Do It Scared

- - -

Light and dark. 

Sight, sound, sensation, and scent.

Existence presses in on her mind all at once, everything from everywhere. She is new, breathing in the very first moments of life, and every part of the spiraling cosmos rushes to greet her first. She cannot understand what any of it means, the world begging for her attention with incessant novelty. 

Time lingers at the edges of her perception, measured in passing breaths.

Then slowly, so very slowly, things begin to take shape. The scents which filled her mind - sharp and coppery, filled with the taste of something thundering - fade into the air. Sensations that wracked her now settle into a singular buzzing form. Her buzzing form. 

Because she is physical and it is through this that she experiences everything. 

Her chest heaves and her skin aches. Air runs through new lungs and blood cycles her heart. Movement is inherent in each corner of her body, blood and air and life all dancing through a form freshly taught that it lives. The blurry shapes of the world, harsh lines and curving edges, solidify into a single image. A room, a constant. Somewhere that she now inhabits. Only one thing disrupts the steady lines of the world.

Another object of movement and sound. 

Another being.

It lingers in the distance, upright and steady, as it watches her panting first breaths. A delicate clinking and the rising sound of liquid on glass fill the air as the figure cradles something in its hand, tilting it back and forth slowly. It lifts its prize to itself before grimacing at whatever was inside. She doesn’t understand the purpose, but the figure repeats the action as it takes her in.

Unceremoniously, and almost by accident, the figure shares the first words she ever hears. 

“Again I call forth life from nothing. Again I enter a stage only filled by legends and worship. Let us see if this time I cannot eliminate some of its more indelicate failings…”

At the time, Mel hadn’t had the presence to understand what he meant.

She didn’t understand that she was looking at her creator in the very moments after creation, as zeal and fervor had begun to congeal. She hadn’t been able to comprehend what she was, the force involved in how she came to be. She hadn’t even been Mel yet, simply an unmolded consciousness pressed into a body.

Days and minutes passed interchangeably as she laid there, body settling into her as much as she was into it. 

Mel was untied from her creation bed eventually, set loose to discover the edges of her form. She wastes no time in exploring. A shape sits in front of her and Mel learns to recognize it as herself, as her own hand. She pulls herself up on shaking legs and leans to propel herself. First into a wall, but then with stumbling clarity, to locations of her choosing. Each new discovery is a joy.

Mel's body is a song of motion and choice, set to move if she only gives it a direction. She delights in doing so. 

Her creator, Robby, seems far less sure of what to do with her. 

Mel will turn to find him already staring at her from across the room, eyes shadowed by something beyond her comprehension. In those moments it almost feels as though he’s not seeing her. Like someone else is standing in her shadow who Robby is trying to find through the wall of her form. Mel isn’t sure why, but something seems to harden him the longer he looks at her. 

He is not unkind though. 

Robby gives Mel a white dress to cover herself with and she spends eternities spinning in circles so she can watch it flare out around her. He gives her food and drink, when it crosses his mind. Mel doesn’t fault him for forgetting. He seems to need it far more often than she does. Robby even tucks her into bed each night with the quiet snap of four little padlocks, safe and sound so her body of movement can practice being still. 

Her creator is caring, he just prefers that she find her own way, like he does with his tasks, unexplained and mysterious. He pours over his desk with a frown, Mel wanders her new world, and time slips past them both as they find a new footing in her presence.

It’s in one of the many openings Robby leaves her that Mel makes her first choice. Something conscious and actively done.

She decides to become herself.

Her home is overrun with fascinating and confusing little bobbles. They spill over every table and shelf. Glass and metal, irregular shapes and smooth curving edges. What’s even more engrossing than the objects themselves is the realizations that they have their own unique sounds.

Robby teaches them to her although it’s not entirely purposeful. He speaks to himself as he works and she finds herself tracing the shapes his mouth makes, feeling them over her silent tongue. She hadn’t understood the purpose of the noises initially but she slowly realized that he was using the same sounds for the same objects.

A table, a chair, a vial. The wall, the door. Her bed, her dress.

He’s using words. Something to express objects and foods, but also people and places, even ideas without substance or physical form. Once she became aware of them, she started to take them in hungrily. Her vocabulary expands in rapid bursts under his unknowing tutelage, even as the sounds in her mouth remain malformed little hums and chirps.

Realizing the purpose of words suddenly gives meaning to the books strewn over every table and shelf. Each and every one of them is filled with words. 

Stories.

Robby is a man of routine for all that he rails against tired institutions and outdated rules. He spends his days following the same patterns. He works at his desk, he paces the room, and on occasional evenings he stumbles to the small armchair resting in the corner to stare into the fireplace. Robby watches the dancing flames with the same contemplative look on his face every time, something dark twisting his features. 

Like his mind has left his body behind in search of something that isn’t here.

She isn’t sure what bothers him, but she watches the fire too. Just in case the cause will somehow illuminate itself.

Sometimes, rarely, that low mood won’t steal over him though. On those nights, a book will find its way into his hand and he’ll read aloud to them both, sharing the words trapped inside. Stories and facts created by distant figures from places far outside their room. 

Tonight the story is part of something called mythology, a word Robby says with a particular twist of his lips. 

(Disapproval, she’ll later learn. It will become familiar.)

Still he reads, pulling worlds from the paper with a quiet voice. “And so the fair nymph Melissa cared for the babe Zeus, coddling and delighting the young god as he grew…”

Something profound aches in her chest at the sound of the new names. Robby has not named her, even now, weeks after being brought into existence. She supposes there isn’t much reason for it when there are only ever two of them. A speaker and a listener. Their fleeting story nights reveal another meaning behind the action though. 

To be named is to be claimed. 

The figures of their books exist because they have names, something that shapes a piece of the world to call out to them. They take space in the world, one that cannot be papered over or forgotten. It asserts itself in every syllable and breath. And although her creator hasn't given her one, she yearns for it.

The nymph drifts through her mind, even as Robby reads onward. A far off girl taking care of a babe with gentle hands and calm eyes. Kind, knowing. Real. Named Melissa so that the world can’t forget to take note of her presence. It calls out to her in a soothing whisper, something hopeful and more. Melissa is already taken and she doesn’t want to leave the nymph nameless.

She’ll be…Mel.

There. Now she exists.

There is no change in the world at this choice. Her creator doesn’t even notice her transformation from an existence to a named being. 

Mel knows though and it’s like she’s just lit a lamp in a dark room. 

Her appetite for words, knowledge, scraps of life outside grows uncontrollably. Mel strains herself to remember every word that crosses Robby’s lips, even if she doesn’t understand them yet. She only knows as much as she can find in this room so Mel learns the limits of her body and the stone walls, the shapes and heft of endless piles of books and instruments. Mel takes what she can find around her and carefully builds facts of her existence.

The first fact is that the stones of the basement are older than her. 

Most things are, it shouldn’t be a surprise, but Mel comes to learn that she does not fit into the natural way of things. 

Her body is complete with long limbs and delicate control. For most, this state would be called maturity. For Mel, this is the first and only state she knows. People outside this room, the ones from Robby’s mutterings and the illustrations in their books, resemble her creator. Not perfectly with different features, clothes, and expressions - but they share a single crucial truth: they are whole. They are all whole and beautiful, from their very first breath.

Mel is not so.

In part because these may not be considered her first breaths.

Mel was made, brought forth from nothingness into a form that was cut and sewn and rigged to resemble the body of a woman grown. 

Thick seams cut over every corner of her body, marking the places where others were bound together. Her left hand alone is the accumulation of four different donors. One for three of her fingers, another for her pinkie and ring finger. A third for her palm that wraps halfway around the back of her hand in a single solid piece. And a fourth to fill in the uneven gaps left by the other three, cut in a strange asymmetrical shape. Not every part of her is so segmented, but the important pieces, the ones with fine muscles and delicate veins, seem to have been of particular focus.

Each and every piece of her carefully chosen by her creator. 

There were no acts of random chance in how she came to be, no roll of the dice by genetics and fates larger than a man. Robby wouldn’t allow anything else to intervene on the task he undertook in bringing her into existence.

The second fact Mel learns about her existence is that she is not something her creator is proud of.

“Here, now.” Robby orders, eyes turned to her for the first time in days as he points at her bed. He flips through a worn black notebook as he waits, skimming over old notes.

Mel abandons her exploration of the dark gap between one of the shelves and the wall, where she had been tracing the continuous seam of the stone, to hurry over to his side. She doesn’t want to keep him waiting. 

Today he wants measurements. That’s why the book is out.

Mel lays down on her bed, the hard surface pressing into her back familiarly as Robby gets to work ensuring every piece of her is as it should be. Arm length, symmetry, range of motion, fine malleability of each limb and tendon. The length of her hair as it brushes her shoulders, growing longer since their last assessment two weeks ago, takes up a page of notes on its own. 

Robby doesn’t speak to her as he works, but he does speak and Mel tries to memorize the words as surely as anything else he says. “Supination and pronation of forearms is smooth…lateral bend of neck is clean without interruptions…” He follows the same path during every exam. Skeletal, muscular, then internal structures like lungs, heart, and spine. The last are always the detail systems: eyes and cognition. Mel tries not to move too much during the process. Robby gets an irritated look when he puts her hand down and it’s not where he left it. It’s hard at times when his fingers pinch or prod too sharply for comfort, but she forces her reactions down.

Good measurements are important.

Robby presses a hand in her throat, fingers probing her voice box uncomfortably as Mel fights a wince.

She’s found herself unwillingly silent around him, unable to attempt the same hiccuping speech she does during her long nights alone. It’s not an issue with her form, but her mind. Air passes over her vocal chords, her mind understands the process to give it life, and yet-

Nothing.

A sharp pinch to her side forces out an instinctive squeak, but it’s nothing like the fumbling syllables she’s been practicing with growing success.

Robby frowns after a beat like he was waiting for something else. “Disappointing.”

And so the test continues.

A part of Mel enjoys the examinations, regardless of how fleeting or disapproving they might be. The touch settles something in her skin with a glowing warmth she can’t get anywhere else. There is a loneliness she struggles to swallow in her independence. 

Robby can’t seem to hear her silent request for more though as he closes his notebook with a bitter expression. “I can bring forth life, but still it seeks to disobey.” He sighs, shaking his head heavily. “Nearsighted.” 

Mel isn’t sure what that means, but it seems to signal the exam is over as he turns back to his desk without another word.

She sits up hesitantly, tugging her dress back into place where it was hiked up. Mel doesn’t feel the urge to return to her earlier exploration anymore. Instead she lingers, letting her legs rest over the side of her bed, dangling absently in the air. He’s found something on the last three exams. A complaint, a gap, a failing. She seems to be falling short more and more without moving a single muscle. 

Mel looks at her hands settled in her lap, tracing the delicate seams that divide her into pieces. 

They all belonged to someone else, someone before her. A small freckle sits hidden between her pinkie and ring finger, delicately laid into the skin like a secret. It once belonged to another girl. One who had a family and a life and whole perfect skin. 

Mel wonders if she failed her inspections too.

Robby drops into his desk chair with a creak, staring at the notebook with that same unreadable expression on his face that she’s seen so many times before. “No matter my efforts…just as flawed as the first.”

The third thing she learns about her existence is also the most fascinating.

Mel is not the first of her kind, but the second.

- - -

Just six short words turns her world on its head.

“Just as flawed as the first.”

It’s not a kind comparison, but Mel breathes in his words like air. Even shameful comparison is a sign of connection, a tie between her and someone else, even if just in their shared disappointment. 

Images of sewn hands and limbs covered with seams fill her mind, sending her stomach fluttering wildly. Mel finds herself absentmindedly tracing her own lines as she pictures another like her. She is not a creation in isolation, not anymore. Now she stands as part of a series, a piece of a greater sum. 

There is at least one other soul in existence that might understand her.

Robby leaves her unbound one day when work drags him upstairs and Mel makes short work of hunting down the cracked full-length mirror buried in a corner. The top edge was shattered before her time, but the spider webbing cracks are large enough to still see reasonably well. She strips off her thin white shift, staring at her nude form in the reflection. Familiar lines criss-cross her body, curling over her belly and chest in large strips before running down her legs in a soft patchwork. 

