Chapter Text
The trawler drifted unanchored into the harbor. Normally, this wouldn’t be too much of a problem, plenty of boats sat wrecked at the bottom of the ocean or floated on the surface of open water as flotsam, ripe for salvaging. This boat had the fortune of being steered towards the wharf by the currents, but unfortunately that meant other trawlers or deep sea salvage boats were unable to leave the harbor as it sat in the middle of the port’s turning basin. Since Chainport had no harbor patrol, being run mostly on an “honor’s system” fueled by kickbacks and brown-nosing, it was up to another vessel to get the adrift boat anchored.
“AHOY! ANYONE ON BOARD, MOVE YOUR BATHTUB OUTTA THE WAY!”
A fishing boat about half the size of the trawler, The Lady Anne, drifted up alongside the ghost ship. The Lady Anne’s owner, Edward, a Rotling with thinning blonde hair, fraying red and black flannel and insulated jeans, and reflective aviator sunglasses, stood on the bow and shouted at the much larger vessel through a bullhorn. Another Rotling leaned out of the cockpit window with a bit of a smirk.
“Hey Eddy! Maybe you should ask her nicely,” he called out. Eddy made an obscene gesture back at him and turned back to the bullhorn.
“AHOY!!! THIS IS THE CAPTAIN OF THE LADY ANNE! THIS IS YOUR LAST WARNING BEFORE WE DROP ANCHOR AND BOARD!”
Eddy was answered by the distant tolling of buoy bells and the water thudding and slurping against the wharf. He dropped his bullhorn to his side, turning to look at the Rotling manning the Lady Anne.
“Do it, Al. My throat’s getting sore.”
Al nodded and flicked the anchor switch. The steel-wire winch on the boat’s stern dropped the metal black ball into the filthy water with a splash. It unspooled until the anchor hit the ocean floor about thirty feet down. Al was also a blonde, his hair still long enough to cover his forehead and brow, and a thick yellow mustache that devoured his upper lip and had even begun to encroach on the lower one.
“Alright, let’s make this quick before she rams into the jetty,” Eddy said, dropping the rubber bumpers over the edge of the boat.
The trawler continued to drift listlessly. As it moved, the cold December morning sunlight hit the boat at the right angle, so it finally stopped gleaming bright white off the hull. The clearer vision revealed the name of the boat, engraved on the starboard side.
FURSTENFELD.
“What a stupid name,” Al commented.
“Hey, ease up,” Eddy said, still tossing the bumpers overboard “Name must mean a lot to somebody.”
“Yeah, but it’s a mouthful, ain’t it?” Al replied. “‘Furstenfeld.’ Sounds like a kid that would get an atomic wedgie from the football team.”
Eddy grabbed a rope out of the supply chest, tying it securely to one of the Lady Anne’s dock cleats before reaching across the water to the Furstenfeld. The Lady Anne was right up alongside her, starboard to starboard. The Furstenfeld squished the Lady Anne’s bumpers as the two bumped together.
“You worried about hull damage, Eds?” Al asked, listening to the deep and watery creak of the boats brushing each other.
“Nah,” Eddy replied, tying the other end of the rope to a cleat just beside the Furstenfeld’s ladder. “Lady Anne is a tough old buzzard. She once got scraped by a dead ship’s mast that was just under the surface? Just some scuff marks, didn’t even take on water.”
“Nice. Believable, too,” Al drawled.
“Hey, come on, I’m not some sea dog in a bar, Al. You know I don’t feed you bullshit stories,” Eddy replied, smiling.
“Oh sure, so that one about you fighting off some claim-jumpers with nothing but a billhook and sock full of sand-”
“Except for that one. I was very drunk. Come on, upsy.”
Eddy climbed onto the Furstenfeld’s ladder, Al following after him while humming the melody of “Doodle, Let Me Go.” Eddy offered a hand to Al, he was on the deck first. Al accepted and was hoisted aboard.
“HEY! ANYONE ONBOARD?!” Eddy cried out.
“So much for a sore throat,” Al said. “I don’t think they’ll hear ya if they didn’t hear a megaphone, Eds.”
“They could be blackout drunk. But they better hope they’re not still onboard, or else I’m gonna keelhaul them for making us do all this extra shit on a weekend.”
“I dunno,” Al said. “Beats staying home with mom and watching ‘her stories.’”
“Mmm. Oh yeah, how’s she doing? Eh- wait, tell me in a bit. Anchor first,” Eddy blustered before hurrying to the wheelhouse. “Hey, check below deck!”
“Aye-aye, Captain Fuck,” Al replied. He looked around at the view of the harbor for a moment before exhaling through his hairy lips and striding towards the bow, hands in the pockets of his insulated jeans. He took the slippery metal steps down onto the poop deck, passing by the net crane and stooping to look inside the boat.
