Work Text:
You were born with pine needle fingers that fell loose and sharp in your sleeves. You were born with paper lungs that gasped and wheezed and grasped for air, eyes that opened into darkness and the cold of stone and rain, and above all, his voice calling you gently back to the light, coaxing, full of hope, Henry, Henry, I’ve done it, the sharp crackle of laughter and lightning.
Well, not born perhaps. Victor prefers to call it--a break. A lapse. Like you had stumbled too close to the edge and he simply pulled you back from it.
You were born in France, before the last war, where your mother gave you up to an orphanage. You studied medicine at Ingolstadt and when the wars happened, you joined the army as a surgeon, which is where you met him.
That is what he tells you, at least, when your ears become accustomed to the sounds of human language again and your tongue can trace the words out back to him, enough to confess that you cannot recall any of this, that you cannot recall anything more than the sensation of being in this body.
“You will remember, in time,” he says, grasping your hands, promises fervent like prayer.
---
At first, he had to teach you how to dress yourself. The clothes he gave you fit as if they were made for you, though some of them are well-worn, the threads coming loose at the sleeves. These he took from you when he found them, though you told him, with a vague flash of memory, that they can easily be fixed. You ask once if they were a brother’s, a friend’s, or how else he came by them, for you know now that he has only Runge and his sister, but his mouth goes taut and you lose him, so you do not ask again.
The clothes themselves you are not so fond of. In the beginning, it was hard for your fumbling hands to tie the cravat straight, and it itched at the scars around your neck, tight like a noose. The sleeves were soft lace and they circled around your wrists, but they felt too old and too dignified for you, like a costume in the rude shows you’d see at the marketplaces, and he fussed when you dirtied the edges.
Eventually, he let you take his coat and wear only a thin undershirt in the summer. You like his coat. It is one of your earliest memories--of cold and absence and then warmth, the way he draped it around your shoulders and held you.
For a long time, he was afraid to let you out of his sight. At first, you thought it was a fear of losing you--perhaps he thought you would run, though you do not know enough to even stray. He brought you on long trips to the countryside, just the two of you and occasionally Runge following, though you never stayed long in one place, and his eyes passed through each person you met with wariness.
He taught you the names of the cities that you passed through and helped you sound out the words, though he only needed to do this early on. You learn fast--your command of language coming to you like the embrace of an old friend, and he praises you for this.
You recover well, the motions of being human. You learn to respond to the name he calls you, his moods, what brings him joy, what will disquiet him and what will make him open up delightedly. What will upset him most of all.
It would be easier, you think, if you simply did not remember anything.
Victor’s face is familiar to you. You know this much. Other faces too, Runge--Victor’s faithful manservant. Occasionally, textures, clothes. The sharp cut of a soldier’s uniform. You are somewhere in the halfway there. It is like a veil thrown over your eyes. There are shapes in the darkness, and sounds, and the occasional flash of emotion that cuts deep into you. Things you should remember. And things you should not.
Victor tells you it is best to turn away from the darkness. “I do not want you to relearn them, Henry,” he tells you. “Because you shouldn’t have to know them.”
It is easy for him to say. You think if he were you, he would not be able to stand not knowing either. But that is Victor as well. He fears death more than anything, even as he fights to stop it.
You do not understand death. Not until one night in the woods, alone, where you stumble across a bird with a broken wing, singing sadly in the roots of an old tree. You think you should be able to fix it. Flesh is flesh, even if you remember only cold metal and human limbs. But when you attempt to lift it up, it feebly pecks your fingers and you twitch, your fingers closing, just barely. When you touch its small body again, it is dead.
You tell Victor later, upset. Back in those early days, you told him everything.
“I was careful,” you say. “I didn’t mean to hurt anything."
“Darling,” Victor says, “It’s not your fault. The strength of man that went into you was more than the paltry admittance God intended for his natural world.”
“But I don’t understand,” you say. “Why won’t it come back? Can you fix it, Victor?”
“Maybe,” Victor says. He is frowning. His hand stills from where he has been scribbling idly in his journal. “I have not fixed anything in several years. I’m not sure it is wise to try again.”
