Work Text:
I will not say that I loved Herbert West, for it would mean nothing now. He is not there to hear it. He did not believe in the spiritual, the soul, the body as anything but a collection of chemical processes, and there is no act of science that could return him to life. Least of all did he care for sentiment without purpose. So he said to me, once, as we lay in each other’s embrace.
I will say that I did not reveal all about our friendship.
In the time that I knew him, West spent the better part of hours muttering under his breath, and the better part of days saying nothing at all. His hands were mottled and burned, and his coats were painted with indelible fluids and stains. He failed to eat, drink, or sleep, without reminder, and on occasion I found him collapsed. Not a finger could be laid upon his belongings unless he demanded it, and without explicit permission he was not to be touched.
Most found him an unbearable creature, he told me carelessly, and he thought the same of most in turn. But I knew his rules, and I did not deign to break them; and so he relaxed, nigh-imperceptibly, in my presence. Perhaps he was hard to visit, harder still to live with, but his eccentricities captivated me, and his company more still.
Come, he would tell me, and lay his hand upon my arm. We would walk together, between classes and boarding houses, and converse of every man-made philosophy beneath the sun. West scoffed at discussion of ethics, and regarded most of the world’s greatest thinkers with a caustic derision, but those who would brand him a cynic did not see the excitement that seized him at his great and terrible work. When speaking of his macabre discoveries, he became as animated as his corpses, and gazed up at me with the faintest of smiles.
Never once did West tell me he was grateful for my presence, but it was not in his nature to say such things. It was in those eyes that I saw it, or think that I saw it. Perhaps I flatter myself. But I believe it.
And one day as I moved to cross the threshold of his cold and dingy room, he looked at me calmly through his spectacles, and stated that I could touch him.
It was not spoken as an invitation, and indeed, nothing came of it at the time; but that mere consent was not simply mere, and his tacit trust left me undone.
That was the greatest effect Herbert West had upon me. In but our first year of association, he undid my propriety like laces in his hands. I had never been fond of the killing of animals, but with West I caught them, and slew them, and handled their small carcasses as they writhed into second life. Every childhood lesson about the sanctity of the grave was nothing before his soft, urging voice and slitted eyes, and even as I flinched at the sight of pale and stolen bodies, I was at his side to carry their cold weight.
I did not even do it with regret. Not then.
So when I entered his room at midnight, bearing glasses of water and wine, I suppose it was little surprise that his hands brushed my fingertips as I passed them to him, and I, remembering my allowance, reached out to smooth his tousled blonde hair. Less surprising, still, that my hand traveled down his face to rest upon his cheek, or that his lashes briefly flickered before he leaned into the touch. Soon he moved forward, closing the gap between us, until he settled at last upon my lap.
West hooked a delicate finger beneath my chin, and drew my face downward to meet his eyes, as cool as crystals and as hungry as the dark. He asked if I feared him. I said that I did, which set him laughing softly, and his left hand traced my chest, stroking my ribs through my shirt until I shivered.
Then he asked why, if I feared him, I did not simply run away; and I told him that fear was an irrational, animal feeling, and I wished to overcome it. But it was a lie, for my other thoughts of West were far more animal and irrational, and they were the last thing I desired to erase.
I have never been kissed the way he kissed me then. I believe I never shall be again.
It was a warm, fierce, clumsy thing, for his lips held none of the skill of his hands. But neither did mine, for even before our intimacy, my work had consumed me. I had known little of my own passions, and less still of their targets. An idle part of me wondered if I ought to recoil from this shared perversity, but it vanished as soon as it came. In the pursuit of knowledge, we had done much that the world deemed distasteful; and I cared for nothing save for the discovery that came with each whisper of breath, and the fascination in every caressing touch.
We had been cordial before, dancing around attachment across the frigid barrier of surnames, but his fingers on my collar brought “Herbert” from my lips, and soon it was my name that was murmured in my ears, and buried in the nape of my neck. He was not gentle in his desires, and at times was almost ravenous, as if touch was a gift he’d never received and he wished to bathe in it. Teeth scraped me from his bruising mouth, and I cried out as I pulled him closer, enthralled by every new scar I found concealed beneath fabric.
If ever a fly was caught in a spider’s web, willingly bound while calling its captor a lover, it was I. Dimly, I knew I lay prone before my own ruin, but I did not mind it. For that spider looked upon me with dancing blue eyes, and I believe I saw strange fondness in them.
…I should not hold such a memory close to me. Not now - not now that he is gone. But I cannot help but wonder if he ever acted as such with another. The logical part of me assures the notion’s impossibility, and jealousy clings to it.
I will not say that I loved Herbert West. Karmic fate has long since destroyed him, and should any godly punishment exist, he cannot have escaped it. Now he lives on in me alone.
There, for better and for worse, he shall always remain.