The idea comes to Edward one night, as he is loosely wrapped with sheets in the back room of a Molly-House. It is one concerning correspondence- not between himself and another; rather, between himself and his other self.
It isn’t as though he had never thought of it before- he pores over many things Jekyll would never dare to dwell upon, not the least of which being the idea of communication with his better half. Were he Jekyll, he’d have dismissed it as an impossibility- in fact, Jekyll already had- but he is not.
He won’t fool himself into thinking it shall look as it does in his fantasies(his hands, more claws than hands, pressed flush to Jekyll’s: Jekyll’s voice, low and rhythmic in his ear: the elder half across from him, in flesh and blood). He knows none of this could happen. Jekyll would say none of it should happen, but to the co-inheritor of their memories, the words would ring hollow.
Still, he thinks up a way to speak with him whilst a more-or-less good-looking stranger breathes shallowly beside him. He will do as Jekyll does when he cannot bear to extract himself from the shelter of his laboratory and write a letter.
He does not say goodbye to the man laid beside him- he does his best to know as little about them as possible. He dons his regular apparel and sets out to the house in Soho, planning his words in advance.
When he arrives, the house is as empty as ever, or perhaps more so- the housekeeper does not show herself, so she is either disappeared or undetectable. All the better for him to write in peace, or as close to peace as someone with his kind of sickness of the heart could achieve.
Edward finds a pen and ink fairly quickly and seats himself at a desk with an oil lamp to write. He does not slope his hand as he usually does when he writes to his other half; he writes just as Henry would have, in the hand that had come naturally to him since the moment of his birth, inherited through his own blood.
“Dearest Doctor,
Or to those who know you (myself alone), Despisable Doctor- I have long wished to speak to you. I know the same is true of you, and you mustn’t try to deny it, for you know the price you pay for denying yourself. Though I have been you, and shall be you again, I cannot say I understand you. I-“
Edward pauses, shifting the pen in his grip, as though his body is subconsciously refusing him. He continues on with a tighter grip-
“-endeavor to correct that.
Do you remember when your Mother combed your hair in the mirror and told you how proud she was of you for ‘bettering yourself’? You had only just begun studying medicine, and coincidentally, you recently started to understand how one goes about appearing normal. She said she’d worried you’d end up institutionalized sooner or later, and that she was terribly relieved.
You thought, in that moment, of her bleeding on the ground beneath you, some blunt weapon held in your hand. A surge of anger came up from within like bile; spilled into your skull. You pulled your face taut into a smile and said how glad you were to be able to prove yourself. She reminded you that you hadn’t quite done so yet, and more of that vile emotion gushed from your chest in secret.
Do you believe, then, that I was the source of these thoughts? You are well aware that you are none the better for my existence- except, of course, in your ability to let yourself go- and yet you feel such terror at my being as to insult me. It is the fear of the unknown, that which each who was instinctually revolted by you felt deep in their bowels.
But I am not unknown. I am more familiar than any beside you. We are not separated as all other people are, by the walls of consciousness made by some fearful god. Why do you feel such dread for
Yourself, Edward Hyde.”
He eyes it, reads and re-reads it, backwards and forwards and sideways. It looks quite good to his eyes, and though he knows Jekyll will do his best to scrutinize each sentence to the point of senselessness, he cannot for the life of him think of how he might do so. He decides that, if Jekyll does, it will only be an excuse to write to him again- to disprove him if possible, or dig into still-open wounds if not.
He waits for the ink to dry and then folds the letter, placing it within his breast pocket. When he returns to the laboratory that morning, he retrieves the letter and places it near to the doctor’s workplace just before he uncorks the antidote.
~
Henry comes to himself with the same relief and disappointment as always. He returns to his own body, the one which has accompanied him since his creation, and he feels at once more and less comfortable in his skin. He is aware of a weight upon his consciousness that is not present in the other. There is once again a layer of disconnection between himself and each action he takes, like his own spirit is possessing himself.
And there is a letter, laid between phials and beakers and precariously close to a gas stove. He touches it only once, to move it to a safe distance in case he is to light a fire. He does not look upon it as he works, though it rests less than an arm’s length from his hands.
It isn’t much of a problem- his work has become increasingly flippant and infrequent since he cleaved Hyde from himself. Following his greatest failure (success, Hyde would argue), he has continued to find fulfillment in it, but only the anxious kind that is to be had whilst waiting for something greater to happen. He is always waiting, these days; looking forward to- or dreading, it’s all the same- the reappearance of Hyde.
He mixes and studies and concocts treatments for common colds and intolerances, all the while his mind skirts around the edges of thoughts of tearing his skin wide open and laying someone beneath his status while the wounds still weep.
Naturally, he knows the letter was penned and delivered by one Edward Hyde, and he’s sure he could recall the contents if he took a moment to pick his own brain. He does his best to ensure that he never does- that his thoughts never settle long enough on it- and he almost carries on as usual.
This cycle of deliberate ignorance doesn’t last long- Jekyll’s impulses are no less regular than Hyde’s, he’s simply had more practice tamping them down. Here, he has little reason to endure except to save himself from an upset, which is hardly a reason at all considering how he lives his life. It takes somewhat less than a day before he’s sat at his desk unfolding the parchment.
As he reads, the first thought that rises to the forefront of his mind is that of how careless Hyde has been. He shouldn’t be surprised- Hyde is beholden to impulse at the best of times- but he is usually cautious when it comes to the matter of protecting himself. If someone had found a way into the laboratory, by accident or force, the letter Hyde left upon his desk could have destroyed everything they worked together to conceal.
(Hyde must have known it would not take him long to retrieve, and subsequently burn, the letter.)
Jekyll sets the letter back upon his desk after reading and rereading it. He gnaws at a loose hangnail on the side of his thumb, peeling it free along with a thin strip of skin.
The letter is what he would call personal to the point of being inappropriate, were it not written by the only person he could excuse it from; the only person who could know such things. He knows- every instant, every second- that his innate wrongness is not owed to Hyde, but vice versa. It is from the rot settled deep within his soul that Hyde emerged, new as Eve from the rib of Adam.
And yet, to think Hyde’s depravity stems fully from within him is unthinkable. If it had, and his better half were as equal and opposite as he’d thought, surely he’d have resorted to the rope already.
(The simple answer: he is not any better than Hyde, and Hyde no worse than him; he deserves death, but holds the same animal fear of it as Hyde.)
He lights a fire and, with an unsteady hand, holds the letter over it. He watches as flames devour the parchment from within, as Hyde must surely be devouring him where he burns bright in his head. He only drops the final fraction when he can no longer hold it without risking injury.
He can find no loose paper in his laboratory, so he tears a sheet from one of his notebooks. After he finishes, with more forethought than that twisted mimicry of a spouse could muster, he places his response in his undershirt’s breast pocket and leaves it there to be discovered upon his next transformation.
