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The Doctor is an old woman now, by the standards of this Town. She is only thirty-five, but in this town of living and walking corpses, where most don't live past twenty-three, she is considered ancient.
It shows in the streaks of silver in her dark hair, the grey withering away at her temples, but the careful movements of her hands as she stitches wounds and applies poultices and the meticulous cataloging of medicines are still sharp and clear in her memory.
The Doctor still remembers the Medium. A pale and reclusive woman in life, vilified and shunned in life, forgotten and unmourned in death.
The Town never forgot the witch blood that ran through her veins.
(Ridiculous, really. It still serves to make her blood boil when she thinks of it now. The Retributionist and the Transporter can trace their lineages back to the first Witches of Salem, and the Doctor herself has mystic blood in her veins. The Town is very much founded on the lingering traces of witchcraft.)
The Doctor, too, never forgets.
The Doctor never forgets the whispered conversations in the dark and the warmth of another person beside her.
The Doctor never forgets how their little jokes and quips, the way the Medium’s hand instinctively finds hers, the little rituals of boiling water and making tea to sooth her headaches when the whispers of the dead get too loud.
The Doctor never forgets the way the women she had spent ten happy (if fraught with tension from the ongoing cold war with the Mafia) years with is accused of spying for the Mafia and led to the lynching stand. The way dark locks frame pale skin as she delivers a defense. The way the Mayor barely glances at the accused as he casts his vote for guilty and gestures for them to kick the stool out from underneath her.
Most of all, the Doctor never forgets the way the Mayor shrugs absent-mindedly when he discovers the woman he’s hung is innocent.
"Medium is a suspicious enough claim; this reduces the cover Mafia can hide among. Besides, hanging a Medium is hardly a terrible loss.
Just a Medium. Just a lowly Medium claim. At that moment the Doctor wants to cut the unconcerned ease the Mayor wears on his face out with her scalpels.
Afterwards, when her tears have run dry, she curls up on the settee with a book that she hardly glances at. The chair opposite her is worn, the shine of the ornately carved wood long since gone. The leather of its seat is cracked, the foam underneath peeking through. It’s pathetically empty.
Eventually she lets herself ponder who she should attend to that night. The Mayor, of course, would be the most logical target for the Mafia. With the kind of swing he had in Salem’s fragile democracy, the spectacle he made that day about being willing to hang anyone to get to the Mafia would have painted a large target on his back.
At the same time, the thought of using her long and careful years of practicing and studying medicine to heal the man who has just so callously lynched the one person she trusted most in this God forsaken town makes her skin crawl. To do so, to put aside her misgivings and heal a man who could care less about the lives of others in his games of chess with the Godfather and continue to do so, night after night, leaving the rest of the Town to pile up as corpses is unthinkable. So when night comes and the wolves begin to howl, she takes her field medicine kit, spelled with carefully maintained runes, and goes to attend to the Jailor.
(She manages to save the Jailor from bleeding out that night and pretends she doesn’t feel disappointed when they wake up and the Mayor is still alive and ready to start another day of accusations.)
***
The funeral for the Medium is hardly a funeral at all. The warm autumn air stirs the faded blue cloth of her dress and red and orange swirl in the breeze among other fallen leaves and the branches of the trees, open and bare, as if already prepared to embrace the onslaught of winter.
She stands before the new headstone and carves the word beloved on to the rock, though it’s an achingly slow process and her back hurts from crouching over the rock by the end of it.
The crisp sound of leaves being crunched underfoot startles her. The Vigilante stands beside her silently, offering no platitudes or condolences. She thinks to herself, that it’s much better this way.
“Come on Doctor,” the Vigilante says at last, through that characteristic gruff manner of his. “God knows what the Town would do without you.”
She shivers slightly in her dress. The sun is setting, and a cool breeze picks up. The thin fabric is hardly any protection of the elements, but it was the Medium’s favorite, and how could she deny herself these last shreds of sentimentality?
She brushes herself off and follows him back into the Town of death.
***
A week after that it’s the Investigator dying from several bullet wounds (the Mafia had likely been overzealous after he found and lynched their Blackmailer that day) and the Vigilante three days after that. The Doctor finds him just in time and allows herself to justify the way she blatantly violates her Hippocratic Oath with the number of lives she has saved.
Eventually though, the Mayor demands loudly why she had not gone to attend to him that night. What member of the Town could possibly be more important than him?
He votes her up to the stand. After all, if she refused to heal the leader of the Town, her allegiances must lie with the shadowy world of the Godfather. She lifts her chin up in defiance, and makes no move to defend her actions.
“I’m the Doctor of this Town, regardless of what you say. And regardless of what I say, I’m fully aware that if you so choose, I will hang today. You know who I am.”
The Mayor looks furious at her insinuation, and opens his mouth to proclaim her guilt. The Jailor vouches for her though, and the Vigilante and the small handful of citizens (though never enough) whose lives she’s saved passionately speak in her defense. In the end, she is voted down from the stand. The Jailor grips her shoulder in support as she sways slightly.
“Was it the Medium who was lynched a few weeks ago?” he asks quietly. “I’m sorry.”
She numbly nods her head. But there’s nothing she can say to that.
But the Investigator and the Jailor are two in a sea of death. For every Town member she saves, two more die the next few nights. She spends nights attending to Town members, to anyone who she thinks is going to be attacked, who she can save, and every morning she goes to the town square and sees a new corpse lying there. Once or twice, she looks up to realize she is in the process of healing the Witch or a Mafia member. Truly, what was the point of being a Doctor if she couldn’t save anyone?
