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rareslash`Title: ONE LAST TEMPTATION BEFORE BEDTIME
Author: Nightspore
Source material: Re-Animator
Pairing: Dan / Herbert
Challenge: Doubles - Life and Death
Disclaimer: I do not own the characters, for which I am sure they are very glad.
Rating: X
ONE LAST TEMPTATION BEFORE BEDTIME
IF I COULD CHANGE THE WORLD, WOULD I EVEN TRY?
In the basement of an old house in Arkham, Massachusetts, in late 1986 . . .
It's one thing to have the answer to your problems, Dan thought, and quite another to be certain it was the right answer.
"Helloooo," West crooned, tapping on the glass wall of the aquarium.
The creature floating inside twitched as it reacted to the vibrations. Its handlike forepaws stretched out and clawed in the direction of the disturbance. The lipless mouth gaped, exposing translucent little fangs like chips of glass lining its jaws.
Dan could see it well enough through the bubbling, glowing, semi-opaque green fluid. It was as yet incomplete, spun glass bones webbed with stringy flesh and covered with skin transluminal as tissue paper. He could discern in it certain resemblances to the human form, but the thing was not human - low and sleek, hints of reptile and big cat, mantis and eel. It was ugly in a fantastical way, repulsive and alluring, but clearly well-made and functional. What was even more frightening about this thing was that despite its inhuman shape he knew it was a neonate, a child.
The light was subdued, filtered through the emerald opalescence, the atmosphere dank and cloaked by the fizzling gurgles of aeration equipment, but Dan could see well enough. There were other small homunculi in aquaria crowded on the shelves of the lab, even more distorted, misbegotten things, living abortions twisting pathetically, endlessly, in their jars of diluted re-agent. West must have made a lot of false starts, gone down many blind alleys, before perfecting his design.
"You're looking at your successor, Dan," he said proudly.
Dan shook his head silently.
He hadn't seen West since the trial. In the end, there hadn't been enough evidence to convict either of them, and the blame had been shifted to the dead Dr. Hill. Dan had gone back to school, and West had simply disappeared.
His relationship with Francesca had been mercifully short lived. They had clung together for a while like two shipwreck survivors washed ashore after a hurricane, but in the end each only reminded the other of the horrors of that night. Dan had tried living alone, continuing his work at the hospital, but found he was being worn down by the continual cycle of death. Even his own last name was an ironic brand of ridicule. Mark of Cain, indeed.
For a moment there, with West, he'd almost had the solution to the problem. Now every time a patient's heart stopped beating it seemed to mock him, taunt him with what might have been. After all he'd been through, the promise of the re-agent still tantalized Dan unmercifully.
And then an hour ago West had shown up on Dan's doorstep and with no explanation or other preliminaries invited him to see his new "work in progress". Dan had shouted and threatened. West sat there through the tumult with a cool, supercilious grin, and finally, as always, Dan gave in and followed him to his concealed laboratory. Too much of his life had been devoted to - and ruined by - the re-agent for him not to see it through to the conclusion. And who knew, Herbert may actually have made a breakthrough, and Dan would finally be able to tell the phantoms who haunted his troubled sleep that their tortures, while unjust, had after all been in the service of preventing human suffering, that they had died (and been brought back) for a worthy cause. Perhaps then they would let him rest . . .
"My mistake was in trying to re-create a human being. Mankind is designed very inefficiently. I'm not just talking about the obvious vestigial things, like wisdom teeth or the appendix, useless organs we're still in the process of discarding. Evolution is far too slow and too dependant on chance. What is needed is a revolution. Imagine being able to design one's descendants instead of having to rely on the whim and fiat of environmental stress and genetic potential!"
He looked up, hungrily anticipating Dan's reaction. Behind the thick curved lenses of his glasses, his eyes were the color of sherry, a translucent reddish-brown through which an inner light shone out.
Herbert reminded Dan of something he had seen a long time ago on the Saturday afternoon monster matinee, a black and white flick which he could not remember the title of. It was about a ventriloquist who dressed up as a little old lady and ran a pet store as a front for his criminal operations. The man would sell a parrot to a rich customer, throwing his voice to make them think the bird could talk. Then, when the new owner came back to complain the bird was mute, the 'old lady' would pay a house call to see what was ailing it, bringing along her 'grandson' in a baby carriage. The baby was actually his accomplice, a midget who would case the house to see if there were anything worth stealing. The part that had frightened the seven-year old Dan so badly was that the midget had looked so very much like a child, with a frail, perfectly proportioned body, chubby face, thin pale hair. In the movie he had hated the children who teased him in his former circus days. He'd killed the little daughter of one of their victims when she stumbled upon them burglarizing her house and thought Santa had brought her a baby brother.
It was the expression in the midget's eyes as he wrapped his diminutive hands around the girl's throat - intelligent, angry, jealous, fully adult in his childish face - that reminded him so much of West.
"Well? What do you think?"
What he had to do was briefly illuminated as sharp and clear as broken glass shattered by an actinic scintillation of lightning in the midst of a storm. Then, just as quickly, everything was plunged into abject darkness again, with nothing remaining but dazzling memory and a set resolution seared into his mind.
Gently, Dan took West by the wrist and pulled him closer. He whispered, "It's beautiful." Wrapping his arms around the smaller man, he twisted his fingers in West's hair, forcing his head back, and kissed him.
West struggled free and stepped away, staring wildly up at him. His jaw went slack, as if Dan had suddenly bopped him on the head with a large wooden mallet . . .
INTO YOUR TENT I'LL CREEP
A year earlier. Somewhere in the jungles of Peru . . .
Dan woke with a start. He'd fallen asleep sitting bolt upright in the chair. He glanced automatically at his watch. If the batteries had not been corroded by the eternal dripping humidity, then it was some time after three am. The medical tent was shrouded in darkness. The air was gelatinous with the sickening scents of pustulating wounds, bile, feces and urine, coppery fresh blood and putrid open sores, a miasmic mist of human miseries blended but not ablated by a thin wash of antiseptic. Dan felt a fresh breeze on his cheek, comparatively cooler and carrying the scent of green growing things. Someone was pulling back the tent flap.
A small, swift figure briefly limned by the dull campfire outside darted in, fastening the flap securely behind him. It was Herbert, of course. He was carrying something bundled in a torn, stained piece of cloth. There was a quick flash of light as he opened the bunker fridge and deposited the bundle inside, making Dan squint painfully.
"Wake up, Daniel."
"I'm awake. What is it? Are they bringing in more casualties?"
That didn't seem right. There had been a lull in the fighting for the past three days, both sides still licking their wounds after the last skirmish. The victims of that were still arrayed in the tent, the morphine drip that was practically the only comfort he could give their torn and shattered bodies keeping them still as death. Perhaps some were, in fact, dead. This was the hour of the wolf, when the human metabolism was at its lowest ebb, the time of night when most deaths - and oddly, most births - occurred.
Herbert was shaking his head, no. He leaned over Dan, plucking with trembling fingers at his clothes, unbuttoning, unsnapping, pulling down, pulling off. "I need to work it out."
He'd been shooting up again.
When they'd first come here, Dan had begged him not to continue doing it, but Herbert disregarded him as usual. After all, if it weren't for the re-agent saturating his system, he explained, he would have succumbed to death when the re-animated intestines of the late Dr. Hill had tried to squeeze the life out of him. He'd suffered cracked ribs, punctured lungs, a crushed larynx, lingering aspiration pneumonia, but he had not died. Dan really had no defense against a testimonial like that. Herbert was blind to the side effects of continually injecting himself with a diluted solution of re-agent. In his opinion (the only one that mattered) the benefits far outweighed the drawbacks.
