AN: This story was written for Gutter, a very good friend in fandom, who claims I don't torture my Worth enough. She wanted, along with other details, Worth actually falling in love with Conrad. But she foolishly said that Conrad did not necessarily need to reciprocate Worth's feelings. I almost consider this an AU, because while I think this is a believable chain of circumstances, it's very separate from most of my ideas about conworth. Also, THIS INCLUDES NON-CON. I would have liked not to spoil anything, but rape warnings should be up front. I do not condone such things, and rape is typically something I prefer not to write. This, however, demanded to be composed as it is. That said, Hanna is Not a Boy's Name still belongs to the marvelous Tessa Stone. No profit is being made and no offense is meant.

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STRUNG REMEMBRANCES

-by: Lira-

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Luce Worth remembered when he met Conrad Achenleck. In honesty, he'd been more worried about Hanna coming in all banged up again, and then over the fact that Hanna wanted Worth to take care of even more of his problems. Like Worth was some sort of fucking family physician and Hanna was just expanding the family a little bit. He hadn't been thinking about Conrad at all, not until he got into a fight with the vampire over whether or not the man was really dead. Usually only Lamont escalated from words to punches with him that fast, so Conrad did make an impression.

And Worth didn't simply mean in the cartilage of his nose.

Worth remembered Hanna coming in for bags of blood for the new vampire, but that wasn't really anything too special. It became special when it didn't stop, when Worth consciously realized that the vampire must be dependent on him for the stuff if he was needing this much this often, even after some time had passed and he should have recovered and been eating properly. Worth remembered not just finding it odd, but finding it almost endearing, in the same way that puppies were plenty cute but he always just kind of wanted to kick them.

Worth remembered going out of his way to track Conrad down, a baggie of blood in his coat pocket. He remembered it because it hadn't been especially hard, not with the little shreds of information he knew about Conrad by that point. He remembered their exchange, squeezing the baggie into Conrad's coffee in a manner that might have, sort of, been discreet. He remembered thinking that the vampire hadn't known how to properly show some fucking gratitude, but that he was pretty sure the fucker was grateful. He'd drank his blood-coffee, hadn't he?

Worth remembered that after that Conrad came for his blood himself, all the time. Worth was sure that Hanna wasn't playing intermediary any more, not even once in a while. Worth knew that this was when the insults had begun in earnest, because Worth was a fucking jackass and he wasn't going to pass up the opportunity to take aim at someone who was as much of a moving target as Conrad was. Worth remembered this well because Conrad kept coming, every time, no matter what Worth said to him. Worth got himself slugged a lot, and uncovered some rare gems, like the time he'd made a stray comment about Conrad's mother and the man had gone tense, perfectly still, before visibly boiling over and plowing Worth into a wall.

Worth suspected some of those wounds were still healing, under all of his other injuries in between.

Worth remembered how he was never able to fear Conrad, how he would never even want to. Conrad was Count Fagula and Worth could not consider him a threat, not even when Worth knew other vampires could be danger incarnate and something even he would not fuck with too far. Worth remembered this well because it had been the grain of the idea, the thought that Conrad could never hurt him more than he would enjoy so why not fuck with that? Why not "forget" to restock the baggies of blood Worth provided for the vampire, why not sit back in his chair when Conrad came to call and force the matter into Conrad's own hands?

Worth remembered it being harder than he had expected. Conrad's will should have been weak from the hunger, his thoughts open to the suggestion that while the cooler might be empty, the office was not devoid of food. Worth remembered needing to goad Conrad into it straight to the end, practically having to take Conrad's face in his hands and apply that fang directly to the pulsing vein visible in his neck. But Worth remembered far better how sweetly it had hurt, how Conrad's fang had caught in his flesh and he had deliberately yanked away, like he'd been startled, so that the tooth would rip and tear when Worth pulled back. Worth remembered it being better than any other pain he'd caused himself, a misery so excruciating it became transcendent.

Worth remembered the biting, so much biting. He remembered still giving Conrad bags of blood, but each time pushing and prodding and goading until the vampire caved or snapped and bit him, just once more. He remembered, in the fuzzy part of his brain where he stored the things he did not like to think about, that this process became a highlight to his life. Worth looked forward to teethmarks from one person who could make it hurt just, exactly, right, without seeming to understand what it was that he did. It was something almost like fondness, thinking that Confag didn't realize that while he was getting fed and maybe feeling guilty over roughing Worth up yet again, Worth was trying not to come in his pants.

