Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“From too much love of living,

        From hope and fear set free,

We thank with brief thanksgiving

        Whatever gods may be

That no life lives for ever;

That dead men rise up never;

That even the weariest river

        Winds somewhere safe to sea.”

-AC Swinburne, The Garden of Proserpine

ONE

*

Six months after Violet Baudelaire dies, she shows up in his apartment.

It’s a normal night. Fuzzy around the edges from far too much wine, the whole apartment grungy and catastrophic looking. The yellowed bulb illuminating his living room flickers like an old reel of film, a crazed spasm of light. It reminds Olaf of the pain in his temples, a constant high jab of headache that throbs behind his eyes, makes even his teeth ache.

Between the headache, the light, and the setting sun, the shadows keep changing.

He’s plenty disoriented, stumbling, dropping records to the floor when he means to flip them, forgetting to guide the needle to its groove and only remembering once the silence feels too heavy.

There’s a sour smell to the air.

Not one that comes from the carpet or the dishes or the alley out his open window. A rot, like mold. A fungal bloom. Some black disaster, growing in the walls.

Olaf pushes the realization away, uncaring. He has not noticed the smell in the handful of months that he has inhabited this grungy apartment, yet he’s hardly been reliably aware. It was enough to get inside, get hidden, get himself used to his refined, bitter victory. He’ll adapt to the smell, to the heavy drag of it in his lungs.

Easier than doing the dishes, he thinks. Or shutting the window.

He picks a record from the stack without looking at it, drops the needle more flippantly than he intends. It jerks, a fine-tipped scratch of noise, and then the music begins. It’s swoopy, whining, dramatic, and not at all what he wants. Olaf makes a disgusted, annoyed grunt in the flickering light and lurches away, yanking the closest open wine bottle off the coffee table and chugging it. Only after the first few swigs does he realize its gone bad - too bitter, and rotten like the scent in the walls. Drunk as he is, though, his lips have gone numb, his tongue dull. He drains the whole bottle, watches the wine fade until he can see the deep green of the bottle bottom.

Behind him, the beat picks up. He drops the bottle to the floor, not hard enough to break. The song, not being his usual bop of bright noise - he prefers it jazzy and obnoxious - annoys him more than it should. He spins on his heel too quickly, (a dizzying jerk of color and noise, his whole body numb and vague as vapor at the edges - ) so he has to catch himself against the little metal cabinet his record player rests atop. The needle skips again. The song changes and it’s not any better.

Out of the corner of his eye, the single bulb flickers out, blinks back too bright. He yanks the record from its track, fumbles for the sleeve. The silence is stark, immediate, as expansive as snowfall. Even the wind seems softer, lesser, though he hardly notices.

Later, he will think it is only due to this silence that he first notices her.

There’s a choking noise, feminine, high, a brittle squeak of terror.

Olaf whirls in an instant, scrabbling for the pocket of his trousers. His switchblade is in his hand before his vision adjusts.

Outside, bleeding in, the light is so blue (the color, he thinks, of a cartoonish corpse - ) she almost looks alive. The fizzing light passes through her, out of her. Doesn’t catch in the shine of her hair or the dip of her collarbones. She stands behind his couch, grabbing at her clothes - pajamas, white with red pinstripes, an embroidered heart at the breast pocket - as if she had never seen them. Her small hands fist at her stomach, catching in the buttons. Another choking noise from her, head tucked down as she examines her body. Frantic little hands. Whining like an animal.

“How’d you get in here?” Olaf demands, slurring.

Now that he can see her alone, he’s hardly startled, only wondering if he can charm her into staying. She’s slight beneath those pajamas, small enough to throw around. He has an immediate intrusive thought - swinging her over his shoulder, a giggle he has never heard, dumping her onto his mattress. Though his switchblade is still ready and willing in his hand. It catches the flickering bulb, gleams, another restless tic of light to warp his vision.

At his voice, her head snaps up.

There’s a raw horror to her eyes that makes him uneasy.

She’s far too pale. Even stuck staring at him, her mouth hanging open, her eyes desperate, denying, he recognizes her instantly.

Olaf’s gut heaves, a sick lurch that has nothing to do with alcohol.

Last time he’d seen her, he had been hurrying through the Baudelaire mansion, the smell of smoke at his back, spotting her in a disgustingly cheerful family portrait, stunned into suspension despite his pursuit, saying to himself as if addressing a friend, “She’s a pretty one.”

And she was. With her two young siblings before her, her father at her back steady as a shadow, her mother leaning to bump their foreheads affectionately together (unified and sickening and, he thinks, a lie - ) Violet looked exactly like her mother as a young adult only softer, more feminine, a kinder ease to her eyes. Though, for all their similarities, he had never been struck by Beatrice in this exact way. All her talent and ruthlessness (and blatant, merciless independence - ) had made her an opponent more than a conquest worth attempting. The contrast between Beatrice and her daughter, even in that one picture, had been enough to make him grin, thinking - does all that purity feel like an insult?

And still. Even in death, even pale as the rising moon, Violet Baudelaire was unfathomable and lovely.

Disgusted, flat, he says like an accusation, “Baudelaire.”

That sparks some awareness in Violet. She turns, glancing around his dirty apartment. There’s no sound to it. No subtle press of her feet to the floor, no breath, no rustle of clothes. Her voice is shrill, sounds shattered and gravelly, as if shot through with static.

“Father?” She warbles. Those little hands still tugging at her clothes. “Father?”

“He’s not here.” Olaf spits. “You’re dead.”

He only truly realizes it once he’s said it, each small observation falling into place and presenting an impossible conclusion. Olaf is sure that somewhere in his piles of mess he still has that edition of the Punctilio - BAUDELAIRE MANSION BURNT TO THE GROUND, FAMILY LOSES ELDEST DAUGHTER TO THE FLAMES. He had stared at the monochrome pictures enough to see them perfectly when his eyes closed. The skeletal, charred remains of the home and Violet printed next to them, a headshot, a candid caught mid-laugh, charming and innocent and utterly worth missing.

“You’re dead,” he repeats. “So what are you doing here?”

Violet’s eyes find his. The utmost revulsion and horror (and something jagged with cruelty, a decimating spark of recognition - ) in them makes him grin.

“You’re - ” She says with a repressed, furious bite. “You. Did this to me.”

She cannot even say it.

You hurt me , Violet doesn’t say, though he can hear it clear and true as if she had. You killed me dead.

His grin grows wider. “Hi, Violet. Nice to see you again.”

The look on her face is stunned, still, feral. She starts blinking like she’s going to cry, or would, if she was able. Olaf leans back against the wall and watches her suffer, delighted with himself, entertained beyond words.

Violet shakes her head, glaring at him beneath the stark cut of her bangs, a snarl to her pretty little mouth. She closes her eyes on a wince, as if cut up by the rage in her, takes a breath, starts to speak. “You left me there - ”

Olaf blinks and she’s gone.

The swamping silence returns.

The light bulb flickers.

His switchblade is folded like a closed book, like a shutting door, like the lid to a casket stuffed tight with flowers.

He returns to his music triumphant and smiling.

Chapter Text

He tells himself he dreamt her.

That the misty presence of Violet Baudelaire scowling in pinstripe pajamas, so furious she could barely speak, was the consequence of too much wine, too little company, and too many days spent indoors.

Although he watches his back the whole time, wears large sunglasses and a scarf despite the pleasant near-summer weather, Olaf manages to leave his apartment eventually. Only for a few hours, and never once does he speak to anyone, yet internally he writhes with shame and fury and, only once he thinks of the burning mansion, the smoking ash, the body of a girl stuck deep in the ground, does he allow himself bitter pride.

A victory, he thinks, even if he’s reduced to restless caution. His charisma stunted, his backbone bent, his nose to the ground, he is still the winner, still the one who lit the match to strike the curtains to char the Baudelaire home. And their eldest. He finds some glee in that.

Though he finds merciless happiness in Violet Baudelaire’s death, and denies as best he can her own apparition, it does not stop the sudden swamp of nightmares.

A dirty mattress, dragged up the stairs from behind a nearby dumpster, serves as his bed. It lies crooked across the floor of his bedroom. Fills the space with a musty smell. He makes sure to close his eyes before he touches it, as if enduring an encounter with an unlovely lover, so he does not have to look at the stains, the wear, the grime. Alone, it’s enough to give him nightmares, yet he usually sleeps with instant, heavy intensity, as if he has never regretted a single thing in his life.

The nightmares show up as sudden and uninvited as she had, on the very same night.

He dreams of himself standing in his little bathroom, looking into the mirror, and his reflection suddenly grinning too wide and too quickly, a stranger, someone in possession of his body with no say at all from him. His reflection reaches up slowly, then out, towards him, as if to say - This is mine now, mine, and you can’t do anything at all -

In many nightmares, he’s the wretched star. A long iron rod is stuck at a downward angle through his forehead and he has to pull it out himself, one hand over the other, feeling it slide behind his teeth, up through the roof of his mouth, past his sinuses, dragging, catching, his mouth filling with blood.

In another, he loses his teeth. Some nights he’s poisoned. Or drowning. Or lying face-up in the gut of a dumpster.

Always, though, he is being followed. He is ignoring his reflection to a pounding at the door, he is swinging that rod once he has it free (slick and slippery in his hands - ) he is stuffing his own teeth into his pockets as he flees.

It’s Bertrand who runs him down. Always Bertrand and never Beatrice and he doesn’t quite know why. ( Father ? Violet had warbled in panic, her very first word. Father? ) Catching up, coming closer, Bertrand trails him like smoke.

Olaf never sleeps long enough to look the man in the eyes.

Most nights he dreams of Violet.

Dreams of her floating in his apartment, spitting maggots. Dreams of only black smoke and the sound of her coughing. Dreams of her portrait from the Punctilio , pointing at him, laughing so hard she can barely breathe, forcing - You did this to me! You did this to me!

He tells himself he dreamt her.

Yet he doesn’t quite believe it.

Olaf senses her before he turns his key. It’s a static to the air, a heaviness, like the feeling of eyes on his skin though no one is around. He debates turning back yet there are several bottles of wine in his grasp that need opening and there is no way he’s going to be forced from his apartment by the ghost of a girl he has already killed.

He wishes he was drunker, that fine blur of intoxication having dimmed his last several days fading only now. Although he knows he’s not, he feels very sober finally turning his key.

She’s floating above the couch when he opens the door. Curled foetal, her head on her knees, her back to him. The red pinstripes of her pajamas barely visible in the afternoon sun.

Olaf scowls at her even though she cannot see, shuts the door too hard, keys jangling. He sets his collection of wine on the cluttered coffee table. When he glances at her again, she’s facing him, still curled in on herself, those wide eyes watching him.

“Welcome back, little sprite.” He says through a sneer, all faux-charm. “I didn’t think you’d return after fleeing last time.”

“I didn’t flee. I can’t control it.” Violet says softly. There’s none of that past fury in her voice, only the weary calm of fact. “I didn’t mean to leave, just like I didn’t mean to appear. I’ve tried to go. Through your door or the open window. But I can’t.”

Olaf grabs a bottle from the table, a bitter red, and drops onto the couch. He tugs the knife from his pocket, clicks the blade free, and tucks it under the metal foil coating the cork until it splits. The foil drifts to the floor. He lets his knife rest in his lap as he jerks at the top with his teeth.

“Too bad.” He says, once he’s spat out the cork. “I have no need for a ghost, no matter how pretty. Can’t you go haunt your wretched family?”

“I can’t do that either.” Violet says as he takes several gulps straight from the bottle. The alcohol hits him like a breath of fresh air, a beloved crutch, an instant shot of glee. “I’ve only shown up here so far.”

Olaf settles his shoulders against the arm rest, stretches his long legs across the cushions. Violet hovers like a cloud, just as pale, a foot above the backrest, watching him. Despite the nightmares and the deep horror her existence summons, Olaf finds himself suddenly grateful for her company, if only to give him an excuse to hear his own voice.

“Then where do you go?” He demands. “When you’re not here.”

Violet scowls at him like he’s playing a joke. A hint of that aggression returns to her voice. Just as demanding, she asks, “What do you mean?”

He takes several more swigs of wine before answering, just to let her suffer. “It’s been two weeks. Since you showed up.”

A fine flick of horror crosses Violet’s face, distracts her attention. Her brows come together in an expression of grief and utmost confusion. Hush. Her worried eyes trace the floor, looking for a memory she cannot recall.

“You didn’t know?” Olaf asks, unable to quell his grin. He twirls the bottle by the neck, watches the wine twist, before setting it atop the table and standing, his open blade clattering to the floor. Calculative, mystified, his eyes roam Violet’s face which is still frozen in distress.

“You’re Olaf, right?” She asks, voice quiet, eyes still vague and unsettled. “I remembered your face last time. Your voice. Not your name.”

That makes him grin, as if someone had recognized him on the street for his creative endeavors. “ Count Olaf. Impresario. And you’re Violet Baudelaire. Deceased!”

She doesn’t respond to that. He takes another step towards her, reaching out. “Tell me, Violet, what’s it like being a ghost?”

That breaks the shock in her. She drops her knees, jerks back through the air with fresh alarm and disgust on her face. Only once she is out of the sunlight does Olaf notice her pajama bottoms, singed black at the ends. This small detail erodes something in his chest, a vicious landslide caving at his center.

“Don’t try to touch me again.” Violet says, harsh. She’s glaring at him. It’s becoming a familiar expression now- fierce, hateful gaze, scrunched nose, a stern slant to that mouth.

Olaf snorts, rolls his eyes. “Or what, you’ll hurt me? Haunt me? You’re as frightening as curdled milk. Especially in those little heart pajamas.”

“I died in this outfit!” Violet shouts. Offense and disgust ball her fists like she wants to strike him. “You killed me in these pajamas! You - left me there!”

Again, though he doesn’t like acknowledging it, there’s a twinge of dread in him. Confronted with the end result of his actions, he feels small but sharp shame, like a splinter buried too deep to pick loose.

“No time to change clothes when your home is burning.” Olaf says, unconcerned. He takes a gulp of the wine, looks her in the eyes, says, “Sleeping beauty Violet Baudelaire. At least you died peacefully. Thank me for that at least.”

“You would think that, wouldn’t you? That I slept through everything. Even with my fever, the smoke woke me well before the fire. But I was too weak to do anything about it.”

That twinge of dread sinks to his stomach, blooms like an ulcer. Olaf tries to remember that night, hunts in his mind for any scrap of her. There had only been the portrait, that photograph, to mesmerize him. Seduced, decimated, unhinged with one glance to her likeness.

If he had found her sick, in those dainty little pajamas, all alone, he thinks he might have stolen her away. Might have convinced her to undress for him, toyed with her addled mind, might have wiped the sweat from her brow, clenched his fist in the damp hair at the back of her neck, softly curling. He might have carried her in his arms down the staircase, (he has a sudden flash of a dream within a dream, an open door seen through an open door - pausing on the landing with Violet in his arms, making her kiss her own portrait as she would kiss him - ) her arms around his throat, making her watch as he struck the curtains.

He might have stolen her. Might have seduced her. Might have taken her and dropped her off miles away in the middle of nowhere, left a bitter, victorious letter for her mother in the breast pocket of her shirt, folded small behind that stitched heart.

There are many things he’d have liked to do with a young, pliant Violet Baudelaire. But he wouldn’t have dreamed of killing her. At least not that night.

Olaf drains the rest of the bottle before he speaks. He’s feeling comfortably blurry besides the ache in his gut - morality, he wonders, or lack of food? He cannot remember the last time he ate - and his twisted appreciation for Violet’s company has started to sour. He can feel himself going soft with alcohol, a rare and rotten consequence.  

“Fever?” He asks, instead of, “Would you have let me touch you?”

“I was sick.” Violet says, still glaring, though her tone is softer. He wonders if he has surprised her. Wonders if she expected laughter or cruelty. They sit in his throat, ready weapons, yet they are wine-soaked and tired and that shred of shame, of missed opportunity, crawls in his gut and he bends to it without option. “Mother had tickets to the opera for months. We were all so excited to go. I’d been feverish for over a day by then but I didn’t want them to miss it. I had just turned seventeen, after all. I could manage a cold on my own. But it… wasn’t just a cold. My fever got worse after they left. I was so confused. Kept hearing things. Thought they’d come home over and over again but no one showed up to check on me. And the house was so still.”

Her eyes find his. She’s dropped the glare and all that’s left is sprawling, endless grief. “And then you showed up.”

Olaf turns so he does not have to look at her. He scrabbles for his switchblade on the floor, uses it to open his second bottle, something pink and too carbonated. This time he folds the weapon back into his pocket, takes a few loud sips through the fizz before collapsing back onto the couch.

There is one detail he shares before he can stop himself, something small and trivial as pocket change yet he is ashamed of it anyway, so sure that it lessens the victory somehow, even if the outcome is better than he had expected or even wanted. A bitter truth he had hoped to avoid. “I didn’t know you were there. If that will stop your whining. Left you there . Brat. It wasn’t about you.”

He closes his eyes incase she floats into view, tired of staring at the cracks in his ceiling and the single bulb waiting for the sun to sink.

Her voice floats over instead, cool and soft as a breeze. “Would you have done it still? If you knew I was there?”

“Yes.” Olaf responds instantly, lying. “And I would feel just as proud.”

“I heard you downstairs.” Violet says, a new hurt to her voice, something brutal and furious. “I thought you might have been my father. But you were talking to yourself that whole time, running around. I tried to call for you. For someone. But I was too dizzy and so tired. And then the smoke started.”

She pauses, her throat closing with the memory. He’s glad he’s not looking at her. He’s so drunk the room starts to twist beneath him, but it does little to distract from the prickle of discomfort over his skin as Violet continues speaking.

“I screamed and screamed. Saw the fire in the doorway. Felt the smoke in my mouth. It came closer and closer and I couldn’t move. It was so loud. And then everything hurt - ”

“ Stop .” Olaf spits. The shame in him has transformed into familiar anger and he welcomes the change, the front door of his heart wide open and inviting more. He wonders if he’ll be forever cursed with flipping sentiment- feeling victory and pride over burning the Baudelaire mansion, over taking their eldest daughter from his most hated enemies, yet, when confronted with the (lovely, gossamer-fine - ) spectre of Violet, he hates himself utterly. “Stop it.”

He rises, the whole room off kilter, slams the bottle down onto the coffee table too hard. It skews, tips and spills with a hiss, rolling off the table and onto the floor. Olaf watches it happen and doesn’t feel a thing. When his eyes focus, he looks at Violet who watches him back with a hard expression of malice, disgust, and remembered fear.

“If you want me to beg forgiveness you’ll be waiting till I’m as dead as you.” Olaf spits, nasty and harsh and so alive with it his heart could burst. “I have no guilt. I’d do it all again. But if I could change one thing I’d have gone to your bedroom and touched you when I had the chance and oh you’d have loved it. Imagine. Feverish young thing writhing in my arms. You’d be so out of it you’d hardly know I was real. Perhaps, Violet, it was a mercy I didn’t know you were there. You’re welcome.”

“You’re vile.” Violet hisses, voice shaking, and only then, hurling insults at him, does she sound like her mother. “I hate you so much I can hardly stand it. Feel free to drink yourself to death. Seeing as I can’t leave, I’ll gladly watch.”

He grins at that, endeared by her hatred. He watches her fuming for several moments, the wild, rapid scan of her eyes over him, her balled little fists. His eyes linger on the singed ends of her clothes. “I saw pictures of you. You didn’t seem this angry when you were alive.”

Something in that hurts Violet so deeply it kills her rage. Her jaw tightens and she glances away, head tucked down. All she gives him is, “I wasn’t.”

The hurt in her reminds him of her earlier horror, confronting the gaps between her waking moments. These periods of introspection make him uncomfortable. He prefers her loud and shouting, her hot eyes on him, all her attention his to wield.

“Thinking on it, drinking myself to sleep sounds like a perfect plan, Baudelaire. I’m going to get very naked and sprawl on my bed and think of fucking you in your burning home while I touch myself. You’re invited to watch, of course. I’ll keep the door cracked.”

“Die.” Violet snaps, and there’s that rage again, so hot and real he imagines he can feel it coming off her like heat.

It makes him snicker as he lurches to his feet, gathering the remaining bottles of wine in his arms, his fingers numb, his whole body foggy at the edges. He stumbles into his bedroom, dumps the bottles onto his mattress.

When he goes to crack the door, Violet’s back is to him, her head down, and he knows he will see this when he closes his eyes, the strip of exposed skin at the back of her neck, pale as frost, while his own body (hot and aroused and very much alive - ) burns.

Chapter Text

He wakes in pain most days. 

Subtle aching, barely there at first. Thinned out towards the edges of his body, dragging like shadow. 

Olaf notices these aches distantly, like remnants of dreams, as he comes-to atop his rank and rotten mattress. Through squinting, he finds his bedroom undisturbed. Still barren, save for the bedding, the piles of clothes, the curtainless window blazing with sun. He heaves his waking sigh to tightness in his ribs, to discomfort. Throws a hand over his eyes, annoyed, cursing at the light, and the sudden shock of pain that spikes from wrist to elbow is enough to make him flinch. It comes later, in rising (body bending, bones cracking like stone - ) that he truly hurts. 

Dread floods his body, always. Every morning.

His very first cognizant thought repeated like a ritual - What has she done now?

A quick stumble to his adjacent bathroom, a smack of the lightswitch, (gut already sinking with fury and ugly, needling humiliation - ) and he is standing before the mirror shirtless and gruesome. Light reveals fresh bruises like rapid gunfire across his ribs, collecting over his heart. Old bruises freckle his body elsewhere - his navel, his arms, the tops of his feet, each mark the color of eucalyptus wilting. 

Although this has become agonizingly normal, his eyes snag on fresh damage. A new soreness blooms as he turns his head, breathes, flexes his jaw. 

His reflection freezes in the lowlight. 

