Chapter 7: In The Stillness of Disgrace
Missing eye or not, Shimon Shelley wasn't blind. Nor was he deaf or dense - he'd been there during that disaster of a luncheon for every agonizing second. There was no way that the 'argument' Dacey had described had been one of Raine's making… unless one took the view that the person who finally snapped under such behavior was the one truly at fault.
But that wasn't his way of doing things - even if he wasn't qualified in the realms of mental counselling, he was too much of a doctor to simply take the quickest and simplest diagnosis available.
On the other hand, it also meant that he was disinclined to beat around the bush when he finally did find the issue, which wasn't ideal when that took the form of 'the person living closest to the patient being a major irritant' and his first thought as to how to 'treat' the affliction was to start yelling.
Not exactly a route that would encourage the rest and recovery he'd recommended to Raine, Shelley wagered as he stepped out into the hall to get some space to calm down.
Something that might have been easier if he hadn't run into a disturbingly detailed painting of a goose.
The Dacey house décor was… certainly something. Something good, he couldn't rightfully say as he stepped away from that particular piece - though he had certainly seen worse, that was a bit like saying extreme frostbite was better than gangrene.
Still, there had to be a point where 'sticking to a theme' simply became a study in obsession.
Idly, he opened a book left out on a table - there'd been no label on it and a faint layer of dust that implied it hadn't been touched in a few weeks, if not months.
Instead of containing yet more birds, it held photographs of people. None who he recognized, save for the late Brenda Aran, who stood by the side of a woman who had a rather strong resemblance to Meryl Dacey - ah, likely the blood-related aunt, then, passed long before Shelley's arrival to Ravenser - and a few faces he recognized from Marshalsea's circle of associates.
Really, it would have been impossible to mistake her for anyone else; even the better part of a year later, that shock of bold magenta hair and coppery brown skin was still painted onto his memory, along with the equally intense personality that had gone with it.
Madame Aran had worn her age well - photos that had to have been easily decades old showed very little shift in her appearance, even as the occasional inclusion of Marshalsea saw the pirate shift between her life stages. Only the one that showed her at a clearly different life stage was one taken as an obvious teenager, sitting alongside a man who looked, in many respects, like an older counterpart of her; separated only by a few degrees of color, hair texture, and a willingness to show his chest off in its entirety rather than just sticking to the abs.
So odd to think that woman, who had been one of the few bright points of his life after everything that happened with Hogback, was family to someone as aggravating as Meryl Dacey…
"Don't touch that!" Meryl hissed.
Speak of the devil.
"A word, if you don't mind, Miss Dacey," Shelley said, closing the photo album as he turned to look at her. "Outside."
Away from the birds and under the open - well, as open a sky as a perpetually cloudy island could rightfully expect at nightfall -, Shelley finally felt comfortable raising his voice above the near whisper he'd kept to inside the building.
"Concerning today's events…" Shelley started before pausing. Yes, it was probably better to put the disclaimer out first, rather than wait for Miss Dacey to needle at its absence. "Full disclosure - I am not a therapist. My education was in the physical medicines, not the mental. But I do have enough personal experience to know exactly how your 'argument' more than likely developed; you continued the same demanding, demeaning, childish behavior from earlier until Raine hit some kind of limit - likely a combination of physical and emotional, considering how far out you were."
As Meryl went to open her mouth, a clear protest forming on her tongue, he shot her a glare that stopped her short.
"Don't you even think about interrupting me," Shelley spat. "I may be taking a level tone with you right now, but do not be mistaken; I am very angry right now. Furious, even, based on what I personally witnessed, and I don't care what excuses you might want to make for yourself, whatever nonsense you have going on out on Stonecutter is none of my concern beyond its effect on my patient. My only concern is Raine's health which, thanks to your actions, means that we will be seeing much more of each other in the immediate future - something to think on, perhaps, before you try to do something else foolish."
"It… it wasn't foolish," Meryl said quietly.
"'Foolish' is the kindest way I can describe not knowing or respecting the physical limitations of others, much less their choices," he countered before sighing. "I suppose can forgive some of it - I doubt that Miss Raine would communicate all of the problematic aspects of her health to someone she's known for… what? Two weeks? Maybe less? But you have eyes and ears, not to mention a brain between them - use it. That woman couldn't walk halfway through town without ending up in a not-insignificant amount of pain, I seriously doubt that taking her over uneven terrain for over seven times that distance wouldn't have some sort of discernable visual effect on her walking ability."
Meryl's expression turned pained, a silent confirmation that there had been some sort of willfully ignored sign.
Shelley sighed again. Really, there wasn't any good reason to beat the girl up over it even further - not when her own conscience seemed to be handling the job well enough on its own. "We can speak more on the subject later, when we are both calm. For now, I suggest that you get some rest - I may return tomorrow to check her progress if I have the time. If not, the day after that."
