#it feels like everything I've ever thought about this ship during the past ten (slutty slutty) years is just pouring out now

[starlene]

Chapter 2: Aftermath

~

After lifting him off the floor like he weighs nothing, John has carried Henry to the sofa next to the library fireplace. He’s straddling him now, eyes black and glazed over, at the same time fully focused on Henry and entirely lost within his own world.

At first, Henry just lies there like a rag doll, silent and aching and overwhelmed with everything that has happened during the last twenty minutes. He lets John kiss his mouth and his neck and rip open his shirt without resisting, only feeling stings of pain whenever John brushes against one of the wounds and bruises he has inflicted. But as John keeps going, he can’t help feeling… something else, too. No one has ever kissed him like that before, so passionately and hungrily. Almost despite himself, Henry starts kissing back.

But with each new kiss, the pain in Henry’s split lip gets worse. It keeps bleeding, his blood covers John’s mouth and face and likely his own as well, it runs down his chin and neck and stains his collar, and with his shirt open and John’s hands caressing his chest, it’s getting spread all over… Henry is starting to feel slightly dizzy. John feels very heavy on him, heavy and hard, and suddenly impatient, too. His hands are grabbing at Henry’s backside now, tearing at his trousers, finding their way inside.

Just as Henry begins to tense up, John’s pupils constrict. His eyes are blue again. For just a heartbeat, Henry and John stare at each other in silence.

Henry sees his old friend, dishevelled and bruised and covered in his blood but John again, not the dark shadow of him anymore. John sees the only man he has ever loved, bleeding and with a pained look in his eyes. He draws his blood-stained hands away like it’s a hot stove instead of Henry he’s touching and scrambles away from him.

“God, Henry, I��m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”

~

John collapses into what Henry can only think of as a bout of hysteria. He is crying so hard he seems to have a hard time breathing. Curled into a ball on the sofa, he sobs and stutters incoherent apologies, not listening to whatever meaningless words Henry says to try to calm him down.

Henry doesn’t have experience in dealing with people on the brink of insanity, but he has a feeling that John can’t be left alone now or he’ll seriously hurt himself. He can’t get Poole or anyone else to help them, he doesn’t want a single soul to witness John in hysterics with Henry’s blood all over both of them. So he gathers all the strength he has left, forces John up from the sofa and half walks, half drags him across the house to his own bedroom. He doesn’t know what else to do, so he pushes John onto his bed and throws a blanket on him.

Then he sits down on the bed next to John. John has turned his back to Henry. He keeps sobbing. Henry squeezes his lip with one hand to finally stop the bleeding and, after hesitating for a bit, places the other on John’s arm.

They sit like that for quite a while. John struggles to get his sobbing and breathing under control, he hiccups miserably for a while, and then he apologises again.

“I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to. I don’t know why I did that.”

“John, please, can you try to calm down? There’s an explanation for this.”

John just weeps in answer.

“I don’t blame you.”

They sit for a while still, and slowly, John’s sobbing ceases.

“If anything, it was my fault. I shouldn’t have left that bottle in a place where anyone can find it. But… ah, fuck.”

Talking has made Henry’s split lip bleed again. He tries to squeeze the wound harder, but there’s blood spilling from between his fingers.

“John, I need to go to, uh, fix this. It won’t be long.”

John doesn’t say anything.

“Do you promise to stay put and not go throw yourself in the river while I’m away?”

John still doesn’t answer, but Henry leaves the room nevertheless.

~

Henry looks around in his laboratory for a bottle of ethanol, a needle and some thread. His hands shake at first, but he manages to still them to stitch the wound on his lip. He has gotten rather used to both pain and blood in the past weeks, but after he’s done with the last stitch, his vision starts to go black and he needs to sit down with his head between his knees.

He thinks about the people he has killed as Hyde, people he felt nothing but hatred and contempt towards. He thinks about John’s outburst and his hand on his throat. He thinks about Emma. He thinks about Lucy.

He gathers his notes and his diary and piles them in the library fireplace, refusing to even take a last glance at the finalised recipe for HJ7. After he gets a fire going, he takes the glass bottle from the floor and pours the remainder of the red liquid in the flames. He feels the heat on his face as the flames shoot up with a brilliant red colour.

