#fic chat

Arkham, 1937:

There is a crash, a shattering collision of glass and gravel and skin and bone, and a cry that is half agony and half triumph, cut short in a shuddering breath.

And then there is silence, and a galaxy of broken glass scattered across the road, glittering in the moonlight.

And there is blood, pooling slowly outwards.

And, lying at the center of glass and road and bloody pool, there is a man...

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Lester, Yang, & Doe, Private Investigators, have been back to business-as-usual for two and a half years now. Well, as usual as business ever gets in Arkham for a trio of detectives who have only two bodies between them, and who, two and a half years ago, were all extremely dead. But the three of them make a good team. These last couple years they've started getting a reputation as one of the few agencies in town that can reliably get some kind of answers and walk out alive from whatever weird bullshit Arkham is throwing at them this week.

So when a man by the name of Matthew Keating, owner of a local store that specializes in the sale of glassworks, comes to them about his shop's front window getting broken a couple of nights earlier, at first it hardly sounds like a case worth taking. Nothing was even stolen.

Except, well... turns out, once they get the whole story out of him, the problem is not actually the window. The problem is more the man found collapsed outside the window amid the broken glass, blood-drenched and horrifically wounded but still, somehow, conscious. When the ambulance arrived for him he was delirious, muttering nonsense about butterflies. Despite his injuries, he put up a fight; the first of the ambulance crew to touch him is now nursing a broken wrist, and another nearly lost a couple fingers to his teeth. He's currently being kept restrained and sedated at St Mary's Hospital, and has been bandaged up beyond recognition. No ID was found on him, and in the little time he's been awake and halfway lucid he has flatly refused to give his name—though he becomes furiously indignant if anyone refers to him as a John Doe.

The police have been unhelpful in ascertaining what the hell actually happened here. By the look of him, they say, the man is likely just some drifter who went crazy and smashed through the window, cut himself up badly in the process. If he survives his injuries he'll probably be sent to the psychiatric hospital; if not there, he'll certainly be locked up for attacking the ambulance workers.

Never mind that the man's wounds looked more like the aftermath of torture than anything that could have been self-inflicted. He's a nutcase, you heard him rambling. He attacked the people trying to help him. Who knows what someone like that might do.

Never mind that the glass from the broken window sprayed out all across the street instead of inward, suggesting someone broke the window from inside the store, and used serious force to do so. Look, you said yourself there was no sign of a break-in, Mr. Keating, nothing out of place. And that display you got up in the window, all those fancy mirrors, they wouldn't have been easy to move out of the way and then put back. Who knows why the glass fell the way it did. Funny gust of wind, maybe. Strange things happen sometimes.

Never mind that the largest and centermost mirror in that window display is the one thing inside the store that has been damaged: a narrow, jagged crack now runs from top to bottom, splitting it in half. Well, you see? He must've hit the mirror when he was breaking the window. I mean, what were you thinking happened? He fell out of the mirror like Alice in Wonderland, and crashed out into the street? Ha!

No, listen, Mr. Keating—the poor fellow will be taken care of. Best to leave it at that, and be glad he didn't do more damage to your shop. Your insurance should cover the cost of the window.

Translation: the police know Weird Arkham Bullshit when they see it, they saw the kind of injuries the man had suffered, and they don't want to have anything more to do with whatever the hell actually happened to him than they have to.

So when, later that day, Mr. Keating walked into his shop's back room to find the broken mirror now sporting two smeared, bloody handprints on opposite sides of the frame, he didn't bother going back to the police about it. The fingers of both prints were facing outward, as if someone had reached out of the mirror and gripped onto the first thing they could find to haul themselves through, and there was absolutely no point in telling the police about it. Instead, Mr. Keating closed the shop for the day, drove out to the coast with the broken mirror, and chucked the damn thing into the Atlantic at high tide.

The next day, now shiny and clean and smelling of seawater, it was sitting back on the storeroom shelf.

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So now Mr. Keating is here, in the offices of Lester, Yang, & Doe. And yeah, Parker has to admit, it's definitely the kind of case they should take.

Parker just wishes he knew what it was about this specific case that's setting off a small but persistent alarm bell in his mind. Something about the mirrors? Ever since he was returned to life, there's been... something, an unease creeping down his spine, whenever he looks at his reflection. Like if he looks for too long, he might realize that he's the reflection, and it's the figure in the glass that's real.

