#jekyll put the potion down
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you’ve been hit with, you’ve been struck by, attempting to draw lanyon
#college lanyon mi amor#lanyon no!#you can’t fix him#jekyll put the potion down#lanyon#robert lanyon#tgs robert lanyon#jekyon#tgs jekyon#the glass scientists lanyon#the glass scientists#tgs lanyon#tgs#tgs henry jekyll#fighterdraws
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im not too sure if this is the right account to send this ask to (very sorry if it isnt) but i was curious if youd be willing to chat/ramble about your own personal jekyll and hyde version? i remember having a small talk with you on artfight about your jekyll and hyde version (im dragondog from artfight if youre curious) and my curiosity has been peaked ever since. i need to know more. your own personal jekyll and hyde designs and story seem so interesting but i rarely see you talk about them which i think is just absolutely criminal.
:00000000
The sacred question has been asked - someone has asked about my ocs-
This is a perfectly okay account to ask this to! It's the closest I've got to a Jekyll and Hyde account after all.
Anyway, thank you so much for asking!!! This ask was gnawing at me in a good way for most of the day while I was away from my computer, considering what information to include and how to explain stuff. It was a lot of fun!
I'm also glad you found them interesting!!!
(Also going to say before I start is that my Jekyll and Hyde versions get very self indulgent which is why I usually keep them to myself so some factors about my story might sound rather weird or seem to come out of left field. Just a heads up.)
So I guess the best place to start would probably be with Jekyll and Hyde themselves?
Like the book, the two of them are basically the same person. When Jekyll turns into Hyde and vice versa, nobody 'takes control', it's more like getting high or drunk where they're still the same person but still act quite different or think differently from each other.
However, they do have differing opinions on each other. Hyde, being a less repressed version of Jekyll, understands a lot of Jekyll's emotions better than him. He knows when Jekyll regrets something or cares more than he wants to let on. Though, as much as he can have these realisations, when he turns back into Jekyll, he tends to dismiss them as 'irrational' thoughts brought on by the potion and not worth considering (aka, the repression kicks in and he refuses to entertain any conclusions he came to as Hyde.)
This leads to a lot of frustration and concerns from Hyde. The knowledge that he has to turn back into Jekyll, whereupon anything he's realised about themself, anything that could help them both, will be instantly dismissed by himself the moment he turns back. No matter how much he writes it down or tells it to himself again and again because it's not forgotten, Jekyll just doesn't want to look at it. And he can't just bother Jekyll as a hallucination ghost like most adaptations. When he turns back, Hyde is gone. Like a stain of breath on glass.
This also leads to fear from Hyde towards his alter ego - If Jekyll ever decided the potion wasn't worth his time and threw it away, Hyde would be unable to do anything about it, would be the one throwing it away in fact. He wouldn't be able to scream or protest or anything. And he enjoys being Hyde. It wouldn't really be death but he enjoys being Hyde so much and hates the monotony of Jekyll so much that it would be like a death.
Luckily, Jekyll isn't planning on throwing the potion out because they do feel the same way and Jekyll enjoys taking the potion and being Hyde just as much (even if he would never actually admit that's the reason). The fear is still there though, ever present.
...I've gotten so deep into explaining their relationship that I have not explained anything else yet, whoops.
Both Jekyll and Hyde have some inhuman traits about them since the first transformation. Jekyll has mildly reflective eyes like a cat but it can only be seen in certain lighting so nobody notices. He also moves with a little too much perfection, a little too graceful, a little lacking in the usual human clumsiness.
Hyde, meanwhile, is just very off putting in many ways. For one is his eyes as shown by this diagram that I made for artfight. (Also his teeth, and his insides being green)
His eyes change shape, a bit like a cartoon character. Other people can, in fact, see this and it is, in fact, weird for them. (He can also probably say <3 and everyone else asks how he just did that with his mouth.)
He also changes based on Jekyll's perception of himself and his 'evils'. This means he can get taller or shorter, or become more obviously monstrous or go back to just being a guy with an uneasy feel about him just based on Jekyll's opinions. If Jekyll starts to fear Hyde and view him as a threat, Hyde changes physically to reflect this.
Personality-wise, Jekyll likes to keep control over every aspect of his life, creating perfect schedules for everything that he's going to do in a day, timing each event down to the minute, designing contingencies in case anything unexpected happens. He can be friendly enough to other people for the sake of his image but he still comes across as rather cold and distant.
Hyde, meanwhile, is obviously free of all this and does whatever he pleases. He tends to be loyal and loving, to the point of being a little too obsessed, and is exceedingly open about how he's feeling. He's also incredibly truthful - he almost never lies about anything but will often fae-rule his way out of anyone realising the real truth. For example, he's very open about being Doctor Jekyll but nobody believes him because he'll just drop it into a conversation and won't elaborate or will elaborate in a way that just sounds even more like a lie. And, of course, Jekyll himself will obviously deny it, so...
Besides that, Jekyll keeps three lab rats, Noir, Spot, and Rose who, due to the potion being used on them, can also change shape like Jekyll and Hyde. As such, Hyde tends to take them with him when he goes out.
(Also, smaller headcanon but Hyde tends to repeat words or phrases twice, "Indeed indeed", "What? What?", etc. Just seemed like a fun addition.)
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Next, Lanyon.
Lanyon and Jekyll are on weird terms because they had a fight years back. After seeing Jekyll's science get more and more dangerous over the years, Lanyon was afraid that he would some day hurt himself in a way he couldn't take back or even die from it. After trying to convince Jekyll to stop for ages, Lanyon finally put their foot down and said that, if Jekyll didn't stop, they would leave.
Both Jekyll and Lanyon deeply regret the argument but neither of them can take it back. Jekyll is too stubborn to admit that he was ever in the wrong and Lanyon can't take it back because then they don't have anything else to hold over Jekyll's head to get him to stop.
At least, that was how the fight was initially.
After the potion was taken, Lanyon, who was very close to Jekyll's mad science experiments and was very used to seeing the signs that Jekyll had done something to himself, was the only person who noticed the change. Seeing Jekyll's new changes terrified Lanyon deeply because he knew Jekyll had done something but he didn't know what. Being a rather skittish person, Lanyon was too scared to speak to Jekyll after that, doing all they could to avoid him.
Maybe things could have continued that way with the two avoiding each other. However, after the fight, Lanyon came out as genderfluid.
They had been meddling with their own gender before in quiet but the fight basically gave Lanyon the midlife crisis moment they needed to go "You know what? I don't care about anyone's opinions. I've seen what caring about ones image did to Jekyll and I don't want to be anything like that."
And so came Hastie and Hattie, two names for the same person, just using different pronouns and names based on what Lanyon felt like at the time.
Jekyll, however, was avoiding hearing anything about Lanyon and completely missed this massive piece of information. Jekyll is also notably, very wrapped up in his own very small world and opinions (also, no internet). He has no idea that transness is a thing.
Hence, Jekyll believes that Hastie and Hattie are not the same person but, instead, brother and sister. Lanyon, meanwhile, who was so open and so gossiped about when they first came out, doesn't even realise that anyone could??? not know????? that they're the same?????? Everyone else knows! They don't even look that different!
This all cumulates in one fateful night where Lanyon, going by Hattie, and Hyde meet. The two of them get along like a house on fire, neither caring much for society's rules and both of them being in some way being shunned for their peculiarities. Hyde is much more outgoing and often pushes Lanyon outside of their comfort zone while Lanyon is more level-headed and can often do the planning and thinking that Hyde neglects to keep them both safe.
All the while, Hyde has no idea that he's talking to Hastie and Lanyon has no idea that they're talking to Jekyll.
Personality-wise Lanyon tends to be very down-to-earth and prefers to do things by the book for the most part. Though this is only for the most part - in terms of dealing with other people, Lanyon gets much more expressive, dressing wildly and often doing strange things like taking live geese into a dinner party. While this does allow them to express themselves in some ways that are beneficial to them, like becoming comfortable with their gender identity, some of these behaviours, like the live geese in the dinner party, are very much a way to push away the people around them, afraid of something going wrong after their experiences with Jekyll.
Until they meet Hyde, Utterson is their only friend (which Utterson is quite concerned about, often trying to encourage Lanyon to make more friends.)
Besides that, Lanyon is fond of gardening, collecting crystals, astrology, and yoga. They dabble with a lot of relaxation stuff like chamomile tea, incense, lavender, etc.
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Utterson, meanwhile, tends to be the most calm and collected out of the three of them, seemingly unbothered by most of what life throws at him and good at handling even the most stressful situations with ease. Not to mention, he has the most unexpected range of skills and knowledge. Whenever anyone has a problem, he's the number one person to go to for help.
However, for the most part, he fades into the background and tends to remain forgotten until someone needs him for something which leaves him lonely and often desperate for attention while being unable to get it. His work as a lawyer allows him to get fleeting amounts of attention, but it's not quite enough and that often leaves him vulnerable to falling in with bad people.
While Lanyon sees straight through Jekyll, Utterson has fallen quite a bit into seeing Jekyll as innocent and naïve, someone who doesn't fully understand how cruel the world can be and needs to be protected from it. This means, when Hyde shows up and Jekyll changes his will for him, Utterson is quite quickly defensive of Jekyll and aggressive towards Hyde, believing that Hyde has nothing but bad intentions. Hyde, however, is quite head-over-heels for Utterson and determined to seduce him or at least set him up with Jekyll.
While Utterson appears unaffected by anything that crosses his path, this is actually because he has difficulty expressing his emotions, his expression and tone generally remaining static. Only people close to him can generally tell what he's thinking and feeling as a result.
Personality-wise, Utterson is generally quite kindly and generous, often seen giving food and money to the homeless. Though, his morality can be a bit of a roulette wheel at times, willing to do questionable things at times if he deems it for a good enough cause.
In terms of hobbies, he will often bake things for his friends and carried the three of them through university as the only one who could actually cook. He also has a slightly more morbid interest in taxidermy and keeps a room in his house for his work.
(For another smaller headcanon, he and Lanyon tend to get into pun fights, much to Jekyll's agony.)
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Then there's Lenore Carew (aka, Lisa Carew, she just got renamed along the way). She makes up the third member of Hyde's little friendship squad with Lanyon. An excitable lady with an interest in the occult and monsters. She and Jekyll were once set to be married but, due to a mutual realisation that neither liked the other in that way, they broke it up. Jekyll has been avoiding her ever since, finding the situation awkward, but Hyde is very much down to be friends with her again.
While she does her best to live up to her family name, being as much of a respectable and graceful lady as she can be, in her spare time she'll often sneak out to go running after whatever haunted house or cryptid sighting she's heard of lately.
The actual reason for her interest is because her mother, before she died, was a prophet, gifted with Sight and Lenore, raised with all these stories of her grandeur and powers, is determined to find a way to awaken those same powers in herself.
However, along the way, these powers actually do start to manifest and, as it turns out, a lot scarier and more difficult to control than she ever realised.
Most particularly, sometimes when she looks at Jekyll, she sees something - or someone - else in his place. She has no idea what these visions mean, whether it's a vision from the future, from the past, or something else entirely.
Personality-wise, while she can excitable and often gets ahead of herself, she can be very kind and compassionate towards others, always the first to slow down and check if someone is okay or to offer a hug to those in need. She can also often show a childish side, enjoying stuffed toys, getting along well with kids, or just playing games.
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Uh, so anyway, there's a bunch more but this post is getting long and I've taken all day with this. If I take much longer, it's going to look like I'm not going to answer. I think this is the stuff that most people would be interested in anyway, Lanyon, Utterson, Jekyll, and Hyde. I'm still missing out an explanation of the worldbuilding itself and the antagonists, not to mention little details and side characters like Poole and such.
I fool around with these characters a lot and that means there's more information than I even remember most of the time until something pops into my head and I go "Ohhhh that plot point. That was fun."
Thank you again for the ask!!!!
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The Glass Scientists webcomic is that EXACT “messy gay story” that I’m looking for. It involves two men from the earliest century, one of them (Henry Jekyll) has internalized homophobia and spent years convincing himself that any gay or LGBTQ+ relationship is doomed to fail due to the heartbreak he personally experienced in college at the time of meeting his lover, and the other (Robert Lanyon, the POC one) is a stubborn self centered yet deep down caring man who’s afraid of commitment and emotional attachment. Even after they separated after having a fuck buddy fling in college that supposedly on the surface meant nothing to them yet EVERYTHING deep down, they remained close friends as they grew older, Jekyll opening his science society and continued with his work, only this time he has a counterpart, Edward Hyde, who brings out everything he doesn’t like about himself, everything he’s afraid to be. Having Hyde be this unhinged openly sexual person yet someone who paints himself as not having any deep emotions makes sense for the story. Hyde doesn’t need to be this big bad murderer because this is a different adaptation of Jekyll and Hyde. It’s not about a man who wants to do whatever he wants so he creates a potion to get off scott free for everything including murder, it’s about a man who suppresses not only his emotions he feels like he dare not feel, but himself, keeping a perfect gentleman facade in constant fear of what others would think of the real him.
Not that too recently in the webcomic, Jekyll has started to question if Hyde truly is “evil” since that’s all Jekyll saw him as. He doesn’t see Hyde as the suppressed version of himself, being in denial and thinking this is black and white. That’s what I love about this webcomic. Characters like Laynon and ESPECIALLY Jekyll are flawed people who need to be bonked on the head about their emotions and how to deal with them in a healthy way, and the comic doesn’t shy away from that. It opens different perspectives, different beliefs on why the characters act the way they act and the hardships they’re going through. Many of these characters are engaging and likable, even if they are flawed and make mistakes or have not the best beliefs, including a trans character named Jasper, a day manager with a dark past named Rachel, and even Dr. Frankenstein. Recently Jekyll and Lanyon are currently in a clash. Laynon never cared about science, that was Henry’s passion, and yet he still stayed by his friends side. Lanyon was at first thinking about quitting, giving up after trying to help Henry in whatever was going on with him (since no one knows about Hyde) but now due to the fear of losing Henry, Lanyon wants to shut down the entire society before it slowly kills his best friend completely. Henry on the other hand doesn’t react so easily.
I love how both characters are in the wrong, and yet you can see both of their perspectives as well. Lanyon has been worrying about Jekyll since the beginning of the comic, only for Jekyll to keep his “perfect easy going” facade and push him away. Lanyon is just done, and meanwhile with Jekyll, all those repressed emotions are starting to come out. As readers we learn that Hyde held resentment towards Lanyon, but he never knew why since in his eyes, Jekyll handles the “emotional” aspect of themselves. It’s clear to say however, that despite Jekyll caring deeply of his friend and even putting him up on a pedestal in his brain (something that was revealed in an earlier chapter) he deep down hates Laynon for what he did, leaving him after Robert had to get married and acting like it was nothing. Jekyll spent years hiding everything from everyone, and Robert does have a point, he’s overworking himself and has been for so long, but Jekyll is a very stubborn character, and I love that. This is the most recent page and I have no idea what will happen next, but I’m all for this, these two characters have been bottling SO much up and I think it’s time they snap. Can’t wait for the next update.
#there’s so much I’m leaving out btw#this comic is kinda long#I’m being vague in some areas as well#but yeah go try this comic out#if you like fantasy/monsters/old Victorian era stuff and of course great character conflicts I recommend a read#there’s so much I can say about this comic it’s SO well written and I adore it#Jekyll is my favorite character he’s written so realistic and layered#and the other characters too#I love the themes this comic tackles as well#probably will talk about this comic again sometime but I just wanted to give y’all my thoughts#unrelated#the glass scientists#webcomics#gay#lgbtq+ characters#comic
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You see. The tragedy of Edward Hyde is that he’s only a person when he allows himself to be, and only to the extent he chooses to be. The tipping point comes when having to be what he is and who he really is becomes unbearable. When he can no longer reconcile his true identity with the fabricated one (which is which? does that matter?)…
And! when that finally happens, when he decides he HAS to be someone else, that person has to hate Henry Jekyll. Not because he put him in the world, not because he strives to destroy that part of his identity, no-
It’s because, in giving Hyde personhood, he puts himself down, and submits to him. And Hyde, being Jekyll, hates submitting to anyone, not even himself, hates being dependent, hates being subjugated… Now, what is he being dependent on, now? The potion, right…?
Just……… Hyde (who represents Jekyll’s addiction) hates Jekyll (himself!) for being an addict (and now needing the potion to remain sober, sane, painless, “normal”). That’s sad. That’s fucking sad. Imagine being cursed to use what little severance you forced upon yourself in an altered state as a coping mechanism to hurt yourself anyway, because you can’t stand being like that (so dependent) anymore. Imagine doing unspeakable things to your brain in order to attain freedom and losing it wholesale.
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I don't really have a point with this character analysis, it's just something that i wanted to point out (because i can *manic laughter*):
Henry Jekyll failed at getting rid of his "bad" side and instead created a version of himself that incorporates only his "bad" traits - for example his repressed impulsivity and hedonism. But when he drinks the potion and Hyde is the result, I realized that Jekyll detaches himself almost completely from him. Hyde's actions are "not his own" but that of a monster; he even gives him a full name and implements him as an independent member of society.
