Work Text:
“You’ve done this before, right?”
Herbert’s face went slack with annoyance, and Dan felt another nervous laugh bubble up inside of him, fingers gingerly loosening their grip on Herbert’s wrist. Tension mounted between them regardless, the operation at hand a delicate procedure. It required finesse, he’d been told. It required care. “Okay, well, jeez. How am I supposed to know?”
“You could pay attention,” Herbert snipped, and Dan bristled a little, lips twisting. “I’ve found you get distracted far too easily, Daniel.” His gaze dropped back to the task at hand, aloof. “All the signs were there.”
“Easy for you to say, Mr. Hyper-Focus,” Dan muttered, letting go of Herbert’s arm entirely to instead feint at his sides; letting the unease ebb easily away. The scientist sharply maneuvered away, shooting Dan a reproachful scowl; the pink slant of his mouth full of pure disapproval. He’d started gathering lines around it recently, Dan had noticed - no doubt the result of many years spent frowning.
Or perhaps, Dan hoped, the later ones more recent - smiling.
“You asked me to do this, Dan,” Herbert continued somberly. “Now I’d appreciate if you left me alone. This is my work.” He nodded in the direction of Dan’s half of the kitchen island. “You do yours.”
Looking back down at the [slightly burnt and misshapen] cookies in front of himself, Dan Cain found that he couldn’t quite fight back a smile.
It was another festive time of year, a new town and a whole lot less trouble. They had miraculously made it eight whole months without incident - unheard of in their line of work, so to speak. Dan had been hoping the move out to California might’ve benefited them as such - most people didn’t so much as bat an eye at the unusual; including corpses shambling around the rolling Calabasas hills.
Out here in Malibu, everything was - serene, strangely enough. Cosmetic surgery wasn’t something Dan ever thought he’d find himself working in, but with its attachment to a hospital and nobody batting an eye at their smattering of references [mostly redirecting to a thin network of friends], it was as good as they’d had in a long while.
Good enough, in fact, to afford a decent house with big windows overlooking the water - small, by Californian standards, but with a nice, big balcony to watch the sun go down across the waves. Apparently, there’d been gruesome crimes there - things that left a stain, if not on the floor, then on the house’s reputation. But far be it for Herbert West and Dan Cain to look a gift horse [er, house] in the mouth.
The only caveat was that the Pacific had nothing on the Atlantic as far as Dan was concerned. But the rest was nice. Even Los Angeles smog smearing the skyline in the distance couldn’t phase him when he took his morning cup of coffee out on the deck to watch the sunrise.
It felt, finally , like they had some kind of life .
Which was why when their new[ish] officemates mentioned having a holiday party, Dan had leapt at the opportunity to socialize. He’d been itching for human interaction - something Herbert could hardly stand to under stand - and wanted to make sure they kept a good thing going. After all, the more relationships they built before things inevitably went south again [at some point, but not now] - the better. He had to keep on his charming A-Game, so to speak, after all.
What was truly great about it, however, was that Herbert had found himself an unflappable niche in the cosmetic surgery department. He had finesse with the scalpel, of course, and the ability to almost-perfectly reset any cartilage, bone, or musculature - but it was actually his bedside personality [or lack thereof] that had garnered him some positive attention for a change.
Dan smiled to himself as he recalled the receptionist’s cackle as she batted at Herbert’s arm while he shrank away, bewildered. He’d said something so utterly scathing about a client that it would’ve made anyone else’s hair curl, but Jessica didn’t mind in the slightest.
“Doctor West, you’re just too much.” Herbert had looked to Dan with deer-in-the-headlight eyes, and Dan had simply grinned at him, brows raised. Two thumbs up had followed, albeit both were met with an exasperated would-you-HELP-me stare that managed to garner enough pity from Dan to rescue Herbert from the interaction he’d never asked for.
But Herbert was funny. Few people knew that about him. It was nice to finally find someplace that actually celebrated his wry sense of humor - along with his practical jokes [and some less practical; “–no, Herbert, they didn’t want to see a pair of lips in preservation fluid–”].
