DISCLAIMER: I do not own any of the original Frankenstein characters. They belong to Mrs. Mary Woolstonecraft Shelley, to whom I'm grateful for spinning such a compelling tale. The OCs, however, are mine.
Transition chapter, quite short, a bit fluffy and made up mostly of internal dialogue. No warnings.
I apologize for the shortness, but I realized that otherwise I'd have to publish a very long one and I was not sure I'd be able to complete it today. If all goes well, you should have more later this day.
Thanks to my reviewers eitherangel, Suindara and TheBlackPages and to WoundedFlame who has not reviewed yet, but has been reading it. I hope you'll not be disappointed by the development, or lack thereof, TheBlackPages.
To the lurkers, speak up, folks. Is that so uninteresting not to warrant a comment? Anonymous reviews are on, if you wish to stay incognito.
To tie up the rather long AN, I have two pieces of news for you:
1) I have jotted down the plan of the story and it is made up of 7 more logical blocks of action. Some of those will probably be split in two or more chapters, but I know where the story is going and how it ends.
2) I won't be able to update until the new year, unfortunately, as I'm very busy next week and then I have to go to my parent's place and I won't have a computer at my complete disposal. Sorry about that.
To conclude as usual: Flames will be used to light the fireplace. It is winter, I could use extra heat.
Enjoy!
Springtime came, finally, late and cold according to his friend, but it was still the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.
Everything returned to life and he was caught in that massive effort of renovation and couldn't help but feel reborn as well, in a spiritual sense.
The grass in the meadows next to the cottage was a tender green so bright and intense that it almost made him cry in joy. Leaves covered the trees again. He had never imagined there could be so many different shades of green in the world.
And the flowers, they sprang everywhere, of so many different colours and shapes. He could spend a morning contemplating them, the delicate petals, the tiny pistils, the bees and insects that flew from one to the other ceaselessly. Sometimes it was almost too much and he had to close his eyes and lie down on the grass to keep his head from spinning.
And the sky was a blue so deep and crystal clear that it almost hurt the eyes, crisscrossed by clouds that looked so soft that he almost wished he could touch them.
Birds cavorted among the clouds and sang their songs, or cawed their calls. He had made a game of trying to discover which bird made each call, to which Hippolyta eagerly participated, laughing in delight, saying that she had not had such fun since she had been a child.
They saw squirrels darting among the limbs of the trees, timid rabbits munch on grass at the edge of the fields, deer darting through the woods, fast and fleeting as a fantasy, and even a shy fox, eyes glowing in the twilight shade approach the cottage in search of food.
He wondered if every human child felt like this on his first spring and then lost the wonder and amazement as years passed by and everything became commonplace.
Maybe not, as human children were born small and unaware, maybe it was not the first spring, but maybe there was one such spring, a magic season when children understood, fleetingly, the wonder of the world where they lived, how harmonious and so much greater than them it was.
Surely he did. He lay on the grass, contemplating the immensity of the sky and the immutable inexorability of the cycle of life, which would keep on turning long after the last human disappeared from the world, he was sure, and couldn't help but feel awed by its divine majesty.
If there was a god or a spirit that governed the world, surely this was his most effective manifestation, or maybe there wasn't and nature itself was divine. In those moments, he could almost believe it.
Hippolyta claimed she felt cold, but compared to winter it was wonderfully warm and he felt comfortable enough to lounge in the grass shirtless, basking in the sun, especially around midday.
Hippolyta didn't seem to mind, as long as he kept his trousers on, but he had to remember to be properly dressed when he came back to the cottage, before Marie caught sight of him and started berating him on the importance of propriety.
In the first few days that had happened a lot, especially as, after spending time in the sun, his skin reddened and anything getting in contact with it became quite uncomfortable if not downright painful.
He felt ashamed of it, taking it as a sign of his unnatural origins, but Hippolyta laughed and told him that it was extremely human.
When she went to Egypt with the Armeè, many of the soldiers, including her, fell victim to the same problem, even if confined to their faces and necks for wearing a complete uniform.
"It is just the sun, my friend. You're not used to it, that's all." she reassured him and in truth, after a while it got better. His skin still reddened if he was not careful, but not to the levels of the first days and he might also be inclined to say that he didn't look so greyish anymore.
Sometimes they spent the whole day outside, bringing food and books with them, walking through the woods and the meadows or sitting down in the sun, while, overhead, two kites that had nested near the house wheeled seemingly effortlessly in the air and whistled their shrill calls.
He knew they must be a mated pair, but he had nonetheless nicknamed them Isis and Nephtys.
The first time she had heard him call them like that, Hippolyta had looked to him with a hint of worry, but he had just smiled and said that it had shocked him, but it had been a good story of tragic love and treachery, rather like Hamlet, and she laughed with him.
Maybe the most amazing aspect of that spring was that, despite his revelations to her, his relationship with her had not changed.
She still called him friend and equal without a hint of disgust, still accorded him the same respect she had always had, still discussed with him and was indulgent with his many faults and quirks.
Intelligent and cultured as she was, she couldn't help but having understood what he was, a creature born of unnatural means and ambition, abominable if not in aspect at least from a moral standing ground to most people, and still treated him as a person like any other, no, like a person unlike any other, friendly, brotherly almost.
"It is not your fault, mon ami." she had said, she had told him that everyone is responsible only for what he chooses to do or not to do, not for what was done to them by force, that his life was his own to carve with his free will.
She had accepted him wholly, without reserves and maybe, just maybe, he could learn to accept himself as well.
What made a human a person? Even animals were born in the same way he suspected, therefore birth was not really a discriminant, he told himself. No, what made a person was the ability to reason, to formulate moral judgements, to act on something other than instinct.
"To know good and evil and choose for himself" was the definition on one of Hippolyta's books. "Or for herself" someone had surreptitiously pencilled in the margin.
That he could do.
When the villagers had attacked him the day he met Hippolyta, he could have killed them, some of them at least, he knew he was stronger and faster than normal humans and some instinct inside him had screamed for him to lay waste on them, to make them scream and bleed, but he had chosen not to heed it. He just wanted to be like them, or to be left alone, he didn't want to hurt anybody, so he had contained his force, tried to shake them off without hurting them too much.
There: he had exercised his moral judgement and that was just the more striking example.
He did that every day, even in the smallest things, for example when he chose not to eat the last macaron, even if he could, because he knew Hippolyta loved them, or when he helped Marie to tote around bags of flour or other heavy items even if she ranted against him, saying that she was not in her dotage yet, because he knew that her back would hurt afterwards, if she left her to her own devices.
Every day was dotted with moments in which he had to do that.
Did that make him a person?
If he were a monster, or an animal he would not care, would he?
No, he was a person, Hippolyta showed him every day and even Marie, even if he probably was a very young person for her, a child, seeing how she interacted with him.
And even if he were to be a person just for the two women in the whole world, it would be enough for him, it already made him feel like he had a life to look forward to.
Yes, spring was rebirth in the truest sense of the word.