What Worth didn't remember was the little intricacies in the progression of events, the seconds and minutes he'd lost along the way. He knew they must have been there, knew from a bit of a history with recreational drug use that sometimes things just got misplaced. Usually it didn't fucking matter if he didn't remember a conversation or two, or couldn't tell if he should have two bites on his neck just then or three. It started to matter when he noticed that his dick would stir if he just touched the ragged indentations on his neck, when he realized that he never bandaged the wounds he received from Conrad because that would mean he couldn't touch them and worry at them and make them hurt more whenever he was bored and his thoughts started to wander.

Worth didn't remember the point when his patients began to exasperate him. He was short on patience to start, but had always been able to throw himself into the work, to enjoy the necessary pains he inflicted as part of the medical profession. But all of a sudden he would feel a stab of irritation when one of his usuals dragged themselves in, when it was an actual problem he'd have to attend to and not a faggy, hipster vampire come to awkwardly retrieve just a little more blood. All of a sudden something else was encroaching upon Worth's apathy, losing him in thoughts of the pain more than he'd known in years.

Worth started to remember again when he found himself in the grimy bathroom of his practice with his dick in his hand. He'd just meant to take a piss. It was a slow night and no one was there. Instead he'd braced himself against the wall because his legs weren't servicing him properly, forehead against the grimy plaster. He'd started moving his hand, quick and firm and tightening more and more around himself with each stroke. So that the touch alone was borderline painful, so that Worth didn't even have to think about reaching for the razor left by the sink to make it hurt more. He didn't care about leaving his toys out like that for anyone to see, but he did care about this, about wringing sensations from his far too yielding flesh until his orgasm would shudder right through him.

But Worth found himself moving his hand from the wall to his neck, pressing short nails into the wounds and not caring for a moment about the dirt. It was reflex, his ingrained thought to cause himself pain when he was so close to coming but not there, not quite there just yet. But the thought to abuse the bites, to ignore his well-loved razor in favor of tearing this tissue back open to a quick thought of /Conrad/ before he came, that was new. New and fucking horrifying but he couldn't care just then because he was groaning low and perfect and why mess with a good thing when it worked?

Worth tried not to remember past then, but he couldn't revoke the thought. He would not reject the circumstances that gave him the best orgasms in working memory. He would not cease pushing Conrad, working him into the rage that satisfied Worth's needs, exorcising a little of Worth's impotent rage with himself in the process. He enjoyed calling Conrad a fag then, invoking every euphemism he could fathom for the filthy things he posited Conrad would like to do. The fact that his accusations far more closely resembled the dirty things he'd enjoy doing to Conrad was chucked in the same corner of his mind as everything else he was very deliberately not even thinking about.

Worth got out more. If he stayed in his clinic he only thought of cutting into himself, Conrad cutting into him, him retreating to his bathroom to jerk off or just doing it under his desk when even that became too much additional effort. He hadn't jerked off that much since he was a teenager, since he'd been doing stupid shit to push the boundaries of just what sort of displeasure he found most pleasurable. But Worth had become a reclusive creature, and his daytime wanderings brought him to places like Conrad's faggy coffee shop, thankfully when Conrad was happily holed up asleep somewhere and couldn't think that Worth was actually coming to see him.

Worth went to department stores. It became a new habit, because they were filled with a vast variety of people all trying to get their materialistic crap for cheap. Worth could exercise his wit on an increased number of perfect strangers, could newly appreciate quite how disgusting he seemed to people when he wasn't in the habitat of his equally disgusting practice. It was not his fault if he ended up in the electronics department, looking at shiny macbooks and MP3 players so that he found himself trying to recall which models Conrad favored just in time to curse loudly and stalk to another area of the store.

Worth would end up in interior decorating, looking at faggy little fringed throw pillows and wondering if Conrad would place plastic protectors on his furniture. Wondering what Conrad's couches looked like and if the depth would be enough for for Worth to fuck him on one of them comfortably, or if they would just have to go to the bedroom. Wondering what Conrad's bed would look like and what the sheets were made of, thinking that of course Conrad would be such a fag, he'd need to have at least three hundred thread count sheets for his dainty little ass.

And of course then all Worth was thinking about was Conrad's ass, standing amongst throw pillows and antique-style lamps and hand-crocheted tea cozies, getting hard in his pants with nothing to do about it. He considered more than once just doing it, touching himself through his pants around all the faggy furniture that made him think all of these faggy, infuriating, unbearable things, but he'd kindled a fondness for the store and still wanted to be able to come back. Instead he made himself familiar with the department store's bathrooms, making the transition from ducking into a stall to jerking off at the urinal, and then just jerking off into one of the shiny porcelain sinks because Worth still didn't care that much about what people fucking thought of him.

