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msjarvis · 1 year ago

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He can’t remember the last time someone had managed to slide around his walls—bypass his common sense and begin weaving themselves into him. Javi also can't remember the last time he wanted something more than a win. Then came you.

Just... 🥹

The way they cannot function well without the other, Javi's frustration (poor shed 😆), Chucho being supportive, the yearning, that red string that connects the both of them, the pink shirt, her giving him crossword clues and everything in between...

Just... 🥹

I'm still watering the goldfish (😭) but it's ok.... 😂

Thank you, Jo... You wonderful, amazing, talented, awesome, incredible you.. ✨💖✨

x. oh, just to be with you

javier peña x f!reader | chapter ten of late night texts

summary: It's the year 2000. Javi is minding his own business on the porch of his pop's ranch when a text from an unknown number vibrates his phone. The only problem is, no one knows he has a phone and no one has his number.

chapter warnings: we're back to texts and phone calls. sorrowful!javi, two idiots pining for one another. fluff. flirting. continuous romcom vibes. falling in love. idiots in love. pls don't be mad at me ✨ wordcount: 3k.

text key: bold is you/reader | italics is javi

He's aware of everything.

How the porch creaks when he steps on it, the way the back door doesn’t quite meet the frame unless it’s locked. How the wind is knocking something else, far across the tall grass and fence posts.

Right now, his focus is on how his curtains don’t quite close. That they're letting the thinnest crack of moonlight cascade through his room. How the smallest luminescent slither keeps dancing in the breeze, yet it still lands perfectly on the propped-up photo strip on his dresser, highlighting the two of you, as though he hadn't committed them to memory.

Then came you.

Not that he complains that you're the exception. He'll never complain when it comes to you.

Having people close has never been his issue. It’s letting himself fall that he’s forever found hard. He can be a lover who makes a night all about the other; he can be a protector, shielding and doing what is needed.

It’s the parts after when he feels he clams up. A portion of him constantly weighing up risks, calculating the damage he could cause—either by a choice he could make or others—long before the city that housed Escobar.

Javi knew his reluctance had stemmed from before he left Laredo, but it was now carved somewhere deeper in him. Something you managed to find with relative ease and cut out of him as if it was nothing.

All smiles. All radiance and fucking beauty, with a laugh that could make his lips curl even if his bones are aching and his muscles are tired.

If he closes his eyes, he can almost convince himself that he’s back there, in the hotel room. Because even if you’d never been here, your room is full of him.

His bag of spilt-out clothes from your time together, slowly letting the scent of your perfume seep out across the room. Your jacket, hung on the closet handle, and the photos and sign you made on his dresser, all perfectly in sight.

you have nice handwriting I did try my best, sometimes I get lazy and letters blur together more. I like how you wrote baby Does this mean I’ve got the whole set now? Cause you like how I say it, how I write it, how I mouth it.

Even when he had known you’d needed to get some sleep, Javi had desperately wanted to beg you to stay up. Sending back a text here or there, already missing you so much more than he was sure he could handle.

He felt lovesick. Like the singer in all those songs that make people either stare at a loved one or bite back tears because they lost theirs. Suddenly relating to a sea of them he’s heard on the radio in the kitchen or hummed in the back of his pop’s throat.

Javi had been happy to see his pops, somewhat surprised he even came out of the house to greet him. But, as soon as his eyes landed on him, he became suddenly more aware of his old man’s age. Noticing the lines on his face, the ones that tell a thousand stories—not all of them he’s sure he’s heard. Curling into the hug he’d barely reciprocated before, unsure how to form the words to thank him for convincing him to go.

Naturally, he asks about you.

It’s more of an interrogation if he’s honest. He shows the photos, the ones now on his dresser, watching his pop smile as he continues to answer the array of questions, until he yawns for the tenth time in the space of five minutes.

“You should get some sleep, Pop.”

“I’ll sleep when I’m dead, Javi. Tell me more about your lady.”

Your lady.

Those two words stand out as if they’ve been illuminated in bulbs, twinkling and shimmering.

now youre back in reality you sure about us Never been more sure about anything, baby. just wanted to check You’re beginning to sound like me, worrying. left a mark on me Think that’s fair, you’ve left a lot on me too. Especially my chest.

“Tomorrow. Promise. The drive took it out of me.”

But Javi isn’t tired.

Somehow, he had suspected he wouldn’t be the moment he watched you leave.

For longer than he cares to number, he's struggled with it. Had developed an unhealthy live-able balance of it when he was working, something he managed to keep as a prize in his return.

Now, it’s different.

There’s an edge to it. As though he's now having to pay back the stolen sleep he enjoyed when he had been lay with you. When he slept with ease and not struggle. Leaving him feeling now like he’s in a lull, a dream. All aware, not in a daze anymore, noticing things he had never given much attention to before his trip out of town.

You had been so warm, so soft. His fingers gliding up and down your side, soothing you as much as it was him. But, you slept with ease. Falling almost instantly once you'd stopped talking, a little jolt and a soft sigh punctuating it.

Fuck, he misses you.

Thumb and index pinching the bridge of his nose, eyes clenched shut. Unsure how he's supposed to manage, and cope, until the next chance he gets to see you.

Till he gets to hold you in his arms, stare at your smile as it grows across your face or feels the light tap of your hand when he’s teasing you...

Something ugly curls inside of him. At first, soaked in sadness, before it shakes itself and burns bright with annoyance. Irritation. Anger at how unfair it all is.

How is it, after all, he’s given up—he’s fallen for the one person not even in his state? A person he had to say goodbye to hours ago, for reasons out of his or their control.

He almost snorts, unsure if it’s due to the tiredness or the reality that after all he’s faced, life would continue to be cruel and deal him such a hand. Tempted to get up, kick off the sheets and pull out the crossword from before he left town.

Javi doesn't. Instead, he closes his eyes, shaking his head—to no one but himself. Because he can't do them without you now. A promise, one given with ease.

He hears the whisper of the wind, the rustle of the trees. Something needling at him that if he wasn't so broken, this would be the perfect amount of quiet to fall asleep to.

Now, it's not the loud of a Colombian city he misses now. It's how your leg slides over his, how your breaths feel on his chest—how you twitch, ever so slightly, as you first fall asleep.

But, it’s the quiet as to why he hears his phone vibrate, practically darting out of bed, knowing it can only be you.

why aren’t you asleep?

Because I can't sleep without you. Apparently.

I miss you too.

I really hate this. I even miss you digging your knee into my hip.

told you that you’d miss it once it was gone

I feel like telling you that you’re right will mean your head will inflate.

youre right

One day, right?

if I could make that tomorrow I would

You really missing me that much?

not enough words in the world to describe how much, baby

Gonna make me cry.

dont cry I can’t wipe them from here

So not wise for me to tell you I cried the entire flight home.

did the person you sit next to seem to mind

They didn’t say anything until we landed. Then promptly told me that I deserved better.

so they thought you were broken up with

I think I may have led her to believe that from the amount I was crying.

fuck you like me a lot

I like you a regular, normal amount.

I don’t think I like you a normal regular amount

That’s the tiredness talking.

you know it isnt

I feel the same. I really miss you.

I miss you too but you should try to sleep you have work tomorrow

Okay, but so do you!

ill be fixing a shed or a pen baby you have to deal with people

go to sleep and then tomorrow we can call as planned

You’d told him that you suspected the first day would be the hardest.

Not the goodbye (and that had been fucking painful) but the following day when they were apart.

Javi hates that you’re right.

It twists inside of him how much he loathes it—grateful that he gets to push some of his anger into repairing the side of the shed. Hammer meeting nail, again and again. Each time with more fury than is needed, only worrying after whether he’s done more damage to the shed post than pre.

"Mijo."

He doesn't find a judgemental look, but one filled with sympathy.

His pop not quizzing him, just handing him a beer. A cold one, droplets descending down the can, sliding across his palm and down his wrist—attempting to soothe the boiling blood in his veins.

“It’ll get easier.” His pop tugs his hat down, shielding his eyes, before staring off into the distance. “When me and your mama first began, we couldn’t see each other all the time either.”

Letting out a sigh, Javi grinds his teeth. A sea of biting comments lathered on his tongue, all set to pounce, to poison.

Instead, he kicks the ground, swallowing most of them back. “She wasn’t hundreds of miles away, though.”

“No,” his Pop says, clapping his hand on his back—both for comfort and likely stability. “But we didn’t have landlines, or tha' other thing you do on y’phone. The tapping."

The tapping.

He doesn't snort, even if it sits at the back of his throat. Burying it in the liquid that slides down his throat with ease.

"Come on, ‘need to head into town, and my truck is acting up.”

Javi doesn’t question it, why he’s the one sliding into the passenger seat of his own truck.

If he’d thought about it, he’d have asked why the truck was acting up or why Pop was driving instead of him. But he doesn’t—didn’t. Just let it happen, staring off as the shades of grass pass him by, fingers playing with the cap on the can, twisting and twisting it.

To fill the silence, he rolls the edges of the can around in his hands. Crunching the sides every now and again, making him wince from the noise.

Then, he finds himself staring at the fingerprints left in the dust from you touching his dash—eyes catching sight of a hair grip on the floor near his boot.

He’s rolling it in his fingers when they’re back on the road, silence smothering them until he watches his pop turn on the radio. As soon as it springs to life, it becomes desperate to try and cut through it. The broadcaster mumbles about heavy rain and increased traffic, but he’s lost in a sorrow of sadness all cast by the spell of a good week to care. The fog around him making it hard to see the wood through the trees, never mind the hope through the misery.

“Dios mio. More trucks passing through now since the bridge opened. Y’noticed, mijo? So many.”

“Hmm.”

Eyes fixed on the grip, the one more worn on one side than the other—imagining your face, the night when he’d watched you take them out, face fresh, one of his tees on your frame.

Then, because the world isn’t cruel enough, the song changes. The radio playing a game with him now, as well as everything else, as he lifts his head, trying to focus on the road. Hearing the soft thud of his pop’s fingers on the steering wheel, his jaw tightened as the lyrics washed over him. Faintly hearing you humming along with the chorus.

Because he heard the song in the diner with you.

Heard it on the radio one afternoon, then again in the bowling alley—how it wrapped its tune around the two of you.

“Heard our song today,” he says, fingers massaging his temple.

He's thankful his pop said he had plans, the quietness settling over the rest of the ranch.

Before he met you, he dreaded the nights he was left alone. His thoughts gearing up, ready to pounce. The minor differences he could have made if he took a step back and stared at the facts, how he should have noticed how deep the corruption was—how much Colombia was taking from him, bit by bit.

Now, he tries not to grin when his pop says he’s going out.

When he’s left alone, allowed full reign to talk as loud as he wants to you—rather than being huddled near the phone, whispering like a teenager.

“Our song?”

“Yeah.”

Javi can practically hear you smirk. “And how does that go, charmer?”

He’s not a singer. Not by a long shot, but he does his best. Humming the tune at first, softly singing the words from the chorus until he trails off.

You snort, before you try to muffle it in a cough.

“You tricked me.”

“Maybe. But, just because I wanted to hear you sing.”

Smirking, he pulls the phone from his ear—shaking his head—before replacing it back to hear you add:

“You have a beautiful voice.”

“Fuck you, baby.”

Your laugh rips from you, hurtling down the phone right to his soul—making fireworks explode in his chest and warmth kiss his nerves.

Because now he can imagine what you look like. Likely head thrown back, eyes closed—nose scrunched a little as your hands grip onto something for leverage.

And it was beautiful. You’re beautiful—your laugh and your smile. Something he feels he should have said long before now. He’s about to rectify that, when he hears it merge into a sniffle—veering into tears and half-suppressed swallows before a noticeable little sob breaks through—as his throat dries instantly, closing.

