x
The bus depot was a wash of yellow and gray, bright blue departure schedules beaming through the low fog of melted snow and diesel exhaust. Worth was out of the cab before it had stopped, legs heavy with dread he couldn't really place, confusion poking at his volatile temper. Conrad was in public and out of costume, crowding Sean Flannerty against one grimy brick wall between the low cement benches on a departure platform. It weren't fuckin' difficult to spot the guy, either, because he was barefoot and coatless in the middle of winter.
This rage pulses through Worth, strangles the breath out of him and roots the clench of his fist to indecision - he can't move forward and he can't go back, Conrad is already there, has already been seen by any hunters what might be hawking the place for newcomers, for drifters, for the dangerous lonely people who pick off the weak in the dead of night, for idiots in pyjamas that don't know any better to stay away from airports, train stops, and bus stations if they're going to be out of fuckin' mortal costume.
Worth's feet carry him forward in a crisp march, and he intends to interrupt whatever stern talking-to Conrad is probably trying to give some asshat actor, but Conrad has his glasses clenched in one hand and isn't blinking and isn't trying to defend Hanna's right to be forgiven, or whatever, no, he's -
Conrad's eyes are very dark and very focused and his voice is very low and Worth, for a heartsick moment, feels like he's walked in on something intimate.
"You were finding yourself in Mexico," Conrad repeats, a lawyer feeding a defense alibi to a doomed man. "Nervous breakdown. You were finding yourself in a border town in Mexico. You know nothing about what happened to Jeremiah Rhett. You had a nervous breakdown and you left and you are very sorry, but you don't know anything about -"
"Don't say the name," Worth adds quietly, criticizing Conrad's technique. "You wanna erase something, don't say it over and over, like don't say 'there is no dragon in the box'. Say 'there is a dead man in the box and you will tell no one'." Because that was technically true enough to click with Sean's memories, to aid the hypnotism instead of jarring it along with associations on what Sean 'didn't know'.
Conrad huffs, does not break eye contact. "You disappeared and you came back with a dead man in a box. You don't want to talk about it. You will schedule an appointment with a therapist, to attend your nervous break, but you will not tell your therapist about the box. You will keep the box, and it will keep you. Because you had a nervous breakdown, and left, and were finding yourself in Mexico."
"Border town," Sean finally mumbled back, nodding. When Hanna had spirited Rhett away, they had already told his brother and father that the man was a Gluttony demon who had absconded at the first sight of freedom and was now on the lamb. This could also be used to send the Agent Bell-end or whomever scrambling the wrong way. Great misdirection.
But if Sean had returned to his place of employment with stories, well. Probably better to let the father and the Agent stay misdirected. Worth knew Hanna intended to invite Xacharia to visit his mother's grave, a literal fucking dragon's cave now hidden under the city. The sense in Conrad being there, doing what he was doing, finally clarified. The dread in Worth's knees ebbed.
"Hanner told ya to do this," Worth asked, glancing both ways across the platform as Conrad mashed his glasses back up his face and stepped away from a dazed sheriff.
"Hanna paid me to do this," Conrad clarified, fingers running behind his ears to correct the smooth lay of his hair under the frame tines. He finally looks at Worth, more than a glance, opens his mouth to voice an observation or protest or question, and flinches as the nosebleed dribbles between his lips and over his chin.
Worth grabs Conrad's upper arm, shuffling him to a space between platform wall and station proper, paranoid of them out in the open like that, even if any hunters nearby probably long saw the stupid asshole in his stupid under-dressed stupidity. Worth shakes Conrad, wordlessly angry. "Did Hanna pay you ta blow yer goddamn cover while you was at it."
Conrad, laughing a little at the nonstop dribble of blood down his face (worried exasperation, the nervous chuckle of the perpetually unfortunate, pale wrists wiping where hands and fingers were already smeared), "Ub. Whad?"
Worth is shrugging out of his jacket, breath hissing between thinned lips, elbows jerking with each angry tug out of the fitted leather. "I get that yer new ta bein' a member of the unspeakably unholy 'n wot, but on what sane everlovin' day was it ever in your head ta leave the house without any cunting shoes." Worth has grabbed the front of Conrad's shirt to shake him by, and a drop of blood falls on the heel of his thumb, and it is warm, and Worth startles, staring down at the small dark blotch.