The new formulation, with the addition of albumin freshly drawn from the eggs of the Cuzco iguana (Pseudoiguana sempervirens), had a slightly different effect. The albumin slowed the re-agent's effect but also rendered it more gentle. The re-animation process itself was slower, taking many minutes instead of a few seconds, but the subjects seemed to be less affected by the torment of re-birth, more in command of their intellectual faculties.
Of course, there hadn't been an unqualified success yet. The soldier's bodies they were working with came to the med tent so damaged that they were hardly able to support new life for more than a few moments. To truly determine the new re-agent's effectiveness, they needed a fresh, whole body, but in the meantime Herbert never stopped experimenting with the limited resources available. Dan comforted himself with the thought that these men would have died anyway, that they had already decided to give their lives for their country, that they were in such agony that a few moments more added to it could not make much a difference. Sometimes he'd almost convinced himself . . . at any rate, he felt he was doing plenty of penance for his sins.
Herbert had already removed his shoes, belt, and trousers, folded them up neatly and placed them in a metal lock box to keep out the insects and snakes that seemed to delight in taking up residence in unguarded clothing. He left everything else on. He claimed that what he did, he did not do for pleasure. Just a quick slam, bam, thank you, man, and it's back to re-animation, Dan thought sardonically.
Now he knelt between Dan's legs, his breath coming hard and fast in tremulous, arrhythmic gasps. Dan, bowing to the inevitable, tried to relax, closing his eyes and letting his head drop back. There was no stopping Herbert now. All he could do was grit his teeth and try to scrounge a few crumbs of enjoyment.
Herbert discovered the addition of iguana albumin had changed the effect of the re-agent in himself, too. He could go longer between doses, and the highs and lows had been flattened out. The rush was slower, cleaner, less painful. He had already speculated it would be so from observing the re-animated corpses. But there had been unforseen effects.
The albumin-enhanced re-agent was primordially powerful stuff. Under its influence Herbert could go for days without sleeping or eating, only drinking water and taking salt tablets to prevent dehydration, his mind staying keen and clear. But the new formula did not merely recharge his body, it supercharged him. Something ignited deep in the limbic system of the brain, the hindbrain inherited from humankind's distant, reptilian ancestors. And in the first few hours after a new injection, Herbert was utterly at the mercy of his body's primitive drives.
Gaining control of his palsied hands, Herbert finally undid the snaps on Dan's trousers and impatiently dug inside the front flap of his boxers. Dan's penis, sluggishly erect, rose in a bowed curve like a sea serpent cresting the waves. His flesh was sticky with sweat, itching from being constantly swaddled in damp cloth, and hot as it was in the tent it actually felt good to be exposed to the open air.
"Already halfway there, hmm? Excellent, excellent. This shouldn't take long." His breath was hardly more than a soft sibilance. He began to work his mouth over Dan, licking and nibbling delicately at the loose foreskin, rolling it back, his lips closing over the sensitive head. He sucked vigorously, sweeping his tongue expertly around the rim, then worming the tip into the urethra, stretching it open. A ripple of sensation, not entirely unwelcome, crawled up Dan's spine, twining amid his ribs and seizing him by the back of the neck.
This wasn't what normally happened. Usually, Herbert was the one pitching and Dan catching, but he must have been delayed by whatever was hidden in that bloodstained bundle. It would take too long to get himself in working order, and he was already hurting with suppressed need. Dan, still stiff from sleep, would be much easier to arouse. Simple expediency.
Dan tilted his chin down a bit and slitted his eyes open. He was fully erect, eight angry-red glistening inches, jerking slightly with every beat of his heart. A pearl of precum gleamed on the tip. Herbert straightened up, dusting off his knees and nodding to himself in a satisfied way. He clambered up on the chair and straddled Dan, who closed his eyes again.
With small, breathless grunts, he lowered himself onto Dan's pulsating shaft. It wasn't a comfortable fit. Herbert was too tight, and he was in too much of a hurry to let Dan do anything to ease himself in. It was hurting both of them, but his re-agent saturated lower brain was at the wheel now. Dan felt like his cock was caught in a slowly tightening clamp, and Herbert was letting out a thin, broken whine of pain.
Even now, when he was technically bottoming, Herbert liked to be in complete control of the situation - the rate of entry, the speed, force and depth of penetration were all his to determine. Dan was perfectly fine with laying back and doing nothing but providing a release. He could enjoy the sensations and tell himself he was still basically straight. In the reeking darkness, in his foggy, hypnogogic state, Dan felt weightless, limbless, without musculature or bones, no physical substance whatsoever. He was entirely at Herbert's mercy as the man seesawed against him, hands locked behind his neck.
West settled down lower, his own weight prying himself open. His sphincter spasmed, the powerful muscle contraction snagging his foreskin and skinning him unmercifully and West squatted. Dan's eyes flew open and he almost leapt out of the chair. Herbert had to grab his shoulders to keep from being tossed onto the floor, his nails drawing blood and leaving those stinging welts that Dan always blamed on the iguanas, should anyone care to ask. It hurt like hell, and Dan wanted it over with.
He grabbed the bony handles of Herbert's hips and yanked him down, at the same time arching his own back, bracing his feet on the dirt floor and bucking his hips. Herbert cried out and jerked like a rabbit being mauled by a weasel as he was almost simultaneously pierced with the pain of his tearing flesh and the sweet rush of pleasure as the tip of Dan's penis rammed into his prostate. Dan, incoherent with sleep and ashamedly aroused, came in a tumultuous rush.
Panting, he subsided, feeling the involuntary muscle twitches in his back, shoulders and thighs dying away. His erection broke, and he felt his cock softening, slumping, pulling out covered in his own sticky juices. His heart refused to stop pounding.
"That's it? You're not even trying, are you?" Herbert was still crouched on his lap, his body tensed tight as a violin string about to snap. That he was still able to speak was not a good sign. Normally the reptilian hindbrain took over to such an extent that he was temporarily rendered speechless, only able to utter fierce, animal snarls and cries. The re-agent burned inside him, the tide of endorphins still too low to negate it. Dan had come too fast and he hadn't been satisfied.
Herbert slapped him.
"Sorry," Dan murmured. He wasn't sure what had happened there. He'd always managed to ignore any arousal he felt. Usually it was him face-down on the thin mattress, biting the pillow to keep from screaming as he forced himself to remain still while Herbert worked out his urges upon his flesh.
"Maybe there's something, some kind of mechanical way to keep the blood in the penis. A ligature device, perhaps?"
"Well, yeah." Dan couldn't resist a laugh even as he was rubbing his sore cheek. "It's a called a cock ring . . . "
He trailed off, suddenly realizing he'd made a major faux pas. Herbert was glowering murderously at him. There was a flickering glow in his tawny eyes, like a piece of amber held up to flame. Dan had gotten the impression that, before the influence of albumin-enhanced re-agent, Herbert had never had much a sex drive. It was a physical failing, perhaps, or he had sublimated the urge to reproduce into his work, or, most likely, it was a combination of the two, although he couldn't know whether work had drained his sex drive or simply vented his frustrations.