The sofa has slid away from its usual place next to the fireplace. There’s blood on the upholstery.

Never again, Henry thinks.

Never again.

~

Henry comes back to his bedroom wearing a fresh shirt and holding a bowl of water. John is still lying in his bed, facing the wall. Henry puts the bowl on the nightstand, sits next to John again, grabs the corner of the sheet, dips it in the water, reaches over and starts scrubbing dried blood off John’s face.

John doesn’t resist. Instead, he slowly turns around to face Henry. His eyes are red and puffy and several bruises are blotting his face.

“John, that red liquid that you drank… I don’t know why you did it, but it doesn’t matter. What matters is that it was my new experiment, and it worked on you. It was the liquid that made you act that way. I know that you, the real you, wouldn’t hurt me like that.”

Henry keeps scrubbing John’s face with the sheet, removing the last bits of blood from his jawline.

“And I want you to know that the things that happened today don’t change the way I see you. Not at all. We can just forget all about it and be friends again.”

Henry drops the bloody sheet back on the bed.

“Obviously, you shouldn’t have drunk my formula. Frankly, I thought you were a lot smarter than that. But then again, I shouldn’t have made it in the first place. And when I did, and when I discovered how dangerous it is, I should’ve destroyed it. Of course, I didn’t, I wanted to keep enjoying it myself, so I didn’t even admit to myself how dangerous it really is. So in the end, it’s all my fault.”

“But Henry… Enjoying it yourself? What on earth could be enjoyable about drinking something like that?”

“It was different for me than it was for you. I can’t say why you reacted to it so differently. You see, for me, it was… It made me feel euphoric. Invincible. Like I can do whatever I want. I felt so light and so powerful at the same time. And that feeling made me do a lot of things that would’ve been wiser left undone.”

John glances at Henry’s stitched lip.

“Worse than what I did to you?”

“So much worse. John, trust me, what you did is nothing compared to what the formula made me do.”

“Did you… kill somebody?”

Henry nods.

“The Bishop of Basingstoke?”

“Among others, yes.”

“I see.”

John stares at Henry in silence for quite a while, his brows knitted.

“It was the liquid for you too, right? Then it… it doesn’t change the way I see you, either. I still… God, I don’t have to say it again, do I? You should know how I feel by now.”

John’s face turns red with shame, but he doesn’t stop speaking.

“Do you know what the worst thing about this is? It’s that everything I said to you is true. It’s just so hard sometimes. It’s not your fault. I didn’t really mean to hit you for it. But sometimes, it just hurts too much to… love you.”

For a while, the room is silent. Then Henry reaches over and squeezes John’s hand in his.

“John. Maybe this is not the best time to bring this up, but you’ve been so honest with me, so I want to be honest with you too.”

John lets his hand rest in Henry’s.

“It’s about something you said back in the library. I haven’t always been a good friend to you. And I want to say, I’m sorry about the way I acted back when we… you know. I’ve never forgotten about it, either, and I didn’t… Shit, this is so difficult to say. I didn’t act like I did back then to imply I didn’t enjoy it. I did. Quite a lot, in fact.”

“Why did you run away, then? And why didn’t you speak to me for weeks afterwards? Do you still remember that, too? I thought you must think I’m sick and perverse and have polluted you with my sickness too.”

“I never thought that. I thought you must be angry with me, for coaxing you to do something that you didn’t really want.”

“You coaxing me? Something I didn’t want? Christ, Henry. You really are blind sometimes.”

Henry takes a deep breath.

“I can be. But now I see that you and I are not so unlike when it comes to certain… desires.”

It’s silent for a while. Henry thinks back to the younger version of himself, the one that slept with John and ran away in shame afterwards. It had felt like the end of the world back then, but now, it seems so small it’s almost meaningless.

Just over the past couple of weeks, he has murdered several people. He doesn’t regret it, even now he thinks they deserved it… but he knows he has to live with the fear of someone finding out he did it for the rest of his life. Compared to that, people whispering that he’s a sodomite seems a lot less heavy than it used to. Compared to covering up a murder, covering up that he’s sleeping with his friend is nothing.

“And John? If you ever want… I don’t know how to put this so it doesn’t sound crass, but if you ever want to do something like that again, just tell me. I… I wouldn’t mind it. No. I think I would like it.”

