The Glass Scientists micro-fanfictions

Hyde - a study

The little tears of his cloak were not artificial, but rather told tales of a life that was well lived, and lived in a way that he had never believed he could ever live but embraced with both hands. Each frayed edge reminded him that he was real. That he lived and lived to the fullest. Even the occasional scorch mark and ember stain, a reminder of an outstanding and altogether incredible failure was there to prove that he was not afraid to quite literally wear the marks of his failure upon body for all the world to see. Usually this was to hide away in the area of metaphor, but Edward Hyde was never the best at metaphors and so made it real. Had he been a little better with the matters of figures of speech he might have even seen the irony of this tying into the very nature of his existence. 

His hair was a wiry mess of spun gold, impossible to manage in any way that could be perceived well in polite society. Choppy and uneven, it was a marvel he could, on those rare occasions where the sensations of his hair brushing the back of his neck bothered him too much, tie it back into something of a more manageable mess beneath his hat. Even manageable, it was still a mess and he was quite fond of this. He was, after all, a bit of a mess at the best of times and he was quite fond of this also. It was the little things that made him himself were a wonder, something of which he could claim really was his own over what was shared by that of the tragically, tediously good Dr. Henry Jekyll, for whom he was eternally tied as one. There were few things he could truly claim as his own, and he would not let them simply slip by unappreciated. 

There was a flicker to his fingers, a hitch to his breath, a tap to his foot and it seemed he could never be truly still even if he did try. His heart raced, the thundering filling the world with a wonderful reminder that he was really and truly alive. Oh, and what a wonderful thing it is to be alive! He could not imagine ever wishing to be still, to be free of those little twitches and a mind that seemed to race in competition with his heart, for each of these screamed to him a reminder that he was he, and he was Edward Hyde and he was alive. Not only alive, but living a life that he could feel in its entirety, no need to try and mask it away behind something that could be perceived in a more proper shape. 

His life was balancing on the edge of a knife, glittering in the light of a grimy gaslamp in a way that shone so beautifully he could so easily forget that he was perpetually close to death. His existence itself was created from a world of improbabilities and more instabilities than a tightrope walker in a thunderstorm and he would want nothing less. Dancing with a grinning inevitable death in one hand and the impossible promises of life in the other, it was a marvel his existence did not collapse into a profound ruin at the drop of a hat. The fact he was alive at all was the result of a series of incredible failures and so he was determined to live up to this legacy. 

It was a common consensus that it was laughably ironic for a man as gloriously alive as he was to so resemble a dead man, or at least a man knocking on death's door. His skin had adopted a sickroom pallor, eyes and cheeks sunken in to leave the impression of a grinning skull. Or, perhaps it would if his eyes did not shine with a life that would leave anyone who gazed into the endless wells of green left with a sense of fearful envy and, perhaps, even enviable fear that they could not truly understand. There was nothing about the living corpse that was easy to understand, and very little true information that could be gleaned from simply gazing upon him, and this was just as he liked it. He was an enigma, a mystery that could never be solved all the while living life as an open book. 

Edward Hyde was not so very unnatural, as was the conclusion many would come to if they were left to observe the fellow for an extended period of time. Quite the contrary, in fact, for the creature, the beast, the man was so wholly and completely natural it stood out as a glaring oddity in a society that had worked so very hard to sterilise and perfect itself. He was not perfect, far from it even, but nobody truly is, the only difference between him and everybody else was that he simply refused to try and lie and hide this behind a shape of perceptible perfection. He seemed unnatural only because he was the only real, truly natural person, his own mask having been thrown aside to reveal the true face that was hidden beneath. A face that we each have but refuse to acknowledge, let alone accept as the concept of 'self' that mankind so fought to discover in our selves while equally shunning the findings. 
Edward Hyde was the sense of self that we fear to accept, that we continue to hide, that we each have all the while being lead to believe it is shameful and something that one is supposed to suppress and forget was ever there at all. 
But without the 'self', who are we? 
Is there anything really left behind one we scrub clean everything that makes us human?
We could ask ourselves this until we find ourselves utterly mad, but perhaps we do not need to sacrifice our minds in this pursuit. Perhaps all we must do is gaze upon the shell of what had once been Henry Jekyll, for he let himself die so the 'self' could live.