors were deep in discussion before the chairman spoke up. “As of right now we will take a vote for and against this proposal. Please keep in mind that your votes would be counted according to the changes I have mentioned earlier. The top 5 shareholders’ decisions will count for three votes each while the rest will be one vote per persons.”
A good amount of hands can be seen for both decisions. Everyone, especially Emily, grew anxious. Turning their attention toward the secretary, everyone awaited for his announcement for the voting, including the reporters and the chairman.
A mix of emotions can be seen as the secretary said, “By a vote of 3, this proposal has passed.”
———
• Back from hiatus! Thank you sm for waiting 🥺•
#nct#nct imagines#nct series#nct scenarios#nct fluff#nct smut#nct angst#nct jaehyun#nct 127 imagines#nct 127 scenarios#nct 127 smut#nct 127 fluff#nct 127 angst#nct 127 fanfic#nct 127 jaehyun#nct 127 series#kpop#kpop fanfic#kpop fluff#kpop scenarios#kpop series#kpop social media au#jaehyun social media au#nct social media au#nct 127 social media au#kpop imagines#jaehyun imagines#jaehyun smut#jaehyun scenarios#jaehyun series
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Clandestine Meetings - James Rodríguez
Player: James Rodríguez
Word count: 1.280
Prompt: “Hello, can the next swap sunday projects be another part of Illciit Affairs (for you) and a sequel to Mirrorball (for Laura)? ✨” (Request by Anon)
A/N: Another Swap Sunday, another angsty James piece! ✨💗 This story is a sequel to @alltoolewin’s Mad Woman-inspired imagine 🥰 If you’re new here, you should read my Illicit Affairs fic first, though! 💖
His name lights up on my phone screen. Which lights up my pitch black bedroom. James pink heartlet-purple heartlet-sparkly heartlet. Because a single red one would have been inappropriate. I know damn well that my name in his phone isn't even a name. Just my first initial. Not even a full stop after it. A lonesome letter. Because apparently, that's much less suspicious.
James pink heartlet-purple heartlet-sparkly heartlet wants to know whether I'm still awake at this ungodly hour. After not talking to me for two whole weeks. "Yes," I type into the message box. I'm a fucking fool for texting back. I hit send. I hit my head against the wall. I'm in love with a married man who's kicking a ball around for a living. Who possibly can't and won't love anything or anyone that isn't his daughter. I'm a fucking mess. Please, James, get a pair of glasses, another one, a better one. What do you even want from me? I can't drink from a can unless someone's asking the waiter for a straw. I can't ask waiters for straws because I'm goddamn shy. I can't. I just can't. So why can't James find himself someone better?
My phone vibrates twice. Three simple letters. A "W", a "Y" and a "D". And a lonely question mark. I don't know who's teaching him English slang, abbreviations, the cool stuff. I don't even know why he's pretending to be cool. As I said, the man kicks a ball around for a living. That's not cool. That's fucking weird, now that I'm thinking about it.
"Nothing." What would I be doing at three in the morning? I spend my nights staring at my ceiling unless we're having sex. He knows that. "You?" Did I ask out of common courtesy or do I really want to know what's keeping him awake tonight?
He replies right away. "I'm in bed, I just can't fall asleep."
"Try drinking some tea. That helps."
He sends me an emoji, the facepalming one. I have to laugh, I really cannot help it, but I do find it hilarious when grown-ass men unironically use anything more than just a normal smiley or the occasional thumbs up. James pink heartlet-purple heartlet-sparkly heartlet ups the ante then. "You're a pain in the ass, princesa."
"You're a pain in-" I stop in my tracks. In my fucking vagina. I delete what I've written so far, just to type it out again. "You're a pain in general, Jamesito." I find myself giggling into the darkness. "My aches are developing aches because of you." I add the one emoji with the bandaged head, then I hit send.
"Want me to kiss it better?" It should've been "you're a pain in my vagina". Definitely.
"James, you're being silly. It's half past three. Go to sleep."
"Told you I'm fucking restless. Talk to me." Pouty puppy-eyed emoji. Dude, please!
I sigh, putting the phone down for a second. Yeah, sure. All of a sudden, I'm interesting again. Because there isn't anything else to entertain him. Of course. I should've known. "What about?" My text immediately is marked as read, homeboy isn't even closing our chat in-between messages it seems. I should be flattered, but instead, I just feel like there's something weird about this. Like, why don't you talk to your wife? Why aren't you on video call with your daughter? It's barely nine in Medellín, I know that. Of course I know that, I've pinned Colombia's local time to my home screen.
"Can I call you?"
You have a fucking phone in your hand. You certainly can. "No. Come over." I hate myself for putting myself through that. I hope he's got somewhere to be in the morning. I can't help but wish for him to turn me down.
"Now?"
Now... Now it's my turn to send him a facepalming emoji. No. Next Christmas, dummy.
"Okay," he replies after a split second. Okay, I'm coming over? Okay, cool, a stupid little emoji? Okay, fuck off? Okay what? Another second passes. Buzz buzz. "I'll be there in ten."
"Drive safe," my fingers type out. Crash that fucking car. After running me over, of course. End our misery. Please and thank you. I roll out of bed to put on some pants. He can deal with my washed out tee, he's seen worse. My naked body, for example. I stumble into the bathroom to pile on mascara, to take the fluffy, pink scrunchie out of my hair, to wash the thin film of cold sweat off my forehead. I don't know nervousness when it comes to him. There's just... anxiety. Every time we have one of our little fall-outs, my amount of working braincells gets reduced by two.
I sit down on the toilet lid to catch my breath. I'm gonna get dicked down and then discarded. It's okay, I'm used to it. I'm a one-trick-pony. But I'm just so good at that one trick that James keeps on crawling back to me. The pinkish polish on my nails is starting to chip, so I decide to adorn my fingers with a few rings to distract from that. They look cheap, they were cheap, but I consider them cute, so it's alright.
I don't like texting after my autocorrect has dubbed him Hummus not once, not twice, but several times. He doesn't like calling as his stutter tends to get worse on the phone. So this is nice. The real thing is always nice. "I missed you," he rasps with his arms still wrapped around my torso. "I missed you, too," I whisper back. Lies. I spent a long, long time cursing his name, relatively sure that I would never be moaning it again, that we were over and done. "I still haven't said Happy New Year," he states the obvious. We haven't spoken since Christmas. "No," I confirm, shaking my head. It was the worst New Year's Eve of my life. I've seen the pictures Daniela had posted on her Instagram. At least James has had a great time, apparently.
"Sorry. I thought I should leave you alone." Yes. Because that's the easy way out. "But... Happy New Year. I guess."
"Thanks. To you, too." It truly feels like New Year's. Waiting for the big something, just to end up disappointed because the big something turns out to be some underwhelming bullshit. "Better late than never." There's still snow on the streets, so it's alright, I guess.
"Yes."
"You're fucking annoying, James."
"Oh. Why?" And fucking stupid as well.
"Did you really come over to stand around in my hallway and wish me a Happy New Year? What are you? A caroler?"
"You told me to come."
"I'm not used to you doing as you're told." I force a laugh. I'm not used to niceties and such. I'm used to... the bad stuff.
He just shrugs. He's so unbelievably apathetic, I hate it! "You have the place to yourself tonight?"
"No. You're here with me." I know quite well that he was referring to my roommate. Who, in fact, is staying with her boyfriend for the weekend. I know quite well that he only asked because he is the furthest thing from an exhibitionist I could imagine.
"Ah. Yes. True." So damn stupid! I wish I could get up and leave. But I'm already standing and there's no way to escape my own apartment. "Well?" I ask in an awful attempt to make conversation. Well, he's gonna fuck me. He's gonna break my heart once again and I'm gonna like that. We've been there before. And we're gonna be there time and time again.
#soccer imagines#soccer#soccer imagine#football#football imagines#football imagine#james rodriguez#james rodríguez#james rodriguez imagine#james rodríguez imagine#james rodriguez fanfic#mine#my writing#swap sunday#request#requested by anon#everton#fc everton#everton fc#illicit affairs#mad woman#colombia nt#colombia national team#angst
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just a little sweeter (pt. 16)
Hi friends. I’ve had this one finished for a while, but like... my motivation is gONE. But I’m trying to pull myself together. I hope you’re all well~~
BIPOC rec: I read Get a Life, Chloe Brown by Talia Hibbert and I’m obsessed. I can’t wait to read the sequel. I also watched the anime Cells at Work (on Netflix). If you love cell biology, or just want a good light hearted anime to watch, check it out. I thoroughly enjoyed it, even though I don’t watch anime usually.
w.c. 2.3k (some angst for your Tuesday)
pt.1; pt.2; pt.3; pt.4; pt.5; pt.6; pt.7; pt.8; pt. 9; pt. 10; pt. 11; pt. 12; pt. 13; pt. 14; pt. 15
“Hey.”
She can already hear it in his voice. “What’s… wrong?”
“Just…” Jihoon’s voice is shaky. “I know this sounds stupid, but is Eunha with you?”
“You took her to work with you,” she says, confused. “What’s going on?”
His breathing begins to pick up, and she can hear his panic building down the line. He can’t even seem to form the words.
“I’m coming to you. Where are you?” She hadn’t taken Eunha to work with her like usual. She was intending to stay late and do some bookkeeping before her meeting with her accountant the next day. Seems like that is definitely not happening. “Jihoon. Where are you?”
“Home. I’m at home.”
“I’ll be ten minutes. Are the guys there?” She starts to pack up her things.
“I called them. Jagi… I don’t know where she is!”
“Have you called Yeri? Maybe she picked up Eunha?”
“I called her, but she’s not answering.”
“Okay, okay, okay. Breathe, my love. I’ll be there soon. I promise.” She slips on her coat as she passes the front counter. The girls look over at her. “I don’t know if I’ll be back today; family emergency has come up. If anything happens here, call me.”
“Sure, eunni!”
She basically sprints to Jihoon’s apartment. Once she lets herself in, she rushes up to the fourth floor. The elevator was in use that morning for people moving in, and she isn’t going to chance waiting today. Breathless and a little too warm, she hurries into the apartment.
The members all turn when they hear the door opening and part ways to let her get to Jihoon.
He’s angrily yelling into the phone at someone. “Where is she? No one else could’ve taken her!”
She’s never heard Jihoon so furious, and from the looks on the members’ faces, they haven’t either. Gently, she touches Jihoon’s shoulder. When he whips around to face her, her eyebrows lift in surprise. She slowly reaches for the phone and he lets her pull it from his grasp. “Hello?”
“Who is this?” a woman asks on the other end.
She pauses to consider who Jihoon would feel comfortable yelling at. “I assume that you’re Eunha’s grandmother.”
There’s a long pause as the older woman seems to process who she is. The woman asks if she’s Jihoon’s current girlfriend.
“I am. Do you know where Yeri is?”
“Like I told Jihoon, I don’t know,” the woman cries. Her voice is desperate. Jihoon’s desperation must have transferred over in the call.
“Has she visited you?” Her heart is beating in her chest, but with the members’ scrutiny, she tries to remain calm for them. “Has she said anything to you?”
“Like I told Jihoon, she only said that he had asked for the key back.”
That fucking key.
“We didn’t even know she had seen Jihoon these last two years since he’s been with you.”
“Okay, thank you. If you hear from Yeri, please let us know.” She hangs up the phone and Jihoon looks to her, a wild look in his eyes. “She really doesn’t know, Jihoon.”
Jihoon looks as if he’s about to start yelling again, but she cuts him off. She turns to the members. “Is it cool if you guys pick up some stuff for dinner? I’m going to call someone I know.”
They all seem to sigh in relief. Before all of them can dash off, she grabs Seungcheol and Soonyoung’s hands. Seungcheol grabs Jeonghan’s hand in reaction.
“Can you guys hang around here?” Her eyes dart to Jihoon behind them.
“Yeah, yeah,” Jeonghan hums. “We can stay.”
She keeps her grip on Seungcheol’s hand and pulls him towards the kitchen. “Let’s just make some tea.”
“I thought you were going to call the police,” Seungcheol says as he follows behind.
“I’m going to call a police officer I know,” she agrees. “But I need you to explain to him what you also know.”
She starts the kettle and then she finds a name in her contact list. She puts it on speaker so that both she and Seungcheol can hear.
“Hello, Jaehyun oppa?”
There’s a faint sound of background chatter. “Hey, what’s going on?”
“You said that if I ever needed you for anything to just call?”
The man on the other end of the line’s voice suddenly becomes alert. “Yeah, yeah. What do you need?”
“Jihoon took Eunha home for a nap and for lunch, because she wasn’t feeling well,” she starts. “Seungcheol is a friend of his and he’s gonna explain the rest.”
Seungcheol jumps in here. “Jihoon also wound up taking a nap, and in that time, Eunha disappeared.”
Jaehyun is quiet for a while. “Does anyone have access to Jihoon’s apartment?”
“I do,” she says. She looks to Seungcheol.
“I have an extra key too,” Seungcheol answers.
“And his ex-girlfriend is Eunha’s mother. She has a key too. But Eunha’s grandmother said that Jihoon asked for that key back recently.”
Jaehyun takes another second to respond. “Do you think she could have taken Eunha?”
“Yeri’s not answering her phone,” she shares. “And it seems possible that she would.”
“Okay, I’ll see what I can do. I’ll call you back. Text me her number.”
She sends the number and then moves around the kitchen to make them tea. She collects some mugs from the cupboards and puts them on a tray. She remembers when Jihoon’s cupboards used to be pretty bare. Then she sees the sippy cup of Eunha’s in the cupboard. The little one had been insistent that her sippy cups be in the cupboard too.
“I didn’t know you knew a cop,” Seungcheol murmurs.
“He’s a regular. He used to hit on me, but then I told him I had a boyfriend and then Eunha started coming to the café.” She takes a few steadying breaths. “He’s a good friend now.”
Seungcheol puts the kettle down and wraps her up in a tight hug.
“Eunha feels like my baby and I want to die knowing someone came in and took her without Jihoon or me knowing,” she whispers into his neck.
Seungcheol hums. “We all feel like that right now.”
She takes a few more deep breaths and then picks up the tray of mugs. They head out to the living room. Jeonghan and Soonyoung are talking to Jihoon to try to calm him down. He refuses to sit down, though Jeonghan and Soonyoung are lounging on the couch, faking their comfort.
“I feel like we should call the police,” Jihoon says. “I want to call the police.”
“I called the police,” she tells him. Seungcheol puts the kettle down and begins pouring everyone tea. She wraps her arms around Jihoon’s waist. Almost instinctively, his arms wrap around her and his face buries into her hair.
Her phone buzzes and she jumps at the noise.
“That was fast,” Seungcheol comments.
She turns her body with the intention to move away. “Hello?”
Jihoon’s grip on her hasn’t loosened.
Jaehyun greets her quickly. “Luckily, Yeri hasn’t turned her cell phone off. We’ve dispatched some officers to pull her over. It looks like she’s heading to Incheon.”
She rests the back of her head on Jihoon’s shoulder. “Can you let me know when you have Eunha? We want to get her right away.”
“I’ll text you when we’ve stopped her mother and you can meet us there.”
“You said Incheon, right?”
“Yes.” It takes him a minute to realize what she means. “Drive safe, hmm? We don’t need you being pulled over too.”
She lets out a laugh of relief. “I can’t believe you’re joking with me right now. Oppa, coffees are on me forever.”
“I’ll take the next week,” Jaehyun replies. “You gotta stay in business.”
She takes a few deep breaths after hanging up.
“What’s happened?” Jeonghan exclaims.
“We need to go right now.” She looks to Seungcheol. “Did you bring a company car? Or did Minghao take it?”
“We came separately,” Seungcheol answers.
She holds her hand out for the keys and he tosses them to her. She grabs Jihoon’s hand, still attached to her body, and pulls him after her.
“Did you find her?” Seungcheol calls.
“Yes!”
The boys make noises of relief as she pulls Jihoon after her.
“What’s going on?” Jihoon asks. His voice breaks and he sounds as if he’s about to start crying again.
“I called my cop friend and he was able to find Yeri based on her cell phone. Apparently, she’s heading to Incheon. Jaehyun oppa didn’t tell me that Eunha was in the car, but we’re assuming, right?”
“Incheon?” Jihoon nearly chokes on the word, apparently not having heard the rest of the sentence.
“She’s not going anywhere. She doesn’t even have Eunha’s passport, right?”
Jihoon’s body relaxes immensely, as if the police chasing after Yeri wasn’t enough to calm him down.
In the car, both of them are so agitated that they can’t even listen to music. She sees the police before she gets the call. As she climbs out of the car, she picks up the phone and sees Jaehyun holding Eunha. Eunha’s face is red from whatever sickness Jihoon had brought her home for. She nudges Jihoon forward to get his daughter.
“Daddy!” Eunha croaks.
Jihoon collects her and buries his face into Eunha’s small body. Eunha wraps her limbs around Jihoon. Meanwhile, she goes to Jaehyun who gives her a side hug.
“Do you want to talk to her?” Jaehyun asks.
She looks over at Yeri, whose face is red and is being handcuffed. She looks to Jihoon as he walks up. “Do you want to talk to her?”
“If I don’t talk to her now,” Jihoon looks to Jaehyun, “what happens then?”
“Lay charges if you want. She’s also drunk driving,” Jaehyun informs them. “So, we get her for DUI, as well as kidnapping if you want to pursue that.”
“You might be able to get full custody now,” she says to Jihoon. While he has most of the custody, visits with her mother were mandatory.
Eunha looks over when she hears her voice, and her arms reach out for her. Jihoon passes Eunha over and he catches sight of Yeri staring in their direction.
“Do we give her the satisfaction of talking to us?” Jihoon asks.
“Us?” she asks.
“You can also talk with her at the station,” Jaehyun suggests. “We’ll need your statements to charge her.”
“We’ll meet you there, oppa,” she says. Jaehyun pats her shoulder and wanders off. She pecks Eunha’s forehead. “How are you feeling, kiddo?”
Eunha responds by cuddling into her.
Eunha is asleep once they get to the police station. She hesitates in the car when Jihoon gets out. Jihoon ducks his head to look at her. “What’s wrong?”
“Do you need me to come with you?”
“Would you rather stay in the car?”
She nods.
Jihoon hums. “Just come in and give your statement.” He passes her the keys. “You don’t have to talk to her again.”
She’s careful to get out of the car without bumping Eunha’s head. Then she follows Jihoon into the station. Her statement is brief. She shares the time that she left the café from the call with Jihoon and how she’s related to Jihoon and Eunha.
When Eunha starts to stir from the noise in the station, she rocks her back and forth.
Jaehyun studies them. “I can’t guarantee that the story won’t get out.”
“Yeah, but that’s a problem for tomorrow.”
After dragging his statement out for as long as possible, Jihoon is led to the cell that Yeri is in. He stands before the bars. There are other women in the cell, but Yeri is easy to pick out. She stumbles towards him and leans against the bars to stare at him. There’s a glassy look in her eyes and a pungent smell of alcohol coming off her.
“You come to gloat?”
Jihoon’s jaw drops in disbelief. “Gloat? About what? This wasn’t a competition.”
“This was entirely a competition.” It seems that while her coordination is a little off, her tongue is fine.
“About what? Who gets to take care of Eunha? You took her.”
“You replaced me. When you said you wouldn’t.”
Jihoon blinks. “I never replaced you.”
“I saw her. Your new girlfriend.” Yeri snorts. “You made Eunha hate me. All she talks about is your trip to Japan, about how daddy and his new girlfriend are so in love, how she wants you to get married.”
“Yeri, she’s two,” Jihoon responds incredulously. “She’s a two-year-old kid who hasn’t seen her mom in ages.”
“And you got a dog?! Who are you, Lee Jihoon? How did this woman domesticate you in a way I never could?”
They’d had plenty of arguments about his inability to come home on time, about his inability to love her the way she wanted to be loved, about all sorts of things that boiled down to: they were just not right for each other. Yeri made it very clear early on that there were things about their relationship and lifestyle that she wished she could change. Maybe three years down the line, things will change in his current relationship. They haven’t yet.
“Mochi is good for Eunha too.”
“It wouldn’t stop barking at me. I’m surprised you didn’t hear me come in.”
Jihoon’s stomach turns.
“Seems you’re still running yourself into the ground, Lee Jihoon. At least that hasn’t changed.”
Jihoon has nothing more to say. He sighs. “You should call your parents. They’re worried about you.”
In the car, he finds his two girls asleep. She jumps when he taps on the window to be let in.
“How was it?” she asks as he slips into the driver’s side.
“We can talk about it later. Let’s just go home and eat and sleep.”
She intertwines their fingers as she settles to sleep on the way back to the apartment. “Sounds good to me.”
#woozi#woozi imagines#woozi scenarios#seventeen scenarios#seventeen imagines#Lee Jihoon#lee jihoon scenarios#Seventeen#Svt
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AR Ship Week - Fanwork Recs
Banner credit
This is the fourth and last weekly post in the lead up to Alex Rider Ship Week. Only 1 week to go!
This week we’ve got a selection of shippy fanwork recs submitted by members of the AR fandom. Enjoy and hope to see you next week!
**Please note that I haven’t listed all the details for the fics so take care to read the tags on AO3 before diving in!
Yassen/Alex
Our Endless Numbered Days by Galimau
Just your run of the mill heartwarming look at the quiet beats of Alex and Yassen's relationship...after the apocalypse. Soft and sweet this fic focuses on the very still and quiet moments of two men at the end times trying to hold onto the things that bring them joy. It's an intimate view of what Alex and Yassen's life could be like of all their cares were quite literally wiped away - excellent world building and writing make this a must read.
Yalex art by Ireliss
Alex and Yassen in a lake! Everything about this picture is perfect - the light, the colours, the feeling of stillness... Probably the most beautiful picture of Alex and Yassen I've ever seen.
Sun Poisoning by fElBiTeR
Angsty, beautiful, slowburn soulmate fic with a twist on the usual tropes and gorgeous imagery
Twisting, Turning, Tumbling by ShiruyTheSecond
A glacially slow burn, road trip au, and sick fic all mashed into one fic, in non-chronological order based on 100 themes. I'd say this was one of the gateway fics into Yalex for me; there's nothing like reading a longfic you thought was gen and wishing it were slash, only for the realization to hit you in the face like a brick 50 something chapters later. Alex is on the run for a variety of reasons after a mission for MI6 goes spectacularly wrong, so he surprisingly finds himself leaning on Yassen for help, experincing whumpage along the way. Absolutely delicious.
Specific Performance by BurntWhisper
Alex is a good spy, good enough that SCORPIA has tasked Yassen with killing him. Yassen can't do that but he can give Alex a very...enthusiastic going away present even Alex hasn't been a very good boy. It's a fun look at Alex and Yassen's first fling with callbacks to the original gen fic. That hits every perfect note and hits a few other things too.
Interlude by Suzie_Shooter
Incredibly soft and fluffly Yalex that ends with an unexpected top!Alex and bath sex. Will absolutely warm your heart the way it does mine every time I read this fic.
Medicine by Suzie_Shooter
The other fic in response to the prompt of "Alex is given a serum that makes him feel good when he tells the truth" except this one is praise kink while the other is humiliation kink! Specifically focused on a smoking hot blowjob and Alex's reluctance turned enthusiam, plus, there's a second chapter, just in case one dose of the antidote isn't enough.
One Year by BurntWhisper
The slowest of slow burns featuring Alex and Yassen on the run from MI6, SCORPIA and their own feelings. Covering 3 months of their life on the run this fic features action as well as the slow, quiet moments where the budding relationship can truly shine through and behind it all the intelligence world continues to grind on threatening to take their happiness with it. It's a beautiful fic with strong, detailed writing and the emotional weight that it deserves.
Midnight Smoke by Hijja
If you're in the mood for darker fics with plenty of Yassen hurting Alex complete with violence and heavy dubcon, Hijja has you covered. This particular fic features a mission-type premise with Alex being sent to investigate a spate of teen abductions only to be captured. Yassen is there, and he has his own goals...
Hello Alex by anonymous
Fanart: a reunion hug between Yassen and Alex.
Face The Truth by capeofstorm
Alex is given a serum that makes him feel good when he tells the truth. Yassen is absolutely a man to take advantage. Recced by Suzie_Shooter
Lights Out by Suzie_Shooter
Yassen and Alex left tradecraft behind for a new life in the Greek islands. Ten years on, their relationship is still going strong and they've become island locals, the proprietors of a sailing club and a windsurfing business. Their idyllic life is disrupted by a new threat that wants them dead. I just love the premise of Yalex riding off into the sunset and not looking back. This fic not only has suspense, action, hot sex, and the intimacy borne of ten years...but once you're done, there are two excellent sequels and a prequel to lap up!
Villa in the Sun by BoldAsBrass
A multi-chapter story within a story as Yassen and Alex keep in touch over the phone through a tale of a Russian bodyguard's encounters with a young English man. This is so cleverly done and beautifully written; I could re-read it and re-read it (in fact, that's exactly what I've done).
Sting in the Tail by Suzie_Shooter
With the world hanging in the balance, MI6 presses an imprisoned Yassen into service. They use Alex to convince him, but also a nasty "sting in the tail" incentive to guarantee results. A thrilling Yalex mission!fic where Yassen and Alex forge their trust in each other by facing mortal danger and saving the world together. I was on the edge of my seat the whole time, eating up the slow burn and wondering how on earth they were going to succeed with all the obstacles Scorpia and MI6 threw in their way.
Rarely Pure And Never Simple by fElBiTeR
Non-con > dub-con > fuck-yes-con speedrun. Recced by Suzie_Shooter
Just Say I Do by Nanimok
I'm possibly biased because this was written for me, but 'woke up married' is a great trope and this is both snarky and adorable. Recced by Suzie_Shooter
Open Invitation by Suzie_Shooter
After Ian's death in TV 'verse, fifteen-year-old Alex is living alone in a depressive, self-destructive spiral. He realizes someone is watching him at home...and decides to give them something more compelling to watch. I am squicked out by creepers, but the characterizations tackle the thorny elements head-on: Yassen's mixed feelings and understated pursuit tactics are 100% believable, as is Alex's volatility; he's alternately confused, provocative, and defiant. Exhibit A:“Does that make you a victim, or a slut?” The question came casually, but it had the unexpected sting of a slap. Alex blinked. “What, I can’t be both?” he countered after a second. Plot ensues, because how can a relationship possibly form from such a premise? Mind the tags (you might trip into your next kink because the sex is mind-blowingly hot).
Flirting with Danger by BoldAsBrass
Basically THE gateway fic into Yalex for me - short and sweet, snappy narration and dialogue, a sleekly dangerous Yassen and Alex who might be a skilled, pragmatic adult but quickly realises he's in over his head. Sprinkle in a bit of dubcon and scorching hot writing and you get this perfect fic.
Burning a Dead Man's Fingertips by GreenQueenofClubs
Multichapter slow burn, MI6!Yassen AU - an excellent premise done extremely well and feels fresh and new, balancing mission-style fic with character development! The dynamic between Yassen and Alex is somewhat different here compared to most Yalex fics as they don't meet until Alex is an adult; a really intriguing glimpse into what could have been...
A Little Pat Down by Nanimok
Airport security can be frustrating at the best of times but couple it with being edged like none other by an assassin turned security guard and it can really be a pain in the ass. A filthy but extremely well written premise. Crack taken seriously is this author's strong suit so not a single one of their works will steer you wrong.
Yalex Ballet AU by anonymous
Yalex ballet AU with absolutely gorgeous imagery and slow burn. Fluid prose and in the background, the shadows of past histories and things unsaid.
Gentleman's Agreement by Valaks
Yassen and Alex have a "gentleman's agreement" for handling their business in the field. No one ever said anything about parent-teacher conferences. Claims to be gen, but deserves a place on this list for subtle genius alone, because with lines like "Like a fine wine, Alex Rider was improving with age" and "How interesting that Alex Rider would be that interested in his hands", what are we supposed to think....? UST in all caps is the best description.
Salty the Sweat on my Fingertips by Galimau
A fun little romp of Alex visiting Tom and having to call his overly protective boyfriend? because he's pregnant and everything hurts. Beautifully written, this fic explores the ending of Oceanbreeze7's Moonfish and follows the extremely creative monster biology to its logical conclusion of Alex getting knocked up.
Slipping Through My Fingers by Nanimok
This kink meme fill hits in all the right places as we watch through the eyes of a very jealous Julius as Yassen gives Alex all the attention he needs. The writing is, as always, on point and the characterization of Julius gets absolutely nailed (almost as much as Alex). Julius/Alex, Yassen/Alex
Other
Miss Julia by DantesThird
Very creepy and traumatic noncon but really believable with Julia Rothman's obsession with John Rider. Alex/Julia Rothman
gone loose inside the shell by cyanides
Fantastic messed-up fic where Julius keeps fantasising about killing Alex, but then the fantasies take a different turn. The possessive 'If I can't have you no-one can' dynamic really encapsulates the ship for me, and the fic stuck in my mind afterwards. Alex/Julius
smoke haze by Ireliss
Dubcon, gun kink. A really intriguing and quite dark exploration of a young Yassen's situation with Scorpia and his very complex relationship with Hunter. John/Yassen
Our Settling Bones by Galimau
A multi-chapter slow burn focused on a former assassin who has lost everything...and Yassen Gregorovich. The tension is off the charts and the characerization is on point. Everything you could want from the rarest of pairs. John Wick/Yassen
Lemniscate by Ireliss
A look at what awaits Yassen when he arrives back at Scorpia after killing Vladimir Sharkovsky. This is deliciously dark as well as being entirely plausible. The sensory descriptions are fantastic. Yassen/Julia Rothman
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ancient names, epilogue
A John Seed/Original Female Character Fanfic
Ancient Names, epilogue: goodbye
Masterlink Post
Word Count: 3.7k
Rating: M for mature themes, mostly T though.
Warnings: just sad feels, my guy.
Notes: One last and final thank you to everyone who has read, kept up, commented, popped in to say hello to me on Tumblr. You really made this an incredible experience. ♡ I can’t wait to get started on the sequel, and I hope you enjoy this little interlude!
Everything hurt.
Or, rather, everything that he could feel hurt—which wasn’t much, or was hard to categorize, considering that opening his eyes felt impossible and thus his brain couldn’t register whether or not all of his limbs were attached or not.
“.... ohn. John, wake up.”
No thanks, he thought, tiredly, as pain splintered up his spine and radiated through his skull. No, I’m really quite good right here where I am.
“John,” and it was Joseph’s voice, muddled with the sound of steady rain. “Wake up.”
John felt the groan, rattling somewhere deep in his chest, as he pushed his eyes open. Then, and only then, did the agony really fucking hit—real, pure body-pain, the kind that sank straight into the marrow of his bones and stayed for a good many days. Struggling, he forced himself into a sitting position, hands flat against cold, wet pavement.
Hands flat. Free. Not cuffed.
“Good,” Joseph said, sounding relieved, “you’re awake.”
When his older brother extended his hand out, John took it; with a surprising amount of strength, Joseph hauled him to his feet, and he finally got a good look around him.
Carnage.
The highway was littered with bodies and blood and the mangled metal of crashed vehicles. He saw dark figures; it was night, late, and his eyes burned, and his body ached, and when the low snarl of one of Jacob’s judges echoed in his ears, he thought, ah, that’s it, then.
Jacob was there too, with Faith glued to his side. Her palms skinned and her dress torn, and the blood from Jacob’s gunshot wound seeping through dark-crimson. A steady sheet of silver rain had begun to fall, drenching them all; the chill seeped straight into his bones.
And, of course, there was Joseph. Relatively unscathed. Not an open wound in sight.
“How did—” John started, his brain still foggy from pain and, presumably, being unconscious. Joseph gripped his shoulders. There was a kind of look in his eye; fervent, urgent, and John realized that it had been there all along—that his brother had always looked like this, and maybe he had just gotten used to looking into different eyes as of late.
“Our followers have stayed true,” Joseph told him, his voice low. “The Collapse remains on the horizon. Perhaps—”
His brother stopped, as though to gauge himself.
“Perhaps,” he began again, “not as close as I thought. I prayed, John. I prayed for us—for you, and for your child, and even for...” Joseph’s mouth twisted viciously for a moment. “Even for that Delilah of yours.”
Elliot, he thought, a wave of sickening, burning fury washing over him even when the venom in Joseph’s voice doused him like gasoline. Liar. Lied to me, lied to my family, lied—
Wretchedly clever and cruel. More devil than woman. He had always known it, had loved her for it, and he couldn’t be surprised when his hand had come back from the fire burned. You can’t have both, she’d said, and she’d meant it; of course she had. He wouldn’t love her if she wasn’t the kind of woman who meant what she’d said.
“We have much to do,” Joseph plunged on, as headlights turned around the corner of the road. “God is going to speak to me, I know it. I can feel that we have so little time left, John.”
“Okay,” John said, feeling a little dazed, trailing after Joseph when he began to move to one of the nearby trucks idling. “Okay, yes, we’ll—what do we do about—”
He stopped, opening the door to the car automatically for Faith to climb in. Of them all, he thought maybe he was the least fucked up—outwardly, anyway. Inside, his body felt like it had been jumbled around, tossed like a fucking salad at Olive Garden. The ache in his head didn’t dull as the seconds ticked by.
Jacob paused. The redhead’s mouth twisted, like he was biting back the things he wanted to say; John knew it had to be something like I fucking told you, I told you the situation wasn’t under control, I knew you couldn’t control her, but the words didn’t come out.
And in his own mouth, words sat, too: I’m sorry, I know I fucked up, but I know I can get her back.
Not can. Would. Would get her back, no matter what. By any means necessary.
“John,” Jacob barked out, and he realized that moments had passed—maybe minutes—of him standing in the rain, the door of the truck open. He moved on autopilot, hauling himself into the back seat of the truck and slamming the door shut.
The air inside the truck was humid, fizzing and popping with a strange energy. He could taste it on his tongue, electric; ozone; vibrating in his mouth and in his skeleton. Some of it the storm outside, and some of it the fury in his mouth, so potent it had become tangible.
Mine, he thought, shifting as pain splintered up his spine and shoulder. My wife. My baby. She thinks she’s done with us, huh? Not even fucking close.
“We have much to do,” Joseph murmured as the truck pulled a u-turn and began its route back to the compound. “Now, more than ever.” Through the rearview mirror, his gaze met John’s; lingered for a moment, and only a moment. “We will find her, John. Her, and your child.”
John felt his eyes flutter. Exhaustion was already beginning to try and take its toll on him. “She traded us in.”
“Yes,” Joseph replied, and his voice was terse, sharper than normal. “But God is ever merciful. And are we not to liken ourselves in his image, so that we may be as holy?”
He didn’t know if he wanted Elliot back to be holy. He thought maybe he wanted her back because she belonged to him—because they belonged to each other, two wretched creatures, and she owed him, and he would have what was rightfully his. What he was owed.
“Yes,” John agreed hoarsely. “Just as holy.”
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Nothing like dry-heaving over a toilet with your mother standing by.
“You know,” Scarlet said, “us Honeysett women have always taken well to childbearing. You were the most perfect baby, Elliot.”
Her mother was perched on the edge of the sink, a glass of rosé (chilled glass, of course) in her hand, golden curls perfectly pinned and coiffed and the floor-length maxi dress pressed to perfection—in stark contrast to Elliot, gripping the edge of the toilet in her sweats, stomach somersaulting and trying its best to achieve Olympic level gymnastics.
You’re not a Honeysett woman, she thought exhaustedly. You’re a fucking Graves woman. She managed to spit, taking in a long-suffering breath. “You said I was colicky.”
“Well, yes. But I never got morning sickness.”