Red welts lace his throat like hickeys. Like strangulation. 

He imagines it on impulse: Violet floating into his bedroom once she hears him snoring. Examining the level of wine still in his hoard of bottles. Placing those little fingers on any stretch of his exposed skin and twisting until a welt rises hot between them. Using all her strength for a bruise the size of a dime.

“You’re lucky all I can do is pinch,” Violet had hissed when he first confronted her about his newfound contusions. “You deserve worse.”

Olaf tilts his head, leans in closer to his mirror speckled with grime. The marks at his throat are longer, deeper in color, more force behind them than idle playground pinching. 

Through the gutting swell of his outrage, he tries to recall any relevant sensation and comes up empty. Most nights, he falls into bed wine-drunk and numb. He is not too surprised he did not feel her. (Though he does enjoy the ending that undoubtedly followed. Himself snoring through her clenching fists at his throat, victorious even in sleep. Violet’s frustration boiling, trying with all her pitiful might to snap his windpipe shut. Useless.)

Olaf stares at his body in the mirror. Wounded by the ghost of a young woman. He is a disgrace to himself. 

This is what finally angers him. Tips past bitter amusement ( “You can barely touch me, kid. Keep it coming. One day you might even break the skin.” ) and into kerosene, heat and spark and flame. Rage.

(Olaf always knows the best way to start a fire. Give him chemicals. Give him matches. Give him flint and stone. Give him anything at all and he will find a way to tempt the latent destruction. Headquarters to a secret organization. A beloved family home. He can do it. Give him a moment. Step back. Watch.)

In the mirror, his mottled chest heaves. His aching throat constricts. It is this violation that sends him snarling into the front room. 

Violet hovers by the window. Hanging like a noose in the air, like a death omen. She has not left for three weeks. 

Most times they do not speak, and Olaf is not bothered by her. He can look at her more readily when she’s silent, appreciate her like a spectacle. A young woman, unable to leave him, floating pretty and pale at the edges of his vision. It’s a dream come true, a wish granted. 

Except for when she speaks. Except for when she touches him. 

“You’re a coward, Baudelaire,” he spits, ready for a fight. Rust in his voice, proof of her damage. 

“Oh, you’re up early.” Violet says, not bothering to look him over, eyes still out the window watching the city bustle. “It’s hardly past noon.”

“Look at me,” he demands, pointing to his red-ringed throat. “Tried to choke me, did you?”

That catches her attention. Violet’s gaze crawls over his body. Though he has plenty, he needs no reason to be furious when she looks him full in the face, eyes like empty houses. It is simply the fact that she exists, arresting in her beauty and impossibility, that gives Olaf enough reason. His hatred feels instinctual. As if it is deeper than his surroundings. Deeper than Beatrice and VFD. Deeper than her murder. 

Sometimes Olaf thinks his hatred has little to do with any of it, and instead that it is in him, of him. That he was born to embody it the way others are born into nobility or desperation. That when he was forming in his mother (like a gem cut from rough and wild stone - ) certain quirks to his existence were inevitable. You will be a cruel and cunning man. You will do anything necessary to survive. You will demand notability. You will hate Violet Baudelaire. 

At the window, nearly translucent in the light, Violet shrugs.“I tried.” 

In his fury, his mind sparks with venomous, irrational insults. I’ll kill you twice, he thinks, then scraps it. Dig you up. Lay you out. I will bite the tongue from your corpse. 

“You want to hurt me?” Olaf demands instead. “You want to kill me?”

She says nothing, only watches him. Those eyes on his skin, making him itch.

“Do it, then.” He snaps, arms open wide, bruises on display in the afternoon sun. Although he would never admit it, he wants it. Wants his own blood in his hands if he cannot have hers.

Olaf takes the switchblade from his pocket, flips the blade into action with a splinter of sunlight, and tosses it towards her. It passes through Violet’s foot and clatters heavily to the floor. 

She does not even watch it fall, too busy staring at him with that calculated distance to her face. Measuring him up. Only then does she look like her mother and it makes his guts crawl. Violet says nothing, does nothing.

Olaf, eager to get a rise out of her, tries again. “You’re real brave, Violet. Attacking a man in his sleep. Why not give it a try now? Go on, I’ll give you a head start. And my best blade.”

“Says you!” Violet shouts immediately, a snarl to her lips. (He knew that would work. He still hears her sometimes when she isn’t speaking, her memory bright and vivid enough to linger. “You killed me in these pajamas!” ) “Says you! The man who killed me in my sleep, you’re going to complain about some pinching - ”

Over her voice, he does not hear the knock at the door. 

“Yes!” Olaf shouts back, a grin so wide across his face it prickles the corners of his mouth. There’s a low thrum of rage swelling in him, rising from the heels of his feet up and up and up, building in his throat like a precious song. “The man who killed you wants a fight! What are you going to do about it? Slaughter me like you want to, Violet, I know you do, so pick up that blade and - ”

Before he feels the displacement of air, he hears the wet crack of impact. Right past his head, smacking against the wall by the door. A spray of red coats the side of his face as he turns. 

A box of wine rests smashed on the floor at his feet, bleeding out like fresh roadkill, like something he has just ground out beneath his heel. Its corners are crinkled from impact, and a large split at the bottom seam is still seeping. 

Violet hovers on the other side of the living room. He sees the moment she realizes what she has done, and all the fury drains out of her into hesitant, aching glee.

“Did you see that?” She demands, though there’s no way he could have missed it. “I… I forced it. I did that.”

Olaf doesn’t know what to say. The rage in him has gone sour, feels small and inconsequential against Violet’s rising power. The bruises at his throat ache as he swallows, rubs the back of his neck. A bitter uneasiness comes over him as he wonders how much stronger she will become. Olaf imagines Violet growing more and more corporeal over time - dense like a cloud of fumes, just as volatile and nauseating. Gaining sensation and memory. Finding her humanity exactly as she left it, waiting to welcome her home.

They stand on opposite ends of the apartment, staring in silence at the box of wine slowly staining the carpet. 

The knocking comes again, measured and polite. From that alone, it is no one he knows. 

“Shut up,” Olaf hisses, though she hadn’t been talking. He crosses the room quickly, peers through the grimy peephole.

Outside, his landlord stands in the yellowed hall light, hip cocked, a slip of paper clutched in her hand. Undoubtedly, she wishes to discuss his rent. Olaf cannot remember the last time he bothered to pay. Each day he would open his door and step onto a new notice, which he would kick away and promptly forget. He glances to the pile of notices on the floor, slowly staining red.  

An idea comes to him. A chance for small, petty revenge.

Olaf dives for a shirt on the couch, wipes the side of his face, and slips it on quickly. It is dark and long-sleeved, perfect for hiding the stain of wine on his skin and his collection of bruises. 

“Don’t get jealous, Violet.” He says, dumping an armful of newspapers and magazines atop the mess. The knocking comes again and before she can answer, Olaf swings open the door with a flourish, purring, “Good afternoon.”

“Oh! Count Olaf,” gasps the woman. She pats the rings of curls at her shoulders, flustered. “I was beginning to think you were out, but then I heard you shouting. The man who killed you wants a fight . Were you… rehearsing?”

“Yes. A brand new role.” Olaf lies instantly. His landlord is younger than him, though not by much. She stands tall and skinny as a piece of butcher’s twine and her skin is pink with recent sunburn, bringing color to a plain, forgettable face. She is attractive in an easy way. Like a blank slate, an empty canvas. Boring, yet rich with possibility. Her position as his landlord turns her to a glittering, tempting resource. He does not recall her name. “Would you like to come inside?”

As soon as she steps into the apartment (nose scrunched in distaste, a frown on her lips, gaze skittering across the mounds of trash - ) Violet is shouting warnings.

“Get out, get out!” she cries, swooping across the room. “He’s a horrible man! An arsonist! A villain!”

Though they wait, no shock registers on the woman’s face. Violet tries again, drawing closer, shouting, “Hey! Hello!”

The woman’s eyes pass through Violet and around the apartment. Completely oblivious to the ghost of a murdered girl hovering at arm’s reach, mouth full of warnings.

It’s a strange realization. One that arrives with more questions than it answers. They gather like shadows in the back of Olaf’s mind. What does it mean that she cannot hear you, cannot see you? Why me? Why you? Are you real at all, Violet Baudelaire?

It seems to hit Violet at the same time. She hovers before the woman mute and useless, one hand outstretched like she might try to touch her. She floats for a moment, suspended in shock. Then her eyes find Olaf’s, already staring. The momentary terror he sees on her face is enough to send a delicious curl of arousal through his body. (Up and up and up, just like the rage.)

“Olaf, you - ” Violet starts, voice high with fear like a child. Her mouth snaps shut with an ashamed turn of her head, a fierce rigidity to her jaw. She lowers her hand. Looks towards the open window. 

You can still see me, right? She does not say it. He will force her later, if only to hear that needling dependency. His mind fractures into options, then. He could ignore her for days, face stone-cold and distant. Grumble about her absence as he undresses for the night or piles more trash onto the wine stain, dried the color of blood and berries. 

Cruelty, that long-gone crutch, hits him like a shot of alcohol. Straightens his spine, brings a triumphant grin to his face.

“As you can see, I’ve taken absolute care of the place,” Olaf says, turning his back to Violet and leading his landlord (anxious, uncomfortable, the yellow form crumpled in her hands - ) towards his bedroom. 

“Yes, well,” the woman blusters. She picks nervously at a spot of peeling skin on her arm and Olaf is so charged with his coming victory that he does not even grimace. “I wasn’t dropping by today for an inspection. Actually, I have this form here I need you to sign about your rent. It’s very late, you know, and if - ”

“I’m sure we can settle this like adults ,” Olaf drawls, holding his bedroom door ajar like an offering.

His landlord freezes, eyes wide with shock. Anxious laughter rises in her throat like a stuttering tic.

“No!” Violet shouts, floating above the doorway like a curse. Her eyes are venomous, wired. “What are you doing ? She doesn’t - ”

“I don’t really think - ” the landlord begins, but Olaf cuts her off, tightens his grip on her shoulder.

“Nonsense,” He says, “Now let’s get you - ”

“Olaf,” huffs the woman, a firm hand pushing against his chest. 

“No!” Violet shouts, charging. “No!”

Olaf sees her reach out, arm pearly-white and translucent even in her pinstripe pajamas. Sees the moment they touch, Violet’s hand on the woman’s shoulder. Sees the moment they both pause, eyes wide and confused. Sees Violet disappear like a blink, like a roll of film run to its stuttering, instant end. 

She disappears without noise, without comment. A shadow of a girl gone by the time he could pull in a new breath. 

His landlord stumbles a few steps, head in her hands. Olaf glances her over, no ready comforts in his mouth. He thinks only of how he might get her to leave without mentioning his rent, or how he might coax her into staying and forgetting it then, too. 

He stares at the woman as she breathes heavily, head bowed. Olaf steps away, thinking she might vomit. And, if she does, how he might stick her with a bill for having his entire apartment cleaned. 

He is considering this, almost hoping for it, when his landlord suddenly straightens. Her hands roam her body in a striking, familiar ritual. Grabbing at her clothes as if she had never seen them. Fists gripping at her stomach.

His landlord tilts her chin, looks him in the eye. Although they have met only a handful of times, her expression is utterly inconsistent. Even in obvious despair, the muscles of her face have settled differently, her body held with such unfamiliarity, she seems completely alien to herself. 

Even to Olaf, there is no mistaking that despair. He has seen it every day for the last handful of months. Even in sleep, Violet Baudelaire haunts his nightmares. Realization and dread make his stomach drop. 

“Violet,” he says, stepping closer. Her hands are on her face now, brushing over her cheeks, her nose, her forehead. Foreign landscape. Although she does not speak, she nods and keeps nodding. Her expression is a strange mixture of horror and elation. 

Olaf acts on instinct, reaching out. Much like Violet must have done. Compelled. Curious. Even as he grasps her hand, he half expects it to pass straight through. Instead, it is warm and solid in his. 

Violet gasps at the contact, loud, nearly theatrical. Olaf braces for the coming shout, for the harsh break of contact, yet it does not come. Instead, she grasps his hand with both of hers and brings it to her cheek.

“It’s been - ” she says through a heave of relief. Although the voice is not hers, the diction is Violet. The cadence to the words, the weight of them familiar as change in his pockets. The corners of her mouth flicker with a frown. Her eyes flutter as if suppressing tears. “ Months . Since I’ve felt anything at all. Any touch. You’re - I’m… real. I’m real.”

Olaf is so stunned, he hardly knows what to say. Touch-starved as he is, he represses the swell of harsh comments ready behind his teeth ( “Last time I said I’d touch you, you wanted me dead. Now look at you, nearly crying for it.” ). 

He wants to keep touching her, this puppeteer. This not-quite-Violet-Baudelaire. He spreads his hand out flat against her cheek. Close enough to feel his clammy palms, his callouses. His fingertips brush the soft hair at her temples. Violet shivers, hands vice-like at his wrist. Her eyes on his face are the only foreign part of her. Never before has she looked at him like this, with such aching, human gratitude. 

He wonders if he could have made her see him like this before. If he had slipped into her bed, easy as a dream, while her mind spun with fever. 

“You’re very real,” Olaf says, soft and calm. As if he had expected this. As if he has absolute control. His other hand rises to her neck, thumb on the racing pulsepoint. Olaf leans forward until their hips touch, until they’re balanced against one another. “Do you want me to keep touching you, Violet?”

Normally, he wouldn’t ask. Would take anything that was not a no as a yes . This time, he wants to hear Violet beg. Wants to hear his name on her false tongue. Pleading for his hands on her stolen body. 

Although her grip on him is still strong, the smile leaves her face. Realization replaces the gratitude. She jerks away from him quickly, stumbling, unaccustomed to the nuances of her alien body.

A wide, sudden grin splits her face. She pats her pockets frantically, feeling for car keys, for a slip of cash in her back pocket. Gleeful, near manic laughter rises from her lips.

“I can - ” Violet sputters, “I’ve got to - My family - ”

“No,” Olaf growls, catching on with sick, instant clarity. His body fills with jagged rage, bracing for a fight. No matter her newfound form, he can overpower her. Can hold her down. Even imagining her with her arms behind her back, plain face pressed into the wine stain, makes his hands feel empty. He wants to make her cry, if only to see the tears. “No.”

Like a last resort, Violet’s eyes go past him to the switchblade on the floor. They both sense the unspoken threat. The potential for blood, whoever gets it first. 

Although he knows he doesn’t need it to hurt her, Olaf lurches towards the weapon first. It’s the possession that ruins him (his blade, his , seeing it in her hands would be a humiliation deeper than he could say - ). 

Violet bolts. 

Even before the weapon is gathered from the floor, he knows he is too late. 

She yanks open the door with wild, careless force. Does not look back. 

“Violet,” he spits through gritted teeth, scrambling to his feet, hardly hearing himself. “I’ll find you. I swear I’ll find you and your wretched family. I will kill you twice - ”

She passes through the doorway and promptly collapses into the hall.

The body of his landlord hits the far wall and slides heavily to the floor. 

As translucent and blue as the first time he saw her, Violet floats before the open door. She wears the same pinstripe pajamas. Her eyes are dark and wounded as ever beneath her bangs. Her expression is still with shock for a single moment.

“No!” she shrieks, throwing herself against the doorway. As if obstructed by an invisible force, she does not pass through. “No, no! I’ve got to - I - ”

Outside, his landlord is coming to. Groaning softly, she rises to her feet, rubbing at her forehead. 

Olaf hurries to the door, passing a furious, shrieking Violet. 

“Thank you for coming by to discuss this,” he says to his landlord with his most polite, theatrical lilt. 

She gazes at him in bleak confusion, shaking her head. “Count Olaf. Um. What were we discussing?”

“My rent, of course.” Olaf says. Meanwhile, Violet beats at the space at his back like an animal, like devastation half-embodied. “You came by to apologize for misplacing it for the last several months. But don’t worry, I know these things happen. I’m sure you’ll find my checks exactly where you left them.”

“Oh,” says his landlord, frowning. “Of course. Thank you. I’ll get right on that.”

He shuts the door to her uncertain frowning. When he turns, he finds Violet at the window again, curled foetal, and weeping (regrettably tearless - ) into her knees. He sees the bow of her spine through her pajamas. The deep curves in the soles of her bare feet, tucked close. The way the sunlight passes through her unhindered like a shard of stained glass.

The switchblade still rests ready in his hand. With a sneer, Olaf folds it, tucks it into his pocket. 

He glances at the pile of trash where the wine stain dries to Violet’s trembling back, rubbing the aching bruises at his throat. With a lurch of disgust in his gut, he realizes that he will have to sleep with his blade beneath his pillow, if only to keep Violet from summoning the strength to spear it through his neck.

Furious and ashamed of himself, Olaf returns to his stain of a bedroom, meanwhile his own voice haunts him like a second spectre. Do you want me to keep touching you, Violet? 

He would have. For as long as she allowed. 

He makes himself sick.

Chapter Text

*

Three days pass.

Olaf busies himself with familiar rituals. In the daytime, he walks a well-worn route throughout the city, nicking mail off the stoops of enormous, grandiose homes, hoping for cash. (He always finds at least one birthday card beneath a bright envelope, some thick cardstock covered in glitter and scrawling, happy handwriting. He grabs the cash, crumples the well-wishes in his fist, and drops the useless remains to the streets. Always, his hands come away glimmering.)

Around sunset, he stops by his favorite liquor store, buying as much wine as he can with his findings, bottles of red gathered in his arms like bouquets of roses. 

He shaves his face at night, flicking soap off his straight razor and up the mirror as he gestures, lost in far-off fantasies. Mumbles to himself as he drags his blade carefully up and over the ridge of his jaw, “Oh, me? Voted Most Talented and Handsome for yet another year? Well, well. You absolutely should have.”

Olaf sleeps past noon. Pens pointless, uninspired scripts. Drinks until he cannot speak.

Violet sinks to catatonia.

She has taken to floating upside down in his kitchen, translucent as a cobweb. Legs crossed like a child, shirt tucked into her waistband so it does not droop. Her hair hangs long and black towards the floor like a drip of smeared ink. Her eyes, unblinking, stare outside and towards the glinting city skyline and its traffic far below. She does not speak, does not inflict her gaze (dark and lonely as a tomb) his way. 

They do not interact, existing within the oblivion of their own company. Three days pass this way, and things are almost comfortable.

Until the letter comes. 

Olaf stumbles into his apartment tipsy, cradling several bottles of wine close to his chest the way others might hold a newborn. In his haste to leave, he had forgotten to turn down his record player, though his trip was short enough that it still drones throughout the place, high-pitched and wailing.

He steps inside to a crash of orchestral noise, scanning the room for reliable constants.

The yellowed bulb still ticks at the center of the room and the air smells stale as ever - festering trash and rot in the walls. Violet floats in the kitchen like a thought in the mind, hair hanging long and tempting enough to make his hands itch.

(He knows that his touch will run her through, that he is no closer to feeling her than he is to understanding her appearance in the first place. Watching Violet turn her head to follow cars outside, hair swaying as if caught in a current, almost makes him forget this. Perhaps she would look at him if he tried. Or speak. She became real once before, he thinks. Almost. Not quite.)

It is only once he turns to twist the lock that he hears the crackle of paper, feeling it stick slightly against the urban grime at his heel. A small envelope has been slipped beneath his door, though not from his landlord. It is rosy, the color of a young girl, vicious pink. For a moment, he thinks it might be a birthday card he had stolen then misplaced in his stupor, but the moment passes as he reconsiders his day and who might be slipping him notes.

The answer comes to him instantly, though he does not feel any better for it.

In other circumstances, he would not expect danger. 

Any letter from her might as well be a demand - for luxuries, for attention, for a simple acknowledgement of existence. ( You’re alive and seen , Olaf used to think anytime she would throw a fit or bare her teeth like a rabid little animal. So desperate for eyes on her. Transparent begging for attention of any kind at all. Too alive and far too seen. ) 

Although Carmelita was vicious, her presence never accompanied a real threat. Yet, even as he scrapes the letter from the underside of his shoe, Olaf can feel the insistence to it. There is a reason to her writing him, and no doubt it is no good.

Olaf dumps his armful of wine onto the couch and tucks his thumb beneath the sticky flap, tearing it inelegantly. Inside, there is a single note written on parchment in thick, square-tipped permanent marker. There’s a chemical waft to the ink that he can smell even over the garbage, yet it is not so freshly penned to smear under his fingers. 

BB IS AFTER YOU, it reads. The handwriting unfamiliar yet unmistakable. WATCH YOUR BACK.

His mind disregards the initial reaction. Spasm of gut-deep fear, instantly suppressed. 

Despite everything - Carmelita’s spit and snarl and attitude - he does not doubt her. 

(Father? He hears Violet calling into the stark void of his apartment, her throat brittle with afterlife. Father?)

For months he has had nightmares of Bertrand Baudelaire hunting him down, coming closer, trailing him the way smoke tracks a breeze. Now, it is as terrifying a reality as his daughter floating phantomwise across the room. 

He wonders how long he has until Bertrand shows up at his door, all smiles and brutal confidence, so sure in his coming justice he cannot stifle his joy. 

Olaf tucks the card back into the little pink envelope, now sporting a print from the filthy sole of his shoe. On his way to the kitchen, he grabs a bottle of wine, pops the cork, and drinks as much as he can manage in one go. 

“Did anyone come in while I was gone?” He calls into the dark blot of the kitchen. All around Violet are stacks of garbage and mail. Piles of papers litter the countertops like fallen foliage, his long-abandoned plots and schemes faded by encroaching grime.

There’s a yellow notepad on the floor, the blue lines warped with rain, the ink runny. He had written only one word at the top, scrawling, rabid: SCRIPT. He had left the window open one morning on his way out into the world. Partly to clear the air, which had grown so foul he could barely stand it, but mostly to taunt Violet. He opened the window as high as it could go. Left her hovering just in front of it. An invitation she was unable to take. She had said nothing, had barely moved, only a soft flick to her eyelashes as he left. 

