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Chapter Text

Breaking Herbert out of prison is easier than Dan had thought it would be. When the idea first crossed his mind, he’d imagined that it would take a team of highly skilled criminal masterminds all working together, like something out of Ocean’s Eleven . Instead, all it takes are a few of the right words to the wrong people during a visiting day to start a full-scale riot, and that is all the distraction needed.

He’s turning out of the prison parking lot when he hears the first blare of sirens behind him. He just hopes that Herbert will recognize the opportunity for what it is—he must have thought about it, how he’d escape, right? He must know this is the best chance he’ll ever have, unless Dan can get that one lawyer to call him back and can scrape together the money for an appeal. Herbert wouldn’t know about the lawyer, anyway—he sends all of Dan’s letters back to him, unopened.

Dan loops the prison slowly, careful to avoid any residential streets and nosy neighbors, keeping an eye out for police cars speeding to or from the prison. He eventually finds Herbert stumbling out of the woods a ways down a back road—a local lovers’ lane, Dan thinks wryly. Appropriate.

“Get in before you give some poor teenager the fright of their life,” Dan says. The first words he’s spoken to Herbert in over a decade.

Herbert stares up at him in shock. “You’re…”

“Get in , Herbert.”

Herbert hesitates for a long moment. Dan is about to try to reason with him, to explain that however mad he is at Dan surely a ride across state lines would be better than going back to prison, but Herbert seems to arrive at the same conclusion, because he nods shortly and climbs into the car. He doesn’t say anything else, just stares out the front windshield as Dan hits the gas.

“I figured we should try to get at least into New York before tonight,” Dan says to fill the silence. “They’ll be looking harder for you here.”

Herbert doesn’t respond.

“I live in Illinois now—Daniel Cain does, anyway. Ethan Morse has a house in the Berkshires and visits Kurt Horning at Arkham Prison every other Sunday.” 

Dan passes over the fake I.D. Herbert accepts it wordlessly, peering at the terrible photo. The silence drags on. Dan switches on the radio. The local oldies station is in the middle of some Boston song that he faintly remembers Meg liking, lifetimes ago. He switches it off again.

Finally, Herbert clears his throat and says, “this I.D. card—they put holograms on them now.”

“I know,” Dan says. “I would’ve had to get a new one in a month. I have the paperwork for it—Ethan pays all his utility bills. Taxes, too.”

“Who’s Kurt Horning?”

Dan listens hopefully for a note of jealousy in the question, but Herbert’s tone is carefully neutral. At least he’s speaking to Dan. “Assault and manslaughter—too many bar fights, one of them went wrong.” He waits for Herbert to ask why he had sought out a prison thug, but he never does. “He started the riot today,” he says, hoping Herbert will understand.

Herbert sighs loudly and leans his cheek against the window. “I had been working productively in solitary. My notes—I was only able to save a few pages.”

Dan had known that Herbert was still angry—the years of unopened letters had told him that—but he had been hoping that his efforts as Ethan would at least thaw him out a little. Apparently not.

“I have all your old notes,” he offers. “Everything I could salvage.”

“This was different. New breakthroughs.”

“Breakthroughs?”

Herbert glares at him. “I’m not telling you any of this, Daniel.” 

“Right. Okay. You don’t have to tell me anything.” They’ve reached the end of the road, where it intersects with Route 2. Dan stops, puts on his turn signal—west, toward Albany. “Only—you will come with me, right? To Illinois?”

“Can I leave, once we get there?”

“Dammit, Herbert, do you think I’m going to lock you in?” Dan closes his eyes, takes a deep breath. Steadies himself. Unclenches his hands from the wheel. “You can leave if you want. Just give me a chance, okay? To show you?”

Herbert doesn’t speak again, but at least he doesn’t refuse. Dan is going to take it as a maybe .

*

They stop at a motel about an hour west of Albany,  a few miles off the highway. The ‘vacancy’ sign is flickering ominously, and the parking lot is completely empty, except for a scrawny raccoon pawing through a dumpster.

Dan checks them in under Ethan’s name and pays cash. He asks for two beds, to which the desk clerk glances at the parking lot where Herbert is waiting, raises an eyebrow and says, “sure,” far too skeptically for Dan’s liking. 

Herbert is back to pointedly ignoring Dan. As soon as Dan gets the door unlocked, he stalks across the room, sits down at the little corner desk, and starts scribbling on the tiny motel notepad, faster than Dan has ever seen him write before. He’s probably trying to recapture everything lost in prison.

It’s striking, how much older he looks. Dan hadn’t been fully prepared to see the creases around his eyes, or the touch of gray in his hair—an unpleasant reminder of all the time they have lost.  Dan wants to apologize, but what can he possibly say after so long? 

“I’ve done more tests too,” Dan says eventually. The only kind of apology that he thinks Herbert will understand. “You can look through my notes, when we get home? See if there’s anything valuable in there?”

Herbert hmm s skeptically, still writing frantically.

“You don’t need to include me,” he adds. “I can just give you the notes. Leave you to work through them alone. Just in case… in case they might help you.”

“Do you think they might help me?”

“One woman lasted a whole week,” Dan says. She had been responsive for most of that time, talking to him about her grandchildren and her childhood and what a good, sweet boy he was, but by the end she had screamed for death. Just like all the others.

Herbert’s pen stops suddenly, and Dan can tell he has to force himself not to look too interested. “You’re using human subjects again.”

“I have keys to the morgue.”

“You have keys to the morgue.”

“I, uh. I dated one of the cleaning ladies,” Dan explains, though his night with Lydia had hardly counted as dating . “Got her keys copied.”

Herbert almost smiles at that—Dan catches the way the corner of his mouth twitches. “That sounds like you.”

“We broke up,” Dan adds quickly.“Or weren’t really even together, actually. There isn’t—I don’t have a girlfriend. Or anyone.”

Herbert raises an eyebrow. “Okay.”

“I spend most of my nights in the basement, actually,” he says. 

“Oh, I’m sure you’ll find some new distraction soon enough.”

There’s the note of jealousy Dan had been hoping for. “Maybe I will,” he says, shrugging, as if it’s no concern to him how Herbert’s jaw was clenching and unclenching.

“If you want me to stay, you can’t bring your-—your floozies anywhere near me,” Herbert says. He looks flustered, almost anxious. He’s tapping the pen against the pad erratically enough that Dan worries he might have to recopy the notes a second time.

Dan doesn’t bother to point out that the term ‘floozy’ went out of fashion sometime before Herbert was born and that, anyway, it’s still an awful way to talk about women. He doesn’t even add that there have been more men than women lately—Herbert will find that out soon enough, if he does stay. 

 “I’ll keep my dating life strictly out of the basement.”

Herbert looks confused for a moment, as if he wants to say more but he can’t decide what. Finally, he gives Dan a jerky nod and says, “Fine, yes. That will be acceptable.”

Dan grins at him. “So you’ll stay?”

“I never said that.” Herbert glances down at his notes and then back up at Dan, frowning. “You have morgue access and space for me to work?”

“Yes.”

“And you’ll leave me to work, undisturbed?”

“You’ll never even know that I’m there,” Dan promises.

*

Dan isn’t sure if Herbert sleeps at all—he’s still hunched over the desk when Dan falls asleep and is in the exact same place when Dan wakes up, a little stack of motel notepads piled in front of him. The only sign that he has moved at all is a cup of coffee sitting on the desk, and another on the bedside table beside Dan.

Dan takes a sip of the coffee and smiles to himself. All these years in prison, and Herbert still remembered the sugar.

*

They stop at a gas station with a pay phone. Dan dials his voicemail to listen to the very concerned warden at Arkham inform him that Herbert West has escaped and might be motivated to seek revenge. Dan wonders what the warden would say if he knew the full extent of Herbert’s ‘revenge’ was refusing to tell Dan any of his newest discoveries. He also wonders what the warden would say if he knew that Dan would have preferred Herbert to come after him with a knife.

He sighs and dials the return number. When the warden picks up, Dan puts on his best concerned voice.

“I’m in New York on business,” he says. “Won’t be back home till Thursday. Will that be safe?”

The warden tells him that they’ve been in touch with the Oak Hills police department, and that they’ll be on the lookout for anyone matching West’s description. “If you give them the go-ahead,” the warden adds, “they can probably send someone down to search the house.”

“I’ll do that,” Dan agrees, looking at Herbert. He’s sipping his second cup of gas station coffee with an expression of intense distaste. “Do you really think Herbert West could be dangerous? I mean—he wasn’t exactly the biggest guy, and he mostly only ever cared about his work.”

“To you, Dr. Cain? I believe he could be very dangerous.”

*

By Thursday, Dan has spoken with an overeager officer from the Oak Hills PD, who assures Dan that they’ve been over his house with a fine-toothed comb and found no sign of Herbert West, or any other hidden fugitive for that matter. Dan doesn’t even have to pretend to be relieved—how would have reacted if he had found the basement stacked high with Herbert’s research and supplies, and some of the remains of Dan’s latest experiment not quite tidied away?

Then again, he would have had to have found the basement first.

Much to Herbert’s annoyance, Dan makes him crouch in the back of the car under an old blanket and Dan’s suitcase for the final approach to Dan’s street.

“My legs don’t fit,” he complains loudly. Probably just to show Dan that he’s not forgiven—Dan doesn’t remember him ever complaining about anywhere they’d had to hide back in the day.

“I know for a fact a taller body than yours fits back there just fine,” Dan retorts. “Be quiet , or Mrs. Morrison will think I’m talking to myself.”

Dan unloads his suitcase first and waits by the window, watching nosy old Mrs. Morrison chatting to one of the Fletcher boys. She waves at him and he smiles and waved back, hoping against hope she won’t decide it’s a good time for a neighborly visit.

It’s his lucky day, apparently, because Mrs. Morrison’s horrible little dog starts yapping and pulling at its leash and she immediately forgets about Dan in her concern over what could possibly be troubling her perfect precious little girl.

Dan waits another minute to be sure, and then goes back to the car for Herbert. It’s surreal, after months of planning and imagining, to finally be standing here on the threshold of it all. He’s having trouble believing it all worked out so well—he keeps expecting to hear sirens in the distance, but the only sound he can make out is Mrs. Morrison’s little dog still yapping inside the house. It feels like this should all be happening on a dark and stormy night, not on a quiet suburban street in the crisp autumn sunlight.

He takes a deep breath and lets Herbert into the house.

*

Herbert examines Dan’s living room— their living room now, if Dan has his way—with the same curiosity he would bring to his research. Dan catches a spark of hunger as he skims the bookshelves and spots some of the more obscure texts Dan has gotten his hands on.

“Impressive,” he admits, fingers brushing against the spine of Pitr Gideon’s monograph on neural decomposition. “He’s well known as a quack, of course, but even so… I’m surprised you could track down a copy.”

“You mentioned it,” Dan says. “It’s in your notes, that you hoped to read it in full at some point”

Herbert nods. “Quack or not, Gideon’s theories were foundational to much of Gruber’s early work.”

“Do you…” miss him , Dan wants to ask, but that suddenly seems to be crossing a line. Herbert never talked much about Gruber—his work, sure, but never a hint as to their personal relationship. Dan had never cared enough to pry, but now he desperately wants to know if Herbert is even capable of mourning.

Not right now, though. Not when Herbert is smiling at the books Dan bought for him, and it feels like there is a real possibility he’ll stay, at least long enough to read through a few of them.

Dan clears his throat. “Do you want to see the basement?”

Herbert is still doing his best to play indifferent, but Dan spots the light in his eyes and the way his fingers twitch at the word. “Very well.”

Dan leads him through the kitchen and into the pantry, fumbling for the light switch. “It’s a false wall, see?” He presses the latch, and the back wall swings forward.

“It’s entirely soundproof,” Dan continues as they make their way down the stairs. He knocks against the foam walls to demonstrate. “I did it all myself—I couldn’t get a contractor to do any of this, of course. I mean, can you imagine that? He would have thought I was a serial killer.”

“Or a sexual pervert,” Herbert adds.

Dan nearly trips. He absolutely cannot fixate on Herbert West saying the word ‘sexual’ or having ideas about sexual things Dan could be getting up to in a soundproof basement or his brain will short-circuit and Herbert will have him as his next test subject.

“Something on your mind, Daniel?” If Dan didn’t know better, he’d swear Herbert sounds almost flirtatious, but when he turns around, Herbert is paying Dan no attention, instead focused intently on the mechanism of the false wall.

Dan flips on the basement light. “All the power down here runs on that generator in the back, so it’s off the main grid. And you should have all the equipment you need—it’s worked for me so far, anyway. If there’s anything else, though, I could probably get it from the hospital.”

Herbert makes his way downstairs into the lab and begins to examine the cabinets with the same degree of care he had given to the bookshelves upstairs.  When he opens the cold storage and catches sight of what Dan’s keeping inside, his eyes widen.

“I thought you hated this kind of thing,” he says, holding up Dan’s failed attempt at a patchwork dog. “What exactly is—this bit?”

Dan winces. “I was trying to see if it could survive longer if I replaced the organs with those of a younger dog,” he explains. It emphatically had not. “It was a mistake I won’t make a second time.”

Herbert prods the tail with one finger, frowning, and then drops the dog back into the freezer. “But the human subjects—they will be fresher than this, correct?”

“It’s a short enough drive. You can do it in six minutes if you hit the light on Wakefield when it’s green.”

“Six minutes is a long time. Longer if that one very talkative neighbor of yours is around.”

“I’ve managed,” Dan says. “Give it a chance at least, okay? I’ll keep an eye out for anywhere closer.”

Herbert looks surprised by the offer. “I haven’t agreed to any of this,” he says sharply. “Don’t buy a new house for me. That would be a waste of your money. I’ll probably be gone by the end of next week.”

“Please.”

Dan’s voice cracks on the word. Herbert must notice it too, because his expression softens slightly and he inclines his head. “I’m not promising anything,” he says. “But if you leave me to my work and accompany me to your morgue when I see fit, then perhaps this arrangement could be workable.”

*

Over the following week, Dan barely sees Herbert. He can’t tell if he’s deliberately avoiding him—even at the best of times, Herbert had always skipped meals and sleep in favor of his work, but Dan would occasionally run into him making coffee or else hear him in the shower. Now, the house seems even more silent than it had been when Dan lived alone, as if Herbert is somehow dampening all the sound simply with his presence.

Dan would check on him, but he’s worried that the slightest disturbance will spook Herbert and send him running away forever. And so he leaves the basement alone and communicates with Herbert solely by sticky notes, which he sticks to the door of the hallway bathroom.

Do you need anything? He writes the first night.

Herbert apparently doesn’t, because Dan wakes up to find the yellow square crumpled up in the trash.

The next night, Dan copies down his work schedule for the week and adds in case you need me . Herbert seems to appreciate the necessity for the schedule at least, because it’s pinned to the fridge when Dan wakes up. Under ‘ in case you need me ,’ Herbert has added, I won’t .

I’m sorry , Dan writes the next night. It’s easier in writing. He knows how to write it—he had included it in every letter Herbert never read, dozens of apologies that had amounted to nothing but practice.

Herbert can’t send the note back unopened this time at least, so Dan knows he must have seen it. He leaves it untouched on the door, so Dan does too, a testament to everything that has passed between them. Underneath it, he writes, what do you want for dinner?

The apology note seems to have had some effect, or else Herbert is just hungry enough not to care, because Dan wakes up to find a list of Chinese food written out in Herbert’s neat script. Dan smiles to himself; unless Herbert’s tastes have changed dramatically in prison, he added an order of crab rangoon for Dan. Dan wonders if it was thoughtful or reflexive—he’s not sure which he prefers, Herbert having cared enough to include Dan’s order, or Dan being so much a part of his life, even now, that Herbert can’t help but include him.

He picks up the food on the way home from his shift and is pleased to find Herbert waiting for him at the kitchen table, reading one of the newer neuroscience books Dan had bought him. He keeps frowning and crossing things out with a red pen.

“That book cost over a hundred dollars,” Dan says.

Herbert glances up. “Were you planning to resell it?”

“No.”

“Then what does it matter?” He crosses out another sentence, his brow furrowed. “It’s complete garbage anyway. Dr. Gruber disproved most of this over two decades ago.”

Dan leans over to see what exactly has offended Herbert to such an extent, but he snaps the book shut and glares at Dan. “This is part of my work,” he snaps. “That means you can’t look at it.”

It’s my book , Dan wants to say, but it would be a waste of time to pretend that he hadn’t always intended the books as a gift for Herbert. Instead, he holds up the takeout bag. “Will you eat, at least?”

“I am here, am I not?”

Herbert doesn’t talk much over dinner. He used to monologue throughout their meals, practically forgetting to eat in his excitement over a new theory, flapping his hands wildly when Dan failed to immediately grasp the implications of the regenerative properties of a certain lobster or whatever else he was on about. Now, Herbert simply prods his broccoli critically while ignoring all of Dan’s attempts at conversation.

“Want to watch a movie?” Dan asks when Herbert has scooped up the last of his food. “I have some DVDs upstairs if you want to take a look?”

Herbert looks unimpressed. “Is this how you get women into your bedroom?”

Dan can feel himself flushing. He hadn’t meant it that way, but he has used the line on more than one date in the past. Not only for sexual reasons either—as soon as he started collecting the books, he had hated having anyone else in the living room. He always felt exposed, like one of them would spot the name Gruber on the highest shelf and recognize how pathetic Dan had become. 

“You can just say no,” he tells Herbert.

“Fine, I’ll watch a movie,” Herbert says. “There’s nothing else I can do in the basement tonight, anyway.”

“Why not?”

“ Cain ,” Herbert snaps. “Stop asking, I’m not going to tell you about the work.”

The surname hurts more than Daniel , and the refusal hurts more than either. Dan wonders if he will ever be able to regain Herbert’s trust, or if it will just be like this for the rest of their lives, with Herbert avoiding him and Dan locked out of his own basement.

Dan is about to lead Herbert upstairs and drop the subject for now, but he has never been able to leave well enough alone when it comes to Herbert. That’s why they’re here in the first place, why Dan wound up risking his career for a second time trying to help a man who seemed to hate him.

“Did you read my notes?” he asks.

Herbert glares at him. It’s a good look for him. “Daniel, you are no longer a part of my work. You made that clear when you sent me to prison .”

“And here you are,” Dan protests. “Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

“I was perfectly happy in solitary. I was finally getting work done free from your distractions.”

“Oh yeah? Lots of fresh bodies for you to work with?”

“The rats were fine.” Herbert takes off his glasses and begins cleaning them on his shirt. “Besides, I didn’t have to worry all the time about whether you’d change your mind and turn me in.”

“You worry about that?” Dan asks. He wants to reassure Herbert that he’s here and he’s sorry and he’s trustworthy, but why should Herbert believe him? Facts are safer. More trustworthy. He puts a hand on Herbert’s shoulder. “I lied to the police for you. If I turned you in now, I’d only be fucking myself over. Besides, why would I go through all this work only to turn around and send you back to prison?”

Herbert rolls his eyes. “I don’t know, Daniel, you tell me. Why would you turn me in, betray everything we worked on together, only to break me out again?”

Dan opens his mouth to speak—he doesn’t know how to explain it, not exactly, but he has to start somewhere —but Herbert shoves Dan’s hand off his shoulder and squeezes past him.

“I’ve changed my mind. I’m not in the mood for a movie tonight.”

*

They carry on like that throughout the next weeks. Herbert gets up before Dan—or simply doesn’t sleep, Dan can’t tell the difference. Sometimes, Herbert leaves a note with a food order, but more often he leaves Dan absolutely no sign of his existence. The ‘end of next week’—Herbert’s theoretical departure date—comes and passes without incident. Dan wakes the following Monday with his heart pounding, suddenly terrified that Herbert made good on his threat and that the house will be empty again. He rushes downstairs, imagining the basement emptied and the bookshelves in disarray, but the stack of defaced books is still sitting on the kitchen table and the bathroom door says, pizza (half pepperoni) .

