Rogue ch.1 + AO3 link (FINISHED)

Twenty-four was a ruse. A compromise, really, between that god-awful eternal sixteen, and the several centuries he didn't look a minute of. He wasn't called on it very often, but he'd gotten used to handling accusations of untruth when they arose, practiced as he was from skirting around his other compromises.



That didn't make him a liar. No, no, he actually hated lying, hated deceiving people who had otherwise earned his trust. But it wasn't because he didn't trust people that he told them he was twenty-four, and not some-hundred. It was because, well, it was for their safety! The less they knew about him the better, wasn't it? Surely.



Still... He felt a bit bad about it all, about leading his 'friends' on to think he was someone he wasn't. He always had. So he never stayed in one place for long. Too hard to confess, much easier to pack up and move.



Maybe it was almost time again. He'd known Worth for years; probably... oh, three or four by now? Maybe five. It was a long time for normal humans, he had to remind himself. Long enough that soon Worth would start wondering about his young friend's stunted growth and bad luck with ghosts. Well, Lamont might wonder, at least. The grungy doctor likely wouldn't give a damn if the young man looked sixteen until the day he died of old age (not that that was probably ever going to happen).



'I've gotten careless,' he thought. 'I always took care of myself just fine, back in the day, didn't I? Too tempting to slip up though, when you know you've got someone to patch you up.' Although the doc grumbled every time the young man wandered into his office, there was a genuine kindheartedness somewhere underneath it all, and he was more grateful than he could say for it.



'Maybe it is time to move on. Before I get too comfortable. Otherwise I'll just--'



He looked up from his cheap plastic bowl, chopstick'd clump of chow mein poised just an inch or so from his open mouth. A wave ran over him, through him, chilling him to his black, half-human core. Preparing for trouble, he skittered from his springy thread-bare spot on the couch, bare feet hitting the floor with a pillow-soft 'whumph', and grabbed up the closest wield-able heavy object. The rarely used frying pan hummed in his hand as he scribbled a tiny rune on the flat side and stalked slowly to the front door of his ramshackle apartment.



Hunched up next to the door, breath as quiet as he could manage, he waited and shivered as the familiar old feeling washed over him like an oil spill. His teeth chattered as he wondered viciously, animalistically defensive in his home, what could be coming for its dues, after so long.



'It's too late, again. I should've moved on months ago,' he thought. 'This always happens.'



Studying the signature radiating from the evil whatever-it-was slowly ascending the stairs (towards him, he knew, paranoid but sure), he braced himself for an attack... and then almost relaxed as confusion set in with the dawning of recognition.



He gritted his teeth subconsciously as another type of horror set in. This aura... It couldn't be... Could it?



He set the pan down, then quickly picked it back up, wished he had something more conventionally dangerous, counted a few perceived steps while the aura drew closer, and set the pan down again as memory and hope seeped in.



The problem was... there was no way he should be happy about this, and no way he should let his guard down. Chances were this was some demon from his past, using a familiar scent to trick him. It wasn't as if people hadn't tried before. Even if, somehow... god. There was just no way. It was outside his door now, just waiting there, and he hadn't picked back up his stupid flimsy little pan, couldn't bring himself to, even though, honestly, without the rune he didn't have the muscle to even stagger someone, let alone really harm.



He decided to stand back from the door, along the far wall of the kitchen, which was neither very far from the front door, nor going to stop a wraith or something from destroying him if that was its mission. He waited there for a minute, frowning at the door and toying with the curly cord of the telephone he never bothered to set up service for, before there was finally a knock.



It was just a knock. It wasn't menacing, or loud enough to alert his land-lady. It didn't sound like the practiced, cheerful knock of a door-to-door solicitor. Just sounded like the knock of a stranger calling upon a service they saw advertised somewhere, which he'd think it was, if the thing on the other side didn't absolutely reek of a rare kind of magic he knew all too well.



For a moment, he considered waiting for the person or thing to go away, but then realized that was sort of stupid, because if it was a violent spirit bent on retribution, it wasn't going to just give up if he pretended he wasn't home, and if it was just a human client (or a humanoid one, at least) then he had nothing to fear and would just be an idiot for passing up the opportunity to potentially get paid. (In all honesty, he didn't strictly need money; he could probably charm Mrs. Blaney into forgetting to make him pay rent, either magically or otherwise, but there was no need to further complicate life if he could pay; and he didn't exactly have to eat, but food was one of the few things that made life worth living anymore, so he wasn't planning on giving that up if he had a choice.)



But as he took the several forcibly-calm calculated steps to the front door, he couldn't help but admit the real reason he had to answer the knock was the dark gaping hole in his chest that was full of failure, loneliness, and other things that meant soul-devouring emptiness.



It didn't get any better when he saw the man's face.



“Hanna... Cross?” the man asked, sounding skeptical.



“That's... me,” he replied, also skeptical, and more than a little stunned to see his fearful hopes sort of confusingly be true.