Hyde on the other hand is very dependent on Jekyll. Even though he rebels against him, when Jekyll puts his foot down, Hyde cannot make the final decision. This way Jekyll is able to drink the reversing potions, write his entry to Utterson and also commit suicide in the end.
Now, my theory here is this: Stevenson wanted to show us that Hyde is "weaker" than Jekyll because he lacks the personality traits that a well-rounded person has. While Hyde is only a separated part of Jekyll, Jekyll is still his "good" and his "bad" side. That way Hyde can only take over when Jekyll is unconscious (when he's sleeping). Otherwise Jekyll is able to supress him.
Although I do have point this out: Stevenson shows us Hyde as an impulsive person without conscience. By Jekyll supressing this part of him, he doesn't develop a good strategy to cope with Hyde's impulses, while Hyde is able to connect with Jekyll's point of view all the better. He knows Jekylls weak points and can attack there.
I just think the way they are portrayed is very interesting and i wished i would have been able to read the book without knowing the twist at the end. It's almost sad that we already know that Jekyll and Hyde are "the same person", it's like Hyde has said: that Jekyll and Hyde will be one and inseperable.
Maybe, Hyde was right after all...
#hello there it's me with those mediocre character analysis again#jekyll and hyde#henry jekyll#edward hyde#character analysis
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The Strange Case of Mr. Hyde and Mr. Harker
The problem of the potion has been at least temporarily solved. Issues of supply have been erased with the aid of the League of Extraordinary Gentlefolk, enough so that triple and quadruple doses can be had...and often they must be. It seems the clock is still ticking down on the ever-imbalanced nature of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, even with a potential sea of the damned elixir to drown in.
It isn't until the night they see what looks like a kindred spirit in action that hope begins to simmer. After all, they had already known the young man before this.
If Mr. Harker can turn from concentrated kindness to the Thing crawling on the walls on a whim and back again, surely he must have some tips...
(For those not in the know, this is a sizable ‘what-if?’ scenario based loosely on the premise of The League of Extraordinary Gentlefolk comic-in-progress putting its roots down on Tumblr, a glorious public domain mega crossover and antidote to Alan Moore’s unpleasant take on the idea. Shout out to the amazing @mayhemchicken-artblog for all the fantastic work already put into the project.)
Ao3 link here
It was in a way almost as extraordinary as stunningly mundane how the mess began. Truly, its inception started long before the League took what mercy it could on him and his condition. Bless Utterson for his mercy, bless him for knowing Norton and his inexplicable wife. Bless Van Helsing, the dear old wonder. And bless, of all shocks, Mr. Harker.
The last time he’d seen the boy had been when Utterson had been cornered into something resembling a birthday party by his colleagues. It was the work of Peter Hawkins, may the old fellow rest in peace, who had conned poor Gabriel into thinking it was a mere talk of professional advice and the bonus of a drink. Instead, the trap had sprung in the form of a veritable horde of his friends assembled under Hawkins’ roof, the route of escape blocked, somewhat sheepishly, by young Mr. Jonathan Harker. Jekyll could still picture the lad as he’d been that day.
A trim fellow, long in the bones and with a curiously elfin edge to his features that stamped him as almost more fetching than merely handsome. His hair had been a solid brown back then, dark as burnt chestnut with eyes to match. Brief as their meeting was, Jekyll had been one of many in the silvering members of the party to wonder why Hawkins had brought his clerk along. A wonder that was followed by an increasing gladness that the young man was there. Not only for the fact that—as it became obvious—Hawkins had adopted Harker in all but law, nor even the revelation that dear tight-lipped Gabriel apparently knew the boy for better than a decade of his brief years, and was as warm with him as if he were blockaded by his own nephew.
No, what thawed the codgers among them was the fact that, like a flower gave off a scent or candle gave off light, Jonathan Harker radiated a feeling of whole and unvarnished kindness. He did not simper up to his seniors for their wise counsel and tales of the legal battlefield, fishing for footholds on the career ladder. Truly, Jekyll had winced over the boy’s politeness when he was ultimately pounced upon by the orators among them, ravenous to share their horror stories with fresh ears. He only broke this decorum whenever a maid or servant came round; staff he knew by name and helped deal with whatever dish or drink was brought in. At one point he cleared a plate and immediately disappeared to interview the cook for her recipe.
“He collects them for his fiancée, Miss Murray,” Hawkins told them en sotto voce. “They want to be able to make all they like themselves. I’ve known her half as long as him. A sharp girl, and as smitten with him as vice versa. If the country at large could ever see those two together, it would doom the prospects of every bachelor in the land, for every bachelorette would see what lies they’ve been fed about matters of love and wifedom. Husbands see their women as a nanny, wives see their men as a chore, but those two? They are Cupid’s own work.” A crease had formed among the half dozen already on the man’s brow. “Poor boy wants to marry her not long after he graduates to solicitor. I think he would set up camp in my office just to work around the clock to have pennies enough for the ceremony.”
Utterson had tutted over his own cigar, eyeing Hawkins with that placid steel that was the constant default of his gaze.
“Poor boy, he says.” Jekyll had nearly gawped at the ghost of a smile creasing under his beard. “As if you were not already gift-wrapping him a castle.” Hawkins had thrown a fuller grin back.
“Hold your tongue, Gabriel. That’s in confidence until he finds out the next workday. Let’s not give him a heart attack in the midst of your big day.”
“It would make a good distraction. I could run for the doctor…”
“The doctor is in,” Jekyll reminded. “And there is no escape. Now, what castle do you mean, Peter? Surely not the Transylvanian—,” But Hawkins had waved and shushed as Harker returned to the room, tucking a recipe in his pocket. Warm hours had rolled on and Jekyll became increasingly convinced of the lad’s nigh-tangible fug of friendliness. A less charitable mind might have likened it to the inviting presence of a chummy dog bred for slavering love, or perhaps some pampered fool so swaddled by good fortune they knew no better than to give and expect mirth.
But no. Jonathan Harker was neither hound nor coddled. It was simply his nature. A nature that, heading home and resuming his toils in the laboratory for the night, Dr. Henry Jekyll had found himself envying as much as shunning. Oh! To be so clean in conscience and intent that it could be felt like a sunbeam! It was the kind of absurd froth churned out by sentimentalist plays and soppier penny books. Such people did not exist. Certainly not among men.
Certainly not in himself. Try as he might. Rather, try as he might not.
It would almost be worth it, he thought, to merely obliterate the dregs of his uglier desires in a chemist’s form of spiritual surgery. Cut it out! Burn it out! Dissolve his evils into foam and let him spit the bile into the sewer to make him wholly the good Dr. Jekyll his friends and fellows believed! Ah, but he was too greedy. Too enamored of those unexercised ills to dabble in that direction. No, duality it must be. He would have his cake and eat it too.
Even so, Jonathan Harker remained a small smiling mote in his memory for days afterward. Like a grain of sand caught under a nail. Minor, yet unignorable.
So good a soul it could be felt. He wished the lad well. Wished harder that they would not meet again. And so such might have come true, but for the coming of Edward Hyde and the impending nightmare of their lopsided coexistence. That damned salt! It was a miracle that the keener minds that Utterson had brought him to could reproduce what they could from the potent crumbs remaining. The last granules of the stuff had been too paltry for a final concoction but enough—God, just barely enough!—to divulge the impurity that had empowered the original batch to begin with.
Thank God, thank God, thank God—
“Dr. Jekyll?”
He had nearly jumped out of his skin. A waste it would have been too, being so freshly regenerated to its proper form. Droplets of sweat and tears flew from his unshorn cheeks as he jerked around. And there was Jonathan Harker. Possibly.
The young man was remarkably changed since the last Jekyll had seen him. There was a greyish undertone to his pallor that brought the freshly dead to mind alongside a surreal impression of ancientness in the features. As if he were merely a stone carving of a young man that had weathered centuries versus the actual model. Most startling was the duo of hair and eyes. Brunet had washed out to a silvery white while the eyes—
Jekyll could not be sure it wasn’t a trick of the light, but a shine had come into them that made him uneasy. His thoughts turned sickly to those nocturnal beasts whose stare reflected moon and lamplight like polished coins. Seeming to realize he was staring, Harker blinked and whatever spell there had been in his silent apparition was broken. Though it made a slight resurgence when he laid his hand gently on the older man’s shoulder. The fingers were so cold he might have taken them straight out of a snowdrift.
“Doctor? What are you doing here? What’s wrong?”
“Ah. It seems to be quite a reunion in this place.” He gave a hoarse noise that was not quite a chuckle. “I should ask you the same, young man. Who did Hawkins have you dealing with on his behalf, hm? Mephistopheles?”
It was meant as a joke. The spike of chill in the resting hand and the hollow gleam of the eyes suggested it was too near to truth for the young man’s liking. And there was something in the air. Some perceptible shift.
Jonathan Harker radiated an antithesis of what Jekyll had felt that day in Hawkins’ parlor; the same feeling that had come off him in soft waves just a moment before. Jekyll could not name the sensation as anything but an intrinsic warning. A metaphysical flash of a poison frog’s spots or the rattle of America’s desert snakes.
Take heed. No closer. In fact, back away. Quickly.
It shuddered up his spine and needled his hindbrain with ice and nightmare. He felt Hyde himself squirm within him. Kneejerk cowardice before a threat now elevated by a hundred.
But then, as quickly as that wretched bristle came, it was gone. Jonathan Harker even managed a weak smile. He was pure amity once again.
“You could say that. I bet my story is longer than yours. I’ve just returned from,” Jekyll caught him hastily adjusting his coat to cover his hip, though not fast enough to hide the handle of a startlingly large blade, “some business outside the city. No time for updates from here. If you can stand to share it, I should like to hear what’s happened to bring you to our door. Though only if you’re up to it.” The words were in earnest. But still.
“It is too much to say, for how little there is to tell. You would take me for a madman even if I spoke the truth. I would babble. Ask your friends, the doctors. Ask Utterson.”
“If you prefer it that way.” Experience honed each syllable. The eyes gleamed again, if dully. “But I have more reasons than most to hear out a man’s so-called babble without judgment. I was worse than that once upon a time. But privacy matters more in some cases. If you don’t wish to tell me, I won’t go fishing for the story from others. Just know that I am a member here. There is no tale too tall for me to hear and I have heard and played a part in many. All of us have. So. Would you prefer a drink and a talk? Or just the drink?”
As always, duality won. Drink and talk it was. Perhaps too much of drink, for it seemed to wash away all sense on his tongue.
Harker stirred barely an inch through it. He frowned over the poor child, of course. A cloud moved in his face when Jekyll spoke of that so-near miss with the battered Carew, Hyde having been startled from his full attack by a far more piercing cry of terror than any blunt plea or yelp from the old man. A keening voice so high in fear that the sex of the victim could not be guessed; just as the voice that Hyde and Jekyll would swear could not have its species guessed.
“It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God!”
A declaration that somehow echoed in the brain without reaching the ear. In more than mortal fear, Hyde had abandoned his murderous project at a run. All delight in the evil was spoiled by the desire to put distance between himself and the voice that was not a voice. It was some thin boon, at least. He was stopped short of a crime that would see him sent to the gallows. Though prison was unquestionably on the table after both the witness of that maid in the window and the description from bruised and broken Carew.
“But even so! Hyde truly wished the man dead. That much I have never dreamt of even in my most hideous whims. Profanities, yes, awful fancies, but the perverse has never tipped over into bloodlust. That being so, I cannot even tell if Hyde could want to kill for killing’s sake or to commit the act solely for the danger it would bring on me. Revenge of the anti-conscience, as it were. I think he would not be so bold again. Not with so cold a logic as his. Surely not against,” Jekyll had swallowed, “not against one so important. But I fear that he might try other quarries out of sheer petulance now that the question of the salt is solved by better men than us. Than I ever was. He will see it as fresh allowance. Either by accident or intention I feel he will push our luck again. No, I know he will. And none of the secondhand joys he once gleaned for me are worth it. I know it, I know it.”
Poisons danced in his head. Razors. Ropes. Pistols.
“They should never have bothered with the salt. I should never have made my plea to Gabriel. I should have let the rot of Hyde take over, let myself wallow for lack of the potion, and then, come the inevitable, both our weaknesses combined would take the cornered animal’s route, as we both deserve.” He peered blearily down into the latest emptied glass. His reflection shined in distortion at the bottom. “Perhaps we will.”
“Don’t.” Harker’s voice fell on him like a stone. “Never take the final solution when others remain before you. Death comes to all.” Then, under his breath: “To most. There is only the matter of waiting and filling that time with the trials of better options. You are a man of science as much as the supernatural. Many of the scholars under this roof are. Is it not your habit to seek new routes where old ones fall short?”
“What? I don’t…”
“The potion is your only catalyst for the moment. Your only switch between one side and the other, and one that has been growing faulty in potency as Hyde takes on weight. If that’s the case, then the solution to your control must go beyond that swill.”
“You make it sound simple.”
“It sounds like exactly what it is. Difficult. But also the only option a brilliant man can take when cornered, unless he means to cheat himself and leap straight to his end.” Again the cool hand returned to his shoulder. This time the chill was a mild thing compared to the thaw that came off the young man’s face. So young and so wretched at once. Jekyll felt for a moment like the younger man beside him; a boy weeping over a thorn in his foot, comforted by an old man bristling with broken glass and nails. “It will be hard to hold out. I know. But try first, Dr. Jekyll. Please.”
“I believe we must already be past titles, Harker. Henry is fine enough between us.”
“Jonathan for me, then.”
The cool hand fit in his own and shook.
That might have been the end of it. It should have been. There was work and practice enough to do on so many fronts. Hyde to wrangle, appearances to juggle. Busy, busy, busy. Perhaps if he had stayed indoors that particular fog-thick October night, all would have stayed as it was.
But he did not and it was not.
He had gone out for the sake of being out with stalwart Utterson in tow. Comforting as his friend’s presence was, he knew the gesture to be a mere safety line. Just in case, old man, just in case. Better to have cover of night for an excursion—just in case. He had insisted Utterson carry a weapon, concealed he knew not where, also just in case. Both men had grudgingly agreed to the others’ terms, both with matching sorrow. The melancholy of their once-golden friendship might have remained the sole trouble in the air but for the noise.
A miserable, glottal, hating, half-human noise that became a choir of gibberish wails and cries. There was no language in the mess that either could detect. Only senseless, slobbering anger. Growing closer. The moon broke through the clouds and gave better light to the situation just as the mass spilled into their street. The horde of them turned from a bruise in the mist to a sea of crisper human shapes. They were hulking men, all of them. Some wore their stature naturally. But others—some unspeakably grotesque others—did not. As if they were patchworks slapped together in monstrous proportions. Parts bloated by muscle or by too-long architecture of the bones. Some—Jekyll gagged to recognize this—had surplus anatomy to the point of seeming like abominations of man and insect. On top of it all, preceding their legion even through the merciful veil of the fog, was the stench.
Decay. Carrion. The chemical stink of mortician’s fluids and even fouler injections.
“Henry,” Utterson said in a tone pressed flat by shock, “I believe those fellows are dead.”
“I believe you’re right, Gabriel,” Jekyll returned, though with a tremor. Yes, the men stomp-shambling toward them were quite dead. Some fresh, some half-grey with decomposition, some dribbling the odd maggot or chemist’s juice. But dead. All dead. Their dead eyes spotted them standing frozen like sheep before the slaughterhouse. The dead saw. The dead surged.
In the same instant, so did panic. It leapt in Jekyll like a living thing—for it was. Fear shuddered, melted, wracked him with so sudden a spasm of change that it struck him with the brevity of a slap. And then Jekyll was Hyde and Hyde was running.
“Move, Utterson!” he had presence enough to shout, for the other man was still rigid where he stood. No, not quite. Digging in his coat for the weapon. A pistol, no doubt. “They’re dead you damned idiot!” he barked over his stunted shoulder. “Run!” But Utterson was never a man to run back in fear, but forward. So he did. So he shot. So he blew the liquid brains out of the nearest dead man—who kept running.
Jekyll screamed within Hyde, pleading, haranguing, think, think, think you selfish devil, think what loss it would be to them both to lose a friend, an ally such as him, when they were already anathema to Lanyon, Hyde, please not Gabriel, not him, damn you, not him, if you help no one else, not even your other half, help him and save yourself pain later, please, please—
Before Hyde could even pretend to listen to the shrilling in his head, before he could fully register that Utterson was about to vanish under a tide of hateful revenants, his finer senses snapped his head upward. Something else was in the fog. It clambered deftly as a spider along the brickwork of a high building. Through the murk, something flashed. Eyes like bright coins. Where the fog thinned, the moon lit on a head of pale hair and a gleam of steel.
What happened next would have been too fast for ordinary eyes. Hyde caught every heartbeat.
The crawling thing on the brick clambered down, leapt, and cleaved the nearest corpse’s reaching arms off. Followed by the top half of the skull, sending a far more impressive puddle of grey matter flying. Butchery ensued as a pale blur mottled itself with discolored gristle and ichor, some of which seemed to glow as it gushed from those few opponents that risked coming near. And there were but few. Dead though they were, the horde drew back as the pallid figure turned its attention on them. Some even clambered over their brethren just for more distance. Even standing where he did, Hyde could sense the reason.
