ok so. this story has a theme i guess!
it is stomach injuries
i am so sorry v_v
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"Undertaker."
The voice slid up the back of Conrad's neck, a deep Texan burr like dry winds through cactus in the moonlight. Conrad nearly dropped the brown envelope Lamont was handing him, but crushed the paper corner between his fingers as he side-eyed the door that lead to the operating room. "Chewing Tobacco."
Rhett snorted, shuffling the rest of the way through the doors, long arms overburdened with boxes and eyes nearly obscured by a worn red baseball cap. Hanna slid past, furiously absorbed in a musty tome of indeterminate origin. Rhett set the boxes on the desk with a nod at Lamont, then leaned an elbow on the stack to study Conrad head to toe (first time seeing him out of costume, and reasonably upright). "You on this job, too?"
Before Conrad could answer, the door to the stairwell banged open and Doc Worth stumbled past, arms full of what looked like the under-frame to a bed. Lamont left the office chair to help, holding the front door open so Worth could drag his burden past.
"I just read the debriefing," Conrad admitted, stuffing his (discreetly!wrapped!) blood pack into the wide pocket on the inside of his woolen Forsyth 2012. He did not continue to explain that his 'mental breakdown' excuse to his studio had left him on a 'suspension' pay scale, nor his surprise that Hanna's operation was not only now a paying one, but one so professional as to have 'debriefing' e-mails and insider support from the local law enforcement (securing them a dry stretch of sewer in which to perform -shenanigans- without endangering any witnesses). "We want to keep the incision small, so we're sending the smallest person possible." At Jeremiah's evaluating eye, "I turn into a bat. It's been pretty useful for portal travel so far."
Worth reappears through the door, dusting his hands and hooking an arm around Lamont's shoulders to lean his entire weight on the guy, pretending at jelly-knees. Catching sight of Conrad on the double-take (they all sort of looked the same, the vampires that passed through the office, having their various auras of subtlety), "Oi, Count Fagula, where you been?" Worth grunts as Lamont elbows him off, sneering his usual grin and rubbing the hollow of his chest as if deeply wounded.
Where normally there would have been a stiffening of shoulders, a scathing defense, or even just a tight-lipped glare, Conrad just hitched his eyes somewhere above Worth's shoulder and carried on. "Egypt," he answered easily.
"Why you been there so long?" Worth pulled a cigarette free of a rumpled pack liberated from his leather jacket, offering the pack to Jeremiah, who was fidgeting with his cuticles so bad they were starting to bleed.
Conrad felt his nose curl at the smell of smoke, his more-vampire-ness-than-usual throwing red alarm bells at any hint of fire. "Why, darling, did you miss me?" he snarked, words dripping with the easy snobbery he'd bantered around in his Cairo crowd, missing those people terribly, wondering what they would have made of Doc Worth, how they'd have turned him on his head so, so easily and with such poise and -
Rhett chuckled, slapping a half-curled fist at the air in front of Conrad's stomach. "How's yer belly, bonedigger?"
If Worth had straightened in owl-eyed confusion at Conrad's aloof sort of maybe flirtation, that expression came pinching down now in utter suspicion at Rhett's question. It then occurred to Worth that Conrad had a life outside of his office and Hanna's circle of wierdos, which was always a difficult pill to swallow for anyone as self-involved as Lucian Worth. Maybe Lamont was right, fuck, maybe Worth did need to pay more attention to the babbling fount of gossip because since when did Conrad call people 'darling'? Was he being 'ironic'? And what th'fuck did DragonsMcGee over there know about the stomach wound? Worth crossed his arms, billowing a puff on his cigarette like an irate coal train.
"Oh, ah," Conrad pulled a hand across the back of his neck, and fucking smiled, "It's fine. Thank you."
Rhett pulled the cigarette from the corner of his mouth to motion with it, squinting Worth's way. "Undertaker here came first round to th' camp. I got woke up ta see about a knife wound from stem ta fuckin' sternum." Shoulders shaking in silent laughter, "Poor Xach thought we'd finally done kilt a tourist. Ain't met a dead man 'fore that day."
Worth couldn't summon anything clever or obscene to say, thoughts still ground to a halt in front of the word 'darling'. "Knife wound, y'say?"
"Mmhm," Conrad nodded, chin in the air. "I was caught cheating at poker, and professed I could not meet for a high-noon draw. Gutted on the spot by a Sam Elliot lookalike."
Worth's scrutiny darted from Rhett to Conrad and back. "Yer havin' me on."