The man (and Hanna thought it was fair enough to call him that; he called his vampire clients men and women, and his werewolf clients, and his ghost clients, even when, honestly, they looked more like ghoulish nightmares. People couldn't help how they looked and, really, Hanna didn't want to be a hypocrite) seemed to scrutinize him for a minute, eyebrows curved concave (or was it convex?) up to the crease in the middle of his grey-greenish forehead. “I was told you could help me with this.” He gestured vaguely downward with his pointed nose, leaving his hands stuck in his trench-coat pockets.



Hanna looked at him. He looked at his orange canvas shoes. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary, other than the fact that a man in his early thirties was wearing orange canvas shoes in combination with otherwise dressy attire. Then again, his shirt was a similar color orange as well, so it wasn't that strange. Actually, the outfit looked pretty good on him, though with his skin color it made him look overall a bit like a pumpkin. A tall pumpkin. The outfit wasn't the problem. No, he knew what the problem was, but hell if he wasn't going to be obtuse when a piece of his past strolled right up to his door a few centuries too late and didn't even recognize him.



“You're gonna have to be a little more specific,” he told the man, crossing his arms because he didn't know what else to do with them, and then uncrossing them again because he didn't want to look too hostile. He felt hostile. And paranoid. 'Good god. What the fuck? What the serious actual fuck?' was what his mind was saying at the moment, and about the best his body could do was not let his mouth follow suit. He was supposed to be somewhat of a businessman, after all.



The man paused for a space of time that would probably have been filled with a deep frustrated breath if he had been breathing. “I'm dead. I'm walking around. I don't think this is normal.”



“Depends on who you hang out with,” Hanna said, almost to himself. “Did you say someone told you about me? I sort of run a referral program, so...” (He didn't really have a referral program, at least not officially, although he supposed he'd give a customer a discount for referring someone if, geez, any of his repeat clients ever really paid him to begin with.)



“Sorry, I... don't actually remember.” The tall greenish man looked down at Hanna and quirked his eyebrows again in a way that Hanna assumed, based on context, meant he was sorry.



“s'okay,” Hanna said, shrugging and remembering a time when he spoke properly and not like a small redhead version of Worth. “What did you say your name was?” Vaguely, in the back of his mind somewhere, Hanna took the time to be grateful to whatever part of his brain made his autopilot function (reasonably well; “referral program” was perhaps stretching it), because if he'd been actually consciously thinking, what came out of his mouth would have been more along the lines of screaming and crying than actual words, and the words he did manage would likely fuck up everything.



The man looked nearly ashamed as he admitted, “I don't remember that either.” Hanna wasn't surprised. Actually, 'wasn't surprised' was an understatement. This man could not know his name. For him to be standing there, looking like death and smelling like an ancient forbidden magic, regardless of how almost-normally he was dressed, there was no way he could know his name.



A thought struck Hanna then that terrified him more than this man's sudden appearance, the thought that this could be his fault.



It was his fault, and he couldn't deny it to himself, that this man had died in the first place. God, it had taken him decades to stop dwelling on it. But it was in the past, and there was nothing he could do about it, when the only way to fix the problem was more of what had sort of caused it in the first place. Except, here he was, walking, talking, maybe not breathing exactly, but doing a pretty good impersonation of a living person, aside from the skin color and the smell. (Not that most normal folks would notice that; it took sort of a practiced nose to pick it out.)



What if he had caused this, somehow, accidentally, subconsciously even? He'd long ago left off the dark magic. Right about the time this tall stubbly man now standing in his doorway had taken his last breath. But magic was weird. It had a mind of its own. Sometimes he didn't feel so much that he was a magical person as he did that he was simply a vessel for the magic to work through.



“You don't need my name to help me, do you?” the man asked.



“No, oh no,” Hanna answered nonchalantly. “Pfft, naw, no name needed, nope.”



'And no name wanted either, John Doe,' he thought. Because, really, it didn't matter (yes it did, it really did, but for this moment, 'it didn't matter') who was the cause of this man's reawakening, just that he was awake, and Hanna wanted to keep it that way. He wanted the man here with him, so he had time to atone for his mistakes, so he could show him he'd changed, so he could ask for forgiveness.



None of that was likely to happen, because the zombie (good lord, he was a zombie, a fucking zombie) didn't remember him or his mistakes or probably anything, and reminding him would be a big ol' can of worms not worth the chance to apologize.



Instead, Hanna would settle for keeping him around for the more purely selfish reason of simply wanting him there. He could do better this time around; he led a safer life, one less likely to cause casualties, and not only because a large number of his current acquaintances were not strictly mortal. Sure, he got into trouble ...fairly often, but not like he did when his job literally revolved around death. He'd calmed down. He'd shook off most of his pursuers. He was incognito now and could maybe risk having friends and partners again. (Perhaps he'd just been telling himself otherwise, not 10 minutes before, but that was, well, before.)



And this time the man... could... maybe... stay with him for good.



As long as he didn't know his name.



Hanna forced his brain back into some semblance of focus and turned back to his friend. The man. The man he'd never met because he was just a client that showed up at his door. The zombie. The tall pumpkin. The greenish fellow. “Um, so, what was it you wanted my help with?”