Dread. Warning. Death is here. Come close, meet my eye, and suffer the consequences.
Not the aura of revulsion and disgust that was his own foul possession, that loathsome birthright that brought as many people running after him for violence as made them cringe and sneer away. This was a miasma of such cold promise of demise that it bordered on the tangible. A veritable perfume of concentrated fatality.
Hyde wanted to run from it and its owner. But not as much as Hyde wanted to see it. Especially as recognition finally revealed the executioner’s identity. His face came clear as he spared one hand to release the kukri blade to latch onto a nearby head and slam it against a wall, bursting skull and scalp like a gruesome egg.
The figure was Jonathan Harker.
And yet not.
As if in a trance, Hyde found himself reversing his sprint to follow the carnage as it was herded back and away down the alley from whence the mobile dead had poured. Utterson made some noise at him and tried to grasp his sleeve. He shook the man off as one would a gnat. Onward, onward, chasing the Grand Guignol scene into the night. And oh, oh! Such a scene! Such a play!
Neither Jekyll nor Hyde had ever been ones for theatre, but this was a show of phantasmagoria that stirred the very worst of rapture in their shared heart.
Harker was joined in his culling of the dead by some horde of ghoulish women, matrons and crones and a single dainty maiden, their nightdresses all stained with the spill of undead veins. Where Harker unmade the horde with blade and bare hands, the ladies ripped them asunder like wolves tearing into fatted calves. Beyond them, a giant of amalgamated pieces stormed through the last ranks of the army, seizing some squalling man clutching an ugly book and a bouquet of syringes to himself. The man hollered things in a reedy voice that sounded like so much madness. A tirade of godhood, of necromancy, of a living world owned by the dead who were owned by him, bow and obey you idiot thrall—
The giant broke his speech quite neatly with the breaking of both the man’s arms. Hyde had to stifle a laugh at the resulting squeal. The whole display carried all the comic weight of the fool characters Shakespeare always peppered his tragedies with. An entertaining distraction. But not so diverting as the second deaths of the cadavers. All had been put down but for some twitching. The lady epicures were seeing to brisk disposal as Harker wiped his blade clean and sheathed it. He stood like a pillar amid the viscera and viciousness for one glorious moment. An ivory Hades overlooking the Erinyes as they devoured back the unruly dead to their proper state.
But between one blink and the next, Jonathan Harker was the dear young man from the League. Hyde could sense the change the way a hand can tell a texture of gravel from silk. The boy looked on the scene with green at his edges, and picked his way deftly through the carnage until he reached the youngest girl of the hungry mass. She too was stepping back from her work a bit shaken. Shamefaced, even. A blip of sour hope rose in him—Oh, dear, what would Mrs. Harker think?—but no, the two were chaste as nuns with each other. Dull. There was some logistical stuff to do with the broken-armed would-be god of the dead still wailing at them and the giant.
Hyde recognized other familiar faces, as well as some new coming out of the makeshift battleground’s metaphoric woodwork. It was a wonder no heads had poked out of the windows to see the fuss. Jekyll would learn later that they had something of an expert in selective drowsiness and perception via an honorary member; the mention of whom made Seward red in the face. Hindsight would connect two and two and reveal the exemplarily voluptuous young woman in the cartwheel hat as their psychic cover. There was very little else to see, bar the giant and some of the company toting the raving fellow away—a fellow who suddenly found reason to keep opinions to himself by way of freezing looks from giant, ghoul, and Harker alike.
“Hyde..?” He did not jump. He’d felt Utterson coming and turned pettishly to face him. The soft old thing had even put the pistol away; though he saw his aiming hand had not left his pocket. “I think we ought to head back.”
“For another hop back to the good doctor. Oh yes, of course. Can hardly risk anything out of doors, can we? Not even in the midnight fog.”
His eyes slid back to Harker, now chatting with something of camaraderie and uneasiness among the carnivorous ladies. They cooed over him like any ring of spinsters over their siblings’ children come to visit. Harker endured them with all the charm of a pup. The thing upon the bricks, the thing that had made slurry of the undead, was gone.
“You never know who’s out in the dark.”
Once back at the League, still picking cadaverous giblets from his hair and fingernails, Jonathan Harker found a hostage situation waiting for him. Of a sort.
“He won’t drink it,” Griffin told him. “The little terror’s always fussed about it, but now he’s like a toddler facing his greens. The lot of us meant to hold him down, only he insisted he was waiting on you.”
“Me?”
“You,” from Jack. He was pacing, his lancet twiddling back and forth over his knuckles. “He made it sound as if you had some business to discuss.”
“That would be something, seeing as I haven’t shared more than three words with Hyde. None of them too polite either.”
“Even so, he’s sworn against taking his medicine without a fight unless you speak to him.”
“I can’t imagine what about. Where is he?”
“Utterson, Art and Quincey are keeping watch on him in the parlor.” Griffin sighed. “If you’d like me to ‘dress for the occasion’ and step in as backup…”
“Wouldn’t matter,” said Jack. He turned the lancet over so it caught the light. “Hyde would know. Higher senses, remember?”
“I’m sure it’s just some whim of his. Jekyll probably had some thought turning over in his head and that passed onto Hyde.” Jonathan tried to think back on what few crossings he’d had with the doctor since his introduction to the League and found all memories to be singularly benign. “Perhaps I upset him without realizing—?”
“Oh, he’s not upset.” Jack again. His eyes were almost brighter than the lancet with his own musing. “In fact, he seemed…eager. Giddy, almost. He says you’ve inspired him.”
Confusion redoubled in Jonathan to the point that he wasn’t certain if he was awake. The residual reek of West’s handiwork was too pungent for a dream, however. So:
“How, exactly?”
“He wouldn’t say. Only that, ‘It has been hard to hold out. But after seeing how Mr. Harker takes his condition in stride, now he is willing to try something new.’ Does that mean anything to you?”
“It might, if he’s referring to what I think he is.” The words left him placidly enough, but Jonathan felt a squirming cold turn over in his belly. He had thought he felt another presence nearby as he and the others went to work—one of a familiar odious quality. But there had been so much happening in the fray and aftermath that he’d disregarded it as a hiccough of his own senses overworking themselves. Apparently not. “Anything else I should know?”
The empty space where Griffin’s head was and was not turned to face Jack. Jack mirrored the motion. Then nodded.
“He says he wants witnesses. To quote directly, ‘Fetch as many of the doctors and scientific tinkerers on hand that you can. Even that Dutchman hack. We shall need their objective opinion when it happens.’ Van Helsing is out of the country and so it’s just down to me and Seward for His Majesty’s demands.”
“I see. But when what happens?”
“The transformations, he said. Emphasis on the plural.”
Edward Hyde was waiting for them on one of the divans. He sat quite alone, but for Utterson who dared to take the nearest armchair. Art and Quincey had posted themselves to block either exit of the room. When Jonathan stepped in, Mr. Hyde straightened to his full diminutive height. His smile was a grimace despite its earnestness.
“Mr. Harker. Thrilled to see you, young man.”
“Mr. Hyde. I wasn’t aware I’d earned your esteem.”
“You hadn’t until tonight. Ah, and here are the good doctors. Better doctors, let’s call them, to give due credit over my other half. The invisible man may have lost to his experiment and the head rattler may be lost to his own mental ills, but at least they aren’t such helpless things as old Jekyll. But neither a mesmerist! A shame. Van Helsing might have been instrumental in our show. Still, I believe we can manage. Seward, I trust you won’t mind us borrowing this for the duration.”
Before Jack could ask what he meant, surprise and annoyance flickered across his face as Hyde produced a clinical thermometer from some sagging inner pocket of Jekyll’s coat.
“When did you—?”
“Oh, Jekyll had a passing thought of asking to borrow one for his own testing. The thought passed on to me. He was curious if there was some recordable shift in temperature that might serve as a tell between one phase and another. A fever spike, a chilling drop. Hard to tell these things when your body is melting up and down. Not that it would matter to know, of course.” He waggled the thermometer before their eyes and his. “The old fool just wanted to have something new to record for his notes. Useless trivia though it is. He’d already guessed it right.”
The thermometer went on the low table before him. While the mercury was descending, it did so from a mildly high reading above the norm.
“There’s a minute increase in temperature. Stress increases heart rate, sets sweat rolling, setting a body simmering. Less the transformation’s fault than the mind’s. Harker.” Again that unctuous grin turned on him. It felt like grease on his eyes. As the little man grinned, he nudged the thermometer further across the table until it faced the adjacent couch to Hyde’s. “Keep that on your side.”
Taking the hint, Jonathan found a seat on the couch. Griffin and Jack bookended him.
“If this is about my hands being cold, then it’s a fair bit more pageantry than the revelation deserves.”
“No, not your hands. Hardly a worthy tell. Anyone with poor circulation can claim a chilly touch. It’s for the sake of your neighbors. We’ve no proper thermostat to use, but even the finicky sensor should prove the point to any doubters.”
“Of..?”
“You and I sharing similar situations, Mr. Harker. Not of the exact caliber, not of the same roots, but cousin conditions just the same. I did not just see you in action tonight. I felt you. Just as clearly as all the curdle-faced company here can feel me, albeit with different results. I revolt. This can act as a call to arms as surely as it might repel. But you?” Hyde clapped his hard palms together in delight. “Oh, you were death walking. Crawling, leaping, slashing, smashing—but Death just the same. A meat grinder on legs, sweating the guarantee of a painful ending in the air. That was you. Rather, the other you.”
Again, that cold twisting in the bowels. Something icier prickling behind his eyes. Jonathan quashed both and buttressed his expression with reinforced civility.
“I think you may have been smelling the spillage of tonight’s unpleasant work,” Jonathan said, gesturing to the rainbow of stains on sleeves and shirt. His coat had covered much, but the mess was potent. “As for the rest, I don’t see how said work deserves your praise or prose. I have picked up some unique traits over time. Some by necessity, some by, I will admit, pure mystery.” He was aware of the others’ eyes on him. Jack’s especially. “But I use them only as anyone would use their skill against an enemy. I am not two people. Just one person who reserves his grisly ability for when it's needed.”
“I didn’t say you were two people. You, cloying heap of sunshine and milksop courtesy that you are, are Jonathan Harker. The other you is not a someone else, but a something. Just as I am.” His oily gaze shifted from Jonathan for a moment to regard the others in the room. It paused for a not insignificant while on Utterson, who frowned sadly back. “Unless you lot truly believe in a more charitable outlook than Jekyll’s? That I am my own man and not a tumor with caricature opinions? An abscess of a homunculus vomiting out another man’s—a true man’s—worst intrusive ponderings? No, I did not think so. Assuming I can think, of course. Regardless, I am a Thing. Just as what I saw turning the living dead into mincemeat was a Thing.”
“Cogito, ergo sum, Mr. Hyde. You think, therefore you are. Enough to have a name. Enough to work against the will of the man you share a life with.” Jonathan gestured at the whole of him. “You exist as a person.” Hyde produced a low noise that must have been a laugh.
“Who do you mean to hearten with that sentiment, Mr. Harker? You or I?” The grin peeled up and back until the gums bared. “Or her? Good Mrs. Harker who kept her own souvenirs from her time as Count Dracula’s Bride-to-be? I am no head doctor, but it is plain to anyone even with a borrowed brain that the dear Miss Martyr must fret terribly over her own level of humanity. She seems the type—,”
“Is there a point you want to get around to?”
Hyde eyed him with some strange balance of wariness and glee. Then he leaned forward as imposingly as his stature could allow.
“The point is you cannot fool me, Mr. Harker. You cannot even fool these dullards’ simple senses when you are so close. Though I can’t tell yet if you’re actively fooling yourself or not. Denial is a powerful drug, after all. So. Are you going to admit yourselves as plural?” Hyde paused here to pull Jekyll’s notebook from another fold of his coat, as well as a pen. He flipped the former open and posed the pen above a clean page. A bead of sweat shined on his brow as he did so. “Or must I prove you both? It should be said now that I do not wish to. I quite despise taking such a risk. But the reward is worth the gamble.”
Jonathan fought down a sigh and an urge to massage away the headache now threatening like a storm in his temple.
“I’m still lost as to what you wish to accomplish by proving some sort of dual nature in me. I am always myself. When a threat arises, I am still myself, just focused on the task at hand. Would you call, for the comparison’s sake, a butcher two individuals because he behaves one way at home and another while he divvies up the cuts?”
“Butchers have a vocation and a professional mien,” Hyde hummed. The pen began to scratch across the paper in halting strokes. “But they remain themselves in mind and body, nature and supernature. I clearly do not. Nor do you, subtle though the change is. I have learned thoroughly how I am to the human eye. Confusing. Deformed without deformity. I am small and strange, but presented in a picture, I would pass as a mere man. Yet I am different. I feel different, needling those atrophied senses that the rest of the animal kingdom still owns in full measure. As the dogs bayed when your Dracula came ashore, the human mind snaps and growls at my presence. I am hated.” The pen scratched, scratched. “Even were I to be a saint among men, I would be hated. You, lucky lad, won a far better lottery. When you are not loved, you are feared. As neatly as dousing a lamp or lighting it. If you do not wish to call it a physical change, then dub it metaphysical. But the change is there. It is real. And I can prove it.”
Hyde took a bracing breath. Exhaled. Then turned the notebook to face Jonathan.
“See?”
Jonathan saw.
And Jonathan changed.
He would not notice it at the time, of course. The world was made too narrow for him in that moment. All that existed was Edward Hyde and the message upon the page. Its content was curt. Its implications sordid. All with Mina’s name at the center of what Hyde imagined happened before Jonathan was stirred on that hellish hour of October 3rd. A fuller list of fluids shared with the Count. Perhaps even a thrill to go with them. Perhaps, the note suggested, Hyde would see to her needs one night. Be she awake or asleep. Jonathan was gone so often, capering with his fellow monstrous ladies. Hunting for the same high of those naughty Weird Sisters and their supple kisses? No blame, Mr. Harker, and no trouble. Yes, Hyde would be glad to see to the missus while he was away. And if she declined, well, perhaps that new boy over in Whitechapel, that Ripper fellow, might just pay her a visit instead—
It was bait. Of course it was bait. Some part of him acknowledged it straightaway in the moment, and the whole of him would admit it later on. But there, here, now? The more pressing notion was that Edward Hyde had thought to even suggest any of it. That there was a possibility, however great or small, that he might decide, on a whim, to act on what was written. This would not do.
Inside the space of three heartbeats, if not two, Jonathan Harker and Edward Hyde were no longer sitting. They were not even within the wide circle of the seating area. Jonathan Harker stood facing the nearest wall with one hand outstretched. A hand that was locked like a hangman’s hug around Edward Hyde’s throat. The smaller man’s face was rapidly turning red as his hands scrabbled at the column of the strangling arm. Stout as he was, his heels could only kick at the air and drum the wall. Somewhere on another planet, voices were raised and feet were running near.
“This—!” Hyde gasped. “You!”
“Me,” the word left Jonathan like an ice chip. Someone put their hands on him. Jonathan turned his head at an angle to face them—Utterson, Art—and saw both men’s faces snap out of concern and into—
Fear. Fear. Fear.
—a paralyzed dread so familiar that he recognized it as if seeing a mirror—
—the head turned, and the eyes fell full upon me, with all their blaze of basilisk horror. The sight seemed to paralyze me—
—or else a certain residual vision in the Transylvanian snow. Mina had written it in kinder words than it had deserved—
—nothing seemed to stop or even to hinder them. Neither the levelled weapons nor the flashing knives of the gypsies in front, nor the howling of the wolves behind, appeared to even attract their attention. Jonathan's impetuosity, and the manifest singleness of his purpose, seemed to overawe those in front of him; instinctively they cowered, aside and let him pass.
Purpose and impetuousness had been in attendance, perhaps. He had not been thinking of anything beyond the former. But he had seen well enough. Seen the slack and freezing terror that he had worn once upon a time, the shovel falling from a nerveless grip. Yes. He knew the effect well.
He certainly knew it then, seeing Art and Utterson halt and lurch back from their grip. Another noise came from Hyde. An airless chuckle.
“See! See! So—ughk—so-good-to-meet-you.” Red now tipped toward purple. “Lie-now-Harker. Say-you-are-unchanged.” Bloodshot eyes went glassy. “If-we-live-if-you-let-us-live—,” His mouth worked mutely a moment, straining on its last drops of air. “Teach-him. Teach-the-damned-doctor. How-to— How—,” His jaw worked dumbly and his hands began to fall away.
“How to what?”
“Change… No salt…”
The eyes began to roll up. Jonathan released his hold. Hyde fell to his knees, gasping. In the peripheral, Utterson plastered a hand to his own heart. Griffin, Quincey and Jack were closing in.
“The salt,” Hyde whooped through greedy intakes. “We are both so…so damned sick of living and dying by the salt and its potion. If I am…if I am truly born of his mind, I should be able to be suppressed…as easily as a thought or whim… That has been his fixation…control of self, of me, beyond being collared to the chemist’s lab. Ha…” He peered up at Jonathan with a mix of dread and hate and a bitterness that stretched so far it nearly circled around to sorrow. “…Indeed, I do want the secret for myself. I am a coward. I desire no fight I know will cost me. Just as all living things have a coward buried in them. It is called the ‘survival instinct’ out of politeness and only the suicidal may say they have grown out of it.