Turning, he places his palm on the fall as he tries to keep his chest from tightening. The knot in his chest, the one he suspects is tied to you in some way, constricts, pulling taught around his lungs.

“I—I miss….”

You sniffle again, louder. “I've been looking forward to this all day,” you whisper, voice catching, words struggling to fall as sweetly as they usually do. “But, is it bad for me to say that phone calls aren’t the same now I’ve had the chance to be with you in person?”

Leaning his forehead against the kitchen wall, Javi wipes his chin. “Took the words outta my mouth, baby.”

He hears you chuckle, almost both heavily and heavenly, before you ask about his day.

He rambles because it’s easy too. You listen, lapping up every single thing. Hearing about his trip to town, his pop making jokes—trying, desperately, to crack through the mist that had descended.

“How was yours?”

Then you sigh, all tight. You tell him about Aish and her interview, before your voice softens as you begin whispering about the prep you’re doing for your interview. He’s about to comfort you, when you continue about the asshole you work alongside has been taken out for lunch by your boss and that you snagged your favourite pair of tights on a desk.

“But, enough about that—guess what I’m wearing?”

Smiling, he bites down on his knuckle, Javi lifting his head, groaning as he tries to think. “All of your clothes at once? Anything else might short-circuit my brain.”

“Won’t tell you then.”

“No. Please. Tell me, baby.”

He hears you move, and is almost sure he can hear you swallow. “You realise that you’re missing something, Javier?”

Fuck, the way you say his name. How it drips from your tongue. Laced in lust and swirling down the phone line to his brain.

He quickly tries to think of his washing, the piles he made—the attempted sorting. And it hits him. His eyes widened, head half-lifting, feeling his eye twitch.

“Fuck—“

“Yes. I’m sat in that. And underwear, of course.”

“Hermosa…”

His throat is dry, painfully so. Mind arranging an image of you from the days he spent with you. And fuck.

“Wasn’t sure this shade of pink was my colour, but I was wrong.”

Jutting his jaw, he closes his eyes—picturing the sight of you. The underwear he’d had the chance to peel off of you, the way it set against your skin—now, accompanied by his shirt on your arms. The buttons are likely undone, showing off more skin than he can currently process thinking about.

“It’s nice on my skin,” you whisper, all honeyed. “Be better on my floor.”

Clenching his fist, he bites his lip. “Baby…”

“Maybe I’ll show you one day.”

Snorting, he traces his teeth with his tongue. “You better. Now, tell me about the underwear.”

“Only if you can answer six across. Clue: now.”

Mouth parting, his jaw rolls to the side, eyes picking a spot on the wall. Thinking. And thinking.

“Want an extra clue?”

“An extra? You're spoiling me.”

He hears you giggle, low and in your throat. “It’s an Italian word. And, ‘I want to see you… blank—“

His eyes flick up, a smile spreading. “Pronto.”

“Correct,” you reply. “Seven words, silenced. You did this to me when you had your mouth on my—“

“Shushed,” he says quickly, fist clenching, trying to stare at the mark on the wall again, and not let the image of you populate in his head.

“You okay, baby?”

Gritting his teeth, he sighs. “You’re devious, you know that?”

“I think it’s your shirt. It’s making me… flirty.”

Grinning, he turns on the spot, back against the wall—head tilting up, eyes closing. “I miss you.”

“I miss you too….” your tone softer, frayed at the edges. “I’m kinda glad I stole your shirt.”

“Me too. Means I get to see you to steal it back from you.”

“Off me.”

It comes out quickly—purposefully chosen, spilt.

Frowning, he opens his eyes. “What?”

“Off me. You’ll have to steal it from my body.”

Grasping the phone, breathing through his nose, letting out a murmured, “Fuck, baby,” under his breath.

AN: for all those wondering if they'll be together in person again, they will. i am a happily-ever-after kind of writer unless otherwise stated. but it was so important to me that they had a magical week, and then returned to their lives.

#mvtthewmurdvck #javier peña x reader #late night texts series #fanfic writer appreciation post #if I keep watering the goldfish I will need to buy a elfin' aquarium #but it will be worth it #damn the talent of this girl amazes me

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see-arcane · 2 years ago

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The Strange Case of Mr. Hyde and Mr. Harker

The problem of the potion has been at least temporarily solved. Issues of supply have been erased with the aid of the League of Extraordinary Gentlefolk, enough so that triple and quadruple doses can be had...and often they must be. It seems the clock is still ticking down on the ever-imbalanced nature of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, even with a potential sea of the damned elixir to drown in.

It isn't until the night they see what looks like a kindred spirit in action that hope begins to simmer. After all, they had already known the young man before this.

If Mr. Harker can turn from concentrated kindness to the Thing crawling on the walls on a whim and back again, surely he must have some tips...

(For those not in the know, this is a sizable ‘what-if?’ scenario based loosely on the premise of The League of Extraordinary Gentlefolk comic-in-progress putting its roots down on Tumblr, a glorious public domain mega crossover and antidote to Alan Moore’s unpleasant take on the idea. Shout out to the amazing @mayhemchicken-artblog for all the fantastic work already put into the project.)

Ao3 link here

It was in a way almost as extraordinary as stunningly mundane how the mess began. Truly, its inception started long before the League took what mercy it could on him and his condition. Bless Utterson for his mercy, bless him for knowing Norton and his inexplicable wife. Bless Van Helsing, the dear old wonder. And bless, of all shocks, Mr. Harker.

The last time he’d seen the boy had been when Utterson had been cornered into something resembling a birthday party by his colleagues. It was the work of Peter Hawkins, may the old fellow rest in peace, who had conned poor Gabriel into thinking it was a mere talk of professional advice and the bonus of a drink. Instead, the trap had sprung in the form of a veritable horde of his friends assembled under Hawkins’ roof, the route of escape blocked, somewhat sheepishly, by young Mr. Jonathan Harker. Jekyll could still picture the lad as he’d been that day.

A trim fellow, long in the bones and with a curiously elfin edge to his features that stamped him as almost more fetching than merely handsome. His hair had been a solid brown back then, dark as burnt chestnut with eyes to match. Brief as their meeting was, Jekyll had been one of many in the silvering members of the party to wonder why Hawkins had brought his clerk along. A wonder that was followed by an increasing gladness that the young man was there. Not only for the fact that—as it became obvious—Hawkins had adopted Harker in all but law, nor even the revelation that dear tight-lipped Gabriel apparently knew the boy for better than a decade of his brief years, and was as warm with him as if he were blockaded by his own nephew.

No, what thawed the codgers among them was the fact that, like a flower gave off a scent or candle gave off light, Jonathan Harker radiated a feeling of whole and unvarnished kindness. He did not simper up to his seniors for their wise counsel and tales of the legal battlefield, fishing for footholds on the career ladder. Truly, Jekyll had winced over the boy’s politeness when he was ultimately pounced upon by the orators among them, ravenous to share their horror stories with fresh ears. He only broke this decorum whenever a maid or servant came round; staff he knew by name and helped deal with whatever dish or drink was brought in. At one point he cleared a plate and immediately disappeared to interview the cook for her recipe.

“He collects them for his fiancée, Miss Murray,” Hawkins told them en sotto voce. “They want to be able to make all they like themselves. I’ve known her half as long as him. A sharp girl, and as smitten with him as vice versa. If the country at large could ever see those two together, it would doom the prospects of every bachelor in the land, for every bachelorette would see what lies they’ve been fed about matters of love and wifedom. Husbands see their women as a nanny, wives see their men as a chore, but those two? They are Cupid’s own work.” A crease had formed among the half dozen already on the man’s brow. “Poor boy wants to marry her not long after he graduates to solicitor. I think he would set up camp in my office just to work around the clock to have pennies enough for the ceremony.”

Utterson had tutted over his own cigar, eyeing Hawkins with that placid steel that was the constant default of his gaze.

“Poor boy, he says.” Jekyll had nearly gawped at the ghost of a smile creasing under his beard. “As if you were not already gift-wrapping him a castle.” Hawkins had thrown a fuller grin back.

“Hold your tongue, Gabriel. That’s in confidence until he finds out the next workday. Let’s not give him a heart attack in the midst of your big day.”

“It would make a good distraction. I could run for the doctor…”

“The doctor is in,” Jekyll reminded. “And there is no escape. Now, what castle do you mean, Peter? Surely not the Transylvanian—,” But Hawkins had waved and shushed as Harker returned to the room, tucking a recipe in his pocket. Warm hours had rolled on and Jekyll became increasingly convinced of the lad’s nigh-tangible fug of friendliness. A less charitable mind might have likened it to the inviting presence of a chummy dog bred for slavering love, or perhaps some pampered fool so swaddled by good fortune they knew no better than to give and expect mirth.

But no. Jonathan Harker was neither hound nor coddled. It was simply his nature. A nature that, heading home and resuming his toils in the laboratory for the night, Dr. Henry Jekyll had found himself envying as much as shunning. Oh! To be so clean in conscience and intent that it could be felt like a sunbeam! It was the kind of absurd froth churned out by sentimentalist plays and soppier penny books. Such people did not exist. Certainly not among men.

Certainly not in himself. Try as he might. Rather, try as he might not.

It would almost be worth it, he thought, to merely obliterate the dregs of his uglier desires in a chemist’s form of spiritual surgery. Cut it out! Burn it out! Dissolve his evils into foam and let him spit the bile into the sewer to make him wholly the good Dr. Jekyll his friends and fellows believed! Ah, but he was too greedy. Too enamored of those unexercised ills to dabble in that direction. No, duality it must be. He would have his cake and eat it too.

Even so, Jonathan Harker remained a small smiling mote in his memory for days afterward. Like a grain of sand caught under a nail. Minor, yet unignorable.

So good a soul it could be felt. He wished the lad well. Wished harder that they would not meet again. And so such might have come true, but for the coming of Edward Hyde and the impending nightmare of their lopsided coexistence. That damned salt! It was a miracle that the keener minds that Utterson had brought him to could reproduce what they could from the potent crumbs remaining. The last granules of the stuff had been too paltry for a final concoction but enough—God, just barely enough!—to divulge the impurity that had empowered the original batch to begin with.

Thank God, thank God, thank God—

“Dr. Jekyll?”

He had nearly jumped out of his skin. A waste it would have been too, being so freshly regenerated to its proper form. Droplets of sweat and tears flew from his unshorn cheeks as he jerked around. And there was Jonathan Harker. Possibly.

The young man was remarkably changed since the last Jekyll had seen him. There was a greyish undertone to his pallor that brought the freshly dead to mind alongside a surreal impression of ancientness in the features. As if he were merely a stone carving of a young man that had weathered centuries versus the actual model. Most startling was the duo of hair and eyes. Brunet had washed out to a silvery white while the eyes—

Jekyll could not be sure it wasn’t a trick of the light, but a shine had come into them that made him uneasy. His thoughts turned sickly to those nocturnal beasts whose stare reflected moon and lamplight like polished coins. Seeming to realize he was staring, Harker blinked and whatever spell there had been in his silent apparition was broken. Though it made a slight resurgence when he laid his hand gently on the older man’s shoulder. The fingers were so cold he might have taken them straight out of a snowdrift.

“Doctor? What are you doing here? What’s wrong?”

“Ah. It seems to be quite a reunion in this place.” He gave a hoarse noise that was not quite a chuckle. “I should ask you the same, young man. Who did Hawkins have you dealing with on his behalf, hm? Mephistopheles?”

It was meant as a joke. The spike of chill in the resting hand and the hollow gleam of the eyes suggested it was too near to truth for the young man’s liking. And there was something in the air. Some perceptible shift.

Jonathan Harker radiated an antithesis of what Jekyll had felt that day in Hawkins’ parlor; the same feeling that had come off him in soft waves just a moment before. Jekyll could not name the sensation as anything but an intrinsic warning. A metaphysical flash of a poison frog’s spots or the rattle of America’s desert snakes.

