Work Text:
[Timestamp: 00:20:13, 10.07.2006]
(Cain remains on the autopsy table. He’s stopped moving. West turns on a surgical light above the table, then gathers the loose wires of electrodes in his hands before he wheels away the control panel used for the electrocution. When he reappears in the frame, he pushes a cart of surgical tools. He picks up a blade and makes an incision to open Cain’s chest and abdomen, then pins the skin back with surgical clamps.)
CAIN: (groans)
WEST: Beautiful.
(West removes the stomach, intestines, liver, gallbladder, pancreas, and kidneys. He places them in organ pans arranged on an adjacent table. During this process, Cain’s fingers twitch. Visible inside his chest, his heart beats and his lungs are inhaling and exhaling air.)
WEST: God saw all he had made, and it was good.
He hadn’t meant to spoil the mood with Genesis, but the words had been on the tip of his tongue. Luckily, Dan seemed to find it amusing; his lip quirked up on one side, deepening a familiar wrinkle on his cheek. Interruptions during sex—like an elbow knocked into a nose, the pop from an old joint, or something Herbert blurted—had never made Dan miss a beat. He’d only smile, laugh, and fuse their bodies together again in unselfconscious love.
Not that he was in any such position now. A half hour ago, Herbert had strapped Dan to a table in the lab, sent him into cardiac arrest with a 2,500-volt electric current through the electrodes on his head, and systematically disembowled him while he was dead—or at least appeared to be dead, semi-conscious while his brain rebooted and his body found stasis from the shock and removal of his organs.
Dan couldn’t be killed. Neither of them could. Following the success of their reagent, now a patented pharmaceutical ready to deploy in hospitals around the world, Herbert had worked tirelessly on a new triumph for him and Dan: a biologic that had transformed every cell in their bodies, rendering them invincible, self-regenerative, immortal. Age and illness couldn’t touch them. Chopped into pieces, their parts would instinctively reattach. Even their blood had a drive for self-preservation.
It was why Herbert had been able to electrocute his husband, and why Dan was conscious in the aftermath. When Dan had woken up after the shock, he’d groaned in the back of his throat. Delightful—it was the same noise Dan made after an orgasm. The preparatory work had gotten him hard; naked on the table, Dan had climaxed as his heart stopped, pulsing the seed of life into the sterile latex of Herbert’s gloves as he died.
A swift death at Herbert’s hands was Dan’s fantasy. Herbert’s own desires were slower, more savory.
His mouth was dry as he studied the table at Dan’s side. His dick throbbed, straining against his slacks, as he stepped forward and nudged the tray containing Dan’s liver an inch to the left. He couldn’t stop staring. There was a buzz in his mind, a greedy need to take it all in, more more more. Removing Dan’s organs had left him soaked in arousal by the end, a ritual as painstaking, he supposed, as watching pornography at the right pace. One couldn’t just scrub the tape forward to the climax. First, you had to remove each piece of your husband from his torso until only his lungs and heart remained to support his brain.
Dan couldn’t speak yet. The fresh surgical trauma would make it difficult. And he was doped with enough local anesthesia to numb a man twice his size. Medications stood a poor chance against their regenerating cells, which made pain management tricky, but not impossible.
More awake now, Dan watched Herbert through slitted eyes as Herbert paced back and forth in front of his treasures. Herbert was fussing, he knew. Losing his composure a little. He’d been so steady and calm during the evisceration, reliant on a surgeon’s instincts, but now as he saw all his handiwork arranged before him, excitement was flooding his system in hot bursts.
“Oh, Dan,” said Herbert. He interlaced his fingers to stop them from shaking. “You look wonderful.”
Another syrupy-slow smile tugged up the muscles on Dan’s face. Herbert’s postmortem had revealed the lovely cavity of Dan’s insides, shining with a thick gloss of blood. Near Dan on the table, his organs squirmed. When Herbert had started his work, the organs were lifeless and heavy in his hands, but now each part was rearranging its exterior cellular structure, growing wormlike tendrils out of fatty tissue thick enough to help them crawl back into the safety of Dan’s chest. Already, his intestines were inching out of their pan, squeezing onto the table with motions not unlike the muscular belly of a snake.
Herbert wished they’d stay still, but he couldn’t blame them. They were behaving by the laws of his science, and his husband was so warm and snug inside. Herbert stepped forward to indulge himself in Dan’s torso again. Reverently, he bathed fingertips in the font of Dan’s blood, then traced his ribs, the swelling curves of each lung, his gorgeous beating heart. Opening up Dan had been a religious rapture mingled with an erotic undressing. A mind-numbing striptease. Herbert thought this would be the part where he would be finished and get himself off.
But there was something missing, some peak yet to crest. Pacing away, he tugged the knot loose on his tie to give himself a deeper gulp of air. His husband was willing and naked for him on the metaphorical bed, but he still wasn’t sure what he wanted or needed. Anticipation had made his palms clammy; he balled up his sweaty gloves and tossed them away. Maybe he needed to change the music. While he’d been stripping Dan, the CD player had invigorated him with waltzes by Johann Strauss, his usual lab soundtrack. Dan had chosen his own music for his death, some rock song with a snare drum that he’d requested specifically to play at their wedding.
Their wedding. Hours ago, they’d shared vows—well, Herbert had—and publicly promised each other eternal love. Dan had been so happy, so vibrant. It had been perfect. And now on their wedding night, Herbert had this private, vulnerable, sensual version of Dan just for him. Herbert smiled to himself. Maybe he needed to put Dan back together before he could find release, see him full and squirming as he zipped him back up in his skin. Yes, that was it.
The process went quickly. Dan’s organs made it easy. But just as soon as Herbert was almost finished, he paused.
