Everything Meg dwells on about pancreatic cancer is true, every detail you see at the beginning of this chapter. I also believe maybe Gloria (in the movie, who eventually dies and her head is used for the Bride) was suffering from pancreatic cancer because of the known symptoms presented: weight loss, constant fatigue, palliative surgery, and advanced terminal stages, as well as slight yellowing of the skin. Plus, more inspiration from TheOtherMaddHatter, this time with their story "I Could See", which is in Herbert's POV and his feelings towards Dan and the various women in his life. I thought it was perfect for the expansion of Herbert's feelings for Meg here. Please don't sue or accuse me of stealing, because I did not.

Chapter Ten

Morbid Sense of Humor

Daniel was stable for now, and Meg currently stood over him with her stethoscope, checking his heartbeat and finding a normal rhythm. Sadly, the surgery was palliative due to the tumor in his body being too advanced in stages to be removed altogether. It was done to relieve him of his pain, but not wholly. Removing part of it did not mean extending his life like the re-agent was meant to do; this proved to make caring for Daniel more difficult. His life wasn't supposed to be like this; he was young and vibrant, supposed to be living and married to his girlfriend had she not dumped him.

Fear of heartbreak, Meg thought, the thought itself coinciding with the rhythm of the man's heart. How could this be so difficult? How could anyone go through life like this? Thank you, Dan, for passing your dedication down to me. It wasn't that she didn't care for any of her patients; it was because death was a natural part of life that had to be accepted...but not anymore. She wished nobody would ever have to fear it coming to claim them.

"Did that police officer ever find you?" Shelley asked as she fixed Daniel's IV.

Removing the stethoscope from her ears, Meg turned and stared at her. "Police?" she repeated, anxiety suddenly consuming her. What on earth would a policeman be doing here, wanting to see me?

Shelley nodded. "Yeah, he came by while you were in surgery." Meg was about to respond when Daniel started coughing again. She lifted the sheet to cover his mouth so his germs wouldn't get all over the place. When he relaxed, he turned his head away so he could close his eyes and relax, wanting nothing more than to go to sleep again. Meg's heart shook, threatening to crack again. He looked so much like Dan, the one who should have lived...the one she should have married...she found her hand taking his and grasping it tenderly and firmly at the same time. His skin was so soft and warm, the palm calloused.

"You're going to be all right...Daniel," she murmured, feeling his hand return the gesture, squeezing hers in his gently, one finger traveling to massage her fingers and ultimately landing on the rose-gold eternity ring stack on the third finger of her right hand, from Dan on her last birthday before he was taken from her. The diamonds twinkled faintly. Feeling them, Daniel's head turned and looked down to the source of the obstacle blocking the skin of her finger. He smiled slightly.

"Boyfriend?"

His intuition was sharper than she thought. He knew the ultimate token of love when he saw it. It made her happy to know he could see right through her, but at the same time when he brought up that very word, Meg let a small tear drop from the corner of her eye. "Yeah."

"What was his name?" Daniel asked softly.

"Dan."

His smile slowly faded then. "Just like me," he said, also sounding like he sensed that what she was going to say next wasn't good, and no different than his break-up. "What happened to him?"

Meg looked away from him and found Shelley watching them both, a sympathetic smile on her face, but how could she possibly know what it was like to lose someone you loved? Other people never knew until tragedy truly struck them. "He's dead," was all Meg could whisper when she gazed back down at him, finding that he'd closed his eyes as a silent way of telling her he wanted to sleep the day away now.

She returned home when it was barely seven o'clock, changed from her hospital scrubs into a lilac flannel shirt and jeans, letting her hair tumble, and the neck of her shirt opened to reveal the vintage pendant from her mother. She was still thinking about Daniel the whole time she drove home. His resembling the one she lost as well as being asked about the latter proved too much now. Her wound from Peru healed, but not her mental scars. Nothing was different, and it was getting too much. She found herself wanting more and more to leave the house, leave Herbert behind, and start over. Never mind the fabulous intimacy they shared. Find someone else and live her life, forget about all of this. She knew she was getting crazier and crazier with this death, gore, and re-animation, so if she stayed here any longer, she would wind up in the local asylum. She had to tell Herbert, and she had to tell him tonight.