“I wished more than anything to be Henry Jekyll dying in your hand, whatever you are. Harker. Reaper. What-have-you. If I were, the sight of the good man strangling to death would have fished the bleeding heart back to the surface and we would both be saved far sooner. I do not even know if I am saved now, or running the clock until you reappear at another hour and divorce our head from its neck without witnesses. Or wrench it off, I suppose. There are a good many villains out there to shift the blame to. With dear Utterson’s pitying exception, your whole little club and the world at large would be only too glad to alibi you or sing your praises.
“I do not want to die, even as I do not want to rage as a prisoner in my maker’s skull forever. But to win the former, the most vital need, I know I must buckle to the latter. It is a sickening way to be. A Thing born of raw desire, having to bow under millstones of necessity rather than want. I hate it. I hate him. I hate us. I believe I even hate you. You, with your good frame and pretty face, drawing soft looks like flies one moment, sending armies running in another. All with Fate’s own gift-wrapped boons of our dead friend’s inheritance to his feigned son, the childhood beloved so fetching and wedded, and the lion’s share of supernatural winnings from your brush with the undead nightmare while your comrades came away hobbled or robbed.”
Hyde had enough saliva now to spit, and he did. He ducked his head after. It did not quite hide the shine of other wetness dribbling down his face.
“Yes, I do hate you. And I hate the hating. And I hate that I hate it. Impulse needs relief from itself, my fellow Thing. So teach him. Teach the idiot Jekyll how to play Cronus and swallow his mind-son whole and vomit him out as needed without the crutch of the potion before we are left choking down a pond's worth every hour.” He tried to spit again and only managed a cough. Something clear dripped from his cheek. “It is the only way we can exist.”
Jonathan considered this. More, he considered Hyde and what he could see of the man without and the man within. For the same reason he could tell where Griffin stood or his unseen cat padded, he could all but see the conjoined lives within that single unhappy body. Edward Hyde appeared to be less a cyst upon the soul of Henry Jekyll than a belated and malformed sibling in an unthinkable womb. If Hyde had truly been the manifestation of Jekyll’s below-the-gutter impulses at the start, that had been the impulsivity of an infant. Innocent and immediate in his wants, but with the ability to act on them with the faculties of an adult.
Except time had done to Hyde what it did to all children, no matter their leaning—it had taught lessons. It had fostered the need for deeper thought than the self-destructive mantra of, ‘I want, so I will.’ He recalled Jekyll’s talk of Hyde carrying a cooler reason and more cunning action than he thought himself naturally capable, just as he'd explained his suspicion that Hyde had contorted from the mere acting out of his constrained desires to something ‘inorganic.’ As if this child-brother born of the potion had festered into some base malignancy.
As Hyde put it, ‘a tumor with caricature opinions, an abscess of a homunculus.’ If the latter term had been mere theatre, it also brushed against something of Jonathan’s own suspicion: a homunculus. An inorganically made human in miniature, produced by alchemy. He had nearly had his ear talked off alongside the others as Van Helsing and Griffin went into a frenzy of theorizing while making plans to track down and interview the specific chemists in charge of making that initial tainted and powerful salt. There was, perhaps, a true Jabir ibn Hayyan working unawares in a lab somewhere; an unwitting collaborator with Jekyll the Accidental Alchemist.
But the mention of alchemy had focused only on the chemical potential, not what it had already made. Not an aberration, not a mere runaway subconscious full of ill and intrusive urges not his own.
Edward Hyde was a dwarf in a flask of flesh and he was, against his best wishes—wishes he had even outside of Jekyll’s hindbrain daydreams—congealing out of a Thing and into a Person. Enough that he had pounced upon realizations and plans ahead of any possible idea from Jekyll. The doctor had not been the witness-without, had not been the one drawing connections and harvesting a grim crop of hope and, most unthinkably, risking his life on the off-chance of goading Jonathan into putting his own dual states on display. Even taking this last as a display of ‘survival instinct’ entering a gamble for a reward later, to not wait until after the potion and Jekyll’s less volatile shield was between himself and any violence, to use his own ill nature to bait the hook, spoke too much of a calculation and grudging willingness for jeopardy that didn’t line up with either Jekyll or Hyde’s estimate of the little man.
In short: The plea had not come from the doctor. Nor from his own under-thoughts. It was Hyde alone who wished himself jailed and put on Jekyll’s mental chain, dragged in or out on his whim.
Unless he wants such a trick for himself, whispered a cold voice in him. It never raised its volume. It rarely spoke at all. But whenever it did, it did so with frost on its breath, speaking up from some lightless place below the cellar of his mind. Can you put that past him, nascent villain that he is? If he mastered such a thing better than the doctor, he could turn Jekyll into nothing more than a respectable costume to wear, donned only for the drudgery of work and safety while he stole ownership of their life’s greater bulk. True, he is a wanted man on the streets out there. But there is precious little to stop him arranging things to transplant himself and the doctor in a new country. One where he is unknown. And there is Mina to consider.
Cold burned in him. His hands folded into stones.
If he is a man, let him face a man’s consequences. If he is a monster, let him face the same. Why should he have more mercy than the demons that laughed as they killed and did worse? Why should he deserve any charity of your effort, your straining camaraderie? Why?
To the cold’s surprise, an answer was waiting:
Because, Jonathan thought back, there is Mina to consider.
Her. Lucy. All the people who had existed before, and yet within, the horrors they had become by dint of transformation. Even now, he still could not help thinking…
“Harker?” He blinked. Quincey was watching him. No fear sat in his face, only concern. “You with us?”
“As if you have to ask,” Hyde muttered to the carpet. “You felt as much before you saw his face. Good Mr. Harker doesn’t bite friends. Heh.” The greasy look slid back up to Jonathan’s face. “Under most circumstances. When it can be helped. And you’re trying to decide what circumstances these are, are you not? Does the Thing get help or get euthanasia, Mr. Harker? Do you—,”
But Jonathan had already turned his back. He slipped out from under any hand that tried to fall in his shoulder or steady an arm.
“Harker. Harker, answer me. Will you help or not?”
Walking.
“Harker!”
Walking. Waiting.
Hyde made a last hateful noise. It was almost lost among the others’. There was a rush of feet, great and small. Hyde coming close. Rushing, rushing—
Jonathan turned as Hyde swung. He had snatched up Utterson’s walking stick and aimed its heavy end at his head.
In a single motion the stick was caught neatly in his free hand.
The other was already occupied with driving into Hyde’s face like a granite block wearing a wedding band.
Jekyll woke to a muddle of sensations. The most pressing of them was the tang of the potion sticking tackily to tongue and palate, the comfort of a bed, and a throbbing pain so immense it had clearly brought him out of whatever pain-killing stupor had been applied. That hot ache sang its way outward from his right cheek, half-swelling his eye and tormenting his upper jaw. When he brushed the gauze swaddling it—oh so gingerly, yet even this sent thunderbolts through the spot—the flesh there was puffed with injury.
Memory sloshed like a thick soup in his likewise-aching head. Memories that might very well have been a lucid dream for all the sense its scenes made through the haze of drug, sleep, and pain.
“…Hello? Is anyone there?”
“Yes.” Jekyll jumped and promptly cursed at the fresh pulse of agony the twitch caused. Seward was sitting in a sort of half-gloom caused by the low light of the room’s lamps. Jekyll gave a brief thanks for that. His head and eye stung terribly, and a space at full brightness would have been a misery too many. He groaned and cradled his face. “Should I bother to ask how you’re feeling, doctor?”
“Like I ran my face into a girder, doctor.”
“Worse than that, I’m afraid. It ran into Jonathan.”
Like that, memory snapped into full focus. Jekyll groaned again.
“Oh, God. That all really happened, didn’t it?”
“I’m afraid it did,” Seward hummed, his gaze dropping to an open book in his lap. His left hand was obscured as he gently tapped some utensil along its pages. Jekyll couldn’t tell what the volume was in the low light, but he took it for one of the younger man’s sparsely used notebooks. The fellow was addicted to the ease and oration of the phonograph as a rule, he knew, and to break out a journal for the purpose of his notes suggested either a desire to let Jekyll sleep, or else not to let him overhear his thoughts. Seward's line of sight flicked back up. It was hard to tell as much except by the raising of his head, as the lamps caught on his spectacles in a way that obliterated his eyes with light.
“Where’s Harker? I need to apologize, I need to…oh. Oh, no.” Jekyll had been scanning the room without realizing it. Something of Hyde’s prickling senses had leached through to him, insisting another guest was present. Or should be. But it was only himself and Seward and no— “Where is Gabriel? Did he..?”
“Still in the building,” said Seward. His left hand danced along the same page. Over and over. “Talking with the Harkers. Thankfully, neither he nor Jonathan decided it wise to have this present during the chat.” From behind his volume, Seward brought up Jekyll’s own notebook, his thumb opening it to the latest page’s message. Shame and vertigo and deepest darkest self-loathing roiled in him at the sight of it. “How much of this was invention on Hyde’s part, Dr. Jekyll? Because if even a syllable of it was spun from your own fantasies…”
“No! Jack, God, no!” The cry strained on his cheek and he bit back another wince. Carefully, he went on, “No. He improvised that. While our more,” his throat almost closed as he tried to get it out, “perverse wants do swing towards the carnal, such have never skewed toward violation.”
“Just as they have never skewed toward homicide? Or want of homicide?”
“That was different. Carew was the spasm of violence from a bully restrained to the edge of madness.”
So he believed. And, he decided against mentioning, the very nearest he and Hyde had ever come to aching jointly for plotted versus kneejerk violence before the freak instant of Carew was a hunger to visit such on those who made sport of violation. A caveman’s take on righteous sadism, true, but if there was any ounce in Hyde he might mistake for virtue, it was that.
Aloud, he continued, “All he put down there was concocted just to goad Harker into—into what you saw.” Jekyll looked up from his lap, where he’d been hiding from Seward’s glare. “You did see him, didn’t you? The other Jonathan?”
“Yes. We all did. Just as we saw the thermometer.”
“And?”
“Unfortunately, no change in the reading. Despite every man in the room swearing by a feeling of sudden cold when Harker leapt at Hyde. Gooseflesh abounded. Freezing animal fear arose when he turned his lambent glare on anyone who tried to pry him from his attack. I will even grant that I felt dread like a tangible effect pressed into me. However, none of this was a great surprise. Certainly not when we have seen such before, both in action and in stillness.”
Seward snapped his volume shut with a sharp clap. Jekyll noticed two things.
The first, that the volume was not a mere notebook, but a bound compilation of typed pages and newspaper print. Its front was stamped with the brand: DRACULA: Entries Concerning the Events of May 18—to November 18—.
The second, that Jack Seward was not holding a pen. It was his lancet. As with the glass lenses, the metal soaked up the ambient light until it seemed to glow in his hand.
“Which you already knew.”
“What?”
“Doctor. Van Helsing and the others may have granted you some snippets of the events that transpired in our past. The Harkers may even have given away some portion. But none of us, even with all our stunted mentions combined, would ever have divulged enough to inspire this particular bait. And so I checked the safe where this was kept,” his fingers drummed upon the volume, “the one of records both sentimental and historical. I imagine he was disappointed to find it so bare of more enticing contents. Nothing but glorified memorandum in that one. Hardly worth picking the lock, but for the joy of entertaining literature.”
“Seward—,”
“It was put back in its proper place, of course. No sign of disturbance. But for this.”
Jack Seward held the lancet at a new angle that flaunted its fine point. There was a tell-tale twinkling crust on one edge.
“Perhaps it was caught under your nails or stuck to a fingertip. Either way, there are only so many in this building who would bother handling this particular salt. Van Helsing and I have not opened the safe in months, and neither of us have combed through these pages since it was first tucked away. You might be able to convince me Griffin was the culprit…”
“Assuming I gave half a damn about prying into the other peoples’ penny dreadful backstories. Which I don’t.”
The voice of Griffin was there. Somewhere.
“Dr. Griffin..?”
But the invisible man did not speak again. Nor did he see fit to don the giveaway of a robe. Seward showed no reaction to this. Only scraped the lancet’s blade clean on his trousers before making the steel dance and flash in his fingers.
“We’re talking about you, Dr. Henry Jekyll. And company. Feel free to start explaining. Or, to save your jaw, I shall hazard a guess. You knew Jonathan Harker long before the vampiric nightmare came to call. Even at his most benevolent today, he is leagues apart from the young clerk you knew in those days. Curiosity gnawed. And via Hyde, that curiosity was allowed to bite. Enough to pick the lock, have a look, and replace the ledger before anyone knew he’d been there. A comparatively harmless vice, all things considered. Was that the rationale?”
“…Yes. Yes, it was. More, we—he—I—I-I don’t know—it seemed fair as it happened. All our hideous history had been poured out in a grovel while we were left in the dark about the people who now held the key to our survival. It was a petty act and it fed into a vulgar one tonight. I’m sorry.”
“Sorry stretches only so far, there, Henry.” Griffin’s voice. Somewhere. The right one moment, the left another. “It wouldn’t have stretched nearly far enough if Carew had died. It won’t stretch at all if you suffer another slip and Hyde, who is surely, truly not powered by your nature, decides to pitch another fit against whoever’s at hand. I doubt if he expected or even wanted to beat Harker’s head in. There’d be no chance of coaching from a dead man, after all. But hey. Maybe he didn’t care. Maybe he was going for another murderous tantrum.
“Just like maybe, just maybe, he would try the same on others here. Or out there. Why not, if he’s careful and quick about it? If he thinks he can get away with it the same way he knows he’d get away with Utterson.”
“What are you—?”
Seward leveled the lancet at him like a pointing finger.
“You might trust Gabriel to take an emergency shot at Hyde in a life-or-death situation, Dr. Jekyll. But from the start, there has been little question that Hyde, whether acting on your hindbrain or his own suspicion, doubts your friend could ever pull the trigger. He also gambled on the saving grace of good nature that is Harker’s default. The ‘true’ Harker, versus his apparent other half. Because Jonathan Harker is so very skilled at his dichotomy. His shifts. His extraordinary abilities that, try as I and Van Helsing might, we have never been able to explain. Man and monster. That is all Hyde can see as far as threats beyond the reach of law.”
“Terribly short-sighted of him,” Griffin hummed. Close. Too close. “As if anyone less obvious than the gallows or a solicitor with a sword were nothing to worry about. We are all heroic types here, after all. Nothing to fear from we bleeding hearts and misfits, right? Not if it risks a good man like you. Henry.”
“Which is a strange assumption,” Seward put in, playing with the lancet again, “considering all you two read. Or does Hyde think because Harker was prepared for damnation to protect his love, that his companions are any less willing to redden their hands? Because I did speak true, you know.” The lancet gleamed. “I do appreciate the term euthanasia. Most sincerely. As do my friends. And, though you may not believe me now, I am telling you this as a kindness.”
Jack Seward stood. The lamplight finally left the lenses to show a stare no less sharp than that of a raptor eyeing a snake approaching its nest.
“You are an old friend of my mentor. I respect you. I understand the pains of mind and soul you wrestled with to bring you to the point of the potion. But respect and fondness are vapor compared to the love I felt for Lucy Westenra, whose life I failed to save, but whose soul I was only too glad to see freed by true death. You, Dr. Jekyll? For all the amiability and care I’ve felt for you, do not let Hyde think for an instant that I would not free you both myself, in the swiftest clinical fashion. Nor would Van Helsing. Nor would Art or Quincey or Mina herself, who was more than prepared to fire a hole through anyone who touched her husband that sunset in the snow.
“If your passenger has labored under the delusion that he is protected by coddling hands and the shelter of your face, let him labor no more. For if Edward Hyde makes even a pantomime of any sordid attempt on anyone in the League—any innocent outside these walls—consequences will ensue. The level of mercy in it will depend entirely on who will get to you first. Because someone will. Even if you run.”
“Even if you’re alone,” Griffin whispered, so near his breath was in Jekyll’s hair. “Though in that case, it would be mere accident, of course. No way to tell otherwise.” When the voice spoke next, it was at a far table. Jekyll watched a bone saw float into the air and turn in the lamplight, as if inspected by a wondering ghost. “In short, the message is this: Fuck around, and you’re fucked. Period.” The bone saw pointed at Jekyll’s head. “Did he catch all that in there? Telegram received?”
Hyde had. He’d been catching it since Jekyll first saw the lancet. Fear had been bubbling ever since, and it had taken both their combined efforts to maintain their doctorial shape. How much was even left of the freshest batch of the potion? Five draughts? Four? Did it even matter anymore?
“Yes,” he finally got out. “Yes. He understands. We both do.”
We’re sorry. In all ways, neither Jekyll nor Hyde could bring themselves to say. We are a sorry, sorry Thing. If not for much longer.
Their final draught would be taken before the toilet’s mirror.
