A bitter wind, stained by the rain that roared outside, whipped the long since sun-faded curtains as they hung by the foolishly open window. The chill of the inhospitable weather beyond the room, however, was nothing compared to the chills and thrills of pure, primal terror that raced through the poor, frightened woman's veins like ice. It had taken no more than the flash of an intentionally poorly concealed blade of a knife to strip her of the feeble glimmer of hope that she had so foolishly dared to allow herself to entertain the lifetime of a cluster of mere moments before.
"I know the good Dr. Jekyll just as well as I know myself," came the eerie sing-song of one Edward Hyde, the nature of his pacing alone making it glaringly obvious that he was in one of his more erratic, unpredictable moods, "We are very... close, he and I. Just as you and I are, my dearest Lucy." The presence of the knife, clasped just so that she was only able to catch a glimpse of it if it hit the light just right, a fact he was clearly enjoying playing with, left the term of endearment with the weight of the most profound mockery. Mockery that was significantly less pressing than the fact the tip of the knife was pointed towards the woman's throat more than enough to make his intention for it glaringly obvious.
"If you're afraid I'm goin' to tell," Lucy began, trying to win herself as much space between her and the man as she possibly could without risking him lashing out, "I swear, I won't tell no one."
This brought a sharp smile to curl across the man's odd features. Both sharp and odd in ways that were perfectly obvious, stretching too wide to flash teeth that seemed improbably sharp on a person, and in ways that she truly could not explain even if she had the time to ponder the matter properly. He rocked onto the balls of his feet just so, quickly stealing back what little space she had managed to secure.
"You won't tell?" repeated he, his eyes stretched far too wide in mock obliviousness, tilting his head to the side, "Then tell me, Lucy, what is it that you shan't be telling anyone?"
Now, whatever it was that Hyde had assumed Lucy had worked out about himself and Jekyll - presumably that they were one and the same - was quickly lost to him as he had evidently not been expecting her actual answer.
"I won't tell no one that you're Henry's lover." she near squeaked out, leaning back as far as she possibly could, her arm wobbling a little as it threatened to give out from underneath her.
"What?" came the near-screech of the man after a necessary cluster of heartbeats to make sure that he really had heard her correctly.
"I'm not judgin' you, sir, honest," Lucy continued, misinterpreting the horror that graced Hyde's features, "Lots of folks come here with all sorts of tastes and interests, it isn't my business who likes what and -"
"That's not what I meant at all!" Hyde near bellowed, quickly resuming his pacing back and forth across the floor in such a rapid frenzy that the poor carpet beneath his feat was sure to suffer, as threadbare as it was to begin with it hardly stood a chance against the odd, irregular footfalls of the the creature of a man.
One good thing about this pacing, however, was that it gave Lucy a chance to scoot back a bit. She'd have much rather have made for the door, or even risk her chances scurrying out the window, but the path he had settled on left him between both. At least he wasn't looming over her, which felt like a little victory among a perpetual series of far more significant losses. Which she rather felt made for the perfect summary of her life, an idea that almost brought a smile - the sort of smile a person wore when they knew the alternative was tears - but she caught herself before she did something Hyde might take as her trying to provoke him somehow.
"That'd just be... gross," Hyde continued, one hand finding itself in his mess of hair, the other busy gesturing wildly with the knife, "Not that, that's fine, people are pretty and I appreciate that very much, but Henry? Gross. Dreadful. He's awful! I mean, I'm pretty wonderful and everyone agrees but I'm all that he isn't but also that he should be but isn't because he's a coward and so he needed me to be all that because he-" He had to pause his increasingly incoherent ramble of a sentence because he had forgotten he needed to breathe, and so had to stop and gasp a few lungfuls. Which did not give him time to slow his brain into anything more coherent.
"So," Lucy, who was very sure she was being talked at, and not talked to, pressed, "You and Henry?"
"Yes!"
"Yes?"
"Yes! Me and Henry, Henry and me," he paused, the hand that had wormed into his hair shifting to tap at his temples, rolling his eyes, "Henry and I," he corrected as if he had been chastised for his poor syntax, "One and the same. Both. The same. One of us. Twain yet one. So on and so forth."
It seemed very much as if Hyde was determined to make his thought process as hard as humanly possible for anyone to try and follow. But in his defence, it was also just as hard for him to follow his own thought processes, so at least the aggravation was a universal experience. It did mean, however, that Lucy required a little longer to try and extract an actual meaning hidden away in the jumble of words that had just sort of been thrown at her all at once.
"Forgive me for sayin'," she began very diplomatically, "You don't look much like Henry."
"Good," a beat, "I'm fortunate to have found myself looking far more dashing and roguish and handsome than Henry could ever hope to be."
Lucy could have very much begged to differ, but she was also very aware that the surface the fellow had chosen to examine his reflection in as if to prove his point to himself was a knife's edge. While she had been right, the man before her was notably shorter than the doctor was, and pale in the sort of way that she would have been excused for assuming was only possible in the very sick and dead, she took a moment to notice that she wasn't entirely correct either. It was all very easy misses, in her defence, as the mole on his cheek looked a little out of place due to the absence of the thick glasses the doctor required to do literally anything, and she had only seen Jekyll without gloves once so it would have been easy to have missed the scar - the result of a failed experiment on a rat that had just bitten him and promptly died within minutes of being exposed to trial HJ3 - they both wore on their hand.
"But how does that work?" questioned she.
"Wouldn't you like to know?" he huffed in reply.
