Work Text:
Life was much more peaceful without Herbert West.
Dan liked to think he was choosing to be alone; after he’d given Herbert’s information to the police, he’d resigned himself to solitude, thinking that the only person who would now really be enthusiastic in his company was behind bars. Back then, he thought he’d had to do it, that it was the right thing, but these days, he wasn’t so sure.
He stared into the fire he’d made beneath his mantle, its crackling almost lost in the sound of rain and thunder outside. His fingers loosely curled around a glass of whiskey, Dan flickered his gaze back to the game on television, though he couldn’t quite find himself able to concentrate on it.
Did he regret turning Herbert in? No, he wouldn’t quite go that far. They’d been doing astoundingly disturbing things, and Herbert was losing it, especially near the end there. But, even so, there was a part of Dan who missed Herbert’s companionship, no matter how stressful it was. He’d taken for granted the promise of an exciting life, and now, working as a general practitioner, he rarely saw or did anything of note.
Over a grumble of hungry thunder, he heard his doorbell ring. It was such an odd occurrence that it took Dan a moment to realize it had happened at all. He pulled himself to his feet, turning the game’s volume down as he made his way to the door. It had to be a neighbor. Maybe their power went out because of the storm and they had to use his phone. Maybe...
But when Dan opened the door, it was Herbert standing there.
He was different; of course he was, it had been fourteen years since they’d last seen each other. His hair was shorter, and wet, sticking to his forehead in short black tendrils. He had different, smaller glasses, and they were splattered with so much rainwater it was a miracle his eyes could be seen beyond them at all. He still retained his smaller build, though he carried himself with even more confidence, although his clothes looked soaked through. He was also sporting a bruise on the side of his forehead, just above his eyebrow, a cut underneath his right eye, and a split lip. Dan stared, until Herbert cleared his throat.
“Are you going to invite me in, or am I just going to stand out here getting wetter?”
Still somewhat at a loss for words, Dan stood aside and let Herbert move past him. Despite the million questions he had, including the obvious ones, like how he got out of prison, or how he found the house, Dan blurted out the most superficial. “Your glasses. Uh, they’re different.”
Herbert paused in the middle of taking off his wet jacket, giving Dan a flat look. “Yes. My first pair was broken the first month I was in prison. I didn’t much care what the second pair looked like, only that they functioned. You’re taking this my extremely well.”
“No... I’m really not,” Dan admitted. “I’m just trying to figure out where to start... and decide whether I’m happy to see you or not.”
“Well, don’t feel obligated to be.” Herbert straightened up, although taking off his jacket did next to nothing to help his dripping all over Dan’s floor. “Although you could tell me where your bathroom is so I can get out of these clothes and stop warping your hardwood floors.”
“I– yeah. Sure. It’s, uh, down the hall and to the left.” As Herbert turned around, Dan raised a hand and grabbed his arm before he could stop himself. They’d touched casually so often before, it didn’t surprise him that seeing Herbert again triggered the habit.
“Wait. I’ll get you something to change into.” He took a few quick steps in front of Herbert and beat him to the mouth of the hallway. As he dug through his closet, he heard the bathroom door close on the other side of the hall, and took a moment to sit back on his heels and panic. Taking a deep breath, he tightened his fist around the sleeve of a red sweater he used to wear often when they were in school. He couldn’t believe he still had it, and he remembered that Herbert used to snatch it to tug on over his thinner shirts when it got cold. He grabbed a pair of sweatpants and took them over to the bathroom, rapping on the door.
“Here, I got some clothes for you.” He twisted the knob, and opened it to find Herbert’s pale back facing him, scattered with a few smaller scratches, as if he’d been in a fight, or at least, had a difficult evening. Herbert turned around, and Dan saw that he was less scrawny than he had been when they’d last met; of course, he’d heard that prison could do that to a person.
As usual, Herbert took the clothes without a thank you, hurriedly pulling them on before taking one of Dan’s towels and using it to dry his hair as best he could. “I’m curious as to when the questions are going to start, Dan. If you keep putting them off, I may have to go first.”