Dan snatches down the note and clutches it to his chest, laughing out of sheer relief. 

A few days later, Herbert asks for a few medical supplies with the words NO QUESTIONS added below, underlined twice. Dan wonders how he expects him to get his hands on three class B narcotics and a very specialized piece of equipment before the next day without being fired or arrested, but Herbert never was all that focused on the practicality of his demands.

Dan spends his lunch break stealing from the hospital. He’s a bit concerned how good he’s gotten at it.

The next morning, Herbert hasn’t written anything else, but there’s a cup of coffee waiting on the kitchen table, black with two spoonfuls of sugar.

They eat together most nights after that, Dan gently trying to steer the conversation towards Herbert’s work while Herbert emphatically shuts him down every time. They don’t have much else to talk about—Dan will sometimes tell stories from the hospital, but Herbert either cuts in to criticize the other doctors’ decisions or to ask Dan snarkily if the female patients were good-looking. Dan generally gives up and eats in silence after that.

*

Herbert has been doing who-knows-what in the basement for over two weeks when he finally comes to Dan late one night, four hours before Dan’s alarm is set to go off, pounding on Dan’s door like it’s a matter of life or death.

Dan stumbles out of bed to open it. Two hours ago he probably would have punched the air knowing Herbert would deign to come up to him, but now he really just wants to squeeze in a few hours of sleep. “Yes?”

Herbert glances critically at his bare chest. “You still sleep like that.”

“I wasn’t exactly dressed expecting you to come banging on my door.”

“I need to go to the morgue,” Herbert announces. “You have to drive me.”

“Herbert, it’s past two in the morning.”

“And? Should we wait to steal corpses during business hours?” Herbert’s voice is sharp, but his eyes keep flicking down to Dan’s bare chest. “Would you please put some clothes on?”

Dan is tempted to press him on how distracted he seems by Dan’s body, but it’s not worth sending Herbert back into another weeks-long sulk. And besides, knowing Herbert, he’s probably just picturing breaking Dan apart for parts.

Even so, Dan can’t be blamed if he takes longer to find a shirt than is strictly necessary, or if he stands directly in Herbert’s line of sight as he does so. Unfortunately, after his initial discomfort, Herbert seems frustratingly unaffected by the display, just sighing and pointedly checking his watch.

“I’m coming goddammit, calm down.”

“We don’t want to waste the night,” Herbert says. “I’m in the middle of a very delicate experiment, and it will all be ruined if I don’t have a human heart at the very least in the next half hour. Preferably a brain as well.”

“I—Herbert, you’re not—”

“I’ve told you already, you gave up the right to ask about my work when you told the police all there was to know about it last time,” Herbert snaps. “Nothing I do will leave the basement, and that’s all you need to know about it.”

“I didn’t tell the police half of what I knew,” Dan protests. For some reason, the distinction is important to him. “Nothing about the work itself.”

“If that detail helps you sleep at night, you can keep repeating it. It hardly changed my sentence now did it?”

Dan could add that Herbert would hardly have been pleased when suddenly every academic in the field was clamoring for credit for his reagent, but there’s no point. Herbert is clearly determined to drive the knife in deeper, and Dan can’t pretend he doesn’t deserve it, so instead he just says, “I wouldn’t tell anyone.”

Herbert makes a little sound, skeptical, but his eyes flick down again as Dan pulls on a pair of jeans, so he takes that as half a win.

Herbert is silent on the drive to the morgue. Dan is starting to hope he might have warmed up a bit, but when they pull into the parking lot, he checks his watch and says, “ Eight minutes,” with a tone of disgust Dan has only ever heard him use about Dr. Hill, back in their student days.

“Does it matter how fast we get here?”

“I told you, Daniel, I’m in the middle of something,” Herbert snipes, grabbing the keys out of his hand. “Are you coming or not?”

“For fuck’s sake, Herbert, will you wait just one second?” Dan calls after him, but he’s already unlocking the back door and Dan has to jog to keep up.

“I can’t ‘wait just one second,’ I am on a deadline .” 

Dan sighs and follows him into the building. It’s nice, almost, seeing Herbert this excitable rather than the sullen version of himself that glared at Dan across the dinner table. On the other hand, it’s 3 in the morning and Herbert is dragging him by the sleeve down a hallway that smells overwhelmingly of formaldehyde, and he feels for a moment like it’s 1985 again and they’re back at Miskatonic, before Dan had fully understood the implications of what they were doing. He’s still not sure how he feels about that.

Herbert pauses at the entrance to body storage. “Why here?” he asks suddenly.

“Excuse me?”

“You have access to the hospital’s facilities, presumably?”

“Harder to trace back to us here, though,” Dan explains. “And besides, it’s easier for bodies to go missing here. Paper files disappear all the time. The hospital system is all digital now.”

“Fascinating.”

“What?”

Herbert tilts his head to one side. “Your foresight. That’s a new skill for you.”

“Hey, that’s not fair.”

“Hmm, isn’t it?” Herbert flicks on the light switch. “Now, you know the deal here. We’re looking for anyone that died in the last 24 hours— not a brain injury or a weak heart.”

“And then what are you going to do with them?” Dan asks, but he starts flipping through the nearest stack of files.

Herbert doesn’t answer, just makes his way through the row of bodies, occasionally peering at one or another and clucking his tongue disapprovingly. “Daniel, time is running out.”

“I’m reading this as fast as I can,” Dan snaps, flipping through a few more pages. “Do you want me to get this wrong?”

“I want you to find me what I need in time .”

“Wait—hold on a second.” Dan stops suddenly, halfway through checking the nearest body for cause of death. “I’ve seen you refuse to answer the phone because you were ‘in the middle of a delicate experiment,’ and now you’re just dropping everything to run out for some fresh parts?”

Herbert raises his eyebrows. “So?”

“So, this is bullshit! There’s no way you left that basement in the middle of something. You’d have waited.”

“Like you know me that well.”

“I do know you that well,” Dan retorts, becoming more convinced by the second that he’s right. It helps that Herbert, for all his professed rush, has stopped fumbling with the bodies and is now staring at Dan with his arms folded. “What is this, some kind of fucked up loyalty test?”

“So what if it is?”

Dan should probably yell at him, or storm out and leave him to get back to the house on foot. Instead he asks. “So, did I pass?”

Herbert’s mouth twitches. “You were adequate. B-.”

Dan thinks he’s joking. He can never quite tell. “So, if you’re making all this up then, are we done here?”

Herbert walks over to his side. Dan thinks for a moment that he’s going to reach out, to clutch Dan’s shoulder like he always used to, but instead he pries the stack of files out of Dan’s hand and starts flipping through them himself. “Well, as long as we’re here…”

Which is how Dan finds himself backing his truck into the corner of the parking lot free of cameras while Herbert drags one of the bodies into the trunk. “B- my ass,” Dan grumbles as he helps Herbert shove the man under the tarp.  “This has to be at least an A-.”

“B+ maybe if you really can get me back to the lab in the next six minutes,” Herbert replies. 

Dan gets there in five.

Chapter Text

Whatever Herbert says, the late night morgue run seems to have thawed him slightly. He still refuses to let Dan into the basement, but he’s started joining Dan for coffee every morning and then again for a few bites of dinner every night before disappearing back down the stairs.

Dan tries to gently nudge the conversation towards Herbert’s research, but every time, he shuts it down completely. A few times, when it seems like Herbert is on the edge of revealing something about his newest project, Dan will say “Oh?” or “Really?” or lean forward too noticeably and Herbert will snap his mouth shut and refuse to speak for the remainder of the meal. 

Even so, Dan gets the distinct sense that he’s making progress. Herbert still threatens to leave regularly, but he’s started to sound less serious about it, almost like it’s a running joke that the two of them share. One night Dan sets off the fire alarm, Herbert pokes his head out of the basement to shout, “That test is ruined , you had better actually be on fire,” and Dan can’t help but feel a bit charmed that Herbert would come running upstairs for him, his lab coat still on and stained suspiciously with blood. That has to be a good sign.

For his part, Dan tries to fall back into a normal routine. He goes to the hospital early, comes home late. Steals whatever supplies Herbert asks for. Tries to let Tina the radiologist down easy when she hints that she wants to go out sometime. Picks up takeout for two on his drive home. Occasionally, drives Herbert to the morgue in the wee hours of the morning and helps out with the heavy lifting.

It’s surreal, having Herbert back in the house. Dan feels caught in limbo, waiting for whatever would make Herbert invite him back downstairs. There are times he feels this is worse than when Herbert was in prison, and at least Dan could forget about him for most of the time, or at least pretend he could forget. Now, the basement door is a constant reminder of everything he can’t have.

He thinks about trying to date again—maybe he should take Tina up on her offer after all, try to put aside his weird fixation on Herbert and the work he’s doing and just have a nice night out. But every time he starts to say something, he remembers how Herbert used to act around Meg and Francesca and thinks that maybe he shouldn’t bring anyone else into the house while Herbert is still so prickly.

Besides, Herbert has already ruined all three of Dan’s longest and best relationships. The last thing Dan needs is further proof that he would never be able to move past his pathetic obsession with Herbert West.

After Herbert’s trial, Francesca hadn’t lasted—she and Dan had never had all that much in common to begin with, and the weight of everything that had happened was too much strain for their relationship to bear. She would catch Dan in the basement late at night, sorting through Herbert’s research, and each time she would look more resigned. Eventually, she simply left. Dan hoped she had found someone who would treat her better. She’d deserved it.

Next there had been Annie and Opal, each for a few dates, and then Tim for a few more, but none of them had stuck around. A string of awkward reminders that Dan was unfit for love until, finally, there was Lisa.

Lisa had been perfect for him. She had just started her first year of residency at the hospital and was smart, beautiful, and capable of making Dan laugh even after the most brutal overnight shifts. She was the first person he’d dated in years who actually felt like more than a replacement to fill the hole in his heart that Meg had left— only Meg, he assured himself, time and time again. Meg was the reason his new life in Illinois felt so empty. Meg was the person he was thinking about when he woke up feeling purposeless. All the nights he spent on the couch staring at the door, expecting a knock—those nights had been about Meg, too.

Lisa was nothing like Meg—where Meg had always been kind, had tried her best to give everyone the benefit of the doubt, Lisa was snarky and judgemental, almost to the point of mean. She had spent their first date complaining to Dan about her supervisor, complete with a very convincing impersonation of him, and Dan had snorted wine out his nose. They’d moved in together a month later.

It had been nice at first, living with someone again, especially someone fun and sexy and normal —he could come downstairs to find Lisa in front of the TV, picking apart the medical inaccuracies on ER , and he’d never once had to worry about finding spare limbs scuttling about.

And yes, it is possible that there were a few moments when he had noticed the similarities. Once, he’d scooped her up in his arms as she’d squirmed away from his tickling and he’d had to stop short, suddenly overwhelmed by the sense memory of another body writhing in his arms. He must have shown his discomfort too, because Lisa had looked worried and asked if she had hurt him.

“I’m fine,” he had said, as if he remembered what the word meant.

Then there had been the time that Lisa had come across an old picture of the staff at Miskatonic Medical, one Dan didn’t even remember taking but had kept in his study all these years, under a stack of other papers. Lisa had squinted at it, teasing Dan about his haircut and his ugly shoes, and Dan had been about to take it back when she had pointed to Herbert and said, “That’s so funny, that guy looks just like my brother.”

Dan had hidden the photo away after that, unwilling to think too hard about what that said about him.

They’d lasted for over a year, even so. Dan had been happy with her, to the extent that he could be happy while every shift at the hospital left him feeling lost and aimless. At least he’d been able to stay out of the basement.

But then Lisa had broken her glasses and Dan, without thinking, had offered to grab her the spare pair he had “lying around”—if “lying around” meant tucked away in the box in his closet that he had never been able to throw away. She’d laughed when she saw them.

“Did you actually used to wear these?” she had asked, squinting through them.

“No, they were. Uh. A friend’s.” It had sounded wrong on the tongue—whatever Herbert had been to him, friend was never quite accurate. “My old roommate.”

She had borrowed the glasses until her new pair was ready for pick-up. The prescription wasn’t perfect, she said, but it was close enough to what she was used to, even if they weren’t really her style. Dan had regretted it almost immediately. It wasn’t that she looked like Herbert, not exactly, but he couldn’t help but notice how her nose turned up the same, or the way her eyes would catch the light when she said please could he rub her shoulders. He should have avoided her for the week. Better yet, he should never have brought up the stupid glasses in the first place. He could have pretended not to have them—he could have given them and the rest of Herbert’s things to good will instead of carting around a box of suits and narrow ties and those goddamn army boots Herbert had bought for Peru.

But Dan couldn’t make himself do any of that, and so instead he’d spent the most emotionally confusing week of his life alternating between staring at Lisa in a way he knew must come across as too intense, and ignoring her completely. It had all come to a head one night, when Dan had put a baseball game on in the living room while Lisa was reading, and she had looked up at him through Herbert’s glasses and said, “Dan, is that volume really necessary when I am working ?” in such a Herbert-esquetone that Dan had knocked over his beer. 

Dan had fucked her there on the couch in what was—depressingly—the best sex of his entire life, after which he had told her that he couldn’t see her anymore. He’d fully deserved everything her sister had done to his car.

*

Lisa had taught him that he wasn’t meant for serious relationships, not anymore. Any girlfriend he brings home now would have to handle the fact that he had an escaped convict living in his basement anyway, and while he thinks Tina-the-radiologist has no idea who Herbert West is, let alone what he looks like, she has definitely heard the rumors swirling around Dan at the hospital. They all have by now. Dan can tell by the way everyone carefully looks away from Dan whenever Miskatonic comes up.

“How do you feel about getting a cat,” Herbert says over dinner one night.

Rufus’s mangled body flashes in Dan’s memory. “...what for?”

“For companionship , Daniel. I’m not the monster you seem to think I am. If I needed a cat for my work, I would simply ask you to procure a dead one.”

“I didn’t think you liked cats,” Dan says, still thinking of Rufus.

Herbert sets his fork aside and looks up at Dan, as if to emphasize his own seriousness. “ You like cats, Daniel. I do not care one way or another for cats, but you seem lonely and I think you should get a cat.”

“I seem lonely?”

Herbert rolls his eyes. He does that a lot whenever Dan speaks. “More than once, I’ve found you sitting in the living room just staring at my door. You come directly home from work, without any time spent socializing. Despite my earlier concerns, you haven’t bothered me with your usual string of idiotic conquests. I thought a cat might help.”

“ You could help,” Dan says, nodding at the basement. “I’d rather—” he stops himself, before he can say something as pathetic as I’d rather have you than a cat . “I could help you,” he says instead, folding his hand over Herbert’s. “I know the work, I understand it. I could be useful.”

Herbert glances at the basement door and then at Dan’s hand on his. He seems to be considering it and for a long moment, Dan is sure he’s going to cave. But then he pulls his hand away and shakes his head. “You should get a cat. As long as it’s alive, I’ll leave it alone.”

*

Dan only stops by the bar in the first place because Tina is having a birthday party and she’d made it clear that she’d really like Dan to be there. He doesn’t have the heart to turn her down again, so he swings by with the intention to have a few drinks and take his mind off the locked basement for a night. Besides, it’s not like Dan has anything better to do with his evening, not when Herbert has made it so clear he wants nothing to do with Dan.

Tina is surrounded by friends already when Dan arrives. She grins and waves, and for a minute it looks like she’s going to come over to him, but then one of her friends says something and tugs her away, leaving Dan standing alone by the bar. It shouldn’t hurt, but for some reason it does.

When the man smiles at him across the bar, he can’t resist. He’s on his third drink and it’s been so long , and every time he lets his mind wander he keeps replaying the memory of Herbert snatching his hand away and telling Dan he’d be better off with a cat. The longer he’s out, the angrier he keeps getting about it—doesn’t Herbert understand what he risked to bring him back into his life? And after all that, Herbert has the nerve to lock him out of his own fucking basement?

Dan doesn’t bring Craig back to his place specifically to show Herbert that he doesn’t care and he doesn’t need a cat, that he’s perfectly fine if Herbert wants to sulk and hoard all of his research and refuse to touch him. Craig is hot and eager and into him and if Dan is thinking about Herbert as Craig blows him, it’s out of annoyance, not because he’s imagining Herbert kneeling in front of him in Craig’s place.

He knows Craig must be disappointed in the sloppy handjob Dan gives him in return, and the way Dan leans away when he goes for a kiss. Dan can’t help it—once he’s thought about Herbert’s lips, now he can’t think about anything else, and nothing about Craig seems appealing anymore. He apologizes after, tries to play it off as too many drinks, and he thinks Craig must accept the excuse because he scribbles down his number before he goes— “In case you want to try again sometime.”

After he’s gone, Dan stumbles into the shower, trying his best to clear his head. It’s far from the first time the thought of Herbert has crossed his mind in such a context—Lisa was evidence enough for that. This is different, though, all-consuming in a way that it’s never been in the past. He feels unbalanced under the weight of it, and tips forward, leaning against the cold glass of the shower to center himself. He’s painfully hard, but getting himself off feels like it would be crossing a line that he can’t come back from, deliberate in a way that his thing with Herbert has never been before.

He squeezes his eyes shut and lets the cold water pound against his back. It was just a bad night, he’d already been thinking about Herbert when he went out, so of course he would be thinking about him now. It doesn’t change anything. If Herbert is going to stay infuriatingly disinterested in him, Dan is going to be just fine without him.

*

Herbert is sitting at the kitchen table when Dan wakes up the next morning, his tongue between his teeth as he corrects Dan’s attempt at a crossword.

“I was almost done with that,” Dan says.

Herbert glances up at him. “8 down was wrong. It was throwing off the whole thing.”

“Don’t you have important work to do?”

Herbert rolls his eyes. “Honestly, Dan, I can afford to spend ten minutes on a crossword.”

Dan stares at him, trying to decide if this is some elaborate prank, or if Herbert has somehow progressed to a stage of re-animation that involves complete personality transplants. “Uhh… have at it, I guess?”

Herbert says nothing else, just purses his lips and crosses out another of Dan’s answers. Dan is fairly sure he’d been right about that one. If he were less hungover, he’d probably try to explain that the crossword was for a lay audience and there’s no way that the scientific name of a rare tropical parasite is going to be an answer. Also—the fact that Herbert is thinking about rare parasites is a bit alarming, given that Dan has no idea what’s going on in his own basement.

“Herbert, uh, you’re not—”

“So, you fuck men now.”

Dan nearly chokes on his orange juice. “ Excuse me?”

Without glancing up, Herbert repeats, “You fuck men now. Apparently. If the not-so-quiet time you spent with that meathead last night is anything to go by.”

“I thought you were in the basement.” Dan can feel his cheeks growing warm. 

“Hmm, I’m sure you did.” Herbert takes a long sip of coffee and then marks something else on the crossword. “I’ve learned that sleep is, unfortunately, necessary to an extent. I came upstairs just after midnight. Not early enough to hear everything, I’m sure, but I caught the final act.” 

Dan’s face must be crimson by now. “Look, I was—”

“I don’t care .”

“You asked!” Dan snatches the pen out of his hand. “And you don’t know who won Best Actor in 1998, you were in solitary confinement.”

The crossword is a lost cause at this point, absolutely defaced by Herbert’s obnoxious corrections, but Dan doesn’t want to meet Herbert’s eyes, so he pretends to fix it. “It’s not new. Men. There were uh, some confusing times in college.”

“I remember a lot of women.”

“There can be both,” Dan mumbles. “But yeah uh. The men weren’t as often.” He takes a deep breath and continues, “I always pretended they didn’t mean as much too. That made it easier.”