They had mixed it themselves in private. Stirred and squirreled it away as easily as anything. Not a grain of salt to be found within it. Plenty of unhealthy things, but not a bit of the salt or its fellow chemicals. The resulting mix nearly burned the nose to smell. Strong as it was, it would power through even Hyde’s sturdy makeup. That same sturdiness that had saved them dying with an even worse face behind when they made their exit. Distantly, both men wondered whose face it would be when they found him.
“It will hardly matter,” Hyde muttered to the glass. Yes, Hyde already. Even after guzzling the last dose a mere hour ago. They could swim in the potion and not make a difference. Too late, too late. Had it always been too late since that first drink? Would there have been a difference if they had halted two, three, even four changes in? “No, it does not matter,” Hyde echoed again. His eyes found the reflection staring back at him. Revolting. Repulsive. Repugnant. Forever after. “I ruined it, didn’t I? Pouncing on the boy like that. Turning the whole lot on us with a foul joke. I should have left it to you. You’d have talked him around.”
Assuming he would have any answers for us, Edward. Yes, Harker changes to do what he does. Perhaps there is some split buried in that snowy head. But it is not one like ours. Not even a cousin. We were fooling ourselves to think otherwise.
“Were we really? Or did I ruin it before we could get both our hopes up over a trick we could not imitate? Or abuse?”
…Maybe.
“Maybe, he says. You are the brains of both of us, Jekyll. Did I botch this because you wanted it? Because I did? Which?”
I cannot say. But I believe I would have botched it either way. Because I know—we both know—that we have tried all that might work otherwise. We have suffered through hypnotism, through different drinks and shots, through meditation and stressors. Nothing has changed. We tried, as Harker once told us to try, and we know there is no other ending but as this.
“No. Suppose not.” Hyde laid one gnarled hand upon the mirror. Strange, he thought, nigh in synch with Jekyll, the way their eyes seemed now. So old in the young face. Solemn, yes. But lacking the irksome weight that so often met them in the glass. “Is this you making a last-ditch attempt, doctor? Trying to turn me over to you? If you want to die all dignified and out of baggy clothes, there’s time to make a last batch.”
No. No, this is fine. Only it’s almost funny. We choose now to share our thoughts civilly rather than simply play conspirator or saboteur. Why is it men are like that when they know the end’s inevitable? What makes them so placid?
“Mr. Harker put it well enough. Despair has its calms. Why did you never mention our snooping to them, by the way? I never was clear on that.”
Embarrassment. Tact. Guilt. Why not you?
“Didn’t seem worth the bother. We do love a dirty secret. Loved them, anyway.” The draught rose to his lips. “Do you suppose I’ll fade away when this kicks in? Or will the Judge on the other side deem me man enough for Hell?”
If it is the latter, then I doubt we shall ever part ways, Mr. Hyde.
“That would figure, Dr. Jekyll.”
And with that, the drink was quaffed. A noxious taste and a worse effect chased it. Burning and foaming and choking he went, they went, bucking and jittering on the floor where he’d fallen. He and him and they spasmed hideously all together. It was not entirely how they’d expected the poison to take effect—in truth, it was almost as miserable as their first transformation—but it was taking effect. In three, two, one…
The door smashed open so hard the bolt tore out of the frame.
A moment later there were long fingers jamming down their throat and the whole acidic mess came rushing up from their belly in a gagging tide. Cold implacable hands turned them over so it could be retched out without drowning in it. They heard the voice of Jonathan Harker first bellowing for the resident doctors then, up by their ear, soft and urgent as he told them to breathe, breathe, breathe, hack up anything that comes up, breathe. It was a hard chore with everything still burning and dripping, sizzling even their gums, eyes and nose running in rivers as their current damned-blessed hardiness fought a far lower dose of poison.
Damn it, damn it, why had he stopped them? Was this not what he’d wanted? What all of them wanted? Even themselves? What was the boy even doing here?
“What are you doing here?” they demanded aloud. Oh, that was odd. The poison had clearly done some damage to their vocal cords. Their tone was garbled somehow. Weirdly echoed. But that was not all. Whatever work the toxins had done, it was enough to disorient the whole of them. The room looked out of perspective, somehow, and their limbs were wrong, they were—
Wait.
They looked down at themselves. Yes, their shirtfront was stained in poisonous swill and bile and the unfortunate-looking dregs of supper, but more importantly that shirt fit. As did the trousers. Henry Jekyll’s clothes fit. And yet, the hands were not the doctor’s. Were they? They were fine-boned and long, yet of that ruddy and hard-palmed texture that belonged to Edward Hyde. The sight boggled them.
…Why did they think of themselves as them?
Their head turned so slowly it creaked on their neck as they regarded Jonathan Harker with owlish wonder. Harker, in turn, seemed a touch surprised too. Shock had died for the young man ages ago, naturally, so surprise was as much as could be hoped for. Terribly unfitting for the occasion, they thought, but it served as good enough reason not to break into a blubbering heap of confusion.
“Look in the mirror,” Harker told them. “Do you need help?”
No, they did not. They took his hand anyway as they staggered up, feeling almost drunk as they found their footing. And their reflection.
They were still staring by the time the rest of their audience arrived.
“What happened?” That was Utterson. Still here. Still here. For them. “Where is he? What—,” He stopped short. Though they’d yet to turn their head, they imagined he was gawking with the rest. Harker still stood beside them, unblinking, but with some secret cooking behind his bonny lashes. “Who is this?”
“We aren’t sure, Utterson. Not at all.”
In the mirror, two young men were looking out of the glass. Jonathan Harker on one side. On the other, a youth who might have been Henry Jekyll’s own brother, had his parents ever produced one. Dark hair, smooth features, tanned skin, long bones. And eyes of two tones. One the pale iris of Dr. Jekyll’s. The other that queasy brightness of Mr. Hyde’s.
“Harker.”
“Yes?”
“I’ll not flatter you and say you know for certain what this is. But you look far too sure of yourself to not have a decent hypothesis. Out with it.”
“Nothing so scientific. Just a guess.”
“Which is?”
“Question for a question.” They looked at him. His eyes caught the light like the points of a lancet. Or the coins on dead men’s eyes. The effect sat bizarrely with so gentle a smile. “By any chance, were you two talking to yourselves before this?”
There may as well have been a theatre production for all the gawping packed into the League’s parlor. Weeks of practice with Harker had passed since the initial revelation and now every head in their menagerie, including a few of the honorary brigade, had found time in their schedule to squeeze into the room. Ostensibly so everyone was aware of the change and nobody was stuck as last-to-know—Mrs. Harker and Mrs. Norton seemed utter sticklers on the point of banishing as many secrets as possible, alas—but it was obvious on too many faces that they’d have invented reasons to come watch the display.
It was perhaps a bit gratifying to see Mr. Harker finally perturbed enough to get some proper pink in his pallid face. If he were flustered long enough he might even pass for better than a comely corpse. They considered mentioning this aloud, but decided it would draw attention away from the show. Later, then. For now, let the young man squirm.
“It occurred to me not long after Hyde made his play with my, ah, condition. Mine is, as most have guessed, a transformation that’s left its stamp quite permanently. Physically, I am always able to do what I do.” To illustrate, he hooked a pinkie under the low table, a thing of exquisitely expensive craftsmanship and incredible weight to match. The pinkie tipped it up as if it were made of feathers. “It is either static or possibly developing at a slow rate. All the other solicitors I know who took the courses for this type of thing are all keeping tight-lipped about the particulars. Isn’t that right, Norton?”
Godfrey Norton shook his head beside a mildly bemused Utterson and a deeply unhappy Seward.
“You’ll not get trade secrets out of me that way, Harker. Nor will I share the hair dye recipe.”
“Damn.” The in-joke earned a laugh or ten before he moved on. “The gist being that I don’t have any grander traits to add or subtract when I throw myself at a fight. I always look like I do. But as most of you know and as Hyde very clearly picked up, I do undergo a sort of change. And I stand by the analogy of a butcher at work versus a butcher at home. The man is the same, but the ‘professional’ side of him takes over when it comes time to finish the task. It is always an active shift for him, just as it is for me. But neither is ever wholly just the butcher or just the man at home.”
“Just the monster or just the man,” they corrected from their spot on the divan. “No need to blush about it, Harker. Monsters can be better men than most men, and vice versa. Was that not the sermon we three settled on?”
“It was. And that point does stand. We’ve all had more than fair reasons to adjust our perspectives when it comes to matters of all-or-nothing identity and where the lines are regarding humanity versus monstrosity. In some cases, the lines aren’t there at all. No black, no white, just a gradient along a spectrum. But when it comes to cases like mine, Jekyll’s, and Hyde’s, the two furthest ends of that spectrum do have minds of their own. And while each can operate free of the other’s input, the result is never as good as collaboration. At least, not as I’ve experienced it.
“What started with my journal-keeping seems to have transferred, by natural or supernatural means, to a sort of internal dialogue. Less like simple A to B to C thought, and more of a…” he dug for a word.
“Chat,” they put in. “Jonathan the Solicitor talking things out with Harker the Reaper. ‘Yes, we could put up with this absolute ass of a client, or we could lop his head off. Hmm. No, no, too much trouble hiding the body. Save that energy for the side job.’” They bared their teeth in a grin any imp in Hell would be proud of. Well, no, too deep. Purgatory, perhaps? “Don’t say you haven’t thought it.”
“I won’t. Of course I have. Everyone has passing outlandish thoughts, no matter how fine they are in their day-to-day lives. Your problem used to be the fact that all those passing thoughts and wants and intrusive what-ifs from Jekyll’s mind kept funneling over to Hyde. Then, when Hyde became more of himself than just a shadow of Jekyll, extra complication was added. Impulse developed into intellect and intellect became a whole person. One who grated even against himself as he suffered the reverse of Jekyll’s predicament. No longer just pure impulse, he started growing a hierarchy of needs versus wants—the same mental checks, balances, and restraints that everyone else must develop as they grow up. And that put the two men to war as much as any vicious spasm; at a guess, the attack on Carew was a side effect of that same growth. Hyde kicking and screaming against himself as much as any mere outburst against Jekyll.”
At that, they could not help a nod. It was true in retrospect as much as the scene itself. Yes, Hyde had done it to rage at Jekyll after an overlong imprisonment. But they could not lie to themselves and pretend there was not something of panic in it too. An awareness they’d not even had words for yet, but the announcement of those hyper-conscious senses that declared to Hyde that his carefree insidious nature was steadily corroding under new impulses. Impulses that weren’t impulses but—ugh—thoughts. Emotions. Considerations. Concerns. Needs. Responsibilities. Uuugghh.
Poor Carew had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time and was made a punching bag for it. Look! Look! I am a monster! I am a horror! I am raw and unchecked! See? See?
They blanched at the memory. Shame for one, childhood embarrassment for the other.
“All this,” Harker went on, “combined with the problem of the potion losing its strength brought the whole mess to a boil. It couldn’t have been doing wonders for their focus, let alone anything like collaboration between the two sides.”
“Especially when both sides were still half-convinced one wasn’t even a person.” They swallowed around a lump. “Not even enough to be a monster.”
Jonathan nodded at them.
“Exactly. Not while you were both in an increasing state of stress. When I make my change going up against an opponent, I am stressed—but not the Jonathan Harker swinging the blade or crawling the walls. He is focused because we are focused. Same for the reverse. I talk to myself and I am better for it, just as speaking to a journal once kept me steady. The same, I thought, should be tried with Jekyll and Hyde. I was discussing as much with Mina and Gabriel when…”
Here the roses flared back in his cheeks. Awkward as a foal.
“When your psychopomp senses started ringing?”
“I felt something was wrong," Harker allowed. "Something was—was ending or in emergency. I can’t define it, except to say I guessed where you were and that you were in danger.”
“What uncanny guesses you make, Mr. Harker. If only it could be put to the lottery. Up you came to the rescue, and one undignified bout of sickness on the tiles later, there we were. I was. Whatever.” They spread their hands in the manner that said ta-da. “Because you had another right guess. Jekyll and Hyde had been talking to each other. There was a…”
Most edifying discussion about how very near we were to being slaughtered like a two-headed calf by the doctors on call if Hyde did a big enough no-no.
They thought it. Thought it loudly as their gazes drifted to Dr. Seward and Dr. Griffin. Then thought it was at least some kind of secret out of this whole thing.
“…moment of epiphany, let’s say. End of the rope and end of all hope. The potion was turning pointless and it seemed to the conjoined wretches that Mr. Harker had washed his hands of them. You know, with the exception of the hand used to knock said epiphany rattling about their head. Jekyll and Hyde found themselves with a truce born of their mutual desire to cut ahead and be done with themselves for good. In that united decision of death, there was calm. Followed by, for the first time, genuine dialogue between the two. It carried on all the way to the mirror and the draught. And as the killing shock took over, something else was dislodged in their makeup, already loosened by the two men’s heart-to-heart. Once Harker had finished burping us until the poison was out, we had already happened.”
“You being..?”
“Edward, for the most part. Perhaps even an Eddie. Just as we—,” there was a sudden melting contortion of the man on the divan. A shrinking. When it ended, a dwarf sat there. One in late middle age, with the heterochromia of the eyes having switched places in the eyes. His smile was a kind curl and laughter sat benignly in his crow’s feet. “—are mostly Henry. Or maybe a Hank. And the audience will notice one unmissable factor in both ourselves and in Eddie.” Again they spread their hands; smaller digits, but now wan with pale indoor hours bent over notes and test tubes. “Namely, that there is nothing amiss about either of us. Not in the extrasensory way, at least. No radiation of repugnance nor sugared goodwill. Hyde in his solitude could not help his unpleasant miasma. Like so.” There was another shifting spasm.
Then young and stout Edward Hyde leered out at them.
“Here I am, in all my glory, making you all turn appropriately pucker-faced. Though notably less so than I have been accustomed to before. Could be due to exposure lessening the impact. Or, if Harker’s own otherworldly feelers are correct, I am giving off less of the old souring effect. My former unfettered moral deformity, as the poets in the crowd put it, has been tempered by mental and spiritual growth.” His gaze met Harker’s. “The homunculus fully formed, so to speak. And, in the opposing direction…”
A last spasm and shudder and stretch and then—
Henry Jekyll sat there. Smiling and very near to weeping.
“…here is the alchemist, in one piece. Or four, doing their best to hold the arrangement. Which was the crux of the issue all along. Arrangement. Agreement. The working theory is that the potion kicked an irreversible condition into motion from the first draught. Even if I had never had a second or third or so on, my duality as Jekyll and Hyde was already inevitable. The routine drinks just prodded the change along faster, like shoving a stone downhill when it was already rolling. But the anxiety of that latter period where Hyde started to overshadow me and Hyde’s own changes started to overshadow him reached their horrid crescendo and it all turned into pure hysteria on both our parts. We hated. We warred. We had to coexist or not at all.
“Bickering and clawing at each other when the solution was right there. Hyde’s womb was my own soul, my mind. Even as his own person, this was unalterable. And so the affliction worsened as the conflict in a mind will spoil everything in one's life. Indecision and panic and loathing that couldn’t decide if it was more for the self or the other kept us unable to help ourselves until it was too late. And it would have stayed too late if you hadn’t broken the door down, Harker. Thank you. For that and so much more.”
Harker grinned at him.
Badly.
Coldly.
“Like not killing you?”
Between one blink and the next, Harker was over the table with his heel planted against Jekyll’s chest. The kukri was already out and swinging in a brilliant silver-white flash toward the doctor’s neck. There was not even time for the gathered League to gasp.
Not until the steel stopped a bare centimeter short of grazing the man’s sweat-glazed Adam’s apple. Specifically, the Adam’s apple belonging to the still-present, and thoroughly bug-eyed, Henry Jekyll.
“Scared?” Harker asked.
“A bit,” Jekyll croaked.
“And yet still here.”
“Right. Yes.” He gulped. Carefully.
“Then that's the last test passed. Congratulations, doctor.” Harker promptly took his blade and his foot back with a sprightly gesture. He pricked his thumb purposefully upon the steel’s edge to feed it, then sheathed it with care. Smiling all the while. It was not a cold thing, but the joy in it was no less insidious. Jekyll rubbed his throat thoughtfully.
“I thought you were joking about this part.”
“Yes. And it was just a joke.” Harker beamed at him.
Jekyll swallowed again as he thought on that miserable conversation with Mina Harker who, to his mingled surprise, relief, and mortification, had been far less incensed than her husband about the ‘joke’ of the goading note. Disappointed, yes, but not incensed. In her words, if she and Mr. Harker took every degenerate come-on with any degree of seriousness in their strange work, they wouldn’t get any work done for all the indignation they would have to slog through. She had been more concerned for her beloved who really didn’t have to go throttling and/or beheading every person to voice a crass word in her direction. Though it was sweet. Harker had countered that she should be just as prudent about not turning every other succubus-adjacent bogeywoman into so much Swiss cheese when they came scrambling after him. Though he was glad to have her in his corner…
And on and on and sickeningly, disturbingly on. The whole exchange had left Jekyll, Hyde, and everyone in-between considerably unsettled.