He returns the bird to you in a fortnight. It twitches in your hand, its eye staring unblinking. Like the animal skins and stuffed puppets you have seen sometimes in the markets.
“It’s not the same,” you say. It sounds petulant, but inside, you are quietly panicking. You are realizing that there are some things that cannot be fixed.
“No,” Victor says, glancing away. His mouth twists, ugly. You set the bird down to wrap your arms around him.
“I should not have asked,” you say.
“It’s okay, Henry,” Victor says. He closes his eyes and leans into you, as if you somehow will protect him. “Do not let it trouble you.”
---
You have been on the road for as long as you can remember when one day he finally takes you back to Geneva. In truth, you have been dying to see it. You remember very little of it, and Victor is not overly fond of talking about it, although you know that it is where he grew up.
It is springtime in Geneva, the ice on the roads thawing and bringing it with it colorful merchandise from elsewhere. The townsfolk move about their business, and from the local tavern comes the sounds of singing.
You press yourself against the windows of the carriage, though it is dark, evening falling as you enter town.
“Come away from the window, Henry,” Victor says, reaching over you to pull the curtain shut. There is something about being in Geneva that sets him on edge. His fingers are stiff, half-fists, and you pat them gently, putting your hand with his to reassure him.
“I like Geneva," you say. “It feels like home. Must we return to the road? Can we not go out and mingle with the townsfolk in their festivities?”
Your companion looks at you, and he is not good at hiding the expressions of his face in the way some others are.
One of the first things you learned to read in him was want.
“The village people are ignorant,” he says. “They do not deserve you, so you must not let them see you.”
“I will stay here with you then,” you say, though you want to go out and dance and twirl like you have seen the young men and women do, in this town and others you have passed through.
“Perhaps it will be good to rest a bit,” he says. He grasps your hand more firmly and laces your fingers together. This, you have decided, is nice. It is a gesture of comfort, as much as it binds you to him. “Come on, Henry, let me show you the castle.”
There’s a woman waiting on the hill when the carriage pulls up before the castle. She has her hood thrown over her face, cloak drawn around her, the early evening of spring time here still biting and chilly.
You take in the castle that looms before you with small awe. You have seen greater from a distance, the houses of lords and ladies, but it is the first time you remember seeing such a thing so close. The base of the foundations are scorched and black, but the stonework is fine and solid, the appearance of something vast and foreboding.
The woman draws her hood back as you two approach.
“Runge told me you were coming back,” she says. She has her arms crossed in front of her, but as Victor approaches her face softens and the two of them embrace. “I am glad to see you again.”
When they pull apart, Victor takes up your hand gently.
“This is Ellen, my sister,” he says. “You’ve met before. Maybe you remember.”
“Good to meet you,” you say and bow, and Ellen looks at you with a gaze that seems to see past you altogether.
“Hello, Henry," she says, and there is caution in her voice. “Have you been doing well?”
“Yes,” you say. “I have been very…happy.”
“That’s good to hear,” Ellen says, and this time when she glances beyond you, you know she is looking at Victor. “Tell me if you need anything while you’re here.”
“I will,” you say, earnest.
“Will you be staying in the estate?” Ellen says.
Victor’s eyes flicker. “No,” he says. “We’ll stay here, I think.”
“Our uncle asks after you,” Ellen says. “As does Julia.”
Victor’s eyes flicker. “I will pay them a visit once things get settled.”
“And what will you tell them?” Ellen says.
“I’ll decide on something,” he says.
---
Though the daytime light filters in through the castle’s beautiful stained glass windows, he takes you down the steps where it is cold and dark and you shudder and try to turn away.
“We used to spend days and nights here,” he says when you falter. It is not the first time he has spoken of a before, but he has spoken of them less and less in the years since.
“It’s cold,” you say, and he laughs.
“It's been a while since it was used,” he says. “It’ll warm up once the old systems start running again.”
You do not say, it is cold that you recognize and thus a cold that chills you. You do not say, this is the cold of my birth, because of course what you remember was not a birth, just an--interruption. A severing.
