#i don't see kit as such a menacing person it's poor charles who does

[gellavonhamster]

charles remembers

gen || Charles | Kit Snicket || pre-canon, Charles/Sir mentioned

ao3 link || originally posted in Russian

“Do you smoke?” asks the girl seated in the armchair opposite to him. Men’s trousers, a men’s shirt, and men’s cigarettes in a cigarette case. Charles’s eye catches the emblem at the latter: the same eye-shaped insignia is depicted on the stained-glass windows of the club they’re presently in, and the same insignia – he know that for sure – is tattooed on the ankle of his interlocutress. Suddenly back to his senses, he hastily shakes his head:  

“No, thank you.”

“Would you mind if I ruin my health a little?”

“Of course not, go ahead. Oh. I mean…”

He must be looking absolutely helpless at the moment, because the girl offers him an encouraging smile and does not hesitate to assure him that everything’s alright. Charles watches her light a cigarette with a glistening metal lighter, which then disappears down her sleeve. With one hand, the girl puts the cigarette to her lips, while using the other one to readjust the pencil she’s pinned her hair with into a messy bun on the back of the head.    

“Good thing you do not mind. Your future boss,” she lets out a wisp of smoke and watches it float up and dissolve in the half-light, “smokes all the time. Sometimes it’s difficult to make out his face behind those puffs of smoke, seriously. So you’d better get used to it.”  

“Oh,” Charles says again because he has to react somehow, doesn’t he.

“On the other hand, I am still not able to prepare you fully. He smokes not even cigarettes, but cigars. The kind that’s like…” she puts two fingers together to demonstrate how thick, at a rough estimate, those cigars are. “Quite a luxury. That’s why he, to quote my brother – not Jacques, but our youngest – smells like corruption. Those writers,” she throws her hand up with a wry smile. Charles remembers it two days later, having first met his new employer. He doesn’t know what corruption smells like, but soon he comes to terms with the fact that the scent that follows Sir around, that of expensive cigars and equally expensive cologne, is the one he’d love to bottle up and breathe in when no one’s watching.  

A little over half a year ago, Charles was kicked out of his house with a scandal, and found himself on the streets, having in his possession only a briefcase hurriedly stuffed with shirts and underwear, and some pocket money, in an amount that was much larger than in the pockets of many other young men his age but still not enough to rent a decent lodging at least for a month. Crushed not so much by his banishment as by the scandal that preceded it, and even more by the fact that a certain person, implicated in what led to him being kicked out and promised to be written out of the will, broke all ties with him, he was wandering the streets aimlessly when a taxi suddenly drove up to him. The girl in the front seat – the very girl currently smoking in the armchair opposite to him – introduced herself as Kit Snicket, introduced the driver – a young man looking remarkably similar to her, and good-looking even despite the mild case of unibrow – as her brother Jacques, and offered her help. Charles had nowhere to go and nothing to lose, so he got into the taxi.  

From then on, Charles has pondered time after time on what he signed up for, having let the Snicket siblings take him to the other end of the city and fix him up for a job at an insurance company – and having agreed to return the favour when needed. The favours he has had occasion to do for the Snickets and their associates – that was the word they used – over the last half a year included giving some strangers the envelopes he was strictly forbidden to open, and sending a telegram under someone else’s name. Never mind that time when he was tasked with taking a seat at the cinema next to some woman and putting into her bag a parcel (Charles still hopes it was just a trick of his senses) that was moving a little. And now they want him to leave his job at the insurance company and take up a position as a secretary at the lumber mill called…  

“Lucky Smells,” Kit repeats, flipping the ash off her cigarette into a bronze ash tray on the table. “It’s in Paltryville, have you been there?”

“Haven’t had the pleasure.”

“Well, you’ll have it.”

“Miss Snicket… Kit… I actually don’t know anything about the lumber industry. I have never ever held an axe in my hands.”