Take heed. No closer. In fact, back away. Quickly.

It shuddered up his spine and needled his hindbrain with ice and nightmare. He felt Hyde himself squirm within him. Kneejerk cowardice before a threat now elevated by a hundred.

But then, as quickly as that wretched bristle came, it was gone. Jonathan Harker even managed a weak smile. He was pure amity once again.

“You could say that. I bet my story is longer than yours. I’ve just returned from,” Jekyll caught him hastily adjusting his coat to cover his hip, though not fast enough to hide the handle of a startlingly large blade, “some business outside the city. No time for updates from here. If you can stand to share it, I should like to hear what’s happened to bring you to our door. Though only if you’re up to it.” The words were in earnest. But still.

“It is too much to say, for how little there is to tell. You would take me for a madman even if I spoke the truth. I would babble. Ask your friends, the doctors. Ask Utterson.”

“If you prefer it that way.” Experience honed each syllable. The eyes gleamed again, if dully. “But I have more reasons than most to hear out a man’s so-called babble without judgment. I was worse than that once upon a time. But privacy matters more in some cases. If you don’t wish to tell me, I won’t go fishing for the story from others. Just know that I am a member here. There is no tale too tall for me to hear and I have heard and played a part in many. All of us have. So. Would you prefer a drink and a talk? Or just the drink?”

As always, duality won. Drink and talk it was. Perhaps too much of drink, for it seemed to wash away all sense on his tongue.

Harker stirred barely an inch through it. He frowned over the poor child, of course. A cloud moved in his face when Jekyll spoke of that so-near miss with the battered Carew, Hyde having been startled from his full attack by a far more piercing cry of terror than any blunt plea or yelp from the old man. A keening voice so high in fear that the sex of the victim could not be guessed; just as the voice that Hyde and Jekyll would swear could not have its species guessed.

“It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God!”

A declaration that somehow echoed in the brain without reaching the ear. In more than mortal fear, Hyde had abandoned his murderous project at a run. All delight in the evil was spoiled by the desire to put distance between himself and the voice that was not a voice. It was some thin boon, at least. He was stopped short of a crime that would see him sent to the gallows. Though prison was unquestionably on the table after both the witness of that maid in the window and the description from bruised and broken Carew.

“But even so! Hyde truly wished the man dead. That much I have never dreamt of even in my most hideous whims. Profanities, yes, awful fancies, but the perverse has never tipped over into bloodlust. That being so, I cannot even tell if Hyde could want to kill for killing’s sake or to commit the act solely for the danger it would bring on me. Revenge of the anti-conscience, as it were. I think he would not be so bold again. Not with so cold a logic as his. Surely not against,” Jekyll had swallowed, “not against one so important. But I fear that he might try other quarries out of sheer petulance now that the question of the salt is solved by better men than us. Than I ever was. He will see it as fresh allowance. Either by accident or intention I feel he will push our luck again. No, I know he will. And none of the secondhand joys he once gleaned for me are worth it. I know it, I know it.”

Poisons danced in his head. Razors. Ropes. Pistols.

“They should never have bothered with the salt. I should never have made my plea to Gabriel. I should have let the rot of Hyde take over, let myself wallow for lack of the potion, and then, come the inevitable, both our weaknesses combined would take the cornered animal’s route, as we both deserve.” He peered blearily down into the latest emptied glass. His reflection shined in distortion at the bottom. “Perhaps we will.”

“Don’t.” Harker’s voice fell on him like a stone. “Never take the final solution when others remain before you. Death comes to all.” Then, under his breath: “To most. There is only the matter of waiting and filling that time with the trials of better options. You are a man of science as much as the supernatural. Many of the scholars under this roof are. Is it not your habit to seek new routes where old ones fall short?”

“What? I don’t…”

“The potion is your only catalyst for the moment. Your only switch between one side and the other, and one that has been growing faulty in potency as Hyde takes on weight. If that’s the case, then the solution to your control must go beyond that swill.”

“You make it sound simple.”

“It sounds like exactly what it is. Difficult. But also the only option a brilliant man can take when cornered, unless he means to cheat himself and leap straight to his end.” Again the cool hand returned to his shoulder. This time the chill was a mild thing compared to the thaw that came off the young man’s face. So young and so wretched at once. Jekyll felt for a moment like the younger man beside him; a boy weeping over a thorn in his foot, comforted by an old man bristling with broken glass and nails. “It will be hard to hold out. I know. But try first, Dr. Jekyll. Please.”

“I believe we must already be past titles, Harker. Henry is fine enough between us.”

“Jonathan for me, then.”

The cool hand fit in his own and shook.

That might have been the end of it. It should have been. There was work and practice enough to do on so many fronts. Hyde to wrangle, appearances to juggle. Busy, busy, busy. Perhaps if he had stayed indoors that particular fog-thick October night, all would have stayed as it was.

But he did not and it was not.

He had gone out for the sake of being out with stalwart Utterson in tow. Comforting as his friend’s presence was, he knew the gesture to be a mere safety line. Just in case, old man, just in case. Better to have cover of night for an excursion—just in case. He had insisted Utterson carry a weapon, concealed he knew not where, also just in case. Both men had grudgingly agreed to the others’ terms, both with matching sorrow. The melancholy of their once-golden friendship might have remained the sole trouble in the air but for the noise.

A miserable, glottal, hating, half-human noise that became a choir of gibberish wails and cries. There was no language in the mess that either could detect. Only senseless, slobbering anger. Growing closer. The moon broke through the clouds and gave better light to the situation just as the mass spilled into their street. The horde of them turned from a bruise in the mist to a sea of crisper human shapes. They were hulking men, all of them. Some wore their stature naturally. But others—some unspeakably grotesque others—did not. As if they were patchworks slapped together in monstrous proportions. Parts bloated by muscle or by too-long architecture of the bones. Some—Jekyll gagged to recognize this—had surplus anatomy to the point of seeming like abominations of man and insect. On top of it all, preceding their legion even through the merciful veil of the fog, was the stench.

Decay. Carrion. The chemical stink of mortician’s fluids and even fouler injections.

“Henry,” Utterson said in a tone pressed flat by shock, “I believe those fellows are dead.”

“I believe you’re right, Gabriel,” Jekyll returned, though with a tremor. Yes, the men stomp-shambling toward them were quite dead. Some fresh, some half-grey with decomposition, some dribbling the odd maggot or chemist’s juice. But dead. All dead. Their dead eyes spotted them standing frozen like sheep before the slaughterhouse. The dead saw. The dead surged.

In the same instant, so did panic. It leapt in Jekyll like a living thing—for it was. Fear shuddered, melted, wracked him with so sudden a spasm of change that it struck him with the brevity of a slap. And then Jekyll was Hyde and Hyde was running.

“Move, Utterson!” he had presence enough to shout, for the other man was still rigid where he stood. No, not quite. Digging in his coat for the weapon. A pistol, no doubt. “They’re dead you damned idiot!” he barked over his stunted shoulder. ��Run!” But Utterson was never a man to run back in fear, but forward. So he did. So he shot. So he blew the liquid brains out of the nearest dead man—who kept running.

Jekyll screamed within Hyde, pleading, haranguing, think, think, think you selfish devil, think what loss it would be to them both to lose a friend, an ally such as him, when they were already anathema to Lanyon, Hyde, please not Gabriel, not him, damn you, not him, if you help no one else, not even your other half, help him and save yourself pain later, please, please—

Before Hyde could even pretend to listen to the shrilling in his head, before he could fully register that Utterson was about to vanish under a tide of hateful revenants, his finer senses snapped his head upward. Something else was in the fog. It clambered deftly as a spider along the brickwork of a high building. Through the murk, something flashed. Eyes like bright coins. Where the fog thinned, the moon lit on a head of pale hair and a gleam of steel.

What happened next would have been too fast for ordinary eyes. Hyde caught every heartbeat.

The crawling thing on the brick clambered down, leapt, and cleaved the nearest corpse’s reaching arms off. Followed by the top half of the skull, sending a far more impressive puddle of grey matter flying. Butchery ensued as a pale blur mottled itself with discolored gristle and ichor, some of which seemed to glow as it gushed from those few opponents that risked coming near. And there were but few. Dead though they were, the horde drew back as the pallid figure turned its attention on them. Some even clambered over their brethren just for more distance. Even standing where he did, Hyde could sense the reason.

Dread. Warning. Death is here. Come close, meet my eye, and suffer the consequences.

Not the aura of revulsion and disgust that was his own foul possession, that loathsome birthright that brought as many people running after him for violence as made them cringe and sneer away. This was a miasma of such cold promise of demise that it bordered on the tangible. A veritable perfume of concentrated fatality.

Hyde wanted to run from it and its owner. But not as much as Hyde wanted to see it. Especially as recognition finally revealed the executioner’s identity. His face came clear as he spared one hand to release the kukri blade to latch onto a nearby head and slam it against a wall, bursting skull and scalp like a gruesome egg.

The figure was Jonathan Harker.

And yet not.

As if in a trance, Hyde found himself reversing his sprint to follow the carnage as it was herded back and away down the alley from whence the mobile dead had poured. Utterson made some noise at him and tried to grasp his sleeve. He shook the man off as one would a gnat. Onward, onward, chasing the Grand Guignol scene into the night. And oh, oh! Such a scene! Such a play!

Neither Jekyll nor Hyde had ever been ones for theatre, but this was a show of phantasmagoria that stirred the very worst of rapture in their shared heart.

Harker was joined in his culling of the dead by some horde of ghoulish women, matrons and crones and a single dainty maiden, their nightdresses all stained with the spill of undead veins. Where Harker unmade the horde with blade and bare hands, the ladies ripped them asunder like wolves tearing into fatted calves. Beyond them, a giant of amalgamated pieces stormed through the last ranks of the army, seizing some squalling man clutching an ugly book and a bouquet of syringes to himself. The man hollered things in a reedy voice that sounded like so much madness. A tirade of godhood, of necromancy, of a living world owned by the dead who were owned by him, bow and obey you idiot thrall—

The giant broke his speech quite neatly with the breaking of both the man’s arms. Hyde had to stifle a laugh at the resulting squeal. The whole display carried all the comic weight of the fool characters Shakespeare always peppered his tragedies with. An entertaining distraction. But not so diverting as the second deaths of the cadavers. All had been put down but for some twitching. The lady epicures were seeing to brisk disposal as Harker wiped his blade clean and sheathed it. He stood like a pillar amid the viscera and viciousness for one glorious moment. An ivory Hades overlooking the Erinyes as they devoured back the unruly dead to their proper state.

But between one blink and the next, Jonathan Harker was the dear young man from the League. Hyde could sense the change the way a hand can tell a texture of gravel from silk. The boy looked on the scene with green at his edges, and picked his way deftly through the carnage until he reached the youngest girl of the hungry mass. She too was stepping back from her work a bit shaken. Shamefaced, even. A blip of sour hope rose in him—Oh, dear, what would Mrs. Harker think?—but no, the two were chaste as nuns with each other. Dull. There was some logistical stuff to do with the broken-armed would-be god of the dead still wailing at them and the giant.

Hyde recognized other familiar faces, as well as some new coming out of the makeshift battleground’s metaphoric woodwork. It was a wonder no heads had poked out of the windows to see the fuss. Jekyll would learn later that they had something of an expert in selective drowsiness and perception via an honorary member; the mention of whom made Seward red in the face. Hindsight would connect two and two and reveal the exemplarily voluptuous young woman in the cartwheel hat as their psychic cover. There was very little else to see, bar the giant and some of the company toting the raving fellow away—a fellow who suddenly found reason to keep opinions to himself by way of freezing looks from giant, ghoul, and Harker alike.