The man raised his eyebrows a bit, as if it should have been obvious. (Hanna noted that his expressions, while still pretty easy to read, didn't really rely on his mouth or cheeks or eyes, which all mostly stayed in a flat, neutral position and left the work to the eyebrows.) “An explanation, maybe?”



'Ugh, right, explanation,' Hanna thought. 'Guess his memory loss didn't affect his personality.' Not that the man couldn't take things at face value, but if there was an explanation to be had, typically, he was going to have it. Now the trick, in this case, was to come up with an explanation that was both truthful and not incriminating.



“Well, you're a zombie,” he said for starters. He didn't receive any feedback for that groundbreaking news, so he continued, hoping the right words would come to him as they fell out of his mouth. “You were dead, and... now you're undead. Probably someone brought you back for, y'know, some reason.”



The zombie man seemed to be taking the news rather well, although it was most likely because he'd figured that much out on his own. His eyebrows stayed mostly still. “Wouldn't that person be having me do their bidding?”



'I'm not sure they're not,' Hanna thought, cringing internally. Whether his subconscious or a different magic user, someone had compelled the undead man to come here. There was just no way he'd have woken up and decided to go visit an old friend on his own. No, someone wanted him here, and that was probably a bad thing.



Hanna tilted his head from side to side, like he wasn't absolutely totally sure about it. “Mm, maybe.”



“I have to know.”



At that, Hanna found he could no longer avoid the man's eyes, as previously he'd been able not to look quite directly at them. But they were bright, and orangey-brown, sort of glowy. He searched them for a moment, a bit against his will, because he wanted to see him, and he wanted to not see him, and he didn't know which would be worse, but it didn't matter because there he was now, looking. His eyes were soulful, and Hanna was relieved. Still he was scared, as is any liar when the truth is on the line.



“Why?” he asked.



The man inclined his head so that his eyes were directed with a laser-focus at Hanna's. “Because I don't want to be a puppet.”



Hanna's heart broke a little, and the pieces dropped into his stomach. How very like him that was, to demand autonomy. And how rightful. Hanna wanted that too, for him, that freedom, and it was painful the possibility that he was the cause of the man's lack of free will, that his own mind may have done this, and that he was consciously perpetuating it at this very moment by not freeing him of it even though he knew how. It would be simple, ABC simple, just a name and he'd have back control. And memories, probably. And therein lie the problem. Because Hanna was selfish, and scared, and as the seconds ticked by in this man's presence, he realized more with each one just how lonely he'd been. Lonely enough, scared enough, selfish enough to risk the fact that some warlock with a grudge may be using his old friend to get back at Hanna for transgressions long past.



Luckily, he was also confident enough that he could handle it, particularly now that he had a reason. The past century or so, he'd really scaled back the types and intensity of magic he'd used, but he figured it was... like riding a bike, for lack of better modern metaphor. No, the magic shouldn't be the problem. Hanna would take care of this warlock or whoever it was that was after him (as he had increasingly convinced himself was the case because malicious meddling was the only plausible excuse for all this), but in the meantime he might have to recruit some friends to help with the finer, more inter-personal details, the sneaking and excuse-making. And he knew a few fellows who were particularly apt at that sort of thing.



“I think I'm gonna have to, uh, consult a colleague about this.”



So the man followed him back down the rickety staircase, quietly past the front office, and down the street, not even questioning why they were going to visit this colleague instead of simply phoning them up, but that most likely had more to do with not being entirely sure what phones were than being a trusting and easy-going individual, though that also happened to be the case.



As they walked, with purpose but not in a hurry (Hanna set the pace, and his quiet friend was considerate enough to match his speed with a slow, comfortable stride instead of rushing him with impatient little steps, as tall people seemed wont to do when unused to walking beside those of shorter statures), Hanna couldn't help but feel a bit nostalgic. He didn't mean to let it happen; this whole ordeal would be a lot easier on him if he could just ignore his past and whatever feelings it wrought, at least until the mess was sorted out. Of course, pangs of nostalgia weren't the sort of thing one planned, and usually popped up at inopportune moments like when you were trying to pretend you didn't know someone but couldn't help remembering that you'd walked down dark streets like this many times before, and it made your face break into a lonely, bittersweet expression. But the tall man was at his shoulder, and there was a good foot of distance between their eyes, and it was the murky 2am dark of the rundown inner-city streets, so it wasn't likely he could see. (Though his eyes did glow slightly, like an owl... if owls' eyes glowed, so maybe the dark was not an issue to him.)



It wasn't far to their destination, particularly not for Hanna, who frequented the place not only with magical and medical concerns, but whenever he was bored, so he was there nearly as often as he was at his own home. ('Home' still seemed like an inaccurate word for the place. You were supposed to feel comfortable at home; Hanna hadn't felt comfortable anywhere for years, let alone that ramshackle apartment.) They were turning down the familiar back-alley in a matter of minutes, and soon-after barging in without so much as a knock, as was customary. (But not 'customer-y'. Customers knocked.)