With that, he turned and made his way back to Ravenspurn, hopefully to an office that wasn't completely full of neglected patients.
In short, it wasn't.
Shelley went to bed.
Shelley woke at noon.
This was typical - after all, he'd been careful to cultivate his schedule to cover the hours that Doctor Livesley didn't and to sleep for a little under seven hours straight was fairly healthy by the standard of such things.
It didn't stop him from having to buy some of the most caffeine dense coffee available in West Blue, but eh, sacrifices and the greater good, he figured as he choked down a piece of plain toast in between sips of the near-pitch black brew. Mild inconvenience was more than a fair price to pay for being able to do his job the way it needed to be done.
Once his barebone breakfast was done - though the pot of coffee would remain to provide a little pick-me-up as needed through the day -, Shelley moved onto the next part of his routine; stretches.
Originally, most of the stretches had simply been for his scars, teasing the tissue back into flexibility after the first part of the healing process had left them tight and immobile. Later, he'd made it into a more generalist yoga routine - breathing exercises and the more typical stretching routines - to help wake him up in the morning and keep him limber from all the time spent hunched over his work, along with emptying his mind of thoughts for a while.
Maybe it'd be worth to Raine or Meryl; Raine for her back and joint issues, and Meryl for mindfulness.
As soon as his breathing exercises were done, Shelley walked to his door, flipped the sign in the window to say 'OPEN', and turned his mind to the business of medicine.
Almost immediately, he had his first customer.
"Got glassed again, Gauthier?"
"Face smashed through a window," the man murmured around his broken stitches and the new damage done to his face.
Effectively the same thing. "Well, come in then - might as well do what I can for you."
"Alright, now that we've got that out of the way, here's a bit of advice for the rest of you that aren't dead yet; don't put things you're incredibly allergic to in your mouths, much less try to swallow them whole on a bet," Shelley instructed as he threw the cause of death's wet remains into a garbage can, only to grimace as he heard a soft 'coo' on impact. "Especially if that thing is a live pigeon."
"Thank you for sitting through this so nicely, Joylene," Shelley said as he tied off the last stitch. He didn't have a lot of children come through his office, thanks to the nature of Ravenspurn, but he did make an effort to keep the experience pleasant for them when they did happen to come through. "You should be more careful playing with your papa's knives though."
"I was peeling potahto," the little redhaired girl explained, pigtails bobbing.
"Hmm, might want to get a safety peeler then," he said, giving the girl's father a look. "That way nobody loses any fingers when there might not be a doctor who can stick them back on."
The sea cook flashed a nervous grin. "Probably a good idea."
Meryl peeked into Raine's room again, trying not to make any excess noise.
She'd been asleep for a long time - or at least, she'd been quiet for a long time. Considering the kind of noises Raine had made when Shelley had first laid her down, Meryl wouldn't have been surprised if the woman hadn't gotten that much sleep at all.
After all, what kind of pain did it take to make someone who muffled their own screams willingly cry out?
It felt mean to interrupt that peacefulness now, but it was already a little past three in the afternoon and Raine still hadn't eaten anything yet that day. Breakfast had been fine enough to skip, Meryl had done that plenty of times without any problems, but lunch?
"Uhm, Raine?" she called softly. "I-I'm going to order from Zahlia and I wanted to know what you wanted to eat."
Raine didn't respond.
Was she still asleep? Or…
"I'm not hungry," Raine said finally, not opening her eyes.
"You… you should still eat something," Meryl said. Looking around the room, she grimaced at the lack of anything to do. Yes, Raine's bag of clothes was there, but those were just… clothes, not something to occupy a mind while bedbound. "I-I can try to find you something to read, if you need some time to think about what you'd like to eat."
Raine didn't reply for a minute, then…
"Fine," she said with a sigh. "I'll think about it."
That was at least something, Meryl figured, as she slipped out of the room to look for those books.
Nearly fifteen minutes of searching later, she had a small collection of books - mostly Aunt Brenda's paperbacks that Meryl had never found a reason to read, and some others that simply seemed to be someone else's forgotten luggage. They were, however, at least fiction, so maybe that'd be enough for Raine to distract herself with.
Raine, having pulled herself up to sit against the backboard while Meryl was gone, flipped through one of the books quickly, resting on a few pages long enough to raise her eyebrows. "Yours?"
"No, my… aunt's," Meryl said, slowly. "She died a while ago. I've never read them."
Was there something weird in them? The kind of books adults favored were usually too dry and long-winded for her to get that far into them, so anything that happened after the first few pages was usually a mystery as far as Meryl was concerned.
"Ah. My condolences then… and don't worry about the books. They're alright, I just didn't assume…" she snorted. "Well, you know what they say about assuming."
