A/N: Takes place a while after the last one. Half a year after Jekyll banishes Hyde, Lucy shows up on his doorstep...
"I'm so sorry to bother you," she began.
"Please." He smiled at her. "It's no bother, Miss Harris. I gave you my card for a reason - if I can help you, I'm glad to do it. Please come in."
He guided her to a chair by his desk, and sat opposite her. Easily, this time. He could remember sitting with her once before, when tension was thick in the room and her presence suffocated him, but that was another lifetime. He had no secrets now; the air was clear.
Until she said, bluntly: "I need to find Edward Hyde."
"I-." He gaped at her. "I don't understand." He hadn't spoken the name, and hadn't allowed it to be spoken in his presence. Except for his nightmares, which he could not control, he had not thought the name at all.
"It's simple. He vanished six months ago, and I can't find him, and I need him – and I know you know him," she said in a desperate rush. "I know you were in medical school together. I know that six months ago he still had the keys to your house." When he recoiled, she reached out – as though to reassure him! "I don't hold him against you," she said. "Please. Whatever you are to each other is not my business, not my place to ask and I won't. But I know you are close with him. And-"
"No. Not are. Were." Finally he found words to interrupt her. "Hyde and I-... were... it's true. But, but not any longer. He's gone."
Her eyes widened. "Gone? You mean dead?"
The lie stuck in his throat, but he managed to nod.
"Dear Jesus." She covered her face a moment, but just as Jekyll was wondering if he should get up and go to her she pulled herself together on her own: sat up very straight and regarded him levelly. "Dead. Are you sure?"
"I-. I don't know."
"You don't know." She let out another slow breath. "All right, well, that's my problem and not yours. Please just tell me where I can find him - where I could find him, if he's all right. And I'll take it from there."
He was fundamentally unsuited to deception. What little cunning he'd ever had in him he'd poured out into his enemy, it seemed, and he'd kept none for himself. "I... can't tell you where he is now," he said at last. "I'm sorry. But perhaps I can help you? If you tell me what the problem is?"
She laughed, bitter and derisive. "Thank you, doctor, but it's not your kind of problem."
Her tone stung. "How would you know what are my kind of problems or not?" he shot back. "I promise you, Hyde has nothing to offer you that I can't match."
Lucy pursed her lips. "Has."
He couldn't believe his own stupidity.
"Tell me where he is."
"Tell me what you need him for. I will take care of it. Miss Harris, please." He cast around for possibilities. "If it's money, please, I'll pay you without asking for-, for any of that. If you need protection, I can call you police, or-... or..."
"Police won't help," she said shortly. "My problems are ugly."
"Miss Harris." He was trying not to feel irritated with her, but how dare she belittle and dismiss him! "I have worked on projects of the utmost ugliness. Please believe me." He took out a pen, cool and clinical. "You came here for my help and I'll give it to you - but only if you cooperate. Tell me everything."
"There's only one kind of help I need, I told you. And if you can't give that to me-"
"I can!" It was pride talking - pride and anger. But whatever his reasons he had said it, and it was too late to back out now.
Her eyes narrowed. "You can tell me where to find Hyde?"
"I can get a message to him. If that's sufficient, please start talking."
"I-. All right. Well. I don't know how to start." Her eyes flickered up a moment, but then she turned in her chair so that she could avoid looking at him entirely.
"Here," he interrupted, before she had even begun. "Go to the couch; it will be easier. Start however you like, and say whatever you feel." He found a reassuring smile for her somewhere. "I have treated diseases of the mind; I assure you nothing you can say will faze me. Please."
She went where he directed her - but perched awkwardly.
"Lie back," he said, from the desk. "Try to relax." She took it as an order, and it occurred to him that he would have had no trouble at all managing her if only he'd been wearing his lab coat.
L.H. he wrote. Underlined it. Added a date.
"So, the thing is, I'm not young anymore," she began.
"How old are you?"
"I'm twenty-two."
"Mm. That's young in an absolute sense. But you mean in your profession."
"In my-? Yes."
"And what do you call your profession, Miss Harris? Forgive me, but I'd rather not offend you by guessing at terminology."
