A/N: YAY HANNA. I love you and your bluntness.

Conrad's been munching on Worthneck for like… a few weeks now? A month? Long enough. And I'm probably-definitely giving you false info on vampires here, but remember that Hanna doesn't quite know EVERYTHING that he talks about.

And maybe wants to herd Conrad AWAY from exclusively feeding on Worth and, perhaps, into selecting a less diseased and/or mentally damaging meal?

Warnings: Awkward hannatiems, language as always

Summary: Hanna likes to talk. Whether he does it well is still under suspicion, especially when it comes to talking to Conrad about fooling around with, er, feeding on Worth.

Addiction Is Bad

Hanna was staring at him again. Not speaking. Just staring.

Conrad had never known Hanna to hesitate over anything. Quite the violent opposite, actually, and any foolhardy flailing was always combined with endless chatter. Granted, he had only known the young man for a month or two, but Hanna Falk Cross was the sort of person to leave you, after three minutes in his company, with a rather inescapable, nay, screaming impression of who he was. Especially after he got you killed.

So the fact that the irrepressible paranormal investigator hadn't spoken for over fifteen minutes while staying in one five-foot-area was a little ridiculously unnerving to the older man, who was hiding in his computer at his kitchen table. Both Hanna and his zombie pal were 'crashing' at Conrad's place before going to check out a lead on something or other, taking advantage of a little central heating after braving the January city chill ('that totally almost ate my scarf, it was rad!').

It was this sideways tactic of simple involvement that would find Conrad accompanying the two on more backwards adventures than he would care to count, but for the moment it was just strange to have other people in his apartment, ooh-ing and ahh-ing at his religiously geometric furniture and poking at his state-of-the-art kitchen equipment that was now utterly useless.

To be honest, the newly-turned vampire had never known what half of it did anyways. Pretty sure there was a rabbit-juicer in there somewhere, or something. He had just bought it from a specialty store, in a set, and therefore couldn't bring himself to get rid of it.

Besides, it matched his sink fixings. Who could say no to a mixer that matched the sink fixings? … Worth, probably.

Gah, Worth.

Another thorn in the vampire's paw was the glossy white square the boy had in his hands. It was a little Polaroid, fresh from the ancient (but still chuggin'!) camera Hanna had found a week ago. Conrad had taken one glance at the mess that was his floating shirt and headphones and scowled, ignoring Hanna's proud grin and returning to work with a little pain in his right temple. It looked like some sort of cheap amateur film student trick: you could almost see the wires. …God, what he would have given to see wires.

The fact that he would never again know what he looked like bothered Conrad in a way he wasn't prepared for, especially for a man who spent twenty minutes on his hair every morning even after he had perfected it to a science. It was just… weird. Alien. And who was going to tell him if he looked like shit? Certainly not Worth.

… Gah. Worth.

For a while, Hanna had looked down at the Polaroid then back up at the very solid vampire in front of him, all the while taking great gobbing oversized bites of his peanut-butter and jelly sandwich. The zombie (Frederick Filibuster today, was it?) had placed it in front of him and was rewarded with a big beaming smile and a bite so instantaneous that it nearly took Frederick's greenish fingers with it. Hanna's sidekick-partner-bodyguard had given Conrad a look both blank and oddly deferential before getting into his cupboards for the sandwich stuff, which only made Conrad uncomfortable. Hell, it wasn't as if it was to any use of him at this point. Hanna and Worth were the only ones in their immediate circle who had to eat, Veser and the lot not included.

Conrad felt like he was being cordoned into a dry, dark little world that included only him and the zombie, and while he seemed like a very nice man—corpse—thing, he wasn't sure how to deal with that. It was a little like a clique. An undead clique who had no use for peanut-butter, no matter how organic.

As if to draw his attention back to the real world, Hanna took a great big popping suck on each of his fingers, more out of boredom or pensiveness than anything else. Sated, he dribbled onto the textured aluminum-mod table like redheaded molasses, slouching in a way that looked awfully uncomfortable. He kept the Polaroid upright in the tips of his long fingers.

An electric-blue eye peeked out from behind the square, eternally but so concisely curious. Defeated, Conrad opened his mouth with a great big tolerating sigh (he'd gotten so good at those) and was about to grit out "Yes, Hanna" but Hanna tilted his head first.

