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Chapter Text

He had failed.

His efforts had been for nothing. Years upon years of rigorous studies had been for nothing. His enduring the shame cast upon him by the professors of his old college had been for nothing. The sleepless nights of desperation in his lonely pursuit of greatness had been for nothing. Harlander’s death had been for nothing. His life’s work had been for nothing.

His long and grievous labour now amounted to but a cadaver that lay lifeless in his lab, cold and wet as a stillborn infant from the storm still tearing open the skies outside. That corpse, that thing, that creature bound to the operating table, he could hardly bear to envision; it was the face of his failure. Never had he been so ashamed, felt so mocked by the universe itself. Oh, how foolish he’d been in thinking that he could defy the expiration that was so innate to the nature of all living things! And how this wicked delusion had cost him decades of his life! He’d fallen victim to the allure of galvanic trickery, worshipped it like a deity, and thus committed blasphemous idolatry. The sin of it suffocated him, though he’d never been much of a theist.

His skin was feverish as he lay in his bed, the satin sheets under him dampening with the salty sweat that seeped from his every pore. The texture of the fabric against his bare chest felt disgusting: too hot and yet simultaneously too cold, the clamminess sending a shiver down his vertebrae. The fever was a great fire that lapped at him, encircled his bed, threatened to consume him, but he moved not; he would let that hellish heat burn him to embers, scorch the flesh right off of his bones as he beheld through wet eyelashes the face of his dark angel. He adored it so, its soft visage of marble and empty eyes so everloving, so safe and secure and clean of any contempt. Yet it had betrayed him: it had lied to him; led him to believe grandeur would follow if he just fulfilled his ambitions.

A deep wave of calm rushed over him once he accepted his fate and succumbed to the heavy weight of looming unconsciousness. At the brink between lucidity and oblivion, his sleep-deprived mind formed most unusual and strange visions; the flames were ones he’d already gotten used to. But now he saw a dream-like sight, which he recognised as a hazy memory from his childhood: he could see his own dainty fingers holding his cherished model of a pregnant woman, an anatomical Venus, assembling and peeling it back again layer by layer in a manner almost absentminded.

At first, this dream didn’t differentiate itself from his memory, agreeing to bend to all the laws and manners of mundane reality. From the dark blue background, he could see he was seated in his father’s study: the very place he’d spent most of his childhood and later years reading books of anatomy and medicine. The taste in his mouth was that of warm milk, familiar, comforting and mild, and in front of him, a glass of it was placed on the wooden Chippendale table.

But something in the scene suddenly distracted Victor’s attention for just the tiniest second - it might have been the ghostly call of his mother’s voice, or the heavy sound of his father’s footsteps echoing in the halls - and, in that short blink, the misty matter that had formed the object in his hands rearranged itself. With a kind of morbid amazement, he soon realised the ivory model was no longer that of a woman: it was, albeit distorted and odd, very recognisably his own adult body, accurate except for the stomach, which was still smooth and round. The model’s eyes were closed, and its expression was peaceful, unblemished by worry and serene like a lake in moonlight. In its uncharacteristic peacefulness, it belied that it was indeed not really him: Victor had always been the storm cloud marring an otherwise pristinely clear sky. Just like before, the model’s left hand was placed to rest atop the bump, cradling it in a gesture most motherly and protective.

Victor wanted to drop the object, break the ivory into pieces and then throw them into the hearth of the study, or, in the least, tear his gaze from the abhorrent, unnatural thing. But he soon understood himself as but a spectator, incapable of stopping the following motions in this feverish dream of his: His pale and stout child’s fingertips, with naive curiosity, reached toward the seam of the pregnant abdomen and, as they had so many times before, slowly peeled the cavity open. What was revealed wasn’t a foetus: it was a skull that lay embedded deep in the pelvis, where the womb of Venus should’ve been.

And the vision, misty as it already was, dissipated completely and left Victor in a dreamless slumber.

Chapter Text

It must have been high noon already, for sunlight seeped through half-closed window shutters and painted all it touched in the room a warm golden hue. The roaring flames of fever had quieted to embers, yet an undeniable heat was still the first thing Victor grew conscious of once he awakened; locks of black hair stuck to his damp forehead, and shivers ran through his limbs as the temperature of his own core rendered all else cold in comparison, the crimson sheets he’d pulled over himself in his sleep barely mitigating the chill.

The dull aches of his body surfaced second: his shoulders, arms, and lower back had been severely strained during the vain efforts of the night previous, and a pestering stiffness now solidified in his frame. A quiet heaviness spread inexactly across his entire self, accompanying the aforementioned sensations; it laboured the drawing of his breath, and weighed against the opening of his eyelids.

The condition of his ailments affected him with such severity that a brief consideration of his having fallen ill with typhus or consumption flashed through Victor’s mind. But he had resided relatively secluded for weeks now, rendering risk of contamination highly unlikely, and the conceptions of illnesses brooding in miasma, albeit still quite popular, had recently been disproven by professors of colleges most respected. And Victor, being the man of science he was, put his trust in rationality: he must have simply been exhausted.

His relief at this conclusion was very brief, for a faint remembrance of the vision that had cursed his otherwise blank passage of sleep soon beckoned his hand to find his abdomen with haste. Gloved fingers landed roughly against heated skin that stretched itself over a lean plane of muscle; a soft fullness he’d almost expected wasn’t there to be found. Even though this was the state in which he, by all means of logic and sensibility, ought to have been, a feeling of barrenness still nestled itself in his heart.

He would’ve been fairly content to wallow in self-pity for his pains, which were now both of physique and psyche, had it not been for a sound distracting his attention elsewhere. And though his wits remained unaffected despite the pressing fever, it took him a while to comprehend what his eyes were seeing: There, at the foot of his bed, something – someone – stood tall, leaning against the high wooden frame of his poster bed.

Had Victor not been riddled with the very real aches of his drained body, he would have thought himself still asleep, subject to another feverish dream. But what he beheld was indeed verity: of it he was helpfully reminded by the sharp flash of pain that radiated across his torso when, terrified as he was in the face of this goliath of an intruder, he pulled himself to sit up against the headboard of his bed. His breath was taken from him in shallow heaves, which narrowed his vision and left him light-headed, almost incapable of identifying the being who watched him so keenly.

But how could he not have recognised this creature – the very sum of his life’s work? The pallid skin, which he had so meticulously sewn to sit perfectly atop the muscle he’d composed with painstaking care? The structure of the skeleton he’d assembled for holding precious organs to support his creation? The love in his handiwork shining through even in the wrapping of the bandagings, which served not only to protect wounds most vulnerable to tearing but to give dignity in the awakening that Victor had already believed failed? And the eyes! – those dark-brown orbs he’d chosen for their clarity, their depth, the soulfulness that exuded from them even in death? No, he would know this creature just from its presence, for it had been the object of his obsession and greatest fantasy for his entire life.

The creature took a stumbling step toward Victor, who instinctively jolted up to his feet, reeling with the rush of adrenaline in his veins. To his horror, he soon realised he couldn’t discern the nature of his creature’s intentions: it had broken free from the operating table he’d bound it to, wandered the great halls of the tower, and found him; whether these actions had occurred with a purpose to them, or whether the creature had simply stumbled mindlessly along a path of doors Victor had left ajar in his yesterly bout of madness, he couldn’t know. And now, as the creature approached him further, Victor couldn’t tell if it was the pure curiosity of one living being for another or the blind bloodlust of a dead soldier’s damaged brain tempting it forward.

Another step, far too quick for Victor’s fear of the latter, made him raise a trembling hand toward it.

“No, please,” he begged in a strangled whisper, his vocal cords not yet recovered from the strain they’d been put to by his own screaming.

To his surprise, the creature slowly mirrored his gesture and raised its own discoloured hand toward him. Victor’s gaze met the creature’s, which held not a single ounce of aggression; only innocence reflected in the dark eyes captivated by his every move. Suddenly, the wheezing breath that hissed in the creature’s throat and reverberated in its chest no longer assimilated itself in Victor’s mind as the groans of a raging beast, but rather as blatant proof of the life force coursing through its body. It was now his turn to approach the other being in curiosity.

Victor tilted his body to the left, and the creature yet again mirrored his actions, slowly moving its own limbs in a way most strange yet elegant nonetheless. Rapture bloomed in his chest – brighter than a spring flower – and a breathy chuckle escaped his lips: all the agony and bodily suffering it had taken to bring this creature to existence might as well have been mere dim memories of years long-gone, for in this moment nothing remained to Victor but the being he’d brought life to. All meaning in the universe stood materialised before him, on wavering and uncertain legs, watching everything in wonder – even his hands as he presented them, peeling off his crimson leather gloves – and in turn being the object of all of Victor’s; having reached the edge of the earth, there was no horizon left – only the sun.

The sun, Victor thought and rushed to the shutters of his bedroom’s great windows: he needed to see his creation in the light. The wooden panels creaked open, and a warm glow flooded the room, so bright that even floating flecks of dust caught it. It would’ve been almost magical, the ethereal tranquillity after a tempestuous night, had it not been for the deep whines that surged behind him.

Victor’s breath caught in his throat: It was his creature, shying away from the brightness in a manner so great that its massive height caved as it tried to cover its eyes, shield itself from this new sensation, because, of course, everything was new to it: warmth, cold, light, darkness.

Victor realised himself already shushing the creature, ere giving a word for it to maybe understand: “Sun.”

He carefully approached the crying being before gently guiding it to turn to the light.

“Sunlight. The sun is…” Victor stuttered when noticing the creature’s weeping stopped at his touch.

“The sun is life,” he said, turning to the light with open arms, not only to show his creation that the sun was nothing to fear, but also to ground himself. Victor still frankly found himself in disbelief at all that was happening.

He took a deep breath and exhaled fully, finding the space in his lungs after what had felt like an eternal weight finally lifted off his chest. To his amusement, he could hear the sound copied by a voice behind him.

“Ah, the warmth…” he mused, and turned back to his creature, who, to his delight, stood right behind him, arms open as it faced toward the light.

Here, he could see it in its full glory, its pale skin against the golden sunlight glowing softly like dew, tender yet adorned with scars not formed in destruction, but by creation. And the way it moved with breath, with life, animated and completely unlike the corpse it had been mere hours ago. It was the most beautiful sight Victor had ever seen.

He reached up carefully to pull at the bandages covering his creature’s head. Already half-unravelled as they were, he could tuck part of them under its chin with ease, revealing full, ink-black lips. Seeing the creature’s face closer now, he realised streaks of tears had dried on its cheeks and still dampened the eyelashes that framed its soulful eyes. Victor knew not what had caused his creation to weep so, but he knew he’d never let those eyes become dampened with sorrow ever again.

The creature’s curious gaze followed his hands as he gestured to his bare chest.

“Victor,” he said, ere motioning to himself and repeating more slowly, “Victor.”

The creature followed in mimicry, bringing its hands to its own chest. Victor awaited with curiosity akin to his creation’s, expecting perhaps the name of a soldier he’d used to make it to fall from those lips which moved in a quiet attempt at speech. What left them under a breath, barely a whisper, more consonant than name, was a name his own: Victor.

“Yes!” Victor’s elation couldn’t be diminished by the confusion of his creature, for it had spoken its very first word! And it had been his own name, never said with such meaning behind it. “Of course you are.”

Victor, already so close to his creature, closed the distance between them by pressing his ear against the creature’s chest. Its skin was cool against his – not unpleasantly like the room had been when he’d awakened, but comfortingly like summer rain falling amidst a drought – and Victor could hear the heart beating in its chest; it was a strong heart, pulsing with a steady pace, and he could’ve stayed there listening to the sound for all of eternity. It brought him an emotion he’d never felt before, overwhelming and sweeping, rendering him nearly overcome by sentiment. What finally broke all semblance of composition was the creature encompassing him in an embrace while calling out his name: a sob wracked Victor’s body, and he found himself unable to contain the plethora that followed the first.

He’d never felt such joy.

Chapter Text

Birdsong carried into the tower, melodious and bright. The heavy velvet curtains adorned by each window in the living quarters framed light in such a way that it softened every surface it touched, generous in its breadth; Victor found even his own sunken and unkempt visage most pleasant in appearance when he caught sight of it in the mirror, as the elation of his spirits smoothed the lines usually marring his brow, and graced his features with a rather youthful air. Where the temperature of his abode had formerly been ever a touch too cold or heavy for comfort, it now settled wonderfully at a mild degree; even the plain oatmeal he’d breakfasted with and for which he’d scarcely the appetite in days previous, now tasted most divine: It was as though the world were rejoicing with him.

And had it any reason not to when something as very marvellous as this creature, so small despite its great frame, as it lay fetal beside Victor on his bed, had newly come into existence?

Victor couldn’t muster the strength to lift his gaze from his creation for even the shortest of seconds: Though he’d never thought of himself as the kind to find sentimentality for simplicity (all his life he’d raced after glorious grandeur and ideals completely unattainable for many commoner) he now sat utterly entranced by even the soft flutter of eyelashes against pallid skin; and found his fingertips – all too rough for such tender surfaces – tracing lines where grafts of skin met in a mending of fine sutures.

Eyes so dark they appeared pitch-black in a face of bruised alabaster white – two bottomless wells amidst fields of blooming cotton and lavender – reciprocated Victor’s gaze with awe he hardly felt deserving of; the creature moulded to his touch as a flower would to sunlight, burrowing into his hands as they cupped its bared face.

He’d fully unravelled the bandaging covering its head and found, to his satisfaction, that the wounds underneath had scarcely secreted any phlegm nor blood; his creature’s limbs all seemed to be in working order too (though they possessed quite a disjointed manner of movement, as currently exhibited by the clumsy hands trying to reach for his face): the being thus showed no clear dysfunction of the corporal sort save fatigue – non-alarming as the creature still responded alertly to stimuli, and only to be expected after as great of a resuscitation, nay, creation, as its had been; Victor, quite frankly, felt it weighing on his shoulders, too – and a sense of pride swelled in his chest: he’d created not only life, but health to bless it.

The creature brought its hand to Victor’s visage in an attempt to mimic his fond caress, but flinched away when its fingertips met the gruff, unshaven skin of his cheek; a laugh ebbed from Victor’s chest as he watched his creature’s expression contort in surprise at this unfamiliar sensation.

“Oh, I apologise,” Victor said, “I’m not very soft, am I?”

His question was only met with a deep hum – nigh a rumble on account of the depth of its tone – and a whisper of his own name. The creature gingerly pulled its hands to its chest and hid its face in the crimson sheets upon which it lay, and (though Victor would rather not the connotations) the action appeared not at all dissimilar in expression to a dog cowering in the face of harsh discipline.

“Here,” Victor said, and took gentle hold of his creature’s wrist; it yielded most amenably, and let him bring its hand to his coils of raven hair, all the while watching the motions with reserved curiosity.