Mel knows the pathway of each and every one with her eyes closed. 

Now it feels like she’s seeing them for the first time again. Her body has become alien to her as every line highlights a potential similarity between her and the first.

Do they have arms stitched in the same incomprehensible pattern as hers? Does their skin carry the same slight cool hue, like it still remembers the time between its forms? What color are their eyes, do the two of them match? Mel smiles at that thought, even as she knows that both of her eyes must have come from the same donor. To see the world through a shared gaze, to know that something so fundamental ties the two of them together- 

It’s an entrancing thought.

Mel turns in the mirror, twisting herself this way and that, like looking at herself harder might reveal something about her predecessor. She’s not even sure of their sex. Do they have breasts like she does, soft and full, hidden away under their clothes? Or perhaps, she wonders with a nervous excitement, are they more like the men in their books? Wide shoulders and long limbs, something between their legs that she’s only ever seen in the illustrations of anatomy texts. 

The questions remain just as hungry for answers as they were when she first stepped before the mirror. 

Mel redresses slower, limbs dragging even as she knows it’s better not to get caught asking things that her creator doesn’t want to answer. Still Mel chances one last look before stepping away entirely, staring at the seams curling over her face.

Would her predecessor look at her as kin if they saw her? Would they recognize her the way the figures in stories seem to know one another despite everything?

Mel doesn’t know anything about the history of her creation, and even less about the first of their kind. Robby isn’t likely to share the story, even if Mel had the words to ask. There is something heavy in his eyes, creeping out on nights when he stares into the fire without a book to distract him. The hissing edge to words he speaks to himself. 

There’s no chance that it's a peaceful story.

Mel stares down at her patchwork form, parts stolen from other bodies. She is not a peaceful being, not at the core of how she came to be. 

She yearns to know.

- - -

The world and her world are two distinct spaces.

The world is found in passing comments slipping out of Robby without thought and in the pages of their endless books. It is vast and hazy, illuminated only through others' words.

Her world is far more measurable.

This laboratory was created in the basement of Robby’s manor, a workspace set aside for his various scientific interests. The door up to the rest of the house sits on one end, at the furthest point of the room from her bed. Between those two points sits almost everything else - shelves pressed up against the walls, tables placed at random like they were set down and simply never picked up again, endless equipment and supplies settled wherever they fit. On the same wall as the door is the fireplace, set into the stone walls with an imposing mantle. That is where Robby’s armchair sits, solely intended for his use.

By her bed is, unofficially, Mel’s space. 

At least by virtue of Robby's lack of interest. 

The basement cuts an irregular notch back into the wall behind her bed. A handful of broken shelves and tables are wedged back there, a kind of refuse pile for things that no longer serve a purpose.

Mel has decided not to pay it any mind that it’s where her bed is arranged.

Robby’s favorite desk, a particularly messy table near the armchair, is in a constant state of near-collapse under the piles of letters waiting for his attention. It's where he spends a majority of his time, even when he doesn't seem particularly pleased with any of them. Often that means slumping into the mess with particular disinterest, scrawling out responses seemingly at random.

One letter-sender, who closes their messages with a swooping H seal, has a talent for forcing his attention though. 

Their letter has already been in his hands for far longer than it should have taken to read the contents. Robby slowly crumples the edges of the paper as he rereads it, over and over. “She acts as though I have been neglecting her-” Robby laughs to himself like it's some kind of joke. “I told her- I told her that I would come as soon as my work would permit me.” He scrubs a hand over his face, lost in thought. “Can it truly be so much to ask that she just wait for my instruction with a little faith…”

Only the silence of the basement greets him.

Mel certainly doesn’t find herself with any answers for him. Not that the thickness constricting her throat would allow her to share them.

He seems to make up his own mind, shoving himself to his feet and marching out of the room, the letter still clutched in his hand. The door slams behind him with a careless bang that has Mel flinching on instinct. She looks around the basement with a strange sense of emptiness. She’s alone again. It’s not an unfamiliar state to find herself in, but it prods at something delicate in her chest regardless. 

Mel tries to shake off the feeling. This is normal. 

At least it is until her eyes catch on Robby’s jacket forgotten over the back of his armchair.

As much as Mel might peel back the secrets of the walls and the furniture and the books of the laboratory, her creator is a dark space that refuses to give up its secrets. Robby doesn’t initiate physical contact with her outside of examinations and Mel has learned that he certainly isn’t interested in her initiating it in his stead. It’s like a physical ward, one that extends to his belongings as much as himself.

Before now.

Mel glances at the door for a long moment. There’s no echo of returning footsteps no matter how hard she strains her ears. It’s silent, like it is when he’s truly left. She can’t contain herself forever, creeping forward as her curiosity overwhelms the urge to stay away. 

Robby isn’t here and he left this behind. Surely he can’t mind too much. 

The outside of the jacket is soft with age, slight signs of wear decorating the elbows. It’s a fascinating little detail, one born from a life outside this room. Hungry for more, Mel flips one of the front panels open to find its interior is far nicer, decorated in a deep red fabric. It’s like a captured piece of flame, practically glowing as she shifts it around to catch the light.

 Mel finally feels like she understands what makes it so attractive for parties as she watches it move - it’s entrancing.

So entrancing that she’s caught off guard by the quiet creak the door gives on its hinges. 

Mel whips around to find Robby in the doorway, blinking at her in surprise. They’re both frozen, neither of them quite sure about what to do. Their eyes meet with a strange unsteadiness, like two people truly noticing each other for the first time. Mel’s heart beats a little faster as she offers him the jacket with a small smile. 

Robby takes it from her, movements slow and uncertain for the first time in…she’s not sure how long. The fabric crumples into an unrecognizable shape under his hands as Robby’s eyes bore into her. It almost feels like one of his exams as he takes her in, weighing her on an invisible criteria. Mel holds still, air thick in her lungs as she waits for his findings. Instead Robby turns and disappears back upstairs without a word. 

She isn’t sure what to make of his reaction until he comes back hours later.

Carrying a length of chain connected to a single shackle.

The chain is bolted deep into the stone at the base of her bed, tied into what looks like the foundation of the manor itself. Robby gives it a rattling shake when it’s set into place, checking that it's set securely. Based on his proud nod, it seems like it is. 

Robby waves Mel over with the same motion as her exams, the shackle open and waiting in his hand. “Come here.”

Mel can feel her hands shaking as something between fear and grief wars in her chest. She creeps closer even as a skittish pounding in her chest tells her to run. The walk over seems to take ages and no time at all until she’s standing within reach, fighting an instinctive shaking running through her body without permission.

Robby doesn’t say anything as he bends down to wrap the shackle around her ankle. No explanations or excuses, he simply moves with his mind set on his goal. He misses how Mel opens her mouth almost desperately, trying to force some sound from her throat. 

She doesn’t want this.

Please.

The sounds don’t come and Mel isn’t sure her creator would hear them even if they had.

He closes the shackle tightly, locked right against her skin. It sits like a brand, the cold metal leaching the heat from her body in a continuous theft. He nods at it approvingly as he stands up, content with himself.

Finally Robby seems to remember he attached it to a person, looking at her again. “Just a precaution.” 

Mel doesn’t ask what it’s a precaution against. There’s only one answer.

He disappears after that, back to the world upstairs and whatever troubles pull at his attention from his letters. Back to places she isn’t allowed to brush too closely without consequence. Mel doesn’t see him for bedtime that night or any nights after. She is free to roam to the limits of her new boundary at any hour, no longer confined to her bed. 

It’s the first time Mel ever truly doubts her creator.

It’s not the last.

- - -

Her world is smaller with the shackle holding her ankle tight. 

The chain is about half the length of the room, allowing her to reach many, but not all, of her favorite spots. The dark corner behind her bed, tucked between the abandoned pieces of furniture, and two of the long chair-less work tables are still within her grasp. The armchair is too far for her now, even when she strains herself against the metal.

The door is out of the question.

Mel’s world is this room and in a single motion her creator halved it.

She still explores the spaces she can reach, even as the drag of the chain behind her is a jarring adjustment. It echoes loudly against the stone, dragging sharp looks from Robby when she does it too often. 

Nevertheless, Mel is not a creature of defeat. 

She just finds more reasons to be still, reaching for the books with more and more regularity. Mel remembers all of the stories Robby has read aloud, each and every word tucked away safely in her chest. She recollects the books from wherever they were discarded and hunts down familiar images as she tries to match the words trapped in her mind to small black marks before her. 

Slowly, so very slowly, the little black marks began to solidify into familiar words. 

The world opens up to her again, this time not in a burst but a trickle, one under her command. Words don’t surprise her anymore, they’re revealed piece by piece. When she’s been left to her own devices in the long nights, Mel will settle a book in her lap and try to put the words to sound, stitching all of the pieces back together.

Some of her books are stories and others are histories and others still are scientific in nature, designed to explain instead of narrate. 

Tonight her subject is scientific, an exploration of creatures found on far off continents.

“Li-Licinia…melite, butterfly.” Mel reads carefully, tracing her fingers over the yellow-winged insect printed on the page. “Note…Note-ab-le for the size of their…underwings.”

It’s not enough just to read it, Mel longs to know it. To understand it deep in her chest. When Mel finishes a book for the first time, the work of long unfiltered hours, she closes it completely and begins again on the first page. She carefully stitches her understanding together from repetition, flipping between pages to measure wing sizes and coloration, letters and sounds coming easier every time.

She reads for exploration that is no longer hers, not even down here, and with time her world opens again in a new dimension.

- - -

“Thyreus abbottii, moth. A lovely insect which, as- as far as we can ascertain, is un-described by any author.” Mel narrates to the quiet air of the basement. 

The room seems to breathe with her, holding onto each of her precious words. She prefers to keep them safely tucked away in her chest, but the night is long and careful with precious cargo so Mel takes the chance.

Tonight, months into her learning and practice, Mel finds that she isn’t entirely alone.

A small pillbug, armadillidium vulgare, wanders past her as it travels across the vast stone floor. Mel sets her book to the side before gently scooping up the small insect with a smile. It doesn’t seem bothered by the change between stone and skin, crawling over her fingers at the same wandering pace. It makes no distinction between her skin and her seams and she smiles at the thought that it might be adding her to its own understanding of the world.

“Hello, little one.” Mel whispers, sharing her words with the small creature. 

The pillbug doesn’t react to her voice but she doesn’t mind. Mel didn’t know how to react when she was first spoken to either. It can be overwhelming. Eventually she deposits it back onto the floor, safe to continue its mysterious journey onward.

Mel smiles to herself about the encounter for hours, feeling its curious meandering motions over her fingers long after it had disappeared.

Three nights later, they meet again as the pillbug returns with the same trundling movements.

“Oh, hello.” Mel greets it with a bright smile. “Would you like to read too?”

The pillbug drifts closer and she takes that for an admission of interest, cradling the insect in the palm of her hand again. 

“Tonight is poe-t-ry, so you probably won’t recognize it. Not like the illustration books.” Mel warns as she settles her book back on her lap. She’s read this one so many times she can see the words on the inside of her eyelids, but her friend hasn’t so Mel maneuvers the page so they can both see it. Just in case. Her pillbug is far more interested in weaving through her fingers like some kind of dance though, so Mel reads to it instead.

Who made the world?  

Who made the swan

And the black bear?

Who made the grasshopper? This grasshopper, I mean—

The one who has flung herself out of the grass, 

The one who is eating sugar out of my hand, 

Tho is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—

who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes. 

Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face. 

Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away. 

Mel pictures the grasshopper in her own hand, right next to her pillbug. She imagines it looking up at her with the large shimmering eyes from the scientific diagram she found. Trusting beings larger than her with a curious open nature. Mel loves her, the grasshopper that dances through strangers' palms. And her little pillbug who trusts her for another visit. And the spider curled up in the highest corner of the ceiling on a web, lazily moving just a few inches over the course of a whole day. 