The lab itself is in disarray when the two of you descend. He grasps your hand again, and you put your hand against the walls. The air smells damp from a recent rainstorm, but the walls are dry and solid. Across the floor, there is a scattering of objects: a thick chain, a couple of empty bottles, drawings and diagrams of the human body. There are surgical tools laid out neatly on the shelf against the wall, and some part of you tells you that this is where you belong.
In the center of the room is what must be a table, narrow and long like a coffin. A sheet has been thrown over it, haphazard. But it is what lies behind the table that leaves you in awe, a marvel of gears and glass, science and engineering. It towers above you in the shape of an hourglass, large enough to fit several men and elevated with cables of woven steel.
There's a clink behind you, and you see Victor picking up a discarded scalpel from where it had been on the floor. It looks tarnished in certain areas but still sharp enough to cut. He holds it up in front of him with a strange look on his face that you do not like, and you think of the scars on your neck that he never told you where they came from.
“Victor?” you say, and at the sound of his name he drops the instrument on the shelf where it originally had been.
“Sorry, Henry," he says.
“What were you thinking about?” you say.
“I was just thinking--never mind,” he says. “It’s all in the past now.”
He still has that wild look on his face. You reach up gently and cup his face and he holds your wrist carefully, his fingers sliding down the shape of the bone. Grips your arm, the hold firm, decisive.
"I will fix all of this," he murmurs, and turns away from you.
---
Victor busies himself with his machines and materials in the lab. He runs his hands over the contraptions, eyes assessing, lifting tarps and smoothing out dust. You hover, for a moment, but he seems lost in himself, surveying the instruments before him, only stopping to dig out the firewood when he catches you shivering once again.
You wander back up the stairs to take in the rest of the castle instead, hand skimming over looping railings and stone walls. Many of the doors now are locked, or wedged shut, and though you are sure you could force them open, the state of the castle feels haunted, preserved obsessively to a particular point in time that you feel afraid to disturb even the dust. Your footsteps echo, a call for an answer that receives none.
At last you come through the stairs to the top of the tower. It’s the west tower, and the window looks out to the shadow of the Alps, sharp and frozen even in the sunshine. The room is lined with shelves, a small library of scrolls and older volumes. A chair with a dusty blue cushion and the stubs of old candles burned out to their ends. There is no echo here, just the creak of your footsteps against the old wood floorboards.
This delights you. You find yourself hungering greatly for reading material these days. Language was the first thing your mind learned to master, and it came to be the thing you cherished the most. Language is flexible, malleable, it comes back easier than other things--memory, dexterity, knowledge.
Victor gives you things to read, natural philosophy, medical treatises. A thesis he tells you you wrote yourself, with a gleam in his eye, although when you read it the words are inscrutable to you, too lengthy and foreign, the diagrams clinical and removed. It is a treatise about assembly, about the repurposing of limbs and other parts of the body. You tell Victor you do not understand it and hide away your own unease.
You do not lie, because Victor never taught you to. You learned from him only how to speak comfortable truths and hide the uncomfortable ones.
What you carefully leaf through now is poetry. You trace the rhythm of the words in your head. Like cycles. There is a comfort to poetry, both wild and restrained in its formal rules. When you place the volumes back, the book brushes a pair of spectacles sitting on the corner. They still have a dull glint to them, placed with the legs out, as if they are just waiting to be remembered and worn again.
They sit right on your nose, and you blink, unused to having something there. You feel no different, but when you look at the window, you feel that it makes you look more scholarly, like one of those students in the university.
You run your fingers over the rest of the titles, cataloguing the volumes, when you stumble upon something else. It is a thin thing, leaned against the wall next to the shelf in the far corner, and you nearly knock it over when you set your books down. Like many other things here, put to rest in a funerary silence, a sheet has been thrown over it.
You do not mean to look, really. You think of Victor’s voice, telling you to turn away from the darkness. But Victor is not here. He has left you for other ghosts, so you must seek your own.