“Hyde..?” He did not jump. He’d felt Utterson coming and turned pettishly to face him. The soft old thing had even put the pistol away; though he saw his aiming hand had not left his pocket. “I think we ought to head back.”

“For another hop back to the good doctor. Oh yes, of course. Can hardly risk anything out of doors, can we? Not even in the midnight fog.”

His eyes slid back to Harker, now chatting with something of camaraderie and uneasiness among the carnivorous ladies. They cooed over him like any ring of spinsters over their siblings’ children come to visit. Harker endured them with all the charm of a pup. The thing upon the bricks, the thing that had made slurry of the undead, was gone.

“You never know who’s out in the dark.”

Once back at the League, still picking cadaverous giblets from his hair and fingernails, Jonathan Harker found a hostage situation waiting for him. Of a sort.

“He won’t drink it,” Griffin told him. “The little terror’s always fussed about it, but now he’s like a toddler facing his greens. The lot of us meant to hold him down, only he insisted he was waiting on you.”

“Me?”

“You,” from Jack. He was pacing, his lancet twiddling back and forth over his knuckles. “He made it sound as if you had some business to discuss.”

“That would be something, seeing as I haven’t shared more than three words with Hyde. None of them too polite either.”

“Even so, he’s sworn against taking his medicine without a fight unless you speak to him.”

“I can’t imagine what about. Where is he?”

“Utterson, Art and Quincey are keeping watch on him in the parlor.” Griffin sighed. “If you’d like me to ‘dress for the occasion’ and step in as backup…”

“Wouldn’t matter,” said Jack. He turned the lancet over so it caught the light. “Hyde would know. Higher senses, remember?”

“I’m sure it’s just some whim of his. Jekyll probably had some thought turning over in his head and that passed onto Hyde.” Jonathan tried to think back on what few crossings he’d had with the doctor since his introduction to the League and found all memories to be singularly benign. “Perhaps I upset him without realizing—?”

“Oh, he’s not upset.” Jack again. His eyes were almost brighter than the lancet with his own musing. “In fact, he seemed…eager. Giddy, almost. He says you’ve inspired him.”

Confusion redoubled in Jonathan to the point that he wasn’t certain if he was awake. The residual reek of West’s handiwork was too pungent for a dream, however. So:

“How, exactly?”

“He wouldn’t say. Only that, ‘It has been hard to hold out. But after seeing how Mr. Harker takes his condition in stride, now he is willing to try something new.’ Does that mean anything to you?”

“It might, if he’s referring to what I think he is.” The words left him placidly enough, but Jonathan felt a squirming cold turn over in his belly. He had thought he felt another presence nearby as he and the others went to work—one of a familiar odious quality. But there had been so much happening in the fray and aftermath that he’d disregarded it as a hiccough of his own senses overworking themselves. Apparently not. “Anything else I should know?”

The empty space where Griffin’s head was and was not turned to face Jack. Jack mirrored the motion. Then nodded.

“He says he wants witnesses. To quote directly, ‘Fetch as many of the doctors and scientific tinkerers on hand that you can. Even that Dutchman hack. We shall need their objective opinion when it happens.’ Van Helsing is out of the country and so it’s just down to me and Seward for His Majesty’s demands.”

“I see. But when what happens?”

“The transformations, he said. Emphasis on the plural.”

Edward Hyde was waiting for them on one of the divans. He sat quite alone, but for Utterson who dared to take the nearest armchair. Art and Quincey had posted themselves to block either exit of the room. When Jonathan stepped in, Mr. Hyde straightened to his full diminutive height. His smile was a grimace despite its earnestness.

“Mr. Harker. Thrilled to see you, young man.”

“Mr. Hyde. I wasn’t aware I’d earned your esteem.”

“You hadn’t until tonight. Ah, and here are the good doctors. Better doctors, let’s call them, to give due credit over my other half. The invisible man may have lost to his experiment and the head rattler may be lost to his own mental ills, but at least they aren’t such helpless things as old Jekyll. But neither a mesmerist! A shame. Van Helsing might have been instrumental in our show. Still, I believe we can manage. Seward, I trust you won’t mind us borrowing this for the duration.”

Before Jack could ask what he meant, surprise and annoyance flickered across his face as Hyde produced a clinical thermometer from some sagging inner pocket of Jekyll’s coat.

“When did you—?”

“Oh, Jekyll had a passing thought of asking to borrow one for his own testing. The thought passed on to me. He was curious if there was some recordable shift in temperature that might serve as a tell between one phase and another. A fever spike, a chilling drop. Hard to tell these things when your body is melting up and down. Not that it would matter to know, of course.” He waggled the thermometer before their eyes and his. “The old fool just wanted to have something new to record for his notes. Useless trivia though it is. He’d already guessed it right.”

The thermometer went on the low table before him. While the mercury was descending, it did so from a mildly high reading above the norm.

“There’s a minute increase in temperature. Stress increases heart rate, sets sweat rolling, setting a body simmering. Less the transformation’s fault than the mind’s. Harker.” Again that unctuous grin turned on him. It felt like grease on his eyes. As the little man grinned, he nudged the thermometer further across the table until it faced the adjacent couch to Hyde’s. “Keep that on your side.”

Taking the hint, Jonathan found a seat on the couch. Griffin and Jack bookended him.

“If this is about my hands being cold, then it’s a fair bit more pageantry than the revelation deserves.”

“No, not your hands. Hardly a worthy tell. Anyone with poor circulation can claim a chilly touch. It’s for the sake of your neighbors. We’ve no proper thermostat to use, but even the finicky sensor should prove the point to any doubters.”

“Of..?”

“You and I sharing similar situations, Mr. Harker. Not of the exact caliber, not of the same roots, but cousin conditions just the same. I did not just see you in action tonight. I felt you. Just as clearly as all the curdle-faced company here can feel me, albeit with different results. I revolt. This can act as a call to arms as surely as it might repel. But you?” Hyde clapped his hard palms together in delight. “Oh, you were death walking. Crawling, leaping, slashing, smashing—but Death just the same. A meat grinder on legs, sweating the guarantee of a painful ending in the air. That was you. Rather, the other you.”

Again, that cold twisting in the bowels. Something icier prickling behind his eyes. Jonathan quashed both and buttressed his expression with reinforced civility.

“I think you may have been smelling the spillage of tonight’s unpleasant work,” Jonathan said, gesturing to the rainbow of stains on sleeves and shirt. His coat had covered much, but the mess was potent. “As for the rest, I don’t see how said work deserves your praise or prose. I have picked up some unique traits over time. Some by necessity, some by, I will admit, pure mystery.” He was aware of the others’ eyes on him. Jack’s especially. “But I use them only as anyone would use their skill against an enemy. I am not two people. Just one person who reserves his grisly ability for when it's needed.”

“I didn’t say you were two people. You, cloying heap of sunshine and milksop courtesy that you are, are Jonathan Harker. The other you is not a someone else, but a something. Just as I am.” His oily gaze shifted from Jonathan for a moment to regard the others in the room. It paused for a not insignificant while on Utterson, who frowned sadly back. “Unless you lot truly believe in a more charitable outlook than Jekyll’s? That I am my own man and not a tumor with caricature opinions? An abscess of a homunculus vomiting out another man’s—a true man’s—worst intrusive ponderings? No, I did not think so. Assuming I can think, of course. Regardless, I am a Thing. Just as what I saw turning the living dead into mincemeat was a Thing.”

“Cogito, ergo sum, Mr. Hyde. You think, therefore you are. Enough to have a name. Enough to work against the will of the man you share a life with.” Jonathan gestured at the whole of him. “You exist as a person.” Hyde produced a low noise that must have been a laugh.

“Who do you mean to hearten with that sentiment, Mr. Harker? You or I?” The grin peeled up and back until the gums bared. “Or her? Good Mrs. Harker who kept her own souvenirs from her time as Count Dracula’s Bride-to-be? I am no head doctor, but it is plain to anyone even with a borrowed brain that the dear Miss Martyr must fret terribly over her own level of humanity. She seems the type—,”

“Is there a point you want to get around to?”

Hyde eyed him with some strange balance of wariness and glee. Then he leaned forward as imposingly as his stature could allow.

“The point is you cannot fool me, Mr. Harker. You cannot even fool these dullards’ simple senses when you are so close. Though I can’t tell yet if you’re actively fooling yourself or not. Denial is a powerful drug, after all. So. Are you going to admit yourselves as plural?” Hyde paused here to pull Jekyll’s notebook from another fold of his coat, as well as a pen. He flipped the former open and posed the pen above a clean page. A bead of sweat shined on his brow as he did so. “Or must I prove you both? It should be said now that I do not wish to. I quite despise taking such a risk. But the reward is worth the gamble.”

Jonathan fought down a sigh and an urge to massage away the headache now threatening like a storm in his temple.

“I’m still lost as to what you wish to accomplish by proving some sort of dual nature in me. I am always myself. When a threat arises, I am still myself, just focused on the task at hand. Would you call, for the comparison’s sake, a butcher two individuals because he behaves one way at home and another while he divvies up the cuts?”

“Butchers have a vocation and a professional mien,” Hyde hummed. The pen began to scratch across the paper in halting strokes. “But they remain themselves in mind and body, nature and supernature. I clearly do not. Nor do you, subtle though the change is. I have learned thoroughly how I am to the human eye. Confusing. Deformed without deformity. I am small and strange, but presented in a picture, I would pass as a mere man. Yet I am different. I feel different, needling those atrophied senses that the rest of the animal kingdom still owns in full measure. As the dogs bayed when your Dracula came ashore, the human mind snaps and growls at my presence. I am hated.” The pen scratched, scratched. “Even were I to be a saint among men, I would be hated. You, lucky lad, won a far better lottery. When you are not loved, you are feared. As neatly as dousing a lamp or lighting it. If you do not wish to call it a physical change, then dub it metaphysical. But the change is there. It is real. And I can prove it.”

Hyde took a bracing breath. Exhaled. Then turned the notebook to face Jonathan.

“See?”

Jonathan saw.

And Jonathan changed.

He would not notice it at the time, of course. The world was made too narrow for him in that moment. All that existed was Edward Hyde and the message upon the page. Its content was curt. Its implications sordid. All with Mina’s name at the center of what Hyde imagined happened before Jonathan was stirred on that hellish hour of October 3rd. A fuller list of fluids shared with the Count. Perhaps even a thrill to go with them. Perhaps, the note suggested, Hyde would see to her needs one night. Be she awake or asleep. Jonathan was gone so often, capering with his fellow monstrous ladies. Hunting for the same high of those naughty Weird Sisters and their supple kisses? No blame, Mr. Harker, and no trouble. Yes, Hyde would be glad to see to the missus while he was away. And if she declined, well, perhaps that new boy over in Whitechapel, that Ripper fellow, might just pay her a visit instead—

It was bait. Of course it was bait. Some part of him acknowledged it straightaway in the moment, and the whole of him would admit it later on. But there, here, now? The more pressing notion was that Edward Hyde had thought to even suggest any of it. That there was a possibility, however great or small, that he might decide, on a whim, to act on what was written. This would not do.

Inside the space of three heartbeats, if not two, Jonathan Harker and Edward Hyde were no longer sitting. They were not even within the wide circle of the seating area. Jonathan Harker stood facing the nearest wall with one hand outstretched. A hand that was locked like a hangman’s hug around Edward Hyde’s throat. The smaller man’s face was rapidly turning red as his hands scrabbled at the column of the strangling arm. Stout as he was, his heels could only kick at the air and drum the wall. Somewhere on another planet, voices were raised and feet were running near.

“This—!” Hyde gasped. “You!”

“Me,” the word left Jonathan like an ice chip. Someone put their hands on him. Jonathan turned his head at an angle to face them—Utterson, Art—and saw both men’s faces snap out of concern and into—

Fear. Fear. Fear.