She loves and loves and loves, each and every one of them.

The next morning greets Mel with an ache as she finds herself stretched out at the end of her chain. She had followed her pillbug after they read together, letting it lead the way after being such a patient audience. Eventually she had been stuck, held back by the chain tight around her ankle, as it continued on without her.

Perhaps, it will be good enough to visit her again. 

When Robby enters the room a few hours later, he barely spares her a look long enough to grimace before turning back to his desk. A new letter with a familiar seal sits between his fingers, already torn open and poured over vigorously. He rereads it again like the words might have changed somewhere in his journey. “Bid the world to slow, all it does is dance faster. Bid a woman to wait and she’ll make waiting an art so hateful it’s as if she never loved at all.”

The mysterious woman of his letters seems like an uncompromising figure, drawing either an agreement from Robby or a place in his mind all evening. 

Mel finds herself wishing she could still reach his desk, this time with her new found literacy. 

Mel is almost resolved to entertain herself with the Latin names in her books for the day when she catches sight of her pillbug crawling over the edge of the desk. Oh, hello little one. It climbs over stacks of paper and through the mess of quills and inks, all in a body completely dwarfed by its surroundings. She smiles at its persistence as it carries on, slowly reaching the paper Robby has shifted his attention to-

Smack.

Robby’s hand comes down hard and fast, crushing her curious little pillbug in a single instant. Mel flinches, chain rattling loudly as she slaps a hand over her mouth to cover a silent scream. 

He- 

He-

Robby absentmindedly wipes away its remains on his jacket with the same grimace he gave her earlier, returning to his work without a word. 

There was no connection in his eyes, no tie to something more threaded between two creatures sharing existence. It was small and in the way so he destroyed it. Something sick fills her chest, stomach rolling dangerously. Mel stares at Robby's back, at the hand that killed. As surely as she knows her own body, she knows he would do the same to her. 

Without hesitation. 

Without grief.

Mel buries herself in the most difficult to reach corner of the lab, behind broken pieces of furniture and debris. Even there she tucks her head between her knees, trying to press herself ever smaller. Out of sight, out of the way. 

It doesn’t matter. She’s still too close. 

He can reach her.

- - -

That night, hours after Robby has disappeared upstairs again, Mel finds the strength to finally crawl out of her hiding place. Her motions are slow, hesitation buried in each shift. Eventually she emerges again to find it abandoned and still, just the same as always.

The only addition is a small grey body left crumpled on the ground by the desk.

An ache builds in Mel’s chest as she stares at it, biting her lip harshly. She can’t reach the desk with her shackle on. 

She tries anyway. 

No matter how hard she strains against the metal cuff, she can’t reach. She can’t cup the body her little friend used to fill. Mel can’t say goodbye. She’s trapped staring from across the room, just as helpless as she was before. The ache in her chest turns, slowly shifting into something black and only familiar from Robby’s worst moments. It only seems to grow stronger the longer she stares.

Oh.

It appears her creator did tuck something of himself in her chest, as surely as any natural father would pass onto his child.

Rage.

Inky and all-consuming. Burning against the inside of her sternum like a match has been struck and everything inside of her is bent on feeding the flame. Mel doesn’t try to smother it. The warmth feels powerful when everything else around her is so very cold. 

The image of her little pillbug is seared on the inside of her eyelids and Mel clings to it with both hands. 

- - -

Fairytales don’t draw her in as completely as her scientific journals had.

The choice doesn’t seem to be up to her though. The first time Mel reached for one of her favorite field guides, the one filled with grasshoppers and delicate fluttering moths and even a lonely pillbug, tears had overwhelmed her in an instant. Too many memories, too many dangerous questions.

So instead Mel casts a wider net, picking up a collection of mostly intact folk stories she finds buried in the corner. They’re short and engaging, full of heroics and trickery, complete with an unbending sense of right and wrong. Some even come with illustrations, like the one sitting in front of her right now. Fascinating little drawings, bringing the outside world to life in brand new ways.

Mel stares at it, tracing the words underneath carefully. 

Double-checking them, just to be sure. 

The old queen arranged the bed for the maybe-princess, stacking twenty mattresses high on the wooden bed-frame. At the bottom of which she placed a since pea.

The girl’s bed is soft and square with a patterned surface and fluffy pillows piled high into the air. Regardless of the princess’s sleep, she was certainly given every appearance of comfort. 

Mel turns to look at her own bed, bare metal and hanging straps staring back at her.

That is not a bed. Not as Robby named it. 

It’s a table, one for a lab experiment. Something to restrain an experiment if it were to misbehave or disappoint or linger too close to the door for comfort. It’s a bed fit for something that doesn’t know what a bed is.

The black pit in Mel’s stomach grows a little hotter.

- - -

A new letter-sender joins the regulars constantly filling Robby’s desk with unanswered correspondence. 

Mel can make them out each morning in the pile of letters that he drops on his desk with a groaning sigh. The messages come on distinctively rough brown paper, more pulp than pressed material, decorated with a sharp purposeful handwriting. At least it seems that way to her. There’s rarely much time between the unsealing of the letter and the rage boiling in Robby’s eyes that has him tossing it, and everything else within reach, into the blazing fireplace.

She’s not sure who Frank is, a name captured from a passing glance at a fist-crumpled page, but he seems to be able to change Robby’s day with a handful of words.

“That damn devil thinks he can haunt me? Lunge at me from the shadows and expect me to jump?” Robby hisses, staring at the burning logs like he’s willing them to consume the latest letter resting on the embers faster. “Curse his black shriveled being and the hell he dragged it from.”

Mel keeps her distance even as she fights a small smile at the wavering note in his voice. As powerful as his temper might be, it doesn’t seem to be able to kill wide eyed fear haunting the edges of his expressions. It’s a fascinating experience to see her creator so unraveled, moved by something even larger than him.

At least, it’s interesting at first.

Robby grows less predictable as the pattern drags on for weeks without slowing, nerves worn down to a ragged edge. Meals start coming at irregular times, or being forgotten all together until a passing whim has Robby dropping a dry loaf of bread before her. Mel does not need food as often as a human might, but she does still feed. 

The volatility introduced to their lives from the letters seems to be slowly targeting the only person in reach. 

Mel braces herself as well as she can.

Tension lingers in the air now, thick and patient, waiting more for a cause to disperse than collect. Instead of disappearing up to his rooms as day slipped into night, Robby settles into his armchair with a heavy sigh, a glass of amber liquid held absently aloft. It appeared in his hand so naturally Mel would have almost said it poured itself. She lingers by her examination table, not quite sure what to do with herself when he has no interest in her and yet it doesn’t feel safe to take her eye off of him.

Then the whisper-soft sound of a letter falling from the overburdened desk, coming unstuck from the back of another note, fills the air. Robby pulls himself back to his feet with simple curiosity, crossing the floor again. 

And he discovers that his hopes of a single day of peace have been for naught.

“Every time I try to be reasonable - to remove you from me like a rotting limb - you come crawling back. Why won’t you leave?” Robby asks the still air. His voice is dangerous, dropping lower with every word until it’s something almost unnatural, gravely and cutting. 

Goosebumps prickle over Mel’s skin almost painfully as she holds herself completely still. 

It’s a conscious fight against instinct buried in her chest even as she knows there’s nowhere to go. Not with the chain keeping her on a tight radius. 

Robby drops the letter into the fire, leaning against the mantle to watch the flames licking over the unopened message hungrily. Even when it’s gone, the last scraps burned away into nothing, the weight of it doesn’t seem to dissipate from the air. The fireplace casts most of the flickering light filling the room, leaving dark shadows and hidden corners that seem as though they could hide any secret or evil. Mel has never been afraid of the dark before, but the room seems to be slowly warping around her into somewhere unrecognizable.

Suddenly Robby turns, eyes catching on her across the room. “You’ll be better, won’t you?”

Mel jolts at the attention, air freezing in her lungs. When was the last time he addressed her? Spoke to her? To talk to her now, when he’s most haunted and she remains just as mute in his presence-

It feels like she’s just been placed in a hunter’s sights.

“You won’t give into that filthy evil, will you?” Robby asks when she doesn’t respond, turning to face her fully. It leaves him backlit by the fire, features almost disappearing into darkness. She isn’t sure he’s even seeing her in front of him. Mel’s heart strains in her chest under his stare, pulling away desperately.

Then he lunges.

Mel stumbles backwards, scrambling for some sort of escape. Robby crosses the room impossibly fast, stomping a foot down on her chain to send Mel tumbling to the ground. The impact feels dulled as Mel twists around to get him back in her sights, staring up at him with wide eyes. She feels like her little pillbug, staring up at an inevitable doom.

Robby seems to think something similar, staring down his nose at her with a disgust so visceral that it seems to burn the air between them. Mel wants to drag up her rage, her hatred, but it feels unreachable under his gaze. As absent as her voice. He drags her back up to her feet by her upper arms, not letting go even as she stands on wobbly legs again. Instead Robby leans in, hands tightening for a painful beat.

“Will you fail me?”

Mel shakes her head furiously, not sure if she’s responding to his question or just begging him to stop altogether. The alcohol is undeniable on his breath, pungent and sharp, as it wafts over her. 

“How do I know?” Robby’s voice trails off, hands shaking as he speaks to something only he can hear. His pupils are wide and dark, eyes sinking into shadow. “How do I know…two demons on the earth instead of one, tormenting, polluting…”

She sucks in a breath at his words without conscious thought. He’s talking about her predecessor, the first. 

Robby catches her reaction immediately, attention snapping back to the present.

“Oh, does that interest you? Do you wish to know why you were created?” He asks, prodding at one of her oldest wishes.

There always seems to be another layer to his words, something she can’t catch lingering under the surface. She’s not sure which answer is worse and Mel can't make herself choose when she's trapped so close to the threat of his temper. 

Robby makes the choice for her. 

Tonight, he decides knowledge is worse.

“You're a debt. To my own moral fallibility.” Robby hisses, every syllable sharpened to a razor's edge. “One begged from me by a beast that shouldn’t even exist. One that you’re supposed to be given over to.” The shadows carve wicked faces over his own, warping right before her eyes into grotesque masks. 

Mel’s heartbeat pounds in her ears as she waits for the final blow.

“It would be a mercy on all of us if he destroyed you.” Robby whispers, shaking his head. 

The moment seems to fracture again as his temper recedes. Whatever he was looking for, whatever ghosts she was meant to contain - he didn’t find them in her eyes. He releases her arms, stepping back as the air cools back to something that can’t contain so many sharp-edged truths.

He lingers only long enough to collect his drink before disappearing upstairs.

The basement feels heavy even in his absence, unable to quite forget the scene it just witnessed. Mel retreats to the quiet corner behind her examination table, even with him gone. Her skin feels like it’s burned where his hands gripped her, tight and painful and almost tingling from the ghost of sensation. It’s the first time she’s been touched in months. 

She didn’t like it.

Still, even in his attacks, Robby told her more than he ever has before. He may have sculpted every word to cut, but her curiosity is stronger than her fear in one particular topic and Mel feels out the edges of her newest scrap of information carefully.

He.

Her counterpart is a man.

- - -

The bruises on her arms fade within a day.

The memories do not.

Mel watches the spider in the corner of the room and can’t help feeling like the fly trapped in its web, just waiting for her rattling calls to drag in the attention of something more dangerous. She returns to her scientific illustrations, petting the pretty helpless paintings of wings on each of her insects.

The tides in Robby’s eyes are changing, drawing away from her with a cool anger that signifies something more than a passing mood. That night was a lesson. 

Mel intends to learn from it.

- - -

He doesn’t mention her predecessor again, mouth tight and letters missing from his daily entrances. She’s not sure if that means they’ve stopped coming or if he’s simply disposing of them before he comes down to see her, but it feels like the end of something.

She’s not sure what’s on the horizon.

Good and bad days begin to intermix with one another in a racing dance. Then they stop being so distinct from one another at all. A good hour, a good minute. Transition lingers in every motion, liable to shift at any time. It forces Mel to be constantly on. Not hidden away so much that he might come looking for her, but out from underfoot and nowhere near him where she might accidentally catch his attention. 

