That evening, in the hospital's morgue, Theo finds himself naked on a metal table and much less dead than most people had been led to believe earlier.
In fact, he's feeling quite alive.
"Yes. Ew." He eyes the blood speculatively, then shrugs and drinks it.
...and lo, his cut is healed. "Ooh."
"Hey, this is huge—maybe that's how you turn into a vampire, some stories have people dying with vampire blood in their system—but if you can heal people like that, that was fast, you could fix so much stuff!"
"And hopefully never have to or actually in fact test it, because the risk is someone otherwise dying. It might have to stay in their system a certain amount of time – upper or lower bound – or it might have varying efficacy or it might have horrible side effects, wait, no, it already does, like, yes, but hopefully this just does the immortality thing all by itself if I get that and I don't have to make them into vampires."
"So many of the potential advantages of being a vampire are horribly morbid," he complains.
"Mm," he says, because ugh he can't just offer a hug this is terrible. "Next... hearing?"
"Good when I'm paying attention. Like, really good. So. Might be difficult to test effectively without me going out of the house. Uh. Heartbeat, can hear that, would be able to hear you whispering if I were upstairs, pretty sure."
"Can you determine how far you can hear people? ...can you echolocate that would be so cool."
"I am not really sure because past a certain point what they're saying gets indistinct, then a bit further it's sort of background noise. And I don't have a neat 'oh this is X meters away' thing attached, and I have not in fact tried to echolocate but I believe some blind humans can do some sort of almost-echolocation thing?"
He clicks his tongue. "… Yeah, I can probably do it. Problem with using this room is that I already know where everything is, and I'll be able to tell where you are because people aren't quiet when they move."
"My automatic reaction to a question like that would've been flirting," he explains.
"Oh," he says. "Right. Could see how my sense of touch – no, or, um, sense of balance? Or proprioception if there's a way to test that, see how they are?"
He raises an eyebrow. "We can still test things that involve flirting, I can turn anything into flirting, I've been doing it since we met if you hadn't noticed."