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“Give me one reason not to walk out that door right now, Herbert West, or so help me God, I’ll leave,” Dan said, voice practically a growl. Herbert froze.
“You shouldn’t-” He stopped himself short at Dan’s expression. “I don’t…”
“Say it,” Dan said, face passive and emotionless. Herbert hoped never to suffer this level of indignity again- or was it the most satisfying thing he’d ever done? Clinging to Dan like Herbert was something helpless- something capable of helplessness. Dan pulled back and Herbert would forever deny the quiet whine that escaped him. Dan grabbed him by the chin and forced Herbert to look at him. They were nearly chest to chest at this point, and Herbert’s bad leg was shaking with the prolonged effort of keeping upright. He shifted his weight. “Say it.”
“I-” Herbert was almost having trouble forcing the air into his lungs to speak, it felt as if he’d been struck in the stomach hard enough to wind himself, “Dan, I-”
“Tell me, Herbert, why I shouldn’t go,” Dan insisted. Herbert dropped his head, maybe in shame, he wasn’t even sure himself at the point, burying his face in the crook of Dan’s neck. He’d been close to Dan a million times, in the lab, in their shared space, in mortal danger. It was usually Herbert who initiated contact, he’d always had a bit of a skewed sense of personal space, but for all their casual intimacies, there had never been a point where Herbert was the one to feel vulnerable. Until now, that is. He didn’t like it.
“Because,” Herbert broke, speaking quietly into Dan’s throat, trying to push back the building heat behind his eyes. “I don’t want you to. Please, Dan, stay.”
“Why?” Dan asked. He was mostly supporting Herbert at this point, the only thing keeping him from sinking to his knees were Dan’s arms around his back, he hadn’t registered the odd hug until that moment. When had Dan done that? “What do you need?”
“You,” Herbert murmured. “Just you. I can’t do it alone, Danny, I used to be fine, but you’ve ruined it, ruined me. I can’t do it without you now, and I don’t want to be alone anymore, and, and-”
Herbert cut himself off with a shuddering gasp for air, and the tears began to fall. Herbert could count on one hand the number of times he’d shed a tear in the past two years, and never was it as mortifying as it was now. Dan sank to the floor with him, keeping Herbert close and not commenting when Herbert’s fingers dug into his back.
“I ruined you,” Dan scoffed quietly, shaking his head. Herbert tensed. “Herbert, you ruined the both of us.”
“I’m sorry,” Herbert said back, not meaning it at all, and he was sure Dan knew it, but it was what Dan wanted to hear from him, wasn’t it? “Please, just don’t go.”
“I couldn’t if I wanted to,” Dan replied. The tight feeling in Herbert’s chest loosened, just a little. “I’d survive it just as well as you would. You ruined us, Herbert. Remember?”
“I know,” Herbert said. He really had, hadn’t he? Dan had nothing, no one. Everyone had either been driven away, or was dead, all due to Herbert’s interference. His design. And Dan- Herbert wasn’t sure when exactly it had happened. When the convenience of a pair of strong, easily manipulated, extra hands became such a… necessity.
It was unbecoming.
Herbert had not been looking for anything similar to companionship when he’d answered Cain’s advertisement for a roommate. No. He’d been looking for a place to live, and an adequate lab assistant to boot. Cain was the best candidate by a country mile, fairly isolated with a basement, and a weakness in that he’d been involved with Dean’s daughter.
Maybe it was when he pulled Herbert from the coil of writhing intestines, when he trusted Herbert to perform CPR while they made the elevator ride up to the main hospital in an attempt to save Megan Halsey, who was of course long gone well before the doors even closed.
Or maybe it was before that, when he’d taken the needle from Herbert’s shaking hands and injected Herbert with the diluted reagent at his behest.
Maybe it was when he looked at Halsey’s lifeless body and was able to calculate how much reagent an attempted reanimation would take without a second thought.
Either way, whenever it had happened, it had gone without notice, and Herbert now felt the need to make an effort to make Cain stay. But had he ever actually asked him to? He couldn’t seem to remember.
At first, it had been easy. Cain had needed Herbert’s clarity to avoid prison following the Miskatonic Massacre, and once they were in Peru he was practically all Cain had. There was nowhere else for him to go, after all. And then he’d saved Herbert’s life all over again and Herbert thought he wouldn’t need to keep incentivizing him.
But Cain was full of surprises. It was one of the things that made him preferable to most other people, that he was always interesting. There was always something to figure out. Or maybe Herbert had been pushing intentionally. Testing to see what he could get away with before the little angel on his shoulder threw in the towel. And then, Herbert had needed to re-stake his claim. Remind Cain that there was something he wanted that Herbert could give him if he would just stay .