It’s a balancing act that she can’t help but fail and her performance only seems to worsen with every day of cohabitation.

She gets better at dodging books.

Mel’s nervous system feels like it's being set alight. She is as measured as she can be in the harsh moments, but in the calm ones her body seems to go into overdrive, heart pounding desperately, almost impatient for the next danger. Even if that means summoning it. It feels like she’s been dragged to the edge of a cliff with no warning about when the man with his hands on her shoulders will simply…push.

Her only sense of condolence is that with each uninterrupted day, the bags under Robby’s eyes become darker, more set into his skin. His eyes drift to the door more often than ever, like he’s not sure if slipping through it would be an escape or a trap.

Mel certainly can’t help him with that. 

The world outside her room feels almost fake at times. Robby disappears somewhere and the door hinges open to some other space, all of the books and furniture and little possessions filling the basement had to come from somewhere. And yet, Mel has never been permitted to see it. To breathe its air or see its creations with her own eyes. She sits in this dark room and waits for a day that never seems to approach. 

Some nights Mel holds her breath, staring at the door for long hours. 

Is this the night, is this when she meets her beast? Does he know about her? Is he coming? Nothing ever appears on the other side of the door, sitting just as firmly locked as ever. Mel tries not to hold it against her predecessor even as her chest aches. 

So the two of them sit in each other’s company. Eyes unblinking and hands shaking. The air growing more and more stale around them, thickening into something unbearable until it's liable to suffocate, until-

“I know you’re in there, Robby! You can’t hide from me.” A man calls from the other side of the basement door with a heavy knock.

That’s-

Someone new.

Mel’s chest squeezes tight, forgetting how to breathe as she stares at the dark wood with wide eyes. Is it…? She doesn’t have a chance to move one way or the other before Robby fills her vision and Mel takes an instinctive step back.

“Not a sound. Bed, now.” He orders, staring at the door with a splintering expression.

She doesn’t bother trying to argue with her silent words, tucking herself away by her examination table. It feels like she can’t draw in any air. 

Is this the day?

“Answer this door or I’m coming in.” The voice calls again, knocking on the door incessantly. Mel knows Robby’s voice. The highs and lows, the loose pitches and tight gasps. This one is all new. It sends a wave of goosebumps prickling over her skin, fingers tightening around one of her bed straps. The motion is grounding, containing, as the edges of her world shakes in its foundation.

Robby runs a hand over himself before pulling the door open with a tight smile. He’s careful to fill the gap, not allowing any cross-contamination between the inside and the outside. 

“Jack, don’t break my property. It was expensive.”

“Says the man intent on wasting his days away in a dull room.” The newly named Jack says, voice clearer now that there isn’t anything blocking it. It’s light, almost carefree in a way. Mel takes it in with silent captivation. “I would think a door is the least of your worries.”

“Quite the contrary. It defines the edges of the room.”

Jack snorts and something loosens in Robby’s skin for the first time in days. Mel blinks at the transition, confused where the short tempers that have become so familiar seemed to fade away to.

“Why are you here?” Robby asks, body still blocking the doorway. Either to prevent Jack from seeing in, or Mel from seeing out. Possibly both.

“A request, from just about everyone who knows you and my own conscience.” Jack says, keeping a levity in his voice even as it thins. “It’s not healthy, shutting yourself locked away like this. Heather says she hasn’t been able to get any time with you in months. I- I didn’t ask last time you did this, I didn’t pry about what happened. But I found you in the wreckage at the very ends of yourself…I wasn’t even sure you would recover.” He sighs, something heavy seeping out of him. “None of us want to see you like that again.”

The last time?

Mel blinks at the idea of him knowing about the first. Jack might not be her predecessor but he knows something about his creation. It's almost enough to have her open her mouth and ask. Almost.

“Jack, I-”

“Your work can wait.” Jack interrupts, refusing any attempt at heading him off. “Come enjoy the world like you’ll actually allow yourself to be a part of it.” 

Robby hesitates for a moment, the words hitting on something deeper. He tilts his head to look back into the lab like he’s taking it in with fresh eyes. The overflowing tables, the increasingly present bottles. Mel, silent and still as Robby’s eyes drift to her. 

Jack seizes the pause, doubling down. “Nothing in there can possibly be important enough to destroy yourself over.”

That seems to be the thing that finally tips the scale as Robby drags his eyes away from Mel. “No...it isn’t.”

“Good!” Jack cheers, seizing on the acceptance. “Do you need to clean anything up? I don’t know what fool’s idea you’re chasing nowadays.” 

“It’ll keep.” Robby snorts as he slips out of the door, not bothering with a look back before he’s locked it shut. It’s unnecessary, Mel can’t reach it either way, but the message is more than clear.

Their voices disappear up the stairs, feet creaking against the floor overhead for a moment before even that fades away.

Mel is left alone again.

In silence.

Something about that, after hearing a new voice for the first time in her life, breaks her heart as the fear and worry and tension that has been filling the basement for days finally splinters. 

The simplicity of the rejection just makes it worse.

Mel was invisible to the new man, presence completely hidden by the narrow crack of the door. There was no recognition or mark of her to be made out, so it wasn’t. And her maker, the one who brought her into the world with conscious motion, doesn't care for her. He despises her.

Wishes to escape from the prison he built for both of them.

Mel curls up in the dim light and weeps, chest heaving in overwhelmed sobs. 

- - -

She isn’t sure how long Robby is gone this time. 

He’s left before, but not like this. Not as questionably permanent. 

Mel feels dusty as time stretches on around her, forgotten along with all other displeasing experiments littering the basement. There’s nothing to break up her quiet despair besides her own voice echoing endlessly. Eventually she can’t quite find a reason to muster that either.

She watches her spider spin its web, gossamer and beautiful in the corner. Trapped down here with her and yet freer than she’ll ever be.

It is her only companion for long unmarked hours.

- - -

Mel tries to picture the world outside this room, tries to conjure up some idea of it from the words tucked away in her books. Her body knew it once, even if it wasn’t in this new form. 

Surely that must mean something. 

Surely she must.

Nothing ever reveals itself for the effort. Mel contents herself staring into the flickering lamps set high on the wall. The fire moves with its own pattern, flaring and falling in tune with a beat no one else can hear. It’s entrancing, beckoning in a way that Mel is sure has spelled the doom of hundreds of her illustrated little moths. 

It must be similar to the sun. What else could be beautiful enough to risk destruction for? 

In her darkest moments, it feels like the closest Mel will ever be to it. She feels like she’d be willing to let it burn her too if it would just promise to warm her.

- - -

Mel sprawls out on the floor with her limbs arranged lazily around her. She lingers somewhere between consciousness and dreaming, the same pattern the world has fallen into since she was abandoned. Her mind wanders as she breathes.

Perhaps her creator won't return until she has dissipated back into nothingness.

Perhaps her pieces will be reused in his next creation.

Mel lets out a soft sigh, head lulling to look at the open book of illustrations next to her. She can read, she can speak. Without the reflection of another person, it falls flat. If a creature hidden in the basement speaks when no one is around to hear, does it even exist?

If a creature names itself alone, does the world still listen?

She closes her eyes and lets herself drift, hazy and undefined. Then, far off into the distance:

“-where are you- - -show yourself!” 

Mel snaps back into the present in an instant, heart pounding as she sits up in a sudden shuffle. Blood rushes in her ears as her stagnant muscles complain, but she ignores it, straining to make out another noise. The voice calls out again from some distant corner of the house up above, words distorted. The sound is clear enough for her though. It’s not Robby or Jack yelling.

Someone new is here.

And they’re upset. 

Their voice is hard to make out, too many walls in the way, but the distant sound of stomping feet and the odd bang echo down to her. Mel watches the ceiling with baited breath. Emotions rush into her like waves against the rocky shore, too many to name as they flit through her in rapid succession. Fear and fascination catch her most vibrantly, stealing the air from her lungs as she waits.

And waits.

The sounds slowly disappear, growing too faint to make out. Mel can’t tell if it’s the result of distance or dying passion, but she holds her breath, the air hanging still and patient in her ears. She’s desperate to make out the slightest hint of where the stranger is. 

And then the basement door bucks in its frame, only held closed by the lock.

“Is this supposed to hide you?” The voice on the other side demands, fists banging on the wood loudly. “Come out here, Robby, face me-”

Her fear solidifies into an almost physical presence, forcing Mel to scramble for her hidden corner at the back of the lab. They’re looking for her creator and whatever it is they want, they’re not his friend. 

What will they do if they find her in his stead? 

Mel knows that she isn’t natural. Even her creator can’t look at her without some measure of disgust. She shudders at the thought and wedges herself deeper between two bookshelves, as buried behind books and debris and her table-bed as she can get. Mel doesn’t want to find out what they’ll do.

The shackle around her ankle sits like a damning beacon, trailing from the edge of her table back to her hidden nook.

She just has to pray they don’t notice it.

The banging on the door stops for a hanging beat before the lock gives way with a sickening metallic snap. The door shudders open, hanging looser in its hinges than before, as it frames the menacing silhouette of a man. He takes a slow step forward to enter the basement proper, looking around as the lamplight finally catches on his burning expression.

His inhuman expression.

Mel’s heart stops, eyes frozen impossibly wide, as she takes him in. That’s no natural-born man - he was made. The dark lines of it are clear on his face, marking where he was sewn together into a single united form. There’s only one person he can be.

The first. Robby’s original creation. 

Her predecessor.

He looks around the room with a dark expression as it becomes clear that Robby isn’t in here either. The lines of his body are tense, sharp and his fists are clenched at his sides, knuckles bleached white.

Mel holds her breath, almost too scared to breathe and draw his attention. She doesn’t know how to react. Her limbs feel frozen, unable to move, even with the proof that the rules must be different now. Mel isn’t sure if she can stand to look at the reality of the man that underpins the dreams she’s fed herself on.

He steps further into the room, taking everything in. There is no haste to his actions, even with the clear tension pulling his shoulders back. Instead his eyes trail Robby’s writings, the diagrams pinned up to the walls, and the half-completed letters littering his desk. He moves slowly, purposefully, taking in each detail like he’s memorizing it carefully.

This must be what it’s like when predators hunt. The smooth slinking movements, just waiting for something to catch his attention.

And then something does. 

Her old bed. 

Mel stopped sleeping on it months ago and Robby hadn’t cared either way, but he had been equally uninterested in disposing of it. So it sits out in the open, just waiting for the man’s perusal as he pivots towards it. The restraints are built into the metal table, purpose unmistakable. He’s partially obscured as he stands in front of the bed, but she can hear the soft clink of him picking one of them up. 

Mel forces down a shudder at the thought. She keeps out of Robby’s way for a reason.

The restraints don’t seem to be able to answer his questions though as he turns towards another book-laden table. Mel almost lets out a sigh when she hears the damning rattle of her chain under his boot. The man freezes, bending down to pick up a segment with a confused expression. His head lifts, estimating its curling path to-

Her.

Their eyes meet for one impossible moment before Mel snaps her head back. 

The man lets out a choked gasp, chain dropping with a clatter.

Mel presses herself further into the wall as her heart races uncontrollably. He saw her. Someone saw her. No, not just someone - the first. The one Robby calls a beast. The dark figure that has drifted through her daydreams since almost the beginning of existence. She can hear the sound of his feet shuffling against the stone, trying to work out getting closer to her through the piles of abandoned furniture shoved back here. That headache is what made it such a good hiding spot in the first place. 

Not good enough apparently. 

The scraping and shuffling continue for long moments, even past the point of progress. Eventually it stops, the man letting out an irritated huff as he's been halted by something. Mel pictures his broad shoulders from the doorway. There’s no way that he can make it all the way to her. 

Which means the next step is hers.

Mel bites her lip harshly, swallowing around her fear. She forces her head forward in hesitating inches until she can find him again.