~
Edward does not notice the letter at first. It slips through the cracks of his mind like sand through his fingers, as per usual with Jekyll’s thoughts and feelings. He is too focused on the beating of his heart and the adrenaline flowing through his body- his body, again, it felt like an eternity but it is his again.
It isn’t until the night is halfway gone that the thought besieges him. There is the slightest pressure upon his chest, like a lingering touch through the fabric of his shirt. It’s the only article of clothing he doesn’t always change upon transformation. He would never speak it aloud, nor would there be any point in doing so, but he finds the manufactured closeness to his other half comforting. Save for those who he beds, nobody would ever see the thing, and those that did would be otherwise occupied.
He knocks back a shot- his third, or maybe fourth- and retrieves the item within his pocket while his throat burns. It’s a note, crumpled from a brief altercation earlier, but otherwise unblemished. A smirk that undoubtedly resembles a grimace tugs on the corners of his mouth.
So Jekyll couldn’t resist temptation. He shouldn’t be surprised, really- Henry’s weak will is the seed which fertilized his make, that which spread the roots of corruption through Henry’s soil. Each time he sees them dig a bit deeper, he feels something strange. (Pride… he thinks it must be pride.)
He handles the letter more carefully than he would a blade as he unfolds it, fingertips grazing the uneven edges where Jekyll tore it from his notebook.
“Hyde,
I do not find this frivolous idea so amusing as you apparently do. Have you any idea how much danger you put both of us in leaving that note where someone could see? Private as my laboratory is, there’s always the possibility of a break-in- and where would that leave me? Where would that leave you?”
Edward exhales sharply through grit teeth, glancing away from the paper momentarily. How is it that Jekyll manages to scold him just as his parents might have, too many years prior?
(You must understand how we feel. If you keep fraternizing with these queer sorts, you’ll end up hung within the year.)
“You say you want to understand me, yet you scarcely care how thin I stretch myself to clean up the messes you leave behind. That is the deal, of course, I won’t begrudge you that. However, this message you left me, seemingly just to dig up long-dead skeletons, is not part of that deal.
I am well aware that you are me. I feel it every day; I think of it every time I lay to sleep, every time my hands clasp together in prayer, every time I see my friends beside me. I dread you because of this. Were you some distant beast, some Burke and Hare the likes of which I’d never see but in the gallows, I would not feel such revulsion.
But I know those thoughts were mine. I know my thoughts made you.
Do not do this again.
Henry Jekyll.”
Hyde’s teeth puncture the thin skin of his lips where he’d been chewing at them, coating his tongue with the metallic tang of blood. His pulse has quickened in his anger, he can hear his heartbeat thudding in his ears and feel it against his ribs.
He was not just curt- Hyde could have worked with curt; had even expected it- he was dismissive. Hyde’s very being was worthy of revulsion to someone like Jekyll. His lack of shame could make Jekyll’s stomach turn, and it did, once he retreated back into their subconscious. Jekyll reached out to the same God he’d spurned in his youth, like piety could somehow cleanse the black mark on his soul.
It’s sickening. Hyde would laugh if he wasn’t so insulted. It should be him dismissing Jekyll as a waste of time, but he had extended a hand to the weak-willed man. He had been practically angelic, but Jekyll still bit at the hand that feeds him.
He crushes the note in his fist and shoves it back into the pocket from which it came. He lifts an arm to signal a waiter to bring him another drink. As soon as he’s sure he caught the man’s attention- it’s obvious from the way he balks- he crumples over the bar, digging his nails into his shoulders. He drags them down the length of his upper arms, drawing lines in his cloak and his skin at once.
If only Jekyll were here with him, so that he could dig his claws into the other man’s flesh. Instead he just reverses and repeats the motion, scratching himself until the waiter returns with his drink.
~
Henry’s head is throbbing the second the light hits his newly-returned eyelids. When he cracks them open, he sees himself sprawled out on his side in the mirror meant to show no one else.
The laboratory floor is cold and hard where Jekyll’s shoulder presses up against it, bone jutting into wood blemished by tincture and blood, not all of which is owed to him. He flips himself onto his back and stares up at the ceiling through a blanket of darkness, tiny dots buzzing across his vision. Another man once stood where he now lies as he cut open cadavers, drawing out sinew and tissues that were never meant to touch the open air.
There is a stinging sensation in his forearm, accompanied by hot fluid trickling down the length of his hand, pooling in the crevice of his palm. Hyde has done something, that much is clear- still, he lays on the laboratory floor in a haze for a long stretch of time. His shirt sticks to his inner arm, and the edges of a hastily crumpled paper jut into his chest, likely leaving red marks and tiny indents in his skin.
His chest rises and falls, evenly but not easily. Each lungful of air that fills him is acidic against his tongue. When he finally lifts his arm, he has to peel his sleeve from the floor. He holds it over his head and watches a wine-colored stain grow upon his shirt.
So Hyde heard his request and subsequently decided to throw a tantrum over it. His face reflexively pulls back into a snarl, the kind of ugly animal expression that he’d usually not dare to wear upon this face. He draws the sleeve up to his elbow and is met with a long cut down the length of his forearm, too shallow to risk Jekyll bleeding out before he could treat it. He isn’t surprised- Hyde would never risk death, even if it would bring Jekyll down to hell with him- but he does find it rather contemptible.
He considers, for a moment, continuing on laying there, waiting until all of his blood slowly spills out of the wound Hyde tore open, letting whatever part of him that might remain within Jekyll kick and scream and despair as they die mere feet away from the sutures they need. He considers it for at least long enough to start feeling the fear within himself, and then he’s pushing himself onto unsteady feet and unfolding a doctor’s bag he hasn’t opened in years.
Jekyll takes a small towel and wipes the wound down, leaving his skin pink where his blood stained it. He threads a needle methodically, pulling silver strands through the miniscule opening. Once he finishes, he settles the point of the needle at the edge of the injury, taking a moment to feel the cool metal pricking at his skin. Blood carries on lazily seeping out, trickling down the sides of his arm.
When he punctures his skin he recalls how Hyde felt making the incision; a rush of pleasure and dread, gut-curdling and rousing at once. He draws it through his flesh, tugging it out the other side with movements he’d declare too stiff and jerky were he working on a patient. Tiny bits of flesh cling to the thread, but he digs back in without a moment’s pause, washing them away with more of his own blood.
(The first time Jekyll saw the remains of a self-destroyer was in his second year of medical school; he stared and stared at the body, poring over each individual injury and wondering how many were made by her own hand. In the end, he decided she must have deserved it, and tried not to imagine himself upon the dissection table.)
Each line he sews into his skin pulls the severed halves of his arm painfully nearer to one another. Eventually they are drawn flush together, and he adds a final superfluous stitch before tying it off with the help of his teeth.