“Hmm.”

“I stopped pretending,” Dan offers. Hoping that Herbert will appreciate the honesty. “After Francesca left—there was a man then.”

“Will you see this one again?”

“Do you want me to?” The words are out of Dan’s mouth too quickly, embarrassing in their eagerness. He glances up to see Herbert staring at him, looking mildly stunned.

“Does it matter?”

“It matters to me,” Dan says. He’s basically admitted it already. “I was going to call him but if you want—I’ll never see him again.”

“Why would you do that for me?” Herbert‘s eyes widen for a moment, almost hopeful, before he frowns sharply. “You never asked with the last bitch.”

“ Don’t ,” Dan snaps, suddenly angry. He remembers Francesca’s tearful face as she was leaving, telling Dan to get your weird shit about your partner sorted out . “She didn’t deserve any of what happened.”

“You brought her as a—a date when you testified against me!” Herbert shouts—Dan can’t remember the last time he heard him raise his voice. “You think I don’t remember who was sitting in the courtroom on the worst day of my life? You think I don’t still have the right to hate every single one of you ?”

“Herbert—”

Herbert stands up suddenly and slams his mug into the sink. Dan’s surprised it doesn’t shatter. “You can fuck whoever you want. It’s your house. Just stay away from me.”

*

Dan is at a loss. He doesn’t know what he can possibly say or do that he hasn’t already—with Meg, when they fought, he’d follow up with an apology and a bouquet of flowers, and eventually she’d smile and kiss him and tell him not to be such an idiot the next time. He can’t imagine Herbert being swayed by flowers—what kind of bouquets do they even make to say I'm sorry I sent you to prison ?

He considers doing another midnight run to the morgue, to bring Herbert a fresh body like the mice Rufus used to bring Dan, but Herbert made it very clear that, when it comes to his work, Dan was to do what was asked of him and otherwise stay away.

He doesn’t call Craig back. He tells Herbert in a note that he deleted the number—if he’s hoping that will help, he’s clearly mistaken, because he finds the note shredded in the bottom of the trash the next morning.

Herbert still eats some of his meals with Dan, to the extent that one cup of black coffee and a few bites of whatever Dan brought home counted as meals. He glares at Dan the whole time now, no matter what Dan tries to say, but at least he’s sitting with him.

“Are you going to stay mad at me forever?” Dan asks over dinner one night, when he can’t bear the silent rage any longer. “I apologized, Herbert. I tried to make it right. I don’t know what else I can do.”

Herbert is silent for a long time, though his expression softens slightly. “I don’t know,” he finally says. “It’s…difficult to be around you.”

Dan can’t remember a time Herbert had sounded so uncertain about anything, let alone Dan. “How do I fix that?” he asks. Pleads.

“I don’t know that you can,” Herbert says. He sounds almost clinical, like he’s delivering a terminal diagnosis. “I don’t trust people easily, Daniel. You proved to me why that was.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yes. So you keep saying.” Herbert pinches the bridge of his nose, sighing. “I suppose you are doing something right, though. I have intended to leave on several occasions and each time, I find myself unwilling to go through with it.”

Something bright and hot swells in Dan’s chest at the words. “Does that mean you—”

“I don’t know what it means, Daniel,” Herbert snaps. “I still don’t trust you. I don’t forgive you. I’m not letting you into the basement.”

“But you might?”

“Don’t hold your breath. If you die waiting for my forgiveness, I’m going to use your body for the next series of tests and there’s no knowing how successful they’ll be.”

“You can, uh. You could do that.” Dan should probably be concerned about whatever unsuccessful tests Herbert is working on, but now even that idea is starting to seem pretty hot to him, Herbert spreading his body out on the table and undoing his shirt with clinical precision. Those hands running over his bare chest…he shakes his head. He needs to pull himself together and stop drooling over the kitchen table before he scares Herbert off for good. 

“It was a joke , Dan,” Herbert says gently. “I’m not about to start experimenting on you.”

You could, though , Dan wants to say. He’s not even sure Herbert would pick up on the innuendo. And on the off-chance that he actually did, Dan isn’t sure he could take another rejection right now, not when Herbert is back to almost-smiling at him.

“I can wait,” he says instead.

*

He finally asks Tina out in a fit of annoyance. Herbert has been pissy all week, something to do with results he won’t share with Dan, and Dan would rather not suffer through another dinner where he was blamed for some experiment he wasn’t even allowed to know about. If Herbert is annoyed that Dan is spending his time with someone who actually listens to him, then that serves him right.

They have a nice date. If Dan could get his head screwed on right, he’d be halfway in love with her.

He doesn’t know why he suggests that they go back to his house. Tina’s apartment is closer, and she seems perfectly willing to invite Dan back, but he insists. He knows too, somewhere in the back of his mind, that he shouldn’t. That this may be his last chance to date a nice, normal girl, and he’s making it about Herbert again. He wishes he knew how to do it any other way.

Tina brightens visibly when she sees the bookshelf— “you’re a reader! I knew you must be!”—but then seems to lose interest when she sees the subjects. “A little dark, don’t you think?” she asks, running a finger over The Science of Near-Death Experiences . “More than half of these are about death.”

“Trust me, it’s all academic interest,” Dan says, thinking of Herbert’s affronted reaction to the question from Lt. Chapman, so many years ago. “I thought understanding would make it easier, you know. Whenever we lose anyone.”

It’s clearly the right tack to take—Tina’s eyes well up and she says, “oh, Danny ,” and leans against him, running a sympathetic hand up his arm.

Dan is about to take her upstairs when he remembers Herbert saying I came upstairs just after midnight. It’s 11:20.

“Do you, uh, want to watch a movie?”

Forty minutes later, when Herbert emerges from his lab, Dan has Tina pressed back against the couch, one hand down her pants. She has her back to Herbert, and her eyes keep slipping closed, every time Dan presses his mouth against the side of her neck.

Herbert freezes. There’s a moment when Dan worries that this was a horrible idea, that he’s going to say something awful to Tina or worse, just pack up and leave like he keeps threatening to, but then he meets Dan’s eyes and he quirks his head to the side, like he wants to see what Dan will do.

Dan keeps his eyes on Herbert as he lowers his mouth back to Tina’s neck. He circles his fingers gently, and she squirms against him and lets out a long moan. Dan can barely tell in the flickering light of the television, but he thinks Herbert is flushed. He’s certainly still watching Dan, his eyes alit with the kind of interest he usually reserved for his work.

Tina shudders and Dan cups his free hand around her head, holding her in place. He tugs on her hair gently, and she moans again, louder this time. Herbert bites his lower lip, still looking stunned.

“Is this good for you?” Dan asks, not breaking eye-contact.

Herbert starts suddenly, as if awaking from some kind of trance, and blinks at Dan. Dan keeps watching him—can’t look away, even as Tina cries out, shuddering, pleading for Dan to give her more, please, Danny , and Dan kisses her as she cums, trembling and panting into his mouth. When Dan looks up again, Herbert is gone.

*

When Herbert comes downstairs the next morning, Dan is alone at the kitchen table with his morning coffee.

“Where’s the girl?” Herbert asks sharply.

“Uh, she’s showering.” Dan can’t meet Herbert’s eyes—everything about last night was overwhelming and humiliating in the light of day, and he suddenly feels awful for dragging Tina into it. “About last night—“”

“It’s perfectly fine, Dan,” Herbert says. He sounds almost cheerful. “We are roommates. Such uncomfortable situations are an inevitable occurrence of living in such close quarters. After all, it isn’t as though you could have known I would walk into the living room—is it?”

So this is how they’re playing it. Not quite denial—the faint trace of a smirk playing around the edge of Herbert’s mouth, the smug knowledge that they both know what they’re doing. “Of course not,” Dan agrees. 

“And it won’t happen again?”

“Can’t make any promises,” Dan says, hoping against hope that he’s not pushing it too far.

Herbert smirks. “No, I suppose you can’t.”

Tina finds them like that a few minutes later, both smiling faintly into their respective coffee cups. She is clearly shocked to see Herbert, and Dan feels another pang of guilt realizing he never actually mentioned a roommate.

“Oh, Tina! This is uh…John,” Dan says. Herbert kicks him hard under the table.

“Oh,” Tina says with a forced smile. “I didn’t know Dan had a… roommate?”

“I just moved here and I’m looking for a place of my own,” Herbert lies smoothly, before Dan can begin to think of an explanation for Herbert’s presence. Dan’s not sure he’s ever seen Herbert seem so normal. “Dan, the absolute gentleman that he is, offered his spare room until I get settled.”

“Oh, Dan, that’s so sweet of you!” Tina gushes.

“That’s our Danny,” Herbert says, flashing his most unsettling grin. “Sweet as can be.”

Chapter Text

Tina is too embarrassed to do anything on the couch the next time—“I know you’re used to living alone, but God , Danny, what if your roommate had walked in?”—but if Dan raises his voice a little when he hears the creak of footsteps in the hallway outside his bedroom, she certainly doesn’t seem to notice. Dan should feel guilty about it. Instead, he just feels tired.

Herbert doesn’t say anything else about Tina, though Dan thinks he has been making more trips down the hall than usual on the nights she’s around. He’s started lying awake, listening for the sound of Herbert’s feet, wondering what it would take for him to push Dan’s door open himself and ask for something more than a fresh cadaver.

He finds himself quickly bored with Tina. She’s too nice, too easy —she giggles at Dan’s every word and winks at him in hallways when their shifts overlap. Every conversation with her leaves Dan feeling as if he’d wandered into one of the romantic comedies he used to watch with Meg. He can’t stand them anymore—the trite, scripted flirtations, the litany of manufactured obstacles. The meaninglessness of it all.

Next it’s Max, who works at the Starbucks around the corner from the hospital and draws winky faces on Dan’s cup every morning. He’s not quite Dan’s type—he’s attractive enough in a boy-next-door kind of way, but he’s way too vain about it. Once, he had very pointedly stretched in front of Dan to show off his six-pack and, instead of arousal, Dan had been overcome by the horrible urge to cut into his perfect skin to see what was underneath. 

Dan should stay away from him for his own good, but Max keeps flirting and Dan is only human—he finally caves and scribbles his number on a receipt that he drops into the tip jar with a wad of singles. Two days later, Max takes him to some aggressively trendy Korean restaurant downtown rwhere Dan nearly falls asleep in his rice bowl while Max talks his ear off about someone named Karla and the arguments she keeps getting into with her girlfriend over adopting either a poodle or a baby. Dan lost track two beers ago.

He must put up a decent enough front, or else Max simply doesn’t care how rude his hookups are, because an hour later they’re making out against the hallway wall while Dan repeatedly checks his watch.

Max doesn’t say anything when he props open the bedroom door. He barely seems to notice, which irrationally annoys Dan—how can anyone be so stupid? Is he really so self-absorbed to think this was ever going to be about him, that Dan is so shallow that he was hooked by a glimpse of skin?

The open door is like a physical presence in the room. With every movement, every layer of clothing Max pulls off of him, Dan becomes more acutely aware of the space where Herbert isn’t. He forces himself not to look at the door too often, to close his eyes and focus on the sensation of Max’s teeth as they graze his throat. Tells himself he doesn’t care whether or not Herbert sees him.

“You’re so fucking gorgeous,” Max says, pulling Dan’s shirt over his head. “Do you even know what you look like? Everyone wants you.”

“Not everyone.”

Max laughs, like Dan is just being playfully modest. He trails a hand over Dan’s shoulder. “Are you kidding me? With these arms? And that hair? I’ll bet you have guys lining up to suck your dick.”

Dan keeps his eyes closed as Max trails kisses down his chest, hesitating for a moment when he comes to the ugly knot of Dan’s knife scar. “What happened to you?”

“Got stabbed,” Dan says shortly. “Long story.”

“Hot,” Max murmurs, pressing an open-mouthed kiss against the raised skin of the scar. “Just when I think you can’t get hotter, you whip out some dark, mysterious past.”

Dan shoves his head aside. It feels too intimate, having this stranger’s mouth touching him there, Max’s shallow, impersonal hot to describe the whole brutal mess that was Peru. He isn’t sure what kind of dark, mysterious past Max is imagining, but he doubts it involves Dan lying in a burning tent in the middle of a civil war while Herbert scrambles to stop the bleeding. He wonders what Max thinks about any of the other scars for that matter, the ones from the years of failed experiments.

“What’s wrong?” Max sounds offended.

“Hurts,” Dan lies. 

Max seems to accept this easily enough, moving further down Dan’s stomach, but Dan’s hand lingers on the scar. He can’t remember that much of that night, just flashes of memory all jumbled together. The pain. The smoke searing his throat. Herbert’s voice, over and over, you’re going to be all right . Like he was trying to convince himself as much as Dan.

Dan finds himself pushing down on the scar, digging his fingernails into the knotted skin, his eyes still on the empty doorway. If it did still hurt, maybe he wouldn’t feel so numb to the rest of it—his life, his job. The version of him that had lain, gasping for air, in Herbert’s arms in Peru.

And then Max’s mouth is around his cock and Dan gasps and opens his eyes and suddenly Herbert is there in the doorway, half concealed by the shadow of the hall. He’s watching Dan with the same kind of smug curiosity he had shown the last time. Dan meets his gaze, trying to convey something— everything —and Herbert might understand after all, because his tongue darts out to wet his lips. 

“I can’t stop thinking about you,” Dan blurts out. He doesn’t mean to, but it’s all too much— the wet heat of Max’s mouth, the sharp pain where his own nails are biting into his stomach, the way Herbert’s eyes have gone wide and dark—and suddenly his mouth is moving of its own accord.

For a moment, it’s just him and Herbert standing there, looking at each other, seeing each other for maybe the first time in years, and it all feels tantalizingly inevitable, and then Max makes a sound, some horrible fake porno moan he probably thinks is sexy, and Herbert sniffs in disapproval and slips down the hall, leaving Dan with the most confusing erection of his life.

*

They don’t talk about it. 

*

The phone call comes while Dan’s in surgery. It’s been a grueling day, and Dan is looking forward to the moment he can collapse onto his couch and maybe, if he’s very lucky, convince Herbert to throw together a sandwich or something for dinner.

He’s zoned out as he changes out of his scrubs, mind still on his last patient and what they can possibly do for her if her body rejects this kidney too. He doesn’t notice the receptionist trying to get his attention until he’s almost out the door and the word police filters through his mental haze.

“What did you say?”

She sighs. “I was saying that a policeman called for you. Sergeant something-or-other. Said he had a few questions.” 

“A—a policeman? From Arkham?”

“Arkham? I don’t think so.” She squints down at her notes and shakes her head. “No, he said he was from Oak Hills PD. He left a number to call him back, or I think he said he could swing by your house—”

Shit. Dan is fairly certain that Herbert wouldn’t open the door to anyone, police officer or not, but honestly with Herbert, he can never be sure what kind of fucked up amusement he may draw at any given time.“What’s the number?” Dan asks quickly, pulling out his cell. “Tell Claire I’m heading out—I’ll check out what this guy wants.”

He dials the number she gives him and waits in his car as it rings, his heart pounding. The police would need a warrant to get into his house, right? The call was almost certainly just a routine follow-up, some update about how Herbert is still missing and Dan should remember to lock his doors at night… Even so, Dan can’t shake the image of coming home to find Herbert handcuffed in the back of a police car, staring up at Dan with that crushing look of betrayal in his eyes.

The phone keeps ringing. It should have gone to a message by now, shouldn’t it?

 Dan swears and hangs up, starting his car. He’ll go home and see that Herbert is fine and that no police officer is waiting at the door to arrest them both. There’s no reason they would know to be suspicious. Dan had checked the security cameras at the morgue three times already. He’d told Tina casually that his ‘roommate Joe’ found a place of his own. He’d checked Ethan’s voicemail twice.

Even so, he can’t shake the sense of foreboding that has settled over him. His driveway is empty when he pulls in. Mrs. Morrison waves at him, and he tries to seem casual as he waves back at her. Her expression tells him he’s failed—he’ll have to bring them a bottle of wine or something when he’s remembered how to smile.

The silence that greets him when he opens the front door somehow feels deeper than usual. The basement door is locked, concealed as ever behind the fake wall, and no amount of pounding on it seems to get through. Why should it? Dan had been so careful about the soundproofing.

He’s starting to contemplate taking an axe to the wood—he still has one somewhere in the back of the garage, he thinks. Lisa had tried to get rid of it during a spring cleaning once, but Dan had insisted that it was worth having around the house just in case—“In case of what ?” she’d asked, and he hadn’t been able to answer.

Surely, if Herbert’s safe, he’ll be able to understand Dan’s concern—maybe they can come up with a doorbell system for the future or an emergency key. Something to alleviate the agony of waiting, of every horrible scenario running through Dan’s head right now. But Dan remembers how fiercely he’s always guarded his work and he’s a bit worried that, if he hears an axe at the top of the stairs, Herbert will shoot him without hesitation.

So he waits. He tries to watch tv, but every other channel is some cop show and he has to shut it off again.

Finally, there’s a creak from the pantry and the basement door swings open. “Daniel, I’m going to need—”

Dan practically flattens Herbert in his haste to grab the man, pulling him close and holding on for dear life. Herbert goes stiff and Dan is expecting to be pushed aside, but then he slumps forward into Dan’s arms, fingers coming up to clutch Dan’s sweater. Dan wonders how long it’s been since he touched anyone like this—can’t remember the last time they’d touched more than accidentally. How long had it been before the trial? Had Dan hugged him at all after the crypt collapsed?

His arms tighten around Herbert now, trying to make up for all those lost years. Herbert has put on a bit of weight since the last time Dan had held him, but his body still fits under Dan’s arms like he remembered. He rests his cheek against the top of Herbert’s head, closing his eyes and relishing the softness of his hair, the smell of Dan’s shampoo on him.

Herbert allows the embrace to stretch on for a few long seconds,  and then he clears his throat and shoves Dan away. “Daniel, I can’t breathe , what’s gotten into you?”

“A policeman called today. Wanted to check the house.”

Herbert frowns, smoothing out his shirt sleeves where Dan had creased them. “Did you—”

“I didn’t do anything , if you’re going to accuse me of something stupid.”

“I wasn’t,” Herbert says, defensive. “I was only going to ask if you knew them.”

“I don’t think so. He’s from here, not Arkham. Left a message.”

Herbert is still frowning. “It’s almost certainly routine,” he says hesitantly.

“That’s what I thought,” Dan agrees, no more convinced. “There’s no reason they should know you’re here.”

“Except… it makes rational sense that I would be here,” Herbert continues. “Our connection is well documented. Your name must be all over my file.”

The words shouldn’t make Dan as happy as they do. “But—I turned you in. Surely they don’t think you would come back to me after that?”

Herbert shrugs, not meeting Dan’s eyes. “I mentioned you more than once over the years. It would be logical to assume I would come looking for you to exact revenge or—or to recruit you back as my assistant, I suppose.” Herbert pauses and adjusts his glasses, still refusing to look at him. Dan wonders if Herbert himself knows whether he wants revenge or assistance.

Herbert coughs softly, flustered, and then plows on. “You should try calling again, I suppose. We don’t want him to come knocking.”

Dan tries not to read too much into the we as he dials the number again, resting his phone on the table between them. Herbert’s fingers are drumming against his thigh compulsively. Before he can stop himself, Dan reaches out and covers Herbert’s hand with his, squeezing gently. 

Herbert shoots Dan a strange look, his hand still under Dan’s, but before he can say anything, the phone clicks between them. “Sergeant Bill McKinney speaking, who’s calling?”

Dan gives Herbert’s hand one more squeeze and then drops it. “Good evening, officer.  This is Daniel Cain. My receptionist told me you’d called?”