Her predecessor made it a fair way, all things considered. He's wedged between the narrow gap of an abandoned chair and the table it’s half-tucked into. A mountain of books and equipment rests precariously on top of both, threatening an avalanche if it’s jostled too hard. It leaves him stuck careful feet away from her, unable to touch or grab or force. Something about that settles the buzzing in her skin. 

As does his strange reaction to seeing her again.

He’s already staring intently in her direction when Mel pokes her head out, but as soon as their eyes meet his expression crumples. Emotions flit over his face too quickly to track, entirely absent of the anger he entered with. 

“Hello, treasure.” The man breathes. His voice is strangely hesitant like he’s staring at a mirage that he’s afraid to disrupt. He presses a hand to his chest like some kind of fairytale knight. “My name is Frank.” 

Mel’s heart flutters as she finally matches a face to a name. 

Frank, the first creation. 

Frank, the one who haunts Robby’s visions and Mel’s dreams. 

Frank, the man from the letters that weighed on Robby’s mind so heavily. Retroactively the memory of all those messages sends a hopeful twist through her stomach. He’d been persistent and demanding and so very determined. What was he after? Maybe, he had even been asking about her? 

It soothes the bruises those moods earned her like nothing else.

Frank is handsome now that Mel can get a closer look at him. There are soft crinkles around his eyes and a swoop of hair that falls naturally over his forehead. The details feel like pieces of him, not spare parts brought together. He feels lived in, settled into himself in a way that Mel still struggles with at times.

Frank watches her with wide eyes, waiting to see if she’ll respond in some way. Some kind of nod or wave or, even perhaps, speak. 

Something to acknowledge him in return.

Mel hasn’t planned what she would say if she met another soul. The thought seemed almost impossible, even in her fantasies. She hadn’t wanted to share her words with Robby, not when he took everything with such greedy hands. Her only experience has been with her insects, her little companions who don’t hold the grudges or capacity to share them.

Still this means something. 

For Frank, for what he means to her, she's willing to offer something so precious.

“My…my name is Mel.” She whispers, throat dry after days down here in silence.

“Mel.” Frank echoes as his shoulders sag, staring at her in wonder. He cradles her name as he says it, mouth curling around each letter with a sweetness she doesn’t know how to accept.

“I picked it.” Mel admits instead, fingers twisting together in her lap as she keeps her eyes on his. She’s not sure if it’s right to admit that their creator didn’t even name her. She’s not sure what the rules are. This is so much more overwhelming than it is with her little insects. They never need her to say anything in particular. 

This- this is all out of her control.

“I picked my name too.” Frank tells her as his face splits into a smile. “It’s lovely.”

Oh.

Mel can feel her cheeks flushing uncontrollably, staring at him with wide eyes. Lovely. 

She hadn’t allowed herself to hope that he might be like this. 

Frank brightens at the heat in her cheeks, straightening as much as his contorted posture will allow. He looks almost boyish, the self-possessed man dripping away from him to give her a more honest version of himself. His clothes are worn, but patched well with even stitches and sure lines.

Almost as clean as their own lines.

Mel follows the line of a particularly prominent seam down his cheek to his neck with a deep-seated fascination.

Just like her own and entirely lacking from Robby. 

It almost feels like it did all those months ago, staring into the mirror at herself and trying to find Frank before she even knew him. Looking at him now feels similar, like each line and piece of himself that she sees is a reflection of her own edges.

Questions echo around her mind though, one louder than the rest.

“Did…” Mel bites her lip, voice falling out from under her.

“You can ask.” Frank promises, blind to the table legs holding him back as he leans forward encouragingly.

“Did you know about me?”

It’s an awful question. There’s no right answer to something like that, but Mel has to ask it anyway. Did he know about her? Why did it take him so long to come? Could he feel something pulling them together despite the distance, just like she did?

“I had…hoped you might be here, but I wasn’t sure. Our creator hadn’t sent word of his progress in months, not to explain if there even was any-” Frank cuts himself off, a dark expression stealing over his face for a moment. 

Mel holds her breath as he collects himself even as a wave of shyness bubbles under her skin. Her time alone has left her feeling more wild than civilized. Behavior didn’t feel important in the silence. Now, skin prickling under his attention and dress smeared with dust, Mel feels underwhelming for such a precious sentiment. 

Like a dirty little thing trying to play at being something more.

None of that seems to matter to Frank as he shakes his head to rid himself of a particularly dark thought before looking at Mel again with an aching softness. “I came to see how things fared instead. Personally. And here you are. Alive, awake.” He says the words so sweetly it steals the air from her lungs.

Mel feels like one of her moths before a light, creeping forward in fascinated centimeters. 

She hadn’t understood the pull described in her books, the force drawing two figures together despite everything between them. It feels like it’s suddenly clicking into place before her as his smile pulls on her like a physical tie. Beckoning her out of her hidden nook towards new potential. The figure from Robby’s words and the man kneeling in front of her feel like two different beings entirely, unrecognizable from the haunted expressions and hissed insults she came to know him from.

Mel’s mouth opens before she can stop it. “Are you a beast?” 

“No, I’m not.” Frank says with a hint of heat curling in his voice. It’s not directed at her, not even as it lights a fire behind his eyes. He seems to know who the question came from without a second thought. “Neither of us are.” 

Mel’s skin prickles at his words, throat thick with something she can’t describe.

Frank tilts his head to take her in. “He didn’t tell you much of who I am, did he?” 

Mel shrugs, wanting to hear Frank talk about himself in his own words.

“I was made first by our creator, in a laboratory much like this one.” Frank says as his mouth draws sharp and tight for a moment. “Then I was set upon the earth alone. Without guidance or care, to find my way through that hazy blur of new existence.”

Mel’s chest aches as she remembers her wobbling attempts at understanding. The confusion of every sight and sound, the overwhelm in every sensation as it dragged across her skin. Her quiet basement had felt like an unbound curiosity. In the vastness of the entire world? It makes something clench in Mel's stomach to think of finding herself for the first time in open air.

“For a time, I wandered. I found understanding by chance and passing coincidence until I was able to take control of my own form and mind with a consciousness.” Frank pauses, an ache of a smile pulling at his lips. “I learned to read, to experience a world above our own. And there was peace in that.” The shallow smile falls from his lips quickly though. “In all that time and my own wandering, there was not a soul alive who would take my hand if I’d offered it.”

His words feel like a dagger piercing Mel’s flesh, tearing right through the center of her.

Frank meets her eyes, something heavy and old buried in them. “We do not live in a world that is kind. Not always.”

She breathes in his words hungrily, even when they’re tinged with such a sickening loneliness. Mel doesn’t know what to think of the world. It holds her little grasshopper and her illustrated sunrises. It also holds Robby and the men who made her shackle. It shakes something in her chest to think that the world outside might be as lonely as her room in here. Her feelings must be obvious on her face as Frank softens his own tight expression to give her a small bittersweet smile.

“When loneliness overtook me, I finally returned to our creator and asked him to make another like me. Someone who might understand this existence the way no one else can.” Frank’s words are carefully chosen as they edge on something deeper. “Someone who might…stay.”

How many times had Mel ached for the same thing? How many times has she set her little insects free and then fought back tears as they left her behind on trails she couldn’t follow? Mel thinks about all the times she’s yearned to allow something to leave her own mind and know it won’t be ripped away from her. She hadn’t realized someone else might be able to feel that same lonely hole set in the center of themself.

“And now you’re here.” Frank whispers. His words contain so much longing and hope that Mel almost doesn't know how to breathe around it. She shifts closer, aching to touch the loneliness he’s offering her-

The rattle of her chain fills the air. 

Both of their eyes fall to the wrought iron sealed around her ankle at the same time, ugly and unavoidable.

“Oh.” Mel breathes as a stomach-churning humiliation crawls under her skin. She’s asking Frank if he’s a beast when she has to be chained up down here to keep her away from the world. 

The chain snakes away from the shackle, winding back through the shelves and tables she scrambled past, barely a hands-width from where Frank is kneeling. He reaches down impossibly slowly, fingers ghosting over the links like he’s taking in their purpose for the first time. 

Mel can feel tears burning in her eyes, throat closing as she waits for him to say something, to pull away in disappointment or regret.

Frank’s shoulders tense, jaw firming in silence. “Can you come here, sweetheart?” 

Mel doesn’t know what kind of judgement that is.

There’s a jumpiness to Robby’s more destructive moods. A readying under his skin like his muscles prepare to move before his mind decides to. Mel can’t find that now in Frank. He ducks his head slightly as she stares, the picture of stillness, like he might shrink into himself enough to put her at ease. 

Something about that is what finally draws Mel forward, creeping closer in achingly slow increments.

Frank doesn’t have to wait. If he wanted to, he could simply drag her closer with the chain. Mel doubts she’s stronger than him. Still, Frank waits. The distance between them disappears inch by tiny inch until they’re sitting on opposite sides of the table that blocked him from getting to her in the first place.

“Thank you.” Frank breathes, giving her a small smile that Mel mimics. His eyes fall down to her ankle again as a barely suppressed grimace covers his face. “I just want to get that thing off.” He reaches forward as he speaks-

And Mel jolts back. 

Just a little bit, enough to keep out of touch.

Frank freezes, staring at her with wide eyes. Mel blinks back, surprised at her own action. She didn’t mean to, that wasn’t-

The distance remains as pointless as ever with the chain still resting next to Frank, but his eyes never drop down to it. Instead he stays locked onto her, raising his empty hands in the air. “I’m sorry, I…I didn’t mean to scare you.”

Mel shakes her head immediately at his low careful tone.

He didn’t - or he did, but not like he’s thinking. Mel has had this shackle on for months. Most of her life in fact. And in all that time, she has only ever been touched by one other person. Their creator. A man full of black moods and sudden tempers. Someone who avoided her touch unless it was to inflict his own and even then it wasn’t often. Or kind.

If Frank touches her, if he removes her terrible familiar shackle - Mel can’t take it back. She’ll be different. 

No matter how many times she’s dreamed of it, wanting it so badly it burns, she can’t help hesitating now. Kind things haven’t come to her easily and they don’t come without a cost. Mel is scared to find out what the cost of this is.

Sucking in a deep breath, Mel gives Frank a wobbly smile that she’s sure doesn’t manage to hide the fear squeezing her chest. “Be gentle?” 

There are so many silent pleas tied up in those two words, so much more than just this moment. Please be kind, please don’t leave her down here, please show her the grasshoppers and sunrises and share the loneliness that they both seem so achingly familiar with.

Frank nods, swallowing thickly. “Always.”

He heard her.

Mel extends her ankle again, holding still through force of will as Frank lowers his hands to the metal again. The assessment of the cuff is much more careful this time as he keeps his hands firmly on the metal, assessing the lock holding the shackle closed.

“I don’t know where he put the key.” Mel tells him, fighting the urge to wiggle the tension loose from her body. She tries to channel her mindset from her exams with Robby, but the stillness and performance that seems almost involuntary around their creator is absent with Frank.

“I have a solution for that.” Frank gives her a small smile, something glinting in his eyes. “Are you ready?”

Mel nods, only lying a little bit, as she squeezes her fingers together tightly in her lap. 

Frank wraps his hands around the shackle and pulls it away from her skin in both directions, muscles flexed sharply under his shirt. The metal gives a mourning creak before it snaps, falling away from her as half of it is bent open. Frank drops the remains of the shackle like it burned him as soon as it’s free from her skin and Mel blinks as the ever present weight around her ankle falls away for the first time in what feels like ever. 

She meets Frank’s eye with a growing smile and he matches it immediately, impossible strength falling away as soon as the metal leaves his fingers. He’s back to her gentle daydream in the blink of an eye. At least, until he looks down and the smile falls off his face in an instant, replaced by a strange punched sound, almost like he’s been hurt. 

Mel follows his eyes down to a thick cuff of bruises wrapped around her ankle, sitting exactly where the shackle had been. 

Huh. 

She hadn’t thought of herself as fighting the chain. It had felt like she was pinned down without any sort of recourse or fight. But this…this paints a different story. Every attempt at following her little insects or at stealing a few more inches or reclaiming lost ground looks like it’s been marked into her skin. Physical proof she’s been fighting the restriction as long as she’s had it.