“There…” Victor mused as he beheld the expression of wonder, which parted violaceous lips and widened black eyes, overtake hurt upon the features of his creation, “That’s nicer, isn’t it?”

Yet another hum sounded from his creature’s chest; it seemed as though the hurt of only moments previous had been entirely forgotten to it in the face of this newfound comfort. A delighted sigh escaped from Victor’s lips when, with the utmost heed, the hand he held fast to his crown started moving in exploring caresses through his hair; Victor had contemplated trimming it on behalf of his long locks becoming most unruly in the humidity of the seaside air, but currently found himself rather glad of his decision not to.

“Soft,” he pronounced carefully, beckoning for his creature to repeat as it marvelled so at the feeling; but repeated to him were only the two drawn-out syllables of his own name.

“All right,” Victor said through a laugh; his creature’s odd liking of this word, though most peculiar, amused him greatly. “Maybe we’ll learn another word come morrow.”

With a tender graze against pasty skin, Victor trailed his hand along the creature’s arm and set it on its shoulder; besides the face and hands, they’d proven most complex to arrange in terms of skeletal muscle and sinew, resulting in multiple scars along the incisions he’d used as points of entrance to the joint. Nevertheless, what troubled him wasn’t a fault found in the structures (they were immaculate, to par with the rest of his handiwork): it was the cool condition of his creature’s skin, so stark he could no longer attribute it to just the heightened temperature of his own.

“You’re frigid!” Victor exclaimed under his breath, ere reaching for a woollen quilt at the foot of his bed.

“This’ll keep you warm – a nice blanket to keep you warm,” Victor mused as he tucked the blanket snugly up to the creature’s chin, and, with the thinner satin sheet, bundled its legs, which fit not under the woollen blanket, on account of the length of its appendages.

‘Victor,’ it called, clear in pronunciation yet jumbled with guttural tone.

“Sleep,” Victor said, and caressed its cheek, running his thumb very gently over its brow as a beckon for it to close its eyes. Briefly, he wondered whether he should offer it some nourishment – a glass of warm milk he often enjoyed himself, perhaps – but, before he could decide, he found his creature already fast asleep, sated for now.

Though Victor himself was weary, he knew sleep would not come to him at this hour; it frequently eluded him even in the wee hours of the night. And so he remained seated, content to watch the steady rise and fall of his creature’s chest – certain as a tide lapping at the shore.

Worries and cadavers of reality could wait; for just this sacred moment, he’d let himself rest upon the pillowy clouds of comfort, and enjoy the quiet feeling that, for once, he and the world were at peace.

Chapter Text

Weeks passed, and as the creature’s strength increased rapidly, Victor’s waned.

The sun was setting, and its golden glow penetrated the dirty windows of the tower, welcoming a brief air of warmth in form of colour, which would soon darken to oblivion; the placid weather which had followed the storm – the genesis – of two fortnights ago had not graced the stead for long, for the skies had soon turned dull and dreary once more: only at dusk or dawn, as the sun kissed the horison, would the warm rays bless Victor’s abode with their short stay.

His heavy eyes could rest only for a deep exhale on the grand window that let the light in; it was but a scant escape to bliss from the draining duties of his new occupation – a cube of sugar for a plough horse worked to lameness. Taketh he any longer from its supervision, and his creature – his precious, wide-eyed, beautiful creature – could yet again find itself in the throes of trouble. Not to say that his creature was ill-tempered (only the very opposite was true, for his creature’s nature was as mild and pleasant as a soft summer breeze): No – what lay at the heart of Victor’s worries was the insatiable curiosity it possessed which had already nearly caused it to burn itself on the many candles and oil lamps, drawn as it was to the bright flame they sustained. And, though the creature was nothing if not gentle, the development of its motor coördination lagged behind that of its strength, and Victor could already see in his mind’s eye how something as simple as a looking-glass could, when broken by the clumsy hands inspecting it, become a cause of injury.

Victor roused himself from his brief musings and ran his fingers through his dirty hair as he turned back to the task at hand; he was in sore need of a bath, yet the water he poured by jugfuls into the washbasin would not be for him: it would be for the creature seated patiently, for once, at the dressing table. Victor had dragged the toilet, along with a bathtub and some tables and chairs, into the grand room which used to be his laboratory – it could not be regarded as such anymore, reduced as it was to a glorified nursery – for the efficient drainage systems there proved more adequate for bathing a creature – who found the splashing of water and the dousing of its creator with copious amounts of it wholly amusing – than the small bathroom they’d previously been situated in.

With the brass basin full of lukewarm water, Victor carried it to the dressing table and set it down next to the mirror. His creature sat still beside the table, atypically ignorant of his presence as it kept its gaze strictly on the small twig held in its large hands: it was a shrub of blaeberry, which Victor had allowed it to take home from their afternoon walk: Though at first Victor had avoided outings in fear of his creature wandering away, overtly curious as it was toward everything, need had before long forced him to exit the confines of the tower: the rations of food had become scarce – or, at the least, the rations which pleased his creature’s appetite; during the first days, he’d only fed it warmed milk thickened with oatmeal; but, finding great displeasure in seeing the gauntness of his creature’s condition, he’d offered it meats in hopes of the more nutritious food putting some flesh on its bones; but the creature had profusely refused even to try the stew he’d procured from the salted pork. Through trial after trial, which had exerted their rations, he’d found his creature’s preferred diet was that of an herbivore; so, in search of berries and nuts, and whatever else edible he could find, he’d first left the tower, his creation’s hand tightly clasped in his own.

Victor opened the creaky drawer of the dressing table to gather a white linen cloth and a tin of shaving soap. He adored the soft hair which grew in patches of blond and hazel on his creature’s scalp, but the fresh scars there still required one final inspection to assure him of their proper healing: unravelled sutures unnoticed under locks of hair could lead to infection. As Victor lathered the frothy cream onto its pale scalp, the creature finally acknowledged his presence: it turned to face him and blinked slowly, its features bearing a puzzled expression.

“I know it’s cold,” Victor said, and gathered some more of the thick cream onto his fingertips for the creature to inspect. “It's shaving soap.”

The creature cared not for the substance held out for it: it had already learned that, despite their pleasant, flowery smell, the taste of soaps was a bitter, astringent of perfumed fats; so it turned its gaze back to the shrub. A moment passed, and, right as Victor would have thought it appropriate to continue with the shaving, the creature turned back toward him, the twig held out in offering.

“Oh,” he stammered; what was he to do with the withered thing?

The creature, though not impatient, waited not for Victor’s response: with fingertips stained purplish from the very same action repeated many a time before, it plucked the single blaeberry – dark-blue and overripe – still hanging onto the twig, ere holding it toward him, its black eyes wide and awaiting.

“That’s a blaeberry,” Victor noted dumbly, hopelessly uncertain of what the creature wanted of him; he currently found himself in the predicament he’d become quite familiar with in the passing weeks; the creature’s physical improvement, albeit slow, was apparent in its increasing strength and balance – even in the way it postured its body, which no longer seemed utterly strange; but linguistically, mentally, no further development had occurred: the sole word known to it was still the very name of its maker: Victor – a name, which had once meant nothing, then doctor, baron, great scientist, and, abashed yet again as it never were – nothing: it had become only an utterance spoken in the stead of ‘I am cold,’ ‘I am hungry,’ ‘I’ve soiled myself’: sentences, which, despite Victor’s great efforts, were never spoken by those ink-black lips.

The creature – very helpfully, it must have thought – soon made its intentions very clear by pressing the berry to Victor’s mouth. Already overwhelmed with exhaustion, straining just to hold a thought, he nearly recoiled at the touch, but ceased the instinct before he could act upon it; instead, he pushed the creature’s hand away, and, with the fingers of his clean hand, picked the berry from its grasp.

“No, thank you,” Victor muttered under a sigh, before offering the berry back to the creature.

‘Victor,’ it dared insist.

“Eat it.” His command was undeniably curt, and he strained no effort to hide the exasperation from seeping into his tone: courtesies, he then had the mind to think, – mere superficial indulgences to the etiquette of society – would have been lost on his creature anyway.

Though hesitant and visibly hurt by Victor’s rejection (its expression yet again reminiscent of that of a cowering dog in the tremble of its lip and the damp glint of its eye), the creature opened its mouth and let him place the small berry on its dark tongue, the motions of this feeding familiar to both of them. Its curiosity for the shrub sated, the creature dropped it and turned to its usual subject: its very own maker.

“Oh dear,” Victor sighed: how he could ever have hesitated outing on behalf of his fear of the creature parting with him now seemed ridiculous; the wretched thing never left him alone!

He’d no privacy, no reprieve, nor respite from the creature’s constant presence ever since he’d first delivered it into the world: In its waking hours, its attraction to him was a constant – not even the most novel of distractions could hold its attention away from him for long; and, lest Victor ever dare try and leave it out of sight for just the briefest while – even the short time it would take him to fetch a bottle of milk from his room – it would start crying out his name, and the noise would tug ruthlessly at the strings of his heart rusted dull from decades of disuse, and cripple him yielding to the creature’s every will (he could not even attend the washroom without dragging it along, for heaven’s sake!)

And, finally, when it would drift off to sleep, always bundled and warm in Victor’s bed and embrace, he himself would not be spared such a mercy, such a repose from consciousness in his spent body: the shallowing of its breath, the quietude of its features, the stillness of its lips all brought back the visions of his experiments – those miserable beings he’d forced into their doomed animation – and their inevitable withering as the fleeting flame of vitality had always snuffed in a final gurgled exhale of agony; he could not rest his eyes for fear of opening them to the sight of his creature only one of those pitiful beings, cold and dead in the cradle of his arms.

‘Victor,’ the creature called, pulling him ashore from the trepid river of his reverie; he’d lost time and current of thought, sunk yet again to his musings in a way more suited for a demented elder; his creature might’ve been the one composed of hundreds of separate pieces in a careful mending of sutures so impossibly intricate, but it was he who was unravelling at the seams.

“Yes…” His voice sounded distant even to his own ears.

Victor’s hands sought, from the same drawer he’d procured the tin and the cloth, an open razor; he had to make haste, for the sun was already slipping past the horizon, and he’d rather not attempt shaving the fidgety creature in candlelight.

“Now,” Victor said, as black eyes so attentive yet helplessly uncomprehending watched his every move, “I am going to shave you, and you are going to stay very still as I do, yes?”

He was not granted a response save for a low hum; certainly not a sign of comprehension, but rather a mindless noise contrived as a response to the uptilt of the tone of his question.

“Here,” Victor sighed.

He grabbed hold of his creature’s chin and beckoned it downward so he could properly angle the blade to its scalp. He could only pass it along its skin a couple of times before his creature tensed its neck and pushed against his hold; its force was most inhuman, and he could not, in a spar of their physical strengths, stop it from craning its head toward him.

“No. Down.”

It obliged as though understanding, though Victor would’ve rather attributed it to its wandering mind.

“There we are.” He’d barely begun, yet putting a finish to the task was all he desired. “Stay there.”

His creature might not have had any understanding of language, but a sense of sarcasm didn’t elude it; as though purposefully retaliating against Victor’s command, it turned its head again: it fixed its gaze upon the small mirror of the dressing table.

“Yes.” Though Victor sighed, an undeniable curiosity dawned upon him as he watched the scarred visage reflected in the vanity: his creature mustn’t have been very well acquainted with its own likeness, for he’d covered most of the mirrors in their abode with sheets not even a fortnight after the creation; the sight of his own decadent deterioration seeping into his appearance had only served to crush his drained spirits further. And there, then, he could see it: his own gaunt face under a feverish sheen, gazing back at him – it was everything but a sight for sore eyes, and he found himself wondering how his creature could ever make a man with such a hideous visage the object of its obsession; for a moment, Victor even felt his wits leaving him in a bout of irrationality: what if, now that the creature beheld itself – perfectly crafted to capture the beauty of flesh – it would understand how unsightly his maker was in comparison? Alas, it mercifully paid mind only to its own reflection, pristine and pale beside that of Victor’s decay.

“That’s you,” he explained to the creature, “That’s you. All right?”

Taking the opportunity of the creature’s newfound stillness in its fixation, Victor inspected the wounds now uncovered: where had once been bloody gashes of fleshy seam against its counterpart was now but sunken lines healed to a purplish hue.

“Oh, yes; this is healing rather nicely,” he noted as he wiped the shaving soap from its scalp.

He set the razor on the table and rinsed the cloth in the basin; a displeased sound passed his lips as he submerged his hands in the grimy water: it had already grown cold and could no longer be of use in the washing of his creature (he could not bring himself to bestow such an unnecessary unpleasantry upon its wholesome existence, no matter how unpleasant it had made that of his own). He wrung the fabric until the last drops of water had fallen into the basin, before flinging it over his shoulder and gathering the tub into his arms to take it to the drainage.

“I’m tired…” It was but an observation, for there was no one to receive his lament. Yet the complaints fell from his lips nevertheless, the sound of his own voice forming sensible sentences perhaps the only thing assuring him he’d not completely succumbed to the madness: “I’ve not slept.”

The water he spilt into the ornamental drain cover reflected the golden sunlight in the drops, which scattered around the floor like pearls of an unwound necklace.

“Not a winky-dinky-doo of sleep for me...”

And there he lost even the comfort of his own coherence – a loss he would’ve grieved openly if not for the distinct clatter of metal against wood sounding from where his creature was sat.

‘The razor,’ Victor thought, ‘I forgot the razor.’ And before he could do anything save shout a “no!” and a “stop!”, his creature had already wrapped its fist around the blade.

“Let go!” He could not hear the timbre of his own voice, for his ears filled only with the roar of blood as he ran to the creature, washbasin abandoned to fall onto the wet floor. “Open!”

His command was left ignored; black eyes he’d once deemed soulful now appeared only accusing to him as they bore into his, the spark of innocence in them displaced amidst this chaos, as though oblivious to the audacity it demanded to look at him so: as though he’d been the one to put that blade into its grasp; as if he were the one clenching the fist and digging the blade into the tendons of its palm – and not the one trying to peel it open despite the hopelessness of his attempts.

“Open your hand!” he begged of it.

How could it not understand what he wanted of it? Could this sensation – pain – be so novel to it that it knew not what it meant, that it knew not that the very structures of his body were being cut apart – irreparably, most likely?

Finally, once Victor opened his own palms, praying that it would mimic him, the creature opened its bloodied hand and let the razor fall to the floor. After the fall, all was silent save for the heaving of Victor’s breath; his hands were bloodied, and they trembled helplessly when he reached for the creature’s wounded appendage. The injured being itself sat perfectly still, watching Victor with a strange expression, as though wondering what his fuss was all about.

“What are you doing?”

Victor found his humours unsettled as he tried to make sense of his creature's reaction: perhaps its nervous system had been damaged at some point in its creation, rendering it incapable of feeling pain – perhaps he should have let it burn itself benignly on the candles it so longed to touch; then it might have known what this sensation meant and let go of the blade at once – perhaps he should have been more careful and placed the razor back into the drawer before turning his back to the creature. Whatever the reason, he knew it was he who was to blame for the blood now trickling to the floor and staining his hands.