Dan sat on the edge of the bathtub that currently housed all of Herbert’s drenched clothes. “Go ahead,” he said. “Still kind of in shock, honestly.”
Herbert turned back toward the mirror and began addressing the cut underneath his eye. “Do you live alone?” he asked, opening Dan’s medicine cabinet. “I find it difficult to believe you do. There always seemed to be someone on your arm, back when we worked together.”
Worked together, Dan noted. So he wasn’t going to mention that they’d even been friends, let alone some of the other things they’d done. “Yeah,” Dan admitted. “I do live alone.”
“Hm.” Herbert washed his hands thoroughly, and Dan couldn’t help but watch, fixating on them as water ran between Herbert’s fingers. He dried them off and took a washcloth off the rack to wet and clean the blood from around it.
“Yeah... I’m a general practitioner at a local clinic.”
“What a waste of talent,” Herbert grumbled as he dabbed at the cut with the wet cloth. “Barely a step up from a school nurse’s office. I wonder what your fellow general practitioners would think if they knew what you were really capable of.”
“Alright, my turn to start asking questions,” Dan interrupted, starting to get irritated. “Why are you here? Did you get out early?”
“No,” Herbert said simply, taking a band-aid out of the box of them from the cupboard. “It’s quite a long story, Dan, but it’s best that no one knows I’m here. Not that we had any mutual friends.” He neatly spread the bandage over the cut, with perfection that Dan hadn’t known from anyone but him since.
“Great. So now I’m harboring a fugitive.” Dan sighed. Herbert had stumbled back into his life no more than five minutes ago and he was already making things complicated. “How’d you find the house?”
“How many Dr. Daniel Cains do you think there are in this town? I found your place of work and went from there. Tracking you was simple. Much simpler than it would have been if you’d decided to work in a larger city, so thank you for that, I suppose.” Herbert took off his wet shoes and socks and left the bathroom, making Dan follow him back into the living room as if he lived there himself.
“What makes you think I’m gonna let you stay here?” Dan asked, stopping in the doorway. “Herbert, you... you ruined my life.”
Herbert stopped in his tracks, barefoot, in Dan’s clothes, in Dan’s house, but seeming as if he hadn’t considered this until that very moment.
“I was doing fine before you dragged me into your experiments, and your reagent, and your... your crazy dreams. I could have had a great life. Meg and I could have gotten married, had kids, everything was falling into place until you moved in.”
For once, Herbert looked like he didn’t have anything to say to that. And what could he have? It was all true, and even he knew it. He looked down at his feet and wandered over to the chair Dan had been sitting in minutes before, reaching a hand out to touch the rim of his whiskey glass. Dan watched him, waiting for a reaction.
“You’re the only one, Daniel,” he said, without looking up. “The only one who never acted as if I was insane. At first, yes, but once I explained it to you...” He pressed his lips together, suddenly looking very small sitting there. “I remember the look on your face, when you first saw that wretched cat move. There was joy there. I know there was. You were just as enthralled as I was. You defended me to Dean Halsey.”
Dan interrupted. “That was before everything started going insane! I knew what you wanted to do, I didn’t like how you wanted to do it. It was wrong, Herbert. It was immoral.”
“Something we’ll always disagree on,” Herbert dismissed him. He finally looked Dan in the eye. “I didn’t come here to ruin your life again. I came here... just to be back in it. I think I may be able to redeem myself, if you would listen to my proposal.”
Dan ran a hand down his face, rubbing at his eyes tiredly. He hated that Herbert was asking him this. Even more, he hated that he knew he wouldn’t say no.
“What do you want from me?” he asked eventually.
“I suppose, among other things... forgiveness.”
- - -
The change was gradual. First, Herbert slept on the couch, and never slept for more than a few hours at a time. Eventually, Dan offered to let him sleep on his bed, and took the couch himself. Finally, some sort of mutual but nonverbal decision was made, and they both slept in Dan’s bed, Herbert facing away from him, toward the window.