Conrad shoves, detaches himself from Worth and the wall, shouldering out of his shirt to ball up against his face and try and stop the nosebleed. His hand flaps out to grab for the jacket, and Worth helps the jacket on him, rage expired like a match thrown into the ocean as the knuckle of his thumb runs up the center of Conrad's chest, zipping him in. Conrad shivers, from the touch or the pain of his hypno-headache, which Worth knew to hurt like a motherfucker, as often as he'd had patients in moaning for hemlock and parsley to stuff up their noses. Maybe Conrad shivers from the cold.
"What," Conrad quips, pulling the shirt away from the mess of his face, "Think the station authority would have called social services? Hm? I look homeless, or something? Think one of these patrolling rent-a-cops would have tackled me for indecency?"
Worth can't be mad. He wants to be mad, desperately so. He wants to want to throw a fist, to scuffle it out between them, to pin Conrad and shove his face in his mistake, to watch the dawning horror and regret and sorry, Doc, sorry for not taking care. But Worth can't do that, can't even want to do that, because Conrad is small and easily thrown but he is also strong and easily angered and that's not what Worth wants, a fight between them. Conrad would just dig his heels in and ignore Worth's advice, maybe get himself killed, maybe -
"First time losing a patient under the knife," Conrad hazards slowly, turning away from the unblinking, somber scrutiny Worth was bearing down on him in their brightly lit patch of cement and brick. "You seem... rattled."
And if Worth had been a little less, that night, a little less himself, then yes losing Jeremiah had everything to do with it. Wasn't very often Worth found someone who could flirt back with insults and sarcasm and low-brow humor and holy hell, had Worth been looking forward to the day Rhett would up and throw that first punch, dude had been built like, like something, well, inhuman, attractive in his long-nosed awkward half-dragon cowboy amble. Worth wasn't just mourning a professional mishap; he was feeling a loss. He shrugged, gaze sliding away like it hurt to look, hands in pockets, beginning to shiver because he was thin and it was cold. "I'll manage."
Worth doesn't even, maybe, believe that, exactly, himself. He'd manage to go along with the motions, sure; he always did, and he would always have to. But he wouldn't be able to manage his impulses, a control already on shaky ground. "What about you, Conbat? Not exactly character, yer ass out of doors with yer curlers still in. Ain't putcher face on or nothin'; yer husband must be ashamed."
And here, again, there is a lack. Worth feels like he's looking for healthy tissue in an x-ray but all he's seeing are animal crackers, because Conrad isn't providing the usual canvas of disdain and there is a huge absurd blank over what Worth expects to see - unhealthy tissue, maybe, not zoo biscuits. Conrad is at hypnotism, and that might have something to do with it - like the more Conrad doesn't want to project something, the brighter that something becomes, because he's just total shit at subterfuge inside and out.
"Not married." Conrad digs his hands into the pockets of Worth's jacket, and carries the fuck on, stepping away from the station proper to wait out a cab. He doesn't sneer, he doesn't scoff. He looks a little bored, a little anxious, distant. Occupied. "I'm sorry you lost your friend," he mumbles when Worth joins his side, eyes glued to the dirt-wet yellow lines of the pickup lane. He is smeared in blood, darkened shirt tucked under an elbow, barefoot and breathless, Worth's coat fitting him just fine, but then why wouldn't it.
Worth reaches over, wipes a thumb against the corner of Conrad's nose and lip, wicking away blood.
"Luce," Conrad protests, grimacing as he pulls his head back. "C'mon, gross."
"This ain'tcher blood," Worth states, rubbing the coagulating mess between thumb and fingers. He has stopped shivering. "Connie, where'd you get this?"
Conrad relents a flicker of annoyance. "From the source. Thought maybe I'd need to, to do what. To uh. Help Hanna."
Worth's eyes narrow. "You bit Sean?"
Conrad rolls his eyes. "Noooo, I bit the cab driver. Of course I bit Sean. It helps, if you didn't know, it helps the um. The thing."
"Hypnotizing."
"Sure. Whichever." A shake of the head, flippant. "If you have a point to make...?" The cab is pulling up, Conrad is stepping forward.
Worth wants to shove Conrad forward, wrestle him into the cab and do unspeakable things to the upholstery of the seat. He climbs calmly in after, instead, because he happens to be great at subterfuge. "It also helps yer nerves. I'd wonder if this wasn't yer first time seein' it, seein' the death of someone you knew."
