The Holy Fool: Chapter 2
The Waters Taketh Away
Word Count: 2.1k Warnings: Mentions of infant death and murder Rating: M Description: An Arcana AU set in a Vesuvia that is half-noir and half-fantasy.
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“Doctor Devorak, if you do not cease and desist, we will have no choice but to take you into custody!” snapped one voice, the annoyance in it softened by the fact that the owner of said voice was obviously trying to suppress a yawn.
“Shouldn’t we get this body to a morgue, get an autopsy report in, identify the corpse, inform the family?” another voice cuts in rapidly-- “That’s standard protocol, why would you just leave a dead baby lying around--”
Asra had trooped on ahead when Liuyin hesitated at the fringes of the forming crowd, tugging his companion after him till they reached the source of the voice.
“Ilya,” the magician greets, and the name almost seemed like a spell-- the tall, gangly man going red-faced from his haranguing had shut up, almost literally, his jaw clicking as he slammed his mouth shut.
His eyes widened, almost to a frantic degree, and Liuyin suspected this new flush was from something other than aggravation as he offers the two of them a small smile that bordered on nervous. “Ah, good morning Asra--”
“Magician,” Asra corrects steadily, seeming to grow increasingly unfazed the more flustered Doctor Devorak seemed. He gestured to Liuyin. “And this is--”
“Liuyin Mei, administer of last rites and curses, blessings, the such,” Liuyin replied, breaking the tension between them by offering their hand to the doctor. “Pleasure to meet you, Ilya.”
“Oh, it’s Julian now,” the man replied, stooping down and pressing a kiss to the back of Liuyin’s hand. “It’s wonderful to see such a lovely face in the midst of such chaos.”
A business card is pressed into their hands, and Liuyin had glanced between it and the man, now straightened to his full height, before they’d tucked the card into their sleeve. “Ilya, that’s enough--” Asra says, a faint note of vexation in his voice. “Constable Marlin, take us to the corpse, please.”
The mustachioed, portly gentleman nods, gesturing them forwards, whilst they shouldered past a few more civilians and reporters starting to gather around a cordoned-off area of the docks, where two bundles lay on the ground, side-by-side.
“When the salvage team found the body and the arm, was there anything else present?” Liuyin turned to a detective on the scene.
The detective turns to Liuyin, frowns, then shakes their head. “No, sir,” they’d replied. “Nothing turned up of note.”
“No coffin?” Liuyin cuts in, and received a strange look in turn.
“Why do you ask?”
“Because around three this morning, in fact, my aunt and I were preparing burial rites for a baby,” Liuyin replies. It wasn’t an outright lie, per se, just a small one-- truly, they hadn’t even seen the contents of the box yet before it was stolen-- “and someone had broken in and snatched it from our property. I think that because the box was so small, they might have mistaken the contents for valuables, and possibly dumped the body of the infant once they realized it wasn’t.”
“Very curious. Why didn’t you file a report?”
“Finding the body ought to have spooked the thief enough,” Liuyin reassured them.
“So this is yours, then?” the detective asks.
“Should be, yes,” Liuyin nodded, watching as Asra paced a slow circle around the larger of the two bundles, a calculated look in his eyes.
“So you’re saying,” furious scribbling commences, “That the corpse recovered from the water was dead before entry?”
“Isn’t that the job of the detectives to determine, sir?” Liuyin replies in response, a calculatedly aggravating response.
It works. An eye-roll of disgust and a sigh later from the detective, they’re told to simply “collect their things” and “get the hell out.”
Liuyin is all too happy to obey, even if it meant carrying a corpse in their arms through the streets of Vesuvia-- the docks were starting to get a little too crowded, too loud, and they felt a headache coming on.
“Asra, let’s go.”
The white-haired magician had glanced between them and the bundle of soaking white silk in the arms apologetically. “I have more investigations to do here,” he says, jerking his chin in the direction of the larger bundle-- the one that Liuyin knew concealed a metal prosthetic arm beneath it.
“I’ll stay--” Liuyin began to offer, about to reach into their pockets for some tiger balm to temporarily alleviate the burgeoning migraine, but Asra shook his head instead.
“Go home, Liuyin. You should get some rest.”
Liuyin opened their mouth to protest, but decided better of it, nodding instead. “Fine. Take care of yourself too,” they’d offered as parting words.
Navigating the sea of people was even harder by themselves, especially considering their cargo-- Liuyin had covered up the baby’s face so no one would take a look and frighten the mass into a panic, and then resigned themselves to elbowing and shouldering their way between the people.
A black-gloved hand reached out to them then, and Liuyin followed it up into the smirking face of one Doctor Devorak. “Need a hand?”
“What do you want?” they inquire in return, less than hostile but shrewd nonetheless, even as they accept the assistance.
“No need to be so suspicious,” the doctor drawls in return, quite cheerfully, using his height as an advantage to navigate through and around the crowds. “It’s quite a reasonable request, though I’m sure we ought to discuss it away from the crowds.”
Liuyin waits till they’re free of the worst of the gathered, before deftly stepping in front of him, their hand still in his, pacing backwards with measured steps and careful not to crash into anyone. From a distance, they’d almost look like two sweethearts with a newborn on a stroll, though in reality, he was just their new acquaintance who obviously held a torch for their best friend, and the newborn was, of course, dead.
“Talk,” Liuyin says tersely.
Doctor Devorak slows his steps down till they were nearly at a standstill in the middle of the sidewalk, dipping down till his wild auburn curls were brushing over Liuyin’s cheek.
“I want to perform an autopsy,” he says, the way someone else might whisper a sweet nothing, breath brushing against their ear and causing a few flyaways of hair to flutter up. “Aren’t you curious why a baby had to die, and why someone kept it so secretive?”