The mess hall was, as Al expected, deserted, but there were a few signs of recent use. For one thing, the floor was soaking wet, no doubt from the boots of the crew working out on the soaking wet deck. Some plates sat on the two wood tables inside, some ready-to-eat right out of the can litterbug meat sitting on the plates. An ashtray with a few crushed cigarettes at the leftmost table. Al picked up a plate to check how old the ground meat was. It was hard to tell with litterbug, as no matter what freshness it was, it always smelled and looked nasty. But the fact that it still slid a bit on the plate and didn’t stick showed him that it was pretty recent.
Al went into the kitchenette, not much in the way of cooking apart from a simple gas stove and a small place to cut up portions. The mini fridge was closed, and something purple oozed from the bottom into a congealing puddle on the floor. He cringed a bit, not wanting to open it, but he knew he had to.
“Hey Eddy! Think I found some of the crew!” Al called out. Eddy didn’t answer back, more than likely unable to hear him through the boat. He crouched down in front of the mini-fridge, reaching a hand out and pulling the door open.
There was a nauseating peeling noise as the fridge door became unstuck, threads of sticky offal stretching and snapping as the door creaked open on its hinges. Al sighed.
“Nice.”
Sure enough, inside the mini fridge were several dismembered limbs. A Rotling’s head, eyes milky and staring, was crammed onto the bottom shelf, along with the legs, which were chopped into uneven medallions in order to fit in the cramped space. On the top shelf were a pair of arms and a limbless torso wedged into the top shelf, the severed stump of a neck pressing hard against the roof of the refrigerator, a smear of purple blood visible on the white roof from the door to the back where it was haphazardly crammed into the fridge. The small icebox, in desperate need of a good scraping to get off all the excess frost, hung partially open. Al opened it and found that the Rotling’s hands and feet were jammed into the space, fingers and toes chapped with freezer burn.
“Oh that is just tragic,” Al said. He sighed again and began to take the parts out of the fridge. His boots squished on the floor, slick with blood and seawater, as he took several trips from the fridge to one of the tables. It took him several minutes to piece the cold limbs and chunks of limbs back together so the Black Hand could knit the flesh back together. It didn’t matter how badly a body got torn up, the mark of the Black Hand healed everything. Clearly, there was a pretty wild story to tell after Humpty-Dumpty here was put back together.
Al eventually got the parts back in the right order, wiping the purple blood off on one of the tablecloths. He checked the other door by the kitchenette, the placard on it reading “Skipper.” While he waited for Fridge Guy to heal, he figured he might as well see the damage inside.
He tried the doorknob. It gave away, but something heavy was blocking the door from the other side. Al barged the door with his shoulder, but whatever was in front of the door didn’t budge. A mix of water and purple blood oozed from beneath the cabin door. Lovely, must have been another chopped to pieces body piled against the door. Maybe several bodies… They needed to be rearranged and they would heal faster. He glanced over at Fridge Guy to check on his progress.
“The fuck..?”
He hadn’t healed at all. That wasn’t right. Even if his body was cold, it should have at least started knitting by now.
“Hey Eds! Come down here and look at this!”
The hook met the back of Al’s skull, piercing through it like a brand new vegetable knife through an apple. It plunged deep into his brain, severing centuries of critical connections in one swipe. He only managed a sputter of purple blood before the hook yanked itself, along with a fat chunk of his skull-meat, free. He fell to the wet floor with a splat and did not move.
The door to the skipper cabin hung open. The figure that exited it and sheared off part of Al’s skull wore an insulated forest green rain jacket it had stolen from one of the crew members. The hood was pulled up and drawn tight, the only things visible beneath the hood being a steady drip-drip-drip of seawater and a pair of preternatural, candle-flame orange eyes. A bony, waterlogged hand, skin stretched so tight it was membranous and nails long and black with sea filth, protruded from the cuff of one of the sleeves. From the other sleeve protruded a hook, attached to its wrist in lieu of a hand. The hook was shiny and clean, almost freshly polished, and radiated a pale miasma that caused the air near the metal to shimmer. The bottom half of the creature, the only other visible part, was deathly skinny, even for a Rotling. Its skeleton barely held itself together beneath a gossamer sheet of dermis, legs reduced to mere femur bones beneath malnourished green skin. It wore a pair of rain boots, also stolen and two sizes too big for it.
It left the mess hall, trailing blood and seawater in a snailtrail behind it. Eddy, still looking for the anchor controls, did not see or hear the creature coming until it was at the door to the wheelhouse. For a second, he mistook the creature for Al, and that was all the time the creature needed to swipe its hook across Eddy’s throat, tearing it open and splattering the wheelhouse floor with fresh purple blood. Eddy gurgled, grasped at his newly aerated throat and then at the creature that slit it open. He tried to grab the front of its water-drenched coat, and the creature allowed this, looking into Eddy’s red eyes with its Jack-O-Lantern orange pair.
“R-Rrrrrr-” the creature attempted. Its voice was a clammy gurgle, choked with brine.
Eddy slipped and fell to the ground, his brain quickly starved of oxygen-rich blood and shortly going limp.
The creature paused to find its voice before croaking out two words from lungs that were a quarter full of seawater.