Rhett shrugged, cradling his elbows. "Don't lookit me, I don't know who done it. Arrived ta remove some scales from the piping and get the body cleared of paralytic. The knife wound was a happy coincidence, quick access to th' stomach."
"'The body'," Conrad repeated, rolling his eyes, still fucking smiling (it carried in the eyes, not the mouth, but it was there and ugh). He turned on heel, shaking his head, joining Hanna at the office's latest installment of waiting chairs (recycled from the dump, with about eighty percent fewer bloodstains!). Hanna sat hunched over the book and his phone, typing rapidly to the forum on which he had continued his investigation into Rhett's predicament - Rhett, in the weeks leading up to that case, having spent quite a few hours similarly through a contraband laptop, communicating with Hanna at the urgency to do so without the clueless but well-meaning buffer of his brother.
Worth shuffled close to Jeremiah, peering suspiciously around the room while Hanna made a phone call to his city zoning people. "What was it like?" Worth mumbled, glaring at Conrad's headphones and unaffected absorption in his own phone's screen, while addressing Rhett.
"Weren't too bad," Rhett shrugged, following Lamont to the operating room to gather more supplies for their trip. "Self-healed, the wound. Left a scar."
"I mean inside. Was it warm, even a little bit?" Worth follows, lending a hand, and they pass through from office to loading truck during the conversation.
"Room temperature." The words did the shrugging for Rhett, aimless and a little unsure. "Very purple. Definitely not alive. Why? You never cut one open?"
"Not 'is kind, no."
"Prolly letcha if ya asked," Rhett hazarded, because Conrad seemed amicable enough. But Worth looked at him as if he'd just insisted a snake's fangs were for decoration. "I mean, it didn't seem like ta hurt 'im like it might you or me." And here Rhett swallowed a little thickly, over the prospect of his similar upcoming 'surgery'.
"What, he just 'let' you?"
Another shrug, Rhett's shoulders crowding closer to his ears the further their conversation went. "Well he was kinda paralyzed, friend. Did me the favor of returning some chaw, once he thawed out."
Worth blinked, hard. "Fuckin'. Explain that."
Rhett, despite being as tall and intimidating and glowy-eyed as he was, was starting to feel the itch to distance his step from Worth's. He'd gotten along well with Doc Worth, the both of them unflinchingly honest and crass and morbidly jovial, but then Rhett had a life of getting along with nearly everyone and did not yet know how to navigate a situation in which his honesty only brought anger. His was an aura of fortune, was Rhett's, while Doc Worth's was more an aura of bad-penny luck (useful when you had it, but you didn't want to need it). "Dropped some chaw in 'is mouth sippin' free some blacknell. Undertaker recovered, spat, handed it over, said his thanks. Nice enough feller."
Worth was chewing his cigarette filter, ash tumbling down the front of his jacket, hands shoved in pockets as he stomped up the stairs. "Hrmph," he grunted, finding it just as difficult to be any sort of annoyed at Jeremiah Rhett. "Then he punched you, roight?"
Rhett scoffed, lightbulb clattering to life. "Naw, then he gave me his phone number, ya big fuckin' baby. In fact, yer interlopin' on our first date, here; an' this time it's him what gets ta enter me." A long, exhausted exhale of cigarette smoke. "Ya goddamn jealous foreign faggot."
Mollified by this, Worth smirked.
x
"What are you gonna do after this?" Hanna's voice had gone soft and deep; his Experienced Detective Ready to Give Advice voice.
Ashleigh studied Jeremiah Rhett in the passing swipe of streetlamps, having spent the greater part of the drive silently amused at the bickering volleyed between he and Worth.
Rhett shrugged a shoulder. "Depends on if we find my ma or not."
Hanna, "If we do?"
Rhett groans on the exhale, uncertain. "We head back to the camp. It's her land, her money."
"What were you protecting her from, all those years ago? Think it's safe now to get her back to that?"
Rhett's mouth pulled thin, wry. "I think I was trynta protect her from herself," he admitted. "Deeply unhappy woman. Drank like a fish," he recited, as if it were his small family's mantra. "Used ter beat the crap out of us. Always squawkin' on about anniversaries and rubies and real diamonds and how many karats gold and blah blah fuckin' blah." A restless shift. "Not such a mystery now, that. Guess I'll hafta change my martyrhood ta Greed. Paperwork's a nightmare."