At any rate, he was terribly inexperienced. Any sexual technique he possessed was nothing more than the knowledge of a skilled anatomist, someone who knew where the nerves were hooked up and which sensations activated them. He knew nothing of give and take, he was merely letting off steam so he could get back to the important stuff - his work. It was sometimes hard for Dan to remember that, and how surprisingly touchy he could be about it. But Herbert's brittle self-worth was entirely grounded in his erudition, and he did not like being shown up in any aspect of it.
Soaked with sweat, his normally crisp shirt clung to him. Through the nearly transparent fine lawn cloth Dan could clearly see the bas-relief of clenched, corded muscles, the limp curve of his cock. Dan often wondered if Herbert kept his clothes on for more reason than simple expediency. He had been rather shocked the first time he'd seen Herbert in the communal showers, which he normally frequented when he was sure they would be empty. West wasn't just below average height. His body was almost as undeveloped as a twelve year old boy's. His narrow shoulders were barely wider than his slim hips, his limbs disproportionally thin, musculature light, his pale skin hairless, even devoid of armpit and pubic hair, which is usually the first to appear. Dan suspected Herbert might have some sort of physical problem, perhaps a mild form of pituitary dwarfism that had arrested his development. His tiny frame belied his forceful personality, but despite the man's arrogance and self-assurance, Dan sometimes experienced a creeping uneasy feeling when they did this, as if he were committing pederasty.
Herbert slid backwards off Dan's lap and began pacing, indifferent to the streak of semen and blood dribbling down his leg, not really thinking about what he was doing, banging his small fists on the gurney, the cabinets, the chicken wire front of the iguana cages, making the imprisoned reptiles hiss and flare their dewlaps warningly.
This wasn't good. Dan had only submitted to Herbert's attentions in the first place because otherwise his raging, re-agent fueled desire would completely unhinge him without an outlet. That was the genie he'd uncorked - although the revitalization it provided was vastly improved, he had to feed the beast or he became its victim.
That was how they'd figured it out in the first place. Not understanding what was happening to him after that first trial dosage, Herbert had seizured. Dan had tried to wrestle him onto a cot, preparing to strap him down and administer an anticonvulsive drug. Herbert fought him, crazed, kicking, scratching, biting his arm hard enough to draw blood. Dan had leaned on him with his entire weight, almost laying on top of him in an effort to hold him still long enough to give an injection. Herbert had been almost as surprised as Dan to find the blows transform into caresses . . .
Dan wasn't quite sure what had happened next. He'd come back to himself a little later to find it was he, not Herbert, stretched out on the cot. West had bundled him in a blanket, put a hot water bottle on his belly and a cool damp cloth on his forehead. He himself was sitting up at the camp desk scribbling away in his notebook. He'd greeted Dan with a disaffected courtesy despite the fact that Dan's blood was still caked in the corner of his mouth and explained what had happened.
In the aftermath, they had come to a sort of agreement.
It was impossible for Herbert to go back to the unenhanced version of the re-agent. It was little more than a placebo to him now that he'd tried the albumin-enhanced version. And he couldn't be allowed to go out prowling at the dictates of his instincts like some sort of lustful lycanthrope. That was a good way for him to be badly hurt, perhaps even killed.
It seemed a small sacrifice for Dan to make - offering himself up once every ten days or so for the continuing good. Dan, after all, still had faith that the re-agent would eventually be perfected. It was perhaps something less than Marie Curie dying of radiation poisoning, but more than Oppenheimer watching the bomb go off and murmuring that he was Death, destroyer of worlds.
Usually, he was able to be more or less a passive participant in the process. After all, it was Herbert being driven insane with desire, not him. If he didn't actually touch Herbert there, Dan could tell himself it wasn't really so bad. A blow job, really, did it matter if the mouth that performed it was male or female? There was no gender difference between tongue, lips and teeth. Being on the receiving end of anal intercourse was not so much different from, say, a rectal exam. Unpleasant, undignified, but nothing to be ashamed about. And even what had just happened, well, a hole was a hole. Right? And there were some perks, if he thought hard about it. No need to use a condom, no worrying about the partner getting pregnant. He'd never liked wearing those. And the rectum was much tighter, and that felt surprisingly good.
But this time it looked like he had no choice. Herbert certainly wasn't going to masturbate himself to orgasm. That had been the first thing Dan suggested when the problems with the enhanced re-agent surfaced. Herbert had simply stared at him with faintly disbelieving contempt. "I don't do that."
"Everyone does it," Dan replied, contemptuous and disbelieving right back.
"I don't." And that had ended the discussion right there.
Dan tried to tell himself that it would be no worse than trying to catheterize a patient, but the analogy didn't really work. Catheterizing someone was a bit like trying to thread a needle with the consistency of cooked dough. He'd certainly never had a patient respond sexually during the process. Not only was it intensely uncomfortable, anyone who was bad off enough to require it usually had other, more important things in mind.
"Come here," he said in weary resignation.
Herbert waltzed out of his reach, and, irritated, Dan lunged at him. Herbert, who was quite out of his mind by this point, squirmed and fought as Dan sat back down, trapping him on his lap. And what do you want for Christmas, little boy? Herbert slithered and shivered all over him, clawing for his eyes. He locked one arm around West's chest to hold him in place and reached between his legs with the other.
He tried to abstract what he was doing, reciting to himself the anatomical structures involved as he circled his thumb and first two fingers around Herbert's slender penis and began to gently stroke up and down. Penis, from the Latin pendere, meaning "to hang down". A complex structure suspended from the front and sides of the pubic arch of the pelvis. Formed of three long smooth masses of highly vascularized spongelike tissue now hardening as they filled with blood. The tracery of veins along his length bulged, ballooning with the pressure of trapped fluid, the head of the penis flushing an angry dark purple.
West curled up like a fried shrimp, cramming his knuckles into his mouth to stifle the involuntary glottal noises from escaping. Dan released his deathgrip and shifted him around so he was laying across his lap. He bent over, feeling his lower back protest. He spent most of the day hunched over the operating field, and this position was playing hell with him, but he feared if he spent too much time manoeuvering around and getting comfortable Herbert would come to his senses and run off again. That had happened before, and it wasn't pretty. After that first time they had experimented with simply strapping West down and pumping him full of sedatives and fast-acting antipsychotics, but his altered metabolism laughed them off and, worried that the uncontrolled seizures would tear him apart, Dan had finally released West and submitted to him.
He shook off the ugly memories of that night and tried to concentrate on the task at hand.
The distal end of the penis narrows slightly, then expands into the rounded head, the glans, exposed by circumcision of the foreskin. Dan took this swollen tip of the penis into his mouth, wincing slightly. He hadn't done this before, so he was playing by ear (so to speak).
He mimicked what Herbert had done to him, holding just the tip in his mouth, letting his tongue churn against the underside where most of the nerves clustered, clamping his teeth down gently on the rim. Pre-cum, thick and sticky and tasting of raw egg yolk, dribbled hotly onto his tongue. He tried to repress his gag reflex and kept working his hand along the stubbornly flaccid length of the shaft, unwilling to take the entire thing into his mouth. He made sure to keep his thumb firmly on the underside, letting his nail scrape down the faint seam of darkened skin runs from the glans along the midline to the base of the scrotum. The scrotum, Latin for, quite literally, "sack", is a loose muscular skin protecting the testicles, yet more Latin, testis, or "to bear witness" (to the owner's masculinity). Two small glands, suspended by the spermatic cords and scrotal tissue, one usually a little higher up and slightly forward of the other (the left, in this case).