“Reeeeeeest…” It raised its wretchedly skinny hand and hook upwards, towards the heavens. “Aaaalleeeeluuuuiiiaaaaaa…”
It then loped to the edge of the Furstenfeld’s deck, heaved itself over the railing and plummeted headfirst into the ocean.
Those that were slain on the boat remained where they were, bleeding until there was nothing left. Cold. Unmoving.
Dead.
Ken raised his cleaver, holding his latest victim still with his other hand. “Alright, now keep in one spot this time or it’s gonna be uneven…”
With a flash of metal, the knife came down and split the hard boiled egg in two, clean and swift enough to hit the wood below it. It fell into two perfectly proportioned halves, creamy yellow inside shiny white. He smirked at his handiwork. This fancy setup was great and all, but some of the supplies were so new they were still a bit slippery. He had dropped nearly half a dozen boiled eggs on the floor just because they kept sliding off the edges of the cutting board. Dropping stuff on the floor wouldn’t have been an issue about six months ago, but they had new rules about cleanliness after their… remodel.
Ken moved the egg halves from the board to the melamine ramen bowl with his knife, dropping them into the broth. He set the hot bowl onto the counter and pressed the third “order ready” button on the kitchen wall. The button chimed and a light came on front of house to let the wait staff know an order was ready, that way none of the kitchen crew had to come up front.
He and his entire family were supposed to be missing after all.
Nearly five months had gone by since the escape from Paradise. The Smiling Dead managed to break two of their own, himself and his adopted daughter Melancholy Hill, out of The Virtue Corps headquarters in the middle of the island. Ken hated asking for handouts, but even he had to admit that his goose would have been cooked without their friend on the inside. Charity, the youngest Virtue, saw through the rest of the Corps’ pseudo-enlightened horseshit and went behind their back to bust Ken and Mel out. She was the reason they could still live in Chainport, hidden in their butcher shop turned café with Charity’s help.
It wasn’t perfect, of course. He missed being the face of the establishment and chatting with the customers. He had to stay in the kitchen or risk giving the game away. And the work was hard. Charity had been 100% correct that the Chainport locals wouldn’t be able to resist real food, so people from all over the island had come pouring in to try the Kawaii Kitty Café’s menu. Walk-ins eventually turned into reservations, and those reservations stretched from days to weeks in advance, it was a full house just about every night.
The money was fantastic. Ken could take the family on weekend trips to hoity-toity places like Glimmer Grotto and rent them private suites at Lantern Heights and still not be hurting for cash. But they still had to watch their step. The Virtue Corps was still routinely combing the island looking for them, so Charity had to keep them updated on her colleagues current whereabouts. And of course, he had to keep Mel on a pretty tight leash.
The whole ordeal back in August had helped his tornado of a daughter slow her spin a bit, but it was still Mel. She wanted to do everything, talk to everyone. Get drunk and meet people. Her 21st birthday rolled around earlier that month, and Ken, the others and Charity had to shorten the island bar crawl he had planned for her when some wannabe bounty hunter spotted them in Glow Haven and tried to turn them in. He was relieved of his limbs. And tossed into the ocean in a bag with some weighty rocks for company. Charity thankfully witnessed none of this since Ken suggested she take Mel home.
Still, the poor kid didn’t have any friends left after they had to cement Jack. And now that she was mostly relegated to the dish pit with her brother at work, she didn’t have much interaction with anybody but her family and Charity. She wasn’t just stir crazy, she was straight up sad most days. It broke his heart to see her scrubbing despondently away at dishes like a little android. He would sometimes pull her into a hug out of nowhere. And, rather than shove him away and telling him to fuck off, she would hug him back. A sure sign she was really hurting.
Mud was acting morosely too. After he had recovered from his thirty story faceplant, he mostly kept to himself. He explained that he really had no reason to stay around the restaurant since he couldn’t bartend, but it was pretty clear he held a particular disdain for Charity’s reworking of the shop. Ken had grown sort of fond of the place, even that dopey little cash register that meowed whenever you opened the drawer. Mud sneered at just about everything, purposefully grinding cigarettes into the linoleum and hocking disgusting loogies into the kitchen sink. Charity had only grown to dislike him more for this, as he still had yet to apologize for shooting her in the head. Where he got the scarabs to keep drinking himself into a coma or buy Candy’s services for the night was anyone’s guess, since Charity would only pay him to work. Ken routinely checked the registers to make sure his older brother wasn’t skimming anything off the top, but if he was, he was doing it so subtly Ken couldn’t tell.
The only person who seemed to be really thriving was Breadhead. He had a girlfriend, a real catch at that, someone with deep pockets and connections. And was… well, she at least acted cute. Ken would never say it out loud, but he always found the whole “brain-in-a-tin-suit” look more terrifying than titillating, but his last wife stabbed him in the back, so he clearly didn’t have the best taste in chicks either. But Charity made up for it by being nothing but sweet to his big palooka of a son. They still hadn’t quite risked going out on a proper date yet since the heat was still on, but it had to be in the near future. Ken was still dreading that… He trusted Charity, but still, it was his son’s first date. The more things changed…
He set a few more dirty dishes on the conveyor belt, turned to clean up his work station and jumped about a foot in the air.
