Work Text:
Dear Victor,
Ernest’s hands paused, twirling his quill between his fingers as he contemplated that phrase. Some of the ink bled onto his fingertips.
Dear Victor. Two words with the world as their shadow. How many times had Elizabeth written them? Henry? How often had Ernest wished to dip a pen into the ink and hash out those letters?
Would this be the last of them?
Ernest looked up from the paper, ripping his mind from the ancient memories unlocked between the familiar strokes of his pen. The window before his desk glimmered with ice. The panes had frozen with intricate designs of frost, like someone had traced their finger over the mountain silhouetted by the setting sun in the distance.
Winter had fallen so quickly. Ernest hardly had enough time to dust off his thicker coats before the mornings had grown later and the daytime shorter. A storm strong enough to blanket the entire house in white was coming soon, he was sure of it.
Ernest could never properly enjoy winter. His father used to preach about how he was “too frail for the cold but too stubborn for the fire.”
While other kids of his class and age would go about their days with more layers, drenching themselves in snow, Ernest’s winter was often spent huddled under blankets or trying not to singe himself as he embraced the fireplace in the hall.
This year, he didn’t even have the comfort of a home.
He had a house, mind. A large house at that. A house full of so many rooms and so many ghosts that he should be dead before he salts it all.
But ghosts weren't much company anyway.
The thing about houses and ghosts is that they don't do much but sit there and rot. Just last week the roof had begun to creak in an alarming fashion, and Ernest was sure some rodents had found their way from outside into the walls.
These developments had not worried him in the autumn as the season passed by, like a cow trudging up a hill to snowy days and freezing nights. But as winter took hold of the land and grew colder, so did the rooms, and so did Ernest. Where he was lethargic and blissful in the summer, this winter reality struck him awake with icy winds.
Ernest stared at the window. It was closed, but a deep chill still lay deep in his chest, regardless of whether the wind pushed at the walls or not.
His eyes shifted downward to the floral patterns etched into the window frame. Perched atop the wood stood a small carving of a dove, its dusty body curving toward the heavens, beseeching its maker for unknowable desires with rounded eyes.
Ernest eyed it for a moment.
His mother had loved doves in the way that all compassionate people did, for their symbolism and their association with large, over-romanticized events. Her dresses, her accessories, and even her make up all held that same disposition as a dove about to take flight, an olive branch in its beak.
Caroline had believed in that branch—that simple twig carved from nature and hearts willing to change. Her dying wish rested on that simple twig.
It was a dying wish never to be: Her wish for her eldest children to marry.
Ernest sighed, eyes shifting back to his paper.
Caroline had put her everything into that poor, rotten, old twig. She did not notice the apathetic glances from Victor and Elizabeth nor the way they never spoke of it except at her prodding. And on her deathbed, her head stuffed with fever, Caroline had held out that wretched stick with such compassion. Such ignorance.
Up until her last breath, Caroline had held that branch tightly, hoping someone would take it.
If Ernest had been by her bedside as she fought for breath—if she had entrusted him with her woes—if any of them had only known of the cursed disease of fate running through his cursed family, Ernest would have taken it. He would have taken the branch before it could be snatched by the cold winds outside. He should have taken it.
His breath hitched, but his eyes did not water. Ernest clasped his hands around his pen to stop them shaking.
Victor should have taken it. He should have honestly taken that final offering, not picked it up like some wretched apple meant for the ground and smiled up at their mother, as if the twig hadn't stabbed him in the heart repeatedly since the day Caroline brought home his sister and expected all of them—him, Victor, Elizabeth, and Henry—to play nicely together like perfect little children.
If they had ever truly been kids to begin with, considering the mental anguish all of them had endured, ingrained into their very personalities and strong enough to drive all of them into madness—for regret, for ambition, for recognition, or for love.
Caroline thought Victor had accepted her offer, and this knowledge had brought her peace in her final moments. It kept her from this sickness of mortal minds.
She thought wrong.
Dear Victor, the paper taunted Ernest as he finally loosened his grip on the pen. Dear Victor.
Would things have changed if that branch had been anything but selfish? Passed from one soul-seeking hand to the next? Or was it converted, the moment it contorted along the family tree, to a broken bridge hanging between the romantic apathy of cousins?
Ernest finally moved his hand, and onto the paper the ink bled these words:
Dear Victor,
I never asked you, busy as you were in grief and study, just how Mother was in her final moments. Was she scared? Did she accept her illness with grace as I never could? Did she ever blame me for my absence? I do not expect an answer, but if you should find a way to give one, I will wait. If afterlife does truly exist I trust your first (and most likely final) apology for mortal affairs be to our mother instead of me.
Ernest lifted the tip of his pen and rested his elbow on the desk, rereading his words.
He remembered how that wish had ended, when Victor and Elizabeth had endeavored to go through with it. He had been present for the wedding ceremony of his brother and adopted sister, as well as the preparation and the tragedy thereafter.
William never saw such white as Ernest did that day. He never had the chance.
More ink bled onto his hand as the quill rolled between Ernest’s fingers. He pressed it deeper into the paper and carved the message:
Victor, Mother did not deserve all that we gave her. Nor did she deserve her death, just as our brother and sister did not deserve theirs.
Nevertheless, they are dead, and I can ask only the afterlife how they fare.
His hands shook and the nib of the pen bent oddly, threatening to break, as Ernest pressed it deeper into the paper.
A question. He could write a question, surely. Just one thing to ask his brother, and then he would know.
He hashed out the words:
Is William there with you now, or have you two been separated for your mortal paths? How about Elizabeth? Have you yet reunited with Henry?
Do you think I could see you all again some day?
