Crossover Fan Fiction ❯ The Apothecary's Other Diary ❯ Makeup Is Scary ( Chapter 7 )

SEVEN Makeup Is Scary

“Can you do my makeup?” Jinshi asked me one day. His natural beauty was such that any effort to increase it would topple countries and start wars.

“Are you trying to bring this country to ruin?” I accused him.

“Huh? What? No. How do you make your freckles?” he asked, pointing to his own nose. Ah, he wants to be LESS beautiful, not more. That was different.

Thus followed a night of makeup preparations. I admit I went all out, thinking of ways to disguise Jinshi into a commoner. Concealing a beauty like his to resemble any old dirt scrabbler you’d see in the marketplace is quite the task. I won’t say I went mad. I won’t admit that. There may have been some giggling. Possibly some cackling. Maybe even a noblewoman’s laugh. You know the kind, with the ohohoho. The sort that would make Hachiman worry over me. Or upset my troops on the Western front. I ended up needing to play 2Wicky on the biwa I’d scrounged up from one of the palace storage rooms. Being foreign, it was dusty and looked like it hadn’t been used in years, if ever.

“What is that noise?” asked Suiren, slamming open my door. It was the middle of the night. Ah, it seems I went a bit mad after all. The old lady, and Jinshi’s grandmother, looked highly annoyed.

“Sorry. Old lullaby,” I lied, carefully putting the instrument aside and turning in for the night.

The things I could do with an orbital gun.

The next morning Jinshi was freshly showered and glowing with youthful energy.

I used the makeup and a spicy drink to roughen his voice. Wrapping around the boy’s abdominals, well defined, and salted oil in his hair and various blotches on his skin and stains under his fingernail he did not look much like himself. I have to say his actual form is to my taste.

“Now, as for you, Maomao,” grinned Suiren malevolently.

And so it was I ended up in makeup and my prettiest dress robe having to remind Jinshi to walk behind me, not in front. And him reminding me a lady of my standing does not shop for vegetables in the marketplace. I did manage to buy some chicken skewers, which we shared. I noticed, but did not comment on the fact that Basen was following us. His familial resemblance to Gaoshun was also obvious. The building he planned to visit was a restaurant across the street from a brothel.

My admissions on caring for my uncle led to revealing his status as a eunuch, though this is no longer so. And then Jinshi asked about how one lowered the value of a courtesan, which is an unpleasant question. I answered it, but it left a sour taste in my mouth. So we parted ways.

Chiba City Blues

I am worried I have gone mad. I dream I visit 16th century China to see my sister, who is dead. Japan is weak when it comes to dealing with mental health issues, and I’m barely doing my classwork, ignoring people at school, and only really speak to Saki these days. And she has her own problems trying to help her brother. Taishi is not any better than I am. Komachi has left a hole in our lives. And I know I had problems with reality before, when I went made after Orimoto rejected me. I went hard into chuunibyo, and dark flame mastery, and silly names and bandages and posing… it was nuts. I was nuts. And I’m worried I’ve gone nuts again, maybe worse than before. When I dream, it feels so real. It stinks of open sewers, incense, rotting corpses, human sweat and boy odor, animal droppings, and my waking dreams are haunted by strange beauties and sharp contrasts. I think it got worse when I visited the library and found the pictures of the palace in my dreams. Red pillars and walls. Yellow roofs. Building after building across several hundred acres of land, guarded, walled, with moats around the walls to keep people in. It was the place from my dreams. I was outside most times, and used this strange urgent power to heal people I met. Streetwalkers with syphilis. Drunks dying of poison in an alleyway. A robbery victim stabbed through their liver. A guard ambushed by robbers. A girl with gangrene on her foot. An old woman with late stage tuberculosis and lungs flooded with blood and fluid. I healed them all, searching again and again for my little sister. In my madness, I searched.

Night after night, instead of restful sleep I endlessly searched. I am obsessed with finding her lost soul, taken too soon.