Rain had come. 

Rain had run the ink from his pages and bled out the newspapers on the floor. When he returned home, Violet was hovering where he’d left her, rain blustering in through the vapor of her body, gusting in rapid streams through the kitchen and over the laminate, soaking through the carpet of his hall and into the front room. 

Since then, he keeps the window closed. 

Olaf enters the kitchen, swigs a mouthful of wine but does not swallow. Even when he steps in front of her, nose to nose, eye to eye, Violet is not broken from catatonia. He gives her a moment. Her eyes do not find his, do not hold any spark of awareness.

He spits out his mouthful of wine. Sprays it loud and powerful right into her face.

Though it passes through her easy as the rain had, the disrespect stirs her.

“Hey,” Violet whines softly, wincing. 

“Hey,” Olaf mocks her, low and stark. Wine drips from his mouth like blood from a bitten tongue but he cannot find the care to smear it away. “Did anyone let themselves in while I was out?”

“What?” She asks, frowning, eyes on his neck, finally absent of bruises. “No. No one.” 

“You didn’t hear anything? No knocking? No shrill brat outside shouting demands?”

“No,” comes her voice, soft as snow. Gaze still avoiding his face, and this makes him irrationally angry. He wants to yank her hair. He wants her to watch him open the window, rising slow as a guillotine’s blade.

She tips slowly, gradually turning until she is right side up, still sitting with her legs crossed and tucked close, her hands in her lap. She nods to the envelope. “What’s that?”

“None of your business,” he snaps, ignoring the lurch of dread in his gut. Unappeased, he demands once more, “No one. You’re sure?”

“I’m sure.”

Olaf hums. “Pardon me if I don’t take the word of a ghost who’s barely moved for three days. I doubt you’d notice if I lit this place on fire.”

Only once he says it does he notice the inherent cruelty in his words. Although he doesn’t regret them, he is still surprised. Destruction, fire, smoke - they are never far from him, seem to fog his mind as if all that ash had settled into his body and never cleared. He aches for it more than he realizes. A conscious desire subconsciously wild.

To his further surprise, Violet scoffs, a harsh scrape of sound. Cynical. “Oh, I’d notice that.”

 Olaf drains the rest of the bottle and drops it empty to the floor. It hits the linoleum with a heavy clatter and a deep roll as it slumps towards a pile of trash. Watching it feels personal, autobiographical. 

He’s getting maudlin again. Emotional. Terrified. 

Still, he keeps drinking. 

“Yes,” Olaf murmurs, popping the cork on his second red. “Your track record proves that, doesn’t it?”

The silence in the room is suddenly needling. His record has stopped. He turns to find Violet watching him, though she does not look as furious as he would expect.

“Were you expecting someone?” She asks very carefully. “Your landlord?”

He doesn’t hesitate before telling her the truth, and only after he speaks does this feel like an oddity. “No.”

“Okay,” Violet says uselessly. “Have you heard from her? Does she remember… what I did?”

Olaf watches her, wringing her hands in the loose cloth of her pajamas, her eyes on only him. There’s a need in her to keep talking, to hear her own voice in the wake of her possession then catatonia. He indulges her with an answer, if only to keep his own terror at bay.

“You’re asking this now ?” He demands, a sour, exasperated expression on his face. He realizes he’s a little bitter for her previous silence. Snubbed. As if she had been ignoring him. Olaf wants to be everything to Violet. Wants her to perk up when he enters a room and hang on his every word. Wants her to ask him to touch her, even if she cannot feel it and he’s left with only smoke in his hands. He gets lost on this spiral of thought, (Violet light as vapor, dark as char, smoke curling through his fingers as he brushes them over her cheek and the ends of her hair) and realizes Violet is still watching him, waiting for clarity. His drink is dizzying him. “It’s been three days and you’re asking this now?”

“Three days?” She asks, a hint of that previous scoff in her voice, as if she hopes he is tricking her. 

“Yes. I said that already. Listen up, little sprite. You’ve been staring slack-jawed out that window for three whole days. How is that surprising?”

Violet hums softly, vaguely. Olaf drapes himself across the couch, wine bottles clinking harshly beneath his weight. 

“I thought it had only been a few hours...”

“Wrong!” Olaf sneers, nasty and comical. He takes another long sip, his lips vague and numb. “You’re like a little pet watching the cars go by. Waiting for me to come home.”

“Hardly,” Violet says, closer now. “You never leave for long.” 

Then, shortly after, her doubt creeps in. “Do you?”

He hums noncommittally. Pestering and taunting her makes him feel better, seems to give the coming doom some distance. He lets her sit in that silence for awhile, sipping at his wine before he intentionally changes the subject. “Well, now that you’ve found your tongue, why not entertain me? Tell me something, Violet.”

She floats cautiously closer, hovering just above the armrest near his feet. “Like what?”

He watches her for a few seconds, considering what she might be able to tell him. “Tell me about your family.”

“My family?” Shock and suspicion make her squint. “Why?”

“Feel free to return to silence,” he offers with a shrug and a wave of his hand towards the kitchen. “I did enjoy the momentary peace.”

She debates this, watches him warily. If he were to guess at the machinations of her mind, he might suppose she would consider their circumstances. It has been days since she heard her own voice for any significant stretch of time. Her body, as always, feels vague and unmoored (except for that instance, bright and quick as lightning, where she was alive again.) She has no one else to speak to. No one else to acknowledge her half-existence. It might as well be him. “I was the eldest child in my family. I had two younger siblings, Klaus and Sunny. They were - ”

He stops listening at this point. Hears only the drone of her voice, steady and calm. He does not particularly want to hear about Beatrice and Bertrand and the happy life they made together, complete with a mansion and children and more money than they could spend. 

“Violet,” he says suddenly, voice softer than he wants. Olaf is not sure where he interrupts her or what she had been babbling about, only that the soothing wave of her voice stops, and that he loves the intimate feeling of her name in his mouth. “What was it like? Possessing her?”

Then, when she does not immediately answer, “How did you do it? Did you only have to touch her? Could you control it?”

“I didn’t mean to do it,” Violet answers eventually. When Olaf glances her way, he sees that she has settled as if sitting on the back of the sofa, her little socked feet mere inches from his. “I just knew I wanted to pull her away from you. To stop it. I didn’t feel touching her. There was no… sensation. One second I was reaching for her and the next second I was her.”

“But darling,” Olaf slurs, intentionally saccharine. “You touch me all the time. You never possess me then.”

When he glances up, her dark eyes are on his neck, searching for the faded bruises of her strangulation attempts. His clothes hide the welts still lingering in his soft spots yet he feels her gaze crawl over him anyway. 

“You’re right,” Violet murmurs. “I’m not sure what that means.”

Their conversation lulls as they both process that. Olaf waits, half expecting Violet to spit something nasty at him to make up for her gentleness, “Maybe I just can’t stand the idea of crawling inside your wreck of a body.”

He waits and waits and it does not come.

Instead, she says, “You said you’d kill me twice.”

“Yes.” 

“Do you want to kill me?”

The question summons a confusing churn of emotions. Unwilling to examine them, Olaf deflects. “Do you want to kill me ?”

“Sometimes. But then I’m afraid I might be all alone here and the next tenants wouldn’t be able to see me.” Violet’s feet have crept closer. Her toes are tucked and disappearing into his heel and he can’t feel a thing. 

“You keep me around for the company,” Olaf snorts. If he were in a different mood, a different kind of drunk, he might have giggled. 

“Isn't that why you like having me around?” She has slipped onto the arm of the couch and tucked her knees close, wrapping her arms around them. It’s the same position he had first seen her take, floating spectral and blue in the midday sun. 

Olaf resists the urge to hiss like a scared, caught little boy - I do not like you! “Eye candy is always welcome, Violet. That’s why I invited my landlord in, after all. Are you really so ignorant when it comes to men?”

“That’s not why you invited her in,” Violet counters, though there’s no spark to it. “You didn’t want to sleep with her because you liked her, you wanted to sleep with her to get out of paying your rent.”

“Such a clever little ghost,” he coos through a wicked grin. “But I’m sorry to say, your fears may not be settled. I don’t pay my rent and I don’t plan to. It’s only a matter of time before they kick me out and you’re left here all alone. Or I may decide a change of scenery is in order. Go someplace else. Hatch a new scheme. Write a play to make me filthy rich.”

“You want to skip town?” Violet asks and he frowns immediately, wondering at his tells. Her face rests on her folded arms. Curled in on herself, she looks young and small and frightened.

“Maybe someday,” he replies breezily, ending it with a long gulp of wine, yet Violet is not fooled.

“What’s in that letter?” Her voice is calm. It is clear she expects the momentary candor between them to carry, but Olaf refuses to allow it.

“I told you. None of your business.” His reply is just as muted. A plan forms in his mind, annoyance replaced. He has something Violet wants and no way is he going to let that be wasted.

“Let’s make a deal, little sprite. I will ask about your experience with possession. You will tell me only the absolute truth. And if I feel your answers are honest then I will let you see that slip of pretty pink paper you want so badly. How’s that, darling?” Olaf rises, head spinning, until he’s in a sitting position, lower back braced against the other arm of the couch.

“But you already asked me about it,” Violet says, obviously confused and searching for the trick.

“Then you have nothing to lose. Deal?”

After several moments of consideration, Violet finally says, “Deal.”

 “What did it feel like possessing her? To be back in a body again?”

“Overwhelming,” she finally settles on. “Right now I can’t feel anything. Not the couch or the rain or the breeze. Your apartment smells foul and I didn’t realize that at all until I was her. So many sensations hit me all at once. It was difficult. In retrospect, I can hardly believe I’d gone on feeling so much day to day when I was alive.” She’s quiet for a moment, cheek still resting on her bent knees facing him, though her eyes are to the floor. “It was like I could feel every hair on my head. Every breath. Even the weight of my clothes felt so strange… And then there was you.”

“What did it feel like when I touched you?” He asks, voice gone soft and low.

Violet’s gaze has returned to his face. He wonders if she is expecting cruelty.

“It felt like relief. I wanted to just… melt. I felt so alive and so human.”

“Did you feel like a woman?” Olaf asks, holding her eyes. “Would you let me touch you again?”

“Show me the letter,” Violet demands.

Olaf tugs it from where he had wedged it against his hip and the couch. He holds it up so she can see. Tilts it towards her the way one might bait a dog. “Answer me.”

When nothing comes, he demands, voice stern with frustration, “Next visitor, Violet. Next delivery person or landlord or peddler comes calling - will you let me touch you? ”

Violet lunges.

Olaf does not even flinch.

Her fingers flash through his, useless, meek with death.

Violet groans with frustration as she tumbles into his lap, then darts to her feet to float above him, staring him down.

“Tricky, tricky, Violet,” Olaf teases through a clenched jaw. “At least you gave it a shot, huh? You poor thing.”

“You weren’t actually going to show it to me,” she spits, and her voice is full of venom, though there is a humiliated hunch to her shoulders that gives her away.

“Oh, but I was!” Olaf grins, the genuine laughter spasming in his chest feeling wholly unfamiliar. “Anything to keep my little ghost wanting me. She wants to see my mail? Have at it. But you went and ruined that, didn’t you?”

She is quiet so long he starts to doze. 

Through the haze of coming sleep, she speaks so softly he barely hears her. “Do you want to kill me?”

Do you want to kiss me? He hears, but knows better. 

“Yes,” he says to both. “Yes.”

Night comes. 

Olaf falls asleep on the couch, dreaming of Violet’s voice through a black void.

Chapter Text

It takes a week before there comes a knock at his door.

Olaf is sitting on the kitchen floor by what has become Violet’s window, a large, stained notepad in his lap and half a cold pizza on the linoleum by his side. A red pen jerks between clenched teeth as he writes with a black marker half dry. Lately, his drafts  have been wild, fanciful, venomous plays, full of revenge and fairytale scenery. Olaf hates himself through his compulsions, and pens a little speck of a ghost girl into each one.

Sometimes Violet hovers over his shoulder, her eyes scanning his work. She’ll offer feedback, never accurate. Whine about his grammar and punctuation as if it matters. 

“Is that supposed to be me?” She asks one evening when the red glow of the city gleams like frost against the windowpane. “The sprite? Have I… inspired you?”

“Cursed is more like it,” he had spat, and tossed his notepad to the floor. 

During that week there came no visitors.

No landlords or postmen or delivery to knock at the door. 

Olaf had considered claiming his apartment needed inspection for his landlord to come visit, but hadn’t wanted to risk some burly maintenance man arriving to darken his door instead (and, even then, tempting him into having Violet.)

He had no money for delivery and no desire to charm one of his neighbors. Each option he considered felt vaguely wrong. Acceptable, but not quite good enough.

Olaf figured he would either find the perfect opportunity or his patience would run thin enough that he would -  eventually - take whatever he could get. 

The knock comes while he and Violet are bickering about set designs.

“ No ,” Violet whines, frustrated and amused all at once. “ No . I’m telling you, Olaf. If you want to be so ambitious as to have a permanently hovering ghost, you’re going to need rigs and counterweights all over the place. I bet it’s usually very expensive, but I could - "

“And I’m telling you , Violet, that I’m not taking inventing advice from a dead girl who regularly attempts to murder me in my sleep!”

Violet scoffs. “You wouldn’t be playing the ghost girl, would you? Why would I try to kill the actress if you’re my target?”

“You could drop her on me from the top of the catwalk,” Olaf says, just serious enough to make Violet laugh. “It would be so dark I’d never see her coming. You’d bust my head in, right in front of everyone.”

“Oh, that poor girl,” Violet sputters. “She wouldn’t deserve to be sacrificed like that.”

“I’ll sacrifice you , you little pest. ”

Loud and demanding, a fist pounds at the door.

They both freeze. The pen drops from Olaf’s mouth.

He does not even look to Violet before darting across the room. Dust covers the peephole and is quickly smeared away under his thumb. Olaf presses his face to the door and is so instantly, deeply excited by what he sees, he clutches at his chest and turns away, unable to quell his grin. 

“I don’t like that look on your face,” Violet says, having joined him in the front room. “Who is it?”

He does not answer. Instead, he swings the door open wide and gestures into his home.

“ Welcome ,” Olaf purrs, bowing like a gentleman. “Miss Spats.”

With a grimace of disgust, Carmelita steps inside, dressed pink as her parcel. Her eyes are covered by obnoxious, glittering sunglasses that shimmer as she takes in his apartment. She wears a tight dress, baby pink, with the words PURE (EVIL) stitched in thorny text across the chest. Beneath that, her long legs are covered in black stockings and flat red sneakers trimmed with white hearts. Her hair is red as ever, though longer with age, coiling and curled to her shoulders, no longer the juvenile springs they once were.

A bright blue bubble appears between her lips and pops just as quickly. “Gee, Countie. You really live in this dump, huh? What a wreck.”

She flops down onto his couch with a flourish. From a hidden pocket spills a bright collection of candies, a pocket knife, and credit cards that cannot be hers. She does not bend to pick them up and instead grabs an unopened bottle of bubbly white wine from the floor.

“Can I have this?” She yanks the sunglasses off her face and flutters her lashes at him with a smirk. “As repayment for my generous warning.”

Olaf stands stunned by the door, bracing his back against it, mind spinning with plans. Violet has backtracked to float beside her wine stain at the wall, watching Carmelita with an alien sort of fascination and worry.

“Countie?” Violet demands, and Olaf knows she will never let it go.

“Take whatever you like, doll,” he drolls, knowing she is only asking to seem polite. “Take three. Is that the only reason for your visit? To ransom my wine?”

To his surprise, Carmelita crosses her legs on his couch, the hem of her dress dipping just low enough that he cannot see her panties. She winks and shakes her head devilishly as she takes the cork into her mouth and yanks it off in one go.

“Can’t a girl drop by to visit her dear old Daddy?” Carmelita coos, though there’s bitterness to it.

Olaf snorts. For Violet’s sake, he snips, “I’m no Daddy of yours and you know it, kid."

“Oh, but that’s not how it feels,” Carmelita says after a long swig of wine. Her eyes glimmer with lascivious mischief when she smirks. “After all, I still remember how to spit just like you taught me.”

“Oh my god,” Violet deadpans, apparently unable to stop herself. “Oh my god. How old is she? Tell me you didn’t - ”

Olaf ignores her, supremely delighted by the sick, perverted spin her mind has taken. He gestures around the room, then to Carmelita. “Well, go on. Give it a go, then, for old time’s sake.”

“Anything for you!” With a truly wretched noise, Carmelita hawks her gum across the room, where it lands with a bounce at Violet’s feet. Violet wrinkles her nose in disgust and evident confusion, her eyes on the gleaming wad of gum.

“Such a charmer, as always, Carmelita.”

She grins at his praise, the bratty scowl falling away. A moment of silence passes between them. With the greetings and pleasantries and reminiscing over with, Carmelita relaxes, eyeing him seriously, getting to the point of her visit.

Money , Olaf guesses, wondering what she actually wants from him. A disguise. A proxy. A bodyguard. A - 

“I need something from you,” she says, very factually. “A hide-away.”

He tries, successfully, to keep the surprise from his face.

“Are you sure that’s what you want considering the warning you left me?” Already, the opportunity she unknowingly gives him has planted itself in his mind, taken root, and a possessive ferocity makes him want to search for loopholes, for reasons why it might be stolen from his grasp like every other good thing before it. There was no way the solution to Violet’s incorporality was so simple, so readily given. “Don’t want to be around for that, do you?”

Carmelita snorts, the sound far more cynical and amused than he would have expected. “Anyone who finds me in your place alone would presume the very worst. An innocent like me?” She pitches her voice high and pleading. “Oh, no , mister. My Daddy here is a real nice man. He took me away from my meanie parents and taught me all kindsa stuff like how to set fires and torture sad little orphans. He’s a brute but he loves meeee .”

“No one would buy that. You reek of deception. One look into those eyes and you’d get the same fate as me.” With a regrettably amused smirk, Olaf sits beside her on the couch, noticing how Carmelita turns to face him, her feet on the couch extended to his side. 

Before them, Violet wavers. Indecision is written on her face, and Olaf can guess very easily what she might be thinking - offer him privacy with the tiny, feminine, young Carmelita, or stay to make sure she is safe?

He looks away from her stricken face and focuses on his guest - all intense eyes and freckles and long, lean legs.

Carmelita scoffs. “You’d be surprised. But no, I’m not worried about that. I need a place to hide out every so often. In exchange, I’ll keep it up with the warnings. Esme still thinks I’m her little shadow so she hardly pays any attention to what she says around me. And you know how much she loves secrets.”

Even with nothing to gain, he would agree anyway. Instantly. Even without her promise of information that might save his skin. Just the thought of Carmelita showing up at odd times of the day and how he might be able to wear Violet down is enough to make him bend over backwards in order to keep their new arrangement alive.

Olaf pretends to think it over, leaning slowly closer until he can pry the bottle from Carmelita’s hands and take a swig for himself, never breaking eye contact. “I suppose I could be so gracious as to open my home to a sad little girl in need of a safe place to stay.”

Carmelita grins at him, looking pleased but unsurprised. It is very clear that she had never considered him refusing her. “Sweet Countie. You really are a real nice man .”

He returns the bottle before she can reach for it. “Though, you’ve got me wondering. What could you be doing out in that big, loud world that needs a hideaway like this?”

She flips her hair, a private, stalwart secrecy dimming the spark of satisfaction in her eyes. “Can’t tell ya. Sorry, Countie. Some other time.”

Here, now, is his very first opportunity. One little conflict. One little speck of information withheld from him, in his very own home, right on the heels of their agreement. Olaf feels the unrighteous viciousness well up inside him as he stands and turns to face her. Violet twitches in the corner of his vision, nervous, protective.

“But, Carmelita…” He holds out a hand to her and she takes it, standing. “Do you really think the vague promise of Esme’s secrets will be enough to please me? To keep me satisfied as you come and go whenever you please? Silly girl…”

In the end, he barely has to move at all. 

Barely has to smirk, to trail his fingers up her forearm, slow with false innocence. 

Carmelita watches him with that ever-bothered glare. Unafraid. Naive. And so very small.

A single step towards her is all it takes. Violet does not even speak.

She zips towards Carmelita with the speed and grace of a hero - throwing herself before the shotgun that is his body, the bullet that is his reaching hand - a champion, a martyr, a saint. Saint Phantom, Violet Baudelaire. 

This time, there are no dramatics. No clutching at clothes or throat or flesh. There is simply a moment where they both reach for Carmelita - and Violet beats him to her. 

Beneath his hand, her cheek twitches.

 Her expression of calculated brattiness softens to subtle dread. Again, he watches Violet appear in Carmelita’s body. Changing it, warping it, playing puppeteer. It’s disgusting. It’s repulsive. It’s so thrilling he could drool. 

Olaf drags his fingers down her neck, imagining the trail he might leave if they were covered in ash or spit or blood. 

“Violet,” he purrs softly, grinning as she shivers. “Welcome back.”

She does not answer. Her fingers curl and clench, her eyelashes flutter, and her breath shudders like one of his skipping records. He lets his hand skim her chin, watching her bottom lip wobble and loving how this image goes straight to his cock. 

“How does it feel? Are you - ” His free hand glides up her back to settle in the dip of her waist, pulling her closer. Just like last time, their hips touch and they stand balanced against one another on familiar territory. “Overwhelmed?”

“Didn’t - ” Violet chokes, warping Carmelita’s voice into a tremorous worry he has never heard. “Didn’t want to watch you hurt her. Couldn’t stand it."

“Oh, how noble. You’ll take the place of this little girl, will you? This stranger you know nothing about? How virtuous. How saintly. With a heart like that, it’s a wonder you didn’t go straight to heaven.”