Not later. Not tomorrow. Tonight.

The problem was that he brought a new body home for the two of them to experiment on. What difference would there be? I want to study life, not death. All of this has brought only more death than life. She scoffed and unlocked the front door, opening it to show the place she called home but Herbert didn't care to. All he was concerned with was the laboratory downstairs.

The house was dark and quiet, but upon turning on the lights in the living room, she was surrounded with an opulent arrangement of brocade wallpaper, the chair cushions and loveseat patterned the same; the floor was covered with a Persian rug, and the windows draped with shimmering silk curtains – all red, too, nothing nightmarish or over-the-top. Herbert was nowhere to be seen in this living area or the kitchen, upon a quick check. Downstairs, as he loves to be.

Said downstairs used to be the embalming room in a sub-cellar, containing a huge incinerator for Herbert to dispose of bodies that failed. "Herbert?" Meg stepped in through the rickety old door that had an iron lock and looked around, frowning when she didn't spot the scientist anywhere. Weird. He was normally bustling around and mixing this and that – or at least by now tested the latest batch of re-agent on their newest corpse before she arrived. This one had been a suicide: a would-be professional dancer who failed miserably and collapsed into despair, resulting in him cutting off his feet and bleeding to death. Another lost young life…ending his life for nothing. On second thought, since she wasn't a psychiatrist, if you had one goal in life in mind and it didn't work out the way you planned, you feel there is nothing else you want to do, and there's only one way out. It made her wonder if this one had any family to support, and if he did, then taking his own life had to have been extremely selfish.

The corpse was nowhere to be found, save for bloodied white sheets on the operating slab in the center of the room, right next to the table…and most notably a cloth-covered basket. Meg got a clenching feeling in her gut too late as she pulled the fabric back –

– and showed a pair of severed human feet. Bloody stumps, shimmering like porcelain as though perfectly preserved, and smoldering in a cloud of white mist. She felt the bile rise in her stomach…

"MEG!" She shrieked and jumped, spinning around fast and hissing angrily when she finally saw Herbert far off from where she was, laughing himself off knowing that he'd startled her, and it infuriated her to no end. And what the hell was he doing in the wall – in a hole in the wall? And why? "Look at this!" he called excitedly, urging her over. He scooched over to the side with limited space but still allowed her to see what he was talking about. "We practically share a wall…with the Averill's crypt in the cemetery. It's a hundred and fifty years of decay."

Meg felt like she was in one of those Gothic horror stories she grew up with, particularly with Frankenstein. Behind Herbert was darkness, but the outlines of the architecture of said genre and the "majestic" coffin itself were evitable. The casket itself could very much contain Dracula himself. Herbert grabbed a hold of the suspending pipe above his head and swung out of the newly discovered chamber. Meg finally found her voice and asked, "What happened to our cadaver?"

"I was finished with it," he stated simply, and there was something more to that. He moved to the other side of the old steel door that had been there since long before they moved into this place. "Help me move this, please? For security."

Meg lifted an eyebrow as she used what limited strength she had to bring the door in her direction until it was secured in front of the hole in the brick wall. "From what?" She got no answer, which irritated her yet again, as she watched Herbert strip off his long protective coat that prevented any debris from ruining his clothing. When he bent down to shove it the rest of the way off, Meg blushed when she saw the curve of his backside as it faced her…how pert it was…NO! No, girl, you got to stop this. You need to tell him you're leaving, and do it now before it becomes harder than it already is. "Herbert, I've got something to tell you," she began, only to be cut off.

"Really? Well, I've got something to show you."

What could be more important than me? Meg watched as he dumped a small portion of something from a vial into a clear, cylindrical container, before closing it as soon as a puff of white began to form inside and spread into a vaporous mist. With great speed, Herbert then picked up a plain white cloth and yanked off the lid, shoving the cloth in and replacing the lid. After a few seconds, he repeated the same routine only to have the cloth back in his hand and go over to the iguana cage. He lifted the latch with his free hand and opened it, taking out the green reptile underneath the belly, the cloth in his right hand, and with a soft "ssshhhh", he placed it over the reptile's face, and within a few moments, the creature was still as a rag doll.

