we're looking at each other and we don't know what to do

This is a fic for the Frankenwho AU that Toby and I developed together! If you want to see his art for this AU, here is the tag.

Set somewhere in the middle of the 1800s, historical accuracy and mad science is played very loosely.

No content warnings beyond just the basics entailed by the tags (handling of dead bodies, bad mental health due to mourning a loved one, etc.)

(See the end of the work for more notes.)

Work Text:

tssssssssssssssssssssssssssssszzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

zzzz

zzz

A flicker.

Tzt.

A flicker.

“Mmmm.”

Flickerflicker.

“Hmmummmumm.”

“Hmumumum.”

“Humunub.”

A flicker. A flicker. Light. Too bright, too bright!

“Clzzz yr zz.”

Screeeeeeeeeeeeeeech.

Ah!

“Srry.”

Flicker. Flicker. Flick. Fliiiiick. Bliiiiiiink?

He squinted.

“Hullo.”

Light. A blur. Movement.

“Th blndfold wz srrd ff. Aiz myt stng.”

Sensation. Not sight. Not sound. Touch? Touch to the… left?

“There we go.”

Touching? No, not touching. Movement. Moving. Move. Movemovemove.

“Hmm. That’s not a spasm. You moving that?”

Movemovemove. So odd. Movemovemovebang.

“Mmph!”

“Yeah, that’ll teach you. Don’t flail your hand around, you’ll hit the gurney.”

The blur moved. A light. Flickering light. Not the other flicker. Softer. Red? Red and orange and yellow.

“Good, eyes can track motion. They’ll be blurry for a bit. Gotta rehydrate.”

Touch to the right. Could move now. Wouldn’t move. Might hurt.

“Gonna keep your legs tied so you don’t slide off, but we’ll have you exercise them soon. I’m going to take the gag off so you can drink, but don’t bite your tongue off, alright?”

Touch. Touch to his… face? Face. Dark blur in vision. Face. Face-to-face.

Something different on his face and in his face. Touch. Touch-to-touch. Something removed. Something moving. Tongue- that was the word. Air moving. Air moving through mouth. Word for that… breath? Breathing. Yes, breathing.

Open mouth, breathing, movement over tongue.

“...Not sure why you’re doing that, but, here. Drink. Slowly. Don’t choke.”

Drinking slowly, choking bad. Right. There was cold on his tongue, just a little. Cold on his lips and chin.

“Close your mouth, dumbass.”

Right. Cold on his tongue, close the mouth, and… gulp.

“There ye go. Let’s do it again.”

They did it again.

And again.

The blur moved. No more water.

“Mrrr,” came the sound from his throat. Oh, he did that.

“Nope, stomach’s still starting back up. Gotta go slow.”

The blur was less blurry. Right, the face. Body. Person. Someone.

“Hllo,” he said. That seemed right.

“Christ, that was fast,” the person said.

“Hmm?”

“Took me a day to figure out talking. ‘Course, he always said that was never my strong suit. But he wouldn’t shut up when he woke me up, and, well, figured it would help your brain get going again. Just don’t get used to it.”

“Hmm.”

The person’s face faced him. Oh. That was why it was called a face.

“Can you think of a name for yourself?”

Oh. Wait, that was a question. He needed to… have an answer. A name? A name…

“Eeth.”

The face went strange, but no response came.

“Eet,” he said again, trying to get the sound right. Why wasn’t his tongue moving right? “Eeth. Eet!”

“Keith?”

“No!” At least that came out right. Well, Keith was a name, but it wasn’t the one he was trying to say. “Ee-tuh. Pfh. Pffffh. Phu-puh-pup-puh. Pee-tuh.”

“Peter?” The face had changed.

“Peet.” There! That was it! Well, Peter didn’t sound wrong, but Pete sounded better.

“Ah. Just Pete?”

“Peet!”

“Pete, then. Welcome to the world.”

“Whrrryuh?”

“The world, creation, life, whatever you want to call it.”

“No. Yew. Hoo arr yew?”

The face… smiled? Yes, it was a smile.

“I’m John.”

“Jawn. Mmm.”

“What, got a problem with it?”

“No.”

“Good, ‘cuz I’m the one who brought your sorry ass to life.”

“Hm.”

“What?”

Pete moved his shoulders. “Hm.”

“Great. Alive for ten minutes and you’ve got an attitude.”

“Hm.” For some reason, Pete smiled as he made the noise. It felt right.

“Cheeky…”

His vision slowly cleared, and John intermittently fed him some more water, then, eventually, a lukewarm broth. Pete’s tongue grew more dextrous, and he was soon able to sufficiently enunciate. John had him untie his own leg straps to practice his hand-eye coordination, and then had him move his legs through their full range of motion. They felt heavy and unwieldy, but his muscles were working, at least, and he was even able to wiggle his toes a little. John helped him move to a chair, and tasked him with alternately rotating his arms and his legs. John himself was shuffling through a stack of papers that, from Pete’s vantage point, looked near-illegible.

“What’s that sound?” Pete asked at one point, looking around the dimly lit room. There wasn’t anything among the scattered books and papers that filled the room that could’ve been the source.

“Hmm?” John asked. “What sound?”

“That… buzzing,” he clarified. “I’ve been hearing it the whole time.”

“Me hearing’s not too good, which direction is it coming from?”

“Just… all around,” Pete said, waving a hand.

“Ah,” John said with a note of comprehension, “Ears ringing. From the thunder.”

“Oh. Will it go away?”

John shrugged.

Pete felt the urge to poke further at that, but in all honestly, he was damn tired. Now that he thought about it, his head felt like it was stuffed with cotton.

“I… what time is it?” he asked. The room had no clocks and no windows; for all he knew it was the dead of night.

“Hmm, I can show you to your bedroom. I’ll have to wake you up every hour, make sure your brain doesn’t give up the ghost.”

“You say that like it’s supposed to be funny,” Pete observed, but he didn’t have the energy to think on it further. “Do I have to get back on the gurney…?”

“No,” was all John said, before scooping up Pete into his arms, bridal-carry style, in one smooth motion. “Damn. You’re light.”

“No, actually, it’s a bit dim…”

Pete smirked, nearly laughing at his own joke. He almost felt drunk on fatigue, now. He was asleep before they reached the room.

Putting on the fresh clothes that John had provided for him that morning (and he knew it was morning thanks to the tiny, dirty window in the corner of his bare stone room) brought a question to Pete’s mind, one that he hadn’t thought to ask, but now had a burning desire to be answered.

“What do I look like?”

Though he had an idea of what faces should look like, John’s was the only one he’d properly seen, and it was an odd one. He had a wicked scar along the right side of his face that looked like it had been stitched back together by a doctor who’d been on their first day at the job, and hungover to boot. Even more oddly, he had two metal bolts jutting from either side of his neck, right along a similarly stitched seam that seemed to ring his entire neck.

There were similar seams running over Pete’s skin, though not nearly as rough. Something about them seemed to draw his attention, but he couldn’t say why.

“Pale. Big nose, long face. Got some facial hair growing in, that’s a good sign,” John answered clinically.

“I meant, do you have a mirror?”

He paused; then, tilted his head. “Right. I’ll be right back.”

John left the room, leaving Pete sitting on the edge of his bed. Despite yesterday’s exercises, he still couldn’t walk, though John had implied that he’d be able to soon, with enough practice. The ringing in his ears, at least, had softened a little, just as John had promised it would.

“Here you are,” John said as he returned, then offered an ornate, almost ostentatious hand mirror to Pete.

“Cheers…”

Pete looked in the mirror.

John was right. His face was pale, even more so than the rest of his body. He had a long nose and a long face, roughly cut dark brown hair down to his chin, and some dark scruff growing in. His eyes were strikingly blue, their color only accentuated by his ashen pallor and the deep bags underneath. He had no seams on his face, but just like John, he had one running around the circumference of his neck, right over his Adam's apple, though protruding from either side were much thinner nails. The one on the right was slightly crooked, not quite perpendicular to his neck.

“Christ,” Pete said, not sure what else to say.

“Pretty sure ‘e’s got a longer beard.”

Pete looked up at John, unamused. Then, he looked back down, and reached up to feel at the nail on one side. He nudged at it, but it wasn’t moved at all, eliciting the sensation of it being wedged deeply into his neck. Something about that made Pete’s stomach turn uncomfortably.

“Don’t mess with that, ‘s wired into your nerves,” John said, no traces of jest in his voice. “Neck’s the best spot to put ‘em between the brain and the heart.”

Pete nodded in understanding, but said nothing, simply handing the mirror back to John. There wasn’t anything else to see.

Walking was hard.

It didn’t feel like it should be hard. He could remember walking. He could feel it in his legs, walking. But his legs didn’t feel it. They were still a bit stiff, and so long. Why so long?

John watched in amusement as Pete toppled over time and again, every time he let go of the chair he was using to help himself up. They were in a different room today, a lab that was plainly where John prepared for the reanimation process. The room was stone and looked like it should feel cold, but all the bubbling chemicals above the burners warmed it up and made it proper toasty.

“‘S not funny,” Pete whined. He crouched down, then leaned forward onto his knees. It was a comfortable position; he liked the feeling of the energy that could be bound up in his muscles, the way it could all be freed in a moment. It was controlling that release that was the hard part.

“It’s a little funny.”

“How long did it take you?” Pete demanded. For the past day, John had been making comments about his own milestones and how they compared to Pete’s progress.

“Couple days. But I’m twice your weight.”

Pete frowned, then grabbed the chair and helped himself up to his feet again. He let go, and spread his arms wide; for whatever reason, that seemed to help.

“What about others?”

Silence; Pete looked over his shoulder to see John standing at a long table next to a vat, but his back was facing Pete and so was practically unreadable.

“...There’s no one else. Just me and you.”

“No,” Pete responded immediately, then shook his head. “That’s not right. There’s other people. That’s- I know there are.”

John turned around to look at Pete; then, he held up one of his hands and tapped against one of the thick bolts embedded in his neck. “Only two of us in the world born from body parts and lightning. Me, then you. No one else.”

He gestured at the table. “This bloke too, once I’m done, unless something fucks it all up. But that’s it. No one else.”

“But…” Pete trailed off. Something wasn’t squaring. There were more people in the world, he knew it. Adults and children and geriatrics and babies and all kinds, he could remember these things. But then… right… scars and lightning. Where did those come in?

“You’ve got knowledge. Try your memory. Where do people come from?”

