Chapter 5 - Just Another Day
"What is that?"
"A smoothie," I answered, rattling my thermos to draw Meryl's attention to it as I walked to the chair closest to her bed. "Zahlia brought over some fresh fruits during the food resupply and there was a half-decent blender hidden in the back of all that mess in your kitchen, so I figured…"
The girl sputtered at the redirect, her brain apparently as frazzled as her hair was currently - not that I could blame here, after nearly a week spent in a doctor's office, shitting her guts out. "There-? What-? Not that, I mean that thing in in your hood!"
Meryl flinched back at the kitten yawned, showing off pearly white milk teeth in the corner of my vision before closing her mouth with a little click. Even without my glasses, it was easy to pick out the details like that - white teeth against jet black fur, save for a blaze of bright white on the kitten's chest.
"It's not a thing, it's a cat," I said.
"Meeee!" the kitten added helpfully, wobbling as she tried to walk onto the edge of my shoulder.
"I-I can see that!" Meryl shot back. "Why do you have it?!"
"Zahlia gave her to me." And when a beautiful woman offers, I'm certainly not going to say no to a little puss- goddammit, I can't make these kinds of jokes around a sixteen-year-old, even if I'd started making them around that age. "For practical purposes."
Meryl sputtered. "But cats eat birds!"
"And fish and mice and the occasional bug, among other things they probably shouldn't, though the 'mice' is a more immediate concern given that a good half of your dry food goods were full of their shit," I said, taking another sip of my breakfast as the kitten gingerly picked her way down to step on my chest, my boobs apparently counting as a comfortable shelf for small animal sitting.
"No, no, this is my breakfast, not yours. You can't digest it."
"Myeeeehhh."
Despite my casual attitude and general good mood, I couldn't shake the feeling that I'd missed some rather important memo on Meryl - yes, she had a clear bird thing going on, but this felt more extreme than that - but I didn't have the mental energy or Wikipedia access available to start picking that particular problem apart.
"Besides, this little kitty's a bit too young to be doing any real hunting. Doesn't have all her springs in yet," I pointed out before turning my head down to look at the subject of the talk. "Are you full of jumping beans yet or are you still baby?"
"Aah-nya?"
"I think you're still baby. Even if you are trying to steal my smoothie."
The kitten blinked and stretched up to bump her nose against my chin. "Muurrrrp."
"See? Harmless," I said, turning my attention back to my drink before I thought of another, more likely complaint. "Or is your problem the fact that she's a black cat? They're not actually bad luck-"
"Black cats with white chests are!" Meryl snapped.
My kingdom, my kingdom for Wikipedia - wait. No, I knew this one.
It wasn't something I'd noted when I'd made Meryl, instead being something that I'd learned on my own time and interest, but it did sync up with her running ties to Irish mythology. "It's not a cat sith."
"Cat-sì," Meryl corrected, placing accents not really covered in Standardized American English on the word in at least two different places.
Jesus Christ, of all the times to -
"It's not a fae creature," I said, dumping the issue of correct pronunciation off to the side for now. "It's a kitten. Black and white, flesh and bone, about six weeks old if I'm any judge, which means it's barely weaned off its mother and probably nowhere near close to being in the running for King O' The Cats unless things have really gone to pot with the Jellicles in the last couple years."
"…what?"
"Sorry; badly executed attempt at a joke." Reference humor that nobody else but the audience got was the wheelhouse of Mercy D. Witt, not Nobody D. Raine - wait, no, no no, don't even mentally tempt fate with mistaken adoption into that legacy. I wasn't built for plot importance, physically, mentally, or emotionally.
"Did Doctor Livesley tell you when you're going to be released yet?" I asked, manually shifting the gears of the conversation away from talk about the Cats musical and my shit sense of humor.
"He said it'd be a couple days - three or four at most, just to make sure that the food poisoning is all out of my system," Meryl said, squeezing the edge of her blankets. "I didn't know there was anything left to get out after the first day, but that keeps getting proved wrong."
I gave a sympathetic grimace as I remembered my own encounter with food poisoning and how well that description summed up the experience. "Well, me and Zahlia got the kitchen cleaned up, so there shouldn't be any repeats of that any time soon to worry about."
