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The pale glow of the candles threw extravagant shadows across Victor’s bedroom walls, shadows that looked more alive than the drunk guests downstairs, where William and Elizabeth’s wedding party was still boiling over. There was music, laughter, and the hot breath of spilled wine, but to Victor all of it was just noise, an uncomfortable frame around the tension crawling tight in his chest.
He had gone to Elizabeth’s room earlier out of courtesy, out of habit, maybe out of guilt, and the attempt to congratulate her on the marriage earned him nothing but a slap across the face. There was no time for an argument. The sharp crack echoed through the room like ice breaking. She accused him of lying about wishing her happiness. He did not answer. He only lowered his head and left.
The hallway felt longer than before. The distant music now sounded like a memory from a world that did not care he existed.
When he reached his own room, he closed the door with a sigh that carried decades of weight. He did not turn on the main light. He did not need to. The small lamp was enough to show how tired he was.
Now, in the muffled silence of his room, he opened a bottle of strong liquor hidden in his dresser and served himself like someone trying to discipline their own heart. He took a long swig, letting the alcohol burn him from the inside out. He wanted it to burn. Maybe that way he would forget the slap, the shame, the weight of broken expectations.
Then he felt the cold wind.
The balcony door was open.
"For God’s sake, leaving this wide open," he muttered.
He frowned. He walked over and pushed the glass door to close it. But the moment he turned his body, something inside him stirred, that animal instinct that whispers when someone knows they are not alone.
The air in the room had presence. Volume. Density.
Victor was not easily spooked, yet the hairs on his arms stood up.
The night breeze carried the smell of wet earth and something else. Something wild.
His instincts warned him before the thought formed. He was not alone in the room.
"Show yourself," he said. His voice did not rise. It was just a dry, precise command.
Silence.
Then the dragging of fabric. Something big shifted behind him. Victor did not turn. He preferred the creature to reveal itself like an animal stepping out of shadow.
A figure emerged, first the silhouette, then the details: strips of wolf fur sewn together, grotesquely elegant; long dark hair with a single white streak falling over broad shoulders; deep, restless eyes. The creature looked like a ghost from the age of myths, something carved from winter and death.
The lamp light touched his face in a way that made him both terrifying and beautiful, like a piece of art that should never have been finished.
Victor let out a tired, crooked laugh, but it was genuine.
"So you were smart enough to survive," he murmured, taking another drink.
The creature tilted his head, studying him as if every breath Victor took was precious. Then he spoke, his voice rough and too powerful for such a small room.
"I did not come here to ask for your love. Or to demand the attention you denied me before. I came to ask only one thing."
Victor raised an eyebrow, waiting.
"A companion. Just that," the creature said.
Victor set the bottle aside. The whole room seemed to tighten, like the universe was holding its breath.
"No." he replied, firm. "I will not create another like you. Never again."
The creature clenched his jaw, not in rage but frustration. His massive body stiffened, threatening.
"Why," he demanded.
Victor closed his eyes for a moment. "Why do you want that, Creature? Desire for reproduction? Want a bloodline of your own? And then what? Death?"
"No." The creature sounded hurt. "I do not want generations. I want someone who exists beside me. Someone who does not look at me and see a monster." He paused. "I just want company."
Victor stepped closer.
"That is how it always starts," he murmured. "They ask for company, and then they want more."His tone sharpened. "Men are men, no matter how they are made."
"You think I want that because you think like that, Victor," the creature said, his voice deep.
Victor let out a bitter laugh. "I do not think. I avoid thinking. Because I know where thinking takes me." He ran a hand over his shoulders.
"I cannot create life like the men out there. I can generate it, but with suffering, with risk, and I refuse to go through that. I would rather be a father than a mother."
The creature watched him. No judgment in his eyes, but no understanding either.
"You are neither of those to me, Victor."
Victor closed his eyes, feeling something ancient and rigid crack inside his chest.
"You are not my child. You are my creation. My invention. The one I shaped in my own image so you could be what I never could. The man I wished I had been, with everything in the right place."
The creature blinked, confused, almost childlike.
"But you are a man too, Victor."
Victor let out a dry laugh and spoke with a voice soft as a whispered confession.
"No. I am not a man, not truly. This body was not born this way. I am a construction, like you. I transformed it, forced every piece to fit what I felt inside. I rebuilt myself to be male. But I know I will never be a man in the eyes of God or men."
The creature did not blink.
"You think I do not understand that? You see yourself as wrong. I am seen as wrong. We are made of the same stubbornness."
He stepped closer.
"To me, you are a man. That is how I met you. That is how I see you," he said with raw simplicity.