“...Babies.” John said nothing, so Pete added, “Sex.”

“You’re not a baby, and nobody fucked to make you, at least, not you, Pete. You’re made of other people. Lots of other people, who died, that I cleaned up and stuck together. Lightning brought you to life, but it also burns most memories away.”

Pete froze, hand on the back of the chair. His mind whirled. Little bits of knowledge and memory were how he knew how to speak, and remember how to walk, and all that, but…

“The brain,” he said after a moment, “Whose brain? I’m them, right?”

John paused what he was doing, but didn’t look back. “A few people. Impossible to get one fully intact after death. Stitched them together, just like the rest of you.”

“But I’m… there’s only me,” Pete protested, putting a hand to his head as if to feel at the grey matter under his skull. “It’s just me. Which one am I?”

John turned back to him again. Pete couldn’t look at anything but the thick stitching across his face that he now knew to be the seam between, presumably, different peoples’ skin.

“The lightning starts the brain again but it’s too much, or maybe most of it went when they died. Can’t know for sure,” John said, voice painfully monotone. “You’re not- you’re not any of them. You’re Pete.”

John looked at him oddly, as if he was about to say something more, but he dragged his eyes up Pete’s form once, and then turned around and went back to his work.

Pete down at himself, at the stitching on his left arm an inch up from his wrist. The stitches were thinner than the ones he’d seen on John, the work slightly neater and the material nearly translucent. But, they did nothing to disguise the raw red line that circled his arm and the two patches of skin, each a slightly different shade of grayish-pale, that it separated.

He flexed his fingers. The hand was all one, he could tell as much, but whose arm was it at the end of? And he could only see the seams of the skin; if even his brain was made of many pieces, who knew how many separate parts were inside him? John did, at least, but he didn’t seem to think that should matter to Pete. And sure, maybe normal people didn’t worry too much about their kidneys or gallbladder on any given day, but…

He grimaced and looked back at the chair he was leaning on. He didn’t want to have to hold onto it forever. So, he let go, and tried once again to take a step.

---

Though he didn’t let it show, John was still thinking about what Pete had said. The questions he was asking. They were too close to questions John had been asking himself since yesterday.

Keith had never treated him as anyone other than his own person. Obviously John had also woken up with general knowledge about the world, taking only a few days to talk and walk and do all the things an average adult human could do. There was nowhere else that information could’ve come from than the brains that had been reconstituted to make his own. But that was just… well, knowledge. Knowledge did not a person make.

But what was the line between knowledge and memory? Even now, as he put the finishing touches on the other body (as he was still calling it in his head), he couldn’t forget for a moment that the skills he was using were all ones he’d learned from Keith. With only the slimmest of effort he could recall Keith’s animated voice explaining all the procedures he’d used to bring John to life. But he had no such voice or experience accompanying, say, his knowledge of the word ‘cat.’ And there were things he’d definitely learned after waking up for the first time of which he’d forgotten the circumstances of their origin. He’d assumed all the knowledge that he and Pete had inherited was akin to that: sourceless, a claim without a citation, a delta without a river.

But. There was such a thing as buried memories, as well. Things that one didn’t know that they knew until circumstances revealed the knowledge. For the first few months of his life, John had only spoken English; then, in a bar, a Frenchman had spoken to him, and he’d understood every word the man had said. Could it be that there was more than just information buried within himself and Pete? Was there something that took only the right circumstances to be uncovered?

“The sooner you can stand on two feet, the sooner you can help me with this,” John said out loud.

“Help you how, exactly?”

John looked back at Pete, who was now managing to shuffle along the edge of a table, so long as he had one hand against it for balance.

“Get over here,” he said. Pete frowned, but clearly took the challenge seriously. Holding his arms out like a tightrope walker for balance, he managed to wobble from the side of one desk to another without entirely eating dirt. (John still wondered as to how Keith had settled on such proportions.)

When Pete reached his side, John gestured at the body in the vat in front of him. “I’m finishing the right foot, then he’ll be ready to go. Then we’ll just have to wait for a storm.”

“Well, I can’t control the weather, now can I?” Pete snarked, then looked back up at John expectantly. An odd feeling flickered at the sight of his expression, accompanied by something akin to a burning at the back of his throat.

“‘Course not. But I’ll need your help the night-of. I’m going to try a different setup with the cables, to account for this one’s proportions. It’ll need monitoring, so I can’t have you stumbling around like a baby bird.”

Pete scoffed. “Alright then.”

John looked over at Pete as the other man stared at the vat and the body within. This one was shorter than either of them, and, like Pete, was mostly made of pieces Keith had gathered and put in the basement cold storage. John had only needed to find a few stray bits for each… most of which were provided by Keith himself.

“This stuff, you know what it is?” John said, pointing to the preservation fluid.

“That’s…” Pete frowned, thoughtful. “The stuff that keeps the body fresh.”

John gave him a flat look. “You just guessed.”

Pete shrugged. “Bodies rot, this one isn’t, what do you want me to say?”

Then, the other man looked back at him. “Was I supposed to know?”

Shit.

John shrugged. “Checking your critical thinking.”

“Right…”

After a moment, John looked back at his needle and thread- or rather, lack of thread.

“I gotta go visit Doris and Boris. You watch him, make sure he doesn’t wake up early,” John said, then stalked off.

“Very funny…”

As John exited into the hallway, he heard Pete’s voice calling after him.

“Wait, yer joking, right-?”

---

Pete looked at the body in the vat.

It looked dead. It was dead. But save for the fact that its eyes were closed and it was submerged in the preserving liquid, it didn’t look all that much deader than Pete did.

Its stitches were careful and neat, just like Pete’s, though it also had a seam along the crown of its head. Perhaps that was how the brain was inserted? But then how had Pete’s gotten into his own skull? He resolved to ask John later; whatever process brought him to life, it was worth learning about. It was very much his business, after all.

When he’d first walked up and seen its long hair, nearly shoulder-length, he’d thought it to be a girl for a moment; but no, the body had all the male bits to be expected, not to mention a particularly chiseled chin. Still, it wasn’t truly a man, not yet.

“I wonder what you’ll think,” Pete said, though he didn’t really know what he meant by the sentiment, what exactly he expected this person-to-be to think about. Everything or anything. The question he was asking, really, was, ‘Who will you be?’

He was half-tempted to reach into the liquid, though the prospect of actually touching a corpse didn’t particularly appeal to him. Was that hypocritical? Probably not. He himself was alive, biologically; he breathed and ate and drank.

“Meet you soon, I suppose,” he said. He steadied his balance against the table, accidentally jerking against it; the water vibrated slightly, but the body did not react, save for the tips of its hair swaying slightly.

Pete had been this, a little over a day ago. A thing in a vat. The idea felt too big to actually fit into his head. Him, dead. Or, not yet alive. Was there a difference?

“Hope you have an easier time walking,” he told it, then, looked at it again. “Yer… pretty short, actually. Less body to worry about. I’m a bit jealous.”

Then, it occurred to him: if John needed his help, then there was a possibility of failure. That this thing might not wake up at all.

A new sensation struck at Pete, as if it were clutching at his heart with nails, threatening to dig them in and draw blood from the source. What would he do if it didn’t wake up? Would it just be Pete and John in this place forever? He didn’t mind John, but… just two people, forever? Or were there still people elsewhere, too? Come to think of it, how come he hadn’t seen anyone else at all? John had mentioned a Doris and a Boris… did they live here too? How come he hadn’t seen them? How big was this place, even? Where was this place? Was it even in… where were they… there was a bigger place than a house… a country?

Fuzzy knowledge of the world as he knew it broke its way into Pete’s conscious train of thought like a boulder through ice. They were speaking English, English English, were they in England? Or somewhere else? He could be anywhere in the world, for all he knew! And he was made of dead people! That was… people wouldn’t take kindly to that, would they? Could he even show his face to anyone besides John and the person-to-be, and maybe this Doris and Boris? Were those even real names? They sounded fake. Who in their right mind would be named Doris and choose to marry someone named Boris? Or the other way around?

At that moment, Pete turned around to see that John had entered the room and was mere feet away from Pete. He startled, lost his balance, and fell forward; his instincts were too slow to break his fall, so he felt the force of slamming his shoulder and face into the cold stone floor.

“Ow! Fuck!” he swore; arms reached to help him, but he squirmed a little. “No, I’m fine, I- John, listen, are Doris and Boris their real names?”

“What?” The hands let go.

Pete flipped himself over to look up at John. “Where are we? Are we crimes against the Church? Or are we in America, or Australia, or- or fucking India, I don’t know-”

“Pete-”

“And how come I haven’t seen anyone else, are Doris and Boris their real names because that’s just ridiculous, right-”

“Pete-”

“And I know my body is alive, but am I alive? Do I have a soul? Are- are they even real? I know about religion and stuff but most of it seems like bollocks to me-”

“Peter!” John nearly shouted, then leaned down and grabbed him by the shoulders and pulled him up to a standing position all in one movement, “Doris and Boris are spiders.”

“What?” Every train of thought in Pete’s head crashed at once.

“They’re spiders that I bred. I used their silk to stitch you together. And this bloke. I needed some more so I left the room,” John said, husky voice dropping to a quieter volume, “Are you alright?”

“No?” he said. He still didn’t know where they were. Or if he had a soul.

“Here, just… sit down,” John said, and Pete half-walked half-limped to the nearest seat, a shabby wooden excuse for a chair. “And breathe, mate. We don’t have to breathe as much but we do still need air.”

“Oh,” Pete squeaked; he hadn’t realized he’d stopped breathing. He took a gulp of air. “Are you going to answer my questions?”

“The ones that aren’t stupid, yeah,” John said. Then, he took his own deep breath, and returned to the vat, though he was clearly still watching Pete out of the corner of his eye. “We’re in an old manor a few hours north of London. You haven’t seen anyone else ‘cos just me and- ‘cos it’s just us living here. Couldn’t keep a servant for longer than a week, though I have a deliveryman bring supplies every once in a while. You’re thinking and eating and drinking and breathing and shitting- well, you’ll be shitting soon- and that means you’re alive. As for a soul, well, I’d say to ask a holy man, but I dunno how kindly the church would take to us. And definitely don’t go blabbing to anyone on the street that a madman made you in a basement.”

“Oh,” Pete said, taking in the answers. “So do you. Ever leave? The manor?”

“‘Course I do,” John said, shooting an unamused glance at Pete. “All the time.”

