The Baudelaires - Blog Posts
Esmé: *starts trying to get into Olaf's pants*
Me with my 6 year old cousin: *Puts hands over her eyes* Look away! Look away!
Post on Tumblr: The elevator of success is out of order. You'll have to use the stairs...
Me: How well did that work out for the Baudelaires?
Look away.. Look awaaayy
I wanted to try out a very stylized style! It was fun to not have to worry about proper portions and stuff
beatrice 6 + 10 thx!
When Violet is born, she’s so perfect and fragile that Beatrice is petrified of her. How can she have been responsible for this soft, unblemished little creature? This creature that needs her - really needs her. And grows up to be so sweet and solemn and clever. Violet doesn’t care what her classmates think of her. This trait amazes Beatrice, she’s enthralled with it. Violet is happy to sit with her mother in the library and look at blueprints quietly for hours, grinning at her when Beatrice brings her green tea. Violet makes her bold enough to start a family.
Klaus is more emotional and excitable, and a grizzlier baby, too. He won’t feed as easily as Violet did, but Beatrice relishes the banality of the challenge. The mundanity of these sleepless nights, the safety of a grumpy baby, it comforts her. Bertrand is better at settling Klaus than she is, and for once, that doesn’t feel like inadequacy. He needs glasses by the time he’s four and he’s got so much to say. Her little conversationalist.
Sunny is still so new, happy and gummy and teething. Surprisingly cheerful, for a teething baby. She doesn’t whine, just chomps on Beatrice’s finger. Rejects the baby food Beatrice lovingly made for her elder two but adores the wooden teething peg that Bertrand whittles her. She crawls so fast that her mother has to skitter across the carpet to keep up with her before the crazy little perfect angel tumbles down the staircase. She’s still so afraid for her children. She never stopped being afraid for them.
The day Beatrice dies, she sent the three of them to the beach. They’ve always been good at entertaining themselves. She needed them out of the house because she’s so scared for them, and old associates visited, didn’t stay long. She’s waiting for them to return, swaning around upstairs, when Olaf slips in through the unlocked front door. He doesn’t make a sound as he pours out lighter fluid, fumbles with his box of matches. If Beatrice had seen it, she would have been impressed at how quiet this loud, brash man, this boy of hers, could manage to be. Given the right motivation.
She only sees him later, the figure of him, while she’s struggling in the drapery. The smoke is thick, but his tall silhouette is unmistakable. How rude of him, not to even come to say hello, before he did this, finally. It outrages her, the indecency of it. Does the past mean nothing to him? Could he not have throttled her to death, to make it personal? Right for them, befitting of their history. Olaf sets fires when he’s angry with people who have hurt him. Beatrice isn’t just people, is she?
Then everything is dimmer and easier, and breathing seems to matter less.