"Oh!" Hanna perked. "You're still going through with the Satanic priesthood thing? Say, that's neat. Those guys could really use some validation, heh. Most just die screaming, possessed by shit they were never fully prepared to comprehend. Or else they don't manage to invoke anything, and just sit around drinking wine complaining about the mainstream." Genuinely supportive, Hanna nods. "But hey, listen, if we don't find your mom, or anyone, you know Doc's operation has a service for, um, for identity changes? In case you want to be able to leave and go places and not get tracked down by any crazy asshole family members who may or may not be in cahoots with a shadyshoes Agency. Heh."
"Oddly specific," Rhett drawls. "But thanks. We'll see what happens."
Worth stirs from the nap he'd been taking in the seat ahead, slumped against boxes. "Ain't free, Mary Jane. Yeh'll hafta lift some of that fat reenactment profit our way, first."
Hanna's mouth twists, "It has to be free, Worth. You can't charge a Dragon for anything but its favor, or else, yanno, drought and disease and crap."
Worth cranes his birdy neck around and grins, too many teeth. "I think I already got this one's favor. Ain't that right, Jem?"
Jeremiah, because that was the nickname his mother had given him (get it, gem), blushes from the regal column of his neck all the way to the dark space where sunglasses met the brim of his baseball cap. "Get fucked, Oz," he mutters darkly.
Worth's grin softens at the edges, fond.
x
Hanna was studying Conrad's profile intently, once they made it down the lime-scaled ladder into the yawning, brightly lit square of underground cement that was a spill-over for rainy days or snowmelt. Conrad hadn't expected the space to be so clean, though the waft of human refuse did linger in the cold press of air. "What," Conrad prompted, without looking Hanna's way.
"You wanna do this fulltime? With us?" Hanna's breath puffed out over his scarf. "Since we're kind of full time for the Judiciary, now. Steady pay. Get your name in with vampire society. There's these regulation things I think you might -"
"I want to design clothes," Conrad answered honestly, succinctly. "I've always wanted to design clothes, and now I think I might be able to." Since he was free from the mortal woes that had gripped his talent in the clutches of practicality, hearing all the while that even his jobs in advertising and home deco were useless fluff only vapid assholes paid for, that he was a general waste of space unless he was breaking his back in a restaurant somewhere (or bruising his fragile psyche over an operating table, because every overbearing mother wanted their genius goddamn child to be a doctor). "So no, thank you, Hanna." A latent smirk, eyes sliding at last Hanna's way. "I'll be available for commission, like this, when you need it."
"I'm not getting turned down because you're in love with me, am I?" Hanna hedged, only mildly suspicious. "Because dude, the cuddling is embarrassing for everyone involved, not just you."
"I'm attracted to warm things when I sleep!" Conrad laments. "I'd hug a fucking lint trap if you'd just pulled it from the dryer! Excuse the hell out of me!"
"So awkward." Hanna gnees, watching their motley crew descend the ladder with the first clatter of their unwieldy supplies.
x
The bedframe is set vertical, a large standing square of runed-up metal. Rhett lays on his back, nude, pale and freckled with what, on closer inspection, turn out to be freckle-sized scales. Rhett rests his neck on the ground bar of the frame, looking up at what would amount to a very flimsy collar for his dragon form. Hanna reassures, over and over, that the runes on the frame will immobilize him sufficiently.
Rhett is terrified for everyone in that room but himself, and says nothing.
Doc Worth bends to a knee, and lifts one of Rhett's arms. "Localized anasthetic," he explains, drawing a needle out. "We hafta carve the runes in, 'cos we don't want 'em ta break or warp when you change." His hands are warm, wrists wrapped in bandages that disappear past the rolled-up sleeves of his coat.
Rhett smirks, scoffing. "Do I need an adult? I think I need an adult."
"I am an adult."
"I need one ain't gonna eye-rape mah nubile corpus."
The needle pulls free, a new syringe is pressed to the other arm. "Clearly you don't know what 'nubile' means. And I'm a professional. I leave all the eye-rape fer off the clock; which, hah, since you ain't payin' us, is right now."
Rhett shivers, and he is the opposite of nubile, long and cragged and black-horned and star-eyed, the bundle between the leanly muscled valley of his thighs inert but unmistakably adult. "So I'm right? We need an escort fer this walk in the park, else you gon' compromise my virtue?"
Worth rifles in his leather medical bag, needles piled near the corner of the bedframe. "Satanic priests got virtue?" Worth mused, assembling a new razor head to a new handle, the scalpel bright and sterile. The swipes into Rhett's arms were not too deep, but he did keep a gauzy rag dabbing across the runes as they formed, so his aim wasn't flawed by all the blood in the way.
