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Crawford Tillenghast met Dan Cain at his Spring 1988 colloquium. It was a practice talk, really, nothing more, and he didn't expect anyone to attend but department members with free time, so the tall, dark, and handsome stranger carrying a flyer and notebook stuck out like a sore thumb.
Even more surprising was how intently he listened, eyes fixed on Crawford like he was the most fascinating thing in the world. Thank God for index cards and slides—anything to keep from meeting that predatory gaze.
Cain kept silent during the Q&A session, but came up afterward and asked whether they might “grab some coffee.”
They went out that Friday; coffee turned into dinner turned into drinks, and he sloppily sucked Dan off before passing out on his own couch. Dan “had an early shift at the hospital,” so Crawford assumed that was that. Instead, he came home to find a lovely bunch of calla lilies left beside his door along with a note offering dinner if he wasn't busy.
Which is how Crawford ended up seeing a doctor. His mother would be appalled, God rest her.
~*~*~*~*~
“So this other dimension,” Dan says while they sprawl on his lumpy red couch during their third date. “Is that where the dead go?”
“What?” Crawford laughs and twists to look up at him. “What do you mean?”
“Well, it's got to have something in it, right? Otherwise why would it matter?”
The fact that Dan's actually bothering to make small talk about this is an utter novelty. If he were a PhD instead of an MD, he'd know better than to get an academic started on their pet theory.
“It matters because we need to know!” Slow down, Crawford, he tells himself. Don't bore him. Don't drive him away. “But yes, there must be something there—if there weren't, there would be no way to prove it exists.”
“So it's Heaven? Or Hell?” Dan looks so hopeful that he hates to shatter his illusions.
“I have no idea. It's probably like nothing we can even imagine.” He snuggles down tighter against that broad chest.
~*~*~*~*~
Dan has lost someone—a fiancee, it turns out, though Crawford would have put money on a male lover based on his comfort at being publicly out. That façade holds up right until the first time they actually try to make love.
What gives it away is the fact that Dan fucks like he's living a fantasy. He's confident, and has a plan, but there's an underlying vibe that he hasn't actually done anything like this outside of his own head before. He moves like a porn star, impractical and oddly clinical in his examination of Crawford's body. He moves like Crawford's a porn star, one who has been given a script of the proceedings. Walk into the house, eat dinner on the couch, talk about work, kiss a little, half a handy, one-two-three fingers in Crawford's ass, sex face-to-face with the lights turned low before Dan finishes him with a shallow blowjob. Then some stiff cuddling before Crawford heads home.
It's always the same.
Surely he just needs a little time.
~*~*~*~*~
“Are you sure you want to work with him? I mean, it sounds like it's really your idea—why hand it over like that?”
Dan hasn't really grasped the mechanics of lifelong academia. Particularly those involving credit.
“Because, sweetheart,” Crawford says, setting his journal atop Dan's creepy pile of leisure reading from Miskatonic Library, “Apart from anything else, having his name on the paper will make people pay attention. I may have an idea, but it's based off of Dr. Pretorius's work—and he's... he's beyond a genius.” He may sound a touch star-struck.
“Should I be jealous?” Dan smiles, shows teeth to let him know it's just teasing, but he still feels the need to defend himself; this banter is natural for Dan, but comes only slowly to a guy who spends most of his time in his own head.
“He's really not my type.”
“Oh? What is your type?” All confident flirtation, this gorgeous man; it's no wonder Crawford never stood a chance.
“I've got myself a doctor, didn't you know?”
“I see how it is. You just want me for the stability.”
Crawford laughs in spite of himself.
“You could have a lab here, down in the basement. I could be your lovely assistant.” Dan straddles his lap and bats his eyelashes outrageously, fingers laced at the base of his skull. Crawford is enveloped. It's sexy, sure, but also—safe. Warm. Melding into one another; he could get used to this.
“Hmm. I think that's magicians, not scientists,” he counters, putting his hands on his boyfriend's hips and parting his lips in invitation.
Something moves behind Dan's eyes before he grants the kiss. “You'd be surprised... ”
~*~*~*~*~
The girl in the bedside photo, the fiancee, is named Meg, and she's dead. Dan seems almost not to see her mementos mori anymore, stacked up all around his house; however long he's lived with them, they've become ordinary background decoration by now. Her lovely face nags at Crawford's memory. He's sure he's seen her somewhere before, black-and-white-and-red all over.