“GAH- For FUCK’S sake, Charity, we got a phone for a reason!”
The small Virtue, dressed to the nines like always, stood in front of the swinging doors with her sparkly pink journal in one hand. She wore an outfit that vaguely resembled a traditional Japanese school uniform, a blazer and a skirt, although colored black with an aqua ascot for a splash of color. She wore a small ladybug hairpin, although since her space buns were metal, she appeared to have affixed the pin to her head with some kind of adhesive.
“You gotta get used to seeing me around, Mr. Ken. I am the ‘owner’ of this place,” Charity said, making air quotes. She then giggled and hugged him about the belly. “It’s so good to see you!”
“It’s great to see you too, kid. How’re things in Paradise?” Ken asked, hugging her in return. It was weird to get hugged so much at first, but by now he’d come to expect and even appreciate the affection.
“Meh as usual,” Charity replied. “Although since Diligence is out looking all the time now, things are less tense, but more boring. So it’s mostly just… blegh.”
The Virtue made a “gag me” motion with a finger.
“This restaurant is great, but goodness gracious, great balls of fire!” she exclaimed, throwing up her hands. “There’s so much more paperwork now! Thank goodness for Patience handling my finance reports or else I don’t think I’d be able to sleep…”
She shook her head and held out her journal with both hands. “Anyway! I have some questions for you!”
“Uh, ya might wanna say hello to somebody first,” Ken suggested, pointing at the door to the dish pit.
“Oh, right! I’ll be right back!” The Virtue cried before trotting over to the door. She checked her reflection in one of the push plates, adjusting her hair pin and smoothing out the lapels of her blazer carefully before hopping gleefully and pushing the doors open. “Hell-ooo~?!”
“Charity!” cried a deep voice from inside.
The Virtue bounced inside and the doors swung shut. Ken smiled to himself as he heard the laughter inside, Breadhead no doubt scooping the smaller Virtue up into a powerful hug. The butcher had gotten used to the displays of affection. His kids were all adults and could do what they liked, long as they didn’t neck in front of him.
Ken did some prep work for the appetizer salads as he waited for Charity and Breadhead to catch up. He couldn’t pronounce the name of the salad they served here, sangchu-something. It was a lettuce base with a spice mixture (secret recipe) and topped with sesame seeds. Months ago, he would have had to taken half a dozen under-the-table deals just to get his hands on red pepper flakes, and now he just… Had it. At his disposal, along with dozens of other spices. He could eat it with every meal now. Is this what it was like to be rich..? Shit, he had never been rich, even before The Black Hand.
The door swung open and Charity stumbled out, smoothing out her outfit. “Sorry about that! Anyway, I had some questions for you, Mr. Ken!” She climbed up onto a kitchen stool and flipped open her journal.
“Alright, go ahead,” Ken said, not turning away from his work. The spice and sauce rub needed to be put onto the leaves by hand, so he couldn’t look at her journal without getting sesame oil and green onion on it.
“What can you tell me about Christmas?”
Ken paused in the middle of tearing the lettuce leaves. “Christmas?”
“Mhm. The archive says that before the Black Hand, several nations such as The United States, The United Kingdom, Japan, Finland-”
“Charity,” Ken gently interrupted. She had the tendency to list when talking about the past.
“Oop, sorry. Several nations celebrated a holiday called Christmas. So let me know if I got this right…”
She flipped open her journal.
“Christians made The Son of Christ’s birthday coincide with The Winter Solstice, since no one really knows for sure when He was born. They adopted the… erm, paggan-”
“Pagan,” Ken corrected.
“Thank you- pagan tradition of bringing a tree into the house. And people put gifts under the tree to open Christmas morning. Is that right?”
Ken dropped the torn lettuce into some bowls. “Well… to tell ya the truth, I have no idea about any of that historical crap. Parents never made us go to church. But yeah, Christmas has religious roots, I guess. We used to put presents under a tree, and we put up stockings over the fireplace-”
“Wait, stockings? Like… socks? Why?” Charity asked, tilting her head.
“...I dunno. We just did,” Ken shrugged, taking out a plastic squeeze bottle about halfway full of pre-made salad rub. “But we put small presents in those. And at our house, at least, we got up early and opened the presents with everyone. We got the chance to play with the stuff we got for a while, and then we went to grandma’s for a ham dinner…”
He sighed. “I still remember that ham. Damn, the glaze was so good. Golden brown, sweet and savory… I remember one year, after we ate half of it, there was a piece of the glaze left over and I took a bite… Manna from Heaven.”
“Wow…” Charity said. She had stopped writing and just listened. “...So… why did you stop?”
“Hm?” Ken turned to look at her for the first time in a while.
“Why did you stop celebrating Christmas?” Charity asked.
“Well… I guess there’s no reason to celebrate peace on earth and goodwill towards men when there’s no peace or goodwill left.”
“Don’t say that, Mr. Ken… You and your family love each other, and Breadhead lo- Um, you shouldn’t hyperbolize…” Charity said, clearing her clean throat.