“Oh yes, Dr. Cain.” Dan doesn’t like his tone. There’s a note of smugness there that can’t signify anyhing good. “I have a few questions for you about your association with one Dr. Herbert West. As I believe you are aware, Dr. West recently escaped from Arkham State Penitentiary during a prison riot.”

“Yes,” Dan says. “Someone from your department came to check on me already. Have they caught him yet?”

“No, Dr. Cain, they have decidedly not, as you say, ‘caught him yet,’” the sergeant replies snidely. “And you see, the rest of my department seems to believe that this is none of our concern. They think that Herbert West is somewhere on the east coast, and that there’s simply no evidence tying him to Oak Hills.”

“That’s a relief to hear, Sergeant” Dan says, keeping his voice light and cheerful. He’s always found it easier to play dumb with the police wherever Herbert and their work were concerned—Herbert had always been annoyed when Dan did it, telling Dan that he refused to humiliate himself in the face of such idiocy, but he couldn’t complain too much when it had gotten them out of further questioning for years.

Until it hadn’t.

 “I do not believe that Herbert West could have evaded us for so long without help,” McKinney declares.

“ Help ?” Dan forces a laugh. “I’m sorry, officer, but you seem to have some strange ideas about Herbert. He doesn’t exactly do ‘help.’”

“He seemed to accept your help for quite some time, back in the day,” the sergeant counters. “You lived together, did you not? And worked together, both at Miskatonic Medical and on your… extracurriculars ?”

“And then I turned him over to the police,” Dan replies firmly. “Don’t you think that might have soured him a bit on the whole help thing?”

“Hmm.” He seems to be waiting for Dan to say more. When he doesn’t, McKinney continues, “Am I to believe that the last time you spoke to Dr. West was at his trial?”

“Before his trial,” Dan says, not looking at Herbert. “After the trial, he wouldn’t—we didn’t speak. I’d said my part on the stand, anyway.”

“But you sent him letters—you presumably had more to say then?”

“Not really,” Dan lies. “Just keeping him updated on the outside world. Friends’ wedding and babies. Stuff like that. I thought he might be lonely.”

Herbert lets out a little snort of laughter at that. Dan slaps his hand over the phone’s speaker and glares at him, but the sergeant seems not to have caught the noise.

“From what I know of Dr. West, he doesn’t exactly strike me as a man who cares about friends’ weddings,” he says. 

“Well, that would explain why he sent back all the letters, wouldn’t it?” Dan asks. His teeth are starting to hurt from the fake smile he has plastered on.

“You called him on several occasions as well. Were these phone calls also to update him on your friends’ weddings ?” McKinney delivers the last two words with a contempt that makes Dan wince.

“I wanted to clear the air,” Dan explains. That part, at least, isn’t a lie. “We used to be friends.”

“You had regrets?” McKinney asks sharply.

Herbert raises his eyebrows smugly at Dan, which isn’t fair, not now with McKinney up his ass like this. Dan flips him off. “I wished it could have happened differently,” Dan says truthfully. “That’s not the same as regretting what I did. Anyway, he refused all the calls.”

“And you have made no further attempt to contact Dr. West since the escape?”

“How would I even do that? I don’t exactly have a phone number for him.” Dan laughs again. “Look, Sergeant McKinney, I’m very sorry I can’t be of more help to you, but I have no idea where Herbert West could be. I’ve really tried to leave Miskatonic behind me.”

“Forgive me if I’m having trouble believing that,” McKinney says. He sounds like he’s gritting his teeth. “In my experience, no one ‘trying to leave’ anything behind them calls a prisoner twenty three times in under a month. Do you know who calls that often? Girlfriends. Wives.”

Dan feels a chill settle in his gut. Herbert, on the other hand, is biting his lip, convulsing with laughter. Dan raises his eyebrows pointedly and switches the phone off speaker. “Surely you didn’t call to accuse me of being Dr. West’s girlfriend ,” he says with yet another forced laugh, hoping he sounds a lot more normal than he feels. “I’m sorry, Sergeant, but I had to perform a very long operation today and I don’t have time for this kind of speculation. Herbert West could be anywhere. Arkham, Oak Hills, back in Switzerland for all I know—it’s no longer any of my concern.”

“Well you see, Dr. Cain,” McKinney says sharply, “it is very much still my concern. And if I find out you’ve been lying to me, I’ll have you put away for life alongside Herbert West.”

Dan can think of worse punishments than that. He’s lived them already. “So sorry I couldn’t be of more help to you,” Dan says, pouring on as much fake sincerity as he can muster. He can practically feel the detective’s fury radiating through the speaker. “I really hope you find him soon.”

There’s a loud rattle—apparently McKinney was mad enough that he had slammed the receiver down. Dan can’t help but feel a bit of satisfaction at that. If the man is going to harass Dan, at the very least Dan can make it as onerous as possible an investigation.  Besides, it’s comforting to know that even someone as determined as McKinney can’t find a shred of tangible proof that Herbert is anywhere near Oak Hills.

Dan sets the phone down on the table. Herbert’s laughter has mostly subsided, but he’s still wearing an insufferably smug expression as he cocks his head at Dan, waiting.

“Do you know this guy?”

Herbert shakes his head. “Bill McKinney? Never heard of him before.”

“Why is he so fixated on you?”

“Lots of people fixate on me,” Herbert says matter-of-factly. The words sting—Dan hates being reminded that he’s only one in a series of lots of people that fixate on Herbert. That, at his worst, he’s not all that different from Dr. Hill. He wonders if that’s part of why Herbert is suddenly so cagey about his work around Dan.

Herbert must catch something of what Dan is thinking, because his smugness disappears and he adds, almost apologetically, “He’s not important, Dan. I suspect he’s simply bored with his sad little life and determined to invent some excitement in the form of a high-profile prison escape. He won’t be a problem for you.”

“He sounded serious.”

“They always do.” Herbert stands and begins pacing back and forth, his shoes clicking against the kitchen floor. It reminds Dan of a ticking clock.

“Can you stop that?“

Herbert stops to look at him, shakes his head, and very deliberately goes back to pacing. If anything, his footsteps are louder than before.

“I’ve stayed here long enough,” he declares finally. “I’m going to gather my things together tonight and then I’ll be out of your way.”

“What? No , Herbert, you can’t—”

“It’s the most rational decision, you can stay at your job and I’ll—”

Dan stands up and grabs Herbert by the shoulders. “Herbert, stop. I don’t care about my job , dammit, that’s not what’s going on.”

Herbert pulls back and folds his arms, glaring at Dan, “Well what do you care about, because you seemed very perturbed by the whole matter.”

“This isn’t funny.”

“I never said it was.” Herbert’s mouth twitches. “Well, it was funny when he called you my wife.”

“Herbert…”

“All right, all right,” Herbert says. “I’m taking this very seriously, Daniel, but if you don’t want me out of the house, I’m not certain there’s much else we can do about the situation at this time.”

“Do you have a gun?”

“Where in the world would I have gotten a gun?” Herbert asks. “I’ve been forced to make do with a knife for months.”

“I have a gun,” Dan offers. “Why didn’t you ask?”

“I didn’t think you’d say yes.” Herbert sounds confused—he should be confused. Dan should be less willing to hand a gun to the man after everything he’s seen. But, unfortunately, he apparently hasn’t learned anything since 1985.

“You should take it. Hold on.”

He leads Herbert upstairs to his room and stops short of the closet, suddenly embarrassed. He doesn’t know what Herbert will think of the box—surely it won’t tell him anything that he hadn’t already figured out from the rack of small dark suits in the spare bedroom, or the way Dan had carefully filed years of Herbert’s notes in the basement. All the same, the box feels different somehow. More personal.

“Can you, uh. Turn around?”

Herbert raises his eyebrows. “Planning to shoot me?” he asks.

“Please just turn around.”

To Dan’s surprise, Herbert doesn’t push further. He just shrugs and turns his back, waiting for Dan to rummage through the box. Dan shoves aside Herbert’s old wallet and hospital ID badge, resolving to throw the whole thing away once and for all as soon as he has the chance. There’s no point in keeping it now anyway, and the last thing he needs is for Sergeant McKinney to come poking around and find an entire box of Herbert West-related souvenirs in Dan’s bedroom.

“Here,” Dan tells Herbert, shoving the box back into the closet and holding out the gun. “This way you’ll be safe if that policeman comes to the house.”

“Because what, now I can shoot any policeman I see? I seem to recall you were quite against that the last time.”

“Things change.”

“They certainly seem to.” Herbert turns the gun over in his hands. Dan can see the moment he recognizes it. “This is mine.”

“Yes.”

Herbert looks confused, like he can’t figure out why Dan has his old gun hidden in the back of his closet. Dan isn’t sure what he can say to that, but fortunately, Herbert seems to decide not to ask.

“Thank you.”

Dan can’t remember the last time Herbert had thanked him for anything. “Don’t waste all the bullets on cadavers,” Dan says, handing him a box. “It will look weird, if I have to buy more.”

“I’ll do my best,” Herbert says drily, but he’s still smiling, and Dan thinks he must have done something right.

*

McKinney doesn’t call the hospital again, nor does he show up at Dan’s house, but Dan can’t shake the feeling that he’s being watched. He’s started checking the street for undercover cars on his drive home and peering out the window whenever he hears a car drive by. To Herbert’s annoyance, he starts making them eat dinner with the lights off, absurdly paranoid that someone will catch sight of another silhouette through the closed blinds.

“Will you relax?” Herbert asks one night. They’re ten minutes into a movie that Dan practically had to beg Herbert to watch with him, and Dan has already paused it twice to check that the sirens they’re hearing aren’t coming towards him. “It’s a firetruck .”

The siren fades into the distance. Dan sits back down and hits ‘play.’

For a few moments, he’s distracted by the movie and the way Herbert keeps twitching at all of the jumpscares despite his insistence that he doesn’t “get invested in such wastes of time.” He’s just getting invested in the plot when the beam of headlights dance across the wall as another car passes.

“You’re being ridiculous,” Herbert snaps. “Sit back down.”

He takes Dan’s beer and scoots further away from Dan. Dan is worried he’s offended Herbert so much that he’s going to storm back to the basement, but then Herbert sets the beer carefully on the coffee table and lies down on his side so that his head is in Dan’s lap.

“There.” Herbert declares with satisfaction, wriggling slightly to get comfortable. His cheek is pressed into Dan’s thigh. “Now will you sit still ?”

Dan doesn’t pause the movie again.

*

They don’t talk about that either.

*

The smell of garlic hits Dan the moment he opens the door. He crosses to the kitchen, surprised—he can’t remember Herbert ever cooking anything more elaborate than instant noodles all the time they lived together, but here Herbert is, at the stove, carefully measuring spices into a pot. Whatever he’s making looks surprisingly complicated and definitely far surpasses Dan’s own meager cooking ability. 

“That smells amazing,” Dan says.

Herbert jerks around in surprise, scattering paprika over the counter. Dan hadn’t even known he had paprika.

“I assumed you would be out tonight.” Herbert’s tone is defensive, as if he’s ashamed Dan would see him succumb to such a mundane failing as hunger.

“Why?” Dan asks. “I never said I would be.”

“You never used to keep me informed of those kinds of plans,” Herbert says primly as he sweeps the paprika into the pot. “It’s Friday night, is it not? Presumably there’s a warm body in a bar somewhere begging to be fucked.”

There’s always something thrilling about Herbert’s use of such crude language, even when it’s targeted at Dan. “Is that all you think I do?”

“Isn’t it?”

As if Herbert isn’t keenly aware of the last person Dan had fucked. “For five years, I used to spend every Friday night in the basement,” Dan says pointedly. “And then after that, I’d spend most of my Fridays driving to Ethan’s house in Arkham so I could make it to visiting day on Saturday.”

“That’s fifteen hours straight.”

“I uh. Didn’t need a lot of sleep.”

“ Dan ,” Herbert says, his voice suddenly strangely choked, like he’s barely able to contain his excitement. He steps forward slowly. “You didn’t .”

How Herbert knows he hadn’t simply started smuggling adderall from the hospital, Dan can’t tell. Maybe there had been a touch of the dirty secret in Dan’s tone.

“Didn’t what?” Dan asks smiling, raising his eyebrows.

Herbert reaches for Dan’s arm and rolls the sleeve up above the elbow, revealing the dark stains where Dan had pushed the needle in. Herbert’s hand tightens around Dan’s arm and his thumb traces over the needle marks. If Dan didn’t know better, he’d almost describe it as reverence.

“Why?”

“I was working full time and carrying on our work alone after every shift. I needed to stay awake.” Herbert cocks his head, like he knows that isn’t the full answer, and Dan gives in. “And I wanted to.”

“When did you stop?”

“Before the last visit to Arkham. I needed to be sure I could.”

“And could you?”

Dan looks at Herbert. He remembers the thrill he had felt those nights after injecting the reagent, how good it had felt working through his latest tests while his mind whirred in overdrive. He won’t say he hasn’t thought about it—the humiliation of having to ask Herbert has stopped him so far, but the way Herbert is looking at him now… maybe he shouldn’t have worried.

Then again, he remembers the week after he’d stopped too. He doesn’t ever want to have to lock himself in the hospital bathroom again because he can’t stop dry heaving.

“I don’t need it now,” he tells Herbert. “I did what I needed to do. You’re here.”

Herbert’s grip on his arm is vice-like. His eyes keep darting from Dan’s arm to his face and back again.

“So,” he asks, his voice wobbling slightly, “You aren’t going to a bar? Or on a date?”

“Do you want me to be going out?” Dan asks. He’s suddenly frustrated—he’s been patient, but it’s absolutely infuriating to watch Herbert come so close over and over again only to pull away at the last minute. Dan wants to grab him by the shoulders and shake him until he finally just gives in. “You could let me help.”

Herbert drops his arm and steps back, shaking his head. “I don’t—I don’t know , Dan. I can’t be sure.”

At least he’s back to calling Dan ‘Dan’ again. “You aren’t stupid.”

Herbert folds his arms. He’s leaning back from Dan now, his eyes narrowed. “I have 13 years of evidence to the contrary. It isn’t exactly the most obvious conclusion that you…” he trails off, frowning. Looking for the right word. “ Care ,” he says finally. He pronounces it like the word offends him..

“I never didn’t care.”

“If that’s true then why should it matter to me whether you care now?” Herbert snaps. “Apparently, it never kept you from sending me to prison. For all I know, you’ll call that obnoxious policeman as soon as you want me out of your way again.” He sniffs. “I’m sure one of your patients will be pretty enough to tempt you eventually.”

Dan bites his tongue—he hates how easily Herbert can get under his skin. It’s clear he’s trying to provoke him, and Dan refuses to give him the satisfaction, to prove him right about whatever fucked up image of Dan he’s still holding onto. He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. 

“What evidence would change your mind?” he asks. 

“I don’t know , Dan. I told you that already. I don’t know if there’s anything.” Herbert sighs. “If it provides any comfort, I don’t like feeling this way. I don’t like not knowing. I keep trying to think of a solution.”

“Can I keep trying?”

“I suppose.”

“Can I help with dinner?”

Herbert half-smiles at that, a little bit mean. “I’ve heard you use that line before. Or is it because you think it will prove you would be useful in the lab?“

“It’s because I want to help, Herbert. I don’t always have an ulterior motive.”

“Don’t you?” Herbert dips his ladle in the pot and sniffs it critically. “I don’t need any help. It just needs to sit awhile to boil down.”

“Is that supposed to be a metaphor?”

Herbert drops the ladle with a splat , holding his hands up dramatically. “Not everything is about you. Sometimes, I just want to prepare dinner.”

“Can I—”

“Fine!” Herbert snaps, stepping out of the way. “You can help by washing the dishes, if you insist. If it makes you feel better. I’m going downstairs.”

Dan doesn’t bother to point out that he hasn’t seen Herbert do the dishes once since the day he moved in. “Very generous of you,” he says drily, picking up the sponge.

*

Dan hasn’t heard anything from McKinney in over a week when he comes home to find a policeman is waiting on the front porch. It must be McKinney, he assumes, from the way he is squinting through the blinds. He doesn’t wait for Dan to shut the car door before launching into speech.

“Dr. Cain, I hope this isn’t a bad time,” he says, sounding very much like he hopes it is a terrible time. 

“Not at all,” Dan says, putting on his best faux-cheery expression. “How can I help you?”

McKinney squints at the house and then back at Dan. “I was wondering if you had a moment to show me around your house.”

Dan locks the car and steps onto the porch, between McKinney and the door. “I think you might need a warrant for that,” he says steadily. His heartbeat is pounding in his ears, almost drowning out his own voice.

McKinney shifts his weight, sticking out his chest so that his badge is more prominent. “The only folks I know who ask for a warrant have got something to hide,” he sneers. “Are you sure you want to play this game, Dr. Cain?”

Dan blinks at him, still smiling. His jaw aches. “Just exercising my constitutional right to privacy, detective,” he says. “If there’s a reason for you to search the house, surely it won’t be hard to get a warrant.”

McKinney’s expression twists at that, and Dan feels a thrill of satisfaction. He’s already tried, he realizes. Tried and failed, because Dan was smart about everything and McKinney has nothing on him.

“Just open the door, Dr. Cain.”

“I don’t think I’m going to do that.”

“Don’t make this harder on yourself than it already is,” McKinney snaps. “If you open the door now, we can work out some kind of plea bargain for you. Hell, I’ll even swear it myself that West was holding a gun to your head and you had no choice but to let him stay.”

Dan has to bite the inside of his cheek to stop himself from laughing directly in the man’s face. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says, turning his back on McKinney to unlock the door. “I haven’t seen Herbert West in over a decade. Now if you’ll excuse me, I just got off a very long shift and I really just want to sleep.”

He turns back and gives McKinney one last wide smile. “Have a good evening, Sergeant.”

He shuts the door in his face, not waiting for a reply, and carefully locks it behind him. Then he crosses to the living room and switches on the Cubs game, turning the volume up high enough to drown out any sound Herbert might make before McKinney leaves.

He doesn’t have to worry. Herbert doesn’t appear until well after midnight, several hours after Dan watches McKinney finally drive away. He seems exhausted, pale and disheveled and swaying on his feet. Dan wonders when he last slept.

“Police came by the house today,” Dan tells him.  “I told him to come back with a warrant.”

“He’s certainly determined,” Herbert replies, slumping down into an armchair. Now that he’s closer, Dan can see that his left sleeve is completely shredded. “The last officer you invited in failed to find the basement. Perhaps it would be best to let this one try his best?”

Dan shakes his head. “I don’t want to risk it. He’s not going to stop until he finds something, and if he does—”

“Then we could take care of him,” Herbert says.

“Herbert, no . We can’t afford that kind of attention.”

Herbert pulls his glasses off and rubs his eyes. He looks younger without them, and innocent in a way that shouldn’t affect Dan as much as it does. “I don’t know what to tell you. I’ve offered to move. I’ve offered to handle him. What I won’t do is let this whole thing take up any more of my time. My work is nearing a critical stage and I can’t afford to sit around every night talking about how worried you may feel.”

“Let me help then,” Dan says, nearly pleading. “Herb, look, you’re dead on your feet. If you keep this up, you’re going to get hurt”

“I am perfectly capable of handling myself, Daniel.”

Dan leans forward and tugs at Herbert’s sleeve, inspecting the damage. Underneath, Herbert’s skin is mottled with several ugly bruises and a few deep cuts that look suspiciously like they were left by human teeth. “Did you even wash this?”

“I am a doctor ,” Herbert snaps, affronted. “I know very well how to perform basic first aid.”

“You need help,” Dan insists. “A second pair of hands.”

“When I need your help, I’ll inform you.” Herbert’s arrogant tone is undercut by the yawn he can’t quite stifle. His eyelids are drooping closed.