Pete went quiet, trying to digest all of the answers he’d received.

“Are you a madman?”

John looked at Pete; his droopy eyes turned his neutral expression into a particularly flat one.

“Point taken…” Pete mumbled.

After a little bit of stewing in his misery, thoughts refusing to coalesce, Pete rose on shaky legs and felt his way along the furniture to return to John’s side. He didn’t say anything, just watched the other man’s steady hands sewing skin onto the body’s left leg.

By the next day, his third day awake, no, his third day alive, he could walk. (The ringing, too, was nearly gone, just a faint hiss in the back of his head.)

Pete could’ve sworn he’d seen a faint smile cross John’s face as the other man had watched him cross the length of the lab without assistance.

“Good, now I can give you the tour,” he concluded.

The manor was huge.

“Bloody hell, did you kill the family that lived here?” Pete asked after stepping into the foyer, a large open entryway with snaking staircases and a goddamn chandelier. Dusty curtains blocked all but a few dramatic beams of sunlight from lighting up the room, giving the odd illusion that it was late afternoon.

John snorted. “No. Keith inherited it.”

“Keith,” Pete repeated, then looked over at John. “You said that name before. Was he the one who made you?”

John nodded. “And you. At least, most of you, ‘n’ the other bloke. I just finished you up.”

“Hold on- do you even know what you’re doing?” Pete demanded, the thought flipping his understanding upside-down. All this time John had been a steady presence of authority, someone who knew what he was going through and understood the underpinnings of the whole process, but if he was just finishing someone else’s work…

John, however, chuckled, and gave a smug smile. “Of course. Probably better than Moonie ever did.”

Then, the smile dropped from his face, and he stepped away from Pete, walking towards the grand front doors.

“C’mon, I’ll show you the grounds.”

Pete followed him. The grounds ended up being a shabby, overgrown tract of land that was half-forest, half-nightmareish garden.

“Here’s the happy couple,” John said, pointing to a tree that was on the borderline between the ‘garden’ and the forest.

“Eh? Oh- fucking Christ almighty!” Pete swore as he realized what he was looking at: two gigantic spiders perched in massive webs strung across the tree’s branches. Each one had a body the size of Pete’s own head and eight gnarly legs fanned out around them.

“That one’s D, and that one’s B,” John said, pointing to the respective monster spider. “My finest creations.”

John shot Pete a smirk at that last line, leaving Pete to roll his eyes.

“And you said that… their silk…” Pete trailed off, feeling at the stitches below his left wrist. John simply nodded.

“Dare I ask what they eat?” Pete asked after a moment, trying to change the subject.

“Chickens, mainly.”

“...Chickens.”

John shrugged. “Been running low, though, gonna have to get more soon. ‘Course, could just use the leftovers from you two…”

He wouldn’t have admitted it, but in that moment, Pete gulped.

“It’s… a bit chilly,” he said, ashamed of how pathetic his voice sounded but not enough to regret the implied request; he didn’t want to spend another minute next to those things.

“Right, you’re still thin as a rake. Let’s get back inside.”

Preparations on the second body were finished, and it was now sitting ready in the second-floor lab; when a storm came along, all it would need is to be removed from its vat, wiped down, and wired up. John proceeded to drill a number of things into Pete’s head that he’d need to know the day-of: what exactly he needed Pete to do, the contents of various syringes, and, perhaps most crucially, what to do if things went awry.

Some of it seemed to come naturally to Pete, but not all of it: he was able to identify the uses of a couple of substances by name alone, and correctly deduce the reasons for certain protocol, but other things left him at a loss. It was as if someone had torn random pages out of a medical textbook and stuffed only the contents of those bits into his head. John was able to fill in the important bits, but it still left Pete with the uncanny feeling of something important only half-remembered.

His interactions with John, too, were a bit awkward. When he left Pete to go over some of his notes for both Pete and the other body, he returned to check in at least twice an hour; not to ask after Pete’s progress, what with him not even speaking most of the time, but seemingly just to make sure Pete hadn’t up and vanished.

“Do you need something from me, or…?” Pete asked him when he ducked his head into the room for what felt like the dozenth time.

“No,” John answered.

“Then why…?” Pete asked, catching his eyes with his own to demand an answer.

“Just…” John trailed off and frowned. “It’s nothing. I’ll leave you alone. Get some rest at some point.”

“I’m not tired,” Pete simply said, and returned to his reading as John walked off. However, the idea had been planted in his head, and he realized that the words were getting rather swimmy (though John’s handwriting wasn’t all that great to begin with.) The sun had set only a few hours ago, and it really wasn’t that late, but- Ah. Wait.

It was then that Pete realized that he had, in fact, never gone to bed the night before. He’d spent a good few hours the previous evening messing around with an old harpsichord in one of the storage rooms, then John had interrupted him and given a thorough history of every set of armor in the house (of which there were a shocking amount), and by then it had been morning and they’d had breakfast before spending the day running through the reanimation protocols.

He rubbed at his face, then blinked hard a few times, his eyes dry from the candlelight reading. He felt tired, but not incapacitatingly so. Hell, he could probably stay up until sunrise if he really wanted to. But John was right- a summer storm could come upon them at any moment, and Pete most certainly didn’t want to be the cause of any mishaps.

He brought his candle out of the room with him and traipsed down the hall to the washroom, where he splashed some water on his face. Maybe it was just the dim light, but gazing in the mirror, the bags under his eyes seemed even darker than they’d been since that first morning when he’d seen himself. He ran a hand over the stubble accumulating along his chin and lips: that, at least, was proof that his skin was alive and capable of growth, though he’d have to ask after a razor eventually.

Struck by a sudden whim, Pete pinched one of the stitches on his neck between his fingers, and tugged on it. As sure as if it were welded to him, it didn’t move or come loose. He’d considered asking John if they would eventually dissolve or fall out, but it seemed insensitive considering that the other man’s stitches were still in after however long he’d been alive, and were far more visible at that.

Still. Pete lifted a hand and held it against his neck to hide the stitches; but, he realized after a moment, he couldn’t hide the nails. Those above all were the (literally) inextricable proof of his status as a person who was created- re-created, not born.

“You alright?”

“Jesus bloody fucking-” Pete shouted, nearly knocking over the candle as he stumbled away from the sudden sound- John’s voice. The man was hovering in the doorway as if he’d just emerged from the shadows.

“Thought you’d heard me,” John said, the faintest hint of apology in his tone. “Something hurting?”

Pete regained his footing and got a proper look at the other man to see a concerned frown on his face. Pete shook his head.

“No, I- no, it’s alright,” Pete answered, and snatched his candleholder off the counter. “What now?”

“I, ah, made some herbal tea. If you want some,” John said.

“Cheers, that- yeah, that sounds nice…” Pete replied, nearly surprising himself. He silently gestured for John to lead the way, and shuffled after him to the second-floor parlor. There, John offered him a steaming cup, and they settled onto only slightly dusty plush sofas.

The tea was quite hot, though it wasn’t painful, only numbing. That was good enough for Pete. He watched as John pulled out a bottle from his pocket, uncorked it, and poured what was almost certainly some kind of liquor into his own cup.

“Oi, pass me some of that,” Pete said, the idea of deadening his mind a bit suddenly very appealing, but John shook his head.

“After we wake the other fellow up,” John said. “Shouldn’t be drinking this stuff so soon.”

Pete frowned; it seemed like a lame excuse, but, well, it was John’s booze. He then watched in drowsy-dampened awe as John knocked back his entire teacup, poured more booze into the now-empty cup until it almost reached the rim, and then knocked that back.

“Christ mate, something eating at you?” Pete blurted out.

John said nothing, only looking right at Pete. His eyes weren’t as bright of blue as Pete’s own, but the stare was like a full-force gust of wind to the face.

Then, John looked away, and the moment had passed. The other man said nothing, simply putting his cup down on the coffee table and turning to lay down on the couch.

Maybe John was nervous? But he’d made Pete alright, and now he had an extra set of hands. They weren’t planning on doing anything too different from Pete’s own awakening. If anything, this would be less risky than Pete’s reanimation, and, in all likelihood, John’s as well, if he really was the first.

Pete was still learning how to read John, but he was pretty confident that wasn’t it. No, it was something else. He looked over at the other man, who’d closed his eyes and looked for all the world like he was going to sleep through the night in that very spot.

Oh. The realization dropped on him like a brick. This house had belonged to someone else, originally: John’s creator, Keith. They’d lived together, presumably- perhaps for as long as John had lived, however long that was. And it didn’t take a genius to gather that Keith was no longer around. The potent shades of melancholy painted onto the scene of the other couch were made of absence. Whether the resulting blend was loneliness, grief, somewhere in between, he couldn’t tell. Pete considered asking a question- what question, he wasn’t sure- but left it. No reason to poke the bear.

“Thanks for the tea. G’night,” Pete mumbled, then stood up and walked away.

---

John had fallen asleep on the couch again, like he’d done most nights for the past couple of months. God, it had been months, hadn’t it? Two months now, he’d wager.

It had felt like a lot longer and a lot less time. That first one was mostly lost to him already, the only impressions left in his mind being abstract collages of gray. From there it had been straight into the mania of preparing the bodies. Pete- or “the taller one” as John had dubbed him at the time- had been closer to completion, and so he’d dedicated all of his waking hours to getting him ready for reanimation, only really starting on the shorter one while waiting for a storm to roll around.

Now, though, Pete was awake. The gray and the mania had both passed, leaving only… mundanity. Working on the shorter body. Showing Pete around. Teaching Pete the reanimation protocols.

…protocols that Pete had learned far quicker than he’d expected, with knowledge John couldn’t have possibly hoped would be inherited by him. He listed the names of chemicals that only John and Keith had used for them, recited uses for concoctions that the two of them had discovered together, and demonstrated far more medical knowledge than an average layperson would ever know.

But it was just that: knowledge. No memories, no identity. No recollection of where the information had come from. Not quite tabula rasa but certainly not reincarnation, either. Pete was not Keith. And yet, he knew things that only Keith would know.

Only Keith and Pete, now. After all, if someone snuck into a scientist’s study and copied down all their notes, could it not be said that the note-taker would know things that only the scientist would’ve been expected to know? Perhaps that was the way to think of it. Copied notes, with none of the same ink spills or torn edges. The knowledge could survive, but stripped of the emotion and disposition of the originator.

