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Chapter Text

"THE SEATS ARE 

EMPTY

THE THEATRE IS DARK

WHY DO YOU KEEP

 ACTING?"

- Bukowski

*

THE VERY FIRST NIGHT

*

It happens in a single week. 

Seven days for Violet's devastating change to occur, each night like a fault line cracking, cleaving her heart open. (Or, perhaps her affection for Count Olaf has always been there, blind and bound and stuffed inside her chest like a wardrobe with tightly locked doors. Not so much changing as lurking.)

In seven days, Uncle Monty will be dead. 

For now, Violet peeks around the door of her brand new bedroom and watches Stephano. It is nearly midnight, and the house is crowded with dark. It huddles in the hall like smog, kept only at bay by the slim taper candle Stephano has placed at the foot of his rocking chair. Wax has overflowed from the copper chamberstick's basin to pool against the floor, inching closer and closer to the chair's rhythmic tread.

Violet is crouched low, a single eye focused between the door's crack. At her feet, her nightgown fans lace. At her back, her siblings are dreaming. Before her, Stephano interrupts her nighttime ritual. Over the months since her parents' deaths, she has developed a habit of sleeplessness.

One that sends her wandering, or pacing, or lying flat in bed pretending at sleep. Even living in Olaf's house, she would wait until Klaus and Sunny went still beside her in their tiny, singular bed to pace. To fret. To acknowledge her own mangled grief, and Count Olaf's treachery, and Mr. Poe's uselessness.

And there, on the floor of her Uncle's house, Violet's body aches with restlessness. She needs time to acquaint herself with her new home and consider her reaction to Stephano's arrival. Despite her warnings, Monty does what adults do. (What Mr. Poe and Justice Strauss and Count Olaf did.) He distracts. He pets Violet’s hair soothingly. Like the most merciful of misguided storytellers, Monty waves away her worries with excuses as he opens his arms to the villain.

Violet should have expected it, and still it stings. From there, all she notices are Monty's failings - his misguided protection, his naivety, his eagerness to distract himself.

(She knows beyond her ability to reassure him - she does not need the sight of a tattoo or the quiver of a false voice to recognize Count Olaf.)

He had only arrived before dinner, and already his presence feels like a problem that will take a very long time for her to consider.

Decision made, Violet rises softly and steps into the hall. 

Despite his faults, she's feeling emboldened by the protection of her Uncle Monty, by his honest and obvious care. Even the beautiful bedroom and clothes seem proof of his devotion, and it makes Violet want to gloat. (I have a protector, she wants her fearlessness to say. You can't do anything at all to me.) The want floats there, buoyant above her desire for self-preservation. And although his eyes are on her from the moment her bedroom door twitches aside, Stephano waits until she is right before him, attempting to pass, to speak. 

"Have you got a hall pass?"

The voice irritates her to an irrational degree, nasal and treacherous and false as it is.

"I don't need a hall pass."

"Oh, I'm afraid you do." Stephano extends his legs as far as they will stretch to block her path, crossing his feet at the ankle like he could hold the pose all night. "Naughty little orphans aren't allowed into the reptile room without supervision. And what kind of, er, very handsome herpetological assistant would I be if I allowed that?"

Violet crosses her arms, glaring at the mocking bare skin of his ankle. There is no eye to stare back, not even a hairless patch of skin to serve as a clue to its absence. "We both know you're no herpetological assistant, Count Olaf."

"I can't say I know who this Count Olaf man is," Stephano drawls in his awful half-whine. "Though he sounds very handsome. But! Violet. Violet, uh, Beaumont, wasn't it? Beaumont? Beauregarde? Anyways. Vi-o-let. Pardon me, but I couldn't help but notice. You didn't deny that I am, in fact, very handsome." If his disguise had an eyebrow, or even two instead of none, she can tell by his expression he would be raising them in a gossipy, implying sort of way.

"And?" Violet asks, voice nearly a hiss. It seems an unnatural talent of his to get under her skin. To provoke and unnerve her to extremes with so little interaction. "Is there something you're trying to ask me?"

Then, from downstairs, the iguana clock shrieks. It startles her, though what startles her more is the following moment when Stephano stands. Before the clock has stopped its shrieking, he has stood, grabbed the chamberstick, tucked an arm against the back of the rocking chair, and dragged everything across the hall into his bedroom. He closes the door soundly and does not return. Violet hurries down the stairs as the midnight hour begins.

Tonight, she avoids the reptile room. Her interaction with Stephano lingers like an honest threat. Violet feels spooked, jumpy, half expecting him to appear around every corner. Instead, she finds her way to the kitchen, which is still soft and calm with lamplight. She fills a glass of water at the sink, sipping it as she snoops. Although there is not much of interest - venom samples in the refrigerator, rodents in the freezer, sterile water jugs in the cupboards among the cooking supplies - it comforts her to see. Feeling more at peace with her surroundings, she refills her water and treads carefully back upstairs. She sneaks as quietly as she can, yet when she crests the final stair, breath held, heart hammering, Count Olaf appears at his open door. 

She can see even in the lowlight that he has been drinking while she rummaged through the kitchen. A certain slackness sinks his neutral expression, yet his eyes carry an attentive gleam. He says nothing. One hand appears from the door and reaches slowly for her water. Violet stands still and lets him take it. In the dim, she watches Olaf pivot her glass until he spots the exact place she had last sipped, a small bead of water from her bottom lip still clinging to the rim. He gulps noisily from this exact spot until there is nothing left.

"Thanks, doll," Olaf huffs, after nearly ten seconds of drinking. "Now get to bed. Pretty little orphans need their rest."