“You get what I mean, kid,” Ken said, rubbing the lettuce with sauce.
“I see…” Charity made a few notes with a pink magic marker. “The reason I’m asking is because the end of the year is coming up, and I wanted to have a festival! The archives said there was a festival where a big party ball popped open at midnight, right?”
“Uhhhhh… yeah. Yeah, they used to show that on TV. In Times Square, when there still was a Times Square. But are you sure you want to have a festival? It’s kind of a sore spot…”
“Sore spot?” Charity asked.
“Yeah,” Ken washed his hands after plating the last salad, red trailing down the drain. “See, the bombs started flying New Year’s Day around… 10,000 years ago now. All it really took was one paranoid lunatic losing his cult of personality to The Black Hand… keys got turned, big red buttons got pushed… And then all of a sudden, everyone who didn’t pledge fealty to the Black Hand…”
Ken dropped the knife he had been using to cut eggs into a stock pot full of water.
“Ka-blooey. Gone just like that,” he said gravely.
Charity looked on in stunned silence. She had never heard anyone recall what Armageddon was actually like on the day of. And to be frank, she didn’t need to hear the details…
“But…” Ken continued, “You never know. Maybe it really has been long enough that the wounds ain’t as sore anymore. I think a winter festival sounds like a nice change of pace.”
Ken winked at her. “You’ll probably need catering for it, right..?”
The door chime sounded out, Ken glancing over at the security monitor to see who it could be. He squinted at the blurry image on the monitor. His eyes widened significantly.
“…No way…”
“What’s wrong..?” Charity asked.
Ken grabbed a 13-inch vegetable knife out of the block and hurried over to the saloon-style doors of the kitchen. He poked his head out carefully, Charity following behind him and peeping out over the curve of his large belly.
A Rotling sat shivering at the bar, several bootprints, so wet they formed perfect, trembling puddles of water, trailed from the door to the barstool. Seawater dripped from the elbows and hems of the Rotling’s blue jacket, although it was so inundated with water that it looked more black. A white wig that might have once held some kind of shape sat on his head, deflated and hanging in droopy wet shags.
“Uh… sir… we- we can’t really have you in here if, um…” The bartender stammered. He was looking at the water that this customer had trailed inside with mild anguish, knowing someone was going to need to mop it up.
The wet Rotling looked up at the bartender. His pleading expression was like a wounded animal left in a cardboard box in the midst of a rainstorm.
Ken glanced over to Charity, and found the space she just stood in unoccupied. He whipped his head back around towards the restaurant and groaned in dismay. Charity was already at the soaked patron’s side.
The Virtue tapped him gently on the shoulder, making him flinch and send a shower of seawater everywhere. His eyes were orange, with darker orange pupils, some pronounced blood vessels branching out around his sclera, no doubt aggravated by saltwater. Could he even see? He shrunk away from her touch.
“…Sir? Can I get you some dry clothes?” she asked gently.
The Rotling didn’t speak for a moment, teeth chattering together and eyes darting around. When he finally did open his mouth, only a clotted gurgle escaped. His chest began to hitch and his already buggy eyes somehow bulged out further as he futilely pressed a hand to his mouth.
“Wuh oh,” Charity gulped, and she dove a hand into hammerspace, managing to pull out and open a black-and-yellow striped umbrella in front of herself. Not a second too late, as a torrent of frothy seawater sprayed out of the Rotling’s mouth, hitting the umbrella and spraying all over the floor and the bar. The bartender exclaimed in disgust and stumbled out of the line of fire as the spout tapered from high pressure to just a trickle of water and sand down the Rotling’s chin. Brine ran in rivulets down the umbrella and onto the floor, various bits of ocean detritus accumulating there, a piece of wood or a scrap of slimy cloth.
Charity kept her umbrella open in case of any additional purging, turning to the bartender, who also looked quite ill.
“Benny, fix the mop and bucket. I’ll pay you extra for this, I’m sorry…” she said with a wince in her voice. She then turned to the hostess. “Dora, let’s get this guy upstairs and let him have a hot shower in one of the bedrooms. With lots of soap.”
The hostess nodded and helped the Rotling, who had begun to droop off of his stool, back onto his feet. A few of the other Rotling patrons pushed away their half finished meals, but most just watched the grotesque display unfold and went right back to their food, some not even looking up from their bowls. Charity hurried to the back door by the kitchen, holding the umbrella at arm’s length.
“Ewewewewewew-!” she whispered frantically, nudging the door open with her foot and shaking the closed umbrella out before dropping it outside, flapping her hands. “Ewww! Hurk- Oh I’m so glad I can’t throw up…”
Ken watched Dora take Jack the Rat towards the steps leading up to the inn area. She squealed in shock as the soaked Rotling grabbed her by the wrist, staring through her with eyes blinded by salt.
“I… I saw…” he began.
Ken was through the kitchen doors in an instant, knife at the ready, prepared to cut this quisling’s throat right there in the restaurant to keep him from telling anyone about Mel-!