"Are you sure you wanna keep feeding on Worth like that?"

Perhaps it was the last of the sandwich sitting puffy in Hanna's cheeks, or the jelly on his fingers, but for a moment, Conrad simply didn't believe it.

Then his eyes widened, aghast, and Hanna snapped up straight and struggled to swallow his last bite with little muppet-like flailing motions.

"No—n-no, no! I mean, you should totally be eating! It's what vampires do! The whole … almost-living, warm-type, kinda … breathing look really does it for you! You look real, uh... pink," Hanna finished uncomfortably, flashing him a sheepish grin and a thumbs up. "And righty's looking real good."

"His name is not righty!" Conrad burst out harshly, hand slapping down on the table.

"Yeah?" Hanna said in that curious tone that clearly meant 'Well, what is his name, then?' and then Conrad realized he had personified his own tooth and by fucking god was insanity contagious? These kooks. These… kooks.

All of them. Getting to him.

The quiet, adult, controlled, blood-sucking artist tried to tell himself he had been normal before they all came parading into his life, knocking over vases and overturning morals and diurnal lifestyles. He had informed himself of it at least twice a day in the beginning, but, in spending more and more time with this cockeyed little circle of harpy-hunting friends, even he was forced to admit that wasn't the case. And if he had been normal, perhaps he hadn't been the happiest, sanest man on earth. At all.

Sanity and normalcy, he was fast learning, were rarely connected — and it was society's best-kept secret.

"This is not about righty," he said gravely, then hated himself the moment it left his mouth. He shut his eyes, nostrils flaring. Righty it was, then.

"Yeah, it is! You bit Worth, so you got righty and your neck healed!"

Conrad just stared at Hanna, arrested, as if afraid to change facial expressions just the slightest millimeter and give it away that he had in fact bitten Worth. Several times. And liked it, in between all the freaking out. Moreso, if he had noticed that his number of fangs had doubled, or that his throat was once more smooth and devoid of messy tooth holes (if a bit whiter), he gave no clue. Hanna sighed and scrubbed at the back of his supple, pink, sort of… good-looking neck.

Conrad bit down into his own lip, hard, even knowing that the god-awful smell that hung around Hanna would always keep the redhead's neck safe. Besides, he really had no wish to face the zombie. Ever.

"I mean… jeez. You've been munching on Worth for, like, a few weeks and you really don't know how this works, do you?"

Munching?

"I substituted an hour of psychology for my "vampire lifestyle" requirements," Conrad answered acidly, the rigidity of his posture and voice betraying how spooked he was by the mere idea of this conversation. How in the world had Hanna noticed? The young man hadn't even posed the question of whether he was—fuck that word—munching on Worth, but whether or not he should keep doing it.

How had he known?

"There ya go, puppy."

Conrad caught the packet with equal parts relief and grumpiness, but his frown dissolved the moment he realized that the red was almost frothy. Frothy and…. warm.

He looked up to find Worth sending one of those awful curly-lipped grins right at him, bags under his eyes made purple by the clammy whiteness of his skin. The doctor lifted his hand to poke his cigarette back between his teeth, fingers shaking just barely; his jacket fell down, uncovering a cotton ball taped to his bamboo-shoot wrist.

"S'yer favorite flavor," he drawled, pausing way too long before elaborating. "Fresh."

His grin doubled in filth and deviousness before he swung his squeaky roller chair around and snagged up a file.

He didn't mean fresh.

Conrad resisted the urge to bang his head into his very expensive, very fragile table, remembering all the times Worth had taken out his confidentiality dick and waved it for the populace to see. Okay, so, maybe they weren't the most covert of arrangements, but that was by no fault of his own. Worth was actively trying to out them both. Not hiding his teeth-marks, un-bandaging them as soon as they quit bleeding. Exhibitionist little son of a –

"Oh, that's okay! I'll teach you!" Hanna exclaimed, snapping Conrad back to his eco-friendly, halogen-lit kitchen. The self-proclaimed investigator rarely got a chance to be an authority on things (to people who didn't think he was insane) and it showed. Hanna's stick-thin chest puffed out and he licked some of the jelly off his fingers to appear more dignified and informed. He smacked his lips, hmmmm-ing.

"You see, it's kinda like … drugs."

"I already don't like the sound of this," Conrad exhaled miserably, finally taking off his headphones.

