Disclaimer: All characters borrowed from Stuart Gordon, Brian Yuzna, and the works of H P Lovecraft.
Herbert isn't dead. Not by a long shot.
It was Dan who got him out. Francesca told him, before she left, for good that time. How, after pulling her free, Dan had gone down on his knees and dug like a dog; dug three feet, throwing aside earth and rubble, until the wind howled down into the crypt, then sprawled out on his belly in the mud and reached through the hole he had made, ripping clinging, spasming flesh away, to grasp Herbert's fingers in his.
They found out later that he had a broken ankle, a cracked pelvis, five broken ribs, and a punctured lung, but Herbert had stopped being aware of any of those things around the same time that he had stopped breathing.
The first pain that he does remember being aware of is the rhythmic pound of the heel of Dan's hand on his sternum. The second one is Dan saying something, and then the mash of his mouth onto Herbert's again, relentlessly forcing his lungs to accept air, and it's the second one - in memory, although he knows, logically, not in reality - that hurt more, still hurts more, and Herbert can't put his finger on quite why.
It drips into his brain like the tap, tap of his crutches on the wood floors as he moves, slowly, about the house. He hears the same sounds at the hospital every day, the rubber tires of wheelchairs passing up and down the corridors. The sounds made by the afflicted: sawn bones and split skin laboring to repair and re-interlace themselves with teeth-grinding sluggishness. Sometimes they never do. Conventional medicine has its limitations, as does the body. Its failures.
The house is quiet. Dan's working late at the ER. Herbert's not supposed to attempt the stairs - not on his own; he's supposed to wait until he has Dan hovering there, ready to grab him if necessary. He takes them now, one crutch tucked into his right armpit and the other held, cross-fashion, left hand gripping the banister. By the time that he swings his foot over the last step, he's shaky-wristed with the pain, but he's succeeded, where he's been told he'd fail. Dan chewed him out the last time that he found out he'd done it, shouting-angry, with all the strings of his neck visible. The same way he'd been the evening when Herbert first came back from the hospital doped up on Tylenol, like he was throwing out everything he could think of, about the police questioning, about Meg, about the cat, because he didn't really know what it was that he was angry about.
He was going, he'd said then, going tonight. He couldn't handle it any more - Herbert's obsession with death masquerading as the preservation of life, Herbert's tinkering with body parts as if they were a child's construction toy. Couldn't handle watching as -
When Herbert had woken at some point in the early hours in the couch-bed that had been made up, sweating and nauseated from the drugs, his tongue sticking to the roof of his acrid mouth, Dan had been asleep in the chair a few feet away, his long body curled uncomfortably, a blanket wrapped around him.
Through the Tylenol sluicing around inside his skull, Herbert had wondered.
What the reason was for the overwhelming relief that he felt.
Dan is a valuable partner, he knows that. A good doctor. That was why Herbert won him over; why he continues to claim consistent victory over the other man's morals. The promise that they might do what every doctor dreams of and find a way to eliminate the barrier, to kick-start the cooling, expiring brain again as one can do with the heart, to snatch life out of the jaws of death, is too seductive. He can talk for hours about the scientific breakthroughs they can make and the greatness they can achieve, but it's always Dan's emotions, his Achilles heel, that Herbert winds up appealing to in the end. Every time that Dan falters, balks at what they're doing, Herbert has the carrot of life to dangle in front of his nose. Life, along with its mess and uncertainty and itching monkey-inquisitiveness, is too important to Dan. Death, the cessation of it all, will never stop being shocking to him.
Dan is a good doctor, and Herbert is a good scientist. That's where they part company, and, conversely, the reason that Dan works so well alongside him. The concept of yin and yang: one filling the area where the other is deficient. The same loving care and attention that Dan lavishes on their work as he does his patients has, more than once, alerted them to problems that Herbert has been too impatient for results to acknowledge. It's Dan, more often than not, who comes down to the basement in the middle of the night to remind Herbert to eat. Herbert is engaged in a daily battle to keep Dan focused on their goals, to keep him from his own weaknesses, but here in the silence, with nothing for once but the aching reminders of his own animal fragility to distract him, he has the perception that Dan's unwavering ability to be distracted by life is also his strength.
Herbert sighs, deeply, and immediately winces at the sharp, piercing pain that follows it. His ribs are healing faster than his ankle, but not fast enough; neither enough yet that he can put his time to good use. He finds himself debating, vaguely, the appropriate dosage to stimulate the bone tissue and accelerate the process. Dan, he suspects, would have asked exactly what it would take for him to learn anything about consequences.
Consequences, of course, aren't something that Dan had apparently been concerned about when Meg was lying on a gurney with her windpipe crushed.
