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Dark eyes splayed open as a fine sliver of light cut through darkness of the chamber, squinting against the sudden barrage as Henry stepped into the dimly lit quarters. Light washed over Victor’s face for a scarce moment, stirring him, before the door snapped shut behind Henry, guillotining the beam of candle-flame filtering in from outside the room.
Twisting to turn his face into the feather and down of his pillow, he felt rather than saw the presence of Henry at his bedside. The soft tap of his buckled shoes against the floorboards scuffed to a halt at Victor’s right. A chair squealed across the planks of pine.
“No,” Victor started, barely more than a murmur, awoken somewhat from his uneasy rest. The word gummed up in the mucus congealing in his throat, voice tender with underuse.
The flush of fever sat high in his cheeks. When Henry leaned forward in his chair to press the back of his hand against his companion’s forehead, he found it white-hot to the touch. Yet an incessant tremble wracked Victor’s entire frame, one that no hours spent before the grate of the fireplace or sat marinating in the warmth of a bath could leech from him. Whatever dreadful secret that Victor kept confined within the recesses of his mind spilled out uncontrollably through the language of his body: the chatter of his teeth, the tremor that clung to his hands, the goose pimples along his skeletal arms.
It was as if the chill was internal.
Henry drew a wet cloth from where it had been soaking in the basin of cold water placed at his bedside, before he touched the rag to the heated plane of Victor’s forehead.
“It is only I, my dear Frankenstein,” he said. Tender as a mother, he ran a hand through Victor’s hair, stamped to his forehead with sweat. The black strands curled against his fingertips defiantly, springing back where he flattened them down.
At last red-rimmed eyes fluttered open, dark lashes batting against the pale expanse of his hollow cheek. “No,” he groaned again, his gaze vacant and leagues past Henry, “devil. Daemon, leave me be. Begone, I implore you . . .” The plea flowed like syrup from his lips, laden with weariness and the burden of his affliction. Leaden arms lifted to tug cruelly at the tresses of his hair.
The sight pulled Henry’s heartstrings taut. The cloth fell limply from his palm. It landed with a splat against the buffed toe of his shoe.
“Victor.” Months of anguish were twisted into the name, torn from his throat like choking. “Hear me. Please,” he entreated. “It is merely your oldest companion.”
Under other circumstances he would have been ashamed at the pleading bleating in his voice. At present, he only bound Victor’s wrists with his hands, tugging them from their absent-minded self harm. Worry spurred the quickened movement.
It was then that Victor’s languid mumbles stiffened into a wild bout of terror, lurching forwards with the remnants of a watery gasp given rise in his throat. “Fiend!” Victor convulsed in his grip, crying out. “Unhand me!”
Henry’s thumbs were still pressed to the veins in the soft underside of Victor’s wrists, pulse fluttering wildly beneath the pads of his fingers. He released them at once.
Deep within the depths of his hallucination, Victor’s chest began to heave in panic, words melting into an incomprehensible stupor. His throat worked in a silent shriek, wailing until he gagged, eyes huge and tongue coiling. The tendons in his throat pulled tight, standing like forks of lightning against the pallor of his skin. Behind his eyes pooled a terrible certainty, a divine knowledge of something unbearable, a look that Henry had grown to know intimately.
At length he drew a shuddering, fragmented breath into his lungs, and stilled against the crumpled sheets. His scream fractured into a squeaky, hiccuping sob. When it was over, Henry leaned in to tuck the blanket closer around him, folding it up to Victor’s chin.
“Victor,” he said, gentle. All he could say seemed useless. “You do recognise me, don’t you? It was but a deception of your senses. Rest assured, we are safe within your apartment in Ingolstadt. There’s not another soul here.”
Something cleared in Victor’s stare, that far-off glaze vanishing behind a heavy blink. Realization shuttered over his face in slow degrees. The fear set in his eyes dissipated and an exhaustion clambered to fill its place.
“Clerval.” It was startlingly lucid, clear like the sharp pull of air from a drowned man resurfacing to the top of the water.
As if commanded by some impulse writ under his skin, Victor straightened against the headboard and sat as upright as if he’d been laced up in a corset. “Pardon me.” His watery smile was insincere and polite. Performative. As if he were entertaining a houseguest. “I nearly mistook you for someone else.” The sentence strung together with lethargy.
Victor’s odd, manufactured dignity felt nearly ridiculous in the wake of his episode. Henry could only stare, horror and sympathy at war in his breast. His face was slack with shock. “Pardon me,” he echoed, weakly. “Lord. You - you need not beg my forgiveness. You must rest.”
“Rest with me. There is space enough for the both of us. We could share,” Victor laughed, phlegmy, the words wavering in his sternum as he teetered forward and cupped Henry’s freckled face in his palms.
“You do not know the significance of what you ask. You are still delirious, dear,” Henry coughed, bashful. His face felt as warm as Victor’s feverish fingers against his cheek.
“Your presence would comfort me,” he insisted in earnest, relinquishing the cheeky lacquer with which he had initially petitioned for Henry to join him.
The notion in itself was not strange; they had shared a bed many a time as children. Henry could still recall with fondness the nights spent weaving tales of fancy and heroism under the same quilt, or taking turns reading aloud from books of philosophy together by the light of a candle.
An abrupt pang of regret struck him just above his breastbone. He wished, suddenly, that he would have given in earnest the words he had flung in jest as a boy.
But now, and here, Victor had languished for so long his body had impressed a shallow niche into the featherbed. It was too intimate - the stamp of his shape in the linens.
All at once he realized he had been staring for far too long into Victor’s pallid, expectant face. He swallowed. It clicked in his dry throat.
“If it would bring you sleep, I will share your bed,” Henry said at last.
“Thank you, Henry,” Victor said, child-like in its easy cheer. He swayed like a pendulum between unguarded vulnerability and an absent, dreamy levity.
Henry turned his back to trade the starched silks of his cravat and blouse for the softer garments of his nightclothes. He cast a sidelong glance in Victor’s direction as he draped his folded waistcoat over the top rail of a desk chair. Victor tilted his head up to look at him. A stream of mucus clung stubbornly to his lower lip, giving way to gravity and slipping to form a grotesque pendant at his chin. Then his head lolled back against his pillow like a ragdoll.
The sight of his tear-streaked face nearly shattered Henry’s resolve. Instead, he spun to face him directly, smoothed a wrinkle from his nightshirt, and smiled as if Victor were the same boy of their youth instead of this shell of a stranger.
The mattress dipped beneath his weight as Henry sat and procured a handkerchief from his pocket. "You've something upon your face, my friend. May I?"
No response fell past his lips. That glassy look had returned to his stare, as if someone had brushed over his eyes with varnish. Despite it Henry moved to wipe the snot from Victor’s face, the stroke of fabric to his chin as delicate as the touch of a newborn. Tacky eyelids sank half shut as the cloth brushed over them, content.
When he ceased his ministrations and drew back he found Victor had already fallen asleep.
Silently, Henry slipped into the bed beside him, stared out at the floral paper of the wall, and longed for the Victor of before to return to him. Desire was shaped like two hands around his throat.