Alas, no: it was not he who had clenched that fist ever firmer around the sharp edge, and it was not he who had placed the blade into that pasty palm in the first place.

“Look,” Victor commanded, holding the gaping wound of the palm to show, for he now demanded that the creature understand what its own actions had caused – what ignoring him had led to, “Look what you’ve done.”

“You have to listen to me!”

Those depthless eyes finally seemed to focus on the mangled sinew exposed to the air.

“You have to listen; I said drop it!” he shouted as he turned to the medical bag beside the dressing table; it proved a small mercy that he’d not had the strength to move it away after changing the creature’s bandages, for he doubted he could’ve currently fetched it from afar as nausea settled in his gut.

“Stupidity!” he exclaimed when finding cotton for cleaning the wound proved a challenge as tears clouded his vision; why that was, he knew not, for he’d never had issues of emotionality when tending to his patients before.

Tearing a tuft of the white fibre, Victor turned to his creature only to find its maimed hand mere inches away from his face.

“No, stop,” he managed in a surprisingly firm tone as he grabbed hold of the creature’s wrist and pushed it away.

“Come here.” He blinked away unshed tears; whatever bout of madness (hysteria he’d diagnose such symptoms, were they of a woman’s) had caused the overpouring of his sentiments should be snuffed at once; no respectable doctor would allow such a lapse in sensibility.

‘Victor,’ the creature muttered, ere reaching for his face yet again with that bloodied hand, showing Victor exactly what his failures had led to – for in the end, who could truly be blamed for the misery of the creation but the creator himself; alas, he’d failed after all: he’d failed to fulfill whatever role it was that he’d tried stepping into that one dreamy morning after the storm.

“No, don’t touch me!” he screamed as the dam broke – as the person he’d tried to be for his creation – someone caring, someone soft, someone better than the pitiful wretch he was – shattered into a million pieces like a frail teacup meeting marble floor.

‘Don’t ever touch me!’, he would’ve yelled still, but the words died in his throat as sobs overtook him; fury no longer blinded him, and he could see his creature looking upon him with a tenderness he’d never been deserving of: though it ought to have been, no anger marred its expression, no scowl curled its lip, and no condemnation tainted its brilliant gaze; it merely seemed to question Victor’s outburst and study how the tears painted his cheeks. With fingers tinted a bright crimson, it hesitantly reached to touch the wetness undoubtedly already dripping down the stubbled expanse of his chin and onto the floor below.

‘Victor,’ it whispered as it cupped his face with its large hand, its cool skin meeting the heated surface of his own.

“No…” he could barely muster a coherent tone, “You’ll hurt yourself further.”

A thumb running gently over his brow, though probably an attempt to comfort, only served to beckon more tears to fall from his tired eyes. In the throes of his fit, he’d fallen to his knees, and it took him every effort just to look up at the creature’s troubled expression. For the duration of a few ragged breaths, he sat as absolutely still as he could with the tremors running through his body.

“Come on.” He could no longer ignore the warm wetness spreading onto his cheek and joining that of his tears. “Show me…”

The creature was compliant when he peeled its hand from his face and took the cotton to the wound, the red of its blood seeping amply into the white fibre; he heard a hiss from the creature as he pressed against the cut to impede the abundant bleeding.

“I’m sorry,” Victor muttered as he wiped away the blood, ere turning the palm to face the rays of golden sunlight; what he saw there, where only moments ago had been a gash so deep it would’ve required multiple sutures to close adequately, was nought but a shallow scratch marring the otherwise pale skin of his creature’s palm.

“But how…” A terrifying notion entered his mind as he beheld the cleanly closed cut: he knew of accounts of insomnia – the lack of sleep and rest of spirits, where the condition had caused the confusion of reality and visions in the sufferer’s mind; were it not for the blood so generously spilt on the floor and, most certainly, onto his visage, he’d believe himself subject to the ailment. And though his wits demanded to find some sense in the peculiar incident, he could not collect the required thoughts to form sufficient reason; he could only, in his misery, lay his head onto the lap of his creature, and weep.

The waning sunlight warmed his body, danced on his skin, and shimmered in the wetness of blood and his tears; it was her final grace, a parting gift, a kiss adieu before she’d set, leaving him to darkness, awaiting only for her return. Her golden light blinded him then, and he closed his eyes.

In his limbo of pain, he knew not the passing of seconds, the fleeting of minutes: only that, at some divine point, a hand fell gently onto his head and fingers twined into his hair.

And a voice, which surely must have been his own, spoke:

“Soft…”

Chapter Text

Beautiful.

– Such was the world in which he awakened; Though his eyes were still closed, he could feel the embrace of his comfortable sheets and of the soft mattress under his body – and what a warm, pleasant embrace it was! The sun shone gently in the eastern sky – he could sense her presence on his skin: on his arms, on his chest, on his face, for, even uncovered against the mild air as they were, they were not cold. Sleep still clung to his body and weighed upon it, rendering his limbs heavy and grounded as though his physical being were but an old chestnut tree, deeply rooted in the soil beneath and peacefully immobile, all the while his spirit chirped feather-light in the branches above.

Though he could have floated forever in this bliss of sensation, a paradise of its own, a strange feeling aroused his conscious thought; very peculiar and utterly indismissable indeed was the sensation of an embrace not that of his bedding: he could feel a heavy arm upon his torso, long fingers splayed across his chest, and a weight upon the bed beside that of his own.

He opened his eyes and found the world a mist in the shades of gold; though he knew very well this to be the room in which he currently resided, everything appeared different in this heavenly light: the sheer curtains of his bed appeared glowing, almost painted like the veil upon the head of a saint, the ebony of the bedposts reflected the warm tones of dawn, and the crimson of the sheets upon him bloomed like the petals of a mystic rose, the colour rich and alive like wine – like blood.

He brough his gaze down and found his body changed as well: his skin was dewy with vitality – not with the sickliness of exhaustion – and his flesh appeared supple and plump, so very unlike the hollowed and bony complexion, which it had taken on during the passing weeks; and, then, he understood that this body – this divine vessel – was not that of his own: it was that of Venus; and cradled in the crook of his left arm, bathed in heavenly light, was a babe, nursing at his – her – soft breast.

This vision precursed sensation, and soon he could feel the pull of that warm mouth, the suckle of tongue against palate, those violaceous lips around his nipple, all beckoning his body to weep milk for the nourishment of the infant – and so it did: it yielded to the demand with such facility, as though the action were as natural to it as the drawing of breath – a simple execution of God’s design; he could do nought but gasp as he felt how this body gave so heartily, so generously, to that being who took with both hunger and need ungilded.

The quiet noise must have disturbed this being so entranced by the taste and receiving of its sustenance; two eyes black as midnight shot up to look at him, and a small sound escaped the being’s throat. Victor dared not move, for the mist, which had previously drowned everything in ambiguity, had dissipated, and now he could clearly see that this being, this babe, was no other than his own creation.

The hand which had lain on his chest travelled up and settled on his hair, where it bestowed gentle caresses on his locks; as much as this gesture comforted Victor, it soothed his creature all the same: soon it fluttered its eyelids shut and sighed in a huff through its nose.

‘Victor,’ it whispered, voice barely more than breath and consonant, never letting his teat fall from its mouth; the creature saw not Venus in this perfect, sacred maternal body so different from his own so profane – it saw him.

The heavy branches of the chestnut morphed into the delicate stems of lilies, and, finding his body his to mould anew, he brought his right arm – pale and dainty like a tower of ivory – to cradle his babe; he could have sworn that, as his hand met the soft, unevenly shaved hair of his creature’s head, the sunlight swelled in tandem. Perhaps it did; this world in which he’d awakened could not be anything but a higher plane of existence, for here, it seemed, his every desire – both sensible and inmost – had all come to fruition, and he could not find his spirits but sated, at peace.

“How beautiful you are…” Victor heard himself muse as he brushed his thumb along his creature’s pale browbone as it suckled lazily.

It sighed once more and burrowed its face deeper into the flesh of Venus’ breast, its nose sinking into the softness. The hand, which had so tenderly caressed Victor’s hair, moved once more over his ear, his cheek, and stopped right where throat would have turned to collar; its thumb found the place of his left carotid artery while its fingers found that of the right; and though Victor, a great doctor, should’ve known the perils of this placement, disbelief had rendered him stupefied, unable to move away from the growing pressure: he could scarcely breathe.

His creature itself seemed utterly unaware of the afflictions of its maker, entirely possessed by its hunger as it drank without restraint, taking more and more of his teat into its greedy mouth; Victor could feel the flow of milk waning, his drained breast struggling to keep up with the demands of the creature.

Though the world had begun crumbling at its edges – though fire had started lapping at his wings as he fell from the heights of the chestnut tree, from paradise – he could only curse himself for his inability, in his faintness, to beckon the creature to his other breast, to provide it the nourishment it so desperately wanted for, so desperately needed.

Even as sharp teeth closed around his breast and sunk into the flesh – as crimson bloomed on his chest, so dark against Venus’ skin yet vanishingly similar to the sheets upon it – as his vision grew dark – Victor could only wish that his creation find the nourishment, which he’d failed to provide in his milk, in the vital fluid of his blood.

Chapter Text

A deafening pounding in his head, terrible aches in his back, an impossible coldness which had seeped into his every bone; from these Victor knew he’d awoken – this time, to verity. Though he could not remember what visions he’d witnessed in his sleep, he was certain of their wickedness; in the same way one knows from a dizzying, sickening feeling of disorientation upon waking that the Nightmare has paid them a visit. Yet, no apparent ill presence had followed him past the realm of dreams; on the contrary, the waking world seemed quite peaceful:

The sun was high, and he could see her gazing down upon him from the vast open sky, for the shutters on his bedroom windows had strangely been left open (it was very unlike him to forget to close them): it must have been well past dawn, yet the skies were still a clear azure; grey clouds which had dimmed the heavens for so many a day were now entirely gone, as though a curse had miraculously been lifted; Victor did feel, despite the heaviness of a restless sleep lingering, as though his very being had been purged; his viscera torn and exposed to the world; his sin confessed and absolved.

Sleep clung to his very frame, slowing his movements and aching at his joints, as he tried to rouse from bed; he knew not how long he’d been unconscious for, for he couldn’t remember ever falling asleep to begin with. A shiver ran down his spine as he pulled at his covers; they were plenty (he’d been bundled with what must have been every blanket in the room, save for the crimson satin sheet, which lay discarded somewhere on the floor) and carefully tucked all the way up to his chin – in a manner he frankly found odd, for he usually slept with his blankets no further up than his chest. But the room was frigid, and no amount of covers could keep the chill at bay.

‘Victor?’ a deep, rumbling voice called his name.

The man in question snapped his head around to assess the source: it had been, of course, his creature, knelt over the great maw of his room’s dead fireplace, staring at him with its bottomless eyes, mouth agape and purplish lips glistening, their colour reminiscent of the inside of a freshly cut plum.

Chill turned to fever as Victor sat horrified by the temporal lapse he’d been subjected to; two fortnights had briefly slipped his mind nigh entirely, and, for the briefest moment, he’d completely forgotten that he had reached the horizon and found himself alone at the edge of the earth – well, alone save for the creature that currently looked at him with a curious tilt of its head.

“Oh heavens! What have you done?” Victor exclaimed when he noticed the dark smudges blotting his creature’s pale complexion.

How could his body have betrayed him so, he wondered as he sprang up from bed; it had forced him into unconsciousness, into oblivion, and left his ward completely without a guardian. He’d even left his door unlocked when he’d retreated to slumber (an action he could not recollect performing, though he quite obviously must have, for in his bed he’d awoken): his creature could have wandered about, and what would’ve been then? If it had gotten lost? If it had hurt itself? If it had found the razor again–?

Victor’s trembling hands found hold of the creature’s shoulders as his watering eyes (damn this sentimentality! whatever had become of his formerly unwavering nerves?) raked over its dirtied alabaster skin; the black substance covered the creature’s palms in their entirety, and smudged the pasty skin of its torso and face in handprints. The trail of the black dappled the floor and ended at the hearth, where ashes and charred firewood still lay asunder from a yesterly fire long extinguished.

‘Victor?’ his creature said, the uptilt of its tone at the end of the word an imitation of a question, and lifted a hand dirtied with that black substance – soot, Victor gathered – to his face.

He should have recoiled from this touch, from the hand which sought only to soil his face. Alas, Victor could only find himself allowing this contact, this defilement: though it hurt his pride, his vanity, it relieved some painful coil which had formed in his heart: a doubt that his creature would no longer seek to touch him after he’d so harshly lashed out; after he had shown it his truest temperament. Victor covered the blackened hand with his own and closed his eyes, burrowing his face ever so slightly into the coldness of its large palm.

“You foolish thing! You ought to be very grateful to have fortune so on your side,” Victor chided under a sigh, but ultimately found his tone dull, void of any real bite that would actually serve to correct his unverbal creation’s behaviour. The black eyes watching him blinked slowly. “You could have burnt yourself had the hearth not been cold.”

The creature tilted its head, and an expression of confusion took over its features: it furrowed its brow and scrunched its nose, which blackened at the tip; with all this dirt and an unevenly shaved head, Victor realised, his creature looked quite haggard, entirely unkempt, even, despite his great efforts.

“I just bathed you…” He sighed and swiped his tongue over the pad of his thumb to wipe at the stain on his creature’s nose.

‘Victor,’ it muttered in that usual, strange manner of its, which rendered his abused name but an utterance void of one real meaning; but its gaze now held a pensive glint, which was entirely novel on that scarred visage, almost anticipatory of a revelation. Victor stalled his tendings and awaited its next action with nigh halted breath; his expectations weren’t inordinate: no, he awaited not a marvel, not a miracle, not even coherence; just a word, perhaps – any single word, no matter how detached and meaningless, no matter how confused and jumbled. He waited, and waited, and watched closely as the plums of his creature’s dark lips trembled feather-light around silent vowels aching to be said, yet abandoned at the cusp of their creation.

Alas, its pursuit ended as it pursed its lips tightly shut into a line of black; another play of mimicry – Victor concluded as a clumsy thumb pressed against his nose – was the amount of his creature’s endeavour.

“Very well,” Victor grumbled in a tone of disillusion as he stood up, his knees cracking and joints complaining all the while as though his tired body had grown aware of the nature of its Sisyphean task.

“I shall then bathe you – again,” Victor declared and watched as the creature clambered clumsily to its own two legs.

For a moment, Victor felt as though his cognitions were halted: it felt strange to him to have to assemble in his mind’s eye the actions which made up the whole of their morning routine, for he’d managed them perfectly fine without giving any a second thought for so many a day until now. It was as though a great disruption had occurred in the delicate structure of their daily rituals– but of course! Victor suddenly realised he’d never started those mornings by waking up himself, having barely slept at all for the last weeks.

