Disclaimer: I don't own ASOUE.
I've had this half finished for ages, and thought I'd better complete it before it gets Jossed into oblivion on Friday. It occurred to me after I'd started writing that my interpretation of the lines in The Grim Grotto that this is based on was actually taken from "The Intractable Interrogator" by RockSunner. RockSunner, if you're reading this, I hope you don't mind that I used your fanon. You're an excellent theoriser (and I can't think how else one would save someone's life with a crouton.)
The title is drawn from the song "VFD" by Michelle Shocked.
Racing Inevitability
It starts with breaking glass.
They both hear it and freeze, Kit with the top half of the test tube still in her hand, fine black powder staining her gloves and spattered down her shirt, Lemony on the other side of the room, nearest the door, still shaking sand out of his cuffs.
Kit looks down, taking in what has happened in a second, even as she hears Lemony spin round and start to come towards her. "Run," she says without looking at him, voice flat, authoritative, stopping him in his tracks. "Don't come any closer. Don't say a word. Hold your breath and just run. Get out of here. You know what to do."
He flees. The door slams behind her, and she leans against the counter top, heart already racing, lungs already starting to burn.
He has an hour.
He has an hour. The knowledge blazes in his mind as he races up the stairs, realising only when he stumbles halfway up from dizziness that he doesn't have to keep holding his breath. One hour.
That's a long time, so there's no need to panic. He can get the antidote in that time, and bring it down to her, and then this will be over, as if it had never happened.
But if he doesn't…
Stop. Don't think about that.
If he doesn't then the consequence will be unspeakable, unthinkable, so dreadful that even the possibility of it is enough to leave him paralysed with terror.
But he won't think about that, because there's no possibility, because it's not going to happen.
He knows what to do.
He can save her. Of course he can.
One hour.
Kit works fast. By the time her brother trips and remembers to breathe she has unbuttoned her shirt and is scooping up glass shards and deadly powder from the floor in it. She flings the whole bundle down the garbage chute, followed by her skirt and gloves, anything that might be contaminated. She washes her hands. She mops up any last traces of powder from the floor, and sends the mop down the chute as well.
She leans against the wall. Already her vision is starting to blur, her limbs are shaking. Relax. Try to relax. She's done all she can do. All that's left is to wait; try to calm herself so the poison spreads slower around her body, and wait for Lemony to get back. It's all up to him now.
She just wishes she could help him, though. Standing here in her underwear like this she feels so powerless. If only she'd thought to save her watch, then at least she'd know how long it's been – not that she doesn't trust him to be back in time, of course she does. But supposing he had an accident.
He won't. He knows what he's doing. Everything's going to be fine, but still, she wishes she had the time. It's just ticking past her now, out of her control where she can't see it, ticking away in her pocket down in the darkness as it slides toward the incinerator. Maybe she should find some way of fishing it out. Not that she doesn't trust Lemony. But anything could hold him up, and if it looks like the hour might finish without him she could just flick up the button at the top and keep the hands from moving. Buy them a little more time.
If she finds a long piece of… Wait. What? That doesn't make sense.
Kit moans, presses a hand to her eyes. The delirium can't be setting in this soon, can it? But at this concentration the side effects are unpredictable. Anything could happen. It's untested. "Focus," she tells herself out loud, painful as speech is. "Focus on what you know, Kit. You're going to be fine. Your brother will be back within the hour."
Her knees are bending. Gradually, she sinks to the floor.
There's a problem.
"I can't just give it to you," Julian explains. "They watch us like vultures watch a corpse in that kitchen. A woman got fired for stealing a sugar packet. She wasn't one of us," he adds, while Lemony nods in agreement and swallows and tries to look as though he's taking this in. All he's really understood is there's a problem. "But we can't afford to attract attention. I can't just walk off with a bottle of horseradish. You see?"
"But this is urgent," Lemony says, although he's already said that part, but maybe Julian didn't really understand him because nothing is happening. "This is terribly important, it's Kit, my sister, she's in trouble and I need your help! I need to find an antidote for…"
"Lemony, I know, calm down," Julian says, pressing his hands down on Lemony's shoulders. "You're getting hysterical. Listen to me. I know what's happened and I'm going to help you, but we have to be careful, and you have to be patient, and you have to do what I tell you, okay?"