He pets her hair and watches as tears fill her eyes, though he recognizes them instantly. It’s not fear that overwhelms her, no matter how much she might wish it. With striking clarity, Olaf recalls Violet’s admission to him, “I just wanted to melt. I felt so human and so alive.” He recalls the way she had gazed up at him with depthless, humbling gratitude. Her tears, however misleading, were similar, aching relief.

Olaf pitches his voice low and soft. “For your peace of mind, Violet, I would never have hurt my dear Carmelita. She’d hardly let that happen. Vicious little thing, she is. Ruthless. I’d have lost a hand… No. But I would have touched her. Like this. And like this…”

He takes one of Violet’s hands in his and cradles it in the air. With a twist of his hips, they’re spinning, slow dancing to silence. Violet stumbles in his arms, unused to the way Carmelita’s body moves. She makes a fist in the holey fabric of his shirt, pressing her face to his chest. Olaf tucks his feet beneath hers until she’s standing on his, light as air, spinning with him even as her legs shudder. 

“I’d make her cry just like you,” Olaf promises softly, recognizing the damp patch against his chest. “Oh, but you’re not crying because you’re scared, Violet. Don’t lie. Don’t pretend. You’re crying because you want it. You want me so bad you can’t stand it? Isn’t that right, Violet?”

They spin softly together for nearly a minute, allowing Violet time to adjust to a foreign body. Already overwhelmed, she sniffles against his chest, her hand shaking in his. She is so pitiful and brave, Olaf can hardly stand it. Twisted affection and want swell in his chest.

“Oh, look at you. You’re shaking. Here, grip onto me. Put your face against my neck, just like that.” He manhandles her, shifting her weight until both arms link tight around his neck and her damp face presses beneath his jaw. Her crying has slowed to metered breathing and soft sniffling. Violet sighs against him, pressing her face so close he can feel the pleased flutter of her eyelashes on his skin. “ Good . Good. Cling to me. Feel me breathe. Feel my heart pound. That’s real and you’re real and I’m going to make you feel alive all over again.”

Violet nods against him. Shakily, she breathes a soft, “Okay.”

Elation makes his heart trip so ruthlessly, he wonders if Violet can feel it. Several emotions flood him at once, all unfamiliar. Happiness, gratitude, excitement. He would have been content with this, if it was all she had wanted from him - a strong pair of arms in the face of sudden humanity. Some light touching, perhaps. Maybe a kiss if he pushed. His boasting and talk had been, mostly, to plant the idea into her head as often as possible. To present their sexual exploits as unavoidable. Olaf hadn’t expected Violet to bend so instantly. He expected to woo her slowly, steadily, to fall into bed after months of visitors, whoever they might be.

Instead, he has her willing and wanting, slumped against his chest. Her lips brushing his neck. Her little fingers fluttering at his spine.

He cannot fathom how lucky he is to be haunted by her.

 A promise forms on his lips, loving and sweet as it is evil. “I’m going to make us both wish I’d never killed you.”

Olaf reaches beneath her dress with both hands as she grips him unsteadily, her face hot and wet against his neck, her breath gasping although he’s barely touched her. He runs his palms slowly over her backside, working the curves with his fingers. Carmelita had worn a thong that morning. Strappy and thin. Olaf aches to see it, familiar heat sinking in his gut. 

“Feel that burn in your belly, Violet? That mess of nervous chaos in your gut? That’s arousal. That’s for me and it’s such a gift.”

He continues touching her, focusing on every part of her back he can reach, hoping to get her accustomed to feeling his hands on her even without touching her sweetest, most vulnerable parts. His fingertips trail up her ribcage beneath her dress, the fabric hiking into the dips of his elbows. Violet shivers against him, already breathing unsteadily.

“You’re going to let me wring every ounce of pleasure from Carmelita’s body, aren’t you? Aren’t you? Oh, sweetheart.” He coos when she gasps, unable to keep the sickly-sweet patronizing from his tone. “Oh, precious. Take a seat and let me see you.”

He backs her up against the couch and forces her to sit on her wobbly legs, wasting no time kneeling before her and slowly peeling that tight pink dress up her body, pleased beyond measure to see Violet’s weak little fingers working alongside his. From the looks of it, the thong is red as her hair and embroidered in plastic crystals. Without asking, he reaches up, hooks his thumbs beneath the straps, and begins to pull them down slowly, wanting to savor the moment. 

“Haven’t you seen already?” Violet breathes. “Before?”

“No,” Olaf answers. “Despite how she may have acted, I have never victimized Carmelita. Even when she was younger and so desperate for attention, she’d have taken whatever I’d given her no matter how sick.”

He tugs until the wad of her panties is tucked behind her knees, but he hardly notices beyond his sudden speechless wave of arousal as his eyes find her cunt. She is shaved completely smooth, and freckled even there. Between her legs rests the tiniest sliver of pink that looks soft to the touch, and already swollen with desire. It’s enough to make his mouth water. 

“Is this what your cunt looked like, Violet?” He reaches out to lazily run a finger up her inner thigh. “So rosy and pink and pretty enough to kiss?”

In the back of his mind, he has a sudden fantasy of holding a mirror between Carmelita’s legs and asking Violet to describe the exact ways their anatomy was similar and the unique, tantalizing ways they differed. He imagines touching her in a myriad of ways, asking, “Do you think your body would have loved this just as much? Be honest. You’d have loved it more, wouldn’t you?”

He wants to touch her bare skin. Wants to tease her and play with her and find the very best ways to make her melt. Yet, ever the gentleman, he rolls her panties up her legs and puts them back into place, an idea formed. He pretends he does not see the slight disappointed frown cross her face.

“Tell me you want me, Violet. Tell me that’s why you possessed poor Carmelita. You were jealous. You couldn’t let her have my attention even for a moment, could you?” Very slowly, he brushes a fingertip over her panties, right over where he’d spotted her clit, just soft enough to register.

In reward, Violet gives him an embarrassed, breathy whine through clenched teeth. 

“Now, now, pet. Use your words.”

Her fingers clench into fists in her lap like she’s debating smacking his hand away. In classic fashion, she ignores his inconvenient questioning. “Before, you said… you could make me feel like a woman.”

That makes Olaf grin as he toys with the straps at her hips, running them teasingly through his fingers. “Thought this through, have you? Is this what you’ve been thinking about when you stare out that window?” He runs his hands flat up her quivering stomach, watching goosebumps spread in rapid thrills up her body.

“ Shut up, ” Violet hisses, sounding so much like Carmelita that he almost wrenches his hands away. “Just shut up and touch me. This is what you wanted, isn’t it?”

“Whatever you say, little sprite.”

He sets to work, no longer intent on denying either of them for the sake of winding her up. Only then does he realize what Violet wants - something quick and easy, not the prolonged session he had dreamed up. It makes sense, he supposes, for Violet to test her limits in a foreign body with a short time limit, to see how well she can hang on to corporeality under stress, no matter how pleasurable. It’s not quite the seduction he wanted, but he would take whatever he was given. At least the first time.

Olaf feels a little rabid and reckless now that he finally, finally , has his hands on her. The image he had mentioned before, of Violet in her bed as her house burnt down around them, has never left him, instead inspiring him when he spends his nights flat on his filthy mattress, a hand in the front of his pants. He has wanted her for so long and desired her so intricately, that, when presented with the opportunity, he hardly knows where to start. What to initiate. His fantasies collect and spiral, almost as overwhelming as his desire.

“So many things I want to do to you, Violet. So many nasty, depraved things, I hardly know where to start.”

The rational part of him knows he should take things somewhat slowly, no matter what she says. For selfish reasons, he does not want to truly overwhelm her. Does not want to push her too far, too fast, so that she flees from Carmelita’s body. Or, worse, never lets him touch her again, no matter whose body she has stolen.

“I have an idea,” Violet says, already a little breathless. “I’ve been… thinking…”

“Go on,” Olaf encourages, running his hands up her thighs.

She glances away, embarrassed. “I’ve, um, never seen a naked man before. In the flesh.”

“That’s a perfect place to start.” Olaf drags his hands back down her legs, fingers lingering as he stands. He begins to pick at the button on his trousers, toying with the zipper, before he stops very suddenly. The rapt, electric pressure of Violet’s gaze registers nearly as a physical touch it is so intense. She opens her mouth, beginning to question him, but he interrupts.

“Ask me, Violet. Ask me so sweetly.”

A rosy blush heats her face, but this time her gaze does not wander. Her wide eyes dart from his hands to his face, and already she looks nearly uncomfortable with arousal. “Olaf, would you undress for me, please?”

“Anything for my little ghost.” Despite the way he had teased her, Olaf starts with his shirt, tugging the ratty henley up and over his head, tossing it carelessly to the floor. Violet’s eyes flick across his body like she cannot take in enough at once. Most of her bruises have left him, yet traces of them can be seen in the right lighting, mottled collections of past contusions warping his skin. Olaf realizes then that she has seen him shirtless before, has seen him nearly naked in only boxers when she had floated into his rooms to attempt to strangle him. He wonders if, even then, part of her had enjoyed the sight.

“Do you want to touch me?”

“Not yet,” Violet answers, eyes on his navel, and Olaf thinks that is nearly the best response she could give him.

“What a perfect answer,” he praises, noticing the way her breath catches at the words.

He makes quick work of peeling his clothes from his body until he stands in only dark, plaid boxers, the elastic band peeling at his waist. His cock juts up towards his hip, and Olaf watches her eyeing him with virginal fascination. She lets Carmelita’s little mouth hang open, hungry, distracted. Her eyes do not flutter. Her pupils are blown wide enough to sink into. Olaf makes sure she is steadily watching before he lets the boxers slip to his feet and he steps out of them and closer towards her.

Olaf runs his hand over his navel and down the length of his cock, pumping it just once.

“Can you, um,” Violet starts, licking her lips, her eyes never leaving his hand. “Can you touch yourself? I want to see how you do it. What you prefer.”

“Are you sure?” Olaf purrs even as he complies. “This doesn’t seem as quick and dirty as you wanted.”

Her eyes finally find his then, and in them he sees familiar analysis, familiar calculation. “I… have control like this. Over her. I feel fine, watching you. I’m not slipping away. If you touch me, I might get… overwhelmed. This I can handle.”

Private glee aches in his chest like an empty stomach. He would take anything he could get, but he had somewhat expected Violet to be fully self-servicing. To allow him to please her, not caring at all for his pleasure in a direct way - only as a consequence, a conclusion, to hers. But for her to want him and to want to see him? It’s a gift. Such a gift that he feels nearly light-headed with the surrealness of it all.

“By all means, Violet. Sit. Suffer. Hold back until you want me so badly you cannot contain it.” She nods and Olaf focuses on himself. He jerks his cock slowly at first, then more elaborately - brushing the fingers of his free hand over his balls, twisting his wrist to the very tip of his cock, rubbing circles just beneath the flushed, swollen head. Violet had asked for him to perform his own routine, to display the ways he touched himself to completion. He will show her every touch, every hitched breath, every moan leaking between his teeth.

“What do you think about when you do this alone?” Her voice is breathless, rapt, though she does not seem to mind.

“You,” Olaf grunts, the thrill of being honest making the flame in his gut burn brighter, scalding him.

“And how do you picture me?”

“Alive,” he responds before he can consider it. Violet flinches at that, Carmelita’s long hands spasming in her lap. “Alive and wanting me.”

She gives him a lopsided smile. “Best I can do is dead and wanting.”

“Good enough.”

Violet lets it go, which relieves him more than he’d like. Graciously, she returns their attention to the task at hand. “You look so... pink. I didn’t really expect that.”

“Just for you, Violet. I’m very soft, too. Don’t you want to see for yourself? Brave girl. Brave little ghost.”

She touches the deep divots of his hip bones first. Then his flat stomach, coarse with fine hair. Though her hands roam, her eyes still watch very closely as he fists himself, slowly now, so she can see every move. Her hands reach out to touch his cock quickly, all at once, as if she is afraid to lose her nerve. Their fingers lace, and he guides her slowly, cautiously, allowing her to feel every inch.

“Oh,” Violet murmurs, obviously surprised. “You’re so warm. And so soft.”

“Brave girl,” he coos again, feeling so elated with victory and sentiment, he’s sure he could come on command. “Pretty Violet. You’re doing so well. Keep going.”

Olaf pulls his hands away, letting them rest on the crown of her head, fingers trailing through the deep red strands. Violet’s touch is inexpert but consistent, creating just enough rhythm to keep his toes curling.

“Can you even imagine,” Olaf pants softly, “how this would feel in your pretty little cunt? How full you would feel? How stretched thin?”

Violet winces and her rhythm skews. “Sounds... intimidating.”

“You should be intimidated. But not scared. Never scared of me, Violet.”

She laughs quietly. “That doesn’t sound quite right.”

“Try something with me,” he demands, mind spinning with all the ways he has imagined having her. “Let me touch you.”

Violet stands, drawing her hands away. Olaf passes her to sit on the couch and beckons her into his lap.

“Not that way - ” he mutters, grabbing her hips and spinning her until she is facing away. Facing the derelict apartment, the door, her wine stain like bloodshed on the wall. Olaf hikes her dress up, again exposing the red thong, straps thin as twine. He lowers her down until she is fully seated atop him. Until her heels bump the fronts of his shins and his cock rises between her legs, hard and insistent. “Like this.”

“What can we - ” Violet starts, yet he interrupts her with a demonstration. His hands again slide to the front of Carmelita’s panties, pressing at her cunt gone wet through the fabric. Her voice cuts hard and dies in her throat. 

Olaf cannot keep the smug grin from his face when he says, “I’ll touch you, and you touch me. Touch me like you did before, Violet. Grind yourself into my hands and think of only me, of only my cock, and how it’s going to fill you up so good and deep you’ll be weeping in my lap.”

With a shaky exhale, Violet does as she’s told. She reaches between her legs to encircle his cock in Carmelita’s soft hands, jerking him slowly.

“That’s it, Violet,” Olaf whispers. The words come out gruff and deep. In response, he sees her shudder, hands twitching. Increasing his pressure, Olaf grinds his fingers against her clit through the panties, feeling the plastic diamonds click and clatter beneath his touch. Already, Violet is trembling, bucking up into his hand in small twitches of her hips. “ That’s it . Keep going. Touch me harder, sprite. More pressure. Yes .”

“Do - Do you think -  someday -” Violet mumbles, voice high as a whine, already close to orgasm. “It’ll fit inside me?”

Olaf’s stomach drops in desperation, like a trapdoor has opened beneath his feet and all he can do is fall. To disguise his stunned tongue, he presses his nose behind her ear and inhales, catching his breath and inhaling the spicy, smoky scent of Carmelita. He suppresses a wild, nearly feral urge to nip her ear, to kiss her neck. Somehow, though, this feels wrong. Too much, too soon. Too far.

“Oh, Violet.” He shudders as her pace increases to match his hand on her, so close to completion he could feel it coiling in his gut. “We can make it happen. I promise. I’ll fuck you till you can’t even speak.”

As if in display, he grinds up into her hand, raising them both off the couch for a moment. “Do you feel that burn in your belly? Let it - ” 

Olaf wants to continue. Wants to talk her through a long and shuddering, mind-numbing orgasm. Yet the moment he reaches beneath her panties, thumbing her clit, Violet’s legs lock around his hand and her thighs trap his cock. She whines through grit teeth, legs shuddering, and throws her head back onto his shoulder. Moans catch in her throat as she comes, and still Olaf touches her through it. He thrusts into the trembling clench of her legs until his own orgasm crests, the coil in his gut loosens, and he comes between her legs.

They sit together, rocking through waves of pleasure, panting.

And it is perfect - even better than his fantasies because it is real. Afterglow has barely unlocked his limbs before Violet starts to gasp, this time in panic. She hops off his lap and when she turns to face him, he finds Carmelita’s doll-like face twisted in dread.

“I can’t keep her for much longer,” Violet hisses, yanking a ratty newspaper from the floor and wiping at his come between her legs ineffectually. “I’m slipping, Olaf, I can feel it.”

He leaps to his feet before he has really comprehended her warning. He dresses quickly as she cleans herself up. Only once he is fully dressed does he see that Violet has sat on the couch, trying to mirror the haughty pose Carmelita had worn before Olaf had prompted her to stand. 

“Get - get ready,” Violet warbles.

Olaf sits at the other end of the couch, clutching the bottle of wine.

Again, there comes the thought of kissing her. A kiss goodbye. A kiss to send her back to ghosthood. And again, Olaf brushes it away, annoyed at the compulsion.

“Of course I can offer you a place to stay,” he begins as Carmelita’s body starts to go slack. “What kind of man would I be to turn away a girl in need? I’m no villain. Come calling anytime you like, day or night...”

He continues babbling and then, all at once, Violet blinks into existence at the center of the room. She still wears the pinstripe pajamas. Still has that long sheet of hair he so hungrily wishes to tangle.

A sentiment long-buried returns to Olaf as he watches her. Even in death she is devastatingly beautiful - body transparent and possessed by light, her eyes like two flames on his face, hot and deep as sin. She meets his gaze as if Carmelita had never been there, had never served them as an easy excuse, a link, a vessel. 

He should feel nothing but glee.

 Should feel crowning triumph and victory to the highest degree. After all, Olaf has gotten exactly what he wanted - yet still the waking memory of Violet’s hands and breath and reflected desire make him feel ravenous. Unsated. Feverish.

Olaf stares at the ghost of Violet Baudelaire as their shared victim sits oblivious between them tossing her hair, giggling -  

and still he aches and aches and aches.

Chapter Text

Chapter Text

*

Her tombstone rests in the most expensive cemetery in the city.

Even in Autumn, the grass is green and trimmed. Marble mausoleums and intricate headstones line the hills in uniform, metered lines. Tall wrought-iron fencing spikes high into the grey sky, intimidating and protective and endless on the horizon.

It is peaceful and preserved - nothing at all like others he has passed in the city. No piles of trash clutter between forgotten plots. Every trail is paved and maintained. He cannot hear the clatter of the highway or the bus stops or the honking rush of midday traffic. Only wind through the trees. Only hush.

It’s the kind of place - boastful of money, elegant, clean - designed to keep people like him out.

An admirable attempt, Olaf thinks as he slides between bent bars in the fencing along the back half of the property. But not good enough.

It takes very little time to find Violet’s grave. He seeks the stone most crowded with decorative mourning garbage and heads there. He guesses correctly on his very first try.

Her tombstone is dark slate, standing tall and rounded as his thumb. It is obviously fresh, the color still deep and untouched by more than a single year’s weather. Unlike others in less desirable areas, Violet’s grave is free from cracks or pockmarks or graffiti. It is clean and perfect as everything else - and he cannot help but find this disappointing.

Olaf had expected looking upon her grave to feel like finding something out of a dream. Surreal, nonsensical, wrong - because, of course, he had just left her behind less than an hour ago, come daylight.

Carmelita had taken her very first opportunity to test his hospitality mere moments after she had returned to herself, unaware and calm as only the naïve can be. 

“Might as well stay the night here then,” Carmelita had said, stretching her limbs until they cracked. She demanded to know the time, reclined on his couch, finished another bottle of wine, and fell asleep in her day clothes. He spared her a single blanket, the one that smelled a little sour and was nearly halved with holes. Just before nodding off, when she was crumpled like cloth atop the cushions, watching Olaf pace or scribble in his notepad or flip a record - she had looked remarkably vulnerable. Relief was plain on her face as she drifted off.

Not for the first time, Olaf had wondered who or what she was hiding from.

He and Violet watched Carmelita sleep, shoulder to shoulder, like new parents keeping guard over an infant.

“I miss sleep,” Violet had shared softly.

Olaf, not knowing what to say, had snorted like she was making a joke before closing his own bedroom door and leaving her all alone. 

In the morning, he and Carmelita departed at the same time. Neither asked where the other was going. Neither lingered. There was only the promise of an open door and the expectation that she would arrive at any time at all unannounced. She boarded the bus, which shocked him to no end, and Olaf set off on foot, walking anywhere at all so he would not have to deal with Violet.

Of course he had managed to find her grave when all he had wanted was to avoid her.

He had expected to feel plenty. What he did not expect was disappointment.

Her headstone is painfully plain. There are no finial details, no borders, no flair. Seeing it nearly angers him - Beatrice should know her daughter well enough to guess the kind of grave she would prefer. It takes Olaf no time at all to imagine it - Gothic, pale marble, carved with hollows of hourglasses or open hands or roses. Her name in a curling font so slanted it was hardly legible. 

Not this bland monument that hardly deserved the honor of her name.

Everything about it is standard. The size, the shape, the font. Even the epitaph seems impersonal and just vague enough that it could have been about anyone at all.

Violet Baudelaire, it reads. Daughter. Sister. Inventor. Taken far, far too soon.

“Taken,” Olaf repeats softly, feeling an intoxicating curl of success flush his entire body.

Because he had taken her, hadn’t he? Taken her - stolen her - right from under the noses of his most loathed enemies. He imagined Beatrice and Bertrand so shattered with grief that they could not even bring themselves to modify Violet’s headstone. No negative photograph carved into stone, no quotes, no passion.

In killing her, he had ruined them.

Though that didn’t seem to stop others from remembering Violet.

Her plot is so densely covered with gifts he almost doesn't know where to look. Fake flowers in a kaleidoscope of colors litter the ground. Little strings of solar-powered fairy lights weave between them, twinkling. Tools he presumes to have been her favorites are pressed into the earth above her grave, long necks of screwdrivers and drill bits hidden in hopes that a groundskeeper might pass them by unnoticed. Scraps of paper flutter in the wind, pinned in place with a series of heavy stones. Some appear to be letters - tiny rolled notes, or long missives in typewritten ink, or small drawings. In one, he sees a family of five stick figures standing too tall and bowlegged before an equally disproportionate house. There is a sun in the upper right corner and each person wears a smile too wide for their heads to hold. Otherwise, he spots folded maps, coins, booklets, and writing utensils.

