A Bad Name

requested by a couple people, although I can't remember which people now. Anyhow, this is what I did with my measley one week off of school before summer term.

Shot through the heart, and you're to blame, Darling—

-"You Give Love a Bad Name"

Republic of the Captain; the barricade

February, year three

"Look, Xena, this is one bomb. How ya expect me ter hit anythin' from way th' fuck over here?"

Something exploded not too far away. Two hours into a siege, and both armies were as stalemated as they were quickly running out of stamina.

Conrad heard the question. It was tired and exasperated and stubborn, and more than anything, it was rhetorical. But to Conrad, it felt like a challenge.

Eyes up the hill. Miguel was better protected than his men, chances were that bomb wouldn't work on him even if they found a way to launch it the full distance with perfect aim, which they couldn't. Amend that. Maybe with a clear shot and a scope he could get a bullet into the man's head, but he didn't have either even if there wasn't a djinn in the way.

Conrad reached down, only half aware of the movement, and curled his finger under the trigger guard on his gun.

Everything snapped into place in a perfect flash. He knew a way. It was dangerous and batshit insane and nothing a human could pull off but—he had the speed, he had the instincts, and very little to lose. He had everything that no one else here had. This one time, he actually had what it would take to pull this off.

He could get killed. When people have the chance to aim, he'd noticed that they tend to shoot into the thick of the torso, looking for easy to catch organs. There was only one organ that could put him out, and they weren't likely to aim for it. But at the speed he'd be moving, he'd be more liable to catch a stray shot than anything else. One unlucky dodge at the wrong moment and there goes his head. Conrad had always had trouble understanding, though, that he was functionally immortal. Although he knew intellectually that he was much less likely to be successfully killed in any battle scenario as compared to, say, a run of the mill investigation, he'd never really believed it. Deep down, he was still certain that when a bomb dropped on him, he wasn't getting up again.

This didn't feel much more dangerous, all odds and statistic be damned. It was only that taking that first, voluntary step out onto the field required a lot more bravery.

The trigger guard was ice cold where it bumped the back of his knuckle. He looked up at Worth, who was watching him with a kind of keen intensity, tracking all of Conrad's twitches with dark blue narrowed eyes. Waiting to see what he'd do? Waiting to see if he'd sit down and give up?

Indignity swelled up inside Conrad like an infection.

"You know how," he said, feeling his lips peel back over his teeth, "last night you said I was a useless hunk of bloodless meat and I'd have done the world more good if I'd just stayed dead the night we met Adelaide?"

Worth made a face like—he squinted, like he didn't understand, and his lips twitched downward like they did when he got nicked mid-strike, or found himself suddenly incapacitated in the middle of a battle. "Yeah?" he said, tone completely devoid of emotion.

"Well…" Conrad said. The infection spread up through his chest into his throat, and he had to scrape his words up past the swelling burn. "Let's see you say that again, doctor."

Before the swell could burst in his throat, Conrad reached over—snap fast—jerked the bomb out of Worth's grip and launched himself up over the top of the barricade, foot pushing so swiftly off the sill of a car window that he thought he might have felt the fiberglass give way under him.

Funny that the most superhuman feat he'd ever manage would be on a night like tonight. Typical, really.

Conrad landed on the ground like a spring and burst into motion. It felt kind of like… this was so stupid, he felt stupid just for half-thinking it, but it felt kind of like being Neo, for a minute. No wonder the other vampires thought they were so fucking cool all the time, if they could do this whenever they felt like it.

Lucky jerks, them with their sires and him having to muddle his way through the simplest bullshit like a disabled kindergartener.

And all this was going through his head as countless armed enemies panicked and turned their sights on him, and fired, and it was like dodging dodgeballs in gym class—Conrad grinned and ducked under one particularly well aimed shot. The bastards back home could eat their hearts out. Who was shit at dodgeball now?