But even as the tried to distract himself, Dan could not dissociate the feel of the flabby crinkles of thin skin sliding over the slowly warming, hardening shaft between his fingers, the sound of Herbert's breath escaping in hissing gasps through his clenched jaws, the taste and smell of his sweat, strangely changed by the poisonous byproducts of the re-agent into something unnatural, astringent and tongue-curlingly bitter, like the juice of unripe persimmons.
West was sobbing quietly as he succumbed to the insistent sparks and rills and yawns of pleasure coursing through him. He was used to having the whip hand in this, as in most things. Even now, half lobotomized by the albumin-enhanced re-agent's effects, West was snagging his fingers in Dan's hair to direct him, shifting about to get the angle just right.
It took a long, long time for him to come. By the time Dan finally wrung a feeble spurt of milky fluid from Herbert, his back was aching from the uncomfortable position, his hands were chapped, his jaw sore.
Dan stood up, twisting his torso to work the kink out of his back, and dumped West off in a undignified heap. Herbert stretched out on the sawdust-littered dirt floor. He'd relaxed into almost instantaneous sleep, or at least into one of those cat naps, brief but deep, which he experienced in lieu of sleep. In a half hour or so, his metabolic equilibrium attained, he would wake up, pop a few tablets of iodized salt and drink two glasses of filtered water, and be back at work.
For a moment Dan stared at the man, hating him with every fibre of his being. He looked so fragile laying there, pristine and white in the filthy, blood splattered dirt, a porcelain doll half-stripped, broken and discarded by a careless child. He looked so innocent. God, what had Dan's life come to that this man could casually force him into such obscene grotesqueries? The re-agent had taken everything away from him, and now he didn't even have control over his own body. He'd never been more than a convenience to Herbert West. He'd provided a lab space, a cover for him. He was a source of connections, a way to get the specimens he needed. Herbert had coasted under the protective aegis of Dan's squeaky-clean reputation, and then, when Dan was ready to turn on him, it was only Meg's involvement in the sordid mess that kept Dan with him. Afterwards, they'd stuck together for each other's protection. Dan couldn't reveal what Herbert had been up to without implicating himself, as well. And that would mean jail time, at the very least. His involvement with West had stripped him of his home, his love, his career, his future.
And now he had nothing left, not even his dignity. He'd been reduced to little more than Herbert's sex toy.
But not everything was gone. If this new re-agent worked, there was the chance that he could reclaim everything. Almost everything. Nothing could bring Meg back, of course. But he was paying for that, debasing himself like this.
Dan couldn't let it end now. They were too close to a success . . .
THE GREATEST TREASON
Back in Massachusetts . . .
"What the devil are you doing, Daniel?" West asked, adding a deprecating little laugh. But Dan could hear the uncertainty behind his voice.
He grabbed West around the waist and collapsed with him onto the old orange crewelwork settee. Hideous thing, they'd bought it at a yard sale, being strapped for cash after purchasing the new house together. He couldn't see straight anymore, as if he were in a Turkish bath or underwater with twisting ribbons of pale pink champagne bubbles streaming past. His heart beat like bongo drums in a Burmese opium den at midnight when there's heat lightning and no moon.
He knew what all this was about now. What it had always been about. It was a common feature of psychosis: you destroy what you can't have.
West had blamed his lack of success with the albumin-enhanced re-agent on the unsanitary conditions, the fragmentary nature of the specimens, the necessary furtive nature of their investigations. But the fact remained that he had made no progress until they returned to Arkham and Dan had left him for Francesca. He had wondered how West had damped the urges, and assumed he'd changed the formula yet again. But no. He had been channeling his sexual energy, not controlling it.
West felt himself to be forever apart from the rest of humanity. He hadn't really meant to hurt anyone. It was just an all-consuming biological problem. He ought to be forgiven. Boys will be boys. It was a betrayal of a subtler kind, where the villain and the victim turn out to be the same person.
It was very simple. Herbert West was creating monsters as a sort of perverted reproductive urge.
"You! You - fool." As he pulled him close once more, Dan could hear surprise in West's clipped tones, fear, anger, even a little admiration. West's red-brown eyes seemed to glow like coals with incalculably ferocious intensity. He was staring at Dan as if he'd never seen him before. And in a way he hadn't. Dan had never asserted himself like this.
"No, dammit," West snarled. "I don't need that anymore - "
"Shut up." Dan smashed his mouth onto Herbert's and thrust his tongue inside. This was no longer just about saving a few lives.
The settee had not been designed for sex. The lumpy, squeaking framework of it refused to let him settle into anything like a comfortable position, their limbs akimbo and plaited. Eventually he ended up with West's head jammed in the crook of his arm, neck bent awkwardly, one leg trapped and going numb against him, the other thrown over the back, rumpling up the afghan draped there.
Up close now, Dan could see how much West had been putting into his work, neglecting his personal appearance. Normally fastidious to a fault, now his jaw was stippled with tiny unhealed cuts from hurried, careless shaving, his hair was sheaved into greasy quills, the corners of his red-mapped eyes clotted with gunk, and there was a frank, pungent odor about him that spoke of too few showers. When he yelled at Dan to stop, to let him up, to get his hand out of there, he could smell acid on West's breath, but nothing else. He probably hadn't eaten in days.
West fought him still, feebly, his skinny arms and legs pinwheeling like a beetle turned on its back. He didn't know it, but he was the architect of his own destruction. Their time together in Peru had taught Dan far too well how to wrench those eloquent, inarticulate sounds from him with his cunning, unavoidable mouth, how exactly to thrust into the wet sweet core of him in an aggressive escalating rhythm, how to amp up the sensations humming through him until he detonated. They tumbled off the settee, still knotted and glued together. Dan, crushed and cocooned inside him, let out a murmur of tortured, guilty pleasure as that delicious downward sensation spiraled through the tightness in his guts.
Forgotten on its shelf, the homunculus twisted in its jar like a newt dropped into boiling milk. West had kicked loose an aeration tube, and Dan allowed himself a brief, grim smile. It would be hours before West noticed, and by then the work would be spoiled. He would be furious, of course. Dan would fear for his life, and he had surrendered to fate that as well.
But for now West was docile, shaken and trembling, laying draped over Dan's legs like a wrung-out wet towel. When he recovered enough to speak he said, voice muffled as his face was pressed into Dan's stomach, "I hate you."
"What? I couldn't hear you," Dan lied.
He rubbed his knuckles into his eye sockets like a sleepy child and glared up at Dan from under drawn brows with a sleepy, gluttonous expression. Now the light in West's eyes seemed to flicker like raked-over embers, nearly spent, yet still holding the power to burn - or to kindle new flame.
Dan's job was not over. He knew he could never heal Herbert West. The man was far too twisted for redemption. But he could distract him, delay him, subtly undermine him and sabotage his work. It would be a life's work.
Martyrdom had its temptations. He was covered with sins, pockmarked and straining under the weight of them, and in a single fiery moment of self-immolation he'd win absolution and redemption. He would repay the dead, lay their unquiet souls to rest, if not be cherished by them. He might be able to sleep again at night.
Dan reached down and tousled Herbert's hair affectionately, not minding at all when the man snarled at him and batted his hand away. He reveled in that last lingering tingle of annealing fire tickling his groin and the inside of his thighs.
A line came back to him from an English Lit he'd taken long ago and barely passed. It was Eliot, he thought, but he couldn't quite remember:
The last temptation is the greatest treason: to do the right deed for the wrong reason.
