Chapter Text
The rain was strange that night. It came infrequently, in short tapping sounds upon the bedroom window. Despite the rain’s strange quietness, it woke Emma.
She stared at the darkened ceiling of her room, feeling her stomach rise and fall with her slow, even breathing. She sighed. Drowsily, Emma pushed herself to sit upon the edge of her bed. Her bare feet touched the cold floor as she stood and hiked up her nightgown ever so slightly with slow fingers. Each step towards her bedroom’s window was passive and delicate in an attempt to stop the floorboards from creaking, which she achieved with some success. With her other hand, she reached to open the window. The whistle of the wind and the hum of a dreaming London always helped her sleep. Moonlight made her thin fingers turn white as she reached for the window’s latch when she paused. There was no rain.
Then a small rock bounced against her window.
Having been knocked out of her tired stupor, Emma rushes to the window and threw it open. She looked down. Standing just a few feet below, rearing back to throw another pebble, was her fiancé, and love of her life, Henry Jekyll.
“Henry!” She called, trying not to laugh. “What on earth are you doing down there?”
He jumped, clearly not expecting her to appear at that particular moment.
“I needed to speak with you!” He called back up.
Emma leaned on her windowsill, her head tilted in amusement. She felt like Juliet.
“Why didn’t you just come in?”
“I needed to speak with you privately.” Henry amended his last statement. “Just…get dressed and come down.”
A sigh escaped her lips. Not of frustration or distress, one of longing. The type of sigh you can only give when the one you care about above all does something incredibly ridiculous. The kind of sigh that can only lead to the utterance of one phrase.
“I love you.”
Emma only caught a glimpse of Henry’s face lighting up in pink and red before she pulled back inside. She dressed as quickly as she could manage, throwing on a pale blouse and simple blue skirt that swept across her feet. She barely put her hair up and rather scandalously, in her mind, didn’t bother with a corset. Besides, she was just meeting Henry. She was getting married to the man in six weeks. Only after a few minutes later, she appeared outside.
When Henry saw Emma, like a beautiful apparition in the moonlight, he rushed to her and caught her in an embrace. She ran a hand across his cheek, coaxing his lips to hers. His kiss felt like the first breath of autumn. Henry pulled away, unable to pull his mouth out of a smile.
“Emma,” He said. “I need your help with my experiment.”
She giggled, slightly perplexed.
“What do you mean?” She asked. “Your proposal was rejected, you don’t have a subject.”
“I know that.” Henry took a few steps from her. “But, I do have a subject.”
Emma placed her hands together. Her stomach knotted with dread.
“Henry, you’re frightening me. What do you mean you have a subject.”
“I’m going to use myself, Emma.” He looked back at her.
That’s what she was afraid he was going to say. She padded forward, clinging onto his arm.
“You can’t be serious…” She said. She rested her head on his shoulder in a fruitless pleading gesture.
“What else am I to do?” Henry pressed his hand over hers reassuringly. He kissed her gently on the cheek. “But I can’t do it myself, I need a witness. I need you.”
It took her a long time to speak again. Emma clung to Henry’s arm, letting the cold wind of the night pass over her skin. She held his arm a little tighter and took in a sharp breath like she was ready to plunge off a cliff into a raging ocean.
“I’ll do it, Henry,” Emma said. “But why come all this way to get me? Why not just get John or Poole to do it?”
Henry turned to look at her, gently taking her hands in his.
“Emma, I’m going to be spending the rest of my life with you.” He said. “If I am to become altered in some way by this, I need you to be there.”
“Oh, my darling, I doubt you’ll change that much. You’re already perfect in my eyes.”
***
The laboratory was never a place Emma was fond of. She would never tell Henry, of course. It was frigid and not particularly well lit and the surgical tools, strange apparatuses and now-empty animal cages that decorated the relatively small room gave her the creeps. Her least favorite aspect of the room, however, was how much time Henry spent toiling away inside. It wasn’t healthy, spending hours, sometimes entire days at a time locked within its confines. Emma supported Henry’s work, no matter what anyone said about it, it was the extreme lengths he went to complete it which worried her.
Emma watched, holding Henry’s journal and a pen at the ready, as he mixed his formula. The process involved several different liquids and powders, none of which Emma knew the name of, much less how to pronounce, all to produce five centiliters of blood-red fluid. Henry raised the hypodermic syringe the formula resided in aloft. He looked back at Emma.
“It’s a thing of beauty, isn’t it?” He asked.
“It’s a bit strange to me.” She said.
“No matter,” He said as he rolled up his left sleeve. There was something frantic in his voice. “This is the moment.”
Despite his visibly shaking fingers, in one swift movement, Henry plunged the straight iron of the syringe’s needle into the vein right in between the end of his forearm and the beginning of his bicep.
“Our moment.”
He injected the formula.
A pause. The air felt so cold that it burned. A single point of black ink bled into the white paper as Emma held the pen to its surface in anticipation.
