HOW TO SUMMON A REVENANT.

7.

SPARE LIVER?

"In which Luthor and Mina challenge their ethics"

Bishop could not sleep.

He tried to. He shut his eyes, fluffed his pillow, tossed and turned and tossed again— but his brain refused to shut down.

He kept thinking about Frank Tate.

He wasn't mourning or grieving or even the slightest bit regretful... but he was disturbed. Frank Tate was a dead man, a man he hadn't even known. Frank Tate had suffered a terrible asthma attack and been laid to rest, supposedly by people who loved him— only to be unearthed by a few college students looking to revive a man none of them really knew.

Bishop wondered if all this made him a bad person, a truly bad person. He wasn't wicked, but did one have to be malicious to be bad?

He didn't care if he was bad. Bad was arbitrary, subjective. Was he bad for unearthing Frank Tate, if it was for a good cause? Was he bad for stealing from Carter, if it was all to cure death? Was he bad, for allowing his cousin and classmate to get involved with a man even he was wary of, for his own selfish purposes?

Bishop paused in his thinking and stared up at the ceiling, unblinking. No, he thought. None of it would matter, once he was great. He would explain it all, later, in the memoir he inevitably wrote about the experience. He would tell his own story, one where being bad never mattered and never will.

Jack released a particularly loud snore, face buried in his pillow. He had arrived three hours ago, stumbled out of his pants, and then fallen face-down onto his bed. He would wake up at the crack of dawn tomorrow to complete all the homework he'd neglected in the evening. Bishop would dread it, as he always did. 

He wondered, distantly, what Frank Tate had been like in the mornings.

Jack snored again and flopped onto his back.

With a sigh, Bishop turned around and tried again, searching blindly in the darkness for sleep.

**

"His liver is absolutely destroyed," Luthor muttered, pulling the gloves off his hands viciously, as if he was disgusted they had ever even touched his skin at all.

"I'm sorry, what?"

Mina shrugged. "In vino veritas, am I right? I'm guessing he was a big fan of that phrase back when he could, y'know... drink."

"So," Severin began as he wound his fingers through his long, blond hair, "Our Body enjoyed the finer things in life."

"If you consider alcoholism one of the finer things, then yes," Mina said, which prompted a laugh out of no one. Her smile dropped, she cleared her throat. "Uh, anyways, he's going to need a new liver."

Bishop's glasses slid up his nose as he pinched the bridge and hung his head. "And where exactly are we going to find a spare liver?"

They were all crammed into Severin's "workshop." Bishop declined to sit on one of the moth-eaten armchairs as Frank Tate took up all the space on the gurney. Mina sprawled on an another chair, arms crossed behind her head while Luthor leaned against the counter and dug his hands into his pockets. Severin was bent over Tate, cataloguing every detail of the Body.

Bishop knew he wasn't thrilled. Frank Tate was stocky, solid, hard. Meanwhile, Severin looked like he'd topple over with the wind, but also simultaneously like he was prepared to trade his name for someone's firstborn. As if he'd felt Bishop's eyes on him, he turned his head and smiled. It sent a shiver down his spine. How could he bear to smile when they were still so far from success?