The Exorcist Doctor

An hour later, Gael and Maeve walked through the wrought-iron archway of the Sallow Hearth Orphanage, and Maeve stopped dead the moment they stepped into the central courtyard.

Gael supposed it was only the appropriate reaction for someone who hadn’t stepped foot in here since they beat the crap out of Evelyn over two years ago, but it was still amusing to watch.

The Sallow Hearth Orphanage, as Maeve probably remembered it, was a dark and dreary ruin with rabid dogs roaming the hallways and ravens cawing death in the night. That orphanage was old news—the central courtyard was now a green and bright and violently alive garden, with thick grass spread across the ground and young trees curled over the repaired cobble paths. Benches and tables were installed all over. A winding freshwater river cut through the center of the garden from one end to another. Six giant Vile Eaters even stood at each corner of the hexagon-shaped courtyard, drinking the green mist and making the air purer than the air inside the clinic, and that was saying something bad about the clinic.

But the children deserved the best.

It wasn’t even a ‘handful of tragic orphans standing around looking inspirational’, either. There were real children. Rowdy children. Shouting children. They were children with muddy-knees, grass-stained sleeves, and missing teeth. Two teams of ten were currently chasing a stitched leather ball across the central garden, and from what Gael could tell, it involved kicking, running, screaming, inventing new rules on the fly, and accusing everyone else of breaking the new rules whenever the ball didn’t go into the goal.

A proper Bharncair game, then. And Evelyn was right in the middle of the team with the blue sashes, shouting at her kids.

“Move, ya little coffin-sniffers! The ball ain’t gonna crawl into the goal by itself! Tamsy, if you kick it backward again, I’m sellin’ your shoes to a widow!”

Across the river, Liorin stood with the opposite team in the red sashes, barefoot on the grass. “No fear! Kick strong! Kick true! Kick not into Evelyn’s face unless the ball chooses the path!”

“Oi!” Evelyn shouted. “Don’t you teach them prophecy-ball, leaf-brain!”

“It’s not prophecy-ball! It’s listening-heart-to-foot!”

“Fuck you!”

“Don’t say that!”

The two teenagers were great leaders for their respective teams, though only in the physical sense. Education wise, there were better options. Still, for the children who didn’t want to participate in the rough-and-tug of the ball game, there were plenty of other activities around the garden—and by plenty, Gael meant the rest of the twenty or so children were all crowded around the giant three-headed hellhounds lounged across the garden, begging them for a ride.

Grimlet, at least, didn’t seem to mind letting three boys sit on his heads while he dozed off in the middle of the day. Another hellhound was strutting around proudly, letting the girls sitting on them pretend like they were princesses and recite ‘Duke of the Murder-Dogs’ to their envious peers begging for their turn to ride. If Gael were the one to decide, he’d teach the hellhounds to charge the kids a fee whenever they had to work for them, but… well, he supposed he had to thank the Saintess he wasn’t the one to decide.

There were better men for that role.

“Behold,” Gael said, spreading his arms and gesturing at the garden at large. “My children.”

For her part, Maeve was still half-stunned, half-astonished at the lively sight.

“... What happened here?” she eventually breathed. “I didn’t know the orphanage reopened.”

“Ah. Yes. I may have forgotten to tell you, but basically, I bought the land deed from Juno two months ago. They’d been sitting on it since the old orphanage shut down, so I thought I’d repair it, renovate it, and reopen it with myself appointed as the director, but…” He jabbed his cane at Evelyn, who was cackling after having stolen the ball from a blue sash boy. “I don’t really do anything, so I mostly let her and the Saint’s Hands run this place. The teachers here are all Saint’s Hands, and every plant you see in this garden was cultivated by Liorin, who’s been coming here to introduce new and exotic stuff to the kids whenever he has free time.”

Then he gestured to the different wings of the orphanage surrounding the courtyard.

