Chapter Text
Three months.
Three months into Harold Coomer’s acquaintanceship with his eccentric and eclectic(in both taste and physical composition) companion was the first time the homunculus had begun to feel, as they’d put it, ‘drained’.
Bubby had explained to an enraptured Coomer,on more than one occasion, the nature of their state of reanimation, far different from Coomer’s own. They were a man-made construct of flesh, artfully pieced together from pieces of different corpses, stitched into a singular being and imbued with life by the great and terrible force of the heavens, in the form of lightning.
Coomer said it reminded him of Prometheus, sculpting mankind from clay.
Bubby said it reminded them of a penny dreadful.
They existed in a state between life and death, though not quite undeath, either. Certainly each composite part of them, corpses as they had been, could be considered undead, but Bubby themself was a new creation that came into life for the first time upon the metal slab of their creators laboratory, never having ‘died’ and therefore not being themselves brought back from the dead, but nevertheless composed of reanimated parts.
They were sustained not by blood coursing through veins, but rather electricity, which was honestly a boon for Coomer. He was still fairly young, by vampire standards, anyway, and his self control could be...spotty at times, and it was nice to have a companion that he could sit beside and feel no desire to tear their throat out and drain them of their life juices. They could subsist without food or drink if they needed to, as well, which was also helpful, as it was often not possible for either of them to venture into civilisation to obtain rations of any kind.
However, there were downsides to Bubby’s condition, as well, which began to make themselves apparent those three months in.
Bubby’s escape from the lab of their creation was as unplanned as it was unorthodox. The whole thing had apparently been pure chaos from beginning to end, and Bubby didn’t seem to enjoy talking about it very much. Certainly an angry mob was involved, at least some pitchforks and torches, and a massive inferno of less than fully explained origin(‘Fire good,’ Bubby had said with a shrug), the last of which providing a convenient distraction for Bubby to make their escape into the nearby woods, but they hadn’t exactly had ample time to plan or provision their flight. They couldn’t take any of the tools or resources their creator had with them when they fled. They had no idea what they would need, nor any idea of what to expect when they were away from that lab for any extended period of time
Three months after their escape, it began to become apparent.
Coomer noticed long before Bubby said anything, and, in fact, had to more or less force a confession out of them about it.
Bubby just began to...slow, the way one does when they’ve gone too long without proper sleep. They began to stumble more often, to take longer to think of words, and such. The difference was very slight, only so drastic as someone who had woken up an hour or so before they’d have liked to that morning, and generally only became noticeable when Bubby was themself tired, but sleep never seemed to completely chase away that fatigue and Coomer worried.
He especially worried when Bubby practically panicked at Coomer’s slight inquiry into the subject, insisting far too forcefully that nothing was wrong and changing the subject. Coomer was eventually able to wrestle(both metaphorically and literally) an answer from them.
Energy of any kind, is finite, and that included the energy that maintained Bubby’s state of ‘half life’. Without supplementing it, it would eventually run out. Bubby’s creator had a huge contraption of wire and steel that Bubby would be attached to via the bolts on their neck. When lightning struck the lightning rod atop the laboratory roof, it would travel down those wires into the bolts and, by extension, Bubby, ‘recharging’ them, as Bubby put it.
“Why on Earth didn’t you tell me?” Coomer demanded.
“Because I didn’t...Because it’s none of your business!” Bubby snapped. “I don’t go snooping into how you get your ‘fix’! When you disappear into a town for the night, I don’t pry into your sudden improvement in pallor. I don’t ask you about the screams!”
Coomer flinched. It was a low blow and he was immediately inclined to take the bait, but the look in their eyes gave him pause. It was a fearful glint like a trapped animal, lashing out in fear, not anger.
He huffed out a small, unnecessary breath and crossed his arms.
“What is this really about?” he asked, voice calm, but stern. “Why didn’t you…,” his voice wavered, ever so slightly, “Why didn’t you trust me?”
The anger in Bubby’s face drained in an instant, falling instead into a look of pain and remorse.
“No, it’s not like that!” they insisted. “I just...I didn’t...I didn’t want you to think I couldn’t...I didn’t want you to…”
“To what?”
Bubby sighed, deflating. They averted their eyes, not meeting Coomer’s gaze.
“I didn’t want you to leave me behind,” they admitted at last, voice barely above a whisper. “There’s never been anything else like me before. I don’t know exactly how I work or how to keep myself working. I was afraid if you realized that, if you thought I couldn’t take care of myself, you’d...decide I was too much trouble.”
Coomer burst out laughing.
Any meekness to Bubby’s expression vanished in an instant and their bolts sparked with indignation.
“Why is it every time I bare my soul to you you laugh?!” they spat.
Coomer wiped a tear from his eye.
“Forgive me, Bubby,” he said. “It just strikes me as so completely preposterous I can’t help but laugh!”
“That I don’t even know how I can exist?” Bubby snarled. “That I don’t have any idea how this...hodge podge of flesh I call a body can even hold itself together? That I could just stop working one day and have no idea why? You find that ‘preposterous’?” they again cast their eyes to the ground, a mixture of shame and rage on their face.
Coomer’s expression softened and he stepped towards Bubby to lay a hand gently on their cheek and guide their face up to meet his gaze.
“That you could think there was anything that would make me want to not be with you,” he said.
Bubby’s eyes went wide and his bolts sparked again, but with a softer sort of ‘hum’ of energy, rather than the earlier harsh zapping.
“You are one of a kind, Bubby,” he went on. “I’ve never even heard of something like you. I didn’t think something like you could even exist. It’s fascinating! You’re fascinating.”
Bubby’s mouth opened and closed like they wanted to speak, but couldn’t find any words.
“It’s easy, as an immortal, even one so relatively young as myself, to feel as though the world begins to stagnate.” Coomer continued. “That someday one will reach the point at which existence can yield nothing else but that with which one is already too well acquainted. But you...You’re something entirely new. Something unprecedented. There’s so much to learn from you. About you. I want to... understand you.”
Coomer dropped his hand from Bubby’s face to their shoulder, this time being the one to avert his gaze.
“Moreover, I want to...I want to see you experience this world, as new to you as you are to it,” he said. Had he not been long dead, a flush would have probably risen to his cheek. “There’s so much you haven’t seen, haven’t done. I want you to see them, to do them. And moreso, I want to show them to you, give them to you. The way your eyes light up at things I’ve lived in fear someday would hold for me only monotony and makes me feel as though I could never again find them mundane...I want to see that. I want...I want to never stop seeing it.”
He braved a glance back up at Bubby, who was agape with shock.
“Nothing so trivial as a lack of energy could possibly deter me,” he said, voice resolute. “Even if I have to build a tower of steel and wire myself, there’s nothing that would make me leave you. For as long as...as long as you’ll have me.”
Bubby’s hand clasped onto Coomer’s still resting on their shoulder, holding on like they expected him to disappear if their grip wavered.
“Forever!” they said, instantly, then seemed to panic at their own forthrightness. “I mean, for as...for as long as you’ll have me.”
Their bolts were crackling with electricity now, sending off small, glowing motes and arcs of energy.
Coomer smiled and reached out with his other hand to touch Bubby’s cheek again.
Many years later, when Coomer would become fully educated on the idea of a ‘circuit’ and the ramifications of completing one by placing one’s hands on either side of what was essentially an openly sparking power source, the resulting occurrence would be an interesting and enlightening memory.
As it stood in the moment, the resulting electrocution simply caused him to be rendered briefly unconscious and his hair to not lie flat for a week.