She didn't, but Meryl felt her mouth twitch towards a small smile anyway. "Yeah. Uh… did you decide what you wanted to eat?"
Raine took a minute to think about it. "Do you think they do mashed potatoes down at the Admiral? I hadn't thought to ask the last few times I was down there."
"I can ask."
Meryl sent out one of her birds, finally having the answer - or at least, something better than a non-answer - she'd been waiting for.
The day had crawled by slowly, but eventually the clock read 6PM, which meant that it was now time for Shelley to get dinner and, if at all possible, buy what supplies he could for his practice - very few of which were readily available in town, but enough could be ordered, if one pulled on the right connections.
The usual shortages wouldn't be too much trouble, but there was the matter of a specialty surgery to be considered - not immediately, not until he had had better sketched out the plan of how he was going to approach both it and the patient, but Shelley was fairly sure that all the parts would align once in place.
After all, after yesterday's events, he doubted Raine wanted to go through a repeat showing of painful public collapse any time soon.
But that was a future issue, one that would most certainly not be solved this night or the next. For now, Shelley figured his best concern was the subject of dinner. Dinner, and how to start the process of pinching what few beris he could.
As he made his way to the Dead Admiral, the calculating thoughts of numbers and blueprints not yet committed to paper were suddenly cut off by the sight of a stranger.
Even later, after there'd been time to analyze the interaction, Shelley wouldn't have been able to explain exactly what it was about the Man in Green that had caught his attention so thoroughly in the first place, but he could always run the events through his mind again.
The Man in Green was a very handsome man; tall, strong, and dark skinned with full lips, long dreadlocked hair, and a precisely trimmed beard that matched up well with the clean, crisp lines of his spring green vest - less so, with the two dead musimouflon he was carrying over his shoulder or the bag stuffed full of what looked like wool from the same sort of creatures he had alongside it.
His eyes, however, were where Shelley found his attention.
Grey-lavender and piercing as any blade, they were… hypnotic, almost. Like staring blankly into the distance, only to find a mysterious point of interest too engaging to look away from but too far to properly make out, the exact reason that they held his attention eluded Shelley, but there was no question that the eyes had it.
A new face in town, Shelley realized after too long a moment of trying to figure out if those eyes were familiar or not, or at least, one who hadn't been here more than the few months or more it usually took for him to run into new regulars.
There was no way that there wouldn't have been a spark of proper recognition otherwise, with eyes like those.
Eyes like those that were now looking at him, confusion and discomfort already clear as a cloudless day.
Oh no.
"Can I help you?" the man in green asked.
Shelley tried not to react to being caught staring. There had to be something -
His eye caught on the dead musimouflon again.
"Catgut!" he said abruptly.
"What-gut?"
"Catgut - not actually from cats, but the intestinal membrane of grazing animals…" Shelley said, the explanation spilling out of his mouth almost of its own will. He was messing this up, he was messing this up so badly. "It's used for surgical stitching. I'm a doctor. I need some - in as whole a condition as possible and properly cleaned, of course. I can handle the rest of the preparation myself after that step."
Well, at least the right words ended up in an order that at least made sense. It didn't hurt that it actually was truly something he needed and that he did have the means and know-how to handle the process on hand - well, apart from the one, rather vital base material that required a supplier.
"Oh," the Man in Green said, expression still a bit startled as he adjusted the load on his shoulder. "I… suppose I can do that. Least gets a use for them besides trying to sell the offal to whoever's dumb enough to go shark fishing around here."
As they began discussing prices, prices incredibly favorable to Shelley's budget, Shelley couldn't help but feel a touch of excitement. This could free up so much more money to go to other things now that he wouldn't have to pay for suturing thread to be shipping to him every other week! He could start replacing old tools, or pulling in the supplies to get Raine's back surgery set up -
His stomach growled, reminding him of a previous appointment.
Right.
"I'm heading to the Dead Admiral," Shelley said, reminding himself that there was a reason why he didn't ever skip his evening meal, no matter how interesting a current conversation or project was becoming. "Would you like to continue our conversation over dinner?"
The Man in Green's expression went fearful for a moment before closing off so thoroughly that Shelley might not have known that fear had been there at all if he'd blinked at the right moment.
"No," he said, adjusting his grip on the musimouflon again. "No, I don't have any more to do with Marshalsea than I can afford to and taking one step inside that place is exactly that, much less taking dinner there. I can make do on my own skills."
That was… unsettling. Accurate to the old pirate's reputation and more than justified with those that survived pissing her off, but still. Shelley would think he would have some awareness of someone who'd crossed that line in any recent months and come out of it as whole as this man - no longer easily thought of as a simple tender of livestock - had.