“Only two of the six wings are for the kids, though. The other four serve as patient housing,” he said. “The clinic can’t keep people long-term if they need clean air, actual beds, and peace and quiet while recovering from their tougher ailments, so we send them here to rest instead. At least they’ll get two of those three things here. Heh. You can take your mask off, by the way. Nobody wears them here.”

Maeve walked a few steps forward, taking off her Saint’s Hands mask and taking the rest of it all in. The plants. The clean air. The pure and smooth windows. The children running without masks. Her eyes moved across the courtyard, and while Gael liked to think he’d become an expert at reading her mind, the truth was, he was only good at poker while he was drunk.

He wasn’t drunk now.

“... Oh yeah! I’ve got a favorite bench,” he said quickly, skipping past her and beckoning her deeper into the courtyard with a grin. “The seat warms your ass. It took me two hours to install it/”

That definitely appealed to Maeve in some way, because she started following him, no questions asked.

It didn’t take long for some of the children to notice her, and the effect was immediate. Three children near their winding cobblestone path froze. One of them gasped, and another slapped the third on the shoulder hard enough to knock him into a bush. Within seconds, a quiet ripple went through the courtyard.

“Look! It’s Miss Maeve!”

“The pretty clinic lady!”

“Miss Maeve’s here!”

A flock of them broke away from the grass, faces brightening like little funeral candles as they ran towards her. Gael wasn’t surprised at all. Most of them had been to the clinic before for checkups, stitches, fevers, infections, broken bones, bad lungs, and the many varieties of Bharncair childhood miseries. Maeve worked reception, so she was the one who always met them first, and she was the one who smiled at them first.

Then the children saw him walking beside her, and all of them hit a silent pause as if they’d run into a glass wall.

One boy’s face drained. A girl clutched her friend’s sleeve. The smallest child pointed at Gael like a witness identifying a murderer in court.

“That’s the creepy doctor.”

“Don’t look at his beak!”

“He gave Tollo bitter medicine!”

“He cut open Jaff’s neck and made Jaff say thank you!”

“My brother says he drinks poison!”

Oh, they had a lot more to say about him than Maeve, so Gael grinned and spread his arms.

“Children!” he boomed. “Come! Embrace your director!”

They screamed and scattered instead, making him cackle. Maeve shot him a nasty look, but he hummed in delight and kept leading the way.

I’ve still got it.

Eventually, they reached the wooden bench near the center of the courtyard, which was nailed beneath a wide-branched tree Liorin had called a ‘hushwillow’ even though it’d never hushed once in its miserable little life. Its leaves rustled constantly overhead and made annoying sha-sha noises, but the bench gave anyone sitting on it a clear view of the sports, the hounds, the flowerbeds, and Evelyn committing minor war crimes in pursuit of victory in a game of ball, so in his eyes, it was the best bench in the whole wide world. Also, the fact that the bench warmed his ass was a plus. He built this shit.

He sat first. Then Maeve sat beside him—not too far away as well—so that was something.

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And for a while, all they did was watch the children play.

Peace really was a strange thing after all.

“... I’m planning to expand in the future,” he eventually said, crossing his legs as he watched Grimlet struggle to throw the three boys off his heads. “I want more branches to open across Blightmarch first—with some dormitories, some recovery wards, and maybe even a proper schoolroom—but then I want branches in Ironwych and Bleakhearth as well. If Calvos and the Master of Masks won’t have it, then I want them to at least send their children here. It’s not that far away nowadays. You can get from here to Calvos’ fortress in under a day if you get a ride from the Saint’s Hands.”

“There’ll be no more children without a home, then,” Maeve murmured, watching Liorin throw a mudball in Evelyn’s face.

“Mhm,” he said, watching Evelyn growl and throw one back. “There’ll be no more kids like me… and you.”

Maeve went quiet at that.

Gael could hear the hushwillow muttering overhead. He considered very briefly telling it to shut up, but Vivi already thought he was insane when he talked to the ravens earlier, so he’d rather the kids around him not think he was delusional as well.

“... You already knew, then?” Maeve finally whispered.