“When was the last time you slept?” When Herbert opens his mouth to reply, Dan adds, “And naps don’t count.”

Herbert shakes his head, yawning again. His whole body is drooping over in the chair—it would be funny if Dan weren’t so worried about him. “The work is all that matters,” he mumbles.

“You won’t be able to do the work like this—what happened to ‘I’ve learned that sleep is necessary to an extent’? I thought you were past this.”

“That was before… latest breakthrough…”

Dan reaches out and snags his glasses off the end of his nose before they can fall onto the carpet. He folds them up and sets them on the coffee table. “Just take care of yourself, okay? If you don’t want me to do it, you’re going to have to do it yourself.”

Herbert doesn’t seem to hear him, just makes a little sound and shifts to make himself more comfortable, curled up in the chair. For a moment, he reminds Dan of Rufus.

Dan drapes the spare blanket over him— “M’not asleep,” Herbert protests when Dan tucks it under his arm—and turns off the overhead light. It’s under a minute before Herbert begins to snore.

*

The next two weeks are torture. Herbert has taken to bringing his dinner down to the basement instead of sitting with Dan. Every time Dan sees him, he seems more exhausted, even though he insists to Dan that he’s fine and the work is progressing well enough without him. Once, Dan catches him wincing when his hip brushes against the table. He wonders how many injuries he must be hiding.

Dan’s shifts at the hospital get worse too. He loses two patients in as many days—he can see both deaths coming, but there’s nothing he can do to stop them. He can’t face the families, sends Claire to deliver the news instead. He leaves early, goes home and sits in his kitchen and stares at the basement door, wishing he could be doing something about it all.

*

Dan can sense that something is off as soon as he pulls into the driveway. At first, he tries to convince himself that he’s just being paranoid, that everything looks perfectly normal and he’s only overreacting because he’s fried from his shift, but then he spots the car across the street. He knows for a fact neither of the Morissons have municipal plates.

He opens his car door as quietly as he can and creeps onto the porch. To his growing horror, he realizes that the front door is propped open a crack.

Cautiously, he pushes the door open further and edges his way into the foyer. For a moment, he strains to hear anything, hardly daring to breath. The house is dark and silent, and Dan worries for a horrible moment that he’s too late, that Herbert is gone already, but then there is a thump from the direction of the living room.

Dan moves forward slowly. As he nears the end of the hall, he can make out the low murmur of conversation coming from the room. He steps closer to hear Sergeant McKinney’s voice, low and threatening.

“…going to do it, Dr. West, or you will be very sorry.”

Dan’s breath catches in his throat.

“I assure you, I’m not about to be manipulated by lazy threats made by moronic policemen,” Herbert replies, though he’s lacking his usual conviction. He sounds out of breath, as if he’s had the wind knocked out of him. Dan is overcome with the sudden urge to rip McKinney apart with his bare hands.

“Do you want to go back to prison?” McKinney demands. “Trust me, it gets a lot worse than solitary in there. I can make sure of that.”

Dan steps further forward, hoping desperately that McKinney’s too distracted by Herbert to hear him. He curses himself for not thinking to grab some kind of weapon—he should have started keeping the bat next to the door again, the second McKinney started poking around. 

There’s a sound like a sob from the living room. Dan rushes forward, pushes the door open to see—

—Herbert on the floor, body shaking not with tears but with manic laughter. His eyes light on Dan and his grin stretches wider still. McKinney looms over him, gun raised, his back to Dan.

“What’s so funny you little freak?”

Herbert raises his eyebrows and glances pointedly to the ground a few feet in front of Dan. Dan follows his gaze to see the gun lying on the carpet. Where McKinney had knocked it out of Herbert’s hands, he assumes.

Herbert is saying something else, still giggling uncontrollably, but Dan can’t make it out over the rush of blood in his ears. Herbert looks so small there, crumpled on the floor behind Sergeant McKinney’s bulk. 

Slowly, Dan crouches down to pick up the gun, keeping his eyes on Herbert. It feels like an eternity as he reaches forward, just waiting for McKinney to turn around and it all to go wrong. Will he shoot Dan on sight, or will he just cart them both to prison? Why had Dan given Herbert the gun instead of keeping it for times like this? Herbert never was good enough at protecting himself. That was why he needed Dan for these moments, and Dan had let him down yet again, and now they were both going to suffer for it.

And then Dan’s fingers are closing around the grip and he’s raising the gun, almost dizzy with the relief of it.

“You might as well shoot me now,” Herbert is saying through his laughter. “I’m never going to do what you’re asking. You know that. You can threaten all you like, rough me up, talk about all the terrible things they’ll do to me in prison. It won’t change a thing. Your son will still be dead.”

McKinney lunges forward and grabs Herbert by the throat, shaking him roughly. “Shut the fuck up or I will make you, so help me—”

“Dan!” Herbert gasps, hands scrabbling at his throat, and Dan doesn’t have a choice. Maybe he never did.

He pulls the trigger.

Chapter Text

Herbert is still giggling when Dan wipes the last of the blood from his face, though Dan is fairly sure it’s more out of relief than amusement at this point. The only word he’s said to Dan so far was “no,” when Dan had asked if the water he was using to rinse off his hair was too hot.

“What did he want from you?” Dan asks when it seems Herbert has calmed down enough to speak normally.

“Something completely ridiculous about bringing his dead son back to life. Apparently he’d been reading about my work for years .”

Dan doesn’t like how proud he sounds. 

“So he thought, what, he could blackmail you into reanimating his son by threatening to arrest you?”

“Apparently.” Herbert sniffs distastefully. “As if I would turn over all my secrets simply to avoid prison .”

“Not sure he would have liked having a murderous corpse for a son either,” Dan adds, stepping back. “Unless you’ve actually fixed that part. You’re clean, by the way.”

“Do you really think I wouldn’t have informed you if I’d achieved perfect consciousness post-reanimation?” Herbert asks. His voice is muffled as he towels off his face. “As far as human subjects are concerned, I've made little progress beyond your own most successful recent trials, though the latest few animal tests have been extremely promising.”

Dan certainly hopes so—procuring the number of dead cats Herbert had requested from the local animal shelter had taken almost a week, and Dan had spent the whole time checking over his shoulder, sure McKinney would pop out of some dark corner of the parking lot to find Dan holding a sack full of stolen, euthanized strays. If Herbert wasn’t—except, wait a minute.

“‘My own most successful recent trials’—ha! You did read my notes.”

“Of course I read your notes. I would never let a petty grudge interfere with the work. Besides, they weren’t entirely useless.” Herbert shoves his glasses back on and slides off the counter. His hair is sticking up in all directions, but now he looks more like he just got out of bed than that he’d been covered in viscera. “Will you stop smiling like a braindead idiot? We have a body to dispose of.”

That sobers Dan up quickly enough. 

The living room is in terrible shape—Dan is definitely going to have to replace the carpet, and he’s not sure he’ll be able to salvage the couch either. The ceiling will probably be fine with a new coat of paint, but it’s gonna be hell to dig the bullet out of the wall. He’d forgotten, without Herbert in his life, how much blood gets everywhere. How impossible it was to scrub it all out.

He doesn’t want to look at the body, has to swallow down bile when he does. Even after so many years, the sight of so much blood still turns his stomach. McKinney’s neck is twisted at a horrible angle and the head is nothing but a mass of blood and tissue, splattered across the soft white carpet. He hadn’t realized how close he was when he took the shot, hadn’t expected the messiness of it all. 

“ Fuck !” he shouts, kicking the leg of the couch.

“You can’t be angry about this, Dan, you have to understand that you were right to shoot him,” Herbert says, words rushing over one another. He looks nervous, like he’s actually worried Dan will lash out at him. “He was insane, he wouldn’t listen—”

Dan holds up a hand to stop him. “Calm down, okay? I’m not mad at you . We just have to think about this.” He looks back at the body, remembering suddenly the last time they’d done this. We can get him back on the street , Herbert had said then, though there hadn’t been nearly this much mess. “Can you, uhh… Can you fix him?”

Herbert stares at him. “Dan, you just spent the last fifteen minutes scrubbing his brain tissue out of my hair. What do you want me to do, a few stitches and a bandaid?”

He has a point. “Someone’s going to come looking for him,” Dan says, starting to pace. “He must have told someone he was coming here, right? Or called it in?”

Herbert shakes his head, brow creasing. “I told you, he wanted me to reanimate his dead son—I don’t think that’s the kind of thing you report to a superior officer. Besides, he didn’t really seem the type of man to have colleagues he trusted.”

“I can’t imagine anyone like that,” Dan says.

“Very amusing, Daniel.” 

“Dammit, Herbert, why did you answer the door? You could have just stayed locked in the basement and I’d have talked to him.”

“Do you think I’m a complete moron? I didn’t answer the door, he forced his way in—I simply took care of him once he was rooting around your living room—”

“— our living room—”

“— our living room then, if it matters so much to you,” Herbert concedes. “That makes it worse, don’t you see? He seemed extremely interested in the fact that you’d collected Dr. Gruber’s life work, if that tells you something about how much he knew. Or how easy he would have been for you to ‘talk to.’”

“I don’t care what he knew,” Dan says. “It doesn’t matter anyway. All I care about now is what we do next.”

Herbert leans down to prod at the bloody mass that used to be McKinney’s head. He’s still wearing his surgical gloves, Dan notices—he must have come upstairs in the middle of one of his tests and kept them on knowing he was about to handle another corpse. “It is a pity that you aimed for the head,” he says. “We could have fixed this.”

“Excuse me for being a bit distracted by the way he was trying to strangle you ,” Dan snaps. “I wasn’t exactly thinking about reanimation at the time.”

Herbert rolls his eyes, distinctly ungrateful. “You weren’t thinking at all . You rarely do in stressful situations.”

“Okay, next time I’ll just let him choke you to death.”

“It wouldn’t have been to death, he wanted me alive,” Herbert says primly. Dan thinks that is as close to a ‘thank you’ as he’s ever going to get. “We should move the body at least while it’s still fresh.”

“Okay. Okay, yes. We can fix this.” Dan crosses the living room and peers out the window. “That’s his car, right? Across the street?”

Herbert shrugs. “Presumably.”

“See if you can find his keys, all right? Keep the gloves on.”

“I’m not stupid, Dan, I have done this before. I left them on this long for a reason.” Herbert rummages in the man’s pockets for a minute before pulling out a set of keys. “We drive it out to the forest preserve off Route 7. It’s a few miles past the mall.”

“How do you know that?”

Herbert stares at him. “Why do you think I have looked into the best locations for disposing of human remains? What did you imagine I was doing when I borrowed your car those nights?”

Dan had very deliberately tried to avoid knowing what Herbert was doing with his car on any night he hadn’t asked for Dan’s help dragging corpses around, hoping that ignorance would be helpful if the police started asking questions about whatever it was Herbert had done.

“That isn’t how I did it,” Dan says, feeling a bit ridiculous as he says it out loud. “When I was, um, trying to carry on the work. I’d always take them back to the morgue for cremation.”

“With new gunshot wounds?”

“I actually modified your nerve gas and used that to euthanize the subjects,” Dan explains. “That way there were no new marks.”

Herbert raises his eyebrows, seeming surprised. “We never tried that before.”

Dan shrugs. “We also never bothered to put the cadavers back when we’d finished with them. I thought it would mean less unwanted attention if I did.”

“That’s an interesting concept. If you could be certain they thought the autopsy was complete and the body was just going to be disposed of… Clever.”

Dan feels himself warm at the compliment. “Thanks.”

“You never included any of this in your notes—why didn’t you suggest this to me sooner?”

“You weren’t exactly soliciting feedback, Herb.”

Herbert seems to concede to this point at least—he’s looking at Dan with renewed fascination, almost like he had that night in their old basement when he’d first explained the concept of reanimation over Rufus’s mangled body. “ Very clever,” he says again.

Dan is definitely blushing now. He’s struck for a moment by how ridiculous the situation is—here he is, standing over the body of a man he’s just killed to protect a man he’s broken out of prison and suddenly he feels nervous and fluttery, like a schoolgirl whose crush just smiled at her.

“It wouldn’t work now, of course,” he admits.

“Hmm, no, it would not.” Herbert prods the detective’s body again. “Unfortunate to waste such a fresh subject. Even without the head. We could use these parts for transplants.”

“And when they come looking for him?”

Herbert frowns. “You may have a point. We’ll get rid of the body too, then. Shame to waste the lungs, really.”

“ Herbert ,” Dan warns. “If they trace him back to here, we’re fucked.”

“I know that, it’s just unfortunate.” Herbert straightens up and brushes off his hands. “All right, I have a plan.”

*

They drive separately up Route 7—Herbert in Detective McKinney’s car and Dan following in their outback, McKinney’s body laid out under the tarp in the back. Dan doesn’t know how he manages to drive the whole way—he keeps being certain he can hear a siren behind him, but every time he checks the rearview mirror, the road is empty.

They turn off the highway onto a long dirt road, well sheltered from view by dense clumps of trees lining the road on both sides. Herbert pulls off to the shoulder about a mile down and parks McKinney’s car carefully before climbing into the passenger seat next to Dan. He rummages around in the glove compartment for a few seconds and pulls out a roadmap map Dan hadn’t known he had with a triumphant ‘ ah! ’.

“What are you looking for?” Dan asks him.

“I have seen cars parked here before,” Herbert explains, pointing at a pen mark on the map.“I was always careful to drive further when disposing of the various parts I wished to dispose of. I believe this is where some sort of drug deals take place, which makes it perfect for our purposes.”

He hops out of the front seat and roots around in his pocket, pulling out a second pair of rubber gloves and holding them out to Dan. “We make it look like he got shot on a stakeout, or else like he’d cracked and was trying to buy the drugs for himself. Simple.”

“There’s no way we can pass that off. Won’t the… blood splatter look weird or something?” He tries to remember what they were always doing on Law & Order . “Or they’ll find carpet fibers?”

Herbert rolls his eyes. “Dan, how many times have we talked to the police while surrounded by the clear evidence of reanimated corpses? They won’t look at the blood splatter or the fibers. They’ll see the body, secretly thank whoever was responsible for disposing of their most insufferable colleague, and clock out for lunch.”

They caught you once , Dan thinks, but Herbert has a point. Dan knows as well as he does that the Arkham PD hadn’t had anything resembling a case against Herbert until Dan had shown up at the station carrying the box of tapes. It had felt inevitable at the time, like Dan and Francesca and Herbert were still trapped in the crumbling mausoleum and all of Herbert’s experiments were still reaching out for them and it was never going to end, not unless Dan did something once and for all to get them out .

Herbert snaps his fingers under Dan’s nose. “Are you paying attention? I said I need help moving the body.”

Dan blinks. “Sorry,” he says and pulls on the gloves Herbert gave him.

Together, they lug McKinney’s body out of Dan’s trunk and shove it into the driver’s seat of his car. Dan holds the shoulders in place as Herbert cranes to fasten the seatbelt and then he steps back, satisfied to let Herbert worry about spraying a convincing amount of blood over the passenger seat. Dan has no idea where the bag of blood had come from.

It’s a bit concerning how definitively Herbert seems to know what to do, holding the flashlight between his teeth as he carefully points the blood bag towards the passenger seat. Dan wonders where he learned what a drug bust gone wrong looks like—did he know all this back in Miskatonic, or is this something he picked up in prison?

He realizes with a pang that he knows almost nothing about what had happened to Herbert in prison. He was in solitary at one point, and he’d had access to rats and some kind of notes, but that was about all Dan could say. Had Herbert had friends? Allies? Enemies?

“Did you pick this up in prison?” Dan asks him.

“Wha’?” Herbert asks around the flashlight, sounding annoyed.

Dan takes the flashlight for him. “Did you learn this stuff in prison?”

Herbert laughs unkindly. “Yes, Dan, I learned it as part of the ‘how to dispose of the evidence when your roommate commits a murder’ class they offer all new offenders.” He straightens to inspect the scene. “It’s just a matter of observation and having more rational thought than whatever idiot from the local police department shows up tomorrow. Get the gun for me, will you?”

Dan trudges back to the car without protest. He’s halfway back to Herbert’s side, holding the handgun in a gloved hand, before he even thinks to question it. Wasn’t blindly following every one of Herbert’s instructions what had ruined him the last time? Hadn’t that been what he’d been trying to escape when he’d made the call to the police back in Arkham?

“Herb, wait,” he says.

Herbert is wiggling his hand at him, impatient. “Dan, I need the gun.”

“Why?”

“To make it look like he was shot in the car.”

“Okay.” Dan hands him the gun. “Just—tell me stuff like that, okay? I don’t want to be in the dark.”

“Are we really having this conversation now ?” Herbert snaps, flicking the safety off. For a thrilling instant, Dan thinks he’s going to point the gun at him, but instead he steps back and aims at McKinney’s driver’s side window. “Stand back, the glass is going to go everywhere.”

“I mean it, Herbert.”

“What do you want me to say, Dan? This is neither the time nor the place to discuss the matter.” Herbert sighs and lowers the gun, holding it out to Dan. “Fine. Here.”

“What are you doing?”

“You want to be included, yes? So aim at the driver’s side window and break the glass. Quickly, if you could. This is taking longer than I had hoped it would.”

Dan takes the gun from him, pleased at the concession, and does as he’s told. It takes two shots to break the window, but then it shatters, sending fragments of glass cascading over McKinney’s bloody corpse.

“Good. That should be sufficient,” Herbert declares, squinting down the road in both directions. “Frankly, this was a lot more work than I had thought it would be. Next time, we’re sticking to reanimation.”

“There isn’t going to be a next time,” Dan says. 

“You say that now,” Herbert mutters. “And then the next psycho will come sniffing around, hoping I’ll bring back his dead grandmother or whatever else and you’ll shoot them too.”

He says it like it’s a pattern, like Dan is an ill-behaved pet who compulsively brings him dead mice. “ I don’t just go around shooting people,” he protests. It’s starting to hit him, what he’s done. “I don’t kill people at all. This was the first time, actually.”

Herbert frowns—a that can’t be right kind of frown, as if he thinks Dan might be forgetting some casual murder he’d committed years ago. “You stabbed that man in Peru,” he says finally. “I was paying more attention to your wound at the time, but I’m fairly certain he died.”

“I think trying to keep us both safe in an active war zone is a little different than shooting a policeman in cold blood,” Dan says. He’s starting to feel the hysteria bubbling up within him.

“You’ve killed plenty of people for the second time.”

“That’s different too. It’s easier when they’re already dead.”

“Is it?” Herbert shrugs. “I’ve never felt that way. Besides, I’m certain his wife will be grateful.”

“He had a wife ?”

“He’s wearing a ring, Dan,” he says, like Dan should have noticed that while McKinney was bearing down on Herbert. “I don’t see why it matters. A man like that is never going to be missed too badly.”

Dan barely hears him—he’s stuck imagining McKinney’s wife sitting up in the kitchen, worrying over him. She’s already had to deal with losing a son, and now her husband will never come home. Did she think he was working late, or was she starting to suspect he had a girlfriend on the side? Was his dinner getting cold on the table while she waited?

He doesn’t remember sitting down, but suddenly he’s on the ground, the cold dirt pressing into his cheek. His breath is coming in short gasps—he can’t get enough air in his lungs, no matter how he tries, and his vision is starting to go blurry at the edges. It feels like something heavy is pressing down on his chest and, for a strange, surreal moment, Dan is convinced he’s being buried alive.

There’s a soft hand on Dan’s neck. “Shh, Danny, you’re going to be okay,” Herbert’s voice says. It sounds like he’s speaking from very far away. “Keep breathing, yes?”

Dan tries to nod. He’s not sure he manages it.

“Do you know grounding techniques?” Herbert asks. His voice is unfamiliar in its gentleness. “Can you tell me five things you see right now?”