John sighed, adjusting his head against the arm of the sofa. The pattering rain against the parlor’s window tapped a complicated rhythm to match his jumping thoughts.

…Rain. It was raining.

John stood up and rushed to the window, throwing open the blinds to see a gray stormy sky. In the distance, lightning flashed.

“Pete!” he bellowed, and went to fetch the other man. They had work to do.

---

It was just a matter of waiting.

They’d removed the body from the preservation fluid, wiped it down, put the body on the gurney, then, figured out that it was too small to use the same gurney that Pete had. So, John had quickly gone and fetched another one, which he just had lying around, for some reason, and used that one.

They’d strapped the body to the new gurney, checked that yes, it did work and wasn’t going to chafe (too badly), and then wired it up. The main connection was through the cathodes in the neck, but there were also thin wires carefully attached to key nerve centers elsewhere in the body. Lined on the counter that Pete was now leaning against were several colorful syringes with the stimulants and re-animation concoctions that he and John had prepared; Pete’s job, if all went well, was to stick a few into each of the new person’s feet, to “get it flowing in both directions” as John described it. John’s steadier and more practiced hands would apply the most crucial ones to the vital organs.

Of course, that would all happen after the lightning struck. Which could happen any time.

“How long can it wait?” Pete asked. He recalled that some of the preservation fluid was absorbed into the skin, giving a little grace period, but he wasn’t sure how long that period could last before the body began to, well, go bad.

“Dunno,” was all John said.

“Were there ever any-”

“No. Just us,” John cut off the question.

Pete considered that; feeling the need to readjust, he chose to duck down onto feet with knees touching the ground, legs spread at an angle. It was a position he’d grown fond of, and he could jump back up at a moment’s notice. Being closer to the body- and the ground- when dealing with lightning like this was a bad idea, but he knew that they’d have a couple seconds of warning.

After only about a minute, though, he stood back up, and sat on the counter instead. Looking at the body once more, he was surprised to see that as its hair dried out, the color turned lighter, already being a much lighter shade than Pete’s own while not even being entirely dry yet.

“Shouldn’t we be wearing goggles?” Pete wondered aloud, and looked to John- to see that the other man was, in fact, wearing goggles. “Oi! Where’d you get those?”

“Got some spares in the next room over,” John answered dryly. He was watching with an unflappable expression that implied much more patience than Pete himself could muster.

Pete mumbled something about grabbing a pair for himself, and made to do just that when he suddenly felt odd. His throat felt tight, and he instinctively forced a heavy swallow; that was when he realized the source of the sensation was his own cathodes, which seemed to be resonating with a low thrum. A metallic taste rose in his mouth, and he understood what was about to happen.

Covering his eyes and practically throwing himself to the corner of the room, a loud BOOM filled the world for a moment before his vision went white and it faded to a loud ringing. Peeling his hands away from his face, he turned around to see-

The body was twitching, flopping on the gurney. Pete rushed to its side to help John with removing the auxiliary wires, but the job was already almost done. Out of instinct, Pete put his hands on the man’s chest to steady him, and there he felt it: a heartbeat. Not just that- the chest was rising, mouth open, inhaling.

He was alive.

Pete beamed; it worked! He suppressed a laugh, then gave up and let it out.

“Pete!” John snapped, and Pete looked up to meet his eyes- dead serious. Instinct kicked in, and Pete reached for the first syringe.

The next minute or so passed in a blur. The new man continued to twitch a bit, eyes still closed as if having an intense dream. (Twitching was good, it meant the muscles were kicking in. It was only a problem if he started to spasm.) Pete couldn’t remember his own first minutes of life, only hazy recollections of being moved to the next room over, which was probably for the best- they were sticking quite a few needles into this new person, after all.

“Talk to him,” John said after a bit. Pete looked up for a moment, confused; John spoke again. “It helped, didn’t it?”

Right. John’s voice. Cutting through the blurred world and ringing sounds. It had helped.

“Hello there,” Pete said quietly; then, remembering how bad the ringing had been that first day, repeated himself more loudly.

“We’re just finishing with your- er, jabs, I suppose. Should help you feel nice and awake,” he continued. “This one I’m doing now is called- well, I don’t know if it has a name, but it’s for making sure your blood’s the right viscosity."

After a moment, he traded it for the next one. “Think this one’s for the skin? So that you don’t scar too badly. Not that it’s going to help with the, er, seams.”

He looked up along the man’s body, and frowned; something seemed off about it. He blinked a few times before realizing what it was: his skin was much less gray than his own, more pinks and beiges and, well, liveliness to it.

“You look a lot less like a corpse than I do,” Pete admitted to the man.

“The new wire setup worked,” John commented. “‘E’s practically got a tan.”

“Hmph. Couldn’t have done me last?” Pete grumbled as he grabbed the next syringe, though he didn’t really mean it. Getting to help with the reanimation process was quite exciting, in fact.

“Wouldn’t work with your proportions,” John answered anyway. “Alright, that’s me done.”

Pete nodded, then, removed the last of his syringes as well. “Done.”

He walked over to look over the new man’s face. He was still twitching a bit, though not as badly as he’d been a couple minutes ago, and his eyes were half-lidded, though still moving about quite a bit. Was he dreaming, perhaps? But he certainly wasn’t asleep; perhaps it was a waking dream as the mind arranged itself from a pile of memories and potential into a stable consciousness.

Pete narrated where they were going as John unlocked the wheels of the gurney, opening the door for them to repeat the journey just the two of them had made but a few days ago: over one room to the smaller second-floor lab. He stepped in to help adjust the new man to an angled position.

“I was in your position- literally- about a week ago,” Pete told the new man, standing close but off to the side so as to not crowd him. “I’m going to untie your hands now, alright?”

Pete then did just that; just out of curiosity, he let his hand linger against the man’s wrist, feeling his pulse. He was obviously alive, yet that rhythm still seemed a miracle.

“Alright, other one now-”

“Mmmm.”

The soft sound drew Pete’s gaze back to the new man’s face, nearly starting at the sight of his eyes. They were wide open, and the brightest blue he’d ever seen. After a moment of hazy staring, the eyes locked onto Pete’s, pupils narrowing slightly.

“Good morning,” Pete said with a smirk as he finished untying the other hand. The man squinted at him, then moved his right hand clumsily, sort of just flailing it once like a kitten batting at a string.

“Don’t worry, I get ya,” Pete said, taking the other man’s hand in his own and giving it a firm shake. “How do you do? I’m Pete. And that’s John- oi, John, now?”

John had, in fact, fetched his pipe, and was now smoking what unmistakably smelled of cannabis.

“Why not? Hard bit’s done, and you seem to have him in safe hands,” John answered, then took a puff.

“You just wanted an assistant, didn’t you?” Pete whined, then turned back to the new man. “Don’t mind him.”

The new man looked at him curiously. “Mmm?”

“Right, let’s take that gag off,” Pete said, leaning closer to untie the cloth. He couldn’t not see the other man’s piercing stare as he did so. Removing the cloth, Pete could see just how pink the man’s lips were; it was as if he’d stepped out of a painting, colors brighter than reality.

Pete didn’t realize he’d lingered so close to the man’s personal space until he felt something- the man had brought his right hand up against Pete’s chest and was pushing against him slightly.

“Oh-!” Pete said, stepping away in a flash. The man’s eyes followed him, and his pink lips were frowning.

“Blrr,” the man slurred, then frowned, tipping his head and looking down at himself. Pete felt as though he were looking into a mirror, seeing the feelings he himself had experienced in those first few minutes of true awareness, the confusion at his body and why it wasn’t working the way he expected it to.

“It’ll come, keep trying,” Pete urged. “Just don’t bite your tongue.”

The man looked at him, understanding crossing his face. “Awl… awl… ruh…”

“Alright?” Pete asked. The man nodded, then frowned, and sniffed the air.

“Oi, John, think he wants you to come over and share,” Pete snarked, looking back at John to see him sat down, pipe in mouth and watching their interactions intently.

Before John could respond, the new man let out a strange noise, something like a cough or a gag. Pete swung his head back to see a look of confusion on the man’s face as he let out another cough.

“Swallow wrong, mate…?” Pete asked, only to watch true panic fill the man’s eyes as he opened his mouth to take a gulp of air and… nothing happened, the inhalation never came. The new man’s impossibly blue eyes met Pete’s, and the message did not need to be articulated: help.

Pete turned to John, who had already risen from his seat, pipe left behind on a countertop to rush over, practically pushing Pete out of the way. Pete watched helplessly as John looked into the new man’s eyes, then placed a hand on his chest, clearly trying to feel his lungs to get a hint as to what was wrong.

“John, what’s-” Pete began, then, to his own surprise, closed his mouth. They hadn’t prepared for this. What do you do when someone suddenly just… can’t breathe? There couldn’t be anything in his throat, he hadn’t eaten anything- heck, he hadn’t even drank any water yet. Surely he couldn’t have choked on that much saliva or phlegm, could he?

Pete took an anxious breath of his own, the smell of John’s pipe filling his nose, and as if lightning had struck again, he realized what was wrong. He flew to the nearest window, tearing the curtains open and throwing the lock to swing the window outwards, storm and rain be damned. He repeated the process with the other large window in the room, and then jumped for the release cord on the emergency fans in the lab, which dropped down from where they were strung up for just a situation as this.

“It’s your pipe, John! The smoke!” Pete called out as he began to turn the crank for the fans. All the arm-swinging he’d done to stretch his muscles was now paying off. “Must be an allergic reaction or something…”

Just as quick as he had just a moment ago, John tore across the room and, rather than simply extinguishing the pipe, chucked it out the nearest window. Pete watched the offending implement fly out and land on the overgrown grass, not all too far from Doris and Boris’s tree.

Pete turned back to look at the new man, who was in turn looking at John with wide eyes. The man wheezed, but managed to drag a breath in, then another. Pete sank to his knees in relief, and watched as John returned to the new man.

“Deep breaths, okay?” John said gently, standing right in front of him, hand on his chest. “A big one in three… two..”

John and the new man took a deep breath together. The new man nodded, curls bobbing as he breathed out.

“Good,” John said, then backed off. “I’ll get some water, you watch him, Pete.”

---

He could breathe again.

That awful smell was still in the air but not as cloying, and his throat was under his control once again. The unfamiliar man was close to him once again, concern apparent in his electric blue eyes.

“Whrrthuhblo?” he asked, tongue still clumsy in his mouth; he tilted his head towards the door, and the unfamiliar man seemed to get the gist.

