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It was just unfortunate, or perhaps typical of their lives these days, that when the subject exploded, showering the basement walls with a mixture of blood speckled with glistening flecks of pollen, Herbert took the brunt of it.
Dan got some of it too, a spray that splattered his face, but Herbert had been the one wrestling with the poor bastard, who up until that morning had seemed to be responding significantly better than expected, able even to give one-word answers to simple questions and seeming to display an awareness of who he'd been before his death. He'd even been grateful for his reanimation, which up until now was unheard of. Even Herbert, who if asked would have have claimed that gratitude was the very least they should have expected, looked surprised when the subject's arm shot out and snagged his arm to yank him closer in order to grate out a breathy thank you into Herbert's face, while Dan sheepishly lowered the axe he was brandishing.
On the face of it, it looked they might have actually made a significant breakthrough, so much so that just before Dan opened the door to the basement, Herbert, with that faintly manic light in his eyes that usually signified he was in a good mood, had been volubly and excitedly insisting that they should have thought about this before. Clearly they should have been looking at the botanical world all along.
And then they'd stepped through the door and into a goddamn jungle.
That was the way it struck Dan at least, vines twining up and around the bannisters like they were making a break for it, and the deeper recesses of the basement almost completely blocked off by a vast tangle of plant life, all of which, it transpired, had sprouted out of their subject, whose gratitude was beginning to sour now that he'd learned his resurrection from the dead had some downsides, not least of which was the part where he'd exploded.
In the aftermath of that explosion, there was silence, interrupted only by a faint dripping sound from the blood dripping down the wall and the remains of their subject slapping against the concrete floor.
Gradually, Dan came to. There was an unpleasant taste in his mouth, an echo of the heady perfumed fragrance in the air, chokingly cloying. It was the pollen, he realised: faintly sickly smell, floral, but with an underlying hint of rot.
He rolled onto his hands and knees and crawled across to Herbert, who was alive but dazed, groaning as he stirred. He was covered in blood, his shirt so drenched it was sticking to his skin and faintly shimmering. As Dan shook him, a droplet fell off his jaw and oozed under his collar.
"Herbert! Herbert, are you..."
"I'm fine," Herbert snapped, although there was something about his voice that suggested that wasn't entirely true, and that he knew it. He opened his eyes and removed his glasses, blinking owlishly as he hunted around for a clean bit of shirt to wipe them on and came up with nothing, achieving nothing but to smear them about a bit. He cast a critical eye over the pieces of the subject still flapping on the floor and the discarded axe. "A little overkill?"
"That wasn't all me," Dan said, as he helped Herbert to his feet. "I think this batch of the serum might have a couple of unexpected side effects."
Herbert's brows contracted in irritation. "And we were doing so well," he started to say, and then he trailed off, blinking rapidly. He started to sit up, about to say something, probably a peevish attempt to place the blame on their subject, and then he wavered, as though he'd suddenly been hit by a wave of lightheadedness.
Dan frowned. "Are you okay? What is this stuff?"
As Herbert glanced towards him, Dan saw with creeping unease that there was something wrong with his eyes. They were glazed, the pupils unnaturally dilated. "Whatever it is," he said distantly, his words were slurring together, "it clearly has a psychoactive affect. It feels a lot like the diluted serum I used to use, only much stronger. Probably transdermal absorption. I can already feel it kicking in." He blinked again, his eyes flicking off to the side to fix on something over Dan's shoulder. "Oh, and it's a hallucinogen. That's new."
And then he folded forwards, moving from a state of scientific curiosity to unconsciousness, fainting against Dan, who wrapped his arms around his back, and fumbled at Herbert's neck for his pulse. His own skin felt tight and vaguely tender where the blood had hit him, stinging a little. He cursed and scooped Herbert up in his arms, kicking pieces of the subject aside as he headed for the stairs.
It set in quick, whatever it was.
By the time he'd gotten halfway up the stairs to the second floor Herbert had regained semi-consciousness, but he was also feverish, his skin even more waxy than usual and sweat beading on his brow. His pupils were so dilated his eyes almost looked black, and his gaze kept twitching between Dan and whatever beings he could see in the shadows.
"You should put me down," he mumbled, although Dan could have pointed out that if Herbert really felt that way, then why was he clinging on so tightly to Dan's t-shirt that Dan probably wouldn't have been able to put him down even if he'd wanted to.
In the bathroom, he set Herbert down, and reached into the shower to turn the water on. The pipes groaned and creaked, coming to reluctant life, taking almost half a minute before the first trickle of water began to seep from the showerhead, and even longer to turn from a trickle to a stream. By then Herbert was bent over the sink, rinsing off his face with palmfuls of water. Dan hesitated, eyeing the back of his shirt, the only part of him that hadn't been hit, but which was now soaked through with fever sweat.
"Are you okay if I leave you for a minute? I'm going to see if we've got anything to bring the fever down."