“What?”

“It is supposed to help,” Herbert says. “Five things, Danny.”

Dan opens his eyes, blinking rapidly in the sudden brightness. Herbert is shining the flashlight in a path in front of Dan, presumably to give him something to look at. Even under the beam of the light, it’s hard to make much out..

“Um…road,” Dan gasps out. “Flashlight. More darkness?”

Herbert scrambles around to face him, shining the light at his own face. He should look ghastly like that, lit from below, but instead it reminds Dan of how a kid would try to look while telling stories over a campfire. He wonders, absurdly, if Herbert ever went to summer camp, if he told ghost stories about reanimated cats. The image is so out of place that Dan finds himself laughing.

Herbert looks concerned. “Is laughing good?”

“Don’t know.” Dan takes a deep breath and pushes himself up. “Good, I think.”

“Can we go home now, or should we keep talking?” Herbert points the flashlight away from himself again, moving it over the road ahead of them. “I know more of the grounding thing. The next one is touch.”

Herbert’s hand is still on his neck. Dan leans into it. “You’re touching me.”

“It’s supposed to be four things you can touch.”

“Mm. You should touch me three more places then.”

Herbert snorts. “If you can say something as dumb as that, you’re fine.” His hand tightens on Dan’s shoulder, firm and steadying. “I’ll drive us home. Relax, Danny, okay? You didn’t do anything wrong. You did well.”

Dan nods shakily, trying to believe him.

Herbert gently shepherds him into the passenger seat, and Dan is struck by the absurd parallel with the way they’d just handled McKinney’s body. Herbert leans over to buckle his seatbelt, and Dan wonders if Herbert would be doing the same thing if Dan had been the one who got shot, if he’d be so calm and methodical about cleaning up.

Then Herbert’s fingers come up to push Dan’s hair out of his eyes, his skin soft and warm where it brushes against Dan’s, and Dan decides that no, however Herbert will react to his death, it won’t be impartial. 

“Are you going to try to reanimate me when I die?” Dan asks as Herbert starts the car.

“You should try to rest, Dan. You’re in shock.”

“That isn’t an answer.”

“Do you want me to say yes?”

Dan has thought about it before. He used to have nightmares about it, back in the days after the Massacre—he’d be dead, floating above the scene and watching from afar as his body blundered about wildly, lashing out violently at anyone who got in his way. It was usually Meg that ended up dead, her neck cracked or her skull bashed open against the wall. After Peru, it had been Francesca. In the most vivid times, the ones that had left Dan shaking and sweating even after he’d woken up, it had been Herbert.

“I don’t want to hurt anyone,” Dan says. “I don’t want to hurt you .”

“You wouldn’t,” Herbert assures him. “I’d make certain it was perfect before giving it to you.”

“Would it just be my heart? Or—I guess my brain?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. I’d want all of you.”

Dan has no response to that. What can he even say? Herbert must know by now how Dan feels about him—’ I’d want all of you, too ’ feels trite, meaningless in the face of everything Dan has done, so he says nothing, just shrugs and settles back against the window. He watches the streetlights flash by, silent, turning the words over in his head. I’d want all of you, I’d want all of you. I’d want all of you.

*

When they get home, Herbert ushers Dan onto the couch and disappears into the kitchen for a few minutes before returning with a mug full of tomato soup.

“It’s all we had left,” Herbert explains. “You need to eat something.”

Dan nods and accepts the mug from him. It’s hot, almost to the point of scalding, and he has to blow on it before he can take a sip.

He hadn’t noticed how hungry he was, but before he realizes it, the mug is empty. He’s still staring at the bottom of the cup when Herbert pulls him to his feet and drags him into the bathroom. The shower is already running, hot enough to steam up the mirror, and Herbert has laid out an old tee-shirt and a pair of sweatpants on the counter. 

Dan showers in a daze. He can’t stop thinking about all the blood still drying on the rug downstairs, of his imagined version of Mrs. McKinney wrapping up her husband’s dinner for later. At the same time, he can’t bring himself to regret pulling the trigger—the moment McKinney had wrapped his hands around Herbert’s neck, he’d sealed his fate. 

He was expecting Herbert to return to the basement while he showered, but he’s surprised to find Herbert waiting in the hallway.

“Good,” he says, looking Dan up and down. Dan should probably be offended to be treated like such a child that he needs praise simply for bathing and dressing himself, but instead the words warm his chest better than the hot shower had. 

“Sleep now,” Herbert instructs him gently, holding open the door to Dan’s bedroom. 

Dan almost doesn’t make it to the bed, his legs wobbly under him. He must look like an idiot, because he hears Herbert snort behind him.

“Goodnight, Daniel.”

“Wait!” Dan calls after him, scrambling to sit up. “Stay?”

“Dan, I have work to do.”

“It can’t wait?” Dan scoots back in the bed to make room. “One night?”

“I’ve taken too much time with this whole ordeal already,” Herbert says, though he sounds much more uncertain now. He’s hovering in the doorway, frozen halfway through the motion of shutting the door.

“Please, Herbert?”

Herbert’s hand clenches tighter around the doorknob—Dan can see his knuckles go white. He’s staring at Dan almost hopefully, like he’s willing Dan to give him a reason to stay.

“Please,” Dan repeats. “I…” I need you , he almost manages, but finds himself choking on the word. “ Please ,” he repeats instead.

Herbert must understand some of what Dan can’t bring himself to say, because he gives Dan a shaky nod and crosses the room, almost painfully slow. He stops again in front of Dan’s bed, hesitating.“I don’t know what you want from me.”

Anything. Everything . “Just—stay.”

Herbert carefully lowers himself onto the edge of the bed, on top of the covers. He’s facing away from Dan and holding himself awkwardly, all tight, rigid angles, but Dan can’t complain because it’s Herbert—he’s finally here and he doesn’t move as Dan shuffles closer.

Tentatively, Dan lifts his arm and rests it over Herbert’s shoulder, waiting to see if he’ll shy away. He can feel Herbert’s muscles stiffen under his touch, and he waits, scarcely daring to breathe, until Herbert sighs and settles back into Dan’s arms. Dan wraps his arm the rest of the way around Herbert’s chest and pulls him closer, resting his forehead against the top of his head. His hair tickles Dan’s nose.

Dan isn’t sure how long they stay like that, slowly breathing together. Tentatively, he starts to run his fingers back and forth across Herbert’s shoulder, almost like he used to pet Rufus. Herbert hums softly, contentedly.

“You’re still wearing all your clothes,” Dan says softly as his hand trails across the knot of Herbert’s tie. “Do you sleep in ties?”

“I’m not going to sleep yet,” Herbert says, though his voice is starting to go soft at the edges, like he’s trying to suppress a yawn. “Told you, I still have work.”

Dan starts to fidget with the knot. “I don’t think you need the tie for your work, either. Can’t imagine the kind of people you’re working with would care.”

Herbert lets out a little snort of laughter, but he doesn’t protest as Dan slowly undoes his tie and lets it slide onto the floor. There’s something deeply intimate about the act, about the way Herbert is allowing Dan to caress his throat, the way his pulse speeds up under Dan’s touch.

Dan pauses, his fingers on the top button of Herbert’s shirt. He can feel Herbert’s chest rising and falling with every breath. “Can I—?”

Herbert tenses under Dan’s arm. He’s holding himself so rigidly that Dan’s worried he might snap. He’s about to move away and apologize for even asking when Herbert slowly lets out a long breath and nods jerkily, his head bumping awkwardly against Dan’s chin.

Dan can’t remember the last time he’d felt this way—certainly not with Tina or Max or any of the other parade of short-term relationships he’d had before Herbert was back. He fumbles with the first button, fingers clumsier than they’ve been in years, and Herbert lets out another little huff of laughter. Dan can’t see his face, but he can imagine his unimpressed expression.

“Do you need assistance?” Herbert asks snidely.

“Fuck off.” Dan slips the button loose and slides his hand down to the next one. Herbert’s skin is warm and softer than he’d imagined under his touch, and he is nearly overwhelmed with the sensation of it. He’s hairier than Dan had imagined too, and he squirms slightly when Dan brushes his thumb over his chest hair.

His fingers reach Herbert’s belt and he stops, suddenly aware of how far this is from anything they’ve ever done before. “Should I—?”

Herbert breaks the moment first, sighing heavily and wriggling out of Dan’s arms. Dan is about to protest, to plead with him to stay, but before he can speak, Herbert shrugs his shirt off completely and Dan forgets everything he was about to say. He can’t tear his eyes away from Herbert’s hands as he deftly undoes his belt, from the taut line of his spine as he leans over to pull his socks off.

“I’m going back to work in a few hours.”

“Huh?”

Herbert crosses the room to switch off the light. He seems completely unconcerned about his near-nudity, neither shying away from Dan’s stare nor preening under the attention. “I’ll sleep now for a few hours, and then I’m going back to the basement,” he reiterates. In the darkness, Dan can’t quite make out his expression.

“Okay,” Dan says, unsure of how to convey any of the emotions threatening to overwhelm him. How to tell Herbert that that’s enough, that he’ll take it, but also that he wants so much more.

“Move over.”

Dan scoots back in the bed again and hesitates, suddenly aware that Herbert is standing in front of him, almost naked, and Dan is still fully clothed. He tugs at his tee-shirt. “Should I…?”

Herbert shrugs. “If you want.”

Dan pulls his shirt off and tosses it aside before Herbert can change his mind. It’s hard to tell in the dark, but he thinks Herbert’s eyes linger on his bare chest.

“We’re just sleeping tonight,” Herbert says, still looking somewhere distinctly below Dan’s eyes. “Nothing more.”

“Okay,” Dan agrees quickly. 

Herbert settles back on the bed next to Dan. Dan press his back against the wall, careful not to push Herbert away any further. Even from this distance, he can feel the solid presence of Herbert’s body beside him. He closes his eyes, breathing in the smell—bleach, he realizes now. He must have started to clean the rug.

Herbert clears his throat. “You can put your arm back,” he says pointedly.

Dan is glad Herbert has his back to him so he can’t see the way Dan is smiling. He drapes his arm over Herbert again and pulls him back against his chest.

He isn’t aware of falling asleep. He definitely tried to stay awake,  savoring the feeling of Herbert’s skin pressed against his and his chest rising and falling under Dan’s hand—desperate not to waste a single moment of the night. Even so, he must have dozed off eventually though, because he wakes up to Herbert moving his arm aside.

He groans. “What time s’it?” he mumbles. “Don’ go yet.”

“I told you I had to work,” Herbert says softly. He reaches out, tentatively, and rests his hand on Dan’s shoulder. “Go back to sleep.”

“You’re not leaving forever, right?”

Herbert slides his hand up to Dan’s hair and begins to gently run his fingers through it. Dan can feel himself starting to relax again. “I’m only going downstairs, Danny.”

“You could stay,” he murmurs, though his eyes are already drooping shut.

“I have work , Dan,” Herbert says softly. “I’ll see you at dinner. Sushi?”

“M’kay,” Dan agrees, already starting to drift off again.

There’s a long pause, and Dan is certain that Herbert must have left already, but then the bed dips as Herbert sits down on the edge of it. He’s dressed again, Dan realizes, as he nudges up against his side. 

“Wha’s up?” Dan slurs, still half-asleep.

“Goodnight, Danny,” Herbert says softly, still not moving. Finally, almost painfully slowly, Herbert leans down and brushes his mouth against Dan’s forehead, before quickly standing up and leaving the room.

Dan doesn’t fall back asleep.

Chapter Text

Work the next day is surreal. Dan keeps feeling like the nurses are staring at him, and he has to duck into the bathroom to check that there’s no trace of blood still clinging to his cheeks. His head isn’t there, either—he brings Mr. Talbot’s medication to Mrs. Martinez even with Claire elbowing him in the side, and he completely forgets to check on Mr. Bremner. He’s just glad he isn’t scheduled for surgery.

He almost forgets the sushi on the way home too, has to turn around a block from the house to go back for it. Once he’s at the restaurant, he realizes he has no idea what Herber wants, panics, and orders one of practically everything on the menu. The teenage cashier raises his eyebrows but shrugs and takes Dan’s credit card.

When Dan gets home, the house is dark and silent, but Herbert has left a sticky note in the foyer that says, Working downstairs, dinner at 8 . Dan smiles at that—Herbert had placed it at exactly Dan’s eye-level.

By the time Herbert emerges from the basement—at 8:17, not that Dan was keeping track—Dan has cracked open all the containers and laid them out on the island. He’d run out of space by the end and shoved the rest onto the table.

Herbert inspects the scene, his mouth doing its little half-amused twitch. “Are we expecting visitors? Did you invite more of Oak Hills’s finest to join us for a cozy night in?”

“Fuck off, I thought you might be hungry. We have a fridge.”

Herbert is still smirking to himself, but he takes a plate and begins loading it up. Dan is tempted to tell him to get his own dinner the next time if he’s going to be so rude about it, but he doesn’t mind all that much. Hell, Herbert eating more than a few small bitest of any food is practically a ‘thank you’ coming from him.

“I’ve been meaning to ask you,” Herbert says, when Dan has cleared the table enough for them to sit down. He pauses to tear open a packet of soy sauce, seemingly unbothered, while Dan’s blood runs cold. Has McKinney’s death inspired him somehow, and now he wants to ask Dan to cross some further line? Or is it that Herbert has finally grown sick of Dan’s pathetic neediness and is finally going to demand that he stop acting so clingy?

“What is your computer password?”

Dan blinks. That was the last thing he expected. “What?”

“Your password, Dan. So that I can search a few things.”

“Uh, Miskatonic86. Capital ‘M.’”

“Astonishing display of creativity,” Herbert mutters, rolling his eyes. “Will you show me?”

“Will I show you… my computer?”

Herbert shoves a piece of shrimp in his mouth instead of answering. He’s fidgeting with his chopsticks, carefully avoiding Dan’s gaze. Finally, keeping his eyes on the chopsticks, he says in a rush, “I have no idea how to use your computer. It’s different from the ones at the hospital. I need you to explain it to me.”

“What hospi—oh, you mean Miskatonic,” Dan realizes. “You haven’t used a computer since 1990?”

“I was in prison as you may recall, Dan,” Herbert retorts sharply. He’s looking at Dan again, if only to glare.

He says it as if Dan had already refused to show him. Dan hates this, hates that Herbert is so embarrassed to admit he needs Dan’s help for anything, even something as simple as running a Google search, that he’ll resort to such an easy dig. Dan shrugs. “I don’t know, I thought you might have had access to one.”

Herbert leans further away from Dan and narrows his eyes. “And where exactly would I have gotten access to a computer? While I was in solitary confinement?”

“You seemed to get plenty of access to everything you needed to do your experiments.”

Dan regrets the words the second they’re out of his mouth. Herbert does this to him, makes him speak without thinking. He always has.

Herbert throws his chopsticks down and shoves himself away from the table. “You of all people have no right to talk to me about that,” he snaps. “Do you really want to pretend that the decade in prison because of your betrayal was simply some kind of–some kind of research fellowship? A nice relaxing time to catch up on my work?” He’s as angry as Dan has ever seen him, cheeks flushed with it.

“I’m sorry.”

“Oh, are you?” And oh, the moment of rage had been nothing compared to this, this frigid dismissal. Dan would rather Herbert had thrown a plate at his head—anything but the way he’s looking at Dan now, this sheer disinterest. As if nothing Dan can say will be worth the time it takes Herbert to hear it.

“Look, what is it going to take for you to believe me?” Dan snaps, throwing up his hands. He doesn’t remember standing up, but suddenly he’s on his feet, rounding on Herbert. Close enough that Herbert has to look up at him, has to care . “Haven’t I groveled enough for you yet? What else do you fucking want from me?”

Herbert stands his ground, folding his arms. “What else other than… what have you done exactly? A pathetic apology and an overindulgent takeout order?”

He’s trying to bait Dan—Dan doesn’t care why, refuses to waste any more of his energy trying to understand the man. He wants to grab Herbert, to shake some sense into him or at the very least to shake some of the bullheaded stupidity out of him, but he’s determined not to give him the satisfaction.

Instead, he takes a deep breath and steps back away from Herbert. “I killed a man for you last night,” he says, more quietly. “You know as well as I do that I’ve done more than that, too. I dragged all your shit across the country with me. I built you a lab. I spent over $20,000 in legal fees too, by the way, trying to figure out how to appeal your conviction.”

Herbert’s scowl softens at that and he cocks his head to the side, confused. “I never spoke to a lawyer.”

“Because you never read the letters , Herb. If we’d both cooperated, my lawyer was sure she could get your conviction overturned, but I couldn’t do anything without your consent.” Dan sighs and rubs his eyes. “Look, I got you out in the end, didn’t I?”

“Pure chance,” Herbert replies, but his anger seems to have ebbed. Without it, he looks exhausted. “You had no way of knowing I would escape in the commotion.”

“When don’t you escape in any given commotion?” Dan asks, and Herbert graces him with half a smile. “Besides, if it hadn’t worked, I’d just have kept trying until it did.”

That seems to reach Herbert. He’s staring at Dan, a strange expression on his face. His brow is furrowed and his mouth is hanging slightly open, as if Dan is an unexpected lab result, one with promising implications for the work.

Dan clears his throat. “So, uh, did you want to see the computer?”

Herbert blinks rapidly, shaking off whatever had come over him and smoothing out his shirt sleeves. “That can wait. I need you to do something else first.”

Dan groans, ready to be dragged to the morgue for the second time that week, when Herbert gestures towards the hidden door in the pantry. “In the basement?” Dan asks, hardly daring to believe it.

“If you would.”

“Yes! Of course!” Dan agrees, starting forward so quickly that he knocks his beer to the floor. It rolls under the table noisily, trailing foam across the floor, but Dan doesn’t care. 

Herbert chuckles at Dan’s clumsiness but doesn’t move to help clean it up or to wait for Dan to do so himself. He won’t look at Dan, just steps around him and over the spilled beer and makes his way to the pantry to push open the door to the lab. When it’s clear he isn’t going to ask Dan again, Dan hastens to follow. He can clean up the beer later.

*

“Be careful of the bottom step,” Herbert calls as Dan descends into the lab. “It wobbles.”

Dan knows it wobbles—he’d spent several hours before his final trip to Arkham trying to make it stop wobbling before he’d finally given up. He’s touched, though, that Herbert cares.

The lab looks much like Dan had expected—mostly how he left it after his own work, though with a fresh body clamped down on the modified examination table in the center of the room. Dan recognizes the cadaver Herbert is working with—T. Lafferty, 23 years old, carbon dioxide poisoning from an unidentified gas leak in the house. Dan had treated his younger sister, had told Herbert when the brother hadn’t made it, had driven him to the morgue to pick the body up. 

What Dan wasn’t expecting is the homemade ventilator—it looks out of place in the basement, though Dan probably shouldn’t be all that surprised, given that he had bought or stolen all of the components on Herbert’s instruction. “What’s the ventilator for?” he asks.

Herbert looks at him like he’s an idiot. “To help him breathe, Dan.”

“He’s breathing?”

“He’s in an induced coma,” Herbert explains. “Part of the trouble we always had was with the overstimulation our subjects experienced—the pain of rebirth, the mind failing to process what is happening to it. I thought inducing a coma might provide for a… gentler re-entry.”

“Can you, uh, un-induce it?” Dan checks the man’s pulse—it’s low, certainly, but not any lower than he would expect from a comatose patient. His breathing appears to be steady for the moment.

“It’s an ordinary barbituate-induced coma, Dan. He should wake of his own accord.” Herbert’s hand closes over Dan’s on the man’s wrist. Dan should move—this can’t be an efficient way to read a pulse, not with Dan’s knuckles brushing against Herbert’s palm, but Herbert doesn’t seem to mind, so Dan certainly isn’t going to remove his hand first.