Violet winces, half a grimace. "Pretty?” The word feels mocking to her. Too shallow. Not something that should even matter, not a detail to her character Olaf should be able to notice. “You think I'm pretty?"

Although he had started to lean back, to draw away, her question gets his attention. He stares a few seconds too long, his face perfectly still. Violet stares back.

"Violet," Olaf says, soft and sincere and sinister. "I think you're the prettiest girl in all the world."

"Really?"

"Oh, yes. It's quite disgusting, really. I think I'm a monster."

In this moment of all moments, Violet feels recognized. She feels a bit like a monster herself, after all. Like a creature hiding inside the skin of a girl, as if her true nature is something vague and awful instead of flesh and heat and heart. (Instead of a girl, she is a curse incarnate, maybe. A plague. Or a finger of death slowly uncurling, killing her parents by proxy as she grows, knowing surely there is more tragedy to come.)

The moment Olaf says that single word - monster - it is like looking into a mirror and fully seeing herself as she truly is. In the wake of understanding, relief pours in.

"That makes sense. I think..." Violet nearly tells him. Nearly thanks him. But her throat closes up against vulnerability, and the urge to share passes.

Misunderstanding, Olaf sneers, "You think I'm a monster too?"

"Of course I do," she says softly, perhaps too gently. "Do you always drop the disguise at midnight?"

Olaf cracks the door to the width of his eye. "Clever, aren't you, orphan?"

"Wait!"

Unwilling to let him retreat, Violet slams against the door with all her weight. No resistance comes, and she spills into the bedroom with such force her knees skid. 

Detestable curiosity keeps her fear far away as she looks about the room. It is not much different than the one she shares with her siblings, even down to the unmade bed positioned against the wall exactly like hers. Olaf stands at the center of the room, Stephano's disguise untucked, unbuttoned, all wrong. Without the mustache, he is not Stephano, yet with the absence of a unibrow, he does not quite register as Count Olaf either. He seems stuck halfway between, some strange amalgamate of base and fakery.

 "Tell me. Please. Just tell me. Midnight? Every night? You get to - to... go back?"

The idea of stripping off a disguise appeals to her. Of shucking one identity for another. She wants to shuck the orphan from herself. To unmask from tragedy. Even just after midnight. Even just to sleep.

Olaf kneels, offers his hands, and helps her to her feet. "I get to go back," he says in a voice that is unexpectedly tender. He releases her hands just as softly. "What do you want to go back to, Violet? Is it a place, or time? Or a feeling? Is it who you were before you lost your rotten parents?"

"I don't know. But I don't want this. This..." she shakes her head, and no words come loose. Finally, after several seconds of struggle, she admits, "I feel like a monster too."

(She feels grief. Grief. Someone, she thinks, should tell her it is a normal feeling, after. Normal to be a child absent of identity without her parents. To be a young woman without her mother. To be a little girl without her father. To be the eldest. To be the leader. To be the protector. It feels like too much, to be so full of absence. To be so swollen with loss, she becomes hollow from the inside out, like a rot-infested tree, softening first at its center.)

Olaf smells her vulnerability like blood in the air.

"I could teach you, Violet. Generous man that I am."

"What do you mean... teach me?"

His offer, as any one before it, reeks of trickery.

"It's a very necessary skill for an actor worth anything at all. In order to become someone else, he must learn how not to be himself. And in order to not be himself, he has to learn how to get back later, once the curtain has closed and the applause settles down several minutes after. See?"

"I... see," she says slowly. The gears in her mind are whirling, turning, no longer slow with fear. "To step into a character... you naturally have to...become yourself again later?"

"Eventually." 

He seems to dismiss her then, turning to drag a regal set of pajamas from a wardrobe in the corner. It seems Monty keeps them stocked for guests, in several different sizes and beautiful patterns. The set Olaf picks is satin, and green as lye. He starts to pick apart the buttons from his disguise with quick efficiency. Violet half expects to see a different outfit beneath Stephano's - the pinstripe suit he wore on the day they first met, maybe. Instead, her eyes meet bare skin and chest hair and the growing stretch of exposed stomach beneath it.

"I'll try it," Violet squeaks when Olaf rolls his eyes at her. "I'll try to - leave myself behind."

"Do."

His shirt is completely unbuttoned, and seeing the rise of his breath swelling in his chest nearly makes her look away. Even the act of breathing seems too intimate to witness, too human. An act in opposition to the monstrous man she knows Count Olaf to be.

Olaf bends, his shirt feathering to the floor, and pats her cheek harshly. (Later, when she has time to consider this interaction, Violet will be startled to recall she hadn't flinched away. Hadn't moved at all, really. She stood meekly, looking him in the eye as he tapped her cheek, still and silent as a prey animal.)

I think you're the prettiest girl in all the world, she remembers with a shiver as Olaf's fingertips linger. After this, this fractional moment of affection so short it could have been hallucinated, he turns away with a final air of dismissal - and it's like something has fallen away without his eyes on her. Some tension severed, cut through to uselessness, like a tendon sliced from muscle. "Go to bed. Come back tomorrow, just after midnight. I'll teach you then."

"But how? I want to try now."

"Desperate, then." He eyes her critically. "Your newest guardian has taken care of replacing your clothes. That's the first step. You strip the outermost layer. You step out of a disguise figuratively."

"Literally?"

He scoffs at this, mouth curling. "Both, Baudelaire. It's both. Once you're down to skin, you get back to you. I undress. I unmask. I rip this thing right off." He points towards his nightstand where a large lamp with a crystalline base sits. Crookedly stuck against the pale shade is Stephano's mustache, wrinkled in the middle like it had been flung there. It looks alarming and silly, almost enough to force a miserable little laugh, yet Violet swallows the compulsion down and looks away. The lamp has reminded her how dim the room is, with only the single candle and the wide window. Through the dark, moonlight glows into the small bedroom, enough to see every corner, every edge, every fine expression on Olaf's face, even down to the angry red irritation at his upper lip.

