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Herbert Cain-West had softened over the years.
That’s not to say he wasn’t still the same sharp-witted, quick-tongued, intelligent man he’d always been. He’d never fully lose that air of superiority, not when he believed most of humanity to be so far beneath him.
But after watching Dan give up so much for him time and time again, Herbert finally began to learn a thing or two about the give-and-take of relationships. While he was still very much prone to taking and taking, he’d learned to give much more than he ever would’ve as a younger man.
Which was why he found himself standing at the entrance to a headache-inducingly loud Halloween party dressed up as Mr. Spock, clinging to the arm of a partially grey haired, but still ever so dashing, Captain Kirk.
Well, “party” was a generous word for the town’s meager Halloween festivities. The event was mostly geared towards kids, but the inside of Town Hall was filled with enough adults milling around and chatting about inane things that Herbert and Dan didn’t seem particularly out of place.
It was their first big event since moving to the town a few weeks prior. Dan had insisted they attend to meet their new neighbors and familiarize themselves with the faces they’d- hopefully - be living with for a long while.
Herbert, while feeling more generous in his middle-age, had still been rather reluctant to go. It had taken quite a bit of Dan’s puppy-dog eyes to convince him to attend, and it was only on the condition that Herbert got to choose their costumes so that they ‘didn’t end up looking completely ridiculous.’ He didn’t need a repeat of their first Halloween as a married couple, when Dan had somehow convinced him to dress as the Daphne to his Fred. Herbert swore he would never don a wig again for as long as he lived.
His reservations about the party were mostly related to the socializing aspect, of course— parties had never been and definitely never would be his forté— but he was also concerned about the other guests’ reception of the two as a same-sex couple. Gay marriage had been legalized a few years back, but Herbert was fully aware that most of the country was still not very open to their union. Another reason Herbert considered himself to be above others. While most people bothered themselves with the mindless drivel of hatred and politics, he concerned himself only with science and truth.
Herbert was snapped out of his wandering thoughts as a woman in a tacky black dress and cat ears scampered up to them with an uncostumed husband in tow.
“Happy Halloween! You boys must be our town’s newest arrivals! I’m so glad you could make it.” She beamed at them through pearly white, albeit slightly crooked, teeth. “I’m Holly, and this is my husband, Jared. We’re very pleased to finally meet you.”
Herbert could practically feel Dan slipping into his charming social façade beside him. Chin up, shoulders back, lopsided grin in pace.
“Very pleased to meet you too, Holly, Jared.” He nodded at each of them respectively, “I’m Dan, and this is my husband-“
“Herbert,” Herbert cut in with an attempt at a smile that, judging by their reactions, fell flat, “Herbert Cain-West.”
“Charmed.” Holly responded, her mile-wide smile shrinking by a few inches. “I must say, I love your costumes! Try as I might, I can never get Jared to go in on a couple’s costume with me.” She nudged her husband, whose eye had wandered to a passing teen girl in a low-cut angel costume.
Jared snapped back to the conversation, laughing awkwardly, “Well, I’m just not exactly the dressing up type.”
Dan chuckled, “Oh, I know the feeling. But while I may not care much for dressing up myself, it’s always worth it to see how silly of a costume I can wrestle Herbert into.”
“Hmph. As if I wasn’t doing all the wrestling this year with these quote, ‘nerdy’ costumes,” Herbert monotoned, and he stared at Holly and Jared, waiting for them to realize he was making an attempt at lightheartedness.
After a moment, Holly tittered politely behind her hand, “Well, those ‘nerdy’ costumes have a great chance of winning our costume contest, if you two feel so inclined to enter!”
“Costume contest?” Dan turned to shoot a hopeful grin at Herbert, who glared back at him with a defiant eyebrow raise and a slight shake of the head, “We’ll definitely have to check it out.”
“You two are a shoo-in, I’m sure.” Holly nonchalantly elbowed her husband again, who had begun ogling a college girl in a nurse costume. “So, you two are… husband and husband? How long have y’all been together?”
Herbert resisted the urge to visibly gag at the mild twang that he was sure Dan was delighted by. Anything that made Dan feel like they were living in a small-town suburban area always seemed to get him unreasonably excited. And sure enough, Dan’s amicable grin widened.
“Oh, how long has it been now, Herb? 20 years? 21?” Dan gave his arm a reassuring squeeze.
While Herbert appreciated his husband’s attempts to make him feel included in the conversation, he truly wanted nothing more than to turn around and head right back outside, perhaps all the way to the nearby graveyard. After all, the only people he particularly cared to converse with were Dan and the dead.