It is a painting. Not very large, the kind that you have seen hung over mantelpieces and desks in other places Victor has taken you to. A man stares back at you, serene and noble, the tie of his cravat neat, elegant coat, a pair of spectacles on his face. His small half-smile cuts right through you as you kneel down in front of it, and you touch it gingerly, as if canvas will give way to human skin, as if you can reach through it to grasp at the past that eludes you so.
You have seen yourself in the mirror, but this is different. To look at someone who is you and who is not, a man who wears your face and your body, though perhaps this skin you inhabit was always his, and you are the one who is borrowing it.
---
Ellen is at the doorway when you descend, but in the design of this space the sharp tones of their conversation carry through to your ears.
“Why did you bring him here?” Ellen is saying. “You know that if anyone in the village sees him--there are enough rumors and superstitions surrounding you as it is. The townsfolk still talk about lightning upon the castle like the curse of God.”
“What’s one more?” Victor says.
“What’s one more?” Ellen says, disbelieving. “If they find out, they will try to kill you both this time.”
“I won’t let that happen,” Victor says. “Not when we’re so close. I can feel it. I thought maybe seeing Geneva again would help him remember. Henry, he believed in this science more than anyone, that’s why he--”
“Henry believed in you.”
“So I have to make this work. Otherwise, everything will have been for nothing.”
“I see. Will you be using the laboratory again?”
A long pause. “I’ve been considering it.”
A longer pause still. “What is there left to do?”
“There must be something,” Victor says. “Maybe the process was not complete. We never did enough research into the brain. We were too focused on the physicality of it all. If I’d known at the time that I would need to--damn it all. There’s just not enough to go off of.”
“Is he not recovering well?” Ellen says.
“Recovering,” Victor repeats. “Well.”
Words can mean many things. You step down the stairs quietly and wait for them to notice you, but Ellen says something else, voice low. Victor sinks into her arms, all furious animation gone. He seems exhausted. You think perhaps the years on the road have taken a harder toll on him than he tells you.
It is a small scene, intimate, domestic. Like you’re an outsider looking in. Intruding. You slink back into the shadows.
---
He twists himself into knots. You recognize the mood in him well, by now, but the only difference is that you yourself feel cold and strange.
You approach him in the lab, thinking to cheer him up, and when he turns around at the sound of your voice, he freezes. Drops what he is holding, and it shatters, the spray falling, barely visible, and staining his sleeves.
“Henry?” the name, your name, falls from his lips like a broken thing.
You smile at him. “I found these with the books,” you say, tapping the spectacles on your nose.
Victor blinks. The glass crunches under his feet like clover in the morning frost, ruined with one stomp of your boots.
The liquid pools, dark and thick.
“Put those away,” he says. “You have no troubles with your vision.”
(Victor is, as always, adept at telling you what you are and aren’t.)
You try to make him smile anyway, thinking of the lines of poetry you have learned. Victor used to praise you for any new thing you brought before him, but now his face sours and he brushes your hand off his shoulder.
“Leave me,” Victor says. When you close the door you hear the sound of something else shattering as he screams, a horrid, animalistic thing.
Your own breath escapes you, strangled by panic. You wish you could scream too.
You throw open the doors. You need to be somewhere else other than this place where the stone walls enclose you. It is pouring outside, and the wind cuts harshly against your face. But it’s there. It reminds you that you are here, and you can feel things. You sigh, sinking down onto the steps, where the overhang is just enough to keep you dry. You look out again over the town, where you’d been so enchanted by all the sounds of laughter, and wonder at how easy it is for affection to refashion itself into resentment.
At last, Victor emerges, calling for you as he does. His voice echoes throughout an empty castle, but you do not hear it, thick as you are in your words and your thoughts and the sudden, gaping absence of anything else, any kind of understanding.
“Come, Henry,” he says, standing in the doorway. He trembles slightly as his eyes sweep over you, for you do not think he returned at all to sleep last night. “What are you doing here?”