At this final sentence, Ernest inhaled sharply. His hands lifted from the page like it had become the surface of a heated stove, and he grasped at the edge of the paper, fumbling with the corner. He glared at the ink-blotted message a moment longer, then ripped it from the wooden surface with an audible cut of air.
He crumpled the paper in his hand and yanked open a thin drawer which usually sunk deep into the desk’s rim. From the drawer he produced another piece of paper which he slid into the last one’s place.
It laid quietly on the desk, waiting.
Ernest pulled his quill where he had dropped it and dipped the tip into the inkwell once more.
The wind outside rose in volume as Ernest stared at the new canvas. The sound was a scream in the ghost-riddled yard of the house, and for just a moment, Ernest wondered to himself how many of his resting siblings had screamed that same scream in their final moments.
With a shiver, Ernest stared deeper into the grooves of the paper, urging himself to move the pen. When no such movement came, he sighed and slouched lower into the chair.
Is this how Henry felt, slaving at a desk covered in paperwork and a half-written poem hidden beneath it? Ernest remembered how Henry had often appeared in his room on summer days, driven in by the heat and a desire to get away from that horrid desk of work.
Henry spent most days in the Frankenstein house, in part for the company and in part to evade his father. When Victor and Elizabeth were unavailable to tempt him toward more exciting adventures, Henry would grab a paper and a pen, sit at the foot of Ernest’s bed, and write poetry. His voice was calming.
“I must not go bland,” Henry would say as he produced from his person a copy of Swift or some other poet's work (Ernest could never figure out where he stored them in a jacket so thin), “for my father thinks it best I abandon writing all together! Can you believe that, Ernest? Abandon poetry for whatever ‘business’ he wishes me to attend.” At this he made a displeased noise that held a few seconds too many, along with a pout up to the Heavens.
Ernest laughed at the theatrics. Until those laughs turned into wheezes. Then wheezes into gasps. And then he coughed until the mirth finally disappeared under the need for air.
As usual.
“He sets me up with lessons and work all day,” Henry continued when Ernest had finally caught his breath, glancing at him cautiously every now and again, “like I am some mule to carry his business for him.” Now he leaned closer, his tie of bright hair falling from the perch on his shoulder and mussing his bangs.
Ernest would pitch closer, too, so he could hear the words whispered to him.
“But I always manage to sneak a few plays in with me. The secret is to keep them under the jacket and say how cold it is every few minutes. Oh!” Pulling back, Henry reached for his paper and began to scribble. “That’s a good theme for something, don't you think?” He smiled at Ernest.
Even if given a thousand years, Ernest thought he could never forget Henry’s smile. Henry smiled with his whole body, like he had a candle stuck inside of him and transparent skin; he always smiled like he completely meant it. Ernest admired him for that.
Victor had, too. Sometimes Ernest suspected that Victor wished to be more like Henry.
But Henry and Victor would never be alike, for Henry would rather have his own blood spilled upon the ground again than be tarnished with what vile substance staining Victor's hands. If that substance had not been Henry’s blood in the first place.
In truth, Ernest knew what killed Henry had not been his brother. In that same vein, however, he knew Victor had a trail behind him. Sometime between Caroline’s sickness and William’s murder, Victor had walked along a path of red, blazing with a human desire to see the fundamentals of the world break.
Victor had always been ambitious like that. He always sought what he wanted, and very often received it—at least, in some sense.
Sometimes Ernest wished he had inherited such a trait as well.
He stared back down at the paper.
Ernest pondered at his desk for a moment, the winter storm making the walls whine around him.
His back straightened with resolve.
Maybe, he thought to himself, maybe I could try.
And so he began to write.
What Ernest realized in that moment was that he didn't want answers. He had never wanted an answer, even before Clerval disappeared, before the wedding, before Ernest and William’s game had led both his brother and his friend to their deaths, and even before Victor had left for that cursed school.
Ernest did not care why Victor had left them for a school so far away. He could live without knowing who had really framed Justine. He never even had to ask his mother just how it felt in her sickbed if fate forbade it.
No, Ernest didn't want answers. What good would an explanation do in this empty house in the middle of winter? No letter he could write would ever answer all—or even any—of his questions.
What Ernest really wanted—needed to do, before this storm caved the roof of his psyche and he descended into that madness rooted within his blood—was trust himself.
Trust himself enough not to make the same mistakes as his mother.
To be there when someone else meets their maker; to never again lose sight of anything of worth in his life.
To enjoy life and poetry as he never could as a child.
To hoist himself out of bed, not because he is sick, but because he has rested with a reason to go outside.
But Ernest could live without all those. They were meaningless sentiments for a grieving man. He did not need to fix all of his mistakes, nor did he have to prove to himself that his life could, indeed, go on.
The only thing Ernest needed in order to finally rest without fidgeting all night in his bed, or to stop those recordings of old conversations and faces from flashing in his mind, was to trust himself.
More specifically, trust himself to let go of misplaced sympathy.
With a long inhale, which made his eyes water as he released it, Ernest put the quill tip back to the paper. The lines were messier this time, margins less defined and letters spilling into each other.
But beyond that disorganization the paper read:
Dear Victor,
You were a brother and friend. I looked up to you. I looked up to your wit and your drive—that same wit and drive which drove you so mad that I still feel the bitterness of your delusions in my morning drink.
I hope your death was quick and fair to you, because I know that is all that you wanted upon your deathbed, unlike our mother who wished only for you and our sister to live on without her.
I wish I could ask for a final word to William, but I know you shall not see each other. Your egotism has surely damned you. So instead I ask one thing of you— Say hello to Zeus’ eagle for me.
Your brother and legacy,
Ernest
The snowstorm wailed.