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spooky-space-kitty · 2 years ago

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Once Upon A Midnight Dreary

Fandom: Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Characters: adult!Henry Jekyll, regressed!Henry Jekyll, and an appearance from Edward Hyde

Words: 2,860

Summary: One of Henry Jekyll's experiments goes a bit unexpected and causes him to mentally regress to the age of four! What will Hyde have to say about this when he emerges? What chaos will Henry cause as a child?

Warnings: References to murder and claustrophobia: this is set during Dr. Jekyll's self-imposed isolation near the end of the novella. Unsafe scientific practices are a given, and there is some mild cursing as well. References to religion and hell.

For my friend Mikey, with apologies that it took me almost three years to write this story: but I'm glad your request led to a friendship! Sorry I only write you back once a week :P

The night is long, and Henry Jekyll’s eyelids are growing heavy with exhaustion. With a table covered in papers and measurements behind him, he leans over his workstation and carves a small portion of powder off a red crystal that sits on a transfer sheet. Gathering the dust, he carefully pours it into a shallow dish and drops it onto the scales beside him. His hands, Henry notices, are shaking. Whether this is from exhaustion or the extended anxiety of these past weeks, he does not know. But there is no rest from his work until the result had been attained.

What irony, that his fervent dream could become such a vivid nightmare. Henry holds his hands up and watches them tremble, relieved that they are his own familiar slim-fingered hands that are lit by the flickering candle-light. He has those half-shattered memories of different hands, moving under his control: wide-knuckled and dusted with hair, and covered in blood… covered in that poor man’s blood…

Henry does not cover his face, but only through concerted effort. His fingers are spotted with the red dust of the experiment, and the results would be skewed should it come in contact with his face or eyes before the steps were finished.

Instead he takes a deep breath to steady himself and turns to consult one of the papers on the chaotic desk behind him. Fixing the relevant measurement in his mind, he selects the correct weights and places them on the other side of the scale.

The two sides tremble for a moment, then come into balance. It is a sign of how often Henry has been working with this particular substance that he had been able to perfectly carve the amount required for the next step of the process. Any feeling of success he might have found is lost to the bone-deep exhaustion of guilt and too many sleepless nights.

He washes his hands in the basin near the stairs, dries them well, and transfers the measure of powder into a test tube, careful not to spill. This mixture is intentionally calculated to hopefully counteract the cruelty and evil that Hyde is a manifestation of: while none of this was trodden territory, Henry is desperate to find a cure. He has tried tinctures made to cancel out the original experiment, but he still finds himself changing into Hyde with no discernable trigger.

Now he is focusing on potentially bringing out a purely positive side of himself: an angel to balance the devil, as it were. It may be that the two mixtures would cancel each other out, leaving him safe from the danger of his- or Hyde’s- actions. Or this might lead to a secondary manifestation, one that could bring good things to the world in equal measure to Hyde’s evil. In his more lucid moments, Henry fears that he might lose himself entirely to these extremes: but then he reminds himself of the danger to society he has created, and knows he must take the risk.

Henry’s hands move nearly on autopilot, mixing the new experiment with the other fluids and powders he’s already prepared. At the end, he is left with a nearly purple-tinged solution, which fizzes against the glass.

He’s tested so many of these that he’s almost inured to the sour scent. Nevertheless, he takes a moment to breathe and centre himself before he forces himself to take the beaker and swallow its contents.

It burns in a familiar way, like acid on his tongue and down his throat. Nothing like the fire of alcohol: nothing like anything Henry had ever tasted before this fateful experiment began. Somewhere in his stomach, the burn dissipates as a tingling sensation spreads outwards from his core. Henry finds himself closing his eyes to focus on defining the feeling, a scientist to the end.

The tingling comes up his throat, crawling along his skin like invisible threads brushing against him, then cover his face and work up to the top of his head, and Henry

Is on the floor.

Henry opens his eyes, and finds the room around him dim. He’s lying down on a hard stone floor. Around him are papers and half-familiar equipment, like he’s in some kind of laboratory.

Curious, Henry starts to get to his feet, and immediately finds his body unfamiliar. Distracted from the scientific artifacts, he sits back on his heels and holds his hands up in front of him. It’s hard to say exactly what is wrong with them: too blocky? Too veiny? Too lined? Whatever it is, Henry is certain that these can’t be his hands: they look far too grown-up, somehow.

And Henry is only four.

Finally pushing himself to his feet, he looks down at himself and sees the clothes of an adult. They seem dirty, but definitely the long sleeves and pants that his parents would never put him in unless it was Sunday: Henry is very bad at keeping his clothes clean, which upsets his mother. Luckily, it seems that these ones have already been through a lot, so Henry doesn’t need to feel guilty about wiping his dusty hands on his trousers.

