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"Ha! I see a gray hair!"
"People very rarely go gray in their teens, Kit," said Jacques without looking.
"Clearly, you're the exception!" Kit grinned.
Lemony walked faster to catch up with them. "You have gray hairs?"
Jacques sighed. "I do not have gray hairs. My hair looked gray in the shadow for a second, and now our dear sister finds the prospect of me going gray before I'm fourteen very funny."
Lemony considered this. "Well...it would be."
"You'd look very distinguished," Kit was nearly failing to hold in her laughter.
"A word which here means-" Lemony managed before he and Kit lost control entirely and both of them burst out laughing.
Jacques rolled his eyes. "If I'm going gray, then so are you, Kit. We're the same age."
"No we're not," Kit objected. "You're older than me." A glint in her eye. "Obviously it makes sense for you to get gray hairs before I do."
"Eighteen minutes, Kit-"
Lemony grinned.
Jacques and Kit stood at the bus stop, waiting for Lemony to catch up with them, as they usually did. He was shorter and smaller than they were, and let them know very thoroughly how sick he was of being the youngest and that he could not wait until he was grown up and tall. In the meanwhile, they were waiting for the bus.
"So how was your game last night?" Jacques asked.
"Great." Kit grinned. "I won."
"How many times?"
"All of them."
Lemony finally arrived, not looking very pleased. "Can't you walk slower?"
"We were walking slower," Kit said before Lemony could answer. "You weren't walking fast enough."
"I was just asking Kit about the game you played last night," Jacques said quickly, well-practiced at defusing his siblings' arguments before they started. "How was it?"
Lemony scowled and muttered something Jacques couldn't make out.
"What?" he asked.
"I said it was awful. I lost every time we played." He kicked a pebble on the ground. "I hate Parcheesi. It's inane."
Jacques had a similar opinion to his brother's, which was why he hadn't joined in the game, but he didn't say that. Instead he said, "Maybe now that you've played a few times you'll be better next time you play."
"I won't be. I always lose at games. Whenever I play cards with anyone I lose too. I don't like games."
"Well, Lem," Kit began, "if it makes you feel any better I think Jacques' hearing is going."
They both turned to face her. "What?" they both said.
"You didn't hear Lemony at first," she pointed out.
"I didn't hear him because he was mumbling! I heard him when he actually spoke clearly! I heard everything he said!" But Jacques, despite his best efforts and training, couldn't keep a small smile from creeping over his lips.
"Maybe your hearing is going because you're so much older than us," Lemony suggested, lips twitching.
"Not you too!" Jacques threw his hands theatrically up in the air in a dramatic display of exasperation. (Kit and Lemony weren't the only ones who could be dramatic all the time.) "I'm barely four years older than you! And Kit and I are the same age!"
"You're older than me," Kit pointed out.
"By eighteen minutes. In eighteen minutes you'll be the exact same age I am now."
"But you'll be eighteen minutes older."
It was probably eighteen minutes, anyway. It might have been eight minutes. Or eighty. Jacques couldn't remember exactly. He thought he remembered being told that he and Kit were eighteen minutes apart, but he wasn't sure.
He'd asked his father, hadn't he? And his father had had brown hair that was turning gray....no, it couldn't have been gray. His father wasn't that old. He'd probably just seen the shadows on his father's hair that made it look gray for an instant, just like the trick of the light on his own hair that had started this whole joke. How old had his father been, anyway? Not that old, surely. But, although it didn't happen in children, it was said that great stress or worry could turn hair gray...
He shook the thoughts out of his head. This was not the time to dwell on such things.
"So," he said, "if I'm so much older than you that I can't hear very well, that means I can't hear you while you're talking."
"What?" Kit said.
"You have a cut?" Jacques said. "Oh dear. Make sure you look at it as soon as you can. You did very well in first aid."
"What?" Kit said again, confounded.
But Lemony smiled, catching on. "Braid?" he asked. "I've never braided anything. I've never seen Kit braid her hair, why do you ask?" This was a game he liked, it seemed, at least so far.
"A task?" Jacques asked. "What task have we been assigned to do?"
Kit groaned. "This is inane."