Elliot gritted her teeth, eyes fluttering shut at the hot wave of nausea rolling over her, prickling sickly heat along her spine in warning. “That’s awesome, mama. Good for—” She swallowed. “Good for you. So glad. Really cool.” She exhaled. “Thank goodness it’s five in the afternoon. What’s that, then? Afternoon sickness?”
“Mm.” Her mother sipped at her wine, setting it on the counter with a little clink that somehow managed to sound three thousand times louder in her wretched state. “Yes, we’ve always been excellent vessels for our children.”
“That’s lo-uuh—” She closed her eyes tight. “Lovely.”
Scarlet’s fingers brushed her hair back from her face, cinching it in a ponytail. “Must be the father.”
You don’t fucking say? Elliot wanted to spit, but there was no room. Scarlet Honeysett tolerated a great many things—poor weather on the day of her events, a lukewarm glass to transport her alcohol, the repeated and systematic abandonment of her by her husband—but a mouthy child she did not.
“Educated inference,” is what she said instead. “I think I’m done.”
“Well.” Scarlet looked at her, arching a manicured brow. “Stay here for a while longer, then, just so you don’t go puking on my carpet.”
“Thanks, mama.”
“Mmhm.”
When her mother swept out of the bathroom and took with her the scent of her perfume—normally familiar and comforting, now only nausea-inducing—Elliot closed the door with her foot and leaned back against the wall in the bathroom. Her chest was burning; the strain of dry-heaving while the skin on her chest was still tight and healing was enough to have probably broken it open if she hadn’t been meticulously taking care of it.
And thank God her mother hadn’t seen that yet.
After a few more minutes of questioning whether or not she was going to actually puke, Elliot pushed herself to her feet and rinsed her mouth out with Listerine. It had not been easy, the last two weeks. Not only was she acclimating to living with her mother again—a thing which she had not done since she was in high school—but she was doing it pregnant. Pregnant, and with the child’s father nowhere to be.
Her arrival at the ancestral Graves home—a meticulously kept two-story historic building that had not only been in their family for so many years, but was planted on twenty acres of premium real estate in what was otherwise a small town named Weyfield—had been a tumultuous one, to be sure. Though her mother seemed inquisitive about what had occurred, she wasn’t even aware that anything had been happening at all.
Because she hadn’t been there.
“What do you mean?” Elliot had asked, incredulous.
“Well, I always come down here when the weather is starting to turn,” Scarlet had replied idly, squeezing her lime wedge dry into her glass. “I left In July.”
“The weather is not turning in July.”
“Some of us, Elli,” her mother had snipped, “are sensitive to changes in the weather. It’s not my fault you couldn’t feel it. Nor my fault that you didn’t answer my phone calls.”
It provided, at the very least, a bit of leeway when it came to explaining what was going on. Her mother had, of course, been aware of the Seeds in some capacity; but only in the kind of capacity that she thought them a zealous nuisance, and a little slimy—“Except for the oldest one, he seems like a good man,” she’d said, much to Elliot’s disgust—but nothing more than that.
This meant that Elliot didn’t need to tell her anything she didn’t want to. For now. Until the news broke, if it ever did; it seemed like headlines these days were more preoccupied with what was going on overseas than what was going on within the States’ own borders.
“Here,” Scarlet said, planting a pill bottle in her hand. “Take one of these thirty minutes before you go to bed.”
“What are these?”
“Sleeping pills,” her mother explained.
Elliot’s mouth twisted. “I sleep fine.”
“If you slept at all, I might believe you. I know you, Elli, I birthed you from my own womb, and you’ve never been a good sleeper.” The blonde paused. “And I hear you at night, you know, moving around. You and that hound.”
Boomer was fairly good at being stealthy, but perhaps not so much so in a house that was almost exclusively hardwood flooring. She’d have to remember that the next time she decided to go on a walk at three in the morning.
Elliot looked at the label. Eszopiclone, it said. S. Honeysett. “I probably shouldn’t take your prescription, mama.” And why are you giving me sleeping pills you should be taking, anyway?
“You need to sleep,” Scarlet said firmly. “For you and baby.”
It took a concerted effort to swallow back bile that tried to surge up her throat—for some reason, the knowledge that there was now a she and a baby, that she was both herself and vessel, made her nausea want to kick in. She hadn’t been sleeping, it was true. Not for lack of trying, either. She’d drink some kind of stupid sleepy-time tea, settle herself into the bed, and lay there. And wait.
And wait.
And wait.
But every time she’d close her eyes, she would be assaulted by images; Joey, jaw snapped and hanging loose from her face. Kian, face a bloody pulp. The blood seeping down her chest from the WRATH scar John had left. And John, of course.
He was always there, too. His eyes on her, his hands on her, his mouth on her.
So good, hellcat, it’s gonna look so good on you.
I’m all yours, just take what you need, I’ll give you anything, anything.
I’m fucking it for you.
I love you, Elliot.
“... listening to me?”
Elliot blinked. Her eyes burned, stinging with the threat of tears, and she swallowed thickly again. It felt like choking. Things often felt like choking, nowadays—things like breathing, swallowing, sleeping. It all felt too much for her to take, sometimes. Like she was deranged.
“I’m sorry,” she managed out, her voice barely breaking a whisper, and the second she felt the slip of a tear down her cheek she quickly wiped it away and sniffed. “I’m sorry, mama, I wasn’t.”
Something in her mother’s expression shifted for just a moment. Her eyes swept over Elliot, like maybe she thought she could see what it was that was really ailing her. Scarlet had tried to pry about John; she’d tried to figure out who it was that had left her daughter destitute, like this. What she didn’t know was that Elliot had left him destitute.
He deserves it, she thought through the heavy wave of exhaustion. Whatever they do to him, he deserves it.
“Maybe you should take a nap,” her mother suggested after a moment. “Dinner in an hour.”
“I’m going for a walk,” Elliot replied, tucking the bottle into her pocket for later. “Boomer gets crazy if I don’t.”
“Well, can’t have that. Back in an hour, then, bunny.”
She slipped past her mother, snagging the dog leash by the door and calling for the Heeler. He came sprinting down the stairs delightedly, and Elliot opened the door so he could go racing out. He’d certainly gotten less time running than he had prior to this, but he seemed in better spirits, anyway—new smells, friendly people. It was a dog’s dream.
“Don’t forget you have a doctor’s appointment tomorrow,” her mother called after her. “I’m taking you in at nine A.M. sharp.”
“Yes, mama.”
The afternoon had passed by in a blitz, as it was wont to do in late Autumn, and now Elliot found herself with so little golden daylight left; but she thought maybe she liked it best like this, walking with Boomer darting around ahead of her, watching the sky wring the last little rays of light out of the sun before it dipped fully behind the mountains.
I love you, Elliot.
She stopped walking, closing her eyes for a moment. A low, dull headache had begun to bloom behind her eyes. Lack of sleep, probably. Lack of sleep, and now she had a—
A fucking baby, she thought, with no absence of despair.
Boomer had doubled back when she stopped moving, and for a moment Elliot felt a vicious sting in her chest. Cry, it said, when the dog nosed her hand with a cold nose. Cry, it said, when she struggled to sit down in the damp, chilly grass, and Boomer could push his face into hers.
She had been alone, before. Alone in all the world. But not anymore.
Boomer tucked his face against her neck and stayed there, panting his hot doggy breath down the collar of her shirt. And as dusk fell, and the first speckling of stars started to make their appearance, Elliot felt herself come undone.
Just a little bit; just for now, while she could bury her face into her dog’s fur and cry, she would come undone.
And when she was finished, she would get up and walk back home. She would sit down and have dinner with her mother, and listen to her complain that while the doctor they were going to see was quite new but supposedly very nice, and she’d take a sleeping pill so that she could hopefully get some peace of mind for one night. In the morning, she would get up and out of bed, and she would keep living. That was all she could do.
For now, though—for a little while, she would let herself grieve. And every time she thought she couldn’t do it anymore—every time she thought she’d reached the absolute bottom—she’d keep fucking digging. What would she do with grief, if not lug it?
She would never heal otherwise.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
“Where the fuck is Weyfield?”
Jacob’s derisive tone did nothing to help John’s mood. Hunched over a map, the scattered papers of the file he hadn’t thrown away, eyes stinging, he thought he’d felt shittier only once before—long before his reuniting with Joseph. Back before he’d been cleansed.
He’d read every paper three times over. Stared at her photo for hours. Nothing felt any better than it had two weeks ago, when she’d been screaming that she would kill him.
“Some nowhere corner of Georgia,” John muttered, passing a hand over his face. “Her file says she was born in Weyfield, but that can’t be right—that shit is so small. Like, population three hundred, maybe? And her mom’s rich, which means—”
“Probably some kind of old money, then,” Jacob suggested. “Historic home. Lots of farmland surrounding it. Didn’t you say her grandfather was a racing jockey, mom never worked, or something? Gotta have room for horses and big fancy homes to go with those horses.”
Oh, John thought absently. Oh, of course. Of course her mother is a trust-fund baby. They would have an ancestral home, wouldn’t they?
They’d been back at the compound for a few weeks; Joseph had been secluded, alone, ruminating and marinating or whatever else it was he had to do to really hear God, and that meant John had been free to figure out what his plan was. So far, it was pretty bare bones.
Find Elliot and baby. Bring Elliot and baby home.
Joseph did not have a timeline, yet. He didn’t even know what it was that had delayed the Collapse—not quite. He had fervently insisted he be left alone to himself and God, to ensure that there were no interruptions—“Interruptions,” he’d said, “interfered with it last time, I won’t have it again,”—and so John, Jacob, and Faith had been left to rebuild what they could.
What members of Eden’s Gate remained after the veritable slaughter the Family had brought upon them were run ragged, but the nice thing about having an enemy meant that they were bound together by the same hatred.
“So that’s it, huh?” Jacob asked, breaking him out of his thoughts. “Weyfield, for the little hellcat?”
“That’s it.” John sucked his teeth and came to a stand, grabbing his coat from the back of his chair. “I should head out to Atlanta as soon as possible. I’ll need—”
“That’s a big city,” his eldest brother cautioned.
“That city has resources I’ll need. As much as I’d like to think that I could just track her down and we’ll kiss and make-up, I get the feeling that if I don’t do this the right way, it’ll be dragging her back kicking and screaming.” He paused, his voice tightening. “And I will be getting her back.”
Jacob watched him for a moment. He exhaled out of his mouth before he reached over, planting a hand on John’s shoulder. He half expected his brother to say something like, just forget it, Johnny, or it’s not worth running the risk of getting recognized, but he didn’t.
Instead, he said, “Be careful, keep in touch. And get my nephew back, yeah?”
John swallowed thickly. There was a lot wrapped up in those words; a lot that he had yet to parse through. Blinding, insatiable fury, that he had been tricked and lied to and deceived, but above all else—above all of that, he missed—
No, he thought, hands shaking and jaw clenching as he pulled his coat on. No, above all else, Elliot belongs to me, and that’s the beginning and the end of it.
“Don’t know it’s a boy,” he managed out, with all of those whispers rattling incessantly in his head. Jacob smiled.
“Joseph does.”
“I suppose so.”
A moment of silence stretched between them, and for the first time in a long time, John felt closer to Jacob than he did to Joseph—and maybe that was because he hadn’t seen his brother’s face in weeks, or maybe it was because he knew that for some strange reason, Jacob was pleased to have Elliot come back, and Joseph might not be.
Not if he was being honest, anyway.
“Off I go,” John blurted out, worried that he would get stuck in an infinite loop of trying to parse out things that weren’t meant for him to understand. “I’ll call when I get there.”
“Take someone with you?”
“It’ll just slow me down. Besides, I’m trying to not draw attention.” He paused, hesitating at the doorway of the church. “You’ll tell me when he knows, right?”
When he knows how much time I have?
Jacob’s expression hardened. He nodded once, short. “I will.”
“Thank you.”
John pushed the door open, stepping out into the night. It was chilly; soon, it’d be snowing, if it didn’t do so that very night, and the compound’s courtyard was bustling with sleepy life. As he climbed into the truck and took a breath to calm the rapid, unsteady beating of his heart, he closed his eyes for just one moment.
Just for now, he thought tiredly. I’m going to take a breath just for now, and then—
And then one more breath, and then another, turning the key in the ignition and shutting the radio off and throwing the car into drive, and then one more breath, until he was breathing all the way to fucking Georgia. He was going to get his wife back.
One way or another.
#my writing#fic: ancient names#otp: death keep off; i am your enemy#far cry 5 fic#fc5 oc#ch: elliot honeysett#ch: john seed#i'm not cry ur cry#i have said thank you so many times and it will NEVER BE ENOUGH#but i wanted to keep things concise. but#thank you#<3#fc5 fic#john seed/deputy#john seed/original female character
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Falling in Temptation
Previous chapters • Sequel to Stars Dance • Fairy Tale Memoirs (Companion story)
Ch. 27: Out of Time
Fandom: Doctor Who // Pairing: 11th Doctor x OFC
Chapter summary: Avalon does what she can to conduct her search for the Doctor before he reaches Lake Silencio. In it, she recruits an old friend of hers and the Doctor's. Even River Song comes into play, although she has other intentions when it comes to handling her daughter. One thing's for sure, they're all on a clock and the clock is about to strike.
Taglist: @ocfairygodmother @anotherunreadblog @maaaaarveeeeel @stareyedplanet @perfectlystiles
[If you’d like to be added to this specific OC’s stories/edits, send me a message!]
Amy came down the stairs on a fine morning, only to sigh when she saw Avalon sitting with her legs up on the couch, a blanket draped over her while she slept all awkwardly and shifty. As Amy moved towards the couch, Rory walked in from the kitchen, having already awoken and was even having a drink of tea.
"Did you do this?" Amy looked at her husband in assumption.
"Yeah," Rory nodded, "I came down last night for water and...she'd fallen asleep this time. I didn't want to risk waking her up by moving her so I just...put a blanket and..." he sighed.
Amy looked down at Avalon and gently pulled the blanket more up, "At least she fell asleep this time," she tried to cautiously move Avalon's head to the couch arm to give her more comfort.
"Yeah, 'at least'," Rory shook his head and turned back for the kitchen.
Amy gave a small sigh as she tried to make her granddaughter as comfortable as possible without disturbing her much needed sleep. But Amy knew that no amount of sleep (however much needed) would make Avalon feel better. It had been a few weeks since the Doctor left them on Earth and it seemed like it would be a long, long time until he decided (if he ever would) to come back.
~ 0 ~
Lena watched her sister make hasty strides in her bedroom, gathering things she would need to take to Amy's and Rory's. Lena couldn't believe the Doctor had left them all back on Earth but after hearing Amy's explanation, she understood why. It made sense. At least her father said it out loud.
Ryland applauded the Doctor for making the sacrifice, something that infuriated Avalon. She swore she wouldn't talk to him in her life if he ever said that again. Nothing justified the Doctor leaving them so he could go die. Lena argued for both sides and since Avalon would never yell at her, she got away with it.
"How long are you going to stay with Amy and Rory now?" Lena crossed the room to help Avalon close the suitcase on the bed.
"Until that idiot Fairy Tale Man comes back. I can't have him sneaking a visit to them and not have me there," Avalon muttered and turned back. "He doesn't want me to find him, ha. It's like he didn't even know me. What I want, I get. And I refuse to let him die."
"But Avalon, what are you going to do?" Lena was genuinely afraid of what Avalon would come up with to get the Doctor back, or to at least catch his attention.
"I don't know but I've made some calls, I'm going to get leads," Avalon stopped by her writing desk, practically swiping a hand over it to dump her writing tools into a small duffel bag.
"From where?" Lena asked.
Avalon didn't answer with words. She just smiled and sealed her duffel bag. "You can come with me if you'd like."
"What, to Amy's and Rory's?"
"No. To meet him."
Lena raised an eyebrow at Avalon. She was scared. Avalon on her own was already chaotic but now that the Doctor had thoroughly pissed her off, Avalon was a force to be reckoned with and there was no stopping her. God help him when he came back.
~ 0 ~
"Who are we meeting?" Lena asked Avalon when they entered her favorite coffee shop.
"A friend," Avalon found an empty table by the glass wall. "Sit." She patted the empty chair beside her and decided to order something while they waited.
"Avalon, I know you're upset-"
Avalon made a noise. "Oh, I am not upset. There is no word to describe what I'm feeling right now."
"My big brother just wanted to protect you…"
"I know that. I understand him, I love him for that...but he should not have to die, alright? I know that if he doesn't figure out a way to stop the Silence he's going to sacrifice himself. I won't be the reason he dies, and I most certainly will not let Kovarian win like that."
"I'm sorry Avalon but what are we supposed to do against the Silence? Truth be told, the Doctor is the only one who can defeat them."
"I want to keep him from doing something stupid," Avalon put her bag on the table. She was deeply terrified of what the Doctor could do on his own when he felt like there were no more options. She wasn't angry that he left her, she was angry that he thought it was the best option. She was so tired of having everyone trying to protect her. If something bad was going to happen to her, it would happen regardless of who was around her. Right now, she just wanted to get back to the Doctor and help him search through all the options he had. She wanted to fight at his side. The Silence had hurt her and her friends and she wanted to hunt them down for it.
"Hello ladies," Lena heard a familiar voice, a flirty voice. She knew who it was even before she looked up.
Captain Jack Harkness stopped in front of the table with his signature smile. Avalon rose up from her chair and hugged him. "Hi Jack."
"Oh my big brother would be having a heart attack right now," Lena mumbled her breath while she watched them hug.
"It is really good to know that you're back," Jack patted Avalon's arms and sighed. "You have no idea how bad the Doctor was when he called me."
"Of course he would find me," Avalon shrugged. "And now I need you to help me find him."
"What?"
Avalon motioned him to grab a seat as she sat back down herself.
"What's happened?" Jack asked, eyes flickering to Lena who seemed more nervous than ever.
"I'm assuming you know all about the Silence now, right?" Avalon asked.
"Yeah, sort of came up when the Doctor called me."
"There's a date that's coming up. April 24, 2011. According to some all mighty future news, that's the day the Doctor dies."
"Come again?" Jack made a face. "He doesn't die."
"He will, because we've seen it happen before," Avalon glanced at Lena. The latter sighed and nodded to confirm the story. "On that day, a future version of the Doctor will invite earlier versions of ourselves to meet him in Utah. We'll have a picnic by Lake Silencio and then a mysterious astronaut will rise from the lake...and she'll shoot him."
"She?" Jack caught on.
"She doesn't know," Lena said before Avalon could open her mouth. As soon as she did, Avalon threw a glare at Lena.
"I do know," Avalon reiterated despite the numerous arguments she had with Lena, Amy, Rory and even Ryland.
"What?" Jack felt like a broken record but until he got more information, that's all he had.
Avalon sighed and looked at him. "I've been going round and round in my head about who that astronaut is and every time I end up thinking it's me. I don't know what version of me it is but I think it's me."
"Avalon, I hardly thinking-"
Avalon knew he was about to side with Lena and, thus, everyone else, so she cut him off. "Jack you have to listen to me. Everyone else thinks I'm crazy but you...you know a thing or two about memory wipes and timelines…"
Lena cleared her throat and mouthed a quick 'She still doesn't know' to Jack before he decided to let it slip who her mother was.
"Kovarian wiped some of my memories when she had me kidnapped. I've thought long and hard about this and I think I finally realized why she would do that. What if…" Avalon paused. It still made her stomach churn thinking about the possibility. She leaned forwards on the table, lowering her voice so that only Jack and Lena would hear her. "What if Kovarian made me do something so terrible that the only way she could send me back without ratting her out was to wipe my memories first?" Jack opened his mouth to respond but Avalon quickly shushed him and begged him to really think about it. "She didn't have to wipe my memories but she did. Why?"
It was the age old question that no one could answer. Even the Doctor had been left blank when they talked about it.
"I...I admit that there is a truth behind those words…" Jack began, "But don't you think you would've been sentenced to jail?"
"Not unless she covered her tracks. How do I confess to a crime I don't remember doing? How do I rat my allies out if I don't remember anything? Who's to say that she didn't kill any loose ends before wiping my memory clean?" Avalon thought she was making some very good points...and Jack might believe that she had.
"Avalon, even if this was true...what about it? What do you plan on doing?"
"Well, first I want to exhaust all my options before I go with the obvious. I want to find the Doctor and I want to help him fight the Silence. I want to know why they took me, why they targeted him. And above all, I don't want the Doctor to be alone." Avalon's gaze lowered to the table. "Because when he's alone, he starts to let all the guilt come through and there's no one to remind him that he's not at fault for what happened to me, to River, to Amy...and if he lets that happen, he'll do something stupid." When Avalon raised her eyes to Jack, they were glimmering with tears. "I can't let that happen. He's helped all of us so many times. It's our turn to help him."
Jack could get on board with that. He smiled at her. She sounded just like anyone who'd had the fortune of travelling with the Doctor. Of course, seeing her determined face told him it was far beyond what the Doctor's other friends felt for him. "You love him, don't you?"
Avalon sighed. "Yes, but please don't downplay everything I said before. I'm not doing it because I love him, I'm doing it because he deserves someone to fight for him."
"I agree with that," Jack straightened up in his chair, giving her a mock salute. Avalon smiled. "What do you need from me, ma'am?"
Avalon beamed. She glanced at Lena with newfound excitement. Lena could only inwardly sigh. This could either end really well or really bad.
"Alright, I know that Torchwood's closed down but you have ways of getting to the 51st century, right?"
"Yeah, vortex manipulator. Don't tell the Doctor I got it working again. He'd take it from me."
Avalon thought for a moment before saying, "Hm, maybe I should just stick you to the bottom of a fish hook with the manipulator and just wait for the Doctor to come."
Jack laughed at her. "You wouldn't!"
"Try me!" Avalon smirked.
"Oh Avalon, it's good to see you again," Jack said as he sobered from his laugh.
"Yeah," Avalon said quietly, her smile falling short but still a smile nonetheless. It was good to see an old face, even if said face had been on the receiving end of many, many screams. She'd make that up to him later on.
~ 0 ~
Several days passed by and in those days Avalon had heavy contact with Jack about possibly sightings of the Doctor. She even wanted to start looking into Kovarian's sightings...and that's where the Ponds had to draw the line. How they would deal with it had to be an extra type of smart because otherwise Avalon wouldn't listen to them. So they went about in a whole different way.
"River?" Avalon was puzzled with her appearance but then she realized she must have come visit her parents. It was only natural. Avalon let River into the Ponds' home and took a quick peek outside into the street...just in case. "Amy and Rory are at work."
"Ah, Amy found a job?" River asked, though Avalon presumed it was just a formality seeing as this was an older version coming to visit.
"Yeah," Avalon shut the door behind them. "Something about perfumes. Got lucky."
"Hm," River came straight into the living room like she knew there was something there. Avalon's work had been spread around the coffee table and the couch itself was buried under more of it. "Seems to me like you've been pretty busy yourself."
Avalon followed her and folded her arms, susiciously eyeing River. "Where are you from?"
With a smile, River turned to her. "Couple months after I visited you all at Demon's Run."
"So then you know exactly where I am," Avalon said quietly, watching River's smile fade. "And you know what I'm trying to do."
"Yes, I do."
"You didn't come to visit your parents, did you?"
"No, I did not." River picked up a random paper off the couch and gave it a quick skim. "Avalon, you are a wonderful writer but all this needs to stop. You can't go looking for the Doctor and much less Kovarian herself."
"I would think that you of all people would understand why I'm doing this," Avalon came forward and snatched the paper out of River's hand. "He's out there, River, on his own. He knows that he's supposed to die and I just know that he will try to sacrifice himself for us."
"I know very well how the story ends, Avalon, and for that reason I beg you to stop. You don't know how deep this goes-"
"Excuse you, I was kidnapped by Kovarian. I think I know just how deep it goes!"
"You spent a few months with her, I spent my entire life with her!" River snapped, quieting Avalon for the next few minutes. "I know exactly what Kovarian planned and how she did it, because where I stand she's already done it. Trust me when I say that you cannot change these events. They must happen."
"Why!?"
"Because they need to, because if they don't, very important people cease to exist," River swallowed hard as she thought back to those moments. They weren't always good but just looking at her daughter made it all worth it. Avalon had no idea what her future was like and it all depended on the Silence's interference. It was a twisted story but it was sadly the reality.
"What?" frowned Avalon, understanding even less of what was going on. "The hell are you talking about?"
"Spoilers my dear," River sighed. "But please listen to me. I know how hurt you are but I promise you that I know what I'm talking about. If you interfere in any way, you will jeopardize the timelines."
"River, with all due respect, I don't give a damn," Avalon declared and turned away, striding out of the living room.
River shook her head at her. "Oh, you are definitely my daughter," she mumbled. "Avalon!" She called after the woman and stormed after her. "You need to listen to me!"
"I really don't," Avalon was in the kitchen trying to find something to snack on from the fridge. "I don't listen to anyone."
"I admire your bravery - or stupidity - but this is not what the Doctor wanted when he left you here."
"Well, I wouldn't know, would I?" Avalon slammed shut the fridge door, ignoring the quiet thud it gave, and turned to River. "Because he hasn't even tried talking to me in these last months! I've had to make do with what I have here and it's not exactly a picnic! I don't know if he's okay, if he's hurt, if he's...moved on." Avalon let a shuddering breath out.
"Moved on?" River repeated, now looking at her daughter like she was the crazy one. "You think he could do that? Oh sweetie, you have no idea. This is what I mean when I say we can't interfere with the timelines. There are important things that happen - people, Avalon - that will be there because we let things happen the way they're supposed to. I swear to you that the Doctor could never get over you."
Avalon seemed to lose the fighting mode she had on - she'd been needing it against everyone lately - and moved over to the table. "Kovarian said some things when she, um, when she had me watching the Doctor's history. She mentioned that one day the Doctor would leave us - Amy, Rory...me - and that we would just be another bunch in his long list of companions."
River silently grabbed a char next to her. "That's not true."
Avalon used to believe that before the Doctor dropped her off like nothing. "How would we know? We're not with him, are we?"
"I just do. I'm from the future, right?"
"Kovarian said there was a girl after us," Avalon went on, clearly discarding River's last words, "She's the one who brings the Doctor to wherever it is that terrifies the whole Silence. The Doctor moves on from us, forgets us…"
"That's not true," River shook her head. "You know it's not."
"I don't know anything, River," Avalon sighed heavily as she placed her elbows on the table and rested her chin on her hands. "Not anymore. I don't know where my Fairy Tale Man is, I don't know what he's doing. For all I know, he's figured out a way to stop everything and he's just...moved on. The story with Avalon Reynolds finished for him."
"Now stop that!" River actually scolded, letting her mother side slip out. "You know that's not true. Kovarian wanted to mess with your head and I'll be damned if that happens. You have to listen to me, Avalon. The Doctor is just trying to keep you safe from the Silence and it would break his hearts if you got yourself hurt trying to look for him."
Avalon met her look with a pretty serious one. Everyone seemed to think she was doing this blind, like she had no logical reasons for it. Yes, she was afraid that perhaps the Doctor really was done with her, but she really did want to help. It was just the longer it took to find him, the more crazy ideas her mind started coming up with. But in the end, there was one sad reality that she carried with her every day. "He's already hurt me, he broke my heart leaving me here." What was worse is that he had still kept his promise to her. He would be with her until the day he died. She would be there, just not her current self.
River had nothing to say to that and even as Avalon got up to leave, she couldn't think of anything comforting to say.
~ 0 ~
More months passed by and despite Avalon's heavy insistence for River to stay away if she was going to be against her work, River kept stopping by. Amy and Rory were thankful for her visits because they had thoroughly given up trying to stop Avalon's search. She was going to get herself into trouble that they wouldn't be able to pull her out of. She'd already given them scary moments as it was.
They'd been particularly terrified when Avalon disappeared for days. They thought maybe the Silence had found her instead but then she reappeared with River who had brought her back nearly by the ear. Amy and Rory had never seen River act like such a mother at that moment. She had found Avalon lurking through a planet known to have a church filled with Silence. River knew exactly what that church was and while it was one of the benign sects of the Silence she didn't trust that there wasn't one traitorous Silent amongst them. In another moment, she would commend Avalon for even finding out about that place but for the current moment, she was furious that Avalon had gone in there on her own.
"I HATE YOU!" Avalon stalked up the staircase when River let her go. Amy and Rory had long ago set up a room just for her and now she would be using it to lock herself away.
"I'm taking this," River waved a familiar vortex manipulator in her hand. "Avalon knicked it off Jack. He was proud that she'd been able to sneak it off him but I'm not sharing the sentiment."
"She's definitely acting like versions of you," Rory mumbled.
Amy agreed with a nod. "What are we going to do with her? I don't think the Doctor planned on her being this...this determined."
"No, no, he planned for it," River hated to admit it. "He knows exactly who Avalon is and that's why he's been extra careful not to make outstanding appearances."
"Have you talked to him?" Rory eyed River suspiciously. He wouldn't put it behind the two to have secret meetings about all this timeline and Silence stuff.
River looked at her father for a long minute before completely glossing over the answer. "He's keeping an eye on her but...we all have to pitch in."
"Thing is, Avalon's not a child. She's got feelings and she's pretty damn smart," Amy folded her arms and glanced at the staircase. "She's able to trick us with minimal effort."
"We just have to keep trying," River said, shrugging her shoulders. "I've done a lot to keep my daughter safe, this is just another of those moments."
From that point on, everyone agreed to keep a heavier eye on Avalon. As annoying and frustrating as it was, Avalon wouldn't try to hurt them. She knew they were trying to help but she would keep doing her search no matter what.
~ 0 ~
It would be one day that somewhat calmed Avalon for a moment. It was no ordinary day and that's why it managed to ease her.
She sat on the couch with a tattered blanket over her legs - an old childhood blanket - and gazed at a beautiful rose gold rose with bright green leaves in her hand. It shined as if it were metal but each time she touched one of its petals, a soft pink dust sprinkled from it...like fairydust. As hurt as she felt, she couldn't help but smile each time the dust would fill the air.
"Happy birthday Avalon," she heard from behind. Avalon shifted a bit to see River coming in with a tempting gift in her hands. "Big 24!" She leaned down and kissed the top of Avalon's head.
"Has it really been 2 years since America?" Avalon shook her head. That really seemed like a long time ago.
River scooted Avalon's legs so she could sit on the couch. "Oh, do you remember the last time we celebrate your birthday? What was it? You're 21st? Oh, what fun that was!"
"Yeah, I got so drunk that, that night is very blurry," Avalon sighed but with a content smile. It had been a fun night.
"Still, I know there's a small get together Amy's fixing up in the backyard for you!"
"I'm not really up for the celebration but I'll just let it happen for them. They've been so nice letting me stay over even when my house is just a couple blocks down."
River smiled lightly. "That's a good girl. Here, open my present!" She handed the gift to Avalon and motioned her to unwrap it.
Avalon set her rose on her lap then pulled the wrapping paper off the gift. Her eyes widened when she found a porcelain doll. It had bright orange hair like she had, curly too, and dark eyes. It had a green period dress and a small tiara over its head. "Oh my God…"
"Do you like it?" River had to control herself so she didn't look so eager for her reaction.
Avalon looked up with twinkling eyes. "You remembered!"
"That you always wanted one of those dolls but never got them because Lena was scared of them," River laughed. "I figured Lena's old enough to understand not to go into your room."
Avalon had to laugh at that. "Right." She fixed some of the orange strands of the doll's hair and smiled. "Thank you, River. I love it."
"Happy birthday, sweetie," River leaned over to hug her tightly. "I know it's been a rough year but you are so strong. You'll make it through this."
Avalon would love to believe that but the truth was this year was kicking her ass. She set her new porcelain doll to the side and picked up her rose-gold rose again. "I got this in the morning."
River raised an eyebrow at it. "Oh, that's fancy." Avalon brushed her fingers over the petals and allowed for River to see the sprinkles of 'fairydust' fly from it. "Ah," River's eyes widened. "That's from Aurals." Avalon gave her a puzzled look, obviously not in the loop about the place she spoke of. "It's a planet. You'd love it. They're the only planet to grow those types of flowers. They look like they're fake but they're actually very real. Where'd you get that from?"
Avalon said nothing as she reached for a white card on the coffee table. She opened it up and reread the letter she'd practically clung to earlier in the morning. 'Happy birthday my Ava. I'm afraid that by now you either hate me or, well, you're hunting me down to kill me.'
River snorted, nearly laughing. "That man…"
'I know that you're very upset with me but please understand that I did not 'leave' you, I had to give you up. I was trying to save you one last time by letting you live in peace while I search for those bad people who hurt you. But today is your day, Ava. Twenty four years ago, a little princess was born and she took life by storm. I love you Avalon, please remember that. Never doubt that. Happy birthday my love."
Avalon looked up with teary eyes. "Signed by 'Your Fairy Tale Man'." She drew in a deep breath, controlling those tears that wanted to come out. She'd cried earlier and she wasn't interested in doing it again. "He was here, River. He was here at some point and he left me this...but he didn't' even talk to me."
"I suspect he knew if he did, he wouldn't be able to leave anymore," River said. She didn't need to be from the future to know that.
"Well, I wouldn't let him leave," Avalon sniffed. She held her rose close to her chest.
"Oh c'mon, no pouty face," River pointed at her. "That's not what the Doctor wanted from you, especially today. It's your birthday!"
Avalon sighed and looked at her rose. "Yeah, it is…" Maybe she should look at things from a different angle, at least for today, and focus on the part where the Doctor actually came back. Even if it was just for a moment, he had been there for one moment and just for her.
She might still be a little special.
~ 0 ~
"Why are you so happy today?" Amy asked then suddenly received an elbow on her side. Rory passed by with a sharp look on his face. She shouldn't question why their granddaughter was so happy, not unless they were looking for Avalon to do the opposite.
Avalon ignored the little moment as she planted her bag on the kitchen table. "I...sort of got a job," she announced. She expected their similar surprised states but she didn't expect them to look so funny. "It's not the end of the world if I get a job, is it?"
"No, no, but…" Rory said, clearing his throat, "We just didn't expect you to...get one."
"Yeah, you hate Leadworth," Amy leaned against the counter, eyeing Avalon suspiciously.
"I do," Avalon made sure to clarify first. "But I figure it's time to stop being a freeloader. Plus, remember that little girl that loved my public reading I did last year? Aurora?" They both nodded. Avalon hadn't stopped talking about that little girl after the event. It truly warmed Avalon's heart to know that a child loved her story so much. "Well, she's six now and I bumped into her in Mrs. Kepner's bookstore. She recognized me and she started going on about how much she would love for me to read more of my stories. Mrs. Kepner thought it was a good idea and so she offered me a job at the store. I'll be doing the public readings with the kids and if I happen to come up with new stories, I'm more than welcomed to read those too."
"Avalon, that's great!" Rory exclaimed, rushing over to hug her first.
"Yeah," Avalon chuckled. "I figure I might as well do something productive while I search for the Doctor."
Amy would gladly take the compromise. She came next to hug Avalon. "I'm really happy for you. It'll be good for you."
"We'll see," Avalon shrugged. "At the very least it'll keep from going crazy and murdering people." Because, oh yes, she remembered exactly what kind of people lived in the town. It was why she barely left the house. At least in the bookstore there'd be more kids and teenagers, people that weren't aware of her reputation. Though she would inevitably have to deal with adults, she knew it would just be for a small time.
"Well hey, how about we celebrate by going into the city?" Amy asked suddenly. "We can have lunch over there and maybe do a little shopping-"
"Ooooh, I could do some shopping," Avalon nodded fast. Both gingers missed the way Rory scrunched his face. Those two at a mall would take bloody forever. "I really miss the wardrobe the TARDIS had for me."
"C'mon!" Amy exclaimed. "Rory, get the credit cards!"
"Yay," Rory muttered as he followed the two women out.
"We should call River," Avalon said, making him groan.