Henry runs a hand through his hair and finds it shorter than his mother usually cuts it, and greasier than he’s used to. Wrinkling his nose at the feeling, he wipes his fingers again over the leg of his trousers, then embarks to explore.

The room is full of marvellous equipment and strange mixtures, and Henry keeps his hands at his sides as he peers at them. It would probably upset their owner were he to touch them.

Once he grows bored of staring at glassware, Henry tries the door and finds it locked. Confused, he pushes the mail slot open and bends down to peer through it, which emphasizes the size of the body he’s found himself in. Through the little metal slot, he can see a dark garden, and the lights of a manor house beyond. Is he in some kind of shed?

Letting the slot close, Henry straightens up (his spine hurts a bit from bending) and notices another door, more hidden in the shadows of a bookshelf on the other side of the room. A little bit scared at the idea of being trapped in this room, Henry rushes over to the new door, barely avoiding tripping over his newly oversized feet.

Thankfully, twisting this knob lets him out of the little room with the science equipment and the fireplace. Henry finds himself in an odd little theatre, of all places!

He is at the top of one of two aisles, which lead down through the seats to a circular stage at the bottom of the room. Henry runs down the steps, curious about what he will find. This body is getting a little more familiar, and things don’t feel quite as scary as he might expect them to. Like there’s a quiet part of him that knows this space quite well, even though he can’t reach it at the moment.

And there’s little flashes of knowledge, like the pop of a photographer’s bulb. He knows the last three stairs will creak when he steps on them: he knows that the wheeled metal table to one side of the stage belonged to the person who lived here before. He doesn’t know why a person would need a metal table in a theatre, though.

Henry comes down into the circular stage, floored with stone and grout with an odd little drain in the centre of the space. He turns to the theatre of empty seats and thumbs his nose at an imaginary audience, then laughs and darts away to duck behind the table. He drags the table into the centre, the wheels rattling as they run over the stones.

The sound delights him, so he hits his hands against the metal top of the table until they sting with the impacts and his ears are ringing with the sound, like a metal drum filling the space. With a whoop of pure childish abandon, Henry runs up the stairs on the other side and continues his exploration through the second door.

There are two dusty empty closets, a door to a cellar that he shudders and closes, and a long tunnel that seems to go underground, but it’s lit by gas lights and Henry’s curiosity pushes him into it. At the end of the tunnel is another locked door. Henry finds a key on the ground, and picks it up excitedly, but it’s flattened and bent and won’t fit in the lock. Henry tosses it back into the corner of the hallway, frowning.

This means that there’s no way out of this structure, with both the doors locked and no keys in sight. Did someone trap him here? Or… did he trap himself?

Something about the thought makes his head hurt, and he can almost hear words at the edge of his mind, here and not-here in a dizzying contradiction.

Unsettled, Henry pushes the entire issue away and wanders back through the halls and the theatre to the original room. This is the only room in the building that isn’t chilly, kept warmer by a fire that burns in the fireplace. There’s a plush chair as well, which seems worn.

Henry grabs the poker and rummages in the fire a bit, happy with the sparks that fly upwards whenever he knocks over a log. Eventually, he takes another piece of firewood from the rack and adds it on top, mesmerized by the way the flames start to creep upwards and blacken the sides.

Once the log is well and truly aflame, Henry gets bored and stands up. He considers trying to kick the door, or breaking a window, but again that pressure at his temples starts aching, and he turns his attention to the glassware.

Now that Henry knows there are no adults nearby, no voices about to be raised in reproach, he visits the equipment with a smile and curious fingers. He pokes all of the powders, picks up various test tubes to sniff their contents, and plays with the metal weights on the scale for a few minutes, then uses the scale to catapult one of the smaller weights up in the air.

The metal weight comes down on the table, scattering equipment and breaking one of the empty beakers. Henry winces, then laughs. Destruction is a pleasure of the young. Remembering his mother’s harsh words, he doesn’t touch the glass shards, but carefully picks the weight out of the debris and puts it back on the scale.

Just as the plush chair is beginning to look nice for a fireside nap, Henry is overtaken by a sudden pain in the back of his neck, creeping up his spine. Trying to reach backwards, his body seizes for a moment, and then everything turns sideways and inside out and there is a moment of pure disorientation before Edward Hyde regains his footing.

Hyde only takes a moment to adjust before he starts laughing. He remembers the previous hour in a sharpness and clarity that he usually doesn’t have for the stupid doctor’s memories, but they are significantly more interesting than Jekyll’s boring day-to-day. The thought of Henry himself destroying his scientific equipment in a childish curiosity makes Hyde smile, even once he’s finished with his chuckling.

Hyde returns to the table and does the same thing that the child had done, slamming a hand onto the opposite side of the scale to send the small weight hurtling upwards. This time, it lands on the floor with a sharp cracking sound. Hyde retrieves the weight and smooths a finger over the small fissure it left in the stone.

