Work Text:
The hospital room was cold, its white walls reflecting the dim glow of a single gas lamp. Victor lay propped against a thin pillow, his leg, or what remained of it, swathed in bandages. The explosion at the laboratory had taken more than his limb. It had shattered his pride, his ambition, and left him with nothing but time to think. The laudanum dulled the pain in his body, but it did nothing for the ache in his soul. His thoughts, unbidden, drifted to him, the Creature, his creation, his forsaken son.
Victor’s eyes, heavy with exhaustion, traced the cracks in the ceiling as memories flooded back. The Creature’s face, grotesque yet hauntingly human, loomed in his mind. Those eyes, filled with a desperate need for love, for belonging, had once stared at him in the flickering light of the laboratory. Victor had recoiled then, horrified by what he’d wrought. But now, confined to this bed, he saw those eyes differently. Not as monstrous, but as pleading, like a child’s eyes in a body he’d stitched together from stolen parts.
“I should have been your father,”
Victor whispered to the empty room, his voice hoarse. The words felt like a confession, one he’d never dared speak aloud.
-
Victor was a man driven by grief and genius, the Creature had been more than an experiment. He was a mirror, reflecting Victor’s own loneliness after losing his mother to tragedy. Victor had poured his sorrow into the act of creation, believing he could defy death itself. But when the Creature awoke, Victor truly believed he could be God to him. He did not care to teach him how a newborn should be taught. So all Victor saw was failure. He’d abandoned him, left him to burn in that laboratory, knowing he’d scream his name until he could not scream anymore.
Now, as the morphine haze softened the edges of his pain, Victor imagined a different path. What if he’d stayed? What if he’d taken the Creature’s trembling hand, taught him to speak, to read, to love? What if he’d named him, not as a monster, but as a son? “Adam,” Victor murmured, testing the name on his tongue. It felt right, biblical, a nod to the first man, and perhaps to Victor’s own hubris in playing God.
He closed his eyes, and in his mind’s eye, he saw Adam sitting by him, his massive frame hunched to fit in a human-sized chair. Victor pictured himself teaching him, reading books to him. Paradise Lost was one that frequented his mind, thinking of Adam reading it aloud while he explained the fall of man not as a warning but as a lesson in compassion. He imagined Adam’s deep, rumbling voice asking questions about the stars, about love, about why men feared him. Victor would have answered patiently, not with the terror that had driven him to flee that fateful night.
“I was afraid,”
Victor admitted to the silence.
“Afraid of you, of myself, of what I’d done.”
The explosion that cost him his leg had been his fault, an egotistical reckless decision that cost him everything. It had only brought more destruction, physical and mental anguish was bestowed upon him.
He shifted, wincing as pain shot through his stump. The doctors said he’d walk again, with a prosthetic, but Victor cared little for his own recovery. His thoughts were with Adam, out there somewhere, perhaps in the snow? Or maybe a vast forest, chasing solitude in a world that rejected him. Victor’s heart ached with a father’s guilt. He should have protected him, taught him to navigate humanity’s cruelty. Instead, he’d left Adam to learn it alone, to be shaped by rejection and rage.
In his delirium, Victor imagined finding Adam again. He pictured himself limping across a frozen tundra, his breath clouding in the air, until he found the Creature huddled in a cave, his scarred face lit by firelight.
“I’m sorry,”
Victor would say, falling to his knees.
“You were my son, and I failed you.”
In this fantasy, Adam’s eyes would soften, and he’d reach out, not in anger, but in forgiveness. They’d sit together, father and son, and Victor would tell him stories of the world, not its horrors, but its beauty. The way sunlight danced on lakes, the way the birds chirped and what it meant and the way the seasons changed, and the beauty it brought.
A tear slipped down Victor’s cheek, startling him back to the present. The hospital room was still, save for the distant clatter of nurses’ footsteps. He clutched the thin blanket, his fingers trembling.
“I could have loved you,”
he whispered.
“I should have loved you.”
The Creature’s fate was unknown to Victor now. Had he perished in the cold, as Victor’s fevered dreams sometimes suggested? Or did he still wander, a ghost among men, seeking a place he’d never find? Victor’s chest tightened at the thought. He wanted to believe Adam was alive, that there was still time to make amends. If he could stand again, walk again, he’d search for him. He’d cross continents, brave the Arctic’s bite, to find his son and beg for forgiveness.
The gas lamp flickered, casting shadows that danced like specters on the wall. Victor’s eyes grew heavy, but he fought sleep, clinging to the image of Adam. He saw him not as the hulking figure who’d haunted his nightmares, but as a child, lost and afraid, waiting for a father who never came.
“I’ll find you,”
Victor vowed, his voice barely audible.
“I’ll make it right.”
As sleep finally claimed him, Victor dreamed of a world where he’d been brave enough to love his creation. In that dream, he and Adam sat by a fire, reading poetry under a starlit sky, and for the first time, Victor felt whole. Not as a scientist, not as a god, but as a father.