He taps his way across the landing to Dan's door, but, as always, he stops short of entering. Herbert's never been in Dan's room, just as he dislikes Dan being in his. Dan asks him what he's got to hide, if he's got the outcome of an experiment chained up in the closet that he doesn't know about yet, but what repels him is the intimacy, the exposure of it. He doesn't want to be in the room where Dan mindlessly unloads his semen between another pair of legs, into another eager, gaping womb; doesn't want Dan in the same room where, every so often, Herbert quickly and mechanically relieves himself. That his body has a need other than food, water and sleep is a source of frustration, not pleasure. Sleep he's on his way to conquering; sex, as it exists, has so far defeated him. Dan would tell him that it was all part of being alive; the brain-numbing act, embarrassing in hindsight, that, as fast as it had seemed the inevitable and only thing, departs and leaves him at a loss as to why he did it. Part of being human. Mere humanity, though, has always been to Herbert a very low goal to aim for.
He knows why it hurt so much, when he was revived. Shock: the violation of connection. For Dan, bestowing consciousness with a sterile hypodermic syringe of re-agent is a last resort and always will be. He's always been the one persistently trying to feed to Herbert little droplets of what he considers to be what life is about.
All of the anger, at what Herbert's done.
To Meg.
To himself.
The reason that Dan hasn't called the police or the local asylum, walked out of the door, and never come back. A tiny light is beginning to flicker in Herbert's mind; fascination, of the kind that he's only found until now in the sight of cells twitching their way back to activity, crowding out disbelief. Dan's words, grated out between compressions, before he knew that he could hear him.
Dammit, Herbert, come on... come on, come on! Not you as well!
Dan cares about him. A great deal. Dan considers him to be his friend.
Herbert's never had a friend, just as he's never had a lover. He's never felt the lack of the former any more than he has the latter, but the knowledge that that Dan is his friend - that he likes Dan - makes his presence, and the current absence of it, intensely tangible. He's gotten used to him being around. Dan is too conservative, still too locked into his dreams of grant funding and white picket fences and the Mayo Clinic, but he's the only one who's ever been open enough to listen to Herbert's theories. He would have scorned the idea of needing any assistant before he met Dan. He'd never imagined that having someone to sit up late and argue the latest experiment with, someone to bounce ideas off, could be so enjoyable. So... stimulating. He has a abrupt fear of not being able to get enough, of having somehow become addicted to it. He needs Dan now, put simply. How bitterly ironic it should be that the ideas and the research are all Herbert's, but that he needs Dan as much as Dan needs him. If not more.
He had fully expected that Francesca's departure would be the cause of Dan's final rejection of their work; behind the final rejection of Herbert himself. Instead, Dan, even in anger, had pulled him closer. The sometimes disconcerting openness and warmth that define Dan, the need for human closeness, had made him instinctively respond to loss by reaching out, physically, even to the person who he might have considered the catalyst behind that same loss. A strange, morbidly curious scenario is starting to play out in Herbert's mind as to how much Dan might want from him, even though he's not aware that Dan's tastes have swung in that direction before.
The realization, when it comes, that Dan could, potentially, make love to him is so stunning that Herbert's briefly paralyzed where he stands.
Herbert has always taken the mating drive to be purely hormonal, a crude process based on animal instincts and unrelated to the potential of the intellect. Joining tissue with needle and suture has an art to it, a precise and intricate beauty, an art that he's never found in the messy jerk of his cock in his hand. Now, though, it occurs to him that Dan's urge to copulate is a part of his urge for connection, his desire to assure himself that someone cares enough to face that kind of exposure with him. Herbert cares, but he's unable to say the necessary words.
The times during these past few weeks that Dan's been there, Herbert's noticed that he's been able to see colors. When Dan goes out, the day seems to drop back into its quiet, painkiller-flavored and vaguely empty grey. That the feelings that Dan gives him might be somehow sexually toned disturbs Herbert, yet even as one part of his mind recoils in disgust, another part stretches a finger towards the idea, poking it experimentally like a specimen in a tray and whispering, what if?
An insatiable curiosity fills him. He wants Dan to come home, very badly.
He stands for a few minutes in the shadows on the landing, staring at the door to Dan's room. Then, one baby swung-step at a time, he moves forward. He has to lean all his weight on one side and fumbles the handle. The door squeaks as he pushes it open, like a dubbed on sound effect in some trashy late night horror. Herbert's already made the dead get up and walk.
Herbert doesn't breathe for a long moment. He has a dread that he's still going to smell Francesca's cloying, manufactured perfume in the room; that, even after all this time, he's still going to somehow smell Meg. When he does at last, though, he only finds the intimate scent of Dan himself, warm and masculine. It grows stronger as he approaches the bed, but there's something enticing about it, something consuming and strangely comforting.
He suddenly has the conviction that, when he looks into Dan's eyes, he can see what's missing from the cadavers when they open theirs. Hurt, anger, and, sometimes, joy.
Slowly, almost carefully, Herbert releases his grip on the crutch in his right hand and leans it against the bed. He lifts Dan's pillow, hesitates, and then presses his face to it. Inhales.
Herbert isn't dead, but, for the first time, he wants to be alive.