“Oh, yes! You must be famished!” Victor exclaimed, gathering he could not remember giving his creature its nightly supper before he’d lost consciousness (everything after the incident with the razor was but a blur to him, warm sunlight being the only certain, though he knew not whether he’d seen her in wake or sleep); Victor had gone without supping too, and he could feel hunger gnawing at his insides, gastric acid nauseatingly burning the delicate inner lining of his empty stomach. Alas, his own needs could wait.

Chapter Text

The creature had breakfasted, as per usual, with oatmeal and milk; Victor had sweetened both with a drop of honey in hopes that the delicacy would distract his creature’s attention – no matter how briefly – from his own shortcomings, which had all conveniently surfaced within the last day. But it was of no matter: his creature (bless its ever gentle disposition) still regarded Victor with a kind of soft curiosity reserved only for him; the poisonous viper of Victor’s tempestuous temperament was met with but a gentle caress and an unadulterated tenderness; and it all sickened him to the core.

How his heart ached when his creature, after having satiated its own appetite, offered its half-emptied bowl of porridge to him; how he would have deemed it better to refuse it and starve himself had he not known how the refusal would’ve marred his creature’s face with a frown. Even now, as he struggled in the midst of bathing his creature once again, how it broke him that it acted most amiably, even though it was plain to see that it would rather spend the noon outdoors, restless and jittery as it was when it looked out of the window at the clear-blue sky.

Victor wasn’t sure whether the wetness on his face was that of bath water or tears; of one he was certain, as certain as one can be, that his unravelling was only beginning – that his descent from the pinnacle to the pit would still be long and painful.

“There you go,” he mused, his voice hollow, as he finished scrubbing down the creature’s left arm. The soot had coloured the water a murky grey. “Now give me your leg.”

‘Victor…’ his creature said and lifted its hand, finger pointed past him at the great ornamental window of Victor’s laboratory – its nursery.

Victor sighed.

“Yes, that is your hand,” he muttered, ere reaching into the mild, dirty water; his white shirt be damned – it was no use trying to save it now, for it had already, as per usual, become drenched within only minutes of his bathing the creature.

“Let us try again,” Victor said and gave a light tap to his creature’s left shin; the being had stilled its fidgeting with the washcloth – Victor had given it the cloth in hopes that it might finally use its predisposition for mimicry in a way which might prove beneficial and bathe itself; alas, it had only played with it and tried to “bathe” Victor instead – held in its hands in place of gazing out of the window. It was indeed a beautiful day, Victor briefly mused as he glanced at what had so captured his creation’s attention, ere returning to his task.

“Give me your leg.” He had neither the strength nor the will to pry the appendage to the surface on his own.

‘Victor.” His creature’s tone was oddly stern, and its body might as well have been truly, as its countenance under certain dim lights suggested, made of marble: it did not budge despite Victor’s efforts, which grew more desperate by the minute.

“Please-”

And then he heard it himself: the unmistakable rattle of the wheels of a coach coming from somewhere not far from the tower; the alternatingly level and hilly topography of the shore sometimes carried sound over distances most unnatural: the howl of a wolf many miles away upon a hill could be heard clearly as if the animal were right upon the very cusp of the front door, as could the distant yells of seamen sailing on a tranquil night, speaking in barbaric tongues Victor recognised only from his travels across faraway lands. But this sound, he knew immediately, stemmed from somewhere near and reached only ever closer, if the slight crescendo was to be believed true.

“Wait here. Don’t move,” Victor ordered as he ran to the window.

His suspicions were confirmed: at the edge where dark forest turned to wild fields, and approaching with considerable stride along the narrow dirt road to the water tower was a two-horse carriage drawn by tall Friesians – the kind, Victor realised in terror, he knew to be used by the Harlander estate. Had he not heard the commotion caused by the direct disregard of his orders from behind his back – the sloshing of water and the distinct sound of skin slipping against metal – he might have sunken into his thoughts, in escape from the suffocating reality closing in on him:

He’d meant to answer the letters no doubt sent to him and Herr Harlander in the passing weeks; he had, above all and truly, meant to send a letter declaring the passing and describing the unfortunate unfolding of incidents, which had taken the wealthy man’s life on that very fateful night – How bizarre that the creative force of life seems to tread along the same path upon which the reaper walks, and ebb from the same river from which both the deer and the wolf drink side by side.

Alas, the long letter inscribed with his initials and addressed to his brother – Victor had thought it better for the news to pass from William to Elizabeth, his bride-to-be, lest the grave subject give her a shock, so he could offer her his immediate comfort – lay written and enveloped yet abandoned in one of the drawers in Victor’s room, and the corpse, frigid and so sufficiently preserved from decay, in the dark bowels of the tower; how could Victor, in his position, have possibly travelled the distance to the post office? The creature, which always clung to Victor’s closeness (even now it clumsily found its way to his side, dripping with water and positively marvelling at the approaching carriage), wasn’t yet ready to enter the world – or rather, the world wasn’t yet ready to receive it. And Victor certainly wasn’t ready to release it.

You are like a child, so excited, clutching your new pet so tightly that you’re strangling it. – The words of the deceased rang in his head like the dull toll of funereal bells, and he turned away from the window as nausea flared in his gut.

‘Victor,’ his creature called and reached to touch his cheek with a cold, clammy hand.

He snapped his gaze to the creature, who stood just as erect and at ease as it always did beside him, unaware of any shame it should feel for its body laid bare – it was Adam, unbanished from the original garden. And rightfully so: Victor, the creator, the maker, had both held and beheld its every part, both inner and exterior; from death he’d formed it a man and breathed into its nostrils the breath of life, creating a being as much part of himself as he was a part of it–

“We must make haste,” Victor heard himself speak before the stream of his consciousness could sweep him under as it often did.

“Come along,” he urged as he grabbed his creature’s hand from his face and guided the being to the toilet upon which he’d laid a towel.

Victor’s hands worked with efficiency despite all, as he patted the creature dry and composed its bandagings; though it knew not shame, Victor did, and his was abundant – it had always been.

His mind was that of a bolting horse, of a flight animal as he pulled his creature to his room along the narrow hallways and spiralling staircases of the tower; the ever-impending rattle of carriage wheels against gravel echoing in the otherwise silent structures was like a whip cracking against his dizzying consciousness as he ran to the living quarters situated closest to ground level.

‘Victor?’ His creature’s voice was uncertain, tinged with hurt; Victor’s grasp faltered when he realised he’d squeezed its hand hard enough to leave purple imprints from his fingernails into the otherwise off-white colour of its skin.

“Come,” he breathed in urgency and pushed his creature into his room: shame he could cover, hide away, but fear, terror in the eye of one beholding his creature (he knew it true and plausible for that is what he’d first felt as well) he could not preclude; he could only delay, and perhaps mitigate the reaction by bracing the spectator beforehand.

For that, he needed his creature to settle quietly into his room even as he left to greet their visitors – a task which might just prove unconquerable. Victor scoured the quarters for something – anything – that might serve to hold the creature’s attention for longer than a few moments: On his table in the middle of the grand space lay hand-made sketches of his studies and books of anatomy – all great distractions had they not already been pushed into those perusing hands many a time when Victor had needed just a second to himself; now they would only appease his creature when he’d read the texts aloud for it and elaborate on the drawings as though his creature could undestand any of the words passing his lips. The complete human skeleton propped in the corner of his room had also initially roused intrigue, but his creature had not toyed with it after it had once fallen apart in its hands and clattered loudly to the floor, scaring the poor creature away with a start. The clock on the drawer beside his bed could keep it entertained, but it had long stilled, and Victor hadn’t the time to wind it adequately; this issue of urgency was made clear by the loud knocking at the front door.

Victor’s breath stuttered as he realised the sacrifice he’d have to make; his cherished model of Venus was one of the only things he’d not let the creature touch (besides the countless bottles of medicine he’d stashed away, but those he could not leave his creature unattended with). His hands trembled as he unlocked the small drawer of his bedside table, before they found firm purchase in the familiar form of the ivory.

“Here… Sit.” Victor guided his creation to settle on the bed and covered its shoulders with a blanket before handing it the object. Dark eyes widened, and purple lips fell open in awe when Victor pried open the delicate plane of the model’s abdomen, showing his creature the white viscera hidden inside. Soon, discoloured fingers repeated the action on another plane and revealed the foetus hidden in the womb; the world, it seemed, had vanished from around it, and the only thing to his creature was now the small object held in its hands.

Perfect, Victor mused and left for the front door, carefully closing his room as he did so.

“You’re here,” Victor concluded out loud as his unclosing the great front doors was only met with unceremonious silence and long stares from his brother and Elizabeth; had he something on his face? “You’re really here.”

And they really were there: William – ever the dapper young man – stood clad in a tasteful woollen suit of amber colour, a complementary cream-coloured hat held under his right arm. His youthful face wore a smile which nearly reached his pale blue eyes; Victor, no matter how many years they’d lived apart, could see it strained right away. Elizabeth, on the other hand, hid not behind false cordialities: her face wore a hard expression that, Victor could see even from under her elaborate green veil, clashed unflatteringly with her soft countenance, the frown unwelcome on her rosy lips and light brow; alas, it deterred not from the ethereal beauty which seeped from her very complexion; her face was framed with a bonnet adorned with colours of lilac which complemented the green of her veil and dress most elegantly, and her figure exuded vitality of youth. Such hard looks from a creature of divine beauty and intellect like hers would have pierced right through Victor’s heart had he received them only weeks before; but now, he’d grown weary, and the flame of passion which had almost come to be his ruin had nigh extinguished.

The stillness finally broke when William spoke:--
“Are you quite all right, Victor? You don’t look very well.”

He approached Victor warily, his gaze clearly evaluating the man’s condition and emotion, as though afraid his brother would bolt; as though Victor were a skittish colt and William its handler – but what an unsightly image! Something – pride, perhaps – flared in Victor’s chest at the connotation; how he hated the emotion which painted his brother’s light features concerned and condolent: pity. And it was, unmistakably, directed at him.

“Oh, I’ve never felt better!” Victor found his own tone too jovial, his voice too loud for his own ears, sincerity clearly feigned; yet, he continued: “I’ve never had a clearer mind!”

William stilled his approach, and Victor breathed a quiet sigh of relief; his hands were still clutched to the frames of the front door as though his standing there, frozen at the precipice, would somehow keep reality at bay, the garden pure.

William’s frown only deepened before he spoke: “Are you sure you’re not running a fever?”

He raised his hand to Victor’s face, no doubt trying to assess his brother’s condition himself, but Victor caught his wrist before his palm could touch his forehead.

“Quite-” Victor would have assured had the voice of Elizabeth not cut in:

“Is my uncle here?”

Victor let go of William’s wrist as his eyes darted to Elizabeth’s.

“What?” he asked dumbly; of course, he’d heard her clear as day.

“My uncle, is he here?” she duly clarified, polite and pleasant no matter the tensions between them; somehow, this strained Victor’s broken heart worse than her hard glare had.

He could lie and tell her that Herr Harlander had left for town and would be gone for a few days; it had been quite usual of him to do so, and Victor had always thought himself cunning with words and charm – they had, after all, gotten him out of plenty of trouble in the early days of his studies when he’d, at times, had to supply his materials from quite the dubious sources. Alas, William, he could fool, but Elizabeth – beautiful, intelligent, marvellous Elizabeth – saw right through his act, thought him crude.

Victor breathed in the last breath of calm, ere speaking the words he knew would unleash chaos:

“No… I intended to send you a letter, but I didn’t manage-”

“What is it, Victor?” William’s face hardened, and, just for a moment, his countenance was that of their father’s–

“Herr Harlander has died,” Victor spoke, his tone matter-of-fact; he anticipated the crumbling of the dainty figure before him, tears which would flow amply down her cheeks. But they never came; William appeared more stunned than she did.

“Syphilis?” Elizabeth spoke after what seemed like a moment of meditation.

And Victor faltered: why, of course, she’d known.

“An accident,” he confessed under his breath; it was no use trying to hide the cause of death: syphilis was indeed grotesque, especially in its latter stages, but a corpse missing the entire back half of its skull was not the doing of a venereal disease – it didn’t require a degree in medicine to tell it.

“Very well…” Elizabeth still seemed unfazed. “And how long has he been dead?”

“Weeks.” Victor shot his gaze to the ground; he could not face the terrible scrutiny of his brother, nor the disturbing pragmatism of Elizabeth.

“And you did not tell this sooner?” she inquired, her tone growing ever more poignant, impatient.

“I tried to, I did,” Victor said, his voice growing desperate, “I’ve even the letter written, I can show it to you-”

“It is of no use now, Victor,” William spoke, ending his heavy silence. He closed the distance between them and pressed a hand to his brother’s shoulder. “I believe you.”

His hand burned where it touched Victor – through his damp shirt, he now realised – and the cadence of his voice made him ill; it felt, though intended as comfort, infantilising, demeaning.

“Today, the horses have to rest – we may take residence in Vaduz – but come morrow, we return to Vienna, and you shall come with.” The order was curt, and Victor briefly truly thought himself ill, for he’d never heard William speak with such certainty. And he could feel the water rising, the river, which had continually, ever since the night of Genesis, threatened to sweep him under a spell of catatonia, pulling him deeper.

“I suppose you’ve stored the body in the colder basement halls?” Preserving bodies is what you had originally intended them for, after all – Victor could hear, though William’s mouth did not move. “We shall send for it a proper carriage afterwards.”

Elizabeth nodded in agreement; Victor felt faint, and he could see the horizon sinking, the azure sky swirling into the dark forest, and feel his clammy hands losing their grip on the wooden door frame.

He could hear but the roar of blood in his ears, and he nearly thought himself entirely deafened, until he heard:–

‘Victor?’

And he spun around on his heel, the vertigo blurring the world until his gaze found the familiar form of his creature, perched upon the stairs of the hall.

Of course - Victor mused - of course, this would be the moment his creature learned how to unclose a door.

Chapter Text

“What are you-?”

Victor felt as though his heart had halted; his mind was dizzy and his head faint, and all the colour which formed reality bled together on its canvas. The sun shone all-too-brightly on her zenith, casting light to darkness and the hall of the water tower into perfect illumination through its tall windows deprived of glass: the damp upon the mossy stairs glimmered unnaturally, broken lattice glinted amongst the carpet of dead leaves, and the deterioration of stone which usually softened within shadow now hardened under the light; it was a perfect display of decay, and as its centrepiece – a lone white rose in a garden of nettle – stood his creation, so pale in the sombre setting that the light which grazed it reflected in the whiteness of its skin and cast a halo around its form.