Back in the present, the makeshift theatre was breaking up with laughs here, celebration there, chatter everywhere. He and Harker both had found no escape from Van Helsing’s latest monologue on the subject, despite having gone through no less than eight already during their interim of practice. The one solace to the Hyde within him was that the Professor took more than a fair share of time to crow excitedly to a stone-faced Seward about all the leaps of psychological puzzle-solving Harker had rushed through at a sprint while red-faced Harker tried to will himself into Griffin’s level of invisibility. Silver linings and all that.
Utterson was, of course, the last one in the room by the time clusters of the League had drifted off into other spaces and personal talk.
Jekyll joined him for an hour. Two. Three. Four. The things that may or may not have been shared between them are private matters. As are any tears that may or may not have been shed, likewise the identities of those shedding them. Towards the end of the night, before the hansom took each to his home—and no, not a word will be said about who within the person of Henry Jekyll wept most at the prospect of a full and uninterrupted return to that place and its faces—they shared a final chat.
“…And you are certain you’ve not seen any more revenants skulking on these streets? Ghouls? Werewolves? A few ghosts on parade?”
“None that I’ve seen, Henry.” Utterson turned to him, the placid gaze still seeming addicted to the sight of Jekyll’s face. “Do you prefer Henry now? I do not know how long it will take to be used to ‘Hank.’ It sounds weirdly American.”
“Mr. Morris thought the same. But not to worry. ‘Hank’ belongs to my compacted self. Hyde is still ‘Edward’ at his ordinary state. And the churlish youth with the patter of brat is dear Eddie. At least, so we have ordered things in here.” Jekyll tapped his brow. “Though I doubt that’s the question that’s gnawing at you now that we’re away from prying ears.”
Before Utterson could admit as much, Jekyll shifted to Eddie.
“You’re worried this mental camaraderie among imaginary friends and fiends is only temporary.”
Eddie to Edward.
“Or that it’s a form of madness like those poor souls in the asylums.”
Edward to Hank.
“Or that it’s all some long game to somehow make another try at juggling last wills and testaments and a fresh uninhibited runaround of various merry sins.”
Hank to Jekyll.
“Which would all be fair suspicions to hold. I would be glad if you held on to them, just as the League surely does. Even if circumstances have changed with regard to Hyde’s side and my own residual unscrupulous cravings. I will not lie and say I do not wish to have unsaintly periods. I do. But with Hyde’s own alteration, there has been a change in equilibrium. As if all the best and worst of my natures have been spread out and intermingled to make an existence less strangled by ‘black and white.’ Striving for the pristine life nearly broke me, just as striving for the most sordid life broke Hyde. We were both of us performers trying to meet and overdo our roles.”
“And what does that make you now, my friend?” Utterson wondered aloud. There was no tremor in it, though there might have been some in his eyes. “How can I know who I speak to anymore?”
“By action, Gabriel. Faces can lie as well as words. But action—the actions all the selves that make me intend to take going forward—will prove me. Because this whole grotesquerie really does come back to my mishandling my wants. By painting everything from the rudest urge to the dullest bit of self-gratification as equal sins, I repressed myself to the point of actual madness. What sane man would have chased and drunk that damned elixir at the risk of death otherwise? For a man to be perfectly angelic is an impossibility, just as pure evil is, without driving one insane. Having more than learned the lesson there, my wants have changed.
“Rather, they have multiplied. All of them tinted with more satisfactory purpose than the mere scratching of an itch. I am more good than I am evil by nature as much as practice, Gabriel. This I can say without hyperbole or vanity. Yet evil is in here as well; rather, cruelty. And it needs its expression too.” Jekyll smiled. It was not quite his own—a jointly crafted grin. “Much good can be done by hallowed means. But if even a fraction of the tales I have overheard as well as spied while making my clockwork visits to the League are but the tip of a larger threat, it suggests we live on the edge of a world ready to be cannibalized by bastards of human and supernatural ilk. The kind of undiluted evil that cannot be parried by goodwill and charity. For that, the world needs its own monsters standing guard, taking point, lopping heads. Metaphorically or otherwise.”
“Forgive my saying so,” Utterson cut in, “but neither you nor any of yourselves have much in the way of practical fighting skill. If you mean to start throwing yourself into the fray with Harker…”
“No, nothing like that. Being hale is no match for that particular polymath of the paranormal. The boy’s juggling Hawkins’ office, detective work, and monster management on scarcely a blink of sleep while the best I could manage was balancing two lives. Yet I do have an advantage my fellow extraordinary oddities lack.”
“That being..?”
“Is it not obvious? They are all steadfast heroes, regardless of their amount of humanity. You can practically feel it wafting off of them. But me?” Jekyll shifted to Eddie. Mismatched eyes twinkled. “I can more than pass muster as a villain, all too ready to mingle with and menace my compatriots in the worsening of humankind with chemical-to-alchemical knowhow. I could never be mistaken for one of the League.” The mismatched eyes blinked. Heterochromia faded to Hyde’s gaze alone as a ghost of the rotten aura thrummed out of the young man. “Not if we put our minds to it. Not until it’s too late for the bastards to undo my mess.”
“…That is quite a leap to make, Eddie. All of you. Are you so sure of yourselves?”
Eddie shrugged.
“It is what we want to do. That’s more important than ‘sure.’ Though there is one last thread lingering which I’m surprised you’ve yet to ask us about.” Again, the smile was wrong for the face. This one was too much Jekyll’s in its mirth. Heterochromia returned in a flicker.
“What is that?”
“You’ve not even inquired about my new last name. ‘Edward Hyde’ is still quite dangerous to be in these parts, you know.”
“Very well. What is your surname?”
Eddie beamed. Beamed and thought of other goodies found lurking in that safe of memories. Not all of them belonging to the vampire hunters. Not all of them about violations of the blood and body.
Not all of them yet addressed.
Some months later, a Lord Henry Wotton found himself facing an occasion he had thought impossible. He was at a loss for words. Namely because all his words appeared to be getting dutifully recorded. Some young cad in black with unequal eyes had taken to trailing him throughout the party with a notebook in hand. The initials on the spine were stamped E.H.
No matter where Wotton drifted, no matter who he spoke to or when, the fellow followed. Always with an unmissable air of one trying to stifle a laugh whenever Wotton opened his mouth. It was curious, even amusing for the first quarter of an hour. By the full hour mark it had grown tedious. By hour two it was bordering on the unbearable, if only because so many of the eyes present had ceased to mind him when he spoke, but turned inevitably towards the young man in black.
Scratch, scratch, scratch went the pen. Flip, flip, flip, went the pages. Ha, ha, ha went the unaired cackle hiding in the odd eyes. Distinctly at rather than with a single witticism. Finally...
“Very well, my dear shadow. I must bite. What is it you are up to? Penning a biography of the party or just myself?”
“Nothing so grand, my lord. I had come here merely to refresh my memory of the best way to deliver the verbal equivalent of gold-plated horse droppings. Thank goodness, you are precisely as vapid as I remember. Excellent material.”
So saying, his pen poised again.
“I do pride myself on proper presentation of vapidity,” Wotton hummed. “Though I must have slackened since last we met, as I usually aspire to the verbal equivalent of—,”
Scratch, scratch, scratch.
“Ha! There it is!”
The young man turned the notebook around so that Wotton and all their audience could read the notes. Apparently, he had invented a sort of tally mark game. There were bullets titled:
HYPOCRISY (FREE SPACE)
DISAGREE TO SEEM SMART
DISAGREE TO SEEM ALOOF WHEN CALLED OUT
AGREE TO SEEM ALOOF (ADD HYPERBOLE = BONUS)
RANDOM FRENCH
INSULT WOMEN (UGLY)
INSULT WOMEN (PRETTY)
INSULT (X) RACE
INSULT (X) COUNTRY
APPLAUD APPEARANCE OVER SUBSTANCE
APPLAUD APPEARANCE OVER SUBSTANCE (WAX POETIC MONOLOGUE = BONUS)
ACTIVELY GIVE BAD ADVICE IN HOPES OF ENTERTAINING DISASTER (SEE: SIBYL VANE, BASIL HALLWARD, DORIAN GRAY)
Each title was cluttered with tally marks. ‘Agree to Seem Aloof’ now had the most at ten dashes.
“You see, once it became clear that your script hadn’t changed a jot in years, there was no reason to take notes. You’re predictable to the point of being mechanical and I need only fill in the blanks for my role. So, to pass the time, I made a little sport. And now look! I’ve hit a ten and owe myself a treat. Oh, now don’t make that face. We both know your sheep love your enabling nattering enough to stay and hover around simpering for your approval rather than go asking silly questions about who has how much culpability in this or that death. Which certainly no one knows about, of course. No one who matters.” The young man’s teeth bared in a sickle. Around him, the air curdled. “Probably. Anyway!”
So saying, the young man clapped the notebook shut so loudly it sent people jumping and others’ heads turning.
“That’s me done for the evening. My thanks again for your wise tutoring. Most invaluable.”
“I don’t believe I heard your name, my friend. I should quite like to address you in the future.”
“Me, Wotton? I am nobody important. Which I suppose does not narrow it down very much. No one is important to you but you. You would walk on your own wife’s face to spare mud on your bootheel. So, a name.”
He made a mock bow and the mismatched eyes almost seemed to blaze. For one surreal moment, Wotton swore he saw the pale eye brighten to the same unhealthy sheen as its twin. The air did not merely curdle as this happened. It nauseated. It grew filthy. It grew poisoned. It grew with the young man’s grin. When the grin split a final time to speak, the voice was wrong. Almost as if it were two timbres in unison, speaking low.
“Eddie Harker, my lord. I do hope we shall see more of each other. Hopefully before consequences have a chance to happen. Between the corpses and the cuckolds piling up in your wake, there’s no telling who will get to you first. Best of luck either way. Good-night.”
With the sound of distinctly less-than-enraptured clamoring at their back, they slipped out of the revelry and melted into the night, pulling down their hat and gripping a newer, sturdier walking stick in one glove. One that would not break in two should the need arise to break something else. Alas, much as they would enjoy seeing the little lord’s teeth scatter and his silver tongue scorched, all of themselves had sadly sworn off any repeats of Carew. There were better things to inflict. The kind of pains that the right kind of patter would never fix. A little hobby to round out the espionage. But that would come later. Not tonight.
Tonight, the sky was clear, the streets were calm, and from a single throat came the sound of a laughing choir. Content to be together.
-FIN-
-?-
#this one's another whopper#my hands are going to mutiny#anyway Let Jonathan Get a Break from These Weird Old Public Domain Dudes' Issues please#jonathan harker#henry jekyll#edward hyde#dracula#the strange case of dr. jekyll and mr. hyde#dracula daily#jekyll and hyde weekly#the league of extraordinary gentlefolk#my writing#The Adventures of Jonathan Harker and the Strange Old Men
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Okay, hot take for my how I’m hoping TGS Jekyll/Hyde’s reveal goes down, if it ever does. Also it’s going to be a long rant that becomes more like word vomit as I go, so preemptive apologies. Strap in.
So, we all know that Frankenstein loves to shit on Jekyll, right? What if when Hyde and Jekyll are revealed to be the same person, Frankie is the first to find out? I feel like most people are wanting Lanyon to be the first to know, and obviously that’d be super interesting to see how he reacts, but for me, it doesn’t feel right. Obviously, I think the boys are really cute, but- and I know I’m going to get hellfire for this one- but I don’t feel like their relationship is as developed as Jekyll’s and Frankenstein’s. This isn’t exactly a critique of the story, I’m actually glad it’s written this way. Henry’s whole problem is that he puts on a big facade, including with Lanyon. I think a lot of it has to do with the amount of respect he holds for him, so he’s afraid of how Lanyon might perceive him if ever he lets that mask slip.
With Frankie, on the other hand, Jekyll respects her somewhat, but mostly gets irritated by her. And we have seen in any instance where they talk one-on-one, Jekyll relaxes his guard, because it doesn’t matter as much to him what she thinks, seeing as she’s made it VERY clear that she sees right through him. That she sees him as a fake puppet to high society, so why would there be any point in continuing to act like a saint?
That being said, the moment Frankenstein first woke up, I was right there with Hyde. I knew I was going to love her character, and was already predicting a sort of tough-love relationship they’d develop. Where Frankie won’t ever fully like Jekyll, but she’ll tolerate, and even occasionally become impressed by him.
There are a lot of complex feelings I think Jekyll has towards her. Obviously, the whole “vying for approval” thing is partly residual from her being his childhood idol and reason for pursuing alchemy and rogue science. I also think it comes from a place of respect. I know I JUST said he doesn’t respect her all too much, but the kind of respect I’m talking about here is different from the surface-level kind. He hates that she sees through him, but it’s also very admirable and refreshing to be talked to normally, seeing as he has to be perfect with everybody else. So it has also kind of developed, oddly enough, into a sort of trust.
So what’s my point? How does any of this relate to the reveal? Well, not only would it be satisfying to see Frankenstein proved wrong once again by Jekyll, but it would make the most sense for the story to use one of it’s famous parallels to show that Jekyll is in dire need of help, and Frankie is his last resort, because he’d rather die than need her help, but he doesn’t have a choice. So I imagine there’s some sort of scenario where the transformations are all out of wack, or in some way, shape, or form, he physically cannot brew himself a potion to change back. I honestly can see it either way, but feel like it’d actually be Hyde in the driver’s seat oh-so begrudgingly asking Frankie to make him his potion.
There are a ton of different reasons why this could happen. One of the biggest ones, and why Hyde would be the one in control, is that- Hyde being Hyde, he fucked up big time, and with Jekyll being their brain’s manager in a sense, he doesn’t logically know how to fix it. Like maybe he forced Jekyll out of the way, and down through their library to the bottom floor. Jekyll starts to become consumed by his mind and kind of disappearing, which is taking a massive toll on their body as well as their cognitive ability. Hyde starts becoming more and more paranoid, is unable to recall a lot of things like the formula for the potion, and his body is shutting down, so he has a hard time moving his hands and feet anyway. He is terrified and so he crawls to Frankenstein begging for help. She laughs at him for a second, then realizes he’s being completely serious. There’s the obvious shock factor of “Mr. Hyde and Dr. Jekyll are the same person?!” And then she still can’t believe it when the potion jettisons Jekyll back out into his physical form. Also it would be absolutely horrific, because he’d of course be screaming the entire time in absolute agony, worse than when he normally takes the potions. Because this time he’s fighting to come back, and it’s like a shock from a defibrillator it’s so sudden. When he comes to, he’s still lost and spacey, so he’s looking around his office that’s in disarray and then at Frankenstein, and he’s wondering what in the blazes just happened. Then it comes flooding back to him- the fear, the confusion, the pain. It comes back so strong that he feels faint, and starts to pass out, but Frankie catches him and is like “oh no you don’t, you dumbass.” He starts to sob, exhausted and afraid of what this reveal means for him. And, somewhere, in the far corner of his mind, relief that he doesn’t have to hide anymore.
And there’s the whole fascination that comes after this where she demands he explains everything, calling him a complete idiot the whole time. And afterwards they have a heart-to-heart and she finally opens up about Elizabeth and they find solidarity in how they’ve messed up their whole lives. Possibly even her telling Jekyll he’s still got time to fix everything, and warning him about becoming like her- old and bitter because she chose science over everything, and everyone else..
Anyway, that’s my hc for how it should work. I kind of want to actually write the scenario in full, but idk if a. anyone would want to actually read that garbage, or b. it would even be decent seeing as I haven’t written anything for years, I just really like this hc and want it to be a thing, fanon or not.
#the glass scientists#tgs jekyll#tgs hyde#tgs frankenstein#jekyll and hyde’s reveal hc#y’all ever realize how much of a loser you are when you say this stuff out loud lol
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I’m going to be so pissed off if you kill yourself, you selfish bitch.
You think Eddie can handle your death a third fucking time? You think Gabriel can? You think I can handle consoling both of them at the same time?
We’ll all spiral.
So what, you made me cry. I can’t name someone who hasn’t. It’s not like it’s hard.
-Ms Dorian Gray
(PS - You weren’t actually bad in bed. You just insulted me first)
So this is what it takes to get a little sympathy from you? Threatening to kill myself? I can’t believe it.
Making you cry isn’t the only reason I’m considering this. It just so happened to be the last straw. Having to see Jekyll permanently turned into that thing, making my own ill decision to try out that lifestyle for myself, loosing Gabriel due to that, having to look up into Harry’s eyes as I bled out on the floor of my own home. I’ve apologized for almost everything I’ve done, and the fact that I’ll never be forgiven is tearing me apart.
I was meant to be ‘the good one’, don’t you see? I was supposed to be different from Dr. Jekyll, not ho down the same path he did. I was meant to be kind and accepting of everyone around me, and I was meant to be untouched by the sin and treachery and pain around me. Coming back to life fucked that up for me.
To learn that there isn’t any such thing as God or heaven, and I had spent my life trying to mold myself for something I would never get to reach, to learn that in the end, no matter how sinful or godly I was being, I was going to end up with the same fate as everyone around me; Can you even begin to imagine what that did to me?
I’d like to believe that there is no such thing as ‘evil’, and people ended up that way due to the circumstances around them. I’d like to believe that every human is inherently good. I still believe that you and Dr. Jekyll have a capacity to be good, but that night… that night I realized he was too far gone to be helped. By giving me a second chance at life, you gave me a false hope that I could help him, that if I tried hard enough I could get to that little bit of good inside of them and put them on the right path again, now that I was finally here for it again.