Sure, almost all the food had ended up thrown out, along with a fair few number of non-food kitchen items, but for the cause of 'not shitting yourself half-to-death for a week', it was a small price to pay.
"Marshalsea wasn't upset with you? For…?"
Meryl trailed off awkwardly, the silence hanging in the air for a moment while I tried to think of a proper response beyond 'pet the kitty' - a process that slowed down once the cat made the tiny leap over to the bed to paw around Meryl's feet.
"No. She actually called me stupid for getting too worked up over that," I said, leaning back in my seat. "Whatever she thinks of me, I'm safe enough for now, and I think it'll stay that way if I don't bring her any more trouble than comes natural on this island."
Meryl didn't quite look satisfied with that, but she did nod. "That sounds about right for her," she replied, sinking down into the bed as what little tension keeping her upright finally ran out of her body. "Did Zahlia tell you where you can go for glasses when she gave you the…"
"Meh?" the kitten asked as she drew closer to Meryl.
"No, she didn't say," I answered, pulling the kitten back to my lap. "I think I made a couple jokes about being the better part of blind, but it didn't really come out outside of that. You'll have to tell me who usually handles that sort of thing and how much it'd cost…"
I couldn't imagine it'd be cheap, considering what glasses ran for in my world, but that was also a world that managed to give one unscrupulous company a near monopoly on the business.
"I think," a deep, gravelly voice said from the door, "that it might be more prudent to have that discussion with me directly."
"Doctor Shimon!" Meryl blurted as I spun around in my seat, half-way rising to my feet as I accounted for an unexpected stranger.
He wasn't big enough for his voice, my brain dully observed. Barely a few inches taller than me - with weird looking boots that probably added that bit of extra height - and probably just that much wider at the shoulder, Doctor Shimon looked made for an underwhelming presence, visually. Most of what I could make out was pale - doctor's coat, grey-ish skin, pale blue hair sweeping over half his face - with black clothes only making those washed shades look paler by comparison.
"You said something about needing glasses?" he asked.
"Uh-"
"Yes," Meryl said for me. "I broke her old pair by accident, so I will be paying for her new ones."
Between her tone and the fact that I didn't have a single Beri to my name, it didn't sound like I would be getting out of that offer.
"Like she said," I agreed with a sigh. "So do I need to make an appointment or…?"
"I'd say to stop by my office later, but between your obvious myopia and my understanding that you're new to our fair island," - the words were positively dripping with sarcasm, and I couldn't quite pin on if that disdain was for the climate or the clientele - "it would probably be better for me to walk you there myself. Would be embarrassing to literally lose a patient rather than lose one in the usual ways."
Snippy fellow. Not that I could blame him, given my experience with Ravenser Odd so far. It was one of those places prone to grey and damp days and the people… well, the people were people and not everyone liked dealing with them.
"Alright," I said, pulling myself to my feet with minimal creaking. "Lead on, MacDuff."
Traditionally, I wasn't someone who did well walking with others. Joint problems had a way of doing that, especially when all the ones below the waist had a functional time limit of a half hour before threatening to crap out for the next twenty-four, and having to adjust to another person's speed to avoid someone being left behind tended to grind that timeframe down even more.
Doctor Shimon was an odd exception to that rule.
Not only had he settled into a comfortable speed early on, he seemed to account for my own effortlessly; I'd only caught him once in the act of slowing down after a minor limp snuck into my walk, and that was mostly because all my attention was on making sure I didn't lose him.
Something to keep note of as I dealt with him more, I guessed-
The thought cut off as I clipped someone, my shoulder catching something a little too soft and squishy to be another person's arm before I bounced backwards, hard enough that I almost fell down before Doctor Shimon caught me by the arm, hauling me straight up again.
"I think you misplaced something," the woman I'd run into said, picking my kitten - apparently pleasantly surprised by the face-first discovery of a bigger boob shelf than I was able to provide - off of her chest.
The part of my brain that desperately wanted to make a dirty joke ran up against the combined forces of my common sense, my social anxiety, and the fact that I didn't have one that was actually funny on hand.
"Thank you," I croaked instead as I took my fuzzy little charge back, fingers and mind going slightly numb from the shock of actually making skin contact with a hot lady.