Henry swipes his thumb down the length of his crooked sutures, trying and failing to recall the last time he did something of the sort. This is the manner of game Hyde wants to play, then- but he does not realize what Jekyll does: that if Hyde gets what he wants and he plays along, it will spell mutually assured destruction for them.
Henry presses the bloody needle to the tip of his tongue and tastes the metal of his implement and his insides. He wipes it down with the towel and when he lifts it, it’s been made shiny as new with his spit and blood. He imagines-
(Edward’s fingers in his mouth, each one tapering into a sharp claw, one pressed down like a tongue depressor. Henry struggles to breathe around it, but Edward is holding his jaw still, smiling at him, smiling from beneath his skin-)
walking out of the laboratory right before he starts on his way to do so, ignoring the buzzing in his ears. He pictures unlocking the door seconds before his fingers touch the metal and it clicks open at their request. He almost forgets to put his coat on, but he catches a glimpse of the red-soaked fabric at his elbow and feels his heart pulse in his esophagus. He covers himself, the heavy fabric a comforting weight against him, and steps out into the early morning light.
~
Utterson keeps shooting Jekyll looks.
They are the discomforting sort of looks where he can’t tell if someone is judging him, concerned for him, or not thinking anything of the sort. Jekyll wouldn’t usually notice a thing like that, but Utterson keeps halting mid-sentence, staring straight at him for a brief moment, then returning to whatever it is he was saying prior.
Jekyll clutches an untouched glass of gin with both hands, swirling the beverage about as he listens to Utterson explain a somewhat perplexing case of his. Utterson had brought a bottle of his favorite make and insisted they share, so Jekyll gave a half-smile and silently let him pour one out for them both. His head is still pounding, and he can remember Edward shuddering and twitching on the side of the street as he tried not to throw up the night before. He mimes a polite sip when the odd looks seem to increase in frequency.
“Henry…” Utterson says in his thoughtful voice, the one that means Jekyll’s about to have to tell a bold-faced lie to reassure him. “I want to ask you something.”
“Is that so?” Jekyll says with a chuckle, tapping his finger against his glass. “It seems you do almost nothing else, these days. What was that about-”
“Henry,” Utterson repeats, firmer, and tilts his head up to meet his gaze comfortably. Jekyll swallows, hopes that Utterson doesn’t notice the nervous bobbing of his throat, and sets his glass on the small table between them.
“Go on, then. What is it?” Jekyll says, perhaps harsher than he intended. He can’t help but feel unnerved by the way Utterson’s eyes scan his face, taking stock of his expression as though it is a gaping wound. He often thinks that there must be none in this world who knows him as well as Utterson- and though even he only knows half or less of Jekyll, it’s enough to feel uncomfortably exposed in his presence.
“It’s about Mr. Hyde,” he says, because the universe was set out to ensure that Jekyll didn’t know a moment of peace. “I know I promised to help him in the event that the extenuating circ*mstances you described came to fruition- don’t look at me like that, I’m not going back on it. I just wanted to know…” Utterson folds his hands, twining his fingers together and resting his chin upon his knuckles. It’s a much more polite alternative to Jekyll’s incessant fidgeting, he thinks- he stills his finger where it had been steadily tapping. “I just wanted to know if you knew about everything he’s been getting up to, as of late. I know you have a particular…” his face screws up, “interest in him.”
Jekyll exhales briefly, trying to project slight exasperation despite the hammering of his heart. He sifts through his memories- as well as his other half’s, with some effort- to try and pinpoint what Hyde could have done to provoke such a question. He can think of little that would warrant reinvigorated concern- Edward’s behavior had only changed in relation to him; Hyde has taken his pleasures in much the same way that he has been for the past months.
“I am well aware,” Jekyll says, turning his eyes to the unlit fireplace beside them. He should have asked a servant to light it, he thinks idly, but he was distracted by the painful, itchy row of sutures freshly threaded through his arm.
“You are?” Utterson murmurs, clearly taken aback. He hums, lifting his glass to his lips and taking a small swig. “He is…” He visibly hesitates, staring down into his drink. “Well, it’s clear what he is- unnatural. Still, I don’t think it ends at just that. I just want you to be sure of what sort you’re associating with.”
Jekyll refrains from letting out a sigh, instead bracing his hands on his knees with the demeanor of a man considering something. Before he can think of a response, Utterson carries on with the sort of urgency he’s rarely seen in him.
“I mean to ask: he hasn’t been trying to get closer to you than he should? Talking you into the sort of things you wouldn’t normally consider? I would hate to think he’s using you, Henry, but… it seems so, and I can’t get it off my mind, no matter how I try.”
Talking him into the sort of things he wouldn’t normally consider? No, quite the opposite- Jekyll’s considerations come to fruition through Hyde’s actions, a perfect and terrible symbiosis. Jekyll shakes his head.
“I understand your concern, but… truly, the nature of my relationship with Mr. Hyde is not the sort of thing that can be discussed openly, even among friends,” he says carefully.
Jekyll knows how the response makes his relation to Hyde look. It’s for the best that Utterson thinks of him in such a way, as even if Utterson is revulsed by him, he shan’t speak a word of it to another. Still, the idea of Utterson thinking him a sodomite- one involved with Hyde, no less- makes bile rise in his throat. He feels as though he could chew his own tongue off, and only stops himself with the thought that Hyde would already have blood dribbling down his chin.
“Harry,” Utterson says quietly, quiet enough that Jekyll has to strain his ears, brow furrowed in consternation. “You must be careful about him.”
“I am,” Jekyll responds. He lifts his glass as though making a toast and takes a long drink. His undershirt, recently changed, rubs up against his stitches and sends a spike of pain through his arm as the gin hits his throat.
~
Edward hasn’t been freed for several days, which is several days too many, by his account. He feels more restless than usual when he comes to, excess energy buzzing under his skin. Still, the first thing he thinks to do is to check for Jekyll’s response.
There is no note, of course- Jekyll has decided not to communicate with him in the classical sense. Still, he had no choice but to react, to fix what Hyde had broken- that was the deal, just as he said.
(There was a moment, one where Jekyll might have truly let himself bleed out, and Edward’s terror flooded him with its aftershocks.)
He lifts his sleeve and finds the rows of sutures exactly where he expected them, clearly done in the same shaky hand that gave Jekyll a final push toward the chemical side of science. He can’t help but smile toothily at the imprecise yet (loving? that can’t be right-) careful way Jekyll had patched them up. He runs his fingers down the length of the ragged scar in the first stages of healing, long nails catching on each stitch. It stings when he pulls them a bit too taut, and it reminds him of the racking pangs that heralded his rebirth.
He wants to tear them out, to ruin all of Jekyll’s work in an instant, but he restrains himself with the thought that he’d lose out on his night should he do so. His fingers still twitch in anticipation, so he lets his sleeve fall back down and digs his nails into his palm.
