October 18, 2023

"Are you heading out for coffee?"

Jamie, on the verge of leaving the hotel, freezes upon hearing her father's words. They're calm, neutral, even curious—nothing at all indicates something negative is coming her way. She mentally braces for an attack regardless, just in case.

"Yeah," she admits. She has to lie about too many things already these days, so she should be truthful now. "Is... there something wrong with that?"

There is so, so much that could be considered wrong with it, it's crazy. Jamie knows she needs to do something about her excessive caffeine consumption; her recent energy drink overdose was a good reminder that, unless she gets her shit together, she'll keep poisoning her body until she's out of days to shave off her lifespan.

It's just that—and this is plain embarassing to admit—she gets serious withdrawal symptoms if she forgoes her usual caffeine fix. The world becomes a jumbled mess of headaches, foggy lethargy and irritable anxiety, all clouded in a haze of complete and utter joylessness. Therefore, if Jamie wants to quit, she'll have to do so in a very specific way: really slow and really steady.

Jamie excels at neither slow nor steady. But she has been trying to cut back the past few days, and she'll finally get it right sometime soon—fifth time's the charm, surely. She vows to tell Dad as much should he come out swinging about this particular bad habit of hers.

(It occurs to her only then that he won't. He isn't aware of the extent of Jamie's caffeine dependence. He hasn't been present enough in her life for the last eight years to be privy to this knowledge. That means expecting an attack over it was just silly.

Maybe, in some small way, an attack like that would've been preferable to the alternative silence. Jamie isn't sure.)

Dad leans back in his seat. He was reading the news on his phone before flagging her down in the lobby. The WiFi is better here than in his and Mom's room, he claims, and he enjoys watching people milling about the square outside. He gestures at the hotel's coffee machine. "You might want to consider giving the local facilities another chance."

Clearly, this is the parent responsible for Jamie's host of inattention issues.

"The coffee machine is shi– broken," Jamie reminds him. Poison is poison, but she'll at least choose to ingest the sludge that actually tastes good.

"Just try it, Jamie."

It's an order, not a suggestion. Orders have always rubbed Jamie the wrong way, but she's gotten better at picking her battles in recent years, and this battle isn't worth fighting. She stands to lose nothing by humouring her old man a little. If necessary, she'll simply take the plastic cup of toxic waste outside and dispose of its contents discreetly in the nearest canal.

So she gives the machine another chance, expecting to be horrified once more. Except what ends up in her cup looks suspiciously like proper coffee this time around. She picks the drink up and finds she seems to be holding a very decent espresso. One that even passes the sniff test. Emboldened by this, Jamie dares to take a sip, careful not to burn her mouth.

The coffee isn't quite the quality she'd receive at the nearby café she's been frequenting since Nathan found it their first morning here, but it's not bad. Not bad at all.

"Holy shit." Jamie involuntarily grins, forgetting to censor herself for politeness's sake. "This is coffee."

"A good samaritan MacGyvered the machine." Dad's tiny smile carries a hint of mischievous pride. "Might save you the walk."

Dad can and will fix any broken object in his immediate vicinity. Guerilla-style, without waiting for permission—they should be thanking me, I'm not even charging them. Vehicles may be his forte and livelihood, but Jamie has yet to encounter any broken thing he couldn't get working and functional again through talent, insight and sheer force of will. Dad spent countless insomniac nights sitting at the kitchen table, working with his hands, building model cars and fixing home appliances brought in by neighbours who'd already have written their items off if it wasn't for him.

(Dad has always been better with objects than with people.)

Jamie is remembering this because, when she was little, she'd hear him stumbling down the stairs in the dead of night, never quite succeeding at being quiet enough for his youngest daughter to sleep through his racket. She'd trail after him and join him at the kitchen table to 'help'. Her aid, looking back on it now, consisted of little more than handing Dad tools and parts when prompted and never, ever touching the night's project itself, lest it end up ruined in a child's hands. But Dad would always make her feel like she was doing the world's most important job, and he'd prepare hot chocolate for them both and let her stay downstairs with him rather than immediately redirecting her to her bed.

Back then, Jamie's presence was still something to be valued.

Those shared nocturnal moments were just sort of their thing for a while, until Jamie reached an age where turning over in bed and going back to sleep became an option far superior to hanging out with dear old Dad. And Dad, who'd been resisting taking sleeping pills for years because he 'didn't need them', finally caved, got medicated, and started sleeping through his nights.

"...Thanks, Dad."

"Pleasure." Jamie waits for him to dive back into his news app, but he holds her gaze. "Do you think we could sit down and talk sometime soon, Jamie? With Mom, too? About... recent events we haven't been able to discuss in person yet."

Cold sweat again. Jamie never sat down with her parents to discuss her prank video and subsequent cancellation. Mom scolded her for it over the phone and the sore subject has been carefully avoided by both parties ever since. Swept under the rug where all the family unpleasantries are left to gather dust for years.

The kind of conversation Dad means, then, might be similar to the one Jamie had with Stella on the ferry a few days ago, with a dose of tearing her chosen profession apart added into the mix. Jamie isn't ready for that. She'd like to talk to her father, yes, but she'd prefer the one who made her hot chocolate during all those sleepless nights.

Not the one who kicked her out of the street because sitting in front of a camera pretending to be funny isn't real work. Not the one who sometimes looks at her like she's the one troublesome presence in his life that he can't seem to fix.

(He may have admitted, when they sat down for lunch in a diner after years of no contact and made a first attempt at reconciliation, that his actions were too harsh. Apologized for them, even. But he never rescinded his words, always stuck to his own belief that maybe her channel should have been called Freakshow Friday after all. Mom only nodded along.)