Herbert gave a gleeful grin. "Look at that. And no tissue damage. It simulates a heart attack, leaving virtually no trace."

Meg scoffed. "Yeah, that's real useful if you wanna murder someone." And get your freshest test subjects without waiting for someone to die on their own.

"Useful in obtaining the freshest animal specimens," Herbert corrected. He carried the dead lizard over to the table and laid it down on its back so its belly was face up and vulnerable and unprotected. Snapping latex gloves on, he then picked up a scalpel and cut around that part of the external anatomy in a jagged circle, peeling back to show all the internal organs, and then pulled out an organ or two, a color coordination of pinks and purples, red blood leaving a mess over his hands. "The amniotic fluids of the Cuzco iguana. Did you know that this reptile has not changed significantly in over…?"

"A hundred million years," Meg answered, bored of this already. No reptile, not even the crocodile, has evolved since the Paleozoic era. "Herbert, I know all of this. Now I have something important to say."

"Now…we extract the amniotic fluids…" He set the organ down in a clear Petri dish and picked up a syringe, doing as he was saying, "…and with that we add the muscle proteins of myosin for molecular motor, actin for muscle contraction and relaxation, and…"

"Tropomyosin," Meg finished for him. "To bind and regulate the interaction of actin and myosin."

"Good." Herbert looked thoroughly pleased as he mixed the combinations in the beaker, before holding up one finger to silently say "wait one second". "And here…" He turned around to where the waiting vial of the sickly, glowing green formula he'd worked on all this time was among the arrangement of beakers and tubes. He picked it up and held it in front of her with an expression of the utmost vigor. "…our re-agent," he finished, completing the process by pouring it into the beaker with the amniotic fluids and muscle/motor proteins. He held it up in front of her face like a magician holding up a hypnotizer, luring the person into a trance. And Herbert was the sorcerer himself, using all his power to draw her back in. "Pure potentiality. Primordial ooze from which life originates."

He set the beaker down and gestured to another cloth-covered container in between them. Great, what now? More severed parts? Meg did not like where any of this was going. And Herbert was getting excited about it all. "Dr. Hill gave me this idea," he said as he drew it back to show exactly what she expected: a single eyeball and all five fingers, minus the hand. He giggled as he assembled them onto a collection of wire serving as the "bones", forming a kind of spiderlike figure. Meg decided she had enough.

"I'm moving out," she said, tension eroding from her body and into her voice.

Herbert looked up then. "What?"

"I said…I'm moving out."

His expression all but presented sheer disappointment, uncertainty, and something else she couldn't identify. "Meg…you can't turn back now. This…" He gestured down to the miniature assembly with his head. "…this is the key to creating life...parts!" Re-animated parts!"

"We're trying to save whole people, not parts!" Meg hissed, disgusted.

"Exactly!" Herbert returned with more passion. "And what are people, Megan, over and above a collection of living parts?"

His words rendered her silent right there, for she couldn't think of a comeback. Lack of sleep is known to mess the psyche up. He's never looked beyond any of this. He's barely even human; why did I give myself to him on last year's Halloween? Why won't he ever LISTEN to me? Herbert picked up the the beaker of re-agent. "We can create…new life." He dabbed the solution onto the collection of fingers finished with the eyeball. The sight would have been adorable to a child, but not for a rational-thinking adult. Meg already pictured it in her mind before the results were presented; the single-eyed spider-fingers began to dance around the interior of the pan, and her stomach lurched.

~o~

Herbert felt like he was over the moon as he watched his first hand-assembled creation titter all over the tin pan like the spider it resembled. His theory about "consciousness in more than just the brain" had never been more right. He could see it all happening now: new beings from different parts of those whose existence was nothing but a laughing matter.

But Meg was thoroughly less than pleased. "This...morbid doodling with HUMAN BODY PARTS!" she shouted, stalking around the table to stand before him. "Is this what it's all about? Is this what all our great work has led to?!"

Herbert faced her with his ebbing anger and fixed his tie brusquely, glaring at her. "Just exactly what are you insinuating?" he demanded defensively.