This makes moving in something of a hassle, honestly; trying not to disturb quasi-invisible grief-decor while also importing several shelves' worth of books, a videodisc collection, a dresser, a toolbench, a personal computer, and his slightly-less-old couch is a fairly ridiculous waste of time.
Still, asking Dan to give up the memories and what she means to him would be inappropriate.
~*~*~*~*~
When Dan brings out the suit and tie his old roommate supposedly left behind, Crawford tries to act grateful. It's a perfectly nice suit, a sober soft grey-brown wool blend, and there's a long coat and scarf as well—just in case it gets cold. He does not ask why it fits him like a glove; he doesn't want to make his lover admit he pities an academic's salary enough to buy him a new used suit. He tries to tell himself that he feels like Audrey Hepburn, rather than Kim Novak, when Dan combs his hair farther to one side and pronounces him “job-interview-ready.” He ignores the way Dan's fingers ghost over his temples and the bridge of his nose as though tracing an absence.
The first meeting goes well. Dr. Pretorius, in between discussing theory and possible avenues of research, says it's nice to see a young academic who still knows how to be professional at work. If there's a little too much emphasis on that last qualifier, well, a genius is entitled to his foibles and Crawford knows who he's going home to. His students also seem impressed; a suit instead of a tee and Oxford appears to lend some air of discipline, a hint of the autocratic, which keeps his classroom in better order than usual.
The sex that night is the best yet. For once, Dan seems quite happy to give up his control and his rituals, and ends up on his belly biting his lip to bruising and begging for everything Crawford can give him. It's passionate, unforced, and utterly divorced from reality.
He wears the suit at least every couple of weeks after that, even through the summer.
~*~*~*~*~
In early September, he comes home from his Tuesday evening class to find the lights out and Dan sprawled on their couch with a black-covered journal and a mostly-empty bottle of bourbon.
“Has anyone ever died for you?”
Crawford can't imagine that anyone would ever want to. Give up all of this existence, every earthly breath, go into the blackness of Void just to keep him here another 40 years? If someone did, he'd certainly be prone to occasional fits of... melancholy. Their silence stretches into the lavender-blue night as he carefully takes a cushion-edge seat to run tentative fingers through Dan's lank hair.
“Was it Meg?” he finally ventures.
“No,” he says with a violent head-shake. “No, Meg died because of me; someone else died for me. The one thing he was afraid of... and I can't even... can't even finish it.”
Dan sobs softly, tears damp on his leg, and there's no more sense from him for the rest of the night.
Whoever it was, Crawford gives his thanks that they saved this beautiful broken man for him.
~*~*~*~*~
Dan doesn't come to bed for six days; Crawford's not even sure he's eating, let alone sleeping. He levels out after that, dismissing it with something about nightmares and never truly getting used to the morgue.
~*~*~*~*~
The funny thing is, Dan really seems intrigued by Crawford's work. He's not in the field, of course, but as an MD he can at least comprehend the physiological aspects of pineal stimulation. His questions help Crawford refine his explanations, help him see where he might be misinterpreted. And apart from anything else, trying to talk quantum physics with a drunk layman is never dull.
“So if nobody knows about something, do you think it exists?” Dan asks, slouching down the couch to sit on the floor.
“How do you mean?” Crawford looks up from his calculations with a slow blink.
“Well, like that cat thing.”
“Schrödinger's cat?” It's important, sometimes, to parse these conversations and ensure that the thing Dan believes he's referencing is the same as what Crawford's hearing.
“That's the dead one, right?”
“Well, according to that thought experiment, the cat exists in a quantum state, and is both alive and dead until perceived—at which point it collapses into either one or the other. But it's not quite what you're thinking.” He stretches his legs out—lectures should only ever be delivered standing at the head of the room or lying down with one's lover, never half-folded.
“Okay... ” Seeing Dan from above is always such a novelty; he looks like an earnest Chocolate Lab tilting its head to and fro. It's impossible not to ruffle his hair.
“Schrödinger was using that analogy to point out the inherent absurdity of such lines of thought. Obviously we know the cat physically can't be both alive and dead at the same time.” Dan's eyebrows twitch. “But without data, it's simply impossible for us to speak with certainty as to which it actually is, and thus to accurately include it in our predictions. Because reality is determined by perception, that means it cannot be either without an observer.”
“But what about things nobody knows? You say your dimension is there, all the time, and we just can't see it.”
