I'm sorry. If I could make it better I would. You'll just have to take this, plotholes and all. So so sorry.

Title: The Ship Captain's Tale
Fandom: Card Captor Sakura
Series: Faces of the Moon
Summary: In which we finally found out what happened to Tou and Meihua
Characters: Xue Fang (Yue), Keroberous, Wei Meihua, Wei Tou, Jacob Lindermeyer (the Ship Captain), Li Daran
Warnings: Violence, character death, and I can't write decent noir to save my life.

The Ship Captain's Tale

Somewhere in the beginning

The Chinaman was dying.

I cradled the big man in my arms, where he coughed up red all over my shirt. He pawed feebly at the tiny knife stuck in his chest, his dark eyes bewildered. It takes some of them that way, truly, death the last great surprise. Others see their death coming and fight it, hating every step they make along the dark road.

I brushed off earth and broken clay shards from a flowerpot crushed by his struggles. He strained my arms but I hauled him up on my shoulder as he tried to speak.

"Mei," he said, and stopped when the blood leaked from his mouth. Then, "Mei." His eyes turned to a crushed rose in the scattered earth. Bloody lips moved. His last breath sighed out: "Huaaaaaa."

And what was he trying to say, hmm? There are a hundred dialects in Hong Kong, and any other town in China. Learn one, and you still won't understand them – not their language, not their obscure feuds, and not themselves either.

But ah! the smokes and scents of this place draw us in, and the teas, and the sloe-eyed perfumed women.

"Schma Y'israel," I began, not knowing the gods he worshipped. "Adonai eloheinu, Adonai echod." He did not understand me. And that's China, Jacob Lindermeyer, I thought to myself. I let him rest.

The dark narrow street, so empty five minutes ago, was filling with people, silent and round-faced, most in the dark blue garb of servants, all culled from the cheap tenements around us. One, a bumbo porter, unshipped his long bamboo portage pole from his shoulder, and I saw the moonlight glint off eyes and hints of scavenged knives. I put a hand on the revolver in my peacoat. It was time to go. And that's China for you.

*

A little from the middle

I rapped a battered guinea against the dark scratched wood of the table. There was a pearl necklace there, and a bundle of silk flowers on the table – wherever I go, business finds me. The air of the night club was thick with white smoke and the murmur of other people's dealings. A singer, neatly packed into a figure-hugging qipao, crooned something about love and loss to the tune of "Apple Blossom Time".

"Mei," I muttered to myself. "Mei. Mei mei mei..." I missed the Chinaman, Tou. He knew everything about Hong Kong, everything except how to keep his mouth shut. And he was a good boy. I'd encountered him some months before, on a furlough in the port. My ship runs anything in bulk – timber or undressed hides, coal, comic books, and camphor. There is always room for small, valuable cargoes shipped in the captain's cabin, and I had been pursuing (believe it) 'magic wishing joss sticks' on behalf of a private client in New York when I ran into the boy, who was so manifestly anxious not to talk about them that I knew he was involved. Somehow.

The family that was said to have made them had been destroyed in a flamboyant fashion. I understood a lone survivor's motives in trying to hide, if that was what he was. Mei mei mei...

"You have little sister?" It was the singer. Even in the dark her pancake makeup did not cover the wrinkles about her mouth and eyes, or the wattle starting to hang on her soft throat. But her eyes were kind.

"Eh?" I said eloquently.

"Your little sister. Your meimei. You get presents?" She pointed to the necklace and artificial flowers and her black eyes smiled. "Good brother."

I set a flower in her smoothly coiled black hair. She lifted her hand to cover mine where it lingered by her face and said "Thank you for mei hua."

I frowned

"Mei hua," she said. " 'Beautiful rose.' "

Ah.

A cold breeze cut through the fug of smoke in the room when the door opened and a pleasant-faced little round man stood in the door, outlined briefly in a shimmer of street lights. He met my eyes and made his way among the little round tables towards me. The singer watched him, her face as impassive as the face of a Kuan Yin statue. I felt her hand tighten on mine and then drop and, as he came closer, she swayed briskly back to the stage.

"Captain Lindermeyer?" he said pleasantly. "This insignificant person is Li Daran. Does the honourable captain have time to discuss business with this insignificant person's family?"

I shrugged and nodded. I had seen the man around, a little, and business is business. We nattered a little, over a consignment of softwoods to be transported from the mainland. At the end I shook his hand, bland, friendly, and smiling. As his black sleeve fell back I saw a tiny spot of red on the white cuff of his shirt sleeve. "I was scratched by a thorn," he explained, smiling, "plucking the blood red roses oh."

And with that he bowed and left. I was filled with the ineffable, murky, and aggravating intimation that something of import had happened here, but then, in this town I often do. I had no idea of what – as usual. That's China, for you.

*

The end is near

Never you mind what I was doing in the House of Jade Stalk and Lotus. Arrangements were being made. Actions set in motion. Business settled.

But in the bar downstairs I heard some of the girls talking, about a room no-one could use, because it had become inhabited by a demon, which was terrifying in its own right and also the eldritch wailing was driving off custom.

There are strange things in the mysterious East, but my money was that it was just a cat. To settle the bet I tramped upstairs with the revolver in my pocket ready to hand and the mistress of the house and a crowd of spectators from the bar creeping behind me.

And so help me, there was the Chinaman's name scrawled on a tag on the door. Tou, written with the sign for peach. He'd shown it to me once, drawing it in beer with his cheeks flushed red from the spirits. This time it was written with another name, the whole surrounded in more chicken-scratchings in shaky vermilion writing. I shrugged, and put it in my pocket.

I pounded on the door.

Quiet.

