Work Text:
Herbert West was undoubtedly a genius… but his ability to care for himself seemed more than lacking.
This was something Dan, ever-observant, had noticed for a while. Where he was meticulous, almost compulsive, in his cleaning habits around the house, Herbert on the other hand tended to approach every space in their home except the laboratory with a perpetual, haphazard indifference. Before they moved into a shared room, Dan had risked a peek inside Herbert’s space and discovered an unmade bed, clothes strewn about the floor, knickknacks cluttering every available flat space, and textbooks on neurosurgery, the nervous system, and, for whatever reason, a primer on veterinary science, all open and dog-eared on the bedside table and the mattress. It was the clothes that surprised Dan the most; Herbert always insisted on being prim and polished wherever he went, his shirts almost disturbingly wrinkle-free (save for the inevitable blood splatters that they’d both become pros at washing out), so all of this seemed very out of character for him. At least, from what Dan knew about his character, which may have been less than previously assumed.
Food and sleep, Dan found, were other areas Herbert struggled in. He seemed to disdain the fact that he needed to eat and rest at regular intervals to keep his body going, and Dan suspected that he pushed himself to his absolute limit on a regular basis as his own private experiment to see how long he could go without a meal or even a short nap. When he did eat, it was with the haste of a mouse trying not to get found out by a cat. After two years spent working with him, Dan still wasn’t sure if Herbert ever actually chewed or tasted anything he ate, or if he just took small enough bites that he was able to swallow without the added time waste of mastication.
From Dan’s perspective, life, to Herbert, appeared to be a series of calculations of efficiency. Dan wasn’t quite sure where Herbert’s math came from, but it seemed that at some point between undergrad and his studies with Gruber, he’d come to the conclusion that barely eating, barely sleeping, and only doing laundry or picking up clothes when absolutely necessary saved the most time in his daily routine. That saved time was then best spent in the lab, of course: bent for hours over operating tables and titration sets, developing cramps in his hands from holding delicate instruments for so long and a deep, lancing pain that tended to shoot through his back whenever he straightened up. Stretch breaks were for cowards, eating was for the weak, and sleep was only acceptable in two-hour bursts at most.
Dan tried his best to coax Herbert out of these destructive habits. Work was important, yes; sleep was inconvenient, certainly; but what would be more inconvenient than losing seven hours of work time every night would be losing weeks’ worth if he were to land himself in the hospital with this behavior. His argument fell on deaf ears, no matter how many times he tried to reason with Herbert about it. So Dan tried a more indirect approach—mentioning, every day, how hungry he was and loping up the stairs to start cooking a late-night dinner in the hopes that Herbert would eventually come trudging up after him like a moody cat, for example. But that didn’t work either. Herbert couldn’t be fooled by attempts to lure him into taking care of himself, nor was he swayed by Dan’s logic about it. Dan even tried picking up Herbert’s room for him once, before they had officially become an item (or whatever they were; it was often hard to tell), hanging his shirts and slacks, ironing the wrinkles out. Herbert had gone ballistic, starting up on a rant about how he didn’t touch Dan’s things and he had a system and now everything was thrown out of whack, and Dan had more than learned his lesson.
Now that they shared a space, he knew to leave Herbert’s items wherever they lay, though Herbert did seem to be a little more prudent about keeping tidy than before. At least in their bedroom.
At first Herbert’s eccentricities about his self-care and his resistance to Dan’s pleas had been endearing, in a strange way, but before long the constant push-pull of what they each felt was best for Herbert grew grating, a married couple’s repetitive spat, a small annoyance that if left unchecked would become cause for divorce. Herbert had dark circles perpetually pressed beneath his eyes like thumbprints; when he took his shirt off, Dan saw his ribs shadowed lightly beneath his pale skin. Surely he had to get tired and had to be hungry most of the time, right?
Dan knew the cumulative effects of a lack of care. He’d experienced them firsthand during a period of time where he thought all-nighters were a rite of passage and starving himself would make his muscles pop more. The crash had been so hard, it had taken him months to recover.
Some weird, still-incomprehensible part of him cared for Herbert, and cared deeply. He would find a way to get Herbert to care for himself, too, so help him God. Or whoever. He wasn’t picky at this point.
And then, on a cold September morning, just before dawn, Dan made his way to the basement after Herbert had failed to appear in their bed overnight. Slumped over the operating table next to his latest project, his head resting askew on his crossed forearms, Herbert was fast asleep.
Dan smiled to himself. The human body was a fickle thing, and Herbert’s had finally pulled the plug on his nonstop movement. Knowing that any sudden moves would wake Herbert, Dan went upstairs to fetch a blanket and then gingerly crept back down to the lab. He removed Herbert’s crooked glasses, draped the blanket over his shoulders, and gave him a feather-light kiss on the forehead.
“Sweet dreams, Herb,” he whispered. “Finally.”