“John’ll be back in a mo’,” the thin man reassured. The buzzing in his ears had completely faded, and he could hear the other man properly.

He nodded in response. Right. The man who had left was named John. And what had John called this one…? Pete?

John had been the one to put a hand against his chest and breathe with him. The way that had felt… had he met John before? He couldn’t remember. But something about John had been, well, not familiar, but not unfamiliar, either. Just… right.

Pete, though, he’d never met before; he was sure of it. He was pretty sure he’d remember a face like that.

“Something on my face?” Pete asked, and he realized he’d been staring. “Listen, you, ah, got a name…?”

“Huh?” he asked, then thought about it. He had a name, surely; everyone had a name. He frowned, thinking, but nothing came. Carefully, he reached his hand up to his head, feeling at the soft yellow blurs that ringed his vision. Ah, it was his hair. He slowly laced his hand through the curls, touching his fingertips to his scalp as if to reach into his mind for an answer.

“You got quite a mop up there,” Pete said dryly. “How about Goldilocks, eh?”

“Nuh,” he denied. That was a stupid name. He had a nice, normal, proper name for a bloke. Something like…

“Rhjzr,” he slurred, then smacked his lips and tried again, “Ruhjer.”

“Roger?” Pete asked, taking a step closer.

He nodded. “Raw-jer.”

“Well… it’s nice to meet you, Roger,” Pete said, tone suddenly sheepish. Roger’s vision had almost entirely unblurred, letting him get a better look at the other man. He was uncannily pale, and Roger didn’t think it was just thanks to the lighting. The oddest part, though- other than that schnoz- were the two nails sticking from either side of his neck along a ring of stitches. What kind of accident had this man been in to require such an odd surgery?

At that moment, John returned to the room, and Roger looked back at him. Now that he was looking, he saw that John also had nails and stitches- far larger ones at that- but somehow the sight of them on John bothered him less than on Pete.

“Here,” John said, holding up a cup. “Drink slowly.”

“Arigh,” Roger affirmed, and held a hand out against John to steady himself as he leaned forward to accept the cup tilted against his mouth. God, he’d been parched.

“He picked his name,” Pete announced while Roger drank. “Says he’s called Roger.”

“Roger, eh?” John said, pulling the cup away while it still had water in it. “Stomach’s still waking up, you’ll have more in a bit.”

“Wh-” Roger started to say, then stopped; he wasn’t sure what, actually, he wanted to ask. There were too many questions running through his head, now.

Pete, however, seemed to be confident as to what Roger was about to ask. “Oh, ah, you’re in the second floor laboratory here in the manor. And it’s nearly noon, now.”

He was pretty sure that wasn’t what he’d been about to ask, but, he took the information nonetheless.

---

John watched as Pete continued to ramble as he showed the new man, Roger, through the exercises for his arms and legs.

Without his pipe, his hands were left with nothing to do, leaving him unable to get quite comfortable. He eventually settled on detangling a wad of silk he’d discarded in one of the cabinets- not an easy task with such fine thread and with fingers as meaty as his.

Roger occasionally looked at him with an expression that he couldn’t quite read. He seemed almost… expectant? Awkward?

“Took me a couple days to walk, same with John,” Pete rambled on, “But we iterated on the procedure with you, so it might come easier.”

“Righ’...” Roger said, looking a little lost. “Er… wha’s whif tha… nay-ulz… on yer neck?”

Pete froze at that, dropping his arms to his sides. “Oh. They’re, uh- don’t worry about that now, I’ll explain later.”

“You have them too,” John spoke up, catching both Pete and Roger’s eyes, the latter’s having gone very wide at the statement. Roger carefully raised his right hand up to feel at his neck, unsteady fingers grasping a nail.

“Wha-” Roger said, surprise shooting up his face, “Tha hell?”

Just as Roger tried to grasp the nail more firmly, Pete dove, grabbing his hand and stopping him from trying to pry it from his neck. “No!”

“Oi!” Roger shouted back, slapping at Pete with his left hand while leaning forward on unsteady legs. He freed his hand from Pete’s grasp but swung at him again; the resulting sound and the way Pete whirled away proved greater strength than expected from the new man, who then toppled over from the tilted gurney and fell to the floor.

“Fack!” Roger swore, turning over; John stood up with a start when he saw the blood on his forehead.

“Shit, shit, sorry Rog, fuck-” Pete swore, beelining to Roger’s side, “That’s not good.”

“He’ll be alright,” John said, grabbing a spare needle from the nearest counter, “Barely a tap. Grab a cloth and disinfectant.”

“R-right.”

John stepped over to Roger, who had managed to sit up somewhat and was now staring curiously at the blood left on his own hand. Right along the seam on Roger’s forehead, there was a small red gash. John leaned down onto his knees to get a closer look.

“Pete was trying to help you,” John said, reaching forward to brush Roger’s curls away. “Don’t smack me, alright?”

“Won’,” Roger said, shaking his head. “Wha happen’d?”

“Hmm?”

Roger blinked, eyes darting. Searching for the words.

“Nay-ulz in my neck. Yors. Peet’s. Why?”

John took a breath. “We’ll explain tomorrow, alright? Will you trust me on that?”

Roger nodded without hesitation. “Trust you.”

“You can trust Pete, too,” John added. Roger said nothing, just looking back with those bright blue eyes.

Not his eyes, John told himself. But the way they seemed to swallow John as if he was the whole world felt undeniably familiar, reminding John of a set of wide brown eyes that once looked at him in just the same way. Eyes that looked to John with utter trust that was, in all honesty, not deserved.

---

Pete returned with a cloth and disinfectant to find John on the floor with Roger, the latter seemingly pacified. He really hadn’t meant to start a fight, simply to stop Roger from trying to pull out the nails wires into his nerves- the man likely didn’t yet have the strength to actually budge them and do any damage, but it wasn’t worth the risk. (But then again, he’d been strong enough to leave Pete’s cheek stinging.)

John judged that Roger wouldn’t need any more stitching, just a plaster and time. From there, the rapid crash of fatigue seemed to overcome Roger the same way it had Pete on his own first day, but even worse, likely due to the extra stimulants they’d used.

John and Pete traded off shifts watching over Roger to make sure his breathing stayed regular, as well as waking him up every hour or so to make sure his brain wouldn’t fall back into inactivity.

Pete expected it to be strange to see Roger awake now, a living and breathing human sleeping on a bed rather than an inanimate thing on a table, but instead it just felt… natural. Roger wasn’t the thing that Pete had watched John stitch together; or rather, that thing had become something else, become Roger, but Roger was not it anymore. He was so unmistakably alive that they couldn’t be the same thing.

---

“Where’s John?” was the first thing Roger asked when Pete entered his room the next morning. He had vague memories of being woken in the night, probably because of the bump to his head, but he’d quickly fallen back asleep. He couldn’t recall any dreams, only vague sensations- the touch of the blanket, the fwip of Pete turning the page of his book.

The other man shrugged. “Asleep, I think. His bedroom door was closed.”

Then, Pete held something out to him: a mirror. “Here, I brought this for you.”

“Er…” Roger said, taking it in hand, “Thanks, I-”

He saw himself.

God, he had so much hair. And bright blue eyes, maybe even as bright as Pete’s. A strong jaw with a slightly crooked nose. A line of stitches going across his forehead, mostly hidden by his curls, with the plaster over yesterday’s gash in the middle. A similar line of stitches wrapped all the way around his neck, with nails driven perpendicular into either side.

“What is this?” Roger demanded; John had promised him answers but now John wasn’t around, so this Pete bloke would have to do. “Why do we have these?”

He gestured to the line on his neck as he did so, then looked up at Pete. The other man looked… haggard? Now that Roger had gotten a good look at his own complexion did he see just how sickly Pete appeared.

“You, me, and John were all… reanimated,” Pete said, the last word both emphasized and delicate. “Not singular corpses, but, lots of pieces from a lot of dead people put together to make a new body. A charge from lightning starts the brain up again, and… whoosh.”

He waved his hand at that last sentiment, then looked down at Roger, nervousness writ plain on his face. But Roger was too shocked to worry about that.

“You… made me? Out of other people?” Roger asked, fingers going to the stitches on his throat.

“No! I- I mean, I wasn’t the one who did it, it was mostly John, well, mostly Keith, he made both of us for the most part, I think, and then John finished you and I mostly watched, but I did help him with the reanimation itse-”

“Who’s Keith?”

That stopped Pete’s mouth mid-word. “Er. He… he’s the one who made John. I don’t think he’s around anymore.”

Roger considered that. “But why? Why make us?”

Something grave crossed Pete’s face, and the other man turned away to sit back down in the chair next to the bed, the one that he’d sat and read his book in while Roger slept. Hand in chin, not looking back to Roger, Pete spoke.

“Keith did most of the work on us, but he didn’t finish. John finished us… after Keith passed, I think.”

“He was lonely,” Roger finished; or at least, he was pretty sure that was what Pete was getting at. It made sense; of course John would need someone after losing Keith.

Pete looked back at Roger again, meeting his eyes. The electric blue made a little more sense, if they were born from a lightning strike.

“Yeah, I think that’s it,” Pete confirmed with a nod. “But… well, you must be hungry. I’ll get you some broth. Don’t- don’t pull out the nails, you could paralyze yourself.”

“I won’t,” Roger agreed emphatically as Pete stalked off. He looked back down in the mirror, sky-blue eyes meeting themselves.

What the hell am I? He asked the newly-acquainted face, but no answer came.

The seams all over his body had been undeniable when he’d changed clothes, and then Pete had awkwardly let Roger drape an arm over his shoulder to help him limp to the parlor. (Or at least, one of the parlors- Roger suspected this manor had several.) He offered him some plain broth, which didn’t taste like much, but feeling the warmth of it go down his throat to fill his stomach was pleasing. He was also proud of managing to use the spoon to bring it to his mouth without spilling any.

“Your dexterity’s impressive, it hasn’t even been twenty-four hours,” Pete observed. The condescension in his tone poked a hole in Roger’s pride; so, he brought up the bowl right to his mouth and slurped the rest down, then looked at Pete with a smile.

“Cheers,” he said cheerily, but Pete only nodded and took the bowl.

“Oh, and the ringing in your ears should go away within a couple days,” Pete added.

Roger frowned. “My ears aren’t ringing.”

“Oh,” Pete said, looking at Roger as if to discern whether he was making a joke. “Huh. Mine did for a few days. That’s… that’s good.”