“It’ll be other people who shall hold axes. What you shall be required to do is to use a typewriter, answer the phone, make coffee – all the things you can do perfectly well. As well as…” Kit puts the cigarette into the ash tray, turns to Charles, and looks into his eyes closely, “to make sure that Sir – your boss – accepts the orders of our organization and declines those of… some undesirable persons and entities. You shall receive a list of those who there should be no business dealings with.”  

“To make sure,” Charles repeats with a frown. Throughout their conversation he has kept rocking his teacup in his hands anxiously, but presently he puts it on the table, having nearly spilled the tea on his trousers. “But you’ve said it yourself that he’s got a difficult disposition. That he’s stubborn and incompliant and used to relying on himself only.”

Charles remembers it two days later, having first met his new employer, and a month later and a year later and fifteen years later, when the arrival of three children to the lumber mill makes him try again to hold sway over Sir – what if after all this time he’d still be able to do this?  

“You got that right,” Kit affirms. “That’s why you’ll have to become irreplaceable, Charles. A model employee. You have to make him arrive at the conclusion that your opinion should be reckoned with.”  

“In other words, I have to bring him to heel.”

“He won’t let you. You’ll have to… guide him gently in the right direction. Ideally so that he would be sure he’s making all the decisions on his own.”

The members of VFD (that’s the name of the organization that Kit and Jacques and their younger brother and many other strange people Charles has made acquaintance with over the last half a year belong to) receive special training since childhood. Charles does not know exactly what kind of training it is but he’s positive that people who can shoot and spy and identify the cup with the poisoned drink by smell – the latter was done for entertainment at a private party he once had a chance to attend – are much more skilled in everything related to manipulating others than he is. He’s… ordinary. He doesn’t feel comfortable in the limelight, and he’s not good at debates. He’s not endowed with the looks of Gustav Sebald or the charm of Doctor Montgomery or the bravado of Captain Widdershins, yet perhaps the matter at hand requires something the VFD members do not possess – such as the skill of being ordinary.  

“All right,” he agrees. Granted, this conversation could not have ended in a different way, because deep down in his heart, Charles is afraid. He’s afraid of Kit and her brothers and each and every VFD member, their intellectual refinement and handsome manners notwithstanding. He still doesn’t understand completely the nature of activities of their organization, and he isn’t sure he wants to, but he owes them his job and money and the roof over his head. Besides, he’s got no one else: he has lost touch with his few college friends; he was betrayed by the person he trusted more than anyone else in the world; his father died in a fire a couple of months after kicking Charles out of the house. Charles remembers it years later, having suddenly realized how many people he knew, VFD and non-VFD alike, have died in fires lately.

What else is there for him to do, anyway?

“All right,” he repeats. “I’ll do everything I possibly can.”

Kit nods amicably.

“I’ve never doubted you, Charles. Some more tea?”

“I still have some, thank you.”

“There’s still plenty in the pot, just so you know. And as to bringing him to heel …” Kit gives him another attentive look, and Charles gets uneasy because he realizes she knows much more about him than he knows about her. “He likes women – hasn’t stopped ogling my cleavage all the while we talked – but he likes handsome young men no less. Use this information as you may think fit.”    

Kit Snicket knows much more about him than he knows about her – including the reason his father banished him. Charles shrinks under her gaze.  

“I don’t think that shall be necessary,” he says crisply. He certainly wouldn’t make much of a seducer, of all things. Charles remembers it three months later, down on his knees for Sir in his study, after locking the door himself. Then again, it’s up for debate which one of them was the seducer in that case.    

“That’s up to you,” Kit shrugs her shoulders and takes her cup. “Well, let’s drink to success, shall we? It’s not champagne, of course, but I am convinced that good tea is just as appropriate for such purpose as alcohol.”

“Yes, sure,” Charles forces a smile and raises his cup. His hand is trembling slightly, and a dark stain ends up spreading on his light-grey trousers. “Ah, damn it…”

“Don’t you fret so,” Kit says friendly, offering him a napkin. “You’ll make it.”

Charles remembers it many, many times over the following years – every time he finds anew that he hasn’t made it, not anywhere near.