All the while, the Mayor presides over his court of death at the lynching stand, safe in the impregnable defenses of a personal Bodyguard and a Lookout watching over him every night.
She hates him, how one person can decide who lives and who dies during the long hours of the day. Just yesterday, they had hung the Spy because the Mayor had decided he must have been a Blackmailer. She hates how he can sleep soundly at night, while they are all being murdered in their beds.
(These days she is kept up not by the thought of her own death but by the thought of all those she could’ve saved and has failed to save. Somehow, she doubts the Mayor has ever had thoughts about the innocents he has killed with the noose.)
She hates the Mafia, the Godfather, for wanting a better Salem and resorting to murder to change it. She hates how they can so callously lie and blackmail their way into hiding amongst the town. She hates the sound of the gunshot ringing through the night, yet another indicator of her failure in her Hippocratic Oath.
She stumbles across the Escort one night, skin painted red as her dress, her life pooling thickly around her. It takes all her years of knowledge and skill to save her, all the while the Escort rambles and rants deliriously, screaming for an unknown assailant to stop. And if her fingers shake slightly in their frantic movements when the first scream escapes the Escort, hardly anyone can blame her.
Seeing her lying on the spare bed, the Doctor is struck by how young the Escort really is. She couldn't have been much older than twenty, but here she is, yet another pawn of the Mayor’s. She looks smaller, in one of the Doctor’s old linen robes that are several sizes too big and without her painted lips and face.
These nights she hears the Medium's whispers in her ear, can feel her breath against her neck and the fingers in her hair. The phantom whispers news from the dead and oh how I’ve missed you, and the Doctor laughs and sobs in equal measure. Sleep is a lost cause by now.
It means she's finally going mad. There's longstanding documented examples in her field of grief driving people mad. Auditory and visual hallucinations, poor judgment, perpetual insomnia. Even she, in her now perpetually exhausted and sleep-deprived state, can recognize the signs.
Still, the phantom before her, vivid and as clear as day, is cruel even for having been a conjuration of her own subconscious. Dimly, she registers that the teacup has slipped from her hand and shattered on the floor.
(The Medium had loved that set, the one with the swirling blue patterns and intricately carved handles. She would’ve been terrible upset at the Doctor for being so careless with their fine china.
Actually, she would’ve been terribly upset at the Doctor for a number of things. For refusing to heal the Mayor, even if he was despicable. For refusing to take care of herself and sleep and allowing herself now to fall into this pathetic state.)
“You’re not real,” she whispers, finally, as if anything louder than a whisper will make the phantom go away. She should be eager for the phantom to go away, to bury her head in her head in her hands and hope that if she simply doesn’t acknowledge her own spiraling cycle of madness, it will disappear. But somehow she can’t let go of this last impression of the Medium, not yet.
“You look terrible, dear,” the hallucination tells her.
“I know,” the Doctor replies. “Are you angry about it? My stunning good looks have been washed away with blood and tears.”
“You never used to be this bitter,” the phantom frowns, seemingly flickering in the dim candlelight. “This is all my fault; I shouldn’t have left you. I should’ve given a better defense, anything that would’ve allowed me some time to prove my role.”
“Are you apologizing for dying?” Hysterical laughter bubbles up in her chest, though it lodges at her throat and dries up.
“You always were hopeless without me,” the pale, washed out version of her Medium says.
“Yes,” the Doctor runs her hand through her hair, unkempt and messy and piled in a bun at the back of her head. The hysterical laughter rises again, “look at me now, I’m vividly hallucinating the ghost of my dead love and I can’t even be bothered to care.”
“Is that what this is about?” the hallucination has an interesting combination of hurt and concern and offense warring over her face. “I assure you, I’m real all right. I’m a Medium, dear, and communication beyond the grave is one of my specialties.”
And that’s so painfully familiar, the steadfast, no nonsense attitude of the woman she knew in life, that for a second, she allows herself to let go.
(And what could it hurt really, just one night, even if it might be an illusion. Just one night of ignoring the fucked up reality outside her head. Just one night of pretending that everything was okay.)
“How’s being dead?” the question slips from her lips without a prior thought, and the instant it does she regrets it.
But the Medium only laughs. “Terrible. As much as you’d expect being dead to be terrible. You’d hate it. There’s nothing to do but sit around and talk to the other spirits and try in vain to shout some sense into the living.
I bring news from the dead though. Let’s go through that first and then we can spend the rest of the evening catching up. You’re going to be telling me just why a trained medical professional is engaging in so many unhealthy behaviors.”
So the Medium tells her. Speculation from the dead about who the remaining Mafia are. The Serial Killer that the Sheriff discovered on the night he died. Who the cleaned roles were. Things that her subconscious could not possibly have thought of or made up. Which means…
“God…” she breathes, stretching out a hand towards the translucent form “You’re really real aren’t you? You have no idea how much I’ve missed you.”
The Medium opens her mouth to say something, probably another comment about how thick the Doctor is being right now, but she’s interrupted by the rustle of cloth.
“Doctor?” the slight form of the Escort appears in the doorway, leaning heavily against the wooden frame, “Who are you talking to?”
And her face crumples and turns as white as the sheets on the bed.
“You mean you can’t see her?”
***
The Mayor has a fair amount of rhetoric. He paints a pretty picture of a Town with no Mafia, no death. A final victory. She looks around, at the hollow and washed out faces: the Escort's perfect porcelain mask, her own dark circles and half-manic expression reflected in her fellow Protective’s face, the Vigilante's gaunt and haggard look, and wonders what victory even means to these people anymore.
How can there still be a victory, after all they’ve lost?
The dead, after all, are poor a replacement for the living.