“You injected the reagent already?”

“Yes. His vitals have been promising to this point, but he needs twenty-four hour observation. I don’t want him waking up while I’m dozing off.”

“So you want to take turns monitoring him?” Dan asks. He’s not sure how much longer he can pretend he needs to keep his hand on the man’s wrist, but Herbert still isn’t moving. “I can do that.”

Herbert drops his hand and nods, suddenly all stiff professionalism. “Good. If you could attend to him after midnight this evening, I can take over again before you need to leave for the hospital.”

“Okay,” Dan says, even though he can’t remember the last time he slept properly. He should be refusing, should tell Herbert that he can’t afford to go into work after another sleepless night, but he can’t risk Herbert never asking again. He has a few hours before midnight, anyway—he can try to nap, maybe, or at least make a pot of coffee when he cleans up from dinner.

“You’ll need to record everything that occurs when he wakes, of course,” Herbert says. “I’d prefer if you wake me as soon as possible, though obviously not at the expense of capturing as much data as you can.”

“I can do that,” Dan agrees, hoping he doesn’t sound too eager.

He almost certainly does, because Herbert eyes him skeptically and says, “It will likely be only a few hours of monitoring his vitals. It isn’t as ifI’m asking for your hand in marriage.”

Dan really is exhausted, because he doesn’t think for a moment before saying, “We’d have to move back to Massachusetts.”

“What?”

Dan can feel himself starting to flush. “If—y’know. You just said, you didn’t ask to get married. We’d have to move to Massachusetts, though. If you had asked.”

Herbert is staring at him like he’s grown a second head—actually, if he had grown a second head, Herbert would probably be taking notes, instead of staring in blank confusion. 

“It’s legal there,” Dan adds, by way of explanation.

“Yes,” Herbert agrees. “I know. I suspect the prison escape would make it illegal, though.”

He doesn’t sound like he’s joking, more like he’s hypothesizing about how a lethal dose of a rare drug in a particular cadaver would interact with the reagent. Like it’s all simply an interesting hypothetical to discuss.

“We could use fake names,” Dan counters. “Ethan still has a Massachusetts I.D.”

“Fake names would definitely make it illegal.” Herbert rolls his eyes. “Will you stop wasting time? You really should try to sleep for a few hours.”

Dan wants to push the conversation further, but he has enough dignity left to shut up and hold the body how Herbert wants it. He’s acting like an idiot, he knows he is, but at the same time— stop wasting time isn’t the same thing as no , especially not in Herbert-speak. He’d been smiling slightly too, amused by the concept rather than outright disgusted. 

“ Daniel , pay attention!” Herbert snaps, waving the video recorder in front of his face. “I asked if you understood what you need to do.”

Dan blinks and takes the recorder from him.  “Yeah,” he says. “Sorry, yeah. I can do this.”

*

His six hours in the lab wind up being spectacularly uneventful. Herbert greets him in the stairwell at midnight precisely and says nothing besides “ Don’t snoop through my notes.” Dan resents the order—he hadn’t been planning on it, but now he can’t stop wondering what Herbert is so worried he might see. Would it really be so awful for Dan to read about the work? Hadn’t he once wanted this, for Dan to be practically salivating over the chance to read about each and every failed trial or subsequent modification?

All the same, he can’t bring himself to disobey Herbert’s instructions, not while he’s finally allowed to sit here, so instead he finds one of his own old notebooks and passes the time flipping through that. He’s pleased to find several signs that Herbert has done the same, just the odd underlining of some variable or circling of a particular result. It’s not much but it’s there, solid proof that Herbert had devoted the time to read all of this work, to think about it. 

Lafferty doesn’t wake before Herbert arrives the next morning, looking better rested than Dan can remember seeing him. The circles under his eyes are fainter, and he’s actually brushed his hair again.

Herbert doesn’t thank him, doesn’t acknowledge the shift between them that had brought Dan to the basement, just clasps his shoulder gently and says, “You should go now if you don’t want to be late to work.”

Somehow, it’s enough.

*

Sergeant William McKinney’s obituary is published in the Friday paper. Dan buys a copy from the cafe in the hospital lobby and carries it around with him all day. He can feel it burning a hole in his pocket.

Herbert scoffs at it when Dan shows him the paper. “Only a $500 reward for any information? They must have really hated him.” He chuckles, skimming through the rest of the article. “Listen to this: ‘While he enjoyed many simple pleasures, like watching sports, eating good food, going to cook outs, and being outdoors, the thing that brought him the most joy was his family.’ What unbelievably trite garbage.”

Dan can feel his stomach clenching. His family… the image comes to him again of the lonely wife, waiting. Of the dead son McKinney had been so determined to save.

“Dan, you don’t think any of that was genuine, do you? I can find you forty identical obituaries on the internet right now.” He shakes his head in disgust. “What an utterly insignificant man.”

“ Herbert .”

“Might I remind you, Dan, that he was fully prepared to choke the life out of me when he didn’t get what he wanted? Who knows how a man like that must have acted at home, or on the job.”

He has a point. Dan doesn’t know why he has to deliver it like he does, why he can’t find any shred of empathy for the woman and boy in Dan’s mind.

Herbert insists on following up the obituary with a Google search, so Dan leads him to his study and shows him how to turn on his old Dell monitor. Herbert takes to the computer quickly enough—Dan shows him how to open Internet Explorer and where to type into Google and then Herbert pushes him away, declaring, “I’m not a child , Dan.”

His tongue pokes out the side of his mouth as he types. It makes Dan’s heart clench painfully in his chest.

“Suspected robbery in connection with a failed drug bust,” Herbert says.

“Huh?”

“I told you, Dan. They think some addict killed him. Some nobody. They don’t care enough to find out otherwise.”

“And what really happened to him, if he wasn’t killed by some ‘nobody addict’?” Dan asks, more to hear Herbert say it than out of curiosity. He knows he should be chiding Herbert for his callous phrasing rather than using it as an excuse to fish for compliments, but it’s impossible to resist.

Herbert rolls his eyes. “That’s a stupid question, Dan. You know as well as I do that you’re…” he trails off, hesitating.

“That I’m…?” Dan prompts.

“That you matter ,” Herbert finishes in a low mumble, clearly frustrated. He’s glaring at the computer screen instead of Dan.

“Would you like to repeat that? I don’t think I heard you,” Dan teases and Herbert reaches back to shove him away.

“Dan, you’re being very distracting.”

“Am I?” Dan can’t help but feel smug about that. He figures he’s earned it, at this point—Herbert has certainly distracted him more than enough. There’s something intensely intoxicating about it, being able to lean in and watch Herbert flush, or for his fingers to fumble on the keys.

Herbert shoves him away again, but he’s smiling now. “Will you let me work ?”

“Why should I?”

Herbert turns to look at him. He’s relaxed, happy in a way that makes Dan’s heart ache—this is what they always should have had, this warm familiarity. For a few seconds, everything between them feels easy.

“If you leave me in peace, I’ll tell you about what I worked on today,” Herbert offers.

Dan grins at him and holds out a hand. “Deal.”

Herbert shakes it.

*

Something shifts between them after that. Herbert doesn’t invite Dan back into the lab, but he tells him when Lafferty opens his eyes, describing how stable he seemed and the way he’d been able to comply with basic instructions before slipping back into unconsciousness. Dan seems to ask the right questions too, because Herbert answers all of them eagerly, his eyes lighting up as he explains the reagent’s effects on blood pressure. 

He doesn’t offer more information in the coming week, but he seems more relaxed around Dan too, and his jabs have lost some of their bitter edge. He’s sleeping more too—Dan wonders if he’d been more worried about McKinney than he had let on, and that now the man is dead he can go back to his grudging six hours of rest.

“I’m not moving back to Massachusetts with you,” Herbert announces out of the blue one morning. They’re sharing one of their increasingly rare breakfasts together, though neither of them has said anything more than pass the sugar.

“Excuse me?”

“You had said that we’d have to move back to Massachusetts, were we to get married. I’m not going to move back to Massachusetts and I have no interest whatsoever in marriage.”

“I know that, it was just a stupid joke—“

Herbert holds up a hand. “I’m not finished. What I was going to say was that while I’m not going to marry you and live out whatever ridiculous suburban fantasy prompted that comment, I would consider going to dinner together. If you could find a time between all your bar sluts.”

“Excuse me, all of my what ?” 

“You know exactly what I mean,” Herbert says. “If you prefer them, you can go out drinking and fuck the first person who looks twice at you. If not, we could go to dinner.”

“Wait, you mean like a date? You’re asking me on a date?”

Herbert frowns. “Dinner is still standard on such occasions, is it not?”

“Shit, I mean, yes , dinner would be great. Yeah.”

The corner of Herbert’s mouth twitches. Dan must sound like a moron. He doesn’t care. Herbert just asked him on a date , he’s allowed a few moments to be completely gobsmacked by the whole thing.

“All right,” Herbert says. “You can take me out Friday night. In the meantime, I’m going to need you to pick up the shipment of rats I ordered online.”

*

The last time Dan was nervous about a date was in the year 1984, when weeks of shy flirting had finally convinced Dean Halsey’s very pretty daughter to go out with him and now Meg was staring up at him with her wide blue eyes and he could barely stutter out an awkward conversation about their shared classes. He’d completely botched it, Meg had told him later—she’d only given him a second date because “you were so cute about it all, Danny, like a little nervous bunny rabbit!”

It had taken three dates total for Dan to finally muster the courage to kiss her. He’d taken her to an art museum and she’d opened up a bit, telling him all about Edward Hopper’s innovative light techniques, Lois Maillou Jones’s celebratory use of colors, Norman Rockwell’s political activism. She sketched a bit, she’d confessed, but “Daddy says he didn’t want some bohemian layabout for a daughter,” so she had focused on a career in medicine instead. They’d had a picnic afterwards in a secluded spot besides a local pond, and she’d sketched Dan’s profile as he talked aimlessly about his hobbies, about his friends from the softball team and his pathetic attempt to join a bowling league. When she’d shown him the drawing of him mid-sentence, his arms waving wildly, he had finally gotten up the courage to lean forward and kiss her, softly. Chastely.

Dan had clung onto that memory for years, metonymy for everything he’d lost in the Massacre. Meg, of course, but not only her. He knows that Meg had been his only chance at such softness, at the kind of memories that always had a golden glow about them. He supposes he had loved others since then, Francesca and Lisa and maybe Tim, but it was a sharper love. Painful, in a way Meg had never been.

And now Herbert—Dan can’t imagine Herbert at an art museum. He’d almost certainly dismiss it as a waste of time, roll his eyes at any painting Dan admired and loudly point out that he could have run several important tests in the time it takes to make their way through the Modern Wing. Dan briefly considers taking him into Chicago to either the Field Museum or the Museum of Science and Industry, but he can’t help but think of Herbert using the red pen in the textbooks. The last thing they need is for Herbert to make a scene defacing some scientific plaque he deems inaccurate.

Dan decides to keep it simple. Dinner and a movie, he suggests, and Herbert rolls his eyes and says, “You have plenty of movies here, I have no desire to sit in public and watch Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle , masterpiece of cinema though it may be.” Just dinner, then, with the promise that Herbert might deign to watch a DVD afterwards—“if you aren’t too insufferable at dinner,” Herbert says when Dan brings it up. “I didn’t hate The Thing , I suppose.”

Dan had assumed that, come Friday evening, he was going to have to drag Herbert out of the basement by force to make their reservation on time. He certainly wasn’t expecting to come home to find Herbert already waiting in the living room, dressed shockingly nicely in a dark blue shirt Dan has never seen before. He’s leafing through one of the textbooks, but he seems less invested than usual. He doesn’t even have a pen out.

“Is that a new shirt?” 

Herbert looks down at it and shrugs. “It’s from Miskatonic. I bought it years ago.”

“I’ve never seen you wear it before.” Dan is certain he’d have remembered—the shirt clings to Herbert in a way he would have thought about for weeks, even before he’d admitted to himself that maybe his attraction to Herbert might be due to more than proximity.

“I never had much cause to dress for dates. I don’t even know why I bought it in the first place—the store attendant was very insistent. She said it was ‘my color.’” He pronounces the air quotes with contempt.

“She was uh, absolutely right,” Dan says. “You look great.”

Herbert eyes him critically. “Is that what you’re planning on wearing?”

He’s still in the cardigan and button-up he’d changed into after his shift. Nothing overly dressy, but certainly presentable enough for dinner, the kind of thing Dan would usually wear out to a nice restaurant.

“No,” Dan lies. “Just give me ten minutes to change and we can get going.”

Herbert shrugs and returns to his book.

Three discarded ties later, Dan starts to worry—what if Herbert had simply meant it as a question, and now Dan is making a fool of himself picking out a tie that goes with his blazer. What if he gets downstairs and Herbert laughs at him—or worse, what if Herbert points out that the last time he’d seen Dan dressed like this, he had been standing in a courtroom refusing to meet Herbert’s eyes.

Dan forgoes the blazer. It seems for the best.

He’s pleased with his decision when he gets downstairs—Herbert says nothing, but his eyes run over Dan twice and he seems satisfied enough with what he sees.

The restaurant is two towns over, a forty minute drive away. Dan had insisted, hadn’t wanted to risk being seen anywhere closer, even with McKinney taken care of. Herbert had conceded grudgingly, though he’d told Dan several times that he couldn’t imagine any of the residents of Oak Hills being particularly up to date with the faces of missing Massachusetts convicts. He had been mildly disappointed to discover that he wasn’t even on the FBI’s most wanted list—“Don’t they understand that my work fundamentally alters the course of human history?” he’d complained to Dan, while Dan tried to convince him that not being raided by the FBI was an overall benefit.

Even with the distance, Dan spends the drive nervous. Herbert had conceded to wear contacts for the night, while Dan had shoved his own glasses on, but it’s not much of a disguise for either of them. He hopes the restaurant is dark enough to conceal them.

“You’re being paranoid again,” Herbert says when he catches Dan checking his glasses in the reflection.

“Maybe I’m just making sure I look good for our date.”

Herbert’s mouth twitches. “You look acceptable.”

“You look amazing.”

“Watch where you’re driving, Dan,” he says, though Dan catches a hint of satisfaction in his expression.

*

The restaurant Dan chose is quiet and cozy, all dark wood and low, warm light. Herbert seems satisfied with it, takes his time with the menu and waves for Dan to go ahead and choose from the wine list. Dan can’t remember Herbert ever drinking wine, doesn’t know what he likes, so he blusters his way through a conversation about vinyards and vintage with their server and eventually settles on a pinot noir that he thinks will pair decently with their orders.

“So you know your wines now?” Herbert asks when their server leaves, clearly amused by the display. “I remember you buying wine based on what was cheapest and came in the biggest bottle.”

“I was making half of that up,” Dan admits. “It’s not that hard—you just say something like “oh but the ‘92 couldn’t possibly compare to the ‘89” and then something about earthiness and, um.” He catches himself before he can admit that what usually happens next is that his date is suitably impressed by his sophistication.

Herbert is smirking like he knows anyway. “I’m certain the wine you so carefully selected will be just fine, Dan.”

Dan kicks him under the table. Herbert just smiles wider. He looks younger in the candlelight. Happier too—or maybe that’s more than a trick of the light.

“So what do people do on dates then?” Herbert asks. He sounds disinterested, sarcastic, like he’s making fun of Dan for being here at all. “What do you say after you’ve suitably impressed your partner by faking your way through a wine list?”

“Wait, have you never been on a date before?”

“The only relationships I have had did not tend to be the kind to include dates,” Herbert says. “Did you imagine that before Miskatonic I had some tedious girl like Meg to wine and dine?”

He’s trying to rile Dan again, but Dan is used to it by now, and any mention of Meg has lost its sting years ago. He’s far more caught up on Herbert’s reference to past relationships. He certainly hadn’t had any relationships while living with Dan, dates or not—had he? Had Dan really been too oblivious, too caught up in his own misery to notice?  Or were they in Switzerland, all these nameless men who hadn’t even done Herbert the courtesy of a night out? Or, worse still—had Herbert actually found someone in the past decade, a fellow prisoner who could be a better partner to him than Dan ever was?

“You look angry.”

“I don’t like thinking about you with other men,” Dan says, startled by his own honesty. “Who were they?”

Herbert raises his eyebrows. “You of all people are asking me about past relationships?”

“I’d tell you about any of mine,” Dan says.

Herbert seems like he’s about to say something when their waiter reappears with the wine. Herbert quickly closes his mouth.

Dan smiles and confirms it isn’t corked, trying not to look too much like he’s trying to shoo the waiter away. It doesn’t matter—the interruption was enough to stop Herbert from whatever he’d been about to say, leaving them staring at their glasses in awkward silence. Dan can’t stop thinking about Herbert in these relationships ; trying to think back to Miskatonic to decide whether any of their classmates seemed the type to sneak off into an empty room with the weird transfer student while Dan’s back was turned.

All the same, now that they’ve been interrupted, Dan doesn’t know how to return to the topic, not without offending Herbert. The silence is starting to curdle between them, so Dan raises his glass and clears his throat. “We should do a toast.”

“To?”

“Can be anything. ‘To us’ is always a nice one.”

Herbert’s expression darkens. “How many girls have you used that on?”

“A few,” Dan admits.

“I don’t want it then.”

“To your work, then?” Dan offers. “I can assure you I haven’t used that one on anyone else before.”

“To the work,” Herbert agrees with a nod, clinking their glasses together. He takes a long gulp of the wine, almost draining his glass in a single sip, and Dan wonders if maybe he isn’t the only one nervous tonight. 

“So, uh, speaking of the work, what are you working on now?” Dan asks, when the silence has stretched on long too far for comfort.

“I’m not talking about that.”

Dan’s face must fall, because Herbert quickly adds, “Because I don’t want to be overheard in public , Dan, not for whatever reason you’re imagining. I’ll show you when we get home, if you wish.”

“Really?”

Herbert sets down his glass and folds his hands carefully. He’s looking directly at Dan now, as open and honest as Dan has ever seen him. “I wouldn’t be here tonight if I didn’t intend to let you back into my lab. I thought that it was clear when I let you into the basement for the first time that you are perfectly free to ask about the work. Frankly, I’m surprised you haven’t seen it all already.”

“You told me not to snoop.”

“I didn’t expect you to actually listen .” Herbert shrugs. “Besides, you could have just asked me to see the rest of it.”

“I didn’t want to push”

“You can push, Dan,” Herbert says and then, so quietly Dan almost misses it, “You’re meant to push.”

“Okay.” And then, because he wants to be clear and because Herbert has asked him to, he does. He mirrors Herbert, setting down his glass and staring across the table. “If I’m allowed… then this is me asking to be your partner again. I don’t want to have to ask what you’re doing, I want you to come out and tell me and maybe I’ll have ideas that actually help you. You can even do the thing where you call me your assistant if that’s what it takes, but that’s not what I want. I want to be a full part of it all.”

Herbert looks—strange. His eyes are glowing in the low light, dark and intense. “Is that all?” he asks, and his voice is slightly rough.

“I could be in the lab full time, even. I could leave the hospital—I have the savings for it. We could focus on the work without any distractions.”

Herbert sighs and drops his eyes from Dan, pinching the bridge of his nose. Dan isn’t sure if he’d said something wrong, doesn’t know what possibly could have offended him. 

“Please, Herb?”

“It couldn’t be without distractions. Not while you’re here.”

Dan can feel his heart sinking, a physical sensation in his chest. He had felt so hopeful for a moment, with Herbert staring at him so intently. He’d been so sure that this time, Herbert was actually understanding him.

Think about it, Dan. McKinney only knew where to find me because of you.” Herbert leans forward and taps the bridge of Dan’s glasses sharply. “Might I remind you that you’re currently wearing fake glasses to hide from the police just to have a night out.”