From there, Roger tried to walk.

Walking was hard.

The fancy furniture made for decent handholds to grab and lean against as he found his balance and began attempting to wobble a foot forward. Behind him, he heard the sound of paper ruffling- and turned to see Pete sat down on a sofa, seemingly reading the same book he had last night.

“I don’t need minding,” Roger told him, unable to contain his annoyance.

Pete gave him a snooty look. “I’m not minding, I’m observing-”

“Call it what you want, I don’t need to be baby-sat,” Roger interrupted.

Pete frowned for a moment, then sat up, stretched, and shrugged. “Fine. Holler if you need anything.”

He stalked from the room, leaving Roger alone.

Without Pete’s presence, the silence of the house filled the air. Rain pattered against the windows, which were mostly covered by old, dusty brown curtains. The room smelled slightly musty, though it wasn’t entirely unlived in, and it had to have been dusted at least semi-recently.

A sound rang out and Roger startled, nearly losing his balance. It was… a harpsichord? A few rooms over, he suspected. He paused and listened for a moment as Pete- it was almost certainly Pete- played a run of notes, then a melody, then- plink! A bum note.

Roger suppressed a laugh, but in doing so, almost lost his balance. So, he resolved to put Pete from his mind and focus on walking.

With the sound of the rain and the harpsichord as his accompaniment, Roger slowly found his rhythm. He fell on his ass a few times, but slowly increased the number of steps he could take without needing to grab onto something for balance: one stride, two strides, a few strides, until he could slowly cross from one end of the room to the other without too much wobbling. He’d probably still be grabbing at furniture for support for the rest of the day, but he could feel himself getting in tune with his muscles and his body as a whole.

Satisfied with the results, he carefully opened the door to the room- taking a step back was still a little precarious- and trailed a hand against the wall as he walked down the hallway, following the sound of the harpsichord.

He did his best to quiet his steps as he approached the doorway the sound was leaking from, slowing down as to not give away his presence before leaning against the wall right next to the doorway. The occasional sound of paper flipping told him that Pete was playing along to sheet music, and the song sounded familiar: a soft and sweet tune laced with nostalgia. Words came unbidden to the tip of his tongue.

“Though I know I'll never lose affection, for people and things that went before…”

The song cut off abruptly, and Roger put a hand to his mouth, realizing that he’d been singing along out of some instinct. Footsteps came towards him, and Pete swung around into the hallway.

“Got the hang of it, then?” Pete said, giving Roger a prickly once-over with his eyes.

“Yeah, more or less,” Roger responded, taking a step away from the wall to prove he could keep his balance without leaning on something. “You seen John around?”

They both knew very well that Roger knew very well that Pete had been a few doors down at the harpsichord the whole time, but he asked regardless.

“Er- no,” Pete responded, awkwardness thick in the air.

“Oh,” Roger said, not sure what to say next despite being the one to bring them onto the topic, “Well, ah, I’m starved, so…”

“Kitchen’s downstairs, help yourself. Probably, ah, stick to liquids, for today,” Pete said with a shrug, then turned and returned to the room with the harpsichord- closing the door behind him as he did so.

The sound was muffled, now, but Roger could still hear it as he carefully descended down the staircase at the end of the hall.

John was already in the kitchen when Roger finally found it, a few odd turns past rooms that seemed to be well-lived in and completely deserted at random.

“That smells delicious,” he commented at the smell wafting from the pot on the stove that John was attending to.

“Good,” John said, not looking up.

“Pete was wondering where you’d gone to.”

John looked up at that, eyebrow raised, then back down at the soup. “He get you anything to eat yet?”

Roger nodded. “Just some broth, a while ago. Pretty hungry now.”

“Good.”

Conversing from several feet away felt awkward, so Roger stepped closer, trailing a hand along the kitchen counter to keep his balance until he was standing by John’s side. The other man looked down at him curiously.

“You’re up and about quick, that’s good,” he said, then returned his gaze to the soup. “Was worried- well, did some things different with you. Denser proportions.”

Roger crossed his arms. “That really all you have to say to me? Listen, Pete told me the basics, you cobbled me together out of other folk, but that doesn’t tell me who I am. My body’s all…” he ran a hand over a seam running down the length of his left forearm, “But who was I before?”

John looked at him, eyes-to-eyes. John’s eyes were a darker blue than Pete’s or Roger’s own, but with an impressive depth that Roger hadn’t noticed when he’d had his allergic reaction the day before. Knowing what he knew now, he thought he could see the flickers of emotion somewhere below John’s stoic expression, but Roger couldn’t say it with confidence.

“There’s no ‘before,’” John told him. “Lots of bodies, lots of brains. Yer something new.”

Something tightened in Roger’s chest, all too alike to his reaction. “I’m- not anybody?”

“You’re you. Roger,” John said with a slow nod towards him. “Welcome to the world of the living.”

Roger grasped at the edge of the counter with both hands, suddenly feeling weak at the knees. There wasn’t anyone looking for him, anybody who knew him, who could fill in the holes in his memory. He didn’t realize he’d made that assumption, hadn’t consciously thought it, there’d just been something in the back of his head telling him that he had someone, at least one person out there in the world, who knew him. Who would be there for him.

“Hey,” John said softly, and Roger snapped to attention as the other man put a hand on his shoulder. John looked as if he wanted to say more, but something was stopping him- nervousness, Roger deduced.

“I…” Roger began, but he didn’t know what to say, especially with what Pete had told him that morning. And then it clicked: there was somebody here for him. John had made him, out of lonely desperation, maybe, but not with any demands to accompany it, and now he was making soup and had delivered on the answers he’d promised, even if they weren’t easy ones. The look in the other man’s eyes was guarded but kindness flickered through, and that was enough.

Roger flashed a small smile, the most he could manage, and relented his death grip on the counter. “I’m alright, just- just starved. Think I’m gonna sit down.”

---

Roger’s smile had nearly cracked John in two.

His hand remained steady on the ladle as he portioned out a bowl each for himself and Roger, but if he were an ordinary person, he knew he’d probably be shaking.

John had seen that smile before, he’d swear it: it was the smile that Keith would give, after the worst nights, when all the madness of the world caught up to the two of them and it would finally show on Keith’s face, and they’d fight through the darkness together until they felt a little better. And that smile was the one that proved that things were getting a little better.

The soup was flavorless in his mouth as he turned over memories in his head, ones he’d buried for the past two months, all the while doing anything but looking at the blond stranger sitting at the table with him.

He’s not you. He can’t be. He’s not, John repeated in his head. He was talking to Keith in his head again. He’d sworn it off, after the first month, but he needed someone to hear him even if he couldn’t speak.

I can’t take it. He’s not you. Neither of them. If I can’t have you back as you then I can’t have anyone.

The urge to self-sabotage grew too great. He chanced a look at Roger. Roger was enjoying the soup.

He couldn’t bring himself to believe it had been a mistake. Had it? It had been selfish, hadn’t it? Nothing but selfish. And cruel. Cruel to Keith, maybe. Cruel to these two, likely. Cruel to himself. No, it hadn’t been, he’d needed someone, he’d been drowning-

He stood up and walked away, leaving his bowl at the table.

“Oi, John, what’s-”

John closed the door behind him.

---

The next few days were odd.

Roger wasn’t sure what prompted John’s exit from the dining room on Roger’s first full day awake, but following that, the other man had practically become a ghost. Roger didn’t see him at all the second day, and only stilted exchanges with Pete revealed that he was around somewhere.

Speaking of Pete, he seemed to hover about Roger like a hummingbird, seeking him out at odd times of the day to ask after him; all, apparently, in the name of ensuring he was functioning properly. Roger repeatedly brushed him off; there wasn’t anything wrong with him, so he wasn’t sure what Pete was looking for, if anything. Something about the other man’s attitude prickled at him, so he responded with prickliness in kind.

All the while, the storm whose lightning had animated Roger had continued to rage throughout the week, leaving the manor feeling especially cramped. Roger had eventually decided to brave the storm just in the name of feeling grass under his feet, but all that had gotten him was muddy and some snark from Pete.

Fortunately, the manor wasn’t bereft of things to do. Roger stayed away from any room containing chemical apparatuses, but that was only a few rooms compared to the myriad filled with random junk and trinkets. There was one that he was pretty sure was John’s room, which he left alone, and a room one door over whose knob seemed to be jammed. Unlocked to him was a room that had probably once been a bedroom but was now a haphazard library, with stacks of books piled up in dusty stacks both on the floor and on top of dressers. There seemed to be some attempts at organization, but none of them had made it very far, creating only small pockets of order amidst the chaos. He did find a couple clippings of what could only be described as salacious materials, with a variety for readers of all genders; Roger pocketed a couple of those for himself.

He did manage to find John, eventually, in a room full of stuffed and taxidermied fish. As Roger entered, John was inspecting some of the mounts as if expecting the fish to talk back.

“Blimey, you catch all these yourself?” Roger asked; John startled badly, and turned to him with visible annoyance on his face.

“I’m busy, go bother Pete,” John said tersely, quickly schooling his expression. Roger felt as though he’d been struck; it was the first sign of any aggression or, really, any negativity at all he’d seen from the man.

“I-” Roger began, flabbergasted at being put on the spot all of a sudden, “Pete’s… well, I don’t know him-”

“You don’t know me either,” John said, turning away from Roger, then added quietly, “Leave me be.”

“A-alright,” Roger relented, and then turned tail and walked from the room as calmly as he could manage.

He puttered about the house for the rest of that afternoon, trying not to lose track of John as he did so. What had he done wrong that could’ve upset the other man so badly? Their last civilized exchange- and practically the only one he’d successfully had with the man- hadn’t been all that long, and John had been nothing but kind and gentle to him.

He’s lonely, Roger reminded himself, he’s been lonely for… God knows how long. But then again, how long has he had Pete around? Roger ran an anxious hand through his hair; the situation all of a sudden felt as though he’d been tossed into a swift river without ever having learned to swim.

He explored a little more that night, finding a room that seemed to be a walk-in closet if a walk-in closet were, well, a walk-in room. He was already growing tired by the time he found it, though, and lingered just long enough to grab a pair of comfy-looking pajamas that fit him, more or less, before retiring for the evening.