When Edward came to be, a visage of hate created from the twisted shadows in a common man’s nightmares, he looked upon himself and felt exhilarated, but even more than that, comforted. It was like coming home, to see that loathsome figure before himself. His hair was twisted and ratty, his nails sharp as a cat’s claws, his face sullied by long branching threads of veins. He felt, in that moment, that he could understand love at first sight.
Perhaps it was only Hyde who felt it, and Jekyll is too broken to be able to see that shameful part of him without recoiling instinctively. In that moment, however, he felt nothing of the sort.
(Even as Henry came back to himself for the first time, he was giddy and euphoric- he had succeeded, and Hyde was the fruit of his labor. Its sickly sweet juice filled his mouth and his throat.)
He turns to face the mirror now, tilts his head curiously at his visage. His very appearance is bracing; he knows Henry has never felt this way looking upon himself. He can hardly bear to see the angle of his jawline, the wrinkles around his eyes, the set of his shoulders.
If Hyde could see him, he thinks, he would appreciate him much more. If Jekyll were to see Hyde- well, Hyde can imagine what would happen. That it should have been his womb of consciousness that brought forth Hyde, that it should be his desires which feed Hyde like an umbilical cord of thought, feels almost criminal.
But of course, it could have been no one else.
Edward divests himself of Jekyll’s clothing- undershirt included, this time- and redresses himself in a corset and dress the likes of which would usually only be seen upon a whor*. Jekyll had considered ridding himself of the garments on more than one occasion- once, even thought of resorting to burning them- but never followed through.
As he leaves, he takes care to cover himself beneath his cloak until he’s a good distance from Jekyll’s residence, vigilant in protecting Jekyll and his identity. It is the fact of their existence: they shall keep each other safe, or die together. Though Hyde is not troubled by recklessness in the traditional sense, still he cannot help but feel some obligation toward the keeping of Jekyll’s secret. It is something beyond simple self-preservation, regardless of what Jekyll might believe.
He does not even particularly like the secret- despises, in fact, the idea that he should have to be isolated and hidden like something dirty- but he owes himself to it. Shame gave birth to Hyde and died in him. Despite his resentment, he pays his dues.
~
Henry stares down at the empty phial, mere droplets of the watery green elixir remaining within the glass, and feels the pit in his stomach grow.
It isn’t the first time this has happened, that he has taken the potion, felt the pangs of Hyde’s eminence begin to overtake him for a moment, then feel them vanish under a tide of Jekyll. It is, however, the singular time he has taken a second dose to combat the lack of effect and still remained trapped within his body. Another phial lies shattered upon the floor, where it rolled from his table after he haphazardly discarded it when the transformation did not take hold.
“Useless drug,” he hisses to himself, clenching his fist tight enough around the phial to send a hairline fracture up the length of the glass. He lets it drop to the floor and break apart, turning back to his workstation with frantic movements. He reaches into a still-open drawer and retrieves another dose of crimson liquor, fumbling with the salt until he’s deposited an approximation of the sufficient amount into the mixture.
He stares transfixed as the robust red liquid is transubstantiated to indigo, then finally to the watery green that is familiar to his eyes. He drinks it down with the ardency with which a greater man might take in the Blood of Christ, a piety the likes of which he could only muster after Hyde had already sullied his soul.
He knows the chance of death greatly surpasses the chance of a successful transformation, and yet he knows he cannot remain as he is. In that moment, he cannot help but feel his destruction as Edward would be better than his continuance as Henry.
It isn’t long- mere seconds- before his legs give out beneath him. He slams down onto his knees hard, dual cords of pain spiking up through his legs. He is suddenly shuddering like a newborn, mouth filling with too much saliva. He is unable to pinpoint where he ends and the pain begins- he has endured an all-consuming agony of body and spirit many times before, but it seems to him as though that base horror has been multiplied innumerable times. Worse yet, it simply carries on- he feels his bones shifting and snapping and reconstructing themselves, and when they are done, they simply break once more.
His vision is filled by nothing but a sea of collapsing stars, supernovas blazing all around him, within his skin. He closes his eyes to shut them out, but they remain, burning their afterimages into his eyelids. He swears he can hear them, too- a ringing in his ears that devours all else, swallowing up the world with its shrill screeching.
It isn’t clear to him when he ended up on the floor, but he’s there now, curling up into a fetal position, as though he thinks will be saved if he only continues to simulate innocence. His stomach empties itself indiscriminately, and his vomit tastes sour and sharp. He carries on spitting and heaving for longer than he thought possible; his stomach should have long since been emptied, and still he carries on gagging up his insides.
He is, at once, terrified to die and eagerly anticipating it. He babbles desperate prayers to God, unable to tell if they ever touch his lips, and simultaneously curses Him for making him wrong- distorting his mind and body, setting him apart from each and every other, making him lesser.
He wonders if his body will be discovered, or if it will be Hyde who they trap in the Earth, to decompose and infect it with his filth. He gulps in breaths between his retching, finally left spitting up nothing but bile and blood, and slams his temple into the floor.
As suddenly as the terrible episode besieged Jekyll, it goes into remission, and Hyde is left to peel sticky eyelids from pulsing eyes.
Edward is cold, shaking like a leaf, feeling the same restless euphoria he felt the first time he emerged from within Jekyll. He’s coated in a layer of sweat and sick, like a burst amniotic sac that pools around the trembling hands he pushes himself up upon.
His eyesight is slowly coming back to him, each blink bringing the world around him the slightest bit back into focus. The first thing his gaze lands upon once the stars vanish is the face in the mirror, leaning into him. It is not the visage of Hyde which looks back at him, but Jekyll- for a second he thinks the treble dose still didn’t do the trick, but when he frantically scours his body he finds the same scrawny frame he expected. Hyde lifts his eyes to meet the other’s, sickly green to dark brown, and a thin smile spreads across his face as the other stares back blankly.
“This is just perfect,” Edward rasps out, drawing sound from his aching throat. He taps on the glass, like Jekyll is a specimen in an enclosure. “Can you hear me, Doctor? Tell me you can, go on.”
As he speaks, Jekyll glances off to the side, eyebrows pinching together in his half-realized upset. He opens his mouth to speak, but quickly stops himself by biting down on his lower lip. He looks back to Hyde, looks him up and down, and his face finally fully twists up in dismay.
“I’m supposed to be you,” Jekyll spits out with such vitriol that it catches Hyde off guard.
“You are me,” Edward mutters, extending a hand to place it upon the mirror’s surface. Jekyll recoils a moment too late for it to be reflexive, a feigned disgust cast upon his features. Edward shifts forward on his knees, stopping only once he’s close enough to rest his forehead upon the glass. His matted, greasy hair smudges the reflective surface as it makes contact. “Don’t trouble yourself, Doctor… this is for the best. Now we can fully enjoy our time together, see?”