"Obviously," returned she, "That's why I asked." She had noticed that after the initial fear of her imminent death had passed into the realm of having accepted her fate, she found herself feeling a little more confident than she thought she ought to. If she was going to be murdered anyway, it was no use cringing and being afraid.
This won a series of huffs that seemed oddly unrelated. But after just long enough for it to have begun to feel excessive, Hyde flopped himself onto the chair she had drawn up at her little makeshift vanity and table. He tucked one leg beneath him before trailing the tip of his knife across the wood of the tabletop for long enough to form a slightly coherent thought.
"I dare say you would not have have all that more than a rudimentary understanding of chemistry and biology, right?" he asked, though it was clearly more rhetorical than anything as he didn't pause long enough for her to answer, "So, imagine it like this. You know the bird cage illusions? Where one side is a bird, other's the cage and you it about and it looks like the bird's in a cage. It's a bit like that. Kinda. Not really. I'm the bird though. Neither are complete without the other because they're both different sides of the same thing. Completely different but not complete without the other. It's that but with more, you know, science and chemicals. And pain. But mostly chemicals."
"If it is like the bird cage, is there any overlap?" A beat. "If not, then that's a pretty awful comparison."
"There was," began he, wistfully bringing his hands to his face, "Not as much nowadays. I know he's there, of course, and he knows I'm there, even if the pretentious bastard likes to pretend I'm not, but its less... tangible nowadays. More vague senses rather than really feeling like the same person. Hell, I can't even really say I was even a myself at all the first few times, it was more just him but feeling better."
Lucy pondered this, nodding slowly as she attempted to digest the idea. Admittedly, even with his attempt to not get scientific or bombard her with details that mean nothing to her, much of it was lost to her. Of course, he was not doing the best at explaining it. Perhaps there was enough of the Jekyll to him that he was careful. Prideful enough to not mention the way went awry. Caring enough to not want her to worry about him. Wise enough to know not to risk the secrets of his work being revealed to anyone at all, lest they find themselves curious enough to repeat his own failures. Or maybe he was just awful at explaining things at the best of times and, as Jekyll had been in one of his moods which was then inevitably amplified tenfold as Hyde, it was far from the best of times.
"Why would he, you, uh?" she began before casting a look to Hyde to find the right term, which he waved off noncommittally, "Why would he do it in the first place?"
She knew very quickly that she was a little too bold in her questioning as a dark look crossed the man's features, his grip tightening on the blade once more.
"Because he had to," he said with a sort of finality that did not suit the fact he continued to speak immediately, "If he didn't we'd be dead. Life'd kill us. There was nothing sincere to it, playing out a role that does not suit us. Hell, he even bastardised his own name, parroting the voices of everyone around us and for what? They don't matter, they're awful, hypocritical and worthless, yet he denied himself even the most fleeting semblances of self. That's why, Lucy. Because he needed me to remember in himself what it was like to be alive. Does that answer your question?"
As he said this, a strange sense of exhaustion seemed to crash over the man in a way that she had certainly never seen of him, and indeed she had doubted was even possible for him until that moment. Of course she understood how unfortunate her own place in life was, doing all she could, giving all she had to in order to live another day, but she had never given much thought to the fact there might be a different world of woes for those who did not carry her own. Then she realised how odd it was for her to be feeling so very bad for a rich man who felt bad about having to fit in with his rich fellows while she had been quite sure she was going to be murdered by the aforementioned rich man not very long ago at all.
Life, Lucy concluded in that moment, was just awful for everyone no matter who they were, so it was a marvel that anyone at all managed to survive long enough for old age to even be a possibility.
Hyde had been quite determined to sit there, brooding desperately as he let himself get caught in the absolute mess that served as his mind, but he was clearly not given this luxury. Part way through the time he had afforded himself and his brooding - a firm believer that a person could always go for a good brooding every now and again to keep themselves in whack - he tossed his head back, letting out an irritated groan as he did so. It was the precise genre of melodrama that he was exasperatingly good at.
"Alright! Alright, god," he whined before rolling his head to face Lucy, cracking an odd, insincere smile, "Well, my dear, it seems as though I must be off. Don't be too crestfallen about it. Not too much, at least, but do try to be somewhat, it does wonders for the ol' ego to have people bemoaning your absence after all."
He hauled himself up to his feet again the sort of way that Lucy assumed a person with no bones at all might flop about. The knife was vanished away to an inner pocket of his coat. Which seemed a terrible idea as it did not have a sheath and so increased the likelihood of him doing the stupid thing and getting himself stabbed through his coat pocket.
"You're not goin' to murder me then?" Lucy asked, only half joking.
"Nah," came the reply, "What a terrible thought! Is that one of the concerns you usually worry about? Dreadful, that's no way to live."
"You were the one what was goin' to murder me." Lucy replied with a perfect deadpan.
"Yeah, I know, but still-" Hyde's statement was completed with a pointed shrug as he turned away, trotting to the door, "Anyways, I'll be off. Goodbye for now, my dearest Lucy, and do remember, you swore to your secrecy." He gave a little hop-skip before he near threw himself out the door, as if he did not trust his legs to behave in quite the ways he wanted them to. Which was a fair call, all things considered.
And with that, a thoroughly unmurdered Lucy was left alone with the sound of the rain outside as company for her thoughts. She let out a clumsy sigh, half-laugh and half-sob, before with an undignified flop, she unceremoniously acquainted her face with her bed. It would have been very easy for her to get caught up in wondering why it was her life was somehow now even more strange than usual, but she knew there was no use. Her life was bizarre, but she was still alive so, really, in the end that seemed enough for her in that moment.