Work Text:
There was a lot going on, and then there was very little, and then there was dark, blissful nothing. There’s not much happening when you come out of that nothing and open your eyes either, save Herbert’s worried face directly in front of yours. You take inventory of his injuries, at least the visible ones, before you even consider noting your own. Bright red bruises around his neck, a blistering burn on his forehead from the laser drill, and the way he’s holding himself seems to hint at more injuries beneath his formerly-white dress shirt. You, on the other hand, are a bit sore but definitely not in as much pain as you feel you should be, given the hazy memories you have of your recent activities.
Doctor Herrod is there too, you think, and a sheet-covered body neither she nor Herbert let you anywhere near. There’s a thought itching in the back of your mind and a dull throb in the back of your neck as Herbert raises a stethoscope to your chest, but you try to push both of those away. Herbert pronounces you healthy as a horse, save a massive bruise blooming across your face but, he says as he turns away, you had that already. You can see him visibly relax as he puts the stethoscope away, but you’re not quite sure why. Unconsciousness isn’t necessarily a good thing, but you could have been doing much worse. And now you’re back. You’re back, you were just unconscious, and you don’t know what to do with the worried look Herbert is giving you.
A nurse must have brought you a set of scrubs to replace the bloodied undershirt and jeans you’d had on, because you blink and you’re wearing some. You blink again, and you’re standing in front of the covered body. Herbert’s watching you warily, but he’s not stopping you, so you reach out and grab the sheet.
Several blinks later and you’re on the floor. Herbert lowers himself to your side, and you realize you’re shaking. Why are you shaking? Why are you shaking? What did you see? He says something softly to a nurse standing nearby, and she passes him a scratchy hospital-issue shock blanket, which he wraps around your shoulders. Miss Halsey, you see him mouth to Doctor Herrod, though you don’t catch the rest of the sentence. Meg? Is she here? You stand up unsteadily, the blanket falling from your shoulders, turn, and see–
Oh. Oh. You see now. Meg lies there, still and cold, bruises around her neck darker than the ones you see on Herbert when you turn your head to him. He looks almost apologetic. You don’t know why; you don’t think he has the upper arm strength to strangle Meg the way she’s clearly been strangled, so it wasn’t his fault. Was it?
You blink again, and you’re in your car. Herbert’s in the driver’s seat, which is vaguely surprising to you, though you’re not sure why until the car pulls out of the parking lot. Herbert drives like he learned how to from a book, and maybe he did, but it was probably the same sort of book he learned human interaction from, which is to say it must’ve been eighty years out of date and also written in Vulcan. He’s got his hands at 10 and 2, but that’s about all he’s got going for him. No checking the mirrors, no turn signals, eyes locked straight ahead like even a nuclear blast wouldn’t distract him from the road a yard in front of your car. You, on the other hand, have been driving since the age of thirteen thanks to that foster family who saw the kids as errand-runners. If you get out of this, if Herbert doesn’t crash and kill you both and if you don’t succumb to some injury you must have overlooked, you’ll have to drive Herbert everywhere.
You can’t even muster up the energy to care about that right now. You lean your head against the blissfully cold glass of the car window and stare out at the houses speeding past. Meg’s house was down this way, you think, maybe. Or maybe it was in the opposite direction on the other side of town. Right, no, hers couldn’t have been this way, because now you’re pulling up to your own house and Herbert is turning off the car.
The two of you sit there in silence. The doctor part of your brain, the part that needs to care for everybody all of the time, says that you never did see Herbert getting checked out at the hospital. Whatever left those bruises around his neck left some abrasions as well, one of which is slowly beading up with blood. You should ask him what did that.
You do, and he gives you an odd look and gets out of the car. You trail after him all the way into your living room before he answers. He says something about Dr. Hill, but you tune out after you hear that name. You’d die happy if you never heard anyone talk about that bastard ever again. Not that you’re looking to die any time soon, no matter how tempting it seems now that Meg’s gone too. But Herbert’s still here, and he’s sitting on the couch like he has a few broken ribs, and he needs you. That’s funny, you think dimly, of course he needs you, he needed you to get on good terms with the Dean, he needed you to help him reanimate those bodies, he needed you to save him and you saved Meg instead. No, you didn’t. You failed at that too, you remind yourself.