“It's more than seeing—any sensory apparatus—”
“Or, love. Say you love somebody, and never tell them, and nobody ever knows—was that love real? Did it exist?”
Crawford's sure it existed; he knows because it hurts. Of course, that means that he has the sensory apparatus to perceive it.
“Hey, wait. Can't the cat observe itself?”
~*~*~*~*~
It's not until November that he decides to wear the coat and scarf, to a dinner meeting with his mentor. They're great, actually; the scarf makes him feel theatrical, and the coat's just the right length, comfortable either belted or open. More comfortable than being in a dimly-lit restaurant with a brilliant man who's not his boyfriend, anyway. After Pretorius sends him off with a too-long clasp of his hand and a list of necessary reading, Crawford reaches into the pocket for cab fare and feels slick plastic instead.
The offending object turns out to be a long-expired clip-on badge from Miskatonic Hospital. The name on it he knows from local news coverage. Herbert West was one of the two students who died in the massacre three years ago—Meg the Photo Girl being the other. One mystery solved. The stern, unsmiling, eerily familiar dead boy's face in the laminated photo answers far too many questions about the whys and wherefores of Dan Cain's interest in Crawford.
He returns it to its longtime resting place and heads home. He knows that he will not bring the matter up when he gets there.
~*~*~*~*~
By February, preliminary testing of the Resonator, at least, is going well—which is more than Crawford can say for his personal life. He's already feeling irritable and headachey when he arrives home near midnight to find his beloved in a decidedly... altered... state.
It's not just the alcohol that will no doubt taint his breath. Whatever he's taken makes his eyes burn with a weird, glowing passion, and he fairly vibrates from unspent energy. Marked-up pages of anatomical drawings, chemical formulae, and arcane sigils surround him like the makings of a deranged nest, but at this point in the festivities he's given up and focused on a single pristine newspaper clipping: an obituary. West's.
It's headed by the same photo from the nametag. Did no one have another image of him?
“Crawford. You're home.”
“Yes.”
“Didn't expect you tonight... ”
Clearly. Cheating with a living man or woman would be easier to handle.
“... thought you'd be staying over with Edward.”
“What is all this, Dan?” He crosses the room casually, hearing the papers crinkle beneath his shoes. His lover's face tightens with each step.
“R-research.” Dan obnoxiously resembles a chastised hound.
“Research.” The uncharacteristic sneer comes easily, a year's aggravation of a mild personality bubbling over all at once.
“It's important.” A big man quailing at phantoms is an ugly sight, one made uglier by the expectations he shatters on the way down.
“Why is it important?” Crawford presses a hand to his own forehead to ward off the pounding in his skull. His vision is beginning to blur.
“Because he's dead, and he's the only one who can stop it.”
“Stop. What.”
“Death!” Dan displays a fanatic's fervor, hands animated and voice shaking. “I need his mind back—he shouldn't have given it up for me, and your dimension is where—”
“Stop it, Daniel!” he snaps. “You comprehend nothing of my work!”
The effect is instantaneous; Dan's eyes roll back in his head, and he collapses to his knees with an almost orgasmic moan.
“I missed you so much,” he gasps, clutching at the shorter man's legs. “I'm sorry. I'm so—I tried, but without your brain... 'physician, heal thyself!'”
The man in the suit looks down fuzzily, a mix of anger, revulsion, and arousal churning in his gut.
“Is this what you want?” he asks, tilting his supplicant's chin up. “To be used? Hmm?”
Dark eyes widen in frantic affirmation.
“Yes. God, yes, make me useful, Her—” His voice is cut off by a painful twist of hair that is then soothed with gentle petting. Eyes drift shut.
“You want forgiveness.”
“No.” Immediate, vehement denial of the obvious; pathetic. “No, I don't deserve that.”
“Oh, you want it.” His voice is intense, commanding, as he unfastens his fly and directs that dark head down. “Earn it, Daniel.”
Crawford wakes up alone the next day, face salt-crusted from sweat or tears. There's breakfast warming nauseatingly in the oven and a sweet note on the fridge. The living room looks just as it always has.
~*~*~*~*~
A week later, while Dan's in New York listening to some medievalist's lecture on demonology, occultism, and resurrection, Crawford spirits his possessions away to the Pretorius Institute.
He leaves the grey-brown suit. Like the man and the house, it was never really his, no matter how long he spent inside any of them.