Piece of Work
Mar. 17th, 2004 04:02 am![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
ghostgecko.livejournal.com posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
rareslashTitle: PIECE OF WORK
Author: Nightspore (more at fanfiction.net/~nightspore)
Fandom: Re-Animator
Pairing: Herbert / Dan
Rating: NC-17?
Author's note: crossposted to contrelamontre
PIECE OF WORK
The creaking had started again.
Creak, thump, creak, creak. They were at it again. Again!
Distracted, West lost his grip on the kidney. It squirted out of his cupped hands like a watermelon seed and hit the floor, bursting and filling the basement lab with an ammoniac stench. He unclipped the hemostats holding back the skin of the donor corpse and threw them against the wall in a fit of petty rage. Damn them! How was he supposed to work like this? How could he concentrate when he knew exactly what was going on up there in Daniel's big four-poster bed? He could hear them all through the house.
His eyes burned like lye from sleeplessness, but if he tried to go upstairs to bed he would only hear it clearer, a symphony of moans and cries with the loose headboard keeping the beat against the wall. West glared at the ceiling, then scooped up the ruined kidney and tossed it into the red-bag wastebasket. He got down on his knees and began cleaning up blood and bile as the creaking of the overtaxed bedsprings scraped his nerves like an unrosined violin bow.
Oh, what a piece of work is man! West thought sardonically. How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In form, in moving, how express and admirable! In action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals! And yet, in the process of reproduction, how like a filthy ape . . .
Every night it was the same thing, as stylized a procession of events as a Kabuki play. Francesca would invade his home, all smiles and batting eyelashes and perfume and soft touches. He could see right through her. She was an animal, a preprogrammed biological robot. In that way she was no more complex than any other lower organism in season, every gesture and word devoted to the sole purpose of wringing the seed from Daniel and passing on her genes to the next generation. Oh, people could call it love, but at the dark, shadowed root of it there was only biological imperative.
It sickened West to see how easily Daniel fell for her calculated gestures. He really had expected better of his assistant than this, although he couldn't say why. He was thankful that he, himself, was immune to the machinations of feminine bewitchment. But no - Daniel was as simple as a rutting preying mantis, blissfully squirting his life into her heaving receptacle while she munched on his head. Her 'love' would lobotomize him as deviously as a mantid's jaws, oh yes it would.
West could see the detrimental effects already. Daniel's attention often wandered. He would catch the young man looking at the Bride sometimes as though waking from a bad dream to find his hands covered with blood. And in those moments Daniel was as far from him as if he were on Pluto, the cold screaming distance of a hundred million miles of airless void sucking the breath out of West's throat, his heart and brain swelling with the pull of the vacuum. It got harder and harder each time to tempt him back. West had thought it would get easier as the Bride took shape.
He needed Daniel. It wasn't something he could do on his own. As much as it bruised his pride to admit it, Daniel was the better surgeon.
West had been practicing in between working on their project, in secret of course. Morbid doodling with human body parts, Daniel called it. But even the great masters drew rough sketches. West had seen one by Michelangelo, a sheet parchment with charcoal drawings of the human hand, repeated with the pose varied slightly each time trying for the perfect effect. And Michelangelo had created David! If even he needed to do a few sketches first, West certainly needed to.
West was so eager to see the whole thing come together that he tended to hurry ahead and skip on the details. It was fiddly work, the pieces kept fresh and supple by soaking in a diluted solution of re-agent until they were needed. It was rather like trying to stitch together jello wrapped in wet tissue paper. But Daniel's sutures were so small and neat they closed the joinings of patchwork flesh almost invisibly. He could easily spend an hour or two lovingly sewing a rather superfluous nipple onto the Bride's cold breast, occasionally pausing to turn to the other table and run his blood-beslimed fingers through the tangled mane of her hair as he whispered loving encouragement into her ear.
And then, just as West had gotten Daniel caught back up in their work, the living woman would come and interrupt. Ruin everything. He'd tried to frighten her off, threaten her with subtle hints. But Francesca only glared at West with frigid, self-assured politeness. In her dim way, she somehow knew they belonged to competing species.
And Daniel, poor, pheromone-intoxicated Daniel, would scurry behind her up to the bedroom like a moth following a scent-trail right into burning candle flame. Another evening would be wasted.
West finished swabbing up the remains of the kidney. There was nothing much left to do now. If tonight followed the usual schedule, the creaking would go on for another ten minutes or so.
