Work Text:
Violet has the shed for her experiments with blow-torches and rivulets, her leather gloves and steel wool, her soldering irons and stacked little boxes of findings for her Etsy business. Isadora likes to write in cafes, stumbles home late at night with ink on her fingers and pens in her hair on her days off; the other nights she balances compensatory cups of coffee from her barista job under her elbows and distributes them to her housemates as they stand around in the cramped kitchen and talk into the wee hours. They do their best to move Duncan’s stacks of papers out of the way before setting cups down on the table when the sun has risen and they finally realise their feet are sore and coffees cold, but newspaper clippings invariably find themselves used as coasters and stained with coffee and tea, some of those nights and most of those mornings. Klaus doesn’t use the table; he works in the university library, organises his desk with geometric precision and keeps his papers as meticulously organised as he’s always dreamed of doing.
They work odd jobs, some terrible, some good as they put themselves through school; they juggle Sunny’s parent-teacher meetings and doctor’s appointments between the five of them where barista shifts and lectures conflict. Their family’s small army of little orange and blue plastic bottles of anti-depressants sprawl like a fungus over the shelves of the bathroom; big and little feet trip over each other coming up and down the stairs, ramen noodles are eaten over the sink, oversized thrift store men’s sweaters are freely swapped between all six of them, and they have the life and the home they’ve always wanted.
The floor creaks and one corner of the table is propped up with a copy of Robinson Crusoe (a long-standing least favourite of them all). The second bedroom, where the wooden window-frames have warped shut in the damp, has futons, but in the first they push two sofas together to make a reading nest. They alternate sleeping between the two rooms as privacy and icy draughts from the single-glazed windows require, and throw pillows at each other for touching legs with icy feet.
On Sunday mornings the sun stretches in to the big bedroom and they spend the morning sprawled like lazy cats across the sofa bed and reading, all six of them. Too many elbows, too many knees between the six of them, but never too many books. They would never leave books lying across the floor willingly of course, but here there simply isn’t the space, and the dog-eared corners of all the second-hand volumes they’ve salvaged from last-chance Oxfam sales pile over each other in Escheresque piles. Often, before he puts his glasses on in the morning, Klaus thinks to himself that the books’ overlapping corners look almost like gears criss-crossing the floor, and he can never help but smile at his sister across the pillows at the thought. And when he finds his glasses and his eyes clear over, the first thing he’ll always see is Violet smiling back, curled on her side with Sunny biting her thumb nestled underneath her elbow, safe and secure and allowed to be an actual child at last.
Then it will be breakfast, and Violet and Quigley will be stealing kisses beneath an upright vacuum cleaner in the broom closet and Sunny will be standing on a step-stool scrambling eggs while Isadora butters toast and Klaus and Duncan are tidying the table and balancing pots of jam and honey between all the stacks of books, and stacking more books on top of the creamer and the sugar-bowl because there’s nowhere better for books to go. And then they’ll all be squeezed around the table banging elbows and laughing and nibbling toast.
And then they’ll return to the bed-nest and then it will start raining and the tiny apartment will shake and creak as draughts slide under the doors as they nestle against each other with their books in their hands. Then they’ll take turns being the one who surrenders the warmth of their toes to get out bed and make the tea (or cinnamon spiked hot chocolate or horchata when it’s Sunny’s turn) and carry the tray of chipped little tea-cups up the perilous stairs to the bedroom as the wind howls.
And then whoever it is will balance the tray on one hand and turn to shut the door of the bed-nest room behind them. And when they do, those reading on the bed will be able to see the peeling hand-painted letters that spell out The Baudelaire-Quagmire Library- A Safe Place on the back of the ancient door as the sixth member of their family crawls back into bed with them with freezing feet and distributes tea.
And then all six of them will be looking at those shakily painted letters, and knowing they’re finally true, they’ll all begin to laugh, and to read.