 "Have you ever been hurt, Violet?"

"Excuse me?" Her breathless question sounds foreign even to her. As if it had been asked by someone else within earshot. A grown woman, maybe. A grown woman who has earned her captivated breathlessness and knows exactly the strange, anticipatory quake backing it up.

"Hurt. Do you have any obvious scars?"

She thinks. In her mind, her body is absent of any trace. No flush of pink to her skin, no freckling, no creases or folds or shadows. She is smooth and soft as freshly-pressed linen. Like a paper doll, just constructed. "No. Well. Not yet."

Olaf smiles. "A beautiful answer. You're a blank canvas, aren't you? Hmm. Nothing to step out of, and nothing to hide. It begs the question - why might you find being Violet Baudelaire so miserable?"

Leader, Violet thinks. Protector. Orphan. Monster. Prettiest girl in all the world.

She can't bring herself to say it, not even one title. Violet will live through her orphanhood because she must, but must she be a monstered orphan? Orphan-leader. Protector-girl. Prettiest monster in all the world.

"You can be like me, y'know. Past midnight, you step away. So get out," Olaf commands softly, once Violet has stood silent and spiraling long enough. "Get to bed. Go leave yourself behind."

He doesn't watch her leave, and Violet slips into the hall guided by a sense of purpose like a stranger taking her hand in the dark. It's not quite hope but it is nearly so - interest, or dawning obsession. 

Already, Olaf's idea is a worthy distraction. Already, her mind gnaws at this complexity - (How, exactly, does she abandon herself? How can she orphan her mind from her body? How should she lose her own mind?) - instead of the tragic past or the unyielding future. 

Violet returns to her empty bed. Sleep sneaks up on her. She has hardly rolled onto her back before she feels it pressing her down. Three deep breaths and she is gone, her mind runny with half-thoughts. She hears Olaf's memory between the buzz of the air conditioning, the cicadas outside, her siblings breathing from the other bed. 

"You can 

be 

like 

me,"

 Olaf says, his voice so deep and so very far away.

*

Chapter Text

THE SECOND NIGHT

*

The next night, she does as Olaf instructs. 

She relaxes in bed and unwinds slowly, in degrees, imagining unlatching clasps at her edges like a manhole cover. Violet steps out of her orphanhood as, outside, Olaf is surely preparing to step out of Stephano. She pictures her body like a general store where she hangs a sign out front - closed for the day. Gone fishing. (Gone out of my mind, Violet thinks.)

She steps into the hall a couple minutes till midnight, and hopes for neutral ground. Earlier that day, Stephano had pushed her, punished her.

"Why the knife at the table?"

The scratch of it lingers. It confuses her, this phantom touch. She had tried to listen to Uncle Monty describe their upcoming adventure to Peru and found herself unable. His descriptions of the land eluded her, no matter how intriguing she found the warm climate and the lush jungles, brimming with rare reptiles. Beside her, Stephano toyed with his blade between her legs until she was trembling, pale, unable to speak through her horror.

"To tease you, of course." In the lowlight, Stephano's grin stretches obscenely, unnaturally, like a nightmare of a man. Violet almost steps away. "To upset you. To make you look right at me." 

Midnight strikes, and far below in the entryway, the screeching iguana clock interrupts any response she might have had. Words flee from her as she focuses entirely on the man before her. Although Stephano doesn't rise from the rocking chair, she can still see Count Olaf appearing beneath the disguise slowly, in degrees. Each screech seems to call him out a bit better - a slight sagging to his posture, a forming scowl, a different attention to his eyes where they rest on her face. Once the hour has fully been announced, he clears his throat harshly, like working out a bone. Then, softer, with the voice she is most familiar, "To test you. To see if you would keep your mouth shut."

"Why would you test me to see if I could keep my mouth shut?"

Olaf stands and rolls his shoulders. He flexes his fingers, cracks his knuckles, and shudders like shrugging off an old coat. There follows a single heartbeat, two, three, where he is absolutely still. Then he is dragging the rocking chair across the hall and opening his bedroom with a flourish.

 "Are you ready for your lessons? Come in, come in, Miss Baudelaire."

She creeps into his room, ready at any moment to turn away or scream. Olaf has lit a small bedside lamp and popped the cork on a fresh bottle of wine. His back is to her as he pours a singular glass. 

"Do you have any experience with performing, Violet?"

"Do you know where Monty's previous assistant went? Gustav?"

He looks at her over his shoulder, stills his hands. "Wrong question. In fact, I believe I asked you a question. The polite response would be an answer. Don't little girls care so much about politeness?"

Then, when she doesn’t speak, "Violet. Performing."

"Oh! No. No, I don't have any experience." She steps into the room fully, intrigued as she is, and brave beyond reason. The door swings closed at her back. They both hear the latch click into place. "But I think I did it right. I - stepped out of myself like you said."

"Are you sure? I don't think so. You're still so afraid of me."

"I'm not afraid."

"Aren't you?"

He turns to face her fully then, offering the wine. It is a small crystal glass, the engraved filaments twisting the light. Red wine, the color of danger. Violet doesn't take it.

"Why did you try to marry me?"

"You're not listening to me, Violet. You're not trying. After midnight, you leave yourself behind. I am not Stephano, Italian man and assistant to Dr. Montgomery Montgomery. And you're not Violet Baudelaire, orphan, wisecrack, and general menace. We have no past, no history. You're just a girl. And I am hardly the man who forced you into a wedding dress and asked for your hand.”