He doesn’t feel the same childish joy in the action, but there is a certain pleasure to it that he acknowledges. The destruction is incidental: what Henry wanted was to see his actions have consequences. A child’s need to feel more powerful than they really were.

Hyde has no need for such play. He returns the weight to the table and knocks one of the test-tubes off, just to cause Jekyll a bit of trouble cleaning it. He’s perfectly aware of the fact that Jekyll’s experiments are their best chance at survival, and chooses one that doesn’t have anything important in it.

Hyde paces into the theatre, leaving the broken glassware where it lies. Being in the laboratory is nothing but frustrating. He could make a version of Jekyll’s concoction, but has no mind for the finer points of its refinement. Measurements and careful paperwork, the work of a man who seeks to put numbers on everything.

Hyde hasn’t bothered to change out of Jekyll’s clothes, and they hang loose around him. As long as he isn’t going out (which Jekyll has made certain of, damn him), he doesn’t care what he wears: their size difference isn’t so great that the sleeves get in his way once he rolls them up, and the belt is easily adjusted.

Walking past the empty seats, Hyde sits on the table in the middle of the operating theatre. It’s larger to him than it was to Henry, and his feet dangle above the ground. Hyde stares out at the missing audience, feeling the familiar anger burning in his stomach, directionless and bitter. He had been made to break the cage that Jekyll had walked into willingly, and now he had been imprisoned again: this time inside a laboratory instead of the back of Jekyll’s mind.

Hyde was not made to sit and brood. He was a creature of action, and there was nothing to do here in this dusty theatre. He envied the simple curiosity of the younger self that Jekyll had inadvertently set free. To be entertained by the simple sound of a metal table and a few hallways to explore. How little he must have seen at that age.

Hyde was harder to please, and getting ever-more demanding. He was hungry for experience, and all he received were the same four walls pressing closer. His unfulfilled appetite manifested in this frustration that warmed his stomach and made his fingers itch for something to pin and scratch and strangle.

Springing to his feet, Hyde paced the floor of the operating theatre, a well-trodden path. Damn Jekyll and his slow-moving work, damn his appearance for how it struck all who saw him and ensured his capture if he broke free of this oppressive space. If there was a way forward, Hyde’s anger was too blinding to allow him to see it.

Not wanting to take out further anger on Jekyll’s glassware, Hyde kicked the metal table across the room into the chairs in the front row. They were attached to the floor and held up remarkably well, but the resultant crash did draw a smile to Hyde’s lips. Humming one of his favourite drinking songs, he retrieved the table and pushed it back into the shadows, and returned up to the laboratory.

The warmth of the fire was almost soothing in this room. Hyde tossed two more logs on the fire and stretched himself out on the heated stone in front of the blaze. Jekyll preferred to sleep on the chair, curled into himself like he wanted to disappear, waking with sore muscles begging for their familiar bed. Hyde preferred the heat of the fireplace at his back, like a noon sun beating down.

Surrendering himself to the lazy pleasure of warmth and fatigue, Hyde drifted on the edge of his own thoughts. What would happen if he ingested the same mixture that Jekyll had? Would there be a child version of Hyde himself, or was there any distinction at all?

Being a child didn’t sound very entertaining to Hyde, but he also remembered how it had felt for Henry, how interesting the world had felt, how sharp the pleasure of exploring something that might be dangerous. He remembered similar feelings in his own time, venturing deeper into the dark areas of London, one hand on his cane and the other on his moneypurse.

Maybe it wouldn’t be that bad. To be a child for a while again.

Hyde yawned widely, showing his teeth to the empty room. Reaching up, he dragged one of the chair cushions down and flipped over to let the fire warm his front. Jekyll’s shirt gaped open on him, allowing the heat easy access to his chest. Hyde tugged it further open, tearing off one of the buttons in the process. He flicked the mother-of-pearl button into the fire and watched it blacken with soot.

Maybe he should throw all of his clothes in the fire, just to watch how they burned. Wouldn’t Jekyll appreciate the irony? Naked like Adam in the garden, before the invention of sin. Hyde smiled to himself as he continued staring into the flames, waiting for his time to run out.

Perhaps Jekyll would save them both. Perhaps they were doomed to the eternal flames. Either way, Hyde was content to lie here and enjoy the warmth for the time he had.

#FINALLY i get to reblogging the fic that inspired me to start using this blog again!!!#i left a more detailed/better written comment on ao3 but i simply must gush here as well #i audibly SQUEALED when i opened the j&h tag and there was an agere fic The People do not know how long i've wanted one #and to find that the characterization and prose is SPOT ON?#JOYOUS DAY #op if you ever write a sequel with hyde OR an agere fic with utterson caregiving or really ANYmore jnh agere #i will lose. my. mind. /positive #reblog #fanfic #jekyll & hyde #gothic lit #favorite

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