Chapter Text
The bullet from Victor’s first shot swings wide and misses its intended mark, though the crimson blood that unfurls like a rose across the right side of Elizabeth’s bodice seals his fate all the same. When William is dead on the hearth, the wedding ruined, and the creature long gone with the withering bride in his arms, the last living Frankenstein decides he shall not be the one to seal his only brother into his tomb and carry on a cursed name.
There is a second and final shot that rings out, fired from a rifle in the upstairs bedchamber, but the creature doesn’t hear it as he carries Elizabeth away from the estate. Faint trickles of her blood drop into the virgin snow every few steps, shining blackish under the moonlight. She is alert as she clings to him, breathing shallowly through the haze of pain, but her strength doesn’t seem to falter even as the side of her white gown slowly turns pink, then scarlet.
“Did you hear that?” she asks the creature, glassy eyes roving over his face as he walks on a steady pilgrimage to nowhere. “That sound—”
“No,” he tells her, briefly bowing his head to press his nose and mouth close to her sweet-smelling hair. It occurs to him with a pang that this is the first real word she’s ever heard fall from his lips. “Be still. You are wounded and the night stretching out before us will be long if we find ourselves lucky enough to survive it.”
Elizabeth lets out a weak, breathless laugh at this. “You should know that I refuse to die without you. Not now—after all this.”
The creature grimaces but decides to tell her the wretched truth of his existence without the softening of any prelude or fanfare. “I cannot die with any permanence,” he says quietly. “Not in any way that would grant me eternal release. Attempts have been made—and briefly succeeded, but only for a short while before the infernal breath refills my lungs.”
“Then I won’t, either,” Elizabeth tells him, seemingly untroubled by such an inhuman confession. “Die, that is. Not until I find myself quite ready.”
“Hush,” he says, begging more than commanding it, simply out of desperation for her to conserve her strength. Her blood is beginning to seep into the front of his oilskin leathers, warm and stark against the biting winter gloom. And then, because the creature cannot help himself or the fearful tremor in his voice: “You deserve far more than perishing in the arms of a wretch. There is no world in which you should have taken a bullet on my behalf—even if I were truly mortal it would have never been a worthy sacrifice.”
Elizabeth’s hand comes up to touch his throat, her thumb resting there over the crude crucifix of a scar above his stolen trachea. “Were I to die tonight,” she tells him, “it would be in the arms of the angel who came back for me. And simply seeing you again, as you are now, would have made it worthwhile enough.”
The creature does not have the will to answer this—to tell her of the terrible things he has done, the men he has killed, how foolish she is in her strange naivety—so onward they walk, nothing or nobody following them but the silvery light of the moon slowly growing rounder with her ripened belly overhead.
In the remote shelter of a frozen cave, the creature opens Elizabeth’s bodice and the laces of her stays with trembling fingers at her insistence. Beneath the stained outer garments he pulls up the cotton chemise, sticky with blood, and finds a shallow laceration across her right side, deep enough to weep but not a killing wound unless it were to become infected. The bullet didn’t lodge within her body, simply tore a seam across her milky skin, like the wing of an albatross skimming a cresting wave. He knows it will need stitching and more careful dressing but that is a problem hovering further away in their near future.
Together they unravel the ribbons adorning her left arm and use them to tightly bind the torn corset against the wound, providing compression to slow the bleeding. Elizabeth’s face pinches some in pain while she shivers, and the creature pulls her stained chemise back down over the makeshift dressing before shrugging out of his coat. The shock and cold can kill her as easily as a bleeding wound, and he would rather turn blue-black with frostbite than see her lips so much as tremble. They leave the ruined bridal bodice behind, having no need for it, but only after Elizabeth’s clumsy hands unfasten the twin sterling brooch pins and conceal them somewhere out of view.
“They belonged to my maman, and her mother before her,” she says, shyly, like the sentimentality of that longevity would make any sense to a man born on a slab instead of from the living loins of his mother. “I couldn’t bear to leave them behind.”
“Keep them safe if they are special to you,” he agrees, bundling his coat around her body before gathering her back up into his arms. “It would be remiss of me to deny you anything in this world.”