It sparked a brief crusade of Worth ducking into different establishments in the city, visiting restaurants and stores and anywhere that had a bathroom they'd let the public into. It was the sort of campaign he would have kicked off in his youth, just for the fuck of it, jerking off in a million different unfamiliar places where he couldn't be reminded of things he didn't want to think about when he was getting off. Except after a while of that bathrooms themselves made Worth think of Conrad, so that every time he tried to take a piss his dick gave him a big fuck you and started trying to get hard.

Worth stooped to actually coming to the coffee shop when it was dark out and Conrad was awake, sliding into a seat at Conrad's table with his best feigned calm. He brought Conrad blood to appease him and never ordered anything to drink, the action maybe supposed to look flippant but in fact being because Worth couldn't do anything any more while in Conrad's company. He always started to mouth off so that he couldn't stop, just talking and thinking about Conrad's mouth and his mouth and other things they could be doing. Blowjobs, he would think, focusing hard on his dick and the fact that it was hard already and trying not to think that mouths were good for kissing too and maybe Conrad would bite him in surprise if he tried.

Those thoughts got him in trouble when he was again in the department store, looking at industrial-grade blenders and wondering if Conrad could still drink alcohol, if he could buy one of these devices and mix Conrad a nice frozen daiquiri where the red wasn't from strawberries, but from blood. The quick assurance from his mind was that if he just got Conrad a little drunk, maybe, maybe then he'd get what he wanted. He always tried not to spell it out in words, to just relish the pain of Conrad's little fang when he could have it and of his own hand pulling too hard and too tight when he could not. To enjoy the parts of the misery that were enjoyable and not admit what his fucking problem was.

But his mind constructed the scene where the industrial-grade blender was in Conrad's kitchen full of blood-spiked drinks and Conrad's faggy MP3 player was playing some equally faggy music and they were sitting on Conrad's couch with broad cushions and plastic protectors and throw pillows on top and what came next should have been some nice invigorating fucking so that Worth could finally get proper fucking relief. It should not have been Worth actually admitting the nature of his obsessive, grasping love, and as soon as the word "love" echoed in his mind he cursed, and would have pulled the blender from its stand and dashed it to the floor had it not been fucking bolted in place. He wanted to break something. He wanted to make a face at the mother pulling her two children along and yell "Fuck!" louder and cause trouble for someone else so he didn't have to be a trouble to himself.

Worth only made it as far as the dairy aisle of the grocery section of the store before he stopped, the cool radiating off of the refrigerators helping him to clear his head. Or at least clear it as far as it took to turn on his heel and swoop back towards the restrooms, the tail of his coat floating out behind him as he hightailed it there. There was one way to fix this. There was always one way to fix this. Except when Worth thrust open the bathroom door and stared at the neat row of porcelain sinks, the answer didn't seem to be jerk off and zip up and go on with his life. His life would not go on, not ever, not when he was dealing with a fucking immortal vampire for all that Conrad was still more of a fucking fag to Worth, not when Conrad continually played into Worth's masochism without putting out.

If Worth was going to bandy about the "love"-word and spend his days among throw pillows and blenders, he might as well bite the fucking bullet and consummate the thing. Worth supposed it was all of Conrad's faggy preconceptions about relationships and fucking and how these things were supposed to go, but fuck, he could teach Conrad a thing or two. It wasn't like Conrad didn't have his fucking undivided attention, and that was already closer to a relationship than any other arrangement Worth had ever placed himself in. All that was left to do was bring Conrad up to speed and claim what he might now admit he wanted to be his.

Worth slipped the lube into his coat pocket from the condom aisle on his way out. It was apricot scented.

Worth knew where Conrad lived, even though he'd never been invited there. He'd found the address out in the course of his looking into Conrad. It didn't occur to him to knock. It was early evening, just as the sun was going down, and Worth didn't expect Conrad to be up for perhaps another hour, he'd just let himself in. It seemed vampires were no more worried about their safety than regular people; shit it wasn't like a plant by the door was a very creative or safe place for a spare key. The inside of the place was completely dark, but that was to be expected. Worth wanted, a little bit, to poke around Conrad's kitchen and check the couches for covers, but more important than that was the purpose of his visit. He found himself walking onward, quietly, to the bedroom.

Conrad was only a lump under the blanket in the dark, unidentifiable as the object of Worth's lust, love, obsession, for so long, or even as a person. But even then Worth's dick was aching in his pants, and even then he could not stop for any longer than it took to pick his way across the room. Worth was not accustomed to waiting or gentle and he wasn't going to make much of an exception even if Conrad had all of his faggy little ideals to be done away with. He pulled the blanket down and rolled onto Conrad on the bed, placing his hand snugly over Conrad's mouth when Conrad turned to face him, blearily. It wasn't like vampires needed to breathe.