But that's just some weird side effect of resurrection, probably. Parker's never mentioned it to Arthur, not when the much higher price Arthur paid for his own life are still visible: in the glint of gold in Arthur's eyes, in the limp he can't quite hide, in the scar on his throat and the scars on his face and the scars, and scars, and scars. Parker's memories of his time at the Waylay are blurry and fractured, but there's enough still there to know that he spent a lot of time playing cards and getting drunk while Arthur was collecting all those scars.

So of course Parker's never mentioned the mirror thing to him; honestly, maybe it's fair he can't look himself in the face comfortably anymore.

That's probably all it is. This case is weird, obviously, it's got Weird Arkham Bullshit all over it, but they deal with that all the time now. Whatever it is, that little nagging whisper that there's something important here, something he should know, it's probably just his mind playing tricks on him.

Yeah. Probably.

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Meanwhile, elsewhere, a local doctor finds an unexpected guest in his home:

Doctor! Good evening. Do you know who I am? No, of course not. But I know you. I knew your parents, too. You've strayed from so much of what they taught you, haven't you? What do you suppose they'd say, if they knew?

Ah—but you can hardly be blamed for abandoning your faith, can you? Not when it abandoned you first. It was a devastating loss, realizing that your sacred messenger, who brought to you the words of the true gods, no longer answered even your people's most desperate calls. I know. Believe me, I know.

What if I told you he had not left you willingly? What if I told you he was murdered, by one who thought himself above even the creator of us all?

And if, hypothetically, I were to tell you that he who killed your messenger now lay unconscious in a bed at St Mary's Hospital in this very town, doctor—what would you do then?

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SO. That's where it started. The plan is to intersperse the Arkham narrative with flashbacks to a different and bloodier place and time, gradually piecing together how we got to that starting place.

All that said:

As I said above, this does leave me with some things that I want to be careful about! Which gets me back to "here's where I have a lot more reading and research to do for this one than some others."

I said above that I want Kayne to have to deal with others on a human level. However I go about that, it's inevitably going to bring me to some pretty major questions about the ways he's perceived by those others, and how that plays out.

First big question is the perception of him as "mad," and the fact that he's not exactly in a better mental place after the events of You're the One. Because, well. The ways the modern US treats people seen as mentally ill are... often not good. The ways the US treated people seen as mentally ill in the 1930s were frequently worse. And to be clear, I'm not out to sit down and go "Okay, today we're going to do a Very Special Episode on the History of Psychiatry." But it's not a light topic, and while the story's still fantastical, I want to be mindful that if I'm Putting Kayne Through Some Shit in this setting, I'm now placing that shit in much more of a real-world historical context than I have done previously. Regardless of the extent to which I do or don't engage directly with that history in the story, the context is going to be there, and is still going to invite associations.

The second big thing is the question of how he's perceived in terms of race, and what that means in terms of 1930s-era New England racism. Obviously, Kayne has no specific canonical appearance and presumably can appear pretty much however he wants, but Kayne in You're the One-verse has found it easier to maintain a semblance of a stable self, and control over the chorus, if he sticks primarily to one physical form. In You're the One I still didn't describe his appearance in that form, because I wanted my Bang artists to have as much freedom as possible with their character designs; for the situation in that fic, that worked. But if I'm dropping him into 1930s Massachusetts (or frankly any portion of the US at any time past or present) and asking him to deal with the human world on a human level, I need to be more thoughtful about how I handle the subject—if he's seen as a brown or Black man, that's going to be a different undercurrent running through his experiences than if he's seen as white.

And then the third big thing is the intersection of the first two, which is, to put it mildly, its own kind of mess.

So for me, as a writer, this isn't territory I want to wander into unless I'm very clear in my own mind about what I'm doing. But at the same time—for me personally, if I'm going to do any kind of "Kayne becomes human" story, those are questions I think I need to reckon with in my writing, and try to handle the moments where the story might veer closer to real-world scenarios as respectfully as possible while I'm writing Kayne as the horrific fucked-up mess he is.

(Happy to chat or listen to thoughts / questions / concerns from anyone on this stuff.)