*end*
Author: Nightspore
Source material: Re-Animator
Pairing: Dan / Herbert
Challenge: Doubles - Life and Death
Disclaimer: I do not own the characters, for which I am sure they are very glad.
Rating: X
In the basement of an old house in Arkham, Massachusetts, in late 1986 . . .
It's one thing to have the answer to your problems, Dan thought, and quite another to be certain it was the right answer.
"Helloooo," West crooned, tapping on the glass wall of the aquarium.
The creature floating inside twitched as it reacted to the vibrations. Its handlike forepaws stretched out and clawed in the direction of the disturbance. The lipless mouth gaped, exposing translucent little fangs like chips of glass lining its jaws.
Dan could see it well enough through the bubbling, glowing, semi-opaque green fluid. It was as yet incomplete, spun glass bones webbed with stringy flesh and covered with skin transluminal as tissue paper. He could discern in it certain resemblances to the human form, but the thing was not human - low and sleek, hints of reptile and big cat, mantis and eel. It was ugly in a fantastical way, repulsive and alluring, but clearly well-made and functional. What was even more frightening about this thing was that despite its inhuman shape he knew it was a neonate, a child.
The light was subdued, filtered through the emerald opalescence, the atmosphere dank and cloaked by the fizzling gurgles of aeration equipment, but Dan could see well enough. There were other small homunculi in aquaria crowded on the shelves of the lab, even more distorted, misbegotten things, living abortions twisting pathetically, endlessly, in their jars of diluted re-agent. West must have made a lot of false starts, gone down many blind alleys, before perfecting his design.
"You're looking at your successor, Dan," he said proudly.
Dan shook his head silently.
He hadn't seen West since the trial. In the end, there hadn't been enough evidence to convict either of them, and the blame had been shifted to the dead Dr. Hill. Dan had gone back to school, and West had simply disappeared.
His relationship with Francesca had been mercifully short lived. They had clung together for a while like two shipwreck survivors washed ashore after a hurricane, but in the end each only reminded the other of the horrors of that night. Dan had tried living alone, continuing his work at the hospital, but found he was being worn down by the continual cycle of death. Even his own last name was an ironic brand of ridicule. Mark of Cain, indeed.
For a moment there, with West, he'd almost had the solution to the problem. Now every time a patient's heart stopped beating it seemed to mock him, taunt him with what might have been. After all he'd been through, the promise of the re-agent still tantalized Dan unmercifully.
And then an hour ago West had shown up on Dan's doorstep and with no explanation or other preliminaries invited him to see his new "work in progress". Dan had shouted and threatened. West sat there through the tumult with a cool, supercilious grin, and finally, as always, Dan gave in and followed him to his concealed laboratory. Too much of his life had been devoted to - and ruined by - the re-agent for him not to see it through to the conclusion. And who knew, Herbert may actually have made a breakthrough, and Dan would finally be able to tell the phantoms who haunted his troubled sleep that their tortures, while unjust, had after all been in the service of preventing human suffering, that they had died (and been brought back) for a worthy cause. Perhaps then they would let him rest . . .
"My mistake was in trying to re-create a human being. Mankind is designed very inefficiently. I'm not just talking about the obvious vestigial things, like wisdom teeth or the appendix, useless organs we're still in the process of discarding. Evolution is far too slow and too dependant on chance. What is needed is a revolution. Imagine being able to design one's descendants instead of having to rely on the whim and fiat of environmental stress and genetic potential!"
He looked up, hungrily anticipating Dan's reaction. Behind the thick curved lenses of his glasses, his eyes were the color of sherry, a translucent reddish-brown through which an inner light shone out.
Herbert reminded Dan of something he had seen a long time ago on the Saturday afternoon monster matinee, a black and white flick which he could not remember the title of. It was about a ventriloquist who dressed up as a little old lady and ran a pet store as a front for his criminal operations. The man would sell a parrot to a rich customer, throwing his voice to make them think the bird could talk. Then, when the new owner came back to complain the bird was mute, the 'old lady' would pay a house call to see what was ailing it, bringing along her 'grandson' in a baby carriage. The baby was actually his accomplice, a midget who would case the house to see if there were anything worth stealing. The part that had frightened the seven-year old Dan so badly was that the midget had looked so very much like a child, with a frail, perfectly proportioned body, chubby face, thin pale hair. In the movie he had hated the children who teased him in his former circus days. He'd killed the little daughter of one of their victims when she stumbled upon them burglarizing her house and thought Santa had brought her a baby brother.
It was the expression in the midget's eyes as he wrapped his diminutive hands around the girl's throat - intelligent, angry, jealous, fully adult in his childish face - that reminded him so much of West.
"Well? What do you think?"
What he had to do was briefly illuminated as sharp and clear as broken glass shattered by an actinic scintillation of lightning in the midst of a storm. Then, just as quickly, everything was plunged into abject darkness again, with nothing remaining but dazzling memory and a set resolution seared into his mind.
Gently, Dan took West by the wrist and pulled him closer. He whispered, "It's beautiful." Wrapping his arms around the smaller man, he twisted his fingers in West's hair, forcing his head back, and kissed him.
West struggled free and stepped away, staring wildly up at him. His jaw went slack, as if Dan had suddenly bopped him on the head with a large wooden mallet . . .
A year earlier. Somewhere in the jungles of Peru . . .
Dan woke with a start. He'd fallen asleep sitting bolt upright in the chair. He glanced automatically at his watch. If the batteries had not been corroded by the eternal dripping humidity, then it was some time after three am. The medical tent was shrouded in darkness. The air was gelatinous with the sickening scents of pustulating wounds, bile, feces and urine, coppery fresh blood and putrid open sores, a miasmic mist of human miseries blended but not ablated by a thin wash of antiseptic. Dan felt a fresh breeze on his cheek, comparatively cooler and carrying the scent of green growing things. Someone was pulling back the tent flap.
A small, swift figure briefly limned by the dull campfire outside darted in, fastening the flap securely behind him. It was Herbert, of course. He was carrying something bundled in a torn, stained piece of cloth. There was a quick flash of light as he opened the bunker fridge and deposited the bundle inside, making Dan squint painfully.
"Wake up, Daniel."
"I'm awake. What is it? Are they bringing in more casualties?"
That didn't seem right. There had been a lull in the fighting for the past three days, both sides still licking their wounds after the last skirmish. The victims of that were still arrayed in the tent, the morphine drip that was practically the only comfort he could give their torn and shattered bodies keeping them still as death. Perhaps some were, in fact, dead. This was the hour of the wolf, when the human metabolism was at its lowest ebb, the time of night when most deaths - and oddly, most births - occurred.
Herbert was shaking his head, no. He leaned over Dan, plucking with trembling fingers at his clothes, unbuttoning, unsnapping, pulling down, pulling off. "I need to work it out."
He'd been shooting up again.
When they'd first come here, Dan had begged him not to continue doing it, but Herbert disregarded him as usual. After all, if it weren't for the re-agent saturating his system, he explained, he would have succumbed to death when the re-animated intestines of the late Dr. Hill had tried to squeeze the life out of him. He'd suffered cracked ribs, punctured lungs, a crushed larynx, lingering aspiration pneumonia, but he had not died. Dan really had no defense against a testimonial like that. Herbert was blind to the side effects of continually injecting himself with a diluted solution of re-agent. In his opinion (the only one that mattered) the benefits far outweighed the drawbacks.
