Vipera Berus
Victor woke in fits and starts, and Elias waited for him. He laid the book down behind Victor’s back and tucked his arm beneath Victor’s neck to support his head.
When Victor’s eyes finally opened, they looked back at him, glazed with fever.
Elias said nothing.
Victor looked around the room, seeing where he was, then he closed his eyes and sighed.
“Is this the end?” he asked.
Elias did not know. “Yaroslav is dead,” he said instead. “His house is a hollow place now.”
Victor hummed in understanding and bowed until his forehead brushed underneath Elias’s chin.
“Do not be afraid,” Elias whispered. “The thread between us strengthens when we are close. If we part, I fear you will stop breathing.”
“Is that not a good thing?” Victor replied. “You look so strong now. I would have it be that way.”
Elias shook his head. “Not like this.”
Tears dampened Elias’s chest, and Victor took a shaky breath.
“Elias, I’m sorry,” he confessed. “I am sorry for taking you from where you belonged. I’m sorry for wasting your trust. I’m sorry for binding you to me, for I do not deserve you.”
The words were sweet to Elias’s ears, but he hushed Victor and carded his fingers through Victor’s hair. Victor was so thin it felt like Elias was holding a sapling.
“Y-your voice and your eyes,” Victor was saying now. “They are so different from when I saw you last. I cannot stand to look at them. To hear you. Elias, I am sorry.”
Elias wanted to say, “It is all right,” on instinct, but it wasn’t.
Instead he said, “There are too many apologies to fit the size of this room. We are the same now. Master and Slave, God and Creation. Two beasts, two monsters, two butchers, one.”
Victor barked a quick laugh and raised one skeletal hand between them to wipe his face.
“You speak like a poet. I did not expect that.”
It was quiet then.
Elias stroked the soft skin behind Victor’s ear until he wasn’t sure if the other boy had fallen back asleep.
“What was that feeling you sent?” Victor asked suddenly.
“When?”
“W-When you were f-finished being angry with me,” Victor stuttered, and Elias’s chest was wet again.
Elias pulled him closer. This must have been at Willem’s house.
“I wished.” He started, then stopped to make sure he was saying this right.
“I wished for you to understand the nature of the person that I had been before these circumstances had so changed me. I was frustrated at your surprise and gratefulness at a kindness that comes so easily to me. You did not know me and I wished you to.”
“I felt it rise in my heart,” Victor said, “like a choir singing three different songs at once. I do not know how you can stand to touch me. You should have let me die on that staircase.”
Elias swallowed hard. “We cannot die. I’ve tried it already.”
Victor made a sound wild and sharp, like a mourning bird. It took long moments before he was able to speak to Elias again.
“I did not know. I . . . Elias, when you leave this place, you must go to Geneva.”
“I can never go back to Geneva,” Elias said. Not unless he wanted to get arrested. It would not be hard to deduce the arrival of a stranger asking for Alphonse Frankenstein and the annihilation of his family that same night.
Victor shook his head. “You do not understand. Elias, you must claim your dowry.”
Elias pulled back enough to force Victor to look at his face.
“What?”
Victor looked away like a coward. “I thought I was soon to breathe my last, and I spent some time thinking. Before I left England, I gifted it to you. All of it, in your name. It should have been half yours by right if I had loved you honestly.”
His blue eyes met Elias’s brown ones. “The house, the land, the fortune. I have no one and it would go back into the country if I did not find an heir. You do not have to keep it, sell it if you wish, but it is yours. It has been for a month.”
Elias stared at Victor in shock. He didn’t know what to say. He could not even protest.
“Victor, I can carry you back to Brogan, and she can pull enough of you from me that you can live to keep it,” he said eventually. “You’re a doctor, a brilliant scientist; you can build so much that I can’t. Help people. I could not dream to—”
Victor put his hand to Elias’s cheek and it was very cold still.
“It is not like me to be selfless like my father, not even after this. It is not in my nature, I’m afraid. But it is in yours. I want to stop traveling here. This is as far as I can go.”
Elias settled his chin back on Victor’s head and tried to stop shaking.
“Even if I wanted that, I don’t think we can choose which of us survives,” he whispered. “We have to end this enchantment; it is an unnatural wickedness and it is hurting us both.”
Victor nosed closer, breathed in Elias’s scent, and let it out with a sigh.
“I see. Has someone read the book to you? The one you stole from Mr. Sauer.”
Elias shook his head.
“We share this life between us. Once recited again, our souls will go back where they belong or to where is most appropriate. Either I will return to full strength and you will be gifted your original weakness. Or . . . or what’s left of me will become yours.
It’s a bit more than fifteen percent over what you should have, so perhaps it might strengthen other parts of you. ”
Elias thought deliriously about Brogan smelling him and Willem trying to offer him a sweet.
Victor was looking up at him again, fever bright.
“You have won your beauty back, somehow,” he said. “I should not have tried to take it.”
“What does your heart say of me?” Elias asked. Begged. He could not hold this in any longer. “Did it ever once beat for mine, or shall I live forever in shame of my weakness?”
Victor just stared at him for a while.
“Does that matter?” he said eventually. “When I would give you the world? Is it weak to be so open to love that it pains and betrays you? I do not . . . share your interests, Elias. But am I not in your bed for my last breaths? Does my wedding gift not wait for your claim? A house, chickens, lambs, coin to keep you warm and fed, my status to protect you from harm . . . More so if you took my name. You may have that, too, if you wish.”
Elias hung his head and closed his eyes. The thread between them was so thick that it could not even move.
“Do not be ashamed,” Victor whispered, his breath a hot puff against Elias’s cheeks. “And hand me the book. It is jabbing me in the back.”