“…Death. I saw death,” Jack finished.
Ken froze mid-stride. The patrons were too busy eating or watching the bizarre performance to notice Ken halfway out of the back hallway. He tiptoed backwards, out of sight.
“I’m sure you did. Let’s just get you upstairs, sir…” Dora replied patiently, patting him on the back and having to guide him up to keep him from tripping over his own feet.
Charity stepped out of the kitchen after thoroughly washing her hands, drying them on a pink dish towel.
“You know him..?” she asked Ken.
She didn’t receive a reply, just a dark glance from The Butcher before he set the knife back in its block and went into the dish pit.
Jack couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a proper shower. There wasn’t much in the way of hygiene in The District, most had simply quit bothering. So to hear from that lady that not only did he have hot water but a bar of soap as well, he thought he was just having another hallucination at the bottom of the abyss for a moment. Until he actually felt the lukewarm water on his hand, his skin so thoroughly chilled that it felt like someone had splashed lava on it.
He climbed into the shower blindly, and remained there for a good hour, inching the temperature up in tiny increments to keep from scorching himself. He felt the filth melt from his body, going down the drain in a black and brown trail, and held his eyes under the shower head, relieved from the salty torment of seawater at last. His vision slowly came unclouded, the mark of The Black Hand finally able to repair some of the burnt off rods and cones so he could see colors and shapes again. He wasn’t sure who the kind woman who let him use the shower was, but he owed her more than a thank you, that’s for damn sure.
He rubbed soap into his bare scalp and held his head beneath the water, closing his eyes. From the darkness behind his lids, a pair of orange eyes leered at him. Drawing closer. Glacially slow but unceasing. A hook hung at its side. A hook that would fit his jaw perfectly.
Be not afeard… I bringeth thee thy respite…
Jack’s eyes shot back open and he swallowed the yelp that threatened to escape his throat. He twisted the knobs to turn the water off and he stumbled out of the bathtub. He dried himself off with one of the fluffy yellow towels and wrapped it around his bony waist, having to fasten it tightly. His eyes ached from exhaustion, you couldn’t really properly sleep when you were drowning and coming back to life every three minutes, but he was terrified to close them. He didn’t want to see the figure in the darkness…
He opened the bathroom door and shrieked.
Ken grabbed the Rotling under the armpits and slammed him against the wall.
“KEN NO-! PLEASE, I WON’T TELL ANYBODY ABOUT WHAT I SAW, I SWEAR!” Jack bawled. “PLEASE DON’T THROW ME BACK IN THE WATER, PLEASE-“
“Shut up,” the butcher commanded. “I dunno how you managed to find your way back onto dry land, Jack, but it takes brass balls to come right back into my own restaurant…”
“KEN, I’M BEGGING YOU! I’LL DO ANYTHING YOU WANT, DON’T CEMENT ME-HEE-HEEE!” Jack continued to blubber. “I’ll work for free, I’ll be your personal servant, I’ll-”
“I said shut up, Jack!” Ken roared. “Your fate depends on one question. So think carefully before you answer, got it? What color is my daughter’s blood?”
“…Purple,” Jack panted.
“What color?” Ken asked again.
“Purple!” Jack cried.
“Spell it!”
“P-U-R-P-E-L!”
Ken let him drop, Jack scrabbling away into the corner and curling up in the fetal position. Ken sighed and sat on the bed with a weighty grunt.
“…A lot of crazy shit’s gone down since we sent you to the ocean floor. But that fact hasn’t changed. You ever breathe a word of what you saw that night, I’ll personally see to it you’re sent somewhere where they’ll never find you.”
“I won’t tell… I won’t tell…” Jack mumbled. “You couldn’t torture it out of me…”
Ken sighed again. “You know, you’re lucky you happened to reappear while I’m supposed to be laying low myself, or else I might not have even given you a chance.”
Jack didn’t respond, staring at the corner and curling in on himself.
“…I’m sorry for what we had to do, Jack. I meant it when I said I liked ya. We all still do.”
There was a creak outside the bedroom door, Ken grumbling and turning to it. “Quit peepin’ Mel. Door’s unlocked.”
The door opened, Mel entering the room. She had her auburn hair tied up in a bun covered by a hairnet, her usual gloves replaced by a yellow set of rubber dishwashing gloves. She smiled a little bit upon seeing her old friend, but it quickly melted back into an expression of guilt.
“…Jack. I’m…”
Mel couldn’t get any words out. Her usual manic glee had run dry months ago. Without his pompadour wig and jacket, Jack looked so small. He was no longer the busboy that unfortunately had to be silenced to save her life, good-hearted, funny, handsome. He was just… Destroyed. Because of her stupidity.
“Jack, I’m sorry…”
She threw her arms around his neck in a hug. He didn’t resist or reciprocate one way or the other.
“…I’m glad you’re okay.” she said. “I know how I acted that night… But the truth is I was scared… They'd kill me if they ever found out. And I wouldn’t come back.”
She chewed hard on her lower lip.
