Well, that took longer than I was expecting. I'm sorry! I have a few chapters written in advance and a solid plan for the rest of the story, so if nothing else, I shouldn't have to take another month-long break. Unless, of course, my muse decides to check out on me. Either way, rest assured, though I did have a difficult time getting from A to A ½ I never forgot about this story (I actually thought about it way too much).
"I was doing as I was told, sir."
"Yes, but if you can't be creative with your initiative, then what good are you as an orderly, Poole? You know the rules: no-one in or out, no matter the cost," he drawled in response. The normally threatening orderly shrunk back, wide-eyed. Mr. Hyde brushed him off. "Now, get out." Hyde moved to the window and clasped his hands behind his back, one curled into a tight fist. The man behind him remained silent before turning and exiting the parlor, and wisely so. Poole had left a gate unattended and the patients had seized the opportunity to escape.
Hyde knew that many of them had no need of an asylum but playing the warden had been…fun. With all of Dr. Jekyll's professional memories swimming around in his mind, Hyde knew enough to play doctor. But without the gentle disposition of his mind's captive, his own experience had included far more neglect of his patients. He did value the information they had given him, however. His lip curled upwards at the flashes of memory in his mind – shouting, slamming doors, tearful confessions of stories untold. Locked away in his lab, there were stacks of meticulously kept journals; information he could use against those who had given it to him, but not only that.
Hyde had begun piecing together all he might need in order to build a portal. A way to travel through realms.
None of this would have been necessary had Jekyll not kept him locked away for so very long. In the months after their arrival in the Land of Untold Stories, the doctor's doppelgänger had no choice but to whisper from inside the coward's brain, his rage festering. All he could do was quietly remind him of Mary. Her face, her smile, her fascination with all of the doctor's gadgets. How unfair it was that she had perished while her killer escaped.
Killer. Dr. Jekyll had been many things in London. He had gone to some questionable places in search of a key ingredient, a method he could use to perfect the serum that had caused all of this. Jekyll had passed contraband to his patients – cigars, ale, writing materials – in exchange for more revealing journal entries. But he had always been cautious. Great care seemed to be in his very blood. A killer was something new.
And, much as it enraged Hyde, he knew it was because of him; the darkness staining Jekyll's soul.
It had been a hard job to formulate the plan, being only a fragmented part of Jekyll's consciousness. Since the doctor's first dose of the incomplete serum, however, Hyde had felt his own presence within the doctor. And so he had begun whispering.
Let go, he would murmur. Take a break. Go on, let me take control. Let me steer the dirigible through this fog. It took nearly a month, but eventually Jekyll felt it. All the fatigue, all the pain. Hyde's pain. There was enough serum left for at least three more doses, and the doctor gladly swallowed one. He set the darkness free.
The rest of the plan was more challenging, and required time. Hyde was careful to keep those thoughts to himself as he made the trek through the city. There was an estate on the hill at the very edge of the settlement with a dusty – yet useful – lab. Hyde shuddered to think what it may have been used for before its abandonment. But when Jekyll awoke the next morning, he would find five more doses of serum.
It went more quickly than Hyde had anticipated, the good doctor using his anguish over the death of Hyde's love as fuel. The serum became his oxygen, and the darkness his escape. And escape he did, over and over for longer periods of time. But like any drug, Jekyll found he required more of the foul liquid to achieve separation from himself as the weeks dragged on, side effects be damned. What did it matter that he could hardly stand on his own? That his bouts of awareness were growing shorter and far more difficult to maintain? All he desired was relief. He craved respite with the same fervor with which he had once craved recognition.
In the end, Hyde hardly had to do much at all. With the tolerance Jekyll had built to the clear, blue liquid, all it took was one particularly large swallow of Hyde's updated, stronger serum.
Even hours later, there was no exhaustion. Hyde had found a peculiarly rugged refugee squatting in his manor and enlisted his help in setting up the rooms. That night, under full darkness, Dr. Jekyll left his flat for the final time.
At first, Jekyll tried to flee – to return to his humble flat and leave his monster, his creation, behind. When once he nearly succeeded, Poole had suggested a weapon. A baton which crackled and sparked. His explanation was that his old mentor, Victor, had given him the idea. Hyde shrugged it off and resolved to threaten his orderly more often, if simply to keep him in line.
Jekyll gave up trying to escape. He gave up attempting to use the lab. He gave up roaming the halls. The doctor simply gave up. Jekyll became the groundsman to escape the patients inside.
Now that they had escaped, Hyde would need a new plan. Then again, Jekyll always had been a coward. Perhaps Poole would be enough now. It was imperative that Hyde remain in control, even if it meant he remain locked inside his asylum for…forever.
The Land of Untold Stories had been meant as a refuge. A place people could go in order to remain safe. There was no chance of their stories playing out. And Hyde, knowing nothing of magic, had leapt at the chance both for himself and his weaker half.
Knowing all that he had learned, he would have made a very different decision given the chance. Magic was always literal and it always came with a price. A locator spell could lead you to remains. Predicting the future could lead to a nasty turn of fate. A land of stories untold was a land where stories couldn't be told. The Land of Untold Stories was a land without time.
At first, Hyde had assumed that his lack of inherent magic would allow him to age as normal. But no matter how he altered the serum, how he spaced Jekyll's doses, he remained as sprightly as ever. The perfect price for Jekyll, who had so badly wanted a normal life. A wretched condition of Hyde's satisfaction.
Now he saw that Jekyll had thrown one more cruel twist into his own melancholy existence. Hyde was stronger, more cunning, and far more powerful than the good doctor. But above all else, the doctor had imagined his darkness as everything he wanted to be rid of. Jekyll carried his memories, but Hyde carried the pain. His darkness was shame, dejection, desperation, and above all else, rage. Hyde bore all the scars of the doctor's mistakes so that Jekyll did not have to. So long as Hyde was in control, he could feel it. And every time he pushed it down, he added another link to his own armor.