"I think I can manage, Dan."
"Okay."
He was in the kitchen scrabbling through the cupboards when he felt the effects hit him full force, sweeping up on him like a tide. One moment he was fine, albeit worried about Herbert, maybe a little warm but nothing to cause any immediate alarm, and then the next he was struck by a surge of dizziness so strong he had to catch himself against the counter.
Recovering, he grabbed the packet of drugs and shoved them into his pocket. He headed up the stairs again, and burst through the door of the bathroom, saw in an instant that while Herbert had succeeded in moving from the sink to the shower in one piece, he'd failed to take off any of his clothes.
From the looseness of his tie and the undone couple of top buttons an attempt had been made. Herbert had managed to kick off his shoes and socks, but when it had come to his clothes he'd quickly abandoned the attempt in favour of thowing himself at the mercy of the water in the hopes that it might wash him clean.
He was sprawled in the shower, half slumped against the tiles, hands spread to steady himself, his legs splayed out apparently to stop himself from falling, his shirt untucked. His face was turned upwards towards the shower's feeble flow, the water cleaving clean trails through the blood on his face, the skin beneath pink with the flush of the fever. As Dan started to pull his t-shirt over his head, Herbert lowered his gaze, blinking the water out of his eyes so he could stare at Dan, squinting a little in the way he did whenever he wasn't wearing his glasses.
"I just wanted to get clean," he said defensively.
"Undressing would help."
Herbert stared at Dan a little harder, and then shook his head, squeezing his eyes shut as his head twitched from side to side in a fervent expression of denial. "I couldn't wait," he said. "It was taking too long. I could feel it soaking through my clothes, and the longer it took... the more I could feel it affecting me." His eyes opened again, fixing on Dan. His hands flexed against the tiles as though searching for support, his lips turning down at the corners. "And now I can't seem to make my fingers work."
"Let me help," Dan said.
Herbert flinched but looked at him plaintively, helpless and miserable and just a little bit irritated. He shuddered as Dan reached into the shower. The open neck of his shirt had revealed the top of his chest. Dan had seen Herbert shirtless before, and once even fully in the nude while they'd been in Peru, and those brief glimpses were rare enough that he still felt a flash of surprise to see that Herbert had chest hair, currently slicked close to his skin. This time, his surprise was tinged with delight and a deeper, darker thrill of arousal.
Herbert's shirt was soaked through, the fabric almost translucent as it clung to his body. He was breathing hard, almost panting, his chest heaving, his eyes fixed on Dan, flicking from his shoulders to his chest to his lips as Dan reached into the shower, wincing a little at the temperature of the water. The plumbing in the house was always temperamental so the water was only somewhere slightly north of lukewarm, but maybe he was a little feverish himself because it felt colder against his skin. He hesitated for a moment, and then Herbert leaned forward, grasped his outstretched arm and pulled him into the shower.
Dan yelped as the water struck him full in the face, simultaneously both uncomfortably cold and the most refreshing thing he'd ever felt. Herbart had managed to pull himself off balance and was now slumped against him, clinging to him, his nails digging in to keep himself upright. The slight sting of his nails was just another thrill of sensation. Pants and all Dan stepped into the shower, pushing Herbert backwards against the wall. The water flooded down his back and his spine, soaking through his hair. He dropped his hands to Herbert's shirt, meaning to unbutton it, and instead Herbert shivered, twisted his head backwards and kissed him, open-mouthed and urgent.
Dan had thought about kissing Herbert before, let himself idly consider it in the moments when he was tired and horny and feeling evey moment of his self-enforced loneliness, and it was almost exactly like what he'd imagined it would be. Herbert was clearly unused to kissing, the movements of his lips and tongue those of someone only familiar with kissing in the theoretical sense, but nonetheless had put a great deal of thought into how it probably worked.
He could taste the pollen on Herbert’s mouth, Dan realised with his last fragment of self-control, and it was all against his chest too, the lingering residue on Herbert's shirt now directly on Dan's skin. He was burning up, the substance stinging against his stomach and his nipples, and his hands were ghosting down Herbert's waist to the waistband of his pants, still theoretically in an attempt to undress him in order to get him clean and in reality... in reality, he wasn't sure what the hell he was doing, only that something had knotted in his chest, a deep and aching desire he hadn't realised existed, but which had clearly been there for a long time.
He broke off the kiss, eyes closing. Herbert's mouth was on his cheekbone, tongue playing over his skin, working its way to his earlobe. And somehow Dan's hand was pushing greedily up under Herbert's shirt to feel the hairs of his chest, the tight stiffened nipples, and even if he wasn't quite sure why, then maybe the noise Herbert made when Dan tweaked a nipple lightly, a startled gasp that turned a desperate groan of want, as his hands scrabbled at Dan's back, might have had something to do with it.