But since that didn’t quite seem like an option, Herbert replied smoothly, “We’ve been together for 20 years and married for 5.” He didn’t miss the way Holly’s face fell every time he spoke, despite his voice staying in completely neutral territory. She was just lucky he wasn’t biting out any sort of scathing remarks about her husband’s blatant disloyalty or her clumpy mascara.
“Impressive! Tonight is actually Jared and I’s twenty-first wedding anniversary. We’d been in a bit of a goth phase back when we were wedding planning.” She explained sheepishly, as if she were somehow apologetic about the date of their wedding.
Herbert tried to imagine the bubbly bleach-blonde woman before him in any sort of goth attire and found the task to be impossible.
Dan laughed lightly, “With Herb’s flair for the dramatics, it’s honestly a miracle we weren’t married on Halloween as well.”
Herbert pouted at Dan’s side. He hated the good natured teasing he was constantly subjected to at these events.
Holly responded with a laugh of her own, shaking her head as if she knew the two of them, “Well, we’d better let you go enjoy the party. What a hostess I’ve been, barely letting you two past the door!”
“Oh, don’t worry about it,” Dan said easily, “It’s been nice chatting with you.”
“You too!” She replied chipperly. “You folks have a good night! ”
“You too!” Dan echoed.
With that, Holly dragged her husband and his wandering eye away into the heart of the darkened room.
“They seemed nice.” Dan said pleasantly, leading Herbert past a few jack-o-lanterns and plastic skeletons to the refreshment table.
“I suppose the woman was acceptable, though she didn’t seem to like me very much. And her husband couldn’t keep his eyes off of every girl who walked past.” Herbert allowed Dan to push a glass of punch into his hand.
Dan raised his eyebrows, “What d'you mean she didn’t seem to like you? She even laughed at your joke!”
Herbert rolled his eyes, “It was hardly a joke. And every time I spoke she looked at me like I had just kicked a newborn puppy.”
“She did not.“ Dan protested.
“She certainly did. Maybe even two newborn puppies.”
Clearly despite himself, Dan snorted. “C’mon, Herbert, get to know these people a little more before you judge them. You can hate everyone once we’ve lived here a few months. Maybe around Christmastime you can become the town’s very own Scrooge.”
Before Herbert could whip up a snarky reply, another partygoer sidled up to them, this time a hunched older woman who wore the ugliest, most massive, purple, black, and orange monstrosity of a Halloween sweater Herbert had ever seen.
“And what are you two kids doing, loitering over here by the punchbowl?” She asked, jabbing a knobby finger at them.
Dan and Herbert exchanged awkward looks before the old woman burst into cackling laughter.
“Only joking! Just my little Halloween trick! Here, now you can have some treats.” She rifled through an oversized alligator skin purse before procuring two huge, sticky butterscotches from its depths and placing them in Dan’s reluctantly outstretched hand. “Now, I don’t think I’ve seen you around here before. What are your names, sonnies?”
The rest of the party went on in a similar fashion. Dan and Herbert were repeatedly intercepted by guests who bombarded them with invasive questions. “Where are you from?,” “Are you two brothers? Friends?,” “Ohh, that’s…nice. How long have you been together, then?,” and the like.
Herbert swore if one more person called his marriage “nice,” he was going to fill the punch bowl with watered down reagent and study their reactions to the ingestion, rather than injection, of it.
After a little over an hour, Herbert felt his social battery beginning to run dry, even with Dan doing most of the talking. He excused himself graciously with a very charming, “I’m getting some air. Bye.” and stalked away.
He wandered outside and circled around to the back of Town Hall, where he had some reprieve from the incessant loop of “This is Halloween” and “Thriller,” and settled onto one of the benches, sighing a white puff of air into the cool night. A crisp late-autumn breeze tousled his hair, making his teeth chatter. He hadn’t wanted to cover up his costume with a jacket, but now he regretted his decision as goosebumps ran up his blue-sleeved arms.
He thought about Dan, still inside the warm party, laughing and talking with their new neighbors, getting acquainted with and filing away every new face and name. By the end of the night, he was sure Dan would have every single one of those names and faces memorized, and have shared a joke or charming anecdote with all of them as well.