You’re crying at this point, apparently, though you don’t know when you started. Herbert doesn’t say anything though surely it’s painfully obvious what you’re doing and the Herbert you thought you knew never passed up an opportunity to snipe at you about your emotional reactions.
But you blink and you’re in bed, a blanket– more comfortable than the one earlier in the day, not that you care– you’ve never seen before, neon green, wrapped around yourself. The door is shutting, and you know if you call out right now Herbert would come back in, but you don’t know what you would say so you don’t say anything and instead slip into dreamless sleep.
There’s a lot of those days that pass in blinks, to the point you can only tell the days have continued to move by the crossed-out dates on the calendar Herbert has dug out from somewhere. You don’t even look at yourself in the mirror again for what could have been a month and could have been a million years. Then you’re showering, and it’s warm enough in the house that the hot water doesn’t fog up the mirror, and you make eye contact with yourself. The irises of your eyes look green, almost as green as Herbert’s, as that damned reagent he used to take, but you chalk it up to the effects of the flickering bathroom light you kept forgetting to replace the bulb in.
Soon enough it doesn’t matter that you never replaced that bulb. At some point, probably one of those days you don’t remember well, Herbert takes care of finding the two of you a new house, an old place on the edge of town. You don’t remember ever deciding that the two of you would still live together, but you really, really don’t want to be alone any time soon, so you don’t complain.
Herbert says he has to go back to rounds at the hospital if he wants to be able to graduate in time, but your leave of absence means you don’t have to return until the spring semester if you don’t want to. You almost say you’ll go back just so you don’t have to sit in the big, empty house alone all day, but every time you think you’ll mention that, the ache in the back of your head– or is it neck– comes back and you have to lay down in a dark room. Herbert scribbles notes down in one of his many black notebooks whenever you do it, a habit you’ve noticed him picking up around you more than before the Massacre. You’re not sure what caused it. He always tells you not to worry, that it has nothing to do with you, but you never quite believe him.
—
You really must be dense, just like Herbert says with rolling eyes whenever he gets pissed off. Or maybe just willfully ignorant, because how could you ignore all the signs?
It’s a Monday– you’ve started keeping track of days of the week– evening when you find out. It had been a good day, is the thing. You’d sent in your forms to the school letting you start classes in December, and Herbert, whose meticulous note-taking on every ache or pain you reported to him had at least become more subtle, cooked the two of you dinner to celebrate. You were surprised he even knew how to cook and having watched him in the kitchen you’re still not convinced he actually does. But the spaghetti and meatballs he sets in front of you look perfectly serviceable, so you dig in.
He lets you get a few bites in before he starts. You don’t remember the words almost immediately after he says them, but you recall bits– the reagent– demonstrated limited aggression– our first success, Danny! His grin falters then fades when you push your chair back, the wood scraping across the floor, and stand up. You ask him to repeat himself, which he does. You ask him how he could have done such a thing. You don’t ask why he saved you– you were maybe the only person who had ever shown any real kindness to him, plus he’s got some attachment issues. You do ask why he didn’t save Meg.
His answer was presumably upsetting, because you blink and you’re in your room with the door shaking from where you slammed it.
You don’t talk for nearly another week, until Herbert perches on the arm of the couch while you’re staring into space and asks if you’d like to have sex. He doesn’t word it that way, of course, instead mumbling something about copulation and knowing one another in the Biblical way, which is about par for the course. You almost laugh; does he think sex is an appropriate apology for killing you– getting you killed, if you’re inclined to be generous– and bringing you back to a world where you’re even more alone than you used to be? But he’s looking at you so earnestly, and maybe his hands are shaking a little, and you think: I’ve made worse decisions, it’s not like I’m not into guys, and maybe this will get him to be a little nicer. So you nod, and he lets out the breath he’d been holding but his hands don’t stop shaking.