—a paralyzed dread so familiar that he recognized it as if seeing a mirror—

—the head turned, and the eyes fell full upon me, with all their blaze of basilisk horror. The sight seemed to paralyze me—

—or else a certain residual vision in the Transylvanian snow. Mina had written it in kinder words than it had deserved—

—nothing seemed to stop or even to hinder them. Neither the levelled weapons nor the flashing knives of the gypsies in front, nor the howling of the wolves behind, appeared to even attract their attention. Jonathan's impetuosity, and the manifest singleness of his purpose, seemed to overawe those in front of him; instinctively they cowered, aside and let him pass.

Purpose and impetuousness had been in attendance, perhaps. He had not been thinking of anything beyond the former. But he had seen well enough. Seen the slack and freezing terror that he had worn once upon a time, the shovel falling from a nerveless grip. Yes. He knew the effect well.

He certainly knew it then, seeing Art and Utterson halt and lurch back from their grip. Another noise came from Hyde. An airless chuckle.

“See! See! So—ughk—so-good-to-meet-you.” Red now tipped toward purple. “Lie-now-Harker. Say-you-are-unchanged.” Bloodshot eyes went glassy. “If-we-live-if-you-let-us-live—,” His mouth worked mutely a moment, straining on its last drops of air. “Teach-him. Teach-the-damned-doctor. How-to— How—,” His jaw worked dumbly and his hands began to fall away.

“How to what?”

“Change… No salt…”

The eyes began to roll up. Jonathan released his hold. Hyde fell to his knees, gasping. In the peripheral, Utterson plastered a hand to his own heart. Griffin, Quincey and Jack were closing in.

“The salt,” Hyde whooped through greedy intakes. “We are both so…so damned sick of living and dying by the salt and its potion. If I am…if I am truly born of his mind, I should be able to be suppressed…as easily as a thought or whim… That has been his fixation…control of self, of me, beyond being collared to the chemist’s lab. Ha…” He peered up at Jonathan with a mix of dread and hate and a bitterness that stretched so far it nearly circled around to sorrow. “…Indeed, I do want the secret for myself. I am a coward. I desire no fight I know will cost me. Just as all living things have a coward buried in them. It is called the ‘survival instinct’ out of politeness and only the suicidal may say they have grown out of it.

“I wished more than anything to be Henry Jekyll dying in your hand, whatever you are. Harker. Reaper. What-have-you. If I were, the sight of the good man strangling to death would have fished the bleeding heart back to the surface and we would both be saved far sooner. I do not even know if I am saved now, or running the clock until you reappear at another hour and divorce our head from its neck without witnesses. Or wrench it off, I suppose. There are a good many villains out there to shift the blame to. With dear Utterson’s pitying exception, your whole little club and the world at large would be only too glad to alibi you or sing your praises.

“I do not want to die, even as I do not want to rage as a prisoner in my maker’s skull forever. But to win the former, the most vital need, I know I must buckle to the latter. It is a sickening way to be. A Thing born of raw desire, having to bow under millstones of necessity rather than want. I hate it. I hate him. I hate us. I believe I even hate you. You, with your good frame and pretty face, drawing soft looks like flies one moment, sending armies running in another. All with Fate’s own gift-wrapped boons of our dead friend’s inheritance to his feigned son, the childhood beloved so fetching and wedded, and the lion’s share of supernatural winnings from your brush with the undead nightmare while your comrades came away hobbled or robbed.”

Hyde had enough saliva now to spit, and he did. He ducked his head after. It did not quite hide the shine of other wetness dribbling down his face.

“Yes, I do hate you. And I hate the hating. And I hate that I hate it. Impulse needs relief from itself, my fellow Thing. So teach him. Teach the idiot Jekyll how to play Cronus and swallow his mind-son whole and vomit him out as needed without the crutch of the potion before we are left choking down a pond's worth every hour.” He tried to spit again and only managed a cough. Something clear dripped from his cheek. “It is the only way we can exist.”

Jonathan considered this. More, he considered Hyde and what he could see of the man without and the man within. For the same reason he could tell where Griffin stood or his unseen cat padded, he could all but see the conjoined lives within that single unhappy body. Edward Hyde appeared to be less a cyst upon the soul of Henry Jekyll than a belated and malformed sibling in an unthinkable womb. If Hyde had truly been the manifestation of Jekyll’s below-the-gutter impulses at the start, that had been the impulsivity of an infant. Innocent and immediate in his wants, but with the ability to act on them with the faculties of an adult.

Except time had done to Hyde what it did to all children, no matter their leaning—it had taught lessons. It had fostered the need for deeper thought than the self-destructive mantra of, ‘I want, so I will.’ He recalled Jekyll’s talk of Hyde carrying a cooler reason and more cunning action than he thought himself naturally capable, just as he'd explained his suspicion that Hyde had contorted from the mere acting out of his constrained desires to something ‘inorganic.’ As if this child-brother born of the potion had festered into some base malignancy.

As Hyde put it, ‘a tumor with caricature opinions, an abscess of a homunculus.’ If the latter term had been mere theatre, it also brushed against something of Jonathan’s own suspicion: a homunculus. An inorganically made human in miniature, produced by alchemy. He had nearly had his ear talked off alongside the others as Van Helsing and Griffin went into a frenzy of theorizing while making plans to track down and interview the specific chemists in charge of making that initial tainted and powerful salt. There was, perhaps, a true Jabir ibn Hayyan working unawares in a lab somewhere; an unwitting collaborator with Jekyll the Accidental Alchemist.

But the mention of alchemy had focused only on the chemical potential, not what it had already made. Not an aberration, not a mere runaway subconscious full of ill and intrusive urges not his own.

Edward Hyde was a dwarf in a flask of flesh and he was, against his best wishes—wishes he had even outside of Jekyll’s hindbrain daydreams—congealing out of a Thing and into a Person. Enough that he had pounced upon realizations and plans ahead of any possible idea from Jekyll. The doctor had not been the witness-without, had not been the one drawing connections and harvesting a grim crop of hope and, most unthinkably, risking his life on the off-chance of goading Jonathan into putting his own dual states on display. Even taking this last as a display of ‘survival instinct’ entering a gamble for a reward later, to not wait until after the potion and Jekyll’s less volatile shield was between himself and any violence, to use his own ill nature to bait the hook, spoke too much of a calculation and grudging willingness for jeopardy that didn’t line up with either Jekyll or Hyde’s estimate of the little man.

In short: The plea had not come from the doctor. Nor from his own under-thoughts. It was Hyde alone who wished himself jailed and put on Jekyll’s mental chain, dragged in or out on his whim.

Unless he wants such a trick for himself, whispered a cold voice in him. It never raised its volume. It rarely spoke at all. But whenever it did, it did so with frost on its breath, speaking up from some lightless place below the cellar of his mind. Can you put that past him, nascent villain that he is? If he mastered such a thing better than the doctor, he could turn Jekyll into nothing more than a respectable costume to wear, donned only for the drudgery of work and safety while he stole ownership of their life’s greater bulk. True, he is a wanted man on the streets out there. But there is precious little to stop him arranging things to transplant himself and the doctor in a new country. One where he is unknown. And there is Mina to consider.

Cold burned in him. His hands folded into stones.

If he is a man, let him face a man’s consequences. If he is a monster, let him face the same. Why should he have more mercy than the demons that laughed as they killed and did worse? Why should he deserve any charity of your effort, your straining camaraderie? Why?

To the cold’s surprise, an answer was waiting:

Because, Jonathan thought back, there is Mina to consider.

Her. Lucy. All the people who had existed before, and yet within, the horrors they had become by dint of transformation. Even now, he still could not help thinking…

“Harker?” He blinked. Quincey was watching him. No fear sat in his face, only concern. “You with us?”

“As if you have to ask,” Hyde muttered to the carpet. “You felt as much before you saw his face. Good Mr. Harker doesn’t bite friends. Heh.” The greasy look slid back up to Jonathan’s face. “Under most circumstances. When it can be helped. And you’re trying to decide what circumstances these are, are you not? Does the Thing get help or get euthanasia, Mr. Harker? Do you—,”

But Jonathan had already turned his back. He slipped out from under any hand that tried to fall in his shoulder or steady an arm.

“Harker. Harker, answer me. Will you help or not?”

Walking.

“Harker!”

Walking. Waiting.

Hyde made a last hateful noise. It was almost lost among the others’. There was a rush of feet, great and small. Hyde coming close. Rushing, rushing—

Jonathan turned as Hyde swung. He had snatched up Utterson’s walking stick and aimed its heavy end at his head.

In a single motion the stick was caught neatly in his free hand.

The other was already occupied with driving into Hyde’s face like a granite block wearing a wedding band.

Jekyll woke to a muddle of sensations. The most pressing of them was the tang of the potion sticking tackily to tongue and palate, the comfort of a bed, and a throbbing pain so immense it had clearly brought him out of whatever pain-killing stupor had been applied. That hot ache sang its way outward from his right cheek, half-swelling his eye and tormenting his upper jaw. When he brushed the gauze swaddling it—oh so gingerly, yet even this sent thunderbolts through the spot—the flesh there was puffed with injury.

Memory sloshed like a thick soup in his likewise-aching head. Memories that might very well have been a lucid dream for all the sense its scenes made through the haze of drug, sleep, and pain.

“…Hello? Is anyone there?”

“Yes.” Jekyll jumped and promptly cursed at the fresh pulse of agony the twitch caused. Seward was sitting in a sort of half-gloom caused by the low light of the room’s lamps. Jekyll gave a brief thanks for that. His head and eye stung terribly, and a space at full brightness would have been a misery too many. He groaned and cradled his face. “Should I bother to ask how you’re feeling, doctor?”

“Like I ran my face into a girder, doctor.”

“Worse than that, I’m afraid. It ran into Jonathan.”

Like that, memory snapped into full focus. Jekyll groaned again.

“Oh, God. That all really happened, didn’t it?”

“I’m afraid it did,” Seward hummed, his gaze dropping to an open book in his lap. His left hand was obscured as he gently tapped some utensil along its pages. Jekyll couldn’t tell what the volume was in the low light, but he took it for one of the younger man’s sparsely used notebooks. The fellow was addicted to the ease and oration of the phonograph as a rule, he knew, and to break out a journal for the purpose of his notes suggested either a desire to let Jekyll sleep, or else not to let him overhear his thoughts. Seward's line of sight flicked back up. It was hard to tell as much except by the raising of his head, as the lamps caught on his spectacles in a way that obliterated his eyes with light.

“Where’s Harker? I need to apologize, I need to…oh. Oh, no.” Jekyll had been scanning the room without realizing it. Something of Hyde’s prickling senses had leached through to him, insisting another guest was present. Or should be. But it was only himself and Seward and no— “Where is Gabriel? Did he..?”

“Still in the building,” said Seward. His left hand danced along the same page. Over and over. “Talking with the Harkers. Thankfully, neither he nor Jonathan decided it wise to have this present during the chat.” From behind his volume, Seward brought up Jekyll’s own notebook, his thumb opening it to the latest page’s message. Shame and vertigo and deepest darkest self-loathing roiled in him at the sight of it. “How much of this was invention on Hyde’s part, Dr. Jekyll? Because if even a syllable of it was spun from your own fantasies…”

“No! Jack, God, no!” The cry strained on his cheek and he bit back another wince. Carefully, he went on, “No. He improvised that. While our more,” his throat almost closed as he tried to get it out, “perverse wants do swing towards the carnal, such have never skewed toward violation.”

“Just as they have never skewed toward homicide? Or want of homicide?”

“That was different. Carew was the spasm of violence from a bully restrained to the edge of madness.”