"Oh," Conrad is sitting forward, not touching the back of the seat, knees squared, fists balled in his bloodied shirt. "That. No, yeah, I've seen somebody die before." A distant gaze, "A few, actually."
"Not countin' the thug on my floor, who would that be?"
"Mmh, well," Conrad wrings a pinky in his ear and scratches a fleck of drying blood from his chin. The cab lurches forward. "I saw a couple holding hands get run over by a bus, pretty recently actually. Before that, your thug; before that, me; before that, a gas station clerk got shot by one of his coworkers futzing with the twelve-guage from under the counter - viscera all over my attache case - and before that, before America, my mother and I saw a group of lads not much older than myself at the time slowly and methodically beat an elderly man to death in the streets." A shiver of the jaw. "And here they sell you Clockwork Orange as entertainment and people think that shit's dystopic and not actually happening every day, everywhere."
Worth remembers to breathe and sits up from his sprawl, crossing one knee over the other, trying to fold himself so he could take up less space, respecting the room that sort of news would claim for itself. "Anybody you knew? 'Sides yerself."
"I knew the old man. He worked counter at the penny-shop near my school. I think, ehah, I think my mother was just annoyed that the kids didn't stop on her say-so. Like that was the first time she really got it, really understood that people don't answer to wealth and status and authority - that without this fragile veil of self-deception you're really just so much squawking meat, right? For the grist? I don't even know what a grist is."
Worth wanted Conrad, wanted to fuck him in a physical sense and wanted to fuck him in a mental sense, wanted to cause eight different shades of feelgood in every sense imaginable (and some yet unknown to medical science). He wanted to crawl inside Conrad and tattoo his goddamn name all along the inside of Conrad's ribs and bring his liver back and fucking eat it raw and paint the map of his bruise-blushing skin with wide wet bloody handprints and leave him greasy between the legs and
Worth remembered to breathe, and recrossed his legs. He did not shiver. "Grist fer th' mill, innit. Grist is grain when it's out its shell, ready ter be ground."
"Mm, well," Conrad nods archly, pretending interest out of the window. "I went to art school, so." A self-deprecating chuckle.
And oh, that noise, the sound of it, Conrad's laugh - quiet and sad - and Worth feels torn up as surely as if the breath of it had been gales in a storm. Worth watches the splay of streetlights passing over the shell of Conrad's ear, the crest of his cheek, the gloss of his black hair. "Sawr my sister die," Worth muttered, bloodless over the evening's tally. Conrad's attention snaps back to him, compassion written on the open fucking book of his persons. "We was twenty five, us. Home for the summer holidays, she from, eh, study abroad and me from medical college." Worth makes a gun of finger and thumb, aiming it at Conrad. "Somethin' evil took her, and me just standin' there like a know-nothin' charlie, sobbing me guts out." His chuckle matches Conrad's. He wonders if the noise tears into Conrad, even just a little. "Well. Kneeling. Leg still hurts when it rains."
Tones even, measured. Maybe Conrad has had practice. "Sorry to hear that."
"Ain't my first rodeo." Worth reaches behind Conrad, draping his arm over the back of the seat for comfort, really quite warm in the blast of the cab's heating. "Gonna be mad at the world fer a little bit, 'cos of losing Jembo the way we did, but en't nothing I seen or can see is ever gonna break anything worse than the night I lost my goddamn other half." A rasping exhale, "So youse can go ahead an' stop lookin' at me like you stomped my puppy, Puppy." He pushes at the side of Conrad's head, craving the sharp safe familiarity of a glare. A sneer. Anything. Ill tissue. No more fucking vanilla wafer PG-rated animal crackers masking the x-ray, fueling hope that possibly, maybe, there was healthy tissue there after all.
Conrad's mouth pulls back, but he glances down the length of Worth's torso looking guilty and it is Worth that sneers, that scoffs, that bares the parts of him that are ill under the x-ray.
"Yer gonna die, quick an' brutal, if you slip up in this city. There are people that want your sort gone and burned, you know that? Abner? Remember him?"
Conrad's eyelashes flutter, even if the rest of him remains unfazed. "Abner had been hired to find Adelaide."
"And you, what, didn't mind that he'da shot yer ass alongside?"