"God no, I'm staying behind!"
"No, you're not," Amy said and so it was.
~ 0 ~
"Jesus, Avalon, did you leave anything for the store?" Rory struggled to carry the new bags Avalon came out with.
"You're over-exaggerating," she patted his cheek and looked around. "Where's Amy and River?"
"They went into the department store," Rory said, nodding towards the store at the end of them. Both his hands were occupied with her bags, Amy's and even River's.
"Yay! C'mon!" Avalon grabbed one of his arms and pulled him towards the store.
"No, no more! My arms are going to fall off!"
"Oh, you're over-exaggerating!"
"I'm really not! I haven't felt my right arm in over an hour!"
Avalon rolled her eyes and led them into the store. It was pretty crowded but they eventually found Amy and River near the perfume area.
"Oh, is that your perfume!?" Avalon practically shrieked, attracting the attention of several of the customers. She ignored them all as she ran towards the glass counter. She grabbed the purple perfume from River's hands and sprayed herself.
"It's a sample, Avalon," Amy said and snatched the bottle from her before she used up the entire thing.
"But it smells so good!" Avalon exclaimed, trying to take it back from her. "For the girl who's tired of waiting! Killer slogan!"
"Yeah, that's quite a real line for us," River said quietly. Amy looked over Avalon with an agreeing nod.
"Oh! Amy!" They heard Rory's shout. He had dropped half the bags he was carrying and things were rolling.
"God, he's helpless," Amy sighed and handed the perfume back to River to go help Rory.
"You go help too!" Avalon plucked the perfume from River's hands and motioned her to 'run along'.
"I think not!" River forced her to put the perfume down on the counter. "C'mon, maybe we can find a nice present for Lena. Her birthday's coming up, remember?"
"I know," Avalon rubbed the side of her head. "I'm clueless on what to give her."
"So then let's look," River whistled for the saleslady to come help them.
~ 0 ~
Two hundred years later would find the Doctor posing as a department store employee and handling a visit with Craig Owens and his new baby son. In all his time of existence he never thought he could end up in a place like that and he'd gotten around plenty of times. Unfortunately, trouble always seemed to follow him as well, no matter how old he got. There were Cybermen in hiding and he had to discover where they were before things got bad, even if that came at a price of dealing with an irritated Craig. But sometimes he had little lucky moments in which something good happened. Right now, as he gazed upon his former companions, Amy and Rory, he knew it was one of those lucky moments.
They'd been picking up shopping bags that Rory had dropped - he wondered why Rory had that many bags in the first place - and then suddenly, a little girl had come up to Amy asking for an autograph. It took the Doctor a few seconds to realize that somehow that Pond had gotten herself a perfume after her.
"For Ellie," Amy smiled and handed the notepad back to the girl, "I like your hairband," she remarked as she stood straight again.
Ellie touched her headband and beamed, "Thank you," she said as she returned to her mother only a couple feet away.
"Can we take a rest...please?" Rory asked Amy and held his arms out with the shopping bags, making Amy laugh. "I can't feel my arms!"
"Yeah, alright," Amy decided to take pity on his misery. "But that's what happens when you get a daughter and a granddaughter. We outnumber you." Rory rolled his eyes but he was mighty better when Amy gave him a kiss. "Avalon! River! Time to go!"
"In a minute!" came the irritated response from Avalon.
The Doctor's hearts nearly stopped when he caught sight of Avalon by the perfume counter. It'd been 200 hundred years since he last saw her. He didn't know how he could've made it this far but he knew it was because he hadn't seen her. It took every last bit of his will not to come get her from Leadworth. He had to remind himself that he needed to keep her safe and search for the Silence, but that search had come to an end a while back. Now he was just drifting through until the moment came. It was why it'd become even more difficult to stay away. He knew his end was coming, there was nothing he could do to change it, so why not spend his last moments with Avalon? He didn't want to hurt her. The Silence had done enough of that. But it seemed like the universe was giving him one last gift before his end.
"God, River, you have terrible taste in perfumes!" Avalon had just sent the saleslady away.
"Excuse you and that mouth of yours!" River huffed. "I do not!"
Avalon raised the bottle she was eyeing and sprayed it to the side. "Dogs wouldn't walk through that."
River's face almost made the Doctor laugh and give himself up. He'd never seen her like that and he was sure that the only reason she was holding back was because it was Avalon on the receiving end.
"You are rude," River finally spoke after a few moments of silence.
"Tell me something I don't know," Avalon shrugged. She tucked some hair behind her ear, allowing the Doctor to see she still wore his watch on her wrist.
He swallowed hard. All he had to do was take a step towards her and she would see him. He was aware that she'd done everything to find him, even going as far as calling in Jack Harkness to help her (that might have made him a bit jealous, just a bit), and while it was tempting to go back to her...he couldn't do it. He was dying, that was the truth. He had to die in order for the world to keep going. If the world kept going, then Avalon would be safe. If he died, the Silence would leave her alone. That's the reason he kept away in these last days.
~ 0 ~
It was late when the Ponds got back to Leadworth. Rory happily let each woman take their bags into the house while he went to grab himself some wine. Yeah, he deserved that.
"You're so mean, Rory!" Avalon shouted from the foyer.
"Yup," he agreed as he searched for the wine glasses in the cabinets.
Amy dumped her bags on the living room floor, not even trying to make it to the stairs. "Okay, I'm so tired."
"I can keep these here, right?" River gestured to her own pile of bags behind the couch. "Stormcage doesn't exactly allow for all this stuff."
"Oh, but they allow you to escape every now and then?" Avalon arched an eyebrow at her.
"Your mouth is on an extra one today," River wagged a finger at her.
Avalon cheekily smiled and moved to gather her stuff from the table. She heard her phone buzz in her bag a moment later. She left the papers in a somewhat neat pile and pulled her phone out of the bag. She read the quick text she'd gotten and gasped so loudly that she worried her grandmother and mother.
"What, what was it!?" River quickly hurried around the couch to meet her.
"I, uh, I got myself in contact with some people on New Earth. They're like your version of detectives and they just got word of a possible sighting of a Silent."
"What? That's stupid," Amy frowned. "How would they even remember them?"
"Because I told them about the chip that Kovarian used on me. They've made their own version - that's not the point! I have to go!" Avalon only made it two steps towards the doorway before River held her back.
"Are you deranged!? You can't go hunt down the Silence!"
"It's just one!"
"It doesn't matter! You can't go there!"
"Yes I can!" Avalon wrestled free from River's arms and turned around to face her. "And you're not stopping me! Nobody is!"
"Avalon, you need to understand this! We've been over this! The timelines-"
"I DON'T CARE!" Avalon screamed. "I don't give a crap about timelines, not when it can stop the Doctor from dying!"
"The people, Avalon. The people that I'm talking about would cease to exist!" River was now fully terrified that this time she might not be able to stop Avalon from going off in search of the Silence. Amy could see that fear from her spot too.
"What people, dammit!? You always say that but you never say who! For all I know you could be lying!" Avalon shook her head. "I'm Gmgoing to New Earth and there is nothing you can do nor say to stop me!"
River watched her turn and leave. Her mind was spinning, everything was spinning actually, and the only thing she heard was 'Don't tell Avalon, don't tell Avalon, don't tell Avalon!'. She couldn't let Avalon near the Silence, it was the biggest task she had and it was the only thing she could do for her daughter in a life that hadn't exactly allowed her to be a Mother. But right now Avalon was going straight into danger and she could not allow it.
"Avalon, stop it! Come back!"
"No!"
River hurried out of the living room with Amy hot on her trail.
"What is going on?" Rory emerged from the kitchen to see Avalon practically sprinting towards the door.
"Avalon, stop! You can't go to New Earth!" River continued to call after her. Amy came rushing after her and now with Rory.
"Why not!?"
"Because I know how everything ends! I know what happens and what must always happen!"
"Yeah, yeah, I'm not listening to anymore of this!" Avalon grabbed the door knob.
"You need to listen to me because I'm your Mother! I know what I'm talking about!" River actually felt like she would combust in that moment. Everything was on fast mode and she didn't register all the words she'd said until after she had.
But Avalon had heard the very moment she said it. Her hand had frozen midway as she turned the door knob. She turned her head towards River, catching sight of Amy behind them. "What?"
River brought a hand to her forehead. This wasn't how she pictured this moment but she had to do it. Anything to keep her safe. "I'm...I'm your Mother, Avalon. I-I know it's hard to understand but it's true. I'm your mother, I know exactly what the Silence is planning because they planned it around me...around us. And I'm so sorry but everything has to happen the way it already has...otherwise you cease to exist."
Avalon didn't say anything. She couldn't. Nothing was making sense right now. River couldn't be telling her the truth. She looked at Amy and Rory for some help, but they had these weird faces. She wanted them to tell her that River was lying, that she was just saying the first thing that popped into her head to stop her from leaving...but they kept quiet. In fact, they were looking at her with sympathy.
"Oh my God," Avalon felt sick to her stomach. "You're not...you're not lying…"
"No, no, I'm not lying. I'm so sorry," River said, taking a step towards her but she saw the exact moment the anger crossed Avalon's face.
"You abandoned me!" She pushed River away. There was a part of her that told her this was all familiar. The sick feeling in her stomach felt like it'd already been there for the exact same reason.
"No, no I didn't!" River reached out for her, wanting so desperately to touch her daughter.
"You left me with my uncle! You have no right to tell me what to do! You've…" Avalon brought her hands to her face as a sour laugh slipped through her lips. "Oh my God, now it makes sense. Now I get why you were always so determined to be around me, to...to make me stop this search." She dropped her hands but pointed a menacing finger towards River. "How dare you come into my life like you didn't abandon me! And how dare you try to tell me what to do! You have no right, none at all, to tell me anything!"
"Ava, how about you calm down and let River explain everything?" Rory thought he could use his special relationship with her to bring her away from the door. He was right. For a second, Avalon faltered. "I'm sure this isn't how she wanted to tell you."
"It wasn't," River agreed quickly.
"Look, I'm not mad at either of you," Avalon said to him and Amy. "I told you not to tell me anything. And would you like to know why?" She flashed a glare at River. "Because I thought it was unfair how my 'mother'-" she did quick air quotations with her hands, "-left it all with you two and the Doctor. None of you deserved to carry that burden." There were tears pooling in her eyes and she fought against them with everything she had not to let them out. "My mother was supposed to tell me that herself but then again she wasn't supposed to abandon me."
"I didn't abandon you, Avalon," River tried to say again without getting interrupted. "I had to give you up."
"Oh my God, if I had a penny for every time I heard that…" Avalon shook her head, quickly wiping off some stray tears.
"I know, I know it's all difficult and you're angry but if you would just come back I can explain everything."
"No, it's too late," Avalon warned River to stay right where she was. "I am 24 years old and how old are you? Far from the age you were when you had me, I'm sure. You never said a word to me! You are not my mother! Emmalina Reynolds is." She quickly pulled the door open and ran out before anyone could stop her.
"What are we going to do? Are we going to let her leave?" Rory hurried towards the door.
"She's not going anywhere," River cleared her own tears off her face. "The manipulator is with Ryland. I'll give him a quick call…"
"River, I'm so sorry," Amy hugged her daughter. She wished she could've done more than just stand there but it felt like it was something River had to do, no matter how painful it was.
"It's fine, I'm…" River wouldn't bother finishing the sentence. She had to act fast. "I have to call Ryland...and maybe someone else too. Scuse me." She sidestepped Amy and went back into the living room.
~ 0 ~
Avalon wandered - stumbled - through the park. She'd barely made it back to her house when all of a sudden she was bombarded between Ryland and Lena. No doubt River had called them in advance to tell them what happened...and to tell them not to let her have the manipulator. She was essentially stuck on earth because of River. She was confused, weren't 'mothers' supposed to want the best for their kids? River failed in all aspects.
She'd began to remember the same moment happening a long time ago with Kovarian. She'd already known this information - Kovarian had told her right in the beginning that River was her mother - but she was made to forget. She had all those pictures of River throughout her life and none of them showed a shred of someone who was a mother. She never came for her daughter.
"You never cared…" Avalon drew in a breath as she came to a stop in front of the duck pond. The ducks were idly swimming by like nothing.
River abandoned her as a newborn. What right did she have playing the 'mum' card now? Here she was trying to make her life better after all the crap she'd been through and River just waltzes in and tries to dismantle it?
Avalon stifled a sob. She shouldn't cry for that woman, but maybe the tears weren't all for her. The past two years had been terrible. So many things had happened. This was the tip of the iceberg and the worst part is that she didn't even have the Doctor around.
She let herself slowly fall to the ground to sit against the rock wall of the pond. She brought her knees up to her chest and sniffled. She just sat there for God knew how long, thinking about everything that had gone wrong in her life. How could one person have this much misfortune? She didn't understand...or maybe she did. Maybe this was her punishment for the way she was when she was younger. Maybe if I'd grown up with my actual parents I would've turned out differently, she bitterly thought. How would her life be if she'd grown up with Oliver Reynolds and River Song?
Her thoughts were cut off when she heard a wheeze in the air. There was even a light breeze to accompany it. She raised her head, staying completely still before her mind thought things that weren't true. She was so angry, so sad, that her mind wasn't completely there. But she'd heard right. Her ears were working perfectly and were her eyes. The TARDIS had materialized across her and slowly, the Doctor emerged from it. The look on his face told her everything.
Somebody had called him. Avalon closed her eyes. That meant River could have always called him.
"She is a goddamn liar," she spat with all the hatred she could muster.
"My Ava…" the Doctor cautiously approached her. He didn't want to get too close to her because this was his last stop and he would have to leave again. She was crying, though, how could he resist?
"When did you first find out?" Avalon asked quietly. She flinched away from him when he sat down beside her. She'd spent a whole year searching for him and now to have him next to her felt odd.
"On Demons Run," he answered just as quietly. "I thought you were Amy's and Rory's child but it turned out the Silence had your files because you were River's daughter."
"I may be her daughter but she is not my mother. Mothers do not abandon their child, they do not lie to them…"
"Avalon, none of us know why River gave you up, but I can imagine it wasn't because she wanted to."
"How would anyone know that?" Avalon finally looked at him. The moment she did she had to take a moment just to remind herself that he was actually there.
He looked at her as well and offered her a small smile. "Because I was once a father and I know the look a parent has when they know their child is hurt. I don't know why River gave you up to Ryland but she didn't do it because she didn't love you. Quite the opposite, actually."
"I don't believe it," Avalon took in a breath. "If I had a child, I would never leave them."
"Even if it meant they would be completely safe?" The Doctor knew the challenge the question posed and he imagined it was the same challenge River had to have faced in her past. "Avalon, you don't know what it's like being a parent. There's this drive in you - an instinct - to keep your child safe no matter what. I had that, Amy had that on Demons Run, Rory had it while we searched for Amy and Melody. I'm guessing River had that the day she gave you up. But you know, all we can do is speculate until you go and talk to her."
"No," Avalon said on the spot. "I saw the pictures Kovarian had of her. She didn't look like she missed me a lot."
"What do you mean?" frowned the Doctor. "Kovarian told you this?"
"She did, and then she wiped it away like the rest of my memories. She had all these pictures of River having the time of her life without me. I don't want her - I don't want her to be my Mother." Tears flowed from Avalon's face. "Please don't make me go back there. I don't want to see her." She practically threw her body over his for what she intended to be a hug.
Still, the Doctor held her in their awkward half-lying positions and held her tight. Two hundred years was a long time to go without touching her. "I am very sorry, Avalon. No one should have to suffer the way you have."
"Just say you won't leave me again." She was holding him like her life depended on it, her eyes screwed shut. "Say you won't, please."
"You know I can't do that, Ava. I love you but...Time says I have to die. If I die, then the Silence leaves you and your family alone. They just want me."
Avalon pulled away to look at him. She studied his eyes - as much as she could with her blurred vision - and saw something new in them. Resignation. "How...how long has it been?"
"Ava…" He preferred not to look at her right now.
"I deserve the truth, dammit. Tell me!"
"I'm 1,103," he answered quietly.
Avalon let out a noise of horror. She slowly picked herself up from the ground, prompting him to do the same. New tears had filled her eyes as she studied him. He looked so tired. "I said I wouldn't let that happen. I wouldn't let you be on your own, especially for that long."
"It wasn't on you to stop anything, Avalon. I had to do it." He couldn't help himself. He had to touch her again. He reached out for her body and was relieved that she'd let him. He was able to wrap an arm around her waist and bring her body to his. He rested his forehead against her, taking a moment to smell her lavender scent again. "Do you know that in a thousand years, I've never really had anyone affect me the way you have?"
"I make everyone sick eventually," Avalon sighed.
"No," he managed to chuckle. She would say something like that. He brought his free hand up to her chin, taking a gentle hold of it. Her skin was still just as smooth and warm as he remembered it. "You're the only one who's ever kept up with me even when I was unbearable. And I've had my moments." Now it was Avalon's turn to smile, even if it was through her tears. "You remember our heist?"
"Yeah," she felt a rush of heat when she remembered their insane snog session in the middle of it.
"You and I...we've had the best adventures together. Make that into a story, will you? Maybe it'll inspire some other person to sweep their loved one off their feet."
"I don't want to write about you as if you were gone," she sniffled. "Please don't go." She curled her hand around his arm that was touching her face. "I don't want to lose you a second time. Watching you die was the most painful moment of my life. Please don't go to that place."
"You have no idea how much I would rather stay here with you, with my Ponds, but I have somewhere to be, somewhere Time needs me to be," he pushed a few strands of her hair out of her wet face. "I just needed to come and say goodbye properly."
"I promised myself that I wouldn't let you go to that place. I tried doing my best to keep you from going there…"
"You did everything you could and you have no idea how much that means to me, but it's time to stop. It's okay to stop. I figured everything out, darling. I know that I have to be there."
Avalon felt her heart breaking all over again and she was getting tired of it. Nothing seemed to work right. He was just giving himself up like that, like he had to...like he had to go face that astronaut. "Do you...do you know who the astronaut is?" She whispered.
The Doctor lowered his head for a moment. He had worked it out after his long search, after his long talks and research, but there was just one thing he still never figured out. The letter. That damn letter that warned Avalon of what was coming, no one had the answer to it.
"Doctor?" Avalon called, pulling him out of his thoughts. "Did you?"
"Yes," he ultimately said. "But I can't tell you, I'm sorry."
Avalon sighed. "That's a shocker. No one can tell me anything, no one can tell me the truth...can anyone tell me anything?"
"I love you," the Doctor said, offering her his best smile, as if they were in the middle of another date. He loved that it still made her smile. He stroked patterns over her cheek. "It's been 200 hundred years and you have no idea how much I've wanted to tell you that in person again. I love you my Ava."
Avalon leaned into his touch. "I love you too."
"I do have to go, though. I just wanted to say that one more time," the Doctor swallowed hard and looked her in her sad, teary eyes.
"...there's nothing I can do to stop you anymore?"
"I have to, I'm sorry."
Avalon was scared out of her mind but it seemed like he had made his choice. She just had no idea how she was supposed to let him walk away again. "There's so many things we could've done together. You said you were taking me to, um, Akhaten?"
"Right," the Doctor nodded. "You would've loved it."
"We could've pulled another heist," she bit her lip and leaned on him.
"And watched Rory have a heart attack?"
Avalon smirked. "We would've won this time." She let her fingers tap over his chest, something she missed doing too. "We would've been on the same team this time, you and I...we would've won the whole thing."
"Yeah we would've," the Doctor grinned at the image of them pulling a second heist with the worst shenanigans they could come up with. He pulled her hands off him and held them tightly in his. He stared at her smirking face and felt the air leave his body. She was insanely beautiful and she had been with him. For a short moment in his life, she had been with him and they'd been happy.
Timetogotimetogotimetogo. He needed to get out of there because he was one second away from whisking her off into the TARDIS to kiss forever.
He let one of her hands go and snapped his fingers. The TARDIS doors opened up but instead of walking straight for them, he needed to do something first. He was going to leave but he had to do it right this time. He couldn't sneak off like the last time. Avalon didn't deserve that.
"Would you dance with me?" He asked her. She blinked at him, naturally expecting him to say anything but that. She took her hands out of his. "Would you dance with me, Ava?"
"Dance?"
He nodded. "I'm going to die, but I have to dance with my princess first. Can't imagine leaving without one."
New tears came to Avalon's eyes. He was really going to do it. Don't waste your last moment, the voice in her head warned. She couldn't waste it. These were her last moments with him that she would remember forever. She took his hand, squeezing it tightly.
"Play us something sweet, will you?" The Doctor called to the TARDIS, or so it seemed. A few seconds later a familiar tune started playing.
Avalon laughed lightly. "Once Upon a Dream."
"Our first dance together," the Doctor reminded her, not that she needed to be reminded. It was their first dance as friends and their first dance on their first date. As if she would ever forget that. He put an arm around her waist again and started to sway to the song.
Little by little, Avalon let go of his hand and brought her arms around his neck. She rested her head against his chest, wanting to be as close as possible to him. "I know you, I walked with you once upon a dream. I know you! The gleam in your eyes is so familiar a gleam. Yet I know it's true, the visions are seldom all they seem…"
The Doctor laid his cheek over the top of Avalon's head, smiling contently for the first time in a long time. He would always love her beautiful voice.
"...but if I know you, I know what you'll do. You'll love me at once, the way you did once upon a dream," she sniffled. "Do you ever sing?"
The Doctor hummed. "That...would be a no. I don't sing."
"I wish you would," Avalon looked up at him. "We could, um-" she forced herself to smile, "-we could've sang 'A Whole New World'. That would've fit us, huh?"
"I think so, yeah," the Doctor chuckled. They just didn't have the time anymore. Time's up. He brought a finger under her chin then leaned down and kissed her. She quickly kissed him back.
A whole year waiting and searching for him had seemed to lead them to this moment. She wished they could do this forever and ever. Their arms wrapped around each other so tightly there was no chance of moving. Avalon remembered all the sappy movies that had those really long, passionate kisses and she would make fun of them all the time. Who knew that she'd end up having one of her own? It was a terrible moment when they had to end it. They pulled away what was necessary to look into each other's eyes, silently saying goodbye to each other.
"You have been my best story," Avalon whispered, having to bite her lower lip to keep herself from bursting into sobs right there and then. "Is there not another story?"
"The next story will be you living happily. Maybe writing a couple stories here and there...and going back to that sweet family who loves you so much," the Doctor tapped her nose. "Try to talk to River, okay?"
"Try to stay alive?" Avalon played her final card which was just to ask. River did say to her that he was never able to say 'no' to her. Let's see if she lied about that too. She cupped his face and leaned closer to his lips. "For me?"
The Doctor swallowed hard. She was far too close for him not to try and kiss her again. The TARDIS wasn't that far away from them, was it? Out of time! Right. He had to focus...but she was looking at him, pleading with him to listen to her.
Maybe…
Avalon pressed one final kiss to his lips. "Goodbye, Fairy Tale Man."
"Goodbye, my Ava," he smiled softly...with tears in his eyes. He forced himself to step away from her, one of the hardest things he had to do. He looked at her one last time, shuddering a breath that wanted to lead to more tears. He turned away and walked back to the TARDIS.
Avalon hugged herself as she watched the Doctor disappear inside the TARDIS. Seconds later, she heard the wheezing noise as the box started disappearing. Her eyes might as well have been water wells by that point. She would've let herself cry right there and then if she hadn't noticed a figure standing behind the de-materializing TARDIS. It took her a few minutes to realize what it was…who it was.
"Hello Mother," the adult Sapling smiled at her and waved with one hand.
Avalon's eyes widened, immediately figuring he must have hitched a ride with the Doctor. Those two had played such a sneaky surprise on her. She ran up to him, throwing her arms around his much taller figure now that he was an adult. "Oh my Sapling! You've come back!"
"I had to," the Sapling hugged his mother tightly. "Father said you would need me."
Avalon could only nod against his wooden chest.
~ 0 ~
51st century, Luna University.
A very young River Song sat in a study with a table full of books and several official files in front of her. With a hand over her stomach, she dropped one of the files and picked up her opened diary to see a date written in one of the pages. She had looked it over at least a thousand times, along with the research she'd done, and she just couldn't figure it out.
"Tick, tock, goes the clock. And what now shall we play?" She heard a strange voice in the room say, "Tick, tock, goes the clock. Now summer's gone away."
"Hello?" River called. "Oliver? Are you playing a game on me? I don't like them."
Kovarian appeared from the shadows of the room flashing a smug smile at River. "Such a lovely old song. But is it about him?"
"You know about the Doctor?" River raised an eyebrow, intrigued by the strange woman. She thought she seemed familiar but...her mind was a bit fuzzy sometimes.
"So very well," Kovarian nodded and smirked at the long stare River was giving her, "Don't try and remember me. We have been far too thorough with your dear little head. I brought a gift, though" she informed as she reached across the table to take River's diary. "Well...gifts."
"A...what?" River blinked.
Kovarian smirked again as she came forwards and picked up River's diary off the table. "So they made you a doctor today, did they? Doctor River Song. How clever you are. You understand what this is, don't you?" She turned the diary around for River to see.
"According to some accounts it's the day the Doctor dies," River answered quietly. "But that's what they are, just 'accounts'. Rumors."
"By Silencio Lake on the Plain of Sighs an impossible astronaut will rise from the deep and strike the Time Lord dead," Kovarian recited with a great smile, as if it were her favorite story...and perhaps...
"It's a story, that's all," River shrugged, though she seemed nervous.
Kovarian sighed casually and set the diary back on the table, "And this is where it begins," she informed, "My gifts to you," she snapped her fingers and immediately a door opened from behind where two of the Silence entered holding a very familiar woman.
"What the hell is that?" River's eyes widened at the sight of the Silence.
"Your owners and, currently, hers," Kovarian gestured back.
"You let me go! Let me go right now!" Avalon kicked and stomped as she was brought in by the creatures. When she saw River she paused but then a deep fury marked her face. "YOU!" She tried going for her, shocking River until Avalon started to yell, "You're not my Mother! I don't want you!"
River swallowed thickly. "How did…?"
"Oh, shush child," Kovarian waved the ginger off and focused on River. "I'm about to make a deal with Mummy."
"Let her go right this instant," River ordered but dared not stand up at the moment.
"Here is the deal, Melody Pond," Kovarian set her hands on the table and leaned forwards, "Those stories of Lake Silencio are all true. The Doctor will be there and he will be shot. An astronaut is to rise from Silencio Lake and it will. The only thing I haven't decided is which one of you will it be? You...or your daughter?"
"I don't understand, how do you know who I am? And how do you have Avalon? I watched the Doctor take her into the TARDIS. She's safe!"
"Ah, time travel my dear. This is just before Berlin. I have your younger self waiting for orders in Leadworth," Kovarian's lips curled into a devilish smile. "I made you what you are and I also prepared a back up. I have trained your daughter to do the task, brainwashed her, everything I need to get this right."
"I am not her daughter!" Avalon still fiercely yelled. "You left me!"
"I didn't do anything," River weakly argued, much too confused to put up a proper defense. As far as she knew, she hadn't left her daughter all.
"Yet!" Avalon snapped. "You abandoned me!"
"I haven't!" River slammed her hands down on the table as she got up from her chair, letting Avalon see that she really hadn't.
Avalon went into shock and fell silent. River was pregnant, very pregnant. She hadn't done anything yet, none of the things Kovarian had shown her. "Oh my God…"
River settled a hand over her stomach. "I'm almost due," she said with a half smile. "And I will never abandon my child."
Before Avalon could say anything, Kovarian stepped around the table for River. The woman quickly backtracked the same step. "Someone is getting into that astronaut suit and doing the deed. I allow you mercy by giving you the freedom to choose who will do it. You can climb into the astronaut suit and shoot the Doctor dead, sparing your poor daughter the atrocious act of killing her love. However, if you decide to keep your baby daughter - I won't judge - then I will have that one-" She pointed back at Avalon who couldn't be more terrified at the prospect, "-be in the suit. She shoots the Doctor and then she's off to Stormcage. I'm sure you could arrange visitations."
River felt a deep fury fill her insides, something she had to be truly careful about given her state. "You will not touch my daughter!"
"Ah, so is that your choice then? You take her place?"
"N-n-n-n-n-no! No!" Avalon started once she got the idea. "She doesn't accept anything! And neither do I! I would rather die than kill the Doctor! Shoot me right now!"
"I would but I'm not interested in finding out how many regenerations you have right now," Kovarian dismissed her and continued on with River. "Well then? I don't have all day, and neither does the Doctor actually. You or her?"
"I won't do it," River said, nearly making a promise to Avalon there and then. "I'm not killing him..."
This did not settle well with Kovarian. "Perhaps another persuasion tactic is needed - my second gift. Bring him in!"
Two more Silence walked into the room dragging in a young ginger man. Avalon and River immediately recognized him.
"Let me go! What the hell are you anyways!?" The man angrily pulled and pulled against their claw-like hands.
"Uncle Oliver?" Avalon struggled against the Silence holding her. "Why-why are you here? Why is he here!?" She threw a glare at Kovarian.
"Oliver?" River had recognized him perfectly, and now looked even more terrified than before.
"Make the decision, Melody Pond," Kovarian began to warn again.
"R-River they're crazy!" the man, Oliver, was struggling hard. "They're talking about murder and our daughter and I-"
"Daughter?" Avalon repeated just before Kovarian's roaring voice went over hers.
"MAKE THE DECISION!"
"NO!" River exclaimed.
Once again defeated, Kovarian struck with another strategy. With one swift move she had pulled out a gun and shot Oliver on the chest. The man collapsed on the ground.
"NOOO!" River nearly lunged forwards as she saw this happen. The tears were quick to fill her eyes and spill down.
Avalon had gasped with horror. "No, no! You didn't have to do that! Why - why would you do that!?"
River tried reaching Oliver but Kovarian blocked the way. "Please…" River begged her. "He's dying…"
"Yes, what a terrible thing you just did," Kovarian said flatly. "How will she ever forgive you?"
River swallowed hard as she looked over to Avalon. "Please...that's her father. Let her be with him. It's his last moments."
"My father…?" Avalon repeated. Her head was spinning and this time it wasn't because of all the electric shocks she'd gotten recently. "He's my…" She met River's teary gaze and watched her nod. "Oh my God!" She wrestled free from the Silence to run to Oliver. She fell to her knees beside him. "I-I...I don't know what to do, I'm sorry…"
Oliver had very little energy left but he had enough to recognize her. He had seen her already before, once. "My Avalon…"
She swallowed hard and nodded her head. "They say...they say you're my Dad. Is that...is that true?"
Olivia struggled to smile at her, hoping to answer her question. "You have my hair."
Avalon leaned closer to him and nodded again. "I...I guess I do?" Oliver groaned and shuddered a breath. Avalon barely understood what was happening but her eyes were giving out tears. She was so sad; sad over him. "You're my father and you're dying. I've killed you!"
"No, no," Oliver reached out as if to hug her so Avalon cradled his body as much as she could. "My beautiful Avalon. You grow up, you'll be safe...and happy…"
"No, no, no, don't talk like that. If it's all true then-then that means we have a lot of catching up to do. Stay with me please," Avalon pressed a kiss to his cheek, feeling a faint tickle over her skin from his light beard. "You're my Dad, you have to stay with me." Oliver smiled at her one more time before his eyes fell shut. "No! C'mon! No!" Avalon called for him to wake up, pleaded him to, but he was completely still.
River was despondent as she looked over her desk to see Oliver still and eyes shut. "He had...nothing to do with this..." She said to Kovarian in a frail whisper.
"I wouldn't have had to do that if you had just obeyed," Kovarian glowered. "You know the rules. You listen to me or else. Who I shoot next is all up to you."
River's eyes flickered to Avalon beside Oliver. She was crying so terrible it broke her heart. Her daughter had just watched her father die, held him. "What happens to her? If I obey, what will happen to my daughter?"
"I'll wipe her memories of everything that happened to her in these last months then I'll send her to Leadworth where she'll meet your younger self. I hear you guys had a blast in Berlin," Kovarian smirked. She knew that no matter what happened she had already won. Berlin had already happened.
The door flung open again and this time several soldiers stormed in with the famous white astronaut suit. Avalon actually screamed at the sight of it, already terrified from what happened and what she already watched happen.
"Not that! Please, not that!" She held her father's body closer to her, as if somehow he would still be able to protect her. "Not that!"
Two soldiers came to rip her away from her father's corpse and for the suit. River screamed at them to stop while Kovarian laughed. "It's time to choose Dr. Song, we've simply run out of time!"
Author's Note:
It's all going down in the next chapter ladies and gents! So excited to see your reactions! It goes without saying that things will be very different from the show and of course it'll be angsty. Also, just a clarification for the time the passed by. When Avalon says it's been 2 years for her, she means in the TARDIS. Obviously in Leadworth it's still 2011 but for her, it's been 2 years since the beginning of this story!
#ocappreciation#doctor who#11th doctor#dw#dwedit#fd: dw#11th doctor imagines#11th doctor fics#dw imagine#dw fics#doctor who fics#river song#amy pond#rory williams#oc: Avalon Reynolds#fic: falling in temptation
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Goodbye Winter
I got this idea after seeing a dialog prompt and an intense need to write something again. So, if you like dancing and banter, you might like this. It gets pretty sappy, pretty fluffy, and at one point, I threw my hands up in frustration because of that. If you like romance, this is romance. Can be considered a sequel to The Path we Walk, but it can stand alone, take it as you will.
Talbott Winger x Alexus Johnson (HPHM MC)
Takes place at a school dance as Talbott contemplates his relationship with Alexus.
3,000+ words.
A general conscientious of Talbott Winger’s life can be summed up in six words: “I would rather be anywhere else.”
Ever since he begrudgingly befriended one Miss Alexus Johnson, the Ravenclaw prefect in his year, he found himself getting dragged to more and more social events around the school.
She was very convincing. Every time some event was coming up, she would interrupt his quiet meals to convince him to attend the event. Dances, festivals, any large amount of the student body gathering together, she would manage to successfully make him promise to attend. It had nothing to do with the massive mutual crush that they both had on each other, but he will admit to the fact that their dating one another did have a major factor on his attendance each time. They were showing up together at these events, and it would be dead rude to not attend when she invited him as her date.
Yes, Talbott Winger and Alexus Johnson were dating. The loner and the elusive curse-breaker.
This came as a shock to absolute no one because everyone knew that their constant witty banter was in fact, flirting. Well, everyone except Talbott and Alexus themselves.
Either way, despite the fact that Talbott hated being in social events, just being by Alexus’s side made it all worth it.
At least, that’s what he was telling himself right now.
Talbott stood stiffly to the side of the dance floor in the Great Hall, watching the other students in his year socializing amongst each other. As a treat (or probably an apology for the latest dark wizard to be let onto the campus), Dumbledore had let every year vote on an individual event to be put together by an elected committee in that year, and the sixth years chose a dance. Naturally, Penny Haywood was head of that committee, Alexus her right hand, However, students like Merula Snyde, Andre Egwu, and Deigo Caplan were also on that committee, and Alexus complained about one of them specifically, in extensive detail, to Talbott when they were eating lunch in solitude together.
The theme the committee had some up with was “Hello Spring” or “Goodbye Winter” or some rubbish like that, as they were now in the middle of March. Something to give them a pick-me-up before the finals that loomed above them. It was formal, much like the Celestial Ball, not that Talbott had attended, he was not so willing to socialize at that time.
He was alone right now because she was either busy with last-minute curse breaking things or dance details, he wasn’t sure anymore, but she agreed to meet him soon.
He dressed nicely, he thought. Charcoal button-up shirt and slacks, complimented by a deep blue jacket, his necklace tucked safely under his clothes. It was more “winter” or whatever than the other students, but he didn’t care. Alexus had given him an off-handed comment on how deep blues looked nice on him, so that’s what he was going with.
