Fic: life less ordinary (April Fic Challenge)

[csi_sanders1129]

Title: life less ordinary
Chapters: 1/1
Author:csi_sanders1129
Ratings: K+
Word Count: 1077
Pairings/Characters: Dan Cain/Herbert West, OC
Synopsis: In which there have been significantly fewer failed experiments and quite a few successful ones
Comments: Written for my April Fic Challenge 2021, Prompt: Grow. Established relationship. Title from Carbon Leaf song of the same name. Comments and kudos would be awesome. Enjoy!

Daniel Cain returns home from a double shift at the hospital just after seven on a Saturday morning. He's tired and hungry and in need of a shower, but the front door opens upon his approach and he finds himself reaching out to catch the giggly five year old that comes barreling towards him and suddenly, he's just glad to be home. "Daddy!" the little girl greets him as he sweeps her up into his arms. "Daddy! Guess what?"

"What?" he asks, prepared for a story of kindergarten shenanigans or fantastical imaginary tales.

"We have a new cat!"

"Oh, really?" he questions, he had not seen that answer coming. He wonders just what Herbert agreed to - surely the man knows better than to promise a pet that might potentially end up as yet another failed experiment – though, to be fair, these days there have been significantly fewer failed experiments and quite a few successful ones.

Hell, the little girl in his arms is their biggest success of all. A few years back, Dan had come home from an absolutely brutal shift with a very tiny body he'd smuggled out of the morgue – an abandoned toddler rescued too late for it to matter, with no one who cared that she couldn't be saved, and no one (short of the inept hospital administrators) who would notice that her body had vanished. He'd brought her home to Herbert and… well, it shouldn't have worked. She'd been dead too long. But it had. The re-agent had brought her back to life and soon they had a very grumpy two-year old to contend with. She'd been their first real success, their first victory over death.

They hadn't known her name, but they called her Eva. They tracked her growth – glad that she was still growing and that neither death nor the re-agent had impeded her development. They hadn't quite known what they were doing, raising a child, but they'd figured it together along the way. They kept her secret until enough time had passed that no one would think of the missing body (why would they, when presented with a toddler who was very much alive, when she was happy and thriving in their care?) and to explain away the sudden acquisition of a child, Dan had claimed that she was his daughter, that her mother had left her with him and run off. From there, the three of them quickly settled into a very strange little family, and Dan wouldn't trade it for anything.

He makes his way up the steps and into the house. He sets Eva down and she scrambles over to a cardboard box on the floor in the living room. There is a grey and white cat there, purring contentedly as it basks in the early morning sunshine streaming in through the windows. Eva pets it gently and explains, "We went for a walk while you were at work last night and we found her by the road. She wasn't moving and she was really, really cold, but Papa said he could make her better and that if the cat woke up then I could keep her. Isn't she pretty?"

So, a successful experiment, indeed. "She is," he agrees. He hasn't had a cat since Rufus – he's missed it.

"And," she says, a beaming smile on her face, "Papa says she's going to have kittens! Look how big her belly is!"

Dan's impressed. A very successful experiment, if the re-agent saved all the kittens, too. That's a new development in the research that he's sure Herbert is already eager to explore further.

Herbert appears from the basement, then, likely drawn out by their voices. "Ah, I take it you've heard about our new cat, then," he says, shooting Dan a fond smile.

"Eva might've mentioned it," Dan jokes. "We'll have to go to the pet store and get some things for her." The cat meows, stands up with a big stretch and crosses the room to investigate Dan and demand head scratches before returning to her box and settling back in for another well-deserved nap in her new home.

"Can we name her Aurora?" Eva asks, "Like the princess?"

"You can name her whatever you want," Herbert assures her.

Eva had leveled Herbert out in a way Dan never thought possible. Before Dan had brought her home, Herbert's experiments had been skewing a bit too close to Frankenstein, putting bodies together in ways they didn't belong, trying to piecemeal things together from haphazard parts and playing god just because he could. He'd been getting further and further away from the sort of science Dan had joined him for, and it had been harder and harder for Dan to try to rein him in, harder and harder for Dan to justify sticking around to watch his descent into madness. Even with how tangled together the two of them were by then, there were limits to their relationship and things had been stretched to the breaking point.

But Eva had changed that, changed everything.

Her resurrection had brought Herbert's focus back to his original goal of defeating death. Initially, Dan had still had to draw some hard lines on the experiments that came in the aftermath, establishing some sort of moral and ethical limit: No, they absolutely could not kill her again to see if it was replicable. No, they were absolutely not going to try it on another child (at least not without a lot, a lot, more research). Herbert had, somewhat begrudgingly, agreed to Dan's terms on the matter. In the three years since then, though, Herbert has managed to replicate the results on several animals (mostly rats, but there's an elderly couple down the street who's dog mysteriously recovered after getting hit by a car and a fox that frequents the cemetery that also got a second chance at life after ingesting something fatal from someone's garbage). Now, he's mostly focused on tracking Eva and his animal subjects for any evident side effects – so far, there haven't been any.

Dan suspects sooner rather than later that Herbert will want another subject – one they can actually use to prove the effectiveness of the reagent to the world. For now, though, it's their secret and Dan will happily take on a hoard of kittens and an inquisitive five-year old over the aggressive zombies their early experiments had resulted in so long as Herbert's along for the ride.