Dross The Fish

This blog is mainly art and fandom focused and I am always looking for inspiration so feel free to send art requests or suggestions and I might draw you something nice. My ask box is always open.

Fair warning, if you have a blank blog and I'm unable to confirm you are human you run the risk of being blocked.

18+ side blog for sending your more nsfw asks and requests

Feed the fish please!: Ko-fi

There is! It's not as fleshed out as the other lore in my AU but there is, in fact, lore for Jekyll's parents.

Mairead (anglicized as "Mary" after the Jekyll's moved to London) and Hamish Jekyll marred when Jekyll's mother was fairly young and she wasn't exactly thrilled to be marrying an older man but Hamish was kind, pleasant and above all financially stable and she was well aware she'd have to marry SOMEBODY (she absolutely hated the idea of being a wife but understood that there just weren't options for women in her income bracket to stay single) so she picked a pragmatic option that provided her with security rather than a romantic one. At first she enjoyed married life well enough, Hamish had enough money that they were comfortable and could even afford small luxuries and because he did business working as a solicitor in London he was often away, leaving her to her own devices. This is how she liked him the most, around just enough that his company was enjoyable and then leaving before he started to irk her.

Hamish was religious, tidy, good-natured, and married to his work. He loved being a husband and he could imagine no greater bliss than to come home and find his attractive wife waiting for him with a hot supper that he could eat while he told her all about work. He laughed at his own jokes, never missed church on Sunday and had a sweet tooth. Above all he was very well liked.

And he was boring. Utterly boring. Mairead always found it hard not to hate him just a little when his idea of a perfect outing was to walk around the park after lunch. Mairead herself was always restless, always longing to wander or to seek out some new excitement. When she could arrange it she saw an opera or went to the horse races. She drank a lot, gambled and spent most of her time with her friends.

Then the worst thing happened. Despite being careful and trying to take precautions she fell pregnant.

If Mairead hated the idea of being a wife she hated the idea of being a mother more, worse she hated how much Hamish loved the idea of being a father. And by "being a father" I mean Mairead did most of the labor, the feedings and diaper changes and Hamish got to come home in the evening and play dad for an hour before putting the kid to bed. After giving birth to Henry, Mairead started to deteriorate.

Suddenly Hamish was home every day because he was excited to be a father. Meanwhile, Mairead struggled to adjust. She didn't fully even understand what it was about being a wife and mom she hated so much, only that it felt like she was disappearing and every day she was living a lie trying to pretend she loved motherhood and that she loved this man. This man who's idea of loving anything could be summed up in a dry kiss on the cheek as he left for work. She hated how it made her feel like a villain to be incapable of loving her husband and her child.

After their move to London She got less discreet about her drinking and gambling. She had affairs. Once she was brought home by the police after fighting with another woman and Hamish, rather than address the issue simply tried to cover it up and sweep it under the rug. He wrote it off as a one time lapse in judgement. He chastised her and urged her to think of their son and their reputation but then simply returned to his routine with the expectation that things would fall back into place.

Things did not fall back into place. Mairead grew increasingly frustrated and began having an affair with an artist. Hamish spent a lot of time and money covering that up and destroying the nude paintings of his wife before they could be discovered. He and Mairead began to fight. Henry was old enough by then to realize that all was not well in his household and he buried himself in his studies. Every time he distinguished himself academically or athletically the fighting would stop and his parents would seemingly be united in being proud of him.

Actually I have pondered this and I'm not set on it but I imagine Jekyll looks a lot like his father but Hyde looks like Jekyll's mother. The black hair and green eyes are from her. I'm also playing around with the idea that Jekyll's mother may have been a bit wild, overly self-indulgent, and most of all resentful of being trapped in her married life and Henry's father paid a lot of money to cover up any scandals. The conflict caused by her having affairs, drinking, and engaging in reckless behavior and her husband caught in a cycle of forgiving her and trying to protect her and his reputations lead to Jekyll putting his father on a pedestal and demonizing his mother externally while internally feeling sympathy for her and harboring some resentment towards his father for creating a home life too rigid and dull for her to thrive in. It's worse because his father wasn't a bad person or anything and Jekyll did love him, but he was inflexible and very fixated on money and reputation to the point that no one in the house, including Mr. Jekyll himself, could breathe. His wife rebelled, his son overachieved and he died before Henry graduated, leaving his son to fill the gap and be the man of the house until Mrs. Jekyll passed a few years later. Henry grieves but also partly blames his father and his feelings about both of his parents are extremely complicated. This is why Edward burns the portrait in my AU, partly out of shame and partly out of anger and lashing out at someone he wishes he could be MORE angry at. Jekyll is a man who is split in two and has been since childhood. Torn between things he is supposed to want and the things that win him praise and admiration and the things he actually wants that damn him and destroy him. And a reason Edward looks like her is because Jekyll subconsciously associates his repressed urges with his mother. When he sees Edward's reflection and realizes it's familiar he doesn't hate it because despite everything he didn't hate her.

He's quite fond of beetles. I think rhinoceros beetles or stag beetles would be his choice.

Nope, here you go. ....