Up through a thicket of men, cobalt coils of slippery smoke were shifting. There we go. Conrad ripped through a fleshy obstacle without pausing, and he could feel terrible about that later because right then he was too busy feeling like he'd finally slipped into high gear after years of fumbling with the clutch. Man ahead, muzzle up. Conrad pitched the bomb into his chest, and in the spark-crackle second before the flames came whooshing up, Conrad thought he heard the snap of ribs.

"Coach Tippleton," he snarled, "I hope you're rolling over in your grave you tyrannical git!"

More targets. Conrad flipped up his gun and fired all twelve rounds into fumbling, swearing bodies. Shield charms sizzled and flared in bright spiderweb cracks and shattered. Men screamed.

Jackson.

He stood there, his hands on his lowered gun, surveying the scene—overconfident son of a bitch, he knew that Conrad couldn't kill him. No one could kill him, not while that overgrown housefire was watching over him.

But Conrad wasn't here to kill him.

Here was something a human could not have done, something only he out of all of them was equipped to do. Long claws bone white in the darkness, Conrad tore his way through the coils of blue smoke and into the eye of the storm, where Jackson stood insulated against the chaotic uncertainty of the world. The coils tore like vines and plasma, but vampire claws are made for killing things that can't be killed and he was moving too fast to be held back by anything short of a mountain.

Jackson's smirk had barely begun to sink down into bewilderment when Conrad was already through, and his claws were wound up in leather string, and the little gray bag at the end was suspended in sudden empty air.

Electricity flooded through Conrad's body, like he'd stuck his hand into a socket. Oh, my, he might not have… thought this one through… as well as he'd assumed...

Here is what it feels like to be plugged into the raging current that makes up an earthbound djinn: imagine a flashflood, or a tsunami, and then imagine being ten feet under the waves as they crash down over a nuclear storage bunker, and then imagine that the waves are made of acid and you are being dissolved as you're spun around, eyes and fingers eaten away, teeth failing, mouth filling—

Worth's hand fisted in the back of Conrad's collar, jerked hard, and pulled him up out of the crashing, chaotic mixed metaphor.

"Go back!" he shouted, yanking Conrad back, away from the blazing scarecrow of bones and cloth that used to be Miguel Jackson. "Get yer fuckin' ass in gear and go back!"

The vampire was barely aware of moving again. In retrospect, he must have been running. Unlike the approach, which had been dizzily fast but stark clear, the retreat was murky and seemingly endless. His body was functioning, knees pistoning and arms swinging, but his head was still swirling in thin eddies of solvent.

It was a bloody good thing Worth had pointed him in the right direction or he might have just disappeared out into the desert until morning, and wouldn't that have been an anti-climatic exit. Come wandering back in around dawn like an addled senior citizen, hey Connie you missed all the action, nice job ditching us.

Conrad stumbled, a few feet from the barricade, and the shock to his system finally shook him out of his daze. His ankle twisted under him, arms pinwheeled, the blast width of a live round broke the air under one sleeve, and then he righted himself just in time to grab the snapped antenna of the car in front of him. Oh god that was embarrassing. Had Worth seen?

Last he'd checked, Worth was practically running backwards while firing up the hill so, no, probably not.

In the fraction millisecond it took Conrad to scramble for a foothold, Worth had already grabbed him by the—are you kidding, that's practically wrist-to-crotch contact—hips and boosted him up high enough to grab the roof and roll over. There was a wet thudding sound. Conrad's stagnant heart dropped.

Conrad hit the dirt, joints bent, and wobbled to his feet. No bullet holes. No pain. No gooey oozing blood. He patted down his limbs, looking for wounds, while Worth tumbled down this side of the wall after him and… that wasn't right… the doctor just fell, like a sack of potatoes, and didn't get up. Something smelled… really good…

Two plus two and oh holy shit.

His knees protested loudly when he dropped down and practically skidded across the frosty dirt to Worth's side. He was just looking blankly up, eyes unfocused, and there was a fluttering hole in the fabric of that god awful denim jacket he'd sewn this monstrous yellow fur lining onto last January and

Conrad's mouth was moving but the words weren't his.