"You're not Stephano. And... you're not Count Olaf right now, either. Are you just Olaf then?"

"Perceptive thing." He sighs and settles on the floor. His back rests against the side of the bed, and his long legs stretch across the ornate rug into the center of the room. Even just as a man without a disguise, he seems to fill the entire space. There is nowhere she can look or step or linger that does not bare his trace. "You really don't want to drink? Seems like all the girls look for ways to grow up too quickly. Here you go, Violet. Have one on me."

He's testing her. It's obvious enough she feels the need to comply. 

She can manage the basest of truces.

"Maybe... just a little."

"A toast." The glass is delicate, beautiful. She wonders if he stole it from the dining room just for her. Olaf raises his bottle into the air. "To not being me, and not being you. Just a man and a girl and nothing else at all. Strangers."

Violet raises her wine, though Olaf waits. "To us. To Violet and Olaf."

"To us," Olaf echoes.

Together, they drink.

*

"Good. You're relaxing. Just like that. You. Step. Away."

And then she feels it.

First prickling, then absence. It is a delusion of the highest quality. No scales over her eyes, no daydreams, no pretending. Just truth, altered. Just truth, in disguise.

"In order to become someone else," Olaf begins quietly, hypnotizing, gentle. "You must know who you're stepping into. Who she is, how she moves, her history. Her motivations. Her secrets."

Although Violet's eyes are closed, she can feel the moment Olaf decides to touch her. She senses each wary inch between them narrowing to nothing, and then his warm fingertips press into her shoulder. The pressure is stark through her thin nightgown, bearing no hesitation, no politeness.

"You hold tension here all the time. It's there when you walk and when you sit and when you rest. I bet it's there in sleep, too. Does the Violet you want to be always look so tense? So hunted? Drop your shoulders. Let that be the very first thing you do."

And so she does. She drops her shoulders and loosens her fists and unlocks her jaw. Before now, Violet has never noticed these tensions. She wonders if they are byproducts of her sudden grief and fear and powerlessness. She wonders if the reason she bites her teeth down hard enough to grind is to ward against crying or doubting or asking anyone at all for help. She does as she is told, and even the relaxing is uncomfortable.

"Naturally, you'll walk easier. Lighter. With your head held high, like all bratty aristocrats. You won't have the weight of the world on your shoulders. You won't glare at suspicious men, or cast accusations, or feel any misery. You are the heir to a great and vast fortune. What ever could you fear?"

Said so simply, it feels very true. Irrefutably true. As if that Violet - proud, smart, capable - were always meant to exist. As if that version of her is rightful. Is predestined. Is waiting, if only she offers her hand.

From there, the shift is so easy.

She phases right out of tragedy and into her fated self. Into who she might have been, if not for the man at her side, slipping the disguise from his heart.

"I did it," she says. Her limp hands rise to cover her chest right at the center, as if searching for proof of a wound. She tries to feel for her heartache, which has suddenly and totally vanished. In its absence, she finds herself laughing. "I did it. I really did it, Olaf! Oh, I - "

She turns to face the man beside her, who watches her neutrally. Gratitude turns her words wobbly. "Thank you so much."

After several seconds of scrutiny, he finally nods. "You're Violet, but you're not."

"Yes," she breathes, so relieved she could weep. This feeling - this absence of feeling - is exactly what she wanted. It is the reason she had shoved open his door, had followed him into his bedroom, had shut her mouth when his knife grazed her. It feels like a gift. "And you're Olaf, but you're not."

In the dim, he reveals a brand new smile.

*

Chapter Text

THE THIRD NIGHT 

*

Before the iguana clock strikes, Violet is asleep. 

She practiced unlatching from herself too early, too soon to sneak off. It relaxed her so thoroughly, she fell into sleep without conscious thought. (It had been easier to disconnect from her life this time. Too easy, the way a crutch becomes easy. The way addiction grows necessary and reflexive. She drops straight into it.)

Come midnight, she is dreaming - and it is a victim's dream.

It starts off as a repetition of the previous night. Violet is walking whisper-soft down the dim upper hall at Uncle Monty's house. Near the staircase, Stephano waits in his rocking chair with his frown and his sputtering candle and his glittering, gleaming knife stuck into the chair's arm.

He says something she cannot make out. The tone of his voice is waspy and antagonizing, yet she pays him no mind. Violet approaches slowly, cautiously, and lowers herself to the floor at his feet. She takes her time gathering the pale ends of her nightgown into her fists, though she cannot bring herself to force it overhead. She knows he wants it. The possibility of her nakedness and what it would imply leaves her hesitating as she kneels. Still, Stephano's eyes trace her body.

Wary and vulnerable, her heart racing in her chest, Violet doesn't dare look him in the eye. She catches only parts of his reaction - the tight flex of his jaw, the stillness, his hand white-knuckled and large on the handle of his blade.

She shifts forward onto her knees slowly, cautiously, and then his foot is between her legs. She clutches Stephano's kneecap, her cheek pressed to his thigh as she sighs. Still, he shows no reaction. Not until the frantic moment where Violet arches forward, her eyes suddenly on his, and kisses the flat, cold face of his blade.

This scene enters her mind for a handful of seconds - 

and Violet wakes suddenly, gasping through terror.

The feeling is so bewildering, she stands, disoriented, even as her body shivers and sweats. She pants as she stumbles into the hall, and only once she finds it empty - no phantom imprint of Stephano with herself at his feet - does she feel her rational mind beginning to work. She leans against the doorframe to collect herself, and it takes several minutes for her heart to slow.

No light shines beneath Olaf's door.

Violet returns to bed.

*

Chapter Text

THE FOURTH NIGHT 

*

Half past two in the morning, Violet creeps into Olaf's room. 