The new formulation, with the addition of albumin freshly drawn from the eggs of the Cuzco iguana (Pseudoiguana sempervirens), had a slightly different effect. The albumin slowed the re-agent's effect but also rendered it more gentle. The re-animation process itself was slower, taking many minutes instead of a few seconds, but the subjects seemed to be less affected by the torment of re-birth, more in command of their intellectual faculties.
Of course, there hadn't been an unqualified success yet. The soldier's bodies they were working with came to the med tent so damaged that they were hardly able to support new life for more than a few moments. To truly determine the new re-agent's effectiveness, they needed a fresh, whole body, but in the meantime Herbert never stopped experimenting with the limited resources available. Dan comforted himself with the thought that these men would have died anyway, that they had already decided to give their lives for their country, that they were in such agony that a few moments more added to it could not make much a difference. Sometimes he'd almost convinced himself . . . at any rate, he felt he was doing plenty of penance for his sins.
Herbert had already removed his shoes, belt, and trousers, folded them up neatly and placed them in a metal lock box to keep out the insects and snakes that seemed to delight in taking up residence in unguarded clothing. He left everything else on. He claimed that what he did, he did not do for pleasure. Just a quick slam, bam, thank you, man, and it's back to re-animation, Dan thought sardonically.
Now he knelt between Dan's legs, his breath coming hard and fast in tremulous, arrhythmic gasps. Dan, bowing to the inevitable, tried to relax, closing his eyes and letting his head drop back. There was no stopping Herbert now. All he could do was grit his teeth and try to scrounge a few crumbs of enjoyment.
Herbert discovered the addition of iguana albumin had changed the effect of the re-agent in himself, too. He could go longer between doses, and the highs and lows had been flattened out. The rush was slower, cleaner, less painful. He had already speculated it would be so from observing the re-animated corpses. But there had been unforseen effects.
The albumin-enhanced re-agent was primordially powerful stuff. Under its influence Herbert could go for days without sleeping or eating, only drinking water and taking salt tablets to prevent dehydration, his mind staying keen and clear. But the new formula did not merely recharge his body, it supercharged him. Something ignited deep in the limbic system of the brain, the hindbrain inherited from humankind's distant, reptilian ancestors. And in the first few hours after a new injection, Herbert was utterly at the mercy of his body's primitive drives.
Gaining control of his palsied hands, Herbert finally undid the snaps on Dan's trousers and impatiently dug inside the front flap of his boxers. Dan's penis, sluggishly erect, rose in a bowed curve like a sea serpent cresting the waves. His flesh was sticky with sweat, itching from being constantly swaddled in damp cloth, and hot as it was in the tent it actually felt good to be exposed to the open air.
"Already halfway there, hmm? Excellent, excellent. This shouldn't take long." His breath was hardly more than a soft sibilance. He began to work his mouth over Dan, licking and nibbling delicately at the loose foreskin, rolling it back, his lips closing over the sensitive head. He sucked vigorously, sweeping his tongue expertly around the rim, then worming the tip into the urethra, stretching it open. A ripple of sensation, not entirely unwelcome, crawled up Dan's spine, twining amid his ribs and seizing him by the back of the neck.
This wasn't what normally happened. Usually, Herbert was the one pitching and Dan catching, but he must have been delayed by whatever was hidden in that bloodstained bundle. It would take too long to get himself in working order, and he was already hurting with suppressed need. Dan, still stiff from sleep, would be much easier to arouse. Simple expediency.
Dan tilted his chin down a bit and slitted his eyes open. He was fully erect, eight angry-red glistening inches, jerking slightly with every beat of his heart. A pearl of precum gleamed on the tip. Herbert straightened up, dusting off his knees and nodding to himself in a satisfied way. He clambered up on the chair and straddled Dan, who closed his eyes again.
With small, breathless grunts, he lowered himself onto Dan's pulsating shaft. It wasn't a comfortable fit. Herbert was too tight, and he was in too much of a hurry to let Dan do anything to ease himself in. It was hurting both of them, but his re-agent saturated lower brain was at the wheel now. Dan felt like his cock was caught in a slowly tightening clamp, and Herbert was letting out a thin, broken whine of pain.
Even now, when he was technically bottoming, Herbert liked to be in complete control of the situation - the rate of entry, the speed, force and depth of penetration were all his to determine. Dan was perfectly fine with laying back and doing nothing but providing a release. He could enjoy the sensations and tell himself he was still basically straight. In the reeking darkness, in his foggy, hypnogogic state, Dan felt weightless, limbless, without musculature or bones, no physical substance whatsoever. He was entirely at Herbert's mercy as the man seesawed against him, hands locked behind his neck.
West settled down lower, his own weight prying himself open. His sphincter spasmed, the powerful muscle contraction snagging his foreskin and skinning him unmercifully and West squatted. Dan's eyes flew open and he almost leapt out of the chair. Herbert had to grab his shoulders to keep from being tossed onto the floor, his nails drawing blood and leaving those stinging welts that Dan always blamed on the iguanas, should anyone care to ask. It hurt like hell, and Dan wanted it over with.
He grabbed the bony handles of Herbert's hips and yanked him down, at the same time arching his own back, bracing his feet on the dirt floor and bucking his hips. Herbert cried out and jerked like a rabbit being mauled by a weasel as he was almost simultaneously pierced with the pain of his tearing flesh and the sweet rush of pleasure as the tip of Dan's penis rammed into his prostate. Dan, incoherent with sleep and ashamedly aroused, came in a tumultuous rush.
Panting, he subsided, feeling the involuntary muscle twitches in his back, shoulders and thighs dying away. His erection broke, and he felt his cock softening, slumping, pulling out covered in his own sticky juices. His heart refused to stop pounding.
"That's it? You're not even trying, are you?" Herbert was still crouched on his lap, his body tensed tight as a violin string about to snap. That he was still able to speak was not a good sign. Normally the reptilian hindbrain took over to such an extent that he was temporarily rendered speechless, only able to utter fierce, animal snarls and cries. The re-agent burned inside him, the tide of endorphins still too low to negate it. Dan had come too fast and he hadn't been satisfied.
Herbert slapped him.
"Sorry," Dan murmured. He wasn't sure what had happened there. He'd always managed to ignore any arousal he felt. Usually it was him face-down on the thin mattress, biting the pillow to keep from screaming as he forced himself to remain still while Herbert worked out his urges upon his flesh.
"Maybe there's something, some kind of mechanical way to keep the blood in the penis. A ligature device, perhaps?"
"Well, yeah." Dan couldn't resist a laugh even as he was rubbing his sore cheek. "It's a called a cock ring . . . "
He trailed off, suddenly realizing he'd made a major faux pas. Herbert was glowering murderously at him. There was a flickering glow in his tawny eyes, like a piece of amber held up to flame. Dan had gotten the impression that, before the influence of albumin-enhanced re-agent, Herbert had never had much a sex drive. It was a physical failing, perhaps, or he had sublimated the urge to reproduce into his work, or, most likely, it was a combination of the two, although he couldn't know whether work had drained his sex drive or simply vented his frustrations.
At any rate, he was terribly inexperienced. Any sexual technique he possessed was nothing more than the knowledge of a skilled anatomist, someone who knew where the nerves were hooked up and which sensations activated them. He knew nothing of give and take, he was merely letting off steam so he could get back to the important stuff - his work. It was sometimes hard for Dan to remember that, and how surprisingly touchy he could be about it. But Herbert's brittle self-worth was entirely grounded in his erudition, and he did not like being shown up in any aspect of it.