"Okay." Lemony nods again, and Julian lets go of him. He does feel calmer, apart from the part of him that still wants to seize Julian by the throat and shriek you have to help me right now, you have to help me because my sister is d– but that's under control. He can be careful, he can be patient, he can follow instructions, he can wait.
Julian leads him to a corner table. "Pretend you're ordering," he hisses, pushing a menu into Lemony's hands. And then, "You've got your manuscript?"
Lemony pats his briefcase. "I-in there. I'm never without it these days."
"Pretend to be preoccupied with that, then, so no one talks to you. And don't worry. Chef's salad, did you say, sir?" Julian asks, louder, scribbling something on his notepad. "Excellent choice. I'll be right back."
The cramps have started now, and she's sweating, burning up as the expression goes, lank hair falling in her face. She braces herself against the floor as her stomach contracts again but her hands slip on the linoleum and she slides, shudders, curls up into a ball. Not that it helps, she's trying to get into a position that feels better but there's nothing that feels better. Well, she'll just have to live with the pain then, won't she? Endure it. What can't be cured must be endured as her aunt who she never liked was fond of saying. She's dead now, lots of people are dead now. Looking at her friends you'd think people died all the time.
Did she kill that aunt, or was it someone else?
She can't remember. She wishes the baby would just hurry up and come. It's hot in here, too hot and all the walls and floors are shimmering. They need to get that baby out before the fire comes. Already there's the heat, but she's shut the door, which should give them a little more time.
Another cramp, and it's a bad one, tearing through every muscle in her body before it lets go and she collapses, trembling and sticky. "I'm hot," she tells Dewey, lying over by the door, and he frowns, shaking his head, grimacing in sympathy. Little drops of greenish water fall from his hair, mingling with the spreading pool around him that's stained brown from blood.
"Can't you come and hold me?" Kit asks in her croaking, painful voice. "You're so cold."
I'm sorry, darling, he says. His face is green-grey-white, dead-white, fish-white. I want to hold you, but I can't. The harpoon gets in the way.
"When is this baby going to come?" Kit moans.
Dewey looks bewildered. You already had the baby, he says. Don't you remember?
Kit looks down herself, at her flat smoothness. "Then where is it?" she says.
Dewey sighs. We're volunteers, Kit. We eat our young.
The Baudelaires are in a similar situation. It's unnerving how often that happens as the story progresses, as though some unseen author were arranging them in parallel. He shudders, and tells himself to stop it. That's just his anxiety talking, a paranoid nightmare.
But he does feel better for being able to write. Just the motion of his hand is soothing, the soft clicking of the keys, the simple repetitive action combined with the knowledge that he's doing something, achieving something, keeping his promise. It helps. Even though with his other hand he's picking desperately through a bowl of salad that he's sure is far bigger than it needs to be, in search of a single crouton. Even though when he blinks there are visions of Kit's face turning blue as she lies on the floor, and even though a phrase from his earlier notes keeps reoccurring to him with the rhythm of the keys – too many waiters turn out to be traitors.
Julian. Julian is an enigma. Julian does not have what anyone would consider a shady past, he's simply a waiter sympathetic to their cause, and Kit agrees with him that this is highly suspicious. Everyone has a shady past. They've never met a single person they could take at face value.
Hope is not an emotion that comes naturally to Lemony. But he hopes nonetheless, over his clicking keys and racing heart and fingers sticky with vinaigrette, that today will be an exception to the rule.
At least you don't have him there with you, Jacques says. He told me things, while he was killing me. Terrible things. What kind of people we all were. What he'd do to you and Lemony.
I don't want to hear that, Kit tells him – with her eyes, she can't use her mouth any more. I feel sick.
Sorry. I think it's the air pressure. Hector says he's working on it. That explains the wheezing sound, then, and the way the floor lurches beneath them. Kit doesn't much care. She can't move and the world is blurring and the ceiling drifts a thousand miles overhead.
She grips her brother's hand. Jacques, she says, I think someone's following us.
I think you're right.
Are they noble or wicked?
Probably not.
There's something she wants to tell him, and she has to do it now, while the orchestra is still tuning up, but she can't think what it was. She reaches up and touches his eyebrow. It's fading. Everything's fading. She's fading. Jacques, she says, it hurts she says but that wasn't it. Something to do with…
Lemony! She kicks, flails, but her limbs are too weak. I need to get down! I'm supposed to be watching him!