Jekyll takes a steadying breath- or some approximation of it, given his abstracted state of existence. His eyelids flutter shut, and Hyde gets the distinct impression that he’s trying to shut him out entirely.
“I hadn’t thought you’d get so desperate so quickly, you know. What finally did it? Was it remembering that poor patient who overdosed in your care? Did you remember how jealous you felt for a moment?” Edward speaks to his other half in a gentle inflection as he recalls one of his earliest failures. He can feel the puddle of vomit and blood seeping into Jekyll’s coat and pants; he feels a surge of visceral disgust, but he’s too pleased at the sight of the the man before him to move.
“You already know the answer, Hyde. Why bother asking?” Jekyll huffs, fingers curling and uncurling at his side.
“Just because you know all there is to know about me doesn’t mean I know all there is to know about you. Isn’t it only fair that you tell me?”
“Not everything, I concede. But that-” Jekyll’s breath hitches, forcing him to pause. “-that, I know you know.”
“Fine,” Hyde breathes out, pulling back. “Tell me why you’re cross, then. Are you disappointed to be alive, or disappointed to be with me?”
“Both,” Jekyll says unhelpfully, true as it may be. “If I were lost within you, at least I wouldn’t have to see what I’ve become.” Hyde marvels at how laughable the notion is, and he probably would laugh were it someone else’s sentiment, but frustration is quickly turning to fury as it boils his blood. Jekyll has done little else but seek him, obsess over the thought of creating him- and now, faced with his reality, he has the gall to regret it?
“You don’t get to say that to me,” Hyde shouts into the mirror, gripping the frame hard enough to feel it splinter. “I’m everything you asked for and more! It’s not my fault you despise yourself.”
Henry flinches at his outburst, but otherwise doesn’t react, as though he intends to simply pretend not to exist until things carry on as per usual. Hyde’s mouth draws up into a snarl at the pathetic sight. “The fact of the matter is…” he whispers, “you owe me.”
“Owe you?!” Jekyll exclaims- it is as though a switch has been flipped. He is facing Hyde now, in shock and indignation. “Your very presence has disabled me… I can think of nothing else than when I shall next be you… what I shall do, how I shall feel…”
“Disabled?” Hyde’s shoulders shake in a laugh. To think that Jekyll still acts as though he’s been corrupted by some foul spirit, when they both know who that spirit belongs to. “You don’t know what you’re saying. Is it not I who enables you to take your pleasure where before there was none, to finally live for each moment I am free? You could never have continued on without me. You need me to live as an invalid needs a chair to move.”
(He saw many of that kind during his studies, and looked upon them with disgust- as though he were any better, as though he weren’t many times worse.)
Henry’s face falls, and his offended posturing crumbles in seconds. He sags in the mirror, knuckles white where his hands remain balled into fists, and falls forward against the glass with a thunk. “I don’t…” he tries, but his voice dies in his throat. “I didn’t before.”
“You would have died, were it not for me,” Edward explains, slowly, as though he’s speaking to a student, as though he isn’t the one who’s meant to be Henry’s protege. “Twice, now. Does that not mean you owe me?”
Henry cannot muster a response. Edward tilts his head, admiring him as he sits defeated. “Don’t trouble yourself,” he murmurs, leaning in to press their foreheads together, “I’ll take care of you.”
~
It hadn’t been long since the divide between Jekyll and Hyde grew more vast and at once allowed them greater closeness when Hyde’s delight at the new situation came to an abrupt end. It had been, for the last two months, that Henry had locked Edward beneath his skin, and Edward, now fully conscious alongside him, could do nothing but plead and deride and wait.
Hyde will not pretend that the incident in which he woke up in his own body unprepared hadn’t scared him (perhaps he will pretend a little, but only when he knows it will upset Jekyll), but the solution Jekyll settled on is borderline torture.
Hyde has had to watch him go about his business, doing charity and hosting his ‘friends’ and reading the Good Book, whereas he’s left to beg for scraps. ‘You should imbibe, just a bit,’ he’ll say, ‘you deserve it after the day you’ve had’. Or: ‘I know you want to wear it, just don’t let anyone see and you’ll have forgotten by morning’. Or: ‘if you keep cutting deeper in the same spot, you’ve practically only done it once’. And on and on, trying to tease out little sins in exchange for the slightest relief.
(Jekyll almost never listens. He doesn’t understand why, after all this time, Jekyll has settled upon the idea of remaking himself as a paragon of virtue.)
But now- Jekyll is back in the laboratory now, and Hyde feels a glimmer of hope like a shard of glass stuck in his throat. He is trying his best to stay calm, but he isn’t made for such things- he can feel his skin growing slick with sweat and his hands trembling in anticipation. He just hopes Jekyll doesn’t look at him for too long, or doesn’t care enough to pay attention in his state of mind.
Jekyll sits on the ground with his back pressed to the cold glass of the mirror. He holds a small phial of red tincture in one hand, and he turns it over carefully, considering the way it shifts in the glass.
“Are you alright, Doctor?” Edward asks sweetly, wrapping his arms around Jekyll, surrounding his neck like a noose. Jekyll shakes his head errant-mindedly, pressing his palm into his eye hard enough to leave him seeing phosphenes.
“Is it hard?” Edward asks, putting all his effort into not sounding too derisive. He lets his hands dangle so that they brush up against Jekyll’s chest, trailing phantom touches across his skin. “Knowing that no matter how hard you try, you can’t change who you are?”
“I already did. I’ve proved myself-!” Henry tries, voice cracking mid-sentence, as though his very vocal cords disbelieve him.
“But it changed you for the worse, didn’t it?”
(Didn’t I?)
His fingers trail up the side of Jekyll’s jaw. Hyde can feel his will crumbling, bit by bit, and he could cry out with joy- but he won’t risk his freedom when it’s close enough to taste. He bites down on his lip until all he can taste is iron.
“It is,” Henry admits in a low voice- not weak; rather, resentful. Hyde can hear the hatred thick in his words, born from the twisted, inorganic state of his heart. He knows, too, how Jekyll feels. Jekyll has lamented, hated, recreated himself, and nothing has changed the immutable facts of his existence: that he is corrupt, that his heart is rotten, that he has been this way since birth and will be this way until death. He will keep indulging, and repenting, and indulging, and repenting. If he had infinite life, he would carry on until the sun fell from the sky.
“You’re ashamed, aren’t you?”
“I am,” Henry says, not even bothering to argue the fact.
Edward grabs his head and pulls him around until they’re face to face, tricking his mind into believing his body is not moving of its own volition. “I can help you,” he promises, grazing his fingers over the cool surface of the phial. “You just have to ask.”
Jekyll glances down, swallowing thickly, and uncorks the phial. The acrid scent hits his nostrils- Hyde can smell it through him, the intoxicating scent of his birth. Jekyll shudders and squeezes his eyes shut, and he seems equally as likely to grin as he is to weep.