“The driver was laughing, Hachiman. He laughed as he ran her over,” Taishi told me when I’d managed to convince Haruno to buy me a bottle of sake. I shared it with my former brother in law. “He was laughing as they hauled him away in the police car. He… he said the Atheist deserved it.”

My own investigation turned up a body floating under the Chiba shipyard docks, as they do. The unnamed corpse identified only by his tattoos, because his face was missing thanks to crabs. He’d been beaten, broken, and disposed of, with a brand on his buttock, one I’d seen once before, and why father never goes to hot springs or the beach. I didn’t tell Taishi this, only assured him that she’d been avenged. It doesn’t help the pain, though.

And every night, I walk the muddy stinking streets of China, searching for her. After four months I found her adoptive father and healed his wounds, including his missing manhood and kneecap. A week later I found his mother, a mess of destruction from late stage syphilis, something I’d been forced to learn about at the library, from books. I’m getting a street-level black medical education at the library in the teaching hospital downtown. I never planned to be a doctor, but it is the only subject that interests me anymore. I healed this woman, my sister’s new mother, and realize it has been 17 years for her, since she died and was reborn. I marvel at my own madness, to so conveniently find her close to my own age in this fantasy world.

That was until I found the woodcut of the 9th Ka empress. A different face, but the eyes are so like mine when I dare to look in a mirror and bother to open the lids. Separated by 480 years, I have found her. My nightly sojourns take me into the outer palace, search and healing as I go. Every time I heal someone, my time there ends, but I feel compelled to act each time I realize I haven’t yet found her. A search, a healing, and I wake up so exhausted. Soubu is a trial of effort to stay awake and pass my classes so I don’t find myself homeless as well as expelled. The history book tells of many assassination attempts on the Ka dynasty children, concubines, and the crown prince hiding as a eunuch, of all things.

The bound foot maid, aching with guilt over attempting to poison a spoiled girl I heal without a second’s thought and discover the prince’s mother, resting, wounds in her belly from a childbirth gone wrong. It tests me, regrowing her organs and restoring her fertility. And finally success. My sister is here. She is here in this room. She is looking at me, and sees me despite the shape I wear. And one sentence, one confirmation, and I’m gone.

I wake up weeping with frustration. I know she is alive, and appeared healthy, though thin with probably malnutrition and overwork. But to only get a single sentence before being dragged away but whatever madness this is.

There is no mental health in Japan. Our people are too proud to admit such problems exist, much less pay a profession to help those in need of expert advice. Instead, Japan has cults, and cults fleece people and often lead to their deaths, usually by shame and a rope in the forest of crows, or a step into traffic against the light, or in front of a train. Sometimes I wake up to the laughing god ringing in my ears. Something only I can hear. I pray at Komachi’s shrine for protection from evil. The sound fades like a bad dream.

I return to my medical books, studying diseases of the organs common to the 16th century. Of medical treatments, of medicines that could cure such problems in my absence. I’ve been forced to learn some Mandarin, since the place I go is filled with its speakers. I cure someone each night when I should be finding rest. Praying at Komachi’s shrine each morning helps clear my mind for the day. I can function, barely. I am careful not to return the looks from Yui in our classroom. The pity. There is nothing she can do for me. I study. I pray. And in the dark of night, I prowl the streets of the city outside the walls of the golden palace of Ka. A month of this before I get a lucky break.

I find myself in a large bathing pool, right beside my sister. There is a terrible scar on her arm, and I activate my magic to help her, finding poison sacks, scar tissue, deadly corrosive toxins still at work in her flesh and unwind them, healing her, neutralizing these poisons. Smoothing her scars. Restoring blood flow and muscle tissue and elasticin in her skin. I even fix her pinky, which is deformed by some childhood wound.

And then we talk, finally talk, and a terrible weight is gradually lifted. She is happy. She is going to marry a prince. She likes her life here. And I warn her about the future, start to warn her, and I’m dragged back to my bedroom in Chiba, words dying on my lips.

“Damn it.”