The mistress handed me the key, and the door swung open into the Chinaman's digs. It was dark and fuggy, a magpie's nest of stolen gewgaws and fabrics. There was an ornate chair of some kind of ebony, and sitting in it was a tangle-haired doll draped in brocade, but both were damaged – the chair sat on a crate instead of half its legs, and the doll had wretched burns high on its face. Unsaleable goods. The reek of male cat was strong in the room, I noted with a certain amount of satisfaction, and when my eyes adjusted I saw a silver-grey beast with lines like a Siamese lurking at the foot of the chair. It yowled, deep and resonant with a streak of crazy warbling at the top of the sound. You know Siamese. You don't? Well, they're all mad. Enough to scare thirty demons away.

I'd won the bet. I wanted to look round Tou's room, though, so I offered a round for the house with my winnings and the witnesses began to melt away.

Then the doll opened its eyes. They showed white and pearly – as mad as the cat's, perhaps, and they looked right at me. Behind me I heard a grown man whimper.

"Two sides of the mountain," the doll – the girl - said in a wispy voice, her English perfect and clear. "Is it a tragic death? Is it the last initiation of an adept? I cannot see anymore." She scratched sparks from a flint and steel in her hands, and lit a lamp underneath some kind of contraption.

It was an incense burner, and as the incense blocks began to warm a scent filled the room, a musk, sensuous and yet pure, like warm clean skin, or ripe peaches on the tree, or the ocean on a clear day with the steamer making a good rate of knots or – no, I cannot describe it.

"What happened to my brother, Captain Lindermeyer?" she said. And I did not know what to answer.

Behind me a merry young voice cried "Found!" very happily and a sap crashed into the back of my head.

When I came to I was on my side on the dusty floor, fighting off a sneeze and the urge to vomit. That smell was in my head, ringing like a bell. I heard very clearly someone whisper, "Duibuqi." I apologise. I heard the shutters open, and a powerful wind blow inside.

And so help me when I looked up from the floor I saw an angel, white-winged, regard me coolly with violet eyes. He gathered the burned girl into his arms, cradling her head on his shoulder and picked up a red leather book with one awkward hand. A sound broke from my throat as the angel leapt from the window.

The other man in the room, who I could not see clearly, ran to the window. Shots were fired. I saw the angel shot in the arm, and something fall. I don't know what happened next. Someone kicked me in the head.

*

A little bit after

I was at the Li family compound the next week, bowing to the elderly patriarch as I finalised our business dealings. Somewhere in the crowd of bowing, smiling people – for they are very polite, the Chinese – I saw my contact, young Li Daran, the eldest son of the Li family, very well put together in a brocade coat with a high collar which almost covered the raking scratches on his chin and throat, which looked to have been made by a large and vicious cat.

I said nothing. What's to say? Because in the ranks of the servants, soberly clad in blue, was the little burned girl, carefully holding a tray of sweetmeats.

How she got there? What Li Daran was doing? I don't know. That's China for you.

And that's the story regarding this book, young Mr Glasscastle. I've never been able to open it, but it has fine workmanship on the cover – see the inlay of the golden lion guarding the lock? Oh, how I got my hands on it in particular? Forget it, Jay, it's China.

*

*

NOTES:

Schma Y'israel, Adonai eloheinu, Adonai echod... This was the closest transliteration I could get from my source. He says it translates to "Hear O Israel, the Lord is God, the Lord is one" – something to say over a dying person.

Bumbo... Again, transliterated from a native source, so there are probably disagreements with my spelling but, you know what, transliterating foreign languages is problematic to start with. A porter, with a long bamboo pole for carrying people's baggage. Probably the 'Bumboy' of the card game Bumboy/Arsehole/Chinese Last Card.

Qipao... Sometimes called a "banner dress" (don't know why) or a cheongsam. Cut fairly full around the bust, narrow about the waist and hips, with a straight skirt (often slit at the side). Can be modest dress for a matron, especially if she's wearing trousers underneath, but can also have unfortunate connotations. I personally can't figure out when the unfortunate connotations are present but, needless to say, it's an appropriate dress for a night club singer.

Kuan Yin... Asian goddess of mercy, or boddhisattva, or a glorious mix of both. Um, not the version that appears in Saiyuki.

The closing line was lifted from the movie Chinatown. Go watch it, it's great. Just, make sure you're not feeling depressed first, or anything, 'cause it's a bit dark.

*

*

Omake:

Here ends the telling of Yue, and Yue forgets nothing and is too proud to lie so that must be all of the story.

But.

In a dusty shed that reeks of amber and sandalwood, tucked on a high shelf, is an old, cheap cigarbox closed with a pasted seal. If we dared break it we would find, among other odds and ends, a tiny downy feather, a lock of hair straight and black as a streak of ink, a silver pendulum bob on a braided string. There is a picture with them: three people on a couch in vigorous disarray. One, a small yellow lioncub with a dandelion tuft at the end of his tail, reclines on an old red couch, his leg extended rakishly and a small white wing lifted flirtatiously over his shoulder. Another, a small, plump Chinese woman stands behind it, her face round and pale as the moon. Even in the faded sepia tints of the antique photo, vivid eyes glare through the camera and make you, the viewer, lean back. She is holding a wide-brimmed fedora hat, tilting it over the face of a man who laughs on the couch, lifting his hands up to her. It is hard to see who he is, and the picture is not named.

Perhaps the little booklets tied up with ribbon might help. But ah, they are cheap periodicals, printed on flaky pulp paper and luridly covered. You open one and read: Once, there was a man with noticing eyes and a sense for the world's mysteries. One blustery morning he opened a book, and all his world changed...