"Looks like someone's lost control of their inner beast," he commented, stopping his spell and revealing himself for the first time. His jaw dropped as he looked upon him.
"Who are you?! How did you get in here?!" Jekyll balked, finally finding his voice when the shock or him wore off. He couldn't tell, was he more afraid of his appearance, or that he'd just appeared by magic in his...was this supposed to be a home?
"Doesn't matter, dearie! But what does is that unlike that blowhard, Lyndgate, I am here to help you!" he joked, stepping forward to tug on his bow tie much like Mary had. An intricate design but…not one he fancied.
"I-I don't even know you! Why would you help me?!"
"Let's just say I have a vested interest in your work," he answered mysteriously. He wanted this serum to work, but more importantly he wanted to see what it would do if it did. "Now, do you want to get into that club or not?"
"How?" he asked with interest. The monster inside of him stirred just as Jekyll's had; monsters always did when there was blood in the water.
"Have you ever stopped to consider what you think of as weakness is really... strength?" he questioned, playing with a magnifying glass similar to the one Victor had in the Land Without Color. He set it aside. What was it with doctors and magnifying glasses? "Perhaps using that serum to get in touch with your deepest desires is exactly what you need."
"Even if you were right, the serum isn't finished. I-I can't get the active particles to suspend in..."
He ignored him as he blathered on. He used his magic to find what was missing from the potion. And then he used his magic to fix it. The doctor shut his mouth the moment his potion began to glow. He knelt down beside it when it finished, gasping and sputtering about in fear and wonder.
He laughed.
"All science needs is a little magic. Congratulations, dearie. You're a genius!" he laughed playfully hitting him on the shoulder. He was certain given his sickly color it would bruise. "Now, if we can just get that pwetty young friend of yours to finally notice you," he commented, walking back to the window.
"You mean Mary?"
"Oh, she's right within your grasp! The question is, how far are you willing to go to get what you want?" As far as he wanted him to go. Sometimes it was all too easy to get them to play into his hands. For, just as he wanted, he watched as dear Henry raised the bottle to his lips and swallowed down a mouthful.
The effect was almost immediate.
Jekyll began to scream as the serum coursed through him. The shirt on his back ripped, a seam split at the side of his pants. His either short or long dirty blonde hair began to recede and turn black, skin turned impossibly paler, and he watched as Jekyll clawed at his throat to pry off the bow tie that would have choked him if he hadn't. He tossed his head in the air and howled like he was a wolf instead of a man. There was something blue about him, something streaking through his skin, altering his face, his bones, his everything.
A moment later, the shrieking finally began to die down. The body writhed less and less with each passing second. Instead he crawled about on the ground for a moment, wriggling there like a confused worm until a hand finally slammed up on the table, followed by another. The being that had been created shook as he rose to full height, several inches taller than Jekyll had been a few moments ago. When he turned, the man in front of him presented him with a scarred face, bloody eyes, and a menacing demeanor, strong confidence the doctor didn't have before. This was not exactly what he had expected would happen with that serum. No, this was better. It was interesting. The serum would separate beast from man. Who was he staring at now? Beast? Or Man? And how would this creature, this new version of Jekyll react to dear Mary.
It was an experiment, one that it took him all of five seconds to come up with after Jekyll had said the potion wasn't done. It had the potential to be perfect for him. But first, he had to test it. The trouble was it wasn't Jekyll's theory he was testing, but rather his own.
Jekyll believed that his serum would separate a man's inner beast from his inner man. He believed it would do that too, he was hoping it would. The question was, what would happen once the two were separated.
He'd seen enough of Jekyll's life to know that his assumption was that he would be able to bring out a man's inner goodness. Good would triumph! The decent soul inside would be free, stripped of its monster's weakness.
His assumption was, that it was a foolish belief.
What he knew to be true was that monsters didn't go down without a fight. The Doctor believed the serum would bring out a person's goodness. But he was certain it would work the other way around. He was thrilled when Dr. Jekyll swallowed down that potion-serum. He was happy when he started screaming and growing, shifting and changing into something different. Not a man, but rather a beast. He just needed to test that theory and figure how who was who? And he knew exactly how he wanted to do it. Time, naturally, was short.
"Oh, now that simply won't do!" he exclaimed as the man before him faced him holding the tatters of Jekyll's clothes over his massive body. He summoned his magic and reproduced perfectly an outfit that he'd seen a gentleman striding around in when he'd first arrived. It fit him perfectly, but better yet, it made him look dashing enough to get into a party. Should he want to, of course…
"What-"
"No time for that, dearie!" he cried before the man could get a word out. His voice was now a deep timbre, a far cry from the squeak and stutter of Doctor Jekyll. It was perfect. "You have a ball to go to, and I have plenty to explain on the way. Shall we go?" he motioned to the door. The man looked around the lab, looked at the bottle he still held in his hand. Jekyll had taken only one swallow, but he wondered…how long would one swallow last. After all, one swallow of a memory potion was enough to rid one of memories for a week, one swallow of a hair growth tincture was enough to merely bring about peach fuzz.
"The serum that created you," he explained. "Best to carry it with you. You never know when you, or Jekyll, might be needing it again."
"Jekyll," he gasped. "I know that man. I know that man because…I am he!"
He looked as though he'd just discovered the moon was going to fall on him at any moment.
"Well, in a manner of speaking…shall we go? He's left me here to give all the answers you seek, but we are pressed for time!"
"You have answers."
"I have all the answers…including the answer to why you are here. Everyone needs a purpose…wouldn't you say?"