Worth was kicked back at his desk, reading, legs crossed at the ankles on top of piles of papers on top of the crooked desk on top of stacked books which were trying desperately to keep the whole thing level, but mostly being squished under the weight. He looked up lazily, since he knew only friends and 'friends' came in without knocking, but he dropped his book in his lap when he noticed who or what Hanna had brought along.



“Jeezus Christ, Hanna, this one's deader 'n usual! This is some straight up necromancer shit. Y' haven't gone rogue, have ya?”



Hanna proceeded to laugh (nervously, though he hoped no one noticed), cross his arms, and send Worth the friendliest dirty look he could manage. Then he didn't deny it. “He came to me for help.”



The doctor swung his legs down to the floor and stood up with his palms flat on the desk top. “Help? Looks like he's been 'helped' already. He's walkin', ain't he? Not sure what else we could do for 'im.”



The zombie shook his head, nearly the most abrupt movement Hanna had seen from him thus far (not counting the past, because they really weren't counting that). “I want to know who did this to me.”



Worth shrugged and directed his answer at Hanna. “I guess yer wantin' my connections then, huh?”



Hanna nodded. “You are the man with the connections,” he said.



Worth crossed his arms, yawned, and studied the zombie. “I ain't no magic-user though. T' track down a sorcerer yer gonna need a good spell too.”



“I got that covered,” Hanna insisted with a cheesy smile and a thumbs-up. Worth looked unsure and leveled a judgmental eye at his young friend. (Oh, 'young'; yet another unintentionally inaccurate word.) Hanna met his gaze, and they stared at each other a long moment or two. Their guest waited patiently in the awkward silence until Hanna turned to him and smiled almost apologetically. “You wanna have a seat or something? I need to talk to Worth for a minute. Privately. If that's cool with you.”



The man shrugged his head a little and turned to obediently scan the room for a chair. Hanna grabbed Worth by the arm of his grungy once-white coat and tugged him into the back, winding through the small maze of interconnected rooms until they were as far from Hanna's friend as possible. He flicked on the light and closed the door behind them. Worth frowned to find them squished together in the cramped bathroom and pushed past Hanna to sit heavily on the toilet, rolling his eyes. (Whoever had used the bathroom last had put both the seat and lid down, which probably meant it hadn't been either him or Lamont; he wondered briefly when the last time was that he was drunk enough not to notice someone else using his toilet.) He lit a cigarette. “Alright kid, what's got yer knickers in a twist now?”



Hanna shifted back and forth on his feet, unsure where to start and how far to go. “This, uh, case. It's different from any other case I've had.”



“Yeah, I imagine so,” Worth said, looking vaguely bored. “Most 'a yer clients are regular humans, ain't they? Or mostly livin', anyway.”



“Eh, that's not exactly true.” Although Hanna really didn't want to go into much more detail about that; Worth always got onto him about dealing with ghosts. The man could be like a mother hen sometimes. “But it's... not that.”



“Then speak the hell up,” Worth grumbled. “I ain't got all day. A customer could walk in any time and I don't want that green-ass client 'a yers bein' the first person they see.”



A hesitant rumble built up in Hanna's throat and he bit his lip, stuck between his desire to be honest and his desire not to complicate things further. “Yeeeaah, I.... knew him? Before.”



“Before?” Worth raised an eyebrow at the rather uninteresting admission. “What? Before ya met me? Ya'll two didn't look that chummy.”



“He doesn't remember me,” Hanna admitted, unable to stop a bit of that wiggly depressing emotion he was feeling from leaking out along with the words.



Worth didn't seem to see the problem. “And ya didn't try to jog his memory?”



Hanna gave a really unpleasant 'smile', canines showing and eyebrows raised but not a hint of actual positive emotion. “Ehhhh..., no?”



“Well why the hell n--,” Worth started, tired of Hanna's non-answers. Then his mind started sorting through everything he'd ever learned about necromancy and his eyes narrowed ever so slowly.



Hanna stood frozen under Worth's scrutinizing glare, like a proverbial deer about to be proverbially hit by a 16-wheeler.

“Hanna, you little shit!”



“I didn't mean to!” Hanna pled, holding his hands up in the small space between them. “Heck, I'm not even sure it was me! I mean, if it was me, I definitely didn't do it on purpose! He just showed up at my door tonight, I swear!”



Worth growled, and Hanna would have been more worried if it had been a less common noise from the doctor. “I don't really give a shit about that! But I've been tellin' ya fer years that necromancy's bad business, an' you din't once say nothin'. Yer a better liar 'n I gave you credit for.” He raised a single eyebrow at Hanna, like he was seeing the idiot magic-user in a whole new light and wasn't sure exactly how much he approved, but that it was likely on the positive side, at least a little.



“I was trying to put it behind me,” Hanna said, honest remorse creeping up into his voice.



Worth didn't say anything for a minute, just stood there with his cigarette hanging between his lips on the side of his mouth that was not curled into an uncomfortable frown. It seemed likely he was debating whether or not to point out how wrong Hanna's actions had been (even though he didn't know the half of it), but eventually he let out a puff of smoke with a sigh, presumably figuring Hanna had learned his lesson, and said, “Well, whaddya want me to do?”