So he believed. And, he decided against mentioning, the very nearest he and Hyde had ever come to aching jointly for plotted versus kneejerk violence before the freak instant of Carew was a hunger to visit such on those who made sport of violation. A caveman’s take on righteous sadism, true, but if there was any ounce in Hyde he might mistake for virtue, it was that.

Aloud, he continued, “All he put down there was concocted just to goad Harker into—into what you saw.” Jekyll looked up from his lap, where he’d been hiding from Seward’s glare. “You did see him, didn’t you? The other Jonathan?”

“Yes. We all did. Just as we saw the thermometer.”

“And?”

“Unfortunately, no change in the reading. Despite every man in the room swearing by a feeling of sudden cold when Harker leapt at Hyde. Gooseflesh abounded. Freezing animal fear arose when he turned his lambent glare on anyone who tried to pry him from his attack. I will even grant that I felt dread like a tangible effect pressed into me. However, none of this was a great surprise. Certainly not when we have seen such before, both in action and in stillness.”

Seward snapped his volume shut with a sharp clap. Jekyll noticed two things.

The first, that the volume was not a mere notebook, but a bound compilation of typed pages and newspaper print. Its front was stamped with the brand: DRACULA: Entries Concerning the Events of May 18—to November 18—.

The second, that Jack Seward was not holding a pen. It was his lancet. As with the glass lenses, the metal soaked up the ambient light until it seemed to glow in his hand.

“Which you already knew.”

“What?”

“Doctor. Van Helsing and the others may have granted you some snippets of the events that transpired in our past. The Harkers may even have given away some portion. But none of us, even with all our stunted mentions combined, would ever have divulged enough to inspire this particular bait. And so I checked the safe where this was kept,” his fingers drummed upon the volume, “the one of records both sentimental and historical. I imagine he was disappointed to find it so bare of more enticing contents. Nothing but glorified memorandum in that one. Hardly worth picking the lock, but for the joy of entertaining literature.”

“Seward—,”

“It was put back in its proper place, of course. No sign of disturbance. But for this.”

Jack Seward held the lancet at a new angle that flaunted its fine point. There was a tell-tale twinkling crust on one edge.

“Perhaps it was caught under your nails or stuck to a fingertip. Either way, there are only so many in this building who would bother handling this particular salt. Van Helsing and I have not opened the safe in months, and neither of us have combed through these pages since it was first tucked away. You might be able to convince me Griffin was the culprit…”

“Assuming I gave half a damn about prying into the other peoples’ penny dreadful backstories. Which I don’t.”

The voice of Griffin was there. Somewhere.

“Dr. Griffin..?”

But the invisible man did not speak again. Nor did he see fit to don the giveaway of a robe. Seward showed no reaction to this. Only scraped the lancet’s blade clean on his trousers before making the steel dance and flash in his fingers.

“We’re talking about you, Dr. Henry Jekyll. And company. Feel free to start explaining. Or, to save your jaw, I shall hazard a guess. You knew Jonathan Harker long before the vampiric nightmare came to call. Even at his most benevolent today, he is leagues apart from the young clerk you knew in those days. Curiosity gnawed. And via Hyde, that curiosity was allowed to bite. Enough to pick the lock, have a look, and replace the ledger before anyone knew he’d been there. A comparatively harmless vice, all things considered. Was that the rationale?”

“…Yes. Yes, it was. More, we—he—I—I-I don’t know—it seemed fair as it happened. All our hideous history had been poured out in a grovel while we were left in the dark about the people who now held the key to our survival. It was a petty act and it fed into a vulgar one tonight. I’m sorry.”

“Sorry stretches only so far, there, Henry.” Griffin’s voice. Somewhere. The right one moment, the left another. “It wouldn’t have stretched nearly far enough if Carew had died. It won’t stretch at all if you suffer another slip and Hyde, who is surely, truly not powered by your nature, decides to pitch another fit against whoever’s at hand. I doubt if he expected or even wanted to beat Harker’s head in. There’d be no chance of coaching from a dead man, after all. But hey. Maybe he didn’t care. Maybe he was going for another murderous tantrum.

“Just like maybe, just maybe, he would try the same on others here. Or out there. Why not, if he’s careful and quick about it? If he thinks he can get away with it the same way he knows he’d get away with Utterson.”

“What are you—?”

Seward leveled the lancet at him like a pointing finger.

“You might trust Gabriel to take an emergency shot at Hyde in a life-or-death situation, Dr. Jekyll. But from the start, there has been little question that Hyde, whether acting on your hindbrain or his own suspicion, doubts your friend could ever pull the trigger. He also gambled on the saving grace of good nature that is Harker’s default. The ‘true’ Harker, versus his apparent other half. Because Jonathan Harker is so very skilled at his dichotomy. His shifts. His extraordinary abilities that, try as I and Van Helsing might, we have never been able to explain. Man and monster. That is all Hyde can see as far as threats beyond the reach of law.”

“Terribly short-sighted of him,” Griffin hummed. Close. Too close. “As if anyone less obvious than the gallows or a solicitor with a sword were nothing to worry about. We are all heroic types here, after all. Nothing to fear from we bleeding hearts and misfits, right? Not if it risks a good man like you. Henry.”

“Which is a strange assumption,” Seward put in, playing with the lancet again, “considering all you two read. Or does Hyde think because Harker was prepared for damnation to protect his love, that his companions are any less willing to redden their hands? Because I did speak true, you know.” The lancet gleamed. “I do appreciate the term euthanasia. Most sincerely. As do my friends. And, though you may not believe me now, I am telling you this as a kindness.”

Jack Seward stood. The lamplight finally left the lenses to show a stare no less sharp than that of a raptor eyeing a snake approaching its nest.

“You are an old friend of my mentor. I respect you. I understand the pains of mind and soul you wrestled with to bring you to the point of the potion. But respect and fondness are vapor compared to the love I felt for Lucy Westenra, whose life I failed to save, but whose soul I was only too glad to see freed by true death. You, Dr. Jekyll? For all the amiability and care I’ve felt for you, do not let Hyde think for an instant that I would not free you both myself, in the swiftest clinical fashion. Nor would Van Helsing. Nor would Art or Quincey or Mina herself, who was more than prepared to fire a hole through anyone who touched her husband that sunset in the snow.

“If your passenger has labored under the delusion that he is protected by coddling hands and the shelter of your face, let him labor no more. For if Edward Hyde makes even a pantomime of any sordid attempt on anyone in the League—any innocent outside these walls—consequences will ensue. The level of mercy in it will depend entirely on who will get to you first. Because someone will. Even if you run.”

“Even if you’re alone,” Griffin whispered, so near his breath was in Jekyll’s hair. “Though in that case, it would be mere accident, of course. No way to tell otherwise.” When the voice spoke next, it was at a far table. Jekyll watched a bone saw float into the air and turn in the lamplight, as if inspected by a wondering ghost. “In short, the message is this: Fuck around, and you’re fucked. Period.” The bone saw pointed at Jekyll’s head. “Did he catch all that in there? Telegram received?”

Hyde had. He’d been catching it since Jekyll first saw the lancet. Fear had been bubbling ever since, and it had taken both their combined efforts to maintain their doctorial shape. How much was even left of the freshest batch of the potion? Five draughts? Four? Did it even matter anymore?

“Yes,” he finally got out. “Yes. He understands. We both do.”

We’re sorry. In all ways, neither Jekyll nor Hyde could bring themselves to say. We are a sorry, sorry Thing. If not for much longer.

Their final draught would be taken before the toilet’s mirror.

They had mixed it themselves in private. Stirred and squirreled it away as easily as anything. Not a grain of salt to be found within it. Plenty of unhealthy things, but not a bit of the salt or its fellow chemicals. The resulting mix nearly burned the nose to smell. Strong as it was, it would power through even Hyde’s sturdy makeup. That same sturdiness that had saved them dying with an even worse face behind when they made their exit. Distantly, both men wondered whose face it would be when they found him.

“It will hardly matter,” Hyde muttered to the glass. Yes, Hyde already. Even after guzzling the last dose a mere hour ago. They could swim in the potion and not make a difference. Too late, too late. Had it always been too late since that first drink? Would there have been a difference if they had halted two, three, even four changes in? “No, it does not matter,” Hyde echoed again. His eyes found the reflection staring back at him. Revolting. Repulsive. Repugnant. Forever after. “I ruined it, didn’t I? Pouncing on the boy like that. Turning the whole lot on us with a foul joke. I should have left it to you. You’d have talked him around.”

Assuming he would have any answers for us, Edward. Yes, Harker changes to do what he does. Perhaps there is some split buried in that snowy head. But it is not one like ours. Not even a cousin. We were fooling ourselves to think otherwise.

“Were we really? Or did I ruin it before we could get both our hopes up over a trick we could not imitate? Or abuse?”

…Maybe.

“Maybe, he says. You are the brains of both of us, Jekyll. Did I botch this because you wanted it? Because I did? Which?”

I cannot say. But I believe I would have botched it either way. Because I know—we both know—that we have tried all that might work otherwise. We have suffered through hypnotism, through different drinks and shots, through meditation and stressors. Nothing has changed. We tried, as Harker once told us to try, and we know there is no other ending but as this.

“No. Suppose not.” Hyde laid one gnarled hand upon the mirror. Strange, he thought, nigh in synch with Jekyll, the way their eyes seemed now. So old in the young face. Solemn, yes. But lacking the irksome weight that so often met them in the glass. “Is this you making a last-ditch attempt, doctor? Trying to turn me over to you? If you want to die all dignified and out of baggy clothes, there’s time to make a last batch.”

No. No, this is fine. Only it’s almost funny. We choose now to share our thoughts civilly rather than simply play conspirator or saboteur. Why is it men are like that when they know the end’s inevitable? What makes them so placid?

“Mr. Harker put it well enough. Despair has its calms. Why did you never mention our snooping to them, by the way? I never was clear on that.”

Embarrassment. Tact. Guilt. Why not you?

“Didn’t seem worth the bother. We do love a dirty secret. Loved them, anyway.” The draught rose to his lips. “Do you suppose I’ll fade away when this kicks in? Or will the Judge on the other side deem me man enough for Hell?”

If it is the latter, then I doubt we shall ever part ways, Mr. Hyde.

“That would figure, Dr. Jekyll.”

And with that, the drink was quaffed. A noxious taste and a worse effect chased it. Burning and foaming and choking he went, they went, bucking and jittering on the floor where he’d fallen. He and him and they spasmed hideously all together. It was not entirely how they’d expected the poison to take effect—in truth, it was almost as miserable as their first transformation—but it was taking effect. In three, two, one…

The door smashed open so hard the bolt tore out of the frame.

A moment later there were long fingers jamming down their throat and the whole acidic mess came rushing up from their belly in a gagging tide. Cold implacable hands turned them over so it could be retched out without drowning in it. They heard the voice of Jonathan Harker first bellowing for the resident doctors then, up by their ear, soft and urgent as he told them to breathe, breathe, breathe, hack up anything that comes up, breathe. It was a hard chore with everything still burning and dripping, sizzling even their gums, eyes and nose running in rivers as their current damned-blessed hardiness fought a far lower dose of poison.

Damn it, damn it, why had he stopped them? Was this not what he’d wanted? What all of them wanted? Even themselves? What was the boy even doing here?

“What are you doing here?” they demanded aloud. Oh, that was odd. The poison had clearly done some damage to their vocal cords. Their tone was garbled somehow. Weirdly echoed. But that was not all. Whatever work the toxins had done, it was enough to disorient the whole of them. The room looked out of perspective, somehow, and their limbs were wrong, they were—

Wait.

They looked down at themselves. Yes, their shirtfront was stained in poisonous swill and bile and the unfortunate-looking dregs of supper, but more importantly that shirt fit. As did the trousers. Henry Jekyll’s clothes fit. And yet, the hands were not the doctor’s. Were they? They were fine-boned and long, yet of that ruddy and hard-palmed texture that belonged to Edward Hyde. The sight boggled them.