"Marilyn," Doctor Shimon bit out. "What a pleasant surprise."
'Marilyn' managed to smirk with her whole body, jutting her hip to the side and her already generous chest out as she shifted her posture. "By which you mean it's not."
"Mostly because I know your fool captain isn't likely to be far behind."
"Ah yes, Crowley-"
Oh, that motherfucker.
"-certainly does have that effect on people," Marilyn finished, grinning as she looked down at the face I was making. "Including those that have only had the displeasure of meeting him once."
Doctor Shimon gave me a sideways glance. "And how did that go?"
"I'm pretty sure Marshalsea threatened to kill him for getting in the way of my appointment with her," I replied, massaging the wrist Crowley had grabbed almost a week ago. I'd scrubbed that patch of skin so many times over the course of the last week, and not just because I was trying to get the filth from that kitchen off. "And I would have been happy to let her."
Marilyn sighed. "You know, I don't get quite what he does to piss people off. I understand that he's annoying, but I never really felt compelled to kill him myself."
"He exists," Doctor Shimon said flatly. "That he can exist around you and you barely notice merely speaks to a lack of taste."
"Oh, dun' be so hard on m'crew, luv," Crowley said as he walked up, black coat cape flapping in the breeze like an overlarge and misplaced bat. "Yeh could 'ave been one of 'em y'self, if yeh were a bit less par-ti-cu-lar about m'line of work."
"I don't work in corpses."
"The once yeh did."
"The once was enough. And I'm disinclined to change my opinion on the matter seeing as you still haven't paid me for Innabug's last surgery."
"Oh, but I gotchu a lil' somethin' nice, this time. S'me mother o' pearl for m'favored shell," Crowley announced as he moved to put something in Doctor Shimon's hair, pulling back the curtain of blue that covered the left part of the doctor's face. His attention turned to me, leaving an unpleasantly oily sensation across the areas his gaze seemed to fall. "And Marshalsea's lil curio! Was wonder'n where yeh mighta wander'd off ta."
"I'll consider that payment - unless it comes out to be fake, again," Doctor Shimon said frigidly as Crowley finally stepped back to admire his work. "And leave my patients alone. You're already a tax on what little I have anyway."
That was a lovely little pun. It was too bad the bastard it was aimed at couldn't take the hint and leave… or better yet, drop dead and remove all risk of ever running into him again.
Instead, it only seemed to encourage Crowley, who swept the hat off of his head and held it out as if to show off the lining… or, more likely, the lime green rabbit that had just poked its head out of the damn thing.
"Dun you wan' ta give Inabugg a lil' check-up? Jus' to make sure 'is recoverin' well?" Crowley said in the same kind of voice that most people used when trying to cajole their pets into taking their medication without biting. "Got a bit of beri to cover the bill direct-like, this time."
Doctor Shimon hemmed and hawed a little, before finally sighing in apparent defeat. "Fine. After I clear out my appointments for the day. I'm sure you can hang onto your money long enough for that."
Crowley grinned. "Ah, I think I c'n manage."
"Good. Don't bother me before then."
With that, the doctor turned away and started walking, forcing me into a jog to catch up for the first time during our entire walk.
"So what's wrong with the bunny?" I asked once we were far enough away for Crowley not to overhear. "Does he throw it around for fun or something?"
"Crowley is a lot of things, most of them sad and pathetic, but unfortunately, he does have the redeeming feature of actually caring about Inabugg," the doctor said with a sigh as he slowed down to a more comfortable pace. "I think I've given that rabbit more medical attention than most of my human patients by now."
"That sucks."
For the rabbit more than Doctor Shimon's practice, but it was probably smarter not to say things like that to the guy responsible for whether or not I'd be able to see anything past the end of my nose with any sort of clarity.
"It's paying work, half the time, so I don't suppose I can rightfully complain."
"Considering that he apparently works in corpses, you probably can," I pointed out. Even for One Piece, that had to be one of those issues that were universally acknowledged as 'a bad thing to be doing'. "What kind of work even is that?"
"He's a resurrection man - don't ask me who buys his supply, there's always some doctor that needs a way to teach their students anatomy that doesn't involve risking a live patient, among other… less ideal motives for keeping a corpse around," Doctor Shimon added with a grimace.
