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The corner of Conrad's mouth could put a line on his face whenever one of his pinched frowns went deep with disgusted surprise. This, coming from someone who had yet to don the jaded armor of his post-modernist generation; it made him look older than he was, that line, springing up the strangest juxtaposition of naivete and scorn. Of course he was surprised by general disagreement and calamity, one simply didn't go around expecting the worst out of people. Conrad was anxious, not an asshole, and was keeping an open mind so when people got around to disappointing him (as they did) he could be free of responsibility. He'd have tried, despite wearing the stank-face. Despite quietly fuming in a corner. Despite his offended surprise, when other people turned out to be less than ideal conversationalists or house-guests or chefs or paranormal detectives or friends.
This night, Conrad's frown isn't pulled tight. The line isn't there. The frown is young without its sharp crease, and sad, and Lucian Worth is surprised to recognize the face without the sneer that usually accompanies it. Worth pauses on the sidewalk, eying the nearest shopfront in doubt - calling over his shoulder, "In Hipsterville already? City gets smaller erry year, christ."
Conrad, who had been standing with his elbows on the flat guardrail that cordoned off the subway entrance, looks up from his contemplation of the dimly lit stairwell below. His shoulders rise and fall with the forced sigh. A custodian shuffles below with a bucket of rocksalt, dusting the stairs against winter ice. The suggestion of snow is hanging in the air, shy gnat-like flakes stirred into hair and scarves by a bitter wind. Conrad taps one of his feet behind himself, readjusting the fit of a heeled boot. His scarf is thin and striped - because of course it is - and there is a designer ceramic travel-mug clutched between his bare hands - because of course there is.
Worth ambles the five or seven steps between the storefront and the side of the square pit of the subway entrance. "Ya posin' fer a photo jus' standin' there like that? Gonna use it on the jacket 'a yer romance novel?"
The line of Conrad's usual, deeper frown flickers, but doesn't hang around on its usual roost. "Fuck off," he mutters into the rim of his coffee mug, not drinking, "We both know you don't read."
Worth smiles, the kind of grin one might have when reassured that everything was still right in the world. "So what ails ya, princess? Might have somethin' in my controlled substances cabinet fer holiday blues, yanno." He sidles up next to Conrad, adopting a similar lean on the guard rail, peering down his nose at the gap between their shoulders as he begins the slow leaning inch toward closing the distance. "Good opportunity ta see if yer corpus will cop ta intravenous cures. 'S useful ta know." A dismissive sniff, "Fer science, an' the progression 'a medicine 'n shit."
"You want to know what ails me?" Conrad asks his coffee mug. "It's about six feet high, is losing its hair and insists on verbally unmanning me at every opportunity."
"Lotta testosterone in m'family. Thins the hair. I ain't losin' nothin'." Worth curls his thumbs under the collar of his leather jacket and snaps it forward, fingers extended from the furred ruff. He sniffs, grin a half-cousin to a sneer and eyes narrowed. "Looked as good as Statham since I was in primary, ya better believe."
"You would have a crush on an action hero."
"See, an' here's where I take offense ta you sayin' *I* unman ya. Job does itself, fancyboots."
This is such a non-sequitur that Conrad just lets his jaw swing open, lips sealing shut around the 'what the fuck' that devolves into a noiseless expulsion of air. Like a bubble popping.
"Yeah," Worth goes on to explain, "Here I was makin' a manly comparison 'a manliness, and the first idear ya jump on is that I'm some sorta swoonin' poofta."
Quietly, incredulously, leaning his shoulders away to get a suspicious glare in, "Aaaaren't you, though?"
"Statham ain't my type, and thass beside the point. Firs' thing on yer mind happens ta be the idear 'a me wantin' cock." An eyebrow waggle, "Think on that a lot, do we?"
Refusing that question the dignity of an answer, Conrad sputters a late protest, "My boots are perfectly masculine."
An unimpressed grunt, "In Spain, mebbe."
"And I'm to believe you've been to Spain -"
"'Course I have." For half a breath, Worth's frown has taken up the line of disgust that usually graces Conrad's. "While it looks like th' only parta you what's got any worldly experience is yer damn credit card."
"Wow." Conrad looks honestly surprised, eyes wide, young, like the late twenty-something he was and not the dour-faced middle-aged knot of worry he liked to pretend at. A bitter chuckle, "Wow. Uh, go away? Yes." He settles back to his perch, taking a step to the side and sliding his elbows along away from Worth. "Go away."
A smoky scoff, deep from the bottom of Worth's stomach. "Tetchy. So I'm only allowed to insult ya 'bout things that ain't true, huh?"