The creature did not, for even a glance to secure its uncertain footing, take its wary gaze away from the visitors in the doorway as it descended, slowly walking down the stony steps, whilst holding itself upright on the railing; it looked right through Victor, yet called his name in a timid tone once it had reached the bottom, uncertainty painted on its expressive countenance. And Victor, barely in control of his fevered need to smooth the lines of worry on its visage, to shield it from the reality flooding through the gates of their paradise, found himself soon at its side, his palm against its sternum – a comfort for the creature and something to ground Victor himself. The contact was met with a cool hand encasing his own in a firm grip.

“Victor,” a voice called, and it must have been William this time, for Victor could hear him drawing nearer, his hesitant step accompanied by one lighter beside it, “What–” the voice paused and reconsidered, “Who is that?”

William’s voice belied not disgust nor other strong emotion, yet Victor knew that turning to face him would serve to confirm the disturbance which was certain to mar William’s usually blithe expression; Victor had already pictured it in his mind’s eye a thousand times: how terror would pull his brother’s lips into a grimace and mark his brow with deep ridges which belonged not onto that juvenile skin.

Yet, as Victor saw him standing now amongst the leaves, his hand in Elizabeth’s, those light features carried only curiosity, if not a slight uneasiness, dampened as sociable yet noticeable in the show of the sclera of his eyes. Elizabeth’s countenance he could not read, obscured as it was in the dark under her green veil.

“Is he a patient?” she asked, close enough now to observe his creation’s scars, and evidently too convinced of his wickedness to wait for Victor’s answer, for she drew a conclusion before he could speak:

“Is he a victim?” she demanded, dissatisfied by Victor’s silence, her voice raised and tone poisoned by her disdain towards him. “His wounds-” She lifted her veil, revealing her hard countenance and gaze fixed on his creature, and stepped closer – too close; Victor could smell her perfume, the smell of lilies of the valley and lilac flooding him with memories of the time he’d thought his belief in the marvelous to be shared, of leading her through the turns and twirls of a waltz, of the soft caress of her hand on his cheek.

Alas, before him was not the Elizabeth he had thought her to be then; whatever sweetness she’d held for him then, no matter how slight, confined and forbidden – only to be seen in the playful glint of her eye, had grown sour and acidic.

“You wounded him like that,” she brashly accused.

“No-” Victor would have defended himself, had his attempt not been interrupted by his creature:

‘Victor,’ it quietly begged and hunched its shoulders in a futile attempt to cower behind the baron’s smaller form; its black eyes dampened as it looked anxiously at William and Elizabeth, and its hands found fast purchase in the damp fabric of Victor’s shirt, its grip growing tighter with each passing second.

“Victor?” William questioned once more as he beheld the strange motions, his agitation now clearer in his tone and his clutching of Elizabeth’s shoulders to stall her from approaching any further.

“The experiment–” Victor said, stuttering through shallow breath as William’s frightened gaze found his; Victor needed not explain any further, for it was plain to see that his brother had understood, yet he did: “It was successful.”

Victor moved his hand from the creature’s sternum to the graft of skin above its heart; underneath his palm, the strong muscle beat a fast yet steady rhythm, and assured him that what he was to say would be the truth:–

“I gave him life.”

Victor had settled next to William in arm-chairs upon the hearth of his room – it was not ideal, of course, to entertain in the same space in which one slept, but the current options had proved painfully limited; so, begrudgingly, Victor had invited his guests and offered them tea. Now, the cups stood cold and untouched on the small table separating Victor’s seat from William’s.

“This is fantastic, Victor,” William said, entranced as he flipped through Victor’s sketches and Harlander’s photographs of the assembly, “Absolutely fantastic…”

Victor could barely hear him; he could only watch as his creature played with the frills of Elizabeth’s dress, as it inspected her hands and the lace gloves she’d worn, as she cooed and talked to it as if it were an infant (what mockery – Victor hadn’t carved a man from the marble of dead flesh only for it to be infantilised!) where they were seated on the carpet in the middle of the room, illuminated by warm sunlight; they’d been fast to settle there once Elizabeth’s agitation had abated, and his creature’s fear had given way to curiosity. They must have sat there for an hour already, timidly interacting with one another as creatures of the same kin, and with each passing minute, the green serpent of jealousy had risen from the depths of Victor’s gut in undulating coils and eaten its way into the core of his heart.

“Truly,” William mused as he lighted a cigar without offering one to Victor; he knew of his brother’s dislike for tobacco. “The impact this could have on the field of medicine if you were to publish your research; you would, no doubt, become the most esteemed doctor of this century!”

Elizabeth seemed perfectly content to amuse the creature, who watched her in awe: she held out her small hands for it, let it toy with the ribbons and silk roses of her bonnet, and, as it reached to touch the red cross she wore around her neck, even guided its purplish hand to her throat–

“Oh!” William exclaimed, catching Victor’s attention, “And how could I forget? I have something for you: I’ve spoken to the Royal Medical Society–”

Victor’s blood turned cold, his feverish skin but a molten cast upon a core of ice as he watched William’s hands procure something – a letter sealed with luxurious crimson wax – from his breastpocket.

“They’re interested in seeing you–”

“No,” Victor said abruptly before William could properly finish; his tone must have been stronger than he’d intended, for, suddenly, every gaze in the room fell upon him. With a grunt to clear his throat, he continued, conscious to hush his words: “No, not yet.” He glanced at his creature, who looked at him with a wordless tilt of its head, its hands still around violet ribbons, its play halted. “I’m not quite ready yet.”

William’s enthusiastic smile fell entirely at his brother’s words.

“I thought that’s what you always wanted,” he said solemnly, retracted the letter, and tapped his cigar against the ashtray, which lay beside the teacups.

“Yes, I did want that– I do!” Victor stammered, “It is just…”

His creature had not returned to its play; it had crawled in that strangely agile, animalistic way, which it had learned from only God knows where, to kneel at Victor’s feet; it still shied from William, and thus settled on the opposite side from him. The baron’s left hand found its unevenly shaved head without thought and bestowed it absentminded caresses, which elicited from it a satisfied hum; Victor had not even realised the peculiarity of this act before he saw it reflected in a troublesome expression on William’s countenance. Victor stilled his hand but let it stay as his creature lay its head onto his lap; the serpent relinquished its venomous hold on his heart.

“I fear, William…” Victor started, but ultimately found no words to follow.

William chuckled then, as though finding amusement in the mere implication that his elder brother, the great doctor Frankenstein, who’d never shown his underbelly to anyone, could now openly confess to such a thing feeble as fearing something. It died down when he realised his brother’s sincerity.

“What are you afraid of?” William asked after a polite pause to grant Victor the decency of carrying on without his impeding; the baron was incapable.

Elizabeth listened to them attentively and watched from where she was seated cross-legged on the floor, her green gown billowed around her, her hands smoothing the ruffled silk of her bonnet. His creature, too, looked up at him in question, its black eyes expectant as it noticed the sudden silence.

‘Everything,’ Victor could have said, and it would not have been an untruth: he feared that his research would be recklessly put to use, that he’d be forced to repeat the draining process of creation time and time again, that his name should forever become tarnished in the field of medicine, that his creature – that perversion of nature, they would say – would be taken for study – that it would be taken away from him. But it was all irrational, something which he ought not be; so, instead, he admitted only to what he could reason – shame: “Something went wrong; a blockage, a suture, a connection.”

As he said this, he watched how his creature burrowed its face into his palm when he recommenced his caresses, oblivious to the harsh reality of the words spoken of it. Then, he turned his gaze to Elizabeth, who looked upon him with a condemning raise of her light brow.

“You?” she scoffed, inviting herself to the conversation, “The great Victor Frankenstein made a mistake?”

“I must have,” Victor said, smothering his pride, “The creature knows but one word and one word alone – Victor, Victor, Victor – and it just parrots it without rhyme or reason.” Victor sighed as his creature immediately proved his point by mouthing his name against the fabric of his trousers, drawling the muffled syllables. “Physically, it is remarkable, yes–” He gestured to the book of research still on William’s lap. “All of its external structures are impeccable; some of the sutures continue to discharge blood and phlegm when irritated, but the overall healing is exceptional. But mentally, in its understanding and assumption of language, I fear, it is severely stunted.” It pained Victor to say the words which were to follow, but they were true, and thus he said them: “I’m afraid it has not the spark of intelligence which I had intended.”

“Why? Because he knows only your name – the name of his creator?” Elizabeth asked in that haughty, knowing way of hers, “Would you fault a child for knowing only the name of its mother? Have you even given him his own?”

Victor’s mouth suddenly felt as though it had been stuffed with cotton; of course, he hadn’t given it a name – he’d not even thought of it.

“It is not a child, Elizabeth,” he dismissively argued, uncertain whether he believed the words himself.

“What are you truly afraid of, Victor?” she taunted, dismissing him in turn, a devious smile finding her plush lips, “That, in your ungodly pursuit to defy death, you have accidentally created life? That all your inhuman endeavours would serve only to replicate what every woman is and has been capable of for the entire history of man?”

“No…” Victor shook his head; he was sinking again, the softness of hair under his palm the only anchor within a mist of feverish cold.

“And, perhaps for the time being, that word – Victor – means everything to him,” she said, “Perhaps, in being anew, the spirit that animates him is simpler – nay, purer than that of the common man.”

“Please…” Victor’s tone sounded pathetic to even his own ears; he could not bear the weight of her words. But his lament had served a cause, for Elizabeth relented; she stood up wordlessly and straightened the crinoline of her dress. Victor sank into his chair with a deep sigh.

“Perhaps we should make our way to Vaduz for the night; it is getting late,” William said after a moment of silence, blessedly ignoring Victor’s anguish; his making note of it would only have served to humiliate the baron further. “I shall send provisions to arrive here to-night.” He got up from his arm-chair with the gracefulness only a young man like him could possess, and gave Victor a meaningful glance. “You should not go famished, Victor.” He hid his pity cleverly behind brotherly worry, but Victor could see the true nature of his act from the sorry expression of his eyes. “And you must regain your energy: the journey to Vienna is a long one.”

Chapter Text

A fluttering veil of mist surrounded Victor; he lay on the ground, his back damp from the dewy grass underneath him. The scent of autumnal decay hung heavy in the air, which whispered in gusts of wind amongst the canopied branches of sycamore trees above. It must have been late evening, for all carried a blueish hue of twilight; it was cold, and atop the lake before him floated swirls of filmy fog as the water, still mild from the remaining summerly warmth, condensed as it met the brisk air.

He was uncertain of why he was there; perhaps he’d fallen asleep reading. When his father’s looming presence disrupted the peaceful routines of their home, Victor would take a book from his library and spend entire afternoons studying – should the weather allow it – on the bank, whereupon he could sit in quiet. But he could not remember having done so today; indeed, currently, he could not remember anything at all, and a sickening, uneasy feeling came over him: something was misplaced, and the feeling grew ever stronger as twilight turned into moonlight.

A form moved amongst the mist, and Victor quickly rose to his feet; whatever it had been, it dissipated as soon as it had appeared. The whispering wind fluttered louder over the scarce leaves of the treetops and bestowed chilly kisses on Victor’s cheeks. Something disturbed the cloudy mass again and moved amidst it and amongst the woods, carrying the distant shape of a person cloaked in veils of white and dancing with feather-light steps upon the mossy forest floor.

Victor followed it and found his body impossibly light, as if it were but a dried leaf floating in a rippling brook; when the personage had disappeared once more, the small stream found its end at one of the familiar side doors of the great Frankenstein estate. Victor stepped forth, and, as the sole of his right foot met the stony threshold, realised that his small feet were bare and muddy – his father would take his cane to Victor if he were to find out that he’d sullied the floors; alas, the hopeless cold of Victor’s condition had grown greater than his fear of punishment, thus he entered.

All was quiet inside: he could find no servants moving about in the halls – it was late, of course, but there was always someone roaming about: chosen servants keeping the fires lit thorough the night, elder ones retreating to rest well after the others as sleep eluded them in their later years, or maids waking early to bake pastries and bread for the coming day. Now, the only thing disrupting the abnormal stillness was the mist which had crept indoors and slithered along the red carpet, filling the halls with its cloudy presence.

“Maman?” Victor called, but found his voice dampened to a whisper; his breath grew heavier, and his chest tightened, “Maman?”

No answer came. Yet, a noise roused from the stillness, as vague and distant as the misty shape of earlier, but recognisable nonetheless: it was the snivelling cry of an infant, and it came from the floor above. Victor mounted the steps which led to the dark corridor of bedrooms; somehow, the mist had ascended as well and covered the floors with its shallow swirls. The first door he came across led to the master bedroom – it was his father’s; when the man was home, the door was always locked, and Victor did not try it. He walked past it, and the cries grew louder: the next door led to William’s nursery; Victor opened it with haste.

“William?” he called, but the room he’d walked into was empty, as it had been before his brother was born: the varnished floor reflected the moonlight pouring through the open windows, ere the mist obscured it, too. Victor turned around and continued until he could find his own room; the door was open, and it was now clear that the cries came from within.

This room, too, was barren, save for the lone cot which stood in the very middle. Victor approached, carried on by the strange flow of water still coursing through his limbs, until he found himself at the edge, peering down at a weeping bundle of crimson blankets.

He took the infant into his hands and positioned it in the crook of his left arm. With careful fingers, he unveiled the child’s face, revealing pale flesh, dark eyes and downy swirls of hair, which might have been russet brown or raven black; it was as though all the features of the child, save for its soulful eyes, eluded him, as though the child were made up of the very same mist which gathered at Victor’s feet.

“There, there…” Victor mused as the child quieted its wails in the cradle of his arms.

The brook had flown to the lake, and the leaf it had carried floated now weightless upon the serene mirror of calm waters; the melancholy in Victor’s chest eased away, and the warmth exuding from the infant in his arms took its place.

“Victor,” a faraway voice called – was it his father?

“Victor,” it called again – it could not be; the sound was too gentle. Perhaps it was his mother–

‘Victor.’

And it was neither, for both of them were dead. The babe in his arms returned to mist and left his cradle desolate, his hands empty, holding only dark sheets of crimson red.

Chapter Text

‘Victor…’

The baron awakened to the soft sound of his creature’s whines and its gentle tugging at the hem of his shirt; he’d fallen asleep – or unconscious – exactly as William and Elizabeth had left him, slumped in one of the arm-chairs at the hearth with his creature kneeling at his foot, its head under his palm.

“Oh, God…” Victor groaned as his wits returned to him: he had barely regained grasp of his senses, yet the disquieting proceedings of the afternoon nursed already a numbing ache in the back of his skull. Oblivion had not been a reprieve: the unsettling visions of his dream only disturbed him further and left him wearier – if possible – than he’d been before his slumber.

‘Victor,’ his creature murmured yet again, and tugged harder at his sleeve.

“What is it?” Victor grumbled.

As expected, the creature did not answer; it only whined in upset and shot anxious glances at the closed door of his room, its demeanour similar to what it had been when it had met their guests earlier. The reason for its distress revealed itself to Victor when he heard the faint knocking originating from the lower hall.