“Do you know what a body farm is?” Herbert asked one morning, as Dan made them both coffee.
“Isn’t that, uh, something to do with decomposing research?”
“Yes. An area of land where bodies in various stages of decomposition are kept for observation. I think it would be a wonderful fit for us.”
“Woah, wait.” Dan turned to face him. “To do what with? To use the reagent on?”
“To develop it further, on smaller parts.” Herbert looked down at the newspaper contemplatively. “Microscopic, even. As difficult as it is to admit, the two of us aren’t getting any younger. It won’t be as easy to wrestle reanimated bodies to the floor as it once was. But that hardly means I have to stop developing the reagent. Its progress can be documented just as well in dead cells. And, on the occasion we do need to use it on a full body, we can do so in a more controlled, remote environment, rather than in the middle of a crowded hospital. Invest in some sort of long range weapon, a crossbow, perhaps, with reloadable ammunition. It would be very easy to keep to ourselves and submit the decomposition research while still conducting research of our own on the side. It may even be, dare I say it, a peaceful life.”
“Haven’t thought about having one of those for a while,” Dan said wryly, taking a drink of coffee. What was truly frightening is that all of this was sounding rather good to him, a life he could be happy with. “Alright,” he said eventually. “What do we need to do?”
That night, Herbert slept closer to him in bed, almost timidly, if Herbert West could be said to do anything timidly. Dan felt his foot touch another, much colder one under the blankets, and eventually gave in; moving until his chest was pressed flush against Herbert’s back, Dan wound his arms around him and let out a contented sigh. Herbert seemed to deflate slightly, relaxing in his hold, and that was how they slept from then on.
- - -
After that, the changes were rapid. They moved, from the suburbs of the small town Dan had ended up in, to an upstate farmhouse that Herbert had seen in a newspaper advertisement. They received a license and grant from the local university, once Dan and Herbert had shown their credentials (Herbert under a false name), and they seemed thrilled to be working with Miskatonic graduates.
“Why wouldn’t they be?” Herbert said as they hauled boxes into the farmhouse. “We’re giving them unprecedented research our compensation is nowhere near the value of.”
“Yeah. What a steal.” Dan rolled his eyes. Could he really live with Herbert West for the rest of his life? “Nevermind the fact that the research is only our cover.”
“I don’t see why that makes it any less important.” Herbert sat on top of a stack of two boxes and called the moving company. “Yes, hello. I understand that, but there’s valuable equipment there that needs to be delivered immediately. No, as soon as possible will not suffice, I said...”
Dan leaned back against the wall, half covered in wallpaper and ripped up at the edges. The house was going to take a lot of work, and Dan knew he was going to be doing most of it on his own. When Herbert hung up the phone and tucked it back into his pocket, Dan watched him thoughtfully.
“Hey, I just thought of something.”
Herbert looked at him expectantly, eyebrows raised.
“What if this was a real farm, too?”
Herbert was about to brush him off, but Dan dove back in before he could. “Listen, I dunno if the research is gonna make us enough money to live on, Herbert. We’d keep the body farm in a closed-off area. No animals or anything, just vegetables. Just stuff to sell, and eat ourselves. Come on, it’s a good idea and you know it.”
It looked like he was going to be dismissed again, but Herbert gave a little wave of his hand. “As long as you don’t expect me to have anything to do with it, do what you want.”
Dan grinned, leaning over to press a kiss to the side of Herbert’s head and getting out of the room before he could be glared at for it.
- - -
After being resigned to a future of fluorescent lights, steel tools, and death, Dan would have never imagined he would one day be working outside like this, as the sun was rising, beating the heat. He straightened up, feeling his back crack, and looked out onto the flat land in front of him, then the house, seeming far, far behind him.
