A/N: This was written for LiveJournal's 5 nevers community. The events in this fic occur after the thirteenth volume and are complete speculations and bending of canon.

Karmic

i. going down is very hard work

In the middle of June, when all the flowers are blooming and dying and perpetuating, and she is feeling sickened, she goes down—

Down the street and does not look back. Does not toss her head and smile and laugh (as her friends do) and instead, there is a suspicion rising in her eyes. Her legs are stick and thin, and her hands are shaking. And she is anemic, and like all the beginning-of-summers go, Sunny walks.

Slow and careful.

And meets him at the end.

"I thought you would come," she smiles: that (in)famous Baudelaire smile. From her father, from her grandfather, and so on and so forth.

And this is when her throat chokes up, and his fingers come (papery, veiny, way too tangled). And soon, she's caught in this too-tight, too-cruel (& real) embrace.

-x-

One day, her tooth is all stained and chipped.

One day, the copper's been oxidized. And there's nothing left. And that's what she's always wanted (she tells herself).

ii. blue, twisted, gnarled and old—the corpse arrives on New Year's Eve

Sometimes, she thinks it is karma or something equally implausible, insalubrious, in-in everything.

He comes at night, like a devil creeping through the silk (one step at a time) and snatches her around the neck. Strangled, or nearly so, she hitches up her skirts and lets his hands fall over. Icy and sharp, they feel like daggers. Like the pain his nails inflict, when digging into her arm.

And the strand scatter, and the threads de-entwine, and they are left bare and vulnerable.

Sunny rushes to cover her chest, exposed and white—the excoriated kill.

"I—I" Sunny begins, and stops because now he has said:

"Beatrice."

Like a whip crashing through the air, like a thousand whistles going off all at once. The silence is broken, and she's left in fragments.

Beatrice for mother, for all that she stood, for all that is left.

iii. I thought you had died

"I…I thought you died, back on that island years ago. I was just a kid, remember? You used call me 'that stupid baby'. And I hated you. We all did."

Olaf laughs, thinks she is funny. (And pretty and naïve and stupid too.) "The world is always changing. And people change along with it. Maybe I've changed."

He suggests.

And she blushes. Crimson, virulent, the harsh shade spreading across her face like a far-reaching, hysterical plague.

And maybe you haven't, she thinks but does not say. Does not let her thoughts break loose in a fusillade. Instead, Sunny is sunny—bright and charming.

And oh—

Oh, how the years have gone by. Sped past her, no glances flickering back. Oh, how she thought she knew love. Love is not, is perfidious, is a chameleon, a devil in disguise.

Oh.

iv. such a joker, monsieur; what is that knife pointed here?

Her head's all messed up and broken. The skull's fractured and rotten. And her mind is a tunnel, pouring out into a flask.

Violet and Olaf: Violent and Old.

Complement and completion, Sunny reflects on what has happened. And how something is so wrong and terrible but so right and justifiable. Not like her, not like her sister.

Who's always been the pretty one. With singed, hurting eyes and a heart too full. And Sunny, too young to have remembered. But I remember.

"Nothing," she says. And smiles brightly back, flashing brilliant her sweet, indulging side.

"Oh?" and he asks, perplexed—amused, thinking she's fantasizing just about him.

"So how is Violet doing these days?"

And for a second, Sunny swears there is a stream of surprise and off-guarded pain contorting his face. Ugly, rictus, dementia agglomerated all in one. The hideous path to the core.

"Good."

v. you didn't really die, and I didn't really survive

"I'm thinking of marrying him," she declares, all of a sudden and dangerous too.

Klaus looks up but does not comment, only laughs (that's a good one), as if caught in some nerdy nostalgia.

But Violet shrieks and glares and dares Sunny to retort her anger back. And for once in her life, Sunny couldn't care less.

The past is gone and done, and she is going to marry him. Him, the Enemy, the Once Forgotten Never Forgiven Man.

-x-

There is a postcard from Sunny some months later. And her and Olaf are standing waving from the flat surface, and in the background, there's that long-dead island resurrected.

"Where is that?" Beatrice asks (the live, not dead one does).

Violet smiles and kisses her new baby-sister, thankful that she doesn't remember.

"Nowhere."