Soaked with sweat, his normally crisp shirt clung to him. Through the nearly transparent fine lawn cloth Dan could clearly see the bas-relief of clenched, corded muscles, the limp curve of his cock. Dan often wondered if Herbert kept his clothes on for more reason than simple expediency. He had been rather shocked the first time he'd seen Herbert in the communal showers, which he normally frequented when he was sure they would be empty. West wasn't just below average height. His body was almost as undeveloped as a twelve year old boy's. His narrow shoulders were barely wider than his slim hips, his limbs disproportionally thin, musculature light, his pale skin hairless, even devoid of armpit and pubic hair, which is usually the first to appear. Dan suspected Herbert might have some sort of physical problem, perhaps a mild form of pituitary dwarfism that had arrested his development. His tiny frame belied his forceful personality, but despite the man's arrogance and self-assurance, Dan sometimes experienced a creeping uneasy feeling when they did this, as if he were committing pederasty.
Herbert slid backwards off Dan's lap and began pacing, indifferent to the streak of semen and blood dribbling down his leg, not really thinking about what he was doing, banging his small fists on the gurney, the cabinets, the chicken wire front of the iguana cages, making the imprisoned reptiles hiss and flare their dewlaps warningly.
This wasn't good. Dan had only submitted to Herbert's attentions in the first place because otherwise his raging, re-agent fueled desire would completely unhinge him without an outlet. That was the genie he'd uncorked - although the revitalization it provided was vastly improved, he had to feed the beast or he became its victim.
That was how they'd figured it out in the first place. Not understanding what was happening to him after that first trial dosage, Herbert had seizured. Dan had tried to wrestle him onto a cot, preparing to strap him down and administer an anticonvulsive drug. Herbert fought him, crazed, kicking, scratching, biting his arm hard enough to draw blood. Dan had leaned on him with his entire weight, almost laying on top of him in an effort to hold him still long enough to give an injection. Herbert had been almost as surprised as Dan to find the blows transform into caresses . . .
Dan wasn't quite sure what had happened next. He'd come back to himself a little later to find it was he, not Herbert, stretched out on the cot. West had bundled him in a blanket, put a hot water bottle on his belly and a cool damp cloth on his forehead. He himself was sitting up at the camp desk scribbling away in his notebook. He'd greeted Dan with a disaffected courtesy despite the fact that Dan's blood was still caked in the corner of his mouth and explained what had happened.
In the aftermath, they had come to a sort of agreement.
It was impossible for Herbert to go back to the unenhanced version of the re-agent. It was little more than a placebo to him now that he'd tried the albumin-enhanced version. And he couldn't be allowed to go out prowling at the dictates of his instincts like some sort of lustful lycanthrope. That was a good way for him to be badly hurt, perhaps even killed.
It seemed a small sacrifice for Dan to make - offering himself up once every ten days or so for the continuing good. Dan, after all, still had faith that the re-agent would eventually be perfected. It was perhaps something less than Marie Curie dying of radiation poisoning, but more than Oppenheimer watching the bomb go off and murmuring that he was Death, destroyer of worlds.
Usually, he was able to be more or less a passive participant in the process. After all, it was Herbert being driven insane with desire, not him. If he didn't actually touch Herbert there, Dan could tell himself it wasn't really so bad. A blow job, really, did it matter if the mouth that performed it was male or female? There was no gender difference between tongue, lips and teeth. Being on the receiving end of anal intercourse was not so much different from, say, a rectal exam. Unpleasant, undignified, but nothing to be ashamed about. And even what had just happened, well, a hole was a hole. Right? And there were some perks, if he thought hard about it. No need to use a condom, no worrying about the partner getting pregnant. He'd never liked wearing those. And the rectum was much tighter, and that felt surprisingly good.
But this time it looked like he had no choice. Herbert certainly wasn't going to masturbate himself to orgasm. That had been the first thing Dan suggested when the problems with the enhanced re-agent surfaced. Herbert had simply stared at him with faintly disbelieving contempt. "I don't do that."
"Everyone does it," Dan replied, contemptuous and disbelieving right back.
"I don't." And that had ended the discussion right there.
Dan tried to tell himself that it would be no worse than trying to catheterize a patient, but the analogy didn't really work. Catheterizing someone was a bit like trying to thread a needle with the consistency of cooked dough. He'd certainly never had a patient respond sexually during the process. Not only was it intensely uncomfortable, anyone who was bad off enough to require it usually had other, more important things in mind.
"Come here," he said in weary resignation.
Herbert waltzed out of his reach, and, irritated, Dan lunged at him. Herbert, who was quite out of his mind by this point, squirmed and fought as Dan sat back down, trapping him on his lap. And what do you want for Christmas, little boy? Herbert slithered and shivered all over him, clawing for his eyes. He locked one arm around West's chest to hold him in place and reached between his legs with the other.
He tried to abstract what he was doing, reciting to himself the anatomical structures involved as he circled his thumb and first two fingers around Herbert's slender penis and began to gently stroke up and down. Penis, from the Latin pendere, meaning "to hang down". A complex structure suspended from the front and sides of the pubic arch of the pelvis. Formed of three long smooth masses of highly vascularized spongelike tissue now hardening as they filled with blood. The tracery of veins along his length bulged, ballooning with the pressure of trapped fluid, the head of the penis flushing an angry dark purple.
West curled up like a fried shrimp, cramming his knuckles into his mouth to stifle the involuntary glottal noises from escaping. Dan released his deathgrip and shifted him around so he was laying across his lap. He bent over, feeling his lower back protest. He spent most of the day hunched over the operating field, and this position was playing hell with him, but he feared if he spent too much time manoeuvering around and getting comfortable Herbert would come to his senses and run off again. That had happened before, and it wasn't pretty. After that first time they had experimented with simply strapping West down and pumping him full of sedatives and fast-acting antipsychotics, but his altered metabolism laughed them off and, worried that the uncontrolled seizures would tear him apart, Dan had finally released West and submitted to him.
He shook off the ugly memories of that night and tried to concentrate on the task at hand.
The distal end of the penis narrows slightly, then expands into the rounded head, the glans, exposed by circumcision of the foreskin. Dan took this swollen tip of the penis into his mouth, wincing slightly. He hadn't done this before, so he was playing by ear (so to speak).
He mimicked what Herbert had done to him, holding just the tip in his mouth, letting his tongue churn against the underside where most of the nerves clustered, clamping his teeth down gently on the rim. Pre-cum, thick and sticky and tasting of raw egg yolk, dribbled hotly onto his tongue. He tried to repress his gag reflex and kept working his hand along the stubbornly flaccid length of the shaft, unwilling to take the entire thing into his mouth. He made sure to keep his thumb firmly on the underside, letting his nail scrape down the faint seam of darkened skin runs from the glans along the midline to the base of the scrotum. The scrotum, Latin for, quite literally, "sack", is a loose muscular skin protecting the testicles, yet more Latin, testis, or "to bear witness" (to the owner's masculinity). Two small glands, suspended by the spermatic cords and scrotal tissue, one usually a little higher up and slightly forward of the other (the left, in this case).
But even as the tried to distract himself, Dan could not dissociate the feel of the flabby crinkles of thin skin sliding over the slowly warming, hardening shaft between his fingers, the sound of Herbert's breath escaping in hissing gasps through his clenched jaws, the taste and smell of his sweat, strangely changed by the poisonous byproducts of the re-agent into something unnatural, astringent and tongue-curlingly bitter, like the juice of unripe persimmons.