Herbert wasn’t jealous of Dan’s social skills. In fact, those skills were why he had pinpointed Dan as being useful to him in the first place. He mostly just found himself getting easily exhausted by them. Dan knew full well he had a practically non-existent level of tolerance for socializing in general, and an even smaller amount for pointless small talk. He never protested when Herbert had to excuse himself, using needing the bathroom or fresh air as an excuse to slip away. Still, he never failed to feel guilty for leaving Dan alone, despite knowing that the other man was perfectly capable of taking care of himself.
He let out another sigh, running a hand through his close-cropped hair that had managed to escape the greatest effects of graying so far, but had still gained a few streaks here and there. Years of deep thought had given him pronounced wrinkles between his eyebrows, and his line of work had left him with no shortage of scars across most of his body, his hands especially.
Age certainly hadn’t slowed him down though, and he didn’t plan on letting it any time soon. After all, it wasn’t age that had brought him out here to sit alone in the dark, swarmed by his own thoughts. He’d just always been this way. It was in his nature to be a recluse, he supposed.
Also in his nature was the small, loving smile that crept across his face when Dan rounded the corner and plopped down next to him, generously offering Herbert his jacket and settling his arm around his shoulders.
“I’m surprised you found me.” Herbert remarked, snuggling deep into Dan’s big, cozy jacket.
“Well, you have a tendency to go wherever is furthest from the light. Like a vampire.” Dan grinned, poking at Herbert’s side lightly.
“Hmph. Vampires are meant to be allergic to sunlight, not all light. Technically I should be hiding from the reflected light of the moon right now.”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right. I mostly just didn’t want to compare you to some sort of bug.”
“I appreciate being spared the insult.” Herbert said with a hint of a smile still coloring his words. “Why’d you come out here anyway? Surely Ms. Holly Halloween and the Ghoul Gang were good enough company for you?”
Dan laughed and shook his head slightly, “Everyone’s been great, honestly, but… I sort of wanted to get away from their weird questions about us for a minute. I mean, how many people in the past hour have called our relationship ‘…nice’?”
“All of them.” Herbert grumbled, “Except for that priest who looked like he was going to burst into flame just from having two homosexuals in his presence.”
“Talk about a stereotype.” Dan grinned, and Herbert felt him shiver slightly against him, “There is another reason I came out here, though,” He continued, leaning down to nose at the nape of Herbert’s neck, the sudden shock of cold making Herbert jump.
“Dan! You’re freezing me!”
“You’re like a little mini-heater, Herbert, I’ve gotta warm up somehow with you hogging my jacket.”
“Well, you can certainly have your jacket back. I can handle some cold air if it means I won’t have an icicle against my neck.” Herbert was aware that Dan knew that the offer was empty. He had made it abundantly clear every winter since they’d met that he really, really, really hated the cold.
“That’s alright. You look too cute in it for me to take it away from you, anyways. Hence the other reason why I came out here.”
“And what may that reason be, Cain?”
“-West,” Daniel added happily, burrowing his face even further in Herbert’s hair, “And that reason is that you’ve been in that adorable- I mean, handsome - costume for hours and I still haven’t gotten a single kiss out of you. It’s driving me out of my vulcan mind.”
Herbert groaned aloud at Dan’s pun, half-heartedly attempting to push him off as he laughed much too hard at his own pitiful joke. “Just for that, you’re not getting a single kiss for the rest of the night.”
“C’mon, I’m your commander, right? I could just order you to give me one little smooch.”
“The ban has been doubled for saying the word smooch. And for trying to use your position of power against your own poor second-in-command.”
“Herbeeeert.” Dan whined playfully, dragging out the word, “Consider it a sweet little Halloween present.”
“Eat one of the sticky ‘Halloween presents’ that old lady gave you. I’m sure it would be just as sweet.”
“I dunno, maybe I should try your lips first and then the butterscotches and compare the sweetness. You know, a little experiment. You should be all for that, Herb.”
Herbert rolled his eyes, trying to fight off a smile. He pretended to consider it for a few seconds. “Well,” He said slowly, “if it is purely for the sake of logic and science, then I guess I can’t argue with that.”
“I personally think this will be the best experiment of ours to date,” Dan said in a lower tone, before gently dipping in to kiss Herbert, his lips tasting of red punch and cheap chocolate.
It was a soft, slow kiss, lasting a while but staying light. A kiss between those who knew they had plenty of time— had the rest of their lives, in fact.
And sitting under the moonlit sky, wrapped up in his candy-sweet husband, Herbert decided he didn’t quite mind being dragged to the Halloween party after all.
That was, of course, until they were announced the winners of the costume contest.