Worth wasn't listening anyway. His face was red splotched with exertion and his breath was coming in labored drags and his nails were half buried in the scraped up dirt and his eyes were far away. Half stunned, the undead man looked up to call for Worth, the shout deformed on his lips when it sank in that Worth was already here, that Worth couldn't fix this problem, that Worth was the problem.

Conrad swung his legs over Worth's hips—flashback to just before Christmas, forest floor, something huge and dead not a hundred feet away and Worth's hips, just like this—and peeled back the jacket. Panicking wouldn't fix this. Panicking wasn't fixing this. He stripped off the jacket and stared down at the huge dark blossom spreading over Worth's chest.

Conrad panicked.

Conrad grabbed him by the lapels and screamed at him because that was the only thing he knew how to do.

"You weren't supposed to come after me!" he shouted, vaguely aware that he was probably entering the denial stage and fuck, fuck, fuck no he wasn't entering anything because there was nothing here to be entered.

Worth's vision flared sharp, finally making eye contact. Pupils stuttered. "Wha'," he managed, "y'really think I'd letcha commit suicide withou' backup?"

The word suicide burned hot and cold in the back of Conrad's throat. Suicide? Was that what this was? He'd only wanted to prove a point, he hadn't meant—but why would Worth—

He asked.

Worth answered.

Coming out of Worth's mouth, it sounded so different. If he closed his eyes and willed away the doctor's face, he could hear the jealous, grieving lover throw himself, like Cyrano, into his last yearning sacrifice. The aria, the red splash of baroque, a lone voice reprising a duet—he didn't know why it reminded him of an opera. It would make a terrible opera.

All that compressed, lonely passion, and he was supposed to believe that this was coming from Doc Worth? That the lone singer in the final act was this man who could bury the closest thing he had to a best friend with dry eyes? This was, to be clear, the same man who had turned down every olive branch Conrad had ever offered him, and who had systematically ripped the emotional stuffing out of Conrad every time he was stupid enough to leave an opening.

Some awful dark place in the shadows of his heart wasn't even certain Worth could feel.

But—god—if he didn't believe it before then he had to believe it now, because bleeding and gasping here on the ground in the middle of a fire zone, Worth had nothing to gain from jerking him around anymore. If he couldn't trust the man in this moment, then goddamn but there was no time when he could trust anything.

Guilt swallowed Conrad whole.

Of course he wasn't going to leave. Sure as hell he wasn't; he hadn't even considered the possibility until Worth literally slammed the door in his face. This was his family, dysfunctional and embarrassing and infuriating sure, but at least it was a real family, and he couldn't imagine leaving it for good now. Not after everything they had survived. What had he ever done to give anyone the impression that he was skipping town to—to—to run off with the milkman or whatever?

(-to be rid of this circus freak show once and for all!)

Oh. No wait, he had said that, hadn't he?

But he hadn't meant it, not really. Maybe Worth had taken his venting too seriously. That would be… Worth taking anything seriously, let alone too seriously, that would be a first.

Conrad looked down at Worth, seeping and clenching-unclenching his fists, and realized that there were a lot of things he may have never given the doctor enough credit for.

Surely there was still time to get it right.

Conrad ripped open the doctor's shirt, sent seams ripping loudly, and then stalled out at the sight of shredded leaking human flesh. A trauma unit and an ambulance, god, he might as well try to sew the stupid thing up himself. What could he do?

Last year, in Adelaide's mansion, they had performed a gross parody of this moment. He wondered if Worth had felt like this, back then, looking over his own broken body.

He asked the question.

Worth answered.

"You what?" Conrad demanded, jamming his hands under the back of Worth's head to lift it up, shake the voice back into it. "Goddamn it Worth you can't just say that to me and die, you awful son of a bitch! Worth you wake up right now or so help me!"

But Worth had faded away into dull delirium, heartbeat slowing pulse by straggling pulse.

Conrad swallowed.