John’s face turns a deeper shade of red as he considers this.

“So you’d be unfaithful to Emma?”

Henry thinks about Lucy. He’s not even married to Emma, and yet, he’s already been unfaithful to her in every way that matters. He knows how easy it is to stray now, and even though the formula is gone, he doesn’t believe he’ll always have the strength to hold back.

“I… I think that might be how it’s going to be. Knowing what I know now, I don’t think I’m the sort of man that… should attach himself to just one person. I don’t think I knew that yet when I asked her to marry me.”

“But you’re still marrying her?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“It would be wrong to back out of my promise just because I didn’t know better back then.”

“Do you still love her?”

“I do. I… I love her as much as I can.”

John’s voice cracks as he asks his next question.

“And me?”

“As much as I can.”

There are tears in John’s voice when he replies.

“I love you too, Henry.”

HJ7

“Henry Jekyll literally doesn’t know what hits him when he closes the door of his library behind him. Out of nowhere, there’s a fist in his face. His lip splits from the punch.”

A what-if fic where John Utterson gets to taste formula HJ7. 

Musical verse (specifically that production of the musical that had Utterson canonically in love with Jekyll and implied they had slept together at some point that’s given me permanent brainworms… but feel free to substitute that with your own favourite production.) Extremely unhappy and generally upsetting.

~

Maybe one day, John Utterson walks into Dr. Henry Jekyll’s empty laboratory.

Maybe the door is left slightly open, as if by accident, and he decides to go inside. Maybe, when inside, his curiosity gets the better of him and he rummages through his friend’s belongings. Maybe he comes across his diary and reads some of the latest entries, a series of incoherent scribbles where Henry seems to celebrate a great success and to describe a horrible accident at the same time.

And maybe, for reasons best known to himself, he decides to have a drink from the glass bottle he finds next to the diary, holding some of the ruby-red elixir the ecstatic entries seem to be referring to.

Unlike Edward Hyde, after the effects of formula HJ7 kick in, John Utterson doesn’t go on a rampage. He feels stronger than usual, and bolder – but he doesn’t want to shout that out for all the world to hear. Instead, his newly cleared mind is focused on a single track of thought. He puts the bottle with the rest of the elixir into his pocket and goes to Henry’s library to wait.

While waiting, he methodically rips apart every single book on the uppermost three shelves of the bookcase by the door.

~

Henry Jekyll literally doesn’t know what hits him when he closes the door of his library behind him. Out of nowhere, there’s a fist in his face. His lip splits from the punch.

Of course Henry fights back. At first, he just hits his attacker without thinking. The attacker hits back, with more force and precision than Henry. Henry’s ears are ringing, his lip and nose are bleeding, he’s losing his balance. It’s only after the two of them have fallen down and are wrestling on the floor that Henry knows for sure that his opponent is John. He has never seen his friend like that, his eyes so dark with fury he can hardly recognise him.

The fight is over soon as John easily emerges the victor. Henry is lying on the floor and John is sitting on top of him, holding him down by the base of his throat. Henry’s lip is throbbing with pain, and he is panting, his chest rising and falling under John’s palm. John presses his hand down hard enough that Henry doesn’t attempt to wriggle away, but not as hard as to take Henry’s breath or speech away.

“What the fuck? What the fuck, John, what is wrong with you?”

“I love you, Henry.”

“What? Is that why you hit me, what–”

“Shut up. Just shut the fuck up. I love you. And I hate myself for it.”

Henry is hurting all over and his head is spinning. His past weeks with Hyde have been full of surprises, but running around town having his revenge and his fun has done nothing to prepare him for his best friend’s sudden assault and confession.

“I have loved you for so long. Almost half of my life. I hate it. You’re always in my mind. I can’t have a moment to myself without you there. I want you out of my mind, but I can’t, you’re always there and I can’t stop loving you. God, Henry. I love you more than anything. I hate you for it.”

John’s words are shocking, but Henry has already stopped paying full attention to them. Instead, he stares into John's eyes. His pupils are so dilated they look completely black and his gaze is wandering, not focused on anything in particular. Just as Henry is beginning to understand what might be going on, a flash of ruby catches his attention. From the corner of his eye, he spots a half-empty glass bottle lying next to a pile of destroyed books on the other side of the room.

