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luluwquidprocrow · 11 months

Text

like a row of captured ghosts

kit snicket

teen

2,568 words

Kit Snicket visits a house in the city.

for @asouefanworkevent's woevember day 2, the baudelaire mansion! featuring my enduring headcanon that the baudelaire mansion was previously the snicket mansion, and b+b get it when they marry lemony. i am 100% willing to admit it is Unlikely, however let us not forget kit saying “our families have always been close”, so, yknow

title from welcome home by radical face

Kit could get in if she wanted. She’d been given lockpicks expressly for the purpose, because the locks on the house were special, but she didn’t need them. She knew the statue in the back of the garden had a hairline crack in one of the hands – she didn’t remember which one, but it wasn’t as if there were many options – that, when pressure was applied, opened a brick in the patio. Under the brick was a lever. If one were to pull the lever, the little window in the hidden attic opened, roof shingles shifting out of the way, and one could wiggle themselves in, with enough effort. Her grandfather had put a number of clever little secrets in the house, and Kit had gone looking for them when she was very, very young, so she knew a decent amount of them. Few others did.

(The lockpicks confirmed that. If they thought that was the only way someone could get into the house, Kit was not going to correct them. And there were worse things, weren’t there, than simple theft, things for which no real defense existed.)

Night air bit at her ankles, her fingers, her neck. She wasn’t dressed nearly warm enough for November, having grabbed her blue spring jacket in her hurry, but the cold was of little concern to her. The mansion stood across the street, set back from the road, with that winding brick path up to the front doors, the maple trees scattering their leaves around the yard. It was in the heart of the city but in a place one would never know unless explicitly looked for – a turn off an erroneously marked dead end, then another, to an old avenue along a river with more trees than houses. Her grandparents had picked it on purpose. Presumably safe, but close enough.

They had added to the windows. Neat, decorative ironwork, curled into hearts and vines.

Kit put her hands in her pockets and crossed the street, her footsteps the only noise.

The fence out front had been replaced as well. Kit’s grandmother had done most of the architecture, and Bernadette Snicket had favored a simplistic, practical style in her work, but the new fence matched the intricacy of the window grates. That just-too-big space in the bars a person could slide themselves through if they desired, that Kit had, years ago, when she’d – that was gone. Kit walked the length of the fence twice, considering. She couldn’t linger long. There was a light on in a downstairs window, glowing soft behind the drawn curtains. Kit could not put it past them to eventually see her. She walked down the sidewalk one more time, picking up her pace. There was no way around the fence. Climbing over it didn’t seem like an option. The points at the top of each iron bar looked sharp, glinting in a stray hit of light from the streetlamp over near Kit’s car.

(Kit wondered how much was a choice – how much was a needed decision – how much was meant to erase. She couldn’t judge Beatrice and Bertrand for that. Not without damning herself, which Kit was not, overall, in the habit of doing.)

Of course there was a sewer grate nearby, and of course Kit pushed it up soundlessly and slipped down inside.

Her grandfather had three boxes – one Kit had already taken some years ago and given to Bertrand, for reasons better left unsaid. One had been given to Lemony. The third was still in the house and held a very specific map of the city. Headquarters wanted it, among other things. And if Kit came across one of those other things, she was at her liberty to take them.

(She and Beatrice had argued, Kit remembered. The sewer was dark and icy, and Kit shivered hard, grinding her teeth together. They’d argued about those other things, and Kit had not been able to give Beatrice, or herself, a satisfactory answer. It was one of the last conversations they had, if not the last. Most likely the last, if Kit was honest. Beatrice had made it clear where she and Bertrand stood, and where Kit stood, and that it was no longer in the same place. And it never would be.

Kit told herself over and over that she would never do it. There would always be another option, as long as Beatrice and Bertrand were alive to emphatically refuse. Right now, there was this option – Kit was going into the house. She was taking the box back. Nothing else. And the box wasn’t even going to headquarters. There were other plans for that box.)