He really did like her, he had for a long time, and he really only did this so that he could be with her, even if it meant being around people. Not that he would tell her that, he had a reputation to maintain after all.
So, waiting for Alexus, surrounded by his peers, he stood, keeping to himself. He fidgeted with the collar of his shirt, not because he was uncomfortable being dressed up, but he was bored. Standing to the side was rather dull, even for him. He didn’t mind being alone, but being alone when everyone else was not made him feel like he was sticking out like a sore thumb, which he did hate.
Granted, sticking out was one of the few downsides to dating Alexus. She was always in the thick of things, especially attention or the spotlight. Dating her brought him into some sort of school gossip, and occasional whispers followed him around the halls as he walked from class to class.
The notion of him being the target of talk at the moment made him rather relieved when two of his classmates, Ben Copper and Diego Caplan, walked over to him.
Talbott wouldn’t call them “friends,” but he didn’t hate their company for a majority of the time. He knew they were good friends to Alexus and they were all in the Circle together.
“Looking sharp, there, Winger!” Diego complimented before delivering a heavy clap on his back
Talbott smoothed out his jacket, muttering a thank you as he looked at the two.
Ben was staring, the usual stoic stare that rivaled Talbott’s own neutral expression of general displeasure. It was a surprise the Gryffindor was there, he had almost a better penchant for avoiding social gatherings like Talbott. Diego was beaming as usual, like the idiot he was. Well, maybe not an idiot, but he was more energetic than what Talbott was used to. There was almost nothing in common with Caplan and Copper except for their dueling skills, which is probably the only reason they were together at the moment. Maybe Diego was trying to show Ben that smiling wasn’t fatal.
Either way, Diego was certainly checking Talbott up and down, smiling, making him rather self-conscious.
“You’re definitely sharp enough for the girl that’s going to be in your arms tonight!” he complimented.
“Save your enthusiasm for the dance floor, Diego, or else Winger might die of embarrassment before he even sees her,” Ben remarked curtly, coldly, not too many hint of emotion in his voice, despite the fact that Talbott’s face was turning a proper red at this moment before he continued. “Personally, dancing, school formals, all of it is a waste of time. There’s so much more that Alexus and I could be doing to avenge Rowan, but she was rather insistent that I get my mind off of that.”
Talbott was now regretting the two having come over to talk to them, and he had to wonder why they did. He was terrible company.
“A favor to her, then?” he gandered.
“Something of that calibre, yes” Ben agreed, “She’s very persuasive, you know.”
“Oh, believe me, I do.”
“Persuasive, and… different. Ever since Valentine’s Day. Have you noticed?” Ben continued.
Talbott raised an eyebrow, now gaining a better understanding of their motivations. Ben Copper fancied himself something of Alexus’s bodyguard at times, her most trusted protector, their friendship one of the longest she’s had. He was taller than her (everyone was taller than her), just a few months older than her. Diego Caplan adored Alexus and it was no secret they did have a bond over their shared Spanish heritage, him even affectionately calling her “hermosa” and other terms of endearment of the familial type.
He stared at them, contemplating his answer.
“No. I haven’t noticed…” he began, “But, something I am aware of, is that Alexus already has an older brother, and, correct me if I’m wrong, but that isn’t either one of you two, is it?”
Ben’s expression did not change.
“As we’re fully aware, however, even if Jacob wasn’t indisposed at the moment, I imagine we’ve been good substitutes. Someone has had to watch out for her, and we have, quite well.”
“She’s more than capable of handling herself, you know.” Talbott side-eyed Diego, who’s charming smile had long since faded from his face. He was not looking at Talbott with confrontation, but rather, some seriousness that he had not seen in him before.
“We know,” was all Ben said.
“It’s really about what Ben has definitely failed to mention,” Diego quickly stepped in. “Yes, she’s changed, but for the better.”
Talbott frowned, looking down at the Hufflepuff, but before he could say anything, Diego continued.
“She’s happier, having someone to lean on since Rowan… Someone like you, who reminds her that she’s human. Still a girl, still a student, like us. Reminds her that knowledge and missing brothers aren’t the only facets in life worth pursuing. You help take away some of that burden.”
Talbott did not know what to say. He looked towards the other students on the dance floor, pursing his lips, thinking. He didn’t understand, he was just one person. She was one person. No, that’s not true. She was a thunderstorm in the body of a 16-year-old girl. Quiet, brewing dangerously under the otherwise composed surface. When she strikes, she did it in a flash and left the world quaking after it. The world was going to behold her power one day, a small part of her world beheld her now, as someone dangerous, dark, mysterious, and beautiful.
He looked back at Ben and Diego. The latter’s signature smile had returned, dazzling as ever like nothing had happened, while Ben’s usual hard-set stoicness had softened into a blank expression that was almost trust.
Before Talbott could say anything, a nicely familiar face appeared at his left arm.
“Are these two giving you any trouble?”
Talbott felt a warmth in his chest as Alexus slid both her arms around one of his own, lacing her hands into his.
“Oh yes, quite troublesome, in fact. You know Copper, ready to duel on the dance floor,” he said, lightly, casually, smiling down at her.
Alexus gave a soft laugh before looking at Ben and Diego.
Diego gave her a gracious smile as she extended her hand. He took it and stooped down to kiss her knuckles, platonically, like a proper gentleman.
“You look as radiant as ever, Alexus!” he complimented.
“Oh, careful, Caplan, as we said, we don’t want a duel on the dance floor,” she warned him not so seriously before wrapping her arms back around Talbott’s.
Diego just winked before he and Ben took off, Diego leading the way.
Talbott looked down as Alexus moved in front of him. He mentally remarked to himself how beautiful she looked. Whereas Talbott’s ensemble was darkened blues and cooler tones like the cold winter, she was spring. Her cotton dress was a much softer blue. It had an intricate white-lace trim and was cinched at the waist before it flowed delicately to her knees. Her hair was plaited back into a long braid, a golden hair pin in the shape of a laurel tucked in.
He felt a light thudding pick up in his chest as she looked up at him.
“You look… amazing,” he said, quietly.
“You look quite amazing yourself, Winger,” she returned, smoothing down the lapels of his jacket before standing on her toes to peck his cheek. “Thank you for coming, I know this isn’t your thing.”
“It’s all fine. You and the committee did amazing, it feels like an afternoon brunch in a garden. Very spring,” he remarked, nodding around.
Truly, the decorations were spectacular. The Great Hall was light, a perfect day with sunlight flooding in from the large windows, the ceiling above was a pristine blue with wispy clouds slowly trailing along the sky. There were small trees lining the edges of the room, potted, no more than seven feet tall each, uniformly hedged. The tables all had white cloth lining them, delicate tea cups and lace doilies surrounding simplistic white daisy and yellow gerberas centerpieces.
“I feel like we’ve done and decorated for a wedding, how intricate everything got,” Alexus muttered. “Penny’s a brilliant mind for this, though, if potioneering doesn’t work out. Merula didn’t make it easy, fighting her at almost every step.” She took his arm and he began leading her away from his wallflower spot, moving towards the dance floor.
“Oh? I bet you were quite the lieutenant. Or were you playing peace-keeper?”
“Lieutenant. Penny’s brilliant ideas deserved to be executed, and executed well. Don’t get me wrong, Merula had some winners, like the floral arrangements, surprisingly, but I can’t tell you how heated two people can get over white daisies and irises, or white daisies and dahlias.”
She stepped in front of him as they ended up in the middle of the dance floor, the song ending.
“But you didn’t go with irises or dahlias,” he remarked as she curtsied to him.
“No, Andre suggested the gerberas,” Alexus informed him as he bowed before they took the start position for the waltz. Extending one of their arms to link them at the fingers, he put his right hand on her back, just under her shoulder blade, she rested her left hand on his arm. “Penny and Merula almost killed him because of how good his suggestion was.”
Talbott laughed, actually audibly laughed as the music started. He stepped back, she followed, stepping forward, following his lead as easily as a breath. Truthfully, this was not the first time they had waltzed together, but it was the first time they had waltzed in front of other people.
Once the bitter chill of February had subsided, chased by the warming of march, they used their animagus forms to sneak out more frequently after hours than they should, both of them flying to the Clocktower Courtyard to dance under the stars to the music of the night. That had started on a bet. Alexus could not believe that Talbott had a musical bone in his body, and Talbott insisted that Alexus definitely had two left feet. She challenged him to dance with her, and that was how they accidentally discovered that the other could dance. Really well, in fact.
Talbott revealed that, as a young child, he first learned how to step on his mother’s toes, and after her death, he was determined to learn how to properly dance to honor her.
Alexus informed him that her mother enrolled her in classes for “proper young girls” and one of the things they learned was various ballroom dances. Well, that was one of the few things Alexus learned before she was kicked out for “consistent disobeying of the rules.” That was kindly putting it, when, in reality, she threw a frog at another little girl (the head-mistress’s daughter) after she tore the pages out of the book young Alexus was reading at the time.
Because of their frequent rendezvous, they had grown comfortable dancing with each other, and it showed now, surrounded by their peers.
In other circumstances, Talbott would have been nervous, possibly stepping on her toes, conscious of every pair of eyes that would be on him. But with Alexus, it felt like the whole world had disappeared, and it was just them in the cloak of night, no cares, no curses. Nothing to bother them as long as they danced and danced together.
When that song ended, they didn’t leave the dance floor, they just waited as the music changed and adjusted accordingly. And again for the next song, and the next, and the one after that until they were almost exhausted from dancing with the zeal and enthusiasm of every song being treated like their first.
“Wanna step off the floor?” Talbott offered, seeing her face flushed from the effort, he himself trying to catch his breath. She just laughed in response, resting her head on his chest for a second before she pulled him to the side where the tables were. As ever, her laugh was the sweetest music he had heard all day, and he wished he knew how to say that out loud. He couldn’t figure out how to articulate this to her, so he just let himself be led, flustered with euphoria.
She pulled him to a nearby table, and they all but collapsed into the chairs next to each other.
“We should not do that again,” Talbott muttered.
“No, we shouldn’t, my shoes can’t handle it,” she agreed, leaning back.
“Refreshments are over there, yeah?” Talbott pointed to an elongated table off to the side, “I can get us something, if you want.”
“That would be nice, thank you.”
He nodded, and stood up, making his way over, Alexus watching him leave until Penny Haywood and Barnaby Lee took a seat at her table.
“That was smashing to watch, Alexus! Where’d you learn to dance like that?” the Slytherin boy asked, eagerly leaning on his seat, facing her.
“My mother enrolled me in etiquette classes for proper young ladies. Ballroom dancing was good and nice, but being a proper young lady wasn’t much my forte.”
Penny laughed lightly. “You and Talbott are good together, you know? Like a proper romantic story waiting to happen.”
“I’ve never been one for romantic stories, the damsel is always in distress,” Alexus said, none-so-dismissively, but she did shrug off the comparison.
“Is that so? I would have thought you loved something with a dashing hero, such as yourself.”
“Does that make Talbott the damsel?” Barnaby asked, quite seriously, which made Penny and Alexus laugh.
“Yes, I imagine he is in this epic tale. Lord knows I put him in enough distress with my strategic gallivanting,” Alexus said, jokingly.
“Oh, is that what you would call it?”
They looked up as Talbott came back, a glass of water in one hand, a small plate of various fruits in the other. He set the glass down in front of Alexus before setting the bowl between them. She took a napkin and put it in her lap before grabbing one of the forks that was already on the table.
“Whatever do you mean?” she asked with fake innocence before stabbing her fork into a grape.
“You think your searchings for the Cursed Vaults is in anyway strategic. That’s a rich joke if I ever heard one,” he replied, just as politely.
She laughed before thoughtfully chewing on her grape as he continued.
“But you’re not wrong, you do cause me a good amount of distress when you do dangerous things.”
Alexus smiled at him. “It’s nice to hear you care.”
“I always care when you do dangerous things too, Alexus. You’re like a sister to me,” Barnaby interjected between them.
Alexus flushed a bit. “Oh,” she said, collecting herself. “That’s incredibly sweet of you, Barnaby.”
“We all get concerned when you fight curses, Alexus,” Penny said assuringly. “We might not all have the same romantically vested interest in you as Talbott, but we all care about you.”
Alexus looked down at the table, really, unable to look at any of them. Talbott knew she always got flustered with emotions, or anyone showing care about her. He knew she wasn’t used to it. She was used to missing brothers, fathers she never talked about, mothers who tried to send her off to boarding schools and etiquette classes. Talbott understood that better than anyone.
“Chin up, Alexus, it’s the truth,” he said softly.
She looked up, right at him, and there was a glistening in her eyes. It was something Talbott hadn’t seen in her since that day when he read poetry to her in the Hospital Wing, promising to walk the hard road with her anywhere she went. She had never been so vulnerable since then.
Alexus blinked once, composed herself in seconds before standing up. “I’m going to see what desserts are at the table. I’ll be back in a second,” she quickly excused herself before briskly walking away.
Talbott watched her retreating back until he could feel the stares of the other two at the table. He turned to them, seeing them examine him with close eyes. Or, at least, Penny was watching him with something knowing, while Barnaby watched Alexus before he, too, stood up and followed her, citing a desire for pastries.
“What?” Talbott asked Penny, perhaps more curtly than he intended.
“Careful, Talbott.”
He frowned. “Excuse me?”
“Be careful, Talbott.”
“Why?”
“Your smile.”
“What about my smile?” He was smiling? He didn’t even realize it, but as it faded from his lips, he understood. He was smiling at Alexus as she left. Just a soft one, not full beaming, but an adoring smile on his lips as he saw Alexus more clearly than he had for a long time.
“Your smile,” Penny repeated. “You look like you're about to fall in love.”
#hphm#hogwarts mystery#hphm mc#hogwarts mystery mc#hogwarts mystery jacob's sibling#hphm jacob's sibling#hphm talbott#hphm talbott winger#hogwarts mystery talbott#talbott winger#jacob's sibling x talbott winger#talbott x jacob's sibling#talbott winger x mc#mc x talbott winger#talbott winger x jacob's sibling#hphm penny#hphm barnaby#hphm diego#hphm ben#hphm penny haywood#hphm barnaby lee#hphm diego caplan#hphm ben copper#hphm fanfiction#acj writes#jacob's sibling
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beatrice
originally posted: april 29th, 2017
word count: 36,845 words
rated: not rated
warning: major character death
beatrice baudelaire/lemony snicket
lemony snicket, beatrice baudelaire, kit snicket, count olaf, bertrand baudelaire, the duchess of winnipeg
implied/referenced character death, murder mystery, alternate universe – canon divergence, detective noir, investigations, murder, the major character death isn’t who you think it is, in which some things are changed around but it all works out sort of how it’s supposed to
summary: Lemony Snicket investigates the apparent murder of a woman known only as Beatrice, and finds himself not only falling in love but into a wild, mysterious, and ultimately unfortunate series of events.
notes:
IMPORTANT NOTE, we're in weird noir shenanigan territory in this fanfic, where things happen that aren't always exactly what they seem. also, the major character death is the kind of major character death you'd expect in ASOUE/ATWQ, so I don't think there's anything in here that this fandom isn't already prepared for on a general note. bearing that in mind, let's get to it, folks
Also, MAJOR SPOILERS for the ending of Why Is This Night Different From All Other Nights?. We're talking SERIOUSLY MAJOR SPOILERS, I cannot stress that enough.
.
There was a town, and there was a girl, and there was a crime, but it was a different town and a different girl and a different crime than before. It was the city, and it was a woman, and it was probably murder. I wasn't almost thirteen. I was somewhere in the muddle of self-doubt that most people call someone's early twenties. Most of all, I was hoping that this time, I wasn't wrong.
I returned to the city early in the morning on the coldest day in January, after a long weekend in a faraway town I would prefer never to think about again, but it's always the things you never want to think about that you wind up thinking about. I went there at least once a year, to think through things I also tried and failed not to think about. I did a lot of thinking and not-thinking those days, but I very rarely, if ever, came up with any concrete answers.
The taxi I took back into the city didn't usually travel that sort of distance, but the drivers didn't seem to mind. They hadn't just offered, they'd insisted. They looked back at me every now and then, but I didn't want to meet their gazes. I looked out the window instead, at the thick grey sky and faded brown buildings. I knew they wanted to talk, and I didn't want to. I didn't know if I could answer any of their questions. I tried to hide myself behind one of the books they kept in the back seat—the taxi also doubled as a mobile library—but my disguises have never been very successful, unless I was hiding in a mailbox or a piano.
"You're awfully quiet today, Snicket," one of them said.
"Hm," I said.
"You are," said the one in the passenger seat, and he turned, looking at me. "You haven't even given us any tips this time."
I thought it over. It felt like ages since I'd picked up a book with the honest intention of reading it through—I'd barely had the time lately, between doing what my organization wanted me to do and then doing what they didn't want me to do. I hadn't even read the book I was hiding behind. I looked down at it and finally caught sight of the title. "You should read the sequel," I said. "Some people say it's not as good as the first book, but I think it gives a deeper view of some of the characters and what they became."
"Fair enough," the brother in the passenger seat said, and he turned back around.
I looked out the window again. The brown buildings gave way to smaller, sturdier buildings and slightly more people. We were nearing the heart of the city. I tried not to be too nervous. I was always nervous when I came back to the city nowadays, because I didn't know what had happened in my absence, and I worried about what I would find.
"Can you tell us what you were up to this time?" the driver asked.
I thought that over too. I wasn't sure how to explain why I had been visiting a cemetery when I was supposed to be investigating a post office. I did, in fact, eventually investigate the post office, and sent along the required information to my sister, before I followed the lead further and wound up almost running into a Quagmire. I was still interfering, as headquarters liked to remind me in their letters that I found stuffed in refrigerated condiments whenever I returned to my apartment. You think you'd learn, they said, which I thought was unnecessarily cruel, but typical of them. We have never seen eye to eye on many matters.
Although I wasn't as determined as I had been in my youth, I still believed that we could do things differently. I still did them differently, to the exasperation and worry of my sister. I didn't know what good it would do, or if it would do any good at all, or if I was still very, very wrong, and would be, for the rest of my life, no matter what I tried to do or how I tried to do it, but I still tried. It was the only thing I could do.
"The usual," I wound up saying. I smiled a little bit when the brothers laughed.
After a few minutes I caught a glimpse of the payphone down the street. "This is my stop," I said, and the taxi pulled to a halt a few feet away from the booth.
"Good luck with everything," the driver said, and when I finally caught his eye, he smiled.
"Don't work too hard," his brother said with a grin.
I raised a hand in farewell as I got out of the back seat. I watched Pip and Squeak Bellerophon drive away, and my eyes lingered on the corner where the taxi disappeared. Then I turned back to the phone booth, glanced briefly at my watch, and leaned back against a streetlamp to wait.
The phone rang five minutes early, which was right on schedule, and I slid into the booth and picked up the receiver. "Hello."
"L," my sister said, and she sounded oddly subdued. I had only heard her that way once before, a long time ago at a funeral, and I was nervous to hear her that way again. "There's been a change of plans."
I tightened my grip on the phone. "What's happened?"
"An associate was killed yesterday."
"Who?" It wasn't unusual to lose an associate, especially as we all got older, but I never liked when it happened.
"Do you remember Beatrice?"
I closed my eyes.
I remembered Beatrice.
We hadn't talked much after our apprenticeships started. But it was hard to forget someone you thought you loved, even at the age of eleven. I remembered the way her dark brown, almost black hair curled under her chin, the way she pushed it back behind her ears when she gave her oral report on the sonnet. I remembered the way she blinked at me when I told her arriving early was the mark of a noble person. I remembered the way she listened, like she was doing the most important thing in the world, and she never took her eyes off you. That was why I'd liked her. She listened, and she didn't patronize, and she believed.
We would go to the diner around the corner from headquarters and order a truly outrageous amount of root beer floats. She'd laugh at things I said that I hadn't intended to be funny, but I never got the impression that she was laughing at me. Sometimes the Duchess of Winnipeg would come with us, and the two of them would try to disguise me the best they could with our organization's disguise kits. I'd help them rehearse their lines for their acting classes. I taught Beatrice to play cards, and Beatrice taught the Duchess of Winnipeg, who used her new skills to win my pen collection from me, and then Beatrice would smuggle them back to me between classes.
I kissed Beatrice on the cheek once. She smiled at me and said "Mr. Snicket, you are one of a kind," and then ordered another root beer float.
Sometimes we talked about growing up, about the things we'd do. We didn't have dreams, we had plans, and we were certain we could achieve them. Beatrice was quiet about it, but I thought sometimes that she was even more determined than I was. I ached a little bit to think about that now.
We had been children then, and we hadn't spoken in years. I lost track of a lot of associates after my apprenticeship, and Beatrice had been one of them. In all honesty, I had tried to avoid her once I returned to the city. I didn't think I could face her.
I knew Kit kept in contact with her, and that they spoke often. It explained why she was so upset. I wished I had words of consolation for my sister, but a sudden emptiness had formed in my chest.
"L?"
I opened my eyes. I looked through the glass of the phone booth and out at the city. It seemed colder now. People continued walking by and I watched them and tried, not for the first time, to understand how they could just keep going, even when the world around them kept changing. "Yes," I said. "I remember her. How—?"
"Someone shot her. B and I—we've been trying to keep it quiet because—" She took in a deep breath. "We think it was someone from our organization."
"What?"
"I think," Kit began, very slowly, as if she was trying to keep her voice from trembling, "that O was one of the last people to see her."
It was worrying to hear Kit talk about Olaf now, after the fairly loud and unfortunately public scene that had ended their relationship just a few weeks ago. Even if he was still considered a member of our organization, if he was the last one to see Beatrice, that meant a certain possibility that neither of us wanted to consider. "I see," I said.
"But I don't—I don't know. Something's going on in the organization. I need someone I trust investigating this. I need you to do it."
It was nice that even after everything I'd done, and everything I'd done to Kit, that she still trusted me. But I didn't know if I was the right one to do it. Beatrice deserved someone with a less conflicted conscience investigating her murder. "Kit, I—"
"Please, L."
I could count on one hand the number of times I'd heard Kit say 'please.' I thought about what it would mean to investigate, and my chest seized up at the thought. Talking to associates I'd been trying not to talk to. Having to make choices about whether something was right or wrong, and then doing it anyway. Everything I worried about, with even more significance than usual.
But Kit asked very little of me, and I still remembered the last time I'd left her alone.
I sighed. "I'll try."
"Thank you," Kit said.
"Where can I find him?" I asked.
"There's a bar he likes. One of ours, actually. On Bayberry. It's two blocks up from your payphone. He might be there."
"Alright."
"You'll have to visit B, too. If O doesn't know anything, B might. Or R, even."
"Can I ask," I began, "when you saw her last?"
"I saw her Saturday. We had lunch with R. We were supposed to hear from her on Sunday, but we didn't, so that night R and I went to her apartment. When we got there...." Her voice trailed off.
"Okay," I said. "Thanks."
Kit was quiet for a moment, but quiet in a different way than before, and I felt my throat close up a little. I knew what she was going to ask. She asked every time, and like many other things, it never got easier to hear.
"How was it?"
I cleared my throat. It didn't help. "It was fine," I told her. "I'll talk to you later."
I hung up.
-
The bar on Bayberry Avenue wasn't a bar that I could say I frequented, but I had been in there at least once before, on an occasion where Kit and I had also been looking for Olaf. I didn't think this time would be as pleasant.
Our organization used the bar, like they did with other restaurants in the city, as a front for gathering information, so there was a good chance I wouldn't just run into Olaf, but any number of my associates. I wasn't eager to see any of them, but I had a feeling I was going to be seeing more of them now, so I nodded politely to a potted plant by the door that looked a little like one of the Denouement triplets. It rustled in return.
Inside the small, narrow restaurant, the blinds on the front windows tilted to let in slivers of early morning sunlight that fell into long rectangles across the black and white tiled floor. The overstuffed grey booths by the right wall were empty, and only a few of the squat, round tables in the center of the room had occupants. Between the bar counter and the collection of bottles behind it on the left wall was the barkeep. I caught her eye. Olivia raised a thin eyebrow in my direction, but after a few moments, she smiled.
I saw Olaf at a table in the back. Even this early in the morning, empty glasses surrounded him on the table, another half-full glass dangling in his hand. But he didn't look upset—if anything, he looked almost celebratory.
Then Olaf turned and saw me, and his face broke into a wide sneer.
I sighed.
"Well, well, well!" Olaf leaned back in his chair and raised his glass in my direction. "Lemony Snicket! What sad rock did you crawl out from under?"
I ignored that remark. "Olaf," I said, walking over and sitting down next to him. I thought about resting my hands on the table, but the amount of empty glasses on it seemed to suggest I think otherwise, so I just kept my hands in my lap.
Olaf tilted his head back but still kept his eyes on me. "You've been out of touch with this crowd almost as much as I have, haven't you, Snicket?"
I frowned at Olaf, and he just grinned back.
"Up to more nefariously noble deeds, the ones that take you out of the city for those weeks at a time that has everyone else all up in arms about you and what you're doing?" He started to laugh, and it wheezed out of him in gleeful, hissing bursts.
I have never liked Olaf, and it was moments like these that reminded me just why. I was already worried enough about my affairs, but Olaf tended to throw the things I'd done in my face with a kind of fascination. He found it entertaining to remind me how much this organization had fallen apart, carefully avoiding what it had done to him as much as me.
I used to tell myself that at least I would never be like Olaf, a man who walked a very thin line between 'socially acceptable' and 'morally reprehensible' like it was his job. I'd watched him grow up from an irritating child with questionable ideas into an even more irritating adult with even more questionable ideas. And then I thought about myself, and what I'd grown up into, and I felt like I was walking that line myself, and then falling off into an ocean of endless misery.
I couldn't think about that now. I shook my head and decided to just dislike Olaf more.
"I'm here about Beatrice," I said.
Olaf stopped laughing and gasped dramatically, but I saw the mirth still gleaming in his eyes, and it scared me, a little, how much he seemed to be honestly enjoying an associate's death. "Oh, yes," he said, clutching at his chest. "Would that it were me, Snicket! How awful this is! So young, so talented, and cut down in her prime—why, I'll always remember, with all the fondness I can muster, which is, I'll have you know, a considerable amount, the time she asked me for acting lessons...."
I closed my eyes for a moment, trying to tune out his fabricated story. It was usually Kit's voice I heard whenever I had to deal with Olaf, telling me he doesn't mean it, not really, not all the time, but this time I heard a lighter voice in the back of my mind, one that said he just likes getting under people's skin, doesn't he?, and I saw Beatrice, sitting across from me in a different restaurant, a diner, frowning as she played with the straw in her root beer float.
I opened my eyes. "Kit said you were one of the last to see Beatrice," I said, trying to keep us both on the same page.
At the mention of my sister, Olaf's fingers twitched against the side of the glass in his hand, but his expression didn't waver. "I was the last, as a matter of fact," he said. "Beatrice and I went to lunch on Sunday. She asked, by the way. I didn't make it a habit of hanging around her. I only said yes because she looked so desperate."
"What did you talk about?"
Olaf shrugged. "Things," he said.
"That's unhelpfully unspecific," I said.
"Well, so was she," Olaf said. "Trust me, you weren't missing anything good, except a woman being a real failure at the concept of guilt-tripping. You need leverage to do that, and she didn't have it." He took a large gulp of his drink. "She was trying to be noble, but she came off as just plain irritating."
I sighed hard. Olaf was being as obtuse as I imagined he'd be. "What else?" I asked, trying not to sound as irritated as I myself felt.
Olaf hummed in thought. "She cried when she left, probably. Seems the type. Then I guess she went home? That's what I did. To my own home, thanks." He looked back at me. "I didn't follow her back to her apartment and murder her, Snicket. I hated Beatrice, sure, but I didn't hate her that much."
I considered believing him, and I told myself firmly that, given his track record over even just the past few minutes, I shouldn't believe him. Myself told me that, realistically, I didn't have any evidence except Olaf's natural personality, and that wouldn't really hold up anywhere. I told myself fine, I'd just have to figure out how to get him to tell the truth. Myself wished me good luck with that. I agreed that I'd need something short of a miracle to have a logical conversation with Olaf.
"Did she say anything else?" I asked. "Was she planning on meeting anyone else?"
Olaf took another sip of his drink. "Maybe. She had quite the rotating list of dinner dates. I wasn't the only one she had her eye on, if you know what I mean."
I knew what he wanted that to mean, and I knew what that actually meant, so I ignored it. "Did she look worried? Nervous?"
"I don't know."
"You ate lunch with her," I said, raising an eyebrow. "You must have looked at her at some point."
"Maybe I did," Olaf said loftily. "And maybe she looked a little scared, once or twice. I can't blame her. I just exude natural confidence, it's unsettling for others less sure of themselves."
"Is there anything else you can tell me?"
Olaf rested his chin on his hand and looked off into the distance. I counted out three minutes in my head before he said, "She bought me a roast beef sandwich."
I took in a deep breath and let it out a little faster than I had intended. Olaf did that to people. I stood up, pushing my chair back roughly. "Thank you for your time," I muttered.
Olaf drained the rest of his drink and dropped the empty glass onto the table. After wiping the back of his hand across his mouth, he said, "Hey. You're going to have to talk to Bertrand, aren't you?"
I didn't want to tell Olaf more than I had to, but this seemed unavoidable. "Yes."
"Can I come with you?"
I frowned. "Don't you have somewhere else to be?" I tried. I didn't want to spend longer with Olaf than was absolutely necessary. I was also, frankly, surprised that he'd even want to join me, considering I didn't think he really liked me, or even liked Bertrand. I didn't think he truly liked anyone, although that was up for debate.
"Nope," Olaf said cheerfully.
"Why would you even want to?"
Olaf merely grinned again, and I tried not to shiver at the sight of it. "I think it'd be fun to watch. This breaks his noble heart, isn't that how it goes?"
That was not, in fact, how it went, in any story. I wanted to get rid of him. But he looked like he wasn't going anywhere else anytime soon, and there was probably no man alive more dangerously volatile than Olaf.
"Fine," I said.
Olaf stood up. "Oh, hey. You haven't seen Esmé, have you?"
"No," I said, not even bothering to point out that of course I hadn't seen her because I'd spent my first hour back in the city in his own pleasant company.
"Oh, well." Olaf shrugged. "She can find me later." Then he looked down at the table. "You're paying, right?" he asked, raising an eyebrow and looking back and forth between me and the empty glasses littering the table.
I sighed, rummaged around in my pockets, and slammed the money down on the table.
Olaf's grin pulled to show all of his teeth. "Thanks, Snicket."
-
It is difficult to comfort the bereaved. Although you may try very hard not to say the wrong thing, you will invariably wind up doing it at some point, not through any insensitivity of your own, or over-sensitivity on behalf of the grieving, but because words are powerful, and memories are jogged at even the smallest, most seemingly inconsequential phrase. It is therefore necessary to bring with you a great deal of sympathy and an equal amount of patience and tissues. I didn't have the tissues, but I had the sympathy and patience.
Contrary to popular belief, I happened to enjoy Bertrand's company. He was the sort of person who was quietly kind, who seemed to make a room safer just by walking into it. The only thing we ever disagreed on was on the skill level of our chaperone, whom we had decided to just never speak of again.
Bertrand welcomed me into his apartment with a small, if strained, smile, and even did the same for Olaf, who sauntered in behind me and looked around the apartment with a critical eye. The sitting room was small but had comfortable couches, and I admired the wall-to-wall bookshelves. Despite Bertrand's grief, obvious in his shaking hands and the way he sometimes looked momentarily lost, running his hand through his short brown hair and frowning deeply, he still insisted on making us tea. He set the tray down on the coffee table and sat down next to me.
Bertrand smiled that tight smile again. "Kit told me you might be coming," he said. "Thank you."
"Don't you have any sugar?" Olaf asked, and he even looked under one of the light blue couch cushions to check.
Bertrand and I looked at Olaf, and then back to each other. "What can you tell me about Beatrice?" I asked. "When did you see her last?" I wished I had a better way to ask that, but I didn't.
"Sunday afternoon," Bertrand said. "I went—what?" He paused, because Olaf had sat up suddenly. "What is it?"
"I was the last one to see Beatrice," Olaf said, raising an eyebrow. "She took me to lunch."
"Well, after you went to lunch," Bertrand said, "I went over to her apartment to rehearse."
"Oh, sure, to rehearse," Olaf snickered. He leaned back against the couch.
Bertrand glared at him. "That's what it was," he insisted.
"What were you rehearsing?" I asked.
"Beatrice and I are in an upcoming play for our organization," Bertrand explained, still staring at Olaf, who was now poking the green couch pillows. "She likes—she liked going over the script as thoroughly as possible so that there weren't any mistakes." That made sense, as our plays were rarely just straightforward plays, and often included coded messages to our associates. "We went over it for a few hours and then I—I left. I came back here. I didn't hear from her after that." His voice cracked a little, and was almost a whisper by the end.
"Were you supposed to hear from her?"
Bertrand cleared his throat. "We had unconfirmed dinner plans," he said quietly.
I had a feeling what that meant, and I thought it would be kinder to not press it. Olaf, however, apparently didn't feel the same.
"I told you," he said, looking at me, "that I wasn't the only one she had her eye on."
"Beatrice wasn't that kind of person," Bertrand said quickly. "I'm sure she only went to lunch with you because she had a reason to."
Olaf grinned. "Did she tell you what we talked about?"
Bertrand blinked a few times. He swallowed, and then he took in a slow breath. "No," he said. "She didn't get the chance to."
Olaf rolled his eyes and pushed himself up off the couch. He walked leisurely around the room, peering into flower vases and music boxes and upending the occasional chess set. Bertrand frowned, his eyes carefully following Olaf.
"When you saw her," I asked, "did it seem like anything was wrong? Did she do or say anything specific?"
"She looked a little worried," Bertrand admitted, "but when I asked she said—" He paused, twisting his hands together in his lap. "She said it was nothing."
"Don't you have any Edgar Guest?" Olaf asked loudly, now pulling books out of the shelves haphazardly and flipping through them.
"No," Bertrand said, watching him with a disdainful look. "I find his poetry a little overly-sentimental, actually."
"So do I," I said.
"Well, there's no accounting for taste, I guess," Olaf muttered.
"Did you know anything she was working on?" I asked Bertrand. "Anything that might have put her in the path of someone that didn't like her?"
Bertrand shook his head. "Beatrice was careful about who she told things, even if they were close to her. I got the impression, however, that she saw Esmé quite frequently."
I knew very little about Esmé, but I knew enough to know that Beatrice probably hadn't been making social calls. "Can you think of any reason why?"
There was a crash in the corner of the room, and Bertrand and I both turned to see Olaf frozen by the window, a pile of books and an accompanying table knocked over at his feet.
"Is there something I can help you with?" Bertrand said loudly, looking incredulously at Olaf.
Olaf shrugged. "I'm just doing Snicket's job for him," he said. Then he stepped over the books and walked to the mantle, looking behind the photographs on it.
I sighed. I felt like a parent trying to keep track of a rambunctious child in a store full of breakable objects while I was trying to buy the most fragile one. Although Bertrand didn't have that much concrete information, he was still being more helpful than Olaf, and I wanted to listen to him.
Bertrand's gaze flicked between us. "If there's something you want to look through, you can just ask."
"He's too polite for that," Olaf said.
"On the contrary," I said, "I don't think Bertrand is hiding anything in this apartment." Honestly, I didn't. I have never known Bertrand to lie like Olaf, or to be the kind of person who kept more secrets than the usual amount one keeps. "But I would like to see Beatrice's."
-
Bertrand unlocked the door to Beatrice's apartment, and the three of us stepped inside.
