I got to take a genuine crack at writing Kiriko this time around! It was, uh, difficult. He's not the kind of character I write exclusively from the outside perspective too often, and I had trouble feeling confident he was appropriately bitchy without losing his charm entirely. As for the prospect of writing from his perspective, I don't think I'd ever want to try. As far as I'm aware, his background isn't particularly fleshed out and he's vaguely defined as a Crested European Something-Or-Other from Whereverthefucksylvania, and unless I can root a character's experience in a place I lose even more confidence in taking their perspective. ANYWAY.
He threaded his arms into the sleeves of his overcoat and stepped out onto the front porch. Henry's wild white head popped up over the other side of the railing.
“Well, you're up and around awful fast after that long trip,” Henry observed. He looked Black Jack up and down. “That the only coat you brought? Wind'll cut right through that if you're going for a walk.”
“I'm fine.” Black Jack descended the steps and scanned the clearing around the front of the lodge. “Is Ms. Audrey with you?”
Henry kicked shut the little latched door to the crawlspace under the porch, and Black Jack suddenly noticed the cobwebs clinging stealthily to the old man's hair. “No, sir, she's not.” He dusted off the front of his sweater, straightened his back, and raised a hand to indicate one of several deep paths worked into the snow that served as routes into the surrounding woods. “Last I saw her, she was on her way out to the chapel.”
Black Jack stepped in the indicated direction. “Chapel?”
“Yep. Erected same time as the original lodge building. For holiday services and so on, you know, when stuff of that kind was more important to people's comfort. And weddings and the like. Of course, it's mostly all come down now save for the stone parts and a few windows.”
“I don't suppose it sees any regular use, then.”
Henry crunched up behind him through the snow. “You'd suppose wrong! It's an attraction on its own. Why, ever since I started keeping it up again we get plenty people every summer who wanna get married there. Or at least take the fairy tale photos.”
“Ah.” Black Jack started down the path and was relieved when Henry's footsteps came to a stop. “Was Ms. Audrey married there?”
“Of course,” Henry said, his voice already growing distant. “Of course.”
---
The chapel was set back in the forest, screened in by trees. One thought struck him particularly hard when he reached the crumbling structure at the end of that snaking path: He could not let Pinoko know about this place.
Guests' requests for what Henry had called 'fairy tale photos' were far from misplaced. Even in winter, the craggy tops of the standing walls rounded with snow and the vines clinging to the granite and slate died back to brown capillaries, it had an enchanted atmosphere. Sun streamed down, filtered through the boughs of old evergreens overhead, and struck the remaining stained glass in the higher windows to scatter color on the snow. He stepped through what counted for the front door and something else, a sharp realization, crystallized in his mind:
Though the walls and trees sheltered the interior from snowfall, the place was still lightly covered in the stuff. It collected in drifts in the corners, it made wreaths and whorls around the larger clods of broken stone, and it was entirely undisturbed by any footsteps but those immediately behind him.
Black Jack walked to the center of the single room and was still a long moment, listening and considering, before he looked up to the sky without immediately realizing why. A dozen fat brown birds, disturbed, lifted off from somewhere on the other side of the wall behind him. He whirled to the doorway just in time for Eleanor Audrey to step into view. She'd traded her soft shoes for boots, but was otherwise unchanged from his first sight of her.
“Doctor,” she said immediately. She waved with her empty hand. The other was occupied by proxy by a basket hung from the bend in her arm. “My god, I thought you'd be out cold and now you're out in the cold.”
Black Jack frowned. “And you aren't cold?” It was more of a roundabout admonishment than a question.
“Oh, no, not in the least,” she said, closing much of the distance between them. “If you grow up in a place like this, you build up a real tolerance.”
He didn't buy it. Her dress may have had sleeves so long they cupped over half her bare hands, but her breath drifted over to him in thick clouds. He shrugged his overcoat off. “Be that as it may, you're under my care now and I don't want you playing around in the snow. Not even dressed properly, which you aren't. If you slipped or tripped on any of the stone under the snow out here you'd be in huge trouble.”
Eleanor let him drape the coat over her shoulders, smiling to herself. She was so pale and her lips so bright in contrast that covering her over in any more black but her hair felt like snuffing out a light. “You're right, of course,” she said. She closed the coat around her throat with her free hand and tucked her smile into the collar. She was just as tall as him, but she pulled off the little tiny shrunken thing act better than her nosy cousin. “I got some stubbornness from my mother, as Dad will tell you if you let him talk long enough. Wentworths aren't big on change or compromise.”
“Your mother isn't paying me,” Black Jack said. He finally took a look at the basket she carried, partly to distract himself from the way the cold made his left shoulder ache where he'd been opened in a hurry to get shrapnel away from his axillary artery. He leaned in and folded his arms. “This is what you're out like this for?”
Her laugh, short and sharp, pinged off the walls. “Yep!” She raised he basket and the bright white bells bobbed on the ends of their long green stems. She must have gathered three dozen of the things, but from where? “We call them snowbells, but they're pretty specific to the area. They grow like weeds around here in December.”
