#>> ꜰɪʟᴇ:// snicket‚ k. // interactions

[spectralhearts-blog]

@tallglassofjustice

Perhaps the reason Kit Snicket did not share her oldest brother’s obsession for definitions stemmed from the difference in their literary tastes, as poetry played with words to evoke emotion and speculative fiction worked to clearly communicate. For example, her own definition for death had become increasingly malleable since Lemony's seeming resurrection in the back of their brother's taxi and her more recent literal - and still as of yet inexplicable - one. While her older brother might grouse on for hours about the application of permanence to an clear definition, Kit had come to the following understanding: there was no defined phrase for the end of life itself that could sum up all of its conflictions. Death may be righteous, or not. Death may be intentional, or not. Death may be at the end of a long life, or cut right through the middle like a taxi in the heat of traffic. Though her brother’s own taxi followed to the letter the various traffic safety laws before it had passed into her own possession, his own death came for him. Too early, too malicious, too unrighteous, and entirely too far from her.

That being said, Kit could never associate the yellow-decked cab so dourly with the end of Jacques’ life, no matter the vehicle that had transported him to the Village of Fowl Devotees. Jacques had loved his taxi, enough to even skip out on the few evenings of entertainment the siblings could muster together during the height of V. F. D.’s noble activities - so Kit loved them too. This city was littered with them, and each time she spotted one they carried what little left of Jacques Snicket there remained in this alien world. 

So maybe that was the reason she stalled this night beside a far neighborhood’s auto-mechanical shop, watching a tuft of hair similar in color to her own continuously disappear behind the taxi’s hood. Every so often, a hand would fumble out towards the other beside them, seeking until their companion would laugh and hand over whichever tool they required. She watched as their companion suddenly turned their head at some summons from deeper within the shop and followed without a goodbye, and the figure behind the hood struck out another seeking hand - this time without a partner to answer. The occasional taxi-driver and ever-Volunteer glanced around before striding up beside them, taking another surreptitious glance into the hood to guess at which tool they were requesting.

Kit shuffled to lean up against the mobile shelf beside them, corner of her lips quirking as she assessed and subsequently rifled through the tools until she uncovered the correct socket wrench fitting. She held it out to them, and got her first clear look at the figure working on the taxi. His taxi. “He...” Her fingers fumbled as her eyes widened and her stomach sank, the fitting falling to a clatter below them and words failing before they could tumble out of her lips. 

It would be the first time in this city that the phrase ghosts of the past would be apt.

[spectralhearts-blog]

@littlethingbeatrice

She was going to be alone with her daughter.

Altogether, a simple statement, if passive in voice though not intention. Kit did need to ascertain Beatrice's experience with certain skills - she wasn't ignorant to reality, she knew that sooner-or-later Beatrice was bound to have a run-in with any number of unsavoury individuals, and she'd much rather her daughter know how to protect herself than be kept in happy ignorance of the world's ills. That ignorance had... been an ideal. Once. But reality had saw fit to catch up with them instead, and Kit preferred rigorous training in evasion to disallow it that same chance again.

Still, simple statements commonly covered all kinds of buried complications underneath, like Your eagles have escaped and been adopted by new owners and I love you, but. Kit was going to be alone with Beatrice, but it would be for the first time since she'd been born. That kind of solitary experience seemed easy when her daughter was more concept than person, a fluttering under her abdomen and comforting kick whenever she'd been at her most lonesome, but now? Beatrice, her own fully-fledged person - a daughter with her own past and expectations for how her mother should be, and how Kit actually was?

Terrifying. Her pulse throbbed under her neck, and Kit lifted one hand to rub anxiously at it, soothe it into submission as deftly as she tugged shut the zipper to her duffel. She was - Kit raised from her stoop, took a final inventory of the day's items with unseeing eyes - she would just have to live up to Beatrice's expectations, simple as that. Fine, easy, no different than any other goal she'd set for herself in the past, and Kit quite pointedly did not fail. Motherhood was... what, really?

Her thoughts stoppered at the genuine confusion blocking her thoughts. She knew she should have read the parenting books Dewey'd collected. Huffing out a sigh, Kit planted her hands on her hips and pivoted back to face her apartment's stairs, calling up a, "Ready?" and throwing all stoppered, fumbling thoughts away. Work on your feet, Snicket. "We'll have to be leaving soon, the next train runs in fifteen minutes."

[spectralhearts-blog]

@lxst-children | snicket, l.

L is for libraries, which are safe places for learning. Cresting the final flight and turning onto the landing, Kit all but seethed the trusted mnemonic under her breath. It was an old habit, an old trick of training from a patient chaperone who tried to make the best out of an apprentice who preferred to act before thinking became an undesired obstacle in her way. She had been trying it since her finger, tracing reluctantly ( and with no small amount of hopeful disbelief ) along the shelves of the children's section, stuttered and stalled at Snicket-comma-L. 

Kit couldn't say she was experiencing much success. ( L is for little brothers, who could be more than a little exasperating. ) The straps of her satchel, holding more children's books than she'd carried with her since her short stint at Prufrock Preparatory, slipped off her shoulder, and she stopped just to growl that little bit louder and forcefully readjust them back into place. She moved down the hall without much care for quiet as she scanned for his door. L is for Lemony, who - for the first time since they were adolescents, perhaps, or even children - was possibly the last person she wanted to see. Under the curdling frustration still laid a sharp pang of watching her sibling turn to her with unknowing eyes. Not so terrible as thinking him dead for most of their adulthood, but a close thing. 

Ah, there he was. Reshouldering her bag once again, Kit rapped sharply on his door, calling out, “Lem — Mr. Snicket — ” She stymied, already caught between sibling and stranger. “ ...I’d like to speak with you for a moment. Would you please come to the door?” 

A pause, and then, with no small measure of exasperation - as though she’d suddenly remembered who she was talking to - “So help me L., if you climb out your window I will spread a layer of thumbtacks so thoroughly under its sill that the next time you’re met with someone outside your door who actually means you harm you will find your escape definitively more difficult.”

[spectralhearts-blog]

@bluesupes

Pulling to idle beside the sidewalk at the sight of a beckoning arm, Kit sank into the worn leather of the driver’s seat and felt the bundle of tension that had gathered between her shoulder blades in the weeks since the masque unravel some. Though she would never be able to maintain it as a regular occupation as Jacques did, sliding behind the wheel of a taxi cleared her head in the exact way that complicated emotional entanglements and Italian recipes did not. Everything was just so much simpler; routes were predictable ( or, when not, with immediate solution through creative use of the term “shortcut” ), destinations were finite. The greatest mystery asked of her was the identity of her passenger -- a taxi, as it was said, would pick up any who asked for one. Kit rolled down the window and made to greet him before her jaw snapped shut with an audible click. The similarities were wholly superficial, but… well, the past months’ peculiarities had her on edge, and long-dead friends suddenly ( and most inexplicably ) returned to life were hardly the furthest thing from her mind. And he really did look so much like B.

The B. who had apprenticed under her brother’s chaperone and could be expected to play pranks in elevators, that was, not the accomplished baticeer and subject of many of that same brother’s long-winded soliloquies. Kit blinked, and shook the shadow of their friend’s face out of her eyes as she smiled, polite if distanced, as she asked, “Where to?”