Many people have obviously visited Violet’s grave. He wonders how they might feel knowing she was still around, still able to think and feel and speak all from within the confines of his derelict apartment.

With yet another sick thrill, he remembers Violet trying to escape his apartment. Of her pitiful wail upon appearance - Father? - and her possession of his landlord, and her eyes so bright with fury they warm his chest even now.

He remembers her hands on his body in hatred and in pleasure, pinching him as hard as she could in sleep - an incorporeal coward, unable to fight. Then later, hands skimming his hips, her eyes blown wide watching him as she touched him ever lower.

He thinks of Bertrand on his tail. Bertrand hunting him down while his daughter’s body rotted in the ground and her spectre moaned so prettily in his lap.

On his trek to the cemetery, Olaf knew he would desecrate her grave in some way. Knew it would be packed full of trinkets from others and imagined with glee how he might like to spit upon each and every one.

Now, however, that seems a little too impersonal. A little too distant. Instead, hands shaking with cold and excitement, he picks at the zipper of his trousers. He holds his cock in hand, remembering how her stolen little fingers had pleasured him, and pisses all over her boring, useless headstone with its flowers and tools and trinkets, like a dog marking territory.

You may have had her in life, Olaf thinks to every single person she has ever cared for as the fairy lights fizzle and her young sister’s drawings crinkle and soak. But in death, Violet Baudelaire is mine.

Chapter Text

With a bustle of forced conversation, Olaf and Carmelita depart. 

There is a clattering of keys, some bickering, and then the door shuts at their backs and they are gone with the sunrise. Violet waits until the clamor of their footsteps has faded down the hall before she very carefully unlocks the door. With a click, she flips the little tab on the doorknob and even spins the deadbolt without having to pause in concentration. 

The motion comes naturally, without strain, and Violet allows herself a happy, astonished laugh.

Her own personal routine had started to develop whenever Olaf left her alone - twisting the latches on the windows, unlocking the front door, and leaving the entire apartment as vulnerable to intrusion as she could. It was trivial revenge. Small. Yet, if there were ever a chance for an intruder to come and rob Olaf blind (of his garbage and his waterworn theatrical books and his record collection surprisingly well preserved - ) it would not be a fault of hers. She, after all, simply presented an opportunity.

Though, to her frustration, in Violet’s many months of residence, none had taken the chance so readily presented to them. Sometimes she could hear his neighbors pass by, skulking to their own apartments, and she would brace herself for excitement that never came. Other times she would go so far as to leave the front door wide open, jawing on its hinges, nearly an invitation. She had been proud and disappointed in equal measure when passersby poked their heads inside, saw no evidence of its inhabitant, and closed the door softly. Still, the mounting disappointment never stopped her hoping.

In the endless days of dereliction and Olaf’s company, hope became the anchor that kept her tied to the world around her. Hope let her focus and plot and plan. In its absence, she felt exactly like the phantom she was - hollow, lifeless, as if she might dissolve at any moment.

So, Violet passes her time by hoping. And hoping, that intangible ambition, often led her to investigation.

When she snoops throughout the apartment, opening doors and cabinets and chests of drawers, she tries to envision what she might like to find or what might help her best. Perhaps a little trinket of the past, one showcasing Olaf’s involvements with her parents or VFD. Old documents or letters or photographs, maybe. Other times she seeks a more modern clue - the pink letter with its mysterious note.

Though none have been found, she continues to try, checking new places each time he leaves. Not only does she come ever closer to clues, but she also gets the chance to practice her strength without warning Olaf. She carefully twists screws free from different floor vents and checks inside, finding nothing but dust. One day she spends the entire time Olaf is away tapping at each grimy bathroom tile, hoping to find one hollowed out. Loose floorboards and medicine cabinets turn out nothing unexpected.

Eventually, when she grows bored or tired of thinking so seriously, she tests her growing strength in other ways - opening doors or twisting knobs or starting the record player. She bats at the ceiling fan cords like a kitten with string. She presses buttons on Olaf’s filthy microwave. She spills every bottle of wine on the kitchen floor, and opens the window each time it rains. She is a poltergeist to the most annoying degree.

The very last time Violet had gone snooping, she had been shocked and deeply disturbed to find her own obituary resting folded by Olaf’s bedside. It had a worn crinkling at the corners that suggested frequent handling. Looking into her own portrait for the first time in well over half a year had hurt her so deeply she dropped the paper without folding it and fled Olaf’s bedroom.

She spent the entire evening in a feverish sort of mania, trying unsuccessfully to spot herself in the mirror.

And this, every morning, is how she starts her day.

After locking the doors, Violet drifts to the bathroom off the kitchen, hoping today might be the day she finally catches her reflection. As always she is unsuccessful, and this frustrates her more than normal.

“Ghosthood,” she curses, eyeing her pale hands at the sink.

Although the ritual had started as a test of sorts - she thought, with her growing influence to the world around her, she might someday be able to see her reflection, however vague - and even as she floats before the blank mirror with its flecked grime and webbing cracks, Violet recognizes this. 

What is new, however, is the girlish flutter in her chest.

Even unable to see herself, she twists before the glass, posing, running her hands over her clothes and the long drop of her hair. Would she look different to herself now that she has been proven desirable? Now that a man has seen her and picked her and wanted her enough to do something about it? If she were alive would she feel worth more because he had put his hands on her?

It’s perplexing to consider. Romance hadn’t been foreign to Violet in life, though she had never quite touched someone with such blinding confidence, such passion, such simple, bare need. Her desire had been as unquestionable as his.

A spark of memory - Olaf’s voice gruff and gruesome with want. “Feel that burn in your belly, Violet? That mess of nervous chaos in your gut? That’s arousal. That’s for me and it’s such a gift.”

She realizes then that a reflection isn’t necessary. Already, caught up in heavy memories of their time together, Violet feels changed. Feels important and precious in a way she never had while living. It is there, floating in the dingy bathroom, hands on her cheeks, feeling flustered and confused and conflicted, that Violet remembers one word that ruins her rare, glowing mood.

Alive , Olaf had said. 

He wanted her alive.

All at once, the happy thrill she had woken with fizzles out. Fury replaces it, so hot and instant and decimating she feels as if she is burning alive yet again - her body a house on fire, a funeral pyre, a smoldering gravesite for her old life. The rage embodies her so absolutely, she is sure it had always been there, waiting with righteous patience to be unlocked and set loose.

You could have had me! Violet thinks as she darts into the front room, too angry for words. She grabs at things without truly seeing them, sending them flying throughout the room, crashing into walls and furniture and garbage.

If you hadn’t taken everyone and everything - ! A record slices through the air and shatters against the far wall. 

If you hadn’t stolen my family and my home and my life - ! Dozens of stashed wine bottles crack in half all at once and a fizzing flood of red gushes from each and every hiding place.

You could have had me breathing! The ratty coffee table splinters. And warm! And happy! And alive ! The constant flickering lightbulb gives one final surge of light and shatters with a crackle, glass spraying throughout the room.

Even taking in her destruction hardly soothes her. Violet gazes around the ruined apartment, enraged and miserable. Here, finally, is her reaction to her death. Here, finally, is her realization that even though she had her phantom mind and stolen bodies she could never again be Violet Baudelaire. Behind her eyes, she tries not to imagine the way her corpse might look, or her headstone, though the images came anyway - the shell of her body rotting in the ground in the finest cemetery in the city.

The realization that Olaf is the reason she is finally considering her stolen girlhood humiliates her enough to cause sensation. Her hands prickle with shame, her face feels swollen with unshed tears, her throat tight with frustration and anger.

Another memory strikes her, with all the clarity and heat as the others. Olaf’s body pressed flush to hers, her face against his throat, his lips at her ear - “I’m going to make us both wish I’d never killed you.”

And there is the source of her ultimate betrayal to herself. The source of her ire. Olaf has done exactly what he promised.

If there is one thing she is sure of, it is that she hates Olaf with a passion that dominates all else. It erases the significance of her human life, her death, her afterlife. Erases the twisted desire and impulsivity that had made her possess Carmelita. 

Yet, with a vicious shriek, Violet realizes that her hatred does not matter. She despises Olaf and still she wants him. She would make her very same choices - would demand Carmelita’s body, would have Olaf undress her, would touch him just as he instructed. Even through her misery, a little flame of wretched arousal flickers in her belly, and Violet is more disgusted with herself than she can ever recall.

Intent on further destruction, she floats to Olaf’s room. Stained clothes fall to shreds between her fingers. Framed photographs of only Olaf surge and shatter against the walls. Saved scraps of theatrical ads are ripped until she can hardly recognize a single word. 

From there, her violence is indifferent.

Takeaway containers and blackened matches and lewd magazines fly throughout the room. Several pairs of shoes dent the walls upon impact. Various wigs tangle in the ceiling fan. Violet snaps candle sticks and claws at his threadbare, yellowed pillows until they burst into greasy tufts of feathers.

As she works, she can feel herself growing weaker. Very soon, she will reach her limit and have found nothing, only succeeding in throwing a tantrum and ravaging the apartment in her anger. Desperation makes her vicious, and as she nearly flips his mattress with her maelstrom of property damage, she wishes for an upper hand, an advantage, a weapon.

In the end, she finds a knife.

It lies hidden under a notepad she has never seen him use, always lying crooked in the corner of the room next to a pile of crumpled clothing. She would almost think he had forgotten it, with the way it has pressed a perfectly-shaped dent into the carpet, yet when Violet clicks the little button and the blade springs free, she finds it sharp and oiled and shining. Very obviously, Olaf takes particular care of it. With every other surface in the room covered in dust or filth, this long blade remains carefully pristine. 

Violet turns the handle to examine in the lowlight, thrilled to have finally found a secret. It feels more solid than any victory so far. No other switch or button or lock compared to the heft of the weapon in her hand, solid as if it belonged there.

The hilt is simple, wooden. Stained black as char. The hardware is scratched from use, the shine dull with time. The grooved pad of the button is worn nearly flat. Olaf has clearly owned it for a long time, held close through his many schemes and plots. On the other side, engraved in simple font, is a quote - A WELL TRAINED PERSON NEEDS ONLY A KNIFE TO SURVIVE.

Below it is a simple monogrammed KS and a tiny, crooked heart.

With every swinging emotion and corporeal touch, Violet has felt herself slowly weakening, yet holding the switchblade drains her nearly to exhaustion even as a small, unsettled smile crosses her face. She has just enough strength to retract the blade and return the notepad to its place before exiting the room.

Instead of guilt or hatred or tricky lust, Violet instead allows herself relief. The feeling is merciful, soothing, and nearly unfamiliar.

With the ease of a ritual, she drifts to float before the window in the kitchen upside down, again letting her long hair trail towards the floor, her eyes on the city while her mind churns with potential.

Chapter Text

*

He leaves the cemetery. (In a staggering rush of triumph.)

He buys wine. (Far more than warranted.)

He is drunk by the time he walks through the door. (A necessity. A hiding place.)

Fear and excitement and cold make Olaf tremble. Standing outside his front door, he fumbles for his keys with numb fingers. On the floor, there is no pink parcel. No notes from his neighbors about the stench, nor eviction warnings from his landlord. Instead he finds a puddle of red leaking like the slow crawl of bloodshed.

In his confusion, he wonders if it is his. Wonders if Bertrand or some other volunteer feigning moral vindication had snuck inside and killed him in any manner of gory endings. His mind twists with imagined murders - poisonings, ingested or injected. A fount of vomit. A bloody torture at Bertrand’s vengeful hand. He even thinks of Violet finally exacting revenge, shutting her window on his neck as he taunts her, severing his head like a cartoonish guillotine.

Olaf stands in the outside hall for far too long, staring at the pooling stain on the ground. In his lifetime, he has witnessed and caused enough carnage to recognize its aftermath unmistakably. It does not take him long to realize it is wine seeping from under his door, (noting only secondly that he is still very much alive and breathing, not yet a ghost of his own - ) yet still the sick daydreams extend, potentialities snagging his thoughts and warping them much like the alcohol. The smell of it wafts through the closed door, noticeable even over the fumes on his breath.

As if haunting him a second way, Olaf’s walk home had been plagued by memories of his nightmares. Especially the one he suffered early on - Violet floating before him, choking, spitting up maggots. It made him wonder if deep down in the cold ground, she was spitting maggots still. 

And this had driven him to drinking, much like everything else.

“Your headstone is a monstrosity,” he hisses upon entry.

Immediately, he notices something is wrong. The entire place is dark, and when he fumbles for the switch at the wall, the light remains dead no matter how many times he flips it. The sick smell of warm wine soaking into his filthy carpet is enough to make him suppress a gag. Two steps in, and his boots squish into the floor.

“Violet?” Olaf calls, shutting the door at his back. He darts to the closest window and scrambles to get it open, cursing the fact that just below was a long line of city dumpsters. “Miss Violet Baudelaire, spectre extraordinaire?”

He staggers deeper into the apartment with only crooked moonlight to guide him. Wine corks roll beneath his feet and he kicks away dozens of glass bottles split perfectly in two, blaming them for his imbalance as he finally reaches the kitchen. When he blindly swipes the set of switches, he is surprised to see the space blink into sudden and stark clarity. 

Ripped magazines and shattered plates litter the floor above the usual detritus. More wine gathers, sick and sticky, like blood splatter on the countertops. The place is such a wreck he knows he will never recover from it, not that he would ever try, but the sight that nearly brings him to his knees is the first thing he notices about Violet. She hovers upside down, cross-legged as before, completely still. At this angle, he can see the back of her neck and the knots of her spine as delicate and dainty as the rest of her.

Here, Olaf shudders with relief and terror. His head spins wildly as he staggers towards her, skidding on garbage. Memories of her gravestone flood his mind, of its boorishness and how it had gleamed wet with piss. An unknown fear had been plaguing him since that very moment, soothed now as soon as it was acknowledged. Hurrying home, gulping drink, Olaf had been plagued by visions of Violet’s corpse.

(Had her clothes sunken to her skin? Did her hair still hold its faint wave? Had her mouth opened in an eternal, silent scream?)

The desecration had thrilled him. Afterwards, it was the consequences he feared.

(Would she be able to sense his disrespect? His possession? His marking on her grave?)

(Would she still be there to welcome him home like a pet at the door? Or would she vanish just as instantly and unfathomably as she appeared?)

“Violet,” he says again, blaming the wine for his sentiment. He passes a hand through her hair even though he knows he will feel nothing. “Hey. Hey . Where’s my little ghost?”

He sees her jaw twitch, and with a slow twist of her head, she turns to look him in the eye, still hovering upside down.

“Olaf,” she says softly, voice like a dove. 

“Did you throw a party?” he slurs, words hushed alongside hers. There is still a far away dreaminess to her expression, proof of her prolonged stay at the window. “You didn’t have to wait until I was gone. I can party with the best of them, little sprite. But I get it. Didn’t want to introduce your friends, huh?”

Violet frowns, confused, and a spark of awareness settles into her eyes. “What? What party?”

“Well,” Olaf waves a hand towards the front room, still dark and damp. “I figured that’s what must be behind all the property damage.”

“Oh. That…” Violet spins slowly, tilting ever so slightly until she can face him right side up. He usually loves watching her do that - unfold her limbs and twist as if underwater, yet now the beauty of it is overshadowed by the curious, concerned look to her face.

She gives one harsh blink. And then she is staring at him with a mix of amusement and disgust. “You’re drunk .”

Olaf snorts. “What else is new?”

“I suppose that’s no…” Violet begins, yet her voice fades to nothing as her eyes catch on the destruction. He sees her examine the split bottles, the shattered records, the dents in the walls with wide, shocked eyes. “What happened?”

Already knowing the response he will get, Olaf sighs and turns away. He fumbles with a drawer, searching for the one spare light bulb he kept, having stolen it from the leasing office on his very first day, as she floats into the front room.

“Oh Violet,” he drawls, not bothering to keep the condescension from his voice as he carefully follows. “My sweet little ghost. You couldn’t even scare a burglar away.”

“I was by the window,” she says, an explanation and an apology all in one. In the dim, he sees her hand reach out to take the lightbulb from him. She replaces the shattered one, tossing it blindly to the ground. The stolen one, once in place, is far brighter than the last, casting new shadows he had never before seen though he hardly pays them any mind. 

As always, watching Violet interact with the physical world is strange and awe inspiring. This time, she acts without conscious thought, without hesitation, and it strikes Olaf as odd. He wonders with an intense prickle of dread how often she has been practicing while he is gone, finding freedom in privacy and absence.

“I don’t like this one,” Violet says, wincing as if it could hurt her eyes. She goes to punch the bulb out and her fist passes it by like a breeze. Only when she glances to Olaf does he realize it was for him, and he snorts in acknowledgement. 

“And I don’t like the state of my apartment. What happened?”

“I don’t remember much,” Violet states, sudden stiffness to her voice. “But I do know someone was in here. And I might have… split all your wine bottles.”

“Yes,” Olaf snips through a tight jaw. “I didn’t think that an intruder would have spent his time that way.”

For this conversation, there is no wine to drink. Every bottle he had bought on his way home was steadily drained and cast to the street, and the ones he had stashed were, evidently, shattered by Violet. Instead, feeling empty without a growing buzz, Olaf collapses onto the couch in the too-bright light, squinting even as he closes his eyes. Usually, alcohol has a way of making him honest, at least with himself. The preamble falls away and he becomes aware of his basest desires, his basest fears, his easiest and most predictable pains. He has his best and his worst ideas when he is drunk, and never anything in between. 

This time, though, reclining on his couch damp with wine splatter and feeling a forming headache throb behind his eyes from the new lightbulb, Olaf has no clue what to say.

“Was it your father?” he almost asks. No sneer, no wickedness, no insults. “Did dear Bertie come calling?”

This thought leads to a memory - the faces of his landlord, then Carmelita, calm and oblivious. Violet had spoken near both of them, had floated inches away, had touched them. Yet neither had noticed her in the slightest.

If Bertrand had come calling, looking for clues as to who the sodden place belonged to, would Violet be able to tell him? Had she gotten so worked up by the appearance of her father that she used all her energy trying to speak to him? And, in her failure, destroyed his things like a poltergeist and broke his every last wine in misery?

He’s not sure how to ask. He’s not sure if he wants to know.

“So distracted by that window,” he chides Violet, who floats silently above him. He can feel her eyes on his face though he has no clue what expression she might be wearing. He can picture them all - pity, fear, rage, indifference, desire - yet he cannot bring himself to drag his weary eyes open to check. “A single intruder you said? Did he… interrupt something?”

Above him, Violet sighs, and he cannot feel her breath. “Daydreaming. I started thinking of your play, and the pulley I could invent for your ghost actress. I was imagining all the different ways I could make a tool that always does the same thing. If I had rope or wire or bungee cord. Things like that. I got… lost in it. I heard some noise and snapped awake, thinking it would be you. But it wasn’t. It was a man. Just one, sneaking through the place. I only saw him crouching into your room, and I…” At the strained tone, Olaf cracks an eye to see Violet is staring at his chest, her eyes distant and intense. “I panicked. I screamed at him, I think, and… shattered the bulb. Started hurling things at him. I think all this mess is my doing.”

And, to Olaf - 

It is a convincing story. 

Predictable enough, even without the knowledge of Carmelita’s warning. He’s sure that Violet, ever smart, could take a guess at the contents of that pretty pink letter. He wonders if she suspects that someone is trying to find him and, above all, that he does not wish to be found. The most frustrating part, however, is that he cannot quite tell how much of her story is untruth. Only that he can sense it like a pair of eyes on his back - deception, deeply rooted as a tooth.

Was it your father? The question rises, and again he brushes it away. Let her try to lie to him. Let her try to flee, just as she had when possessing his landlord. He will outwit her or talk her into corners. He will triumph without lifting a finger.

“You didn’t recognize him?”

“No,” Violet says, regret in her voice. Above him, she extends her legs until she floats completely parallel to his body. If they were touching, she would be atop him, her head on his chest, their legs entwined. It would be intimate. It would be gentle. Instead, Violet rests her chin on her crossed arms and floats belly-down in the air, close enough to touch, if he were able. “I’m not sure if you’re safe here anymore.”

Her obvious concern burns in his chest like acid, corroding to bone. It brings an uncomfortable swell of indignation and disgust along with small, twisted, rejected heartache. Feeling even a fraction of affection makes Olaf want, more than normal, to hurt her. “While your concern is certainly touching , I’m afraid I’m not safe anywhere, little ghost. I’m a wanted man. I burnt a pretty girl to a crisp in her very own bed. I destroyed her home. And then I visited her gravestone to piss all over it. And atop its mountains of sappy trinkets and grieving letters. I - ”

“You… Olaf, you - you? On my headstone?” Instead of the vitriolic rage he had expected, the words leave her hushed and pinched.

He opens both eyes to stare right into hers then, and never has he felt such a torrent of vindication and absolute ownership before this very moment. “I did. Like a dog . You’re all mine, Violet. Why pretend anything else?”

The suggestion of intimacy disappears as Violet moves, rising to sit cross-legged and stare down at him with an amusing churn of devastation and horror and unguarded ire. She opens her mouth to speak, but Olaf interrupts her, calm, possessive even in speech. “Why, even, pretend to care? You are less like yourself every passing day. You slip further from life and into death. Your nobility is fading.”

“My nobility ?” Violet spits. Her hands are balled in her lap and her shoulders are hunched with violent tension. In another situation, he is sure her rage could split his wine bottles all over again, quartering them. She could crack the shattered plates. She could, if she tried, even strike a match. But her focus is too intact for that - she watches him with unwavering attention, waiting for an explanation.

“You possess innocent women for the pleasure of sex with the man who killed you. Phantom Violet, the body snatcher . And, look at you. You’re only so upset because you wish it mattered to you. I desecrated your grave and you don’t feel a thing because you’re hardly that corpse in the ground. And you never were.”

