He was in the armchair you’d dragged closer to the hearth, his frame too vast for it, making the sturdy oak look like a child’s piece. You called him ‘my quiet giant,’ sometimes just ‘my giant,’ and the name would make the tension around his remarkable eyes soften, just for a moment.

You were darning a sock, not because it needed it, but because the rhythm of the needle—in, pull, out—gave your hands a purpose, a reason not to shake. He was watching you, as he often did, with a focus so absolute it felt like a physical warmth on your skin.

“You are making that small, tight stitch again,” his voice was a low rumble. He had a way of speaking that felt excavated, each word pulled from a deep well of unused sound. “The one you make when your thoughts are chasing their own tail.”

You looked up, the darning egg a cool weight in your palm. “Is that what I do?”

“Yes.” He shifted, the leather of the chair sighing under him. “Your brow does this.” He lifted his own hand and mimicked a tiny, furrowing line above his own brow. The gesture was so tenderly observant, so human, it stole your breath. This was the man they wanted to burn as a monster. The man who noticed the weather in your soul.

“They’re still out there,” you said, the statement a capitulation. You never spoke of the mob directly, as if naming them might conjure them through your walls.

“Let them circle,” he murmured, his gaze returning to the fire. “They are wolves snapping at shadows. They do not know the shape of what they seek.”

But someone did.

The knock, when it came, was precise. Three measured, almost polite raps on your door. Your needle stilled. The giant in your chair went preternaturally still, not with fear, but with a listening intensity you felt in your own bones.

You knew. Even before you rose, even before you crossed the few feet to the door, the floorboards cold beneath your stockinged feet, you knew. You felt his eyes on your back, a heavy, desperate weight.

You opened the door just a crack, the chain engaged. The man standing there was gaunt, washed out, his face a canvas of feverish intellect and profound exhaustion. Victor Frankenstein. He looked like a man who had stared into an abyss and found his own reflection staring back.

“We need to talk,” he said, his voice quiet, devoid of the hysteria you expected. It was worse, this calm. “About what you are sheltering.”

“I shelter nothing.”

A faint, pained smile touched his lips. “Do not make the same mistake I did. Do not confuse the semblance of life for its substance.” His eyes held yours. “You feel… affection. I see it. You’ve provided it a kindness it has never known. But you are feeding a fire that will consume you. What you see in there is not a man. It is a perversion of nature. A beautiful, terrible mistake.”

The words were needles, finding the secret, unvoiced fears you kept locked in the deepest part of yourself. The times you’d woken in the night to see him just standing at the window, a silhouette of pure, unadulterated loneliness that felt ancient and bottomless. The way his gentleness could, in a flash of remembered pain, turn to a rage that shook the very timbers of your small home. Was he a man, or a storm given flesh?

“He has a soul,” you whispered, the words meant for yourself as much as for Frankenstein.

“It has the soul I gave it,” Victor countered, leaning closer, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial hush. “Cobbled together from graveyards and charnel houses. A patchwork of rage and sorrow. It is not its fault, but it is its nature. Help me. Help me put it to rest. For its sake. For yours.”

He laid a small, leather-wrapped bundle on your doorstep. A small vial with what you believed to be poison, glinting in the weak light from your cottage. “In his tea. He will feel nothing. A gentle sleep. It is a kinder end than the one the mob will give him.”