Her intention had been to check if he was awake, yet her lurking was obvious enough that he found her in the hall, speared on a cut of moonlight. Wordlessly, he opened his door, and Violet entered.

The crystalline lamp glows warm yellow light from beneath its shade where Stephano's mustache dangles at the edge. The bed is unmade, and various quilts and pillows cover the floor. A suitcase is open at the center of the room, jawing and wide, to display a world map perched from latch to latch. It is charted in various routes and colors, and its margins are cluttered with notes. 

"Violet," Olaf says softly as the door falls shut at her back. "You're still bleeding."

"Oh," she says, half a gasp, as the pain catches up again. The ache of her cut has followed her since the morning, and although she had been able to stop its bleeding several times, it continued to stretch open with the smallest of movements. "Stephano... Stephano cut me. It was rather deep."

Olaf frowns and grabs at the blooming spot of red at her waist, warm and wet on her nightgown. He closes his hand around that burst of color, and crumples it into his fist. Anger tightens his jaw, burning in the dark of his eyes as he drags her into the adjoining bathroom.

He flips the light switch. Every inch is tiled in a deep, rich green color, and even here there are touches of Uncle Monty's eccentricities - a bottle of old snakeskin, a framed shard of opal, a poster from an opera house in Belgium. Distracted as she is, Violet hardly notices when Olaf sets her atop the closed toilet.

He's dressed in a different set of pajamas, she notes. This time, they are white, clean cotton, and struck through with red pinstripes. A tiny heart is stitched at the chest pocket, an oxymoron if she ever saw one. With a squeak, the mirror's face flips from the wall, and Olaf sorts through the medicine inside with obvious impatience. A tin first aid kit is withdrawn. Olaf kneels on the floor before her as he pops the lid to skim its contents.

"Show me."

Violet doesn't gasp, though the relief that spills through her nearly prompts one. And, tugging her nightgown higher and higher and higher, she realizes this is the very same man from her dream. Though he is calmer, out of the disguise. More himself.

She holds her nightgown high and flush, just under her chest. She shudders with a strange mix of breathlessness and fear.

"He chased me on the stairs," she explains in a rush, just to get her mind away from her dream as Olaf's fingers skim her side. "He really wanted to hurt me. He would have done worse, I think, to me or one of my siblings if - " The sharp sting of antiseptic shocks her. Olaf twists the cotton ball there, a faint smile on his lips. "If - if my uncle hadn't stopped him."

"What a nasty man," Olaf murmurs. He lets the sodden cotton ball fall to the floor, and dabs her skin with gauze.

"Yes," Violet agrees. Her breath comes in soft, shallow pants. Her body feels suffused with sudden tremors, like she has been thrown into the cold. Though her hands, fisted tight at her chest, are hot and sweating. "Nasty. Vicious."

"How could he hurt a girl so pretty as you?"

He pinches the wound closed, and her response leaves her with a gasp. He tears off the wrappings from a tiny set of butterfly bandages with his teeth, ignoring each wince as the first is pressed into place.

"One more, now, and then I'll cover it."

Watching the slow work of his hands, Violet recalls what Stephano had said, right before his knife bit into her. Harsh and honest and guttural - "I'm not playing, Violet."

Her cut served as a lesson, more than anything else. More than just an injury. In the daytime, he is Stephano - threatening, nasal, treacherous, fully inhabiting his disguise the way a bruise inhabits the body, from the core filled up to the skin. 

But come nightfall, he is honest. He shucks his disguise like a bad costume, like a haunted house stripped to studs. Like Violet had, the moment she passed through his door.

"I don't think Stephano is very nice."

"No. Nothing like me."

"He's - he's nothing like you at all."

A moment passes in strange quiet. Lightheadedness makes her vision swim.

"There you go, Violet. All done and good as new." 

Olaf pats her wound through the bandages. He stands, retreats, and replaces the first aid kit. Once the medicine cabinet closes, he examines his face, scratching at the sparse stubble, and Violet watches as he begins to shave. He uses only a single-bladed razor and hot water from the sink.

"You can put your nightgown down."

Violet blushes. Only once her nightgown falls into place does she notice her parted legs, her open knees, and she cannot recall the exact moment she had done that. For several minutes, she watches Olaf shave.

Part of her, the Violet that cowers in the hall, expects Olaf to cut her. She expects a hand around her throat, or in her hair. She expects a varied collection of threats, cruel beyond measure. But Olaf - this Olaf, her Olaf - has no need.

"You don't seem so... so interested in me when you're just yourself."

He pauses a swipe of the razor. It leaves a square void of skin at his cheek, surrounded by stubble. His eyes on her are hard and dangerous, like a provoked animal.

"I'll admit, Violet," he says through a tight sigh eventually. "I'm finding myself unsure of what to do with you."

"What do you want to do with me?"

He narrows his eyes, turns to face her.

Violet braces herself.

A knock sounds at the door.

"Stephano," comes the soft scrape of Uncle Monty's voice. "I saw your light. Would you care for a nightcap?"

Olaf moves. His hands are on her instantly, with all the strength of a bear trap. He lifts her under her arms like an old coat, takes three steps back, and shoves her into the open wardrobe. He slams the doors shut and turns the lock.

Violet scrambles against piles of discarded clothes. Her cut twinges as she draws her knees up to avoid the doors, curls inwards, and listens. It is hard to do over the fierce strike of her breath, of blood in her ears.

"Oh, Montgomery Montgomery," Olaf fumbles, his voice all wrong, his character hastily and badly summoned. "No need for that. No need, certainly, for any kind of cap."