"Uh... Maybe, maybe later." Talking is good, but this isn't the right time. Jamie doesn't trust herself to have this conversation with everything going on. She's been jeopardizing the precarious peace of their truce far too much already, so she'd better not risk it. "End of the trip kind of later. See ya, Dad."

Dad doesn't stop her or say anything else while Jamie makes her escape, scurrying up the stairs back to her room as fast as she can manage without spilling espresso everywhere. Can't have the receptionist getting shouty with her again. But, she figures during her flight, Dad must be given credit for one thing despite all his shortcomings and faults.

He did save her the walk just now.

~~

The safe haven that is her and Nathan's hotel room is all Jamie's this morning. Nathan didn't want to waste time getting his boat-operating practice in and saw Gino about receiving instructions this morning, before the man could run off to spend the day hanging out with some of his old friends. He is currently taking their borrowed boat out for a spin, becoming acquaintanced with vehicle and canals alike, and, based on his mumbled threats addressed to the Doctor, stopping by a couple of stores to get his hands on weaponry.

Jamie, in the meantime, has been busy doing one of the few things she does well: scouring the Internet with dogged determination and dredging up the answers she needs from its depths.

Displayed on the laptop screen she forgot to close is the Instagram profile of @graffa_midnight. It belongs, or rather, used to belong, to a boy called Raffaele Mezzanotte—Italian-Romani, Venetian amateur graffiti artist, and a mere nineteen years old at the time of his disappearance in 2014.

Jamie sits down at the desk again, placing her coffee beside her and refocusing her attention on the profile. She scrolls through its old content mindlessly. The journey takes her through an array of images showing colourful street art beneath bridges, near train tracks, and on the walls of abandoned buildings.

Raffaele Mezzanotte had undeniable talent. The likes and comments on his posts, as well as his follower count, imply he was attracting a modest but growing audience, though his disappearance may have increased its size.

The artist himself rarely appears in the photos he posted. When he does, he has taken pains to protect his anonymity—not a bad idea, because Jamie doesn't doubt he was spraying his graffiti without permission. In his photos, Raffaele's hoodie attempts to hide dark hair, his prescription sunglasses obscure his eyes, and a red bandana covers the lower half of his face.

The boy was a veritable twenty-first century urban desperado. His disguise would've made it hard for Jamie to confirm his identity as Nathan's ghost if it hadn't been for the more recently posted pictures, showing the creator behind @graffa_midnight in full display.

Raffaele's brother has been maintaining the account post-disappearance, uploading shots of his lost younger sibling in his final years every once in a while. Jamie had been translating his captions before she ditched the task for her coffee break. He seems to believe Raffaele might have ran away from home, that he may still be out there somewhere, and hopes his brother or someone who has seen him might stumble across the photographs and reach out.

The photos show a tattoo on Raffaele Mezzanotte's hand. The old logo of the local soccer team, Venezia FC. A winged lion, like the statuettes and symbols Jamie has been seeing around. It is, apparently, the Lion of Saint Mark. An icon of the city of Venice.

The moment Nathan lays eyes on this account, he'll tell Jamie this is the person he saw. Raffaele's brother's posts into the void have served their purpose and will bring him and his family answers and closure after almost a decade of uncertain grief, though not in the way he was hoping for. Because Raffaele Mezzanotte is dead, his spirit lingering in the halls of Poveglia's ruined asylum.

The ghost wouldn't have flashed his identifying tattoo if he didn't want his loved ones to know about that.

Jamie takes a gulp of coffee, not paying attention to how it burns this time around. She needs to wash this shit down, is all. She opens a new tab to stare at, preferring the blank neutrality of Google's search bar and accompanying clickbait articles over the dead boy's art. That Insta page, the death's injustice, have seized her by the throat.

The Doctor killed Raffaele Mezzanotte, who was all of nineteen years old. A mere kid putting his work on the Internet because he was doing something he loved and wanted to share it with the world.

Jamie used to be a kid just like that.

If she disappeared without a trace one day, would Stella post pictures to her socials every other month? Would her family keep looking for her?

They would. Maybe. At least for a little while. Perhaps not for a long time—not for ten full years. Jamie likes to think they'd miss her, but it's gotten hard to gauge sometimes.

(Losing her could be peaceful for them. Quiet. Her parents and Stella would have lives undisturbed, just the way they like it. All Jamie has been bringing into the equation for them is trouble, exasperation and countless headaches, even while actively making efforts to do better. Their conflict wouldn't be there if she wasn't. So they'd have to be at least slightly relieved if she wasn't there anymore to make a mess of everything.

They'd have to be.)

Jamie wishes this train of thought would derail already. She shakes it off best she can. What her family would do doesn't matter. This is about Raffaele Mezzanotte and his people. Their lives, their losses.

It isn't much, but Jamie vows to do her everything within her power to help them. Because they'll never have closure if she doesn't, and they deserve better than that.

But Raffaele can't have been the Doctor's only victim. Jamie's fingers hover over her keyboard, her eyes glued to the search bar. There are other victims to find. Yet, although they, too, must be out there, Jamie doesn't have any leads to pursue on them. She doesn't even know what search terms she should use to find them.

She could start scouring missing persons databases at random, but she'd be wasting time seeking an unspecified amount of unidentified needles in a gargantuan virtual haystack. If she's going to look for them and hope to be successful, she'll need more info.

Speaking of info...

Jamie closes her laptop, taking her phone out of her pocket. It's been a few days since she sent her notorious email, yet no answer has arrived in her inbox. Nathan said they needed to be patient, but Jamie has been for more than a day now and she has just about reached her limit.

Time to give Veronika a call.