In the end, he does neither. Edward guides his hands to the pouch of salt he’s kept in his pocket for nearly a fortnight, murmurs “There you are, just like that-” when he pours it into the tincture. From within the blood-red fluid, the elixir of life emerges, swirling in a miniscule tempest.
“Good,” Hyde rumbles, unable to keep the enthused growl from his voice, “You really are good.” Henry lifts the phial to his lips and drinks it down. Hyde can feel his lips as if they were his own- he always can, but now, they both taste the sour, stinging taste they haven’t in two months. Two months too long, he would say, but Henry’s muscles are snapping apart and reconnecting themselves, and they are both consumed by their agony.
It is nothing compared to the incident of his birth, nor the incident that nearly killed them both, but he still chokes on his bile and blood as he writhes. His skin melts and reconstructs itself, cell by cell, within the span of a few seconds. And, at last, Hyde is there, gasping unevenly and grabbing at every inch of his body like he’s reuniting with a lover.
“God,” he hisses, scrambling closer to the mirror. Jekyll looks back at him with a smile that shows more gums than teeth, unable to restrain the obscene excitement bubbling up inside. Hyde doesn’t thank him- he should spit curses at him, truly, but finds himself wishing to do neither. He does press a kiss to the glass, spilling luminous green fluid down the length of Jekyll’s reflection. Jekyll inhales sharply, but stays silent. Hyde flashes him a grin when he pulls back, toothy and glistening with spit. “It took you long enough.”
~
There is something in his eyes, there must be- something in the way he recites practiced niceties, or the way he carries himself. Whatever it is, Hyde feels, in the moment, as though he is being condescended in a profound way. In that older gentleman’s eyes he sees (mother, father, god, Jekyll) someone who thinks him lesser.
(Hyde gripping his cane, bludgeoning the man with the tool, spraying blood across the cobbles. His face caved in, ruined to the point that none would look upon it without feeling sick, making him equal to Hyde in his repulsiveness. Thrashing him as he twitches, forcing out viscera from the inarticulate lump of offal below him.)
In that moment, he pictures everything Jekyll would have- vividly, skipping over no minute detail. He shouts, he howls, he can hardly control the violent spasming of his limbs as he gesticulates wildly.
(Bringing his foot down upon him, then the other, then the cane once more with a blow so brutal that its wood splinters and it snaps in two. Falling to his knees, dirtying himself with the blood gushing like a river down the street, swinging at him until his knuckles are throbbing and raw, until he hears more than one of his fingers crack against the fractured skull.)
It is easy, when Hyde is running on naught but impulse, adrenaline, and fury, for him to batter the man without pause. It isn’t until his arms grow sore that he sees, with full lucidity, the results of his actions.
(Blood on his cloak, his shirt [their shirt, Jekyll and his both], spattered across his face and in his eyes and dripping down the length of his nose to find its way into his mouth. He is covered in blood, an immaculate painting of gore, and it is beautiful because it is terrible, and he is going to die. He is going to hang just as his mother and his father and his oldest friends and his first lover all told him.)
He scrambles to his feet, takes his cane in his hand- but one piece, the nearest and least intact- and runs. His entire body has broken down into full-on tremors, such an intensity to his shaking that he thinks that even his organs must be participating. He feels so alive that he could cry from joy. He doesn’t realize until he’s run at least six blocks that he is, and that the hot, warm, wet feeling of blood and the hot, warm, wet feeling of tears are more than a little alike.
He feels Jekyll within him, feeling all that he feels, trying to sew a single strand of remorse through their heads and finding himself unable to even thread the needle. They are one and the same, now, fleeing through the London night, stumbling over their feet every few bounds.
It must be pure animal instinct and muscle memory that bring him back to the laboratory, for Hyde is consumed by the memories of what he’d done (almost more intense than when he’d been committing the act). He must get blood on the door, but maybe not- he can’t remember opening the door, only falling to his hands and knees inside and crawling up to the desk.
The ingredients rattle around in the drawer above him as he struggles to grasp them, eventually giving up and pulling the entire drawer free to drop it in his lap. He mixes the concoction with as little care as he took when he broke his ring finger against the man’s face, only now able to tell as it bends oddly in the light of the former dissection room. He does it right, or at least right enough, on autopilot- or perhaps Jekyll is piloting, and it’s his hands that fervently handle the salts.
“To that fine Mister, whoever he may be,” Hyde rasps out in his conflicted euphoria. He takes one long swig, an indirect kiss through their mutual vice, one which has ruined more men than one as of today. It’s the best drink he’s ever had, and he revels in the painful contortions of his body as Jekyll returns to himself.
Henry sees, in that moment, his (too-long and too-empty) life flash before his eyes. There is painfully little of it that he enjoyed with all of himself- even less that was not in service of Hyde, whether in his search for a way to cleave his halves apart or in his time occupying his body and mind.
He can feel many different parts of his body shuddering in synchronicity- his legs, his hands, his heart, his lungs, even his tongue. He has to force his hands together in prayer, as his very body seems to refuse the action. His skin, to him, seems to threaten to slough off when he interlocks his fingers and starts babbling prayers.
This is his place- of course, how could he have forgotten- on his knees, shuddering, degrading himself before a distant, unknowable divine witness as the rot in his heart continues to fester. He can still feel Hyde’s perverse glee wrapping around him like tendrils, coiling up the length of his spine, capable of dismantling him piece by piece at any moment.
(One time. One time, he gave in, and now he’ll never forget the face of that man who he brutalized for no other reason than his own sick satisfaction.)
He bends over, presses his forehead to his hands, presses his hands to the floor made warm with blood, and prostrates himself before the Lord. He is usually of two minds regarding God: one of naive hope that there truly is someone watching over him, the other of blood-curdling dread at the thought that there may be someone who knows him as he knows himself. Now, as he spews worshipful verses with such feverish adoration that he would end up institutionalized for it alone were he to do so in public, he hopes with all his being that there is no one listening.
Henry can feel it when the specter of Edward inches close enough to press their legs together and drapes an arm over his shoulders, but he does not cease. Edward, seemingly, does not care- he strokes small circles on the nape of Henry’s neck with the kind of care that should not exist within him.
(Is this wicked? Is caring for someone like Jekyll an inherently corrupt act?)
“It’s okay,” he says, and Henry wishes to believe him and to do to him what he did to that gentleman at once.
(He saw a few of his teeth, with exposed nerves and a thick coating of blood, fly from his mouth. Was he already dead at that point, or just unresponsive?)
“It isn’t,” he growls, shortly after an ‘amen’. “You’ve ruined me. Everything I tried to be, it’s all lost. Because of you.”
“Because of me?” Edward scoffs, extricating his hand from Jekyll’s back. “I only gave you what you wanted. How could I ruin something that’s already ruined?”
“Why would I want such a thing?” His throat is closing in on itself, the way it should have done when he brandished his cane against a civilian, the way it only does when he is confronted. “Why would any man want such a thing?”