"It's still illegal to kill people, Worth. I doubt hunters indiscriminately murder people suspected of vampirism - I mean I doubt that they do it for free, or just as like a hobby, or Lost Boys Corey Feldman shenanigans-style." Conrad twists in his seat, not unhappy, not nasally argumentative, just calm fucking zoo biscuits, absurdly. "In Cairo, they were part of the caliphate. Like, citizen's arrest type shit." A twisting hand, not even trying to pretend at masculinity, "Vigilante hunters are dangerous and unpopular and just as likely to be killed by other, normal, sane-headed hunters who are just keeping the peace. I didn't kill anybody and I didn't turn into a bat in a crowd of onlookers and nobody even noticed the shoe thing or the coat thing because people? Everyday, everyone? Way self-involved. I've probably passed hundreds of vampires in my lifetime and never blinked twice at the lack of breath in, what, winter air or if one wasn't wearing the right clothes for the weather. Coulda just told anybody who asked, that I was Canadian.
"My own fucking publisher," Conrad rambled on, exasperated, emphatic, "Marcellaine. Vampire the whole time." He throws his hands up, scoffing another of those strange, easy laughs of his, teeth flashing.
Worth wants to suck those teeth right out of Conrad's head.
"Sorry," Conrad concludes, and it's not 'sorry for not taking care, doc', but it is sorry. "You um. You came all this way after, and that's not fair, because you just lost someone. And you don't want to lose anyone else. I get it." Conrad nods, eyes narrow. "I get it, right? Why you're so angry all the time? You're scared."
Worth's hearing tunnels from all the rushing blood clenched in squeezing veins.
Conrad huffs, throwing his eye-roll forward. "Or, you know, not scared. But you probably overthink. We're probably very similar, you know that?" And then Conrad delivers the line that crumbles Worth's brain entirely; "I just wear my scars on the inside, is all." And he's looking forward and his hands are in the pockets of Worth's coat and he's perfectly calm, contemplative, indulgent even. He's sad, maybe, regretful at their loss, and his thoughts are five to ten feet ahead of the cab, where he can see, where maybe soon there will be Hanna's street, Hanna's building.
Worth can't even pick up the pieces of his shattered thoughts, much less the throbbing lump of his kicked heart. "Why would you say a goddamn thing like that," he rasps, petulant in his hurt.
Conrad spares a glance, eyebrows rising, curious. "Just a thought I had, when you didn't launch yourself at Sean for the shit he said to Hanna. Would have marked you for an indiscriminate brawler; but either you don't care to try and fight Hanna's battles, or you just never throw the first punch, or you never throw the punch at all when it's something actually important, like the things a guy might say out of grief. Or maybe you actually sort of agreed with Sean, and you sort of blame Hanna, and you more than sort of blame yourself, because you're a very intelligent person and very intelligent people have this problem where they overthink things, so they don't act. And you didn't, you didn't act. You're an incredibly hesitant person, Luce, unless you're given a direct problem to solve," and here the cab is slowing, is stopped, but Conrad lets the meter run to finish his thought, "Like a diagnosis or emergency response. You'd have ended up a firefighter, or a cop, or a disaster response or something, because danger and self-sacrifice are the only things that can shove you outside of that shitty zone of indecision. You're a scuffed-up witchdoctor in a back-alley squeeze between the demands of a mortal criminal system and an immortal healthcare deficiency. Tell me that's not because you get an excellent 401K."
Every electric pulse of Worth's psyche is moaning within him, battered down by the piercing observation and then stroked back up by the sarcasm, left hanging and wanting after Conrad leaves the cab. Conrad keeps the door propped open with his hip, unzipping Worth's coat to toss it in with a casual thanks for the loan. The door shuts. Worth scrambles to the seat Conrad had occupied, and he growls his destination to the cabbie, watching Conrad jog up to Hanna and Ashleigh on the snowy stoop, watching the bend of a pale stomach as he tries to fit his bloodied shirt back on, watches the flash of teeth as Conrad explains what needs explaining.
Worth's fingers claw down the glass with a squeak as the cab pulls away, and he bangs his head on the curve of the door because he's good at subterfuge but that doesn't mean that it's ever easy, especially when he has to out-strip the calm confidence of a dweeb who used to be crippled by his own nervous temper but, at the moment, was just fucking insanely okay and fine and well-adjusted to death. Worth had just been out-done on a level he'd never expected, and the sting was almost good enough to compensate his guilt, to jar his whirring thoughts outside of the drain-circle binge of my fault, my fault he died, shoulda called it off when we saw how small he was, shoulda -
Almost good enough, to occupy himself with all the ways Conrad was shit at subtlety, but excellent at observation.