Something proud settles in her chest at the sight of her injury. 

It's the first one Mel has ever earned.

Frank doesn’t look nearly as accepting as she feels, face twisting darkly. When their eyes meet again, a furrow has pressed its way deep between his brows. 

“I’m sorry, sweetheart.” His voice carries so much more than an apology, something darker lingering in his eyes, but Mel doesn’t dwell on it. They both know he had nothing to do with it.

“It’s okay. It doesn’t hurt much.” Mel says as she moves her ankle around freely in little testing motions. It’s better than ‘doesn’t hurt’, but Mel doesn’t know how to put the rest of what she’s feeling into words. It feels like getting one of her senses back. 

Frank clearly isn’t soothed by her words, the lines pressing deeper into his face as he looks at her. 

That won’t do. 

Mel leans forward, almost on instinct, as she lifts her palm to hover over Frank’s cheek. He goes still, staring at her with wide eyes as she does the same. The moment holds for a beat before they both seem to lean into the other, meeting each other in the middle. 

Her hand gently cups Frank’s cheek, feeling the warm weight of him leaning into her. 

It’s a shock, an upset of every boundary and restriction she’s ever known. It doesn’t feel dangerous though, not in the way Mel expected. Mel can feel the lines of his cheek, the movement of his body under hers. She pets a thumb over the skin under his eye, tender and soft and exploratory. 

Frank lets out a panting gasp, air rushing out of him all at once as he leans into her touch. 

It’s not how Robby looks her over during her exams, all clinical motions and self-narrated complaints. This is gentle, soft. Careful in the same way Mel handles her little insects and precious books.

Like what is being touched is too precious to damage.

“Thank you.” Mel offers softly, breaking the silence in the air to put something from her head into words.

Frank seems to hear it, turning ever so slightly into her palm to brush her skin with his lips as his eyes stay on hers, quiet and promising. 

Mel feels her face heat impossibly, staring at him with an impossible urge to both pull away and lean in. 

Frank leans it, but the press of the table legs blocks him, holding him back. He’s certainly strong enough to break the table, the shackle is more than enough proof of that, but he doesn’t out of some greater sense of gentleness. He lets out an irritated huff, frowning at the table, and Mel can’t help but laugh. His mood is immediately lifted, expression brightening at the sound of her voice.

“Perhaps, would you care to join me?” Frank asks with a smile, waving back towards the rest of the room even as he makes no motion to pull away from her.

She nods, carefully crawling after him as he backs them out through the mess. It’s almost a shock to move in silence without any tell-tale rattling of the chain following after her. Mel finds herself shoving it out of the way as they crawl past, something that Frank catches with bright approving eyes. Finally they emerge into the basement again, feeling strangely new like they’re standing on new legs. There are no boundaries between them, no tables or shackles. They’re simply two people.

Mel blinks at Frank as he rises to his full height, standing over her by a fair portion. It doesn’t feel scary, not when she’s felt the gentleness of him under her palm. In a way it almost feels encapsulating like he might shield her from everything else. 

Frank’s mind doesn’t seem to be too far away from her own as one of his hands comes up to touch the ends of Mel’s loose hair where it runs over her shoulders, letting it ghost over his fingers with a whispered breath.

Mel holds still, careful not to break the moment.

“Beautiful.” Frank breathes. 

It feels like the world disappears, hanging suspended in this moment. Mel’s skin warms with the heat of her blush. Lovely. Beautiful. She hadn’t thought that compliments could sound so lovely and so addictive all at once. The lamplight catches Frank’s eyes as he smiles at her, reflecting the light with an impossible glow. It’s something that never happens to Robby, no matter the angle he stands at. 

Perhaps that’s why he struggled to look at her.

Mel can’t see the difficulty in it as she looks at Frank. He’s gorgeous, even in his inhumanity. Perhaps even more so, since she knows that it must match her own.

She catches his hand in her own when he moves to pull back, delighting in the freedom of touch now that it’s finally hers.

Mel knows her skin, every corner of it, but Frank’s is new and she’s fascinated by his seams. Where her hands are separated into four pieces, his are split into almost a dozen. Less than two knuckles worth of skin in any direction goes without running into some new seam. Mel traces the lines with soft curiosity, following the delicate dance of function and form threaded throughout the muscles and sinew and tendons. Frank is malleable beneath her, moving with her slightest encouragement. When she looks up from her exploration, he smiles at her with a tender expression.

“What happens now?” Mel asks, his hand still cradled between both of hers. Frank shows absolutely no interest in pulling away so she contents herself in stealing as much contact as she can. 

“Now I take you away from this place. Somewhere better.” Frank promises, fingers curling around hers in turn.

“Home?” The word escapes before Mel can stuff it back down where it’s safe. There’s so much more to it than just a location. Home is…its a promise of something she’s not certain either of them have ever received. A safety in existence, one without end dates or disruption. One without chains.

Frank’s eyes shine in the light as he squeezes her hand. “Yes.” He manages to press a lifetime of yearning into a single word. “A home, for both of us. Far from anyone who would seek to take it back.”

“Okay.” Mel breathes, chest warming dangerously. She can almost see it in her mind’s eye. Somewhere just for the two of them, for nature. A piece of existence that’s all their own.

He looks around the room for a beat. “Is there anything you want?”

Mel looks around, taking in the room with fresh eyes. The quiet walls, the empty fireplace. Her lonely bed that isn’t. It seems almost fitting that it remains as it is, empty and united. Mel will find new things to fill herself with. 

Frank seems like a fine first subject.

She turns back to him with a squeeze of his hand. “No, I’ve got everything I need.”

Frank smiles down at her with a flood of warmth, leading her towards the door. It’s still hanging open and loose on its hinges, revealing a corner of the spiraling staircase that leads upstairs. Mel almost falters at the sight being so unrestricted after all this time, then she does, coming to a sudden stop in the middle of the floor.

Frank pauses with her, blinking at her in confusion. “What’s wrong?”

Mel glances back at the dark hidden corner that holds her shackle. They’ve stepped over the limit of her chain. She hasn’t made it this far in months. Her chest ignites with an unsteady anger, something she wishes could burn through the fear congealing in her stomach.

“I…” Mel’s words fail her for a moment. “I’ve never left before.”

This has been her whole world for her whole existence.

She’s lost her shackle and she’s embraced her beast, but to leave? To cross the threshold and find out which stories are true about the world and which ones are fiction? Mel isn’t sure she’s strong enough for this dream to meet whatever reality has in store for them. 

Frank seems to be able to read that in her expression, ducking his head slightly to meet her eyes. “It’s okay, sweetheart. Whenever you’re ready.”

Whenever she’s ready? It’s never Mel’s choice. The path is always decided before she’s ever had a chance to realize there was another way. It’s a trembling promise that he’s offering her, full of patience and a warmth she can’t describe.

Mel stares into his eyes for a long moment. He’ll stay, he'll be there. No matter how long this might take her. She finds she’s brave enough to move with a promise like that.

They step over the barrier of the threshold with a shuddering breath. Nothing emerges to force them back, to command Mel into her old chains. She squeezes Frank’s hand and they keep moving, following the curve of the steps up and up. The doorway to the basement disappears below them and something in Mel loosens as it is put fully behind them. As they come up to the top of the steps, the feeling of Frank’s hand in hers keeps her together as the world grows in the span of a single heartbeat. 

This new room is…comfortable, if Mel was looking for the word. 

It’s like something out of one of her books, full of couches and tables and informal decor. The walls are filled with paintings that she only has some of the words to describe, showing off lovely scenes of people in nature. The walls are covered in vibrant wallpapers and there are splashes of color in every direction, reds and yellows swirled in rich patterns. 

It feels like Mel is opening her eyes for the first time all over again.

She steps forward to look closer before freezing at the strange sensation of the rug against her bare feet. It’s soft. She hadn’t expected that. Or how much she would like it. Frank joins her on the rug, thick boots keeping him from feeling it. He doesn’t look bothered though, smiling at her with an enduring delight.

“How is it?” He asks, something boyish and bright in his words like he’s living through her as much as his own eyes and body.

Incredible. Overwhelming. Strangely everything and nothing like she had imagined. She laughs and Frank seems to hear it in her voice, grinning in turn.

Her stomach gives a plaintive growl, interrupting both of them.

Ah. It’s been a few days, hasn’t it?

Mel has gotten used to the irregularity of her eating schedule and the ways in which her body can simply go without, but even she has limits. Days of laying alone in the dark means days without food. Now that she is truly awake again, moving around under her own power, she can feel her stomach cramping painfully.

Frank squeezes her hand gently, tugging her towards one of the many doors branching off of the room. He has a sense of purpose as he moves, already aware of his destination. 

Mel follows after him, still holding onto his hand as she stares around each room they pass with wide eyes. A few of them have overturned chairs and tables and Mel frowns at them. Did Robby have another temper before he left? A small reminder of the thumping and clattering she heard up here earlier drifts through her mind. Oh. That makes more sense. She saw what Frank could do with the shackle. A few couches and chairs hardly seems like such a temper, especially after so many of his letters went unanswered.

They finally emerge from the endless pathway of rooms and halls to find themselves in a well-coordinated kitchen. Frank doesn’t have any sense of shyness as he rifles through the cabinets for a moment. Mel mourns the loss of his hand in hers even as she explores, poking at the cold oven curiously until Frank gives a triumphant hum.

They drift back together as he lays a box full of linen wrapped breads on the countertop. “There we go.”

“What’s that?” Mel asks as one particular loaf catches her attention. It’s lumpier than many of the others, like there are big gaps where it didn’t expand in the oven.

“That’s a strudel, they’re sweet breads.” Frank says, picking it up and pressing it into her hands with a smile. “Here, you’ll like it.”

Mel takes a tentative bite, chewing for a moment before her eyes open wide in a smile. “It’s good!” She takes another bite and tries to savor the sweet sugar glaze layered on top of the soft bread. Who knew such delicious little treats existed?

When she opens her eyes again, Frank is watching her with a pained expression for some reason. He reaches out and for a split second Mel thinks she said something wrong, that her treat is going to be taken away. Her fingers tense around the dough, but Frank simply tucks a strand of hair behind her ear.

He seems to like her hair a lot.

“Have you not had many pastries?” Frank asks in a soft voice, low and private. Something about it warms her chest. He seems to make a point to show that he’s only talking to her, something purposeful instead of accidental.

“I’ve never had one.” Mel admits with a shrug. She didn’t know what she was missing, but there was no upset in the lack when she didn’t know it existed in the first place.

Frank's mouth creases tightly, a simmering heat entering his eyes.

“What’s wrong?” Mel asks with a frown. She didn’t mean to upset him. “Are…are you mad?”

“Not at you, sweetheart. Never at you.” Frank swears with a solemnity that condemns any other option. “But our maker still has no kindness for ones like us. It…hurts to hear it.”

Mel is no stranger to the hurt that their creator’s words and actions can produce. She lifts a hand to rest over Frank’s chest, right where his heart beats. That’s where she hurts the most when Robby says something cruel. 

Frank's shoulders fall at the touch and he captures her hand for a beat to kiss her knuckles. “How long were you down there without him? Has he been gone long?”

“I’m not sure.” Keeping time in the laboratory is a loose estimation, not a perfect science. Still Mel can read the signs of her own body well enough for a range. “Days. At least two, maybe more like three.” 

Frank’s expression darkens again and he busies himself getting her a glass of water so she won’t see it. By the time he returns to her side, the worst of it seems smothered under a more contained expression. Frank sets the water in front of her with gentle hands, glass barely making a sound.

“Did he keep you inside too?” Mel asks curiously.  

“No, Robby turned me out as soon as I lost his favor. Something that passed at my very creation.” Frank says with a tired shake of his head. He doesn’t reach for any of the food, instead he just watches her eat like somehow the action fills both of them at once.

