Conrad paced behind Worth as they forged the path back towards the crossroads, furiously absorbed in what the Boggart had told him, how true or untrue it could have been, how easily he'd given in to despair while Doc freaking Worth had struggled with the thing so effortlessly. How was an addict, of all people, so much better at fending off mental anguish than him? But then, wasn't he doing the exact thing the creature had said, and comparing himself unfairly to a much better person? The curl of cigarette smoke plucked at Conrad's attention, and he cast his glare up at the stringy man with the stuffed and clattering pack slung over a bare shoulder, who strode ahead as if nothing at all had just happened. As if Conrad's many years of hard work and therapy and self-affirmation hadn't just been toppled like a great house removed of a single brick.
Conrad wanted to sit down. He wanted time to process, to slowly untangle himself from the overwhelming paranoia that he was useless and obnoxious and had made a huge mistake in even showing up at that swamp to help because nothing he did was ok or right or fair or kind or - his steps slowed. He watched the small hill of Worth's rucksack steadily disappear through the cool mist of the boggy path. Worth would find the dead man and help with his leg. Conrad needed a vacation. Florida was nice. He'd send Hanna's friends back and just take a week or two to escape the pressures of -knowing people- or
The rythmic clank and clatter of Worth's stride startled Conrad from his plans; only the sound was coming from behind, from where they'd just transgressed. Worth was surprised to see him, cigarette burned down to the filter.
"You get a leg ahead, Connie?" Worth switched the pack to his other shoulder, sweatier than Conrad remembered leaving him.
Conrad wrapped his arms around his middle and shivered, already guessing there were bullshit time-space shenanigans at play. "I've been standing here two minutes, tops. Tying a shoelace," he fibbed, defensive over his current morose vulnerability.
"Awr, shit," Worth let the pack drop and threw his spent cigarette. "I been hiking fer half an hour. Straight path. No mister green. Cellphone signal used ter be clear, too, but it's shite now."
Conrad's mouth twisted. He'd been missing for half an hour and Worth hadn't noticed. The pinch of uneasiness surged (with a fierce victory that Conrad could be right, even if it was about something awful) - he was less than annoying; he was invisible. Great. Perfect. Awesome.
Worth chose a dry enough log on which to sit, upending his canvas pack with a dark mutter, bones and wooden idols and feather dolls and what looked like a complete set of tarnished silver tea-ware, all clattering out as if he'd burgled an anthropology museum. "Musta yanked out an anchor," he muttered, fingering through the pile to separate treasures.
Conrad knelt. "Hand us that brass lamp. I met someone looking for something similar."
Worth glanced up skeptically. "What if it's the anchor?"
"Then I guess we don't get it back to him," Conrad snapped, peevish in his impatience to get out of the wilderness and into an air-conditioned motel so he could melt down in relative solitude. "But in the meantime, you stay here. I run ahead with this, drop it off with Aristotle, or else show back up down that path, right? Because we're only getting fucked up while the anchor is being moved around, right?" Conrad has stood, nose curling, suspicious of the forces at play. "Or else I get lost, but I know I'll do a quicker job of it either way. Being what I am, and all. Now."
Worth, gnawing the inside of his cheek, uncurls his legs on either side of the pile and shrugs. "Y'can go ahead an' try. You gonna do that with every single thing here? Process 'a elimination?"
Conrad frowned. "Only if you think you really need all that junk."
Doc Worth crossed his arms, clearing his throat. "Just to tell ya now before ya leave an' get lost or what, I didn't mean ter say I'd kill ya. I was conflatin' you an' that antagonist," a flailing, dirty hand over his shoulder, "back there."
Conrad scoffed, tossing up the tarnished fat-lamp and catching it with a ring of dry empty metal against dry dead skin. "You'll owe me twice for this. I could still drag you."
Worth's grin was sharp and brief and he aimed it at the ground to consider the splay of artifacts between one long leg and the other, sucking a tooth with a chirp of air. By the time he glanced back up to answer, Conrad had already darted off on the errand.
x
"Ugh. Whatisthat." Conrad bent over to rest the heels of his hands against his knees, eyeballing the third mysterious trinket to be run back to the zombie in the hopes it wasn't a trans-dimensional spacetime anchor. It looked like bones, small ones tied together with thin rusting chicken wire.