Relief that Worth wasn't going to turn this into a lecture flooded Hanna. “I want you to help me figure out the truth. Er, but I wanna sort of keep the details on the down-low until I really know what happened.”



“Y'mean you wanna keep yer little friend out there from figurin' out what a shithead you are.” Worth took a puff and leaned back, digesting the situation. Hanna knew he wasn't really mad, but that he just didn't like being misinformed, and the whole past few years between them was turning out to have been a massive omission of information, if not entirely misinformation.



Hanna put on his best puppy-dog eyes, which wasn't hard at this point, because he honestly did feel bad about what a fuck-up he was. Not sorry, because that implied a desire to change, but still bad. “Yeah, basically. It's just, I screwed up, I know, but I wanna try to fix things before I admit it to him. He was my friend once.”



“Hnn, yeah? Guy's been dead, what?, ten years, looks like?”



“Yeah, maybe a little more than that?” Worth gave Hanna that look, that 'son, you best stop lyin'a me' look, and Hanna cringed, but figured he may as well be perfectly honest with someone tonight. “Maybe more like a hundred-somethin'?”



A look passed over Worth's face for just a moment that was like the little brother of murderous rage, but it quickly dropped into more of a 'you know what? Fuck it', as he exhaled the breath he'd been holding. “Pretty composed fer such a old corpse.”



“I put a preservation charm on him,” Hanna said, looking into the grungy bathroom mirror but not really seeing himself, remembering the past but not really seeing that either.



Worth was quiet a moment, as he observed Hanna through his little cloud of smoke. “Alright, so you want me to babysit him while you play detective?”



“Would you?” Hanna asked, perking up. “Just while I do the summoning? Just in case the reaper's not in the mood to keep secrets.” He didn't bother explaining the process to Worth because he knew Worth was colloquially familiar with most basic magic processes and could put together the rest of it with little help. The man was almost frighteningly quick, particularly when it came to magic; it was a little surprising he'd never gotten into the field himself, although Hanna suspected it was mostly because he couldn't be bothered.



“Yeah, alright,” Worth said, looking like he didn't want to agree to be helpful but was physically incapable of actually turning Hanna down (which Hanna knew was pretty close to the truth). “Ya really think yer reaper's gonna have any secrets fer you to keep?”



He wasn't asking if the reaper would know the secrets-- even though he was pretty sure Worth had never met a reaper, anyone who knew people in the supernatural community knew someone who knew one and knew that reapers knew pretty much everything-- he was asking if what the reaper knew was worth considering a secret, and the problem was that Hanna didn't know. That really was the problem. “God, I have no idea,” he admitted. “But I don't wanna take the chance that they-- oh man, it's been so long since I've dealt with one, I almost forgot! Reapers are weirdly formal-- they always address people by name when they greet them, so, yeah, that is a huge secret!”



“A secret name? 's there somethin' else yer not tellin' me, 'side from apparently bein' a hundred year-old necromancer.”



“Ex-necromancer,” Hanna said, distaste obvious in his expression and tone of voice, although perhaps not for the reason Worth was probably thinking. “It's his name that's the problem. You know how it is. Names have power.”



“His name,” Worth mimicked. “I'm guessin' you mean the zombie. Yer not even gonna tell me what it is, are ya?”



Hanna shook his head, apologetic but firm. “I'm not even gonna think it, if I can. I don't wanna risk it.”



“Yeah, yeah, I'm gettin' that,” Worth grumbled from behind his cigarette.



“Thanks,” Hanna said, and he really really meant it.



Worth looked away from the too-earnest look on Hanna's face. “Whatever, kid. Let's just get this over with so I can go about adjustin' to my unwanted new knowledge 'bout you in peace. Whaddya need fer yer summonin' or what-have-ya?”



Hanna thought back to all the old rituals he'd once been well-versed in. Reaper summoning... Right. Reaper summoning was the one that was either particularly difficult or particularly easy, depending on the resources you had available to you. Currently he had at least one of the resources he needed sitting barely a foot away from him, although given Worth's opinion of necromancy (a part of which reaper summoning was usually considered), Hanna wasn't sure he'd actually be able to take advantage of it, and he was long past taking without permission. (In truth, he'd never liked using non-willing participants if he could help it, but he'd stopped doing so entirely even before he'd first met his un-undead friend, and hadn't done so since. For the most part.) But Worth, much like a mangy dog, could all but smell fear, so Hanna steeled his face into an expression he hoped exuded confidence and, moreover, morality, and told Worth, “Well, your blood, for starters.”



'Morality!' Hanna thought again, as Worth seemed to chew on the idea of donating his blood for Hanna's cause, looking as if it tasted like a fatty piece of gristle he couldn't spit out.



“What else?” he asked, and Hanna was a bit surprised, though he couldn't tell if Worth's question meant he'd agreed or was still metaphorically chewing, maybe looking for a bite of something else to make the gristle go down smoother.