Beatrice had done her apartment in shades of cream with red accents, although that didn't account for the red stain in the carpet by the door. I tried to ignore the feeling in my stomach and instead thought about how it must've happened. Someone came to the door. Beatrice opened the door. Someone shot Beatrice. Someone left. Kit and the Duchess of Winnipeg showed up, found Beatrice, and—what? Called it into headquarters. The higher ups must've moved the body. The police weren't involved, because the police are never involved, and they just would've complicated things.
I stared down at the stain on the floor. For being the remains of a murder, it wasn't very big. I told myself that she must not have been there for long.
I looked back up at Bertrand and Olaf. Bertrand was staring around the apartment, pale and lost again. Olaf, thankfully, hadn't started tearing through the place like he had with Bertrand's, but he looked at everything carefully, as if sizing it up. I wondered if he really did think he was doing my job for me.
The main room was long but not narrow, with a piano in one corner and the customary bookshelves settled on either side of the window on the far wall. There were two doors, one I assumed went to the kitchen, and the other to Beatrice's bedroom, the latter I hoped I wouldn't have to go into. Towards the middle of the room, a series of chairs sat around the grey and empty fireplace, and near the chairs, a white desk, piled with immaculately organized groups of papers.
The more I looked, the more I saw the small touches of Beatrice—the Neruda books on the shelves, the curl of her handwriting across the papers on her desk, the complete tea set sitting on the coffee table. An unfinished cross stitch of what looked like part of a message resting on a couch cushion, the picture of her and my sister and the Duchess of Winnipeg on the mantle, Sunday's newspaper folded up by the tea set. A slice of strawberry cake in the fridge. A Tito Puente record still in the record player. A new unwrapped box of tea on the kitchen counter. This is all that's left of her, Snicket, I told myself, and you did nothing about it.
Then I saw it. Hanging on the wall above the fireplace was a portrait, delicately painted, of Beatrice.
It wasn't as if I had been imagining that a twelve year old Beatrice had been killed, but that had been the last time I'd seen her, so somewhere, that was still the image of her in my head. When I looked at the portrait, I realized just how many years had gone by. She'd gotten taller, and her hair had grown longer, and her smile had turned sharper. She wore a purple sundress, and she stared out at the room with deep brown eyes that seemed to survey everything. I was struck suddenly by how much I had missed, and I felt like Beatrice was silently chiding me for it. It was a dreadful feeling.
I could hear her as if she was standing right behind me. I heard your apprenticeship starts soon.
It does, I had told her.
I also heard you picked Markson, she said, the smile clear in her voice. What are you getting into, Mr. Snicket?
Nothing much, I had lied, because I hadn't known, and it was a question we often asked each other.
She laughed. You'll need this. She handed me her tape measure, the one shaped like a small bat. Take good care of it, okay?
I never saw it again. I never saw Beatrice again.
Bertrand's voice brought me back to the apartment. "Are you looking for anything in particular?" he asked.
I pulled myself away from the portrait and looked at Bertrand. "Anything that might tell me what happened," I said, "or who might have wanted her dead." I moved through the room, stopping by the desk again and rifling through the papers. There were letters from a few of our associates, but none that I would consider enemies, and nothing from anyone I didn't recognize.
"A lot of people probably want most of us dead," Bertrand said, a little numbly. He stared at me as I looked through Beatrice's desk. "Those were Beatrice's letters—she wouldn't have wanted you looking through them—"
"I'm sorry," I said, and I meant it. "I have to."
"But—"
"Something you don't want Snicket to see, Bertrand?" Olaf asked, and he emerged from the kitchen, which I hadn't even seen him enter, eating the slice of cake from the fridge.
Bertrand paled. "I—no, that's not it, it's just—"
"Afraid he'll find out something?" Olaf continued, a taunting smile on his face, and I had a bad feeling about what he was going to say next. "Like what happened when you told Beatrice you loved her? Because if I remember correctly, she didn't exactly return your sentiments, did she?" He took another bite of cake, his teeth scraping against the fork.
If there was even any color left in Bertrand's face from before, there certainly wasn't any now. He seemed to sway on the spot, and he grabbed the back of a nearby cream-colored chair for support. "I—"
"We all knew she didn't like you, that she was just being polite," Olaf said, waving the fork around. "Come on. What'd she say, when you told her?"
"That's none of your business," Bertrand said, his voice trembling. "You don't—it's not—"
"Oh really? Because Beatrice is dead, Bertrand," Olaf said, and the smile on his face twisted in a way I am fearful of describing fully. "And I think that makes you a little suspicious, don't you think?"
I looked at Bertrand, whose face was doing a very admirable job of staying carefully blank even as his eyes watered. "I—" he began, very shakily. "I can't be here." He walked quickly to the door. "I'll be in the hall."
Olaf snickered and jammed the rest of the cake in his mouth as the door shut behind Bertrand. "I'm so glad I came," he said, a little muffled from the cake.
I glared at Olaf. "I think you should leave," I said quietly. It seemed now that the drawbacks of Olaf being here outweighed the benefits of making sure he didn't do anything else. If all he was going to do anyway was insult Bertrand and me and then eat a dead woman's cake, I didn't think I had to watch him anymore.
"But then who would tell you how to do your job, Snicket?" he said, his voice light, his eyes dancing.
"I think you should leave," I repeated.
Olaf held my gaze for a long moment, still grinning, before he laughed again, dropped the plate and fork on top of the piano, and walked out. I heard his cheerful good-bye to Bertrand, and I pretended not to hear the answering sob.
I took the plate and fork back to the kitchen and washed them off. I put them back in their proper places in the cabinets with a little more force than was necessary. Hate is a very strong word, but sometimes it is the only word to describe how you feel about someone so vile and terrible, and in that moment, I hated Olaf more than I'd ever done before.
I stayed in the apartment a little longer, looking through the records, the cabinets, even inside the piano. There was nothing that gave any indication as to what Beatrice had been up to, who could've entered, or why they would've wanted her dead. Also, I felt uncomfortable being there with Bertrand just outside the door. With a sigh, I gave it up for the moment as a lost cause and went back into the hallway.
Bertrand, who had been leaning against the wall, jumped when I closed the door. His eyes were red. "What did you find?" he asked.
"Nothing so far," I said, shaking my head.
Bertrand closed his eyes. "I see."
I wished I had some words of consolation for Bertrand, since I still didn't have any tissues. But I still didn't know what to say, and I worried that anything I could say would just make it worse.
"I didn't kill her," Bertrand whispered.
"I didn't think you did," I said.
We stood in silence. Then Bertrand opened his eyes and dug through his pockets before he pulled out a small object. "Here," he said, and he handed me the key he'd used to unlock the door. "You'll probably need it. I don't think....well, I won't have much use for it now." He pressed his lips together tightly.
Something cold settled inside me at Bertrand's words. It is difficult to lose the people closest to you, particularly when you are not expecting it. It's like having a good book taken from you before you had the chance to finish it, and then the book was burned, and you realized with a slow, sinking feeling that you would never be able to find out how it ends. You can imagine, but you will never know for sure. A numbing grief settles in your chest in the space created by this loss, one that seems to cause as much pain as it causes you emptiness. I had cared for Beatrice, in my own way, but Bertrand had loved her, and it wasn't until that moment that I truly understood that space that had formed in our lives or what it meant.
I cleared my throat more than was necessary. "Thank you," I managed.
Bertrand smiled, or he tried to smile, or his face did something that was less of a smile and more of a sincere attempt to pull himself together. He sighed, and then he walked off down the hall, turned the corner, and disappeared.
I stood in the hallway for a long time, looking down at the key in my hand.
Later, I returned to my own apartment alone. It was about the same as I had left it—relatively clean except for the layer of dust starting to settle over the furniture and the papers I had pinned to the walls. My typewriter still sat in the corner. All my books were still there. Kit had restocked the refrigerator. I checked the condiment jars but found nothing important. I sat down and poured myself a drink but didn't taste it. I rolled the glass in my hands instead and watched the darkness settle outside through the lone window in my living room.
It wasn't the first night I had cried myself to sleep. But it was the first night that it was because of Beatrice.
I had a feeling it wouldn't be the last.
-
I spent the next morning questioning the landlord of Beatrice's apartment building and the other residents of her floor. They recalled nothing out of the ordinary that night, because they weren't trained for that sort of thing, but one of them placed the gunshot at ten-thirty that night.
"Did you call the police?" I asked, hoping they hadn't.
They shrugged. "A gunshot's not unusual around here," they said.
Afterwards, I returned to her apartment to search it properly, now that I didn't have Olaf and Bertrand with me. The room was exactly the same. Same cream carpet, same red and white furnishings, same thick curtains, same stain. My eyes lingered on Beatrice's portrait above the fireplace for a moment, and then I went to the desk and sat down.
On the left side was a thick collection of papers, bound by a smooth white cover with typewritten words on the front. I flipped through it briefly. It was the rehearsal script, with a few of the props underlined but otherwise nothing that stood out about it. I set it back down.
Now that I could peruse her letters without interruption, I found that there was a little more information there than I'd assumed. There were quite a few letters from Bertrand, letters that I was a little embarrassed to read. I read them anyway, and only confirmed that Bertrand had been in love, but certainly in a way that didn't suggest he'd go so far as to murder Beatrice for spurning him, if she'd even done that anyway. I wondered what Beatrice had written back to him, and then I told myself, very firmly, that it didn't matter.
In one of the desk drawers, which I had a great deal of trouble opening with a nearby pen, considering my lock-picking skills hadn't gotten better over the years, I found a letter from Monty, where he'd written her in the Sebald Code about the location of the Virginian Wolfsnake. There were other letters from the Duchess of Winnipeg, written after the previous Duchess of Winnipeg died. There were notes from Josephine and my sister, locations of meeting places or drop offs, and I even found a note from Olivia, partially burned, outlining the details of something that had involved our Volunteer Feline Detectives. If they told me anything, it was that Beatrice had been at the center of a good number of fragmentary plots.
A notebook, bound on the side with a lock, rested in the center drawer. I bit my lip and steeled myself. I still felt sick breaking the diary open, but I did it. I had to know from her what had happened the day she'd died, and the only way to do that was to read it. I flipped through to the last entry.
January 8th
Today I asked Olaf to lunch, to talk about what I'd overheard at the Veritable French Diner yesterday afternoon. He looked surprised, but when I told him I'd pay, he agreed. What a charmer.
I tried to tell him he didn't have to do it, but he told me—in no uncertain terms, either—that he was going through with it anyway. I tried to appeal to his sense of nobility—or at least morality—although I am finding that the terms are somewhat similar—but he laughed at me and told me he wasn't the only one planning things like he was. I didn't fall for the bait, though. The evidence I had was against him, and that was what I wanted to talk about.
When I told him Kit would be so disappointed in him, he suddenly stopped laughing. His face became hard and cold, and he looked every bit the villain everyone believes he is. He told me that if I ever mentioned Kit's name again that he'd—well, it was a gruesome threat, to put it mildly. I left the restaurant shaking.
I'll have to tell Bertrand and Kit and Ramona, so we can figure out where to go from here. I don't think Kit will like it.
I feel so sorry for her—I know how much she cared about Olaf. I was starting to believe he cared about her, too. It can't have been easy for them—Esmé certainly didn't make it easy, I know that. I'll never forget the first time Kit told me about Esmé, since she'd become an apprentice after us and I didn't know her very well yet. "She's subtle about everything but her clothes," Kit said. From what I've seen of Esmé from interacting with her, and especially from following her the past few weeks, I have to agree.
Whatever happens, I've hidden it in my bedroom. It feels silly to say it, but I don't think I've ever been so frightened or worried in my whole life.
I leaned back in the chair. It had cleared up a few things, but now I had more questions. What did Beatrice have against Olaf, and had she managed to tell anyone else? Why was she following Esmé, and what did she find out? What had she hidden in her bedroom? I had never known Beatrice to be anything but in control of every situation she was in—what scared her?
Had Olaf gone through with his threat anyway? I didn't put it past Olaf to lie to me about what he'd done on Sunday. He could easily have followed Beatrice back to her apartment and then waited until Bertrand left. But by the time Beatrice wrote the entry, she hadn't seen Bertrand. How much time had passed between that entry, Bertrand's arrival and departure, and her death at 10:30? What had prevented her from putting it in?
"Lemony?"
I looked up and saw a woman frozen in the doorway, her eyes wide, her hand still on the doorknob. I hadn't seen her in quite some time, but I immediately recognized the tight curls of black hair and the distinctly Winnipeg facial structure.
"I didn't know you were in the city, R," I said. I was always uncomfortable using initials with my associates, but with the Duchess of Winnipeg, I never felt that comfortable calling her Ramona, no matter how many times she'd insisted over the years.
"I didn't know you were here either," Ramona said, a little breathlessly. She closed the door behind her and walked slowly toward me, taking off her coat. Then I saw her eyes fall on the diary in my hands, the letters open on the desk in front of me, and the sparse color in her cheeks drained away. "You're investigating it, then."
"Yes.”
"I'm glad it's you," Ramona said, smiling sadly. "I'm so glad to see you, Lemony."
I stood up in time to hug Ramona back as her arms tightened around my chest. Although I hadn't avoided Ramona, like I had avoided Beatrice, I still hadn't made it a point to interact with her, which I regretted now. It was nice to see her.
Ramona pulled back, sniffling. "I saw the light on from the street, and I thought maybe Bertrand was up here, but I—it's you, it's really you." She laughed a little and wiped at her eyes. "Have you found anything yet? Anything at all?"
"A few things," I said, looking down at the diary. "Do you know why Beatrice was tailing Esmé? Bertrand said she didn't tell anyone what she was doing, but did you maybe—"
"Beatrice didn't tell a lot of people a lot of things," Ramona said, shaking her head. "She was always very quiet about what she did, because she was careful, and she liked to cover her tracks. But she told me and Kit some things. She told us a little about Esmé."
"Like what?"
"Well, she said she was doing it on our organization's orders. Headquarters was suspicious of Esmé, which is not surprising at all, knowing Esmé. Oh, and then Kit told us she was following Olaf. Not on any orders or anything, she was just following him. She told us that at lunch the day before—" Ramona closed her eyes and took in a long breath. "Before."
"What happened on Saturday?”
She sighed. "Well, like I said, Kit and I had lunch with Beatrice. Then Beatrice left to go follow Esmé again. She said it looked like Esmé was going to meet Olaf."
"Where did my sister go?"
"What?"
"If Beatrice thought Esmé was meeting with Olaf," I said, "shouldn't Kit have gone with her, if she was following Olaf?"
"Oh, that's right!" Ramona said. "She meant to, they even meant to leave together, but outside the restaurant we ran into Dewey and he and Kit went somewhere, and then Beatrice—she went wherever Esmé was. I—she was supposed to tell me that night. She was supposed to check in, but she didn't, but I—I didn't think it was too unusual, she often got wrapped up in things to the point where she didn't communicate for a while." She swallowed and looked down, twisting her fingers together. "But when Kit and I didn't see her at all the next day, we got worried, and we went to her apartment that night to make sure she was—make sure she was okay. And, well." Ramona gave a watery chuckle. "She wasn't, was she," she whispered.
"She had lunch with Olaf on Sunday," I said. "Can you think of any reason why?"
Ramona frowned. "If Beatrice voluntarily went somewhere with him, she must have had a reason."
"I want you to read this." I held out the diary.
Ramona took it. I watched her eyes move quickly down the page. "So Esmé was with Olaf on Saturday!" she said after finishing the entry. "Beatrice must've overheard whatever they talked about. It sounds like she found out something dangerous. Olaf brags a lot, about a lot of things, he might have said something he didn't intend to and she overheard him."
"What could he have worried about her overhearing?"
"Well, even if he talks a lot, he can be kind of vague about it, can't he?" Ramona said, handing me back the diary. "You ask him one question and he winds up making it about his acting career or roast beef."
I nodded. I knew that all too well.
"I know he's up to something—when isn't he, really—but I don't know what. It sure sounds like something horrible, though, for him to threaten her. Kit might know."
I'd have to find Kit and ask her about that later. Now, I had another question to ask Ramona. It was something I hadn't asked Bertrand, considering he hadn't had the view of Beatrice's apartment that Ramona had. "When you and Kit got there, did you see anyone else? In the hallway, or outside, or even in the apartment? Anyone at all?"
Ramona bit her lip. "....I thought I saw Bertrand outside," she said slowly. "It looked like he was walking away from the building when Kit and I got there. But—but I couldn't tell for sure if it was him, Lemony, it was dark and his back was turned, it could've been anyone."
It was puzzling to think of why Bertrand would've still been at Beatrice's apartment, but I didn't think it was him, or that he'd be the type to lie to me about what had happened that night. I closed the diary and set it back down on the desk. I thought about what Bertrand had said the day before. A lot of people probably want most of us dead. I said it to Ramona.
"Probably." Ramona smiled grimly. "And there's even more who would actually go through with it if they thought one of us was enough of a threat."
I looked up at the portrait of Beatrice. We all knew, somewhere, the risks involved in what we did. We all knew what could happen to us, what had happened to some of us even before this. But it was still hard to think about it sometimes, that there were things at work in the world so opposed to us that they'd go as far as to remove an associate completely. I stared at the portrait, and the longer I stared the worse I felt, but I didn't look away.
Ramona followed my gaze and her smile turned soft. "I painted that for her," she said quietly. "Last summer. She—she kept complaining that she had to sit still for so long." Her smile wobbled dangerously. "She was always doing something, always out somewhere, always meeting people or watching them. She doesn't—she didn't like to be alone. She kept to herself sometimes, but she didn't like to be alone."
She sounded like she was going to cry, and I didn't like it. I had only seen Ramona cry once, and it was an experience I didn't want to relive. Something about Ramona crying always made me want to cry, because it just didn't seem like Ramona, headstrong and stubborn Ramona, the Ramona who teased everyone and had a laugh brighter than the sun, should ever have to cry. I tried to change the subject gently. "I didn't know you painted, R."
Ramona cleared her throat. "I am a woman of many talents, Lemony Snicket," she said, managing a smile and something like her usual lofty voice. "Stick around and you'll find that out."
I smiled.
"Aha!" Ramona exclaimed. "How long has it been since I've seen you smile? It looks good on you, Lemony. You know, we should really get together. We can play cards again, like we used to!"
My smile faltered. I liked seeing Ramona, but I hadn't expected her to say that. I didn't know if I was capable of doing that, of spending any more time than I had to with my associates. "Or I could just give you all my pens right now and save us the trouble," I said.
Ramona just shook her head. "Come on, Lemony," she said, still smiling. "You never talk to me anymore. Or anyone!"
"I'm not very good company," I said.
Her smile turned a little sad again. "Doesn't Kit ever tell you that you think too much?"
I turned away from her and studied the carpet, as if that would make me feel less embarrassed. "Sometimes," I muttered.
"Well, you really do," Ramona said, and then she put her coat on. "There's not a lot of us left, Lemony." Her eyes darted back to the portrait and then to me. "We should stick together."
I shrugged awkwardly. I knew Ramona had a point, but I still couldn't bring myself to agree with her. It would just cause her more trouble than she needed.
Ramona's sigh sounded faintly exasperated, but she didn't press it anymore. "Are you at least going to come to the play next week?" she asked instead, buttoning her coat.
"The play? Oh, right." I remembered the script on the desk and what Bertrand had said yesterday.
"It's been a bit of an afterthought for everyone the past few days," Ramona said. "We haven't rehearsed since Saturday. We're planning one for tomorrow, though." Her smile was thin now. "We've got some casting problems to work out now."
"You're still going to do it?"
Ramona held her head high even as her mouth trembled. "The show must go on, Lemony Snicket," she said. "I mean—I don't think it'll be the same without her. But we have to do it. She would've wanted us to do it. We have information to give out. I guess you know Bertrand's in it, but even Olaf is. Even if he never shows up to rehearsal on time." She rolled her eyes. "Honestly, I don't know why he's still in it. The information we give out is usually about his friends, if you can even call them that."
I frowned. "He doesn't notice what you're saying?"
"The messages aren't in the script, they're in the actions," Ramona explained. "We pick up different props for different plans. Beatrice came up with that. In case the script is changed or compromised, or we get new information too quickly to change the script, we can still convey what we need to with the props."
"That's clever," I said with a smile.
"Very clever," Ramona agreed. Then her expression turned serious. "About the play—there's something I think you should look into—"
The door slammed open and cut her off. Ramona and I turned to see Olaf, Bertrand, and Kit entering the apartment, already in the middle of a conversation.
"I don't see why you had to come with us," Bertrand was saying, striding into the room as if determined to get away from Olaf, who was close behind him. "I don't even know why you want to!"
"He just likes to know everything that's going on," Kit said irritably.
Olaf gaped at them, affronted. "So do you two!"
"What's going on here?" Ramona asked, looking between everyone.
"I'd like to know that myself," I said. I didn't mind seeing Bertrand, and I was happy to see my sister, but the fact that Olaf was with them made me uneasy.
"At least Bertrand and I have a reason to be here!" Kit said, slamming the door behind her. "You didn't care about Beatrice!"
"Alright, you've got me there," Olaf conceded, crossing his arms over his chest and surveying my sister. "But I think you all are a little too close to home here. You've got all these emotions getting in the way of figuring out what happened. I think I, as a somewhat impartial third party, should take over!"
"You'd never get anything done!" Bertrand exclaimed.
Olaf gasped dramatically, like he'd done yesterday. "What lack of confidence! I'm sure I could uncover anything Snicket could, and probably even more!"
"Which brings us to why we're here in the first place." Bertrand turned to me. "Have you found out anything new since yesterday, Snicket?"
Ramona and I looked at each other. It would've been different if Olaf hadn't been there—we could easily have discussed Beatrice's diary entry with Kit and Bertrand. But with Olaf in the room, I was wary to say anything too important. We came to a decision.
"Nope," I said.
"Not a thing," Ramona said.
"There," Kit said, whirling around and facing Olaf, while Bertrand sighed next to them, all the fight seeming to drain out of him. "There's nothing to find. Are you happy? You can stop playing this stupid game of yours and leave!"
"Game?" Olaf asked innocently. "And what would that be, Kit?"
"Where you bother people and talk in circles until you get them to do what you want just so you'll leave them alone!"
"You didn't think it was so stupid when we were kids, Kit," Olaf said, suddenly leering at her in a way that made me nervous. "You thought it was clever."
"I've grown up, thanks," Kit replied shortly. "Get out."
"Mm, no," Olaf said. "I don't think I will." He threw himself down into one of the armchairs, crossing his legs and twisting his head to look about the room. "You know, Beatrice had a lot of nice stuff. What's going to happen to it?"
I frowned at Olaf. There was something he was looking for, something he didn't want anyone else to know about. I remembered what Beatrice had written. Whatever happens, I've hidden it in my bedroom.
"I don't know," Bertrand said, and this time he glanced at Ramona.
I remembered that almost all of the Winnipeg line had been involved in our organization in some way or another, and that Ramona would most likely be the one to know what would happen to an associate's personal possessions after their death, considering what had happened to her mother.
Ramona blinked rapidly. "Oh, well—our organization will most likely repossess it? It's not like she had a will or anything, I don't think."
"Great!" Olaf said. The expressions on everyone's faces, including my own, tried to tell him that that was not great, but Olaf had never been one to listen or read the atmosphere. "So we can just take stuff, right?" He picked up one of the nearby flower vases and brought it up to his eye, staring inside it, just as he'd done before at Bertrand's.
"Put that down, Olaf," I said.
He turned, looking at me now, and smiled a tight smile. "Beatrice had something of mine," he said. "Or something of Esmé's. Either way, you know. Now I'd like it back."
"I didn't know you were Esmé's personal assistant now," Kit muttered.
Ramona, Bertrand, and I all looked at each other with varying degrees of worry. I had the feeling it was Kit and Olaf's first time in a room with each other since the fight that had ended their relationship. It certainly explained the way they were going at each other. I didn't know whether or not I should stop them or let them continue—I had a feeling they might have continued even if I did try to stop them, anyway. Relationship problems tend to unintentionally override the importance of everything else, even a murder investigation.
"Well, you wouldn't, would you?" Olaf shot back, dropping the vase back down onto the table.
Kit raised an eyebrow. "What's that supposed to mean?"
"You're pretty bad at following people, Kit. Did you think I didn't notice you, trailing behind me lately?" He stared straight at her. "Still don't trust me, do you?"
My sister looked desperate for a split second. "That's—" Kit began, but then she stopped, as if realizing they weren't alone. She schooled her expression back into something reminiscent of the way I usually saw her, calm and collected. She probably fooled everyone else in the room, but I saw the way her shoulders tensed. "Of course I don't," she said, now glaring down at Olaf. "Not with the people you associate with."
"Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't we associate with the same people?" Olaf gestured to the room. "Aren't we all associating right now?"
"Don't be so literal," Kit snapped. "At least the people I started associating with were better than Esmé!"
"Oh, so it's alright for you to see new people and get away with it, but not me?"
"Dewey does not regularly engage in suspicious activity," Kit said, struggling to keep her voice level.
"And Esmé does?" Olaf asked, his eyebrow raising.
"You can't honestly think she doesn't."
"See, this is your problem, Kit," Olaf said, and he pushed himself up out of his chair with a force that moved it back at least an inch. "This has always been your problem! If something or someone doesn't fit into your narrow view of the world, you immediately suspect it!"
"Go on, then," Kit said. She still stood her ground, with her jaw clenched and her arms crossed tight over her chest. "Prove me wrong, Olaf. When was the last time you saw Esmé, and what was she doing?"
For a moment, it was as if something had broken open in Olaf's face, a realization of something he hadn't considered. His eyes went wide.
I suddenly had a thought. It was a wild thought. Realistically, it made no sense. But also realistically, reality is sometimes fairly unpredictable. Life tends to be a little absurd at the worst of times. It was improbable. It couldn't be. But for a second, for that single second, it was a thought that made a little bit of sense.
But then the moment was over, and Olaf was grinning again, a twisted grimace. He walked slowly over to my sister until he was too close to her. "That is none of your damn business," he hissed.
A heavy silence hung in the room. Kit glared back at Olaf and looked like she could tear the world apart. Ramona looked like she wanted to hug Kit and punch Olaf at the same time. Bertrand, still in the corner, looked concerned. And Beatrice's portrait, hanging on the wall, looked down at all of us.
I figured now was a good time to speak up. "I think," I said, "that we should all leave. If I find anything else, I'll let you all know."
That seemed to bring everyone back to the gravity of the situation. Bertrand cleared his throat and left the room first, nodding at me as he left. Ramona waved a little as she approached the door, and I waved back. Olaf stared at Kit for a moment longer before he too walked out. The second the door shut behind him, Kit sighed, her shoulders sagging. She sat down in the chair Olaf had just vacated, let out an impatient noise when she realized what chair it was, and sat down on the couch instead.
I walked over and sat down next to her. "Are you alright?" I asked.
"Am I alright," Kit repeated, smiling hollowly. "I don't know. I guess I don't know anything."
The more I lived in this world, the more I was miserably certain that I was not the only Snicket sibling plagued by a sense of horrifying doubt. But it was still strange, almost frightening, to hear my sister so uncertain.
Kit sighed again, more rushed than before, as if she was trying to shake herself out of her previous conversation. She turned to me. "You look tired," she said.
I shrugged. "So do you."
"Don't sass your sister," Kit said, but the corner of her mouth pulled up a little bit. "Did you really not find anything new yet? Anything at all?"
I thought about the diary. "Beatrice had lunch with Olaf on Sunday," I said. "It sounded like she had something against him and was trying to talk him out of it. She hid whatever that was here, in her apartment."
Kit looked around the room. "That must be why Olaf wanted to know what would happen to her things. And Beatrice could've hidden it anywhere, with all the different ways to hide information. You don't know what it is?"
"No."
She stood up and walked around slowly, running her fingers over the mantle, the tables, the unfinished cross stitch. "Have you looked everywhere?"
I cleared my throat and glanced briefly in the direction of the bedroom door. "I have it on good authority that it's probably in there," I said, "but I—"
Kit almost laughed. "My brother, the gentleman," she said, and she crossed to the other side of the room and pushed open the door to the only room I hadn't entered.
I remained in the sitting room while Kit searched the bedroom. I heard her opening drawers, flipping through books, removing box lids, switching lamps on and off, running her hands over the carpet, and properly picking locks before snapping them shut again. Meanwhile, I tried not to look at the portrait on the wall, irrationally afraid that I would find Beatrice's painted eyes upon me.
A few minutes later, Kit emerged from the bedroom and sat back down next to me, pushing her hair behind her ears. "Well, whatever it is," she said, "Beatrice hid it well. I didn't find anything suspicious."
I sighed. Then I realized I had to ask my sister a question I didn't think she wanted to hear. "Kit," I began, "can I ask why you were following Olaf?"
"You just did," Kit replied automatically, like she always did, but her shoulders had tensed again. She ran a hand through her hair. "I just—I wanted to know what he was up to."
"What was he up to?"
"Not much. He spends a lot of time with Esmé, but there was nothing I could find to tie them specifically to any plots. They probably just hide it well, though."
I didn't want to ask the next question either, but I had to. "What did Dewey want, when he talked to you?"
Kit's mouth twisted. "....nothing. It was nothing."
"Nothing?" It was hard to believe my sister would have deserted even a self-positioned post over just nothing.
"He just—" Kit fidgeted with the edge of her jacket, pulling the hem tight around her fingers. "He just wanted to talk. About me. He asked how I was doing. If I was okay."
I didn't say anything. Dewey Denouement was better than Olaf, but I was still a little surprised that at that moment my sister had prioritized him over following a potentially dangerous associate.
"Don't give me that look," Kit said darkly.
I blinked. "What look?"
"I know what you're thinking. You think I haven't thought the same thing?"
"What?"
Kit clenched her jaw tight again. "That if I hadn't gone," she said, her voice low, "I would've been able to find out something to prevent this whole thing from happening. And then Beatrice—" She closed her eyes.
I frowned at my sister. "I'm sorry," I said.
"Forget about it," she said, shaking her head. "It happened, and I can't—I shouldn't—just forget about it. It's not going to happen again, anyway. I'm not that stupid."
My eyes found their way up to the portrait on the wall again. I thought about Olaf, and the look on his face when Kit had mentioned Esmé, and the thought I'd had in that moment. I wanted to ask Kit about it, but I also didn't. I knew what her reaction would be, and I knew I wouldn't like it. I knew she wouldn't like it. But there are many things in this world that we don't like and have to go through with anyway.
"Kit," I said, "do you think everything adds up here?"
Kit frowned. "What do you mean?"
"Someone's lying," I said. "Or everyone is. Or covering up for someone else. Or they just don't realize it."
"That sounds like almost every situation we've ever been in."
"There's things that just don't feel right—Olaf's reactions, what Bertrand told me—and why hasn't anyone seen Esmé?"
"What are you getting at?"
I took in a breath. "I wonder," I said, "if Beatrice was really here that night."
Kit's face did exactly what I thought it would. Her mouth pulled into a sad frown, her eyebrows furrowing. As we got older, she tended to look that way often around me.
"Hey," she said, very gently, "I know you—"
"I'm just saying," I said quickly. "I'm just thinking out loud. Stranger things have happened."
"But this—there's no way around it, Beatrice—Beatrice is dead. I know it's hard, I know, but—"
"Fine," I said, shaking my head. "Forget it, Kit."
"L—"
"I said, forget it." It came out harder than I wanted it to. I walked away from her, frowning down at the floor. "I'll think about it myself."
Kit was silent for a few moments. "I hate it when you do this," she said softly.
"Do what?" I asked, turning back around to face her. I was angry with my sister and I let it get away with me. "Get in over my head because I want to know? What else am I supposed to do? What else was I trained to do?"
Kit didn't reply. She just stared at me, with that expression I was sadly accustomed to. We looked at each other for what felt like a long time, until my anger faded away and I felt horrible about it and Kit once again looked as tired as I felt.
"I'm sorry," she said.
"Forget about it," I said again.
Kit stood up. She walked over to me. "Anything else you need me to do?"
I shook my head.
"Are you sure?"
I shook my head again.
She stared at me a little longer before she said anything else. "I'll see you later," Kit said, and she left.
I stood there and glared at the floor. Kit thought I was wrong, which was understandable, as I had been wrong before on multiple occasions, but I didn't want to be wrong this time. She'd been right when she'd said that something was going on in our organization, something more than the usual things we all got into. It didn't seem that far-fetched to think that might apply here as well.
There was one way to make sure. Just in case.
-
Despite not talking to him for months, I managed to track down Hector fairly easily. When your associates know the kind of food you favor, it is not difficult to find you, especially when it is around dinner time and you're supposed to be eating. I found Hector in a Mexican restaurant. He sat in a back booth, away from the light from the windows and the overhead lamps, eating a quesadilla and perusing the newspaper, if you could call The Daily Punctilio a newspaper, which I suppose you could in the sense that it was made of paper and had words constructed into sentences that may or may not be news.
I slid into the seat across from him. "Hello, Hector."
Hector jumped, nearly dropping the quesadilla. He did drop a section of the newspaper, though, which was probably for the best. "Snicket! I heard a rumor you were back, but I—"
"I am," I said. "For now, anyway. I need a favor."
"Of course," Hector said. "What is it?"
"It's about Beatrice."
Hector blinked in surprise. "But she's—"
I shook my head quickly. "I know, just hear me out on this. I need you to tap the phone in her apartment."
"You need me to what?"
"You heard me."
Hector stared at me, the quesadilla dangling in his hand. "Why?"
"I just need to make sure," I said.
"Of what?"
"I don't know." I did know, but I didn't want him to have the same reaction Kit had. I didn't like being vague about it, but I didn't have any choice.
"That's pretty specific," Hector commented, frowning.
"Just trust me, Hector. It's a precaution."
Hector took a few more bites of his quesadilla and chewed thoughtfully. "Alright, Snicket. I'll go there tonight, okay?"
I smiled. "Thank you."
-
I didn't have a reason to be in Beatrice's apartment later that night, but I was there anyway. Hector was downstairs, all the equipment set up to tap the phone, ready in case anything happened. Nothing would probably happen. I didn't have to be there.
But I wanted to be there.
I told myself that I would be looking for what Beatrice had hidden, what Olaf wanted and what Kit and I hadn't yet found. It didn't hurt to look again. It was probably wise to look again, in fact.
I didn't mean for it to happen, but when I stepped into the apartment and turned on the lights I found myself looking at her portrait again. The longer I stared at it, the more I heard her.
I'm going to miss this when you're not here, she'd said, stirring the straw in her root beer float. Whatever will I do, Mr. Snicket?
I'm sure you'll think of something, I told her. I said that there were diners in most towns that probably served a variety of carbonated drinks with ice cream in them.
She smiled at me, the smile that would've made me do anything, the smile that had me there in that apartment. You won't be there, she said.
I had said that maybe I could arrange something. It shouldn't be too hard to see each other. It shouldn't be too hard to sneak away from our chaperones, who never knew everything anyway.
I didn't. I hadn't. I couldn't. I turned away from the portrait and stared at the records by the record player until the face of Tito Puente was burned into my mind and Beatrice's wasn't.
I reminded myself I had a job to do. I reminded myself that several times. Myself reminded me that that didn't mean it was going to be easy.
I didn't want to be in Beatrice's bedroom. That was a line I did not, under any circumstances, want to cross, and why I'd had Kit search it instead of going in there myself. But Kit wasn't here now to check it again, and I had to find what it was. I still didn't know what it was, but I had to look for it anyway.
Beatrice's bedroom was styled similarly to the rest of the apartment, and in general, like most people's bedrooms. The closet doors were the kind that slid against each other when you pushed them. There was a white vanity and dresser against one wall. The bed was on the other side of the room. There were books in here as well, piled on bedside tables. Everything looked clean and neat.
