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It's easy to love things that are still and unmoving, with possibilities playing tricks on the minds of the imaginative. Distance makes the heart grow fond after all, and six feet's worth of descent has a tendency to feel so much further than it actually is. An impossible distance, it once had been. Like walking into the sky. But Victor had overcome inertia and hurried to close that gap which seperated the dead and the living. He discovered many things then, about life. Some which he studied, grinded the skin off his hands flipping pages to learn, and some which he stumbled upon on the way. And some remarkable few, which tripped him over and left him to rot in a pile of himself on the floor.
It is easy to love the dead and gone. To love those with images twisted by time in their favour, those with decayed muscles and minds who can do nothing to shake one's festering affection. Those that one miss, and forget to be mad at. Those whose sharp edges get nulled by the layers of stone and dirt upon their resting bodies. Those whose frown and wrinkled lip have melted away for good, leaving nothing but peace left on their face for all of eternity. Their last sin committed, and no-one left to judge them for it but God.
It is easy to love those who can never again do evil, and those whose peaceful abstence could convince you maybe never has. It is harder to love the breathing and moving, those with posibilities yet to strangle and fellows yet to disappoint. God, it is hard to love the people with bodies of motion, who shifts in ways no being should. Whose thin, translucent layers of skin twist and contort over their moving muscles like it's one size too big or too small, depending on where on the body it sits.
Victor never did find satisfaction in a straight road of discovery, barren and blank. He needed obsticles, problems to solve, to keep himself stimulated. He never took the easy path and never settled for anything less than impossible. But he also wouldn’t settle for failure. His dreams were never able to simply stay dreams. He made plans, goals. What is the worth of an aspiration limited to the world of rest? His aspirations went beyond it, would uproot it, the realm of eternal rest. That much was certain. That much he knew, had known for a long time, since he knew it was possible.
Something in him snapped. As if by a punch to the gut the breath was knocked out of him, and Victor found himself paralysed in the wake of an experiment gone well. It had gone well, so why didn’t it feel like it? Why was the well so… unwell? Not in a medical sense, because it had all gone well. Everything was precisely as it ought, so why wasn’t it? Hadn't he turned the world up-side-down? Was he expecting to still be standing? Hadn't he ripped the ground from under his own feet, dragged the earth through itself and back, only to end up besides himself? Where was his head? Where was his steady hands? Why was he fading away from himself, when the world faded back into view anew?
Previously immobile mass was moving, adrift, shifting on the bedding like snake shedding its skin. Victor watched as the thing squirmed, bending and twisting like a headless worm, rumbling deeply in wordless despair. His beautiful features, hand sewn and carved by Victor himself, twisted into primitive expressions of pain and sorrow, nothing like the face of any man he'd ever seen before. The sight shook him deeply. In front of him laid nothing more than a caricature of his careful handiwork; a caricature of the human image he was trying to create. That peaceful perfection bitterly twisted by unruly emotion, like a knife in an open wound.
It is easy to love a life that has been, and a life that is yet to come. The little life, unknown and shapeless like clay ready to mould. Then it’s shoved like a bun into the oven, and you’re forced to stand witness to the thing as it swells and ferments. And all that excitement, all that hope, withers away. It grows to be lumpy, bulging where it shouldn't. The recipe was both tricky and costly, Victor cannot afford a bitter aftertaste.
The newborn stretches its hand out towards him as if by sheer, ancient instinct. But the motion is blind, weak and clumsy, and it tremors beneath it’s own weight. Suddenly the creature turns its head, jerking away from the bright labratory lights, and jams it into the hard corner of the bedding with a loud cry. When its squinting eyes fall onto Victor, they widen. His entire face open up in something near close to a smile. It's not charming. It's undressed and vunrable. Desperate, like a baby bird. It isn't charmed. It's recognition, mindless acknowledgement. It makes Victor shrink into himself helplessly. He can feel the ground of his new world swaying underneath him, and all the weight of the creature’s despair pressing down on his amygdalae. Everything is still and frozen in place, and everything is burning up and falling into the sky. The earth’s spun off it’s axis and stopped.
How young isn’t Victor? How very unprepared isn’t he, for this? For that? How little doesn’t he know about entertaining life beyond the vessel of which it is carried? He can strike a match to the body’s furnace, ignite impossible sparks without oxygen, but what does he know about heartburns? About heartaches? About hearing your own voice cry out in fear and not knowing it belongs to you? What does he know about choking on your first breath ever drawn, and squirm at the unfamiliar way it runs through you? What does he know about the whole world entering you all at once in a single, horrifying moment? And how little doesn’t he know about where to even begin to soothe such overwhelmed senses? How little doesn’t he know about where to even begin to soothe his own?
Victor feels so small. The creature is large, and its anguish even larger. It sees Victor flinch and stumble, and it locks onto the motion. It directs its movements with its head, arms and legs being a writhing afterthought, as it grovels off the bedding. It lands on the floor with a painful-sounding thud, and there it lays screaming. Something thugs in Victor’s chest. He staggers back and clutches the table he knows to be near him, though his vision has started to blacken around the edges and he cannot for the life of him tear his gaze from the creature to scope the room. Breathing lightly and rapidly, he takes a second to simply watch the scene played out in front of him. The creature has folded in on itself, sobbing, calling out with a voice unfamiliar to the both of them. Victor stands still, barely even daring to blink.
He thinks back to the birth of his younger brothers, as he naturally cannot remember his own. Is this how it was? How they felt? How they looked? He remembers the screaming that echoed through the manor and the blood-drenched linens. The many months their mother bore them and the many hours and days it took her to deliver. Difficult things to create, they were. All life is, as Victor has come to understand. So far, the stories are the same, the memories align. But there are parts Victor doesn’t know. He wasn’t in the room, he didn’t see it happen, and the birthing of a child specifically is not an area he excessively has studied. Maybe this is similar. Maybe it isn't at all.