Somehow, I had a feeling his one brush with the field had been closer to the latter.
"Of course," he continued, "he has other lines of work besides cadaver trafficking - I know he takes jobs to help people fake their own deaths and has… exaggerated his own a few times, the few times he's gotten caught on islands that take corpse robbery seriously. I think he's been up on the gallows three times and been buried alive at least once."
Ugh. That was certainly… a specialty, especially for someone who's other hobby seemed to be stage magic. "So Marshalsea… what, sells him the corpses of anyone who dies in town?"
"As I understand it, she pays him to get rid of any bodies that go unclaimed by their crews. Easier than maintaining a graveyard, given that this is a pirate town. I'm pretty sure he takes any that are worth enough to the Marines for bounty, but beyond that? I wouldn't know; they simply go on the Barking Hare and they don't come back."
It was cold, it was practical, it was… entirely in line for a woman who managed to become old and grey in a profession that didn't let most of the people in it live past middle age.
"Whatever works, I guess," I finally said.
"Yes; whatever works," he agreed as we finally came to a door that had a helpful sign bearing the words 'DOCTOR, SURGEON, MORTICIAN, OPTOMETRIST, VETERINARIAN, TAXIDERMIST' nailed to the wall next to it.
As soon as we were inside the waiting room area, I took a seat, letting my body melt into the chair as the pain in my ankles and feet eased.
That walk had been a bit on the longer side for what I'd done in the last few years - enough for me to feel it and know that I'd keep feeling it for the rest of the day, more than likely, judging by the dull ache coming from that area. Spending a week in a world that played by the laws of shonen manga hadn't changed that fact of my existence.
Doctor Shimon leaned over me, close enough where I could make out the pursed line of his mouth - blue lipstick was a nice touch - as his one visible eye gave me a once-over. "What-"
A moan from some backroom saw him wave the stillborn question off; quite literally, as I tried not to jump at the sudden swish of white sweeping in from my left peripheral.
"We'll talk later," he said. "It appears I have a walk-in to attend to first."
With that, he disappeared, only the faint sound of footsteps echoing against old wood floors giving me any sign that he was still even in the building.
Now alone, save for the little fuzzy ball of fur on my shoulder, I could take measure of my surroundings.
Doctor Shimon's office wasn't much like Doctor Livesley's, aesthetically speaking. There were all the same signs of being a medical space - the stinging smell of disinfectants, the casual spotlessness of every shiny surface - but stylistically? They couldn't have been more different.
Livelsey's was done up in a generic style - fairly open layouts in a domestic aesthetic that felt very bed and breakfast, the faint scent of flowers softening the harsher scent of rubbing alcohol, but there was still the vibe of everything being a little too picture perfect and pastel to be anything other than a healthcare facility.
Doctor Shimon had gone hard in the other direction, cluttering his dark and limited workspace with the gadgets and gizmos of half a dozen specialties, their main common factor being that they all carried that mad scientist vibe despite probably being valid medical tools in most cases. Hell, I was pretty sure about three quarters of the ambient light in the waiting room was deliberately being filtered through specimen jars full of technicolor preservative soup full of…
I stared at a jar close to my head. Actually, I couldn't tell what was floating in there. Could have been human fingers or a fucked-up mushroom or something else altogether best left unthought about.
The jar next to it was definitely full of eyeballs though, which my kitten was about two minutes from shattering all over the floor, if her intent interest in getting up on the shelf next to it was any indication.
"No no no," I told it as I pulled her back away and into my lap. "You don't get to make a mess. And you lost hood hammock privileges until we go home."
"Nyeeh!"
"Yes, yes, it's so frustrating not being able to get on counters and destroy everything," I agreed, smoothing down her fur. "But that's what you get for being a naughty baby."
My still-nameless kitten repeated her sound of displeasure as she needled my legs with claws not yet sharp enough to have any meaningful effect beyond establishing that she had them.
"I appreciate you sparing me the pain of having to remake all of those," Doctor Shimon told me as he guided a man with a face spiderwebbed with stitched-over scars and off-color skin grafts towards the door. "Try not to get glassed again before those stitches heal, Gauthier."