It's too late for that, Jacques says, and the floor underneath Kit breaks free and she slides down into blackness as her brother drifts away. He won't let anyone watch now.
Julian lied to him.
There's no antidote here. What there is is limp salad and watery dressing and a pathetic, gullible fool, a man who surely knows better than to trust anyone. Knows to expect betrayal. Knows better than to hope.
Chef's salad, sir? Excellent choice. How could he not have heard the contempt in those words? How did he miss the trap clicking shut behind him? He sat there and typed and trusted and all the while his sister was choking out her last breaths all alone beneath him. Julian must be laughing now, watching him, everyone in the restaurant is probably watching him come to think of it, smirking behind their menus and watching for him to realise that it's over, the game is over and he lost, too bad, Lemony, what a trusting soul you are, it's such a shame that now poor Kit is –
Unthinkable.
But what else is there to think?
Your sister is dead.
And just then the automatic movement of his hand slips one last, hidden piece of dry herby bread into his mouth, and his tongue floods with bitterness.
Lemony gasps, chokes, for one horrifying moment almost swallows but stops himself in time and springs from his chair and grabs his typewriter and rushes from the room, negating any hope of not drawing attention to himself. But almost uniquely since he stopped being an infant he doesn't care who notices him. Doesn't care about anything, as long as he has a mouthful of horseradish and a chance.
Olaf tears her gloves off, and there's blood underneath.
I know that, she says, but I didn't start it. So what do you want me to say?
He looks up at her through red, tear-filled eyes and doesn't reply. It's cold now, here in the darkness. All the fires have gone out.
Kit looks down at the orphaned boy in front of her. I've got a daughter about your age, she tells him. And a brother.
Lemony bursts through the door. There she is on the floor, half naked, motionless. He drops to his knees beside her, scoops her up in his arms, presses his mouth to hers, passes the antidote. Kiss of life.
She is warm. Still warm.
He can't find a pulse. This means nothing. He's never been any good at that. He can barely find his own.
He cradles her. Tenderly. Moves hair out of her eyes.
Surely he was in time. Maybe a minute too late, but what can happen in a minute? A person cannot be destroyed in a minute. This is Kit. She bites her fingernails. She enjoys the work of Raymond Chandler. She ate cornflakes for breakfast this morning, with yoghurt, and sliced apple.
He will count to thirty.
One mississippi, two mississippi, three mississippi, and by thirty mississippi she will have opened her eyes. Four mississippi, five mississippi, six mississippi. And if she does not, then he will lay her down on the floor, and he will go find a sheet to cover her face (seven mississippi, eight mississippi) and he will watch as her body is wrapped in linen and lowered into the earth (nine mississippi) and then he will finish the books, because he has promised, and then (ten mississippi) he will go to her graveside in the dead of night, with a handful of stones to leave in tribute, and a small vial of cyanide, and he will make atonement for his failure. Eleven mississippi. Should it come to that.
Twelve mississippi.
If he can work up the courage.
If he has to.
Thirteen mississippi…
Even the darkness is fading to black.
Kit sees a light.
She makes her way towards it.
Twenty-eight mississippi…
Twenty-nine mississippi…
Thirty mississippi.
Lemony looks down into his sister's face. Her muscles are slack, her limbs loose and floppy, her eyelids do not even flicker.
He holds her close. His trembling fingers stroke her hair.
Thirty-one mississippi.
Thirty-two mississippi.
Thirty-three…
And her eyes fly open.
Lemony makes a sound he last made as a young boy, a wild whoop of delight, and Kit gags and coughs and retches. She clings to his shirt, sobbing and shuddering, gasping out broken streams of thank you, thank you. Kit, warm, wonderful, alive. He can't imagine what she's thanking him for. Surely, it should be the other way around.
"This is a miracle," Kit says, when they've both calmed down. He's draped his jacket around her shoulders, and they are holding each other. They will sit like this for the rest of the afternoon, cradling one another, listening as they breathe. In, out, in, out. Disaster averted.
"Miracles scare me, Kit," Lemony says. "I'd prefer just to call it good timing."
Kit shrugs, and holds on tight. Same difference.