Dan’s heart. Reaching inside the ribcage, he cupped it in his palms and felt a swoop in his low belly. Here was everything in his hands, the completion of his work. Their success. The key to eternity. The throbbing core of the man who’d helped Herbert achieve greatness, and along the way educated him on the inviolability of love.
This heart belonged to him. Which meant the one beating in his chest belonged to Dan.
An understanding took over Herbert then, a swollen, needful urge. Still bent close to Dan, he took off his tie and undid the buttons on his shirt with trembling hands. He watched his husband’s fever-red eyes fixate on each inch of his chest as it was revealed.
Dan put his lips together and managed a wolf-whistle. His voice came out in a rasp. “I thought this was a sterile field.”
A joke. Neither of them had to worry about infection. Herbert’s gloves had been a prop requested specifically by Dan for the foreplay. With Dan’s eyes on him still, Herbert crossed the room and strained on his tiptoes to reach the surgical mirror, tilting it into place. He injected himself with local anesthetic, a sharp needle to the chest. Then he crawled onto the table and straddled Dan.
At this angle, he wouldn’t be blocking the view from the video camera. For an hour, it had been on its tripod capturing their lovemaking. A video had been Dan’s idea, shyly posed as a scientific record, but Herbert had understood what he really wanted: material to enjoy later. The idea had flattered Herbert. Hence, this snuff film made on their wedding night, and Herbert’s debut as a pornography star.
He giggled. He inspected the ten blade he’d used to slice open Dan’s chest, licked it clean from an icing of Dan’s sweet blood, then struck it into his own breast.
“Herbert,” croaked Dan, alarmed. He could move again; his grip was tight and firm on Herbert’s thighs.
Herbert’s brain had yet to reinterpret the new relationship between immortality and pain. Through the numbness, nerve endings fired off warnings about the cut, the sting, the ache. Still, he could get through it. He had to access his heart.
“Dan,” he said. “I need to be inside you. I need you inside me. Do you understand? I’m giving you my heart.”
[Timestamp: 01:06:13, 10.07.2006]
CAIN: (pauses) Oh, God. Yes. Will it work?
WEST: It will work.
(West leans over and retrieves surgical retractors from the portable table. Cain assists him. Once his chest is opened with a rib spreader, West removes his heart with cuts to the aorta and major arteries, and holds it in his palms. Blood has spurted and gushed onto Cain, coating his skin and face. Cain reaches up and takes the heart from West. It beats in his hands.)
CAIN: Oh, honey. Did that feel good?
WEST: (groans) Yes.
CAIN: Take mine. Before you faint.
(Leaning over, West executes the removal of Cain’s heart, working inside the ribs. Once the organ is detached, he cups it inside his chest. His back arches. Cain is moaning as he places West’s heart inside his own body.)
By the end of it, Herbert was panting and wheezing. Spittle had foamed at his lips. Blood leaked in jelly-like strands from his wound, a stop-gap emergency paste made by his body to keep his veins from gushing all his blood onto the floor. Held together by the equivalent of regenerative superglue, he was able to remove the rib spreader on his own. He felt his pulse speed up. Heat surged through him. The heart had accepted him; the exchange was complete.
Their cells, the result of Herbert’s greatest accomplishment, had been transformed so close as to recognize each other’s parts, and Dan was inside him now, pumping Herbert’s lifeblood through him. Herbert was carrying the solid weight of his lover’s heart, grown all these years in another body and now entrusted to him—
Successful dual open-heart transplant performed in a matter of minutes, without sedation—
Herbert was a triumph, a god, he could succeed at anything he wanted, anything—
He kissed Dan’s cheeks and neck through a sheen of blood and rubbed his erection on Dan’s leg. He squeezed his husband’s sides where the skin was flayed open, working his grip lower toward his hardening cock. “Oh, yes,” Herbert moaned. “Oh, yes, yes…”
“That’s it, honey. You look so fucking good.”
Did he? He was hardly the picture of professionalism anymore. There was sweat and blood all over him; his collar was askew and his shirt open to the navel; the cut in his chest would be bruising purple, the edges raising in bumps as the flesh closed itself together like a zipper. He was going to come. He’d lost his mind. And Dan was still looking at him like he was the most wonderful man alive.
Dan loved him. Tears sprang into his eyes. Dan loved him and had given him everything, his hand in marriage, his heart, his body, withhold no atom’s atom or I die. Herbert had killed Dan, turned him inside out, and now Dan was writhing under him in pleasure, ready to orgasm again from the friction of their bodies against each other. He cried, “Herbert—sweetheart—”
The plea ripped through Herbert. Dan was so darling when he was helpless.
“You’re mine,” snarled Herbert, grinding his hips into Dan. “You liked this? I’ll give it to you again.”
“Oh, fuck yes, please...”
“Next time, I’m going to cut off your hands. I’m going to dismember you and put your pieces in my bed.”
Dan groaned as he came. As he jerked, his fingers pressed flat against the autopsy table, and his wedding ring clacked on the metal.
The sound, the reminder, was all Herbert needed to follow him over the edge.
[Timestamp: 01:23:50, 10.07.2006]
(Silence for six seconds. West moves first to remove the surgical clamps that hold Cain’s skin back from his abdomen. He pulls the edges together, then smooths a hand down Cain’s chest. Slowly, he touches Cain’s cheek and brow. He moves fingers back through Cain’s hair.)
WEST: I love you.
(Cain leans up to kiss him. West seems shy or embarrassed. He quickly gets down from the table, looks directly at the camera, and crosses the floor. His face fills the screen for a moment; the camera is jostled. He’s fighting against a smile. The video cuts off.)