They reemerge into the snowy night, trudging onward through the cold. “Then don’t deny me you, yourself, the truest nature of the man you’ve become while we were apart,” Elizabeth says, warm breath ghosting at his collarbone while the distant stars twinkle overhead. “Tell me your name so I can thank you properly. Tell me something precious nobody else in the world knows about you and if you wish it, I shall do the same.”
“I don’t have a name,” the creature says, still resenting the truthfulness of that. “I was never given one to claim as my own.”
“Then you should claim one for yourself,” Elizabeth tells him firmly. “Anything that speaks true to your heart.”
“I will ponder it,” the creature says. The commotion of the day has made his mind weary even if his unnatural body persists without failing, and he will need more time to consider such a thing. But he decides to indulge her all the same, as tragic as his truths may be: “The first kind thing anyone ever called me—the blind man, in the forest cottage, who taught me the beauty in words—was a friend. The second kind thing anybody ever called me was an angel.”
Elizabeth smiles faintly at this, ashen-faced but beautiful all the same. “You are,” she says simply. “A friend, and an angel. But I don’t know if either of them are suitable for a name.”
“No,” the creature agrees, his breath a soft cloud upon the air. “I think not.”
“Should I reveal something to you in kind?” Elizabeth asks a short while later, clearly growing weary now. “A secret to uphold my end our bargain.”
“There is no need,” he says gently, comforted by her steady breathing and her heartbeat above all else. “Having you in my arms is precious enough.”
“I will tell you anyway,” Elizabeth whispers, her words as fragile as the crystals of freshly fallen snow blanketing their path. “I kept the leaf you gave me…that night in the catacombs beneath the tower, when you were still bound in chains. Even now it remains on my dressing table in the abandoned bridal suite.”
“The leaf?” the creature asks, stunned as remembrance slowly washes over him like a gentle pool. He had unwittingly forgotten that moment, as if it had been excised with a scalpel from the earliest iteration of his mind—but yet it remains. Simply hidden from him until a passing wind uncovered it once more.
“Yes,” Elizabeth says, granting him a tiny, private smile. “A leaf, for me. I’m sad to have left it behind.”
The creature inclines his head to survey the strange sorrow shining in her eyes, not grasping the full scope of her small loss in a common maple leaf, yet recognizing its importance to her all the same.
“Do not mourn,” he says, and then makes Elizabeth a promise he intends to keep. “I will give you another.”
The creature walks until the watercolors of dawn are beginning to stain the horizon violet, and only then does he stop because Elizabeth is asleep in his arms and they have happened upon a hunting cabin without wood smoke or firelight inside. Empty for the winter or abandoned altogether, he hopes against all odds.
He rouses Elizabeth and leaves her safely nestled against a wide tree at the clearing’s edge before investigating further. The windows are shuttered but for one with broken slats, and the darkness within the cabin seems blissfully absolute. He circles the small structure three times, searching for any signs of life or danger, and finds none. The back door gives easily under his strength and the smell of frozen dust and disuse greets his nose when he ducks inside. There is nothing within but an empty hearth with an iron pot, a three-legged stool, a roughshod table, and a derelict, moth-eaten mattress on the floor. The latter is likely pilfered through with vermin by now, but it will be a serviceable place to rest and recover for as long as they may need it.
The creature makes quick work of breaking the stool into kindling and lights the lot with a worn flint stone bolted beside the hearth. He brings Elizabeth within the cabin and lowers her onto the old mattress after encouraging any furred pests within to make ample room, and then drapes her with his oilskin before going out to comb the nearest trees for dead limbs. When he returns with an armload of firewood, she is awake and still resting where he left her, looking bedraggled but otherwise relieved in the crackling warmth of the fire.
“If you fill the old pot with fresh snow, we can put it to boil and wash my underpinnings,” Elizabeth says. “It may be easier to clean the wound that way.”
Her logic is sound enough but feels incomplete, given the skeletal circumstances. “There is nothing to close the wound here,” the creature says. “We will need to travel further—find somewhere, someone, who may be able to help. A doctor, perhaps, or a practiced midwife…”
“We wouldn’t dare risk it,” Elizabeth says, tipping her head from one side to the other. “Not yet—not so soon after I have you back. I have everything I need right here.”