“The blood of a vampire?” Hanna said, accidentally making it sound like a question, which typically did not make one sound as if they were very confident about their idea or really know what they were doing exactly. “I kinda thought maybe Lamont could get us some. Oh! The blood doesn't necessarily have to come from you, actually, I could get it from Lamont! It just has to be, uh, mortal blood. And the other blood doesn't have to be from a vampire exactly, I just think it's probably easier to get than, say, demi-god blood. Unless you know any other immortals.”



Worth made a face like, 'Ain't I lookin' at one?' so Hanna quickly waved a hand and amended his statement. “Like, uh, a normal immortal. Mine won't work. The reapers say I, uh, smell funny.”



“Uh-huh.” Worth seemed uninterested in his excuses and totally interested in moving the heck on. He tapped out his cigarette ashes in the grungy sink. “I'll call up 'Mont and let 'im know. What else ya need?”



“Bones? Or bone powder. The older the better. The vampire blood's actually supposed to be the hard part in this one.”



“Nah, shouldn' be too difficult,” Worth said as he stood and flicked the last bit of his cigarette into the (empty? Wow. And miraculously almost clean) tub to smolder itself to death. He nudged past Hanna back out into the winding hall towards the front room and his desk, where his only phone was sitting probably off the hook on the floor somewhere underneath. “Monty's picked up a few more clients recently. 'm sure he can work out a trade with one of 'em.”



“I hope so,” Hanna said, chewing lightly on his lower lip as he followed Worth. “Vamps don't usually like to share their blood with just anyone.” And, as he'd previously reminded himself, he was done taking without permission. The last time had worked out okay-- nobody had died-- although, actually, no, that wasn't quite true. Well, it had turned out alright, anyway, but he still would rather not have to steal a vampire's blood, especially for something that was not literally life-or-death.



He'd fallen a few yards behind Worth, because goodness that man's legs were long and he could get places in a hurry when he wasn't pretending to be a complete layabout, so he heard the man talking to someone before he saw them talking. At first he'd assumed Worth was chatting with his 'new zombie friend', but even Worth was not usually outright rude to people he wasn't fairly familiar with, and his tone of voice was much like the one he used with Lamont when they were antagonizing each other, so Hanna assumed that it was Lamont who had conveniently come by with the good timing he was somewhat known for, until he heard the responding voice, which was both higher pitched and higher strung than their resident deliverer-of-goods, who tended to sound more or less like he was waking up from a good nap even when he was in the middle of a heated argument.



A second or two later, Hanna rounded the corner and found Worth bickering comfortably (a style of bickering Hanna thought only Worth and those who fought with him could manage) with a very pale vampire, who certainly was not Lamont. They paused when they saw Hanna, and the vampire acknowledged him with the very minimal amount of politeness required (which was still more than he got from a lot of people; this was the city, after all, and the sorts he dealt with often claimed to be too fed up with 'this shit' (usually meaning the generalities of life, Hanna gathered) to be bothered).



“Your new assistant?” he asked Worth, nodding in Hanna's direction. “Or maybe the long-awaited exterminator?”



“Colleague 'a mine,” Worth answered, not rising to the bait, most likely because he'd heard it a million times before. “Hanna Cross. Introduce yerself, Connie. A 'lil more human inneraction won't kill ya, probably.”



The vampire scowled in immediate response (so immediate, Hanna was fairly certain it didn't even matter what Worth said, he'd have scowled anyway) and turned as if he were going to take the suggestion and introduce himself... before the name and small stature and curly red hair caught up with him and his scowl became a wide-eyed hostile glare.



“Hanna fucking Cross? You're kidding me.”



It was then that recognition hit Hanna as well. And he'd just been thinking about when he'd first met Conrad Achenleck, the last time he'd taken a vampire's blood without permission. He was a little surprised at himself that he didn't recognize Conrad immediately, although it had been decades ago, and the man was a little bit less, uh, beatnik than he remembered him.



“Uh, long time no see, Conrad,” Hanna said, waving awkwardly.



“How the fuck are you still sixteen?!”



Well, it was good to see that Conrad hadn't changed much since contracting vampirism. 'How is that even possible?!' and other variations of such disbelieving exclamations were among the things Hanna had heard most from Conrad's mouth during the short time they'd spent together. Correction, 'How the fuck is that even possible?!'. He was a very seeing-isn’t-necessarily-believing kind of guy, the sort that had a problem taking things at face value, even if they were right in his face. Hanna would have expected him to be a little less surprised about the existence of weird, supernatural-y things once he adjusted to being one himself, but some people were just stubborn like that, he guessed.



“I'm twenty-four,” he said, nonchalant. “So what are you doing here? You're friends with Worth? Man, that's crazy. Never would've expected that.”



Conrad wasn't having it. “No, how the fuck are you still sixteen?! And I am not friends with Worth. I just buy blood from him.”



Worth chuckled gruffly. “'Cuz he's too much of a pussy t' go out 'n get his own.”



