#how soon am i gonna regret trying to write kit? we'll see

[gellavonhamster]

a room for one night

gen || R the Duchess of Winnipeg, Lemony Snicket, Bertrand Baudelaire, Kit Snicket || ships mentioned and/or implied: R/Beatrice, Lemony/Beatrice, Bertrand/Beatrice, Kit/Beatrice, Bertrand/Lemony || pre-canon 

ao3 link eng  || ao3 link rus

inspired by @beatricebidelaire‘s post that I can’t find now (tumblr search function, am I right?) but the idea was the following: two volunteers, the “there was only one bed” trope, but all they do at night is talk about Beatrice

“Should I sleep on the floor after all, perhaps? Lemony suggested.

R gave him a bewildered look. “I feel like we’ve slept in the same bed before often enough for you not to worry about propriety, haven’t we?”

“That’s not what I meant,” Lemony raised the edge of a dull bed sheet covered in light blue polka dots, and tapped on the base of the bed. “I meant the beer crates.”  

They checked in the hostel early in the morning, left their belongings, and went out to explore the surroundings – not only and not so much out of tourist curiosity as to find the restaurant where they would have to spy on a couple of persons of interest to VFD tomorrow, select the table it would be the most convenient to spy from, and evaluate the escape routes just in case. After that they simply had to go to a café for root beer floats, and then they made the mistake of visiting a museum whose size they severely underestimated. The room had been checked for wiretapping and other unpleasant surprises of that sort earlier by another volunteer who was passing through the town but could not stay for long and perform the task that was ultimately assigned to Lemony and R. What that volunteer had not mentioned in their report was that the room had a sloped ceiling, so low in places that it was possible to bump one’s head by accident, as well as that the bed was essentially a mattress placed upon several beer crates put together. Though they were not happy about the ceiling, the bed, which they had a good look at only in the evening as they were preparing for sleep, only made them laugh.    

“Ah, that’s what you’re talking about. Come on, if they keep this bed in a double room, it means it won’t collapse under anyone. And I assume that many have tried…”  

“Your Grace.”

“I mean, this is a double room…”

“Your Grace,” Lemony repeated, shaking his head. Despite his deliberately disapproving voice, he was smiling. “Sometimes I cannot believe you belong to the cream of society.”  

“That’s because you do not spend enough time among all that cream. It is sour at best,” R climbed under the blanket. Her legs were aching a little after wandering the town and the museum, and the dubious bed felt like a paradisiacal cloud to her. “Hey, what’s with the face? Are you all right?”  

“Yes. No,” Lemony hesitated. “May I ask you something?”

R tensed up.

“Go ahead,” she consented. She had suspicions regarding what was bothering her friend, and she was not sure she wanted to talk about that.

“Do you hate me?”

R reached out and touched his forehead. Lemony frowned.

“What are you doing?”

Stalling for time, she thought, but what she said out loud, naturally, was a whole different thing.

“Checking if you have fever, since you seem to be raving.”  

“R, I am being serious,” Lemony pushed her hand away softly. Both of them were lying on their sides, face to face, and in the mellow light of the night lamp Ramona could see it clearly that he was talking completely seriously indeed – she could read it in his eyes and on his lips. “I am not asking you for politeness; I am asking for an honest answer. If my company is oppressive to you, I will get a separate room, and tomorrow we can organize work so that our paths would cross as seldom as possible.”

Ramona rolled her eyes.

“Fine,” she spoke. “You want honesty? Here’s your honesty. No, I do not hate you. I love you, you fool,” and she wasn’t lying, wasn’t trying to spare his feelings. Lemony was her best friend from their very childhood. Despite his peculiar personality, it was easy for her to love him – it was a genuine, virtually familial attachment that was not complicated by anything superfluous.

“And Beatrice?”

He was watching her so intently and sadly that she couldn’t bear it and closed her eyes. She was silent. He kept waiting.