Mel takes another bite of her treat, stewing on his words as she chews. They’re made by Robby. They’re of him as much as they are anything. He built them, sewed them together piece by piece. Yet Frank is kind and Mel loves. In the exact ways that Robby isn’t and doesn’t. Do they possess something beyond their creators' making, or does he simply not share those sides of himself with things that don’t deserve it?

“My exile wasn’t all bad. I’ve gotten to travel to far away lands, see distant people.” Frank tells her quietly. Something sly and charming steals over him for a moment as he leans in with an unpracticed motion, like he’s trying it for the first time. “In all my time, I have never seen anything quite as beautiful a sight as you though.”

Mel giggles despite herself, a smile pulling at her warm cheeks.

Frank straightens up proudly, grinning to match her. 

There is a giddiness in their interactions, the feeling of something rippling back and forth with growing trust. The idea of what stories Frank must have from his travels sends a tingle down Mel’s spine. Perhaps he would be willing to trade his for the ones Mel has memorized in her head. It wouldn’t need to be a trade. If Frank wanted to speak, Mel would listen to him until he ran dry of all words. 

Maybe even longer than that.

Lingering conversations and time to enjoy each other's company. What could possibly mean more than that?

Frank opens his mouth to say something else with a similarly sly smile when a door slams open somewhere across the house. Their smiles drop as the quiet warmth around them is popped in one sudden shift.

Their creator has returned.

Ice fills Mel’s veins as she looks up at Frank with wide terrified eyes. Images of shackles -  stronger, tighter, more restrictive as they cut her world down again - fill her mind. Mel’s treat falls onto the counter as she goes rigid, a trembling pressing its way into her limbs like a chill.

Darkness steals over Frank’s features, eyes sharp and protective. “I’m not going to let him hurt you.”

Mel bites her lip, eyes drifting towards the door.

Frank catches her chin and pulls her eyes back to him. “Mel. I swear. He won’t touch you.” His lip curls dangerously, resembling one of the wolves from her illustrations. “I won’t allow it.”

“Do we hide?” Mel asks as her voice falls out from under her into a whisper. Just the knowledge of their creator’s presence seems to pull it from her, choking her back into silence.

“No, we’ll walk out the front door of this place.” Frank says, shaking his head sharply. “It’s the least we’re owed from him.”

Mel doesn’t care about owed when freedom is on the line, but Frank takes her hand with the same gentleness as before and she clings to it as he leads them out of the kitchen through living rooms and parlors at a steady pace. They make it through four rooms before their luck runs out and their creator turns to greet them as soon as they cross the threshold of an overturned living room.

Robby takes them in with wide eyes, taking them in with an expectant disbelief. “You’re here.” 

Frank’s whole body seems to change at the sight of their creator, hardening into an impenetrable wall. He fills the room just by straightening, directing all of Robby’s attention to him. “I am.”

They’re on strangely even standing like this. The signs of the road are all over Robby, jacket still clutched in his fist as he stands over one of the toppled armchairs. He hardly looks like the lord of the house. Somehow Robby finds a sense of collection within himself to lift his chin disapprovingly. “You got what you wanted, another creature like you. Why do you linger?”

“I have questions. Questions of why I wasn’t told months ago. Of why she was expecting a beast.” Frank hisses, stepping forward as the anger licking at his seams creeps out. “I knew you were base, but to go so far-”

“I’m base?” Robby echoes as his voice raises to meet Frank’s. “After the things you’ve done, you would call me such things? Berated by a damn devil-”

Frank shakes his head suddenly. “Not here.”

Mel frowns at Frank’s back, not sure what that’s supposed to mean. Robby seems to make out its meaning easily.

“Who’s modesty are we protecting? I don’t see a lady present.” Their creator asks as a mocking laugh creeps into his voice, like he’s arguing with someone simple. “I daresay I know her far more intimately than you, seeing as I built the little bi-”

“Not. Here.” Frank cuts him off, lunging forward with impossible speed to grab Robby’s shirt in a tight fist. He drags him sideways towards another door, one leading into an office. Robby kicks out against the floor instinctively, but it doesn’t slow Frank in the least as he drags them inside. He gives Mel a gentle look as he closes the door with a far softer click than his motions should have created.

Her gentle protector.

Frank and Robby carried the motions of routine in their argument, a well-worn dance they’ve both seen before. It’s a bare kindness that Frank offers her after seeing how she flinches from sharp expressions and sudden motions to take this inevitability to another room. 

All the same, there’s no chain to hold Mel back from the things she isn’t supposed to know anymore. Mel is free and she is curious. She wants to know about the history that brought all three of them standing here tonight and there’s only one way to find it. She creeps forward, kneeling so she can peer through the keyhole gap in the door. 

The office is boxy, shelves lining the room with a desk sitting on one side and a fireplace resting against the other. The fine details are hidden from her by the reduced window she’s looking through, but she can see enough to make out Frank and Robby staring at each other from separate sides of the room. 

They size each other up like animals measuring prey, slow, assessing.

Robby straightens one of his cuffs in a sharp disapproving motion that has Mel’s stomach twisting dangerously. Frank appears entirely unaffected, mouth set in a thin line as he stares their creator down.

The moment lingers until the discomfort in Robby finally snaps. “Say it.”

“How long?” Frank asks, voice low and dangerous.

“Since what?” Robby retorts, gesturing like he’s waiting for Frank to clarify himself. “Since she was brought to life? Months. Since she could talk? Never.” He shakes his head, more for his own benefit than anyone else’s. “Goes to show the disobedience inherent in your kind.”

Frank doesn’t react, tucking away that little piece of Robby’s ignorance with the barest shift of his head. “Months you’ve kept her from me-”

“Months I fought my better judgement, my own sense of morality!”  Robby sneers, features growing vicious. “Do you think I reveled in her existence? A reminder of what each breath in her lungs represents? It disgusts me, being brought low by threats and simpering words to make another monster like you.”

Oh.

Mel’s eyes prickle sharply as the words connect with her just as painfully as intended. She had thought about where her pieces came from, the girls who used to own them. Her value had never been a consideration though. Mel drops her gaze down to the thick scars lining her arms, as clear as anything against her pale skin.

Monstrous.

The word had been in her books, applied only to the most vile and heinous beasts. Ones born from terrible things, and other’s bodies. Just as she was. Just as Frank was. For the first time since learning it, Mel’s heart aches for the poor beasts crawling around the night. They didn’t ask to exist, not a single one of them had a choice in the matter. How are they monsters for being brought forth by another’s hands?

Why is their creator still clean? Why does he get to decide?

Robby isn’t quite done yet, pulling Mel’s attention back into the office.

“I should have destroyed her before you ever had the chance to darken my doorstep again.” He spits, low and poisonous.

“You would still threaten to take her back from me?” Frank asks with an almost incredulous expression, like he can’t believe what he’s hearing. “You would break your promise to me, even now? Months after success? 

“I’ve spent years with you standing over me, haunting my movements. It would be due reward to torture you as you’ve tormented me-”

“Haunting you?” Frank snaps, temper flaring too sharply to be ignored any longer. “I threw myself to the wind these long months. France, Switzerland. I let myself be drawn to the furthest corners of the sea, into the deepest Ottoman lands, so as to keep myself out of your sight. To satisfy the needs of your flighty convictions and promises.” The room seems to almost breathe with the conflict, air thinning as Frank’s voice sharpens itself for a blow. “To keep you from pulling away.” Frank says with a dark laugh, watching Robby with a sneering expression. “Like you are now.”

Robby hovers by the room’s unlit fireplace, as far from Frank as he can get. He grimaces at the accuracy of the comment even as he makes no move to draw closer.

“Does my misery bring you happiness in some way?” Frank asks with a shake of his head.

“I don’t yearn for your misery-”

“Yet make every motion to increase it-”

“-I yearn for your lack of very existence.” Robby hisses as he steps forward, back straight and arms held rigidly behind him. “I wish for an end to reminders of a younger folly so that I might finally return to life. My life, the one you stole away at the very moment of your animation.”

“Of course.” Frank says with a venomous tone. “A return to your life as it was before. To the fiancee you left behind. And how is Heather after all these months of being cast aside without explanation?" 

“I told you not to say her name.” Robby threatens, jolting forward even as his posture remains unnaturally straight.

Frank stares down his nose at him. “I told you not to give me cause.”

There is a brief glint of metal as Robby lunges forward, fire poker swinging wide from behind his back. Frank dodges, eyes flashing brilliant blue as he throws himself out of the way. The failed blow just drives Robby forward, swing after swing arcing through the air. 

“So this is how it’s to be?” Frank hisses, dodging each attempted blow with a coordination that Robby can’t hope to match. They weave over the carpet in a dangerous dance.

“I am your creator and I will be your end. I’ll see you returned to the ground, both of you!”

Frank shifts, driving himself forward in an instant. He dodges the latest flailing swing, dragging them both down to the floor in an uncoordinated heap. The fire poker goes wide, bouncing away from them. Coordination abandons them as they scratch and claw and twist hungry hands into loose cloth. 

Robby shoves Frank back and lunges for the fire poker again, hand thrown out wide. Frank simply rears his fist back, staring down at Robby with a burning expression.

Man versus man, a lonely clash of speed.

Frank wins.

He brings his fist down in a punch that resonates through the air. Robby’s head bounces off the floor with a thump, limbs jerking in an aimless reflex. Frank pulls his arm back and does it again, and again. Raining down hits like something has come over him, spilling out of that familiar black pit at the center of each of them. Blood flecks his fist, then splatters it. 

Frank slows as it drips down his knuckles, panting heavily as he stares down at Robby. 

“You are my creator, but since the moment of my creation…I have been your master.” Frank tells Robby in a low voice. A croaking groan gurgles up at him from the floor, dragged out of the depths of Robby’s chest, but Frank doesn’t react. “I think it is time we end this.”

Mel’s heartbeat roars in her ears as she watches unblinkingly. Is she supposed to be ignorant of what comes next?

Then his head turns, eyes meeting hers through the keyhole. 

“Come here, sweetheart.” Frank says barely above a whisper, beckoning her inside with a shockingly soft expression.

He knew. 

Frank knew that she was watching. That the door wouldn’t keep her from needing to see it. He might have even known it would come to blows with Robby in the first place, dragging them away from her so there was no chance of misdirection. The fire from before has disappeared from his face again, leaving behind the calm patience of the man who shares her seams and broke her chain.

Mel feels herself straightening up on weak legs and opening the door without conscious thought.

The room feels strangely exposed without the protective barrier of the door in front of her. She passes the fire poker as she gets closer, now forgotten on the floor. Frank watches her approach, kneeling over Robby in a motion that reeks of both conquest and deterrence. 

It’s almost hard to find Robby’s features in the mess as she draws closer, blood drooling over his skin in a sticky haze. Still, she can see the slow rise and fall of his chest, the undeniable proof that he lives. For some unknown length of time yet. One of his eyes tracks her movement to Frank’s side, harsh and condemning even in silence.

Frank is careful as she draws close enough to touch, taking her hand in one of his like he’s approaching something skittish. “You’re okay, it’s okay.”

Mel slowly joins him on the ground, watching his thumb smear a bloody mark as it pets over her skin. It’s just as soothing as before, all soft edges and gentle touch. No sign of the hailstorm he just unleashed. 

Her stories didn’t contain scenes like this. Princes kneeling in blood, evil brought low but unfinished in a lingering ambiguity. Princesses don’t watch the blood creeping over the floor slowly reach the edges of their dresses, wicked up into the fabric like a blooming wound. They certainly don’t stare at the scene with a silence that isn’t quite condemning.

“I know.” Frank whispers as Mel turns to take him in, staring at the blood coating his clothes. He shakes his head against words she can’t bring herself to say like he hears them regardless. “I-I don’t choose to act this way. Not when it’s left in my hands.” 

His words are pleading, begging her to understand, to hear his own silent subtext. 

‘It’s never left in my hands.’

Her eyes drift down where he holds her so impossibly gently. The split skin of his knuckles is proof enough of the effort in survival. Before their eyes, it knits itself back together impossibly fast until it lays in the united pieces he began with. 

