The Glass Scientists micro-fanfictions

I can explain (requested)

Oh! How his mind raced and rushed and reeled in the most decedent and addictive way! Each nerve, each fibre of his being shook with the total and complete force of life, and by goodness was it incredible. His fingers twitched as adrenaline shocked his nerved and deadened his doubts as the mania flooded his mind with a tidal wave that curled an involuntary smile right across his face. It was horrible. It was was frightening. It was amazing! From what had once been the sad and lonely Henry Jekyll, like a butterfly emerging from its cocoon as something more, something better than it had once been been, stood the new and improved, the better, the real and true Edward Hyde. Each ache that filled his form, each shake that his wheezing breath brought on, each change to all that he was and could be was holy and-

And the door was open.

Why was the door open? Henry wouldn't have left the door open. He was too fastidious to overlook something so glaringly and agonisingly obvious as an open door, even if he was - secretly, despite all his claims against it - excited to relent the control of the self for the evening. Then why was the door open? He didn't do that. They didn't do that. They shut the door, there was absolutely no way they could have left the door open why was the door open why was the door open why was the door open why was the door open?

Footsteps.

Someone saw. Someone opened the door and now somebody knew. Somebody knew. That's bad. No, not bad, it was more than bad, it was the worst possible thing that he could think of and that is insanely dreadful. He had only existed for a matter of moments how the devil had he managed to screw up so majorly already? Surely it should have taken at least an hour for such a cataclysmically disastrous thing to happen.

In his haste to give case, Hyde did not wait to ensure the chemicals had adequately settled and so he staggered rather significantly into the wall with a thump and a snarl, both coming at a similar enough volume to combine unpleasantly. He clawed himself forward, launching himself after the source of the sound.

There was something of both the frightened, fearful prey and the frightening, fearsome predator behind his movements, chasing the unfortunate man who had made the foolish mistake of wanting to enquire of the doctor's wellbeing. In a bestial flash that could not have come from any place outside of the sheer determination of the desperate, he was upon the man. The man flinched under his touch, and he did not feel even a single flicker of guilt at the sharp intake of breath that this won from the unfortunate fellow that was within his grasp. If anything, this prompted him to tighten his grip a little harder, just to make him squirm and suffer for just a moment longer.

"Good lord Henry, what the devil have you done?"

Just inches from the savage, snarling face of Edward Hyde was the panicked look upon Robert Lanyon's own. Now, Lanyon had never had the misfortune of being face to face with a rabid animal - which was not a fact he would have ordinarily thought he would consider at risk of changing to fiction until he became unwillingly acquainted with Mr. Hyde - but in that moment he found himself tragically aware of what the sensation would have been like. The blonde creature - creature, for he could not rightly call the beast before him a man - was not rabid, but he was hardly carrying himself with the disposition of a gentleman in polite society, and hardly even of a drunkard in the gutter, but something altogether different. New. Dreadful.

"Don't call me that!" Hyde practically barked at the man, stealing away what little space there still was between them to get threateningly into the other's face. The manic fury shifted, however, into one of equally manic sorrow, burying his face into the other's shirt before repeating his declaration of, "Don't call me that..." a great deal more pitifully, "He isn't here right now, I'm here. He went away."

"And where-" Robert began, but found his mouth uncomfortably dry and so needed to pause to swallow before he could try again with more confidence, "If he is not here, then where is Jekyll? What have you done to him that lead to this?" The second question came with a judgemental waving of his hand, trying to not so subtly free himself from the smaller man's grip.

"Why? Do you care so much about him that you worry about him?" It seemed the moment of sorrow had well and truly passed to leave something frustratingly patronising in its wake. "Is it so impossible for you to think that he chose this? That this is, that I am a conscious decision on his end? Is it so bloody impossible to think that he wants this?" The questioning had rather quickly shifted from addressing the man to vocalising thoughts that were busy bouncing about in his mind in the erratic way his thoughts seemed to be in perpetual motion.

Lanyon went to open his mouth to reply to at least one of the questions that he had been unceremonially bombarded with, but was stopped before he could utter a single syllable. With an uncomfortably cold finger brought to the taller man's lips, Hyde brought him to silence. There was more of a threat than a warning behind this and it seemed the smaller man was just a little bit too ready to lash out and he didn't want to push his luck any more than he already was with not outright fleeing.

"Not out here, what if someone overhears?" Edward asked, his voice slipping into something closer to singsong, "It'd ruin him if anyone knew that he already ruined himself. Come, come!" He dropped his hands to secure the other's, already beginning to try and drag Robert away. "We'll discuss this in his - my? Whatever! - office!"

"How do I know you'll tell me the truth?" was the only form of protest the other offered. He was hardly fond of the idea of being alone in an enclosed space with the madman, but if he was to offer an explanation to the strange and unnatural sight he had seen then he was willing to take the risk.

"You don't! Let's go!"

It was just after evening had become officially night when Lanyon set foot into the office of the esteemed Dr. Henry Jekyll, and he did not leave until the sun was beginning to peek up over the horizon before he left, looking several years older in a way that would not have come purely from a lack of sleep. He never did breathe a word of what he was told that evening, but let it be buried away with the other wicked little secrets he was prepared to carry until his death.