He carried the bin of gnarled carrots back with him, and set them on the counter indoors before taking off his gloves and setting them down next to it, knowing full well that Herbert would cringe if he knew Dan was allowing dirt on the counters they made food on. As he passed the half-open office door to go back to their bedroom, he noticed something inside, a dull green glow.
It was an unspoken rule that Dan would never again meddle in the affairs of Herbert and the reagent, so long as Herbert managed to keep it out of Dan’s life as much as possible, but this time, Dan couldn’t contain his curiosity. He pushed the door open the rest of the way and turned on the light. On the metal desktop, in a soft blue hospital lab tray, lay a shriveled dead tomato, and beside it a closed vial of glowing green reagent.
Dan couldn’t help himself; he let out a laugh, picking up the sad looking tomato and observing little pinpricks where Herbert’s syringe had gone in, trying to bring it back to life. Trying to see, he assumed, if he could develop a reagent that worked on plants a similar way it did on humans. To make Dan happy. Did Dan deserve to be happy?
That thought had come out of nowhere. As Dan set the tomato back in the tray, he backed up, and sat in the desk chair, feeling the wheels roll back a little under his weight. He’d tried to pin everything that ever went wrong in his life on Herbert, but the truth was, Dan could have always said no. Could have said no when Herbert wanted to move in, could have said no when he wanted them to work together, could have said no to continuing to work together, could have stopped himself from injecting the reagent into Meg’s heart, could have stopped himself from letting that same heart reel him back in and do everything Herbert wanted him to do... all Herbert ever wanted was to make discoveries, to learn. He wasn’t actively trying to drag Dan into the dark place he ended up in anyway. And how did Dan respond, rather than simply leaving? He’d turned him in. The man who’d been his best friend all through the end of school, and the beginning of their careers. And somehow, Herbert didn’t seem to resent him for it, even a little.
Dan turned his head when he heard their bedroom door open. He was glad that Herbert was sleeping again, rather than injecting himself with the reagent to keep from doing so. Dan quickly got up from the chair and rushed to the door, getting outside just as Herbert was coming down the hall, hair only a little disheveled, still looking as dignified as one could after waking up seconds ago.
“Daniel.” He narrowed his eyes. “What were you doing in my work room?”
“Nothing,” Dan said. “A fly got in. I got it.” He leaned in and gave Herbert a kiss on the lips, before heading back to the bedroom so he could get changed and take a shower. Herbert’s eyes followed him the rest of the way down the hall, confused, but a little happy.
- - -
“Can I ask you something?”
They were lying in bed, somewhere between late night and early morning, neither of them quite able to sleep. Herbert was under the blankets up to his nose, facing away from Dan as he usually did, expecting Dan’s arms to creep around him at any moment, until they didn’t. He looked over his shoulder. “I assume you’re able, so yes.”
Dan gave a sharp little exhale of annoyance. They were both over fifty now, well used to their new life that was no longer new, and more than that, used to one another’s company again. Still, the subject of their past grievances had never come up, and every once in a while, such as now, it plagued Dan so much that he wasn’t able to get to sleep.
“Did you ever forgive me?” he asked. “For turning you in, for giving them all that stuff about you?”
Herbert frowned as he turned to face Dan fully, although the dark of the room didn’t allow them to see much of each other’s faces. “What would possibly make you come to the conclusion that I didn’t? You think I’ve been living here with you for the past decade because I was waiting for you to apologize?”
“No,” Dan admitted. “Guess not. I still need to, though. Look... you never made me do anything I’ve ever done while I was with you. I did all that myself. But I act sometimes like you made me do it. And I’m sorry.”
Herbert was silent for such a long interval that Dan wondered if, in the darkness, he’d fallen asleep. Eventually, he felt a hand take his under the blankets, squeezing it, as if it wasn’t an act of affection, but of fear that whatever was in his hand was going to slip away.
“And would you ever forgive me for that?” Herbert asked. “For making you do it, even if that was what happened?”
“Yeah,” Dan said. “I would.”
They fell asleep.