Seized by some unnameable impulse, West left the basement. He went upstairs, hugging the wall, avoiding the center of the steps. Even his light weight was enough to make them creak. He cat-footed it down the hallway and paused in front of the door to Daniel's bedroom.
The house was old, the wood of the door frame warped. Even without meaning to, he could glimpse them through the small gap. He saw Daniel on top of the woman, his shoulders bunched, his rib cage heaving, the individual vertebrae of his back popping up and down like piano keys as he thrust, his thigh and buttock muscles crimping with the strain.
Herbert's lips drew back in an indignant snarl. That gummy-skinned, fumbling gasping and groping was nothing like the beautiful work they did together. The meticulous stringing of tendon to muscle, muscle to bone. The careful packing of organs into the shell of the torso. The amazing feel of once-dead tissue quivering to life. There was an art to it, this sculpting of nature's rejects into a new complete form. The incredibly delicate touch it required . . . he had often watched Daniel's large-boned but surprisingly deft hands gently cupping the Bride's cold flesh, and imagined them on his own.
West's splayed fingers pressed down on the unyielding surface of the wood that separated them, the skin under his nails whitening.
Oh, Daniel.
The moaning sound reached a climax. Daniel was huffing and puffing like an old-fashioned steam engine cresting a steep hill, and Francesca mooed with mindless pleasure. West knocked his forehead hard on the wood panel, his own breath catching like a rusty gear in his throat.
There was murmur of sleepy conversation. The doorknob rattled. Startled, West ripped himself from his reverie and drew back into the shadowed depths of the hallway. There was no time to duck into a room, they would hear the door close. Francesca emerged, looking tousled and smug. She passed by and didn't even see him as he crouched there like a little mouse. He waited, eyes closed, willing himself invisible til he heard the zip of her jacket, her keys jingling, the front door slam.
West tugged his tie loose, suddenly finding it very difficult to breathe. He was angry at himself. It was his house, too. She was only half-welcome, and there was no reason for him to be cowering in the corner. He turned to go back into the basement, when he realized she had left the bedroom door open. There was no sound coming from inside.
West wrestled with himself for a moment. Daniel didn't like sleeping with the door open. Out of politeness alone, he should close it for him. Yes - it was the polite thing to do.
He peered in, one hand on the door frame. Daniel was fast asleep. Well, he deserved a good rest, didn't he? He'd worn himself out.
In fact, West told himself as he padded over to the bed, Daniel really shouldn't be straining himself like that. He still hadn't completely recovered from the incident in Peru. The soldier's bayonet had punctured his bowels, letting the waste and stomach acids flood the sterile body cavity, the blade's surface carrying all manner of infectious filth into the wound. Peritonitis was an ugly thing. Daniel might easily have died in their primitive surroundings, or spent the rest of his life carting around a colostomy bag to bypass ruined intestines. Francesca wouldn't have found that very attractive, would she, West thought, an unlovely sneer distorting his face. With a easing motion, he slid the sheets down, suddenly eager for another look at the twisted scar.
Daniel had not bothered to pull on his boxers back on after finishing, and there it was on his left lower abdomen, gleaming pale and shiny in the moonlight filtering through the curtains, as long and thick as West's smallest finger. He remembered opening Daniel's shirt and seeing the gluey loop of greyish-pink intestine bulging out of the jagged wound. In that moment, with the incendiary bombs raining down around them, surrounded by enemy soldiers, hundreds of miles from the nearest civilization, his last vial of re-agent wasted on that damn experiment, West was sure he would lose Daniel.
West lay down beside him. Daniel murmured in his sleep, shifting in a settling motion and rooting his face into the pillows. The heady, jungle smell of sex saturated the sheets, human sweat and the raw egg yolk scent of fresh semen. West felt a momentary panic, a sudden paralysis, as if he had surprised the mirror and found no reflection there. This wasn't the first time. It would happen without warning, as he was looping a suture or stirring an ingredient. Daniel's hand would brush past him as he reached for a speculum, or their knees would bump under the table. A tremor would seize West and he would stop what he was doing, as if an angry signal were buzzing in his brain.
Odd, how he felt no repugnance at the touch of cold, charnel clay . . . yet the feel of smooth, pliant living skin stretched taut over angular bone quickened his heart rate and sent strange muscle spasms tremoring at the base of his spine.