"Very well then," Shelley said, stepping back. "My office is open at night and in the afternoons, barring the odd call out. Feel free to come in at any time you have the guts available… or any need for my skills."
The Man in Green nodded tightly before walking away - towards the back door of the Dead Admiral, likely to pass over his goods without properly crossing the threshold into Marshalsea's personal territory.
Peculiar… but not so peculiar that Shelley would comment on it to Marshalsea. He'd just… keep an eye on the man in their future dealings.
Now, despite his… streamlined idea of self-care, Shelley did know the importance of a balanced diet.
This knowledge was mostly used on difficult patients, but he applied it to himself often enough… usually by making sure that he got his complete daily value of just about everything in a single setting.
"An… entire baked ziti? Just for yourself?" Darea asked, her tone disbelieving.
"Yes," Shelley replied. "And some water."
Was that healthy? Probably not, but it was better than just going without and it allowed him to get exactly what he needed in the shortest amount of time so he could then throw himself back into work. It also didn't hurt that the Dead Admiral's chef had a good selection of casserole recipes up their sleeve - the food here was far better than what he'd eaten back when he'd first started the habit as one of Hogback's apprentices.
It wasn't too long of a wait until the food was done and heading his way, but, of course, that would also be the moment that someone would choose to interrupt.
"Doctor. So rare to catch you outside your office," Marshalsea said as she descended the stairs. "Or at least, that's what I was led to understand before Pew told me about yesterday's events. Care to fill me in on that?"
"After I eat," Shelley replied. "Unless you have any objections about that?"
"Only about your location, maybe."
Marshalsea turned to look at Darea, hands full of hot casserole, and gave the horned girl a Look that set her cringing back.
"Bring his food up to my table - Dr. Shimon will be joining me for dinner."
"As if I could turn down such a generous invitation," Shelley said, drawing out the word a touch longer than necessary as he stood up to follow the elderly pirate up the stairs to her usual table.
To the doctor's surprise, there was already someone sitting there - an older man in a cheetah skin cowboy hat, somewhere around fifty years old if Shelley had to guess, with dark skin and long purple-black hair that was just starting to gather strands of silver.
He was vaguely familiar, in the way that said Shelley had seen him before outside of any professional sense, but hadn't done anything worthy of attention outside of existing and wearing that hat in public.
That wasn't odd for Ravenspurn, yet…
No, Shelley decided, shutting down that train of thought as he sat down at the far end of the table, he had enough going on without adding in every single oddity on the island to the list of 'things Dr. Shimon has to deal with'. Best just to leave the man to his musimouflon kebabs and stick with whatever problem Marshalsea was about throw in his lap.
Darea, still holding the ziti, quickly set it down in front of Shelley, giving him a questioning glance that radiated pure stress.
"I can handle the rest from here," he promised. "Don't worry about it."
The girl nodded before scuttling off, clearly relieved to be getting out of Marshalsea's immediate presence.
"You should be nicer to your waitstaff," Shelley said.
Marshalsea scoffed at that. "Zahlia's waitstaff; it's her place - I just live here. And that one's-"
"On probation. Yes, I've heard about that." Actually, he'd heard a little over half a dozen different versions of the story by now, but Shelley had figured that the truth was much more mundane than most of the theories floated, given that he'd actually dealt with Darea and her friends first hand a few times. "Doesn't mean you should bully her."
"Please. Bullying the small fry is one of the few pleasures left to me anymore. And you know I could be so much worse about it."
Yes, he did know, given that he'd had to help piece together more than a few of the idiots stupid enough to try themselves against a woman who'd competed with the likes of Edward Newgate and the Pirate King himself back in the day - being in her mid-seventies and her cadre of pre-existing conditions hadn't handicapped her enough to make it anything close to resembling an even fight.
"I'm sure you didn't call me up here just to talk about the weather," Shelley said, stabbing a fork into his dinner to scoop up his first bite.
"Hah! Even if it was in the habit of being some variation on 'overcast' and 'stormy', I wouldn't," Marshalsea laughed as her own dinner arrived, carried up by one of the actual paid waitstaff - a generously seasoned plate of rice, mixed greens, and black-eyed peas further filled out by grilled chicken and to be washed down by a tall glass of some manner of pale technicolor blue alcohol.
"I see you're following my dietary recommendations." Apart from 'reduce the alcohol consumption' aspect, but small victories.
Marshalsea shrugged as she chewed on a mouthful of chicken, beans, and rice. "Livesley said the same thing to me and, ornery old bat I may be at this point," she said after she swallowed. "I'm not stupid enough to go against the recommendations of both a New World level doctor or the guy who worked under fucking Hogback for five whole ass years."