In the dim of the room, Worth could only tell that Conrad's eyes widened because he saw the whites of them, before Conrad's expression loosened marginally as he recognized Worth. Worth was sure it was still a display of surprise over his presence in Conrad's condo, but he'd say something about that later. Something. He'd figure it out. The pressure of his pants dictated that other things come first, Worth's free hand feeling down the length of the body beneath him. When Conrad bit his hand it was only an encouragement, and Worth clamped down harder, his other hand reaching the clasp of his pants.

Once Worth's dick was out and he'd deduced that Conrad slept in his underwear, things moved faster. Worth replaced his hand with his mouth and only groaned against the vampire when Conrad bit that instead. It left his hands free to tug at Conrad's underwear, impatient, shifting so that he thwarted any attempt on Conrad's part to talk to him. For a few seconds the scent of apricots filled the room, and then slick fingers were pressing against Conrad, pressing into Conrad. Just because Worth liked it rough didn't mean Conrad had to suffer horribly, and Conrad was already pushing against him and biting and Worth got the feeling he'd enjoy his degree of suffering just fine.

Worth couldn't concentrate on preparations for long, not with Conrad shoving at him, but he took that to mean that Conrad was just ready to go. If Conrad's body clenched painfully tightly, and if Conrad kept trying to scoot up the bed away from what Worth was doing, then fine. Conrad just needed to get laid more, and Worth could fix that. When Worth slicked himself, slid into place, and shoved in, the grip of Conrad's tensed muscles was almost unbearable. He stilled for a moment, mouth going slack, genuinely afraid that he'd just come right then and it would all be over, and that was when Conrad punched him in the face.

Worth grunted out and leaned up, using both of his arms to pin Conrad in place and looking down at him with his dick still buried. He was used to that sort of thing from fighting with Mont, from fighting with Conrad those times when Worth needed to goad the vampire into biting. It wasn't so hard to wrestle Conrad still, to jerk his hips independently forward and back, even as Conrad moved against him. But past a point Conrad simply ceased biting or hitting and just lay there, like a virgin girl in her marriage bed too overwhelmed to reciprocate. Worth's dick slid more easily then, and Conrad's yielding body still clutched him borderline-painful-tight, and Worth was so close it was criminal.

Worth only noticed then that Conrad hadn't gotten hard, and was so quiet that it might have been strange if it weren't for the fact that Conrad didn't need to breathe, anyway. It was too late to do much about it; the next moment Worth was coming, and then he'd completely forgotten anything else. Coming so hard he jerked against Conrad, clenched down with his hands where he was still holding Conrad's arms tight in place. When he came down from the absolute high of it, even better than he'd been expecting because he hadn't expected Conrad to fucking hit him in the middle of it and everything, he bothered to pull out and roll off of the vampire.

"What was that supposed to be, you fucking bastard."

The words were spoken softly, and for a moment Worth didn't even register that Conrad sounded angry, but also frigid, a tone of voice he'd never heard from Conrad before. Worth knew that he had planned to say something, at least to relieve the pressure, about all of the obsessive feelings and the fact that he thought it was love. But now that his dick was limp and he could just lie there, it was so much more bothersome to express himself.

"I'm waiting."

Fuck, okay, maybe Conrad was pissed because Worth had neglected him a little and Conrad hadn't gotten off, but maybe Conrad should have jerked around a little bit less so Worth wouldn't need both arms to pin him. Worth gave an exasperated sigh and sat up, thinking he could just offer to make sure to get Conrad off too, next time.

"Figured wiv all th' foreplay, it was high time we consummated this thing. Ah'll do yeh better next time."

"What /thing,/ Worth? Did you think... Oh god."

Conrad's voice broke a little on the end, and Worth noticed that Conrad had pulled the sheets back up, was pulling the blankets close all around him. It was only then that Worth wondered if things were starting to go off script. He wasn't used to fucking relationships.

"Just get out," Conrad added. "Get the fuck out."

Worth remembered the conversation, what there was of it, for a long while after that. In his opinion he did not pine. It was a fucking misunderstanding. When Conrad came to tell him, more than a week later and in very stilted phrasing, that he would be getting his blood directly through Lamont, with a little help from Hanna, and did not wish to endure the trainwreck of Worth's company ever again, Worth was admittedly a bit perplexed as to exactly what the fuck had happened. So he asked.

Worth also remembered, for a long while later, Conrad's parting remark when he had gone to leave. That you know Worth, whatever you thought you were doing, Conrad had been waiting for someone special. And it sure as hell wasn't you.

Worth simply didn't know if it was the comfort of knowing he would always be Conrad's first that helped him launch himself out of the mess that was all of these cloying emotions and bother, or just the fact that now he knew he'd fucked another virgin, add one to the tally. It was all the same, in the end. The story of Worth's one true love, consummated, unrequited.