"Come on, you know what I am. I'm a working girl."
"Working girl," he echoed as he wrote. "All right. Please go on. So you're not young for a working girl...?"
"That's right, and it's the young ones who get the better end of things. They earn more, and they're more worth protecting because Spider sees it as a sounder investment. When a girl gets old, it's nothing to him whether she's treated right. Whether she's perky or exhausted, whether she wears a fancy dress or rags, whether she's sick or well. Even whether she lives or dies."
"I see." He hesitated. "But I was under the impression that you were a valued, uh, employee."
She laughed. "What, because he introduced me as a star on the night you came to club? He says that about whoever's onstage that night. It's supposed to make people pay more for us." Then she froze. "Please don't tell anyone I said that. If Spider hears-"
"Nothing you say will leave this room. Please go on."
"Well. I'm older now, and I missed a lot of work because of Hyde, and-"
"He paid you for that," he interrupted, almost panicked. "Didn't he?" It had been his only consolation, that Hyde had compensated the woman for all the misery he had brought.
"Oh yes," she said – bitterly. "Paid me handsome. And Spider kept it; that's his way. But Hyde's jealous. He's roughed up my other clients before. Spider doesn't want trouble, so he started warning the fancy ones off me. So I started making less. Which means I'm worth less to the house, and it shows. Spider stopped standing up for me when men were-... you know. Then he started steering those ones towards me on purpose. Doesn't want to risk any of his better girls. So now..."
"So now you're obliged to see the clients who are violent or dangerous," he finished for her.
"Yes. There's one more than all the others who's terrible, belts me around and chokes me out – all the way out I mean; everyone chokes a little but this one puts me to sleep and I wake up with him- um-. You don't need me to draw a picture." She sighed. "Spider lets him. Eggs him on, even. And this week he moved another girl into my room with me, and people say he said she'll soon have it to herself. I think-… I think I'm not safe at the Rat anymore. They're going to turn me out – or worse."
Jekyll put his pen down. "Well-... so leave!" he said, aghast. "I can find you employment somewhere else. For God's sake, I'd hire you myself! Not like that," he added, when she tensed. "I meant respectable employment. You can keep a house or something – can't you?"
"I can't leave." Her voice had suddenly gone tight and nervous. "I'd be looking over my shoulder for the rest of my life. Can you imagine what he'd do if I-...was gone?"
"Spider? But you said he's more concerned with his other girls-"
"Not Spider."
"Your client? Give me his name, and I'll see that he's arrested. Men can't-"
"Not him. Hyde."
His stomach sank.
"Hyde told me once that-... he-..." She was gasping for breath. Finally admitted: "I can't."
He didn't go to her; it would be unprofessional and just now professionalism was his only bulwark against falling apart. "There are-... handkerchiefs beside you, Miss Harris," he said quietly. "And water. On the table."
He gave her a moment to compose herself. She did it more quickly than any woman he'd ever seen, which was heartbreaking in its own right. "I can't leave," she said flatly, when she had finished weeping. "If Hyde is alive, and you've said he is, then he'll come back for me someday. He said he would. And if I'm not where he's expecting me to be, then he'll be the one to kill me. If I haven't already died on the streets."
He swallowed. "So that is why you need Hyde in particular. You need his... permission."
She nodded. "That, or better yet I need him to come break a lot of heads and collect me from the place entirely. He used to joke that I'd come live with him someday. I never believed it, but... he seemed to." She took a long shuddering breath. "I'm more to him that just a hole to squirt into - pardon. But I know he will come looking for me eventually." She shuddered. "I just can't wait til eventually." She moved restlessly. "I really didn't mean to come and, and lay this all at your feet. I just... you wanted to understand why. Why I need Hyde. And now you understand."
"Yes - I understand."
She rose from the couch and turned to face him. "So... you'll pass the message along to him?"
"I'll let him know that you need him."
She nodded. "And in the meantime I'll be right where I am," she said, "Doing what I'm doing, and hoping for the best. So please tell him to hurry."
TBC.
There will be one more part to this. I've got it mostly done, and I'm planning to put it up in a couple of days. Let me know what you think so far!