“I can’t tell you that, Doctor.” Edward’s hands thread through Jekyll’s hair, swimming through a sea of well-kempt strands. His razor-sharp nails graze Jekyll’s head, not entirely unpleasantly. “I can only tell you that you do.”
“I do,” he whispers, pulling his still-clasped hands up against his chest. A broken sob claws its way out of his throat, splintering in his ears. He can never be forgiven. He cannot repent, because he knows he does not regret it, though he tries with all his will.
Then he remembers: the fear, frantic and feral like a rabid animal, Hyde had felt as he considered the risk of his downfall. The terror at the thought of the gallows that still thrums beneath Jekyll’s skin, a sensation he does not think he will ever be without from this day forward. The rope that could so easily end his life and legacy in one fell swoop.
This, perhaps, is his way out.
As he sees it, there are now only two options for him: to die like the monster he is, or to bury Hyde so deep inside that he suffocates, that he stops clawing at the coffin, decays, and fertilizes Jekyll’s goodness with his remains.
Jekyll looks up at Hyde, at the strange image of the man he knows to be his other half, with a blurry outline and vague afterimages trailing behind him. He can never fully focus on his features like this.
“This is it,” he whispers, shamefully giddy at the thought. “You’ll die in me. There will be no more of this… madness.”
He sees the instant Hyde’s expression shifts, turning from unabashedly exhilarated to horrified. “You can’t do this.”
“I already did. Now, you’ve proven to me that you can’t be trusted.”
“Trusted? Would you say you can’t trust your hand to pen your letters? You couldn’t even last three months! You’ll be lucky if I stay put for a week, or, or even a handful of days,” Hyde rambles, words slurring together as the realization of what he’s done dawns upon him. It feels good, Jekyll realizes- instilling the kind of terror in him that plagues Jekyll each morning and evening, with every breath and footstep and shot he takes.
“You were right. You couldn’t have ruined me. After all, I’d long since been ruined. But,” he says, hands covered in half-dried blood and errant chunks of flesh loosed from a man’s face, “you could save me.”
“You’ll condemn me to a living hell? You must know you’ll be right there with me!” Hyde shouts, hands balled into fists that tremble and twitch at his sides.
Jekyll knows.
~
Hyde isn’t sure when Jekyll decides they’re going to die.
The uncontrolled transformations might have given him the pleasure of schadenfreude at Jekyll’s expense, but he is a wanted man with no control over the time or place in which he may appear. How dreadful, then, that Jekyll seems to have given up on the idea of surviving entirely- Hyde asks (yells and screams and cries) for the proper salts, brews and scrawls down notes and tears through pages of scientific theory, all the while Jekyll is practically planning their funeral.
Jekyll indulges him, surely- ironically, he started to do so far more regularly after condemning Hyde; giving him little victories as though to spite him, to remind him that this is all he will ever get. Now that he risks losing himself to Hyde at all hours of the day, merely by existing, he carries on indulging.
He will scowl at the blasphemies scratched into the margins of his scripture, sure, and what he did to the portrait of their father (a vile, wretched man, and he knows Jekyll thinks it too) upset him for an hour or so, but he never tries to punish him. He knows that Hyde is already trapped within his personal hell- a life in which he is no longer an avatar of desire but of fear, bone-deep and virulent.
Even as Jekyll treats him with the fond irritation better suited for a wife he’d never have, Hyde can tell that he’s given up. He can tell from the way that, as of late, he hardly ever tells Hyde to take a dose of the potion and free him. Hyde knows: Jekyll doesn’t think there will ever be another batch. He’s rationing them out like a starving man, lapping at droplets that have long since evaporated.
Hyde doesn’t know whether he feels the same. He doesn’t let himself think about it. If he allows himself to think, for the briefest moment, that their life is forfeit, he might as well take the cyanide left in the drawer for him.
Jekyll asked him to take the potion today. It felt like nails through his hands, his breasts, his throat. Why should he ask for control now, when there is but one phial of the elixir remaining? He sat for at least an hour, leg bouncing, convinced that Jekyll would kill them the moment his skin snapped into place.
He hasn’t; not yet, at least. He’s sat at the desk, writing a letter to Utterson- an explanation, one which paints Hyde in a far more negative light than he rightly deserves, in his opinion. Jekyll pauses between sentences, takes a few moments to bite the tip of his pen before reminding himself of his time limit, then carries on writing.
There were no gentle words and cautious explanations for Lanyon. Hyde showed him the horror of their existence, and Jekyll was left to pick up the pieces. Instead of doing so, he buried them deeper into that disappointment of a friend’s flesh, burying him alongside the likes of Sir Danvers.
Edward watches from behind his eyes, feels the pressure he applies to his pen- they both press it down far too hard, but only Edward has ever snapped a pen in half by doing so.
When Henry finishes, he looks down at the page blankly, a thousand-yard stare usually only seen on soldiers and widows. He is his own widow, Edward thinks, in a way- his body is lost to him; even now, he can feel Hyde’s veins shifting under his skin, yearning to be free.
“Is that it?” Hyde asks him, deadpan save for the slightest wrinkle in his brow. “Your final words? There’s quite a lot of them. Surely you didn’t need to write so much.”
“I did,” Henry murmurs, and when he finally blinks, he looks like he’s waking himself up. “I need him to know about… everything.”
(‘About you’? Perhaps… or, even, ‘about us’.)
Henry is turning his hand over, inspecting the blood vessels he can see through his relatively pale skin, watching it grow even paler. “I didn’t draw it out unnecessarily. I told him all the important parts; there were merely a great number of important parts.”
“Sure,” Edward says, trying to make it clear he doesn’t mean it. He watches Jekyll’s nails sharpen in agonizing slow-motion. “I don’t intend on dying anytime soon, you know. You’ll be here, inside me. Just as you wanted, only in reverse.”
“If you survive this,” Henry says, “I’ll commend you.”
“You will,” he mutters bitterly. “Just need a few more days…”
They sit in silence for a long stretch of time as Henry tries to postpone his transformation for as long as is humanly possible. He moves away from the desk, with the letter and the will laid out before him like his obituary, and sits down beside his bookshelves. What used to be a place of peace had quickly morphed to an anxious enclosure as Hyde scoured the volumes for any sign of hope, going the way of most things nowadays. Still, in the midst of numerous haphazardly discarded volumes, he places a hand on his defiled bible and begins to pray.
It’s almost comical. Hyde can’t help but roll his eyes at the sight, although it’s more out of disgust than anything else. Jekyll bows his head, submitting himself to judgment as though he wouldn’t lie until his tongue grew numb to get away from that same judgment, were it coming from his fellow man.
“Why do you even bother? You must know your soul is forfeit, at this point.” Hyde watches as Jekyll cards through the pages, eyes skirting around the angry scribbles born from his hand. “I still can’t understand you.”
