He'd come to collect at the clinic a little later each time. Wasn't sure what his goal was, but at first it hadn’t been to starve. He doesn’t know what it turned into. It was obvious he ran dangerously thin, the irritation getting under his skin more often than usual, exhaustion heavy in his limbs and his mind, endlessly cycling day by day. He has a tendency to feel parched. He's been ignoring it.
Conrad had just wanted nothing more than to be human again, and it was easier to pretend without looking down at the empty blood bags in the trash can.
nevermind , 22, a waste of time
it's truces, half baked compromises
i'm just trying to be the man
by laying on the brakes again
- why july
In some alternative universe, Conrad's head is above the water and the sky is flecked with constellations. It sings that he wrote his prosperity into the stars, and its voice is the sweet taste of the wind brushing past. The tune used to be not so pleasant, but he's shifted and melded it with his own hands, because that's the only way to twist fate if it's determined to plummet you downward. He would've been dead if Hanna didn't do the same, and he took the reins like he showed him, hands shaking, but the thing is that he took them.
In this universe, his head's underwater but he's still so thirsty. The salt makes his sanity quiver, and he lost his grip a long time ago, if throwing down the reins counts as losing it. None of his phone notifications are texts because he never texts back, and after a few months that's a louder message than any he could've sent anyways.
The world has been upturned for so long he doesn't even know it only goes as far as the radius of his apartment. The sky has fallen and all of the stars have fizzled out on the pavement, once bright, now nothing but dark matter - don't mind that through the curtains, they still blot the night. It's the end of things. It's whatever.
Conrad wants to die. But nothing matters, he died months ago and now his ghost is just floating through.
He's not feeling too good. He couldn't sleep the day before, and his head's swirling more than usual, but it feels like the walls of his apartment are doing this scary new thing where they're closing in. Tonight he reaches a new point where he thinks that actually, maybe some fresh air might do him well this time. He really needs to get out of here.
The door clicks closed. Artificial lights have never been known to hurt him, but the hall's lit well with glowing yellow bulbs and they make his vision swim, an ache humming behind his eyes. Need sleep. Can't sleep. It's a Sisyphean nightmare, he thinks, but at least the full moon greets him when he walks into the chill air, loyal in its orbit and beautiful. His legs follow the north star, wandering side roads in shades of silver and shadow without destination. He hears a flutter.
Through streams of moonlight, the tide turns to keep him down.
.
A heavy, solid strength slams into him and whisks his wiry frame into a wall of brick. The impact thunders through his body in shocks of pain, and Conrad gasps like a fish out of water, wide red eyes staring into a face obscured under a dark hood. A woman. But her teeth are bared in a wild snarl, and she has the fangs of a rattlesnake.
She uses an interesting method. God damn is it effective. His assailant grabs him by the hair and cracks the side of his skull against the bricks.
Conrad loses consciousness in a bout of nauseous fuzz and almost-thoughts, then blinks back into existence in a moment of terror and darkness. Of cold grime and concrete, and of pain rerealizing itself in a quickly mounting wave. His head is a burning, pounding pang that only keeps increasing and it's wet with the only blood he has left.
His body is a marionette with its strings held by a limp hand, so he doesn't move it. Something that he soon realizes might have saved his life, because the figure looms over him, he can feel the prickle of her presence on the back of his neck, can hear the rustling nearby. She's rummaging through something at his side. A bag, searching for an item within.
Conrad has no idea what is going on. His mind is still five minutes ago, watching the clouds graze by the moon, combining slowly into the current moment with a dissonance like two pieces of metal machinery colliding, filling his mind with a discordant sound. Still, in some primal understanding, he knows that he is about to die.
Impossibly, there's one thing that stands out more than that.
He is so thirsty.
It's his own blood that he smells, old, rotten. It's been sitting stagnant in his veins for far too long. He knows this like it's marked on his calendar: It has been six months since Conrad started running from his fears, and one month since he last tasted blood. At that point, doesn't really matter if it's vampiric blood he's craving, now does it? A starving man gets desperate for scraps.
He rears up like a cobra and strikes the throat of the other vampire, and his fang tears a jagged rip in her pale flesh.
His faux human skin is dissipating off his body in streams of magic haze, and a white bone exterior forms a grotesque mask of sharp angles and icepick teeth. The woman's scream is the contorted rage of something west of an animal.
He'd come to collect at the clinic a little later each time. Wasn't sure what his goal was, but at first it hadn’t been to starve. He doesn’t know what it turned into. It was obvious he ran dangerously thin, the irritation getting under his skin more often than usual, exhaustion heavy in his limbs and his mind, endlessly cycling day by day. He has a tendency to feel parched. He's been ignoring it.
Conrad had just wanted nothing more than to be human again, and it was easier to pretend without looking down at the empty blood bags in the trash can.
The scent of his own iron made him brave. It's nothing compared to this. The other vampire's blood sprays across his face, and his eyes dilate like a predator, taking up the whole of his wide irises - because now, he is nothing but a predator.
The rest of his time in the alleyway is a series of thoughtless movements that he'll remember later in broken pieces. There is the sound of a weak wrist dropping something she'd been holding, ready to strike it into his flesh as far as her strength would allow. It rolls to a stop next to them - a branch of wood whittled to a sharp pike.
Conrad's throat is so dry, the inside lined with sandpaper, days without liquid and now his precious remainder runs down the side of his face, traces his jawline in the dark. It joins the rest. It's messy, like putting your mouth to a fountain. And she hadn't expected him to wake up, because the vampiress is struggling with sloppy movements, making a gurgling snarl that will stick in his mind in a few hours, making his stomach wrench sickly.
Until she isn't.