“Just give me the blood, you hack! I'm starving!” Conrad held out a small stack of bills and waved them impatiently. Worth grumbled a good-natured sort of 'yeah, yeah' under his breath and took the money from the man's pale fist, heading into one of the back rooms where he kept his stock. The vampire turned his wide eyes back to Hanna, looking like he was angry that the mage's existence didn't fit neatly into his clean, cultivated mental view of the world. “How do you still look the same as you did fifty fucking years ago? You're not a vampire.”



“Magic?” Hanna offered.



Conrad seemed to want to protest that, although he knew it was technically a plausible reason and wasn't well-versed enough in the intricacies of the rules of magic to really argue. Worth came back with a bag of blood packets as he was opening his mouth to fire off some denial of Hanna's excuse, so he said instead, “Thank God. I was about to-”



“What?” Worth interrupted with a cocky smirk. “Bite yer own wrist, ya pansy?”



The vampire glared, but with less vitriol than he might have if he weren't sinking his fangs into the top of a pouch. “Shut up, Worth,” he said around the punctured plastic.



Hanna was interested to catch up with Conrad again after so long, since he usually didn't get to keep in touch with his clients, but at this moment he was more interested in getting back to the real problem he was facing. (Conrad was a vampire, and apparently competent enough of one to survive this long, so he'd be around to talk to once Hanna had gotten the current situation in order. Technically, all of them here (aside from Worth) were likely to be around for a good long time, so it didn't really matter what order he did things in, but solving the case with 'his new friend, the zombie' was more than first priority right now, it was the only priority. It would be looming over him until he knew for sure what had happened and what was going to happen. It would probably loom over him forever, even if everything worked out perfectly, because no matter how great things went from then on out, there was no changing the past or erasing decades of guilt. He had to get this figured out.) He scooted behind Conrad, who was still bickering with Worth, and found his zombie (what? God, why did he think that? His?) sitting with admirable posture in one of the less rickety chairs near the door.



“Heyyy,” Hanna said, coming up to stand diagonal to him. “Sorry to leave you here. I just needed to work out some details with Worth.”



“It's not a problem,” the man said (and, geez, Hanna really needed a name for him-- if he had some name to think of him by then he was less likely to accidentally... fuck things up hardcore, which was still a major concern of his at this point). He tilted his head up just slightly to look at Hanna, who stood less than a foot taller than him when he was sitting, and Hanna wondered casually if he'd ever have gotten to a normal height if he continued growing past the age of barely-pubescent. “Do you have what you need?”



“Uh, not yet. Worth's gotta get in contact with one of his, well, contacts, and it could be days before he can get all the ingredients for us, so, y'know.” He shrugged in apology of the delay. “I hope you don't mind waiting.”



The zombie shrugged his own response, probably not in that much of a hurry after having been dead for 'however' long, and probably not in that much of a hurry because he'd always been a patient sort of fellow. Though a moment after his shrug, a subtle look came over his face that was probably only subtle to people who were not Hanna, people who didn't know the intricacies of the expressions of both the undead and of a gentle, intuitive detective from the 1800's. It was a look of realization that came right before a slightly harder look of determination to solve a problem without inconveniencing anyone more than was strictly necessary. It was kind of a painful expression for Hanna to see, so he preempted it by offering a solution to what he thought was probably the problem his friend was trying to solve. (Or at least he hoped so.)



“You can stay at my place if, y'know, you don't have some other place you'd rather be. While we wait.”



He was worried for a minute that he'd let his hopes get ahead of him and perceived the situation wrong, but then his friend the zombie's posture sagged a comfortable few millimeters and he didn't let out a breath of relief because there was probably no air in his lungs with which to do so, but he smiled up at Hanna and said with a genuineness the magic-user was certain he didn't deserve, “Thank you.”



Hanna had to look away. He crossed his arms, like 'oh, no big deal', because, hey, it was no big deal, right? And he held the heavy breath of, what was it? Surprise? overwhelm? that threatened to fall out from between his very frowning lips. “Hey, sure,” he said, glad his voice wasn't shaking too bad. “My apartment's kinda, you've seen it, it's not like the Ritz or anything, but mi casa es su casa.”



Of course, the man hadn't had a need to know any Spanish when he was alive, and the phrase hadn't come into popular usage yet, so unless he'd learned Espanol since his reawakening, he probably wasn't going to get that last part, but he seemed to understand what Hanna had meant. Although that brought Hanna to another point, something he'd forgotten to ask earlier that night, even though it probably should have been one of the first things to cover.



“By the way,” he started, clearing his throat of any mucous that had decided to spontaneously gather there upon seeing the zombie smile, “how long have you been, you know, undead?”



“I'm not sure,” the man replied. “My memory is sort of hazy. The first thing I remember is walking down the street toward your apartment. I don't know how I knew to go there. It just seemed like something I had to do.”



“Wait, so, you don't remember anything before tonight?”



He shook his head, if such a subtle motion could be likened to something as dynamic as shaking.