"This is your madness, Herbert! This has nothing to do with me! Just look at this!" She pointed to the "doodle" in the pan, which was now peeking over the rim and propping up two fingers for elevation. "Is this how you expect to understand life, by playing God?! You're so obsessed with this that you can't see what's really in front of you!" Meg looked into his eyes when she spoke that one word used to describe a person whose pursuits differed from an average level. "I'm out of here."

He saw that she really did mean to leave him, and his heart got the best of him. She had been getting more and more frustrated with him lately and he knew she meant it. For the first time she called him insane; why couldn't she see that this was part of who he was? "Oh, I see!" he raged out at her as he followed her for the door. "I didn't see you rejecting my work when Dan was lying there DEAD – the man you loved and tried to save! Where were your great ideals then?"

She whipped around and pointed a warning finger at him. "Don't you –" Her voice failed her as her temper boiled over, actions speaking more than words. She settled on turning away from him so he stared only at her back.

Do it, his inner voice insisted. Do it now before she slips away from you. "Megan," he began, taking a deep breath in an effort to calm himself down, "what was it about Dan that you loved?"

He gave a small smile when he saw her body go rigid and straighten at the question. It was working; now it was time for the next step. He'd put up with her grief and inability to move on long enough. But now was the time to attempt to put an end to her pain so she could finally live. All of this…all of this is for her.

Herbert walked around the corner to the freezer, stocked with smoldering frozen ice and preserved various organs and parts, unlocking it from the side and opening it, fetching one particular from the top shelf before closing and locking again. The birth of what he intended to do, in this next step in his mission, to keep Meg with him. He walked back out to her, finding that she had turned around to see what he now held out to her in both hands, a gesture of his own way of begging her to stay. Her face was a mask of disbelief.

"Dan's heart."

He watched as she moved slowly, deliberately as if in a trance, her disbelieving eyes locked on the plastic-wrapped, perfectly preserved organ of her former lover in his hands. Herbert held it out in both his hands, the very tool to keep Meg Halsey from abandoning him forever. I can't ever tell her the true reason I need her. She'll never understand how much I love her, so this is the only way. "Help me…to continue the work."

He could see that it was working. She was still watching him as though in a daze, looking dazed and distracted, lost in thought when she was obviously listening to him and absorbing. Herbert knew full well what she was thinking as he handed the heart of Daniel Cain to her, letting her take in its warmth in her hands for the first time in forever:

A new Dan could be created, and perhaps the old Dan would live through this one.

"We will create a new life," he continued, having finished laying out a new, clean white sheet over the operating table after discarding the old one, and taking the heart from Meg's hands, unwrapping it and laying it down, exposed to the world. "…starting with Dan's heart."

The both of them could hear the faint da-lub of the heart, still present despite being removed from its long-gone owner…and very much ready to be given to a new one. Meg looked down at it, pursing her lips tightly together, reconsidering, but Herbert knew that the process of putting together this new Dan would require more persuasive words and action in case anyone – or anything – would try and take her away from him. "Yes," she whispered, voice barely audible.

He had her. Now he had her. "Now, Meg..." He moved back around and closer to her side, almost behind her, so that his body was nearly touching hers. "You're going to have to help me at the hospital. Help me gather everything that we need."

She didn't look up at him, kept her eyes on the organ in the middle of the long table, but her head slightly tilted upwards to let him know she heard him. "What about the police?"

Smiling softly, Herbert reached and brushed her hair behind her shoulder so her neck was bared for him to lean down and kiss. "Oh, dearest Meg, the police will never come here."

His body jerked around with hers at the same time just as the buzzer which was connected to the front doorbell sounded off. Damn it! he roared in his mind. He hated visitors, whoever it could be at this time of night.

Oooh, Herbert you manipulative little bastard. ;D But we all know he's doing that for a reason. He's fallen for the first woman who started taking him seriously even if they don't always agree, but that happens all the time in a relationship and different ways. I'm in one myself to know that. He's still a human being, after all; he can't be wholly ice-cold. He loves Meg but fears she'll never understand and leave for sure, so he's using her love for Dan - and Dan's heart - as well as the creation of a new one to keep her at his side.