He’s leading you to your room, but he’s not looking at you, and you get the feeling his hand is only in yours so you don’t trip. He looks so young in the moonlight trickling through the hallway window, and you feel something like a yank to your heart when you remember he’s only twenty-five and you’re only twenty-six, and you’ll never, ever be twenty-seven. He’s twenty-five and you don’t think he’s ever even kissed anyone and, sure, you’ve briefly thought about having sex with him, but not this way. If you think too hard about the way you maybe did want it to happen you might cry, so you let him pull you into the bedroom.
He lies on his back on the bed with hands almost politely folded over his chest like a dead thing, like he's waiting for you to take him, like he's waiting for you to bring him back to life. He's acting like it's just an experiment, and maybe it is, but you look at him lying there, a furrow between his brows and muscles tense, and you realize you can't do it. You tell him as much. He doesn't understand the mechanics of intimacy anyway, you're pretty sure, so you convince him you just can't get into it and the little head, so to speak, isn't in the mood. He frowns and scribbles in the notebook he brought for some reason, muttering something about the effects of reanimation on blood flow. You don’t think you’re imagining the small light of relief in his eyes, which more than anything reassures you that you made the right call.
He is flushing red, though, and you’re not sure you’ve ever seen him embarrassed but that’s definitely what this is. He slips out of your bed and out the door, and something in you hurts at watching him go, but you don’t know what else you could’ve done.
You make a concerted effort, after that, of being nice to him. You’re not sure why you weren’t more that way recently; a few more days of solitude gives you many thoughts, good and bad, but mostly a vague sense of gratitude. You really should be, and probably are, grateful for him bringing you back. Of course he would, if he got the chance. You’re sorry he got the chance and, sure, maybe you wouldn’t have minded going with Meg if she had to go, but for once you can’t blame Herbert for his actions. So you’re grateful. So you wash his laundry, make him sandwiches to eat at the hospital, unpack his laboratory equipment from the moving boxes.
He hasn’t been working as obsessively as he used to, you’ve got to say. He made sure the new house had a suitable basement, of course, but he hasn’t brought home anything larger than a lab rat to test the reagent on. You don’t know if it’s because he found the right formula to bring you back and decided that there was no need for improvement. Sometimes, when he looks at you in a certain way, you flatter yourself and think that it’s because he doesn’t need to save anyone besides you.
So he smiles at you when you hand him his folded shirts, so he eats the sandwiches you pack even when he used to never eat anything, so he puts the books you’d packed away up into your new bookshelf. And on those days, those times, you don’t think you’re flattering yourself so much. You think maybe you’re right. You think maybe, since you met him, you were always the endgame for his work.
—
It’s January, the week after Herbert’s twenty-sixth birthday which the two of you celebrated with cheap grocery store cake and even cheaper beer, and you come into the house after a long shift, laughing. Herbert smirks beside you, his shitty pun having landed well, pulling off his scarf and stomping the melting snow from his boots. The foyer light is glinting off his fogged-up glasses, making his lenses look like shuttered windows hiding his eyes. But you, you are lucky enough to have seen almost every expression reflected in those eyes. Big green eyes that can go from piercing to soft in an instant, dark hair he’s letting grow out just the slightest fraction, the ski-jump slope of his nose, pink lips that you’ve seen smile more often the longer you’ve lived together.
You realize with a start that you haven’t thought about Meg in weeks. Right on the heels of that thought comes another one: you’re not entirely sad about that. Not that you’re not sad about her dying, of course you’re sad about that, you think you’ll always be sad about it, but you decide maybe it’s okay that you’re thinking about her less. She wouldn’t want to hold you back. She never did. Even right at the end, when she said she wished she could hate you, she wanted you to go out into the world and have a life you wanted. Well, you haven’t left Arkham yet, but as you look at Herbert wiping his glasses on his sleeve you realize you’re pretty damn happy with this life you’ve created.
That realization shakes something loose in your heart, or maybe shakes it perfectly into place. You hang your coat up on the rack, brushing against Herbert’s arm as you do so, and his bend down to take off his shoes accidentally elbows you in the stomach. Maybe you’ve come down with a fever, because how else could you explain the heat that rises in you at the touch, but you watch him adjust his tie and you know beyond a doubt that something needs to happen.