If that past adventure's grotesque foreshadowing had brought him one worthwhile thing, out of all the pain and fear and guilt, it was this: he knew exactly what lengths a man could go to, when the life of someone he loved was on the line.

He turned that word over in his head. He loved someone, painfully and obviously, right, but. Someone loved him, too?

And then the solution was so stunningly, stupidly simple that he felt like a massive tool for putting off this long. He pried Worth's jaw open with one hand and lifted the other to his lips. Wickedly pointed fang ripped a line down the length of index finger, so deeply that he hit bone and his hand exploded with scalding pain. That should take a few minutes to heal. Oh god shit that hurt a lot worse than he thought it would.

"Think you can ditch me," he hissed through gritted teeth. "Think again."

He slid the digit from tip to joint along the surface of Worth's tongue, spit and blood and loose undead flesh in a mess across the warm muscle. When his skin healed again, it would heal around bloody traces of saliva. If this didn't cure him of any lingering germaphobia then exposure therapy was a certifiable load of horseshit.

This had to work.

He hoped that was enough. Did the human have to swallow? He couldn't remember what it had been like when he turned, what with him having been something like clinically dead at the time.

"Wake up wake up wake up," he whispered, hand gripping deathly tight in Worth's grubby blonde hair. "Come on."

The ground shuddered. Conrad looked up, for the first time in minutes.

Flickering, slit eyes looked back. White teeth, solid and sharp in coiling smoky gums. The djinn opened its mouth, and sound poured out although the jaw never moved.

"Ah, the little bloodsucker who set me free," it sighed, wolf-grin ratcheting wider. "What a nasty thing you did to poor Miguelito."

Worth's breathing dipped so shallow that it barely shifted the air.

"Look," Conrad snarled, looking up again, "I am really not in the mood for your shitty taunting because as you might be able to tell I've got a dead guy here who happens to be about ten thousand times more important to me than whatever fuckall you're peddling."

"Well that's awfully ill-mannered of you."

"Take it up with my therapist," Conrad snapped. "Go back to whatever hellhole it is you overpowered dust clouds come from."

The coils of smoke compressed like muscles underneath skin. "I plan to," the djinn replied, thoughtfully. "But first I think I'm going to eat you, and then I'll eat the herd of mortals scuttling around your feet. Nothing personal, I'm just in one of those moods."

Conrad looked up and down the towering height of supernatural malice. What had Hanna said? Mt. Everest, right?

"You know what?" Conrad said, settling the unconscious body of Worth as gently as he could on the ground. "Any other day I'd be pissing myself scared, probably, but you want to hear something interesting?"

The djinn tilted its massive head. "What might that be?"

"You have picked the very fucking wrong day."

Run the math. Fifteen foot tall transcendental shapeshifter versus a five foot something grieving terrified vampire. The djinn never stood a chance.

-A-

Between the battle and panic and the rush to make the change in time, the funny thing was that Conrad only finally started crying in the moment when he finally knew for certain that things were going to be okay.

Worth woke up, and Conrad left huge cold tear stains on his ruined shirt.

-A-

Worth came back from picking off survivors with a drunken stumble—Conrad remembered his first taste of human blood, the daze, and wasn't sure if he was grateful not to have seen Worth undone like that, or just… disappointed? The doctor was stumbling as he made his way back to the barricade, and Conrad hopped down off the roof of an SUV to help him back across.

It was a sign of how bizarre and disconcerting the process was that Worth let him help at all. God that man had unholy goddamn gallons of pride to spare.

"Are you feeling okay?" Conrad asked, wracking his brain for any helpful memories. Four years wasn't that long, all things considered, but time wore down the details like an endless tide. He remembered that the first night was the worst, when you could feel all your organs rearranging themselves if you only stood still and quietly enough.

Worth laughed, red smears along the chapped curve of his lips. "Ey," he said, the hand that was hung over Conrad's shoulder lifting up to grab his chin, "Less compare sizes, eh?"

He hooked a grubby finger under Conrad's lip, on the side where the fang was stunted, and tugged up. It was a testament to just how fucking worried about him Conrad was that nobody's nose got broken after that point.

