Chapter 10 - On The Tip Of Everyone's Tongue Part 3
It had nearly an hour off of noon when they left the Wheel - Meryl Dacey had failed to materialize and Holliday had gotten much of the information he'd wanted but…
"So, what exactly was in there again?" Pew asked for the third time in three hours as he threw up another handful of targets for Holliday to shoot, the curve of his mouth and teeth locked in a way that spoke more of a shit-eating grin than his neutral expression even without throwing in the tone of his voice. "Right rock."
A bullet shattered the piece of slate into shards right as it reached the height of its arc, while the other items - a broken bottle and a lump of basalt - fell back to the sand unharmed.
"There was…"
Holliday stopped, putting aside his desire to not have to think for a bit in favor of thinking about the right words.
"There were books and disc records. Music ones," were the ones he settled for as he reloaded his revolver. "More than I was expecting and some looked fairly interesting."
There. Carefully neutral, not making any overt judgements of the Raine girl's life choices. And since glitter didn't have a smell, there wasn't any way for Pew to know for a fact that Holliday was lying.
"I appreciate a good sound disc, myself," the blind dolphin fishman said, collecting some new items for skeet shooting practice from the shoreline. "Never was able to play one myself without breaking something though."
"Yes, they do tend to scratch easily."
"What? No, I kept snapping the little arm things on the players," Pew said, shattering the stone he held with a single sharp movement before throwing the shards up in the air. "Ridiculous how fragile they are."
Holliday carefully did not comment on the correlation between that bit of machinery and the flesh and bone arms that Pew had a tendency of snapping whenever sufficiently annoyed as he reduced the flying shards to even smaller fragments with a bullet a piece, switching guns without hesitation when it became clear that six bullets weren't going to be enough - it felt a little too close to inviting the fishman to demonstrate on him.
"My ammos just about spent," he said, removing the casings from his guns' chambers and putting them away in his bag to reuse later, while making a mental note to give his revolvers a proper cleaning later in the afternoon. "You mind calling this a 'draw'?"
The fishman nodded. "Think I can live with that."
They began to walk their way back to town, neither in any particular rush to get anywhere - Holliday, because the next target objective on his mission wasn't exactly known for breaking his schedule and was likely still going through the motions of waking up, and Pew, probably because he didn't have much else to look forward to unless a fight broke out.
So perhaps it shouldn't have been that much of a surprise that their paths crossed with one of the last people Holliday wanted to deal with right now.
"Who's this guy?" Meryl Dacey asked, her face scrunching up as she looked Holliday over. "And why does he have glitter all over him?"
This was it - his first mission ever ruined by glitter. Not teenagers or even teenage girls, because that ship had sailed a long time ago under the flag of his own army, but glitter? Definitely a first, and not one helped by Meryl's calling further attention to it.
Oberon was going to be insufferable as soon as he found out - and he would find out. When it came to the dignity of his friends - especially when it was lost -, Elegast Oberon always found out; quickly and thoroughly.
Pew grinned.
Holliday knew that whatever the fishman was going to say was going to both reinforce his cover story while also making his life significantly worse for the next week.
"I think that answer depends on the day of the week and how Marshalsea's been playing with him."
"What?" the girl asked, realization dawning in her eyes in a building cascade of horror and appall. "Why would she be- she's too- that's disgusting!"
No, he figured this was going to be that much worse.
He coughed, interrupting the drama before it could further spin out into another dimension of 'things he didn't want to deal with'. "If you don't mind, I have other matters to attend to today."
With that, he turned and started on his way back to town, catching only a few fragments of the conversation behind him - mostly on the subject of Meryl Dacey's job, which the girl exploited her Devil Fruit powers very well in, and the half-year anniversary of her aunt's death.
Stepping into town was a return to comfortable invisibility; even with the stubborn trace of glitter still on him, it still didn't stand out as something strangers needed to comment on - in a town like Ravenspurn, even walking around covered in blood was one of those things that ran the risk of being entirely ignored.
He could have made use of being covered in blood, actually, as his next objective involved getting what information he could from Shimon Shelley - not that he expected much, considering how tightly the disgraced doctor held to his professional principles, but it could likely be something he didn't know yet.
Like, perhaps, what sort of medication the mysterious Raine had been keeping on board her boat.
But first, he needed an excuse to talk to the man.