His fingertips lightly skimmed Daniel's shoulder, strayed across his chest. There seemed to be a sort of electricity, a tingling in his fingertips that traveled up his arm. West tilted his head, then removed his glasses and slipped them into his shirt pocket. The room further than two feet away dissolved into a soft blur of greys. Only Daniel, his sleeping body lightly sheened with sweat and limned with silver, remained in focus, as if he were the one real, true thing left in the world.
West admired the artful play of moonlight across the planes of Daniel's face. He knew the man's body, every bone, muscle and sinew. After all, who had nursed him back to health through the raging fever of the peritonitis? Not Francesca, certainly. Daniel's body held no secrets from him, no more than any other body did.
Still, West couldn't resist considering anew the man's slim, sculpted muscularity. Daniel was a healthy, sound young animal, his somatotype perfectly balancing the grace of an ectomorph with the solid construction of a mesomorph. West flattened his hand, exploring the roughness of the light feathering of hair on Daniel's chest. In the aftermath of sex, his nipples were still darkened and engorged, like warm little eraser nubs under West's appraising palm. He grinned, darkly amused as Daniel reacted unwittingly, his swollen lips parting, his sooty eyelashes, wetted by tears of exertion and stuck together in sheaves, fluttering as he drew in a pleasured breath.
West could see how most people would be deluded into thinking the hand of some supernatural being must be involved in the creation of man. But really, the human form was just the end product of a long series of coincidences and lucky breaks, and West knew full well that he himself only saw the beauty because the eye that beheld it was also the end product.
End product indeed, he told himself, absentmindedly running his small hands over the sharp flare of the illiac crest, noting in a detached way how the unconscious man groaned, his thighs parting. West was the terminal branch on the evolutionary tree. He would father no children. The billions of years of struggle and survival, the infinitesimal chance in the timing of sperm and egg that went into his creation was all for naught . . . his genes would not be passed on. In the view of the species, he was nothing. Less than nothing: he took from the environment, but he would give nothing back except his flesh to someday rot in the ground and nourish the soil.
No.
He denied it - he denied fate and chance and chaos. He would never give nature red in tooth and claw the satisfaction of devouring him. He took no succor in blind faith and spat in the face of blind nature.
If no God existed, he would make himself a god.
Growing excited now, West felt a warm anticipation settle like a weight in his stomach. There would be no more chance! He would populate the world with the creations of his own hands (the hands now stroking the sensitive skin of Daniel's inner thigh, thin fingers kneading the firm swell of his gluteus maximus muscle as if making a loaf of bread, rolling his testicles like silly putty between heated palms), beings of unique perfection and undying beauty. Death only existed to clear the stage for a new set of players - if his creations were perfect, there would be no reason for death to exist.
And if one day Daniel should die . . .
West's fingers clenched, and Daniel frowned in his sleep. Breathless with unaccustomed emotion, he forced his grip to relax. He hadn't been able to touch Daniel, not since he recovered. What would he say if he woke now and found West's small, trembling body curled up beside him, the delicate hands busily probing his most intimate flesh, the dark eyes looking into his own? Ah, but it was hard to pull away. Warm skin . . . so much better than the scant comfort he got from his creations, with their clammy crazy quilt of integument stretched over mismatched bone and tortured musculature, the mutant feel of their distorted bodies flexing and scrabbling against him, half-desirous, half-repelled.
His lax fingers brushed Daniel's wilting cock with the tender affection one would use to pet a sleeping kitten. How he would love to grasp him firmly, shout his name and wake him up. It amused him immensely, the face Daniel made when he was surprised: his heavy brows arcing up from his guileless cocker spaniel eyes, his soft mouth going slack in shock.
But there was no excuse for it anymore. He was healthy now. Healthy, normal. Healthy enough to spend hours with that woman, hours he could have spent in the basement laboratory doing something useful and productive.
"What am I laying here for? I'm laying here as if I had a chance to enjoy a quiet time." West's voice was a hoarse whisper. Yes, there was much work to be done. He was refreshed, full of ideas. A phantasmagoria of twisted forms paraded through his mind, things that could spring from no woman's womb, creatures born of his own skill and imagination. His palms itched to get working again.
Don't worry, Daniel. I forgive you.
He stood up, straightened his tie and his rumpled shirt, combing his hair back into place. He turned to go, then paused, and once more stroked the man's body possessively, a single fingertip tracing the line of Daniel's jaw, contemplating, memorizing.
So this is what a muse looks like.
Yes, Daniel. Enjoy yourself while you have the chance. You're mine now, although you don't know it yet. You're part of my new world of gods and monsters. And when we no longer need women, there will be just you and I . . .