The creature levels her with a questioning stare and watches as she pulls the silver brooches out from under her borrowed coat, turning them around so he can see the sharp point of the polished pin on the back, glinting like the edge of a dagger. “If you break off the needle from the back, we could boil it as well and then use it to close the wound. A few lengths of loose silk unraveled from my cape could prove quite helpful in a pinch.”
She seems so convinced of her plan that the creature almost finds himself reluctant to doubt it. “If any part of the process is unclean, you will develop a fever and become ill,” he says, trying and failing to dissuade her.
“And we shall deal with that trouble only if it comes to pass,” Elizabeth says. “Please—boil one pot first and throw it out, and then we’ll sterilise the rest. I would go out and gather the snow myself but I fear I may need all my strength to stitch the wound together.”
“You cannot,” the creature stammers, feeling slightly fraught in the face of her boldness. “It is too cumbersome and delicate a task to perform on yourself. And painful, above all else.”
“Trust me, we women of the world have dealt with far worse than a flesh wound and a bit of blood,” Elizabeth tells him with an unladylike snort. “I’ll manage just fine with you here to help me, angel.”
He doesn’t wish for her to keep calling him an angel, but he would also sooner fall on a sword than ever ask her to stop.
“I will do it,” he blurts out before the decision even fully solidifies in his mind. “After the needle and threads are boiled and the wound is washed. I—I will cleanse my hands and do what I can to remedy it, if you will permit me. The bullet was intended for me and it…is the least I could do.”
She gazes at him where he still stands by the fire, eyes unspeakably tender despite her pain. “Of course I would permit you,” she says. “I find it entirely difficult to believe you could ever possibly harm me on purpose.”
“You shouldn’t say such things,” the creature tells her, partially turning away as his features darken. “When failure inevitably finds me again, whether today, tomorrow, or some remote day in the sightless future, I would despise knowing I proved your words to be false.”
Elizabeth is quiet for a long moment until her voice returns. “I’m only speaking what I feel to be true in my heart,” she says, as her eyes travel over the mismatched planes of his face and shoulders. “It seems I think more highly of you than you think of yourself, which is unlike any other living man I have ever known. But at the same time, I desperately wish you knew how special you are.”
“Please,” he grunts, loosely covering his face with a hand to dispel her eyes resting so heavily upon him. “Do not.”
“I won’t carry on, not right now,” Elizabeth relents, throating working in place. “But I fear I may have to do everything in my power to convince you, someday, of the man you are and the man you may want to become. Now—we mustn’t delay, because I haven’t had a bite to eat since yesterday afternoon and I fear my nerve is waning along with my resolve.”
Their plan is settled from that point onward. The break of dawn gradually turns to morning and the creature gathers up clean white snow in the cast iron pot, letting it come to a rolling boil over its hook on the open fire before he dumps the lot and starts anew. Elizabeth pulls her chemise over her head and offers the bloodied garment to him, then busies herself with tugging a fine thread loose from her cape with the sharp end of the silver pin. The creature takes the other brooch from her and delicately snaps it from its sterling chains—wincing as if he has hurt her more than an inanimate piece of finery—and uses the barrel of the second pin as a form with which to wrap an eye on their makeshift needle with nothing more than the brute strength of his thumbnail and a clever twist of one wrist.
It is all exceptionally rudimentary, but it seems like it may feasibly work. While everything is boiling above the fire, the creature contemplates scalding his own hands there in the pot just to purify them. The wretched flesh would grow back clean, he is quite sure, but the fear it would instill in Elizabeth after so much strife isn’t worth sacrificing her confidence. Not at a time like this.
Nonetheless, when he goes outdoors again with the freshly boiled pot on its hook, he settles it in the snow bank and then buries his hands into the icy virgin cold to numb them as much as he can. When they plunge into the steaming water the pain is a visceral slash and throb so terrible it makes his forearms ache, but the raw, blistered hands he pulls from the pot are clean, and within a few minutes the flesh on them is restored to what it was when he walked outside, ever the same. The creature stands there in light of his agony, reconciling his aberration as both a blessing and a curse, something holy and demonic in the same breath. Unnatural. Perverse. And yet—he is purified enough to touch the most precious thing he knows.