Watson was surprised to see the tall figure rummaging through the bathroom medicine cabinet in the middle of the night. It was unmistakably Adam, and the splashes of dark, rusty red in the basin of the sink were unmistakably blood. “Adam? What’s going on? Have you injured yourself?” Adam turned. “I’m sorry, Dr. Watson. Did I wake you?” “Oh no, I was already awake,” Watson replied, stifling a yawn. He moved closer to inspect the giant. Adam was holding a stained wad of gauze to his palm. “What happened to your hand, Adam?” Watson asked, reaching out for Adam to present his hand for examination. Somewhat grudgingly, Adam allowed it. “It’s nothing; I forgot Erik put a trap out in the garden. I saw something shiny out of the corner of my eye while I was patrolling and reached down to inspect it. The device is destroyed; unfortunately.” Examining the hand, Watson saw that both the palm and back had deep scores where the teeth of the trap had hooked him and the longer strips of shredded skin where Adam had forcefully pulled his hand out, further damaging his flesh. “That looks quite serious. We’ll need to clean it, and some of these will need stitches. Why didn’t you call for help or bring the trap in so we could remove it properly?” “I got angry. I scarcely felt it in the moment, and after I got myself free, I ripped the device apart in a fit of rage.” “Erik will be put out when he hears that. He works very hard on those.” Adam grumbled something unintelligible under his breath, but any anger he’d carried had already burnt itself out. He let Watson fuss about in the medicine cabinet and retrieve a needle, some antiseptic, and a roll of catgut. Curling the good corner of his lip at the antiseptic, he sighed, “Is that necessary? I can’t get infections in the first place, and that foul tincture of yours stings.” “It’s not nearly as bad as you make it out to be,” Watson said as he continued unscrewing the bottle and pouring a small amount into a pad of cotton. “Besides, I’d rather clean it properly even if you don’t need it than start making a habit of not using it.” Adam didn’t argue. He winced a little when the cotton pad touched his skin, but it wasn’t until Watson began to thread the needle with catgut that he had to turn his head away and shut his eyes. Watson did not pause his ministrations or hesitate to make the first stitch, but he was perplexed. Adam was not given to timidity or fearfulness. He was nearly indestructible. Watson was well aware that things that would kill most men barely slowed the Frankenstein Creature. Yet here he was, unable to look at his flesh being mended with something as small as a needle pulling thread. 

When he’d closed the last stitch, he dabbed away any remaining blood. He held Adam’s hand for just a moment. A brief, comforting gesture. Adam knew if he turned his head he would see blue eyes crinkling with warmth as the corners of Watson’s mustache lifted. “There you go, all done!” He could hear the smile in Watson’s voice.

Plucking up his courage, Adam ventured to look at his hand. The stitches were thin and neat. A far cry from the more haphazard, faded, pinkish-pale lines that Victor had left when he’d sewn Adam together. He wondered if Watson’s would be added to his collection or if they’d fade to nothing. He compared the old scars on his wrist and fingers and imagined, as he had often before, a young man trembling with excitement, rushing his work out of sheer impatience. Adam liked to think that perhaps Victor had looked forward to seeing his creation live. Watson was different. His was the handiwork of patience, of care and compassion. Adam closed his fingers over the neat lines to hide them from view.

"Wow I wonder why my week is going so badly"

It's also bad for the environment, but yeah. The ubiquitousness doesn't help. I now have to use it at my job and it's replaced some of our older programs and this wasn't a change for the better. And honestly, this is a more minor nitpick but I also really hate the way it talks. I know that's weird but having to deal with an AI bot multiple times a day makes it hard for me not to feel increasingly hostile towards it. Every time I try to correct it I get a whole paragraph of the program backpedaling and trying to cover its ass.

"You're absolutely correct! I apologize for my error. I can see now that this is not what you asked for and I will try to do better from here. It's good that you flagged that I gave you the wrong information. Your understanding of graphs and charts is very impressive and it shows you take your work seriously! I am committed to providing you the quality your dedication deserves. Though I wasn't able to understand your directions before, I understand completely now that what you were asking for was a horizontal clustered bar graph and instead I gave you a pie chart!" And then it repeats the same error in a different flavor and then repeats the apology almost verbatim and makes me wish I was allowed to just use an excel program like I used to.

In a way he remind me of Greg arkin from Smallville, with his insect like transformation and love for ants. But he was... lonely. But Louis have friends even.

No. Theo is not dysphoric enough to pursue surgery or permanent change, she also isn't a transman or masc aligned NB. Regardless of what she might seem like to a modern audience she is from the late 1800s her idea of gender is not going to be the same as your idea gender and when using pronouns for the character I will always default to how they would identify, even if it's outdated. If pressed for a more modern expression when she actually survives to modern day she'd be more likely to view herself as genderfluid and use terms like "drag king" more comfortably than she would non binary. She'd still default to fem pronouns and masc pronouns depending on what she's wearing or which gender she is performing. I don't think she'd ever be comfortable with they and atm "he" is only used while in drag or cross dressing. But it's a moot point because she and her perception of herself are tied to the Victorian/Edwardian era and that context informs her gender/sexual expression.