“You don’t have to forgive me, or even talk to me, ever again. But you can’t tell. It won’t just be me if you do… It’ll be everyone. Promise me you won’t tell… Because I don’t want to throw you back into the water.”
“I won’t tell,” Jack said. “Now let go.”
Mel relinquished her grip, sniffing and climbing back to her feet.
“I’ll see you around then…” she muttered before traipsing out of the room. The door wasn’t shut for long, as Charity entered the room soon after.
“What’s wrong with Mel..?” she asked.
“Don’t worry about it. Just some… uh, conflicting emotions is all,” Ken explained.
“Don’t be so vague, Mr. Ken, I nearly got ralphed on a little while ago. What’s going on here?” Charity asked, hands on her hips.
Jack, finally seeing the woman who was so kind to him before with unclouded eyes, promptly shot to his feet and tried to pry the window open, still clad in only a towel. The window didn’t budge, having not been opened in quite a while thanks to the cold.
“Uh, Jack..?” Ken said, watching the younger Rotling struggle to move the window even a few centimeters. “Hey. Jack. Charity here is a-”
“Virtue?! You guys are turning me over to The Virtues, aren’t you! This has been a setup from the start-!”
“Uh, no? It hasn’t,” Ken replied. “You sorta walked in here on your own, kid.”
“I’ll handle it, Mr. Ken,” Charity said, trotting over to the window. She only came up to Jack’s armpit, but made him stop in his tracks regardless, recoiling against the wall. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Jack. I’m Charity of The Virtue Corps. I know you’re probably very confused, so let me fill you in on what’s happening. Since you’ve been gone, the restaurant you used to bus tables at has undergone kind of a makeover…”
Charity explained everything, having detailed records of the events stored in the archives. She broke it all down succinctly, from the Angel Egg Heist to Ken and Mel’s arrest to Charity’s own aiding in their escape. Down on the street, there was a group of Rotling panhandlers. Three danced and sang, one sat in a camping chair and played guitar. They received several scarabs in just the 20 minutes or so it took for Charity to explain everything.
“…So in order to make it seem like The Smiling Friends have skipped-”
“Dead,” Ken corrected.
“Whatever- have skipped town, I purchased this place and remodeled it so it looks like it’s under new management. Pretty clever, if I do say so myself!”
Charity crossed her arms and nodded proudly. Jack stared for a bit, before looking at Ken, who nodded as well.
“Okay. So… you know about..?” Jack asked, making a few vague motions.
“Uhhhhhhhh… no, I’ve never deep fried a turkey before,” Charity guessed. “Oh, wait! Is this a movie title?”
“Yes, Jack, she knows about Mel,” Ken sighed. “So do the rest of The Virtues. That’s why we’re hiding like we are.”
“But… The Virtues hate us. Why would they..?” Jack asked. It wasn’t clear whether he meant the question more for himself or the others in the room.
“It’s a work in progress…” Charity said. “But I promise that I don’t hate you. Charitable guarantee.”
She then turned to Ken. “Mr. Ken, I want you to promise me that you won’t cement Jack again.”
“I can’t promise any such thing, Cherry,” Ken replied promptly. “It’s bad enough that The Virtues know about Mel already, if the people on the island found out? Game over.”
“Game over, huh?” Charity replied. She made a phone with her pinky finger and thumb, taking on a convincing sniffle. “‘Diligence, I… hic I need help… Some Rotlings here… They stole my lunch money…’” She then resumed speaking in her normal voice. “And just like that, the people who want her gone are locked up.”
“I thought you didn’t like hurting people…!” Jack exclaimed.
“I don’t. But some friends taught me that there’s nothing all the way good or bad in this world…”
Charity looked over her shoulder at Ken, who smirked.
“And sometimes, doing the right thing gets your hands dirty.”
Ken nodded, but his proud smirk didn’t last long. “...That doesn’t change the fact that absolutely nobody can know, Charity.”
“And no one is gonna know. Jack promised, right Jack?” the Virtue replied, looking back at Jack with a cocked head.
“I promise,” Jack replied.
“Charity…” Ken started uneasily.
Charity sighed, hanging her head a bit. “You’re gonna make me do it, aren’t you?”
“Do what..?!” Jack asked.
Charity spun on her toe, clasping her hands together and bringing them to her cheek. She popped one foot out for some extra saccharine flare.
“Puh-leeeeeeease?~” she asked, in the most cloying tone imaginable.
“Alright, alright..! Just cut that out, will ya? Jeez…” Ken complained, waving a hand in defeat.
Charity immediately deflated back to normal, shivering a bit. “Blech… You know, I wouldn’t do that if it didn’t work. C’mon, let’s give him some privacy. I think I left my journal downstairs.”
Ken and Charity went back downstairs to give Jack some time to catch up on sleep, saving some other questions, such as the method of his escape, for later. Although he was still apprehensive about closing his eyes, the warmth of the bed and the pleasant sound of acapella music down in the street were a one-two knockout punch, and he was asleep in minutes.