Inside, Elizabeth uncovers herself where she reclines on the stuffed mattress and begins to pluck at the ribbons holding the layers of fabric over her wound. The creature watches this from where he stands by the fire, carefully arranging the boiled needle and thread on a torn section of her chemise. Elizabeth’s entire upper body is bare save for her red necklace and she makes no swift moves to cover her breasts in the cold, though the rosy nipples pebble and grow tight in the chilled air.
The creature swallows and tries to steady himself for what inevitably may come next: not only touching this beautiful woman in her vulnerable state, but mending her back together again with his crude hands, so unlike the skilled surgical prowess of his creator.
“Have you decided on a name yet?” Elizabeth asks conversationally, turning onto her side and twisting her hair up and over one shoulder so that it’s out of the way. “Should I need to scream out in vain to somebody other than God, it would be lovely to have something particular in mind.”
He looks up, startled, to find her mouth twisted into a wry little smile. “I’m sorry, I only jest,” she blurts out when she sees his expression. “Please don’t look so dejected—sometimes I have a poor habit of being crass when I feel anxious. My maman and governess tried to break me of it, to little avail, as you can see.”
The creature wracks his brain for something, anything, to offer to her. If she needs his name to lean on as a crutch, as a bastion of support, he cannot deny her this either. Swift images of terror and grief run like darting rats in his mind, and in the end he can only think of one story, and one particular day, that isn’t marked by pain—the first book he ever read aloud, under the patient tutelage of the blind man. The first story ever told, in fact, about the first man in all creation.
“You may call me Adam if you wish,” he tells Elizabeth quietly. “It is plain but I enjoy the simplicity of it, given…what I am.”
“The first of your kind,” Elizabeth says, smiling in approval. “Yes, a man unlike all that came before him—I quite like it. Thank you, Adam.”
“There is no need to thank me,” Adam murmurs as he tries to tamp down a flush at his throat, carefully bringing the tools he’s painstakingly fashioned and boiled over to the bedside. “I only pray this works and that my hands move more quickly than my tongue.”
Elizabeth finally seems to steel herself in preparation for the pain to come and idly covers her chest with her forearm, cupping one breast in her hand. The wound on her side is no longer freely bleeding after their long night trekking through the cold, but the meat of her flesh surrounding the open laceration is bruised a mulberry wine color and slightly singed by the bullet’s graze. Adam knows it will soon begin bleeding again as soon as he punctures her skin with the needle.
“I have nothing to help with the pain,” he whispers, kneeling beside her. “If it is unbearable, and you should need me to stop—”
“I won’t,” Elizabeth says roughly, clearing her throat. “We’ll see it through together, from start to finish. I trust you with my life. Now please carry on however you see fit.”
Adam threads the needle in silence, doubling the silken fibers over on each other to strengthen their hold. Knotting them proves slightly more difficult with his large fingers, but he manages it all the same, and then fetches another piece of the boiled chemise to keep at hand. Elizabeth seems to hold her breath through it all, but then lets out a long exhale when he passes the warm bit of cloth over the wound, quietly hissing it back in again through pursed lips.
“I’m fine,” she murmurs, though she pulls her hand from her chest to loosely cover her face. The queer intimacy of it all is surreal enough to make Adam’s heart pound in the hollow of his throat: not so much the fact of her nakedness being tied to any burning sense of desire, but the way in which they are two entities now bound together in a pact so strange and sudden that she has bared her breast to him out of sheer faith in his avowal to honor her no matter what.
“I will begin, now,” Adam says despite the faint tremor in his own fingers, and then doesn’t quite trust himself to speak again. He examines the wound, the shape and depth of it, and then takes one last shallow breath before piercing her skin with the sharpened tip of the pin.
Elizabeth lets out a faint gasp but doesn’t move, not until he pulls the needle through the puncture and draws the thread through her skin. She flinches at the force it takes to tug the eye through, making a terrible little cut-off sound of pain, alabaster fingers flexing against her own cheek.
