Series of Unfortunate Events One-shots, What-ifs, and Drabbles

Love

Violet had taken her siblings to the graveyard where their parents were buried. They wore black for the occasion. Even Beatrice, who had never known the Baudelaire parents, dressed in black to see the grave of her namesake and her namesake's husband.

Violet had the foresight to bring a picnic and spread out the blanket in front of the grave. She put down the basket. She sat down and motioned for her siblings and her young charge to do the same. Beatrice II crawled into Violet's lap and started playing with her hair. Sunny and Klaus sat next to Violet, each putting a hand  on her shoulder, sensing her agitation. The Baudelaire plot was sizeable, as the family was quite wealthy, but the joint headstone of Bertrand and Beatrice Baudelaire was dusty and covered with plant growth. Tenderly, almost reverently, Violet cleared their parents' headstone of dirt and plants, and Klaus began to cry. Sunny traced the inscription on the tombstone with her finger and read it aloud. "Life is not forever. Love is." This was enough to make the young girl cry as well.

"I loved them so much," Violet cried, suddenly. She dissolved into tears and slung an arm around each of her siblings. "And I love you." Klaus and Sunny leaned into their sister, and Beatrice II clung to Violet's dress.

"Do you remember when we tried to make them breakfast in bed," Klaus recalled, "and we didn't know how to make anything but toast?"

His question brought back so many memories. Not just to the morning in question, but to the last time they had recalled that faraway morning, as they clung to each other in  Count Olaf's house. But they had since sat at his grave. Violet gave a watery smile. "And we burned the toast," she finished.

"And Mother and Father came downstairs, and they thought we had set a fire," Sunny said, beginning to smile as well, "and when they saw our burnt toast, they made us all pancakes."

Violet passed out the food that she and Sunny had made together- really, it was mostly Sunny- and as they ate, the three older Baudelaires smiling through their tears, they told Beatrice II stories about their parents, everything they could remember- about their mother's favorite reading nook; about the way their father's eyes crinkled when he laughed; about how, above all, they loved each other. 

Klaus took a poem he had written out of his pocket and put it on his parents' grave. Violet laid a bouquet of flowers she'd gathered next to the poem. Sunny put an assortment of her favorite rocks and arranged them, artfully, around the poem and the flowers. Beatrice II asked for a pencil and a piece of paper, which Klaus produced from one of his pockets and gave to her. She worked for several minutes, the other Baudelaires watching her, and showed them her rendition of a family portrait. Violet could see that Beatrice had made great pains to show Klaus's glasses as crooked, as they were when he was most comfortable, and had drawn Sunny's large, sharp teeth, and had put a bow- most likely meant to represent a ribbon- in Violet's hair, and Beatrice's recreation of herself was in the center of the portrait. Then she put the picture next to her guardian's offerings on the Baudelaire parents' grave.

All four Baudelaires embraced.