Her bones crackle into a carapace, and through the adrenaline that mutes his pain, her claws rake into his abdomen. They tear through, and an alarm goes off in his head, causes him to break away from suckling in a violent hiss.
It turns into a guttural scream.
Something cuts through the immunity and rains fire upon his insides. Conrad flings himself back on all fours like an animal, and a deafening tone is assaulting his conscience, an instinct that rattles all the way to the core: Get out. Escape. Run.
.
The stone corridor is shadowy and silent when Worth cracks the door and finally peeks out at whatever the fuck made that noise in his alleyway.
He glances down and sees the ghastly, bloodsoaked form of the vampire, face half monster and one set of talons curled over an open stomach. Oh, fuck. Oh, it's bad. Is he even alive? He starts to check for a pulse, then he realizes what he's doing, and his skinny arms hover for a second before he scoops the body up and carries it inside. If he is alive, he needs help fast.
He's chosen to forfeit on guessing whatever the fuck happened here. Instead he kicks everything else out of the way as he hustles through the cluttered lobby. Not a good time to have all those deliveries laying about, in fact the worst time possible to trip and land face first.
On the table, Conrad's white arms hang limply off the sides while he snips off the rest of his shirt and stares down at whatever lies below it. He's never seen the inside of a vampire before, and this is the worst circumstance to learn about their anatomy, so he has to guess the subtle wrongness of his flesh is all normal. Time to move on as fast as possible, most alarming thing first: His innards are sizzling. It's like they've been tossed in hot oil, but there's nothing he can see aside from the tissue beginning to darken and decompose slowly. Will it become aggressive, or will it slow to a standstill? Will it continue to eat until it consumes everything inside the man, a spreading plague upon his system?
He doesn't fucking know. The doctor has his examination gloves in his hand, but throws them down and searches his pockets desperately for something.
Hanna picks up almost immediately.
"Doc? What's going on?" The alarm is ringing clear in the boy's voice. "Are you okay?"
"Got a vampire with his organs sizzlin' away like stir fry, what causes it?"
The phone's on speaker on the tool tray, gloves snapping on.
"What? Oh, fuck, uhh-"
"Hurry," he grits out.
He can practically hear Hanna shift gears. "Organs, plural? Silver will blister, but I can't see how it'd do it like that. There's nothing inside?"
"Nothin'."
The painfully long silence of thinking.
"It's got to be," Hanna hesitates, "something still in there, just invisible. Holy oil or holy water."
Good enough to go off of. So he has to clean out the residue, do damage control. For several minutes both ends of the phone call are shuffling, shoes on the floor moving fast, items grabbed with swift hands. All the while, Conrad lies on the table like a cadaver during an autopsy, and it occurs to Worth that he really misses the vampire's nervous comments as opposed to his bleak stillness, replaced by the echo of only his movements in the sterile room. Instead, the only words spoken are Hanna distantly explaining to his partner, hushing his fast flow of syllables as the door shuts and they make their way toward the apartment stairwell.
Pausing, gloves stained with blackish matter, Worth has one more question to ask him.
"How can y’tell when they're dying?"
There's nothing but the shifting of the boy's jacket as he moves, and then he pauses in unison with the doctor, his echoing footsteps ceasing on the landing.
His voice is small and wavering when he says it.
"Worth, is it Conrad?"
"Answer."
He hears the hushed reassurance of the zombie, the whisper of words with a hand to his shoulder. Hanna lets out a shuddering breath. "If they're okay and well-fed they'll be lukewarm. The less okay, the colder. When it's really bad, they turn into ash and smoke."
The doctor peels one of his hands free and wraps his fingers tight around the vampire's arm, impressions pressed into his skin. Barely the ghost of warmth, but warmth all the same.
"Yeah, it's him."
.
When he gets here, he's racing through the doorway and tearing down the hall. Hanna bursts into the operating room, but not far from the cracked door is the doctor with an outstretched arm, barring him, trying to slip into the right spot that blocks him from seeing the dying vampire.
"Let me see him, doc! I can help!"
"There ain't nothin' you can do, Hanna-”
He didn't expect him to actually tackle him, but that's what he does, crashing into the doctor's side and tipping off his equilibrium before either of the men can stop him, darting out of range and toward the table.
"Hanna!" The undead man's voice is a sharp bark, reaching out lightning-quick to steady the doctor before he marches off toward his other target.
"Get 'im out of here!"
The damage is already done. Both the redhead's hands cover his mouth, his blue eyes staring, and he's mumbling things that Worth isn't paying any attention to right now, moving across the tiles to grasp the magician's shoulder, the zombie already on the other side.
They show him out. It's hard to focus after that, when the boy's broken regret spills from the other room and doesn't stop for a long while, even after he knows that Conrad's not dead. Minutes pass, and the holy water settles down to a simmer. A few minutes more, and the downward progress stills completely, replaced by the doctor's hovering uncertainty.
But Conrad’s skin is still lukewarm, and so he waits.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the
Organization for Transformative Works
Fandom: Hanna Is Not A Boy's Name
Rating: Explicit
Word Count: 2.8k
Summary: While spending some time in Tallahassee, Conrad and Worth make the most of having the house to themselves.
I was possessed by a demon to write this instead of the many things I'm supposed to be doing. Hannapocalypse, because of course it is.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the
Organization for Transformative Works
Rating: Explicit
Fandom: HiNaBN; conworth
Summary:
It took four fucking years and Doc Worth had to die, but they are finally communicating the bare minimum about their relationship. Anyway. Doc Worth has kinks.
It's not even that long of a fic, but I've been sick on antibiotics and it's made the whole smut writing process a bit slow going. Anyway, this is for the four and a half people who followed me in 2012 for Hannapocalypse and then somehow didn't leave
