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It was on a summer evening, lying embraced by warm grass and the shade of a willow tree out back of the Frankenstein manor, hands intertwined, that the dreaded words were finally given breath.
“What are we, Victor?” Henry Clerval asked his friend, his peer, tentatively. Victor covered up his initial dismay at the question with a smile and a quivering brow.
“In what sense? Philosophically? Anatomically?”
“Goodness, no. I’ve heard enough of your lecture on anatomy,” Henry snorted, squeezing Victor’s hand fondly. “I don’t mean us as individuals, but us as a single being. What are we?”
With a sigh, Victor feigned consideration.
“We are friends, in all things,” he began slowly, as if he had not laid awake considering this very question. “We are brothers, though not by blood.”
“That’s all?” Henry asked, smiling sadly. “My heart feels wasted on our great friendship.”
Victor bumped Henry’s shoulder playfully. “I am engaged to Elizabeth. It is not so simple.”
Henry rolled his eyes with a huff.
“Yes, you are engaged with Elizabeth,” Henry repeated. “And Elizabeth is engaged with her tutor, at least two of your peers that we know of, that footman with the silly hat, likely her maid and–”
“Enough.” Victor interjected sharply, loosening his hold on Henry’s hands. “Elizabeth is free to do as she pleases.”
“Then surely you are as well.”
“I am what?”
“Free to do as you please, I mean.”
Victor looked at Henry with the kind of pain that springs only from terrible, terrible fondness. The way you might look at a landscape painting, knowing it’s beauty would increase tenfold if you had only been there to witness it. The bitter heartache that clots cold and deep, beyond modern understanding of the body.
“You are so special, Henry,” Victor said, releasing his hand from his friend’s. “Not just to me. You are remarkable beyond my understanding. The world looks down at you with admiration.”
“I must be very remarkable indeed to evade the understanding of the great Victor Frankenstein,” Henry replied. His words, barbed, like the stem of a rose. “From our time together I’ve learned that little escapes your knowledge. What is it that makes us so different?”
With a sigh, Victor gently lifted Henry’s palm into the light, so the shadows wrapped around the tendons and drew contrast in the shapes. He traced from the top of the longest finger, down towards the palm and over the knuckles.
“Men are great machines, parts connected to parts, the product of heaven's oversight.” Victor rubbed Henry’s callouses, traced the spots where the carpals met the metacarpals. “I sometimes forget that we are even more than that.”
“See, you speak beyond my understanding,” Henry began, but Victor shushed him, brushing over the base of the finger where one day a ring would sit and grow tarnished.
“If I thought you were a fool I wouldn’t keep you around,” Victor scolded, earning a grin from Henry. “Now, where was I?
“Here on your palms, there are red streaks, which means you have been pulling up the reeds in the garden without gloves again. This scar here,” Victor pressed his thumb into the soft skin beneath Henry’s pinky, “is from one of the stained glass windows in the chapel. I tossed a croquet ball through it and you volunteered to fetch it.
“You keep your nails short, because when they get too long you begin to bite them. Despite being a noble, you have the hands of a workman, because you always trust yourself to do a better job than others. Your hands are big, bigger than mine.”
“I’m taller than you,” Henry added. “Of course my hands would be bigger.”
“That may be true, but the beauty is not in the reasoning,” Victor explained, putting Henry’s hand down and guiding him to look at Victor’s. “The beauty lies in the map. Your anatomy is nothing without those things that make them special to you.”
The words came easy, because they were the same ones he repeated to himself every day. People were more than the sum of their parts, no matter how wonderful those parts were. He often wondered if he would be happier if he could look at Henry without thinking about the shape of his skull. Without wondering if the dips in his cheeks were due to his bone structure or the arrangement of the fat and muscles in his face. Without wondering every time Henry smiled whether the slight smirk to one side meant the muscles on that side were more developed.
“Now, looking at my hand…” He twisted his wrist a bit in Henry’s grasp so that the light hit it the same way it hit Henry’s. “...tell me what you see.”
With each moment of silence that passed, though he anticipated it, Victor grew a little wearier. Every second, a tick of a clock, and the crackle of Victor’s heart breaking.
“I’m sorry,Victor,” Henry said heavily after a minute had passed. “It’s just a hand. It’s just your hand.”
Not unkindly, Victor pulled his hand from Henry’s hold and set it in his lap.
“I know,” he said quietly. “You asked what makes us different.”
“And you showed me,” Henry finished, expression drawn.
In the face, after many years, fine lines form in the skin from repeated motion. The glabella is a bony point between the two superciliary arches, where the glabellar lines form when our brow furrows. When we smile or squint in pain, the orbicularis oculi is used, and with repeated use, Crow’s Feet appear. Smile lines. Periorbital lines. All different names for the same expression: one of hurt, one of age, one that occupies Henry’s features at that very moment.
“I won’t ask about us again, Victor,” Henry assured him. “Just, please, stay with me. The world is so much closer to the heavens with you in it.”
And Victor will stay. Not out of obligation, or sentimentality, or anything that simple.
He stays because he wants to remember this landscape, even if he’ll only ever get to see it as a painting. He wants to capture all that he feels sitting here, yearning to rub away the pain in Henry’s expression, and hide it away forever. He sits and waits and doesn’t kiss away the furrow in Henry’s brow, no matter how much his conscience screams at him, because it’s no use.
This is his poison to bottle up and leave in the dark until he’s bitter enough to indulge, too far gone to do anything but scorch the hurt out of his system.
He’s saving it for the man that he will build, better than ever. One that will understand him and praise him as a creator, as God.
Because he cannot have the perfect man, so all there is left to do is create another one.