I tried to make the search as quick but thorough as possible. There was nothing under the bed. The dresser drawers were filled alternately with more books and clothes, and I used the books to prod through the clothes for anything that stood out, anything that clunked or crinkled.
Nothing. I still found nothing. I looked around the room again, thinking it would be helpful if I knew what exactly it was Beatrice had hidden. I thought back to what I'd seen Olaf look through—behind books, behind picture frames, inside vases. It couldn't be very big, then.
I opened the jewelry boxes on the vanity, I looked inside the shoes in the closet, behind all the books, inside the books, inside anything I could find. And I still hadn't found it. The most notable thing was the small key I'd found in one of the jewelry boxes, but there wasn't anything I could find that had a matching lock. I replaced the books and the shoes and the box lids and left the bedroom, thinking I could read through the entry in her diary again and try to see if she'd left any other clues.
"Well, well, well."
I was doing an awful lot of spinning around when people walked into a room that day, and I did it again, still gripping the handle of the bedroom door. Only instead of Ramona being in the main doorway, like she'd been earlier, it was Olaf, lounging against the door frame, that same smile on his face. I was getting sick of that smile.
"What are you doing here?" I asked, although I had a good idea why.
"Just thought I'd drop by," he said.
"Don't you have anything better to do?" But even as I said it, I knew it wouldn't be able to get rid of him. A similar sentence hadn't worked yesterday, and it didn't look like it was going to work now.
"Nope," Olaf said. "And neither do you, it looks like, so you can get off your high horse, Snicket."
I frowned. "I'm supposed to be here," I told him. It was true. More or less.
Olaf eyed the bedroom door behind me, my hand still on the doorknob. His grin became too wide. "And you guys all think I'm creepy," he laughed, walking forward leisurely, his hands in his pockets. "Isn't this a little much, even for you?"
I jerked my hand away from the doorknob and glared at Olaf, my shoulders tensing. Olaf stumbled a little as he came towards me, and I tried to brace myself, because an intoxicated Olaf was worse than just an Olaf drunk on his own self-confidence and a smaller amount of alcohol.
"You'd think you'd be more careful," Olaf said. His smile pulled even more. You think you'd learn, I heard. I hate it when you do this. "You always get in too deep, don't you? That's what your sister always said, anyway."
"We're not talking about my sister," I said.
"Mm, I guess we aren't," Olaf said, shrugging. "We're talking about someone else." His eyes flicked to the portrait on the wall and then back to me. "I'll give her this, she was pretty. You thought that too, didn't you?"
I didn't reply. I didn't look at the portrait. He just likes getting under people's skin, doesn't he? I heard it anyway, and then I hated that I heard it, because it just proved Olaf right. And it wasn't that I didn't know I loved Beatrice, but to hear him bring it up made it seem twisted and wrong.
"You think that now, I guess. What, you think she's going to come out of the wall and profess her love for you? What dream are you in, Snicket?"
"I don't know what you're talking about." I tried to make it sound like I didn't care, but I couldn't.
"I mean, what happened to the last girl you liked?" Olaf said, completely ignoring me and looking up at the ceiling. "What was it again? Oh, I know I know this one, it's right on the tip of my tongue...."
I grit my teeth together and looked anywhere but at Olaf. I tried to focus on the face of Tito Puente again but I couldn't see him from this side of the room. I didn't want Olaf to go on but I couldn't find the words to stop him. They all seemed to stick in my throat, and it hurt to breathe around them. It hurt to breathe at all.
"That's right!" Olaf exclaimed, rocking back on his heels. "You killed her father and she ran away from you! Well, good thing most of us are orphans, that first thing's already taken care of. But the running away thing, well, I'm sure Beatrice would do that if she saw you now."
I clenched my hands into fists so he wouldn't notice they were shaking. "Get out."
"I'm just telling it like it is!"
"You don't know anything," I told him fiercely. "I want you to get out."
"Come on, Snicket," he said, and I knew he was goading me, but I let him do it anyway, I let him get away with it, I let him get to me. "Your sister isn't here to protect you. You think you can stop me from doing what I want?"
"Yes," I said.
"How?"
I thought about the usual answers, how good and noble people would naturally triumph over the wickedness in the world, even if it took time. How there were people out there already working against him. How I should be confident and secure in the fact that justice would get him eventually. How I didn't have to do anything specific, just enough to make sure it happened, how I didn't have to ask why or how but just know instead that I was doing my job.
But in that moment, I hated Olaf and everything he stood for, everything he stood against, everything he'd done and might have done and would go on to do. I knew he was vile and wicked and a liar and probably a murderer, and that the world would be better off without him, everything would be better if he just wasn't there.
Doing my job had become a phrase that could mean too many things. But that was only a distant thought in my head then. I didn't care. All I cared about was that Olaf was wrong and if he said one more thing I would show him how wrong he was.
Something like that must've shown on my face, because Olaf smiled approvingly.
"See, this is what I almost like about you, Snicket," he said, nodding slowly. "You get it. You'd do it again."
I felt all the color drain out of my face. All the fight and all the breath rushed out of me like a punch to the gut. It was with a slow, dawning horror that I really understood, probably for the first time, that my life and everyone's lives had spun so far out of control in our quest to even just do one good thing, even the smallest good thing. This was what we'd become. Or, at least, what I had. That was bad enough.
"No I wouldn't," I whispered, and I sounded like a petulant child and I hated that too.
Olaf leaned in close. I could smell the liquor on his breath. "I don't think you're noble, Snicket," he smiled. "I think you're wicked. I think all of us are, or we will be." He didn't sound bitter. If anything, he sounded satisfied. He took a step back. "I'll be seeing you," he said, and then he walked out, shutting the door with a loud snap behind him.
I stared at the door. People do difficult things for more or less noble reasons, I reminded myself, breathing heavily, my hands still shaking. People do difficult things for more or less noble reasons. People do difficult things for more or less noble reasons. People do difficult things—
I grabbed whatever was closest and threw it at the door. Sometimes, when one is angry or frustrated, it is helpful to throw things, like pillows or expensive dining ware. Other times, it just makes you feel worse. I looked at Beatrice's diary, splayed open by the door, the pages crinkled from being thrown, the lock twisted from where I'd broken it earlier, and I tried not to cry. It didn't work for too long. I was tired. I'd been tired for a long time.
A while later, I walked over and picked up the diary. As I smoothed the pages, something fell out from between them and fluttered towards the floor. It was a folded red business card, a little worn and faded. My throat closed up again as I read the words inside.
I am sorry I embarrassed you in front of your friends. I only wanted to talk to you. You have always looked like an interesting person, and I very much enjoyed your oral report on the history of the sonnet. If you would care to spend afternoon recess together....
I'm not ashamed to say it. I cried again. I hated everything I'd done and I hated myself for doing it.
Not for the first time—and probably not for the last—I wished more than anything that Beatrice was alive.
I slumped down into one of the chairs by the fireplace and stared up at Beatrice's portrait until my eyes blurred and I fell asleep.
-
It was some time later when I woke up, because someone had turned on a nearby lamp. I rubbed my eyes at the sudden change, sitting up in the chair, and looked up to see a gun very close to my face. I followed the line of the gun up to the hand curled around it, and then the arm after that, and then I looked up into the unmistakable and angry face of—
Beatrice.
I closed my eyes. When I opened them, she was still there, standing over me, her dark brown, almost black hair curling in waves down her shoulders, her mouth a thin line, her gun still pointed at me. I dug my nails into my palms, just to make sure, and the honest relief unfurling in my chest only increased when the pain confirmed that I wasn't dreaming.
"You're alive," I whispered.
"Who are you." She didn't say it as a question. She said it as a demand, in the kind of cold voice that would've made me afraid if I hadn't been an associate. "Where's Bertrand."
"I don't know," I said. "I'm Lemony Snicket."
Beatrice's eyes grew wide. She took a step back, lowering her gun, and gaped at me, all the anger in her expression falling away. "Lemony? What—what are you doing here?"
I thought about how to answer that, what with the murder victim standing in front of me and looking incredibly alive. "Well," I said, clearing my throat, "I think there's going to be some debate about that now. I thought I was investigating a murder."
"Whose?"
There was no graceful way to say it. "Yours."
Beatrice paled. She grabbed behind her for one of the nearby chairs and sunk slowly into it, gripping it tight. "What? What do you mean, mine?"
"I mean," I said, "someone was killed here Sunday night. We thought it was you."
"I didn't hear anything about this." Beatrice frowned. "I would've come back right away, why—?"
"Kit and Bertrand kept it quiet," I explained, "because they thought someone from our organization had done it."
Beatrice sighed deeply. It looked like both of us were thinking the same thing—that if it had been someone from our organization, that the schism perhaps went deeper than we had all thought. And if Beatrice was alive—
"I wonder who it was," she said quietly, turning her head and looking towards the door. The red stain still stood out against the carpet. "Who was here. Who did it."
"I guess I'll have to find that out now," I said.
I watched her carefully. Not to disparage the Duchess of Winnipeg's artistry, but the portrait hadn't done Beatrice full justice. Her hair curled a little more around the edges, and she was a little taller than I was, and I hadn't seen her smile yet but I was sure it would be sharper and the kind of smile that would stop me in my tracks. She wore a long red coat buttoned up to her chin, and her deep brown eyes stared around the room as if cataloging everything while she thought.
I leaned forward. "Can I get you anything?"
Beatrice shook her head. "I'll get it myself," she said, and she stood up slowly and walked into the kitchen. She returned a moment later with a glass of water and a raised eyebrow. "Did you eat my cake, Mr. Snicket?"
"No." A long chill ran down my spine when she said my name, and I had to clear my throat a few times in order to keep going. "Olaf did."
Beatrice's eyes flashed. She suddenly looked as angry as she had when I'd woken up. "Olaf was here? When?"
"Yesterday and today."
"Did he take anything?"
"I made sure he didn't."
"Good," Beatrice said fiercely, and she sat back down. She took a long drink before she spoke again, fixing me with a sharp stare that made me a little nervous. "How did you get wrapped up in this?" she asked, a hint of amazement in her voice. "I haven't seen you in nine years and here you are, investigating my murder?"
I swallowed. "It just worked out that way."
Beatrice raised an eyebrow again. She didn't comment on it, but she didn't look away from me, either.
"Can I ask you something?" I said.
She took another sip. "I guess you'll have to."
"Where were you?"
Beatrice leaned back in her chair, still considering me with her dark eyes. Her fingertips tapped against the side of the glass. "I went away," she said, "to think something over."
"The information you had about Olaf."
Her eyes narrowed. "Something like that, yes. I needed time to think about it, to figure out what I wanted to do. It just took longer than I thought it would."
"Why was Bertrand supposed to be here?"
"I had asked him to watch the apartment for me while I was away."
I thought about what she'd hidden in her bedroom, the thing I couldn't find. I wanted to ask her what it was, but the look on her face told me I probably wouldn't get very far.
"Why were you following Esmé?" I asked instead.
"I was told to follow her," Beatrice said. "She and Olaf are planning something, and I was supposed to find out what it is. I did."
I wanted to be irritated with Beatrice since she obviously wasn't telling me everything, but I couldn't blame her. I had shown up in her life, in her apartment, after nine years, investigating her death that wound up not being her death at all. I wasn't sure if I would trust me either.
Beatrice took another sip. "What do you know about Esmé?"
"Not much," I said. "I know she's considered a threat to the organization."
"She is," Beatrice said. "Very much so. Sometimes I think she's worse than Olaf. What's she been doing?"
"Actually," I said, "no one's been able to find her."
Beatrice leaned forward, looking concerned. "You don't know where she is?"
"No."
She set her glass down on the coffee table. "I have to go find her," she said, getting up quickly and moving towards the door. "Come on, you're coming too."
I stood up and grabbed her wrist before she could get too far. "No," I said.
Beatrice stopped. She looked back at my hand and then up at me. "No?" she echoed.
"Neither of us are going," I said, "because you're not leaving this apartment."
She raised an eyebrow. "Excuse me?"
"Someone's tried to kill you," I said, "I don't think it'd be safe for you to—"
"The fact that we live dangerous lives is nothing new to me," Beatrice said. "I'm going after her. You don't have to come if you don't want to, that's fine."
"I can't let that happen," I said firmly. "What if something happened to you this time? You should just stay here and we'll talk tomorrow, and—"
"So, what," Beatrice said, wrenching her hand away from me, "you just show up in my life after nine years and tell me what to do? That's what you're doing now?"
I stared at her and hoped I didn't look too desperate. As much as I'd wanted Beatrice to be alive, as much as I had missed her, as relieved as I was to find out she was still here, now that she was in front of me, I didn't know what to do. I wanted to tell her everything, and I didn't want to say anything at all. I wanted to let her look for Esmé and I wanted to go with her and I never wanted to see her leave again and I didn't want anything to ever happen to her. I wanted to go everywhere with her and I never wanted to move again. I thought about what Olaf had said, and I thought about all the things I'd done, and I didn't want to drag Beatrice down with me by getting too personal, by getting too close, no matter how much I wanted to.
"I guess so," I said quietly.
Beatrice looked disappointed—and then she just looked sad. "You know," she said, "I really missed you."
I felt my stomach drop several feet. "I'll see you tomorrow," was all I said, and I walked out.
-
I didn't leave the building. Instead, I went down into the basement to Hector.
"I haven't heard anything yet," Hector said, looking up as I walked in. "The night's still young, though—"
"She's alive," I said. "Beatrice is alive."
"What?" Hector gasped. "She's—she's alive?"
"She's alive," I said again.
The phone on the table in front of Hector clicked a few times, like someone was dialing a number. Beatrice was calling someone. I walked over and grabbed the receiver and brought it to my ear, and Hector stood up beside me to listen.
"Hello?"
"Bertrand?"
"....Beatrice? Is that—"
"We need to talk."
"I'll come over."
"No, just—I'll meet you downstairs."
"What? No, I'll come up, I'll—"
"No. Pull up outside, we can talk in your car."
"....alright. I'll be right there."
I was a little angry at Beatrice for calling Bertrand, but I wasn't completely surprised. I didn't think anything I said could really stop her.
Hector and I looked at each other. "If she's alive," he said, "then who—"
"I don't know," I said. "We can think about that later. Come on."
We went back upstairs, passing through the lobby and out into the street. It was hard to see between the darkness and the flickering streetlamps, but I spotted a nearby group of trashcans. Hector and I crouched down behind them.
Not long after, a car pulled up to the curb. I saw Bertrand in the driver's seat, tapping his fingers against the steering wheel. A moment later, Beatrice rushed out of the building and got into the passenger seat. Hector and I couldn't hear them, but we watched them have what looked like a somewhat intense conversation for a few minutes. Afterward, Beatrice got out of the car, and Bertrand drove away.
Beatrice looked around before she took off in the opposite direction, walking quickly down the street. I could hear her heels clicking even after she had disappeared into the night fog.
"What now?" Hector asked.
"You follow Beatrice," I said. "I've got something else to do."
-
I followed Bertrand back to his apartment.
Ramona had been right—it was Bertrand she saw that night, leaving Beatrice's apartment. I was going to find out why. I knocked loudly on the door to Bertrand's apartment and waited until he opened it.
"Snicket?" He looked shocked to see me.
"You were at Beatrice's apartment Sunday night, weren't you," I said, getting straight to it.
Bertrand swallowed. He stared at me for a few moments before he said, "Yes. I was."
"What happened that night?"
"Why don't you come in," he said with a sigh.
We sat down in the sitting room. Bertrand didn't offer to make tea this time. He looked everywhere but at me, as if nervous.
"What happened?" I asked again.
"I did go over to Beatrice's to rehearse," Bertrand began. "That was my honest intention. But when I got there, before I could even open the door, she opened it and almost ran into me. She looked frightened, and I'd—I'd never seen Beatrice genuinely frightened before. I asked her what was wrong, but all she told me was that something had come up and she had to leave. Then she asked me to stay in her apartment until she came back, because there was something in it that I had to keep safe. She wouldn't tell me what it was. I told her I would, and she thanked me and ran off.
"I stayed there for a few hours. It was dark before anything happened. I was in the kitchen, and I heard the front door open. I thought it was Beatrice, but she didn't say anything. Everything was quiet. Then I heard the gunshot, and I ran to the front door and I saw—well, I thought I saw Beatrice. I thought it was her."
"No one but you knew that Beatrice had left," I said. "So why did you think it was Beatrice that was killed?"
"I—I thought she'd come back," Bertrand said slowly. "She didn't say how long she'd be gone, so I didn't know when to expect her. I—I was in shock. It...." His voice trailed off as he looked away. "It looked....so much like Beatrice...."
"Why did you leave right away?"
"I—I had to make sure. I went to try and find her. But she didn't tell me where she'd gone, so I called all her usual places but she wasn't there, so I—I assumed it really had been her. Trust me, Snicket," he said, shaking his head, "I was as surprised as you were to find out she was alive."
"You didn't see anyone else? You didn't see who had done it?"
"No, I didn't. They were gone by the time I'd reached the front room."
I stared at Bertrand until he met my eyes. "Why did you lie to me?"
"Olaf was there. And I—" He paused. "I didn't know if I could trust you," he said. "I'm sorry. I really am."
His words stung. It wasn't unexpected, but it still hurt to hear him say that. I cast around for something else to ask Bertrand. I remembered what he'd said the first day, and figured now was the time to press it.
"Did you have unconfirmed dinner plans?"
Bertrand sighed. "We'd talked about it on Saturday. I often asked Beatrice to dinner, and we did go out a few times. But it wasn't—a usual thing or anything. I care a great deal for Beatrice, it's true. And I did tell her that. But she didn't—she said she couldn't think about a relationship right now. And I respected that."
I sighed and told myself not to feel too good about that. I thought of the conversation Hector and I had seen in Bertrand's car and found myself with another question. "Did she tell you what it was this time? What she hid in her apartment?"
"No. She still didn't tell me."
I got up. "Thank you," I said, and walked towards the door.
"What are you going to do now?" Bertrand asked, watching me leave.
"Figure out what really happened," I said. Then I paused. I dug around in my pockets for the key Bertrand had given me the other day, the one to Beatrice's apartment. "Here," I said, holding it out to him. "You should take it back."
Bertrand looked at it and then back at me. "I think you should keep it," he said. "You might still have more use for it than me."
-
When I returned to Beatrice's apartment in the morning, I knocked. It didn't feel right to use the key anymore.
Beatrice looked a little surprised when she opened the door, but then she smiled tightly. "Come in."
I walked inside. The stain was gone from the carpet, but other than that, everything was almost exactly the same. But it felt lived-in now, Beatrice's presence filling up her apartment once again. The cross stitch was gone from the couch. The most recent newspaper sat on the coffee table. The new box of tea had been opened and sat brewing in the tea set. The curtains were open, and a bright sunlight spread through the room. A record spun in the record player, not Tito Puente but something softer, a quiet jazz number I couldn't place.
"I was just fixing this," she said, and she walked over to her desk and sat down. I saw her pick up the diary.
I frowned. "I'm sorry," I said. "I really am."
"It's fine," Beatrice said, bending over the lock with her screwdriver, but she didn't sound fine. "Nothing I can't fix."
I watched her for a few moments. "Where did you go last night?"
Beatrice twisted the screwdriver with a little more force than necessary. "I did what I told you," she said. "I went to look for Esmé."
"Did you find her?"
"No. I didn't." She turned the screwdriver again, her brow furrowed. "What about you?"
"What about me?"
"Where did you go, after you followed Bertrand?"
I cleared my throat. "I checked in with some of our associates. Almost everyone's accounted for."
"So you don't know who was killed here."
"No. Not yet."
I hadn't slept much last night, from contacting people I hadn't contacted in years and thinking through what I'd said to Beatrice over and over again and regretting everything about it. There was something I wanted to say to her now and I didn't know if I could.
I sat down in one of the chairs and thought it over until I couldn't think it over anymore. "Beatrice," I said quietly.
Her head shot up, the screwdriver skidding across the lock with a short screech. Her eyes were wide. It was like she was shocked to hear her own name, or to hear me say it. I felt something similar.
"I'm sorry about last night," I said. "I shouldn't have said what I did. You know what you're doing and I shouldn't have interfered. I was just—I was worried about you."
"I gathered as much," she said. "I do know what I'm doing, though. You don't have to worry. In fact, I'd rather you didn't."
"It's just, if something happened to you this time—something I could prevent, because I'm here—I wouldn't like it."
"I don't need a bodyguard," Beatrice said shortly. "And you weren't doing this on orders or anything. You don't have to make sure I'm okay. You can go back to whatever you were doing before this." She sounded bitter.
I frowned and tried not to think about what I'd been doing before I'd gotten that phone call from Kit. "I'd like to stick around, though."
"Why?"
"I want to see where this is going," I said. "It's not every day you get to investigate a fake murder."
She did a good job at almost completely hiding the disappointment in her face. "I see," she said.
"But there's something else, too."
"Oh?"
I took in a breath. "I did you a disservice by not speaking to you for as long as I did," I said. "I would very much like to work with you again." I really did. It was probably a bad idea, but I wanted to.
A small smile pulled at the corner of Beatrice's mouth. "You really did, you know."
"I'm sorry for that, too."
"You're lucky I'm so forgiving," Beatrice said, "and that I missed you as much as I did. Because I missed you a considerable amount, Mr. Snicket."
I looked at Beatrice, and I saw the intelligent, determined girl I'd fallen in love with when we were kids, and the intelligent, determined woman I still loved as an adult, and I let myself smile. "So did I, Beatrice."
Beatrice smiled back, the full smile I'd been thinking about, and it was sharp and bright and in that moment I knew it would still make me do anything.
"I guess that makes us associates again," she said. "Partners, even."
"It certainly does."
She turned back to her diary and finished fixing the lock. Then she stood and walked over to me, holding out her hand. "Well, then. We'd better get to work, Mr. Snicket."
-
We went to lunch, just the two of us. The restaurant was honestly too nice for the state of my suit, but Beatrice didn't care. It was a dark, quiet place, and we sat in the back like we'd been trained to do in any public setting, even if I preferred to sit next to the exits instead. Beatrice and I both ordered sandwiches.
"What kind of restaurant," I said mildly, as the waiter left, "doesn't even serve root beer?"
Beatrice stifled her laugh in the sleeves of her sweater. "Next time," she said, "we'll get root beer floats. I promise."
I tried not to get too hung up on the phrase next time, but it didn't work, and it was all I thought about until our sandwiches arrived. I hadn't realized how hungry I was until the food was sitting in front of me, which is often the case.
Beatrice took a bite of her sandwich. "So, I have an idea," she said, "as to where we can start. I need to find Esmé, and you need to find who was in my apartment and who pulled the trigger. I think I know who might be able to give us a lead."
"Who?"
"I don't think you're going to like it," Beatrice said, smiling a little.
"Try me," I said.
"If there's anyone who knows more than they should and will give out that information without thinking," Beatrice began, and I had a horrible feeling of foreboding before she continued, "it's -- "
"Geraldine," I muttered.
"Geraldine Julienne," Beatrice confirmed, still smiling. "You still don't like her?"
"I don't so much dislike her," I said, "as I think she just doesn't understand when to keep her mouth shut. You can't tell me you honestly enjoy her company."
"No, not particularly," Beatrice admitted. "But we both need somewhere to go from here, and at least she'll be able to give us something."
"Let's just hope she hasn't told anyone else," I said. We ate in silence for a few moments until I spoke again. "What sort of information do you give out in your plays?" It was something I had wondered for a while, and I finally had the opportunity to ask. I just didn't know if she'd give me a straight answer.
Beatrice frowned, and she looked closed off again like she had last night, and I tried not to let it sting too hard, because it wasn't like I'd told her everything about myself, either.
"Anything deemed important," she finally said. "Anything that could help foil the plot of an enemy. Sometimes it's concrete information, sometimes it's just something small."
"What you know about Olaf—will you be putting that in?"
"Yes."
"If it's so important, why wait to give it out during a play?" I said, picking at the remains of my sandwich. "Why not act on it at once?"
"I'm not the only one working on things like this. Every Thursday, in fact, around the city, there's a different play from our organization, and a certain group of people attend each performance, take in their information, and compare it to their own. You don't know what another associate knows. I don't want to hinder someone else, especially if I wind up being wrong. I mean, I don't think I'm wrong." Beatrice shook her head. "I can't see how I am, not about this, but I need to make sure. I'd rather wait. It's important, but you can't rush something like this."
I certainly couldn't fault her for that. I thought of something else to ask her, and I didn't think she'd like that either. "About Sunday," I said. "Does anyone else have a key to your apartment, besides Bertrand?"
"Ramona," Beatrice said. "That's all."
"Could either of them have given it to anyone else? Bertrand gave his key to me."
"That's because you all thought I was dead," Beatrice said. "But Ramona, she wouldn't give it to anyone else. I know that for a fact."
"Would anyone want to break in?"
"Maybe." She shrugged and stared down at the table.
I frowned at her, although I felt bad frowning at Beatrice. "Is there anyone specifically who might want to?" I swallowed. "Who might want to kill you, Beatrice?" I asked softly.
Beatrice looked away, her fingers pulling at her sleeves. "We all do dangerous things that people don't like," she said. "It could have been anyone."
"Do you have anyone in mind?" I had someone in mind, but I wanted to see what she'd say. I wanted to see if she'd tell me what she was hiding, and why she was hiding it.
She shook her head and didn't say anything else. I frowned down at my plate and didn't say anything either.
-
Geraldine Julienne worked for The Daily Punctilio and was largely responsible for the numerous falsities printed within it. There had been quite a few occasions where the locations of our headquarters had almost been revealed due to her foolishness, but if there was one good thing about her, it was that she usually happened to be in the right place at the right time. She just didn't see the whole picture.
Geraldine was thrilled to see us, which I thought was surprising, considering I've never made it a secret that I found her difficult to deal with. Her office at The Daily Punctilio was small and neat, with a single typewriter, a whole pile of blank papers, and nothing on the walls but a single framed picture of an outlandish hat. I thought was the exact antithesis of a journalist's office. Beatrice and I sat down in the chairs in front of Geraldine's desk, and Beatrice asked if she'd seen anything of Esmé the past few days.
"Oh, I wish," Geraldine laughed. "I don't see her much to begin with, although I really wish I did, she's so talented! I mean, an actress and a financial adviser! But speaking of that, she actually hasn't turned in her most recent article. I mean, I'm perfectly willing to try to write her column myself, even if I know absolutely nothing about money. I'd do it for her, though!"
"Have you heard from her at all?" Beatrice asked. "Any phone calls or telegrams?"
Geraldine hummed in thought. "I don't think so. She has this man deliver her articles, she's so busy, you know! What was his name again? Oh, I'm so bad at names—Earl? Eric? Emory? Oscar, maybe?"
"Ernest?" Beatrice said, genuinely shocked.
"That's it!" Geraldine exclaimed, looking delighted. "Next time I see him I'll finally be able to say hello to him properly! How nice that'll be."
"What was her article about?"
"Local wealthy organizations," Geraldine said, as if she were discussing the weather. It still sent a chill down my spine. I didn't like the idea of Esmé being any more involved in our organization than she needed to be, and apparently, neither did Beatrice. She frowned, and I didn't like the look of a frown on Beatrice's face.
"Thank you, Geraldine," she said politely, and then she stood up and turned to me. "We should get going, Mr. Snicket."
I had something I wanted to ask Geraldine myself. "I'll be a minute," I told her. I waited until she left the office before I looked back at Geraldine.
She blinked up at me excitedly. I'd never seen anyone's eyelids move that fast before, and I never wanted to again. "Anything else I can help you with, Mr. Snicket?"
"I hope so," I said, and I really did. "Did you hear from Esmé on Sunday?"
"On Sunday? Actually, I really saw her that day!" Geraldine said. "We weren't together or anything, but I went shopping Sunday afternoon because I always go shopping Sunday afternoon because I'm always hoping I'm going to find one of those marvelous outfits that Esmé wears, and instead of finding an outfit, I found Esmé herself! I was going to go over and talk to her, when I realized that I should really be brushing up on my reporting skills, and I decided to just follow her instead!"
There is a word for lucky things like this happening. In fact, there are many words, some of them kinder than others, and the one I preferred for this moment was serendipitous.
"I mean, how many times do you get the opportunity to see as master of fashion at work? I was already planning the headlines—Stunning Financial Adviser Buys New Purse!"
"Was that all?"
"Mr. Snicket," Geraldine said, smiling, "of course it wasn't! You don't go out and buy just a purse, especially if you're Esmé! No, she bought a whole outfit—oh, what do you think of Local Actress Buys Entirely New Outfit?"
"It's charming," I said, and Geraldine beamed at me. "What was the outfit?"
"Oh, it was this long red coat, which I thought was honestly a little understated, given her past fashion choices, and some heels, then she put on this wig that just looked fantastic on her, it was longer than her usual length and not quite as dark as her hair and it curved a little on the ends—"
I stopped listening to her. I turned towards the door, where I could just see Beatrice through the frosted glass. I knew it was Beatrice because I knew she was there. But from behind, she looked like anyone. She looked like anyone in a long red coat, anyone in heels, anyone with long dark hair that curved on the end.
It was what I'd considered all along, but I still didn't like it, and I especially didn't like that Beatrice clearly wasn't telling me everything she knew about Esmé. I didn't want to tell her what I thought until she told me what had happened that night, and I wasn't even sure when that would happen, considering she seemed to be adamant about keeping it from me.
I don't think I've ever been so frightened or worried in my whole life, I remembered, and I frowned harder.
I stood up and turned briefly back to Geraldine. "Thank you," I said.
"Oh, well," Geraldine called, even as I walked away from her, "it was nice to see you two! I can see the headline now—Actress and Detective Visit Newspaper Reporter!"
"I'm not a detective at all," I said, like I had done a long time ago. "Please don't report this," I said, which was a more recent saying I was getting accustomed to using. I pulled open the door.
-
I didn't want to ask Beatrice about Esmé, not yet. I didn't get much of a chance to anyway, considering the moment we left Geraldine's office, we began to look for Ernest. This was harder than it sounded, considering I think even Kit occasionally struggled a little to tell the Denouement triplets apart, and one often found themselves in a situation where they thought they'd been talking to Frank only to find out it'd been Dewey all along. If Ernest knew something, though, then it was worth the hassle to find him.
"It's discouraging," Beatrice said, as we walked through the city, "to think that Ernest isn't as trustworthy as we thought he was."
"It is," I agreed. "I wonder how his brothers feel." I thought about Frank, and then Dewey, and then I thought about Kit, and then I tried to figure out where all of us would wind up, one day, with all the trouble we were in, and I didn't like the answer I came up with.
Looking for Ernest meant examining the number of places in the city where our organization had at least some semblance of control. We went to the pier first, where we had the luck to run into Widdershins. Although he was supposed to have seen him, he hadn't seen Ernest at all for a few days now. We told Widdershins to get in touch if he heard anything. We checked the bar where I'd first found Olaf the other day, but Olivia hadn't seen Ernest either. She wasn't particularly concerned, however.
"He comes in sometimes," she said, wiping down a glass. "Do you need him for anything in particular?"
Beatrice and I exchanged a glance. "We're just worried about him," Beatrice wound up saying. "Could you let us know if he does show up?"
"Sure," Olivia said. "Whatever you want.”
No one seemed to be able to tell us where Ernest's apartment was, otherwise we would have checked there as well. We eventually expanded our search to any of the Denouement triplets, but it didn't help. I kept quiet for the most part and let Beatrice do the talking, and I just listened and watched her instead. I watched her and I wondered. I wondered about her and Esmé and the growing knot in my stomach. We found very little in our search, and only succeeded in tiring ourselves out.
I accompanied Beatrice to the theater that afternoon for the rehearsal Ramona had mentioned yesterday. I figured Beatrice must have told Ramona that she was alive, because when we entered the theater, Ramona herself ran towards us, delight shining on her face, and pulled both of us into the kind of hug I'd forgotten existed.
"Don't tell me if this gets awkward," she said, holding on tight, "because I am not, under any circumstances, letting go of you two ever again."
"Oh, well, I guess I didn't need to breathe anyway," Beatrice said, her voice coming from somewhere inside Ramona's hair.
"Lungs are not a necessity after all," I commented into Ramona's shoulder, and when Beatrice and Ramona both laughed, it felt for a moment like we were back in the diner we'd frequented so often as children. It was a comforting feeling, amid everything.
Ramona did eventually let go, and she stepped back to smile at us for a moment. "You two are really impossible," she said, still laughing as she walked back up to the stage.
Bertrand smiled at me when I saw him, which I thought was kind of him, considering our last conversation. Then he beamed at Beatrice. "I'm so glad to see you," he said quietly. "That you're alright."
Beatrice gave him a small smile in return. "I'm glad you're alright, too."
It seemed, then, that Olaf was the last to know that Beatrice was alive. I heard him before I saw him, as he was whistling some tune backstage, and the noise grew louder as he approached. When he emerged onto the stage, he saw Beatrice almost immediately and froze, his eyes wide, his lips mid-whistle.
Beatrice watched him carefully, but she still smiled politely. "Hello, Olaf."
Olaf stared back at her for a moment with a peculiarly blank look on his face—and then his expression changed, and he was back to that perpetual grin he wore so often lately, only it looked more strained than I'd seen before.
"Beatrice!" he exclaimed, throwing his arms wide and walking towards her. "Well, would you look at that! Miracles really do happen, don't they?"
"It looks like they do," Beatrice said. Behind her, Bertrand looked concerned, and Ramona had paused where she was pulling some of the props out from the back, but neither of them intervened. We all watched Beatrice and Olaf, but they said nothing else to each other.
Then Olaf's eyes found mine for a second, and I expected him to give me a look I wouldn't care for, but he just smiled at me, and it pulled in a way I didn't like. I told Beatrice I would wait for her in the back and made my way to the section of seats by the far wall of the theater. I found my sister there, leaning back in a seat, her arms crossed over her chest. I sat down next to her and watched her survey our associates as they began their rehearsal.
"You were right," Kit said quietly, her eyes fixed on Beatrice.
"It was due to happen, I guess," I said. "I wind up being right at least once a year."
Kit rolled her eyes. "You don't give yourself enough credit."
I didn't say anything. Instead, I looked towards the stage, watching Beatrice as she flipped through her script. I found myself glowering at her, and I didn't like it.
"Have you found out anything new?" Kit asked.
I wasn't in the mood to tell Kit what I thought about Esmé, or to talk with her about the Denouements, because I wasn't sure what her reaction would be to either of them. I shook my head.
"Beatrice didn't tell you anything?"
"No." At least I could answer that somewhat honestly.
Kit looked back at Beatrice, and took her time before she said anything else. "Have you told her?"
I sighed. "No, Kit."
"If you did—"
"I am not," I said, louder and angrier than I intended, "telling her what happened just to—to wring a confession out of her." I looked away from Beatrice, and away from my sister, and away from everything else until I glared down at my shoes instead. I wasn't truly angry, though. I was more worried than anything else.
I could hear the frown in Kit's voice. "That's not what I meant, L, and you know it. Why are you so riled up?"
"I don't know," I muttered. I said it again, as if that would help me figure out what I didn't know, and it didn't. I was still thinking about Esmé. I was still thinking hard, and I didn't like what I came up with. I didn't like what I had to do. I didn't like going behind people's backs.
I stood up. "Kit," I said, "keep an eye on things. I'll be back later."
Kit raised an eyebrow. "Where are you going?"
"I need to check something."
-
I went to the Veritable French Diner.
It was a small restaurant, but it had wide, great windows that let in light through sheer white curtains, and each round table had a dark blue tablecloth draped over it with a small bouquet of flowers in the middle. If you sat at the right table and got the right waiter before he was transferred to another restaurant, which I did, there was the chance you might find out something.