West was sobbing quietly as he succumbed to the insistent sparks and rills and yawns of pleasure coursing through him. He was used to having the whip hand in this, as in most things. Even now, half lobotomized by the albumin-enhanced re-agent's effects, West was snagging his fingers in Dan's hair to direct him, shifting about to get the angle just right.
It took a long, long time for him to come. By the time Dan finally wrung a feeble spurt of milky fluid from Herbert, his back was aching from the uncomfortable position, his hands were chapped, his jaw sore.
Dan stood up, twisting his torso to work the kink out of his back, and dumped West off in a undignified heap. Herbert stretched out on the sawdust-littered dirt floor. He'd relaxed into almost instantaneous sleep, or at least into one of those cat naps, brief but deep, which he experienced in lieu of sleep. In a half hour or so, his metabolic equilibrium attained, he would wake up, pop a few tablets of iodized salt and drink two glasses of filtered water, and be back at work.
For a moment Dan stared at the man, hating him with every fibre of his being. He looked so fragile laying there, pristine and white in the filthy, blood splattered dirt, a porcelain doll half-stripped, broken and discarded by a careless child. He looked so innocent. God, what had Dan's life come to that this man could casually force him into such obscene grotesqueries? The re-agent had taken everything away from him, and now he didn't even have control over his own body. He'd never been more than a convenience to Herbert West. He'd provided a lab space, a cover for him. He was a source of connections, a way to get the specimens he needed. Herbert had coasted under the protective aegis of Dan's squeaky-clean reputation, and then, when Dan was ready to turn on him, it was only Meg's involvement in the sordid mess that kept Dan with him. Afterwards, they'd stuck together for each other's protection. Dan couldn't reveal what Herbert had been up to without implicating himself, as well. And that would mean jail time, at the very least. His involvement with West had stripped him of his home, his love, his career, his future.
And now he had nothing left, not even his dignity. He'd been reduced to little more than Herbert's sex toy.
But not everything was gone. If this new re-agent worked, there was the chance that he could reclaim everything. Almost everything. Nothing could bring Meg back, of course. But he was paying for that, debasing himself like this.
Dan couldn't let it end now. They were too close to a success . . .
Back in Massachusetts . . .
"What the devil are you doing, Daniel?" West asked, adding a deprecating little laugh. But Dan could hear the uncertainty behind his voice.
He grabbed West around the waist and collapsed with him onto the old orange crewelwork settee. Hideous thing, they'd bought it at a yard sale, being strapped for cash after purchasing the new house together. He couldn't see straight anymore, as if he were in a Turkish bath or underwater with twisting ribbons of pale pink champagne bubbles streaming past. His heart beat like bongo drums in a Burmese opium den at midnight when there's heat lightning and no moon.
He knew what all this was about now. What it had always been about. It was a common feature of psychosis: you destroy what you can't have.
West had blamed his lack of success with the albumin-enhanced re-agent on the unsanitary conditions, the fragmentary nature of the specimens, the necessary furtive nature of their investigations. But the fact remained that he had made no progress until they returned to Arkham and Dan had left him for Francesca. He had wondered how West had damped the urges, and assumed he'd changed the formula yet again. But no. He had been channeling his sexual energy, not controlling it.
West felt himself to be forever apart from the rest of humanity. He hadn't really meant to hurt anyone. It was just an all-consuming biological problem. He ought to be forgiven. Boys will be boys. It was a betrayal of a subtler kind, where the villain and the victim turn out to be the same person.
It was very simple. Herbert West was creating monsters as a sort of perverted reproductive urge.
"You! You - fool." As he pulled him close once more, Dan could hear surprise in West's clipped tones, fear, anger, even a little admiration. West's red-brown eyes seemed to glow like coals with incalculably ferocious intensity. He was staring at Dan as if he'd never seen him before. And in a way he hadn't. Dan had never asserted himself like this.
"No, dammit," West snarled. "I don't need that anymore - "
"Shut up." Dan smashed his mouth onto Herbert's and thrust his tongue inside. This was no longer just about saving a few lives.
The settee had not been designed for sex. The lumpy, squeaking framework of it refused to let him settle into anything like a comfortable position, their limbs akimbo and plaited. Eventually he ended up with West's head jammed in the crook of his arm, neck bent awkwardly, one leg trapped and going numb against him, the other thrown over the back, rumpling up the afghan draped there.
Up close now, Dan could see how much West had been putting into his work, neglecting his personal appearance. Normally fastidious to a fault, now his jaw was stippled with tiny unhealed cuts from hurried, careless shaving, his hair was sheaved into greasy quills, the corners of his red-mapped eyes clotted with gunk, and there was a frank, pungent odor about him that spoke of too few showers. When he yelled at Dan to stop, to let him up, to get his hand out of there, he could smell acid on West's breath, but nothing else. He probably hadn't eaten in days.
West fought him still, feebly, his skinny arms and legs pinwheeling like a beetle turned on its back. He didn't know it, but he was the architect of his own destruction. Their time together in Peru had taught Dan far too well how to wrench those eloquent, inarticulate sounds from him with his cunning, unavoidable mouth, how exactly to thrust into the wet sweet core of him in an aggressive escalating rhythm, how to amp up the sensations humming through him until he detonated. They tumbled off the settee, still knotted and glued together. Dan, crushed and cocooned inside him, let out a murmur of tortured, guilty pleasure as that delicious downward sensation spiraled through the tightness in his guts.
Forgotten on its shelf, the homunculus twisted in its jar like a newt dropped into boiling milk. West had kicked loose an aeration tube, and Dan allowed himself a brief, grim smile. It would be hours before West noticed, and by then the work would be spoiled. He would be furious, of course. Dan would fear for his life, and he had surrendered to fate that as well.
But for now West was docile, shaken and trembling, laying draped over Dan's legs like a wrung-out wet towel. When he recovered enough to speak he said, voice muffled as his face was pressed into Dan's stomach, "I hate you."
"What? I couldn't hear you," Dan lied.
He rubbed his knuckles into his eye sockets like a sleepy child and glared up at Dan from under drawn brows with a sleepy, gluttonous expression. Now the light in West's eyes seemed to flicker like raked-over embers, nearly spent, yet still holding the power to burn - or to kindle new flame.
Dan's job was not over. He knew he could never heal Herbert West. The man was far too twisted for redemption. But he could distract him, delay him, subtly undermine him and sabotage his work. It would be a life's work.
Martyrdom had its temptations. He was covered with sins, pockmarked and straining under the weight of them, and in a single fiery moment of self-immolation he'd win absolution and redemption. He would repay the dead, lay their unquiet souls to rest, if not be cherished by them. He might be able to sleep again at night.
Dan reached down and tousled Herbert's hair affectionately, not minding at all when the man snarled at him and batted his hand away. He reveled in that last lingering tingle of annealing fire tickling his groin and the inside of his thighs.
A line came back to him from an English Lit he'd taken long ago and barely passed. It was Eliot, he thought, but he couldn't quite remember:
The last temptation is the greatest treason: to do the right deed for the wrong reason.
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Date: 2004-12-02 04:59 pm (UTC)And this ain't nearly as kinky as "Saint Valentine WAS a Martyr, You Know", which is an alternate ending to the first movie in which Hill wins (temporarily at least), ends up with Herbert alive but lobotomized, Meg as Hill's undead love slave who, under his telepathic control carves up (re-animated) Dan until he resembles and exploded circuit diagram, and ends with Herbert trying to sew Dan up like a rag doll . . . but I digress.
Glad you liked it.