Worth grinned as Conrad bent the offending finger back so far that the joints practically squeaked. "Looks like I di'n inherit yer stubby prickers, mum."

Conrad scowled and readjusted Worth's overgrown weight with a violent jostle. The doctor grunted.

"If you don't stop projecting your oedipal complex on me, you're gonna see what the light at the end of the tunnel looks like up close this time."

"Heh. See yer recoverin' from yer mournin' stage real fast, sweetcheeks."

"Oh—you. Augh—"

How could you waited hot and dry on the tip of his tongue, and it would have been so easy to just drop down without resistance into that pit of familiar indignant rage. You can't just make light of death like that—how dare you belittle my suffering, why can't you just appreciate how much you just scared the shit out of me, don't you realize how close I came to really having a reason to grieve?

But strains of opera still echoed through the hollows of Conrad's head. Hadn't he already been down this road, already seen the stupid, messy places it led?

Conrad gave up trying to convey any verbal feelings, then, and settled for something from a foreign language. He reached over, twisted Worth's head in his direction, and kissed him like a train plummeting into a canyon.

Well. That was what it felt like anyways.

"You're a callous bag of shit," he said, once he'd pulled away, "and you need to sit down for a couple minutes until your system acclimates to being fed so fast."

Maybe it was just the post-feeding daze, but Worth looked vaguely like a doped up concussion victim for a long time after that.

Conrad spent the next few minutes corresponding with the sergeants—none of them was exactly sure what a real sergeant did, but it seemed like the easiest thing to call the people at the top of the chain of command—and pulling together a last strike effort to chase the White Town stragglers back to their cozy little hell hole across the desert. Giving any orders felt weird and kind of duplicitous, but Hanna was still out and Worth was in no condition and wherever Hanna was passed out there was sure to be a hovering Zombie, which just left him.

It was a little frightening, to be so alone.

Of course the first thing Worth wanted to do once he'd gotten his bearing back was find Hanna. Honestly, he probably hadn't even gotten his bearing back yet, he probably just got tired of sitting around. Conrad was pretty sure, though, that running around in his state wouldn't do much worse than make him feel miserable, so he decided not to put up too much fuss.

Honestly, if Worth had asked him for anything in that moment, up to and exceeding Conrad's head garnished on a platter, he probably would have gotten it.

They made their way back from the frontline, over the bullet-pitted ground and through the maze of drafted nurses performing various acts of crude field medicine and the waterboys rushing around and the spouses calling out for each other, and down into the hollowed-out gas station that had become their makeshift hospital.

Conrad barely had to open his mouth before a girl—wow she was young, what was she doing out here on a night like this?—was pulling them away to the inside of the station, where the owner's office would have been. A few bright candles lit up the darkness, where Hanna was sitting on a sheet laid out over a long desk, wrapping up his own leg wound with mechanical motions. His ever present dead companion tapped him gently on the shoulder.

He looked up.

Worth's perfectly formed, delicate fangs flashed yellow in the candlelight, and Conrad winced as badly as if he'd been cut by the light.

Hanna looked at Worth, expression fuzzy at first, like he was having trouble focusing on anything at all. Then the sharp focus flared and sank in his eyes, like a camera flash, and comprehension set in.

Neither of them knew what to say. Worth stood there, frozen in a hunch with his hands shoved in his pockets, for a tense second before he broke into rapid but stiff businesslike movement, extending limbs and inspecting cuts. Conrad grit his teeth and wished he had something useful to occupy himself with too—it wasn't fair that Worth got to hide behind the whole doctor routine when Conrad was just hung out to dry here, awaiting judgment.

"You died," Hanna said, voice hoarse with fatigue and the aftermath of blood vomit and now horror.

Worth scowled and hid his face behind Hanna's shoulder, maybe inspecting for wounds but probably just being a big coward.

"You died," Hanna repeated, staring down at his hands. "And I wasn't there."