Except Doctor Hogback had rarely given out dietary advice, Shelley wanted to say. His patients had always been the rich and important types who wanted solutions for the immediate now that wouldn't force them to change anything about their lives. The people who were less arrogant, less fixed on their concept of how their lives should be and unwilling to sacrifice even a single beri's worth of luxury, and always and inevitably poorer were the ones that got that treatment and almost always from the assistants.
He sighed as he swallowed the protest and another mouthful of his dinner. Nobody wanted to hear the 'fallen student' bleat about the alleged inadequacies of his teacher. "You are more sensible than many of my patients, Madame Marshalsea."
"Madame. You're too polite for your own good - there's no 'Madame' about me, unless you cut out that first syllable, and only my enemies and my lovers do that."
The cowboy jerked a bit at that, the laugh disguised as a cough quickly turning very real as his drink went down the wrong way.
Well, that was certainly one way to learn about someone's sex life, Shelley thought as he took another bite of his ziti, turning his eyes away from the domesticity of his elders. Not really his area, given the scars and reputation chasing off most potential contenders outside the usual trash, but…
The thought petered out as something more immediately real caught his attention.
In a corner between the fireplace and the wall, almost rendered unobtrusive by the shadows, was a sword. A katana, maybe three feet long from purple wrapped hilt to hidden point, with a black sheath dotted with the palest shadow of red - florals? Circles? Something between? - symbols and the slightly unraveled braided purple cord of… oh, there was some technical term for it that likely made sense to those interested in blades… wrapped around the sheath a few inches down from where the guard met its mouth.
Whatever the technical term was for all those pieces didn't matter. Really, the fact that Shelley had taken note of a weapon outside of the context of 'oh, yet another inconvenience to be removed from a corpse and/or living patient' was more concerning, yet…
"That isn't your sword," Shelley noted, speaking that interest into the world.
"Nah, it belongs to that Raine girl. Interesting little piece of work, both of them."
"What."
"Yeah, you wouldn't think it from looks, would you?" Marshalsea said as Shelley started reevaluating his whole plan for Raine's replacement vertebrae, trying to calculate the different force and strength requirements for that level of exertion - oh god, and that was even without knowing an iota about her preferred fighting style, gods be damned - in his head. "But it takes all types in this world and she's got that touch of spark that makes for the real fun fighters. Think it'll be entertaining to take her out for a spin sooner or later; been a while since I got a good spar in, even if I'll probably have to hold back a lot to keep from-"
"She's bedbound for the rest of the week," Shelley interrupted. Possibly for the next two or three, if he could get his supplies in fast enough along with consent to treatment and a working plan for how the hell to rebuild a body to stand up to whatever horseshit Raine would be putting it through.
Now it was Marshalsea's turn to be confused. "What?"
"The Dacey girl got her into trouble, dragging Miss Raine around Stonecutter, and ended up throwing out her back after trying to get her to go cliff climbing or some other nonsense. I had to physically haul Miss Raine back to Ravenser myself," he said, taking a moment to swirl the water in his glass. "Which also neatly answers your question earlier of why I abandoned my usual pattern of doing things yesterday."
"Damn. That's a pain in the ass. Not any permanent damage though?"
"Nothing that wasn't there already," Shelley promised. "Though I haven't exactly had time to give Miss Raine a proper thorough examination beyond making sure her back was merely strained instead of broken, so I can't testify to anything beyond that and what my patient has shared herself."
"Ugh, keep me posted on when she is cleared for physical nonsense then," Marshalsea said, leaning back in her chair. "I want to try my hand at fighting that kid at least once before I die, but I'm not going to cross a medical man in order to do it."
"So considerate," he replied as he sipped at his drink.
"Mostly because you're the reason I can still walk halfway decent and I'm not entirely sure you can't change that if I cross you bad enough."
Shelley smiled at that, carefully not confirming or denying the assumption as he set to finishing his dinner before it could go cold.
"God, I haven't seen someone tear into food like that since the last time I made the mistake of treating a D. to dinner," Marshalsea muttered as Shelley cleared the halfway point of the dish.
"That's because the only ones you ever hung around with were the feral ones," the cowboy replied. His voice, Shelley noted, was a slightly rough around the edges baritone - almost exactly what he'd expected from the man's looks, but still somehow surprising for the fact that it was new.
"Please, yours is just the 'silent but deadly' kind of feral - there ain't been a D. born that was ever domesticated, only tamed by sheer dumb luck, and even that's a crapshoot," Marshalsea shot back good naturedly. "That's the only way you can account for fuckin' Garp staying with the Marines for as long as he has and that man is still physically incapable of following a single one of their party lines."
Shelley tuned out the rest of their conversation in favor of focusing on his dinner. Whatever drama with the Hero of the Marines Marshalsea had at whatever point in the past, it really wasn't his business - after all, how likely was he to run into someone like that? Knowing Marshalsea was already bad enough.