The box would be in the downstairs office, under a floorboard. Probably Bertrand’s office. The windows were one of the ones her grandmother had put the stained glass in, and shards of blue fell over the green floor when the sun sat just right in the sky. It was a good room for thinking, and Bertrand likely did a great deal of it there. Kit swallowed and hurried further through the sewers, past the names that didn’t matter, and started scanning the curved ceiling. If one knew where to look, there was a sloped hatch up there that led up into the passage between the house and 667 Dark Avenue. Kit would open the hatch, get inside, go into the house, and then leave the same way. And there it was. Tucked in a shadow, just waiting for her. Kit reached up for the wheel, ready to heave the door open. It was going to stick with so little use.

The wheel turned easy under her hands.

Kit jerked back, her whole body seizing up. Someone had been here. Someone who was not her. Someone who wasn’t just checking. Kit spun the wheel frantically and the hatch fell open.

(She’d brought Olaf here. Her grandparents hadn’t cared who knew the location of their house, but their generation had been different, and Kit’s parents had stressed, when they could, the importance of keeping this secret. Her associates thought it was a safehouse, one they could never quite find the location of, and wrote off as another ruse. She’d driven Olaf, pointing out landmarks the whole way, because she’d thought –

Kit was not foolish enough to think she’d get married. But Olaf was important to her, and she was foolish enough to think he’d stay important, and that when Lemony inevitably married Beatrice and they took the house, Olaf would be there too.

They crept in through the fence. Olaf chased her around the maple trees. Kit took him into the house through the font doors and showed him what her grandparents built. And he understood what the Snicket mansion meant, in the way he had to understand what the Count’s mansion meant. Some time later, Kit realized he had not.

Olaf’s memory was shit, except where it mattered. Except in the things she wanted him to forget. He’d remember where this house was and it was only a matter of time before he – before anyone – got their hands on the Baudelaires.)

Kit hoisted herself up into the passageway. She tugged the hatch closed behind her, then felt around in the black for the dip in the center. Her fingers kept slipping, shaking, pushing into metal that wasn’t right, nicking her nails, her heart thudding faster and faster in her chest and rising to a crash in her ears – where was it? There. She found the button and jammed her thumb into it. The metal hissed as it sealed from the inside. It wasn’t enough, Kit knew. Nothing would ever be enough now. But it would have to do.

She ran along the passageway, keeping one hand on the wall. It came to an abrupt end, and Kit had her hand ready to pull open the trap door into the office when her mouth went dry. She swallowed, and then did it again. Once more. She let the trap door fall open and climbed into the Baudelaire mansion.

The office was dark, as expected. Bertrand kept his desk by the windows, because of course he would. Not because Kit’s grandfather had, but because Bertrand would obviously like the view. The bookcases still lined the walls, but the books must surely be different. Kit wondered what he kept there, but there was no time to get into it. She could see the strip of light hovering under the door. It was poetry, probably. He probably kept poetry. Fairy tales he read to his children. The chair at his desk was different than the one her grandfather had there, perfect for sitting in and telling stories. She turned and faced the wall.

The floorboard was in the far left corner, at the front of the room. Kit moved slowly, quietly, barely breathing. Bertrand had covered the whole floor with a thick, heavy carpet, so at least that was in her favor. She bent down, tugging the corner of the carpet up, and lifted the single loose floorboard.

(She always wound up doing this, she thought, in a voice that sounded stunningly like Lemony’s, wry as he ever was. Sneaking into someplace to steal something important. At least now she had experience.)

There it was. Just as it had always been, another secret waiting for its time. The small, jeweled box with the complicated lock with the code her grandfather had taught all three of them. Kit tucked it inside her jacket and replaced the floorboard.

It hit her like a shot, her breath catching in her throat. The sewer hatch locked only from the inside. She couldn’t go back that way. She whirled around, clutching the lump in her jacket to her chest. The best way to leave – the closest way out – that was through the library, two rooms down, through the passageway in the wall and up to the hidden attic. But that meant leaving the room. Standing in the hallway. Walking to the library, unseen.

(She did not have experience. That voice sounded like Jacques, if Jacques had ever been so straightforward in his disappointment. She had to get out of this house before she kept thinking.)

Kit waited. Listened. She couldn’t hear anything from here in the office. She went through the map of the ground floor in her head, the foyer at the front, into the parlor, the living room to the left, the kitchen to the back, the dining room to the right – the hallway behind the kitchen, with the office, the billiard room, the library. The left wall in the library, where the hidden door was. Conceivably, it was easy. Wasn’t it?

She turned the door handle and left the office.