Dan hummed a little bit, contentedly icing wobbly blue lines on a six-pointed gingerbread star, haphazardly following up with a handful of scattered sugar-pearls. “How’s this look?”
“Deplorable,” said Herbert without so much as taking his eyes off the meticulously-piped red scarf on his snowman. His batch had of course been perfectly-executed, each shape holding despite the high temperature. He’d been insistent that they use the same recipe, but in making multiple batches; Dan had gotten a little careless - hence why his were a bit more unstable, he supposed. Too much baking… powder, right?
Or was that soda–
“Dan,” Herbert smacked his arm gently and Dan started, pulling back a bit too late. The icing from his piping bag dribbled over the end of a tree, smearing across the counter.
“Feels familiar,” Dan’s mouth said before his brain caught up with him. Herbert gave him an affronted look that only led to further laughter, Dan’s cheeks flooding with rosy color. “Oh, c’mon. You were thinking it too.”
“I was not, ” Herbert declared, turning up his nose and going back to what he was doing. Swiping a finger through the frosting, Dan shrugged and popped the digit in his mouth, watching as Herbert painstakingly applied small bursts of a tiny piping tip to create a knitwear pattern on his snowman.
“You really wanna win the best cookie prize, huh.”
“Don’t you, ” Herbert said, then flushed - as Dan smiled like the cat who’d caught the canary.
“Why, Herbert,” he drawled, dancing his blue-stained fingers over his partner’s way, “you do care.”
“Don’t you touch me with those hands, Dan Cain,” Herbert warned, holding up one of his own as if to ward him off. Brown eyes sparkling, Dan snuck closer with a villainous laugh, wiggling his phalanges.
“Do not, ” Herbert ordered, dropping his piping bag altogether to assume a more defensive position. Dan snatched at his sides, then swept around to drag a finger through more of the loose sugar, Herbert beginning to bolt around the island. “Dan. DAN!”
“C’mere, Herbert - you aren’t afraid of something sweet, are you?” Dan’s voice was more goofy than ghoulish, especially when Herbert started floundering away, voice rising shrilly.
“DANNN–”
Dan snatched the back of Herbert’s shirt with his cleaner hand, and, dragging him in, nudged his foot against Herbert’s ankle to throw him off-balance. For one beautiful moment, they stood in their 70’s house, suspended in the kitchen beneath an orange-and-white light fixture, over tile that had been well-loved and worn under the steps of people who preceded them. There was nothing but the sound of their breath, the distant waves, and the rumbling of a truck passing by.
It was happiness incarnate, Dan thought. And again -
It was life.
One he risked by calmly and purposefully smudging a line of bright cobalt across Herbert’s freckled cheek, stopping just short of his enormous glasses. Green-hazel eyes went from shocked, to incensed, to narrow slits of pure venom. The thrill of it all brought a refreshed smirk to Dan’s face, even as Herbert icily vowed, “you’re going to pay for that, Dan.”
“Oh, yeah?” Dan mumbled - then, sweeping Herbert back up enough to swoop in and gnaw the sugar back off his face, growled a more emphatic, “oh yeah?” that broke the barrier of Herbert’s wrath enough so that he squirmed and squeaked [though he’d definitely deny it]. Dan’s arms found their way around Herbert, and though he knew the other man could break away at any moment, he chose to stay.
They’d both chosen to stay.
Ten towns in six years. It’d been exhausting, impossible, downright dangerous and life-threatening at times, but moments like these affirmed that everything would be alright.
They were home for the holidays with each other. They had a future, their work continued, and this was, Dan thought, perhaps as close to “happily ever after” the two of them could get, given who they were. What they did.
They’d never made cookies together before, never been so open about things before. Never felt so free, at least from what Dan could see, hear and feel .
Whatever happened next, for now, it was pure happiness.
And Dan could honestly not ask for any more.