[fic wip] Evil West, eventual Jesse/Edgar

[hexmix]

 continuing the WIP-posting with this Evil West fic from uhhhh last spring? whenever it was we finished playing Evil West on stream lol. it's a monster-of-the-week type fic that's gonna largely be Jesse pining :3 cuts off literally right where i stopped writing lol, sorry about that.

Bloom didn’t even look up at him, just kept gently rolling the heart back and forth within the cup of his hands, like he was weighing it, blood and ichor dripping down his long gloves to roll off his elbows, his shirtsleeves rolled up, their once-white cuffs bled through as if with ink.

Autopsy room stunk to high-heaven, a worse funk than Jesse had been privileged to in a good long while. Something he hadn’t known till that moment that he should be happy about.

“What d’ya mean,” he said slowly, looking up from the heart to the little crease between Bloom’s brows, “that that thing’s human.”

“Just as I said–” Bloom started, sounding distracted as he curved up a thumb to finger the clean-sliced edge of the aorta. He frowned at the motion, frowning deeper for a brief second when Jesse cut him off, interrupting with, “Didn’t take you for an idiot, Bloom.”

Bloom looked away finally, blinking at him with a sort of delayed surprise, like it had somehow escaped his notice that Jesse was there and had been talking with him for the past ten odd minutes.

“Mr. Jesse,” he said, and then, “I can hardly believe it myself, sir, but it’s,” and here he floundered a bit, his mouth moving with an impossibility of words, “Dr. Blackwell herself agreed with me, there is simply no difference from a human heart.”

He intoned it with the same near-reverence he’d said it with the first time, only now his wide eyes were trained on Jesse, an urgency there like he could impress the importance of the horseshit he’d just said through his gaze alone. Jesse turned his glare back down at the heart, then back up at Bloom, no happier with the words the second time, neither. 

“You tell me what the ever-living hell it was doing in that, then,” he said, gesturing roughly to the body that only mostly lay across the dissection table. Its limbs had been removed, but its torso was long enough, big enough, that its doughy sides draped down over the edges like a joke of a tablecloth. Its head, what was left of it after Edgar had blown the top of its skull out, rested on a smaller table that had been drug over just for that purpose.

Jesse hadn’t fought it himself, had been cooped up still in Washington when Edgar had been sent out after whatever-the-fuck had been tearing through the nearby cattle farms, but he could get the idea of it well enough. It had been a man once, after all, the same way all the Sanguisuge’s little helpers were once men. Still roughly had the shape of one: legs, torso, arms, head. But its skin was so loose it was too close to a liquid to hang on to really: Bloom had had to stitch it through with wires and hooks to get it to keep from pulling right off the fat and muscle and pooling on the floor.

Edgar had told him that when it was alive it had had two porcine eyes that had been sunk far back into its skull, and that it didn’t seem to have much of anything for a skull at all beyond eye sockets and forehead, that its skin had draped down beneath its eyes like a veil, pooling into a thick, flabby mass at its neck, a gaping, drooling maw somewhere in there that had made wet gasping noises and spewed, intermittently and uncontrollably, a yellowish-pink pus.

Edgar’s crossbow bolts had been unable to pierce its deceptively soft-looking skin; they’d merely sunken in like the damn thing really was made of dough. Blades hadn’t had much of an effect either, as the skin would just knit back together, bloodless. Though eventually, Edgar had said, his voice tight with the residual anger of a hunt gone wrong, when he’d been able to cut the same place enough times to slice deep enough, that same yellow-pink pus had oozed out.

He’d had to resort to the shotgun eventually, a weapon he didn’t particularly like. Had had to get right up in the thing’s disgusting face, shove the muzzle in its mouth-hole and shoot its brains out through its pate.

And it still hadn’t died right away, Edgar had groused, glaring at the distance Jesse was keeping from him, but like hell was Jesse willingly getting any closer when he smelled like that.

“It gripped my shoulders like a vice and just toppled over, like some kind of damn mechanism locking up, and then,” his mouth twisted, and he fitfully rubbed more of the astringent solution Amelia had given him into his exposed skin, for all the good it seemed to be doing, he still fucking reeked.

But he’d also stripped down to his waist and sat on a wooden stool over a small collection of buckets, his muscles tense with his irritation and anger, his skin dark and furred and wet with the solution, crossed through with scars, and Jesse had found it was like pulling himself out of spider silk, trying to look away.

“It sort of,” Edgar continued, scowling at the words he himself was saying, “dissolved. Still solid but not. Almost drowned in the damn thing.”

“What, just went and turned to mush?” Jesse had asked, trying valiantly not to stare as clear liquid dripped down between Edgar’s pecs, losing itself in his chest hair. He’d swallowed, his throat too dry, and not because the Sanguisuge had come up with some new horror.

“Better if it had,” Edgar said, still prickly as a cactus, and ran the rag up his throat. Jesse followed its progress desperately, a mad sort of relief building that Edgar smelled so foul it was enough to keep him from attempting anything foolish.