"Snicket!" Larry exclaimed when he arrived at my table. "I didn't realize this was a sad occasion?" he offered, almost hesitantly.
I looked around us. It was late afternoon, so there were more people than I would have liked in the room, but not too many that I couldn't say it. "The world is quiet here," I murmured, and Larry smiled. "Why don't you take a seat, Larry. You're not that busy."
He sat down across from me. "What brings you back to the city?"
"A whole mess of trouble," I said. "Did you see Esmé and Olaf here on Saturday?"
Larry nodded. "I did. They often come in, as a matter of fact."
"Did you hear anything they talked about?"
"No, I didn't get a chance to. An associate came in and took over my section for me, including their table. But it looked like they were having a real passionate conversation. They looked—well, they looked happy."
I tapped my fingers on the tablecloth. I didn't want to think about what could make Olaf and Esmé happy. "They came in for lunch, didn't they?"
"Yes.”
"So they were given the usual lunch special complete with—" I paused and looked at Larry meaningfully. "The item."
Larry frowned. "Actually," he said, "I didn't see one given to them, but there was one on their table."
The words sunk in, and I still didn't believe them. "Are you saying," I said, leaning forward, "that Olaf and Esmé brought one with them?"
"They must have," Larry said. "That's the only other way they could've had one."
I sat back slowly. I didn't like to think about that. I didn't like to think about that at all, or what it meant for Olaf and Esmé, or what it meant about what Beatrice had hidden in her apartment. I didn't like it, because it complicated things again, and things were already complicated enough.
"Thank you, Larry," I said, and I stood up. "I'm sorry I can't stay longer."
"Oh, that's fine," Larry said, waving a hand as he got up as well. "We're all pretty busy lately, aren't we?"
"We are," I said solemnly.
I went back to the theater. The rehearsal was still in progress, and I sat back down next to Kit, who looked at me with concern.
"You look terrible," she whispered. "What did you do, L?"
"I don't know," I said. "I'll find out later."
Kit sighed. She looked like she wanted to ask more questions, but she didn't.
Almost an hour went by before she spoke again. "Look," she said. "About what I said earlier. You and Beatrice have really missed each other. If both of you are keeping secrets, you're just going to hurt each other more."
"I think that's what they call an occupational hazard," I said.
"Oh, please, L," Kit snapped. I turned to her, wide-eyed. She'd never spoken to me like that before. "Not everyone gets another opportunity to fix their wrongdoings."
Kit didn't look at Olaf, but I did. He walked around the stage, shouting his lines with unnecessary volume. I wondered if he knew Kit was here.
"If you two pass up a chance to be happy just because you don't want to admit you both made mistakes—and I'm sure both of you have, otherwise we wouldn't even be having this conversation—then I don't know what to tell you, L. There's not a lot of us left," Kit said, and her voice, which had been hard and sharp, suddenly softened. "We can't afford to do things like this to each other."
I sighed. "You're right," I said, because she was, even if I didn't want her to be. You can think that it's easier, and sometimes better for all involved, if you keep everything secret from one another, but it just winds up creating problem upon problem until you are left with nothing but yourself and your lies and an unbearable loneliness, because you've either driven everyone away or they've died with their own secrets. It was a prospect that looked considerably likely for me, and I didn't like it. I didn't want it to happen to Beatrice either. I just didn't know how easy it'd be.
"Of course I'm right," Kit muttered. "I'm your older sister, that means I'm always right. Well—" She smiled a little. "Almost always."
I smiled back at her. We both looked somewhat happy, something that hadn't happened in a long time, and we watched the rest of the rehearsal in silence.
It was cold and dark outside by the time Beatrice and I left the theater. I wished I had gloves. Beatrice tucked her scarf around her neck and we walked quietly through the city streets. In the warmer months, there were people constantly on the streets at night, but the January chill had chased away everyone who didn't need to be there.
Beatrice sighed, and her breath curled in the cold air. "Where did you go?" she asked.
"What?"
"During rehearsal," she said. "Where did you go?"
It was for the sake of honesty that I told her the truth. "I went to talk to Larry," I said, and I even kept eye contact with her.
"Ah," Beatrice said, and she turned away. She shoved her hands into the pockets of her coat. "Do you—what did I ever do to you, Mr. Snicket?"
I frowned. "What do you mean?”
"You don't trust me anymore," she said, and she didn't ask it as a question. It was a sad statement that hung in the air between us.
"No," I said, shaking my head quickly. "I do trust you, Beatrice. But I worry about you."
I could see the muscles of her jaw clenching. "I told you not to," she said, and she walked a little faster, a little away from me.
"It's not as easy as that," I said, catching up with her.
Beatrice shook her head. She didn't say anything until we'd walked a few more blocks. "Did you find out what you wanted to know?"
"I don't know," I said. It was too quiet after that.
I went up with her to her apartment, just because. Beatrice took longer than I thought was necessary to find her keys, and she looked like she wanted to say something, but she didn't. I didn't either.
"I'll see you tomorrow, I guess," she finally said, once she'd unearthed them from her purse.
I nodded and hoped I didn't look too miserable. "I'll see you tomorrow."
I was only a few feet down the hallway when I heard Beatrice gasp. I turned around immediately and saw her frozen in her doorway, her eyes wide, her hand still on the doorknob. I ran back to her.
I didn't have to ask what was wrong. I saw it right away. There are a few words for what an apartment looks like when it has been torn apart by someone, and my personal favorite is ransacked, although the nice word didn't make Beatrice's apartment look any better as we stood there and stared at it. The furniture pillows had been thrown to the floor, the portrait on the wall had been tilted as if someone was looking for a secret compartment, the records had been tossed carelessly aside on the floor, although thankfully none of them were broken. The desk papers were crumpled and torn, the desk drawers themselves dangling precariously. The coffee and side tables had been flipped over, scattering pages of the newspaper and shattering the tea set. The saddest sight was the books, pulled out of the bookcases and thrown to the floor, the pages bent and ruffled. At least everything was still intact, however, instead of engulfed in flames.
"Is anything missing?" I asked.
Beatrice looked around the room. She walked forward carefully, scrutinizing everything, putting it all back in place, but she kept her back to me. I watched her flip through the papers on her desk, test the lock on her diary, replace the desk drawers, rearrange the pillows, fix the angle of her portrait. Then she moved towards the bookcases. "Why don't you check the kitchen," she said as she picked up the books from the floor. "You should know my apartment as well as I do by now."
I knew what she was doing, but I agreed anyway. I went to the kitchen but I didn't check anything—not that much had been rifled through. Instead, I eased the door open slightly until there was a space small enough to look through, and I saw Beatrice go to her bedroom. She pulled open one of the bedside table drawers and fiddled with something inside. I heard her sigh of relief and I shut the door. I waited an appropriate amount of time before I walked back into the living room.
Beatrice was waiting by the piano, reorganizing the sheet music, as far away from the bedroom door as possible. "Nothing's gone," she said.
"I didn't find anything either," I said, then I walked over to her desk and picked up the phone. I didn't dial a number. I listened carefully. Then I pressed the switchhook a few times in succession. "Hector?"
It took a moment for him to answer. "Snicket?"
"Something's happened," I said. I didn't look at Beatrice, even when she came over to stand next to me, looking concerned. "Have you seen anyone around here today?"
"As a matter of fact," Hector said, "I did see—well, one of the Denouement triplets. Maybe Ernest? I caught a glimpse of him outside."
"Did he have anything with him?"
"No, I don't think so. What happened?"
"There's been a break-in," I said. "But everything's fine. We'll talk later." I hung up, and I finally turned back to Beatrice. She looked back at me, and I could tell she was trying not to appear too scared. I couldn't even get angry with her. I was too anxious to feel anything else.
"Beatrice," I said, "I want you to tell me what happened Sunday night."
She blinked furiously. "I—I already did, I—"
"Esmé was here that night," I said. "And I think you know that, or you suspect it. I think you have something she wants. I think you're not telling me everything and I don't know why, but if we're going to go any further then you need to tell me, Beatrice."
She swallowed. Her eyes flicked back and forth between mine. Then she walked back to her bedroom, and she opened the drawer again. I saw her unlock a long, thin box from inside with a key from around her neck that she'd had hidden under her sweater, and from the box she pulled out a long, thin rod with a little gear on the end. She slid that end into a small hole in the bottom of the drawer, and the false bottom pulled up. She took out the item inside and replaced the board.
"This is what Esmé wants," Beatrice said, staring down at what she held in her hands. "I stole it from her."
I stared at the sugar bowl. Beatrice walked back into the living room with it and sat down on the couch, and I sat beside her.
"I followed Esmé and Olaf to the Veritable French Diner on Saturday," she began. "I disguised myself as a waiter so they wouldn't recognize me. I knew Esmé had a sugar bowl—it was never collected, and she never turned it in, so I knew it had to be important. I knew it had to have something special on it. And from what I overheard during their lunch, I knew I had to steal it."
She lifted the lid of the sugar bowl, and we both looked down at the small tape recorder inside.
"What did they say?" I asked.
Beatrice shook her head. "They were planning a lot of things," she said. "And it wasn't anything more than what they've already done, or what we think they've already done, but the way they talked about it this time, it—it was worse than usual. They made it sound like they'd do it all and more to get their way. I didn't like it." She took in a deep breath before continuing.
"I switched the sugar bowls, and I didn't think Esmé noticed, which was probably my first mistake. I hid it in my bedroom. I went to lunch with Olaf on Sunday because I—I thought I could convince him to back off. I thought he'd be easier to talk to than Esmé." She smiled bitterly. "I try to be such an optimist sometimes. But he wouldn't. I came back home and was going to call Bertrand when Esmé called me. She realized I had the sugar bowl, and she—she threatened me." Beatrice closed her eyes. "I'd never been threatened like that, not even from Olaf just an hour before. What she said, it—it genuinely frightened me. I was scared of what Esmé was capable of, what Olaf had planned with her, what they might do. I'd never felt like that before, and I didn't like it. I didn't know what to do, so I—I ran. It was stupid, and foolish, and I regret doing it, but—" She looked up at me. "Have you ever been threatened before, Mr. Snicket?"
I thought back to the highest floor of a medical clinic and the broken window and the man I'd seen there. Then I thought about the circumstances around the last time I'd seen him. "Yes," I said quietly. "I have."
"Then you know it's not very pleasant."
"It's not."
"You sometimes do very foolish things when you're threatened. They don't often make sense. I had to leave. I ran into Bertrand as I was leaving and told him to watch the apartment, to make sure no one got in to try and take the sugar bowl. So I went away, and I thought things over, and I was going to come back anyway—I figured I'd been a coward long enough—when someone almost found me. It looked like Dewey, but it could have been any of them. I suppose it probably was Ernest. Then I knew I had to come back. And then—well. You know the rest."
"Esmé came to your apartment to look for the sugar bowl," I said. "She must've known you'd left, she might have been following you. She disguised herself as you in case anyone saw her. She didn't see Bertrand, because he wasn't in the main room. And then someone shot her, because they thought she was you."
"You asked me," Beatrice said softly, "if anyone would've wanted to kill me. Esmé wanted to. She told me so herself. She hated that I saw right through her. And—" She swallowed. "Olaf wanted to."
"If you thought it was him," I said, "why did you say anything to him at the theater?"
"I'd already tried to talk to him once, and that's how this whole horrible mess started," Beatrice said. "And I—it's just a thought. I don't know for sure. He would never have killed Esmé, for one thing. They use each other too much for one to get rid of the other."
"But he didn't know it was her," I pointed out. "He thought it was you. If you were out of the way—" I shuddered at the thought. "If you were out of the way, no one else would've known their plans. He could've continued with them."
"But he couldn't have gone to my apartment," Beatrice said, her eyes widening. "He couldn't have—Esmé must've told him she was coming here, they couldn't have acted separately, they're not that uncoordinated. He wouldn't have come here if Esmé was already taking care of it. But that leaves us with Ernest, but he doesn't necessarily have a motive.”
"He may not have a motive that we can think of," I said, "but he did break into your apartment, and we can't find him, and he did try to find you when everyone else thought you were dead. That probably was Ernest you saw. He wouldn't have looked for you if he believed you to be dead."
"True," Beatrice said. "We'll have to start looking for him harder." She sighed long and hard, put the sugar bowl down on the table, and slouched back against the couch cushions. "Tomorrow, though. I don't think I've ever been so emotionally exhausted in my life, Mr. Snicket."
I smiled softly at her. "Can I get you anything?"
"You can make us some tea," Beatrice said, rubbing her eyes. "And then you can stay."
I felt the smile leave my face. "I can't make any promises," I said quietly. "And your tea set was broken, anyway."
"There's another one in the kitchen. Go make the tea, Mr. Snicket."
I made the tea. I picked something with chamomile and let it steep while I helped Beatrice put the rest of her apartment back together. Afterwards, we went back to the couch with our tea. Drinking tea alone can often still make one feel better about things, but it works even more when you're drinking it with someone else. Beatrice and I sat and sipped at our tea until we felt marginally better about our situations.
"That false bottom was very clever," I said.
Beatrice smiled, her face going faintly pink. "Thank you," she said. "I made it myself."
"Do you like to do things like that?" I asked. "Invent things?"
"Sometimes. It's more of a hobby than anything else. What I like the most," she said, "is music."
I glanced over at the piano. "Do you play often?"
"Yes," Beatrice said. "I find it very relaxing. But what about you?”
"What about me?"
Beatrice laughed a little. "I haven't seen you in nine years, Mr. Snicket. I feel like I barely know anything about you sometimes."
I frowned. "Is that why?" I asked. "Why you didn't tell me about Esmé earlier? You don't trust me?" I sounded hurt, but I couldn't help it. It'd been a fairly emotionally exhausting twenty-four hours for me too, and I had a feeling it wasn't quite over yet.
The smile faded from her face. "No," she said. "That wasn't why."
"Then what was?"
She looked down at her teacup in her hands, and then she smiled a grim, pained smile. "We hadn't seen each other in nine years, Mr. Snicket. I didn't—I didn't want to just be that frightened girl who didn't know what to do, because I'm not. But I was so scared, and I—we'd always told each other to just get scared later." She laughed a little bit. "I didn't want you to think any less of me because I couldn't, because I didn't want to admit to myself what had happened."
"I find telling myself to get scared later works less and less as I get older," I said. "But I would never think any less of you, Beatrice, not at all. Not for anything."
Beatrice looked up at me. Her smile changed to the one I liked the best, the one in the portrait, the one she'd given me that morning. "Thank you. I suppose I just got used to doing things by myself."
"You don't have to do everything alone," I said. "You can count on some people."
She sat up, still smiling. "Just some people?" she asked. "No one in particular?"
I cleared my throat. "Oh, well," I said, suddenly self-conscious, "not really."
"Mr. Snicket," she said gently, "you don't have to do everything alone, either. All this time, we could've helped each other."
"I don't know," I said, quicker than I wanted to. "I don't know if I'm much help at all."
Beatrice frowned softly. "What do you mean?"
I gripped the handle of my teacup tighter to try and disguise the way my hands had started trembling, but it didn't work. I set the cup down on the coffee table, but that just left my hands exposed. It was one thing for Beatrice to admit she was scared. It was another for me to admit what I'd been trying to run from.
"Lemony," Beatrice said, resting her hands on top of mine, "what happened in Stain'd-by-the-Sea?"
I swallowed with considerable difficulty. I felt like I had to pull every word out of me, and each one left a large hole somewhere inside. "You read the reports," I said. "You know what happened."
"All I know is that a villain was killed on a train," Beatrice said. "But you don't see it that way, do you."
I stood up, pulling away from Beatrice. I felt her eyes on me as I walked slowly around the room, trying to say out loud the only question that mattered, even if I had asked it too late.
"Beatrice," I said, "is it more beastly to be a murderer or let one go free?"
Beatrice was silent for a while, and I didn't like it. "Lemony," she said softly, "I don't know if it's as black and white as that."
I clenched my hands into fists. "There is no moral grey area," I said, "for murder."
"Maybe there is," Beatrice said. "You were—"
"I was twelve, Beatrice!" I shouted, finally turning to face her, and I tried with everything I had not to look away. I had never really yelled at anyone before, but I couldn't stop myself now. "I was a child! I pushed a man to his death, and I'm supposed to feel proud of that? That I did something good, something right?"
Beatrice stood up, her eyes hard and blazing. "It doesn't matter if it was good or right, Lemony, you did what you had to do! You knew what Hangfire had done, what he was capable of! No one else was going to stop him, that's why you got involved in the first place!"
"I shouldn't have been there, in the first place!" I shot back. "I should never have been in that town! I gave up everything to—"
"To save something important!"
"No, to become what I was trying to stop!"
"No, listen to me!" Beatrice said, and she stormed over to me, her eyes flicking back and forth between mine. "If you hadn't done it, everyone on that train would've died, and you know it! There was no other option, there was nothing else you could've done!"
"I could've done something! I could have—"
"What? You could have what? Talked to him? Do you really think he would've listened to you?"
"You tried to talk to Olaf!" I reminded her.
Beatrice took a step back, her eyes wide. She stared at me for a long moment. "I think," she said quietly, "that there is a point at which you can reason with someone and a point at which you have to do something. You'd tried to reason with him already, and you couldn't. I try to reason with Olaf, now, because he was a volunteer, he still is a volunteer. I want to believe the best in him, because the schism has done so much damage already. I have to believe, because I don't want to hurt him."
"Then you would do the same?" I asked, watching her carefully and feeling a cold sadness sinking through my chest. "You'd do it, if you had to?"
Beatrice clenched her jaw tight. "I don't know," she whispered. "Maybe I would." She swallowed. "And if I did do it—if I was saving someone else, if I was saving this organization, not even just as an organization, but as my friends, my family—then it wouldn't matter if it was right or wrong, what it meant to do it, whether it was beastly or not. I would be doing what I needed to do."
I wanted to admire the way her voice barely shook as she said that, but all I could see was the way her hands trembled. We were too young to be making these decisions, and we'd always be too young.
I sat back down slowly. "It's hard," I said, which didn't exactly encompass the scope of the situation or our lives, but was the only thing I could think to say. "It's hard, and I'm tired, Beatrice."
She sighed, the kind of world-weary sigh I often heard from all of us when we thought no one else was watching. "I know."
"The older I get, the worse I feel about it all. What we've all done. What I've become in trying to do what I thought was—" I didn't know if I wanted to say right. I moved on. "I don't even know what I wanted anymore."
Beatrice looked at me sadly. She sat down beside me and took my hands in hers again, and I held onto them tighter than I'd ever held onto anything before.
There are things no one tells you about becoming a volunteer, especially when you don't exactly volunteer to be a volunteer to begin with. They don't tell you the things you'll be doing. You suspect the things you'll be doing, and you think you can do them, but you never really think you'll be doing them. And then you do them, and you realize everything is much more complicated than you thought it was, that in order to try and do one thing you have to give up something else.
Then you get older, and your associates get older, and you all find yourselves thinking things like this, and sometimes the only thing you can do is sit in silence with them and think about the things you've done, the things you're trying to do, and what they all mean. You don't necessarily figure out any answers, because there are no real answers. You just think about everything and feel the certain misery reserved for the people who try to do their best. That's what Beatrice and I did, for a long time.
"Lemony," Beatrice said, a while later, "we're still here. We've still got the chance to try and change things, to try and do them differently. We can still be the people we hoped we'd be."
I looked at Beatrice, at her face softly illuminated by the nearby lamps, at the way her eyes held mine. I squeezed her hands. "We can try," I said. "But I don't know if it's enough."
"It's enough," she said, and I let myself believe her.
-
In the morning, we didn't talk about the night before, but that was fine. We didn't have to talk about it. We'd said everything we needed to. That didn't mean we felt much better about any of it, but we'd come to terms about it.
Instead, Beatrice and I made breakfast and talked about books. I found out Beatrice made a mean fried egg, much better than any other eggs I'd ever had in my life, and we discussed for quite a while whether or not a story written by an Irishman about people at a party really had a plot or not, and what that said about what kind of story it was. Then we compared the plays of an American playwright and wondered what social commentary she'd been going for in one of her earlier plays about a boarding school and a later play about a hotel. It was calm and quiet and just what the two of us needed. It was late morning when we realized how much time had passed.
Beatrice sighed. "We should get going," she said. "Before Ernest manages to slip away from us."
I set down my fork. I hadn't forgotten about Ernest, but he hadn't been at the forefront of my mind, and now I felt that familiar sinking anxiety that appeared every time I had to do something considerably dangerous. "What are we going to do when we find him?" I asked.
"We'll take him to headquarters," Beatrice said. "They can deal with him there."
We set the dishes in the sink and put our coats on. It felt like we were gearing up for a final battle, although we really weren't. I turned to Beatrice, watching her slide her hair out from under the collar of her coat, how her eyes were alight with a bright, glistening with a fire that I'd seen so often when we were children. It was nice to see it now. It was nice to be here, with her. I thought about all the times I'd left the city, and all the times I'd come back. They were very few. I thought about Beatrice, her hands in mine. I thought about all my miserable worries and how she'd made them seem smaller.
She turned to me. "Well," she said, smiling a little, "it looks like this is it, Mr. Snicket."
"It looks like it is," I agreed. "Once we find Ernest, we should be in the clear."
"Hopefully," she said. "And then what?" Her smile grew. "What do you usually do when an assignment is over?"
I thought about what I'd been doing last time, and then I tried not to. "Leave," I said. "But not this time."
"What makes this time different?"
"You," I said. "I'm staying. Here. With you."
Beatrice blinked a few times. Her face flushed as she stared at me. "Are you really?" she asked, a little breathlessly.
"If you want me to," I said, because I thought it would be polite to give her a way out if she wanted it, just in case.
"I do," she said quickly. "I meant it, what I said last night. Do you?"
"More than anything," I said. I moved closer to her and took her hands. I had run from her for nine years. I couldn't do it anymore. "I'd rather never be away from you again, Beatrice. I want to stay here and make tea for you until we grow too old to hold teacups, I want to listen to every record you have until I know them all and know all of you. I want everything we've missed the past nine years, I want to figure out where our lives are going and go wherever that is with you."
It can be hard to admit the feelings you have for people, as you never know what is going to happen, and sometimes the best you can hope for is just to tell them anyway and hope that they feel the same way, and if they don't at least you've done something, and can wallow in a little less misery than you would've if you'd never said anything at all.
But Beatrice's smile went bright and delighted as I talked, and she tangled her fingers into mine. "I'd like that," she said softly. "I'd like that a lot. I thought about that, things like that, all these years. But I didn't know if I'd see you again, so I didn't think it could really happen. But now you're here, and I'm so glad that you are, that we could have the chance to try again."
Our faces were so close together now, I could count every single faint freckle on her nose, and then every individual eyelash as she came even closer. There was just Beatrice and I, in this moment, nine years of waiting no longer between us.
And then the phone rang.
Beatrice and I stepped back from each other. Her cheeks were still red and I was sure she could hear my heart beating in my chest. We stared at each other for a few more seconds before realizing that the phone was in fact still ringing. Beatrice cleared her throat and picked up the receiver, tilting it so we could both listen. "Hello?"
"He was just here," came Olivia's voice, hushed and quiet. "In the bar. He came in, looked around, and then left, just a moment ago. If you move now you might be able to catch him."
Beatrice frowned. "We're on our way," she said, and hung up. She turned to me, and her mouth curled slowly back up into a sharp grin. "Are you ready, Mr. Snicket?"
"I'm ready," I said, because I was. We stopped briefly to ask Hector if he'd come up to the apartment to stay there while we were gone, on the off chance that someone tried to get in after us. Then we high-tailed it to Bayberry. Beatrice and I got there in time to see the back of Ernest Denouement a block ahead of us, weaving in and out of the small crowd of people moving through the city. We sped up to keep an eye on him. He walked at a furious pace, a suitcase swinging from his hand.
I've said before that the key to following someone is to follow someone who doesn't expect to be followed, but that doesn't always work out to be the case. Ernest was the kind of man who looked like he knew he was going to be followed and was going out of his way to make sure no one could do it. He loitered in doorways and alleyways, plucked the hats off of strangers, and at one point even doubled back through the same shopping district. Beatrice and I had a hard time keeping an eye on him as we employed similar tactics in following him. We'd all had the same training, after all.
"What do you think he's got?" Beatrice asked quietly as we sidestepped around a group of people walking just as quickly as we were but in the opposite direction. "Where do you think he's going?"
"I don't know," I said. I didn't like not knowing. There was no way he could have the sugar bowl, since it was still in Beatrice's apartment. The suitcase looked like it had a weight to it, as it swung heavily in Ernest's hand, so it had to contain something. Another sugar bowl? Another piece of evidence? The required belongings to successfully skip town, leave the country?
"What do you know about Ernest?" I whispered. "Besides the fact that he isn't as trustworthy as we thought he was."
"Very little," Beatrice admitted. "I've rarely ever seen him. What about you?"
"I met him once," I said. "At least, I'm assuming it was him. He was with my sister and Olaf. I got the impression that he was good at hiding things."
Ernest made the mistake of looking behind him just as Beatrice and I made the mistake of making eye contact with him. The three of us froze for a good five seconds before Ernest turned tail and ran down the street, pushing people aside in his wake.
We ran after him.
He tried to lose us down more alleyways, in more disguises, but Beatrice and I, racing behind him hand in hand, were too quick for him. We'd already chased him this far. We weren't going to let him go now.
He brought us to a modest apartment building. Ernest tore open the door and rushed inside. Beatrice and I hung back for a moment to make him think he'd lost us before moving silently inside. The lobby was dark but clean, and deserted. I could hear Ernest already slamming his way up the stairs.
I followed Ernest first, as my shoes were softer than Beatrice's on the staircase. When he disappeared into a room on the third floor, I leaned over the railing and motioned for Beatrice to come up.
We surveyed the door Ernest had entered from the end of the hallway. I gestured to Beatrice to ask if we should just kick the door down, and she gestured back that, with her heels and my shoes and the sturdiness of the door, it probably would take a few unnecessarily noisy kicks. I gestured to ask again if she had any sort of weapon on her, to which she pulled her gun out of her handbag. I felt reassured but also nervous. I was worried about it going off, accidentally or on purpose. Beatrice caught the look on my face and shook her head. It was what we did. We didn't have the time to worry.
The two of us inched down the hallway, and that was when we noticed the door was in fact already cracked open. Light slid out from the opening into a thin, almost imperceptible white line across the floor. No wonder we'd missed it. I pushed on the door, just a bit, and held my breath as the opening widened and Beatrice and I peered through.
One often expects sinister people to have a sinister look about them, but this isn't always the case. It was not the case with Ernest Denouement. He didn't look suspicious at all. He looked just like his brothers, which is to say he had a narrow face and dark eyebrows and a look about him that made him appear to always be searching for something. I had seen the look on Dewey quite a few times. But it could also have been because Ernest was digging through the suitcase.
The rest of the room was almost carefully bare. There was a table, on which Ernest had set the suitcase. There was a chair. There was one window. There was another door on the left wall, closed and with just the faintest bit of light coming out from the bottom. I looked back at Ernest and noticed what he'd been taking out of the suitcase—tight rolls of bandages.
I wanted to watch a little longer, to see what Ernest would do, but he was a man on a mission as he searched through the suitcase. I didn't think it would be wise to linger any more than we already had. We had a job to do, at the end of the day. I opened the door the rest of the way.
"Ernest," I said.
Ernest's head jerked up, and he stared at us with cold eyes. He dropped the bandages in his hands. "Well," he said. "It looks like this is it." He was surprisingly collected for a man cornered in a small apartment.
"You tried to kill me," Beatrice said behind me, her frown clear in her voice. "You killed Esmé instead. You broke into my apartment. I wouldn't have expected that from you, Ernest. I don't know you well, but I held you in a very high regard, just like your brothers. I considered you an associate."
Ernest shrugged, although his mouth seemed to tighten when Beatrice mentioned his family. "I was following orders. You would've done the same, I think."
"Whose?" I asked.
He shook his head. "It'll take more than that to get me to talk, Snicket. And by that time, I don't think you'll care."
I frowned myself. I didn't like it. I didn't like any of it. He didn't act like a man at the end of his rope. He acted like a man playing a part. All of us did that. I just didn't have a good feeling about Ernest doing it.
"That's enough," Beatrice said. "You're coming with us."
And he came with us with a very minimal amount of fuss. I remained in the room while Beatrice took Ernest aside and secured his hands so he was less likely to get away. I was staring at the door at the end of the room and the thin sliver of light underneath it when Beatrice came back in.
She took my hand. "We've done what we can," she said. "We've done more than we were supposed to, even. Both of us. Someone else can look into it now."
I knew she was right. I looked at my hand in hers and also knew that I'd had enough, and so had she. It was time to go.
We took Ernest and his suitcase to headquarters. I was thinking about how fractured all of our allegiances were becoming, and so, it seemed, was Beatrice, so we didn't take him to the one in the city, instead making the longer trip to one of our other headquarters stationed in a different city. It was lengthy, but I hoped it'd be worth it.
We went back into the city to Beatrice's apartment. It was only when we were inside that Beatrice checked her watch, and she let out a small shriek as she looked at the time. I jumped, as that was rarely a noise that preceded something good.
"Oh, I almost forgot!"
"What?"
"It's Thursday," Beatrice said, pulling off her coat and running to her bedroom. "We have to go to the theater, there's a play tonight, we have to meet Ramona there—"
I remembered, and I looked at the clock on the wall. If we hurried, we could just about make it in time.
She came back out quicker than I thought she would, wearing a long red dress, her hair up and away from her face. She looked at me and smiled expectantly.
"Am I dressed for the theater?" I asked, feeling considerably self-conscious in my brown suit and coat next to Beatrice.
Beatrice looked at me thoughtfully. "Well, your suit could be nicer, but you're wearing a tie, so you should be fine." She walked over to me and I linked my arm in hers.
We took a taxi to the theater on the other side of the city. We rode in a companionable silence, watching the setting sun wash the city in a pale orange. I held Beatrice's hand in mine the whole ride there.
When we got out of the taxi, I saw Ramona standing outside the theater, waving in our direction, her program clutched in her hand. The white lights seemed to make her smile even brighter than it usually was. "Everyone else is already inside," she said when we reached her, "but I thought the three of us could sit together."
Beatrice, Ramona, and I sat towards the front of the theater. It was clean and well-kept, with deep red curtains and dark blue seats. It was a fairly good play—our organization didn't just perform these plays for the codes inside them, but also for our own enjoyment and for the public that attended them as well. The codes themselves were difficult, to the point that an untrained civilian wouldn't notice them, but a volunteer could crack them with a bit of thought. The most pertinent piece of news we received from the play was that one of our buildings in another city had been compromised and was no longer safe to use—thankfully not the one Beatrice and I had taken Ernest to, but we still looked at each other in worry. If it had happened once, it could happen again. I hoped Ernest would be taken care of before then.
That being the only truly concerning moment of the night, a great success as far as outings for our organization went, I watched Beatrice the rest of the time, and the way her eyes shone in the darkness, the way she decoded everything immediately in the commonplace book on her lap. It was nice to sit there between Beatrice and Ramona. It was nice to see Ramona mouthing along the words of the play as she took her notes, to see Beatrice so focused, to sit there and feel almost safe between good friends. If this was what it meant to be involved, to know when to stop in an assignment, I was starting to think that maybe I wouldn't mind.
After the play, the three of us walked outside. It was as dark as it had been in the theater, but much more well-lit, and a good deal colder.
"Well, I'm hungry," Beatrice said, putting her commonplace book back into her bag. "Mr. Snicket, would you escort a nice lady to the nearest restaurant?"
"I'd be delighted," I said. Next to us, Ramona hid her smile behind her gloves. I thought it would be polite to ask her to join us anyway, so I did.
But Ramona shook her head. "No, that's alright, I've got plans with Olivia. You two lovebirds will just have to soldier on without me!"
Beatrice laughed, and I felt my ears go red. Ramona hugged both of us briefly, which I was thankful for given our last adventure in hugging Ramona, and dashed off in the opposite direction.
Beatrice and I walked fairly leisurely for someone who had said she was hungry, but she didn't seem to be in that big of a hurry. She had her arm linked through mine again and smiled until I couldn't help but smile too.
Suddenly, Beatrice stopped. "Look!" she exclaimed, pointing ahead of us.
I guess I had known somewhere what part of the city we were in, but I'd forgotten that we were as close as we were to that building. It was a relief, almost, to see it after all this time. "It's still there," I said quietly.
"Of course it is," Beatrice laughed. "Come on," she said, and I let her take my hand and pull me across the street and into the diner we'd gone into so often as children.
It was exactly the same. The booths were still a stunning if slightly faded red, and the smooth black and white tables were still slightly sticky around the corners. The cream walls looked brighter than I remembered, but that was probably because of the night outside and the bright white lights illuminating every corner of the diner inside. The excessively chrome jukebox still stood by the door, and Beatrice paused to flip through the options before she deposited a few coins and pressed one of the buttons.
We sat down in the booth we'd always used, the one in the back where you could see the rest of the diner perfectly, including the exit. We ordered root beer floats and listened to the soft opening guitar of the song Beatrice had picked.
"You know, there's a cover of this song," I said, "where a singer sings it with his daughter."
Beatrice rolled her eyes. "I know. I'm surprised this jukebox had the original. I like it a lot better."
I smiled. "So do I."
It was a little strange to be in that diner as adults. Although I wished we would, I hadn't ever thought we'd do it again. There was something comforting about being back there, looking across the table at Beatrice, alive and vibrant. It made me almost certain things would finally work out for once.
The waiter brought us our drinks. Beatrice stirred the straw in her float idly. "I went out to dinner with Bertrand once," she said, "and he ordered a chocolate ice cream soda. I told him that's considered a crime against humanity and didn't talk to him for a whole week."
"I have nothing against other forms of ice cream soda," I said, "but I do think root beer is the best."
"I agree," Beatrice said. She took a sip and I watched the grin spread over her face. "They're perfect.
I looked down at my own root beer float. I had something I wanted to ask her, not about the investigation but about her, but I didn't want it to seem callous or inconsiderate or like I was asking her to pick a favorite, because that is not really how anything works.
"How do you feel about Bertrand?" I wound up asking, which definitely wasn't how I wanted to word it but was how it came out regardless.
Beatrice raised an eyebrow, but she answered me anyway. "Bertrand is my co-star," she began, "in the theater, and sometimes in things we do for our organization. I care for him a great deal. He's very kind and sweet, and very reliable. I like his company. But I—I don't love him. I've always had other things on my mind." Her eyes met mine.
I took an unnecessarily large sip of my root beer float. "Did you really?" I asked, because I wasn't quite sure what else to say.
"I did," she said. "I do."
I stood up and walked to the jukebox. I browsed through the song selection so I didn't think about how my heart was pounding in my chest. I selected one of the songs and looked at Beatrice, waiting for her reaction when the upbeat guitar started.
Beatrice laughed. "That's sweet of you," she said. "I like this one too. Better than his cover of the other song."
"I think this one is my favorite of his songs," I said, sitting back down. "I like to think it's relevant."
"That's because you worry too much," Beatrice said, and she smiled so fondly at me. "I hope it's not all relevant, though. I'd hate to think this is it for us and our relationship."
"I'd hate that too," I said. "Let's hope it isn't."
"You know, I think we have some unfinished business, Mr. Snicket," Beatrice said, and her smile was impossibly grand under the lights of the diner.
"Do we?"
She laughed. "You," she continued, as she reached across the table and took my hands in hers, "are honestly one of a kind."
My heart skipped.
Beatrice leaned forward, but I met her halfway, and nine years after I had done it, Beatrice and I kissed in the back of that diner.
