It took a full fifty years beyond my rebirth before I was able to pass as a man. Some changes stemmed from elven magic spurring my body to heal. Some happened on their own as my more living parts grew into my more dead. But mostly the changes happened because I left my father behind.
He found a ship after I left him on the Arctic ice, and fed the captain a sad tale of pity and victimhood. Years later, the elves found records. I learned the day before I left to join the Union Army that my father had pinned several murders on me, the son he called vile and monstrous.
I never murdered. Nor was I eight feet tall, or as ugly as he described. All were lies he manufactured as a way to strike at me from beyond his grave.
Those lies were the reason I used the Civil War to test the limits of my invulnerability—and the limits of my personal misanthropy, all of which culminated in my attempted suicide-by-witch.
That moment ended when Rose wrapped her toddler arms around my neck. She didn’t believe my father’s lies, so for her, I set them aside.
Yet every morning, I was corpse-cold. The elves tattooed over my scars with their beauty, but underneath, my body continued to hitch and halt.
Sally came more for Rose than for me, and I came more for whiskey than for Sally. She said she didn’t mind my cold touch, but she did. Then she left.
Benta wanted a wall of misery, and I was happy to oblige.
At one hundred fifty years past my father, I made an effort to live. University reminded me that I was more than my cold flesh. Kindness is its own beauty, and for the first time in my life, women found me acceptable. But Annie was a pixie of a woman, fine-boned and tiny, and I am an ogre of a man. We did not fit together. Not physically. She cried. I cried. And our relationship was no more. Savannah, whom I also loved, tolerated my morning corpse-likeness until I refused to use my intimidating bulk to further her family’s automobile dealership fortune. I returned to Alfheim, richer in worldly experience, but poorer of heart.
The eighties and nineties allowed for some easing of my loneliness. I could pass as a professional athlete, and as long as I was warm, I did not lack company.
I still missed Annie. And Sally. And I occasionally wondered what would have happened if my father had not destroyed the female companion he had promised me. We could have commiserated in our ugliness. But instead of a sister, he built a brother more monstrous than I. What if he’d inflicted his horror on a woman? It’s best that I am now an only child.
My father told me that I did not deserve someone to ease my suffering. I did not deserve anyone who might listen and offer a touch. I’d had more than two centuries of the universe demonstrating to me that even though Victor Frankenstein was more of a monster than I, though he had lied and manipulated, he had—that one time—told the truth.
Yet some part of me still hoped. Which part, I did not know. The spirits of the men from whom I was molded had long ago entered The Land of the Dead. But something remained. That hope wanted to set aside the self-loathing and the rage. And that hope fell fully, utterly in love.
I am not a fool. Falling in love is simply the discovery of connection. Staying in love is the motion of life. Motion takes work. It takes sacrifice, the kind and quantity of which is determined by the quality of that initial fall. Yet I hope.
When Ellie Jones wrapped her arms around my ice-cold neck, when she cried against my shoulder in the frozen blizzard winds, when she whispered “You’re here,” that hope blossomed into need. We had common ground in sacrifice, Ellie and I. We had common ground in loneliness. We had each other.
And I would fight every mundane and magical on Earth to keep her safe.