…Why did they think of themselves as them?

Their head turned so slowly it creaked on their neck as they regarded Jonathan Harker with owlish wonder. Harker, in turn, seemed a touch surprised too. Shock had died for the young man ages ago, naturally, so surprise was as much as could be hoped for. Terribly unfitting for the occasion, they thought, but it served as good enough reason not to break into a blubbering heap of confusion.

“Look in the mirror,” Harker told them. “Do you need help?”

No, they did not. They took his hand anyway as they staggered up, feeling almost drunk as they found their footing. And their reflection.

They were still staring by the time the rest of their audience arrived.

“What happened?” That was Utterson. Still here. Still here. For them. “Where is he? What—,” He stopped short. Though they’d yet to turn their head, they imagined he was gawking with the rest. Harker still stood beside them, unblinking, but with some secret cooking behind his bonny lashes. “Who is this?”

“We aren’t sure, Utterson. Not at all.”

In the mirror, two young men were looking out of the glass. Jonathan Harker on one side. On the other, a youth who might have been Henry Jekyll’s own brother, had his parents ever produced one. Dark hair, smooth features, tanned skin, long bones. And eyes of two tones. One the pale iris of Dr. Jekyll’s. The other that queasy brightness of Mr. Hyde’s.

“Harker.”

“Yes?”

“I’ll not flatter you and say you know for certain what this is. But you look far too sure of yourself to not have a decent hypothesis. Out with it.”

“Nothing so scientific. Just a guess.”

“Which is?”

“Question for a question.” They looked at him. His eyes caught the light like the points of a lancet. Or the coins on dead men’s eyes. The effect sat bizarrely with so gentle a smile. “By any chance, were you two talking to yourselves before this?”

There may as well have been a theatre production for all the gawping packed into the League’s parlor. Weeks of practice with Harker had passed since the initial revelation and now every head in their menagerie, including a few of the honorary brigade, had found time in their schedule to squeeze into the room. Ostensibly so everyone was aware of the change and nobody was stuck as last-to-know—Mrs. Harker and Mrs. Norton seemed utter sticklers on the point of banishing as many secrets as possible, alas—but it was obvious on too many faces that they’d have invented reasons to come watch the display.

It was perhaps a bit gratifying to see Mr. Harker finally perturbed enough to get some proper pink in his pallid face. If he were flustered long enough he might even pass for better than a comely corpse. They considered mentioning this aloud, but decided it would draw attention away from the show. Later, then. For now, let the young man squirm.

“It occurred to me not long after Hyde made his play with my, ah, condition. Mine is, as most have guessed, a transformation that’s left its stamp quite permanently. Physically, I am always able to do what I do.” To illustrate, he hooked a pinkie under the low table, a thing of exquisitely expensive craftsmanship and incredible weight to match. The pinkie tipped it up as if it were made of feathers. “It is either static or possibly developing at a slow rate. All the other solicitors I know who took the courses for this type of thing are all keeping tight-lipped about the particulars. Isn’t that right, Norton?”

Godfrey Norton shook his head beside a mildly bemused Utterson and a deeply unhappy Seward.

“You’ll not get trade secrets out of me that way, Harker. Nor will I share the hair dye recipe.”

“Damn.” The in-joke earned a laugh or ten before he moved on. “The gist being that I don’t have any grander traits to add or subtract when I throw myself at a fight. I always look like I do. But as most of you know and as Hyde very clearly picked up, I do undergo a sort of change. And I stand by the analogy of a butcher at work versus a butcher at home. The man is the same, but the ‘professional’ side of him takes over when it comes time to finish the task. It is always an active shift for him, just as it is for me. But neither is ever wholly just the butcher or just the man at home.”

“Just the monster or just the man,” they corrected from their spot on the divan. “No need to blush about it, Harker. Monsters can be better men than most men, and vice versa. Was that not the sermon we three settled on?”

“It was. And that point does stand. We’ve all had more than fair reasons to adjust our perspectives when it comes to matters of all-or-nothing identity and where the lines are regarding humanity versus monstrosity. In some cases, the lines aren’t there at all. No black, no white, just a gradient along a spectrum. But when it comes to cases like mine, Jekyll’s, and Hyde’s, the two furthest ends of that spectrum do have minds of their own. And while each can operate free of the other’s input, the result is never as good as collaboration. At least, not as I’ve experienced it.

“What started with my journal-keeping seems to have transferred, by natural or supernatural means, to a sort of internal dialogue. Less like simple A to B to C thought, and more of a…” he dug for a word.

“Chat,” they put in. “Jonathan the Solicitor talking things out with Harker the Reaper. ‘Yes, we could put up with this absolute ass of a client, or we could lop his head off. Hmm. No, no, too much trouble hiding the body. Save that energy for the side job.’” They bared their teeth in a grin any imp in Hell would be proud of. Well, no, too deep. Purgatory, perhaps? “Don’t say you haven’t thought it.”

“I won’t. Of course I have. Everyone has passing outlandish thoughts, no matter how fine they are in their day-to-day lives. Your problem used to be the fact that all those passing thoughts and wants and intrusive what-ifs from Jekyll’s mind kept funneling over to Hyde. Then, when Hyde became more of himself than just a shadow of Jekyll, extra complication was added. Impulse developed into intellect and intellect became a whole person. One who grated even against himself as he suffered the reverse of Jekyll’s predicament. No longer just pure impulse, he started growing a hierarchy of needs versus wants—the same mental checks, balances, and restraints that everyone else must develop as they grow up. And that put the two men to war as much as any vicious spasm; at a guess, the attack on Carew was a side effect of that same growth. Hyde kicking and screaming against himself as much as any mere outburst against Jekyll.”

At that, they could not help a nod. It was true in retrospect as much as the scene itself. Yes, Hyde had done it to rage at Jekyll after an overlong imprisonment. But they could not lie to themselves and pretend there was not something of panic in it too. An awareness they’d not even had words for yet, but the announcement of those hyper-conscious senses that declared to Hyde that his carefree insidious nature was steadily corroding under new impulses. Impulses that weren’t impulses but—ugh—thoughts. Emotions. Considerations. Concerns. Needs. Responsibilities. Uuugghh.

Poor Carew had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time and was made a punching bag for it. Look! Look! I am a monster! I am a horror! I am raw and unchecked! See? See?

They blanched at the memory. Shame for one, childhood embarrassment for the other.

“All this,” Harker went on, “combined with the problem of the potion losing its strength brought the whole mess to a boil. It couldn’t have been doing wonders for their focus, let alone anything like collaboration between the two sides.”

“Especially when both sides were still half-convinced one wasn’t even a person.” They swallowed around a lump. “Not even enough to be a monster.”

Jonathan nodded at them.

“Exactly. Not while you were both in an increasing state of stress. When I make my change going up against an opponent, I am stressed—but not the Jonathan Harker swinging the blade or crawling the walls. He is focused because we are focused. Same for the reverse. I talk to myself and I am better for it, just as speaking to a journal once kept me steady. The same, I thought, should be tried with Jekyll and Hyde. I was discussing as much with Mina and Gabriel when…”

Here the roses flared back in his cheeks. Awkward as a foal.

“When your psychopomp senses started ringing?”

“I felt something was wrong," Harker allowed. "Something was—was ending or in emergency. I can’t define it, except to say I guessed where you were and that you were in danger.”

“What uncanny guesses you make, Mr. Harker. If only it could be put to the lottery. Up you came to the rescue, and one undignified bout of sickness on the tiles later, there we were. I was. Whatever.” They spread their hands in the manner that said ta-da. “Because you had another right guess. Jekyll and Hyde had been talking to each other. There was a…”

Most edifying discussion about how very near we were to being slaughtered like a two-headed calf by the doctors on call if Hyde did a big enough no-no.

They thought it. Thought it loudly as their gazes drifted to Dr. Seward and Dr. Griffin. Then thought it was at least some kind of secret out of this whole thing.

“…moment of epiphany, let’s say. End of the rope and end of all hope. The potion was turning pointless and it seemed to the conjoined wretches that Mr. Harker had washed his hands of them. You know, with the exception of the hand used to knock said epiphany rattling about their head. Jekyll and Hyde found themselves with a truce born of their mutual desire to cut ahead and be done with themselves for good. In that united decision of death, there was calm. Followed by, for the first time, genuine dialogue between the two. It carried on all the way to the mirror and the draught. And as the killing shock took over, something else was dislodged in their makeup, already loosened by the two men’s heart-to-heart. Once Harker had finished burping us until the poison was out, we had already happened.”

“You being..?”

“Edward, for the most part. Perhaps even an Eddie. Just as we—,” there was a sudden melting contortion of the man on the divan. A shrinking. When it ended, a dwarf sat there. One in late middle age, with the heterochromia of the eyes having switched places in the eyes. His smile was a kind curl and laughter sat benignly in his crow’s feet. “—are mostly Henry. Or maybe a Hank. And the audience will notice one unmissable factor in both ourselves and in Eddie.” Again they spread their hands; smaller digits, but now wan with pale indoor hours bent over notes and test tubes. “Namely, that there is nothing amiss about either of us. Not in the extrasensory way, at least. No radiation of repugnance nor sugared goodwill. Hyde in his solitude could not help his unpleasant miasma. Like so.” There was another shifting spasm.

Then young and stout Edward Hyde leered out at them.

“Here I am, in all my glory, making you all turn appropriately pucker-faced. Though notably less so than I have been accustomed to before. Could be due to exposure lessening the impact. Or, if Harker’s own otherworldly feelers are correct, I am giving off less of the old souring effect. My former unfettered moral deformity, as the poets in the crowd put it, has been tempered by mental and spiritual growth.” His gaze met Harker’s. “The homunculus fully formed, so to speak. And, in the opposing direction…”

A last spasm and shudder and stretch and then—

Henry Jekyll sat there. Smiling and very near to weeping.

“…here is the alchemist, in one piece. Or four, doing their best to hold the arrangement. Which was the crux of the issue all along. Arrangement. Agreement. The working theory is that the potion kicked an irreversible condition into motion from the first draught. Even if I had never had a second or third or so on, my duality as Jekyll and Hyde was already inevitable. The routine drinks just prodded the change along faster, like shoving a stone downhill when it was already rolling. But the anxiety of that latter period where Hyde started to overshadow me and Hyde’s own changes started to overshadow him reached their horrid crescendo and it all turned into pure hysteria on both our parts. We hated. We warred. We had to coexist or not at all.

“Bickering and clawing at each other when the solution was right there. Hyde’s womb was my own soul, my mind. Even as his own person, this was unalterable. And so the affliction worsened as the conflict in a mind will spoil everything in one's life. Indecision and panic and loathing that couldn’t decide if it was more for the self or the other kept us unable to help ourselves until it was too late. And it would have stayed too late if you hadn’t broken the door down, Harker. Thank you. For that and so much more.”

Harker grinned at him.

Badly.

Coldly.

“Like not killing you?”

Between one blink and the next, Harker was over the table with his heel planted against Jekyll’s chest. The kukri was already out and swinging in a brilliant silver-white flash toward the doctor’s neck. There was not even time for the gathered League to gasp.

Not until the steel stopped a bare centimeter short of grazing the man’s sweat-glazed Adam’s apple. Specifically, the Adam’s apple belonging to the still-present, and thoroughly bug-eyed, Henry Jekyll.

“Scared?” Harker asked.

“A bit,” Jekyll croaked.

“And yet still here.”

“Right. Yes.” He gulped. Carefully.

“Then that's the last test passed. Congratulations, doctor.” Harker promptly took his blade and his foot back with a sprightly gesture. He pricked his thumb purposefully upon the steel’s edge to feed it, then sheathed it with care. Smiling all the while. It was not a cold thing, but the joy in it was no less insidious. Jekyll rubbed his throat thoughtfully.

