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Coaxing any information about past events out of Herbert was usually more trouble than it was worth. It was less out of any trauma or care to keep his mystery - although Dan privately suspected these did play a part - and more because he simply found it irrelevant, boring, and a waste of time.
However, just like Dan managed to drag him from the lab to at least consider joining him for takeaway now and again, when circumstances allowed he had convinced Herbert to divulge enough information about his origins to paint an intruiging picture.
Among other curious anecdotes, he found out that West's parents had perished in a house fire the origins of which were seemingly a sore spot, and the fact he'd even escaped with his life was the first sign Dan got of a key fact.
Herbert West always lived to tell the tale. Or, more accurately, consider the event in his research.
The first time Dan bore firsthand witness to this alarming habit was in the aftermath of the Miskatonic massacre. Having returned home in a daze - numb, shivering and resigned to the fact that he'd lost the two most prominent figures in his life at once in the span of an hour - he'd fallen into a dead sleep and near jumped out of his skin when he later awoke to the sound of the door being fumbled with.
Armed with a bat, he'd opened the door to find none other than West, struggling at the lock with shaking hands.
"Oh, Dan. It helps than you're up. I think I'm in shock. It's fascinating, my fine motor skills are failing me but my mind is completely sound,"
His voice rasped and wavered, heavy bruising already starting to appear across his throat, but besides that and his generally disheveled state he seemed fine. Undoubtebly, miraculously alive.
Dan, ignoring any good sense or doctor's instinct left in him, pulled him into a tight hug. He accepted it bonelessly but didn't reciprocate, letting out a little gasp at the sudden rough handling.
"Dan?"
"Shut up. Just, shut up a moment,"
"Be reasonable,"
At that, Dan pulled away, but kept a firm grip on both his shoulders as if ready to shake him.
"Reasonable? I thought you died. You nearly died,"
"No I didn't," Herbert laughed coldly. He slid out of his grasp and into the dark of the house, not even bothering to turn the lights on as he went. Dan just stood in the doorway, dumbfounded.
Five years later, the conversation came up again. Sure, Dan had seen his roommate tossed like a near five-foot-seven ragdoll more times than were worth counting in the meantime, but it was a few weeks after Hill's final ambush that it started to bother him.
It was an eerily normal, domestic night for them. It was what used to be a rare and pleasant occurence; Herbert coaxed from his basement long enough to allow Dan to pull him in to whatever he was doing, eating or watching a film.
On this occasion, it was some bad horror flick from the sparse pile of VHS tapes that had moved house with them. Herbert was eerily normal too. He rolled his eyes at all the scares, huffed at the cliched lines, and rattled off in long spiels about the innacuracies in anatomy or quantities of blood. An almost endearing habit a few years ago, Dan suddenly couldn't bear it.
"Herbert, stop,"
"What? I've told you - if I must engage with your trite, grating taste in cinema to keep you on side then at least allow me the luxury of engaging in my own way,"
"No, just," Dan struggled "It's not that,"
"Then what is the matter?"
"This, all of this. Why are you acting like you didn't just almost die?"
"Are you sure you're of sound mind? That was weeks ago, Dan. You pulled me out of the crypt and for that I have already thanked you. You remember?"
"Yes, Herbert, I remember," Dan breathed heavily through his nose, practiced at not rising to clear bait after so many year of having it dangled over him.
Of course he remembered. He remembered Herbert's limp body, clammy and smaller than he'd ever realised. He remembered his broken glasses and fractured leg. He remembered how, despite West's cockroach-like ability to leap up after being thrown and wake up after all manner of near-death scrapes, this was the closest he'd ever looked to mortal.
Even after the massacre, if it weren't for Meg and the general trauma of it all, he likely wouldn't have thought Herbert dead, not truly. But there, then, in that rubble, he'd entertained that terrifying idea for just long enough to stick.
And now the man had the audacity to bitch about practical effects like nothing in the world had changed.
"That's not my point. You've had so many close calls that I'm starting to wonder when you'll get too close and what I'm supposed to do if that happens,"
"That's the issue? That you're pondering my mortality? If we spent more time in the lab then we do running through the motions you've decided normal people must do then maybe we'd have a cure for it by now," Herbert said cattily "If I die before then and you cannot revive my mind, then you know what you must do. You take my notes and you continue the work yourself,"
"That's still not what's bugging me, Herbert," Dan loathed the patterns of thinking that made his roommate such a good scientist.
"Then what on Earth are you so worked up about?" Herbert looked genuinely interested by the failiure of his conversational predictions, if not also a little annoyed.
"You, Herbert. Not the work. You. I don't want you to die on me. I can't," Dan said quietly "Not after Meg,"
Herbert's expression closed, and he turned away "Her again,"
"Whatever stupid issues you had with her are not what I'm getting at. You've ruined my life. You've altered me as a person to the point that I barely know who's in the mirror and you've stood in the way at every chance I've got of normalcy since the day we met,"
"I see. Clearly you view me as someone worth getting worked up over,"
"You just don't get it, Herbert. You've changed me. I don't know how to live without you and maybe I-" He trailed off, measuring the sentence in his brain before he let it into his mouth "Maybe I don't want to,"
"Oh," Herbert said.
Dan stared at him, searching his face for any discernable reaction, but he gave him nothing to work with. From the abrupt, one-word sentence Dan even dared assume he'd done the unimaginable and rendered Herbert speechless.
"Do you really not care about dying, Herbert?" Dan prompted. He paused mid-breath for a responding scoff that never came. Instead, Herbert just kept staring at him inpenetrably.
He was well aware that Herbert thought near only in the clinical, the biological - processes stopping, starting, increasing in speed. What was something like death to someone like Herbert? A final puzzle left unsolved, probably. Nothing more than an unfinished crossword sitting out on the kitchen table, a frustrating end at the hands of something he'd spent a lifetime trying to outsmart.
That was what he'd decided on until now at least. Now he wondered if, deep down, the man he'd chosen to dedicate himself to was just as soft, mushy, and scared as every other irrational sack of chemicals he spent his time around.
It took Herbert a few visible failed attempts to speak again.
"I would certainly find it regrettable to be prevented from further research," Herbert said slowly and increasingly like he couldn't believe his own ears "And, since you're clearly so desperate to hear it, I would also prefer not to be seperated from, well, you,"
Dan laughed despite himself "Gee, coming from you that's bascially a proposal,"
Herbert smiled back, awkward and rare "This is already far more than a marriage, Dan. I suppose you'd be upset if I said 'til death do us part given the circumstances of this conversation?"
"I'll forgive it. If you're careful from now on, that is,"
"I won't be,"
"I know,"