#kitlington if you squint

[beatricebidelaire]

i still haven’t found what i’m looking for

featuring: Ellington Feint, Lemony Snicket, Kit Snicket

word count: ~1.4K

alt: ao3

written for the @fic4fic exchange for @conundrum-esoterica, hope you like this!  Based on the headcanon that Ellington Feint and Madame Lulu were the same person. This was plotted before season 2 came out and ignore the added plotline for Olivia

warning for atwq spoilers

Sometimes, an unexpected revelation of truth might cause your whole life to crumble, discovering that everything you had believe on to be a lie, everything you had try to help achieve was based on the wrong assumptions.

It felt like a never-ending free falling down a bottomless bit, it felt like everything was spiraling out of control – as if she’d ever had it under control at all, a small voice in the back of her head scoffed.  Her mind was too occupied on the free falling feeling to pay any attention to it.

Perhaps it was ironic that while she wasn’t literally falling, another person was. Someone she’d once placed all her hopes on, someone that had always been a faraway goal to achieve, someone whose memory she’d been clinging on. Ellington Feint watched, stricken and horrified as her father, Armstrong Feint – a.k.a Hangire –fell off the train and straight into the Bombinating Beast.

Someone was screaming.  It took her a while to realize it was herself.  A few feet away stood a thirteen year boy – or was he almost thirteen? – with a determined expression. The boy had promised to help her, and while she’d never been naïve enough to believe that he would always be on her side, she’d never thought it would end up like this, either.  She had never known what he was capable of.

She wondered if he’d ever known.

She wanted to look at him and see if he dared look her straight in the eyes now, but when she turned to him, his eyes were shut close.  Typical, she thought bitterly, biting down her lips with a mixture of grief and seething anger.

She stood there, listening to the Mitchums going on about perfect how their son was, how he would never break a law ever.  How they wouldn’t arrest him, and how they would arrest her.

That was when he spoke. “You’re letting a murderer go free.”

Their eyes met for a moment, and suddenly accusations were tumbling out her mouth, angry, hurt, and unstoppable. “You’re a murderer yourself. You’ve been tricking me since the night we met, in order to push me in the right direction. You knew all along, didn’t you? You knew Hangfire was my father.”

He reached out to grab the chains that bound her hand, and as his fingers grabbed around them, she felt as if he was grabbing her heart, gripping it so hard that she couldn’t keep on going anymore. “I hoped it wasn’t true,” he said finally.

He’d always called her mysterious and unfathomable, but at that moment, she thought that he was the unfathomable one, not her. She couldn’t comprehend who he really was behind the somber expression, couldn’t comprehend if there was a limit to what he was capable of if he thought it necessary. And if he’d suspected, she wondered, how long had he been planning such a calculated, ruthlessly efficient move?

Accusations and arguments and justifications flew back and forth between them, and then it was cut short as the Mitchums stepped in, handcuffs ready to arrest her. He made some protestations, but she could see his associates’ faces and how they disagreed with him.

At this point, a part of her really just wanted to go into the prison, because everything outside of it, everything she had been fighting for until right this moment was gone now.  And one of her only friends had just killed her father.

At this moment, maybe it didn’t make much of a difference, in or out of the prison.

She stumbled into the prison cell on the train as the door slammed behind her, and that was when Ellington Feint noticed there was another girl in the cell. Her features looked oddly familiar in the dim lights of the cell. Before Ellington could finish her thoughts about wondering who she reminded her of, the other girl extended a hand.

“Kit Snicket,” she introduced herself, and Ellington felt like everything clicked and shattered all at once.

She and Kit Snicket didn’t stay in each other’s company for long, as Kit had other missions to attend to back in the city.  But during this time, Ellington did get some more intel about the organization that was VFD. Every time Kit explained a special training lesson of VFD, Ellington still inevitably thought “so that’s how Snicket learned to kill, was it?” even if the thought wasn’t completely logical, because things like deciphering codes from a letter certainly felt very different from pushing someone into a beast’s belly.

She had long since accepted that yes, her father had been a villain who’d done many terrible things, but did that justify his murder?

Sometimes she wondered would Kit Snicket have done the same thing as her brother, or would she have chosen a different route?  Ellington would like to think that Kit wouldn’t, but she could never be sure.

However, every other day spent with Kit was the gradual realization that Kit was not only clever and competent, but also usually very determined, and didn’t let anything stand in the way of the mission she wanted to achieve. She had morals, clearly, but just as clear was that those morals weren’t exactly the same as what the society considered as morals most people followed.

Kit Snicket was very sure in what she believed as necessary, and wouldn’t hesitate to do it.  Seeing her like that, though, only made Ellington even more unsure of what she herself believed in.  Sometimes, late in the night where when the other girl already fell asleep, Ellington was wide awake, thinking about the person right beside her. It was a feeling mixed with admiration, envy, jealousy and intimidation for her confidence and determination and knowing what her goals were. Some nights Kit felt like everything Ellington hoped herself to be and everything she wanted to run away from and everything she wanted to stay close together until the end of days. Some nights all those thoughts morphed together into a desperate desire to run away together with Kit to some faraway land where no one or no organization would ever find them again.

They didn’t, of course, run away together.

The “run away with me” ultimately got stuck in her throat as they parted ways with a firm goodbye handshake. Kit’s handshake was like Kit herself, sure and confident, as if she knew always knew what she was going to do next.  

And as Kit turned away and boarded the train, Ellington suddenly felt the last piece of certainty in her life just left forever.

Without Kit, she felt more lost than ever now, and even less sure of what were the rights and wrongs to believe in than before.  Sometimes she thought maybe she should just let other people make these decisions for her from now on, if she no longer trusted herself on moral judgments. Perhaps this was escaping responsibility, but who was to say which people deserved to have responsibilities anyway?

For a few years she travelled alone, collecting information on the way just in case it might be useful later.  She tried helping people, regardless what her younger self would think of that person’s quest worth helping. Was this doing good for the world? She wasn’t sure. She was never really sure of anything now.  But the more she did it, the easier to pretend that it was.  Deep down, she knew this was just a way of distracting herself from her haunted past, to ignore it and maybe one day she would successfully forget it, too. It was a way to pretend that maybe she was actually a good person, that this was her set of morals she longed to have. It was a lie, of course, but it got easier to believe over time, like all lies people told themselves.

After a while, she decided to invent a new identity for herself, a way to help others with the information she collected.  After all, having a mask to hide behind from made all the pretending easier.  A few crystal balls in a store gave her all the inspiration she needed.

She made necessary preparations, fancy setups in a carnival tent, all ready to dive into her new identity, of a way to pretense she wondered briefly if she would ever come back from.

Once upon a time, Ellington Feint knew who she was.