Liuyin couldn’t help it, they found this scene far too comical-- here he was, almost flirting, and here they were, a literal corpse in their arms being toted about like a loaf of bread.
They snorted, and then laughed, ignoring the affronted expression on Doctor Devorak’s face, pushing the dead infant into the doctor’s hands as they continued down the street. “By all means,” they said, giggling as they watched him fumble with the package before regaining his handling.
He was, in fact, quite adorable when flustered, the thought came unbidden to Liuyin.
They pushed it out of their mind and nodded on. “Come back to my shop, then. I’ve got a decent workspace.”
“Administer of funeral rites, right, right,” the doctor nodded, muttering to himself as they passed through the streets with trickles of conversation being passed around as if it were a strong liquor-- sparingly, with each their turn.
Gradually, he’d discovered that they were adopted by an aunt, their parents were unknown, and that Liuyin was frightened of creatures that crawled. In return, Liuyin found out Julian was orphaned as well, raised by a woman who was “practically a grandmother”, and was an apprentice to one of Secretary Satrinava’s children when he was learning his practice before joining the Ministry of Public Health.
They’d both known Asra for some time, though the doctor clammed up about the nature of that relationship when pressed-- and Liuyin was too polite and well-trained to ask further.
Finally, they’d reached the door of the shop-- a small property on the edge of the central district, white-walled, with evergreens peeking over the tops of the shingles. The double doors were thoroughly pasted with yellow talismans, layer upon layer over the years, till hardly any of the original wood underneath could be seen, strips of sun-bleached paper fluttering in a limp breeze.
“What are these?” the doctor asks, trying to make out the sigils and reaching for one of the slips of paper.
“Don’t touch it!” Liuyin says in a near-shout of alarm, throwing themselves onto his arm.
He retracted his hand back rapidly, blinking down with a query in his eyes.
Slowly, bit by bit, Liuyin let go of his arm. “Sorry I yelled…” they replied, eyes trailing right over where the button of his jacket opened at the dip of his collarbone. “Those are protective charms designed to keep intruders of the supernatural sort out.”
“I see,” he’d said, face settling into a look of consideration. “In that case--”
“Yinyin?” A slender, petite woman with dark hair in a high-collared dress over which she’d draped a dressing robe emerged from the opposite door. “I thought I heard your voice-- oh!”
Auntie Liya was staring somewhat judgmentally, at the two of them-- and Liuyin suddenly became aware of their proximity to Julian, pressed nearly chest-to-chest, the bundle in his arm held awkwardly at his hip to prevent getting crushed.
Their face lit on fire and they stepped back right into the door of talismans, pushing it open blindly and stumbling back into the courtyard. “C-come in, Doctor Devorak, we’ll set up a table for you.”
“Aren’t you going to introduce me?” Aunt Liya asks expectantly, hands on her hips.
Liuyin squeezes their eyes shut, as if praying for the ground to swallow their mortification, and then nods obligingly, painting a smile across their features. “Auntie, this is Doctor Devorak, who helped me recover the body that was stolen from us earlier this morning. Doctor Devorak, this is my Aunt Liya, who I’m apprenticed under.”
“Charmed,” the tall man replied, reaching to shake the matron’s hand.
He mustn’t have expected her to grab his hand, remove his glove, turn it palm-up, scan it, and then let it drop back with a, “Humph!” and a “that one’s nothing but trouble, Yinyin,” to her ward within the span of the few seconds he was caught off-guard, tossing the glove back to him in the meanwhile.
Doctor Devorak, to his credit, only fumbled briefly with the glove that she threw back at him, Liuyin taking the chance to transfer the bundle of corpse baby to their own arms, deeming it unstable in his current state of hesitance.
“A-Yi, Auntie, we really must be carrying on with the investigation,” Liuyin replied as they gestured the doctor to them with hurried movements, as if urging them to escape before Aunt Liya got around even further in passing judgement upon the two of them-- who were strictly professional, sorry and thank you.
“Investigation?” their aunt asks incredulously, and that was pretty much all the incentive Liuyin needed to grab Doctor Devorak’s free wrist and tug him insistently up the steps and through the open sliding doors to the left, into the coffin-house where the dead were banished. “Yinyin, you stupid child, come back out here!”
Liuyin led him through the white-sheets hanging from the entrance, skirting around a not-quite-fully burnt trough of incense sticks that was arranged in front of an altar housing the statue of a stern-faced man.
Liuyin had paused in front of it for a brief moment and bowing, murmuring a few words of supplication under their breath before they’d continued on, holding open yet another set of white curtains as they led him into another room.
He’d taken stock of the surroundings and deemed it acceptable-- a waist-high table, good lighting, and the area was evidently kept clean. Despite the number of corpses that must have gone through this coffin-house, it smelled more strongly of incense than of necrotic flesh, and though he was far too accustomed to less glamorous working conditions, he’d appreciated the meticulous care that the witch and their aunt had. “You can set it down on the surface of the table,” he’d informed them.
They’d concurred with the request, gingerly laying the bundle down. “I assume you brought tools with you,” they said.
“Of course, darling,” the doctor offered a smirk and cast off his coat, leaving it hanging on one of the hooks on the wall, before bringing out what looked like a leather portfolio, but bulkier, from one of the folds.
“I’ll leave you to it, then,” Liuyin says skeptically, eyeing the variety of sharp blades and implements he’d unravelled from the bag.
“Don’t want to stay for the show?” He asks, raising a brow.
Liuyin narrowed their eyes at him. Fine, two could play at the banter. “No,” they replied. “I’m going to just purify everything so the infant spirit doesn’t latch onto you and eat your spouse’s children in the womb.”
The doctor took it in stride. “Have fun!”