There can only be one explanation for this.

Henry can’t help himself: he suddenly feels very inquisitive, almost frantically so. Now that he knows personally what his new formula is capable of, it would be too dangerous to even think of testing it on anyone else. But if a test subject volunteers like this, well… The scientist in Henry is already making observations and taking mental notes. It’s so fascinating to see the effects of his formula on another person, he doesn’t hear what John is saying anymore.

“John, how much of the formula did you take?”

John answers by switching his right hand to the base of Henry’s throat and slapping his face with his left. Henry feels a new gush of blood spurting from his lip.

“LISTEN TO ME! Will you for once in your life listen to me? You’re so incredibly selfish. It’s always your studies, and your experiments, and it doesn’t matter to you what happens to the people around you because you simply don’t care.

You’re so fucking selfish, Henry. When you get some idea in your mind, you act like it’s the only thing in the world that matters, and everyone else is just there to make it happen. And when it doesn’t happen, you act like it’s the fault of everyone else but yourself. Like no one else has dreams or even any sense in his head than you.

God. Some days I hate you for all that. And yet I want you. I can’t help it. I want you so bad, but I know you don’t want me. It destroys me. It destroys me to remember how we tried it once, and how you ran away afterwards. Don’t think that I’ve forgotten about that. I can’t forget it. I can’t forget how it felt when you woke up and pushed me aside and ran away.

And yet I want you. God. Not anyone else, I never have, just you. I want to have you. I want to fuck you, but I can’t have that. I want to love you, love you as my husband and not as my friend, but I can’t have that. I can only have you as my friend, so I try to be the best friend I can be, though for God’s sake, you don’t make it easy. But I try, so I can have you like that. That at least as a friend, I can be closer to you than anyone else.

But now that you’re getting married to your precious fiancée, soon I can’t even have you like that anymore.”

John stops his tirade for a moment, as if to allow all his accusations some time to sink in. Henry doesn’t say anything, but he thinks, it’s not like that. He loves Emma like one loves taking a walk across a sunlit meadow on a beautiful spring day. And he loves John too, like one loves sitting by a warm fireplace after a rainstorm. He loves them both, in completely different ways, and it has never occurred to him that by inviting Emma into his life he would be pushing John out of it.

But he doesn’t love John like John loves him, that much is true. He can’t be John’s. He can’t be anyone’s. Not even Emma’s, not completely, he doesn’t want to be–

Henry wheezes as John moves his hand higher on his throat. As his assailant speaks again, he sounds very close to tears.

“Henry, I can’t go on like this. I can’t go on loving you so much. I want it to stop. Why can’t I make it stop? I can’t stop thinking how you’re the only thing that I want. That I’ve ever wanted. I live for you, and you don’t even notice it. You make it so hard for me. I can’t bear it anymore.”

John is crying now, he is leaning over Henry and his tears are falling on his face.

“I love you so much, but my life, everything… It would be better without you. It would be better if you didn’t exist.”

A wave of fear courses through Henry, sudden and white and hot, like molten lead. His formula has clearly unleashed a torrent of fury and misery within John, stronger than Henry could ever have believed his friend capable of feeling. But now, with the grip on his throat tightening further, Henry understands that simply hurting and intimidating him might not be enough for this new side of John. No. He might actually be dangerous.

And with John already being the sturdier and stronger of them, even without HJ7 in his veins boosting his strength… More and more waves of white-hot fear are storming in Henry now. He’s starting to panic, he knows he can’t fight back, but he tries to think, think, think.

Henry knows that in a situation like this, Hyde wouldn’t agree to any bargain, but maybe John’s is a different beast. Maybe he can be negotiated with. John’s grip is getting almost too tight for Henry to speak, but it’s not quite there yet. He decides to take his chance and beg.

“John, please… Don’t. You can do anything else to me. Anything you want. I want you… I want you to do it, whatever you like. Just please don’t kill me.”

John’s pitch-black eyes stare straight into Henry’s for a moment.

“I mean it. I’m yours. I’m yours. Anything you want. Just… Please…”

The hand holding Henry by the throat lets go. Henry gasps for breath as John scoops him up from the floor and squeezes him against himself. It hurts when he pushes his mouth against Henry’s split lip.

Henry’s blood flows in their mouths and seals their kiss.