all the glory that the lord has made, and the complications you could do without
On September 13th at midnight, Dr. Henry Jekyll became someone else. Driven by desperation, by arrogance, by love or longing or the will to save mankind, these motivations are immaterial. The fact is that he made himself complicit in selling a little piece of himself, of his humanity or his soul or whatever and he is, for the moment, without remorse.
Hasi returns him to his house full of ghosts, too full of memory and too loud. There is water in his hair, under the collar of his shirt; he is both alive and scraped raw inside, trembling and stricken by terrible, numbing calm.
A mistake has been made.
It must be a mistake.
He'd remember. He would. With Cameron he had understood how Hyde saw the necessity, how in his darkest heart the hammer swinging down was not something Jekyll would not do, but merely something he could not.
Surely he would remember this, the taste of her skin, the slim sliding warmth, the way her eyes would change --
-- oh but there is something, an echo of an image sliding by - losing this cannot happen; he plunges a hand into the nearest kitchen drawer for a pen and --
There is a photograph of Hasi taped to the inside of the drawer, a photograph which once held two people - the other has been torn out.
Erased.
For the first time, Dr. Jekyll begins to consider that he might be in over his head.
But he can control this. It was simply the first time; it was bound to be ...unpredictable. Hyde will simply vanish from her life, and after a while he'll be nothing more than a terrible story that, when she tells it, will be somehow charming.
He can control this.
Can't he?
Hasi returns him to his house full of ghosts, too full of memory and too loud. There is water in his hair, under the collar of his shirt; he is both alive and scraped raw inside, trembling and stricken by terrible, numbing calm.
A mistake has been made.
It must be a mistake.
He'd remember. He would. With Cameron he had understood how Hyde saw the necessity, how in his darkest heart the hammer swinging down was not something Jekyll would not do, but merely something he could not.
Surely he would remember this, the taste of her skin, the slim sliding warmth, the way her eyes would change --
-- oh but there is something, an echo of an image sliding by - losing this cannot happen; he plunges a hand into the nearest kitchen drawer for a pen and --
There is a photograph of Hasi taped to the inside of the drawer, a photograph which once held two people - the other has been torn out.
Erased.
For the first time, Dr. Jekyll begins to consider that he might be in over his head.
But he can control this. It was simply the first time; it was bound to be ...unpredictable. Hyde will simply vanish from her life, and after a while he'll be nothing more than a terrible story that, when she tells it, will be somehow charming.
He can control this.
Can't he?