“Herbert,” you say, because you don’t know what else to say, because that’s the one name you’ve never been able to keep out of your mouth, and he raises a quizzical eyebrow at you. Suddenly it’s like everything you’ve ever thought about him wants to spurt out your mouth right this instant, and biting your tongue is the only way to keep it in. He’s creepy, he’s wormed his way irreparably into your life, he’s the smartest man you’ve ever met, he’s gorgeous as hell.
You don’t realize you’ve moved closer, your hand raising towards his face with a mind of its own, until Herbert grabs your wrist midair. He looks like he wants to say something too, like he’s biting his tongue too, and you think whatever he’s going to say might ruin you. You want to let him ruin you. “Daniel.” Just that one word makes your heart pound in your chest. “Dan,” he corrects. “What are you thinking?”
You laugh like you’re about to cry, because since when has Herbert West ever asked anyone about anything along the lines of how they were feeling? “A lot. A lot, Herbert.” There’s something vulnerable in his eyes that tells you he doesn’t know what to say, so you continue. “You’re just…” It seems like all your previous flirtation experience has flown right out of your head. “You’re just you,” you finish. “And that’s wonderful.”
“Wonderful,” he repeats. “Is this along the lines of ‘my eighteen-hour shift was actually only twelve hours’ wonderful, or more like ‘Herbert cooked us lasagna for dinner’ wonderful?”
It’s such a Herbert way of phrasing things, a bizarre and confusing as hell dichotomy, that you just have to laugh. “More like ‘I just realized my housemate is extremely attractive in looks and personality’ wonderful.”
The silence that follows is like the aftermath of a gunshot and like the nothingness from when you were dead and like the first few seconds after waking up from a lovely dream, all at once.
“Ah. I see.” You know he does. You know he sees you the way you truly are, has always seen you, walked into the house at 666 Darkmore already seeing you. “Well.” He clears his throat and you think maybe your ears are ringing. “That’s… interesting.” The blush creeping up his cheeks gives him away, and you start to grin from ear to ear.
“Yeah? Interesting? You think?”
He rolls his eyes at your shit-eating grin but releases his hold on your wrist. “Yes, Dan, interesting.” Somehow, he looks small, but not in a pitiful way, more like the hard nut of his exterior has started to crack and reveal the softer– not like you’d ever say that to his face– person inside. You were always going to follow him for however long that he let you but in that moment you know that he deserves it. He’s a genius, he’s a little cracked, and he’s looking at you like you hung the stars.
And you’re staring. You laugh self-consciously like you’re nineteen again and sitting with your first girlfriend on her dorm room bed. But that went well, didn’t it, and maybe this will too. You hope it will, more than you’ve ever hoped for anything. Herbert’s looking at you like you’re some new specimen he can’t wait to learn more about, and you’re still laughing, and you put your hands on his hips, your back to the wall, and you kiss him.
He makes a little noise into the kiss, something between a sigh and a giggle, and it’s one of the most adorable things you’ve ever heard. You want to hear it again, and again, and again. You hope he lets you.
When you pull back, he smirks, moving his hand to brace himself against the wall beside you, and you realize he’s effectively boxed you in. And damn if that isn’t one of the best sights you’ve ever seen. You laugh. “You’re going to kill me like this, Herb.”
“Again.” The reminder doesn’t hurt deep in your chest this time. “But I’ll bring you back. Again.”
“Of course you will.” Your tone is bittersweet, like the way burnt marshmallows are worth the sacrifice, and you let your forehead fall against Herbert’s. He breathes in, slow and steady, then speaks again.
“I think I may have gotten the reagent right this time. There were only a few minor tweaks that needed to be made after you were brought back, and–” He looks suddenly unsure, and you knock your nose to his to encourage him to continue. “–the research department at Miskatonic thinks they could set up some formal testing programs. Mice and such, at first, but…”
You love him– and yes, this is love– more than ever in that moment. “Oh, Herb,” you say with a sigh, almost reverent. A memory from months ago, which feels like years and years ago, like you’ve lived so much time between then and now, pops up. A basement and a dead cat and the realization that you were in the presence of something much greater than yourself. “You’ll be famous.”
He’s clearly remembering the same thing you are because he grins, so wide it looks like it might hurt. “And you,” he puts one hand to your chest, where your heart is still beating despite everything, “you, Danny, will live lifetimes.”