“The provisions!” exclaimed Victor as he remembered his brother’s promise, and, invigorated by the prospect of possibly getting to eat something that was neither stale nor meagre and harvested from the forest, stood and strode to the door of his room. His sudden animation beckoned a start from his creature, but he managed to soothe it adequately for the time being: “Stay, all right? I’ll be back in just a second.”

And, down the grand staircase, Victor flew to the front door, making the distance with haste for fear of his lengthened absence rousing agitation in his creature. With his left hand, Victor pushed his greasy locks away from his face in what might have been a futile attempt to compose himself, and, with his right, unclosed the entrance.

“Guten Abend,” came the weak greeting from a small, rugged boy – certainly no older than thirteen – perched restlessly at the tower’s doorstep; distantly, Victor recognised him to be the son of the old man who kept a general store in town – he’d visited the establishment a handful of times when his laboratory had been under construction.

The moon shone bright, obscured only slightly by thin and gauzy wisps of clouds; in its illumination, and aided further by the lamp held in the boy’s hand, Victor could see a stout pony hitched to one of the stone posts of the court, and a modest wagon harnessed to the animal; in it were crates which, Victor assumed, contained whatever supplies William had procured for him.

“Ist der Baron Frankenstein hier?” asked the boy nervously, and glanced past Victor into the hall as though looking for the man himself.

“Ja, das bin ich,” Victor confirmed.

This elicited from the lad a brief expression of shock ere he could catch himself and placate it. Victor nearly found himself irritated at the boy’s disposition, and, furthermore, by his evidently innate disbelief at his being the master of this abode; alas, with a sigh, Victor surmised the confusion excusable in light of his own current condition – undoubtedly rough, though he could not confirm – not being representative of his rank.

After a beat of awkward silence, the boy turned to fetch two stacked wooden crates – large but seemingly not too heavy – from the wagon, and carried them to the door. Stopping there, at the entrance, he stalled, evidently contemplating whether he should place them there or cater further to the baron (which he seemed awfully disinclined to do, visibly fearful as he was even without entering the imposing building – Victor was aware of the unfavourable attitudes of some of the townsfolk held towards the once-abandoned tower).

“Soll ich das für Sie hinauftragen?” the boy offered, despite all, and Victor wondered how much William must have promised to pay for the errand.

“Nun gut, belasse es dabei,” Victor reassured, and let the boy off with a nod; the lad sighed quietly in relief, put the crates down, and left him with barely withheld haste, though not before bowing in an overtly polite adieu. The light of the boy’s lantern dimmed as he drove away along the long road amid the moors.

Victor entered his room, the crates in his arms and his chest heaving; carrying them up the staircase had proven more exhausting than he’d initially believed. His creature roused quickly from where it had been waiting for him, seated beside the door, and greeted him by wrapping its long arms around his torso and sighing his name into his hair, careless or simply unaware of how the action nearly caused the baron to topple.

“All right, easy now,” said Victor, and slipped away from his creature’s hold to place the crates onto the cluttered table, ere his arms could give out, “I was gone but for five minutes, and you behave as though you’ve been entirely abandoned…”

The creature gained a piteous look at his rejection of its embrace, but forgot all about its upset once Victor started undressing one of the crates of the cloth placed atop it to protect the goods under; uncovered was a wide assortment of different foods: some salted venison, gloriously fresh vegetables and fruit of all colours (Victor nearly moaned at the mere sight, as most which had passed his lips in the past weeks had been a dull gray of oatmeal), and bottles of milk.

“Are you hungry?” Victor mused and picked a peach – delicate and perfectly ripe – from the crate.

His creature did not answer even with a butchered murmur of his name, but it leered beside him at the food with longing, wide eyes in an expression which could not have been more telling of its appetite if drool were to dribble down its chin; its naïve awe might have been comical, but most of these provisions were, indeed, entirely foreign to it. With a hearty chuckle, humoured as he was for what felt like the first time in an eternity, Victor split the peach in his hands; the sweet juice dripped amply down his fingers and onto the floor as the fuzzy skin of the fruit parted. He then removed the stone and gave one half to his expectant creature, who took it into both of its large hands. Victor raised the other half to his own lips and took a bite out of it; an insurmountable, loud groan left him when the flavour spread onto his tongue as his teeth sank into the tender flesh, releasing the nectar to flood his mouth. His creature, perhaps puzzled by Victor’s vocalisation, stalled with the fruit halfway to its mouth.

“Go on,” Victor prompted and gestured to the untouched half in his creature’s palm, “Try it; it is good.”

His creature scented the fruit but didn’t eat it; it wrinkled its nose and looked at Victor with an almost sceptical expression in its black eyes.

‘Victor,’ it mumbled and lowered its hands, perhaps taken aback by the unfamiliar scent of sweetness.

“It’s a peach,” Victor mused and took another bite of his own half.

“Peach – can you say that?” he attempted; lifted as his spirits were by the delightfulness of enjoying something saccharine, he had the strength to endeavour at the unyielding task of teaching his creature language. Alas, answered to him were only the two syllables of his own name; Victor sighed, but aborted his disappointment at once.

“Here.” He plucked the peach from his creature’s hands and held it to its mouth.

“Open,” he beckoned, and his creature, recognising the motions of feeding, opened its mouth and let Victor place the fruit onto its tongue.

A moment passed as his creature contemplated the taste of this new food, but soon it swallowed and looked at Victor with wide eyes; the baron barely had the time to appreciate the expression of unrestrained delight on his creature’s countenance, ere it took to ravenously licking the remaining nectar from its fingers.

“You approve, then?” Victor laughed and beckoned his creature to lower its hands so that he could feed it the remainder of his half. With deft hands, Victor pitted another peach and gave it to his creature. “You’re lucky that we’ve plenty more.”

Basking in the shared contentment of both novelty and rediscovery, Victor and his creature supped just so: by sampling and savouring all the different kinds of aliments – save, of course, for the meats which the creature would not eat even with persuasion. Victor’s appetite became fast sated, but his creature begged ever for more, quite like a child (though it decidedly was not, even as Elizabeth would have it), who had tasted sugar for the first time.

“There, there,” Victor mused as his covering the crates and storing them away was met with a low whine, “Eat any more, and you shall fall ill.”

Victor walked to the small washbasin situated in one of the corners of the room, and bade “come hither” to his sulking creature, who stood yet at the table.

“Come now, come,” Victor insisted, when his gesture went nigh entirely unnoticed, “I cannot put you to bed with your hands stained so; you would sully the sheets.”

His creature huffed and whined and gazed longingly at the provisions put away, but eventually gave in and tottered to Victor and sat down onto its knees as it had been taught to do; it was much easier for the man to clean it when he didn’t have to rise to the tips of his toes just to reach its head.

“There,” said Victor and guided his creature’s hands into the water. After washing and drying them, he took a damp cloth to its face and wiped until all of the dried, sticky residue of nectar came off and its cheeks gained a fresh, rosy colour; Victor caressed the soft skin and beheld as his creature leaned into the touch and closed its tired eyes. “Now, off to bed you go,” he spoke tenderly, feeling a kind of comfortable warmth in his chest: though agony had been the most prevalent of his emotions during the visit of his brother and Elizabeth, a weight had ultimately lifted from his shoulders and made its absence known now that his famine had been quelled.

He tucked his creature into bed with familiar motions and changed into his nightgown. The creature watched him all the while, unusual as it was for Victor to prepare himself for sleep, which he’d denied himself altogether for the last few weeks; today was different, for the nervousness which had incessantly plagued his mind relented now and allowed him a promise of rest. Though ere settling in bed, Victor went to revive the fire, gathering the coals with a poker and thus kindling a weak flame.

‘Victor,’ he heard spoken from the bed.

Victor glanced over his shoulder and met the eyes of his creature, who looked at him wistfully from where it had turned to the foot of the bed.

“Yes, I’ll be there in a second,” Victor assured, though the fire was contradicting, hardly taking hold properly as it was and remaining instead a weak flicker of the occasional flame. He found himself musing as he stirred the glowing embers absentmindedly: “So… Now you have met them: William and…” Victor faltered, unknowing of the reason why; he should not hold such feelings toward the fiancée of his brother – it should not pain him to say her name aloud. It was absurd! And somehow, the difficulty surfacing as he spoke to himself (his creature could not understand, regardless) felt more shameful than it would have been should so have happened in company.

“Elizabeth…” he managed eventually, though barely noting it, for he could not feel his mouth move, nor his throat produce the sounds; yet, he quite obviously must have, for the word was whispered, nay, breathed into the air.

Finally, a flame kindled within the hearth, and Victor could return to his creature, who waited impatiently, used as it was to Victor lulling it to sleep; it welcomed him greedily by closing its arms around his waist and pushing its face against his chest before he could even lie down properly.

“What has come to possess you? You are behaving most impossibly…” Victor tutted, though nursing no true annoyance; he distantly attributed the overtly cloying disposition to the stressors of the day unsettling his creature’s humours, and laid himself and his mind to rest.

Victor closed his eyes, but his creature beside him would not allow sleep: he could feel its pasty palm sneaking its way from his flank up to his cheek. Victor pried open his left eye and saw mismatched orbs, glinting softly like black pearls in the dim light of the fire, observing his features with a kind of newfound acuity as though seeing truly him for the first time – as though they’d only ever vacantly perceived his physicality before, free of any real understanding. The creature bestowed timid caresses on the whiskers of his cheek and his stubble, which had grown so long one could almost call it a beard (Victor absolutely hated it; he’d have to shave it as soon as possible); with the utmost gentleness, it thumbed at the skin under his eye, which Victor knew must have been terribly dark, and lastly, trailed its hand lower to clasp it benignly around Victor’s throat, all the while bringing the other to its own. There, it finally seemed to settle.

“You go to sleep now,” Victor mumbled. He pulled the blanket higher, swaddling them both into a cocoon of warmth, and closed his eyes, lacking the strength in his tiredness to question his creature’s bizarre ministrations. The gentle, mild waves of sleep lapped at his mind and rocked him quietly into the waters of slumber; Victor allowed it, assured by the soft sound of his creatures breathing and distant crackles of the warming fire, that he should float.

‘Victor,’ his creature murmured low and moved its hand ever so slightly on his throat.

“Mmmhm…” Victor answered without unclosing his eyes. With each inhale, the shore grew further, and with every exhale, the waters grew deeper; and, for a moment, Victor truly believed that he could be allowed this comfort no less blissful than the most beautiful reverie, and no less comforting than the familiar embrace of his own creation.

Alas, a single ripple in the glassy surface destroyed all illusion of such calamity, and Victor found himself drowning, sinking into murky waters, and gasping for breath, only for his burning lungs to fill with water:

‘Eliza-beth,’ his creature drawled.

And before Victor had even grown conscious of acting, he’d ripped himself out of the creature’s embrace and escaped the bed; he stood on wavering legs, and his breast heaved fiercely though, harrowingly, his heart lay entirely lifeless – but a heavy stone – in his chest: the serpent had swallowed it whole. The coy eyes of his startled creature looked at him with alarm.

“Elizabeth?” Victor cried, his voice cracking not into a wail but into a burst of hysterical laughter, “Elizabeth?”

“That is the word you decide to learn now – after all my pains to teach you even a single word that isn’t my God-forsaken name?” His trembling hands were aching for purchase; they found it in the fire poker he’d discarded earlier.

“Is it her voice?” The vision of his creature watching Elizabeth tenderly, holding her hand as she cooed to it, flashed in the eye of his mind. “You find it alluring, do you?”

“Or is it her soft features?” The awe upon the creature’s countenance as it beheld Elizabeth had seared itself like a branding iron into the flesh of Victor’s brain; he whacked the poker against the stone floor as the wound throbbed. “Is that what has finally got you speaking?”

The creature flinched at the sound and cowered, lowering its frame.

“Oh, so now you’re afraid of me?” Victor asked, his tone deliberately lowered yet seething, irritated as he was only further by the show of cowardice. “Why would you be afraid of me? I’m not going to hurt you; I made you. I am your maker, but you do seem to have forgotten that as you call out to that– that witch!”

“What possesses she that I do not?” Victor growled and approached the bed.

“Oh, it must be her femininity, isn't it?” he exclaimed as though coming to a great epiphany, “You could not help but fall in love with it – it is innate, after all! Inclined as a child to its mother, hmm? Well, she should be very glad; that is what she believes you to be – an infant!”

The creature whined and brought its hands to its face, as though attempting to shield itself physically from the anger of Victor’s words – yet another show of its lacking intelligence.

“Answer me, you beast!”

The poker forcibly collided with one of the bedposts at the foot end of the bed; the creature flinched away harshly and crawled back against the hearboard, its ungainly legs catching in the sheets.

“Speak, now that you’ve proven yourself capable!” Victor roared and whacked the poker against the crimson sheets scarcely an inch from his creature as the flame of wrath reached its eclipse: it had swallowed everything.

“Is it her bosom – those breasts capable of weeping milk for your nourishment, hmm?” Victor demanded; his creature closed its eyes and whimpered.

“You look at me when I am speaking to you, you vile thing! What has she? A womb-?”

And, as the small flame of a candle snuffs out as it becomes deprived of oxygen, the immense inferno of Victor’s wrath extinguished when his creature, supine as it curled in on itself, and strikingly small despite its great frame, looked up at him with glassy eyes and a snotty, tear-streaked face, crying in perfectly silent sobs, so very afraid.

Victor could see, now that the mist of rage had dissipated, that the trembling hands connected to his frame were no longer his: they were of his father’s, and the dark eyes weeping as they looked at him were no longer those of the being Victor had created: they were his very own.

“Oh God…” Victor gasped and let the poker fall to the floor heedlessly, uncaring that the sharp end managed to nick a deep wound into the flesh of his right foot. The clatter startled his creature, who let out a choked whimper.

“I’m so sorry, I’m so, so sorry…” Victor begged under his heaving breath as he approached his creature and crawled onto the bed, soiling the sheets with his blood; he tried to reach for the being, but it only whined and backed itself further against the headboard, its soulful eyes desperately fearful under wet eyelashes.

And the rightful fear was held toward Victor – its creator, its maker, the one person who should only ever offer comfort and guidance, love unconditional, as his mother had offered to him. Victor crumbled as he finally realised the verity: his creature was, indeed, the face of his greatest failure – not of his failure to conceive something intelligent, but rather of his failure to nurture what he had begat – of his inability to escape his own truest nature: he was a man, hard and barren, and the son of his father, successful in surpassing the sire in every aspect – even in his blind cruelty.

Chapter Text

Victor lay upon sheets of blue silk; his fists clutched the fabric with a force that strained the tendons of his fingers and burned the muscles of his arms. He could not see, for a mist of tears blinded his vision. Yet, he could hear hushed voices beyond the great hum of his own rushing blood, the violent, unequal throbbing of his heart, and the crackle of all-consuming flames vehemently lapping at his prostrate frame; he needed not see them to know them true, for he could feel his flesh searing, his entire body aflame with agony so great that nothing human could surpass it.