Violet cannot hear Uncle Monty's response, or their terse conversation through the cracked door. She is frozen in place for an eternity, breathing in the cluttered smells of fresh laundry, of the pine wood wardrobe, of Olaf's disguises thrown to the floor. Finally, there comes a deep metallic click as the lock turns. Yellow light spills in like an egg yolk breaking, and Olaf stands before her in the gloom. 

Stephano's mustache is askew. Half his face is shaved. He looks like a different man.

"Violet," he demands. A hiss, though not his usual violent one. A plea. "Violet, Violet. What do you want from me?"

She doesn't think. She launches herself from the wardrobe, hungry and scared, to kiss him. Violet isn't sure it's what she wants until it is happening. And then, kissing him, it is all she wants.

Olaf freezes beneath her. There comes no moment of reciprocation - no softening of his mouth to hers, no pressing against her, no sounds of appreciation or relief. And then his hands are finally, finally on her - her upper arm, and fisted at the back of her head, just as she imagined - and he is yanking her off so hard her teeth snap together.

He shoves her back into the wardrobe roughly, slamming the twin doors shut so fast they nearly clip her nose. When she slinks out, she finds him facing the window with his back to her, his shoulders hunched, a hand hovering over his mouth like he might puke. Disgust shows in the tense droop of his back.

Violet stands, shifting her weight, nightgown whispering against the floor. She wonders - what do you say after your first kiss? What do you say after your first kiss, when the very same man will wish you dead by first sun?

"Um..."

"Get out."

"What?"

 "Get. Out."

Silence settles, thin as spider's silk. Fragile as her nightgown. 

"I liked it."

 He says nothing, though a ripple of despair shudders all through him.

"Goodnight, Olaf."

*

Chapter Text

THE FIFTH NIGHT 

*

The moon is sliced thin like a gash in the sky, and Violet is watching Olaf drink. Her glass sits forgotten at her feet, still fizzing. Relaxation softens her hard edges. Her shoulders droop. Her cheek is pressed to the bend of her knee. Alcohol dulls the pain of her cut from Stephano, covered in fresh wrappings by Olaf’s steady hands.

"When do you sleep?"

He shrugs. 

"What are you drinking?"

Olaf snorts like she has just told a joke at his expense. "Champagne."

It’s said weightily, with some adult emphasis she doesn’t understand. It must show on her face, because Olaf rolls his eyes. "It's celebratory. Usually."

"Are you celebrating?"

That makes him smile, wide and real and oddly charming. "Never. Never ever."

"Surely..." Violet’s heart races with embarrassment. There is a needling curiosity going all through her. Her stomach is quivering with anxiety, with tension, with wine. "Surely there must be something to celebrate?"

"Like what, Violet? Your very first kiss perhaps?" 

She was surprised he opened his bedroom to her. Past midnight, Violet waited in the hall like a stray dog. She worked herself in knots wondering if she should knock or try the knob for herself. If she found it locked against her, would she beg? If she slipped a finger under the crack in the door, would she be able to leave herself behind just as easily? How sick of herself would she have to become to beg Count Olaf for his company?

This seems to be her price for admission. Honesty. She considers her response. The Violet she becomes in his presence refuses to shy away from scrutiny, or hide her history, or lie. "Could you really tell?"

He snorts, a funny little laugh. "Let's toast to it. Here."

Beautiful as a magic trick, he pulls a fresh bottle of wine from under the bed. The glass is dark and green as the sea. It is chilled, beaded with mist. Violet wonders when he had crept downstairs to retrieve it. Wonders if he was anticipating her visit.

"A toast," Violet agrees. She holds her dainty glass steadily as he pours wine the color of peonies. "To my first kiss. To not being me, and not being you. Just a man and a girl and nothing else at all."

"Strangers," Olaf agrees. He taps the neck of the bottle against the stem of her drink in cheers.

Together, they drink.

Two glasses of wine later, Violet finds her voice. "Can I kiss you again?"

He had been talking about something, she realizes in the following hush. Olaf’s voice was like a background churn to her slippery thoughts. Like the droll of the sea, or the buzz in a gramophone. She searches in her memory for whatever he might have been saying, and only a handful of words stick. Production. Star actor. Voted most handsome.

"You make me sick."

Violet feels that more than she hears it. Feels it like a drop down an elevator shaft, or a knife between her knees, or a gash along her breastbone. Heartache, despair, and danger all around. "I thought you said... you told me I'm the prettiest girl in the whole world."

Olaf glares. His free hand fists against the ornate rug. "That was Stephano."

"It wasn't," Violet insists. Tears build in her eyes. Her face flushes hot all the way down her neck. "I know it wasn't. It was after midnight. And you weren't wearing a disguise. You meant it. I remember."

He swigs his drink.

"Then - then doesn't that mean you want to kiss me?"

"Why aren't you sleeping?" Olaf asks. "Little girls should be sleeping at such a late hour."

Violet allows the distraction. It gives her time to recover, to swallow the lump in her throat as large as her fist. "I can't sleep anymore. Not really."

"Shall I tell you a bedtime story?"

"...What?"

"Lie down. Right here. Like this." He pushes her shoulders down and Violet lets her body follow the motion until she is flat against the rug. Olaf follows suit, their heads brushing at the crowns. Their eyes map the ceiling together, studded with glowing fake stars. She hadn't noticed them before.

“I’m sure you’re much too grown for The Littlest Elf or The Pony Palace.”

“I am,” Violet agrees, though internally she doubts it. Like this, she would listen to whatever Olaf offered. Even if it was a telephone book. A grocery list. An obituary. “Tell me a story about a monster?”