As soon as he cleared his plate, he made his excuses and goodbyes before leaving as quickly as a brisk walk would allow - noting absently, that Marshalsea's dinner companion had followed him to the door, only to turn away and start a soft-spoken conversation with The Tearer the moment Shelley thought to ask the man why.
Despite not really taking the time to sit and read in recent memory - or, I amended as I remembered internet fanfiction, sit and read real-life original books -, I'd sunk into the books Meryl had given easily enough.
Part of it might have been boredom - Meryl had taken over a corner of the room to do her own art-related things in complete silence, so there wasn't much stimulation to be found there -, but another part that I was more sure of was that I hadn't really wanted to get into the conversation of why Meryl's dead aunt had just left lesbian porn laying around and why Meryl, very much a teenager, hadn't sniffed out that fact at any point before now.
To be fair, once I'd gotten past the initial hump of getting into the characters, it was pretty good porn, complete with a decent plot and characterization to match, but there was that other question brought on by the fact that it even existed and that was the nature of Meryl's family.
I'd never given her one in her original story, I was pretty sure. She'd just been one of those characters who had come into their world ex nihilo, without any blood relations unnecessary to the plot, with maybe some kind of famous ancestor lurking in the wings just present enough to justify a secondhand sense of grandeur. There'd been no parents, no aunts, no tangible presence of loss outside of the sort of the nebulous and omnipresent loneliness that had defined what little of that story I'd actually typed up.
Meryl was certainly lonely, but it wasn't as crisp and innocent as a weird teenager's fanfic would have portrayed it and her way of handling it was similarly not as clean cut as 'well, that's what you get with an inexperienced idiot writer'.
Yes, she had hurt me, yes, her behavior was fucking obnoxious and, yes, she should have known better. But had I been any better at that age?
Wait, scratch that, I'd spent age sixteen constantly disassociating in an actively abusive household. Completely different animal, even if the PTSD from that had only started letting up recently.
But the point was still there, itching at me; could I, in good conscience, keep flipflopping between treating Meryl as a flat, predictable character and then as someone who could be held accountable for bad choices and behavior? Could I do that even as I got angry at her for applying a similar thought process to how she treated me?
I sighed. No, I couldn't continue to play the part of hypocrite, even if it felt good to put myself on the pedestal of 'well, of course I know best'.
And the first step to dealing with that? To making any part of this situation better? Was to open up communications and try to have a genuine conversation.
"What are you doing?" I asked, putting down the book.
Meryl twitched.
"I mean, beyond painting. I got that bit," I added, trying to cover up the invitation to give a deliberately obtuse and unhelpful answer.
'I know we're having food, but what kind?'
'The kind you can eat, now shut up and set the table.'
Goddammit. I was trying to be good and reasonable here, and tripping over old triggers and long-buried irritations wasn't going to help.
Meryl licked her lips. "Uhm. Just… people. Out of the old family album."
"Ah. Going well?"
"Not… really. It's hard. I'm good at birds, but… people are trickier," Meryl admitted as she carefully laid down another brushstroke. "It's not that I can't do the faces, it's…"
"It's the eyes," I finished. It was a problem I'd had often enough myself - hell, it'd set my own art style back for years thanks to all my hang ups with getting things perfect and even then, getting over it had simply meant twisting myself more towards cartoony styles rather than even attempting to verge into realism. "If you can't get the eyes right, you can't get the soul."
Meryl blinked.
"Well, most of the time anyway. Eyes don't always have to be there. But it's the emotion, the personality, the life," I amended, trying to articulate the idea in a way that was… cleaner, easier to understand for someone who didn't live in my head with me. "Mishandle those things and you just have… you just have a line-up photo or a mannequin. Maybe a beautiful one, but still… dead. Empty."
"…I didn't realize you were an artist," Meryl said after a moment's silence.
I'm not a professional. Nothing special. Can't make things that look real, can't draw anything but a shallow range of human forms, can't make a living-
"Pencil and paper mostly, sometimes inks if I'm feeling confident. I don't do it as much as I used to," I said instead, sticking to facts as I shoved the old litany of doubts down. I'd been able to do more with computer art, but that simply wasn't a thing in this world, was it? "Between my back and my hands, it can make it hard to go for very long, even on a good day. And I can't paint for shit, apart from a little watercolor, so you have me beat there."
"It's… I don't think it's a competition."
That was… that was so smart of her. Maybe an easier realization to reach when you didn't have an internet constantly measuring you up against someone else with more experience, more resources, more training, but still.
"I'm still learning to remember that," I said. "Do you want to show me what you're working on?"
Meryl paused, apparently weighing the merits of letting me see in her mind for a moment, before she gingerly began the process of turning the easel over to face the bed.