His eyes widened. He nodded his head "yes" and followed after him like a puppy. Adorable, even Dr. Jekyll's monstrous side was a bit of a disappointment. But he was working on a plan in his head, one that might test just how disappointing he was and just how much different, or alike, he was to his counterpart.
He made himself invisible to everyone but Jekyll, and down on the street once more he ordered the man to summon a carriage for them where he could safely reveal himself and not spend his energy on magic. Once they were in the carriage, he explained, with carefully chosen words what the serum would do, how it was meant to bring out the worst in Doctor Jekyll, meant to separate them. It had worked and who he was now was the result. The man listened eagerly as the horses clopped along the bumpy road, making him long once more for soft dirt paths. Or at least he listened eagerly until they arrived at that particular part of his explanation.
"The worst? Why would he do that?"
"So you can do what he can't," he explained with a smile. "Your counterpart…well he's a bit ridiculous; shy, unassuming, polite."
"And I'm not?"
"Perhaps…you're all the parts of himself that he doesn't want to be. My theory is that he has the ability to get what he wants, he just lacks the…let's call it 'confidence.'"
"Confidence…" he echoed.
He nodded. The trap was nearly set. "It's the same with dear Mary."
"Mary?"
"The woman he adores more than anything. She's a threat to his work, even if he doesn't know it. She also happens to be the daughter of a Mr. Lyndgate, a man who just so happens to have the power to give Henry exactly what he wants."
"Mary?"
"Oh, no, no, no…a membership to the Scientific Academy," he pronounced with a flourish. "Lyndgate has the power but won't make him a member, and Henry is too shy to…shall we say…push."
Jekyll nodded. He appeared confused but seemed to be taking it in at least. And he…he was looking for the final piece of his trap, "the bait" he supposed. It was the right time, and a glance out the window told him he was in the right place. He knocked against the carriage, letting the driver know to stop the horses. Nursing a mild concussion from the ride, he glanced out the window and into the ally beside the Academy. He wasn't worried about being seen, what he'd gathered from the couple's previous conversation was that they liked a little danger, liked to be watched. Just so long as their faces were hidden in shadow. He wondered how they'd feel about it after all this.
"It's also the same Mr. Lyndgate that happens to be just there…" he pointed out to Jekyll's monster.
The man pulled the curtains of the carriage back and looked down the ally, to a shadowed couple in a very compromising position. With his vision, the monster might not have been able to make out details, but he could see far more than he wanted to. Mr. Lyndgate, he currently had his pants open and his hands around the waist of a woman. Their mouths worked in tandem with their hips. Her leg was bent up at his waist hiding what no one wanted to see.
He tried not to think of Belle.
"Pretty thing, isn't she?" he commented to him instead. "Young enough to be the dear man's daughter."
The man jerked the curtain closed and sat back in his seat looking distressed. "What do I do about it?"
"That is the question, isn't it?" he answered mysteriously, unwilling to give the man the answer because seeing what he would do with the information he had was exactly what he wanted to see. He knocked on the cab again and the driver urged the horses forward. They said not a word to one another as they went around the block a time or two, giving the dear old man time to finish his tryst and pull himself together before they finally pulled up to the Science Academy again and the shadows were gone. Now he'd see what this "beast" was made of.
"Are you ready for your debut?" he asked as they stepped into the foyer. He was once again invisible to all others but Jekyll. The man who'd opened the door for them continued up toward the stairs to the place he could hear music and the low rumble of voices coming from. But the beast hung back.
"I don't feel like the same man," he growled, his voice now a deep timbre. He stared into the mirror that was waiting there in the foyer. His fingers gently touched the scar that ran along the side of his face. "I-I don't look like him, either."
"Because you're not the same man," he explained. "In fact, you're not a man at all, really. You're parts of a man...the parts, scars and all, that Jekyll wanted to hide from the world." He laughed as a new thought entered his mind. He couldn't step inside that room and call himself Dr. Jekyll, no one would believe him, and he'd never get anywhere near Mary. He needed a new name, and he knew what was fitting. "As a matter of fact, maybe that's what you should call yourself...'Mr. Hyde.'"
"If you're ready, Sir," the doorman inquired, turning back from him. He disappeared from Hyde's sight just as the butler came around the corner to escort him into the ball. The giant of a man looked around wildly for him, but he kept himself hidden. He'd given him all he needed to know, now he had to let him go and see what he did with that information.
True confessions. Although I really liked putting this bit of the story here for a number of reasons, I really hated writing these scenes. I would say they don't translate well but it's not really that at all. They're just not as well written as a lot of the other things. In the last chapter I gave Rumple the inner jab of "That escalated quickly", which is really tongue in cheek because when you peel theses scenes apart, when you read them, when you examine them...they escalate almost too quickly. Details are left out, important things that the story needs to work are removed. But of course, instead of having time to fix it all, at the point of season six they were really working to almost compress the scenes as much as possible so that they could fit everything into the story they wanted to and it really shows in these scenes. I got asked in the last chapter why I had to have Rumple catch Mr. Lyndgate with the girl in such a public place. This is the reason why. Because if I didn't resort to doing something like that I couldn't see any other way the story would work, how Hyde would get that kind of information, why he would share it, etc. Oh, season six...we could write books about all the problems with it, but I feel it's already been done.
Thank you for your reviews Alarda and Grace5231973. I appreciate them. I'm sorry this chapter is so...blah. Only two more in the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde bit and then we're back to the castle, where the storyline might not be happy, but at least it's cohesive. Peace and Happy Reading.