Disclaimer: Fox logos, the LXG trademarks and characters do not belong to me. I make no profit from this venture.
Author's Notes: If anyone notices technological discrepancies in this, it is because I've set this firmly in the steam punk genre.
This follows on from Shards, so some references may not make much sense to brand new readers, but this is supposed to be accessible to all.
It's been a while. A long while. Let's fix that – I hate leaving things unfinished.
Blood and Water
Chapter One: I am your opus
It begins with a death.
Not the hack of the knife across the throat; metal itching across bone; slipping as the blood bubbles; rutting on the raw edges of the meat; the cartilage crunching and splintering with a wet suck.
Not the blister of the flame; the scorch of the skin; the tightness of the flesh crisping, peeling, falling away; the lungs flaming, boiling with each breath; eyes crying hot blood, as the veins shrivel tightly around the muscle.
Instead, the inhalation of liquid; foamy as the surf, the teeth biting against this invasion with the skull's grin; chomping in the mouth, the water seeping, slipping into the throat with the forceful murky breath of liquid, burning as it slides hotly across the trachea, churning in the lungs with the futile boil of the last breath.
The struggle, the immersed victory of that black water; all serving as a prelude to the damp, rich soil beneath his feet.
The edges crumbling on themselves, scattering to cover the coffin; a rain of soil that forms an eiderdown to smother the coffin: small, pale wood, so small it is almost a perfect hexagon.
And the salt sweetness of the air; damp, and cloying, mixed with the screams of the gulls swimming overhead and the humidity of fish and vinegar in the mouth, all this wheeling in the fog around him as the priest takes his point of departure from St Paul and the passage on redemption through the blood.
And floating there, opposite him, white burning through the December darkness crawling up from the grave, is Skinner's face; closed in the half-light.
Sawyer has no words that will make this right, nothing that will expel the water from lungs and heat the blood. No holy grail to pour into small lips, blue from the cold. And like the others the fierce spite of weakness bites him in the cold morning air.
And Skinner; supported by the salt-water ties of the League who stand around him as blurs of empathy, swirls coldly in the stilled heartbeat of this: his home. The remote island of Faihal where the only thing Sawyer hears breathing is the sea.
And the only thing open is the grave.
In the clearing the water moves quickly, falling with the sharp shatter. In the air above him, moving with the sweet-sap smell crawling in his nose, the leaves breathe, in and out, in and out.
And behind all of this, the cold, fresh smell, salting his throat, his eyes; ice stretches across the wind, moving from the bay in dead, drifting circles of bone-bleached flakes, dry as the sea.
"It must hurt."
Nemo's voice from behind; deep and resonant in the hush of the breathing clearing.
Skinner has no choice but to hear him. It is too silent not to.
"What must hurt?"
He avoids eye contact, even though Nemo—creator of evasion and ambiguities—seeks it. To look into those eyes would be to admit it—that; yes, it hurts; it hurts more than I think you could imagine. Perhaps only Alan would understand this hollow feeling—this hole, an abomination of blackness that opens up when a child dies.
He doesn't say this—his voice has stopped, bruised from the effort of those three words, and yet Nemo pulls no punches.
"Death, especially when it comes so early, so unexpectedly seems unfathomable. You've lost the piece of immortality that your nephew embodied. When he died, part of you died with him. The death of any child hurts more than words can express."
And it does; with the throb of a raw wound. Something indefinable has been cut out of him. He feels the pain in his throat; the clawing of salty tears, the clout of a scream beating silently to the fist of his heart.
"This will not help." Nemo states, those eyes blazing across the paint on Skinner's face. "To come here; to wallow in this—this is not the way to recovery."
Skinner turns to him. He doesn't know what's on his face, but whatever Nemo sees there is enough to create a change; a click of understanding.
"They say he died here y'know."
The words are out before he has given them permission, loud and with a deep anger behind them, and if he thinks anything it is: no—stopstop.
Nemo continues watching, impassively, and it is this, more than anything that lets Skinner continue, rage, perhaps, if not disappearing then at least subsiding.
"I'm looking with the wrong eyes for this job—but—" A gesture towards the weir.
Nemo's eyes follow his hand out to the moving water and for a while they continue moving, skimming along the water. Then he moves out, following the stream, his hands in the water.
"What do you see here?" he asks Skinner.
"It's-wrong," he replies, hoping that—
"Perhaps: there are no stones, no currents; nothing to explain the fall fully."
"And no footprints—no tracks. Where is the evidence?"
Skinner looks at him and strains to see the same deep trickle of suspicion behind Nemo's eyes —darker than the water in the weir and just as murky. He can almost hear it in his voice when he asks:
"This is why you came back; because something is wrong here?"
"He was a careful child!"
The same bitter anger is back. Nemo can see it in the twist in Skinner's frame, in the hands that seem to want to clench, not around the back of the chair, but instead around Jekyll's throat.
"I'm not suggesting he wasn't, Skinner, but a child can slip and drown in an inch of water if they land properly!"