As usual, Poole pulled him out of his reverie. Hyde turned to face him as he reentered the room.
"Sir!" the orderly called out. He sounded out of breath. The door swung closed behind him. Poole was limping. More than that, he seemed to be dragging something along with him. "Someone is trying to get inside!"
"What?" Hyde replied, his brow furrowed, eyes narrowed in confusion. He was the well-known warden of a dark asylum, who would want–
Suddenly the double doors of his parlor burst open.
Hyde shot upright at the sound of a loud bang, the shackles on his wrists reminding him that he was a prisoner once more, this time of metal rather than flesh. The cell itself was not so bothersome to him, it actually reminded him of his manor in the Land of Untold Stories. If slightly smaller. But these chains…
Still, it was only polite to acknowledge his guest. And she was quite familiar.
"I see you found my friend. Was she helpful?"
Hyde was unsurprised that his question was met with an explosive bout of bravado. So he turned and he pulled himself up to face this Savior who was far braver than all the others he had encountered. He had to hand it to her, she was impressive. The former warden saw the look in her wide eyes; the one that only came from decades of hardening. This Savior had clearly spent her life in captivity – or on the streets – always being told that she was nothing, that she meant nothing. Even in this small cell, facing a man who could easily snap her neck if she strayed too close, she was putting on a show. Proving herself. I am the Savior, Hyde thought wryly, hear me roar.
And so Hyde did his best to show her that it was unnecessary. That's funny, that's what the Saviors always say. She wasn't special, she was simply another line of defense. The trick was not to lie. This was a game, and the only way to win was to stay ahead. Wherever there's a Savior, there's a villain who brings them down. Perhaps she could defeat the next villain, but there would always be another. I expect you'll want to help them as Saviors do, but you have to ask yourself: is saving them exactly what causes your story to end? She might succeed in helping the next victim, but could that be her downfall?
The story of the Savior was predictable – he had seen it all before. First came the tremors, then the desperation. And hard as Emma may try to mask it with her steely gaze, she was desperate. She stepped here, he shifted there. They sparred with words, he stared her down, and it was only when she strode out of the cell that Hyde finally admitted to himself that he was exhausted.
He had played this game in the Land of Untold Stories. The countless times he had convinced Jekyll to take the serum. The nights he spent roaming the streets, acquiring his patients. The game was as familiar to him as this damn cell, and he was tired of it. Of all the untold stories he had brought with him to this strange new land, his own was the most overdue to play out, and this steel box was only increasing his restlessness.
If Hyde were being honest with himself, he felt some trepidation at the thought of facing his weaker half once again. This land was no London and it was certainly not the Land of Untold Stories. There were no narrow misses for death. Nowhere to go where any wounds suffered may be halted in their lethal course. It was as if he had taken leave from reality, and suddenly returned. But this land was very real. Facing Jekyll would mean confronting the very real possibility that he would not survive the encounter, especially now that the good doctor had managed to ensnare the sympathies of so many heroes.
Still, he had been waiting years for a chance like this. A chance to face the coward who had lived in the shadows of his own waking mind for so long and to destroy him, once and for all. And for a moment he had thought – he had truly believed – that this land would be that chance. This Storybrooke. This could have been a haven for him, an opportunity for his story to play out. Jekyll had begun the battle for control the moment he drank his first dose of his serum. Hyde had nearly won in his dark asylum, and this Storybrooke might have been the place where he could win. And yet…
Hyde cast a glance around his cell. The only light was streaming in from the windows by his head, dim and red. This was the Dark One's doing. It had to be. Rumplestiltskin had to know that the heroes would be waiting for someone to cage, and that rat of a doctor would have told them exactly how to take him down for long enough to lock him away. The Dark One had clearly been counting on that, and after Hyde had failed him, letting all those patients escape with all their grievances against him, he must have been waiting for the chance to punish him. But Hyde had a grievance as well.
Rumplestiltskin was meant to set him free.
In addition to those with stories untold, the warden would take the Dark One's problem customers. The ones who tried to break their contracts with him. Unsatisfied users of the magic they had borrowed from him, or else those who had suffered as a casualty of his dark deeds who had gained just enough power of their own to be considered a threat. In return, once the Queen had cast the Dark Curse, Hyde would be given a new life in this Land Without Magic and Jekyll would be trapped in the back of his mind forever.
Except that Hyde had failed. The patients had escaped his asylum, and the Dark One had sealed the Land of Untold Stories. Mr. Hyde could never escape. Not even with a portal of his own making.
Hyde had resigned himself to this fate, carved out a corner of the land and sat quietly, until the strangers from Storybrooke had arrived. Nobody had dared trespass on his estate before them. He knew it must be the Dark One. And for Hyde, being only partly correct had been enough. He himself was the only being in the Land of Untold Stories who was unable to escape, but perhaps if a portal were to open up for someone else, he could slip through as well.
Failing that, he had allowed his impatience to get the better of him. It was a rare day when he would admit that having Dr. Jekyll in the back of his mind had been beneficial. Without the good doctor, Hyde was brash. Audacious. He had arrived in Storybrooke with half of a plan and enough arrogance to fuel it. And in a satirical twist nearly as caustic his imprisonment in Jekyll's mind, this cell had given him the time and the quiet he had needed in order to unravel what he needed to do. Defeating the Dark One – controlling his leash – was the only way to begin. Rumplestiltskin was easily the greatest threat. Once Hyde could establish himself as Storybrooke's greatest menace…well, then the fun could begin.
Now, if only he could escape.
So, a little different from what I typically do, but I think it turned out okay.