A bit later, Mel came upstairs to check on him with a cup of hot chocolate. Charity claimed that the citadel had a large arboretum with fruit and edible seed trees of all kinds, and thus chocolate was still available to the world in small quantities. Jack was still dead asleep, the comforter half off of his body and his leg spilled off the bed. Mel set the mug down on the bedside table, tucking him back in and pushing his leg back onto the mattress. She glanced out the window at the performers, crinkling her nose. They sang in a different language. That didn’t bother her, but the corny music did. It reminded her a lot of what Charity had playing in the Café.
She looked at Jack for a moment, before pressing a light kiss to his cheek.
“...I’m glad you’re back, Jack.”
For all the millenia she’d been around, Candy prided herself on being natural. Sure, it meant more sag, and she didn’t blame any of her fellow women of the evening for getting some work done, but bust size was a bit less important of a selling point when everybody’s skin was partially rotted away. Besides, it beat paying some quack to shove bags of silicon into her chest that might not even graft properly. She had heard horror stories about women who would be stuck with one bigger than the other or two irregularly shaped ones because their surgeon couldn’t find the proper tools or supplies and used some cheap workaround.
Candy lit a cigarette and crossed her legs, seated on her usual bench. The weather had gotten cold, so she put on her lavender parka with cream fur trim over a pair of insulated ski pants (still tight enough to hug her ass nicely) and a sweater with a cleavage window. She knew some other women would just wear their usual skimpy clothes and put an open parka over it, but Candy wanted to be comfortable at work.
Someone sat beside her, a woman. She was wrapped up in a royal blue wool coat, with what looked to be genuine fox fur accents and gleaming silver buttons. Her hood was drawn up tightly around her head, hiding her face. Shapely legs were wrapped snugly with black insulated leggings, and on her feet appeared to be white high heels.
Candy studied her posture. She could usually tell if someone was just there to sit or if they were too shy to up and ask for her services. If they just sat back against the bench and took in all of their surroundings, they were probably just waiting for their ride to pull up. But if they sat up straight, or intensely stared at one specific object or spot; they were there for her and getting cold feet.
This woman had excellent posture and stared straight ahead. Candy smiled. Either that flickering street light across the street was quite interesting, or…
“That’s a beautiful coat, hun,” Candy said. “Where did you get it from?”
The woman looked away from the light, down the street. The furred edges of her hood quivered a bit in the cold wind. Candy caught a whiff of a sweet, delicate perfume coming off of her. Rosewater.
“Although if I’m honest, I’ll bet you look even more stunning without it,” Candy continued with a smile. “Do you want someone to keep you warm tonight?”
The woman seemed to drop her gaze just a bit before turning to look at Candy for the first time. Rather than a face, there was a glass visor holding a brain.
The smile fell from Candy’s face immediately, and she made to stand before a hand wrapped in blue velvet extended outward to stop her.
“Sit,” Chastity said.
Candy did as she was told, her heart drum rolling.
“Candace… that is your name, yes?” Chastity asked. “You are a prostitute. Do not deny this, you just attempted to solicit me. Such concupiscence could land you in the Inferno.”
“You’re not gonna pay the bills, are you, sweetie?” Candy replied acidly.
“Mind your tongue,” Chastity ordered, her tone frigid. “I have scant patience for a Rotling’s puerile witticisms.”
“And I don’t have much patience for book-burning, puritanical synths like you,” Candy said. “Now are you gonna spit out more thesaurus words, or are you gonna pay me so we can get this over with?”
“I’m not-” Chastity clenched her fist. “I’m not here for your… ‘services.’ I have no interest in women nor strangers-”
“Riiiiight, of course you’re straight. ‘Man shall not lie with man, that is detestible,’ hm?” Candy snarked.
“How do you kn- That is n- …Good lord,” Chastity covered her visor with a gloved hand. “Listen to me. I know you’re a friend of Mud.”
“No I’m not,” Candy said. “And it wouldn’t matter anyway. He skipped town back in August.”
“When you lie, you flare your nostrils,” Chastity said. “Spare me. He is hidden in that new café. The only reason I’ve failed to report him being there is because I do not wish for the proprietress to face any repercussions.”
Chastity tucked her hands into the pocket of her coat. “I know that you know, Candace. I’ve been performing reconnaissance on that eatery for months. You go in there now and again and do not exit for hours.”
“I'm eating,” Candy declared. “I stop in there for lunch sometimes!”
“Again, your nostrils widen. No, you are not just eating. I know who you go in there for, and I am conscripting you to pass a message along to him.”
“No,” Candy rebuffed.
“You have no choice. He is to meet me at the wharf tomorrow morning at 10:00. If he is not in attendance, then you will be arrested for soliciting a Virtue. Have a pleasant evening.”
Chastity stood and began to walk away.
“But… But why?! What did I ever do to you..?!” Candy cried out.
Chastity placed a heel down with ample force, loud enough to echo throughout the street. The Virtue rotated her head like an owl, a full 180 degrees backwards. Even with no face to express it, the Virtue radiated anger in a hot shimmer.
“Because I know you’ve been fucking him.”