"Ain't human," Worth assured, making room on the log for Conrad to sit while he inspected the artifact. "Look at the phalanges. Too long, clawed." He plopped the weathered skeleton in Conrad's lap, then dug around his pack for a cigarette. "Monkey, most like. No tail, though."
"Might've fallen off. Is that it?" Conrad tucked his knees to the side to eye the pile of odds and ends, nodding at the ground. "If this is the anchor, we'll want it in one piece."
"Thassa finger. Human." Worth plucked the leathery curl of bone mistaken for a tail from the dirt and hummed, inspecting it in the strong pale wash of moonlight. "What news from Green? Red calmed his nuts over our predicament yet?"
"Hanna's confident of your return. Zombie sewed himself back together and offered to help with, er, this. But I sent him to the shack to give that lamp to the guy looking for it. Seemed pretty important. He might find us later, or head back out of the theater to talk to Veser and company." Conrad nodded, small skeleton in hand as he stood.
"Brought the entire damn cavalry, did we?" Worth grunted, suspicious over his lit cigarette.
"I needed the support, even if you didn't." Conrad cradled the skeleton delicately between his palms, stepping carefully down the path. He returned not twenty minutes later, at a run, skidding to a halt to accept the next piece of garbage for the test.
When Conrad showed up at the wrong end of the path, wooden hair ornament in hand, Worth removed himself from his log to pile the rest of his finds back into the sack.
"That'll be it, then," Worth announced gruffly. "Let's walk 'er back and chuck 'er into the water from shore. Boggart can carry it back where it belongs; useless fucking bugger otherwise."
"Er," Conrad hesitated, then thrust the comb out at Worth's middle. "You go ahead and do that. I can carry your pack to the crossroads."
"Awful charitable," Worth mused, scratching his chin with the back of his thumb as he took the comb and shoved it in his pocket. "What's the occasion? Lose yer sense 'a urgency? Yer gut wound flarin' up?"
Conrad flinched, eyebrows crowding in over his glasses. "Wh-"
"Sawr the scar when you unpinned yerself shirtless; still looks wet. How long ago was that? You ain't feedin' yerself right at all without me or sommat?"
Conrad felt his neck and chest prickle with what heat his dead blushing skin could muster. "I'm fine. I'm being nice to you because you are at a disadvantage. I don't need mrph-"
Worth's carved-up palm is stuffed against Conrad's mouth, his other fist buried in Conrad's shirtfront to keep him in place. "I betcher so weak y'cain't even shove me off," Worth drawls, eyes narrow, cigarette flickering at the corner of his mouth. "Hold yer nose and have a swallow, Connie, it's medicinal."
"Fw snell ike arbage!" Conrad argued, hands hovering over Worth's wrists but daring not to grasp.
"Yeah I got that, by the way you ain't stayed anywhere near downwind, and I betcha it's the magic, like Hanner said it would be, and I can tell ya right here an' now that all this runic 'garbage' is gonna wash off when I pass through them theater doors and I'd ruther you take a nibble while it ain't any kinda easy for you ta do so." A hard, appraising glare, "Lest we forget yer a creature built ta dash mortal lives offa mortal planes."
Creature. The word bit and gnawed at Conrad's already wounded confidence, and the vacuum of guilt finally sparked into a black hole of anger, Conrad's fingers wrapping over Worth's wrist to expose the pale stretch of his dirty (ugh) palm and the red-angry gash that had already smeared plasma across his chin (double ugh). Conrad's strength had not waned as guessed, however, and he could indeed bend Worth's wrist far enough away and back so as to bring the man to his knees, Conrad glaring coldly the whole while, gaze unfocused and fingertips gone sharp.
And there, behind the low buzzing reek of emptiness and death that permeated from Worth's usually livid scent, was the flicker of that reallygreatamazing smell (and, honestly, taste). Conrad's nostril's flared the same time Worth's skin went ruddy with heat; Worth's expression fell from it's usual defiant perch into uncertainty.