“So,” She began. “How do you feel.”
Henry stood still. Very still. More still than Emma had ever seen him in fact. His eyes searched the room as his mind searched for the right words.
“Warm. Very warm.” He finally said. “Like there’s this heat spreading through my veins.”
Emma quickly wrote his statement down. Just as she finished, Henry stumbled back, catching himself on the table.
“Henry!”
“No, no, I’m fine.” He waved his hand, smiling a very strange smile. “Just a bit lightheaded.”
Emma watched with bemusement as Henry began to laugh. He placed his head his hand, his whole body shaking ever so slightly from this sudden onslaught of glee.
“A slight feeling of euphoria.” He could barely speak the words.
Delirious laughter echoed through the laboratory. Emma quickly stepped over to the table, putting the journal and pen aside, and grabbing her fiancé by the shoulders.
“Henry? Are you alright?”
As slowly as he lifted his head, his laughter died down. Yet Henry could not remove the grin from his face.
“No noticeable behavioral differences.” He barely managed to keep the laughter down once more.
Emma smiled and sighed, removing her hands from his shoulders and retrieving the journal again. She quickly wrote down the few coherent things he had mentioned.
“Now, the die is cast.” She said, flicking out one last letter.
“I suppose it is,” Henry said, placing his hands on his waist. “We just have to wait. But I’m right.”
Emma covered her hand with her mouth and smiled. She’d got him on one of his little monologues.
“I know I am.” He continued. “But only time can prove my theory now. Prove it to all those fools who didn’t believe me.”
His breathing was ragged.
“I’ll prove it to them. I’ll show them.” He thrust his hand forward as if gesturing to some unseen audience. His smile was full of pride. “I’ll show the world I—“
Henry’s hand dropped. His whole body seemed to go limp from some shock. He stumbled again, and again caught himself against the table. But worst of all, the pride was gone, he looked terrified.
“Henry?” Emma asked, somewhere between horror and good spirits. She felt her own feet stumbling backward. “Is something wrong?”
“Oh, God... What’s this?” He barely choked out. A question to the air. His chest rose and fell at an alarming speed with each hyperventilated breath.
Emma was shaking. She clutched the journal so tightly her knuckles turned white and her nails dug into the black leather of the cover.
“Emma,” He barely stammered. “Some-Something is happening, I can’t explain it!”
Henry’s head suddenly whipped downward. He clutched his face in his hand and desperately gripped to the table with the other. Before his face disappeared, Emma could’ve sworn there was a change in it. Some horrible, near undetectable change.
She couldn’t speak. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t look away.
“There’s something inside me!” He cried out. His voice was strangled. Each word was pushed from his throat with painful effort, and each word was louder and more frantic than the last.
“Emma, it’s driving me insane—“
Henry could barely finish that last word before his voice twisted from barely coherent words to loudest, most agonized scream Emma had ever heard. Both Henry and the journal clattered to the floor. He writhed, his whole body contorting in agony with each cry of anguish. Henry’s voice itself was contorted as well. It began to rasp, seeming to drop deeper as he cried out. Emma wanted to help him. More than anything she wanted to cover her ears and scream, loud enough to drown him out. But she couldn’t. She was paralyzed. Suddenly, Emma felt her eyes playing tricks on her.
Was Henry’s body changing?
She couldn’t bear it. She couldn’t bear to look at that horrible prodigy. Tears came bursting forth from Emma’s eyes as she shielded them with her shaking arms. Her mind was completely submerged in terror.
And then it all stopped.
No more crying out, no more desperate gasps, just silence. Silence and this ever so quiet ragged, rasping breathing.
Slowly, Emma lowered her arms, only to see Henry, no, someone like Henry, standing with his back turned to her. His back was near bent, hunched over the table, as the stared into the mirror just on the opposite side. Emma gasped, tripping backward. He suddenly straightened his posture. He heard her.
With a slow, sweeping movement, his claw-like hand pointed to the journal and pen on the floor. He flicked his wrist upward, wordlessly indicating for her to pick it up. She did, frantically flipping through the pages. The pen rattled in her hand.
“Midnight…” He said. His voice was too low, too deep, too gruff to be Henry’s. He rolled back shoulders. His shoulders were broader than Henry’s, too. “And all’s well.” He added a sing-song tone to his voice.
This creature that stood before Emma ran his hands through his undone hair, laughing breathlessly. Calmly, he turned to face Emma, leering and looming over her like some abominable shadow. And finally, when she saw his face, another dagger of fear was driven through her heart.
His face was some gruesome parody of her beloved’s features. Limp strands of hair cast a shadow across his sunken cheekbones, pale lips and dark, merciless eyes. He looked down at his hands, stretching his fingers and savoring the sensation before finally, to her dismay, casting his gaze upon Emma again. His eyes searched for words again, a leering smile pulled his lips.
“Free.”
And once more, laughter echoed throughout the room.