He snorted. “Of course I knew,” he muttered. “I knew it the moment I saw him again. That outfit, and those red-lenses… he’s the same Raven who took your mom and dad.” Then he exhaled through his nose, draping his arms along the back of the bench as he craned his head back. “This is one fucked-up coincidence, huh? The Exorcist who killed the monster that came out of my mom’s chest is the same Exorcist who adopted you after my dad killed your parents. Actually, now that I think about it, isn’t that the plot of—”

“‘The Divine Horrordy’?” they said at the same time.

They paused at the same time.

Then they chuckled at the same time.

“Fuck-ass movie,” he said.

“Lame plot,” she agreed.

And so they sat with that for a while, watching the ball game between the red and blue team devolve into a mudball-slinging contest. It wasn’t very entertaining. Evelyn mostly carried her team, and Liorin mostly carried his.

“Did you… know he was a Raven, then?” Maeve asked slowly. “Your dad, I mean.”

“Nope,” he admitted. Then he squinted, pursed his lips, and thought again. “Well, maybe. I dunno. I was a dumb fuck back then. I think I vaguely knew he was always a bit weird, but I knew he was smart, and I knew he loved mom a lot. As for mom… well, I don’t really know her. She died giving birth to me. She must’ve been great, though, for dad to have spent my entire life up to that point trying to figure out how to bring her back. Isn’t that cool? That someone can love another person so much they’re willing to dye their hands red and black just to get a chance at seeing light in their eyes again.”

With that, he reached into his coat and pulled out a flask of alcohol. Maeve’s eyes flitted to the label for a moment. 94%. He was approaching apotheosis soon, and he knew it, so he uncorked the flask with his thumb with a bright grin.

“... But fuck that shit, right?” he said. Then he took a big swig. The alcohol burned down his throat. “Like, so what if your wife died? So what if you’ve lost the love of your life? Everyone in this city has lost someone. Every gutter rat has a grave they can’t afford and a ghost they can’t feed. You don’t see them kidnapping thousands of people and planting bombs inside them and turning them into bug-food for extraterrestrial parasites. Like, what the fuck? Just drown your sorrows in alcohol like everyone else. Bitch.”

It certainly wasn’t his expected reaction, but Maeve actually snorted a little.

“Don’t drink that,” she chided, slapping the flask in his hand.

“Why not? I’m about to become god. I’m right fucking there.”

“You’ll see god before you be god.”

“Hey, either way works for me.”

As he took another long swig, Maeve also leaned back against the bench, craning her head back.

“Do you know what sort of experiments your dad’s doing with Myrmurs, then?” she asked softly.

“No clue how it all links back to mom. But…” He glanced at Maeve in the middle of his swig. “If I recall correctly… he fed your parents and your whole neighborhood to parasitic flowers, right?”

“Mhm.”

Gael lifted his right hand, tapped his little finger to the palm, and the three hungry flowers bloomed halfway, immediately trying to bite the beak of his mask off.

“I don’t remember much about dad, but I do remember there being lots of flowers around the house,” he said, keeping his head just far away enough that his flowers couldn’t rip his nose off. “And I mean they were everywhere. In the house, in the lab, pressed into books, floating in jars, growing from things that probably should’ve been thrown out or buried… and back in the catacombs under the Endless Masquerade, he also bloomed an exotic flower garden out of nowhere and used the hungry flowers there to stave us off. If he’s a Raven, then I’m pretty damn sure his official title within the Church's registry’s the ‘Flower Doctor’ or something lame like that.”

Maeve nodded slowly. “Because all of you Plagueplain Doctors get an official title.”

“But I’m not officially registered since I never went to the Church in Vharnveil once, so I don’t have access to any of dad’s records,” he said pointedly. “So, if we wanna figure out what he’s planning on doing with his flowers and Myrmurs, one way of doing it is going up to Vharnveil, getting myself recognized as one of the Seventy-Two Demonic Plagueplain Doctors of the Church, and that’ll probably get me clearance to access some files and records related to dad. We’ll probably find a clue that way.”