Victor stepped back, almost stumbling, not from alcohol but emotion.
Silence stretched between them. Strange, terrible, intimate.
Hearing that from his own creation felt like something breaking open.
"You want a companion so you will not be alone," Victor murmured. "And I pushed you away because you reminded me of my own loneliness."
The creature breathed deeply. "I cannot redeem anything by saying I understand. But I do know what it is to carry a body the world rejects. You fought to be seen as a man. I fight just to be seen as alive."
Outside, the party music throbbed like a universe indifferent to the tragedy upstairs.
Victor wavered.
"To create another like you would be condemning her to exile. To persecution. To pain." He touched his forehead.
"Loneliness is a condemnation too," the creature replied.
Victor hesitated. Because, despite everything, it was true.
"I do not know if I can do what you are asking," he admitted, his voice cracking. "But I cannot pretend I did not hear you."
The creature stepped back, like he had been given the first crumb of hope in years.
Victor suddenly moved, not with anger but with a misplaced, surprising determination.
He went to the wardrobe, opened a suitcase, and began throwing clothes inside. Shirts, pants, nightshirts, underwear, notebooks, bottles of medicine, an old leather bundle he kept hidden. The creature watched, bewildered, as if the script of the play had suddenly changed.
"Victor, what are you doing," the creature asked, voice low, almost fragile.
Victor did not stop. He shut a drawer with his hip and let out a tired huff.
"I am going with you."
The creature blinked. "Going with me?"
"Yes." Victor turned, holding two glass vials like someone choosing weapons. "I said I would not create another life like yours. And I will not. I do not have the equipment, the reagents, the lab, and to be honest, I do not have the arrogance anymore." He packed the remaining vials. "But you asked for what you really wanted. Company."
The creature took half a step back, as if this was more unbelievable than a storm suddenly forming inside the room.
"Company," he repeated.
"Yes." Victor shut the suitcase. The sound echoed like a final point. "You said you are not looking for descendants. Not for children. Not to multiply anything. And I believe you. But I also know the world. Things change. Needs change. And when the time comes," he swallowed, looking straight at the creature, "to create life for your child, that I can do."
Silence.
A silence so deep it felt alive.
The creature’s breathing shifted, almost human, almost animal. His head tilted, trying to understand a promise too absurd and too tragic.
"You would come with me? Leave everything? Your family? This place? This party, this life, these humans?" he finally asked, voice cracking.
Victor let out a strangled laugh."They never saw me. Not in the way that matters."He pulled on a thick fur coat. "And most of them only notice I exist when they need someone to blame or someone to feel superior to."
The creature did not argue. He simply watched.
But something had changed in his eyes. Not joy. Not relief. Something stranger, the shock of being chosen. The unfamiliar warmth of someone deciding to walk beside him because they wanted to.
"To where," the creature asked, making a vague gesture, lost.
"Wherever you want," Victor said.
He paused.
And for the first time that night, his eyes drifted away from pain and guilt. He looked at the closed suitcase and murmured:
"My mother left a property. Old and far away." A small, sad smile touched his mouth. "A farm. Almost abandoned. I never sold it. Maybe because I always knew I would need a place no one else wanted."
The creature lifted his chin thoughtfully.
"A farm," he repeated, tasting the word. "Far from men?"
"Far from everything," Victor replied. "It is big, old, freezing in the winter, falling apart. But it is my mother’s land. And for a ridiculous reason, that always felt too sacred to give away."
The creature let out something like a sigh.
"Victor, are you sure," he asked softly.
Victor lifted the suitcase onto his shoulder. He looked at his creation and answered with certainty:
"I have made worse choices."
The creature blinked slowly, absorbing the impossible.
"Then let us go," he murmured.
Victor walked toward the balcony door. The creature stepped aside as he unlocked it again. The night outside was dark but breathable. A darkness that hid more than it revealed, perfect for two fugitives.
The creature stood beside him, huge, wrapped in furs and long hair, blending with the night.
Victor touched the railing, breathed the cold air, and said:
"Tonight it is just us. Tomorrow we will see what the world makes of us."
The creature walked beside him, not behind, not ahead, but exactly at his side.
Behind them, the party kept glowing, loud and ignorant, celebrating a future Victor would never have.
As he and his creation walked out of the estate, away from the music and toward the unknown, they carried a bond the world would never accept, but which, that night, finally took shape.
They crossed the dark field surrounding the Frankenstein property, two beings made of flaws and stitching, each carrying in their body the testimony of having been built, altered, and marked.
There was no happiness in them. But there was purpose.
And for creatures so broken, that was already a strange, fragile kind of hope.