Jekyll exhales long and loud, hand pausing on a page within the Book of Psalms that has yet to be desecrated.
(For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made.)
“Of course you don’t understand how I feel,” Jekyll says suddenly, eyes lighted with realization. “I was made by God, but you weren’t. You…” He takes Edward’s immaterial hand, twines his fingers through Edward’s twitching claws. “were made by me. I’m the one you pray to.”
For all the time Hyde had tried to pry blasphemies from Jekyll’s lips, the sound of the words seem to fill his chest with lead. Jekyll is holding him carefully and smiling serenely, like he’s trying to take on the countenance of a merciful god- like he wasn’t the one to trap Hyde for months, to revile him at every opportunity.
But of course Jekyll would take the opportunity to make himself out as holy to the worst of mankind. Hyde is the only one he thinks could ever worship him (could ever think him greater than a bug to be crushed underfoot), so he jumps at the thought, snapping his jaws shut around it even when he knows he’ll end up with a hook through his mouth. He must be thinking himself a savior to his other self, nailed to a cross for Hyde’s sins, absolving him of his misdeeds. If he truly were holy, Hyde would spit in his face, but this… Hyde’s pulse is running faster than usual, his blood which never calms feeling tenfold more vigorous than is typical.
“You’re right,” he says, leaning nearer to Henry, tightening his hand around the other’s. “Is that what you want me to say? That I’ll worship you, make an idol of you? Do you want my interest so terribly? I tell you: you’ve had it all this time, and rejected it.”
Henry shakes his head weakly, a halfhearted denial of Edward’s words. “It isn’t that I… want it. It is just the truth. Surely you can see it, I’m… you know my lies better than I.”
Edward hums, as if considering, like he truly isn’t sure of his feelings on the subject. He resents it when Henry lies to deceive himself out of responsibility, but he can hardly begrudge him this, even if it turns out to be a falsehood.
(Does one create their own consciousness, their own beating heart? Is it something one should take pride in, the formation of their sinew into that which resembles a man?)
“I see it,” Hyde says in a low and scratchy voice. He glances down at their hands where they are joined as though in communal prayer, a stark image of blasphemy given the unholy creature which one belongs to. His eyes trace the outline of Jekyll’s jaw, down the length of his Adam’s apple, all the way to the hollow of his neck.
He presses his teeth to Henry’s throat, scraping them along the thin skin just hard enough to sting. He can feel Henry’s breath hitch the second he makes contact, an abrupt halting of his faculties. “What are you doing?” he asks Hyde in a weak voice, face contorting to something between a grimace and a dazed stare.
“My kind of worship,” he mumbles into his pulse point, and when his tongue forms syllables it brushes up against Henry’s neck. “Don’t pretend you don’t know what I mean.”
Henry gasps in a breath as Hyde worries his teeth on the divot between his jaw and his neck. He looks away, then closes his eyes when that doesn’t work, then tilts his head away when he still can’t tamp down whatever foul emotion he’s feeling. “You’re not supposed to-”
“Shh,” Hyde cuts him off, dragging his fingers through Jekyll’s hair and taking hold of it with a tight grip. “I know I’m not.”
Perhaps his retreating into Jekyll, his momentary suicide, is the same as Jekyll’s desperate blathering to a God who would forsake him if he stood before him for judgement. He is Hyde’s safe haven, a creature comfort which he can only indulge in whilst in the sanctuary of their own mind. He thinks Jekyll, whose blood he sustains himself off of like a leech, deserves some kind of thanks.
He bites down hard enough to draw blood were he material, feeling the thrilling shock that jumps through Jekyll. He gnaws on him like an animal trying to find bits of meat still clinging to a bone, continuing on even as his body starts to contort and change.
His own teeth dig into his shoulder, brilliant tendrils of pain that stretch into his skin from his neck, his shoulder, even his esophagus. He pulls on it like he’s trying to snap a thread, and he feels it shift painfully as it reconstructs itself from within his mouth.
Before he knows it, he’s sat on his knees surrounded by vapid literature, and Jekyll is the one whose teeth surround his throat. He swallows anticipatorily, waiting for Jekyll to withdraw the pressure. He does, after a moment, but first, he bites down harder than Hyde had the entire time. Hyde cries out in pain the best he can with his larynx in Jekyll’s maw, hand jumping to encircle his neck protectively on instinct.
Jekyll draws back, and in that moment Hyde sees a picture of enmity and adoration, at war with one another in the grinding of his teeth and the quivering of his eyelids.
What a terrible man he is, Hyde thinks with relief.
~
When the ax crashes down the third time in a row, Hyde sees the wood splinter and his feeble body, already racked by tremors, convulses.
“‘Til death do us part,” Jekyll says thoughtfully over his shoulder, painfully close to the shell of his ear, close enough that Edward can feel the gust of his breath. “This seems to be a perfect ending.”
“No,” Edward argues, stubbornly refusing Jekyll’s complacency to his final breath, “Not ‘til death. We’ll be together much longer than that, Doctor.”
“You don’t need to call me that. It’s as if we’re strangers, when we’re-“ closer than any handsome couple reciting flowery verse to one another, closer than any old friends the likes of which could read the words printed upon one another’s sclera, closer than even a mother and child, still festering in her womb, waiting to be rent from safety and comfort never to see it again, “-nothing of the sort.”
“What would you have me call you, then?” Edward asks with a slight upturn to the corner of his mouth, the sly kind of smile he knows young men and women would swoon at. “Hyde?” he says, drawing out the lone syllable as though it is the name of his lover (it is, it has been).
Henry shudders and starts to turn his head away, but Edward takes hold of his jaw with his free hand, jerking it back to face him. Henry meets his gaze with dark pools filling his eyes, pupils so dilated that Edward thinks he might drown in them. “Thank you, Hyde,” Edward whispers, hand shaking where he grips the cyanide he dreaded for so long.
(God damn you, Jekyll- damn you to hell right beside me, decompose with me in the great beyond, or the vast unknowable nothing of death; either will do.)
“Thank you,” Henry says to him, the first and last time he’ll say anything of the sort to his creation, those wide eyes betraying the fear that still grips his heart, “Jekyll.”
The name punches a hole in his skull, sends cerebrospinal fluid gushing from his ears and eyes, makes and remakes him as Jekyll had done so many times before. It overwhelms him with an ocean of thoughts and emotions he did not believe himself capable of thinking or feeling.
He thinks, as he takes his medicine: perhaps Jekyll will keep his soul safe from the torments beyond life as he did within it. Perhaps Hyde will return the favor, if he feels so inclined. The phial shatters in his hand, showering the floor in tiny glass shards. Henry takes his hand, now gushing blood where he tore it open, and presses a single, lingering kiss to his palm.
With that, he brings the life of that wonderful and fearful Edward Hyde to an end.