All sound became that of his own blood-curdling screams when a sensation blindingly painful tore itself from his core and revealed the true nature of his anguish: it was not borne from external forces at all – the scalding kiss of a flame was but the brush of a feather in comparison – but from within; it stemmed from his abdomen, from his very own loins: he could not escape it.

The tears in his eyes swelled until they grew heavy and ample, and finally shed; and he was granted sight: he found himself in a grand room, familiar yet unknown, surrounded by faces he could not place names to; they were men, dressed in fashions of decades past. Only one, severe and withered, stood out from the rest; the pale blue eyes set deep within that ashen face analysed his form with a scornful clinical detachment, and though Victor could not recognise them, he immediately sensed the cruel nature behind them and knew it to be true.

“The linen – bring it to me at once!” commanded the man to the anxiously rambling people around him, without once letting his gaze fall. Then, he advanced on Victor and brought his cold, wrinkly hands to the burning skin of the baron’s thighs and, consequently, Victor’s awareness to the shape of his own form; the revelation shook him: The aching flesh upon Victor’s bones was not his own: it was that of Venus – or perhaps only reminiscent of it; the bare skin gleamed a sickly, feverish sheen, the breasts ached tender and swollen, and the abdomen strained round and heavy with child. Victor concluded anon, his instincts abandoning all sensibility and logic, that the pulsating agony which coursed through his frame in molten waves of fever could be no other than the pain God had reserved only for woman, His punishment to Eve – the organ of the original sin – and every woman manhood had begat from her flesh after: the divine punishment for the sin of desiring enlightenment. Victor’s pains were those of labour.

The grey man wrenched Victor’s thighs apart with his tenacious grip that punished the pillowy flesh; Victor gasped and, invigorated by this blunt force, released his right hand from its vice on the sheet dampened from his perspiration and took it, trembling and clammy, to shield the now-exposed zenith of his carnal woe: Venus’ inguen. There, his fingers met not the offensive flesh of his own male organs but the dizzying and foreign, velvety smoothness of labia, and though the flames never extinguished, the sensation beneath his palm, curiously, flooded his chest with bliss, cool and soothing as the water of a brook in winter.

“She is bleeding to excess, doctor,” said one of the strange faces looking at Victor (or trying to; it seemed as though the mere sight caused the man nausea, wincing and flinching as he was between each failing attempt).

“I am aware,” dismissed the old man – the doctor – and pried Victor’s hand away to replace it with the dabbing of a wet cloth. Victor would have crawled away, shut his legs, shielded himself with his hands, but all strength eluded him; he could only lie there and feel as the damp fabric rubbed against Venus’ organ so broken and bruised that its sensitivity surely could not have been greater were it truly but exposed sinew.

A moan tore itself from Victor’s throat, his voice hoarse and barely audible even to his own ears as his pains surfaced once more. The doctor glanced up from his work, his icy gaze meeting Victor’s, and evaluated the baron, nay the accouchée, with something akin to contempt in his expression as though he were regarding someone more intimate yet lesser than a patient, ere speaking: “It is of no matter: the mother has served her purpose; the infant is now of greatest priority.”

The room swayed as Victor beheld his now retracted hand: the small palm and the dainty fingertips – even the delicate wrist – were all covered with glistening crimson, which bled ever into the bedclothes underneath him despite the doctor’s halfhearted efforts to contain; he could feel the fluid seeping from the tender organ as wax drips from a candle, oozing first amply with warmth, and then slowly cooling and clotting, until all is hardened and dry; terror fast made the baron ill, and he nearly thanked the tears which flooded his eyes anew for obscuring his sight, and the loss of blood for shrouding his consciousness and leaving him unable to sense the slow and torturous process of life exiting his core.

Alas, Victor’s agony would not cease, for a great wave of pain crashed over him once more, and he could only writhe and wail as the infernal flames consumed him from within; their summoner – the archangel he’d prayed to for his entire life – materialised into his crumbling vision, reached her sanguine hand toward him and revealed her horrible face: there, unburdened was the mask of a fair angel, lay only a rotting skull; she had become death.

And Victor screamed, and screamed still when he awakened within the warm cradle of his creature’s embrace and crimson sheets, and cried ever, when the arms around him stilled; halted was the breath which coursed within the body of his creation, yet the being did not withhold its touch, and though Victor should have been relieved by the small mercy, it served only to grieve him further; it had been terrified what could only have been moments before, violently torn as it had been from the oasis of comfort wherein it had spent the dawn of its existence. Yet, it had taken the body of the unconscious Victor – its creator, the maker of its misery – into its gentle arms.

Victor sobbed quietly and pressed his cheek against the mild flesh of his creature’s sternum when it renewed its caresses – faint and hesitant, but blissfully true; Victor brought his hands – not the hands of his father, nor those of Venus: his hands – to hold around his creature’s form. He looked up at its face then – the dried streaks of tears running along its pale cheeks, the rosy flush of its skin not from the careful bathing by the hand of its caretaker but from the remaining heat of upset, the faint tremble of its dark lower lip – and met its soulful black eyes, which were dampened yet with sorrow.

After a moment of heavy stillness, one of the creature’s tentative hands trailed from Victor’s back, along his spine, and up to the nape of his neck, where its fingers twined into the long locks of raven hair. A contemplative expression took hold of the creature’s visage, and a ghost of fear passed on its countenance – it nearly looked as though tears might have come to tarnish its beautiful face once more; and so they did: drops flooded the eyes which anxiously gazed at Victor with hurt; yet, as the creature caressed the curls underneath its palm – though not without painfully timid carefulness, which had not existed there before; it's touch for Victor had formerly always held a naïve unguardedness, which had now entirely vanished – its fluttering lips moved around silent vowels, until they could settle upon the desired mouthpiece and quietly utter:

‘Soft…’

Chapter Text

“Victor!” exclaimed the agitated voice of William as the hands of the same holder fiercely gripped onto Victor’s shoulders, “Has something happened? Has your illness worsened?” and, in a gentler, more apologetic tone: “You must excuse me; I let myself in, for you did not come to answer the door. I feared something might have happened to you... ”

Victor groaned as the sound of his brother’s voice – its sophisticated baritone accent usually so warm and soothing, and fitting for such a genteel man – pounded in his ears now like the shrill cry of a rooster. And, just as the offensive sound of the flightless avian, so did the voice of his brother pry Victor from slumber. His eyes, heavy yet with sorrow, opened to the familiar sight of his room: its colour seemed peculiarly banded as the bright light of dawn crept in through every small crevice between pane and frame which it could find, and thus entered as glowing pillars of dust-flecked gold. Its illumination blinded the eye, yet the corners and gaps of darkness between were left entirely wanting for the sun’s glorious glow; only the distinctive animal glint of two irids within the furthest corner of the room revealed there a third presence.

“My illness?” Victor questioned begrudgingly, though none of his focus could truly follow the progression of dialogue: his broken heart fluttered in his chest as he beheld the glowing orbs and, in turn, succumbed to becoming the object of their inhuman gaze, cold and unreadable.

“Yes – your fever, Victor,” said William, and placed a cool hand against the flushed skin of Victor’s forehead, “You may have denied it yesterday, but it is most evident now!”

The man rose from where he’d sat at Victor’s side and opened the pane before one of the tall windows, inviting light to pour in and wash away the darkness from all the room. The eyes which had watched Victor closed as the creature flinched at the sudden change and shielded its face with its pasty hand; clumsily held within the appendage was the model of Venus given to it the day before.

“Oh-” William stammered, dumbfounded as he noticed the creature; he briefly glanced at Victor with a questioning expression, yet quickly righted his posture, composed himself and continued: “It is of no wonder you should have fallen ill: the air is most stagnant here.” He unlatched one of the lattices and unclosed it; the outside world intruded into Victor’s room in the form of birdsong accompanied by the fresh smell and hum of the salty seaside breeze.

“You must bathe, Victor, for you are in no condition to travel in such a state; I only hope that you’ll recover sufficiently so that we may be allowed to part today.” Sympathetically looking at his brother, yet having understood him to be in no immediate peril despite his plight, the young lad chuckled and added with light humour, “I should believe you moribund if I knew not of your inclination for dramatics.”

Shooting a glare at his vexatious little brother, Victor rose into a half-seated position upon the bed, bracing the weight of his torso onto his arms, and hissed quietly through his teeth as the motion caused the sheets covering his legs to brush against the sore wound on his foot; Victor noticed then, that the blood he’d bled onto the sheets could hardly be distinguished from their deep crimson.

“You think me moribund? – Leave and allow me to expire, then!” Victor retorted dryly, outwardly indulging his brother’s jest, yet crushing his spirits inwardly with the heaviness of the true intention behind his every word.

William’s humour immediately dissipated from his countenance at Victor’s deprecation of his own self, and he spoke with utmost sincerity as he helped his brother with the firm aid of his hand: “Let one funeral suffice, Victor… We could not possibly return without you; I hope to be wedded soon, and I could not ask for more than your presence on that day.”

“Very well…” Victor muttered, blinking away the damp that seemed so awfully inclined to gather in the corners of his tired eyes as of recent. The black eyes, which had watched him from within the dark, would not seek his gaze anymore, and a tear formed despite his efforts, yet he caught it soon with a swift hand.

Worry cast upon William’s visage, but Victor left it unnoted and declared with faux-gaiety, “I shall need some aid in gathering my luggage.”

William’s countenance brightened at Victor’s words; it was as though a heavenly light had been cast onto William’s face when he smiled, for, with his light features, flaxen hair and bright blue eyes, Victor saw in him then not as the young yet becoming man he was today but as the ruddy-cheeked cherubian child he’d once been. With a squeeze to Victor’s clammy hand, William assured:

“I’m certain the driver will gladly be of service.”

A tepid bath was drawn and scented with floral oils; beside it on a stool were laid clean clothes. All was quiet except for the soft sound of water droplets falling from a leaking pipe onto the stone floor.

With the worries, which had incessantly plagued his mind for the last weeks, momentarily pacified by the assurance that William and Elizabeth would keep watch over the creature in his absence, Victor found himself in a position whose sensation he’d nigh entirely forgotten: he was alone – truly alone, for he was not just the only person within the grand room, which had once been his laboratory, but, with the creature sated and certainly much more at ease with the guests than it would have been with him, he was also unneeded, unwanted, and uncoveted: no grasping hands were there to seek the touch of his skin as though it were the softest of silks; no eyes were there to watch him and his every move – the entire world – with fascination and in turn, to show Victor the marvel to be found in everything; no presence followed him even when he’d rather be alone (he realised now that he’d only ever wished for a reprieve from all his unending tasks of caretaking – never from the being whom he’d taken care of); no voice was there to pitifully whine whenever Victor would fail to provide whatever was wordlessly asked of him; no lips were there to speak the sole word to ever have passed them – the name which he thought had been taken away from him by means of degradation and senseless abuse, but which had, in truth, only ever been given to him as spoken by those lips he’d himself created.

With these musings tormenting his soul, Victor lay in the embrace of the mild water, which soon lost its clarity as it became clouded with grease, sweat, soot and blood; the sanguine fluid seeped from his right foot as his vigorous scrubbing opened anew the partially dried wound. It caused him grave pain, yet he could not restrain himself from picking at the scabbed edges of the laceration with his overgrown nails, and – once he’d grown numb to the sensation, and all the crusted membrane had parted from the skin upon which it had formed like tufts of wool from a fleece – from pushing his digits against the sinew until a moan was torn from his lips as his pain eclipsed; he was left breathless and blissfully unable to diverge his attention from his physicality.

Minutes – or perhaps more – passed in that meditative state, ere he roused from his miserable stupor as William’s voice carried through the door:

“Victor?” the voice asked tentatively, “Is everything all right? You’ve taken quite some time…”

“Yes,” Victor answered, his voice an unflattering croak. The water had grown cold, and where physical pain had earlier served as a distraction, now it only heightened his anguish, the tremors of his aches like accents upon notes of woe. “I shall be there in a minute.”

The voice paused ere replying: “Great – we will be waiting for you in your room.”

And, with heavy limbs and even heavier spirits, Victor quit the bath and dried and dressed himself and the wound; he took a seat at the vanity he’d so often used in tending to his creature, procured with the familiar motions a razor and mildly scented shaving soap, and lathered the latter onto his beard (his earlier assessment of the state of his facial hair had been incorrect: no-one could mistake the coarse bristles of black and silver upon his chin for a stubble). Angling the small oval mirror so that only the lower half of his face reflected to him – he could not bear the thought of revealing to himself the atrocity which must have been the sight of his own visage – he shaved the hair thereupon, excepting only the whiskers of his cheeks as per his usual grooming habit; thus, bathed, dressed in clean clothes and somewhat combed, he nearly felt human once again.

“...for me? Thank you.” Victor heard Elizabeth coo, the sound echoing in the hallway as he walked toward his room.

‘Eliza-beth…’

“Yes – that is my name!” Elizabeth exclaimed, her melodious voice carrying into the hall bright as birdsong, “William, did you hear him?”

“I did,” answered William through a hearty chuckle, his words somewhat muffled by what must have been the bit of his pipe between his teeth.

Victor quietly approached the half-closed door, peeved by his aching foot and careful not to step into the light escaping from the room so as not to expose himself. Revealed to him was a scene exactly akin to the one he’d seen the day before and what had conjured to the eye of his mind now: William sat within the same ornate arm-chair he’d claimed yesterday and nursed at his pipe leisurely, the gaze of his brilliant blue eyes cast upon the creature and Elizabeth beside it, the two of them lounging on the carpet like children in their play. Held preciously in her small hands was something glowing a radiant orange in the ample sunlight: a dried maple leaf.

‘Elizabeth,’ his creature said with confidence heightened by her praise, its attentive eyes solely upon the face of the person whose name it called; Victor could not see her mien for she was seated with her back to the door, yet he knew that his creature’s regard must have been returned to it with a fondness likening only to that one could receive from their mother – the same fondness she’d once held for him.

“Well done!” Elizabeth beamed and glanced at her fiancé, revealing to Victor the fair skin of her rosy cheek and the smile livening her entire countenance, “Can you say William? Wil-lee-um?”

The creature watched Elizabeth keenly and silently tried the offered syllables. Alas, ‘Elizabeth’, it repeated.

“Oh, that’s quite all right,” she said through a giggle, her smile audible within her voice, and took one of the creature’s hands to hold in hers, “I’m certain you shall learn it very soon.”

The creature mirrored Elizabeth, its dark lips turning up into a coy smile.

‘Eliz…’ it started, only for its voice to die down before the third syllable of the name: as Victor shifted his weight, accidentally leaning against the creaking frame of the door, the creature’s gaze suddenly shot to the silent voyer of the scene, and its expression fast turned frigid as it looked at Victor, its eyes flickering as though struggling to recognise the man. Soon, it must have succeeded, for suddenly, it shied away with a low whine, covering its face with its pasty palms.