Conrad shakes his head in a furious little shiver, jaw clenching, refusing to answer. The snow begins to fall, small crystalline flakes, then bigger, heavier, wetter; it collects on Conrad's shoulders, in his hair, on the sleeves of his coat. He stares down at the collective, catches a cluster of flakes in his palm. When the snow doesn't melt, he crushes it in a fist.
Worth lights a cigarette, watching Conrad closely. He slides himself over, bumping their shoulders together, offering the cigarette over. When Conrad doesn't take it, Worth plucks the travel mug from Conrad's far hand and puts the cigarette between his fingers, pulling the mug over in front of himself to inspect it, prying its lid off, sniffing - empty. Still smelled like the department store it must have come from. "So now, wh -"
"How about you don't insult me at all," Conrad finally blurts, dragging furiously on the cigarette because yes he could stand to take something from Worth, this time, and not feel at all bad about it. "Since you're supposed to be oh so in love with me. Am I ever going to see any kickbacks from that, or is your weird charity as good as it gets?"
"Ey now, who says I'm in love with yer?" Worth scratches at the center of his chest, dull fingernails scraping hollowly across the leather of his lined jacket.
Conrad looks around, wary of any passing listeners, dropping his voice in a furious hiss "That cupid's arrow, maybe? The fact that you never leave me alone, and that you won't take my fucking money and -"
"I happen ta run a non-profit organization called a free clinic, an' it'd be plain tax fraud if I ever took payment. Don't wanna get myself 'r my business kicked outta this country, ya presumptuous twat." Worth lights his own cigarette, eyes cold and reptilian, going in for the kill. "An' who all says I gotta do what some blighted arrow fired by any inta-dimensional beastie tells me?" He taps cigarette ash into the ceramic designer travel-mug, then seals the lid back on. "Ya got a lotta assumptions bouncin' round that egg-shaped head 'a yours, y'know that?" A sharp sniff. "Christ."
"Okay," Conrad drawls, pleading to the night sky, "I'm sorry I think you're some kind of uncultured back-water hick. That's unfair of me." His fingers are tense around the cigarette, flaking the ash in an audible snap of the thumb. "I didn't know that, about your, er, business. Shouldn't have assumed." He pauses, raising an eyebrow, eye trained on Worth sidelong, expectant.
Worth grins out of the side of his face, head twitching in half a shake. "This the part where I say 'no worries, mate'?"
Conrad's mouth thins, but the line of his usual frown remains absent. "Nope. You do whatever you deem best, and I accept the fact that the only thing I can control is myself." Another furious pull on the cigarette, nerves bundled tight just beneath the surface.
Worth's grin grows. "I remember this neighborhood now. Used ta get sleepin' pills on the cheap fer my tweaker patients. Building right across the street here, right? 'S a head-doctor's office, innit?"
Conrad's expression crumples up in confusion. "If it is, it's not an establishment I've ever patroned."
Worth momentarily shares that confusion, but puts his cigarette to his mouth instead of commenting further. Conrad returns to his saddened contemplation of the subway stairs and Worth watches the snow collect in gelled hair, on tense shoulders, in an open palm that rubs the stuff between fingers and never melts it. Worth's face twitches and he realizes his cigarette is down to the filter, column of ash falling to his sleeve. He shakes himself, shakes the snow off himself, drops the cigarette butt and grinds it under heel, breath expelling before him in a cloudy sigh.
"Might wanna keep that a habit, smokin' in cold weather," Worth drawls, dusting himself down.
"Because my breath doesn't show," Conrad nods, biting his lips together. "Yes." He raises his cigarette butt, nodding a thanks that is aimed across the street, impartial and dismissive.
Worth's face twitches again, the corner of his nose and mouth, the outer curve of his eyebrow. He makes the noise he likes to make, not quite a grunt, rubbing at his stubbled chin as he turns to fully regard the creature sulking without its usual vim and venom. "Hanna tol' me, 'bout that night. It was the night ya died, wunnit? The night ya came inta my clinic trynta pull one over like I don't know what a dead man looks like."
Conrad's eye flashes sidelong, dark cherry red behind a thick blue eyeglass frame, black eyelashes pretty against the paper-white of dead skin.
Worth makes his noise again, shorter, like it had been punched out of him. "Well," he tilts his head to the side. "On the topic of things you an' I didn't know 'bout one another. I didn't know that."