“No,” he continued, “its skin just went and wrapped around me, tried to enter any hole it could, mouth, ears, nostrils, like it was,” he paused again, sour expression settling into a grimace, “like it would have peeled off the damn thing to funnel into me.”

Jesse was trapped somewhere in the sound of Edgar saying the word hole still, a prison he’d made his damn self, which he had to somehow scrape himself out of, horror burgeoning, to say, “Like a parasite?”

“Like a literal damn parasite,” Edgar agreed, and flung the rag back down into one of the buckets with a splash that left his own legs coated. Not that he seemed to even notice, as mad as he still looked.

“If they’re making these things contagious now,” Edgar said, and he sounded more tired than anything, the same weariness he’d worn since Dad had died settling over him like a shroud, “we’ve got a damn plague on our hands. Don’t want to find out first hand what would have happened if that thing had got me, but if they can replenish their numbers on their own? Without some tick’s interference?”

The horror was really starting to work its way in then, not least because Jesse was thinking about what would have happened if the damn leeches had gotten Edgar too, had turned him into some thing Jesse had to put down. Dad all over again. And Jesse, panic building sour at the back of his throat, didn’t think he could do it, not to Edgar. Didn’t matter what he became, Jesse couldn’t–not again–

“Hands off management,” Jesse said, voice thin so he tried to swallow the fear, tried again, “would free up their schedules.” He sounded a little more normal, but Edgar was eyeing him, mouth flattened to a grim line.

“Go see the kid,” he’d said at last, dismissive, “see what he makes of the blasted thing.”

But what Bloom made of it was plain horseshit, and the fear from earlier had curdled into impatience.

The creature lay like a blob of congealed fat there on the table between them, Bloom still holding the heart, still looking at a loss, while Jesse’s lip curled. “Not a single one of these freaks comes out anything other than half-rotten. Seen enough of their insides to know.”

Bloom nodded enthusiastically, “It’s a side effect of the transformation, the stress on the human body. It even shows in familiars, burst capillaries and run down hearts, like they’re decades older than they actually are. But this!” and he held out the heart a little, “It’s completely unmarked! There’s no rot, no corruption. It’s not even,” he spun a little, towards the left, and took quick strides to bring himself from the foot of the table to its side, so he could hold the heart out over the gaping, stinking cavern of the creature’s chest.

“Mr. Jesse,” he said, voice gone breathy and low like he was imparting some secret, “it’s undersized, look!”

So Jesse looked. Saw the heart cradled in Bloom’s hands over the putrid hollow, and noted for the first time how ridiculously small it looked in comparison. The torso was so wide him and Bloom both could lay down inside it and still have elbow room. 

“It had a complete working circulatory system,” Bloom stressed, “but it shouldn’t have been, not when it’s this big. A normal human heart couldn’t have handled the stress this body would have put on it. There should be signs of strain, and there aren’t.”

Jesse frowned, leaning over a bit to get an overhead view of Bloom’s hands framing that heart, blackened, half-rotten rib bones like teeth surrounding them, the thing’s insides more pus than anything, and it reeked far more than Edgar had, which meant that maybe Amelia’s solution had something of an effect after all.

He probably, to his chagrin, wouldn’t have noticed it if Bloom hadn’t pointed it out to him, but he had seen the insides of more creatures and men than he cared to count, and he could see how wrong it looked clear enough, like the heart really had been something alien to this creature, slipped inside by Sanguisuge magic.

He remembered what Edgar had said about it feeling like the thing wanted to take him over, and frowned harder.

“So what the hell does it mean, Bloom?” he asked, looking back up at the kid.

Bloom blinked at him again and then drooped, sighing as he moved to plunk the heart back on the tray he’d originally taken it from. “Sorry to say I don’t rightly know, Mr. Jesse,” he said. 

Jesse grumbled, crossing his arms and turning his glare back to the corpse when all it did was make Bloom wilt even more. “What’s it going to take for you to find out?” he asked.

**

“Like I told Mr. Jesse,” Bloom said, his voice practically buoyant as he rode between them, “you could also bring one back alive–”

Edgar interrupted him with a wry, “And how do you expect us to manage that? Leash the damn thing? Stick and carrot?”

“They make cages that big–” Bloom replied, practically teasing, and Jesse stared resolutely ahead, molars grit, sun too hot and flies too many, and thought to himself that it wasn’t that far of a ride, and Bloom was a good kid, and a decent enough field agent to take care of himself but Edgar was a worrywart, and it wasn’t like Jesse himself felt any better about dragging the kid out with them, not after Vergil–

Jesse exhaled sharply through his nose and let his horse take the lead she wanted, drawing the two of them out slightly ahead of the others, Jesse guiding her a bit to the left so he wouldn’t have to hear Edgar grumping about his dust.

Not that Edgar would have even noticed, at least not right away, he was snickering at something Bloom had said, and he sounded almost fond–for Edgar anyway–when he replied with, “And your lady doctor would okay that, you reckon?”

“Absolutely not,” Bloom said, and laughed his high, coltish laugh that had never bothered Jesse before that moment.