Nemo watches Skinner jerk violently as if the words are made flesh—the pain physiological.
"There are no tracks! There are no stones!" Skinner's mouth is barely breathing around the words, "You can ask Nemo—he didn't drown—he was murdered!"
There is a stillness in the room as if the breath has been lost completely; a vacuum of sound.
Nemo speaks, perhaps without knowing what he is saying.
"There was definitely more than we could see there—but murder, Skinner?" He sees Skinner's eyes, full of suspicion and hurt flick between him and Jekyll, the hands tighten on the back of the chair.
He is reminded of a joke shared once, Skinner teasing with the simple line: "You won't see me coming, you know." Perhaps, Nemo thinks, there is more in that statement than humour.
When he begins to speak again there is a controlled element to his voice; the hint of something suppressed.
"Every month my sister was paid a total of fifty pounds—a widow's pension. Her husband was killed a mining accident. The payment of the pension only happened if the child was still living with her." The voice rises slightly, the thing beneath the current stirs. "Doesn't that seem just the slightest bit odd to you?"
Jekyll tilts his head slightly and Nemo can hear the sigh in the words even before they are spoken.
"Generous, Skinner, not suspicious. But seeing as you're so insistent I'll agree to this—we'll look at it, if only to assure you that there was no murder here."
"Don't you pull that patronising shit with me Jekyll!"
"Goddammit Skinner—!"
The voices are louder, boiling over each other, and in them Nemo can hear the real threat of violence below the surface.
"YOU WILL BE SILENT!"
His ship, his crew will not be pulled apart again, and it is this though more than anything that is made clear when he speaks with the voice of a Dybbuk—that thing outside of himself that terrifies even these two into the uneasy silence of the room.
The words have stopped them, and Nemo knows he must fill the air with something more constructive.
"We will look into this—not to reassure ourselves, not to prove ourselves—but because this needs to be done." He states.
They are looking at him now with the intent not to look at each other, and if anything, this focussed attention makes him feel less solid, makes the intent he is holding feel like liquid. When he speaks once again, he feels something other than himself forming the words.
"We will do this properly gentlemen, we will do this well."
A pause.
"Now; where do we then begin?"
The room glistens with the smell of antiseptic.
Jekyll knows from the way the doors swing shut that they are oiled; from the way that the desk shines that it is oiled.
Everything is polite, professional and efficient; smooth and calm.
His hand is cold when he places it in Jekyll's.
"Doctor Marber," he introduces himself, and Jekyll has to concentrate hard, the individuality of the man is falling away like so much water. "Were you a relative?"
Consistently making eye contact is hard enough; Jekyll has seen this gaze many times; he saw it in Medical Lectures where the surgeon made the first cut into the flesh—the look that speaks of nothing but a disjointed nature from the act the hands are doing and the way the brain is feeling.
He feels like laughing, with something sick inside him; some black bit of humour looking at the man across from him, and he has to clamp down hard.
"A friend of the family." Is the safest response, and his mouth twitches just sounding it.
"I'm sorry for your loss." Marber's mouth forms the words but Jekyll knows that he's a million miles from here, that he's said these exact words before, and for him, now, they have no meaning from re-use. "Obviously, I'll do whatever I can to help you today." He finishes.
He feels the sudden urge to dislocate Marber's shoulder.
"Perhaps you can," Jekyll begins, matching voice to voice, gesture to gesture, subtle pantomime. He finds it gives a certain needling-satisfaction that dislocated joints lack. "You were the one whom examined William?"
The doctor acknowledges this with a nod, brief, abrupt. Perhaps the needling is too severe.
Beginning again, with a practised smoothness developed in the viewing rooms of his own mortuary training: "What did he die of?"
He notices how the eyes flick into sudden awareness, a brief disjoint from the earlier professional discourtesy.
"He drowned." The voice replies, measured, careful. "When he fell, he must have knocked himself unconscious, the body's natural reaction is to keep breathing, and so he simply—" The voice pauses."—drowned."
"Physiologically," Jekyll asks, "what does that mean?"
Jekyll watches as Marber relaxes. Before him is no longer a man who is mocking, defensive, but a grieving, uncertain specimen. "Physiologically, in fresh water drownings inhaled water is immediately absorbed into the blood causing hemodilution—" he pauses, to check how Jekyll is holding-up under the introduction of medical terminology. "Please stop me if I'm going too fast for you." Marber states and smiles; he continues, "The diluted blood quickly leads to heart failure due to ventricular fibrillation, a condition simply described as shivering of the heart, or anoxia, which, for the layperson is oxygen starvation."
"So," Jekyll begins, "William drowned in freshwater, which cased dilution of the blood and resulting ventricular—sorry," he pauses, trips over his own words, deliberately, "what was that again? Fibrillation?"
"Yes," Marber answers, nodding slowly and deliberately, "a tragic accident."