Conrad's eyebrows lift, but he otherwise seems unfazed. "Is that an apol-"
The door ten paces further down the sidewalk rattles open, and music and noise and warm food-smells spill out of it. "They have our table," Toni announces, head jerking as Conrad stands to drop his cigarette butt. "Hey, doc! You eatin' out tonight too?"
The recovery is swift. Doc Worth chuckles, hits Conrad's shoulder with his own as he passes him, sweeps a bow in front of Toni and makes a ribald joke on the covert nature of his mission in that part of the city that night. Worth cranes a look past the haute couture double-doors with a wary stank-face before declining Toni's cheerful invite to join them. He parts their company after Conrad disappears wordless and distracted into the restaurant.
Toni calls out her goodbye, a 'maybe next time' hanging unsaid in the cold drift of snow.
By the time 3 a.m. rolled around and Doc Worth was passing back down that sidewalk, returning from his errand, Conrad was perched in the same spot, holding the same travel-mug, smoking a different cigarette. Doc Worth sidles up to put his elbows on the square pit's guard-rail, eyes hollow and ringed by the dark circles of exhaustion. He looks down the street - a sight emptier than their earlier meet-n-sulk - and then over and down at Conrad, who had not so much as flinched in Worth's direction.
Doc Worth peers across the street, then behind him at the darkened shopfronts. He focuses on the thing that Conrad is so thoroughly focused on - a single snowflake in his uncurled palm. Doc Worth pulls a face, watching the snowflake for some time. Calculating. Closing the distance between their shoulders, Worth reaches over, middle finger hanging down from a hand curled as if to type on a keyboard. Doc Worth's fingertip taps down on the snowflake, pressing it into the stiff plane of Conrad's palm. Melting it into a bare dollop of water.
"There," Worth gruffs, shaking his hand as he withdraws it to clear whatever damp from his fingertip. "Prollem solved." Doc Worth claps Conrad on the shoulder, watching for the flash of red, for the crease at the corner of a mouth, watching. The clap on the shoulder turns into a squeeze, watching.
The cigarette ends collected around Conrad's boot-heels are dark-paper, flavored things.
"Hey, c'mon," Worth drawls, shaking Conrad's shoulder. "You don't move 'r say nothin' then I'll hafta find a lift and wheel yer frozen arse on unnerground here. Let ya be a decorative fer the hobos."
The cigarette in the corner of Conrad's mouth hitches, ash tumbling down into the sourly lit subway entrance.
Doc Worth slides his grip to Conrad's far shoulder, elbow around the back of his neck, a lanky reach around a hunched posture. "Ey, now... Connie, c'mon. I'mma find somethin' in my cabinet fer ya an' cheer ya right up. Yeah?"
"Don't call me that." Conrad's voice was surprisingly normal. He exhaled a plume of clove smoke on the sentence, having held it in his lungs for who knew how long. "My name is Con-rad."
When no further lecture is given, Doc Worth punches Conrad in the shoulder nearest, grabbing his coat sleeve, ruffling him up a bit in a chummy shuffle. " 'S good ta meet ya, Conrad. Name's Luce." Tilting his chin, practically glued to Conrad's side. "Give us one of those, ey?" Instead, a flat pressure meets Worth in the side of the ribs, as he is shoved a good yard down the icy sidewalk, grabbing the guard rail to keep from toppling over.
"You mean Lucian becomes Luce, as in Lucy?" Conrad rages, coldly quiet. "You've been calling me girl names this whole fucking time because you have a dweeby girl name?"
Doc Worth's laughter is loud and sharp and boisterous and he knocks some snow off the flat of the rail in Conrad's general direction. "Fuck off, princess tiny-feet; I take cock an' I'm still more'v a man than you."
The ceramic travel-mug shatters in Conrad's grip and he holds the pieces up in surprise. "Augh! You absolute fucktoad!" What's left of the mug comes crashing down to the sidewalk, a bright shatter in the silence of a sleeping city. "You've been giving me grief this whole bloody fucking time because youuuu," fingers grasping an invisible neck to strangle it, "are the one with masculinity issues!"
Doc Worth shrugs a shoulder, heart hammering against his ribcage, pulse up. He is valiantly tamping down the grin. "So?"
"SO FUCK YOU!" Conrad shakes the last of the ceramic dust from his hand and stalks down the sidewalk, stomp stomp stomp.
" 'S that a proposal?" Worth calls after, leaning back against the rail, slumping to stick his hips out and kicking a shoe free of snow. A pale hand flashing the bird is the only answer Conrad throws behind himself and Doc Worth chuckles, biting the inside of his cheek as he watches the fashionable set of winter wear diminish into the snowy night.
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