“I see.” Black Jack lifted a few of the drooping head with his fingertips. The insides of the cups were practically luminescent in their brightness.
“Do you like flowers, Dr. Black Jack?” she asked, leaning over his bowed head.
He straightened up. “I like them when they're alive and in the ground.”
“Well, aren't you a sentimental soul?” She turned to rejoin the path. “Walk me back, doctor?”
“Of course.” Otherwise, he may never get a chance to do his job. He walked just behind her.
“Your coat is awfully heavy,” she said once the lodge came back into view through the last line of trees.
“I keep some tools in it in case of emergency,” Black Jack said, well aware of the understatement. “Think of it as my second doctor's bag.”
“How trusting of you to let me wear it.”
Black Jack scoffed. “It's not like I had another on hand to use.”
“But you aren't cold?”
“I'm freezing, so quit talking and keep walking.”
She chortled and walked faster, then ran, all the way to the front steps of the lodge to stand by her father. Black Jack started to charge after her, but thought better of it. He could only make it worse grabbing her. Instead, he kept his pace and proceeded straight up the steps and into the lobby.
“You're paying me to treat you, not to play in the snow. I need to examine you so I can communicate our needs to the hospital and make a lab order. You can bring someone with you if you want, obviously.”
Her footsteps behind him came in a slow, unsteady rhythm. “A lab order?”
Out on the porch, Henry called, “Don't allow dogs here, insurance is too high as it is.”
“I only brought the means to collect some samples, not test them. It would be a different story if I could work from my clinic,” Black Jack said. He waited at the foot of the stairs, watching her. “I'd like to determine your immune function and hormone levels and so on I understand you struggled with serious anemia earlier in your pregnancy as well.”
“Yes.” She approached him cautiously, her basket of flowers scooped in both arms against her chest. “I feel better now, though. Is that all you're looking for?”
He started up the stairs and frowned to himself. “Do you have other concerns?” It wasn't unlikely. She had, according to her admission and his extrapolation, had unprotected sex with at least one man no longer in the picture.
“No,” Eleanor said after a pause that lasted their trip up to the second floor. “I just have such trouble trusting doctors since- Well.”
“You're paying more than enough to afford to trust me,” Black Jack said. He went to his door and unlocked it. He was so relieved not to find it unlocked. “You're confident being examined alone?”
She set the basket on the floor just to the side of the door. Wet soil sprinkled onto the carpet from gaps in the weaving. Did she pull them up bulbs and all? “Yes, it's fine. I can tell you're a gentle person.”
Black Jack's lips became a thin line. “It's necessary to the profession. Anyway, let's start. I've called a courier to bring your samples to the lab. The results will arrive electronically, and the turnaround shouldn't even be twenty four hours.”
Eleanor stepped in behind him. She breathed out. “I see. All right.”
“Let's get it over with, then.” Black Jack went to open the suitcase that had been such a nightmare to bring into the United States, very aware of Eleanor's gaze on his back as he collected his supplies.
---
Eleanor Audrey was healthy.
At least, from all appearances he could discern without opening her up or getting his hands on imaging equipment. And the labs had to come back. He sunk deeper into his slouch in the chair he'd pulled over to the big multi-paned window that dominated the southern wall of the lobby. He could ignore the chatter of the other guests who'd filtered out of the adjacent dining room and lingered after dinner. It wasn't as easy to ignore the incessant plinking of one kid noodling on the piano in the corner.
It was possible she'd simply pulled through the worst of it, or what would be the worst until she came full term and things went south fast. An extra-uterine pregnancy carried in the fallopian tube couldn't progress long without disaster – the tube would inevitably rupture, the mother would bleed out rapidly, he'd seen it before – but the rare case carried in the abdominal cavity stood some chance of viability. He'd read about two cases in which the mothers had carried their pregnancies to term and only found out at the last critical moment that they had been in peril the whole time.
He sipped at his coffee and watched the intermittent gusts outside kick the snow up in imitation of waves.
It was possible. The babies delivered were small and premature, but it did happen. He had no reason to believe the anemia and bleeding that had threatened Eleanor before were a problem any longer. If not for the records from her previous doctors, even he might have taken for granted that nothing was wrong at all.
Maybe a mother's intuition truly was that powerful, at least some of the time.
He shut his eyes and let the cup be warm and heavy in both his hands for a while.
These things got to him too easily.
“Well, well.” Black Jack jumped at the sound of the voice he least wanted to hear. “Good evening, doctor.”
Kiriko had slunk right up beside him. He was wearing a heavy gray overcoat and a scarf from which he hadn't untucked his hair, but he wasn't snow-coated enough to have come from outside. How, how had Black Jack failed to notice him before?
“What are you doing here?” Black Jack asked as he got to his feet. As if the answer weren't a given.
“Resting,” Kiriko replied easily. He hooked his gloved thumbs in the pockets of his overcoat. “Yours isn't the only work that's draining, you know.”
“It isn't draining,” Black Jack said, defensiveness rising into his voice before he realized he'd slid right into speaking Japanese.