“You were going to hurt them !” Violet insists, shrill and loud. “Neither of those women wanted you, Olaf, and you were going to - ”

“But you did,” he cuts in, voice cold and factual. “And you still do.”

At that, Violet says nothing. She looks seconds away from inconsolable tears, and still Olaf cannot resist the sick urge to tear into her.

“Violet,” he begins, a hint of honey to his tone. “My precious girl. Answer one question. Just one, if you please.”

Her eyes flick to his. It is all the response he needs.

“Remind me. Your little siblings. What were their names?”

Silence twists the air between them. Violet’s eyes are frantic as she glances around the apartment, searching desperately for answers she will not find. Her hands clench and inch closer and closer to her face with every moment as she curls in on herself.

“You poor thing,” Olaf coos, soft despite the grin on his face. 

Violet covers her face in shame, folding herself as small as she can manage, a long wail rising like song from the back of her throat, and Olaf feels only long, golden victory.

Chapter Text

NINE

*

“I remembered.”

Several minutes of wailing preceded just as much quiet. Olaf had watched Violet’s meltdown impassively, feeling only a flicker of entertainment to blight his possessiveness. Finally, her voice comes to him from behind the cupped shell of her hands as, even still, she hides her face.

“Let’s hear it then,” he says, only marginally disappointed that she finally recalls the names of her siblings. He would much prefer her to remember eventually, if only so she could doubt herself without the constant sulking truly forgetting would inevitably cause.

Her eyes rise from above her hands to glance down at him, expressive with exhaustion and weary shame. “Klaus was my younger brother. Sunny was our youngest sister. Our parents were Bertrand and Beatrice Baudelaire.”

Olaf resists the urge to sneer in disgust. Although he’s not positive about her siblings’ names, the inclusion of their parents leaves little room to doubt.

“Congratulations, little sprite.” Repressing a groan, he rises to lean against the arm of the couch, still staring at the curled ball of her limbs. “Despite my best efforts, you remain Violet Baudelaire. What a shame.”

“Your best efforts?” Violet warbles.

“No. Your failing memory is most likely due to time and no fault of mine. Sadly, I cannot take all the credit.” He gives her a grin, far larger than normal, and he’s sure the overwhelming glare of the new light bulb sticks against his teeth. “That’s all your fault.”

Despite herself, Violet laughs. It’s watery and desperate, just as relieved as it is guilty. Her shoulders are no longer hunched in violence. Now, however, her entire body seems to slump midair, exhausted beyond death. She floats as luminous and still as the moon.

And Olaf still stares, assessing. 

The display of forgetting has thrown him off. He thinks about her earlier speech, how it had pinged in his mind as a lie, and wonders, perhaps, if Violet is even sure of the truth herself. There  could have been a man entering his home, be it a drunken neighbor mistaking his unlocked door for their own, or a disappointed burglar, or Bertrand Baudelaire all flesh and blood and vengeance. There could have been no one at all, and Violet had simply ruined his things for the fun of it. He does not know. He does not really even care. With Violet unreliable at best, he considers the ruined sanctity of his home - haunted first by her, and now an intruder - like an open wound exposed too soon to air. Healing halted, and danger all around.

“I’m not sure if you’re safe here anymore,” Violet had said.

Although he heard the words true as she had spoken them, Olaf realizes now that they had registered as something else entirely. 

The last safe place is safe no more, he thinks, and desperately wishes for a drink.

Escape comes to mind instead. He thinks of gathering his meager possessions and leaving to anywhere else. Anywhere Bertrand could not find him, while leaving Violet all alone in the ruins. Although he knows he should flee, Olaf feels no inclination. He will not run from Bertrand like a coward. He will not leave Violet behind, no matter how bitterly he acknowledges the sentiment.

After all, he doesn’t like seeing her upset. Not like this. Not as a consequence to her ghosthood in place of his own doting cruelty.

“There is a newspaper in my bedroom,” Olaf begins, before he is even sure of a solution. “That contains your obituary. It has the names of your family printed all over it. You’re free to take a look whenever you like.” Then, an afterthought, “Unless you forget how to read next.”

“Thank you,” Violet murmurs, and her eyes are soft with gratitude and relief. “Very much.”

“However will you repay me?” he drolls, sarcastic, weak, hardly expecting an answer.

In the following quiet, their minds seem to sink to the same place. If they aren’t going to have an honest conversation about the supposed intruder, Olaf thinks, then they should at least be discussing the sex. Somewhat, anyway. Enough to break the ice. Enough to give them another chance. But Violet, young and inexperienced, is unfamiliar with this, and he takes no pity on her.

“No Carmelita tonight?” Violet eventually asks. Her voice is all innocence. All tact.

“Don’t sound so disappointed, pet.” He hardly knows himself when Carmelita will show up, though judging by the timing of her previous arrivals, it will be in the evenings, only once the sun has set and darkness blankets the city like smog. He hopes she visits soon. He wants her on his sodden couch every night if only to serve her purpose - a repository, a fusion point.

“Only wanted to know if I should be looking out for spit gum,” she teases.

“What do you care? It would fly right through you.”

“I suppose you’re right,” Violet says with a sarcastic sigh. “What’s one more piece of trash on these floors anyhow?”

Before he can respond, he watches her sit up straighter to toss her long hair, an amused yet faux-disgusted look on her face. “Gee Countie,” she sneers in a piercing voice. “You really live in this dump, huh? What a wreck.”

“Carmelita Spats, in the flesh,” he teases along. 

Grinning, Violet tosses her hair yet again, bats her eyelashes at him, and leers. “Can’t a girl drop by to visit her dear old Daddy?”

Although it hadn’t before, hearing Violet repeat Carmelita’s words, especially with such a title, sparks riotous arousal in him. Already, his breathing falters, and Olaf feels his trousers go tight with anticipation.

“Oh Carmelita,” he coos. “Drop by anytime. Do not mind any apparent gaps in memory, or the way your young body might feel after. Stay the week. Stay a lifetime.”

Violet laughs, and through his growing arousal, the sound does something maudlin to him. When their eyes meet, hers are warm with amusement and affection. “How did you meet her anyway?”

He debates answering her, if only for a moment. Imagines discussing his history with Esme, their various schemes, and how they had stolen a young girl, claiming to be her shiny, brand new parents. But he does not want to explain. It would only lead to more questions which would no doubt become increasingly more uncomfortable and personal. The origin of his relationship with Carmelita doesn’t matter. He knows what she’s getting at, in any case.

“Do you really want to know?” Suddenly serious, he stares her down. “Or do you want to talk about Carmelita? Around her? To gear up to the heart of things?”

 Violet says nothing. Again, her inexperience presents itself in inaction.

“We can talk about the sex all on its own, Violet.” Olaf is all sickly sweetness. All cloying. “No need to feel embarrassed.”

“I’m not embarrassed,” Violet insists, though it is weak and false. “I wasn’t sure… how to begin.”

“We can begin anywhere you like. But I’ll make this easy on you. Tell me how it felt when I took you into my arms. Start there.”

Violet does not even hesitate. She stares right into his eyes and speaks clear as a prayer, “It felt like I was meant to be there.” 

At the words, there is a particular erosion at the center of his chest. A giving way, a landslide. His heart is tumbling beneath his ribs and he stares up at Violet with a mix of awe and desire and more affection than he can handle.

“Tell me more.” Olaf ignores the struck softness to his voice. His hands skim the ragged ends of his henley and over his stomach while his heart continues in agony.

“In the end, you were right, but so was I. I didn’t want you to hurt Carmelita. But I did want you to touch me. I wanted you to… want me.” 

“I did,” he murmurs, fingers on his button and the tab of his zipper. “I do.”

“I wasn’t going to give you a choice,” Violet says, just as gentle. She floats over as if on a breeze to sit just above his knees, eyeing the obvious bulge in his pants and his scrabbling grip. “If you were going to touch one of us, it was going to be me.”

“It would be you anyway,” he insists. “My phantom. My little sprite.”

Before him, Violet smiles. It’s a flower of a smile, blooming pretty as her namesake. It makes his pulse race ever faster. Her eyes again linger on his fingers as he pops the button and slowly drags the zip.

“You remember, I’m sure,” she begins, throat clenched, eyes aflutter. “How I had wanted to see you, at first. Just you.”

As if he could forget. That nervous trill in her throat, her voice of glass - “I’ve, um, never seen a naked man before. In the flesh.”

“Would you like to watch now?” At her nod, he vows, “Then I’ll give you just what you want.”

Olaf shoves his trousers low off his hips, just enough to free himself. He’s not quite hard yet, not fully, and Violet’s eyes on him are ever-curious, ever eager to learn. “Do you remember how I looked? Wanting you so badly I could hardly keep still? Well. Keep talking, Violet. Reminisce. I’m sure you can work me up with just your voice alone.”

All confidence, he folds his hands behind his head, watching. Violet floats ever closer, and just seeing her pretty blue mouth so close to his cock makes him throb.

“I’ll talk you through it then. Um. I’ve been thinking about something you said to me when I was possessing Carmelita. I asked if you thought - if you thought that, someday… it might fit inside me.” 

His breath hisses through his teeth. Already, his stomach is trembling and he is frowning in delicious frustration. His voice is all grit and gravel when he says, “I recall.”

“You said how full I would feel. How stretched thin…” Her pale fingers float in the air just above his cock. A curious thought furrows her brow, and he can practically see an idea taking root. “And I’ve realized I want that. I want that with all of me. Your cock, Olaf. Stretching me open, just like you said. Filling me up…”

“ God , Violet,” he hisses, fisting the hair at the back of his head until it stings. He is fully hard by now, and precum dribbles in sticky drops onto his stomach. When he glances at her, she is smiling, delighted, though a reflected heat simmers in her eyes.

“I want you to overwhelm me. Make me cry for it. Make me beg, Olaf, you know I will.” Still her fingers tremble in the air above him, and it is only by the finest sliver of his composure that he does not raise his hips into the air, uselessly seeking them.

“Such an angel,” he pants. “Such a godsend.”

A welcome distraction , he thinks of saying. The last good thing in my miserable life.

Violet’s happy smile stretches. “Are you close?”

“ Rather .”

“Well,” she purrs, mischief on her face. “Let me try something.”

Her fingers trail across his cock, so soft he wonders if he imagines them. With a gasp, he jolts upright, balancing onto his elbows to watch. Violet has taken his cock in both hands and is pumping him exactly as he had demonstrated. It is such a shock he cannot help but moan at the sight, low and strangled.

“You’re - ” Olaf hisses. “Violet, you’re - ”

She tries to take him into her mouth, and he sees the moment his cock passes through her, into her, and her following confusion and anger is almost enough to make him laugh. Instead, the mere knowledge that she had tried, had wanted to taste him, combined with her impossible touch is enough to tip him fully over the edge.

Gasping, Olaf comes onto his stomach, and Violet drops his cock in alarm. He collapses back onto the couch, breathing hard as aftershocks quiver throughout his body.

It takes him much longer than normal to gather his thoughts. Olaf floats in a postorgasmic haze, eyes closed, panting even minutes later. When he finally cracks open his eyes, Violet is watching him eagerly, a hint of a smile still lingering on her mouth. She looks proud and beautiful and Olaf is, once more, overcome with the desire to kiss her.

He rises yet again onto his wobbling arms and runs a hand through the mess at his stomach. “Don’t you wish you could clean me up, Violet? Once I’m spent and trembling and my mind is filled with only longing for you?”

Violet opens her mouth, begins to speak, but he cuts her off with a wink. “A tongue bath doesn’t sound too bad.”

“Um,” she finally responds, glancing from his softening cock to the cum drying tacky on his stomach. “Is that… normal?”

“Oh yes,” Olaf insists. “All the time, in fact. It’s common courtesy, Violet.”

“You can’t be serious...” The look on her face - confused, apprehensive, curious - is enough to make him giggle.

She catches on at that, laughing along. “You liar! You tricked me! You cad!”

Although she is weak from earlier, she summons enough strength to playfully pelt him with small items - pencils, plastic silverware, scratched sunglasses, wine corks.

“You would have done it,” Olaf says, falling back onto the couch. “Had your mouth been cooperating, you would have gladly - ”

“ Stop it!” Violet insists, hardly able to speak through her giggling.

Olaf forgets her gravestone, his intruder, and every other shared tragedy between them.

They laugh together. The night closes in.

Chapter Text

*

This time, the parcel is plain. 

Only a white envelope worn at the edges from travel, with a bright stamp fresh off the sheet. There is no color, no flair, not even Carmelita’s thrash of handwriting. Instead, her warning is typewritten on thick hotel cardstock. 

BB NEARBY. DON’T ANSWER YOUR DOOR.

For the calamity the news suggests, Olaf’s first thought is bleak with humor. Since when does Carmelita know how to use a typewriter?

He flips the cardstock, as if expecting some hint. It is expensive paper, weighty and thick. The grandeur it possesses makes him sure of one thing. Though he does not recognize the name of the hotel - The Proserpine - he can tell it is upscale. Its name is pressed in gold leaf at the top of the paper which rests heavy between his fingers. Images of Bertrand skulking through swanky theatres and between occupied rooms at glitzy hotels burn behind his eyes. Never would he expect Olaf to live in such a dilapidated stain of a place by choice. Olaf, surely, would grift and gravitate to power and influence like every other instance before. He would become an auctioneer or a doctor or a stage director with farflung credentials. Not a drunkard surrounded by garbage, waiting for a childhood foe to come put him in the ground.

His next reaction is just as useless as his first. The instinctual drive to flee flushes his body, makes his heart pound in preparation to run. Olaf folds the note against his chest and slips it into his pocket.

To Violet, he trills, “Bills, bills, bills. An eviction notice - final warning! What a waste of time.”

“They’re going to kick you out for real someday,” she teases, tone so light and happy, Olaf grimaces.

When he turns, he sees her peeking at him from over the top of his newspaper. He knows without asking that she is reading her own obituary for the dozenth time that morning, attempting to stave off another lapse in memory. Having it closeby and easily at hand should a blankness come has caused her temperament to rise. She spends more time chatting with him, or singing softly to herself, or sketching inventions for potential performances. Sometimes, she tells him stories from her short life and, mostly, he listens. Every morning, she reads the paper, and afterwards Olaf sees how happily she must have behaved in life before he had taken it all away. 

“What’s that look on your face?” Violet’s eyes on him are warm as she folds the newspaper and floats close, out of a stray beam of sun. Her little fingers brush his cheek, the tiniest sliver of pressure. “Poor Olaf. You’re pale. You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“Aren’t you clever?” His eyes flicker against the touch. He wants to sink into it the way he sinks into drunkenness - with relief and oblivion.

“Me, clever? Well. It does say so in my obituary.” Olaf glances from Violet’s smirk to the newspaper tucked under her arm. Through the blue haze of her, he can read the full title, can see the monochrome pictures of the charred mansion and Violet’s portrait beside it, laughing. BAUDELAIRE MANSION BURNT TO THE GROUND , he reads. FAMILY LOSES ELDEST DAUGHTER TO THE FLAMES . 

“Clever and pretty,” Olaf murmurs, unable to look away from her sweet face printed small enough to fit into his palm. “What a catch you are.”

“Not anymore,” Violet disagrees with a shrug. “Some old man burnt me alive.”

“ Old ?”

She laughs, exactly as he knew she would. After, her fingers again brush his cheek. Soft, she asks, “You’re okay?”

“Never. Do you remember your name?”

“Violet Baudelaire,” she answers, diligent and serious as a schoolgirl.

“Good enough for me. I think you can put that newspaper away for awhile. I've got a surprise for you." On the cluttered coffee table, resting atop two discarded mugs, is a plain black book. During one of his many walks to the liquor store, he had swiped it from a stoop when no one was around, having spotted it half-concealed behind a pot of small yellow flowers. The book had a note on the cover, stuck with decorative, glimmering tape - Loved this anthology. My door is open to discuss anytime! Two streets up, remember? Beside it was a plate of fruit tarts wrapped in cellophane which he left behind, yet the book he had slipped under his arm with intention before loping quickly away.

At the time, he thought Violet might like to read it to keep her mind sharp. Holding the book now, feeling the weight of it in his hand, he realizes, like so much, it was never meant for her. 

Olaf tilts it so she can see the cover embossed with flowers so full of blooms they droop. “It’s poetry. Think you can handle it?”

Violet considers it with a curious tilt of her chin, as if she cannot quite fathom what he is asking of her. "You want me to read it to you?"

"Take pity on an old man, Violet Baudelaire." Although he means it as a joke, his tone falls flat, and even his humiliation fails to show up.

Violet summons the book from his hand and settles it into her lap. She crosses her legs, floating as effortlessly as he breathes, and cracks the cover. As she skims the pages, surely looking for a poem she might recognize, Olaf settles onto the couch. This process takes longer than usual, and he is grateful for Violet’s distracted eye. He does not want her to see the way he winces as he stretches across the cushions, the way he must force himself down slowly, trying to ease an ache that will not give. Stress strings his body taut, more painful with every passing second, like a sharp point driving steadily into flesh.

And it is not necessarily from Bertrand’s looming visit. As Olaf lies flat on his back and presses an arm over his eyes, he considers that he has always been a home for misery. It has been in him, and of him. He has harbored misery like a chronic condition. 

The gnawing chill of Bertrand’s arrival hardly matters to him. Weariness and apathy hang from him like a pair of twin nooses. Instead of fighting the weariness, he allows himself the mercy of sinking into it. 

Olaf wants, with simplicity and humble, private desperation, to hear Violet speak. 

Only once he fully settles does he realize he has left his front door unlocked. Yet Violet clears her throat, and he cannot find it in himself to care about turning a bolt.

“ In the orchard of memory, a bite out of every apple, ” Violet reads. Her voice is metered and slow the way he’s heard poets in his youth perform, careful, reverent. “Sometimes the past digs me up.”

Slowly, her voice soothes him, and even the relaxing hurts.

“You mourn the girl I was as if I killed her, as if I left her in a field somewhere, shipwrecked in the dry grass…”

He knows Violet continues to read as he drifts off, because he catches fragments of sentences as his mind settles, reels, and settles again. To further distract himself, he takes to imagining her alive, smiling, lingering in places she might have liked to visit. 

“I hold her like a sister, a candle burning...”

A picnic, a pebbled beach, safe and warm with sun.

“In the room my body makes…"

A library, a home of her own, a field of tangling wildflowers.

"And in the round and quiet room of sleep.”

*

He wakes without warning to a fist at the door. 

It pounds with distressed, arrhythmic speed, and so heavily the knob shudders with force.

Olaf jolts awake on gasp so wretched it makes no sound at all. As he tries to catch his breath, he heaves himself to his feet, and scans the room for Violet. In the time he has slept, darkness has stolen over the city, cloaking his windows, not a single star in sight. His blurry eyes skim the apartment, and he does not find her. 

No fear enters his mind as he lurches for the door. No hatred, no fight. Only relief at approaching the end, long and rambling and hard-won, like a choked river finally emptying to the sea.

Upon yanking it open, he expects to see a man. At least one, with at least one weapon. In the hall, he finds no childhood face hard with grief. No glint of sharp metal. Instead, there stands a young woman hardly out of childhood herself, face hard with fear for grief she knows is surely coming.

“I told you not to answer your door!” Carmelita hisses. She darts inside with no invitation, kicking the door closed and turning each of his locks with the same desperation that had woken him. After, she crosses her arms and paces the front room with her shoulders high and hunched. Stress radiates from her like heat. “Jeez! Do you have to be so stupid? It’s like you want him to gut you!”

“You shouldn’t be here,” Olaf spits. He watches the wild turns of Carmelita’s anxious pacing, and the way she pauses, every fourth circle around the couch, to check the windows. He wonders what she expects - a certain automobile, or a man under a streetlamp, or a subtle signal. The panic she so clearly shelters melts something in him as he watches her checking for locks on the windows. Carmelita did not deserve to be here any more than Violet. She should not be here, on this night of all nights, preceding the arrival of a man who wants him dead. He has brought these two young women into a mess entirely and consciously of his own making. And yet here she was, hands tugging at her tufts of pigtails as she grimaced as if preparing for war. In an instant, Olaf is heartbreakingly fond and grateful for his little protector. “Not tonight, Carmelita. Not after that letter. Get out.”

At that, Carmelita spins to a stop and glances up at him from under her lashes, a subtle pout on her lips. It seems to be a learned gesture, repeated so often she hardly notices her body following through, trying to persuade a desired outcome. “He could be here any minute, ya know. I saw him today, this morning, there .” She nods to the letter in his hand, crumpled from folding, that he has pulled from his pocket. Carmelita tries to take a deep, steadying breath but it is shallow and stuttering. When she speaks, her words gather speed like a storm whipping itself further into frenzy. “Esmé’s been scouting out hotels and attending all kinds of parties and I - I just started seeing him . Out of the corner of my eye, like a ghost. This man. Everywhere. Just - there . Keeping his distance. But he was following us around every place we went.”

Again, she tugs on her pigtails ever so slightly, like she has to resist pulling them as hard as she can manage. Only then does he notice how worn Carmelita looks. One heel has broken off her pointed red shoes, which are crusted in mud and city grime. She appears to be wearing a cheerleading uniform several sizes too large, and beneath it, her black tights are streaked with rips and holes. A heavy denim jacket hangs from her shoulders, rolled thick at the wrists. In the outfit, she could be any teenager plucked from the street, and seeing her like this, reduced as she is, makes Olaf bristle with misdirected anger.

“Eventually Esmé noticed him too. She told me all about him and how he was probably looking for you. Hunting you down. She guessed he thought you’d still be bossing us around. I tried to throw him off, talking real loud about how I thought you had left the city, maybe gone to the mountains. But Esmé, you know. She talks. I’m sure he heard her say you’re on this block...” Her voice fades. Her little fists are knotted so deeply in her hair Olaf can’t see them at all, and her eyes are fixed unseeing to a spot of garbage on the floor.