However, seeing as it surrounds itself with people like you, there’s no chance I get to help either of you. For fucks sake, you’re dragging Gabriel down with you! Have you not seen what you people have pressured him into doing?! The both of you, Dorian and Jekyll, are on a sinking boat, and it seems neither of you want to see the other escape, grabbing each other by the ankles and pulling the other back into your doomed vessel. Hand in unlovable hand.
I would rather not have found any of this out about him. I would have rather stayed in my little box in the ground, blissfully unaware of any of the problems you refuse to fix. It’s sickening to watch. It’s one thing reading about murderers and sodomites in the papers, but it’s another thing to watch it happen to your own best friend, with no hope of escape for them. They don’t even want to escape. They’re basking in the darkness and terror of their actions, sharing in its spoils with you and Gabriel, rubbing off their darkness on everyone around them like a pig covered in it’s own filth.
You even managed to rub off on me. Sure I’ve found that there’s a bit of merit in having sex with those I’m attracted to, but all else that’s rubbed off on me? That despicable potion? Cannibalism? Straight up sadism? I cannot live like this, knowing that this is a terrible situation for me to be in. There’s a reason people advise against these things, you know. It’s a warning sign that I’m on a path to ending up exactly like Edward Hyde. I— I can’t have that…
As much as I love him, as much as I want to believe that I can save him, no matter how far gone he is, there’s no hope. Not for any of you.
Especially not for you.
So spiral, see if I care. See if it fixes you, even for a moment. I won’t be able to see it, but if the trauma of my death is what fixes Henry and Gabriel, then so be it. At least I’m good for something.
#ask hastie lanyon#ask lanyon#hastie lanyon#anon#anonymous#asks#dorian gray#tw sui ideation#tw suicidal ideation#tw cannibalism mention
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Varsha: The Potion and The Poison
▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄✼▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄
Standing next to Ishmael was a young woman with dark skin, large brown eyes, and long black hair. Her face was mesmerizing to look at, appearing almost otherworldly. There was something about her eyes and her smile that made you trust her, want to protect her at all costs, but it also gave you a feeling of safety, of hospitality. But it didn’t end at her face, of course. It was in her clothes, too, a white top showing off her midriff, covered by winding, indigo-colored fabric, a saree, of silk, with a fine pattern of silver that gleamed in the light of the lamps. A thin chain went along where her hair was parted, leading down onto her forehead to a golden ornament, a similar design shared by both her earrings and the stud gracing her left nostril. But the gold and silver didn’t clash, no, it was far from that. They harmonized in a way that should not be possible. Or, to put it into one sentence: She looked regal. As soon as she laid her eyes on the guests entering the bridge, she placed both her palms together under her chin and gave a deep bow.
Skinner whistled in astonishment. “Wow, I think I’ve just found the most beautiful thing on this ship!” he called out and had already started heading for the woman when Nemo grabbed him and held him back.
“Nobody is to touch her,” the Captain immediately declared.
“Sorry,” Skinner quipped back, “didn’t know she was your daughter.”
“That honour isn’t mine to claim.”
“Clearly, Skinner, she’s out of your league,” Gray declared and pulled him back towards the group.
“This, gentlemen,” Nemo said as he gestured towards the woman to come closer, “is Miss Varsha Devi, the jewel of this ship. She may not speak our language, but she understands every word.”
“I always thought women on a ship meant bad luck,” Quartermain regarded with a smirk.
“Not this one. In fact, since Varsha has been on board, the seas have been nothing but kind to me. - Perhaps due to her navigation.”
▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄✼▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄
Quietly, you are saving me
Please, don't fade away
Into the darkness of night
I don't need no light to see you shine
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That was when he heard music down the hallway, though only very faintly. Any regular human probably wouldn’t have heard it but, seeing as some portion of Hyde’s superior senses carried over to him, he did. It was an exotic instrument, possibly stringed, with a very distinct timbre. Curious, Jekyll followed the sound to a door that stood just slightly ajar. Nonetheless, the opening was just barely enough to look inside.
The room was lit by a circle of candles, or rather small oil lamps, their flames flickering with the sound of the instrument. In its middle sat Varsha, playing an instrument that vaguely resembled a guitar, though with a smaller, oval- or teardrop-shaped body and a long, thick neck with many more strings than a guitar could feasibly have. It was ornamentally decorated, with designs similar to ones found in Varsha’s jewelry. Distinctly, a snake wound itself around the body of the instrument, a sleek creature crafted by a master, no doubt. Still, the instrument was no match for the beauty of the artist. In the light of the candles, Varsha’s skin took on a copper glow and her hair gleamed golden. The flames flickered in her eyes and her jewelry glimmered. With the way her sleek fingers gently plucked the instrument, a man could get jealous. But not Jekyll. Certainly not Jekyll. After all, them being in any sort of relationship was an impossibility. As he tried to convince himself of that, he barely even noticed himself taking out his pocket watch and starting to fidget with it. First of all, Varsha was divine, and she was fundamentally good-hearted, something Jekyll wished he could claim of himself but clearly couldn’t. He couldn’t possibly burden her with the looming threat that was Hyde, not someone as kind and as fragile as her. Not anyone, but definitely not her. Secondly, Nemo’s protection of her. Though he was not her father, he did shelter her like his own daughter. Skinner had told Jekyll that Nemo had forbidden anyone in the League from as much as touching Varsha, making it very obvious how sacred her purity had to be to him. Even the most elevated and proper courting of her could upset the captain and that was the last thing Jekyll wanted. Not to mention that Varsha probably wouldn’t be interested. After all, who would want a pathetic man like him? The only thing he had to offer was his doctorate. Not even his moderate wealth that he had managed to carry over from London would be a viable factor, considering that she lived in the utmost luxury aboard the Nautilus - if she even cared about riches at all. Thirdly, and most importantly of all, Jekyll knew of the fact that it was customary in India for marriages to be arranged. Surely, someone as beautiful as her already had a husband, or at the very least a fiancé. Nemo may have mentioned that she had no family to speak of, but then he probably had made the arrangement himself, in his efforts to care for her. With Nemo off the table for obvious reasons, the next possible option was Ishmael, but as he was a Westerner, he was an unlikely choice. But there were hundreds of Indian men on board this vessel and one of them was sure to be engaged to her, officially or not. But no matter how much he tried to reason, his heart still beat faster than it should, his hands shivered about the pocket watch and his breath hitched. It was like he was hypnotized. The dangerous snake to her snake charmer. For a while, it was just him and her and the music between them. That was until a voice echoed through Jekyll’s mind.
“Yes, Henry. Look, but don’t touch.” Hyde gave a chuckle. “That’s your way.”
Suddenly, Jekyll became very aware of his surroundings. Of the shadow he might be throwing into the room, of the clicking sound his pocket watch might make, of his breathing that Varsha might hear. Quickly, he put the pocket watch away and hurried around a corner, away from this peaceful image.
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Tagging: @daughter-of-melpomene and @waddlesworth aka the LXG mutual and one of the few people with good content on the movie on this platform. I thought I'd honour you this way, hope you don't mind :)
#the league of extraordinary gentlemen#lxg oc#oc: varsha devi#moodboard#playlist#manip#oc intro#she's absolutely very human trust me#totally nothing sneaky going on here#totally didn't pick pieces from my writing that would drop hints#if you want to find out more you'll have to wait for more or ask :)#(please let me ramble about her)#photopea adventures
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Gabriel,
It’s funny. I always thought I would be happy if this happened. That I’d be thrilled to have Eddie to myself. But, I hate to see him like this. I hate to see him so distressed. So, I’m not happy…
Eddie doesn’t hate you. Not even as Hyde. He doesn’t. He wants to think they do, because it’s mad at you. Because it doesn’t think it deserves you. Because they push you away to harm himself.
Perhaps this is speculation, but the doctor has said it himself. I get him. He loves you. Wether you like it or not- wether he likes it or not- he is in love with you.
Please don’t hurt him like this, dear…I can’t stand to see him like this.
Sincerely,
Mx. Dorian Gray
(PS - You ought not to compare yourself to me. I am perfect; there is no one on this Earth or beyond who is quite like me. That’s not your fault <3)
… I know they don’t have much control over what they say as Hyde. And I know he only said all that to get me to leave him be, to push me away and harm himself further.
It just hurts to hear such things coming from them. As much as I adore him, and as much patience as I have for him, I can’t pretend that what he’s said didn’t hit me hard enough to knock the wind out from my lungs.
I never intended on leaving him, and I never intended upon never forgiving him for his words, but I’m angry as well. I’ve been having nightmares about Lanyon every night since that day, and I keep telling myself ‘if only I had known’ but I did know better than to allow Lanyon to continue her self destructive behavior, drinking the potion and unraveling her mind until it left a thing barely reminiscent of her former self. I should have know better to charge selflessly in there and try to save her from herself by taking the elixir back and giving it to Harry to keep safe. I should have known she wasn’t herself and would do anything to get her way, even harming me… I should have know that Griffin would support his decisions and steal the potions just for his own enjoyment.
I should have done better, I shouldn’t have frozen up when I found that Lanyon was going down the same path Dr. Jekyll had, and would most assuredly meet the same fate.
And she did.
Perhaps we hadn’t lost all of Lanyon to ‘Spider’ and her rationality and sense of self were still in tact before she died. But Jekyll warned me. Jekyll warned me time in and again about the dangers of his elixir, and I didn’t heed his advice.
I stood there and watched. I had even broken into his home to steal the drug for myself the first time.
Curiosity is not a force to be reckoned with. That’s what I’ve learned. It can get yourself killed. Satisfaction of knowing will not bring you back.
Dr. Jekyll is the victim here, and here I am acting like a selfish prick, trying to keep myself safe more than anything. Either that or not caring enough about myself and putting my entire life on the line.
I’m sorry, doctor. I still love you, and I’m still here for you. I’m willing to come over to your place, or have you over to mine. I didn’t mean to lash out like that and try to run away from my problems again. Let me make it up to you; let us reconcile and be with each other again, I’m tired of being angry at you for something that isn’t your fault.
And Dorian, thank you for coming to me. I needed this, and I’m proud of you for being willing to speak to me even after I upset Dr. Jekyll.
(P.S. Your little postscript note made me laugh. Indeed, that’s quite true! You’re unique, and quite perfect, and even I could never hope to be exactly like you. It was perhaps unfair to compare myself to you.)
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I really think we were all so primed for Robert to die that we’ve totally mislooked the idea of Henry dying like in Robert’s arm despite everything
Considering Lanyon's taken somewhat of an Utterson-type role in the story as well, this is also a decent possibility. Robert's been the one looking through the will, trying to meet Hyde, doing all the detective work. He doubles as Utterson and Utterson happened to be the one to find Hyde dead.
And suddenly I want to headcanon that Robert started having nightmares about the will when he found out about it like Utterson. I've already used that idea for an RP after all-
Putting the rest under a read more because of all the death and death-related angst
Imagining the scenario of Robert being the one bashing Jekyll's door down with an axe for some reason or another. Best case, it's because he knows Jekyll is about to endanger himself in some way and is desperately trying to get to him in time.
However, as he finally stumbles through the door, there's the smell of almonds in the air and, lying there, is Jekyll having poisoned himself.
Holding Henry in his arms as the last of his life drains away.
Or, secretly, doesn't considering the fake death potion....
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Let me hurt him for you chapter 3
"So, let me get this straight, Dorian drank a potion that you made for me to suppress vampirism?" Mina had heard and seen several oddities in her life...and how was an incident of this magnitude near the bottom of that list?
"Yes, I will have to collect more supplies later to create it again for you; I hope...this encounter...has not...you know..." Henry mumbled, feeling the urge to rub the back of his neck in embarrassment but not wanting to stop the comfortable position of having Mina's arms wrapped around his and his other hand on hers, his wrists and hands having been bandaged with great care by Mina who had managed to find some clean wrappings in one of the boxes.
"It has not; I appreciate your efforts and am impressed that you have found a way to suppress..." Mina trailed off, looking at the street momentarily before offering a smile.
"Don't get me wrong! I love you for you! I just wanted you to be comfortable and happy..." Henry looked at the ground, biting his lip in anxiety over trying to find the words he wanted to say and say them correctly "I know how it is not to be able to enjoy things the way-"
A soft finger was pressed to his mouth, ceasing his building stress as blue met grey.
"It is alright, I do want to try it" Mina could hardly hope to think she would ever be able to be an ordinary woman again, even if it only would be for a day, to have such a thing at her fingertips, the vampiress had to fight to keep her excitement down to prevent unleashing the darker part of her self.
To be able to feel her emotions again fully, not to have to suppress them to try and keep the vampire under control, to keep from hurting others, so many things she had once taken for granted, the taste of food, the warm sun in her face without being irritated by it, she had no doubts her skin felt cold to the touch or a disgusting lukewarmth.
Henry was always warm; flashes of heat plagued him, and Mina hoped her chill brought him some comfort from his fevers. To think he had done all of this for her, only Jonathan had ever bothered to care about her in such a way before him.
Mina still missed Jonathan terribly, his strong arms wrapped around her, keeping her safe, even after learning of her curse, he had still wrapped her in his embrace, loved her just as deeply as before, he had even said he would join her in vampirism if that is what she wanted, but Mina had, of course, refused, she would never curse the man she loved with this sorrow, she had been his bride, his wife, through sickness and in health, till illness took him from her.
Suppose Mina could find amusement in the fact she seemed to have a type in men who were not traditionally masculine...not that it stopped said men from moments of great bravery and passion.
Henry could never be Jonathan, but he did not have to be, they would never have the wedded bliss that Mina and Jonathan had shared, the doctor had no interest in marriage anyway, he had been content to remain a bachelor the rest of his days, but he, like anyone, still needed companionship, he had also taken such a thing for granted, but now they had each other, all of their good and bad doing its best to co-exist.
What a pair they made.
Henry smiled as Mina put her head on his shoulder, reaching up he brushed some hair from the vampiress's face and smiled back even as Hyde let his presence be known.
"That little fucker is still back there, alive," Hyde growled. He had been stirring fitfully ever since they had left the warehouse, the back of Henry's mind pounding with the heat of his rage "We should have let Mina finish him off"
"I did not want that thing on her a moment longer; Dorian Grey is not going anywhere far in the state he is in. Best to get Mina back and feeling safe before we come up with any plans on how to handle this," Jekyll argued back; he wanted to make Dorian pay for what he had done, itched to do something to make him suffer as much if not more so than how Mina had with that device around her throat.
But Mina was the main priority now, get her back to the Nautilus, then come up with some excuse later to leave, he did need more ingredients for the potion to give Mina, and he remembered her mentioning how she did miss a specific brand of sweets from when she was human.
Pharmacy, sweets shop, and then off to find where Mr. Grey had slithered off to.
"Promise me we can at least make his true demise as painful as possible"
"I think I can agree to that..."
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"Oh! I forgot I did make two of them" Henry smiled as he held out a simpler vial of the suppressor potion, it was nowhere near as pretty as the rose vial, but Dorian had ruined the surprise anyway...
"It is incredible that you were able to...how long have you been working on this?" Mina asked, fighting the urge to grab it, eager to feel like herself once again after so long, but she could wait a moment longer.
"Not long after we...well...I thought it might be nice to have a ...p-proper date ...dinner...a show..." Henry blushed, Mina's smile afterward only adding to the shade "Even those like us deserve some happiness, right?"
Mina nodded with no shortage of experiences, mourned for being unable to fully enjoy them in her eyes.
The vial was placed gently in the vampire's hand, and Mina almost shook as she popped the cork out of it and tipped the glass to her lips, careful not to spill it any.
The potion burned her throat, and it was not the most pleasant tasting of things, but the monster that lay curled in the back of her mind slowly receded, more than distracting her from such insignificant unpleasantries as her face too, found a blush as her blood flowed freely after sitting dead for far too long.
Henry watched in awe as Mina's cheeks developed a soft pink hue, and her eyes sparked, her fangs turning back into human canines.
Dear God, she was undescribably beautiful no matter her form.
" And she is ours, Henry" was the greedy thought Hyde expressed for both of them, his rage sated at the image.
"How do you feel?"
"Human"
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"You look great!"
"How about a kiss for ol Rodney to celebrate, hm?"
Nice to know Mina was still capable of a scathing glare even as a human....
"You must be thrilled," Nemo offered before everyone would see a floating bruise in the shape of a woman's hand wandering around the following days. "Shall I assume you will be heading out to enjoy the rest of the day?"
"Actually, considering the circumstances I think staying here would be prefu-aaauhh" Mina yawned suddenly, covering her mouth before blushing in mild embarrassment "Oh, Pardon me."
"Seems the potion returned your need for sleep," Tom noted, chuckling a bit.
Mina frowned, she did not want to spend her day as a human sleeping it away, not after all the hard work Henry had put into it for her.
"I think enjoying a nap would not be a bad idea," Henry said, making Mina turn to him in slight surprise at his lack of disappointment "it makes sense your body would need a bit of a recharge after...the incident earlier today, and I do need to get more supplies to make more of your elixir. Afterward, I'm sure Nemo would not mind us borrowing the library for a reading date."