*end*
Author: Nightspore (more at fanfiction.net/~nightspore)
Fandom: Re-Animator
Pairing: Herbert / Dan
Rating: NC-17?
Author's note: crossposted to contrelamontre
PIECE OF WORK
The creaking had started again.
Creak, thump, creak, creak. They were at it again. Again!
Distracted, West lost his grip on the kidney. It squirted out of his cupped hands like a watermelon seed and hit the floor, bursting and filling the basement lab with an ammoniac stench. He unclipped the hemostats holding back the skin of the donor corpse and threw them against the wall in a fit of petty rage. Damn them! How was he supposed to work like this? How could he concentrate when he knew exactly what was going on up there in Daniel's big four-poster bed? He could hear them all through the house.
His eyes burned like lye from sleeplessness, but if he tried to go upstairs to bed he would only hear it clearer, a symphony of moans and cries with the loose headboard keeping the beat against the wall. West glared at the ceiling, then scooped up the ruined kidney and tossed it into the red-bag wastebasket. He got down on his knees and began cleaning up blood and bile as the creaking of the overtaxed bedsprings scraped his nerves like an unrosined violin bow.
Oh, what a piece of work is man! West thought sardonically. How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In form, in moving, how express and admirable! In action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals! And yet, in the process of reproduction, how like a filthy ape . . .
Every night it was the same thing, as stylized a procession of events as a Kabuki play. Francesca would invade his home, all smiles and batting eyelashes and perfume and soft touches. He could see right through her. She was an animal, a preprogrammed biological robot. In that way she was no more complex than any other lower organism in season, every gesture and word devoted to the sole purpose of wringing the seed from Daniel and passing on her genes to the next generation. Oh, people could call it love, but at the dark, shadowed root of it there was only biological imperative.
It sickened West to see how easily Daniel fell for her calculated gestures. He really had expected better of his assistant than this, although he couldn't say why. He was thankful that he, himself, was immune to the machinations of feminine bewitchment. But no - Daniel was as simple as a rutting preying mantis, blissfully squirting his life into her heaving receptacle while she munched on his head. Her 'love' would lobotomize him as deviously as a mantid's jaws, oh yes it would.
West could see the detrimental effects already. Daniel's attention often wandered. He would catch the young man looking at the Bride sometimes as though waking from a bad dream to find his hands covered with blood. And in those moments Daniel was as far from him as if he were on Pluto, the cold screaming distance of a hundred million miles of airless void sucking the breath out of West's throat, his heart and brain swelling with the pull of the vacuum. It got harder and harder each time to tempt him back. West had thought it would get easier as the Bride took shape.
He needed Daniel. It wasn't something he could do on his own. As much as it bruised his pride to admit it, Daniel was the better surgeon.
West had been practicing in between working on their project, in secret of course. Morbid doodling with human body parts, Daniel called it. But even the great masters drew rough sketches. West had seen one by Michelangelo, a sheet parchment with charcoal drawings of the human hand, repeated with the pose varied slightly each time trying for the perfect effect. And Michelangelo had created David! If even he needed to do a few sketches first, West certainly needed to.
West was so eager to see the whole thing come together that he tended to hurry ahead and skip on the details. It was fiddly work, the pieces kept fresh and supple by soaking in a diluted solution of re-agent until they were needed. It was rather like trying to stitch together jello wrapped in wet tissue paper. But Daniel's sutures were so small and neat they closed the joinings of patchwork flesh almost invisibly. He could easily spend an hour or two lovingly sewing a rather superfluous nipple onto the Bride's cold breast, occasionally pausing to turn to the other table and run his blood-beslimed fingers through the tangled mane of her hair as he whispered loving encouragement into her ear.
And then, just as West had gotten Daniel caught back up in their work, the living woman would come and interrupt. Ruin everything. He'd tried to frighten her off, threaten her with subtle hints. But Francesca only glared at West with frigid, self-assured politeness. In her dim way, she somehow knew they belonged to competing species.
And Daniel, poor, pheromone-intoxicated Daniel, would scurry behind her up to the bedroom like a moth following a scent-trail right into burning candle flame. Another evening would be wasted.
West finished swabbing up the remains of the kidney. There was nothing much left to do now. If tonight followed the usual schedule, the creaking would go on for another ten minutes or so.