No, not quite impossibly fast. Inhumanly. 

A term that belongs to both of them. There is a recognition in such a cruel term as long as it’s shared.

Robby lets out a gurgling hiss before them, hatred burning bright in the eye that isn’t already swollen shut. Mel is pretty sure she can see a broken tooth or two spat into the blood next to him, but she doesn’t look closely. It’s not kindness that leads her choice.

Frank is still fixed on Robby, tense with a barely concealed anger, the heat of it boiling under his skin. “It’s a charity no one ever sees fit to give. They push and push, and it’s when we snap that we’re the villains.”

Frank finally lifts his eyes back to her and they look impossibly old, an exhaustion older than both of them carried over from some past life to weigh him down. Mel remembers his words downstairs, the quiet admittance that they do not live in a kind world. Frank has seen it. Distant lands and the passage of seasons, strange faces and missing seams. Something in all that vastness has worn him down. Chased the soft heart of him from the very first moment he woke. And from the very beginning, that charge was led by their creator. By the man who reviles them both for the life he brought into them.

He had been born in a public kind of cruelty as surely as she was formed by the quiet isolation of the laboratory.

“Sometimes this is the way of the world.” Frank says it softly, almost as gently as a confession. He looks between her eyes carefully, searching for something.

Then he takes Mel’s hand in his, slowly guiding it down to rest on Robby’s throat. She can feel the skittering tempo of their creator’s heartbeat under her fingers, rapid and panicked. 

There’s a question in Frank’s motions as they hesitate over him, not a single ounce of pressure behind his hand. For all of their similarities, they were forged by very different fires. He doesn’t know if she’ll follow him on this path. This is Mel’s choice. Just like the shackle and the stairs. If she pulls back, Frank won’t hold it against her. She never has to get her hands dirty if she doesn’t want to. He’ll handle all the muck and filth of the world, no matter what form it takes. 

All he’s asking - pleading - is that she doesn’t shy away from him after he does it.

That she understands why his hands are stained the way they are.

Mel’s heart aches for him, twisting to look into those endless blue eyes of his begging her not to let go of him. He might hide it, or give it to his anger for fuel, but Mel knows the truth. The world has been cruel to her other half. Cruel in a way that teaches and punishes, cruel in a way that scars, even on a being that doesn’t retain the physical marks of it.

Frank has never been her monster. Not once. 

Even when he was her beast, he came to her with a hopefulness. A lightness. A possibility that she could be seen, could be found. No. Her monster is whole and perfect from birth and despises both of them. Her monster is cruel hands and words intended to cut and icy shackles wrapped around her before she knows enough to run. 

Mel gives Frank the barest nod, her own trembling promise. 

She understands. She’ll stay.

They turn back to Robby with one motion, a single mind set to a single purpose. Frank presses into Mel’s back as their fingers tense around Robby’s throat, interlocked with one another. The blood on Robby’s skin is quick to coat Mel’s fingers, blurring the edges of where one of them ends and the other begins.

Robby stares up at them in disbelief as he lets out a gasping gurgle, shock seared into his face. It’s a shock that comes from a refusal to acknowledge how close one is playing with their own destruction. From that very first moment of creation, Robby was playing with things beyond his understanding. He gave them life and then he taught them hatred. His hatred. Poisonous and black and suffocating to every other thing that makes its home in their tender chests.

Hatred has never failed to consume its master, no matter how smart or clever.

And a father isn’t immune to the evil he breeds into his children.

His words echo in Mel’s mind for a moment and she finds the thick weight that closes her throat around him lifts enough to speak. To title him as he never did her.

“Monstrous.” Mel whispers, feeling Robby’s throat bobbing under her grip as his eye opens impossibly wider. 

She supposes this is their first proper introduction. 

Perhaps it’s fitting that it’s their goodbye.

Frank lets out a soft breath behind her, pressing impossibly closer to her back. He feels surrounding, protective, like a wall between her and the rest of the world. His breath runs over the nape of her neck warmly, an echo of the heat seeping from his palm into her hand. It feels like they breathe in the same motion, the same trust.

Robby’s mouth opens and closes futilely, desperate and hungry for air. He doesn’t find any. They lean in as one when Robby finally goes still, his hands falling loose and limp at his side. The heavy weight of his gaze slowly dissipates as his gaze falls on the ceiling, blank and unseeing. The room stands still, not daring to breathe as they slowly lift their hands away. 

He doesn’t move. Their creator is dead.

That fact settles in the air strangely, disjointed with the rest of the world. It feels like claiming that the ground is hollow or that birds fly backwards. Their creator was a truth of existence as much as water and air, casting a shadow much larger than himself. 

Now, he simply…isn’t.

“He’s gone.” Frank says like he’s not sure he believes it. “He’s actually…” His voice teeters between shock and relief, staring at the cliff’s edge they’ve thrown themselves off of with no regard for what sits at the bottom. 

Mel settles on her haunches, staring down at the bloody stickiness coating her fingers now.

Her entire life has been spent in the basement laboratory of this one manor. She has counted the stones hundreds of times, read the books that filled her space with an unquenchable hunger until they were seared into her mind by sheer repetition. She learned every corner and seam and nook in that entire room. All of the facts of herself and her life spread out across a single unending plane.

And now Mel has a Before and an After.

She carries two halves of her life that can’t be joined anymore. Their maker is dead, body lying on the floor in front of her. And with him disappears all of the safety and comfort and horrors of the Before.

Frank is still speaking, words drifting past her without clear beginning or purpose. “-don’t owe him…that…Mel?”

She turns to look at him, eyes drifting to a small smear of blood left on his forehead where he combed back his hair. He must have forgotten the blood still drying on his hands. 

Their hands.

“Mel?” Frank asks again with a strained voice. “Are you okay, sweetheart?”

Mel falters, mind looping for a moment. What is she supposed to say to that? How is she supposed to put this new feeling to words?

It’s not grief or loss, it’s not her familiar hatred. It’s like a sweeping chill has burrowed its way into her chest as they sit in the wake of their own actions. She doesn’t regret her choice, but she regrets being made to choose. Being forced to answer in the same absolutes as their creator. They were stronger than him so they survived and he didn’t. But he had been stronger than her little pillbug, so it didn’t. 

Is that it? Is it simply the will of the stronger being to impose itself on smaller ones? 

In escaping him, did they both bend to their creator’s rules so completely that they became him? 

Frank cups her face with bloody hands, thumbing at her cheeks with a nervous roughness. “Oh sweetheart, I’m sorry- I’m, please come back to me. Please.”

Mel drags her eyes down to his, feeling like some of the heaviness in his eyes has leeched into her body. They did it. She’s free. Frank is free. They don’t have to live with a shadow at their backs any longer. Why is she still angry? Then why does she still want Robby to smile at her?

Mel’s lip wobbles without permission, a suffocating breathlessness rising in her chest. “Am I evil?”

“No.” Frank denies immediately, cutting off that line of thought without hesitation. “No, sweetheart. Never.”

“How could I not be?” She asks as her chest squeezed tight. Surely the problem has to lie in her. There is a before and an after that did not exist. Surely there must be a cost to this, perhaps it’s her.

“How could you be?” Frank asks like what she’s saying is absurd. Impossible.

Mel feels tears burning in her eyes again. His faith in her, in some goodness buried in her, is like a blade hanging over her head. He doesn’t understand the thing filling her chest. “I was made from-”

“Love.” Frank interjects, voice thick and trembling as he stares into her eyes with a heavy weight. The force behind the word makes her pause, coming back to herself enough to feel the warm pressure of his hands on her cheeks.

“What?” 

“Love. Before meeting, before existence, I loved you. Wholly. Completely.” Frank says, watching her with desperate eyes. “That is what you are made from, more than anything or anyone else.”

Frank says it as surely as he would name the source of any of her donated parts. He tucked his love and his softness into her from the very moment of existence. He gave it to her to protect and use and wrap herself in when she needed to feel someone there with her after her insects had crawled away.

“To make up for the lack of anyone else.” Frank whispers with brutal trembling honesty.

He knew that asking Robby for her to be created meant asking for someone else to understand his isolation. He asked for it knowing he was begging for a shared doom. And he promises all of himself, every seam and flaw and achingly human piece, to make it up to her.

Mel thinks that she would be lonely no matter who she was or how she came to be. Something inside of her would always chase those around her away. No matter how good she might appear. Frank begged for Mel to share his isolation. She can’t find it within herself to be upset.

At least, like this, she’s loved too.

Mel pushes Frank’s hands away from her cheeks for a single free-fall inducing second before she wraps her arms around his neck and buries herself into his skin. He doesn’t waste a second closing his arms around her tightly, hands burying itself in her hair to keep her right where she is. 

“I swear- I swear.” Frank promises in desperate breaths against her ear. She can feel his heart pounding under her like it's straining out of his chest to find her. “Forever.”

“I know.” Mel whispers, pressing her nose further into his neck. She can feel him. Under her skin, tucked between all of her borrowed organs and donated strips. His love - for her, for the world that hurts them far too easily - pulses in time with their hearts. Mel loves him because her love has always been his, echoing through her chest endlessly.

Mel pulls back just enough to press her lips to his, a coppery tint smeared between them. Frank doesn’t finch at the taste, curling himself around her as he kisses her back just as consumingly. It’s not just love, but the continued promise of it. The promise of a heart just as tightly bound to him as he is to her. 

A reciprocation that he was never sure was coming.

They press into one another like the tides, pushing and pulling and never fully withdrawing. They may be alone, without a creator or people, but they’re two halves of a whole and they have each other. Again and for the first time.

- - -

They leave the office behind without the speed of shame, hands interlaced tightly with one another. Running implies guilt, wrong. They did nothing but live as they were made. There is nothing for them to be ashamed of. 

Mel doesn’t spare their monster dead on the floor another glance as they leave him behind, quiet and still. She’s gotten all she’ll ever get from him.

The rest of her personhood she’ll find on her own. 

Frank smashes a few of the wall sconces as they pass them, motion bursting out of him. The fatty oils that keep the candles burning splatter onto the floor in burning sparks. Neither of them slow as the fire catches on the plush rugs and thick-woven curtains filling every room, watching it feed hungrily. They come to a set of double doors and Frank pushes them open with a grand gesture, feeding a breath of life into the burning manor.

Mel’s world expands and expands and expands to fit everything stretching out before her. She feels as greedy as the fire curling at their backs as they step out onto the top of the grand staircase, looking over the rolling green gardens. What isn’t manicured lawns fades into rolling grass hills, spotted with the rare stretching bend of trees covered in rich leaves. The air tastes new, fresh with something bright and curling against her taste buds.

It brings a fresh sting to her eyes, this time far less tragic than it was down in the basement. This, this is worth it.

Worth anything.

Strangely the most disappointing part is the sky. It’s strangely dim for all the stories she’s read about it.

“Just wait.” Frank promises with a smile, able to read her thoughts with an ease that feels like a promise. 

Minutes pass slowly, sky lightening in creeping increments. Finally, off in the distant horizon, an impossible brightness pierces the edge of the world.

Mel stares at it with wide eyes, heart thundering in her chest. “What…what is that?”

“That,” Frank says with rising delight, “is a sunrise. The first of many.”

Mel is entranced by the rising fire, watching it as closely as she dares even as her eyes ache. The sky lightens around the sun’s brightness, painting the sparse clouds with colors she’s barely found in the most decorated book pages and jacket embroidery. It’s so vivid and sure that it makes everything else she’s ever seen look dull in comparison. The world is alive, breathing in the day like a first breath.

A new beginning for all of them.

The sky blushes for long moments before a crisp blue takes its place. It’s only when the sun fully crests the horizon properly that Mel turns back to Frank. The delight of the sunrise and impossibly blue skies stare back at her from his eyes, rich and waiting.

Mel takes a steadying breath, squeezing his hand. “I’m ready.” 

“This way, my love.” Frank promises with a soft kiss to her knuckles, leading her on. Down the steps before the burning manor, across the beautiful manicured gardens, and away any mention of this wretched place or what it held.

Now it’s just the two of them.