The next morning, Roger returned to the closet-room, and ended up spending hours looking through the odd collection of clothes heaped in piles on the floors, stuffed in dressers, heaped in piles on chairs, hung up willy-nilly, and heaped in piles on top of the dressers. After a while, he noticed a trend in that most clothes either fit himself or were much too big; from this he guessed that Keith had been closer in height to himself than to John. Still, surely not all these clothes were for just two people: there were women’s clothes as well, professional clothes, military regalia, fancy dress, and just too damn much for two people to wear even in a lifetime.

Roger had to admit: walking out of that room with a proper set of clothes on and a spare set bundled under his arm might have been the most alive he’d felt yet. Of course, they were a little musty, so he sought out Pete, who he found in the library.

The other man was reclining on a plush sofa, legs strewn across the length of the seat, and so utterly absorbed in his book he didn’t seem to notice Roger at all; at least, not until he bumped against a precarious stack of books while trying to traverse the room, sending them sliding to the floor.

He glanced up at Roger, who couldn’t bring himself to feel guilty about making the messy room slightly messier. “Oh, hullo.” Then he looked back down at his book.

Christ, Roger couldn’t figure out the other man’s problem. But he wasn’t there to crack Pete, just to ask him a question.

“Do we got anywhere I can do some washing up?” he asked, gesturing at the clothes under his arm.

“Yeah, washing room’s through the kitchen, door on the left,” Pete said, then flipped the page. “And would you mind opening the curtains a little wider?”

Roger looked at the length of room between him and the window- and the obstacles along the way- and rolled his eyes. “Sure.”

He traipsed across the room to reach the window and threw wide the curtains to reveal-

Sunlight. A full shaft of it was spilling into the room, making a dance floor of the air as a crowd of dust and specks whirled in the sunbeam. Roger turned back to see the room utterly transformed, all the same yet so plainly different in the bright light, quite a few shadows chased away making it easier to see just how cozy the room was.

“‘Ta,” Pete mumbled, still not looking up from his book.

“Pete- blimey, look!” Roger exclaimed, turning back to the window, from which he could now see a wide, blue sky over rolling green hills.

“Eh?” Pete asked, looking over his shoulder up at Roger and the window. “What?”

“The storm’s passed,” Roger said, now feeling a bit like a fool. Of course Pete wouldn’t be impressed- he’d presumably seen many sunny days before. Still, he couldn’t help but lean right up against the window to take in the view.

“Yeah, stopped raining last night,” Pete added, flipping a page.

Roger resisted the urge to huff. He turned and stomped back over to Pete.

“You are as pale as a corpse. Let’s go for a walk,” he said right to his face. The bags under Pete’s eyes weren’t doing him any favors, not to mention the fact that he didn’t look like he’d shaved once since Roger had woken up.

Pete frowned, but then, shockingly, seemed to consider it. Then, he lowered his book. “S’ppose someone needs to warn you about Doris and Boris.”

Roger frowned. “Who’re they?”

Pete chuckled a little, put his book aside, and stood up.

---

Pete rather enjoyed watching Roger jump in surprise at the sight of Doris and Boris in their trees. Doris had added to the effect by being in the middle of spinning a new web between two branches; the sight of her massive legs working on the white strands was uncanny at best.

“Bloody hell,” Roger swore. “And you said-”

“Yup. Their silk’s holding us skinbags together,” Pete said with a smirk.

Roger shot him a disgusted glance. “You really don’t have to phrase it like that.”

Pete shrugged; Roger rolled his eyes. Then, a smile crossed his face, and in a flash, he shoved Pete.

“Tag!” Roger called out, and rushed off across the overgrown lawn.

“Eh-?” Pete said, taken by surprise, but Roger had already put quite a bit of distance between them, “Oi, hold on!”

With that, he took off after Roger, who’d taken off towards the side of the house and was circling around towards the front. Neither of them had proper shoes on, and Pete felt the still slightly soft ground beneath his feet as he trampled the grass.

“Hold up, Rog-!” Pete called out, already feeling his breath go shallow, but Roger had turned the corner and gone out of sight.

Pete paused to catch his breath, and listened for Roger in the distance, but the sound of the breeze through the grass and trees drowned out any chance of hearing him. So, instead, he called out, “Piss off, I’m going back inside!”

Then, he lingered at the corner of the manor, under the window to the kitchen, and tried his best to listen. After a moment, he heard the reckless rustling of grass, and-

“Oof!”

Pete had tackled Roger as he’d turned the corner, grabbing the other man by the shoulders and knocking him to the ground. To his surprise, Roger laughed, eyes closing for a moment as he smiled and then began to grapple with Pete. Within moments, Roger had turned the tables- and Pete himself, flipping him over so his face was in the grass.

“Gach!” Pete cried out as he spat grass out of his mouth; he felt as Roger successfully pinned his arms behind his back.

“I win!” Roger called out, then relinquished his hold. Pete flipped back over to see that the both of them were now grass-stained and muddy, but there was a smile on Roger’s face.

“I know you were practically born yesterday but that was pretty childish,” Pete griped, earning a cuff on the shoulder.

“Just wanted to stretch my legs proper,” Roger responded. Then, he stood up and offered a hand to Pete, who grumblingly accepted it.

“Yer mad,” Pete rebutted, weakly, then, looked around, “But… ‘s nice out.”

“Don’t get out much, eh?” Roger commented. Pete rolled his eyes. Through unspoken agreement, the two of them started walking back around to the front entrance.

“Haven’t had much time to,” Pete responded to Roger’s comment as they walked.

“Ah. Right. Workin’ on me,” Roger said. “S’ppose I should thank you for that.”

“I told you, I didn’t do much,” Pete said earnestly, then shrugged, “Was mostly cloudy out, between my storm and yours.”

Roger stopped. “‘Old on, how long have you been awake?”

Pete looked back at him and frowned. “Little over two weeks now. Why?”

“But you- you knew all about that bloody stuff, and-” Roger said, confusion curling his lip; then, he shook his head, curls bouncing as he did so. “Why the ‘ell were you asking me about all that, then? About me muscles and everything?”

“Wha-?” Pete started, then frowned; he hadn’t considered how that would come off to Roger, who didn’t know that Pete had barely a week’s head start on him. He looked down at his feet. “I, ah, didn’t know what else to talk about.”

Roger eyed him for a moment, then, chuckled, and said, “Let’s go wash up, then.”

“Eh…?” Pete asked as Roger turned and hurried towards the house. He didn’t quite follow; well, he didn’t follow Roger’s thoughts- he did follow the other man indoors.

As they took turns wiping themselves off in the first-floor bathroom, Pete turned over Roger’s words. He had known a lot of the science behind reanimation, right from the get-go… surely that wasn’t within the average persons’ pool of knowledge, was it? Where had John gotten, well, the constituent parts for Roger and himself?

An amusing image of a community of rival madmen all trying to resurrect the dead flitted across Pete’s mind- he didn’t put John above getting his hands dirty, not for a moment, and the collection of rifles he’d found in the attic certainly didn’t hurt- but that idea was a farce and he knew it.

He turned back to other oddities in his- or Roger’s- knowledge. There was the song he’d been practicing, the one he could mostly recall, but… he hadn’t known the words. He’d known there were words, he could tell, somehow, that it was a song meant to be sung, and yet they had entirely escaped him. But Roger…

A sickening realization struck Pete as he stood in the bathroom, watching Roger wipe at the mud on his coat. There was one person who’d have the knowledge of reanimation, a person who was most certainly dead. And Pete and Roger knowing complementing halves of a song could, possibly, be explained by them both having different pieces of someone’s brain…

“John, where’s John?” Pete asked out loud, then, without waiting for an answer, stormed from the room, fists balled. This couldn’t be- but it made too much sense-

“Oi, hold on!” Roger said as he trailed behind him, but Pete was a man on a mission; he flipped around to snap at the other man, right there in the hallway.

“John’s got explaining to do,” Pete growled, “If he thinks I’m- we’re- some kind of substitutes then-”

“What are ye talking about?” Roger demanded, but there was no anger in his voice, only confusion.

“S’ppose- you should know too,” Pete accepted; if he was going to spring this on John then he should at very least not spring it on Roger at the same time. “Think it through. I only woke up, what, two and a half weeks ago? How would I understand all this chemistry? How could you and I know separate halves of a song?”

“I don’t follow,” Roger said, shaking his head. “Halves- what do you mean?”

“The lyrics. You were singing them, that day- I didn’t know them. I knew there were lyrics, I was trying my damnedest to remember them, but you knew- do you know all of them?”

Roger frowned, still shaking his head slightly, but then his eyes lit up. “Yeah. Yeah, I think I do.”

“But not the melody?”

“No… no, I didn’t, not ‘til I heard you playing it.” A quizzical expression crossed Roger’s face. “How…?”

“Think it through,” Pete said once more, “If everything we knew to start with came from the people we’re made of, then what are the odds, eh? It’s like the song was split down the middle between us.”

“Makes sense we’d have some bits from the same people, no?” Roger defended. “I don’t- I don’t mind, at least…”

“No, but, well- yeah, you’re right, but…” Pete conceded- it could be that they both got the song from some random bloke- “Who else would know what I can remember now? All the science? Who else but John, besides the person who made him?”

Roger’s eyes widened in realization. “That’s… no, but-”

“John said that we were new people, but, what if that isn’t what he was hoping for? What if we were just… an experiment?”

A hand went to Roger’s mouth as if he were suddenly feeling sick. “That’s- no, I can’t- he wouldn’t. John wouldn’t.”

“How would you know what John would and wouldn’t do?” Pete probed, an unsettling feeling going through him.

“I don’t…” Roger trailed off with a look in his eyes that practically shattered Pete. “I just, since I woke up, ‘s like, he’s just felt… familiar. I can’t explain, I just-”

“Then that settles it,” Pete said grimly, turning back around to continue his search for John.

“Wait,” Roger said, firmly, before grabbing Pete’s wrist and stopping him in his tracks. Pete looked back again and shook off the other man’s hand while delivering his best glare.

“If he put bits of Keith in us then we deserve to know,” Pete snarled, but Roger’s expression stayed determined.

“I know, I’m bloody well pissed, too, but- I don’t want to hurt him, alright?”

“I’m not going to kill him,” Pete said, rolling his eyes, “Just get some bloody answers.”

“That’s not what I meant. He’s- he’s grieving. He must be, right?”

That, at least, struck home to Pete’s heart. Yes, John was grieving, and there was no mistaking it. It was Pete who’d pieced that together in the first place.

But I have to know, Pete repeated to himself, but then gave a curt nod.