Olaf complies immediately, readily, like he has always been waiting for her to ask. “There once was a monster with teeth as long as your hair. He lived in the woods, and in the sea, and in every shadow. He could grow to the size of a ship, or shrink to the width of a button. No creature was safe while he lurked around the corner, for this monster was a master of disguise. Even his voice could change with the simplest of tricks - Oh, please! Oh, please! I am but a lowly, bookish, pretentious villager in need of great help!"

Violet startles. Olaf's voice seems to come from all around. From out the cracked window, and down the long hall, and even the slats between floorboards. When she looks at him, astonished, she sees his hand cupped around his mouth at an angle, his smug grin stretching to each end. 

"He lures victims any which way, using only his voice. He eats them whole once he catches them, and grows stronger and more clever every time. Once he eats them, he can become them. Another disguise to add to his long list. One day the monster ate a grown man, desiring his obvious cleverness. He thought that was the end of things, but he followed the sound of vulnerable yapping, and came upon a cottage with children inside. They begin to mimic the monster, though they never leave the protection of the house. But the children grow hungry just as the monster does, and eventually they are face to face. Want to guess how many there are?”

Violet’s stomach sours. “Three?”

“Three children! They look ordinary and boring and tasty enough, but they begin to blur at the edges. They shift into one shadow, one child, one disguise. All this time, they have learned from the monster who ate their human father, and became monstrous to survive.”

“Then what?”

“Then there was just a little boy left. And the big monster ate him too, because he knew nothing else. But the monster grew sick after that. Too much heart.”

Violet is distracted because she wants to take his hand. It feels like the tale costs him something, has weight, but she can't figure it out. “So what's the point exactly?”

Olaf shrugs. Either he has lost the plot along the way, or he refuses to tell her. “A father loves his children.”

Violet's head spins. Her eyes are burning and drooping and she cannot keep them open. Does that mean you don't want to kiss me? She thinks. Do you love me? Am I a monster too?

She falls asleep on the floor, and wakes in her own bed to a blinding white sunrise.

*

Chapter Text

THE SIXTH NIGHT

*

"I had a strange dream the other night. Shall I tell you about it?" 

They're drinking again. Violet has downed half the bottle by herself this time, forgoing her shallow little glass.

"If you like.”

Olaf is fiddling with his suitcase. Checking small pockets and little flaps she never would have noticed if not for his sleight of hand. He prods a spot just under the handle’s hardware, and a tiny lockpicking set springs free from an internal shell. He pokes it back into place where it sets with the scratch of a spring.

"You were back inside Stephano. Disguised as him, I mean. Sitting in the hall in that creaky old rocking chair." Violet’s pulse is quick. This Olaf seems to have no hard edges, no failsafe of character. She has to know his limits. “I snuck outside to meet you. I… knelt. I knelt on the ground at your feet. And you looked at me like you wanted to keep me there.”

Olaf’s hands are frozen now. His shoulders are locked into place. Even his breathing has stilled.

“You wouldn’t touch me, but I… I kissed the flat part of your knife. I kissed it like it meant something.”

"Are we going to do this our whole lives, do you think, Violet?” His voice is gentle, sinister. It snakes through the bedroom like toxic gas, like a credible threat. “Until one of us relents? Until I give up, or you give yourself to me?"

"I've already given myself to you."

"You haven't. You haven't."

"I have!"

"You know what you are, Violet?" Olaf stands, turning that blazing stare to her face. He's smiling but it's sick and cruel, and Olaf himself - not Count Olaf, not Stephano - looks happier than she has ever seen him. "You're grieving. You're sick with it. You are out of your mind."

"I'm not," Violet insists. "I'm not grieving, or sick, or - "

"Of course you are," he spits. "And someone should tell you it's normal to be sad and dreary and annoying because your boring parents are dead. They're dead, and they left you behind. And, oh Violet, the world is so cruel! It's so big and bad and so very loud. And you're just a teeny tiny little girl. How could they do that to you? How could they leave you behind and give you to me?"

Violet tries to speak, but her throat has closed. Her mouth spasms weakly with suppressed crying, and she covers it, humiliated and horrified.

"What kind of parents would leave their beloved children without a solid plan of any kind? Placed into the care of strangers? With no guardian, the responsibility falls onto you, doesn't it, Violet? How weighty it turned out to be, protecting your siblings and your inheritance! Oh, the responsibility! The grief! Why, you've hardly mourned have you? You've been too busy being victimized."

"Stop it," she hisses. "Please stop."

"You are not infatuated with me, handsome and talented and clever as I am. You do not want me, no matter how many lovely little dreams you have of kneeling at my feet. You are sick. You are hurt. You are showing me your belly in hopes I don't tear you open."

It hits her like a fist, his correctness. Square in the gut, so no breath remains. She is giving herself to him, just like he said. For mercy. For a stayed hand. But he's wrong, otherwise. Violet is infatuated with him - uncomfortably, irrefutably. Even in this devastating moment, her eyes linger on the cut corners of his jaw, his hands, his shoulders. Even the oddest places - the nape of his neck where his wild hair ends. The wrinkled corners of his eyes. The relaxed posture when he is just Olaf. Which makes her notice the difference now, straight backed as he is. A performer.

"You're Count Olaf again. I can see it."

He takes a mocking little bow. "In the flesh."

"But why? You told me to - leave the other Violet behind. You said I'm not orphaned here. I don't have to feel it. So why bring it up? Why come out - " she cuts herself off with a realization. "You're Count Olaf because you're scared. And you're scared because..." she tries to think. The wine is making her stupid, her thoughts too slippery to catch. "Because of my dream."

"Why would I be afraid of your silly little dream?"

"It made you feel..." she thinks. Something doesn't seem enough. Under normal circumstances, she can imagine a kissed person might be happy or relieved or left wanting. But he doesn't look like any of those things. He looks upset. Haunted. Ill. "It made you feel sick."