"You have to go right now?" Mina was curious about this lack of annoyance and honestly would have liked him to take a rest with her since he too looked like he needed it.
Henry nodded offering an apologetic smile "I'm afraid so, I'm not sure if our next stop will have the chemicals I need, and I want to have it on hand in case we come across a festival or other event."
Mina did not like it, but it made sense since Dorian drank her would-be first dose of the medicine. Glad he did, though, as it hopefully put him down for good this time! It had been a shock seeing his corpse drop to the ground all bloodied before Henry had distracted her, Mina's mind was still slightly buzzing with this image, but it could also be her exhaustion talking, they would have to return to the spot in order to retrieve the body just in case he did-
A kiss to her cheek distracted from the idea of a foul job, and Mina was smiling again.
"I won't be long, don't start reading anything too interesting without me" Henry allowed himself a mild joke.
"No promises," Mina quipped back.
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Jekyll gripped the bags in his hand tightly, finding what he needed had been without incident and had only taken him about ten minutes, if he timed this right, he would be back before his absence proved worrisome.
And might even have time to pick up those donuts, the shop owner said he would have some fresh in the next hour or so, which would more than explain his tardiness if someone asked, a warm bag of sweets would distract anyone.
And the resulting fight over them would also prove a good diversion from unwanted questions of where he had been well waiting for baked goods of all things.
"Other way, Henry, do not get distracted; I know that little rat bastard is here...he has a different scent from the one he had before, but it sticks out like rot," Edward growled.
Rot was the perfect way to describe it too, no doubt the potion not allowing his life of hedonism to go unchecked anymore, and Mina had been healthy, unharmed by the potion at all, but this...Dorian seemed to have been affected by it, the scent of disease hung in the air so thick that even Henry could smell it, if all of the picture's visible sins appeared on Dorian as the day progressed, the once-immortal would be dead before the hour was up.
A mild pity, all things considered.
Good thing he brought gloves.
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Putting an end to the debate “who wins in a fight, Seward, Jekyll, or Frankenstein?” using facts and logic (and stats). They may use weapons but NOT assistance, outside help, or their powers (this goes for Jekyll! DROP THAT POTION INSTANTLY OLD MAN!)
FRANKENSTEIN
YAY: has enough resolve to get into a fight, would gladly fight someone bigger than him if he had good reason for it, the most physically active of the three, also the youngest, has mountaineering experience, can and will use a cleaver, is a Romantic
NAY: rotten coward, chronically ill, emotional, might be too depressed or euphoric to properly fight, anxious, not big or strong, doesn’t have enough fighting experience to defend himself, definitely doesn’t want to be here
VERDICT: if he can be egged into fighting, he becomes a pretty testy and unpredictable foe, but that depends on luck. If he doesn’t have it in him to fight, he just won’t. Most likely to collapse either from fear or a bad cough and not recover quickly enough before he’s utterly destroyed.
SEWARD
YAY: enough guts to face a vampire, very desensitized to violence and weird stuff at this point, good with a knife, probable experience roughhousing, very VERY honor-bound, desperate enough to cheat, crafty enough to not need to cheat.
NAY: emotionally sensitive, not a fighting type, better at facing danger from the backseat, has little self-preserving instincts, too tired to retaliate, generally unlikeable and therefore satisfying to punch/stab, panics all too quick.
VERDICT: good defensive fighter but doesn’t have enough muscle to offend, and his knife isn’t always reliable. With Frankenstein it’s a 50/50 chance he wins, but with Jekyll that might be less certain. Easily distracted. There will come a point in which he finds his two foes too scary and he might either double down or attempt to give up, key word attempt.
JEKYLL
YAY: is full of hatred and anger, the tallest and most physically imposing of the three, has fighting experience, enjoys violence for the sake of violence, crafty, quick at improvising weapons, more pragmatic, overdoes himself, looking for excuses to go for the overkill.
NAY: the oldest of the three, somewhat insecure, maybe impotent, overthinker, concerned with manners, the type to not want to get dirty, arrogant, overestimates his abilities and then backs down.
VERDICT: as long as nobody is watching, he will give his all and unleash loads of anger on his foes. His age might have taken some strength from him but he doesn’t give up easily. Will feel sorry about Frankenstein to a certain degree, but not about Seward. Smokes them both with relative ease, though he probably sustains more damage than he believed, and his indecisiveness makes the battle longer than needed.
OVERALL VERDICT: Seward lasts more than expected but eventually is defeated, Victor has a 50/50 chance of making it to the mid-battle, Jekyll wins but at what cost (his dignity).
#doc talks#gothic fiction#frankenstein#dracula#jekyll and hyde#dr seward#victor frankenstein#henry jekyll#jack seward#the strange case of dr jekyll and mr hyde#dr jekyll and mr hyde#gothic literature
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At this point in the story I’m getting very bored. Is anyone else? I mean it dosent feel like anything’s happening. In fact, it feels like we’re getting to the end because everything is getting resolved very quickly.
Another thing is that at this point there is no antagonist. All of the antagonists have quickly been done away with. At this point, it feels more like ‘a day in the life of ‘ story. Where is all the adventure and excitement that was there in the beginning? All the relationships are getting wrapped up in a neat little bow with no action happening. Perhaps my boredom is only because it’s a week by week update and I’m just ready for the story to be over after 8 years. I’m getting readers fatigue. I know that this story will have a happy ending and I know that these two hopefully will get together there just doesn’t seem to be any stakes in the story anymore to keep me interested. It’s not that I’ll stop reading, it’s just boring now.
Problems I have with this story :
Every singe antagonist has quickly been dealt with. There is nothing for our protagonist to fight against.
There are no stakes. (Every single hint of stakes has been quickly resolved. But perhaps we are in the lull before the storm)
There is plot armor (even though things can bleed and die, apparently this rule does not apply to the main characters) ( Hyde only bled once but that’s all that happened. Nether character can be physically hurt in real life which is unrealistic.
Lanyon talking about his feeling after Jekyll’s wakes up from uncontioustess doesn’t really feel like it belongs here. You’d think he’d wait to do that. But I suppose since we are nearing the end, we have to put these moments somewhere in the plot.
Jekyll talking about how he hopes the society will fail seems weird because we’ve been told over and over again that his is important to him.
The exhibition ends up not actually being important and everything goes well. Like foreshadowing it as oh something gonna go down but then nothing happens.
Minor nit picks:
I still don’t know how someone can make a curved dagger that is sharp. How does that work? This boggles me and continues to keep me up at night.
Hyde’s fireworks that he picked up at the black-frog bazar diapered and have been completely forgotten. As well as Hyde’s dagger that also was introduced and disappeared. There was also a death potion. Are all of these things going to be important to the plot going forward? Because if you have a gun you have to fire it somewhere. If not useful to the plot, why we’re they introduced in the first place?
Why are Hyde’s pants drawn like there tights? This bothers me.
The prostatues clothes don’t seem historically accurate to me. It looks like a costume you’d find in an adult Halloween store.
It seems like we’re checking all the boxes on LGBTQ but have we covered a straight relationship yet? No. But we’ve covered everything else. I see no straight representation. It doesn’t matter, because this comic isn’t made for straight people. That’s fine I can deal with it. (There is some but it’s way in the background and not talked about much.)
The author said she wished that she made Jekyll trans. You already have two trans people in this comic, why do you need more? I get that your trans but does every character you make need to be that way? If you did that it would make this comic super boring.
(The author coming out as trans in 2020 did not surprise me. What did surprise me was it took them this long to realize it based on how much they talked about all there trans characters.)
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The sleep deprived Ironwood Jekyll and Hyde essay no one asked for.
And yet I'm here.
Because otherwise I'm gonna pass out on the bus thinking about cake.
And no one wants that.
Given this is the Internet clarifying it's the food kind, I'm sorta hungry. They were eating cake in the office but I was fasting and I didn't want it anyway but caaake 🥺. And tired but I already mentioned that.
Anyway.
So bit of pretense... (pretense? Is that the eight word?)... Context! Context for this I'm gonna go over the Jekyll and Hyde thing.
Unfortunately not the very superior Monster High version.
Trust me if I could loop that in here I would but... Alas.
Heh.. Alas. That's such an Ozpin word, alas. Probably with a slow nod of the head in complete seriousness, eyes shut.
... I never promised this would be coherent.
Anyway, Jekyll and Hyde, greatly thought of and put in media as being split personalities. The evil Hyde and the good Doctor.
But that's not really the case, and that distinction is important for this.
Jekyll and Hyde are one person. They are one and the same and not for nothing that's the entire point of the story but whatever. Nooo let's just not pretend that didn't happen and why we got those long letters about it.
Lanyon didn't die for this okay.
I'm not salty about it.
At all.
Anyway! Jekyll was doing as crazy scientists did and did dark science (the likes of which Victor Frankenstein could never) and tried to seperate himself (No not that way, we just talked about this) ... His feelings into good and bad.
Because Victorian England was a lot less cool than we like to think. That's what happens when your in mourning for 60 odd years (even years) and blame your son for your husbands death. Even tho it really wasn't his fault, Victoria!
Anway (someone please count how many times I say that) Victorians were werid and because of the high standards of decency Jekyll was very much stuck in the role of good doctor.
But he wanted freedom to do... Whatever its not really clear. Again, stupid standards of decency, could've been murder, could've been drag who knows (although I'd watch that adaptation, Hyde is his drag name and idk anything about drag shows but damn)
So instead of doing the typical desi girl thing, and heading to "the library" he made a magical, sciency potion to seperate what he deemed his good self and his bad self.
As you do.
But they are the same person, Hyde is Jekyll and Jekyll is Hyde. Hyde is the name Jekyll gives himself when he drops his inhibitions and let's himself do what he wishes. Something he's never done which is why he believes Hyde appears younger than he Jekyll is.
But what does this have to do with Ironwood?
Well Ironwood also differentiates between what could be considered his good self and his bad self.
"James is what my friends call me, to you it's General."
James, an ally to the people and friend of Ozpin and a loyal member of his inner circle.
The General, an Atlas councilman, overseer of the AceOps, leader of the Atlas military and its organisations.
That's what we see, or at least I do.
But unlike Jekyll and.. Me, Ironwood doesn't differentiate these two like this. For him it all boils down to the answers of one question.
What are you afraid of?
James is afraid, James is terrified that the world his world is crashing down around him. Leo is traitor and paid the price, what if he falls down the same path? Everyone is lieing to me, what do I do... I wish Ozpin was here.
But the General is not afraid, not even a little.
To Ironwood, fear makes you weak. And so he hides behind his own mask like Jekyll and becomes not Hyde but his own version.
Jekyll drops his inhibitions to become Hyde.
James puts up a wall over his true feels and becomes The General.
It's kinda the opposite of Jekyll and Hyde.
And yet both serve the same escapist purpose, Jekyll as Hyde has the power to do whatever hed wants...whatever that is leaving Jekyll to deal with the consequences.
James as The General is the highest person in all of Atlas (in every sense of the word). James would have to go through and appease the Council, James is afraid to fight to the end and do what truly matters... But The General has no such limits.
James is his humanity, his humility, his feelings and fear. But he shoved them aside, all his inhibitions to do what he felt was right.
He wanted to destroy a monster and so he became one. He took the tin man's heart and gave it back to the wizard who granted him it.
... Which I guess is him shooting Oscar? Though he kinda went off the deep end before that but that cemented it? Even though like 2 people died and Marrow almost died if Winter wasn't there.
I'm guessing the moment with Watts? Though that's interesting because Watts is the evil scientist. But if isn't because he spared Watts which frankly makes no sense... Unless its James's last hurrah before falling to his own fear and leaving nothing but The General.
And well we know the story of Jekyll and Hyde Ultimate power and control was all a lie. Neither shall live if the other dies.
I dunno if it makes sense but it was fun.
@theangelofangst @bowl-of-shortness hey I just wanted to share this ramble with u guys 😅
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because nobody wants to hear about me rambling on and on about Jekyll & Hyde: The Gothic Musical Thriller i’m doing it here. this is a really long post and I’m not even done I just got tired and need to go do my medications lol.
Starting off, quick explanation of the plot and important characters for those who don’t know
The plot itself is this: a man named Henry Jekyll had the bright idea to create some potion or something that will separate the Good part of a human, and the Bad part. With enough work, the plan was to separate them and gain control over the Bad part, and thereby destroying it.
This fucks up though, of course, and Henry creates his alter ego: Edward Hyde. Edward is creepy and cruel and easily pissed off, he kills like... seven people? Despite the fact his alter ego is quite literally evil personified and murdering people (Henry KNOWS this might I add, they share memories, it’s basically just if you injected someone with a serum that reeeally pissed them off and deleted their morals), Henry doesn’t stop there.
He continues to make more of the potion, modifying it in the hopes of controlling Edward while admitting that he finds it exhilarating to be Edward and that he doesn’t want to stop. I do believe he only stops after he realizes he can’t fix Edward or delete him.
In the end, Edward kills a bunch of people, scares the shit out of London and then ON HENRY’S WEDDING DAY, IN FRONT OF HIS WIFE, suddenly comes out (putting Henry in a lot of pain and generally making a big scene), kills someone (i think?? or someone shoots him in a non-lethal place, I don’t know), and then holds Lisa (henry’s wife) at gun point. A man named John (i think) tries to talk him down, and only when Lisa pleads for Henry to come back to her does Henry finally resurface, give John his gun (?) and convince the man to kill him. He does, Henry dies to three bullet wounds.
Overall, it’s a neat story!
There’s a woman named Lucy, who’s my favorite because she’s delightful. She’s essentially a prostitute (her wiki page thing says she “Works as a whore for money” or something along those lines) who works at a bar. She has a song where she meets Henry titled ‘Lucy Meets Jekyll,’ where Henry is (i think) drinking at the bar because in the pervious song the Board of Governors denied providing supplies and test subjects for his research. This takes place before Henry actually creates Edward.
Later, Lucy meets Edward in the song titled ‘Lucy Meets Hyde’. She starts the song off with “I know you, don’t I?” and Edward vaguely replies by telling her “After tonight you will never forget me.” Edward also has a line where he sings “A toast to the night. A toast to... Romance! To those unafraid of taking... a chance,” which is him repeating what Lucy says in Lucy Meets Jekyll (which I think is super neat). When she asks his name (after he goes on this rant about how he’s her guardian angel, her guide to salvation, whatever) he goes “...Hyde... Edward. ...Hyde,” and both Hyde’s are said in this really creepy, whispery kinda voice but he says Edward so much clearer and I think that’s funny.
Also if I could just choose my name as fast as he did that’d be great because his name crisis lasted like two seconds and mine has lasted 4 years uwu
Anyawys, Lucy has this other song about nobody knowing who she is (her voice is pretty and I love listening to it but the song kinda makes me zone out so Im missing some context lol) and then the song ends with Edward showing up going, “...I know who you are,” and she replies “Oh, for a moment I thought you were someone else,” and Edward pauses then goes, “...For a moment, it almost was,” and that makes me UNREASONABLY happy. Like I don’t have a reason I just get very pleased when I hear those lines.
Also anybody and everybody tells Lisa not to go through with her marriage to Henry, mostly because she’s like apparently the prettiest woman in town and every man wants to marry her but also because Henry is a doctor, which is apparently a bad thing or something?? ( "Lisa's marrying a Doctor, instead of an earl! Poor girl!” ) and when I was listening to the playlist in full trying to pay attention I kept being like “LISTEN TO THEM- PLEASE, YOU’RE GONNA GET TRAUMATIZED ON YOUR WEDDING DAY!” so that’s fun
Also I don’t think I said this: I didn’t watch the musical. I found it on spotify and didn’t have the braincells to actually watch it, so I’m missing the context from in between songs, but i’ve got most of the plot as far as I know.
oh- the song “His Work and Nothing More,” makes me very depressed because it’s a song about some people (i forget who exactly) singing about how Henry is obsessed with his work and he doesn’t hang out with people anymore.
the song “The Engagement Party” has a line where John finally sees Henry show up (because he was late) and goes “Henry, at last! What could possibly be more important than your own engagement party?” and he sounds so normal and then the musical gets all dramatic and Henry sings about being close to a breakthrough. I don’t know why this line pleases me so much but it does :>
Oh and Confrontation? a masterpiece. Anybody who’s done it and done it well is amazing that’s ONE PERSON singing TWO PEOPLE in a fast paced song like that. Not only do they have to sing it all in one take but they also have to switch the physical look and position between the characters and it’s amazing.
and if you didn’t know, that tiktok audio “I live inside you forever! With Satan himself by my side!” is from this song, and my friend (who doesn’t give a SHIT about Jekyll & Hyde and always cuts me off before I start rambling for hours because xis attention span is buckets) thinks it’s amazing and belts it out with me. It’s the only song from the entire musical xe will listen to.
#henry jekyll#edward hyde#jekyll and hyde#jekyll & hyde#Jekyll & Hyde: The Gothic Musical Thriller#musicals#infodump#infodumping#i love jekyll and hyde so much#it's so neat!#yes this interest started in monster high#stop judging me :'D
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