The subject, for all there was one yet, seemed to be a brown-skinned woman in flight - not quite a fanciful image, given that this was One Piece, but still energetic in a way that commanded one's attention on impact - though it still was too early to make out the proper details of anything beyond 'those arms are shredded' and 'ABS'.
Goddammit, me, stop being gay for five seconds and focus on aesthetics.
"I'm painting a picture of my Aunt - the one who's books you're reading," she said, her voice a bit shy. "It's far from done, as you can see, but I think it's going well."
Tasteful! It didn't hurt that the subject of the piece was gorgeous too, but I didn't think that anyone would be stupid enough to say 'hey, your dead aunt is hot and I'd like her to lift my dumb bi-lesbian ass over her head' to someone clearly in mourning, even if you were currently halfway through the first part of said-aunt's lesbian porn collection.
"Very well done - I'm sure she'd approve of it too," I said instead, taking in what was there so far; the body was present and slowly being filled in, the background basic and near complete, but the area of the face was only light pencil sketching - enough to get an idea of her looks but not quite there in terms of actually communicating the person it was supposed to be depicting. "Do you want to talk about her? Maybe that'll help with capturing more of her spirit in the picture - remind you of who she was in life rather than the hole she left behind."
"You talk like you know what it's like."
…was it worth it to open up about my past already?
I only had to think about it for a moment - if I wanted Meryl to trust me with the tales of her dead people, I was going to have to share my own.
"I've lost a lot of people in my life, so I'm… very familiar with the grieving process," I said slowly, easing myself into the subject. "Family members, friends, some of whom meant a lot to me. I know there's no one way to… to process the passing of someone, because there's so many moving parts to it. How close you were, how they passed, how much time they had, was it quick or slow…"
Was it a release, an accident, or the quickest and most permanent escape they could possibly make from their current situation?
"But talking usually helps. If you have a good listener, anyway," I said, pulling myself away from that particular rabbit hole of dark thoughts. I was here to listen to Meryl, not get caught up in retreading the old ground of that particular 'why' for the thousandth time. "So, if you want to, I'm here, no matter what you want to talk about."
There it was, an offer clearly made and not tripped over in social clumsiness. Now the ball was in Meryl's court and the girl was clearly weighing the offer in her mind.
A minute passed, then two, as Meryl sat and thought.
"I… I suppose you're right about that. To talk about it," she finally said. "I've… been avoiding it and it's not… it's not getting better doing that."
I didn't reply, not wanting to interrupt the story that Meryl was slowly drawing out of the deep internal place where she'd kept it bottled up.
Cracking open an album of photos, Meryl began to tell me all about her Aunt Brenda. How the woman had effectively raised her on her own after her wife - the actual blood relation to Meryl - had died at sea, what second hand adventures she'd had that Meryl still remembered all the high points of, how abrupt and devastating her death had been.
"My grandfather… has helped, but he's not… I don't always understand his advice and the advice I do understand I don't always take," she admitted, pausing in a section of the book that seemed dedicated to a group photo of a pirate crew, featuring a much younger and less scarred Marshalsea shamelessly mugging up to the camera. "He means well, but I don't…"
"Sometimes," I said slowly, letting my initial desire to tear at the man's failure at being a present figure in his granddaughter's life ease into the background radiation of my emotions - those kind of fights weren't good for conversations like this. "Sometimes, when you're dealing with older people, you have to remember that they're at a different point in life and come from a very different situation than you do. That they were raised by a different culture, even if you're from the same place and roots, because that's what the passage of time does - it changes things, for everyone."
I reached out to gently touch Meryl on the shoulder.
"It doesn't always make them wrong, but it does make some of their ways wrong for you, especially if they're not willing to adjust them for your sake."
Those were the words I wished someone had told me a long time ago, before I'd broken and rebuilt myself over and over again to try to meet the standards of people who constantly believed in moving the goalposts so I'd always fall short. Even if Meryl's situation was nothing like mine, it still felt right to pass those words along.
I didn't draw attention to the fact that she was on the verge of tears - I might have been trying for open conversation, but I still wasn't equipped for dealing with big emotions right now. Besides, the shiny eyes and faint dribble of snot might have just been allergies from all the dust in this place.
"Now, where were we with the photos?" I asked, turning the page to show a very young Brenda with a rather attractive, copper-skinned man with bold magenta hair who, never the less, gave me an odd feeling. Not of déjà vu, but of an ill omen on the wind. "Ah - who's this? Her big brother?"
"N-no," Meryl answered, wiping under her nose. "That's her… her dad. Sky Knight Ruarc."
Children deserved good non-judgmentally treatment, not an interrogation, Shelley repeated to himself again as he took in the scene in front of him.
This child, much like Joylene from earlier, was calm for the situation, but there was a distinct difference between maintaining one's composure in the face of a cut finger and wearing a positively bored expression while a nearly two-foot-long, very live centipede was sticking out of one's nose.