"Hey, it's better than being dead, right?" Hanna said with horrible cheer.

"I am dead!"

"You're undead, which is the opposite of dead, which … still doesn't necessarily define 'alive,'" Hanna winced (because Conrad really didn't appreciate elucidations on his state of being, it made his cold flesh less easy to ignore), then shrugged. "Anyways, it's sorta like drugs in the way that, like, every person you drink from is like a stimulant. If you hop from drug to drug, heroin to alcohol to maybe LSD or something, you can't really get, like, woah, super-addicted to any of them. But if you stay on one for a crazy-long time, it's like you get stuck with it. You think you can't eat anything else. And if that person takes anything like alcohol or drugs or something, it'll taste different."

"Worth smokes," Conrad said tensely, as if realizing it for the first time. Or, rather, isolating that tang that his senses told him was special even if Worth's was the only fresh blood he'd had.

It gave him a bit of a high, a chemical tingle on his tongue. He'd just thought it was because Worth was warm. Was he indirectly getting hooked on nicotine? Conrad's teeth clacked shut at the thought, clipping his lip again.

Fuck him. Fuck the filthy bastard. He should know these things! No, he did: that explained the grimy grin, the constant smugness. He knew how much Conrad hating smoking, smoke, smokers — any and all derivatives of that senseless cancerous corporate death-trap — and here he was turning him into an addict in little gulps.

He should have known he was sipping liquid sewage when he broke a vein. Did it matter whether the cigarettes were unfiltered? Was he capable of getting not only cancer but immortal cancer?

"I could get … addicted to him?"

"Yep," Hanna said with his prized, hammer-on-the-head bluntness that nearly knocked Conrad unconscious on the spot. Then the young man propped his chin in his hand and snickered dorkily, wrinkling his upturned nose. "Kinda sounds like a goopy love song, huh?"

The oh-fuck-that prickle that went up Conrad's back turned his spine to hamburger and eloped with his kidneys, leaving the young artist gaping for so, so many reasons.

"How – uh, how fast can it happen?"

"Woah! Don't freak, Connie! It takes a long time, like, years for things to get that far — even though fresh-turned vamps get hooked more easily—" Hanna's oversized hands were suddenly fast at work wadding up the perfectly good and equally useless napkins that sat in Conrad's useless napkin holder that matched his toaster. "—buuuuu-uuuuut this one time I saw this totally dependant vampire who tried to drink from someone other than his host and he was like heur-heur-urk-bllllleueeeaaaaarrrrrggghh-!"

A few wadded-up napkin balls tossed helter-skelter from under Hanna's chin clarified any point that the awful cat-sound left to the imagination. Conrad looked, beyond perturbed, from the scattered white balls to the boy's sunny did-you-like-my-trick grin.

"And that's … blood?"

"Organs, I think," Hanna deadpanned, scratching curiously at his hairless chin. "They were squishy, at least, and smelled organy. And they looked super-important and the guy looked like he missed 'em the second they were out. And they didn't look … like, yannoe. Stuff-back-innable."

The grin was back.

"And I don't want that to happen to you!"

"Holy fuck," Conrad said weakly.

There were so many more questions that the pressure of them threatened to make his head explode, but the sound of the door opening made his mouth snap shut before he could even make a pop. Rockefeller strode in with a plastic bag and a movie, urbanely removing his black fedora and placing it on the entryway hat-stand (which also matched Conrad's kitchen table). Hanna gneed shrilly and scrambled over to him, praising his sandwich mastery: perfect ratio of peanut butter to jelly and minimal squishing out the sides. The zombie smiled his dislocated-but-content smile, hand naturally resting on Hanna's curly bouncing head.

Hanna gleefully invited Conrad to come watch the movie with them. Conrad was about to mention, but not object, that it was his own living room they were inviting him to, but his jaw dropped when Hanna tugged the prize out of the plastic bag and shoved it in his face.

Trainspotting.

Conrad suddenly wasn't in the mood, but gave them full access to whatever un-popped popcorn they could find in the recesses of his useless cabinets. He shut his laptop, grabbed his coat and threw a furtive glance at Hanna's upturned rear, waving from side to side as he puzzled loudly over the DVD player while the dead man watched. Then he swallowed and reached for the door.

Just because he had a dealer didn't mean he was addicted.