And the clothing store seemed like a likely place to find one.
Tipping his hat to the shopkeeper, he quickly browsed the sections, looking for the tell-tale texture of a certain material… and quickly finding it in the form of a pair of latex booty shorts, just close enough to his size not to catch suspicion.
He paid for his prize, trying not to call attention to the fact that the hand holding the thing had already started breaking out in hives, and stepped behind the store.
The things he did for his job, Holliday thought to himself with a grimace, as he unbuttoned his shirt and proceeded to rub the latex material over his chest and neck. At least this part wouldn't take too long to kick in.
Shimon Shelley had a reputation - one that had been inevitable from the moment he'd entered the orbit of one of the most famous surgeons in modern history. The highly muddled scandal surrounding his leaving Dr. Hogback's practice, conjoined with Dr. Hogback's disappearance at that same time, had only served to turn that reputation into its worst possible iteration.
The man himself experienced firsthand, though?
Probably one of the best doctors Holliday had ever had, in terms of patient care.
Dr. Shimon had a particular brand of brusque delicacy that made a patient feel respected and secure without wasting much time or frivolity on the usual niceties. There was none of the rough handling and threats of violence that so often characterized sea doctors, nor was there the simpering toothless 'suggestions' or apathetic disregard of the average high-end civilian doctor.
The man had found the perfect balance of firmness and gentleness in medicine and tied it together with a consistent line of respect that felt neither sarcastic nor mocking.
"Your heartbeat seems to be holding at… about 150 beats per minute, which is unideal for what is should be a resting rate," Dr. Shimon said as he released Holliday's wrist. "Combined with the hives and your described chest pains, I'd say you have a severe allergy to… to…"
Of course, Holliday was probably testing the hell out of how far that respect could go, coming into his office with an open shirt, covered in both hives and glitter.
The doctor grimaced, apparently trying to figure out the intersection between the most likely culprit, the least awful mental image, and the most tactful way of wording his conclusion.
Holliday decided to throw him a bone. "The allergy is to latex."
"So the glitter was just for… fun," the doctor said dubiously.
Not in the least. "Yes."
"If you are fully aware of the extent of your allergy, how did you even touch that much-?" Dr. Shimon's face twitched uncomfortably, actually losing a bit of what little color there was to it before he cut himself off. "You know what? I absolutely do not want to know the details."
"Thank you."
It did save the trouble of coming up with a suitably and believably embarrassing lie, though Holliday had a feeling that the doctor's imagination had come up with something fairly close to the story he'd had planned on using.
The doctor stalked off to his back room, coming back with small tub and an even smaller glass bottle.
"I will give you some nitroglycerin for your chest pain - and suggest that you take an aspirin before bed, if you don't have an additional allergy to that - and," Dr. Shimon said as he unscrewed the lid of the tub and started smearing the cool substance inside across Holliday's chest. "Give you this lotion - which you should use about four times a day, with a roughly three-hour space between each. Not for sexual recreation - it is not intended for oral, anal, or any other of internal use. And you should probably wash the glitter off before your next application instead of grinding it into your skin."
Holliday took a breath and opened his mouth.
"I said that I didn't want to know any of the details. Any of them," Dr. Shimon said, slapping a heavier handful of the anti-rash lotion on the spy's chest. "Unless you neglected to mention that you also have hives on, in, or around your-"
Holliday cut him off. "I was going to ask if anything interesting has happened around recently."
"Not in the least unless you count the event I already related to Marshalsea over dinner and the fact that there are now two more people in town I can actually tolerate."
Which likely brought the total number up to somewhere around three. "I assume that Miss Raine would be one of them -" mostly based on the fact that there weren't that much in the way of new people actually staying in Ravenspurn long term, "-but who's the other?"
"The musimouflon herder - I assume he lives somewhere outside of town."
Holliday racked his memory for - right. There had been an influx of the wool more reliably lately. "Oh? What's his name?"
Dr. Shimon paused. "I… don't actually know. Our interactions have strictly been business so far."
What could… right. "Catgut."
"You're well informed."
"I try to be. So, strictly business, no names needed. And you still like him better than most of the people in town?"
"He was reasonably polite and didn't throw anything at me, comment on my history, or make any unwanted advances of any nature," Dr. Shimon said, shrugging. "That alone puts him above most of the population. Is there anything else you need?"