Seized by some unnameable impulse, West left the basement. He went upstairs, hugging the wall, avoiding the center of the steps. Even his light weight was enough to make them creak. He cat-footed it down the hallway and paused in front of the door to Daniel's bedroom.
The house was old, the wood of the door frame warped. Even without meaning to, he could glimpse them through the small gap. He saw Daniel on top of the woman, his shoulders bunched, his rib cage heaving, the individual vertebrae of his back popping up and down like piano keys as he thrust, his thigh and buttock muscles crimping with the strain.
Herbert's lips drew back in an indignant snarl. That gummy-skinned, fumbling gasping and groping was nothing like the beautiful work they did together. The meticulous stringing of tendon to muscle, muscle to bone. The careful packing of organs into the shell of the torso. The amazing feel of once-dead tissue quivering to life. There was an art to it, this sculpting of nature's rejects into a new complete form. The incredibly delicate touch it required . . . he had often watched Daniel's large-boned but surprisingly deft hands gently cupping the Bride's cold flesh, and imagined them on his own.
West's splayed fingers pressed down on the unyielding surface of the wood that separated them, the skin under his nails whitening.
Oh, Daniel.
The moaning sound reached a climax. Daniel was huffing and puffing like an old-fashioned steam engine cresting a steep hill, and Francesca mooed with mindless pleasure. West knocked his forehead hard on the wood panel, his own breath catching like a rusty gear in his throat.
There was murmur of sleepy conversation. The doorknob rattled. Startled, West ripped himself from his reverie and drew back into the shadowed depths of the hallway. There was no time to duck into a room, they would hear the door close. Francesca emerged, looking tousled and smug. She passed by and didn't even see him as he crouched there like a little mouse. He waited, eyes closed, willing himself invisible til he heard the zip of her jacket, her keys jingling, the front door slam.
West tugged his tie loose, suddenly finding it very difficult to breathe. He was angry at himself. It was his house, too. She was only half-welcome, and there was no reason for him to be cowering in the corner. He turned to go back into the basement, when he realized she had left the bedroom door open. There was no sound coming from inside.
West wrestled with himself for a moment. Daniel didn't like sleeping with the door open. Out of politeness alone, he should close it for him. Yes - it was the polite thing to do.
He peered in, one hand on the door frame. Daniel was fast asleep. Well, he deserved a good rest, didn't he? He'd worn himself out.
In fact, West told himself as he padded over to the bed, Daniel really shouldn't be straining himself like that. He still hadn't completely recovered from the incident in Peru. The soldier's bayonet had punctured his bowels, letting the waste and stomach acids flood the sterile body cavity, the blade's surface carrying all manner of infectious filth into the wound. Peritonitis was an ugly thing. Daniel might easily have died in their primitive surroundings, or spent the rest of his life carting around a colostomy bag to bypass ruined intestines. Francesca wouldn't have found that very attractive, would she, West thought, an unlovely sneer distorting his face. With a easing motion, he slid the sheets down, suddenly eager for another look at the twisted scar.
Daniel had not bothered to pull on his boxers back on after finishing, and there it was on his left lower abdomen, gleaming pale and shiny in the moonlight filtering through the curtains, as long and thick as West's smallest finger. He remembered opening Daniel's shirt and seeing the gluey loop of greyish-pink intestine bulging out of the jagged wound. In that moment, with the incendiary bombs raining down around them, surrounded by enemy soldiers, hundreds of miles from the nearest civilization, his last vial of re-agent wasted on that damn experiment, West was sure he would lose Daniel.
West lay down beside him. Daniel murmured in his sleep, shifting in a settling motion and rooting his face into the pillows. The heady, jungle smell of sex saturated the sheets, human sweat and the raw egg yolk scent of fresh semen. West felt a momentary panic, a sudden paralysis, as if he had surprised the mirror and found no reflection there. This wasn't the first time. It would happen without warning, as he was looping a suture or stirring an ingredient. Daniel's hand would brush past him as he reached for a speculum, or their knees would bump under the table. A tremor would seize West and he would stop what he was doing, as if an angry signal were buzzing in his brain.
Odd, how he felt no repugnance at the touch of cold, charnel clay . . . yet the feel of smooth, pliant living skin stretched taut over angular bone quickened his heart rate and sent strange muscle spasms tremoring at the base of his spine.
His fingertips lightly skimmed Daniel's shoulder, strayed across his chest. There seemed to be a sort of electricity, a tingling in his fingertips that traveled up his arm. West tilted his head, then removed his glasses and slipped them into his shirt pocket. The room further than two feet away dissolved into a soft blur of greys. Only Daniel, his sleeping body lightly sheened with sweat and limned with silver, remained in focus, as if he were the one real, true thing left in the world.