It was a troubling thought, because most of the dead that Hanna had ever raised regained consciousness almost immediately. Ones that didn't 'wake up' from the start usually never did, and there were several reasons for that. Either the necromancer hadn't bothered to bring back the spirit along with the body, because he was planning on using the corpse as a disposable tool that didn't need to bother itself with things like thinking, or he was planning on using it as a disposable tool but the soul refused to separate from the body so he suppressed it. The only other reason a reanimated body wouldn't wake up was if there was no soul left. He couldn't decide which idea was the worst.



However, he didn't want to worry his poor client, so he shrugged like that was a totally common problem for the undead to have. “Well maybe we can get some of that figured out with the rest of it,” he offered and then kind of mentally smacked himself because what? Why was he offering to solve more of this mystery? He was just digging himself into more of a hole! Either he told the man that he couldn't find anything out about his past and made himself look like an incompetent loser-- not to mention disappointing him, or he told him the truth and woooaahh was that ever not gonna happen! Geez. He hoped he could find a compromise.



The zombie stood, and the extra height made him seem almost as if he were looming over Hanna, which would have set him on edge if it were anyone else but was actually sort of comforting, being who it was. “I'm not very worried about it,” the man said.



Hanna turned around to more fully face his tall companion and found that at this short distance he had to look up quite a ways, which he felt he would actually like to get used to again. “Er, okay,” Hanna said. Personally he thought it was a bit odd not to want to know your own past, but he certainly wasn't going to force the issue. He turned back toward Worth and found that his and Conrad's conversation was simmering on low heat, and took the opportunity to interrupt. “Hey Worth, we're gonna head back. Tell Lamont I said please and thanks for the bones?”



“Yeah, get outta here,” Worth replied, waving them off and setting his attention back to Conrad, who'd put on another scowl and asked shrilly, “Bones? What does he need bones for?”



They left the run-down building that Worth's little office was nestled in and stepped back out into the flickering lights of the run-down streets surrounding it. This city that he'd found himself in was actually one of his favorites, compared to places he'd lived before. It was sort of gross, yeah, but no more or less than you'd expect of a place like this, litter and graffiti strewn here and there like any teenager's room. But it wasn't careless, it was casual. It didn't reek of desperation and despair, but smelled more of the pride you have in the meager mess you've managed to accumulate when you've been down-and-out for too long, although with a faint odor of urine overlaying it, sure. And where most cities didn't seem to give a damn about you, this one had just the right amount of nosiness, just enough to make you feel like someone would notice if you'd disappeared. It wasn't surprising that this was the city Worth had ended up in, and Lamont and apparently Conrad too. That was probably why he'd stayed so long.



He glanced over his shoulder and found ...erhhh, the man (he was still working on a name or a title or something) walking there with his hands in his pockets (had they left his pockets since they 'met'?) in what Hanna had always thought of as the body-guard position-- within arm's reach, at his elbow, on whichever side was nearest the street. He'd done it on their way to Worth's as well, switching sides whenever they crossed to the other side of the road. Funny he should still remember something like that, when he'd forgotten his entire identity.



Actually, Hanna wasn't sure if that was normal. This whole situation was sort of a first for him. The zombie of an old friend spontaneously visiting him, obviously, yeah, but this was different than anything he'd done when he was an active necromancer. First of all, the amnesia, and really that was all he could think to call it, because it wasn't like the forced suppression of spirit he'd seen before-- those undead were just shambling corpses, couldn't even walk straight half the time. (Why anyone even used them like that was beyond Hanna; it was seriously inefficient.) And then the man's age. His dead-age. Most of the undead he'd met were less than a year old. Or, er, a year dead. After that, the standard procedure was to just raise the ghost instead (probably because nobody wanted to deal with decay any more than they had to, even mages who reveled in death). Third-- the fact that he'd known him. It wasn't... it wasn't as if Hanna had never raised anyone he'd known before... but with all three of those factors combined, it made for an unprecedented set of circumstances. So maybe it was normal for his friend to have retained his personality, it was hard to say.



It was a nice, mild night, the sort that really lent itself to strolling, but Hanna was glad when they got home, because he was suddenly quite tired. It hadn't been a longer night than most others in which he had a case, but it was certainly more exhausting. He supposed emotional involvement could do that. Typically, sleep was pretty low on his hierarchy of needs (really, 1. breathing, 2. not bleeding out, and 3. not being possessed by demons were his only true priorities), but it was still as useful to him as to any other human in retaining a certain amount of mental acuity and pleasantness.



“So, make yourself at home,” he said, as his tall friend followed him inside and was polite enough to close the door gently behind them. “I've got to do some...” 'human things', his tired brain almost said, managing to actually put out of his mouth, “sleeping.”



The zombie nodded. “Good night,” he said, as easy-going as ever.



“Good night,” Hanna replied, leaving the man to his own devices, whatever those might be, and rounding the corner to his bedroom, which was really hardly more than a mattress-room but would do the job. The mattress was probably not quite as old as him, and its springs creaked mightily under his scant weight when he fell upon it, but it was better than the floor, and vaguely better than the couch, and happened to be where all his mismatched blankets were at the time, so he cocooned himself in them, tucked his head into his pillow, and fell almost immediately to sleep.



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