Oh, he can imagine it. Esmé sitting prim and decorated at a table of lavish, stylish foods, gossiping loudly for everyone to hear. Revealing ever more about his life and what it has become whenever she spots Bertrand nearby. Just to keep things interesting. Just to wield her words like weapons with exciting, deadly consequences.

“You saw him, then?” Olaf demands. “At that hotel. The - ?”

“Just this morning at the Proserpine,” Carmelita confirms. “It’s new. All the way on the other side of the city. It’ll take him a day, probably, to get here. Maybe less if he really books it.”

“Then how did you get here so quickly?”

Carmelita squirms. Her shoulders rise even higher, and when she bares her teeth at him, this time it is in a pained, awkward grimace. A red flush diffuses her face, burning even to the tops of her ears. She looks like a child caught in a humiliating lie. “I sent the letter from the hotel. Paid to have it delivered on foot so it would get here extra fast, ya know. Uh. And then, I… really booked it over here.”

Olaf waits for a punchline. Waits for something to make sense. In this moment of all moments, he cannot fathom Carmelita’s sudden devotion to him. He does not understand her sense of kinship nor the protection she feels enough to eavesdrop and send him warnings and wear herself ragged trying to beat his enemy across a crowded, dirty city.

Before, there had never been much warmth between them. Olaf would have sooner kicked her than praised her. Even in her calmer moments, usually slumped into Esmé’s side, drooping with sleep, when her snarl and brattiness and generally awful behavior was muted, she never directed any softness his way.

Though, he thinks, remembering how she used to pester him for attention, stamping her feet so hard her curls bounced, he can recognize the root of her dedication to him. Olaf knows what it is like to suddenly be without parents. Without home. Without any security at all. You take any outstretched hand, whatever is offered to you, no matter how reluctant or cruel. He might not have been the best father to Carmelita, but he was all she had left of any kind of father at all, and he can imagine how it might have pained her knowing a man was coming to kill him and that she could have tried, at least, to stop him.

Olaf realizes only then what she had expected to walk into - a butchery, a bloodbath, a murder scene.

His hand around Carmelita’s arm is too firm, strong enough to cause pain, yet he does not care as he starts dragging her towards the door. Through her shrieking and thrashing, he says, “You’re leaving. Get out . Get out .”

As much as he had twistedly missed the venom of her, she fights back dirty. Carmelita stamps those chipped, broken heels onto his bare foot and tries to pry his hand off her with her sharp little nails. Still, he gives her no leeway. No chance to fight.

“Let me help you pack,” Carmelita demands. “You’ve got to run away. You need to leave, not me. Let’s - ”

“Go anywhere else,” Olaf snips, finally yanking her within throwing distance of the door. “I don’t care where you end up but it can’t be here. Don’t you hear me, you little demon? Stop fighting. Stop - ”

His hand is on the first lock, about to twist it free, when he catches a shock of blue out of the corner of his eye. Violet has floated into the front room, peeking in from his bedroom, her newspaper clutched to her chest. Seeing her, the fight leaves him in an instant. His body has formed a plan before his mind has even acknowledged one.

He drops Carmelita’s arm and shoves her away from the door. Silent with shock and momentary confusion, she only glares at him as she tries to catch her breath.

“Actually, there is something you can do for me, Carmelita,”  Olaf says, strangely calm, his eyes never once leaving Violet’s.

“What?” Carmelita hisses. “If you push me around again, I’m leaving, and you can rot here for all I care. I didn’t need to - ”

“Violet,” he says, gesturing, as she floats further into the front room. Her expression is soft and pitying. “If you would be so kind.”

“Violet?” Carmelita scoffs. “Who’s - ?”

“You’ll be beautiful,” Olaf mutters before he is even sure he is speaking. “Saint Phantom, Violet Baudelaire. My little sprite.”

She presses her fingers to Carmelita’s brow as if in blessing.

For an instant, there is calm. 

Olaf knows, with unshakable surety, that it will not last long.

Chapter Text

*

“How does she feel?”

“Familiar. Easy.”

 He watches Violet flexing Carmelita’s fingers like a new pair of gloves. Watches as she stretches, rolls her shoulders, and touches the soft planes of her stolen face. Once done, Violet takes a deep breath and holds it in her chest as long as she can handle. Eventually, the breath comes out slow through her freckled nose as she places a hand flat on her breastbone. “She was very upset. Her heart’s still racing.” 

Through Carmelita’s eyes, Violet casts him a suspicious, concerned look that is uniquely her own. “She said someone was coming to gut you.”

It is a question, an invitation, a plea. If Olaf were feeling more like himself, he would crack a joke. Would twist her words into an entendre or an insult. Through the sudden, hard constriction of his throat, he tries to form speech. Tries to explain in a way that will not scare her - though he’s never been good with the truth. 

Yes , he debates saying. This will be our last night together, if we make it that far. Several responses crowd his mind, sick with softness and dread and impatience. I deserve a good gutting, don’t you think, Violet? (Won’t you lie down with me?) Your father and I have reached a conclusion, and we both want me dead. (Won’t you let me hold you?)

Instead, grey with pain, Olaf says, “Don’t ask me. Not right now.”

Violet takes his hands in hers, warm with blood and life.

“Okay,” she breathes. They stand flush as they had that very first time, hips touching, balanced against one another. “Later, then.”

A moment passes. Two. Three. Between them, there mounts a growing haze of sentiment left unvoiced - fondness, regret, longing, and grief gutting enough for two.

Then, easy as breathing, they kiss.

Violet rises onto her tiptoes as Olaf drops her hands and gathers her into his arms. Her fingers lace at the back of his neck, holding him as if there is all the time in the world. Against his lips, he can feel her smiling.

“Won’t you lie down with me?” Olaf almost says again. “Won’t you let me hold you?”

When Violet finally pulls away, her face is serene and sad. “That felt like a goodbye kiss.”

Olaf does not let her speak anymore after that. Especially not something so devastating. Instead, he kisses her and keeps kissing her until she melts against him. He grabs her hips with hard possession, steering them to the couch, and laying Violet down. He kisses Carmelita’s cheeks, her button nose, her chin, her neck. He pets her over the cheerleading uniform, privately delighted to find her already trembling, and feels Violet relax under his attention.

Hardly a single minute has passed since Carmelita’s possession, and already, Violet is amusing him. Olaf dips to kiss her neck, hands rough on the peaks of her hips, and only seconds later there is an insistent fist in his hair, tugging him back to her mouth. A red ring of irritation smudges her lips, burns from the friction of his scruff, so livid it must sting. 

Still, Violet kisses him as if it is her very last chance. Still she whines the moment he pulls away.

“Needy little thing, aren’t you?”

Violet only nods. Her eyes are drooping, and her chest is ragged with breath. Her hand stays latched into his hair, nails scratching gently. Olaf cannot imagine what this must feel like for her - to be so full of life after months of blunt deadness. To feel and touch and react, after such a long absence of any solid sensation.

“Kiss me?” 

Deadness, bluntness, darkness. Olaf wonders if that is what awaits him, or if he’ll become a ghost like her. If they’ll haunt the apartment together. If, maybe, they could touch.

“Olaf? Kiss me?”

“Ask me again,” he demands, forcing his morbidity away as he slips atop her. Olaf sinks into the cushions on his hands and knees between the gaps her body makes. The light from the new bulb blazes at his back, and his shadow falls across her black as ink, blurring her edges as she blends with nightfall. “Ask me nicely, Violet.”

“Please. Please . Give me something. Everything. Give me - all you’ve got.” Her hand reaches up, grazing his chest, the column of his neck, past his shoulder, and into the air. It wavers there, open-palmed, reaching for the bulb like a demand. Olaf watches her fingers flutter. After a moment, there is a squeak of metal on metal as the bulb spirals in its socket, and drops to shatter against the coffee table. Dark floods in like water to a sinking car. “I’ve waited long enough don’t you think? Now kiss me. Kiss me.”

He does.

*

If there is one thing Olaf learns about Violet - through her pleading, her tugging, her insistence - it is that she loves to kiss and be kissed. She does not tire of it, even when he uses his tongue or his teeth. Even when he nips her harder than he means, hard enough to make her yelp and little bruising welts well up under her skin like blossoms. He gives her a series of lovebites across her collarbones and along her throat, and he feels like a teenager doing it, yet Violet gasps and giggles beneath him and that is all the reason he needs.

“Won’t Carmelita - ” She breaks off with a gasp as he bites the pale, smooth skin just below her jaw. “Won’t she be upset?”

“I don’t care,” he spits, voice fraying and low. Olaf leans onto his knees as he tugs his henley up and over his head. Violet’s eyes skip across his body, so heavy he can feel them. Two twin points of pressure on the growing bulge in his trousers, his navel, his lips, his eyes, and back down again to the pressing imprint of his cock.

Again, as he allows Violet to gawk at him, there comes sick surprise. His arousal feels shallow compared to its usual disgusting ruthlessness. As if hidden. As if in disguise. For all the times he has imagined this opportunity, (fantasizing between dreams, between thoughts, between every breath - ) he has never questioned his desire for her. Yet now, there exists a disconnect. An absence. Although his body surely wants her, he hardly feels his cock in his pants. Hardly feels his kiss-swollen lips or the places her hands have lingered. 

Doom and impatience have dulled his senses. Retracted them.

Olaf cannot even find it in himself to be upset about it. Instead, he focuses on Violet. Her face is undisturbed with longing so pure it (nearly) makes him jealous.

“And you don’t care about her body either, do you? Not really. Not at all.”

“No,” Violet agrees, breathless. Moonlight falls across her body in sparse stripes, cloaking her. In the dim, he can almost imagine that it is Violet in the flesh. Violet’s long legs, pale and thin as drips of wax, her sheen of long hair, her dark doe eyes. Her rounded lips, her fingers brushing through the hair at his belly. Olaf lets his eyes go hazy, pretending that bubblegum on Carmelita’s breath is Violet’s favorite, and not a smell he associates with springy curls and vicious girlhood. “Not one bit.”

They slot closer together like hand-hewn joints, not a splinter out of place. Olaf’s knee rises between her legs, and Violet ruts against it with shameless, tactless jerks of her hips. She grinds against him at a steady pace as he praises her - nonsense words he cannot recall as soon as they leave his mouth, yet they seem to do the trick all the same. Soon, Violet’s rhythm, already weak, skews. Her breathing is rough against his neck. Her fingers skitter at his ribs as twitchy and reactive as the rest of her.

“Would you like more?” Olaf murmurs into the soft hair just behind her ear.

Their cheeks brush as she nods. “Yes. I said - anything. Everything.”

He moves away, hands dragging down her neck, over her chest and abdomen, pressing forcefully against her clothes. He would use his fingernails if she were naked - wanting stark, violent scratches over the divets her bones make. Perhaps, if he is lucky, there will be time for that at the very least.

The pink cheerleading skirt is far too large and slides up easily, practically hitting her sternum before there is any resistance. This time, instead of the red thong, Carmelita wears cheap satin panties and every seam is fringed with frills. They are girly and delicate - good for a keepsake if their situation were different.

 Despite the lowlight, he can see how aroused she is. Already, a slick patch soaks through the fabric. He hooks his finger into the hem, tugging it down and over her long legs, only to snag at the ends of her broken heels.

“You didn’t take these off?” Olaf hisses, playful, choking down a laugh that is half heartbreak. Beneath him, Violet shrugs and murmurs, “It’s been a long time since I’ve had to think about shoes.” 

Finally, he tosses the lot to the floor where they clatter with a brief noise like applause. Red lines of pressure mar Carmelita’s skin. Olaf presses his fingers into them, attempting to smooth them out like wrinkles in a funeral suit.

“That’s better, isn’t it?” 

“Much,” Violet agrees through a sigh. He thinks, then, of all the sensations she has never felt. Not the simple pleasure of a massage from a lover, not being held and cleaned up in a postorgasmic daze, not the tender hand of aftercare. Nothing sweet, and nothing brutal. No love or romantic affection of any kind - only what has come from him. It feels like a tragedy.

(Olaf, admittedly, has hardly felt them himself. Only moments of tenderness, only emotions too fleeting to remember. He knows the actions, the performances, if only for the sake of avoidance or manipulation. Never before has he wanted affection this genuinely. Never before has he wanted to inflict them upon someone else until now, with a dead girl smiling up at him, utterly transfixed.)

“My fingers first, I think.” 

At his touch, Carmelita’s body opens with the experience of a grown woman. Although the sensations must be new to Violet, Carmelita’s body is eager and easy. Her knees do not come together with anxiety. There is no question, no hesitation. Although Violet must not know what she is in for, her stolen body surely does, and Olaf tries his best not to wonder.

“How does that feel?” Violet’s following gasp is answer enough. Hardly a minute passes before her legs begin to lock around him, shuddering. Her voice is a stutter of moans in her throat. She either does not hear him or does not wish to answer, and her silence has him wondering yet again, this time in appreciation, how overwhelming each sensation must be. He can tell she’s approaching orgasm once his fingers are steadily crushed by the muscles inside her, yet Violet frowns down at him, almost pouting. “I’m - I’m so close. Wait. Wait! Stop . I can - wait.”

“You said you’d take everything, Violet,” he reminds her. “Take this.”

“But - ” she pants, confused, a furrow between her brows. “Isn’t it? Too soon?”

“Poor, pretty Violet,” he coos, pressing up and in, pressing on that little spot that nearly makes her eyes cross. “You think you can’t come for me more than once? You really do, don’t you? Poor baby. Poor stupid little girl. Fall apart for me, Violet. Come on now. Come - ”

A strangled sound catches in her throat. Her body heaves once, twice. On the third, her hips rise in the air and hold as if bent in hysteria. It seems to take Violet awhile to gain control of her limbs, relaxing gradually until finally she collapses into a spent, panting sprawl. Olaf holds her through it all. He withdraws his fingers, wipes them thoughtlessly onto the couch, and shoves her shoulder aside until he can wedge himself at her back. Carmelita’s heart races so rapidly he can feel it through her skin against his own.

 In the time it takes Violet to catch her breath, Olaf considers their next steps. 

He weakly conjures his past hopes and fantasies. Shuffles through them like an old reel of film spinning itself to wreckage. Quickly these images shrink as he contradicts them with their reality -  they have very little time, now. Inexperienced as Violet is and insensate as she has been, Olaf wonders with growing displeasure how low her tolerance or appetite for sex might be.

He learns, very quickly, that he never should have worried.

With great strain, Violet flips in his arms to face him. Her cheek rests against his chest where she presses her lips to his skin in lazy half-kisses. “That was wonderful. So strange. Thank you, Olaf. Thank you.”

“You’re very welcome,” he says and means it.

Her hand drifts lower, the slightest hint of touch through the waistband of his pajama pants. Even through the daze in her eyes, there is a spark of intuition there that Olaf immediately loathes. Before she speaks, he knows he will only feel the same devastation as before.

“You’re not acting right,” Violet says softly. Regret weighs on her tone as if she is almost sorry to bring it to his attention. “Are you really worried about what Carmelita said? Why not stay somewhere else for tonight? You could - ”

“No.” Although he knows, somewhere in that flimsy, foul connection between his heart and his mind, that he should finally explain, no words come. He does not know how to voice his disconnect or his dread or his longing. Not even how he feels within this very situation, this minute, this second -  trapped in his morbidity. Pinned into his skin with death fast approaching.

Instead of coherent thought, there exists only a grey crackle of electricity and contradiction in his skull. He wants to hold Violet for the rest of his life. He cannot wait for this night to end. With Violet, he never wants it to end. He wishes Bertrand would hurry up. He wishes Bertrand had killed him months and months ago. He wishes Bertrand would never come. Surely, this was hell enough. “No. I’m not going anywhere.”

“Are you sure?”

He nods, and even the familiar fury he would feel at being questioned has vanished.

“Well. In that case...what can I do for you?” Her fingers skim his waistline and he hardly feels them at all.

“Whatever you like,” he says, trying not to consider a mercy killing. “Do you require… instruction?”

“A little.” Violet presses another kiss to chest. “Tell me where to start, maybe?”

“Well, we should probably get undressed,” Olaf drawls, attempting his usual teasing candor. Violet laughs softly. They rise together, avoiding the shattered glass from the bulb speckling the coffee table and the surrounding floor. He helps Violet shimmy Carmelita’s skirt from her hips, and shuck the large denim jacket from her shoulders. When she turns, swiping her curls from her neck, he tugs the zipper of her top down before hauling it overhead. Violet sputters as her hair brushes into her face. They laugh together as she attempts to spit it out. Carmelita wears no bra, so Violet stands completely naked before him in a body that is not hers. 

This time, he is almost glad for the darkness. 

“Now you.” Violet grips the waistband of his pajama pants and tugs them down, following the motion to the floor until she is kneeling at his feet. Olaf steps closer to her and out of his clothing. Only then does he see that his erection has flagged, and that he had not noticed at all.

“Violet Baudelaire. What a charmer. I didn’t even have to tell you to get on your knees.”

She shrugs, a nervous little flinch, though still she smiles. Instead of answering, she kisses the sharp line of his hip. Her touch inside his thighs feels foreign, unfamiliar. Hazy and undefined, as if it is not a human touching him so much as a feeling of pressure. Olaf does not notice the progression of Violet’s mouth until she has taken his cock inside it, just past the wet entrance of her lips. As she works, he can feel his erection growing. Returning. Under her ministrations, it takes no time at all, and allows him several moments of clarity and distraction.

 He feels a bit more like himself with his cock in her mouth. 

Relieved, Olaf buries his fingers into her hair, yet immediately it feels all wrong. The smell of bubblegum rises from her breath, and Olaf steps away before he is even sure of the action. Violet attempts to follow, and ends up toppling towards him, empty hands thudding to the carpet.

Again, he cannot find the words to explain himself.

“Next step,” is all he says as he lurches away from her and to the couch. Olaf lies on his back, staring up at the ceiling with its water stains and its cracks. When he glances her way, Violet is standing and staring at him with an unsure, self-conscious expression. In an effort to win a smile, he smacks his own thighs. “Come on, Violet. Up here. On top of me.”

Though she comes closer, her concern does not fade. She looks away from him, brushing bits of dirt and debris from her knees gone red with friction. Still, her eyes find him immediately after, twin flames on his hand where he strokes himself.

“I don’t want to crush you,” she says, voice hoarse, and Olaf cannot suppress his laugh.

“This might be more fun if you do try to crush me, Baudelaire,” he snickers, sudden elation swelling through his entire body. Mania rings in his mind, low, growing. “Ride me like you’re trying to end me.”

Violet rolls her eyes. The tension in her shoulders sags. He can perfectly imagine that expression on her own face, and it makes him laugh all over again. “Come on. Come here.”

Hand ghosting his hip, she throws one leg over him and settles to her knees atop the cushions, staring blankly, waiting for instruction.

“That’s much too far away,” Olaf chides, amusement still in his voice. “You’re not fucking my knees .”

“I - ” Violet sputters, shaking her head indignantly. “I wasn’t going to - !”

“Up you get!” Olaf’s grip is strong as he grabs her biceps and drags her up his body. 

She follows his lead, leaning closer, until her hot little hands are pressing bruises into his chest and her cunt is flush against his cock. Violet whines, high and strangled. Olaf flicks his hips, teasing. The slick slide of their skin together is good enough to give him chills.

“How’s that?”

“Perfect,” Violet responds, and he can tell she’s telling the truth. Her jaw hangs open, her brows turned up like she might cry. That telltale hitch is back in her chest. One hand splays on her pelvis, just above the scratch of hair, in a confused gesture. “It just… doesn’t feel like enough.”

“No, I don’t think it would. Sit up. Here.” Violet follows his lead, hiking herself up onto her knees. Her body cuts through the shine of a street lamp outside, at just the right angle to cast Carmelita’s form in a surreal orange glow. Like so many things, it reminds him of Violet. Violet, blue with afterlife. And here, using Carmelita’s body, suffused with orange like cardamom and cadmium.

In the end, he fucks her harder than he means to.

Violet sinks onto his cock with a sound straight from heaven. A high, shocked squeak that is all pleasure and sweet suffering. Again, there is no hesitance. No question. He does not give her a chance to fumble. Instead, Olaf reaches out, hands nearly encircling the small span of her hips, to grind their bodies together.

“This what you wanted, Baudelaire?” He hears himself growling, nearly spitting with sudden ferocity. “This it? Bodysnatched an innocent girl just for some cock, didn’t you?”

As with her earlier orgasm, an expression has frozen onto her face. Her mouth hangs open, stuttering with moans, her brows drawn up as if she might start to cry. There is a gleam of spit on her bottom lip, bright as a glass bead.

“ Yes ,” she hisses, nearly losing her breath with every quick snap of his hips. “ Yes .”

“Come on, Violet,” Olaf demands. In punishment and provocation, he thrusts up into her harsh and fast, driving himself deeper. “Give me something. Something , ghost. Tell me. Tell me .”

“It feels - ” A full-body shudder races through her. “It feels exactly like I’d hoped.”

“ Oooh ,” Olaf sneers. “Everything you’ve ever dreamed, am I?”

He does not give Violet time to respond. Instead, he lifts her off his cock, rises, and drops her face-down onto the couch. In an instant, he is atop her, inside her, drilling her to the cushions. Violet’s stuttering cries are muffled. Her hands fist to the fabric on either side of her head.

“That won’t do,” Olaf spits. With an angry swipe, he yanks on a fist-full of Carmelita’s curls until her neck snaps back, until he can hear her. Whiny, breathless moans tangle in her throat. Then, when he grows underwhelmed by hearing them, he presses the heel of his palm against her cheek, and shoves her down hard. “Exactly like you’d hoped, huh, Violet? Given you everything, haven’t I? So generous I am. So kind. Do share your - your every. Single. Thought.”