Rhett had chuffed a laugh, but said no more, watching the cold gray dome and its islands of eco-lighting above. "Dragon, huh," he started, as Worth stood to get to the other side of him. Rhett closed his eyes, already flinching from the thing clawing against his ribs. "Sean's, uh, he's got dark hair, and -"
"We'll getcher princess from the castle, no worries," Worth assured, voice low and quipped, earnest. "We got a file, pitchurs. We know what he looks like."
Quietly, "What if he ain't there."
"Then you'll get some pretty bitchin' scars an' a fun dinnertime anecdote outta this, won't yeh?"
"I jus' cain't figger it. What I coulda been trynta protect him from.
"Don't think as if it's gotta be nothin' specific," Worth lectures, carrying on down Rhett's arm from shoulder to wrist. "Sometimes we just wanna keep our people close, within reach. Safe. 'S natural, that greed." He wags a finger, stepping to crouch near the other arm, bootheels scuffing on the swept cement. "Just maybe you learn ta control it, yeah? No more swallowing yer neighbors an' no more cavernous fucking stomach excavations."
Rhett scoffs, eyes glinting, and says no more.
x
"He's... small." Conrad complains, arms crossed. Runes were glowing, a body had snapped and cracked and unfurled to a copper-scaled dragon the size of a horse, maybe. A small horse.
Hanna had expected Rhett's neck to fill the space of the bedframe, for his mountainous belly to threaten the structural integrity of their hidey-hole. "He's starved," Hanna agrees sadly, hefting the undecorated but no doubt historical and special bronze-tipped spear. "Jeeze. This is bad. Small is bad." With that, Hanna lunges forward, driving the spear into the spot he hoped was the dimensional-portal part of the dragon's stomach. The dragon twitches, but even though its muscles ripple under leathery skin and grating scales it is held immobile by the runes carved into the bedframe looming over its veined, exposed throat.
There is a little blood.
Conrad has stripped to the waist, uneasy. "How are you so sure this could swallow anybody whole?"
"Same reason I'm sure your brain manages to fit into an itty bitty bat skull each time you transform and can re-expand, undamaged," Hanna answers easily. "I've seen this before; I know all the patterns. Disappearances, droughts, miracles, scaly person, someone in the background trying to get their hands on precious gems and spanish dubloons either way." A shrug, Hanna using the butt of the spear to prop open the fleshy incision, revealing a strip of sunlight.
Conrad shrinks from the light, and poffs into a bat, and takes up the rope in his footclaws.
Worth has straddled the dragon by now, holding the flap open with his bare hands, peering down. "It's a cave," he announces. "But we're upside down to it. Yer gonna fall left, so adjust yerself."
"Got it." Conrad suffers Hanna's helping hand, and slips through the foul-smelling incision into bright, fresh, clean air.
x
The meat-pile is not rotten. Nothing rots, or tarnishes, or ages at all. The cave is wide-mouthed, brightly lit by daylight and ever-burning torches. It's all just too fairy-tale picturesque for Conrad to find any sort of comfort in any of it, but then he figures the people who get sent here, swallowed, really, probably had idyllic issues of their own. Like mistaking this, possibly, for some sort of heaven where there was no hunger or aging and entire feasts toppled wholesale atop entire treasure troves.
Someone had sorted, or rather there might have been someones whose job it was sorting, baubles from dead animal (and live animal, which could be see outside the cave doing general animal-like wandering.
Conrad tugged the rope in a flutter, and flapped to the floor as the rope coiled through in a heft. "Sean?" he piped, rolled his eyes, then transformed under the shade of the dead-animal heap to get a bigger voice. "Mr. Sean Flannerty?" Conrad called, then louder, until he heard a clatter near the front of the cave.
"Get down," the voice from the pile of car tires hissed, unmistakably southern.
Conrad startles, because he is naked, and crouches behind a sorted pile of ... er, kitchen sinks? Or smashed toilets. "You know your name sounds like that guy from that movie," Conrad hazards, hoping he had the right southern dude on the proverbial line.
"Oh, fuck off, not Sean Patrick Flanery," the voice stands, dark handlebar mustache on a twenty-something face looking absurd and theatrical. Sean darts forward to a pile of old boots, Sheriff's badge glinting in the bright jeweling light.
Conrad goes bat, picks up the rope-end, and flaps forward. "Don't freak out," he squawks, dropping the rope at Sean's feet as a lead pipe is swung messily toward his general direction. "You have to climb this if you want to get out of your boyfriend's stomach."
"My what's what?"