"Connie," Worth hedged, tugging his arm to test the hold. "What're ya gonna do now, flatten me unner yer fat arse? Quitcher foolin'." Knees scuffing in the dirt of the path, Worth pushed, and pulled, but it was he who was weak and dehydrated and exhausted, and Conrad curled slowly nearer with each tug, movements twitchy like a spider approaching the wasp in its web.
When he was close enough to Worth's ear, Conrad hissed, "I. am not. a. creature."
Worth, blood singing with so much yes it was making Conrad's throat ache, scoffed. "Still a fatass though."
Conrad's sneer fell open and he bit the air beside the long column of Worth's neck with an audible clack, still repulsed by the runic magic hanging over Worth's skin like so much bug spray. He meant to push Worth away, into the dirt, just to lord it over him what bad shape he was in, but Worth pulled Conrad perhaps to see him similarly toppled and similarly exemplify his current state of weakness and Worth had sat back hard with an 'oomph' and Conrad had come tumbling after. The startle of the fall, and the general direction, down, atop someone, found Conrad's fangs sunk quite naturally into the sweat-salty skin of Worth's neck, despite his frantic push up to try and levy his weight away from the various warm hills and valleys of bone and flesh beneath him.
But oh, there it was, that spike of flavor raking its fingers between Conrad's teeth and treading its bootheels down the velvet carpet of the back of his throat, stamping the very clear idea into his impulses that he should not let go or push away so long as that amazinggreatwonderful song in Worth's blood was his for the pulling. Eyes an inky black for the size of their pupils, Conrad bit down harder, seeking out the golden tinge where it might wane from his palette, inhaling sharply through his nose as a rush of hot, alcohol-thin blood painted the road to his gullet.
Yes, said the blood working its way fresh through Conrad's system. Right, of course, said Conrad's bruised ego, resigned to be that 'creature' so reviled, if he was going to be reviled either way. His arms tightened, a spider terrified of the sting of its wasp, knee planted firmly on the cool packed ground and the other slanted off somewhere trying not to touch Worth's hip or thigh or anything at all, unbalanced, arms tightening around the body that was stretching back, falling to the dirt -
Conrad follows, hunched on his knees, forhead pressing into moss and dried mud as his bite firms, pinching the wound he had opened. He's just a spider, grip shifting again to better lift its wasp nearer, masticating skin and tendon with venom until the bleeding stops. The back of Conrad's jaw aches from the new use of glands he still knows nothing about, and he uncurls to a drowsy stand to wipe his mouth with the back of his wrist. His mouth falls open to suck the smear of blood from the heel of his palm, an erratic subconscious sort of thing, thoughts completely distilled to the few most basic while a gutful of living blood takes its overwhelming course.
Worth has sat upright with a curse, hand at the side of his neck, double-checking the lack of open wound.
Conrad, staring down the path towards the crossroad, absently offers a hand to help Worth stand.
Squaring his jaw, Worth takes the offered arm. He is woozy and angry and leans too hard into the stand, pressing forward with a shove that doesn't budge Conrad out of place. His palms are on fire from the wounds, and curl over Conrad's shoulders as his elbows buckle and his mouth opens against Conrad's sharp inhale of surprise.
"Ngk," Conrad complains, shoulders bunching under Worth's grip.
"Don't feel too good, does it," Worth pants against Conrad's mouth, "when someone does it ta you, hey?" A sharp jerk forward as Worth regains his balance, a shake. "Don't fuckin' grab up on people if y'don't wanna get grabbed up on."
Conrad doesn't have anything to say, looking through Worth instead of at him, as dazed as he had been the last few attacks he'd ever poised - but now with the extra mistake of having imbibed the murky taint of runic magics. "Hm?" Conrad answered, late. "Luce." His glare focused, then slipped.
Worth stepped back, offered a week slap to Conrad's face, demanding he knock it off and get right.
Conrad opened his mouth, forgot what he was going to say. Stepped back, carefully, shaking now, to slouch against a tree. "Why," Conrad questioned carefully, elbows up and palms pressed flat against softened bark, "is there an entire night sky in that puddle over there?"
"Just stay put," Worth growled, hand chopping the air. "I'll be back in a skip."
A full six minutes of silence passed before Conrad's indignation caught up with him, but the road was empty.