Violet gasps, and he can feel the stark shapes of her molars against his palm. She shudders yet again as he thrusts into her, as if her body could hardly take any more. As if her knees were going weak.

“Olaf, you - ! You’re a dream come true. A - a nightmare ,” she pants. Olaf cannot tell if she is serious, nor does he care. His only focus is the girl beneath him and her borrowed body, so red and wanton and eager to please. “I wanted you since… since the second I remembered your name. Remembered you. Your face, your voice.”

The frustration in him boils. He yanks on her hair again, so hard her teeth clatter. Still, Violet continues to babble. “I think, even before, I’d - oh! - I’d have wanted you. A handsome man sneaking into my bedroom. A - a villain my mother warned me against.”

“Liar,” he hisses. Irrational, bottomless outrage sears him from the inside. There is no way she means it, no way she is telling the truth. Still, Olaf fucks into her with a brutal, punishing pace. “Little liar, Violet.”

“No!” she insists. “You - you killed me and you kept me and - now - you get to have me.”

Although he would have liked to hear the rest of her pleading, emotional outpour, Olaf never gets the chance. His orgasm sneaks up on him. You killed me , is what sends him hurtling over the edge with no hint or preparation.

It is with great effort that, mid-orgasm, he pulls away from Carmelita’s body with a wretched, delicious sound, and finishes coming onto her backside. Immediately, Violet slumps as if unconscious. If not for the fluttering of her eyelashes against her very red cheek, Olaf might assume her dead.

“ God ,” he pants. His eyes roam lazily over her body, appreciating. “Violet. Don’t tell me you’ve fled her body. This would be quite… compromising. Should she wake.”

“No,” Violet grunts. The only movement she gives him is a twitch of her fingers. “I’m still here.”

Olaf nods though she cannot see him. When he rises, he realizes his earlier absence has returned. He can hardly feel his bare feet on the floor. Can hardly feel the air on his skin or the thrum of his heart in his chest. It is a wonder he was able to fuck her in the first place, he muses as he wades through the collection of garbage on the floor. Only once he finds a relatively clean newspaper does he return to her side to clean her up.

Olaf crouches beside the couch, scraping the crumpled newspaper across her bottom. It is not quite the aftercare he wanted to offer, but it is something. Violet hardly notices him touching her until she is almost clean. She swivels her head to face him. In the dim, her expression is calm yet unreadable. After several moments, he realizes her teeth are chattering.

Olaf squints, trying to make her out. Beneath his hand on her back, he feels cold, clammy sweat and gooseflesh. “Violet?”

“I’m f-f-fine,” she chirps immediately. “Just cold. I think. Sorry.”

Olaf shakes his head. Despite his unfeeling body, he can sense how warm his hands are against her skin as he flips her and hauls her into his arms. She squeaks once as he turns around, still limp, and marches to his bedroom. This time, instead of dumping her, he kneels and places her gently onto the mattress at the floor.

“Sorry,” she says again, fingers brushing his bent knee. Olaf ignores her, instead taking his cleanest blanket and wrapping her up tight. Once done, he crawls in beside her and holds her close, applying pressure as if stopping an open wound.

“Wait,” Violet murmurs eventually. “Wait. I think… She’s sleepy.”

What follows is her startled, happy laughter. Her hands unwind from the blanket to smack softly against his abdomen as if she had just made a joke. “She’s exhausted . I hardly remembered what that felt like.”

“I’m not surprised,” Olaf comments, voice low and hushed in the dark. “She raced through the whole city today trying to find me.”

At that, Violet goes quiet. Her laughter fades as quickly as it had begun. “Will you tell me why? In the morning?”

“Yes,” he promises. Exhaustion presses in on him, deeper than he has ever felt before. There is little point in hiding the truth from her now - not when they could wake at any moment to his front door kicked in by her father. “Ask tomorrow. Ask nicely.”

Violet nods. In the gloom, he swears yet again that he can almost see her. The girl from the obituary. The dead girl and the familiar slant to her cheekbone, the roundness to her lips, her long sheen of dark hair. The moment he focuses, however, that girl is gone and it is Carmelita’s body in his arms, swaddled and shivering.

“You can sleep, Olaf,” Violet says, gentle and full of mercy. “I don’t think I can. But I can pretend.”

He scoffs. “You’ll lay there and breathe?”

In the dim, he can make out the wet shine of her teeth as she smiles. “Of course. It’s been so long since I’ve been able to breathe at all. Sleep.”

Violet shifts until they are sharing the blanket. Hush drops over them like dew, and Olaf settles despite himself. He tries not to think of the future. Tries not to imagine his coming fate. Instead, he focuses on the uneven rhythm of Violet’s breathing. 

Did you mean it? He thinks of asking as his mind begins to drift. Would you have wanted me in life?

Later, he feels her fingers brushing the wispy ends of his hair.

He does not dream.

*

Chapter Text

*

TWELVE

*

Sometime in the watery blue of early morning, Olaf wakes.

Carmelita’s head rests heavy on his chest and her curls are tickling the underside of his chin. Again, just like when he was lurching to his pounding door, he feels no fear. Only its absence. Only its dearth, wide and deep as a splitting canyon. Into the soft, still room, he whispers, “How’s your grip on our dear Carm?”

“Fine,” Violet sighs immediately. Her fingers tap against his ribs. “She’s not struggling this time.”

And that, out of all the things she could say, stumps him. Mind still slow with sleep, Olaf does not know what to say, and he is not sure if he even wants to know any more about the intricacies of possession. Reeling, he stays silent until he feels fit enough to rise. Violet follows at his back, still draped in the blanket, and they make their way into the front room. 

 He gathers his discarded clothes from the night before and dresses quickly, watching as Violet does the same. Still, silence clogs his throat. He did not expect to make it through the night, and his endurance disorients him. Survival clings to his back as tight as ever.

“You should let her go soon,” Olaf eventually says. “I want her gone.”

“You want to give her a chance to run,” Violet says, folding the wrists of Carmelita’s heavy denim jacket.

Olaf shrugs, unsure and uncaring. His earlier fondness for Carmelita has faded along with everything else. No colors, no sensation, no thought. Only Violet, and suffering, and Violet, and anticipation.

“Well,” Violet sighs, coming close. Her hands lock hard around his. On her face is a strange mix of dread, fondness, and duty. “One last kiss before I go?”

He nods, and dips his chin to kiss her. The sweet press of their lips together nearly makes him slump. Here is the tenderness he could not find when he had her laid out. Here is his fear, his affection, his gratitude, his regret, his steepest and most desperate hope.

“ That was your goodbye kiss,” Violet breathes as they part. “I could feel it.”

“Goodbye,” Olaf says, and kisses her once more.

Violet pulls away first that time, with a sick, sad little frown. Then, like a performer, she turns away from him and lies down on the couch facing away. Violet curls Carmelita’s legs in close, tucking her knees like a child. For nearly a minute, she simply lies there breathing, giving in to the exhaustion he’s sure her body still endures.

“Just a moment,” Violet murmurs. As if a visitor were waiting. As if she were stepping into another room.

Olaf nods and retreats into his bedroom. It still smells of sleep and bedsheets and the spicy undertone of Carmelita’s skin. For a heartbeat, the apartment is utterly still. The next, he hears a harsh intake of breath. A fast rustling of fabric.

“ What are you still doing here?” He surges into the room before Carmelita has a chance to think. She jolts immediately away from him, grimacing, scrabbling to her feet. Her face is pale with shock and her mouth hangs open on a gasp. “I told you to get out . Snuck back in, did you?”

When he yanks her to her feet, Carmelita does not fight. She merely stares at him wide-eyed and confused to the point of tears.

“I didn’t - ” she sputters. “I don’t remember - ”

This time, Olaf is able to haul the door open, and he shoves her out into the hall where she collapses, her broken heel a snare. Seeing her there, meekly pushing herself to her feet, reminds him of his landlord. Of Violet, having just lost possession of her, scratching at an invisible boundary.

“My hospitality is through,” Olaf hisses. “Never expect - ”

“He’ll be here,” Carmelita interrupts, low, serious. Her eyes on him are sharp, filled with concern and disgust in equal, conflicting measure. “Within the hour, I bet. I’m surprised you’re still alive.” 

“That makes two of us.” 

In the following hush, he half expects Carmelita to reach for him - to beg, yet again, to flee. Instead, she shifts in her broken heels and rolls her neck as if trying to work through a soreness. There, already, is the beginning of her realization. And Olaf wants her gone anyway, wants her as far from his wretched home as possible, yet at that moment it has nothing to do with Bertrand Baudelaire - Olaf wants her gone before she feels his violation someplace he can witness. 

Across the hall, Carmelita stares with sadistic understanding. “You really do want him to gut you.”

Olaf closes his eyes, reacting before he can stop himself. “Don’t come back.”

He slams the door, but does not lock it. Soon, there comes the soft scraping of Carmelita’s footsteps as she walks away. Olaf turns, marches to his front room window, and knocks his forehead against the glass so forcefully his teeth clatter. He will make sure Carmelita leaves, this time. He will study the bus or the cab she boards, and he will watch it drive away until he can no longer see it. Then, he can wait. Then he can be ready.

“Will you tell me what has you so upset?” Violet asks tentatively. Olaf knows without looking that she floats at his back, knees drawn up like a child. “Now that we’ve… indulged?”

“That was hardly an indulgence,” Olaf snorts. “We merely scratched an itch. I could want you - ”

Forever , he was going to say. Forever . But his end is nearing and he does not have the luxury of forever, or vague, stretching time.

“Could you feel it, Violet? That night?” He tries to sigh, and finds his lungs have seized. “Did you know you were going to die?”

She considers this for longer than he anticipated. As if dredging up the details - the wisdom - from her death requires unexpected effort. “I didn’t know I was going to die until I was already dead,” she says, once Olaf has found his breath. “I kept thinking my father was coming to save me. That he’d be there any moment. I hardly noticed the burning.”

He wonders if he will hardly notice whatever Bertrand has planned for him, and nearly snorts. “That doesn’t seem likely in my case. I made it easy for you, did I? In my… ultimate mercy. Well...”

Then, before she can ask, he spits, “There is a man after me. He will kill me.”

“A man?” she repeats, as if she has never heard of such a thing. “Who?”

“An associate of mine.” Outside, there is the steady rush of pedestrians and motorcars and cluttered bus stops. Pigeons, garbage, graffiti. The same backdrop to every sullen day before it, though this time it looks especially disgusting, especially precious. “A childhood…”

He stops himself. Peels his face from the glass. His shoulders lock as he peers down to the cityscape. Violet appears at his side, so close their cheeks nearly brush, to watch Carmelita shoving open the heavy double doors. She stomps quickly to the nearest bus stop, head down, back bent. Although she looks as any teenager might in her bulky denim jacket, she still attracts attention.

Across the street, watching the jawing doors, sits a man. He wears a rich brown suit the color of an open grave and a wide-brimmed hat, the shadow of which nearly obscures his face. At Carmelita’s exit, he folds the newspaper spread across his lap. He tracks her with a casual, metered tilt of his chin.

And this small movement - this smallest of tells - is how he knows. Despite Carmelita’s frantic, humiliating need to help him, she has tipped his hand. Her exit has revealed his hiding place like none before, like a beacon, when all she had ever tried to do was help.

From posture alone, he could spot Bertrand Baudelaire anywhere.

Strong but loose-limbed. At ease even during conflict, like a soldier. Even in their youths, Bertrand carried himself with casual, threatening confidence, with maddening surety that any confrontation could be easily swatted away. As if indestructible.

Which, he supposes, remembering Violet’s begging, was how all little girls viewed their fathers. Indestructible. Solid as bedrock and reliable as stone. Out for blood, should his children be hurt. Should his daughter be burnt to dust in her childhood bed.

Olaf’s gaze skirts.

Violet hasn’t spotted him. Her eyes linger on Carmelita and he cannot guess what she might be thinking as she watches the other girl fuss over her hair or her clothes or sneer at the other citizens waiting at the stop, but he does know that she has not spotted her father. Reflexively, he considers not telling her. He could leave Violet ignorant for a handful of minutes longer, preserving their delicate flashflare of truce, rot, and need. He could let Bertrand break the news with his arrival before he makes Olaf regret keeping his mouth shut. Better to tell her, he thinks, while his teeth are still in his mouth for speech and not littering the ground at her father’s feet. Better, finally, to explain.

“There are many reasons, of course, why he would want me dead. Too many to list, and several I’m sure I don’t recall and don’t care to because he deserved them. All of them. But I did expect revenge. Someday. Revenge. Revenge for - ”

Violet’s fingers jab across his face, forcing his mouth closed. His voice cuts. “Don’t say it,” she pleads, voice suddenly rough as a crow’s. Her tone carries a peculiar begging he has never heard - not in her rage, nor her demands, nor her desire. Although she surely knows what he will say, she clings to flimsy, false ignorance. “Don’t. Don’t tell me - ”

“For killing his eldest daughter.” Olaf does not look to where she floats to his side, unwilling to see the stricken horror on a face so pretty. “For burning her alive and feeling nothing.”

A little squeak of sorrow leaks from Violet’s throat. Her hand falls away.

Feeling nasty in the face of her horror, Olaf jerks his head towards the man across the street. “See that man there? That’s your father isn’t it?” He hardly gives Violet a chance to look, yet he sees the moment it happens - the suffering drops from her face as if repelled, and in its place comes fire. “Dear Bertie is coming to skin me and I’m not about to stop him. I might as well - ”

She jolts away from the window as if dodging a bullet, as if the sky were falling. When he turns, Violet is floating upright, stance extended like a warrior. Her chin is tucked low, her eyes ablaze. She looks far more alive and aware than ever before, even when brutalizing every woman who has passed through his door.

“ No ,” she spits, extending her arm towards his bedroom. “No. He’ll be ruthless. He’ll - hurt you, and he’ll enjoy it. He can’t have you.” There is a pause as she stares mutinously into the city, through it, and to her father, surely thinking of her, wishing for her, and mourning her still. There is a faint whistling sound, and as soon as he blinks, his spare switchblade is in Violet’s outstretched hand, snapping as the blade springs free. “Not if I do it first.”

It says so very much about him, Olaf thinks, that he sees her like this and considers clapping. Before the slight stings of horror and betrayal comes a blooming swell of pride so expansive his ribs struggle to cradle it. His pride at Violet’s cunning, her ruthlessness, her cruelty begetting mercy, nearly makes him laugh with joy.

“Oh, Violet ,” he breathes, unashamed at the rapturous shallowness to his throat. “You knew that was there. How long have you wanted to run me through?”

Violet directs the savagery of her stare onto him. No denial comes. In its place is her mercy, her compassion, her grace, her own ugly need to see him bleed.

“I’ll be quick,” she offers.

Olaf snorts. “You’d better be. Otherwise you’ll mangle me, and there’ll be no point. I’ll make myself at home.”

At his back, he hears the moment the bus pulls away. When he glances over his shoulder, Carmelita is gone and Bertrand is folding his newspaper. They have, maybe, five minutes.

And it is just that easy. Deciding to die.

Olaf settles against the couch, watching Violet loom ever closer. No sadness or hesitation cross her face as he might expect. Her hands reach out, brushing over his chest, over where she will gut him.

“You’ve got to want it, Violet,” he reminds her softly. “You’ve got to mean it. Otherwise you’re no help. He’ll keep me alive and you’ll get to watch the consequences.”

“I know,” Violet says, and there, finally, is a wobble to her voice. Her eyes, dark as shadow, linger on his center, on the dense, membranous pulp just beneath the skin. She positions the blade over his heart, and it gleams in the dim of the early morning. Both hands grip the hilt at awkward angles as she grimaces.

“You’ll hit my ribs, doing it like that. Here. Like this.” Olaf handles the blade through her blue hands, tilting the edge so she can put her weight on it, so it will fully sink down into the wet depths of him. The blade is small, narrow, and hardly five inches long. Good enough, but not easy. Not always quick. “Like with the wine. And the bulb. You force it. Straight down. As many times as you can.”

Violet nods, and when he glances up, he sees her eyes already on his face. “I’m sorry,” she spits, like a reflex. She is a young woman with her manners so ingrained into her identity they have not faded in death, even as the details of her past surely has. Still, he’s sure she means it.

Olaf debates apologizing. For anything, and everything. For wanting her. For defiling her grave. For killing her dead. He thinks he could apologize even further back into the sharp, aching early days of his own childhood - Beatrice was my very best friend , he thinks, and there is regret in that statement all its own.

There is so very much he could apologize for. 

Though, Violet would not believe him because he would not mean it. Olaf isn’t sorry for anything, not one thought or action or villainous deed that has landed him on the other side of his second best blade, wielded by the phantom of Violet Baudelaire. His hands spasm at his knees as he resists reaching out to touch her - her face, her neck, her hair. Any part he could reach.

“Mercy,” he says instead. “Mercy, little sprite.”

Violet grunts, and the blade sinks into him. Disappears into his chest cavity like a magic trick - a flash of silvered metal gone in an instant. A strange, biting pain spreads through his torso, his entire nervous system flooding with shock and adrenaline. Again, the blade rises and sinks, rises and sinks. He cannot breathe. Bright blood spills from the wounds, far more than he would ever have anticipated. Against his will, his body is reacting. Pained noises leak from his throat as he spasms uselessly, grunting, willing himself not to fight. His ears are ringing, and his eyes are blurry, though still he finds his head lolling to look Violet in the face.

“ I hate you, ” she hisses. “ I hate you, I hate you - ”

Again, she spears him open. His entire front is hot and heavy with blood.

“ - me. Please join me, Olaf, be a ghost, be a ghost with me - I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I’m so - ”

Violet pulls away with a final, frightened gasp. His switchblade stays sheathed within the wet mess of his body. 

Four stabs, with his backup blade. Four stabs, and he can hardly breathe, can hardly think through the electrified sizzle of his mind. The pain in his chest is minimal, is nothing. His body is paralytic with shock, the scourge of his nerves blunt and numbed.

Violet’s hands rise to his face, cradling it, and already he can feel her touch solidifying cool and firm against him. He wants to touch her. Wants, one last time, to feel her. But his hands are too heavy, too useless, at his sides. He tries to explain, tries to breathe, and a small sucking sound issues from the sopping cavity of his chest.

“No,” Violet spits. “Don’t speak. Look at me, Olaf. Look at me. I'm right - ”

“Well,” comes a voice from the doorway. Violet freezes and they both look to see Bertrand entering as if he has just come home. He wears the earth-brown suit, and carries a matching briefcase. The newspaper, folded very precisely, is tucked under his arm, yellowed with age. His eyes take Olaf in and drop to the floor, where a large puddle of blood must be swelling between his feet. He shuts the door politely, without looking back, removing his hat upon his first true step inside, like a gentleman, like a welcomed guest. “This certainly isn’t how I expected to find you, Olaf.”

Bertrand marches in slowly as Olaf’s head lolls yet again. His chin dips to his chest. Beside him, Violet is staring at her father with her mouth parted in shock. All over again, she is a scared, helpless child. She is the girl who spiraled with fever, who begged Bertrand home, who burned.

“Father,” she murmurs, like a prayer. Softly. Her voice wrecked with love even as she knows he will not hear. Still, her hands linger gently at Olaf’s face. “I’m here,” she says to them both. “I’m right here.”

Olaf finds Violet’s eyes, and he manages a weak, coppery laugh. “You could kill him,” he wheezes. “Maybe he’d - join you.”

“You,” Violet begs. “You.”

“You’re dying. Sorry to see, I’ve arrived too late to do it myself,” Bertrand says, carefully avoiding the puddle of blood. He pushes some of the trash atop the coffee table aside so he can perch on a corner, their knees parallel, man to man. 

Through his swimming vision, Olaf can hardly see the man’s face, though he recognizes the square angle to his jaw, the dark waves of his hair, and the singular curl that trembles at the center of his forehead. Bertrand drapes the newspaper over his knee, and Olaf is shocked and delighted to see that it is an exact copy of the one he had given to Violet, the same edition from over a year ago with her obituary in the backpages. Olaf wants to laugh in Bertrand’s face. He would taunt him, if he were able. But breathing is becoming a chore. He’s gasping softly. Gaping, like a fish. He wishes Violet would stab him again.

Bertrand’s eyes, so much like his daughter’s, look him over. “Who hurt you?”

Olaf summons the energy for a nasty smile.

Bertrand shakes his head.

Silence settles between them, the only sounds coming from Olaf’s mutilated chest, his ragged breathing, growing ever fainter. Unconsciousness hovers at the edges of his vision, grey and beckoning, and so very easy. Still, he lingers, eyeing the man who has hunted him down, only to find his plans already ruined. It is his last victory over the Baudelaire’s, this dying, and he is going to watch Bertrand stew in his disappointment and unresolved grief for as many moments as he has left.

And Bertrand, for all his effort, stays silent. Cool and stoic, even in the aftermath of his collapsed scheming. There is no speech - nothing about their childhoods, his villainy, Violet, or his much deserved spot in hell. Still, the joy shines on his face. Still, there is happiness in the way he leans in to watch Olaf’s gasping, peering into the deep vivisection of his wounds.

His breathing dips. Bertrand whistles happily.

His initial shock is beginning to fade, and he can feel his sluggish heartbeat all the way in his fingertips. Then comes the pain, like nothing he has ever felt before. Still, as Olaf chokes and sputters, there is a righteousness to it. A bone-deep accuracy. As if it has always been his destiny to bleed out, the chasm of his heart torn open, his chest suffused with red. Blood oozes down his body, hardly slowed.

At his side, Violet is peering into his face with the same rapt focus as her father. He cannot see her, only a blue smear in the air, but her presence is absolute.

Come find me , he thinks, managing a flick of his fingers. Hoping it is a promise, a signal, a dismissal, a truce. Something. Anything. Just let her see him.

Olaf closes his eyes. 

The world drops out from under him.

*