Chapter Text
Tell me your secrets, and ask me your questions,
Oh let's go back to the start…
I was just guessin' at numbers and figures,
Pullin' the puzzles apart.
Questions of science, science and progress,
Do not speak as loud as my heart.
-- The Scientist by Coldplay
In an instant, Olaf had recovered…and the look in his eyes told Violet that she would probably pay dearly for causing him to lose face in front of his followers. The shock had been glazed over by pretension and bravado, and whatever weakness she had glimpsed had been hidden. Yes, she had her dress and her faith in herself, but Olaf had cruelty and a mob. The resolve she had so recently renewed began to falter despite her attempts to cling to it.
Olaf stood and dragged her roughly towards him, calling for the attention of his henchmen. "For those of you who have not met this little wildfire, I introduce Violet Baudelaire – the very generous beneficiary of our quest!" The laughter that sounded was far from amused, falling closer to menacing. Olaf's hand was bruising Violet's arm, and she squirmed to get away. He glared down at her with dangerously shiny eyes and hissed, "Move again and I'll kill you with my bare hands."
He chortled indulgently to his henchmen, who looked at her as if they had similar intentions. "But, my friends, not only is she the source of our budget, no! She will be working alongside us, gentlemen! A daughter of V.F.D. vermin is going to help us destroy everything left of that cursed group!"
A crazed look had filled his eyes, and the henchmen went wild. The group went frantic, wild, animalistic at the irony of the situation and at the thrill of victory within their grasp—until one henchman had the ignorance to ask, "Hey boss, she's cute and all, but what can she do to help us? We have lots of decoys already workin' for us."
"I should kill you for daring to question me." A hush fell over the room, and the man trembled in anticipation of a quick, painful death. "However, it is a valid question, I suppose. As you know, there are still three more families untouched by our wrath, happy remains of V.F.D. that we must introduce to the touch of fire! And Violet, cunning little inventor and scientist that she is, will use her skills to make our takeover and kidnapping seamless as never before. With her help, we will burn the three remaining houses to the ground, dispose of V.F.D.'s remaining members—and force their children to help us in our schemes just as I am now forcing Violet to aid us!"
Now Violet finally knew his plan. Her money was not the end but the beginning, the beginning of the end of V.F.D.—the final removal of the great and good that her parents had worked so hard to create into the vast maw of darkness and despair. Violet wanted to protest, to scream out that she would never aid Olaf and his lackeys to destroy so many lives, but she was frozen in dread and shock. She only realized that Olaf had dismissed his henchmen when they began filing out of the laboratory, and she remained alone with the villain in whom she had foolishly thought there might have some good.
He jerked her arm roughly before releasing it. "It really would have been disappointing if I had had to kill you for causing a fuss, after taking all that effort to save your miserable life. And what in the hell is the idea with that dress?"
His voice broke Violet out of her stupor. "So that's it then. You're not going to just be happy with my fortune, you want to ruin more lives and cause more destruction—for what? Some misguided, petty idea of revenge?"
Olaf stood angrily, walked over to the lab doors, and slammed them so hard that Violet jumped. She almost expected him to growl as he approached her. "Did that blow to the head knock all the sense out of you? You forget that you're my captive, orphan, and you'll do as I say. That includes shutting the hell up and helping me in whatever business ventures I choose to pursue with your aid."
Violet realized that, yet again, her sense of self-preservation was fleeing quickly with rage—why did Olaf of all people possess the ability to make her forget everything and just speak her mind? "What bothered you so much about my dress, Olaf? Is it that it's the dress of a woman you slew in cold blood…a woman you burned alive in her own home, along with her children? Or do you just not like the color?"
His hand found her throat, and she felt herself lifted to slam against a bookshelf. Yet again, she had worked Olaf into a murderous rage. She knew she had to do something, quickly, before the life was strangled out of her. She took as deep a breath as she could and spoke. "Olaf, wait, please! I shouldn't have…"
Olaf's eyes were like glass. "No, you shouldn't have, but that's really not my concern, is it? I can always change my plans, and find a new orphan to help me."
She could feel tears forming, and choked out, "I'm sorry." To her surprise, this simple statement led Olaf to release her from his iron grip and let her fall to the floor. He turned to stalk away from her but a sound stopped him. It was the child-like sound of sobbing, the type of sobbing when one does not have words for what one is feeling but can only choke and cry. The wrenching feeling that he had felt before, the one had not been able to name, returned—and this time he knew what it was: pity.
He was shocked to discover that much as he pretended otherwise, to himself and others, somewhere along the way he had started to care for the orphan girl that wept before him. He imagined comforting her, wiping the tears from her soft face, and shuddered at these new thoughts, unfamiliar and perhaps not entirely unwanted, he realized. She was not the young girl he had first met; the dress she wore now made that infinitely clear. She had grown to be a woman as spirited as her mother and the other women of V.F.D., who had not simply waited like war widows at home but fought and died alongside their husbands—and sometimes, yes, their children—in the schism's aftermath.