“I- alright. I won’t browbeat him,” he acquiesced. “But I’m not going to let him get away with silence.”

“Alright, then,” Roger said with a nod. The two continued down the hallway, side-by-side.

---

John was picking through a stack of books in the library when Roger and Pete walked in.

He looked up to see both of them with determination in their eyes. Was that expression familiar? A little… yet neither of them pinched their eyebrows together so close that they seemed to touch. Pete’s kinetic energy bounced to a frequency all his own, and Roger’s crossed-arm posture was controlled almost to the point of feigning relaxation. Neither resembled the man whose body had completed their own.

John eyed them both. He knew what they were going to say before they said it, or at least, the gist.

“John, we had a question we wanted to ask you,” Roger said diplomatically, then looked over to Pete.

“A question about Keith.”

Something cruel closed a fist around John’s heart, and he closed his eyes. “I can’t-”

“We need to know,” Roger said, then, softer, “We deserve to know, John.”

He opened his eyes and rushed for the door, but Pete stepped in his way. Pete, who he could probably throw halfway across the room if he tried.

“John-”

“Out of my way,” he snarled, and took Pete’s surprise as a chance to push past him and out into the hall.

I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Oh, Moonie, I’m sorry…

He felt as though his heart was being stilled entirely by that iron grip, all the world going fuzzy and receding as though he were falling through the floor into some dim, distant place. Entirely by instinct, his feet found their way to the master bedroom. Some time in that hazy first month, he’d locked it from the outside and managed to break the key off into it; he’d written that off as good fortune, and had taken to sleeping on the couch in the parlor one door over. Now, actually bothering to apply his great strength to it, he broke the knob and the door swung inwards.

The room smelled dusty, but somewhere underneath it was a familiarity, a receding scent of sweat and odd chemicals and dirty clothes. He only managed a few steps in before falling to his knees. He pressed his hands against his face, nearly doubling over at the wave of sorrow that crashed through him, the hazy grip of apathy slackening only to make room for the grasping, icy hand of want.

Oh, God, I’m sorry. You’d know what to say. You’d find the words, you’d say something to me and it would all be alright, you’d know how to tell them, hell, you’d tell them the truth and they’d be smiling by the end of it. But you’re not here.

By some strength not of body but of will, John climbed onto the bed, and cried.

---

Even Roger could see it: John’s flight really only had one explanation.

“Well there’s our fuckin’ answer,” Pete said, before scoffing and turning around to leave the room.

“Wait, hold on,” Roger said- he was getting tired of saying that. Fortunately, the other man actually stopped to listen. “Don’t- just let him go. He’ll talk when he’s ready.”

“And when’s that gonna be?” Pete asked, but they both knew that Roger didn’t have the answer. “I know, I… I’m not gonna bother him without you.”

Roger suppressed a frown, trying to read Pete’s face.

“I don’t think he- if he meant for us to be Keith, or hoped for it, he hasn’t shown it,” Roger said. He knew it sounded like he was trying to persuade himself rather than Pete, but he really did think that this was all just rotten circumstances.

“I know, but… could be a test, or somethin’,” Pete said, but he didn’t seem to believe his own words. “And even if he didn’t mean anything by it…”

Pete shook his head with a huff, then turned around to walk out the door, only to stop himself halfway and look back at Roger.

“Well, while we’re waiting… mind writing down the words?”

“Eh?” Roger asked, taking a moment to follow the non-sequitor, “Oh, to the song?”

“No, to the bloody Magna Carta. Yes, the song,” Pete said, then turned around for real and stalked off… seemingly expecting Roger to follow him?

Well, fuck it. Roger was curious now, too.

He followed Pete back to the parlor with the harpsichord. Pete tore a page out of a notebook on the piano stand and offered it to Roger alongside a pencil; he took it with a mutter of “thanks” and then wrote out the lyrics, speak-singing them under his breath to jog his memory. This was the first time he’d written, so his handwriting was rather messy, but it was legible enough and had improved a little bit over the course of writing it all down.

“Ready,” he said, looking back up at Pete, who sat alert at the piano, legs bouncing with anxious energy.

Roger stood back up as Pete began to play, the notes soft and flowing; the other man nodded once, twice, thrice-

“There are places I’ll remember, all my life, though some have changed…”

The first view lines came out slightly hoarse, his voice not entirely warmed up, but he fell into the rhythm easily, and the words came surer and surer.

The lyrics were ones of nostalgia and love, and so Roger closed his eyes, trying his best to feel his way to the place they came from. They were ironically unfitting, coming from someone who’d only lived for a week so far; what was it like, to have a person that you loved even more than a lifetime of joyous memories? Roger couldn’t say- he had neither of those things- but he followed Pete’s playing and somewhere in that sound was something that felt like truth.

“In my life, I love you more…”

Roger opened his eyes as Pete began to play the instrumental bridge, and almost jumped as he saw past the harpsichord to see another figure in the room, sitting on a plain bench next to the door: John.

Pete unsubtly bit back a curse as he nearly missed a note, but he kept playing, and the solo neared its end. He looked back up at Roger, who quickly met his eyes; Pete nodded again, and-

“Though I know I’ll never lose affection-” Roger sang, and then Pete joined in, voice rough but pretty.

“-for people and things that went before. I know I’ll often stop and think about them-”

“In my life, I love you more,” a third voice joined in, a high falsetto.

“In my life, I love you more…”

Pete followed Roger’s gaze to see John, the source of the falsetto that had cracked on the final line, but the two of them stayed silent. The other man’s eyes were bloodshot, and his gaze was distant.

“That was Keith’s favorite song,” he said, voice hoarse. Then, he looked over at the two men at the harpsichord. “But he couldn’t play. And he couldn’t- well, he loved to sing. I loved it when he sang. The other patrons of the bar didn’t.”

Roger silently stepped past Pete to sit down next to John on the bench.

“I didn’t- you’re not him. Neither of you. And I never meant for you to be him. You can’t bring back the dead. They’re gone. But I needed someone. And he was… what I needed, to finish you two. I never thought- I didn’t think for a second that what I was doing would bring him back. But then both of you, sometimes…”

The silence hung as the two considered the implication: John did see something of Keith in the both of them.

“I knew about the science,” Pete finished the thought.

“And I felt like… I knew you from somewhere,” Roger added.

John looked up at Roger, eyes mournful. “But you didn’t. You don’t know me.”

You don’t know me, because you’re not Keith.

The admission should’ve been a relief, but the grief in John’s eyes seemed near to spilling, and Roger couldn’t possibly take joy from that.

“I know you a little,” Roger ventured, as gently as he could. “I know you had a friend named Keith, and you miss him loads.”

“And I know that you’re a bloody madman,” Pete announced, tone almost smug.

Roger snapped up his gaze to look at the other man- what was he thinking?- but then a hearty laugh filled the room- John’s laugh.

“Fair cop, that,” John said, laugh fading into a sniffle.

“Well then…” Roger said after a moment, looking at the other two, “I’m not Keith, Pete’s not Keith, and John’s not tryin’ to make us some kind of Keith substitute. So… we alright?”

“Well, that’s a bit of a crude way to put it,” Pete said, a little too dismissively for Roger’s liking.

“Oi, this was all your idea,” Roger snapped back.

“Yes, and you’re very welcome for that,” Pete said with a smirk, then took an exaggerated sitting bow, waving his hand in a flourish.

“Oh, fack off,” Roger grumbled, then looked to John, who had taken a pipe out of his pocket. “Oi! I’m allergic to that, remember?”

John glanced over at him, then down at the pipe. “Ah. Right.”

“Hold on, that reminds me- John, you promised I could have summa that once we were done with Rog. You’re overdue-”

“-Christ Pete, will you leave the man alone? He was just-”

“No, s’alright,” John cut Roger off, “Been meaning to show you ‘round our collection. Got a lot of fun pipes ‘n paraphernalia.”

Roger put a hand to his face. These people are mad.

---

When the sunny weather promised to hold, the three made preparations to take a trip into town.

Pete watched as Roger adjusted a stylish hat on his head to hide the seams on his forehead; his curls already did a pretty good job of it, but it was better safe than sorry. John had told them that the locals already knew him as the odd, freaky-looking man from the manor with nails in his neck, but that did little to mollify the two, who were both wearing scarves plundered from the clothes room.

“Looks good on you,” Pete said idly as he watched Roger futz with the hat.

“Oh,” Roger said, hands falling to his sides before looking back at Pete with a smile. “Cheers.”

Pete’s cheeks flushed with warmth, and he turned away under the guise of adjusting his scarf. After a moment, John emerged, not nearly as over-dressed.

“Oh, and the locals know me as Mr. Entwistle,” John told them as they headed out the door.

Pete couldn’t help but snort. “What kinda name is that?”

“...Moonie came up with it,” John said after a moment. Pete and Roger both stayed silent; it was the first John had brought up Keith since that moment in the music room. He hadn’t been hiding away anymore, and had in fact been fairly chatty, but he’d mostly talked around the subject of Keith.

“Well, Roger and I should get last names too,” Pete spoke, breaking the awkward silence as they continued to walk down the overgrown path that led off the property.

“Does the house have a name?” Roger asked.

John considered that. “Well, Keith inherited it from his uncle Earnest, last of the Daltrey line. But the locals call it the Townshend Manor, considering.”

“Considering…?” Roger queried.

“It’s at the end of the town,” Pete said, rolling his eyes. Then, he licked his lips. “Pete Townshend. I like the sound of that.”

“S’ppose I get Daltrey, then,” Roger said, then sniffed, “‘Townshend’ is a bit stuffy.”

“S’not,” Pete protested; it was probably silly to already feel a sense of ownership towards the name, but he really did like how it sounded. “What does ‘Daltrey’ even mean?”

“High riverbank, I believe,” John said.

“How the hell do you know that?” Roger demanded, turning to him without breaking his stride.

“Read it in a book,” John responded, tone even.

Pete frowned. “What does Entwistle mean?”

“Dunno,” John admitted.

Pete shrugged, and the three continued walking down the path. After a moment, he began whistling- not any melody in particular, just something that sounded nice. Perhaps he’d write it down to play it on the harpsichord later.

Notes:

If you haven't heard Keith's version of In My Life, I recommend listening to it at least once.

I hope you enjoyed, and if you haven't already, please check out Toby's art! This fic would not exist if not for him bringing this AU to life. His other fanart is also pretty cool...

I also have other Who fics if you're interested ;)

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