“What is it, dear?” asked Elizabeth as her hands sought the creature’s wrists in a bid for it to uncover its face. The strange spell of domesticity had been broken.

Victor, deeming clandestinity no longer of use to him, fully opened the door and permitted himself entrance.

“Victor!” exclaimed William as soon as he saw his brother, and stood up to greet him. His intelligent gaze rested upon Victor’s countenance for a moment, as though evaluating the transformation that had passed; he must have concluded the change was positive, for soon he remarked: “How well you look!”

Taking hold of his brother’s arm, William guided the baron further into the room. Elizabeth had turned to look up at Victor, her expression now void of all the warmth it had held only a few moments previous.

“Your creature here has proven your assessment of its linguistic capabilities quite wrong: it has spoken Elizabeth’s name,” William gladly declared, excited to share the news with his brother.

Victor hummed solemnly and spoke: “So it seems that it has…”

“Most of your necessities have been packed – I suppose we need not take all of your research at once, seeing as the experiment has come to a conclusion; we may send for them later, if you wish – and the coach is only waiting for my order to harness the horses,” said William, cheerful in anticipation of their return home, ignorant or simply oblivious to his brother’s low spirits. “Oh! And, by the by, has your…” William paused and glanced at Elizabeth. “Has he,” continued he, gesturing to the creature, “Some clothes we may dress him in?”

“Clothes…” Victor mused as he watched the ever-curious being, who, despite its timidity, seemed to study his ‘new’ mien with its black eyes peeking at him from between its fingers. Despite their outings, which had required its dressing, the creature did not have its own dedicated clothes: Initially, it had been difficult to dress its squirming and fiddling frame in anything but one of Victor’s longest overcoats, which, though intended to fall at the ankle and allow a wide breadth at the wrists, reached only barely the shin and cut off at the elbow as worn by his creature.

Yet the woollen cloak had sufficed for the autumnal noons atypically warm despite the persistent overcast and the proximity of the sea; thus, even as the creature hearkened over the days and slowly learned to stay still as Victor dressed it, he’d never truly faced the need to provide for it any other clothing (though the thought had passed his mind; but he was no tailor, and the idea of dressing his creation in the garments of the diseased soldiers – the only ones which could perhaps fit it more properly than the clothes Victor could borrow (Harlander’s had been out of question), its ‘easier’ scale be to thank – irked him completely). Sated as the creature had been even in its ill-fitting coat and the blankets with which Victor would swaddle it indoors, and in which it would burrow like a pleased cat, Victor could almost ignore the guilt he’d felt for failing in yet another task of caretaking.

“No; besides the bandages, it has only ever worn one of my coats,” he answered truthfully, if not a little shamefully, “My nightgown may fit if left unbuttoned; trousers will not, but perhaps breeches shall; and neither socks nor, should I believe, shoes are to its liking,” he added, recounting the time he tried to wrestle onto its ungainly feet socks which it plucked off as soon as he’d turned his back to it.

“Well, that shall have to do for now,” said William with his usual cheer and, in his placid smile, poorly hidden pity for his brother; it made the baron’s skin crawl. “I’m certain we shall come across a tailor more than willing to produce our friend some nice garments of his own; I believe there may be one as close as a few towns over: a young seamstress from whom I once commissioned a lovely tea-gown for Elizabeth. Perhaps we’ll spend the night there.”

Elizabeth hummed in agreement and stood to begin her preparations for the coming departure. Ere joining his fiancée, William gave a final squeeze to Victor’s arm and smiled as he spoke quietly:

“How glad am I that you are well enough to join us; I cannot wait to have you home.”

As William left his side, and Victor seated himself in the chair formerly claimed by his brother, the baron caught sight of something in the periphery of his vision: a tall mirror tucked into a corner had lost its draping in the bustling assemblage of his possessions, and, from within the glassy pane, looked at him now a man of decently groomed appearance, with his combed locks of raven hair, a freshly shaved face and clean attire, which communicated all a certain dignity despite the weariness of the countenance visible in the dark undereyes and cheeks wanting entirely of the ruddy plumpness of youth; and though Victor had indeed not looked as well in weeks, he had never in his life felt so unwell.

Chapter Text

The departure from the tower had felt as swift and sudden as the submersion of a swimmer jumping into frigid water from a tall cliff: Victor had barely realised the gravity of the change ere the coach had already travelled ten miles from the domicile which had been his oasis for the last months. He’d not even checked to see what it was that his brother had deemed to be part of the ‘necessities’ gathered; he knew not whether his diary had been packed, whether his new autumn coat provided by the generosity of his late benefactor had been gathered into his travel wardrobe, or whether his precious anatomical model had made it into the luggage–

Oh, but there it was! Victor idly noticed, as Elizabeth procured the small ivory figure from the pocket of her dress and gave it to the creature (from whom she must have gotten it in the first place), seated restlessly at her side and opposite Victor. The pastoral scenery moving with the brisk pace of the horses’ trot had kept the being’s attention rapt for a long while. But the current, monotonous stretch of freshly harvested fields must have tired it: no longer did it sit with its nose pressed to the window of the coach, both its eyes and mouth widened in awe and its breath fogging the surface, which in turn would cause the creature to huff and crumple its nose in displeasure of the sight becoming blurred. Instead, it sat hunched with its long limbs tightly pressed against its torso as if vainly trying to make their scale smaller within the claustrophobic space of the carriage, its fiddling fingers seeking and playing with every button, hem and loose string on the ill-fitting clothes donned onto its clumsy body; one of the silver fasteners on the familiar, dark woollen overcoat already hung only by a thread, which would surely snap as soon as the grey fingers were to find and pull on it just once more.

But they never did, for the fingers found new purpose when handed the model of Venus. The creature took it gently from Elizabeth’s small hands, but did not start toying with its many layers at once: it simply held the manakin in one of its great palms for a while, and then traced the lines of the stone face with the index finger of its right hand.

“Oh, yes – she is very pretty,” Elizabeth cooed as she observed the creature with the same fascination she had held when gazing at butterflies, her voice melodious but dimmed by her botheration in Victor’s presence.

Vexed as her coos visibly calmed and elicited a small smile from his creature, Victor huffed and returned to his musings, turning his gaze to the far-stretching golden fields, the dark and beautiful forests beyond, and the imposing, snow-clad mountains standing tall against the blue sky on the horizon.

Indeed, he reflected, he knew not at all what possessions he had with him on this long and certain-to-be torturous journey back to civilization: the only earthly possessions of which he could be sure, were the clothes on his back – the same ones he’d worn when he’d first visited the tower with Herr Harlander down to the very gloves, he noted, the only difference being the way in which the fabrics which had once hugged his form with tailored precision fell now loosely onto his withered frame – and the one book he’d taken with him: the binding of his hand-made anatomical sketches. He knew not why it specifically had been the one which his hand had so haphazardly found in the frantic departure, for it held no real value to him: every paragraph and note within it he knew by heart, and though they had been a great aid when he’d needed precision in mending various parts of a body together, he’d not for a long time used the diagrams for their intended purpose: for the last fortnights he’d only ever read them on late evenings, the heavy weight of a drooping head on his shoulder and attentive black eyes locked onto every detail, which his finger would point out from the drawings, so stubbornly refusing to close to sleep.

It sat now entirely untouched in his lap where it had been since they’d first settled into the carriage; Victor worried the cracks on its worn leather cover with his thumb as he watched the fields change from rows of wheat to rye, from rye to oat, and from oat back to wheat once more, all the while pondering the enigma of his last-minute decision to bring the book with; if not to find an answer, then to simply avoid thinking of the anxieties of an uncertain future.

And, though this dreary task tired him as no other, he could find no rest; the cart rattled and jostled his frame, and while the tremors of wheels turning against a well-trodden dirt road usually served to lull, this uneven and rocky rural path would always manage to violently shake the coach right as Victor would have nodded to sleep. Furthermore, William, who sat beside Victor with a newspaper in hand – however dear he was – seemed to have made the peeving of his brother his priority, as he mused aloud his thoughts and trivial remarks – which were unfortunately still not trivial enough as to leave wanting for a response, and that from Victor specifically when his fiancée would be too enraptured to give one of her own – on the article (something about the war coming to an end) and occasionally joined Elizabeth in entertaining and pampering the creature, who barely managed to contain its nervousness.

Thus, Victor spent the remainder of the drive in a strange stupor, a state between consciousness and sleep, where reality and visions intertwined and became indifferentiable from one another: At one point, Victor dreamed that the sun had set and night had fallen, only to awake with a jolt to a bright afternoon; at another, he’d closed his eyes as William read aloud the curious tale of a young soldier who had returned home wounded and so altered in phsyche, that even his own mother had believed him to be a devil wearing the skin of her son who had perished in the war, and hallucinated that it was his creature who spoke the tale and claimed it as its own.

After nearly thirty miles of these feverish waking-nightmares, which worsened only with every passing mile, the carriage finally arrived at a small lakeside town at the fall of dusk. Victor stirred fast from the drowsy state, no more rested than before, once the road turned to the hard surface of cobblestone, which the horses’ shod hooves struck with a distinct ‘clop’. Other sounds of the bustling town emerged soon: the rattle of carts and coaches passing by and the snorts of the horses and mules pulling them, the loud voices of conversing men smoking away their intoxication in the crisp air afore taverns and those of ruined women perched at the windows of their brothels calling bypassing gentlemen to perdition, and the sounds of shop-keepers closing their establishments for the day. All this town-life, illuminated by glowing oil-lamps, captivated the creature, who willed to watch and perceive everything, its eyes staying on one object for barely a second at a time, yet understood nothing.

“Please, make some haste!” William ordered the driver and spoke a few words in his fluent German, and soon the tired Friesians picked up their pace under the crack of a whip.

“We must not loiter if we wish to catch the seamstress today,” he explained in a softer tone, seeing as his sudden command had startled the other passengers in the carriage, “And that would be optimal if we wish to continue come noon tomorrow. I, for certain, would prefer that: the business needs tending to, and all this travel is terribly tiring.”

Elizabeth hummed conversationally ere she spoke: “I rather like it: the scenery can be so beautiful at times; and without the identity which we associate with our home environment, one is free to behold it untainted as it is. And he seems to enjoy it, too.” She turned to the creature and took hold of its hand. “Don’t you?”

It timidly looked up at Elizabeth’s fair visage, gently covered her hand with its own, and tentatively opened its mouth as if to utter a word, but silently closed it after a glance at Victor. The baron scarcely had time to grasp the meaning of this matter ere the carriage came to a sudden halt before a tailor shop.

“Oh, here we are!” William enthusiastically exclaimed and, barely waiting for the driver to descend from his seat and open the door, jumped out of the coach to stretch his agile limbs.

Though Victor had feared and expected much greater difficulty, after the initial shock of the young seamstress encountering the nervous creature, the transaction proceeded in an almost ordinary manner: the measurements were taken with practised ease as the creature curiously watched the seamstress’s every move, and the fabrics for every garment were picked as per what was fashionable and, more importantly, comfortable. And soon they were retreating to a nearby inn, where they would spend the night.

As Victor walked beside his brother on the quiet street, pained by his ever-aching foot and the effort to hide the resulting limp, following a few lengths behind Elizabeth, who led the creature by the arm, he whispered to the man beside him: “What did you say to her?”

“To whom?” asked William in a similar tone.

“The seamstress – she paid almost no mind to…” Victor hesitated, uncertain how to address his creature, but he needed not, for his intentions were understood:

“Nothing,” William answered and spared Victor a sympathetic smile, as the baron’s bafflement must have shown on his countenance. “The war has changed the people, Victor; I may not share Elizabeth’s ardour and passionate opinions on it, but I have seen it myself: men who come home scarred beyond recognition, made entirely invalid by unspeakable violence. Your creature may be peculiar in countenance and mien, but to people who have seen their fathers, husbands and sons return from the war with gangrene on their mutilated limbs and blood on their mauled faces, a scarred visage and mute temperament are almost a pleasantry.”

They walked the rest of the way in perfect silence.

Once they’d supped and finally retreated into their quaint accommodations – William and Elizabeth into their separate ones, and Victor with his creature – the baron truly felt the sickening weight of exhaustion creeping into his frame; he was glad to possess the adequate strength to disrobe himself, but undressing his creature, who shied away from his every touch and flinched at the sound of his voice, proved an almost futile task.

“Please,” he sighed when the being shrank from his touch and covered its face with its pasty hands as he attempted to open the buttons of its coat, “I am not going to hurt you; I just want to undress you – I just want to go to sleep...”

He blinked away the tears of frustration gathering in his eyes and unbuttoned the clothes despite the arms obstructing his attempts. At last, his creature was rid of the unusually many layers of its clothing and stripped to its usual bandagings, and Victor could retire to bed. But the creature moved not from where Elizabeth had led it; it stayed perfectly put in the middle of the small room, its black eyes flickering between every surface of the strange space, its posture tense as it hugged itself with its long, pale arms.

“Come here,” Victor beckoned, lifting the blanket in invitation for the creature to join him. Alas, it ignored the gesture and stayed still in quiet observation. The room was quite barren: besides the bed, it held only a small dresser, a bedside table, a chair and a porcelain toilette pushed into one of the corners; yet, with the way the creature ogled its every detail, every painting hung on the walls, and every adornment on the blue tapestry, one may have thought it the most captivating hall of a grand castle.

Victor huffed an exasperated sigh; with nothing better to do – or, rather, nothing better he could think of in his fevered confusion of mind, he sat up in bed and took into his hands the book he’d lain on the bedside table upon their arrival. He opened the cover, uncaring which spread he should find (it was one of the functions of the heart), and began reading aloud the notes scribed onto the pages.

He continued with this pursuit until the candle, which had provided him with the light to do so, slowly extinguished as the wick reached its end. He then pressed his head to the cotton-covered pillow, wishing for sleep that his ailing body stubbornly denied him.

After an hour of stillness, he hearkened to the shuffle of movement coming toward him and, ere long, felt a tentative weight dipping the mattress at the foot-end of the bed, and the blanket being lifted; the heavy yet careful weight crawled toward the head of the bed underneath the safety of the covers, and soon Victor could feel the touch of a wet-cheeked face pressing against his abdomen. Within that moment, Victor’s spirits were both elated and depressed at once; and, as soon as he was certain that his touch would not be fled from, he descended to where his creature had awkwardly crammed its body into the inadequate space of the lower-half of the bed and, to pull the being into a tight embrace, wrapped his arms around its torso, which had grown cold as it had stood so long bare in the chilly room.

His creature whined and twined its long fingers into the fabric of Victor’s nightdress as though to pull the man ever closer, but relaxed and quieted soon as sleep took over its travel-weary frame; Victor pressed his lips to its smooth brow, and fast followed it to slumber, certain that he’d never be able to let it from his hold again.