“It’s raining,” you say. You stretch your hand out to catch the drops of water idly. You are thinking suddenly about how this is the kind of weather that makes Victor take ill. About how you aren't even sure what the feeling of being sick is. “And there is nothing else to do.”
“I’ve been neglecting you,” Victor says. “I’m sorry for that.”
“That’s okay,” you say. You are glad enough to have your Victor back for the moment at least, steady and caring, the one who treats you like there is nothing else worthy of his attention, not the version of him that simmers with a barely contained volatility.
“Will you tell me what you’ve been working on?” you say.
“Perhaps later,” he says. “When you feel better. I don’t want to bore you with trivialities.”
“It’s upsetting you,” you say.
Victor smiles, a rueful slanting of his mouth. “It’s nothing,” he says. “I am simply reminded that God does not give up power to us mortal men easily.”
“Maybe you should take a break,” you say. “Will you read to me tonight?”
---
That night, you dream of dying.
You dream that something is wrapped tight around your neck and you cannot breathe. You cannot see either. Everything is shadows and half shapes, lights at the edge of your vision. There is a crowd around you, and you look desperately for someone you recognize. For Victor. Just one last time, you think. One last time. But your vision is so poor. You don’t even know if he’s there or not.
The words fall on your lips “I did everything and regret nothing”, rehearsed over and over like the lines of a play.
The crowd roars. Murderer.
Someone shoves you forward and forces you to kneel. You know with cold, nervous certainty, that they will kill you.
Then you wake up.
“Henry! Henry!” At night, Victor calls your name softly, tenderly. He says it like you are a precious thing, the most dear thing in the world to him.
“Victor,” you say. You are gasping, your chest heaving. He has wrapped the blanket around you, but you feel so cold. Victor is holding your hands, your fingers laced together, his own eyes wild, and you realize that there is blood caked underneath your fingernails from where you scratched at the old scars around your neck.
He squeezes your hands and pulls you close and suddenly all that matters is that he is here, in front of you. You breathe, fast, small and vulnerable as you shake.
“You’re alright,” he tells you.
But he wasn’t there, in your dream.
You looked for him and could not find him.
“Why doesn’t it hurt?” you say suddenly, when the world stops spinning and you feel like you can finally catch your breath.
“What?”
“I died, didn’t I?” you say. “I was dead, I swear, that--”
“It’s just a dream,” Victor says fervently. “You’re safe, Henry, I’d never let them hurt you again.”
“Again?” you say.
“It’s just a dream,” Victor repeats, as if that will make you forget.
“Victor,” you say haltingly. You look down at yourself, where the stitching scars your limbs. You have seen Victor, whose skin is unblemished, unmarked. You had never wondered too much about it before, when Victor was a singularity to you, incomparable to anything or anyone else. “What happened to me?"
“They tried to kill you,” Victor says. “But I--I brought you back. I stole you back from God’s hands.”
He runs his hands along your bare torso, reverent. It was strange for you to read, when philosophers speak of man as a singular being who holds control of no one but himself and to know that your body is not entirely your own. Your body has always been for Victor’s to touch and test, to work with and discover together.
“Victor,” you say, “who am I?”
“You’re Henry,” he tells you, soothing like a lullaby. “You are the closest thing to my heart.”
(Victor tells you not to seek the darkness, but you think that what he misses, what he craves from you, was shaped by it. Henry had a surgeon's hands and a soldier’s steadiness. Henry challenged Victor, drew him into argument, pulled him away from his science when it didn’t go his way to enjoy the smaller comforts of life.
Your hands are unpracticed, unwieldy, your wrists marked by human engineering. You wonder suddenly if they were meant to be yours. You wonder how Henry’s--your body must’ve looked when he rescued you from the executioner’s stand, too late to salvage the whole, but enough to piece everything back together.)
“And if I never remember?” you murmur into his ear.
“You will,” Victor says, holding your hands. “We’ll find a way. I won’t let it be otherwise.”
He kisses you on the cheek and calls you by the name he gave you, and you touch him tenderly, the way you have learned he responds best to, but you know what you have come to suspect deep in your heart: he is looking for someone long gone within you.