“I love her too,” she said finally. If her love for Lemony was simple and straightforward, then her love for Beatrice was disconcerting, at times uplifting, at times stupefying, and only one thing was clear: while there was friendship in it (in R’s opinion, no real love was possible without friendship at all), there was certainly nothing familial about it. “As if you do not know that.”  

“I do,” Lemony confirmed. She opened her eyes again and looked at him. Of course he knew everything and even more. In the area of romantic feelings towards Beatrice Baudelaire he was no less of an expert than she.

R sighed.

“You know I would not come between you, now that she has finally made up her mind and chosen you,” she said firmly, to him and to that small nasty part of her soul that kept wondering why Lemony Snicket should get what she had been dreaming of. “I cherish both of you too much. That may come as a shock to you, but crushes come and go,” shit, she promised to be honest, but when one is not completely sure if what one says is true, that does not count as a lie, does it? “But friends like the two of you are hard to come by. Are you going to ask me if I am happy for you? No, I am not happy that the girl I liked chose you,” that was a good word, ‘like’, it made everything less significant. “But I am happy that the two of my closest friends are together, and doing fine. Well, as fine as it can be for the most dramatic people I know.”      

“Hmm,” was all that Lemony said. He covered her hand with his. “I believe that you wouldn’t lie to me, and I want you to know that I am sincerely sorry that it all turned out like this. If I can do anything for you…”  

“You can,” R propped herself up on one elbow. She was eager to be done with this conversation as soon as possible. The more they discussed that, the more she thought about Beatrice, and so the more difficult it was to let her go. And she had already decided that she would let her go – it could not go one like this anymore. She deserved better. All of them deserved better. Maybe Lemony and Beatrice enjoyed drama, but she preferred comedy. “Stop trying to set me up with every girl we meet that I say is cute. Or at least stop using literary quotes for that purpose, I am begging you.”

Now it was Lemony’s turn to roll his eyes.

“Ramona, please, I’ve already apologized…”

“We still have to face that receptionist in the morning, you know.”

“What’s wrong with quotes?”

“They perplex normal people. Some things exist for VFD internal use only,” R put her head on the pillow again and winked at him. “Now let us go to sleep already, shall we?” 

***

“Do you think I should cut my hair?” Kit asked.

Bertrand looked up from the book, the preface to which was supposed to contain an encrypted message, and shifted his gaze to his friend. She was combing her hair by a rather dirty oval mirror. Usually Kit put her hair in a bun or a ponytail, and occasionally Bertrand (and many other people, in all likelihood) forgot how long and voluminous it was – a heavy brown waterfall.  

“If you are tired of your current hairstyle, then by all means you should,” he observed. “What is important is your own opinion on that.”

“I see. I don’t even know what I expected,” Kit put the comb down on the only nightstand present in the sparsely furnished motel room, and started plaiting her hair for the night. “Bertrand and his famed diplomacy…”  

Bertrand put the book aside.

“We can do without diplomacy,” he said in a tired voice, took his glasses off and rubbed the bridge of his nose. He and Kit had driven for four hours today, and tomorrow they had to drive as much. The heat was unimaginable, the air conditioner in the taxi kept acting up, they had already eaten all the food they had with them, and the only kind of food one could come by in that part of the Hinterlands were crappy hot dogs and candy sold at gas stations. “I remember Olaf used to shower your hair with compliments all the time, and I get your wish to do something to spite him, but if you’re going to cut it every time the two of you split up, you’ll go broke splurging on hairdresser’s services.”  

“This is not ‘every’ time,” Kit threw her plait over her shoulder. “There will be no next time. And that has nothing to do with him. As to hairdressers, I can cut my own hair just fine. Now, if you like – I got scissors in my bag…”  

“I think you should get some sleep and think about this in the morning.”