He realized that Violet's sobbing had taken a turn into hysteric. She could not stop crying, her panicked emotions make her weep harder and harder. Olaf knelt next to her—much as he had before, but she was never to know that—and reached out a hand, his only thought to calm down the frightened, confused young woman before she began hyperventilating. "Violet, I…am sorry."
She squeaked out a surprised hiccup, shock freezing her sobs within her. "You…you said my name." Then she realized that not only had he called her by her given name but he had apologized—for what in specific she did not know, but to hear an apology from Olaf was like expecting gravity to suddenly reverse.
Olaf could not meet her eyes, and instead reached out a hand. "Here." He led her to one of the many couches near the dirty greenhouse windows and sat beside her. When their eyes finally met, hers were full of awed, uneasy wonder, as if she knew of his epiphany, even though he could barely reconcile with himself his suddenly realized attraction. He felt as if she had torn him open to rifle through all his secret thoughts, and felt naked under her gaze.
"The truth, that's what you want, isn't it? You want to know why, why I'm the way I am, why Count Olaf is a villain who fought against the brave and true V.F.D., who ruined so many lives, and all that? But no, no matter what I say, it's going to be a pack of lies compared to that utter garbage fed to you. You're not going to believe a word I say."
The man before her had just attempted, for the umpteenth time, to kill her, and Violet found she no longer cared. The anguish in his eyes was real, the intensity of his glance at her stunning. She saw something different when their gazes met, glimpses of which she had seen before—during their encounter in the lobby of Hotel Denouement, and on many other occasions. She did not know what had changed in the few minutes since she had arrived and learned of Olaf's plans, but she could sense a shift in his emotions toward her…dare she say it, something more forgiving, even gentle, had clouded his fierce anger.
It was not unlike the time, so long ago, when he had eaten raspberries with the Baudelaires in his kitchen, and proposed that Violet play his bride in his twisted sham of a play. Yet then the feel of his hand stroking her cheek had been one of malice, of contempt and masked fury. Now…she trembled at the fact that he appeared to have let down his guard, to have begun to react to her attempts to change him. Was it another ploy to gain something from her, allegiance perhaps, or something more?
Violet could bear the suspense no longer. What Olaf was about to say could be the key to her quest to make him realize the good in himself—the nobility and caring that appeared to be buried deeper within with each passing day. The thread she was grasping was a thin one…and she was looking for any way to make it more tactile.
"Tell me. Please…I need to know."
He cleared his throat but did not speak, and they sat in silence in the thin light, Violet studying Olaf's face and Olaf studying Violet's small hand, which he held in his own rough one, turning it over and over again as if the courage to speak was held in its whorls and lines.
"My parents raised me well, to be polite to women and friendly to children and the elderly. I was taught manners and chivalry. They took me on picnics and held me while we read together in front of the fire on chilly winter nights. Sometimes, they went out for the night, telling me they had meetings for a club they had joined and not to worry, that they would be back soon. I loved them, and they loved me. We were a happy family, and I knew no sadness, no hate, no anger. Until…"
Violet felt a draft flit through the room, as if her body knew what was to come in Olaf's story that was not fiction but truth, concrete and unchangeable.
"I now know that any one of those nights, one or both of my parents could have walked out the front door of our mansion and never returned. VFD asks everything of its members, who are glad to fight and risk all for their precious ideals. Yet none of them suspected that the fight would soon turn inward."
He gripped Violet's hand so hard that it burned, but she did not want to let go and gripped his hand back just as fiercely. This was the story she had waited years to hear…the story of the truth.
"By the time I was a young initiate into VFD, still restricted to menial chores and simple missions, my parents began to disagree with other members of VFD over the effectiveness of their tactics. My parents wanted to use more extreme, more controversial methods to fight the enemy, while others were content to keep to their slow plodding.
Eventually, plans were made in secret to silence those who wanted to veer from the traditional VFD's ineffectiveness. A box of poison darts was relayed into the hands of two of VFD's most trusted agents, known to have completed hundreds of missions with few glitches or errors, and a small group of their closest friends among the other agents. They would then follow the dissidents – my parents, and another man whose name I never learned – to a mission at the theatre, pretending to back up my parents and the man."
Olaf fell silent, and then met Violet's eyes with a look of such burning ferocity that she became frightened again. Yet she was enraptured, and could not have run if her life had depended upon it.
"Your parents killed my parents that night in the theatre. They found the bodies full of enough poison to kill a dozen men."
Now, Violet yanked her hand from his, knowing that what she had heard could be nothing but the truth but longing to prove it false. Why Olaf had burned her family's house to the ground, why he had sought her family's fortune so ferociously, why he killed and stole and tortured…all the gruesome pieces snapped together. "How do you know it was my parents, Olaf? How?"
"Because…they told me themselves."
It was this last sentence that ripped away any remaining illusions, and thrust Violet into the harsh light of reality. Her worst nightmare was no longer a dream, but the truth…nothing but the truth.