“They’re not fake.”

“Irrelevant,” Herbert says. He clears his throat and drains his wine. It’s odd to see him in this setting. Surreal. He seems so out of place chugging wine in his nice shirt, it feels a bit like watching a video of a cat wearing human clothes. 

“I’ve been thinking about moving,” he announces finally. He’s back to avoiding Dan’s eyes. “I believe it’s past time.”

“What?”

“North Dakota, I’ve decided.”

“Herbert, please. Why?” Not now. Had Herbert planned this as some kind of goodbye dinner, throwing Dan a bone over his pathetic crush before disappearing forever? Dan can’t look at him anymore, squeezes his eyes shut to avoid it. For a moment, he’s worried he might cry.

Something brushes against Dan’s hand. He opens his eyes to see Herbert’s fingers resting on top of his. “ Together , Dan,” Herbert clarifies gently. “I’ve been thinking about us moving to North Dakota. You mentioned before that you would consider moving.”

Oh. Dan lets out a shaky breath, almost a laugh. He feels lighter than he has in years, giddy with the relief of it. He turns his hand over under Herbert’s, lacing their fingers together, and Herbert squeezes. “Why?” he asks again, though it doesn’t matter. They both know he’s going to agree. 

“I think it would be for the best—McKinney won’t be the only person who comes looking for me here, not as long as you’re still going by Dr. Daniel Cain, my last known associate. Besides, it might be nice to leave the house every so often without having to drive an hour out of town. I’m worried you might insist on fake mustaches next time.”

Dan does laugh at that. Herbert has a point too. Dan hates having to check every few minutes that the couple by the window aren’t secretly watching them, hates having to search McKinney’s name every few days to make sure there are no new developments in the case. A new state might do them both good—new names certainly will.

“What about—”

“My work is going quite well, thank you,” Herbert interrupts loudly, and Dan turns to see their waiter returning with their orders— lamb for Herbert, some complicated mushroom pasta dish for him. 

When he’s left, Herbert quirks his head to the side. “What about what, Danny?”

“Why North Dakota?” he asks. “Have you ever even been to North Dakota?”

“When would I have been to North Dakota?”

Dan shrugs. He realizes again he has almost no idea what Herbert’s childhood had been like—hell, he doesn’t even know what state he’s from. He must have lived in the states before Switzerland, right? He tries to imagine him as a kid on a family roadtrip to Mount Rushmore or the Mall of America, but all he can picture is Herbert as he had first met him, full suit and tie, but slightly shorter.

“Well, I have never been to North Dakota. I looked it up on the internet, however, and it seems like it will suit our purposes perfectly. There is a low enough population we should be able to operate quite undetected, and the climate is not too humid for my preferences. The criminal penalty for graverobbing is relatively low as well, which ought to benefit us if we are unfortunate enough to be caught. Besides, it has one of the lowest average lifespans in the midwest and the highest teen mortality rate out of all fifty states.” Herbert raises his eyebrows. “Think about it, Dan. Practically all our subjects would be under sixty.”

Dan should be alarmed that Herbert is looking up teen mortality rates. Instead, he’s stuck on the way Herbert had said ‘our purposes’ and ‘our subjects’ so matter-of-factly.

“Uh, why under sixty?”

“Lower risk of heart problems, cancers, whatever else may be wrong with them. I really think I may be close to something with the pentobarbital, Dan.”

“Seems like you’ve put a lot of thought into this.”

“So you’ll agree?” Herbert asks, and Dan catches a hint of uncertainty in his voice. “You would come with me?”

“I—it’s a big change,” Dan says, picking at his pasta. “Where would we even live?”

“I found a listing that seems ideal,” Herbert replies quickly. “Three bedrooms, two bath. 1500 square foot basement.” He’s practically vibrating with excitement. “And do you know why it’s still for sale? Because ‘no one wants a house that close to the cemetery,’ Danny. The owner’s becoming desperate.”

That sounds—fairly perfect, actually, though Dan worries what Herbert thinks they need three bedrooms for. “Uh, I’ll think about it,” he says. “There are lots of things we’d have to sort out first.” He isn’t sure why he’s fighting this, why he can’t just shout yes like he wants to.

“We can sort them all out, though,” Herbert insists. “Dan, do you know the two highest causes of death in North Dakota? Exposure and overdose!”

No one should be able to sound so excited listing causes of death. Dan understands though—he always used to prefer the exposure victims the winter would bring when he was choosing his own subjects. They were always the best preserved. 

“Yeah, okay,” Dan agrees, as much to convince Herbert to stop shouting causes of death as anything else. He was always going to agree anyway. “I can do North Dakota.”

Herbert beams.

*

The drive home is strange. Herbert seems satisfied, like he’s gotten all he wanted out of the evening. Out of Dan. He’s resting his cheek against the window, smiling faintly as he watches the endless stretches of cornfields pass by.

Dan turns on the radio. It’s some top forties station. 50 Cent is rapping about how he’s into having sex, not into making love. Dan tries not to focus on the lyrics, glances over to check if Herbert has noticed, but he’s still just staring out the window.

“What are you thinking about?” Dan finally asks. 

He thinks Herbert is ignoring him, or else too lost in his own head to respond. The silence stretches on over a few more embarrassing minutes of 50 Cent, and Dan is about to change stations at least when Herbert clears his throat and says, “I was considering names.”

“Names?”

“We’ll need different names when we move to North Dakota. I was contemplating the options. I’ve decided on Hans.”

“Hans?”

“As an homage to Dr. Gruber.”

“That’s more sentimental than I’d expect from you,” Dan admits. “You were close? You never told me much about him. Just his work.”

Herbert shrugs. “I think of them as one and the same, Gruber and his work. He was a good man, though. Intelligent. Kind.” He pauses, swallows. “That will always be the failure I regret most, that I could not save him.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Why are you sorry? It wasn’t your failure.” He sits up in his seat. “I won’t fail the next time.”

Dan can’t be certain, but he suspects Herbert is talking about him. I’d want all of you , he had said before, and Dan suddenly pictures Herbert, an old man who has moved onto a new town, a new assistant, now going by ‘Dan’ to commemorate his newest great regret. He wonders if Herbert would shoot him if the reagent fails and Dan ends up as murderous as the others, or if he would try to contain him somehow, a tragic, rabid reminder of what Herbert had been unable to do.

But no, Dan isn’t going to let that happen. He reaches over for Herbert’s hand. “ We won’t fail the next time,” he says.

*

When they pull up in front of the house, Dan takes his time parking, turning off the car. Herbert had let Dan hold his hand for most of the drive home, until Dan had had to pull his hand away to signal. Dan thinks he would let him kiss him now, if Dan can just get up the courage to lean across the gearshift and finally do it.

Or maybe not, because there’s barely a moment and then Herbert is unbuckling his seatbelt and climbing out of the car.

Dan follows him into the house. He knows he must be acting strange—he’s hyper-aware of his body, of how close he’s standing to Herbert in the foyer, of how often his shoulder brushes against Herbert’s as they both bend down to take off their shoes. Herbert gives him a weird look and steps back pointedly so that Dan has room to shrug off his coat.

“So, uhh…” Dan starts awkwardly. “We can watch a movie?”

Herbert stares at him for a long moment and then shakes his head. “I have a better suggestion—didn’t you want to see the latest research?”

Dan can’t imagine anything he’d rather do.

*

In the basement, Herbert has pushed aside the examination table—Lafferty is still lying on it, hooked up to the ventilator, his pulse low but steady. In the center of the room, he has a new device set up, something Dan has never seen before. It’s sparking slightly. Behind it, Herbert has arranged rows and rows of cages, all containing the little white rats that he’d had Dan pick up from the pet store. As Dan approaches, one of them looks up at him and squeaks.

“What do you know about nanoplasm?” Herbert asks Dan. He’s leaning around Dan, his front pressed completely against Dan’s back as he pulls one of the nearest notebooks towards them and flips it open.

“Uh, not much,” Dan admits. “It has something to do with brain function, the Levine, Mortimer, et al. paper on it was a pretty big deal.”

“It has everything to do with brain function,” Herbert corrects. He’s put his glasses back on—they almost fly off in his excitement and he has to push them back onto his nose. “Don’t you see, Dan? This is it , this is what we’ve been searching for all these years. Nano-plasmic energy.”

He finds what he’s been looking for in the notebook and waves it in Dan’s face. “It’s a completely neutral energy!”

Dan catches Herbert’s wrist and takes the book from him. “Completely neutral? So you mean, the nanoplasm from a rat… any rat… could be transplanted into a human brain?”

Herbert’s eyes light up. “I knew you would understand. None of them ever understood me like you do, Danny.”

Dan barely hears him. He’s flipping through the notebook, captivated by all the words printed in Herbert’s neat script, methods of extraction, interspecies trials, interaction with reagent at various doses… He suddenly feels like he had in the basement of their first Miskatonic apartment, watching Rufus scream as he was reborn a second time. 

“Herbert, this is incredible.”

Herbert preens. “I haven’t even shown you the best part, I did take some of your notes on balancing the reagent and…” He stretches forward again, and Dan can think of nothing but the heat of his body pressed against Dan’s. He leans back into it.

“Herb,” Dan says. His voice catches embarrassingly on the single syllable but he doesn’t care anymore, he can’t stand another second of the tension stretched between them. He needs it, needs more than Herbert’s breath, tantalizingly warm against Dan’s cheek, as he pulls the notebook towards them both and flips it open.

“You see,” Herbert says, pointing. He still hasn’t moved back, and Dan can feel every hair on his body standing on end. If he didn’t know better, he’d wonder if it was some effect of the neuroplasm, the electricity sizzling in the air, but he’s done pretending the sensation is anything more than Herbert’s proximity. 

“When you combine your modified reagent with the NPE—”

Dan can’t help himself—he twists around, grabs Herbert by the shoulders, and crushes their mouths together.

If he’d thought Herbert would be hesitant or tentative about this, he was so wrong. The notebook thuds against the floor as Herbert’s hands fly to Dan’s hair, pulling him closer. His mouth opens easily under Dan’s—his kisses are as clumsy as Dan had expected from a decade without practice, but they are eager and hungry, as if he’s been starving for this as much as Dan has. Dan is starting to believe that maybe he has—when Dan brings his hand up to the man’s jaw, he lets out a desperate little whine so hot Dan that momentarily forgets how to breathe.

“Can we–?” Dan doesn’t know what he’s asking for—Herbert is pulling his hair now, biting sloppily up the side of Dan’s neck, and Dan definitely never planned this far. He tries again, “Upstairs?”

Herbert pulls away—just a few inches, still clutching at Dan’s hair, but Dan suddenly feels the distance like a physical ache. Fuck going upstairs—he tugs Herbert back to him, kissing him over and over until they’re both panting. When Herbert finally tries to speak again, it takes him a moment to find his voice. 

“I thought you wanted to go upstairs?” he asks, and Dan can tell he’s struggling to sound composed. He looks an absolute mess—cheeks flushed, hair sticking up in all directions, glasses askew. Dan feels a swell of pride at the sight— he did that, he made Herbert come undone so beautifully.

“Mm, in a minute,” Dan murmurs, plucking Herbert’s glasses off his nose and setting them aside. “Just wanna look at you first.”

Herbert flushes deeper under Dan’s stare, throat bobbing as he swallows, and Dan can’t help but kiss him again. He slides their tongues together, trails his mouth along Herbert’s jaw where the shadow of day-old stubble is coming in, down the side of his neck. Back to his mouth. His lips are almost unbearably soft under Dan’s and Dan isn’t sure he’ll ever be able to stop kissing him, not now that he’s started. Not now that he knows what it’s like.

“This doesn’t count as looking at me,” Herbert whines, squirming away suddenly, and Dan is struck by the miraculous revelation that Herbert’s ears are ticklish. “ Dan , stop.”

Dan laughs, pleased with himself, until Herbert presses forward again and slides his hand down Dan’s front to palm his dick through his pants and Dan almost chokes on his tongue.

“Okay, yeah, upstairs now.”

“Are you certain you don’t want to stick around to see our new reagent in practice?” Herbert asks, grinning widely. 

“Later, fuck, come on , Herbert.”

They make it to Dan’s bedroom relatively unscathed. Dan still can’t stop touching Herbert, can’t believe his luck now that he finally can touch him anywhere and everywhere, so they get distracted a few times on the way up when Dan reaches out and grabs Herbert by the waist and kisses him out of breath again, until Herbert squirms away and says, “Bedroom, Dan.”

Dan backs Herbert up against the bedroom door, savoring the way Herbert’s mouth opens so easily for him, all the strange desperate little noises he makes as Dan nips at his mouth. 

“No open door today?” Herbert asks, all smug satisfaction. It’s more arousing than it should be, the way he’s smirking at Dan like he knows him so well. “I thought you always insisted …”

“Somehow I don’t think my nosy roommate is going to be skulking around tonight,” Dan replies, starting to undo Herbert’s buttons. “It was all for him,” he adds, wondering if it’s possible for Herbert to look any more smug.

Instead, Herbert closes his eyes and lets out another tiny whine. “Say that again.”

“That it was all for you?”

Herbert nods shallowly. He’s like something out of a magazine like this—not anything trashy or hardcore, one of the arty erotic ones. His eyes are still closed, his head flung back, his shirt half-unbuttoned.

“It was all for you,” Dan repeats, and he’s not talking about the door anymore. “Everything. All for you.”

And then they’re kissing again and Herbert’s hand is back on his cock, and for the first time in years, Dan has to grit his teeth not to come too soon. He catches Herbert’s wrist and pins it against the door.

“Wait—”

“What?” Herbert opens his eyes again, and Dan almost laughs at the expression on his face. It’s so typically Herbert .

Dan takes a deep breath. “If we’re gonna do this, I have to tell you something. It’s important—”

Herbert folds his arms across his chest. “Dan, you had better not have caught something from any of your slutty bar pickups, so help me—”

“ What ? No, shit, I’m clean, but—”

“There’s the shock of the century,” Herbert mutters, like he hadn’t just had his hand on Dan’s dick. “You can’t tell me that last muscled dimwit wasn’t riddled with STDs—”

Dan rolls his eyes. “Herbert, will you just listen for a minute?”

Herbert looks up at him expectantly, looking for all the world like Dan is interrupting an important experiment, except for the way his shirt is still hanging open. “Yes?”

Dan clears his throat. “I, uh. Okay. It’s important to me, if we’re gonna do this that you understand this means something to me. That’s all, okay? I just need you to know that you aren’t one of my ‘bar sluts,’ as you so delightfully called them.”

Herbert just stares at him, brow creasing in confusion. “Yes. Clearly.”

“Okay then.”

“Okay then.” 

Dan is about to reach for him again, but he stops. He’s so close to the truth, he can’t stop now. He doesn’t even think Herbert will kick him out for saying it. “Not just, like—I don’t mean because we live together or are friends or whatever, okay? I—I’ve been in love with you for seven years. Probably longer than that, if we’re being honest, but definitely seven.”

“Eighteen.”

“Eighteen what?”

Herbert sighs like he does when Dan is being particularly slow to understand an equation. “That’s how long—for me. That’s how long it’s been.” 

“How long… shit , wait, Herbert, are you saying—”

“Yes.”

Dan takes longer than usual to do the subtraction, his mind entirely consumed by Herbert’s yes , by the flash of dark chest hair peaking out from the opening in his shirt. “Eighteen years…” he repeats. “That’s 1985.”

“Yes.”

“Wait, since we met, before Peru —”

“Do we have to keep belaboring the point? You claim you’ve loved me for seven years—‘at least’ seven, so can we get on with it already?” His tone is casual, but he won’t meet Dan’s eyes.

Dan steps closer, pushing their bodies together, and catches Herbert’s hands before he can put them on Dan’s waist. He leans down to whisper into Herbert’s ear, “Not until you say it.”

“Say what?” Herbert asks, trying to pull away.

“Come on,” Dan pleads, pressing an open-mouthed kiss onto the spot on Herbert’s cheek that makes him squirm. “Come on , Herb. Tell me you love me.”

“I just did,” Herbert replies, his voice shaking. Dan is delighted to find that he’s hard, straining forward to rub up against Dan again. “Dan…”

“Just say it properly , the actual words,” Dan insists. He takes both of Herbert’s hands in his right, careful not to twist them too far, and then uses his other hand to grip Herbert’s hip, pinning him back against the door as he tries to grind against Dan again. 

Herbert whines again, but he’s staring up at Dan with such naked desire that Dan almost abandons his teasing—he would, if it weren’t so satisfying to render Herbert so flustered and desperate.

“Please?” he repeats, and he can see the moment Herbert’s resolve cracks.

He clears his throat. “Dan? I love yo—”

Dan kisses him before he can finish. 

*

As soon as he lets go, Herbert is on him, his hands clever and competent as always even paired with the needy sounds he keeps making. He gets Dan’s pants open before Dan can fumble with another button, and his fingers close around Dan’s dick. Dan has to bite the inside of his mouth hard enough to draw blood to stop himself coming there and then. He gives up on Herbert’s shirt entirely.

Despite his best efforts, Dan probably lasts less than five minutes after that. Herbert is good at this, better than he has any right to be, and he doesn’t stop grinding against Dan’s thigh as he strokes him, his hips thrusting just out of time with the movement of his hand. Dan barely has time to think, can’t say anything more than, “Herbert…” before he’s coming so hard he sees stars.

Herbert starts to finish himself off before Dan’s brain has fully rebooted, but he’s present enough to nudge Herbert’s hand aside and replace it with his own, kissing him until he’s shuddering and crying out Dan’s name. 

Herbert stands up almost immediately after— “To get a towel , Dan, will you relax?”—while Dan struggles the rest of his way out of his clothes. He barely makes it to the bed before Herbert returns, completely naked now and holding out a damp hand towel for Dan. Dan smiles to himself—he would have had to practically run to make it back so quickly.

“Sorry it was so quick,” Dan mumbles. “You’re really good at that.”

Herbert looks flustered at that, rubbing a hand over his face. “I’m not exactly the most experienced but it’s not all that different than, you know.” He makes a quick jerk-off gesture and oh God , Dan is in this deep because it is one of the most arousing things Dan has ever seen. 

“We could try again if you want,” Dan offers, though he’s having trouble moving at the moment. He’s so warm now, relaxed and boneless in a way he hadn’t known he needed.

Herbert slips into the bed next to him. “We have time,” he tells Dan, stretching out.

Dan reaches out and runs his hand lightly over Herbert’s chest, around the curve of his ribcage. “Fuck, you’re beautiful,” he says.

Herbert shoves his hand away. “I don’t need a pickup line in bed, Dan. I’m not one of your—”

“—bar sluts?” Dan finishes, raising his eyebrows. “I think we established that.” He kisses Herbert, soft and closed-mouthed. “That doesn’t change how fucking gorgeous you are.”

Herbert frowns, squirms back at that. “Dan—”

“Too much?”

“For now,” Herbert mumbles. “Just—give me time?”

“Okay.”

Herbert stares at him for a long minute and then says, “You can kiss me again.”

Dan is more than happy to comply. He doesn’t know how long they lie there, trading lazy kisses and soft touches. It feels timeless—for however long it lasts, Dan can forget about everything, all the horrors of their past, his anxiety about the future. 

Finally, Herbert clears his throat and stands up. “I should get back to the lab,” he says. “I need to run a few more trials on the rats before I can transplant the NPE to Lafferty.”

Dan reaches out to stop him.  “Stay,” he says. In my bed. In my life . “Please, Herbert. Just—stay.” 

Herbert hesitates. Thirteen years stretch between them. Finally, he lies back down. “Okay,” he says. “I suppose five more minutes wouldn’t hurt anyone.”

*

He stays the night.

*