“Of course.” Kiriko abandoned English as well. “My point is, my last job was long and difficult and I'm taking advantage of proximity to somewhere nice to get my head right before I return to Japan.”
Black Jack turned back to the window and watched Kiriko in the dim reflection. “So you're already through killing someone.”
“He was old and struggled for a very long time, Black Jack.” It was harder than Black Jack liked to ignore the patient way he said it. “He struggled so long his family were tired of him and I was the only one with him for a whole week before he died.”
Anger rose in him. “That's not a justification for killing him.”
“You don't believe there's any justification for dying,” Kiriko said, that damnable patience still lingering. Black Jack couldn't help but feel needled, condescended to. “But it's done, now, and there's nothing for you to be mad about. Whoever you're here for, they're in no danger of me snapping them up.”
Black Jack scoffed and drained his coffee. He wasn't about to tell Kiriko he was mad at someone for dying.
“Unless that's not what you're mad about.” Kiriko tipped his head back and studied him with his eye good eye. He'd been watching through the reflection, too, Black Jack realized. “In which case, why not come walk with me?”
“Hah?” Now, Black Jack looked over his shoulder. “What for?”
“We're both in morose moods and it's beautiful out.” Kiriko trained a sharp smile on him. “You're just going to sit there stewing otherwise, right? Come on. Nobody's stealing anyone's work this time around, so let's play at being civil.”
He was right, of course. “I was going out anyway,” Black Jack said, shrugging. He left his cup on a side table for Patrice to whisk away later and took his overcoat off the back of the chair. “You only get the light for so long in winter.”
“And the quality of light is very fine this evening,” Kiriko said. He turned in a very pointed way, looking away from Black Jack and out the window. Then, he started for the door. “I've got a flashlight in my pocket, though, don't worry.”
Black Jack pulled his coat on tight and scowled. “It's not like I'm not scared of the dark, you ass!”
“Oh, naturally,” Kiriko said, waving a dismissive hand over his shoulder as he walked to the door. A few guests filing out of the dining room had paused to watch the apparent argument they couldn't decipher by now. “It's just best to have one when you go out into the snow at night. Don't take offense so easily.”
Instead of saying anything else, Black Jack huffed and stalked after him.
The light off the snow really was lovely. The view through glass did no justice to the pink sunset quality it threw over the heaped and mounded world of a forested mountain after heavy snowfall. It turned the stretching shadows purple.
Black Jack stuffed his hands in his coat pockets, not willing to turn back and fetch his gloves from his room.
“You haven't eaten yet?” Kiriko asked as they passed under a line of those purple shadows.
“Didn't feel like it.”
“You might be better off. Only the soups here are remotely edible. I've been on an invalid's diet for almost a week just to enjoy my meals.”
They walked in silence for a while. It was only when they stepped onto the path Black Jack recognized as the winding track into the woods that would take them to the chapel that Black Jack found himself compelled to make some sound other than the scrunch of his shoes in the snow.
“I'm here to deliver a baby, in case you were wondering.”
“Ah.” Kiriko sounded almost distracted. He looked up as he walked, and Black Jack did the same. The boughs of the trees from either side of the path met in a long, snowy archway above them. “New life! You see? You get to beat me after all, in a roundabout sense.”
Black Jack smiled to himself and returned his gaze to Kiriko's back and the path. “In a roundabout sense,” he agreed.
“There's more to it,” Kiriko said after a while. He stepped out of the half-dark the trees provided and into the rock garden the chapel had become. “You wouldn't come out here for something so simple, and if you would nobody asking for something simple would pay your rate.”
Black Jack used the new space to put some distance between them. He stepped 'into' the chapel and walked to the far end to appreciate how the light came in through the circle of colorful glass high set high on the stone wall. No Virgin Mother, thankfully, just abstract shapes in concentric circles suggesting something floral. “It's a pregnancy with complications,” he said, finally.
Kiriko didn't let him keep his distance. “Keep your secrets, then,” he said. He leaned back on the marble remains of an altar. “They're too pricey for me, especially with you eating into my client base from time to time.”
Black Jack was silent, looking back up at the window. A screaming wind kicked up and brought snow sliding off branches and hissing to the ground outside.
“They're both safe from me, Black Jack,” Kiriko said in the stillness that followed. “I'm a man on vacation after a hard job. Nothing more or less.”
Black Jack made a small sound of acknowledgment that the wind tried to drown out.
It couldn't muffle the cry from the chapel's entrance.
“Doctor! Need a doctor! Which one of you?”
They turned in unison to see a young woman, totally breathless, shouting in over-enunciated English.
Black Jack stepped forward first. “What's the problem?”
“Little boy.” She closed her mittens loosely around her neck. “Dying, can't breathe, throwing up.”
Of course. There was always more work. Black Jack pushed past her. “How long's he been sick?”
“Just now,” she said, shuffling behind him. Had she really come out here in house slippers?
“Does he have any food allergies you know of?”
“Man, I don't know him, he's here with his mom and she didn't tell me anything besides go get a doctor.”
That would be a probable 'no,' then. “I'll take a look.”
There was always, always more work.