West admired the artful play of moonlight across the planes of Daniel's face. He knew the man's body, every bone, muscle and sinew. After all, who had nursed him back to health through the raging fever of the peritonitis? Not Francesca, certainly. Daniel's body held no secrets from him, no more than any other body did.
Still, West couldn't resist considering anew the man's slim, sculpted muscularity. Daniel was a healthy, sound young animal, his somatotype perfectly balancing the grace of an ectomorph with the solid construction of a mesomorph. West flattened his hand, exploring the roughness of the light feathering of hair on Daniel's chest. In the aftermath of sex, his nipples were still darkened and engorged, like warm little eraser nubs under West's appraising palm. He grinned, darkly amused as Daniel reacted unwittingly, his swollen lips parting, his sooty eyelashes, wetted by tears of exertion and stuck together in sheaves, fluttering as he drew in a pleasured breath.
West could see how most people would be deluded into thinking the hand of some supernatural being must be involved in the creation of man. But really, the human form was just the end product of a long series of coincidences and lucky breaks, and West knew full well that he himself only saw the beauty because the eye that beheld it was also the end product.
End product indeed, he told himself, absentmindedly running his small hands over the sharp flare of the illiac crest, noting in a detached way how the unconscious man groaned, his thighs parting. West was the terminal branch on the evolutionary tree. He would father no children. The billions of years of struggle and survival, the infinitesimal chance in the timing of sperm and egg that went into his creation was all for naught . . . his genes would not be passed on. In the view of the species, he was nothing. Less than nothing: he took from the environment, but he would give nothing back except his flesh to someday rot in the ground and nourish the soil.
No.
He denied it - he denied fate and chance and chaos. He would never give nature red in tooth and claw the satisfaction of devouring him. He took no succor in blind faith and spat in the face of blind nature.
If no God existed, he would make himself a god.
Growing excited now, West felt a warm anticipation settle like a weight in his stomach. There would be no more chance! He would populate the world with the creations of his own hands (the hands now stroking the sensitive skin of Daniel's inner thigh, thin fingers kneading the firm swell of his gluteus maximus muscle as if making a loaf of bread, rolling his testicles like silly putty between heated palms), beings of unique perfection and undying beauty. Death only existed to clear the stage for a new set of players - if his creations were perfect, there would be no reason for death to exist.
And if one day Daniel should die . . .
West's fingers clenched, and Daniel frowned in his sleep. Breathless with unaccustomed emotion, he forced his grip to relax. He hadn't been able to touch Daniel, not since he recovered. What would he say if he woke now and found West's small, trembling body curled up beside him, the delicate hands busily probing his most intimate flesh, the dark eyes looking into his own? Ah, but it was hard to pull away. Warm skin . . . so much better than the scant comfort he got from his creations, with their clammy crazy quilt of integument stretched over mismatched bone and tortured musculature, the mutant feel of their distorted bodies flexing and scrabbling against him, half-desirous, half-repelled.
His lax fingers brushed Daniel's wilting cock with the tender affection one would use to pet a sleeping kitten. How he would love to grasp him firmly, shout his name and wake him up. It amused him immensely, the face Daniel made when he was surprised: his heavy brows arcing up from his guileless cocker spaniel eyes, his soft mouth going slack in shock.
But there was no excuse for it anymore. He was healthy now. Healthy, normal. Healthy enough to spend hours with that woman, hours he could have spent in the basement laboratory doing something useful and productive.
"What am I laying here for? I'm laying here as if I had a chance to enjoy a quiet time." West's voice was a hoarse whisper. Yes, there was much work to be done. He was refreshed, full of ideas. A phantasmagoria of twisted forms paraded through his mind, things that could spring from no woman's womb, creatures born of his own skill and imagination. His palms itched to get working again.
Don't worry, Daniel. I forgive you.
He stood up, straightened his tie and his rumpled shirt, combing his hair back into place. He turned to go, then paused, and once more stroked the man's body possessively, a single fingertip tracing the line of Daniel's jaw, contemplating, memorizing.
So this is what a muse looks like.
Yes, Daniel. Enjoy yourself while you have the chance. You're mine now, although you don't know it yet. You're part of my new world of gods and monsters. And when we no longer need women, there will be just you and I . . .
*end*
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