That wasn't what Conrad was expecting. Honestly Conrad didn't know what he was expecting, except maybe getting thoroughly thrashed for putting the two of them in danger like that and he was ready for that, he deserved that. This, though… God, Hanna looked like he was about to cry.

"Ey hey hey," Worth said, grabbing the redhead's face, "I know where yer about ta take this little moonlit picnic up Guilt Trip Hill an' I ain't standin' fer it. Lookit me, I'm still walkin' ain't I? Mighta had a near death experience n' decided ter go vegan for all the difference it makes."

"If I'd been there," Hanna muttered, "if I just held on a little longer—"

"Hanna, ya passed out like a goddamn crashin' jetliner. Ya don't got much control over that."

"I—"

But Conrad had had enough of that for one night. He moved forward, batted Worth's hands away, and bent down so he and Hanna were eye to eye.

"This isn't your fault," he said, pronouncing each individual syllable like he was trying to carve them into Hanna's brain. "I did a stupid thing, and I put us in danger, and Worth got killed."

"Oi," Worth replied irritably, "was only dead fer a couple'a minutes, Christ, I seen worse on an operatin' table. Sides, I got my own damn self killed. Ain't nobody made me run out there after ya, I did that all on my own."

"But I should have realized you'd do that—"

"Neither of you would have needed to if I—"

"Actually," the zombie interrupted, the low rumble of his voice breaking through the frenzy, "I would like to take responsibility for this."

Conrad looked over at him, disbelieving. They all did. A moment of mouth-flapping silence ensued.

"Huh?" Worth said, eloquent as ever.

The dead man tilted his head slightly, eyes flashing. "Well," he said, "seeing as everyone else was claiming responsibility for something that wasn't their fault, I thought I would throw my own name in the hat."

They all stared some more.

The dead man shrugged. "Peer pressure is a powerful thing."

Hanna let out a startled breath that turned into a broken giggle, and then full fledged wheezing laughter. His dirt streaked fingers reached out, scrabbling for gloved hands, and held on.

Conrad grabbed his own shoulder, arm crossed over chest, and looked at the ground. He felt a little better, like some awful spell tightening around their throats had broken in the air between them, but still not guilt-free. Maybe the only person they could really blame was the soldier who fired the shot, but he didn't feel like it was true.

Those—stupid, awful, unbelievable—last words made it clear. Worth had done that for him.

For him.

For.

Conrad hissed out a cold breath between his teeth, trying to collapse his useless puffed up lungs. The worst part of it all was the terrible rush that sung through his cavernous guts every time he remembered. No one noticed his erratic breathing, between Hanna's half hysterical laughter and Worth's grumbling, and—

No, the dead man noticed. Although the range of expressions available to his musculature were limited, Conrad couldn't help but think that the look he was being given was something like sympathetic. The kind of look that made you feel like maybe he didn't understand exactly what you were feeling, but he understood that it was messing you up.

Conrad shivered, although he was dressed fine for the weather.

Patroclus—he was Patroclus tonight, wasn't he?—slipped away from Hanna after the hiccupping had given way to hoarse exhortations for details about the battle, and stepped quietly up to Conrad's side. His hat had a bullet hole in it. Conrad wondered if they would have been able to patch him up again from anything lower down.

"You did the right thing," he said, quietly. "Hanna did the right thing when he brought back you, and you did the right thing tonight."

A faint shudder ran through Conrad. Now that he was far enough away, physically, he could feel the memory of the barricade taking on a looming, surreal quality. Thank god that vampires don't dream.

"I know," Conrad sighed. "It's not that, so much. It's more like…"

He stopped, at a loss for explanation. The silence hung heavy between them, or maybe it was just him, but the dead man didn't shift to leave or to fill the void.

"…I'm really happy," Conrad confessed, finally, his longer fang worrying a bloody spot in his lip. "And that's so messed up."

Patroclus looked aside at him, warm orange against the February shadows. "You'll have to fill me in on the details," he said, "but I can offer you my certainty, for whatever that's worth, that you deserve whatever happiness you are feeling right now."

(END)