“Keep going,” she croaks, even as hot tears well in her eyes. “It’s not so bad, darling, I swear it—continue, please, before I overthink things and lose my composure.”
Adam repeats the process, carefully and methodically, aligning each prick of the needle through her flesh so the thread will pull neatly and close the wound millimeter by millimeter. Bright red blood thinly weeps from the tiny holes he makes, staining the once white thread pink, and has to be frequently blotted away so that he can focus on his handiwork without it dribbling over Elizabeth’s side.
It is agonizing, in a sense. Her rattled breathing, the gasps of pain, the silent tears so plentiful they pool in the hollow of her throat. Elizabeth digs her fingers into his shoulder at the second to last stitch and he pauses, unsure of himself, before she bids him once more to keep going and see it through.
By the grace of something holy, there’s more than enough thread to neatly tie off and knot the final suture when the wound is closed. It is an imperfect job, made by imperfect hands, but Adam wipes the remaining blood away and rebukes the bestial voice in the back of his mind that drives some impulse to lick her wound like an animal—just for the thrill of tasting it, to feel the puckered skin under his tongue.
He does not fall prey to such a compulsion. But he does throw down the needle with more force than intended and reaches for her trembling hands, tenderly pulling them from her face so that he can lay his gaze upon her bloodshot eyes.
“It is finished,” he whispers. “You have suffered and I’m gravely sorry for it, for everything that you have endured on my behalf.”
“Don’t be, you foolish man,” Elizabeth says, though she breaks slightly around a fresh sob, exhausted and hurting as she is. “Oh, I’m the one who’s sorry,” she weeps. “You aren’t a fool, forgive me for saying it. I don’t mean to carry on like this, truly—”
Adam isn’t sure of what he should do, but he thinks of how he felt when the old man held him close and called him a friend. The healing and the hope that raced through him, potent as it was; accepted and comforted, for just the briefest moment. It had been life altering. It had been sacred, in an existence such as his.
“May I…hold you?” he asks, tentatively touching two fingers to the soft inner part of her elbow.
Elizabeth reaches for him and meets him halfway, desperation oozing from her like a feverish sweat. It’s not the intensity between man and wife, but a different sort of primal need, the raw desire to be known and beheld, to be cradled by a soul so kindred it may as well be a mirrored reflection of the self.
Adam holds her head against his collarbone and wraps a long arm around her trembling body, feeling her bare skin touch him in the places where his sleeves are rolled back and the front of his tunic hangs open. Elizabeth cries in broken sobs, hiccuping and dampening the linen against his chest—crying for more than the physical pain, he thinks, though he remains unsure of how to ask about the expanse of her private grief. There’s so much he doesn’t know about her life, and all he can do in this moment is hold her and bear witness to the present.
“Thank you,” Elizabeth whispers against his mosaic of skin, even though Adam hasn’t said anything. “Oh, God. Thank you.”
When she’s damp with a light sheen of sweat and limp against him from her crying, Adam smooths her hair and ponders the trouble of finding clothing now that all of her wedding gown but the skirts and pantaloons have been dismantled and ruined. Not only for modesty’s sake, but for practicality as well: the temperature will drop again come nightfall, and even in the cabin with the fire crackling away the drafty walls will let the cold seep through. There’s also the trouble of things like obtaining food to eat, bedding to sleep with, and a fresh dressing to cover the wound in Elizabeth’s side.
He cannot bear to leave her, though. Not yet. So he waits until she’s calmed and dozing upon the mattress, loosely covered again by his coat, and then he removes his own tunic and goes to set another pot of water to boil. He’ll go without his shirt in the meantime, he supposes, and let her slip it on over her head to keep warm after he’s hung it by the hearth to dry.
Out in the snow, the tacky crimson beneath Adam’s nails rinses clean in a delicate swirl of rusty pink water, like a scrying bowl foretelling a future he can’t yet discern or name. With only the forest there to watch his secret sins, he brings a thumb to his lips and curiously sucks at the coppery taste of Elizabeth’s lifeblood, astonished to find it tastes exactly like the blood he once felt pooling in the back of his own wounded throat.