The unfortunate man made a vague and muffled sound of assent as he gingerly limped his way to the door, disappearing into the relative brightness of the outside world.
As soon as the door closed, Doctor Shimon turned his attention to me.
"How long have your joints been a problem?"
"I thought we were here about glasses?"
"Considering that you barely managed a fifteen-minute walk and were in pain from standing still for the five minutes we spent waylaid by Crowley," Doctor Shimon said, his tone drier than dust. "I'd say that your sight is a secondary issue."
He wasn't exactly wrong. Living without glasses was shit, but 'shit' in a way that was mostly just massively inconvenient. Living in constant pain because your tragic backstory broke your body decades ahead of schedule? Distinctly beyond that.
I took a breath, trying to calm myself down enough to… spell out the issue as cleanly and concisely as possible. With a minor creak of effort, I stood up, putting my kitten down on my vacated chair as I did.
"Look, Doctor - I've talked to people about this whole… mess," I said, waving my hand at my body. "Had tests and X-rays and scans and all that done, and I've got the same answer every time - the damage is done. It's never going to heal and the only treatment I can get will just, at best, slow down how fast the rest falls apart. That's it. If there's a surgery that can fix it, it's not one I'll ever be able to afford."
That was just the facts. Things that I'd been forced to accept years ago, even if even thinking about them stirred the old embers of resentment back to life in my chest.
It hadn't been my choice to be hurt, to spend my childhood being broken over and over again. I hadn't had the option to say no or to leave when things started going sour - hell, they'd been sour from the start and nobody who'd had the power to change anything had cared enough to step in and say 'stop'. Why was it me that had to live with the consequences of someone else's-?
I released a too hot breath I hadn't quite realized I was holding, the air just managing to get past the growing pressure on my throat.
"Maybe you're a better doctor than the ones I had before," I said, trying to force years of half-resolved trauma back down into a box to deal with later. "Maybe you'd be able to do something about it that nobody else could. But the chances are that I'd never be able to pay for something like that. So let's just work with what's feasible - and that's getting those glasses out of the way."
Doctor Shimon stared a me for a moment before turning away. "Alright - the examination chair is this way," he said, gesturing to the other side of the wall of jars. "And if you'd place your little trouble maker in one of the carriers, it would be much appreciated."
I did as he asked, taking a moment to tell my kitten that, "Baby goes in baby jail," and getting a squealy mew in response as I shut the door on her.
"You're familiar with what's involved with this process?" Doctor Shimon asked as I settled into the chair.
"Look through the not-binoculars, tell you if option 1 or 2 helps clear things up more, maybe get some drops that make my eyes funky for an hour or so to look the retina or something else in back." A memory ticked at the back of my mind for a moment. "And don't squint to make out the letter board better if it's blurry."
"Yes, definitely don't do that last thing."
As the doctor fiddled with the different lenses, spinning and swapping them around, I got my first proper look at him.
Again, his looks didn't match up with his voice - delicate features and a fine jawline had been lost in the blurs of my faulty eyes, but now that I could make out the finer details of his bone structure, it was impossible not to notice that he was the kind of 'pretty' that netted boy band and modelling contracts…
Well, I amended as he switched the lenses again and the details sharpened again, not quite. The classic formula for 'pretty boy' was there, but the mix was thrown off by the bruised bags of sleep deprivation under his eyes and - slightly more concerning - the dark red scars slicing across the part of his face previously hidden by the curtain of blue hair I'd noted and dismissed earlier.
Whatever had made those marks had been both extensive and devastating, the marks in Doctor Shimon's skin cratering through the paler, untouched areas like a topography map of Mars - all the same color, the texture consistent, and, despite all that, familiar.
Probably because of the odd starburst like arrangement around the doctor's slightly off-color left eye; it was a common enough design in fiction, probably reminding me of the X-Men's Cable or something-
Something clattered to my right, followed by the triumphant mew of a mischief maker contained no longer by baby jail.
"No no - don't touch that -" Doctor Shimon started, rushing out of view to counter whatever fresh hell my precious little kitten - and apparent escape artist - had just unleashed on a piece of more than likely irreplaceable equipment.
Not quite able to pull my face away from the binoculars of vision unfuckening, I had to settle for following the 'battle' through sound.