"We have to get you clean," Dan managed between kisses, and it was almost a plea as he jerked the button of Herbert's fly loose before yanking the zipper down, and Herbert was agreeing, telling him that that seemed like the prudent course of action even while Dan was shoving his pants down over his hips. Herbert's teeth closed on his earlobe and he groaned involuntarily, grinding himself against Herbert without quite meaning to, and up until that moment he hadn't realised he was hard.
Every inch of his skin felt sensitive, as though the outer layer had been scored away. He could feel Herbert's skin, the hairs and the bones beneath the skin, the flesh beneath, his hip bones and the muscles of his thighs as they splayed, opening outwards to let Dan in closer, and weird how well they fit together, weird how much he wanted to do this, despate for it suddenly in a way that couldn't be entirely the effects of the pollen.
When his hand closed around the base of Herbert's cock, he fought it, pausing for a moment, forehead resting against the cool tiles, trying to think past the weight and the heat of the cock in his hand and Herbert's panting little breaths next to his ear. Somehow he couldn't seem to focus on anything else.
Herbert's arm curled around his back, the nails digging in at the base of his spine, scratching down to the top of his buttocks, digging in hard as if Herbert wanted to know every inch of him intimately, not just the outer parts but his insides too, as though he would have found every part of Dan fascinating. And this was Herbert West, so it was probably true, and while that wouldn't have surprised Dan, the fact that he took intense pleasure in knowing it was probably true did, a little. Herbert always had been one to value even the less important body parts, skin, organs, bone, viscera, the meat and flesh of a man.
"Please," he hissed in Dan's ear, less a plea than an accusation. Dan kissed him to shut him up and then he was dropping down onto his knees, pushing Herbert's sodden pants down around his ankles. And here was something else he'd never done, although he'd had it done to him, so he got the gist, much like Herbert had managed to figure out kissing.
He slid his tongue around the head, let it slip inside his mouth, running his tongue around it, hesitant at first and then more urgently, taking it deeper as Herbert's hands knotted in his hair and the water ran down over his head. It was cold now, or maybe it just felt that way because of his overheated skin, but he didn't care, didn't give a damn about anything but this and the sounds Herbert was making. Herbert's legs wavered and he almost collapsed, but Dan wrapped his hands around the backs of his thighs, hooking one over his shoulder, his fingers twining between Herbert's buttocks as he rubbed the underside of his balls.
They fucked up against the shower wall, which was probably a bad idea for a number of reasons, not least because of the risk of slipping and breaking their necks, Herbert reaching back to push up underneath Dan's shirt and claw at his chest, Dan's bunched up pants against the backs of his thighs and his mouth at Herbert's throat. He pushed his hand up under Herbert's shirt to grasp his waist, reached around him to wrap his hand around Herbert's cock, once more hard as steel and aching, the movements of Dan's hand matching his own urgent thrusts while the water drenched the both of them, half-blinding them both, soaking their clothes and at least diluting the pollen-infused blood even if it didn't entirely wash it away. He kissed Herbert's throat, nipped lightly at his ear as Herbert twisted his face around. Dan leant forward over him, letting Herbert's lips meet him, the kiss an urgent claiming one before Herbert broke off, groaning in pleasure, the hand braced against the tiles crooking into claws.
Dan pressed his lips to Herbert's throat again, plastering the skin with more kisses as Herbert reached back, burying his fingers in Dan's hair and pushing his body back against him. Dan felt Herbert's cock kick in his hand as he came, and came himself a few seconds later, groaning his muffled pleasure into Herbert's throat.
And in the aftermath, he thought: shit.
"Did I hurt you?" he asked, pulling away, eyeing up the red mark on Herbert's throat with a flash of alarm, wondering what the hell had gotten hold of him, figuring that it was just Herbert West. "Damn it, Herbert, I'm sorry."
Herbert shook his head, shooting him a look of impatience. Dan's anxiety eased off, replaced by a pang of regret for another very different reason. He should have known that to Herbert this was probably just an unpredictable side-effect, no better or worse than the reanimated running amok, and at least no one had died, or at least no one who hadn't been dead already.
"Good," he said, not at all meaning it.
"Definitely some unexpected side effects," Herbert murmured faintly once they were out of their clothes, and, Yeah, no shit, Dan thought.
Herbert, however, wasn't finished. "Nothing that can't be mitigated, though," he said, and Dan shot him a look, trying to work out what the hell what he meant by that, and whether it meant what he though it might, and if so what that might mean, and trying to do all of that while dizzily realising that he still wasn't used to seeing Herbert naked, and that he might never get used to it, or to the way Herbert responded eagerly when Dan stepped in towards him, still dripping wet and his skin more sensitive than ever, prickling with gooseflesh in the cool damp air of the bathroom as he pressed their bodies together.
That, he was pretty sure, was something else he'd never get used to.
But he was doing to give it a damn good try.