The bed creaked when Kit climbed onto her half of it. As the old guy at the reception explained to them, there were no single rooms in the motel. “You can have one room with no trouble,” he told them in a conspiratorial voice. “Not a soul for many miles around! No one will know.” That amused them: it wasn’t often that they got mistaken for a couple. Bertrand was under the impression that the two of them, in their glasses of the same shape and even often with a similar facial expression, must rather resemble relatives – if not siblings, then cousins. “Easy, B,” he heard Jacques Snicket’s voice in his head. “This is my twin sister, not yours.” Bertrand grinned.  

“Olaf isn’t the only one who likes your hair, you know,” he pointed out. “For example, Beatrice said that they are, and I quote, ‘gorgeous’. She’s even a little bit jealous.”  

“Is that so?” Kit said. It was as if something in her face changed when he mentioned Beatrice, but that might have also been just a trick of the light in the dusk – the floor lamp by the bed, the nervously blinking neon sign outside. “I see you and her have grown quite close lately.”  

“We are working on a new production together.”

Kit was right, of course. He and Beatrice had been working at the same theatre for years, but they only really bonded lately, when the actor who was to play her lover had to leave on VFD business and his part in the play was given to Bertrand. Frankly speaking, he didn’t like Beatrice much until recently. He used to think her too loud and careless and pretentious, yet now the closer they got, the more he became convinced it was just another role that Beatrice used to protect her real self from fake friends, bootlickers, and the press. There was something extremely flattering in being allowed behind that façade, allowed to see the less kempt but at the same time more cosy space that it was hiding. Bertrand hoped to justify her confidence and not to lose her friendship – which was precisely why he knew well that at a certain point, they have to cease growing closer to each other.      

“I am not saying anything of that sort,” Kit remarked. “It is logical that the actors playing a pair of sweethearts spend a lot of time together – it is necessary to practice… and so on.”  

Bertrand turned off the floor lamp. It crossed his mind immediately that he shouldn’t have done that at that moment. It might have looked as if he didn’t want Kit to see his face or, for instance, to notice he was blushing. Not that he was actually blushing, of course. ��    

“Don’t worry,” he said. “Your brother’s relationship is under no threat. I am not the kind of person who could do that.” He almost added “Not to him”, but stopped short. He wanted to believe that he was not the type to ruin someone else’s happiness in any case, but there was something especially important in not ruining Lemony Snicket’s happiness. For a long time, their interaction used to come down to the debates of varying degree of seriousness, the non-committal (at least at first sight) discussions at the get-togethers, and Bertrand’s sincere frustration that Snicket seemed to dislike him. It was only lately that a careful friendship had come into being between them. When Bertrand tried to analyze that friendship, he ended up overwhelmed with the same feeling of awkwardness that resulted from his attempts to analyze his growing closeness with Beatrice, so he just allowed that friendship to grow, trying not to think of anything too hard. Anything but one thing: Lemony Snicket certainly was on the list of people he never ever wanted to cause any pain.        

“I know,” Kit replied. He couldn’t see her face: he was lying on his back, and she was on her side. But he could guess that she was smiling, and that her smile was far from being carefree. He couldn’t guess why, and he wasn’t sure he should. “Have you set the alarm?”  

“For six, as agreed. Will you be able to drive at that unearthly hour?”  

“You insult me,” now she must have been smiling from the bottom of her heart. “I could have driven all night without stopping for sleep. We’re in this doghole solely because I had pity on you, B. Appreciate it.”  

“I do appreciate,” he turned over to his side too. The thin curtains provided no protection from the handfuls of pink and green light that the neon sign was throwing at their window. Bertrand could make out the stripes on Kit’s pyjamas and the thick plait on her pillow, reminiscent of one of Monty’s snakes in the twilight. He remembered Kit’s words about the scissors in the bag. “So, have you changed your mind about cutting your hair?”    

“I have,” she answered, and he seemed to hear something strange in her voice and didn’t wish her good night, because he didn’t know what she, in turn, could hear in his.