“I thought you were joking about this part.”

“Yes. And it was just a joke.” Harker beamed at him.

Jekyll swallowed again as he thought on that miserable conversation with Mina Harker who, to his mingled surprise, relief, and mortification, had been far less incensed than her husband about the ‘joke’ of the goading note. Disappointed, yes, but not incensed. In her words, if she and Mr. Harker took every degenerate come-on with any degree of seriousness in their strange work, they wouldn’t get any work done for all the indignation they would have to slog through. She had been more concerned for her beloved who really didn’t have to go throttling and/or beheading every person to voice a crass word in her direction. Though it was sweet. Harker had countered that she should be just as prudent about not turning every other succubus-adjacent bogeywoman into so much Swiss cheese when they came scrambling after him. Though he was glad to have her in his corner…

And on and on and sickeningly, disturbingly on. The whole exchange had left Jekyll, Hyde, and everyone in-between considerably unsettled.

Back in the present, the makeshift theatre was breaking up with laughs here, celebration there, chatter everywhere. He and Harker both had found no escape from Van Helsing’s latest monologue on the subject, despite having gone through no less than eight already during their interim of practice. The one solace to the Hyde within him was that the Professor took more than a fair share of time to crow excitedly to a stone-faced Seward about all the leaps of psychological puzzle-solving Harker had rushed through at a sprint while red-faced Harker tried to will himself into Griffin’s level of invisibility. Silver linings and all that.

Utterson was, of course, the last one in the room by the time clusters of the League had drifted off into other spaces and personal talk.

Jekyll joined him for an hour. Two. Three. Four. The things that may or may not have been shared between them are private matters. As are any tears that may or may not have been shed, likewise the identities of those shedding them. Towards the end of the night, before the hansom took each to his home—and no, not a word will be said about who within the person of Henry Jekyll wept most at the prospect of a full and uninterrupted return to that place and its faces—they shared a final chat.

“…And you are certain you’ve not seen any more revenants skulking on these streets? Ghouls? Werewolves? A few ghosts on parade?”

“None that I’ve seen, Henry.” Utterson turned to him, the placid gaze still seeming addicted to the sight of Jekyll’s face. “Do you prefer Henry now? I do not know how long it will take to be used to ‘Hank.’ It sounds weirdly American.”

“Mr. Morris thought the same. But not to worry. ‘Hank’ belongs to my compacted self. Hyde is still ‘Edward’ at his ordinary state. And the churlish youth with the patter of brat is dear Eddie. At least, so we have ordered things in here.” Jekyll tapped his brow. “Though I doubt that’s the question that’s gnawing at you now that we’re away from prying ears.”

Before Utterson could admit as much, Jekyll shifted to Eddie.

“You’re worried this mental camaraderie among imaginary friends and fiends is only temporary.”

Eddie to Edward.

“Or that it’s a form of madness like those poor souls in the asylums.”

Edward to Hank.

“Or that it’s all some long game to somehow make another try at juggling last wills and testaments and a fresh uninhibited runaround of various merry sins.”

Hank to Jekyll.

“Which would all be fair suspicions to hold. I would be glad if you held on to them, just as the League surely does. Even if circumstances have changed with regard to Hyde’s side and my own residual unscrupulous cravings. I will not lie and say I do not wish to have unsaintly periods. I do. But with Hyde’s own alteration, there has been a change in equilibrium. As if all the best and worst of my natures have been spread out and intermingled to make an existence less strangled by ‘black and white.’ Striving for the pristine life nearly broke me, just as striving for the most sordid life broke Hyde. We were both of us performers trying to meet and overdo our roles.”

“And what does that make you now, my friend?” Utterson wondered aloud. There was no tremor in it, though there might have been some in his eyes. “How can I know who I speak to anymore?”

“By action, Gabriel. Faces can lie as well as words. But action—the actions all the selves that make me intend to take going forward—will prove me. Because this whole grotesquerie really does come back to my mishandling my wants. By painting everything from the rudest urge to the dullest bit of self-gratification as equal sins, I repressed myself to the point of actual madness. What sane man would have chased and drunk that damned elixir at the risk of death otherwise? For a man to be perfectly angelic is an impossibility, just as pure evil is, without driving one insane. Having more than learned the lesson there, my wants have changed.

“Rather, they have multiplied. All of them tinted with more satisfactory purpose than the mere scratching of an itch. I am more good than I am evil by nature as much as practice, Gabriel. This I can say without hyperbole or vanity. Yet evil is in here as well; rather, cruelty. And it needs its expression too.” Jekyll smiled. It was not quite his own—a jointly crafted grin. “Much good can be done by hallowed means. But if even a fraction of the tales I have overheard as well as spied while making my clockwork visits to the League are but the tip of a larger threat, it suggests we live on the edge of a world ready to be cannibalized by bastards of human and supernatural ilk. The kind of undiluted evil that cannot be parried by goodwill and charity. For that, the world needs its own monsters standing guard, taking point, lopping heads. Metaphorically or otherwise.”

“Forgive my saying so,” Utterson cut in, “but neither you nor any of yourselves have much in the way of practical fighting skill. If you mean to start throwing yourself into the fray with Harker…”

“No, nothing like that. Being hale is no match for that particular polymath of the paranormal. The boy’s juggling Hawkins’ office, detective work, and monster management on scarcely a blink of sleep while the best I could manage was balancing two lives. Yet I do have an advantage my fellow extraordinary oddities lack.”

“That being..?”

“Is it not obvious? They are all steadfast heroes, regardless of their amount of humanity. You can practically feel it wafting off of them. But me?” Jekyll shifted to Eddie. Mismatched eyes twinkled. “I can more than pass muster as a villain, all too ready to mingle with and menace my compatriots in the worsening of humankind with chemical-to-alchemical knowhow. I could never be mistaken for one of the League.” The mismatched eyes blinked. Heterochromia faded to Hyde’s gaze alone as a ghost of the rotten aura thrummed out of the young man. “Not if we put our minds to it. Not until it’s too late for the bastards to undo my mess.”

“…That is quite a leap to make, Eddie. All of you. Are you so sure of yourselves?”

Eddie shrugged.

“It is what we want to do. That’s more important than ‘sure.’ Though there is one last thread lingering which I’m surprised you’ve yet to ask us about.” Again, the smile was wrong for the face. This one was too much Jekyll’s in its mirth. Heterochromia returned in a flicker.

“What is that?”

“You’ve not even inquired about my new last name. ‘Edward Hyde’ is still quite dangerous to be in these parts, you know.”

“Very well. What is your surname?”

Eddie beamed. Beamed and thought of other goodies found lurking in that safe of memories. Not all of them belonging to the vampire hunters. Not all of them about violations of the blood and body.

Not all of them yet addressed.

Some months later, a Lord Henry Wotton found himself facing an occasion he had thought impossible. He was at a loss for words. Namely because all his words appeared to be getting dutifully recorded. Some young cad in black with unequal eyes had taken to trailing him throughout the party with a notebook in hand. The initials on the spine were stamped E.H.

No matter where Wotton drifted, no matter who he spoke to or when, the fellow followed. Always with an unmissable air of one trying to stifle a laugh whenever Wotton opened his mouth. It was curious, even amusing for the first quarter of an hour. By the full hour mark it had grown tedious. By hour two it was bordering on the unbearable, if only because so many of the eyes present had ceased to mind him when he spoke, but turned inevitably towards the young man in black.

Scratch, scratch, scratch went the pen. Flip, flip, flip, went the pages. Ha, ha, ha went the unaired cackle hiding in the odd eyes. Distinctly at rather than with a single witticism. Finally...

“Very well, my dear shadow. I must bite. What is it you are up to? Penning a biography of the party or just myself?”

“Nothing so grand, my lord. I had come here merely to refresh my memory of the best way to deliver the verbal equivalent of gold-plated horse droppings. Thank goodness, you are precisely as vapid as I remember. Excellent material.”

So saying, his pen poised again.

“I do pride myself on proper presentation of vapidity,” Wotton hummed. “Though I must have slackened since last we met, as I usually aspire to the verbal equivalent of—,”

Scratch, scratch, scratch.

“Ha! There it is!”

The young man turned the notebook around so that Wotton and all their audience could read the notes. Apparently, he had invented a sort of tally mark game. There were bullets titled:

HYPOCRISY (FREE SPACE)

DISAGREE TO SEEM SMART

DISAGREE TO SEEM ALOOF WHEN CALLED OUT

AGREE TO SEEM ALOOF (ADD HYPERBOLE = BONUS)

RANDOM FRENCH

INSULT WOMEN (UGLY)

INSULT WOMEN (PRETTY)

INSULT (X) RACE

INSULT (X) COUNTRY

APPLAUD APPEARANCE OVER SUBSTANCE

APPLAUD APPEARANCE OVER SUBSTANCE (WAX POETIC MONOLOGUE = BONUS)

ACTIVELY GIVE BAD ADVICE IN HOPES OF ENTERTAINING DISASTER (SEE: SIBYL VANE, BASIL HALLWARD, DORIAN GRAY)

Each title was cluttered with tally marks. ‘Agree to Seem Aloof’ now had the most at ten dashes.

“You see, once it became clear that your script hadn’t changed a jot in years, there was no reason to take notes. You’re predictable to the point of being mechanical and I need only fill in the blanks for my role. So, to pass the time, I made a little sport. And now look! I’ve hit a ten and owe myself a treat. Oh, now don’t make that face. We both know your sheep love your enabling nattering enough to stay and hover around simpering for your approval rather than go asking silly questions about who has how much culpability in this or that death. Which certainly no one knows about, of course. No one who matters.” The young man’s teeth bared in a sickle. Around him, the air curdled. “Probably. Anyway!”

So saying, the young man clapped the notebook shut so loudly it sent people jumping and others’ heads turning.

“That’s me done for the evening. My thanks again for your wise tutoring. Most invaluable.”

“I don’t believe I heard your name, my friend. I should quite like to address you in the future.”

“Me, Wotton? I am nobody important. Which I suppose does not narrow it down very much. No one is important to you but you. You would walk on your own wife’s face to spare mud on your bootheel. So, a name.”

He made a mock bow and the mismatched eyes almost seemed to blaze. For one surreal moment, Wotton swore he saw the pale eye brighten to the same unhealthy sheen as its twin. The air did not merely curdle as this happened. It nauseated. It grew filthy. It grew poisoned. It grew with the young man’s grin. When the grin split a final time to speak, the voice was wrong. Almost as if it were two timbres in unison, speaking low.

“Eddie Harker, my lord. I do hope we shall see more of each other. Hopefully before consequences have a chance to happen. Between the corpses and the cuckolds piling up in your wake, there’s no telling who will get to you first. Best of luck either way. Good-night.”

With the sound of distinctly less-than-enraptured clamoring at their back, they slipped out of the revelry and melted into the night, pulling down their hat and gripping a newer, sturdier walking stick in one glove. One that would not break in two should the need arise to break something else. Alas, much as they would enjoy seeing the little lord’s teeth scatter and his silver tongue scorched, all of themselves had sadly sworn off any repeats of Carew. There were better things to inflict. The kind of pains that the right kind of patter would never fix. A little hobby to round out the espionage. But that would come later. Not tonight.

Tonight, the sky was clear, the streets were calm, and from a single throat came the sound of a laughing choir. Content to be together.

-FIN-

-?-

#this one's another whopper #my hands are going to mutiny #anyway Let Jonathan Get a Break from These Weird Old Public Domain Dudes' Issues please #jonathan harker #henry jekyll #edward hyde #dracula #the strange case of dr. jekyll and mr. hyde #dracula daily #jekyll and hyde weekly #the league of extraordinary gentlefolk #my writing #The Adventures of Jonathan Harker and the Strange Old Men

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