Lemony came back from his apprenticeship haunted. He had shadows under his eyes that didn't go away no matter how much he slept - no, no matter how much time he spent in his room, because judging by the endless click-clack of typewriter keys he was not getting much sleep. He flinched at shadows. He avoided any conversation if he could help it, drifting through the halls like a shadow. He shuddered at the sound of splashing, of buzzing, of swallowing, of train whistles. He picked at his food and never went out in the sun. And, no matter how many times Jacques told him that what had happened to Kit wasn't his fault, he would not breathe a word on how his apprenticeship had been. All Jacques had were the tidbits he knew from Monty and Widdershins and Josephine, and it wasn't nearly enough.
"I'm writing about my apprenticeship," Lemony confided in him once, which was progress. "About everything that happened in Stain'd-by-the-Sea." This explained all the typing, at least, although he wished Lemony would take a break to sleep a lot more often than he was.
"And will you let me read it?" Jacques pressed.
Lemony didn't answer.
Jacques hesitated, and took a gamble. "That's if I even can read it," he said.
Lemony looked surprised. "Why wouldn't you be able to?"
"Well, you know," Jacques said with a straight face. "I'm so much older than you, I have a hard time reading things. I can't see the words clearly. I might need you to print them extra large so I can read it."
For the first time in weeks, Lemony smiled.
The night of the opera, Jacques saw Kit once, and Lemony not at all.
"Be careful," he said.
"I will," she promised, serious for once, but that meant nothing with volunteers.
"Please..." He didn't know what to say, or how to say it. So he trailed off in silence.
Kit tried to smile. "I'll manage. I move fast. After all, I'm a lot younger and spryer than you."
Now is not the time, he thought, but his heart was ever so slightly lighter, and he managed a deadpan "Ha ha."
"I can't believe Lemony's marrying Beatrice," Kit said, breaking the contemplative silence. "Now I feel old."
"First time I've ever heard you say that," Jacques noted.
Kit shrugged. "I can say you're old, too. Our baby brother's getting married, that must make us old, right?"
Jacques chuckled.
He would never say it, but he felt similarly to Kit. His little brother, a man now, soon to be a husband.
And his sister, too. "Never mind Lemony," he said. "What's this I hear about you and a certain Denouement?"
Kit rolled her eyes and playfully swatted at him, but her blush gave her away.
When the news came about Lemony, Jacques thought the world must have stopped. Everything seemed frozen. And even when time started moving again, it did so slowly, everything moving like they were surrounded by syrup. All color had been leached out of everything, and the air was ice.
Jacques had once read a book about grief. How to handle grief was helpful when you were a volunteer.
Or so he'd thought. It was useless now.
But one part for some reason kept floating to the top of his memory. It had mentioned that parents often took losses of children much harder than vice versa. Because children losing parents was the natural order of the world, although hopefully not young and suddenly. Everyone knew that one day, hopefully in the far future, their parents would die.
But parents outliving their children wasn't natural. Children weren't supposed to die before their parents did. Children weren't supposed to die.
We didn't die, Jacques thought, but his parents had never seen them again.
Lemony was - gone - and Jacques wasn't his father, Jacques was his older brother, but he and Kit had raised Lemony as much as the organization had. Now he was gone.
Jacques felt old.
Fifteen years later Jacques was in the Village of Fowl Devotees, having finally succeeded in tracking down Beatrice and Bertrand's children.
He was not expecting to be mistaken for Olaf.
The sight of the Baudelaires alive and well were an immense relief, and he nearly wept right there before the town. A man and woman who were very obviously Olaf and Esme - Olaf had always been ridiculously proud of his disguises - had him arrested and brought to the jail.
Jacques was not expecting to make it out. Firestarters had never been kind to firefighters who fell into their hands, as Olaf's recent string of murders attested to. He'd just never thought that one day he'd be one of them. Nobody did, he supposed. But now he was.
Olaf walked slowly down the line of cells, taunting him. He always had liked to make a scene. Jacques did his best not to register what he was saying.
He hadn't been fast enough, he thought. He'd moved too slowly, and they'd caught him. He had forgotten the long, contradictory list of rules that governed this village, and "know your territory" was a rule every volunteer knew. He hadn't heard the sounds of people pursuing him until they were far too close. He hadn't spoken, hadn't explained the truth before they cut him off; he hadn't thought fast enough, his wits had not been quick enough.
He saw his brother's and sister's faces in his mind's eye, and he laughed, suddenly, a thrill of amusement within him, not even seeing the surprised, angry confusion on Olaf's face. I really am getting too old for this.