That, at least, was easy. Another of Daniel’s better qualities was that he was loyal, to a foolish degree at times. Meg’s heart was Herbert’s ace, and Cain had folded. For a second time, Herbert thought he’d secured Dan’s prolonged presence. But his creation, wondrous as she had been in the moments she'd lived, failed, ultimately. (And Hebert refused to believe that she’d failed for any other reason than Dan’s new girlfriend.)
Herbert was not capable of jealousy. Especially not over something like that.
But it did make his blood boil to see Cain reject their shared mission in favor of someone else. That he could possibly need anything more than what Herbert was offering him.
It was Dan who dug him out of the rubble though. Alone. Which counted for something. His face when he saw Herbert, barely conscious and with a compound fracture to his leg counted for more. If Herbert were more lucid, he’d be more confident in the thought that he saw Cain offer a watery smile as he pulled him out of the hole that had been their house before handing him off to a paramedic.
Now here they were, the last person in the world to give a damn about the other, collapsed in a seedy motel while they waited for the police to stop poking around. The pair of them grew restless and snappy, getting closer and closer to this explosion that was a long time coming and Herbert didn’t know what he would be without Cain anymore. He found he now needed him. Herbert shook.
“Are you really sorry for it?” Dan asked. Herbert pressed his face deeper into Dan’s neck and didn’t reply. Dan hummed like he’d been expecting that. “I didn’t think so.”
“Danny-”
“I have conditions, Herbert.”
“Anything,” Herbert promised, and at that, Dan barked out a laugh so loud that Herbert jerked back and away from him- and then immediately realized his blotchy, tear-tracked face was in full view and curled his arms around his head like it would be any less pathetic. Dan pulled him back and let Hebert rest his head where it had been before, still chuckling to himself.
“Liar,” Dan laughed. “Don’t say ‘anything’ like you mean it. You’re pathological, West. You couldn’t change to save your life, and we’ve both seen the proof of that.”
“Dan-”
“I won’t ask you to do that. I won’t ask you to become something else,” Dan interrupted. Herbert sagged against him. “No more lying to me.”
“Alright,” Herbert nodded into Dan’s chest. He could do that.
“No more stealing body parts without telling me,” Dan said. Herbert just kept nodding. “I’m not dealing with the police again. Work on strengthening the serum to work on bodies that aren’t as fresh. Old cemeteries. No more from the hospital until they stop looking at us.”
“Alright,” It would be more challenging, but Dan had a point- both about potency and police attention.
“I don’t know what stopping the reagent will do to you,” Dan said. “So I won’t ask you to stop, but I’ll ask you to slow down. No more nightly doses, you have to sleep and eat like a real person.”
Herbert stopped nodding, instead grunting his disapproval- but Dan seemed to realize he was going to accept nearly any terms presented, even if he did fight that specific one.
“And you’ll listen to me,” Dan told him. “You’ll listen to what I tell you because you not listening is what got us here in the first place. If I tell you to do something, or not to do something. You’ll listen to me. You get so in your own head that you forget that there are fucking consequences to what you’re doing, and we can’t afford any more mishaps.”
“I-”
“You’ll listen ,” Dan insisted, squeezing Herbert around the shoulders as he did. Herbert shuddered, nodding absently. “Good.”
“You’ll stay, then?” Herbert asked, well past the threshold of feeling ashamed of himself.
“Say you need me,” Dan replied. Well, now he was just being cruel.
“I need you,” Herbert breathed. He was practically in Dan’s lap now, clinging to him and riding out the last of his sobbing fit. “Danny, I need you, I need you, please stay.”
“Okay,” Dan whispered back, tilting Herbert’s head back and taking in the sight of Herbert West, finally cowed into something adjacent to submission, face beet red and damp.
Dan looked at him not in the way he’d looked at Meg, or Francesca, but instead his gaze was the same he had when he noticed that the dishes had been done while he was out, that there was fresh coffee before his shift, when Herbert had outstretched his hands with Meg’s heart in them instead of his own and offered Dan a chance to maybe see her again.
Dan ran surgeon’s hands along the sides of Herbert’s face and cataloged him in the way he would when running through the points of an operation, memorizing swollen eyes and a runny nose like they were anything other than a lapse in Herbert’s impenetrable façade- like they were a rare beauty and not unfamiliar weaknesses, and kissed him like he was afraid Herbert was the one who’d need convincing to stay.