"And you're absolutely certain it's not pinching right now?" he asked again as he prepared to… extract the uninvited guest.
The centipede gave a small wiggle.
"Yahuh."
…that sounded enough like a 'yes'. "Alright," Shelley said, taking a breath. "Let's see if we can get this fellow out in one go."
The centipede did come out cleanly and without much fight, two facts that Shelley thanked every god that could have possibly had input on the situation for as he dumped the creature - still alive and still wriggling - into a large specimen jar to deal with later.
"Alright!" he said, tone brightening as he pulled a lollipop out of the jar of sweets he kept on his desk. "That leaves the last and most important step of the operation-"
Upon receipt of the candy, the child immediately stuck it up the same nostril that had held the centipede only a minute ago.
…perhaps Shelley would be right to recommend the child's minder get some manner of faceguard.
"Yes, technically, I can do that, but ethically, I very much cannot give you an unconsenting stranger's f-"
"I'll find someone else then!" the would-be patient announced, dragging the unconscious body of their - friend? Victim? - out the door behind them by the ankles.
"Sir, this is a fur coat, not an animal. You can't taxidermy a fur coat."
"Have you tried?"
Shelley opted not to dignify that question with an answer.
"Again, Gauthier? It's barely been twelve hours." And nearly 4AM, for that matter, which was a bit of an odd hour for the level of violence he was seeing on poor Gauthier here.
The man, face running with blood from injuries that, for a change, seemed like the lesser of his newest set, merely whimpered as he limped into the office, evidence that - whenever the attack had happened - it had taken time for him to make his way to the relative safety of Doctor Shimon's office.
"Alright, you can stay overnight - at the very least, it'll keep you out of trouble," Shelley said, letting the unfortunate pirate in before flipping his sign to 'CLOSED'. He'd maybe try to follow the trail of blood tomorrow, if an early morning rain didn't wash it away while he was asleep.
Once he got Gauthier stitched back up and settled into a spare cot with some pain medication to keep him resting, he slid into the last part of his daily routine; another round of stretches followed by an update to his ledger and organizer.
Check in with Dacey house in the next three days, he wrote, careful to keep the words clearly spaced before underlining the directive. And, after a moment of thought, an earlier directive of 'get more information on Raine's spinal condition' was underlined twice.
That would be enough for the night, he figured, as he turned off the lights and made his way to bed and began the process of drifting off to sleep, dreams of musimouflon terrorizing the town and jumping all over the roof of his office already replacing anything resembling coherent thought.
Author's Notes
Remember the note in the last chapter about this going faster? WELL- turns out it was right!
So my (Monica) notes first this time, unlike the previous chapter my outline for 7 was a lot more detailed, the next one is too.
A lot of my goals in this chapter and the coming ones are to develop the island and other characters some more before they end up leaving for another one, and set up some mysteries to be explored later.
Also some things have been edited in the previous chapter to line up with my vision i wasn't clear about in the messier outline for chapter 6
The title of this chapter and the next two are all lines from Gratitude by Oingo Boingo, there's some thematic reasoning for me helping me write it but i wouldn't go deep on the song itself and more the lines picked out.
We should have some art on DD's blog to accompany the chapter to show what meryl's family mentioned in this chapter looks like.
Shelley's weird eating habits are actually based on my own (sweats)
Nvz infodumping hours activate*
As a sidenote that isn't informational, working off of Monica's outline was really refreshing because, while I know the value of having a good plan and have been working on my plotting skills in recent years, it's still not something I've mastered on the micro-scale (I can do a decent plot on the big scale, but still working on building the finer frameworks within a single arc). Monica, on the other hand, is a lot better at avoiding the pitfalls I tend to fall into (overfocus on a single character, overcomplicating certain things, sense of pace) so it all evens out pretty well and we're able to work well during our talks on any given subject.
Catgut suture has been used in medicine since the third century AD and is still used in most of the world thanks to it various useful qualities (high tensile strength and good knot security) on top of being absorbable by the living body, making it great for internal operations where you can't just go after the stitches after everything's healed up, though most places have switched to synthetic polymers in human surgery for various reasons, one of which being concerns about transmission of mad cow disease.
It has never been made from cats, despite the name seeming to indicate that - it's mostly a side-effect of evolving language; originally, the term was 'kitgut' which meant 'string used on a kit' aka, a fiddle or violin.
Marshalsea's drink would have been openly referred to as a Sex In The Driveway - or, adapted for a setting that doesn't really have cars 'Sex In The Drydock' - cocktail (a variant of Sex On The Beach that involves Blue Curaçao liquor which, as you may have guessed from the name, is Very Blue), but I didn't get the chance to lace it into the dialogue.