It was almost immediately that Maeve’s gaze sharpened—as if she wanted to reject the idea of him going up to Vharnveil immediately—but he turned his head and beamed at her before she could say anything.

“Or,” he said, “we can go the other way: we find my dad together, beat the shit out of him together, then ask him together. How’s that plan sound?”

Maeve stared at him.

And for a second, her face was blank—still as the pond in his underground botanical garden—until she suddenly shook her head.

Then she raised both her hands, cupped her cheeks, and gave her face a good squeeze as she closed her eyes.

“... Yeah,” she breathed. “Yeah, that sounds… that sounds good.”

Gael tilted his head. “You’re approving violence, dearest wife? Now that’s character development—”

“No.” Maeve opened her eyes, though she still held her cheeks as if they were keeping her face from falling apart. She stared straight at him then, so fierce and sincere he almost couldn’t bear to look back at her. “I’m sorry. I was just…. confused about a lot of things. I couldn’t think it through by myself, and every time I tried, I only ended up making it worse in my head. These six months, I should’ve just… I…”

She trailed off, unable to find the words. The truth was, Gael couldn’t either. He’d tiptoed around her the past six months because he was worried she hated him for what his dad did to her family, and even though he hadabsolutely zero reason to believe she was someone who’d do that… a part of him had still been deathly afraid of that possibility. He was a doctor, after all. He was a dreamer. And every night for the past six months, he’d dreamt of worlds where she no longer woke up next to him in the dreary mornings. He’d dreamt of worlds where she looked at him with that same disgusted expression she wore on the first night they met, only, in his dreams, she would wear that expression for the rest of his life.

So he’d tiptoed around her, as if he could’ve done that forever and kept this inevitable conversation away.

But thinking back on it now, it was probably the dumbest shit he’d done in a long, long time—because their bloodshackles were chained together.

And so was their fate.

Like it or not, he’d rather like it than not.

“... Come on, now,” he said, shrugging as he draped one arm over her shoulder. “You know you can always talk to your dearest husband about anything. Though there’s no guarantee I’ll listen depending on how drunk or drugged up I am, so I guess—”

She hit him lightly on the arm, scowling. “Shut it.”

“Okay. Sorry.”

And there it was.

They were normal again.

Painfully normal.

Beautifully normal.

Maeve still liked him enough to hit him, and… it was like someone just lifted an invisible statue of the crooked Saintess off his shoulders. He could breathe again. He could feel himselfagain.

So he started chuckling to himself—almost a nervous, instinctive response than anything else—when she reached down to her belt.

He knew what she was pulling out before he even saw it: the lower half of his Raven mask that she hadn’t worn in six months.

She held the mask for a while. The courtyard noises moved around them, somehow even louder now as Evelyn and Liorin dragged the hellhounds in the mudball fight, but she wasn’t a single bit distracted as she stared at the thing she’d avoided for half a year.

Then she lifted the mask, strapped the beak over her mouth and nose, and took a deep, heavy breath.

“... Well,” she whispered, glancing at him with lights in her eyes. “I think I did miss the scent of this mask a little.”

Gael cackled. He couldn’t help it. “It’s the best, ain’t it?”

“Mhm.” She leaned her head against his shoulder, closing her eyes. “It’s… pretty warm, too.”

“The mask or my shoulder?”

“Use that brain of yours, Raven.”

And so she didn’t move her head away from his shoulder. Neither did he pull away, even though her skull was hard and heavy and he was already starting to see stars in his eyes from the 94% alcohol he’d half-downed.

They could just enjoy this moment as it was—watching the children play, listening to Evelyn and Liorin squabble, and feeling the hellhounds’ heavy steps vibrate through the earth—but he wasn’t about to let the other half of his flask go to waste.

Oh well.

Apotheosis, here I come—

“Do you like kids?” Maeve suddenly asked.

Gael blinked.

That question came out of nowhere.

“... I hate them,” he eventually said, grinning from ear to ear. “I’d rather die before I get a kid.”