"Yes," Holliday said, pulling out the bottles of medicine out of his bag. "A friend of mine asked me to see about getting these refilled - unfortunately, they don't take good care of their belongings and I don't know enough about medicine to make sense of what's still legible. Can you?"
"You probably would have been better off asking Dr. Livesley for his opinion; I'm hardly a chemist," Dr. Shimon scoffed, though he still took the bottles, squinting his eye at the water-damaged labels. "Hm. Let me check something."
The doctor turned on his heel, coat swirling behind him as he quickly moved to another room, returning with a small stack of thick books.
Minutes passed in near silence as pages turned and the doctor hummed, pitch rising and falling as he dug further and further through his available reference guides, cross checking what was there with the bottles Holliday had provided.
Eventually, Dr. Shimon closed the books.
"This," the doctor said, rattling the bottle with the white tablets, "seems to be some manner of anti-depressant - not a common one, because none of the listed names are in any of my medical journals, though I hardly keep a full accounting of what developments are going on in that side of the field, but the warnings on the label are pretty standard concerns for that kind of medication."
A bottle of blue-green tablets was next.
"This one, I am actually familiar with and keep a stock of, though under a different name and in some slightly different dosages. It has a few different primary uses; as an anti-anxiety sleep aid, for countering seasickness, and managing allergic reactions… something you should probably familiarize yourself with at some point, Mr. Holliday," Dr. Shimon added coolly.
Holliday was loathe to admit that the young doctor was probably right.
The last bottle, which had both the largest tablets and the least amount, was held up. "This one… this is an anti-inflammatory. A relatively recent discovery and not typically used in tablet form - almost every study I've seen it named in has used it intravenously and the few that haven't have noted that its viability is greatly reduced when taking orally. Its entire use is in reducing the pain and effects of arthritis."
"Could you recreate any of them?" Holliday asked.
Dr. Shimon stared at him blankly for a moment.
And then made a noise that wasn't immediately recognizable as a laugh; rough and raw in a way that usually only came with some manner of throat infection or hoarseness from screaming too much.
Well, at least now he had an idea of how often the doctor made that kind of sound.
"Are you joking? Even if I had a full laboratory with unlimited supplies, I am a surgeon before all else - my qualifications in this field end at the practical application of the medicine and the effects it has on a body post-mortem, not the creation of it for use on the living," the doctor said, waving at his many jars of specimens. "If I were to make any advances in my field, it would be in… in prosthetics! Or more efficient surgical tools! I may not be useless in the field of pharmacology, but I am certainly not of the caliber required for such a task as that."
"No, I cannot 'recreate' them," Dr. Shimon said, sitting down heavily in his chair. "At best, I could place an order or buy a pre-existing stock of them from a specialist - I think these two," he rattled the bottles with the blue-green and yellow pills in them, "would be the easiest to get a hold of, but the anti-depressant? Much trickier."
Holliday tried not to twitch as the doctor turned his one eye - painfully icy blue compared to the murkier purple of the glass prosthetic - to focus on him.
"Now are there any other subjects you'd like to quiz me on or can I return to doing my job? I know it looks like I have all the time in the world, but I really don't," he said, shoving the bottles of medication back towards the spy. "And close up your shirt before you leave, will you? I have enough problems without people assuming that I'm the type to sleep with my patients."
Author's Notes -
And so closes part 3 of our chopped chapter experiment. RIP Holliday's dignity.
Holliday's latex allergy was Monica's idea, along with his decision to exploit it. And yes, his symptoms were intended to be that bad, both to internally make sure Shelley wouldn't question his office visit and externally prove how serious he takes his job, even if his dignity ain't exactly coming out of it intact.
The medication from the boat is based on stuff I take myself and in slightly obscured detail (because even if my meds are pretty common on the market, it's weird to go into too much detail on the internet and it's not really needed for the story) - I also tried to 'justify' Shelley's familiarity with it roughly based on the relative years of their development IRL and with how closely they'd relate to his career; anti-inflammatories and medicine that can be used to treat seasickness/interact with anesthesia would make more sense for him to be familiar with than psychiatric medication.
I also imagine that Outsider medicine is one of those things that kinda falls in-between the extremes of 'can they take it apart and make their own' cause some shit's pretty wild IRL but so is some of the stuff doctors get up to in One Piece.