-
A badly-written story sometimes involves characters coming to the height of their happiness, or to a somewhat satisfying end of their plot line, at a crucial moment that looks like the end of their narrative, only for the whole thing to continue and for their happiness to be suddenly stripped away from them in a contrived moment used only to maintain drama at the expense of the story.
This is, of course, assuming that the characters are supposed to end up happy or satisfied. Regretfully, very few of us end up happy, and even less of us are truly ever satisfied with what happens to us.
So it was with a feeling of certain trepidation as to what else was to come that Beatrice and I found out Olaf wasn't at rehearsal when we arrived at the theater Friday afternoon. When Kit didn't show up either, my nervousness increased. My sister had still been following him, as far as I knew. I didn't like the thought that something could have happened that might involve her.
"I know I said we should let someone else handle it now," Beatrice began, later that night when we had dinner, "and I did ask Ramona to check out that apartment Ernest was in, so I suppose all our bases are covered, but I'm genuinely concerned about why Olaf would've disappeared so suddenly. He's not one to miss something theatrical. Where do you think he is?"
I thought about it. Although Olaf had been my first suspect, and I still suspected he'd some something, the evidence had pointed to Ernest. But it felt now like we'd missed something, something important, and I didn't like that feeling. I never have, and I never will.
"I don't know," I said. "We can find Kit and ask her if she knows anything."
"Don't you think we do an awful lot of finding people and talking to them just to find other people?" Beatrice asked, smiling. "I think next time, we should get an assignment with a little less legwork."
I liked it when she said things like next time. It felt like nothing could touch us if we thought that far ahead, if we thought about our lives together and where we'd be going from here.
"Next time," I said, and it came out as a promise that settled between us. I didn't mind. I fully intended to keep my promises to Beatrice this time.
-
We went looking for Kit the next day after breakfast. Given that it was usually rather hard to locate my sister, Beatrice and I found her easily. She and Dewey Denouement were sitting outside a cafe, talking quietly and seriously with each other and sitting side by side, when Beatrice and I approached.
Dewey glanced at Beatrice and me with a certain nervousness, which I felt bad about, given that we'd technically arrested his brother yesterday, but he smiled a little bit all the same. Then he stood up, murmured something to Kit, and walked away quickly down the street.
I kept my face carefully blank, although any expression I made would've been somewhat hypocritical, given that I was holding Beatrice's hand. Kit still frowned at me when we sat down across from her.
"Don't give me that look," Kit said carefully.
"What look?" I asked.
Kit shook her head. "Fine," she said. "Look. I was asking Dewey about Ernest and he said that while Ernest's crossing to the other side of the schism didn't necessarily surprise him, and that Ernest's been hanging around Olaf for longer than I honestly want to think about, that Ernest was with Dewey Sunday night."
It felt as if the world had suddenly shifted, and that everything was falling out from under me in a dizzying, horrifying way.
Beatrice blinked quickly. "He was what?"
"All three of them were at the library that night," Kit said, frowning down at the table. "They were reshelving books until about ten-thirty. Dewey said that neither Frank nor Ernest left his sight the whole time."
Something cold and hard was sinking in my chest. The gunshot that night had been fired at ten-thirty, I knew that for a fact. There was no way Dewey could be lying, not to Kit, not about his brothers. There was no question that Ernest had been the one to break into Beatrice's apartment, but if he had an alibi for Sunday night, then something was terribly wrong.
"Then who?" Beatrice said. "Who—?"
All three of us looked at each other. I saw the barely-contained desperation on my sister's face. All this time, we'd been right. We just didn't want to believe it.
"I still can't find him," Kit whispered. "And if he was responsible for what happened to Esmé, then he's crueler than I ever thought he'd be."
"Then we need to find him," I said. "And we need to find him now."
"We'll split up," Kit said. She divided up the city between us, and was even kind enough to let Beatrice and I look together. Before we went our separate ways, her eyes found mine, and I didn't like the look on her face. My sister should never look so miserable.
"What's going to happen if we can't find him?" she whispered.
It was then that I remembered the sugar bowl, still locked in Beatrice's apartment, and all the secrets it held. I thought about what would happen if Beatrice couldn't get those secrets out, if we couldn't find Olaf to stop him before he carried them out. I didn't like what I came up with.
"We'll find him," I said.
We didn't find him.
The three of us scoured the city, but we still came up completely empty. The day wore on, and so did out patience as he looked for a man determined not to be found.
"There has to be some way to draw him out," Kit said when we met back up at the cafe, running a hand through her hair. "We can't let him get away from us."
Beatrice's eyes widened. "Our play," she said quietly. "On Thursday. We'll change the date to Tuesday. He'd have to show up for that, there's no way he'd miss the actual performance."
"That could work," Kit said. "He does love an audience. But how do we let him know?"
"We'll send a telegram," I said, thinking fast. "To headquarters, the one that was compromised. If Olaf's gone over to the other side as much as we fear he has, then there's a good chance it'll get to him, even if he's not there. It's our only option."
It probably wasn't. But it was the only thing we had going for us.
-
Monday, a telegram was delivered to Beatrice's apartment, with a postmark that had been smudged a great deal more than we wanted it to be, after a day spent in exhausting rehearsal. It was probably the shortest and most cryptic telegram either of us had ever seen, and in our line of work we had seen a regrettably good amount of short and cryptic telegrams.
I'LL BE THERE TOMORROW NIGHT
O
Beatrice set the telegram down on her desk. "We've got him," she said.
-
Tuesday went by quicker than any of us thought it would. Beatrice and I spent the day going over what we would do with Olaf, where we would take him, who would be involved. We'd get through the play and handle him afterwards, take him to one of the headquarters we knew for certain was safe. We made sure Bertrand and Ramona were ready to do their parts. We made sure Kit was already at the theater, staking it out. We ate a late lunch and listened to Beatrice's records, and she whistled different tunes from them while eating crackers to see if I could identify them. I was horrible at it, and she told me as much.
"You're horrible at this," she laughed through her mouthful of crackers. "Tomorrow we're going to go through every single record I own until you know them all."
"Are you telling me I'm going to acquire a newfound appreciation for Tito Puente?"
"Are you telling me you don't already have one? That's practically illegal, Mr. Snicket."
It was too peaceful, and neither of us wanted it to end. I told her as much.
"I don't want this to end," I said, which was probably one of the most honestly romantic things I've ever said.
It made Beatrice's face turn red, and she bit her lips around a smile and looked away. "We'll have all the time in the world," she said.
We went to the theater. Beatrice disappeared to get ready, so I wandered the building, making sure everything and everyone was where they were supposed to be, wondering if Olaf had miraculously arrived early and on time for once. He hadn't. But we still had time.
I spent some of it with Ramona in the meantime, as she was already ready and had been for a while. We sat at a table in her room and entertained ourselves the way we always had—by playing cards.
"I only have one pen on me," I said, watching Ramona shuffle the cards.
She pouted. "Oh, fine. We'll play for your handkerchiefs instead."
Our card games passed in companionable silence for some time, and Ramona made off with several of my handkerchiefs with a series of well-timed card hands. When she was shuffling the cards for another game, I thought of something.
"Did you find anything in that apartment Ernest was in?" I asked.
Ramona frowned, her hands stilling around the cards. She set them down. "Well," she said, reaching into the bag she had hanging over the back of her chair, "I'm actually not sure." She pulled out a plastic bag with a small item inside.
It was a scrap of a bandage, half of it stained a deep, imposing red. I took the bag from her and stared down at it. "Someone else was there," I said.
"And they were injured," Ramona said quietly. "Do you think it was Olaf?"
"It's a possibility," I admitted. "But I don't know." I had a feeling it wasn't Olaf, but I didn't know who else it could've been.
"I don't like thinking about who else it could be, honestly."
"Neither do I."
Ramona sighed. "After tonight, everything should get cleared up, right?" She took back the bag and slid it away. "It'll all work out, and we can all go out for celebratory drinks afterward. Well, celebratory root beer floats." She smiled pleasantly and went back to shuffling the cards. "I think we have just enough time for one more game."
"I'm running out of handkerchiefs," I said, inspecting my pockets.
"That's just too bad, Lemony Snicket!"
By the end of the card game, I was, in fact, another handkerchief lighter. I hadn't regularly played cards in nine years, and I'd paid for it, but I didn't mind.
Ramona sat and folded her purloined handkerchiefs neatly. "You've really got to up your game," she said. "Nine years and you haven't improved! I'll steal your heart away one of these days if you're not careful."
I laughed. "You'd have to take that up with Beatrice."
Ramona's whole face smiled at that, her eyes crinkling at the corners. "Go be cute somewhere else," she said, standing up. "I need to fix my hair before curtain." She shooed me out of her dressing room and shut the door when I was back in the hallway.
I took my time walking back to Beatrice's room. I couldn't help it. I was thinking about that bandage, about Ernest. I was thinking about who else could've been there. I thought about someone else, someone I hadn't considered before, and then I put them out of my mind. There were more pressing matters right now. We had to get Olaf. Then we could figure out what to consider next.
Beatrice was still getting ready when I entered her dressing room. I leaned against the wall by the door and watched her zip up the back of her dress with steadier hands than I would've had. I'd already said something many, many times, but I thought I'd say it again. "Good luck tonight."
"Same to you," Beatrice smiled, straightening her dress. "Have you seen him yet?"
I shook my head. "He said he'd be here, and as much as I don't like taking him at his word, this is the kind of thing he wouldn't miss."
"Here's hoping," she said. Then she turned slightly, showing off the entirety of her dress, which was shiny and silver and framed her perfectly. "What do you think?"
I walked over to her slowly. Despite my worries and doubts, everything was still here, including Beatrice. Especially Beatrice. "You look beautiful," I told her. "You really do."
"Don't you dare mess up my makeup," Beatrice muttered, but she kissed me anyway, her arms curling around my shoulders, my hands at her waist.
"Good luck," I said again when she stepped back.
Beatrice leaned her hip against her dressing table and grinned at me, her eyes twinkling. She looked too exasperated and fond to say anything else, so I said it again, just to hear her laugh, loud and bright.
I left her room and started to make my way back to the front of the theater when I heard a voice.
"Snicket?"
I turned to see Bertrand standing in the hall behind me by an open door. "Bertrand," I said. I walked over to him. "What is it?"
Bertrand looked at me, but he didn't seem angry or upset or anything that wouldn't bode well for either of us. Instead, he put a hand on my shoulder. "I wish you two happiness," he said with a genuine smile.
I gave him a smile of my own. "So do I. Good luck tonight, Bertrand."
"Thanks, Snicket."
We parted ways, and I returned to the lobby, which had accumulated a large number of theatergoers in my absence. After struggling through the crowd, I found my sister leaning against the far wall.
"Have you seen him?" I asked when I reached her.
"No," Kit said quietly, her eyes scanning the room. "Not yet."
The crowd in the lobby lingered for a while longer. Kit and I stood at the edge and watched. I saw Hector, and then Olivia, and I saw Dewey, wearing a tie that was a little too loud for the theater but looked nice regardless. He waved at us before turning to talk to Josephine and Ike. Everyone else, all the regular patrons, were a blur. I wondered what it was like, to be able to go to the theater and not worry about codes or associates or whether or not something was going to work out. After tonight, maybe we'd be able to do that.
It wasn't long before the lobby started to empty, everyone going into the theater, and soon it was just me and Kit, looking in opposite directions and thinking. We'd have to go into the theater soon, but neither of us moved. I had the feeling Kit was waiting to ask me something, the same thing she'd asked me on the phone that first day, and I couldn't avoid it this time.
Kit sighed. "Hey," she said. "What really happened? You never told me. You just said it was fine."
"There's not much else to tell," I said. "I went there. I didn't see her. I never do. But the headstone is still there. I looked at it for a long time." I didn't think I'd ever be able to erase it from my memory. Years from now, I'd probably still see the carved letters of Armstrong Feint when I closed my eyes, and feel the same drop in my stomach when I remembered the casket buried beneath it was empty.
"Lemony," my sister said, and it was the use of my name that made me look up at her. It had been years since I'd heard her say it. Kit looked sad and tired, but she smiled. "It's enough."
I looked at Kit and let her words sink in. I thought about Beatrice, and I thought about Armstrong Feint, and I thought about the fleeting memory of Ellington Feint's curved eyebrows, and for one, single second, I really believed my sister was right, or that she could be right, or that I could be right, whatever that even meant. I really believed it was all enough, everything we'd done, everything that had led us to this night.
"Come on," I said, and I even smiled a little this time. "We should get inside."
-
Kit and I sat in the front row. She rolled and unrolled her program in her hands, her eyes fixed on the curtain. I looked around the room and marked the positions of our associates. Everyone was in place. I turned back. The lights went down.
The play began.
It would be just like Olaf to keep us all in suspense, to wait until the last moment to make an unnecessarily grand entrance. I knew the play by heart now from having gone over it so many times, and I knew when his first appearance was. The minutes ticked by and finally, half an hour into the play, Ramona said her line and turned to where Olaf was supposed to enter from stage right.
But he didn't.
A sharp, cold tension settled in my stomach. Next to me, Kit clutched her program in still hands.
Ramona shot a glance at Beatrice and said her line again. Again, nothing happened. No grand entrance, no bad acting. No Olaf.
I saw Olivia take a step forward from her position by the left wall, and Dewey exchange a glance with Hector. The rest of the audience looked, for the time being, blissfully unaware that there was anything wrong. Each second that went by without Olaf's appearance felt like a hand tightening around my throat. Where was he?
Something squeaked in the back of the theater. Kit and I turned, and in the small sliver of light created by the door opening, we saw the man standing by the back row, a familiar man in a particular tie we'd already seen earlier. I almost stopped breathing.
"That's impossible," Kit whispered. "He's already here, he's—" She started to look where we both knew Dewey was stationed in the corner, and then she stopped. "He wouldn't," she hissed. "Ernest wouldn't."
I looked at Ernest a second longer before turning back to Kit. We hadn't counted on this, on Olaf not showing, on Ernest, of all people, being the one to arrive, when he was supposed to be safely out of the way. I felt that dizzying sensation like the world was falling out from under me again and swallowed hard. I could already hear it in my head, like I had when I was a child. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Each thought was a drop of horror into my stomach. "We've got to get Beatrice out of here," I said. "Before Ernest does anything." I looked back at the stage, my mind racing. How was I going to get Beatrice out of the theater? What could I do? What could I say?
"I'm going to do something," was what I said. "Can you stay here and handle it?"
Kit nodded. "Yes."
"I'll need your handcuffs."
She frowned, but she pulled out the handcuffs I knew she had stashed in the bottom of her handbag. My sister was always prepared.
"I don't know what's going to happen."
"We rarely ever do," Kit said.
I smiled. I got up, reminded myself to get scared later, and ran onstage.
It is a generally accepted truth that life is often fairly absurd. I am sure that, for instance, I will once again attend or at least hear about a play in which people are convinced the antics of my associates and enemies are actually part of the play itself. Whether that means people are gullible, or that they just often see and hear the things they want to when when it goes against obvious facts, I don't know.
I gave Beatrice a significant look before I strode towards her with as much determination and confidence as I could muster. "Beatrice," I said, "I arrest you for the murder of Esmé." I brandished the handcuffs for effect.
I saw Bertrand pale in disbelief, the way Ramona's hands flew to her mouth, the surprise masked quickly by a firm resignation on Beatrice's face.
She nodded at me. "Alright," she said. "Alright."
"Magnificent!" I heard someone shout from the audience. "I didn't even see that one coming!"
"There's no one named Esmé even in this play!" Another exclaimed. "What a twist!"
I tightened the handcuffs around Beatrice's wrists. It was the only thing I could think of to get her off the stage, and it seemed to be working. I led her to the side of the stage. "Well," I said, "that'll be all." I pulled the curtain closed.
That, of all things, was what truly upset the audience. "Wait a moment!" One of them called, as the curtain slid together in front of us and sectioned my associates and I away from the audience. "I paid good money for this play!"
"But what happens after the arrest?" Someone else shouted.
"Let's take this into the lobby," another voice said, one I recognized as my sister's.
I unlocked the handcuffs and shoved them in my pocket. "We don't have much time, Beatrice."
"Beatrice," Bertrand called out, he and Ramona rushing towards us, "what—"
"I'll tell you everything later!" Beatrice said.
I took her hand and we started running, leaving behind the confused audience and our concerned friends.
"What happened?" she asked, as we moved quickly through the back halls of the theater. "He didn't—"
"Kit and I didn't see Olaf anywhere," I said. I pulled her through a door and down a short flight of steps into another hallway. "But Ernest showed up. Something's gone wrong."
Beatrice exhaled shakily. "We should've known," she said, "we should've known—"
"We know now," I said. "We've got to get out of here. Our associates will handle things."
When we were outside, the cold wind biting at our faces, I looked back just for a moment through the glass front of the theater to see my sister standing in the lobby, easily controlling the crowd that had gathered around her as they demanded answers.
That was the last time I saw Kit.
-
Beatrice and I raced back to her apartment, taking the back streets to avoid being seen. As we ran, we heard the piercing whine of a fire engine not too far away, and we immediately stopped. We'd been trained to do that.
"That sounded close," Beatrice said, breathing hard. "But we don't—"
"We don't have time," I said. "They'll have to deal with it without us."
We made it back to her apartment safely. Beatrice turned to me the minute we were inside. "What now?" she asked.
"Now," I said, "I'm going to find Olaf." I didn't know where he'd be, but I had a good idea about where to start. It was a place I should've checked much, much earlier. I'd checked everyone else's, after all, but it just hadn't occurred to me to check the most obvious place, and I tried not to feel too bad about it.
Beatrice took a step towards me. "I'm coming with you," she said.
I almost did let her come with me. But I didn't. "No," I said.
"It didn't work the last time you told me that," she said, frowning, "and it's not going to work now."
"Beatrice, please," I said. "Please, don't risk it this time. Just stay here, don't go anywhere, don't open the door for anyone. It'll be safer than you out there." Although her apartment hadn't been safe before, and realistically, nowhere was safe, at least it was somewhere no one would find her, at least for a little bit. It certainly wouldn't take me that long to find Olaf, if he was as nearby as I thought he was and as he said he'd be. I didn't know what would happen when I caught up with Olaf, and it was better if Beatrice wasn't there, even if I wanted her to be. I wasn't going to let anything happen to her this time around, regardless of what I had to do to ensure that.
Beatrice looked like she wanted to argue. It was a look she wore often, but this time, she closed her eyes and sighed. "Alright," she said. "Alright. I'll stay here. But you'll be back," she said, opening her eyes. It was not a question.
I smiled. "I'll be back." I kissed her, and I meant for it to be brief, but Beatrice grabbed my shoulders and held on.
She stepped back a few moments later. "You'll be back," she said, and she let me go.
-
Breaking into someone's apartment is not exactly legal or ethical, but it can be incredibly beneficial. There are things you can learn about a person only from careful examination of their belongings. These are the things they do not tell people, and perhaps the things they don't even tell themselves. It was for these reasons that I went to pick the lock on Olaf's apartment. If he was there, then that would be that. If he wasn't, then I could at least figure out where to find him.
Olaf's apartment wasn't so much an apartment as it was the tiniest room with the smallest door on the topmost floor of the apartment building two streets over from Beatrice's. I was in luck that the door was so beaten and the lock so rusted, so I didn't have to worry about trying to pick it open. All it took was a few meetings between my shoulder and the door jamb.
I stepped into the apartment and lit a match from my pocket. The single window on the far wall was bolted shut, and the room had a musty, shadowy feel. Dirty and patched clothes were strewn haphazardly about the sagging couch and chairs that had been jammed into the small space—if you stepped over them delicately, it looked like you would reach the kitchen, which from what I could see was the only thing untouched in the apartment. I looked past the coffee table, piled high with newspapers and drama magazines and ashtrays and his incomplete tea set, until my eyes fell upon the desk situated between a chair and another door. The mirror sitting atop it was the only clean thing in the apartment. Between the stage makeup and the empty wine bottles were a few photographs. One of them was face-down on the desk, and I picked it up.
The glass was cracked slightly, but the picture inside was still perfectly clear. I looked down at my sister's face. There are very few pictures of my siblings and me, but I believe there are more pictures of Kit than any of Jacques or me, mostly because Olaf once went through a period of photographing her like he was either trying to keep track of her or never forget her, much to my concern. Something twisted inside me at the thought that even after everything, Olaf kept her picture, even if he had hidden it.
I set it back down. I lit another match.
The second frame was empty. I wondered briefly what could have been inside, what Olaf had felt was either so unimportant he threw away or perhaps so important he took it with him, but then I saw the third photograph. It didn't have a frame. It was a photo of Esmé, her face close to the camera, smiling her wicked smile. Beside it was a folded piece of paper, slightly crumpled. I unfolded it. I brought the match closer and found Esmé's quick handwriting scrawled across the page.
I still can't believe Beatrice stole it! Can you believe her? All that planning we did, and she just waltzes in and takes it right out from under me! I'm going to give her a piece of my mind, I swear. I'm going to make her regret she ever underestimated me. I'm going to wipe that smile off her pretty little face tonight.
Call me when you get back in, darling, and we'll celebrate.
A chill ran down my spine. Olaf hadn't initially known, then, that Esmé had been to Beatrice's apartment, because Esmé hadn't been able to get ahold of him. But now he knew Beatrice was alive, and he knew what had happened to Esmé, and all this time he'd been waiting for just the right moment, just the right dramatic moment where he could get Beatrice alone and finish the job Esmé had started.
I dropped the letter back onto the desk and ran out of the apartment.
-
I took the steps up to Beatrice's apartment two at a time, my heart pounding in my chest. I told Beatrice to stay there because she'd be safe, she'd be alright, and I was still wrong. I was wrong again, and if I had to lose one more person to my already extensive list of mistakes, I didn't know if I could take it. I almost went to look for Hector for backup before I remembered he wasn't here anymore. He was still at the theater. It was down to just the three of us, then.
I reached Beatrice's apartment and unlocked the door, flinging it open. "Beatrice?" I called, looking around. "Beatrice?"
It was a scene I never wanted to see.
Beatrice stood by the piano, her gun held steady in her hand and pointed straight at Olaf, who almost lounged as he stood by the couch, his own gun fixed on her. I watched them, breathless and afraid.
Olaf noticed me first. "Why, Lemony Snicket!" he exclaimed, and he pointed his gun at me now. "I should have known you would've shown your face at some point tonight."
"You're just in time, Mr. Snicket," Beatrice said quietly, casting me a quick glance. "Olaf was just about to tell me everything."
Olaf smiled wide. "Well, I've never denied an audience the pleasure of watching me do what I do best," he said, and he schooled his features into a tortured look that seemed strange and out of place on his face. "I did it, officers," he said, in a high, mocking voice, like this was just another play, like we were still in school, like he could still get out of it if he wanted to. "It was me! It was all me! Take me away so I can repent for my deeds against society!" Then he dropped the expression and grinned that horrible grin of his. "Is that how you thought this would go, Beatrice?" he hissed at her. "Is that what you wanted?"
Beatrice's frown deepened, but she didn't say anything. I saw her hand move slightly around her gun, still pointed at Olaf.
"But anyway, I was here that night," Olaf said, that grin still on his face, but it was harder now, scornful. "And I shot Esmé. Of course, I didn't know it was Esmé at the time. I don't go around shooting my friends, thank you very much." He put an amount of emphasis on friends that made me shiver. "Thanks to some quick thinking from Ernest and my associate across the hall—" I thought of the one tenant who'd been able to give me the time of the gunshot, the one who'd said a gunshot's not unusual around here. "—they were able to get Esmé to a safe place to recover. Which she's been doing with no small amount of complaining, I'll have you know.
"I'll admit," he continued, fixing his dark eyes on Beatrice, "that you almost pulled one over on me, Beatrice, by being alive. But that doesn't matter now. Esmé is alive, and she and I are going to make it out of this city alive. And if you give me the sugar bowl, I'll be the nice, compromising man I am at heart, and I'll consider letting both of you walk out of this relatively alive. A gunshot isn't too hard to recover from. That's only fair, I think. And that's providing I don't miss."
Olaf fired. The bullet passed right through the space between Beatrice and I, striking the door behind me and staying there. He made the point that with the proper lighting, he was perfectly capable of killing both of us when he wanted to. He was not going to miss.
I remembered the bandage Ramona had found, the closed door in the apartment Ernest was in, then the inexplicably small patch of blood that had been on Beatrice's carpet before, and it dawned on me that no one had ever mentioned the body, what had happened to it or where it'd been taken. It was because very few people had seen it, and the ones who had really seen it had dealt with it before anyone else could.
We hadn't had the time to notice it wasn't Beatrice. I cursed myself for not following up on that, for getting too wrapped up in too much else to think of the most obvious thing, for forgetting to ask the simplest question that even Olaf had asked—where was Esmé? And we'd paid for it.
"And maybe I wouldn't even stop there," Olaf said, almost casually. "You two aren't my only problems, although you're probably the most troublesome. I'll just go through and kill every volunteer, like your precious duchess, your dear sister, even Bertrand, so none of you ever get in my way again. I didn't say everything on the sugar bowl. I'm not that stupid. And I think you'll understand tonight that I'm capable of much worse things."
"Olaf," Beatrice said, her voice surprisingly calm for someone who had just been threatened multiple times, "I told you before, there's still a chance, you can still come back to our side! You did so much good work before, there's no reason to throw it all away! If you come with us, we can protect you, we can all use the sugar bowl for—"
Olaf actually laughed, his loud, wheezing laugh. "Oh, Beatrice! You always get it wrong, don't you? Just like Snicket over there. You're in no place to make a kind of bargain like that. You weren't before, and you aren't now!"
Beatrice swallowed. Her eyes hardened, all their softness falling away. She looked cold and determined, even with the fear I could see making her shoulders tremble. I knew that look. "I'll pull this trigger if you don't," she said, her voice low.
Olaf grinned at her. "I don't think you have the guts," he said, starting to laugh again. "You'd never do it."
"I'd rather not, honestly," Beatrice said. "But I will if I have to. Think about your associates, Olaf, think about Kit—"
The mirth vanished from Olaf's face in an instant, replaced with a vicious fury. He fired again, and this time it just barely missed Beatrice's shoulder.
"I'm not playing around anymore, Beatrice," Olaf whispered. "I told you that before. I'll do it. Give me the sugar bowl or I'll kill you where you stand."
Beatrice took a small step forward.
I didn't dare say anything out loud. There were things I wanted to say, a million things, probably, but I couldn't get any of them out.
"I want to give you one more chance," Beatrice said. "Please."
Olaf shook his head slowly, a leer pulling across his face. It was the same twisted look he'd given me when he goaded me before. I saw his hand tighten on his gun, and then I had a horrifying feeling about what was going to happen the second before it did.
It happened in an instant. Beatrice pulled the trigger, and the shot rang out, and the bullet went through Olaf's left shoulder. There was a moment of silence where he stared at Beatrice, white-faced and wide-eyed, before his knees hit the floor, his right hand scrambling over the bullet hole that was dripping blood down his shirt. He inhaled, a rough, rasping noise that caught at the end. Then he fell forward, and all the breath fell out of him too.
Beatrice lowered her arm. She took in a long, deep breath and then turned around and looked at me, her face still set.
She was right. There was a point at which you could talk and another at which you had to act. I had done that with Hangfire. She had done that with Olaf. This was what our lives were.
It was what my life was, but I didn't want it to be Beatrice's.
I stepped in front of Beatrice and took the gun from her hand. "You weren't here tonight," I told her. "You and I lost track of each other once we left the theater. Olaf and I were here alone. You came back in an hour and found him."
I didn't know if it was the right thing to do, or the wrong thing to do, or if that was even going to matter in the long run. But I figured it might be what I had to do.
I said before that people do difficult things for more or less noble reasons, but it wasn't as clear as that. People do things—not noble or wicked things, just things—for reasons. It probably didn't matter which side we were on, whether or not what we did was right, or wrong, or too much, or not enough. Sometimes it was just what you had to do. Maybe it wasn't what you wanted to do. But it was what you had to do. We all had our parts to play, and these had to be ours.
"No," Beatrice said firmly. "This—I did this—you can't, I'm not going to let you—"
"I'm not going to let you become a murderer," I said.
"You couldn't let Hangfire go free," Beatrice reminded me, "and I couldn't let Olaf go free. I had to, and I don't regret it—"
"You don't now," I said, "but you're going to wake up one day, tomorrow, next week, next month, next year, and suddenly realize you do."
"I don't need you to protect me," Beatrice said desperately, "I don't want you to protect me, I just want—I just want you, here, with me, doing what we can, and I don't care where that takes me, just as long as it's with you, and—"
I put the gun in my pocket and took her face in my hands, her skin smooth against my shaking fingertips. "I'm not going to let what happened to me happen to you," I said, "and nothing is going to change that."
"You'll have to go away," Beatrice whispered.
"I will," I said, and I wanted to ask her to wait for me, or to come with me, to run away where nothing could touch us, where we could go and figure out what everything really means, but I couldn't ask that of her. I loved Beatrice more than anything, but I couldn't. I stared at her and took in everything—her deep brown eyes, the pieces of hair that curled by her chin, the way she looked at me with all the love I ever wanted. Take a good look, I told myself, because this is all you're going to get. I started to take a step back. "Maybe it's for the best," I said instead.
"Wait," Beatrice said, and she pulled away first and ran to her bedroom. I saw her fumble with the drawer in the bedside table and pull out the sugar bowl and bring it over to me. "Take it."
I frowned. "No, you—"
"Take it," she insisted, pushing the sugar bowl into my hands. "Hide it for me. We'll need it later."
"No one else is going to know what happened," I said.
"Not until you come back. And you are coming back, you're going to meet me at our diner in a month when this is all over, after I've handled Esmé, and we're going to fix everything. And in the meantime, I'll know the truth," Beatrice said fiercely, her eyes flicking back and forth between mine. "I'll know."
I put the sugar bowl in my other pocket and took her hands in mine. I wish you did, I thought. I wish you could. I wish you could know every truth, every mistake, everything I've tried and failed to do, everything I will go on to try and do.
I wish you understood why I couldn't, why I wouldn't meet you at the diner in a month, why this couldn't happen. Because you and I, Beatrice, we wouldn't work out, not in the end. I will wish, on long, dark, cold nights, where the only thing keeping me warm is the memory of your smile, that we did work out, but we will not.
"You'll know," I said, and if she heard the fear in my voice she didn't comment on it. I leaned forward, very slowly, and kissed her on the cheek.
Beatrice's mouth trembled. "You're one of a kind, Mr. Snicket," she whispered.
I tried to smile. "Good-bye, Beatrice."
-
I made sure that Beatrice slipped unseen out the back alley before I exited the building by the front entrance. It was past midnight now. I walked quickly through the streets, doing my best to avoid the streetlamps, the sugar bowl clunking occasionally in my pocket. I could hear the sirens again, this time a little fainter, and I wondered vaguely where they were. When I reached the end of the street, I heard a familiar rustle, and then an equally familiar cough. I paused, looked at the nearby bushes, and waited.
A few moments later, Jacques Snicket stepped into the street. My brother and I looked at each other for a long time. It felt like too many years since I had seen Jacques, since I could look him in the eye. But he didn't look disappointed, or upset, or anything I'd imagined he'd be when we finally caught up with each other. Instead, he looked as tired as I felt, just like Kit always did.
I pulled out the sugar bowl. "I need you to hide this," I told Jacques, pressing the bowl into his hands. "And I mean hide it."
Jacques looked startled for a moment, and then he looked down at the sugar bowl and his expression turned to one of resignation. "I shouldn't," he said.
This was no time to get angry at Jacques, so I tried not to. "Please," I said.
Jacques sighed. "Alright," he said, and he slid it into his pocket. "What's on it?"
"Information about Olaf and Esmé we might need later. I don't know what's going to happen until then, so we need to hide it."
He looked at me. "I heard the gunshot."
"Olaf's dead," I said quickly. "I did it."
Jacques smiled a little. "I don't think you did."
It was nice that he still had such faith in me, even if I'd done it before and was clearly capable of doing it again, or of at least taking the blame for it.
"I have to leave," I said.
"I can get you out on the Prospero in the morning."
"No." I shook my head. "No one from V.F.D. can know where I'm going. I—" I bit my lip. "I don't know when I'll be back," I said, and it was at this point that my voice broke. I turned away from Jacques, but it is very hard to hide things from your siblings, and I know he saw my shoulders start to shake.
Jacques hugged me. I hugged him back. When we let go, he looked me square in the face. "It'll all work out," he said.
No it won't, I wanted to say. I'm just being a coward, because I would rather run to protect everyone than do it for real, than own up to my mistakes, I wanted to say. I hope we see each other again, I wanted to say. I didn't say any of it, and I never saw my brother again.
I started walking.
-
It wasn't long until I found myself at the phone booth again, the one where Kit had first told me about Beatrice. That felt like a lifetime ago.
I dialed a phone number. Even though it was late, it only rang twice before someone picked up. "Bellerophon Taxi Service and Mobile Library."
"I'm sorry," I said. "I need a favor."
I heard the smile in his voice. "Anything, Snicket," Pip said.
"I need you to hide me."
-
The month that followed was not the best for our organization. During the play, the fire-starting side had burned down the city's headquarters, and some of the associates in there at the time did not survive. In the scuffle that ensued, Ernest was able to successfully get Esmé out of the city and to a location where she could continue to recover from Olaf's gunshot and carry out her nefarious plans from afar. Because of this, Beatrice was not able to handle Esmé as she had planned. Her last hope for saving the situation was the sugar bowl.
The sugar bowl containing the information against Olaf and Esmé that I'd given to Jacques to keep safe until we needed it was lost that night, when Jacques went back to headquarters as it burned to see what he could do. My brother was unable to tell Beatrice what had happened to the sugar bowl, and Beatrice still believed that I had it.
Between the theater, the fire, Olaf's death, the loss of the sugar bowl, Esmé's assumed death and actual disappearance, and my disappearance, which had been preceded by a string of actions that were going to be hard to justify without the sugar bowl, no one could really be sure what happened that night. Even Beatrice found she wasn't sure, and she had been there in person. Everything that happened afterward made it too unclear, and when I didn't show up at the diner a month later to discuss the contents of the sugar bowl, which no one could even find anymore, she had to assume the worst. I let her.
The fire-starting side, assuming I had already caused them enough trouble, even though I think the trouble I have caused spreads to everyone, even beyond the schism divides, took the opportunity to covertly carry out the crimes mentioned in the sugar bowl and blame me for them.
I let them do it. I couldn't do anything to stop them anyway, without the sugar bowl. And the more reasons I had to stay hidden, to prevent myself from interfering in the lives of people better off without me, the better. I let it ruin my relationships with everyone, my siblings, my friends, even with the Bellerophons, even after they'd found a place for me to hide, because I didn't want them involved anymore.
I think it goes without saying, then, that I never saw Beatrice again.
-
It took me longer than I wanted to find out what became of Esmé. By the time I'd found her again and had figured out what else she had planned in the intervening years, it was too late. On late nights, I wonder if I could have done more to stop her, to stop the newspaper headline that officially pronounced Beatrice Baudelaire dead. I'm still not sure. I'll probably never be sure. And if I couldn't stop what came afterward, then the least I could do was write it down.
There was a city, and there was a fire, and there were three children.
I went to work again.
-
notes:
we did it cats!!!! we made it!!! we climbed this whole mountain!!!!
so this fanfic is based off a 1944 noir movie called Laura. I changed some things around in order to fit the asoue-verse, but the premise is the same -- detective falls in love with seemingly dead woman -- which I always thought was a weird and interesting concept. so definitely check the movie out!! it's got YOUNG VINCENT PRICE in it and you can find it streaming on TCM's website sometimes OR watch it on archive.org!!
by the way, this is the song that beatrice plays in the diner, and this is the song lemony plays.
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