Jekyll meets his eyes, and holds his gaze. Marber is waiting for him to leave, to accept the reasonable explanation on offer.
Jekyll leaves him stewing in his own juices for a while. He watches as Marber's eyelids blink swiftly, once, twice, thrice.
"Was there are evidence of physical violence?"
Marber shifts in his seat as the question expands to fill the room. It's not an uncomfortable movement. It's the movement of a man who knows the game and is approaching the set and match.
It infuriates Jekyll.
"None whatsoever, sir." Marber's reassuring smile creeps across his skin. "We check very carefully in these cases; there was no bruising, no sign that anything untoward happened, it is a tragic accident, but one that occurs most frequently on this island when children have been left unsupervised."
He feels now that Skinner was right; something is wrong here, something is hidden behind the professional courtesy.
"May I see the medical report?"
The smile never wavers. "I'm afraid not sir. Pathologists reports are available to the police and direct family members only."
He feels his skin prickling in anger. This conversation is drawing to a close for Marber before it has even started, like so many before.
"Is that all I can do for you, sir?"
When he speaks he can hear the anger in his voice.
"You have very advanced technology at your disposal here Doctor Marber, correct?" He is rewarded with a smile and a nod of the head, smooth, relaxed. "Why then was it that a boy with no monetary backing, no inheritance or rich family could be autopsied here? Where was his payment coming from?"
Marber manages to look truly sympathetic for a brief moment, but when he speaks Jekyll is very aware that an act is being performed for his benefit. "William's mother, Mrs Chrishaaven, was awarded a widows pension after the very tragic death of her husband," Marber explains and shakes his head, slowly, softly and very carefully. "Such a tragic lady," he sighs, "I believe there was enough money from that to pay for the doctor's attention."
He stands carefully, the smile, once again, in place.
"I am sorry to have to leave you, but if that is all Mr. Jekyll, then I'm afraid I have patients to see and reports to complete. My secretary will be through to show you out, good day to you."
He shakes Jekyll's hand, walks to the back of the room and walks through a frosted-glass door into the laboratories beyond. He leaves the professional office and leaves Jekyll alone.
To his left there are three filing cabinets, locked, he is sure but in his hand is the lock-pick Skinner has lent him. He feels a strange sense of satisfaction.
He starts at the drawer labelled C-Ci. The pick crunches with a hollow reverberation as it enters the lock, and clicks as it turns through the combinations. A hollow clang and the drawer opens.
He begins flicking through the files. Carver, Cerran, Chris and there, amongst the C's: Chrishaaven; A blue envelope containing a sheaf of papers that he pockets.
"I heard."
She's trying to be as quick to the point as she can be. It's difficult when she has to talk to him. Something in her heart pulls tight. She remembers him, flayed, carrying her through the cold night air.
Jekyll sits, back to the door, sleeves rolled up just the smallest bit, collar loose. When he turns there's a light in his eyes.
"Who did you hear from?" he asks, and the warmest gesture for Mina to come into the room is in his hands.
She smiles, sits on the small chair next to the bed. "Skinner," she watches the discomfort flit across his face, and her smile grows broader. "He's grateful, not angry."
He turns back to the papers on the desk in front of him and she can see the back of his neck, bare just above the collar of his shirt.
"He was right." Jekyll shakes his head slowly.
She pauses, lets the admission breathe for a few second. "Was he? Murder is a huge leap of logic. What would anyone have to gain by the death of a small child?" she finally asks.
She feels a deep quiet within her. She knows where Skinner is now, knows what his grief feels like.
Jekyll turns to her, thoughtful and quiet in the lamplight. He beckons her over to join him.
"Here and here," he points to little entries on the patient's record. Standing above him she can smell the heat of his blood in the warmth, coppery, rich as new pennies. "And again: here and here and here."
She looks at the entries.
"Full physical examinations." She summarises.
He turns to look at her, his eyes liquid in the reflection of the lamplight. His breath brushes against hers.
She moves away.
"Why would a leading pathology and medical laboratory perform monthly examinations on a boy with no connections of any importance to the institute?"
At first Sawyer thinks he's back underwater where the Nautilus burns above him and the firth is ice cold, churning and bloody.
But the water around him is salty, black, still.
So salty he feels himself floating to the surface naturally. Soft debris keep brushing against his skin, soft as flesh, cold as seaweed.
Something tangles around his ankle. He pushes out against it, but it tightens.
If anything, the more he struggles the more it tightens.
Above him he can see light; white as day, cool as ice, he feels the water pressing on him, holding him.
His lungs grow tighter, the water grows heavier.
He kicks out now, stronger. He starts moving his arms actively reaching for the surface.
Whatever it is it holds on.
The water is so heavy, the pressure is so cold. The ice is seeping into his mouth; water between the skull's grip of his teeth.
He's frantic, fear pulsing through him in waves, and the more he kicks the more he seems to sink back down.
He stops looking ahead to that whiteness, and looks back to see what's holding him.
And beneath him—
TBC