Characters: Doc Worth and Conrad Achenleck

Prompt: Erasers

Notes: One-shot. Written while listening to 24, by Switchfoot. AGAIN. Jeeze. That song just fits all the characters perfectly in my head, I guess. Please give this a chance. You'll understand it more later if you read my other stories. :]

As hard as it was to believe, Worth bathed. He was actually a decently clean man; no, he didn't get the luxuries of shaving every day (who was to say he didn't like his stubble?), and no, he did not get the privilege of hot water when he did take a shower or bath. This was to be expected; he didn't make millions. People who visited Doctor Worth were shady, and as he had learned, there are two kinds of shady: the rich and the jackass.

Mostly, Worth got the jackass.

The shady rich types were people who wanted to have operations and get medications under the table, totally hush-hush, paying big bucks to secure their anonymity. The shady jackasses were people who promised big and then ran off with your shit. That was the sort of customer the doctor got. And then there was Hanna, Conrad, that Zombie guy; the charity cases. He helped them out because they did more than business with him. Actually, he didn't really understand why he helped them out mostly free of charge; that was a stupid policy, but one he stuck to.

He thought about his lack of finances and his clientele as he stood under the lukewarm water of a rickety shower faucet, with terrible water pressure and a tendency to decide it didn't want to work anymore and randomly shut off for minutes, hours, days, weeks at a time. He stared at the wall, the peeling paper and the scurrying, harmless garden spider trying desperately to find its way out of the wall, back into whatever dark corner it made its web in. He looked down and saw his own, tall, thin frame; he could nearly see his ribs now. He was hungry. What time was it? Who cared. He wanted a cigarette, though getting one right now would require not only getting out from under the water, but finding his lighter which he'd lost an hour ago. Again. For the seventeenth time that day.

Ssshhhhhhht!

The sound of the showerhead going on temporary strike. He hit the tub's drain with his foot, and kicked the tub's side hard with his hand, sitting down and realizing, just as he did every time he had to take a bath, that he was too tall to fit into this anymore and he really should get a proper showerhead or a larger bathtub, but who had the money for that, and why did he really want to go out of his way anyway? Everything just broke down in the end, even the human body, and sure, vampires and zombies and werewolves and things like that, all claimed to defy that law, but even they broke down and got hurt once in a while. Why did he really need a new bathing system? This did the job fine.

He stared down at the water, oddly misty, and was forced to hug his arms tight into his chest, looking kind of like a really messed up psychopath in the dim light of the standing lamp in the corner and the tub forcing him into a sort of fetal-position. He set his forehead down on his knees and heaved a sigh that sounded too hollow and hoarse for his liking, but what was too his liking anymore, really, except cigarettes and sometimes chocolate, maybe a couple good books and now he was starting to sound like a widow in her late forties with no life. He cracked a crooked smile at the thought and wiped it away quickly.

He didn't know how much longer he sat there in the suspicious water, but it must have been a while. When his eyes opened again the room was still dimly lit as ever, but the water was still and cold, and his skin was wrinkled and his scars looked strange bunched up that way. He stood up and drained the water, threw the damp, overused towel over his head, drying his hair as he stepped out of the tub and looked around for something, muttering to himself about his lighter again and remembering where he'd left it.

He went into his office re-dressed in his clothes and lab-coat trimmed with fashionable yellowing fur, pulling a dingy lighter from out underneath a large pink eraser, and he looked around the empty medical facility that smelled way too much like hospital-grade sterilizer despite it's grungy feel. He did a double-take; that eraser. It wasn't his.

Doc didn't use pencils, really, because that wasn't the way you did things, with pencil, where you could go back and change things. Doc couldn't change anything he had done, or that had been done to him. He couldn't change what he'd said or not said. Nothing could he change, and he wasn't going to start changing things by using a pencil. He picked it up and looked around, feeling the odd rubber in his hand and turning it over.

He pocketed the dastardly thing and picked up a post-it note left on his desk, frowning. Conrad's artsy handwriting.

'I came to see you, get my dinner, but you were probably busy. Didn't see you. Helped myself. Conrad.'

He rolled his eyes, cursed a little, and then he froze.

He backtracked to the doorway of his private quarters, and looked down at the carpeting. It was a shag, vile, terrible brown color, and it left a perfect impression of anything set on it. Conrad had been standing in the doorway.

He laughed a little bitterly and shook his head, shutting the door and sitting down in the rolling chair by his desk. That eraser was Conrad's, he'd written the note and when Doc looked at it, he could see that Conrad had been trying to write something other than 'probably busy'. He sighed and shut his eyes, pulling out a cigarette, lighting up his favorite pastime, and propping his feet up on his desk, tossing the note into the overflowing wastebasket and keeping the eraser.

No, Doc didn't want to start using pencils, because he couldn't change anything that had happened to him. However, he kept the eraser as a reminder that the people who did use pencils were often just trying to make sure they didn't do any more damage.

Worth didn't care about damage done or damage received.

Doc Worth was made of damage.

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