The Glass Scientists micro-fanfictions

The Mind

How long has it been now? How long has be been locked away in an insurmountable purgatory that stretched onwards for an eternity and a day spare on either side? If he were ever to be free again, would anyone remember him? Would anyone still speak his name or had it already slipped away down with the ever tumbling sands of time that slipped through the fingers of all who walked the earth? Was he dead in the eyes of all those who knew him or perhaps there were still those few that might hold the faintest scraps of hope in their heart that he might one day return again? How long had it been?

Okay, well, the true answer to this was that it had been, at most, four hours since Dr. Henry Jekyll locked one Mr. Edward Hyde away in the deeper recesses of his mind so that he could actually get some work done, but in his defence it felt like it was a lot longer. Time, which already felt altogether weird and false, ran differently in the mind, and it was easy to lose himself in the incongruity of tracking time in a timeless state, a fact of which displeased him greatly, and a fact he would absolutely not be quiet about if he was close enough to the forefront of the mind to actually be heard lamenting the inconsistencies of time.
But he wasn't even able to do that. He was bored. Bored! Boredom was a fate that felt worse than death, a true torture for the man - the concept - that so desperately craved stimulation he would willingly watch the world burn to ash around him if it meant he could spend a matter of moments entertained before being dragged back into the tedium of it all.

Well, actually he would rather not watch things burning for a while. He had managed to get his fix of that and was a little disappointed to find that he really, really did not like it. Not if he could get in trouble for it, at the very least, as there was nothing more dreadful, in his not so humble opinion, than having to face the repercussions of his actions. Edward Hyde was remarkably capable, however his cognitive functioning, heightened in some ways, had several elements that were diminished in others and this meant his forethinking was defined not by whether something was wise or not, but rather by whether it would or would not provide him the stimulation that he so desperately craved above all else. 

Ordinarily, when he was bored he would use this as a chance to poke about in those terrible little - little in the sense of actual time it spent occurring in the wider scheme of his lifespan, not in the sense of significance in his life - memories that he, as Henry, would rather not ever have to face again but he, as Edward, knew it would need to be explored if it were ever to progress away from having to be locked away, shunned and forgotten. He didn't consider it like this, of course, but that was another matter of not having the forethought to think that through exploring the unwanted memories he might be able to grow and accept them as a part of his life. But it seemed he wasn't even going to be able to find this source of entertainment while locked away in the mind. 
It was dreadful, really. He had just wanted to poke about for a bit. See what was lurking in the darker nooks of his, their, the mind out of a perfectly idle curiosity with no intention of weaponising this against his more tedious self, and other similar such lies, and he would rather like to think that this was only fair. He had been shoved back there, so why should he not make the most of it? But he couldn't even do that! 

As Hyde was little more than an abstract notion at that moment, the other abstract notions of the mind were a little more literal for him at that time. The shadowy nooks of the mind were a great deal more alive than they had any right to be, and they most certainly did not like him poking around in places that were definitely supposed to be left untouched. Actually, it seems they didn't particularly like him at all. If they were just there to be some sort of guard dogs of matters that were better left to rot into the sort of hazy, obscure memories that couldn't be recalled with any real ease, then they would have left him alone when he got far enough away. But they wouldn't. They wouldn't leave him alone at all, in fact, and that was just frankly dreadful and he would very much like that to stop soon, and he cried thankee sai. 

Fortunately, if there was any good fortune to be found at all when in perpetual purgatory, he did not need to breathe in the mindscape and so he could just keep running without the fear of having to stop to catch his breath. Of course, he did still have literally everything else that he needed to fear, but if he could tick one thing off at the absolute least then he was not utterly hopeless. But he was still stuck hiding in a tedious childhood memory of past lessons that he could barely recall, so he didn't exactly want to have to keep running. 

Alone in his office, Henry Jekyll found himself caught up in such a strong bout of nostalgia he actually needed to lift his pen from his page before his thoughts ran too far from his work. It had been a while since he had thought about his childhood, and while there were a great many factors that made it a less than sentimental time for him, however he found himself missing the more simple time of his youth.