“You’re Violet Baudelaire right now,” Olaf says neutrally. His attention crawls across her body like a drunken flush. “I can see it. The tears. The fear. Is she the one who wants to kiss me, or is it her replacement?”

“You forced me out,” Violet says. Her hands are shaking. “I didn’t even notice her come back. I don’t think I’m very good at leaving myself behind.”

“That’s alright. You’ll step away once it matters.” His voice pitches lower, deeper. Like he is reciting a promise. “I can see that, too.”

“Would it matter - ” she starts, stops, fumbles for bravery. “Would it matter if it was me or the other me? Would you kiss one and not the other?”

His hand clenches like he's resisting dragging her by the hair into the hall.

"How many times will the orphan offer herself to me before she learns she's unwanted?" Olaf's eyes on her burn with genuine fury, genuine hatred. "Get. Out."

Heart in her throat, Violet flees.

*

Chapter Text

THE VERY LAST NIGHT

*

"How do you feel about the sea?"

"The sea?" Violet repeats, like she has never heard of such a thing. Klaus had told her just that morning that Peru is bordered by the Pacific Ocean, though she senses this isn't what Olaf has in mind.

"Well," he amends, grinning. "Technically it's a large lake."

Violet has finished three and a half glasses of wine, so she forgets to answer. Her mind has looped back in time to a different body of water on a desolate shore, and a heavy stone in her hand, and a sick plume of smoke in the sick grey sky. She thinks of Briny Beach while Olaf speaks softly, nonsensically. Of leeches, and carts of limes, and clowns serving mediocre diner food. Of long cliff faces, and taxicabs, and time. He speaks and speaks and speaks until Violet cannot hear her own thoughts past the churn of his voice.

She dozes.

When she wakes, the deep dark has shifted to indigo blue outside, and the stickers on the ceiling have dimmed. In her hand, Olaf's fingers loosely curl through hers. She wonders who reached first, who opened their hand, who accepted? Who relented?

They realize their position at the same time. Olaf lurches to his feet to glance out the window at the changing sky. He peels his mustache from the lamp and fishes in the nightstand for a tube of adhesive, smoothing it into place before the glue has dried. It wrinkles as he speaks.

"Your time's almost up, Violet."

And watching him from her position, flat on her back like a trodden rug, his indecision sickens her. He cannot decide between Olaf or Count Olaf or Stephano. He cannot decide between desiring her, or desiring to kill her, or even neutral indifference.

Not Violet’s, she thinks as she stands in the gloom. Not mine.

This time, he gasps when she kisses him. It feels like his first genuine reaction she has ever witnessed.

"Give me Olaf," she demands, hands fisted in his slippery silk pajamas. "Give him to me. Give me - "

"You wanted me, Violet?" He leans away from her then, just the same as last time, though his hands are circling her waist, and he drags her into his lap the moment he hits the bed.

"Not Count Olaf. My Olaf. The one that's nice to me."

"I'm never nice."

A real kiss, then. Tipped flat on her back in his bed. It makes her head spin. She is still sleepy and half-drunk and confused. The kiss perplexes her even as her body heats beneath his hands. He pulls away to nip at her jaw, her neck, and Violet isn't sure if she likes any of it at all.

"Do you know what to do? When you are so sick with worry - " He bites at her neck and a thrill of gooseflesh rips across her skin. "When you need to escape? When you cannot stand being yourself?" His hands brush over her belly with strong possession, bunching her nightgown. "You step aside. You let her go. You come to me."

It feels almost like he's punishing her with the kiss. (How dare you do this to me? She hears as clearly as if he had spoken it.) Like he's trying to prove a point to one of them, and she cannot tell which one should be learning from this.

"I come to you," Violet agrees, breathless and panting.

"Say it again."

"I come to you."

After, once he kisses the very breath from her and steps away, Olaf wipes his hands on his trousers like he has touched something foul. Stephano's mustache has skewed from the force of their kissing, crossed absurdly over his cheek. Violet reaches out and fits it into place.

"Off to bed then. You have a few more hours of sleep left."

"Okay."

Sleep sounds like the best gift in the world. She does not have the backbone to ask - "A few more hours until what?" The conversation would only push her further from the mercy Olaf is offering her. She stumbles back to her bedroom. She slips into her bed - plush and fresh and beautiful, and alien because of it - and wakes without dreaming to darkness. Still night.

Violet isn't sure what wakes her. Never before has she visited Olaf twice, and both her siblings are sleeping soundly in the other bed. Unease prickles up her spine. Intuition turns her head. She is on her feet and creeping before true suspicion has formed.

Inside the reptile room, the windows are fuzzed with lilac light. Dawn breaks gently as a new day waits. Violet floats through the room, checking tanks and their locks, checking humidity levels, hunting down tragedy.

In the end, she finds it waiting. Finds Uncle Monty with his open hands, his open mouth, his empty eyes. He sits in his favorite study chair at his cluttered desk, the one with the towering stacks of books and fountain pens and misplaced stamps stuck inside the drawer. His body is far too still, foreign in its rest. He looks just like himself. He looks like a stranger.

“Violet.”

A soft shriek catches in her throat. 

Count Olaf slinks from behind a bookcase like a shadow incarnate. His dark eyes are heavy with promise. Vertigo descends. Her vision sways. 

(“What do you do?” she hears in her memory.)

Olaf shifts closer, closer. She feels the heat off his body like a match just struck.

(“ - when you are so sick with worry? When you cannot stand being yourself?”)

 “Let go, Violet,” he murmurs. “Step away. Come here.”

Olaf opens his arms, and they close to hold a brand new girl.

*