A clatter of metal, a quick series muttered oaths too low to catch, a very small pissy hissing fit at being foiled, the screech of a pinch latch being opened and closed as the kitty crate closed on a criminal once again, and then a small plink.
"Never seem to get these damn things to fit right," Doctor Shimon muttered as he walked back into view again, popping something small into his mouth for a moment before spitting it out again and pushing it into the… empty eye socket from which it came.
As he turned back to me, blinking as the prosthetic eye - not perfectly matched to the other, six shades too deep into indigo to even come close to matching the sky blue of the live eye - settled back into place, realization finally dawned on me.
Of course, this would be him. The 'joke' about his fake eye never fitting right only sealed it.
"Shimon Shelley," I breathed.
After all, why would the universe just stop with Meryl Dacey when I had so many other creations to throw in my face.
"I see my… infamy proceeds me," Shelley said, not looking happy with the recognition - though considering what I remembered of writing him…
Shit. "You trained under Doctor Hogback," I said, pulling on the one of the two threads I was certain still applied to him as he was now. "At least up until he pulled his disappearing act, anyway."
That's where the scar was from - a failed getaway after Hogback had stolen Victoria Cindry's body from the grave, courtesy of a guard dog… or something else, given that a dog attack didn't usually leave marks like that in my experience; less slashes and scores, more holes, more patterns in the form of teeth.
"That's leaving out a lot of details, but what you said is true," Shelley said, his tone becoming a little less frosty than it'd been a moment ago. "Most people don't believe the resume - and those that do usually focus on what led up to my leaving his… most generous tutelage."
Most people didn't know your story from the author's point of view, I pointedly did not say.
Instead, I opted for another, blander truth; "I don't make a habit of insulting people I've just met, especially when it comes to shit I don't know the first thing about."
Shelley's mouth twitched towards a smile, but didn't stick the landing before falling back into a neutral line. "I suppose that the fact that I'm also holding your ability to see further than a foot away from your face clearly over your head is also a factor in that decision-making process."
"Well, that's also true," I agreed, looking back at him again with the fresh interest of a creator fascinated in seeing how someone else would redesign an old work of theirs.
I'd designed Shelley blonde and with shorter hair, along with a very different personality; cheerier, in a wan and fragile sort of way, which would have stood out in Thriller Bark, but sharp around the edges the way I'd always found fragile things to be.
All those bits were gone, but everything else; the scars, the delicate features, the ill-fitting eye, the voice, the brittleness when approached with his past and how Hogback had screwed him over, those were all things I'd given him. But just like with Meryl, someone or something had taken my character and, in the process of breathing real life into them, turned them over and around filling in all these spots I'd missed while taking out some I'd made major focal points, increasing complexity and vibrancy in exchange for my knowledge of them, rendering them fascinating near-strangers that I could trip over déjà vu with.
Somehow, I liked it better that way. It made the old mistakes feel less like failure.
Author's Notes
This chapter's title comes from the song Just Another Day by Oingo Boingo.
Shimon Shelley is an OC of mine roughly from Fall 2012, mostly because the theme music I assigned to him while working on him came from the Frankenweenie soundtrack concept album (which might or might not end up influencing chapter titles later down the line).
The Barking Hare is named after Burke and Hare, the 19th century serial killer duo who started out in graverobbing + bodysnatching but quickly figured out that the best way to grab a fresh corpse was to make it yourself.
Gauthier is meant to be a quick shoutout to Gotye's look in the Somebody That I Used To Know music video. Because that's what you get when you get reconstructive facial surgery from someone who started out and stayed a Frankenstein-style mad scientist.
Monica (co-writer/creative assistant/herder of cats): So like the past few chapters have been with the loosest guideline imaginable, but after 4 was written, I FINALLY got a sense of how we should pace this.
previously i was busy just working with DD (Nvzblgrrl) on much later island and characters because that's where my focus lied, but over the course of the last week we've finally got a much clearer plan for the immediate future, which is much more helpful. The two things i demanded of that was "get raine glasses sooner please to not drag out her blindness longer than needed" and "time to give shelley some spotlight" which should continue over the next bunch of chapters.
Oh yeah the bump joke was my idea, too.