The hallway was half-lit from the living room at the end of the hall. Now she could hear the phonograph, playing a jazz record she didn’t recognize. Beatrice and Bertrand had to be in there, and it was right across from the library. Unless they were in the library. Unless they were – Kit gave herself a shake. She wouldn’t know anything until she moved. She just had to move. She just had to move. Kit just had to move.

She couldn’t see the green floors. Beatrice and Bertrand had rugs everywhere, in elegant red and ivory. Kit tiptoed over it, hesitating. Paintings hung in groups down the hallway, flowers and little portraits and framed children’s drawings, scribbles of the garden hung with the same care as the art. They must be Violet’s. The jazz record kept going. Kit’s grandmother had liked oil paintings of flowers. She’d had a few in the hallway herself in her time.

(Katherine, Bernadette Snicket had said.

No, Kit insisted. How old was she then? Four? Just Kit. And her grandmother had looked pleased, like Kit had passed a test. Everything was a test and always had been, tests she’d completed perfectly, and why did it hurt? How far had Kit gone down the hall? The box sat against her ribs like another heart, heavy. Everything ached, especially her jaw, clenched shut like her life depended on it. And it did. This life around her she wasn’t a part of anymore, this family, this safety, Kit’s life existing outside of this place, everything depended on Kit, on her walking out of here alone, back to her apartment. The whole series of events spooled out in front of her as a nightmare unraveling. Was she crying? Why was she crying?)

Kit took another step, then another. The library was one foot away on the right, a mile away, mere inches, an eternity. The passthrough to the living room on her left gaped open.

Bertrand hummed a bar of the jazz record. And then –

“What’ve you got there?”

Kit froze.

“I knew I left it somewhere in here – ha! That book I was looking for, for Violet and Klaus.”

“You really want to do the cob, don’t you?” The smile was clear in his voice, and Kit pictured Bertrand leaning forward in his chair, his hand on his chin, gazing at Beatrice and bursting with delight.

“I absolutely do! I get to do a fake death scene and everything. How many kids books are going to give me that kind of opportunity, Bertrand?”

They were alone. Their voices were far enough into the room that they shouldn’t see her at the doorway. They joked like she remembered, exactly like she remembered. Did they joke like that with their children? Would they have joked like that with Lemony, here, like they used to? With her? Would Olaf have – would her grandparents – wasn’t Kit supposed to be here too, not because it was hers, that wasn’t what mattered, what mattered was –

Kit held her breath and didn’t let it out until she’d slipped into the library, until she’d rushed to the wall, until she’d nearly slammed her hand into the door hidden in the dark wallpaper, until she was safe in the narrow passageway. She wanted to run, to keep running. But they’d hear her in the wall. She took it step by step with her chest burning, traveling up two floors to the hidden attic. There was the little window in the roof, waiting for Kit to wiggle her way out. She did. The climb over the roof and down the trellis was harder, with her whole body trembling, but she made it.

She stumbled through the garden, racing over the brick path back to the road, to the fence – she shoved her heels into the ironwork, scrambling over it, the tip of a bar slicing into her calf and her palms. She slipped on the way down the other side and her hip met the sidewalk, pain skittering through her leg and up her side. Get up. Get up, Kit. And Kit did, back to her car across the street, into the driver’s side.

Kit took long and deep breaths. In and out, until her head was back on straight, with the plan set right in her thoughts, as it was supposed to be. Everything was as it should be. She set the box down gently on the passenger seat. She did not look at the Baudelaire mansion. She would patch herself up later, when she had time. She took another breath and put the key in the ignition.

She had to go back home.

#asoue #woevember #no you do NOT see my unformated dashes shhhhhhhh i am so tired okay :) i'm not fixing them i'm going to bed :)#uh. this fic is a Time. in many ways. like.................#kit snicket and the terrible horrible no good very bad evening of Situations. by lulu vandelay #where is this in canon????? uhhh. tentatively violet and klaus are like toddlers i think. yeah?#i struggled with the title. frantically scrambled for a new one bc my original one. look i thought it was tonally too creepy. i think that #was what was freaking me out about it.#AT. 1:56 IN THE GODDAMN MORNING #the next day 2:23 pm update -- changed some words/smoothed some things/left a lot of the passive voice bc i think it's needed here

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