Isaac night x immortal female reader
Tw/cw: grotesque imagery of resurrection, the agony of immortality.
You had lived with it gnawing at your ears, your mind, your soul for twenty-five years. Not silence like a quiet night, but silence that pressed in on every side, a suffocating weight, smothering the memory of air, of light, of sound.
Your flesh refused it. Even after the explosion tore you apart—bones shattered, skin melted, your blood turned to ash—the curse of your body had worked to rebuild. Slow, too slow. The damage was too great, the healing dragged out over decades. While others rotted to dust, you lingered in that coffin, buried beneath the Skull Tree, half-regrown, half-decayed, trapped in eternal dark.
At first, you had been too weak to move. You had lain there with worms threading through the hollows of your ribs, with roots cracking your sternum as they sought water in your chest. You felt everything. Your nerves, regrowing before muscle, left you in screaming silence, unable to claw but able to feel the gnaw of beetles against your marrow.
You tried to bite your tongue, to choke on it, to force the mercy of death. But it healed. It always healed.
When your arms were whole enough, you began clawing. Your nails split, peeled back, and grew again. You beat your fists bloody on the coffin lid until your wrists snapped like dry twigs, then reset themselves crooked, then snapped again. Dirt sifted into your wounds. You drank it. You breathed soil until it became a part of you.
You lost count after ten years.
When the coffin finally cracked, it was not triumph but rage that filled you. You tore upward, through the filth and rot of thirty years. Your head broke the surface, and night air poured in—cold, wet, cruel. You screamed. It was not joy, but a jagged cry of something dragged out of hell.
You collapsed onto the earth, heaving though your lungs did not need breath. Mud caked your body, blood streaked your arms in blackened smears. Your fingers dangled broken at odd angles, still twitching from the frantic clawing.
The Skull Tree loomed overhead, pale in the moonlight, branches crooked like the bones of a giant’s hand. The place smelled of damp rot, and you with it.
That was when you heard it.
Soft, muffled, almost mistaken for the insect-chitter of the night. But no—it was rhythmic, steady, wrong.
You froze. The sound came from beneath the tree.
Madness and hope tangled inside you. You crawled on hands that were little more than flayed muscle and shattered bone, dragging yourself to the roots. You dug with fingers that bled anew, splitting to the bone. Your knuckles popped as you forced them through stones, through roots, until you found it.
Not flesh, not human. A heart of brass and glass, its tiny gears still grinding, its pendulum swinging, ticking. For twenty-five years, it had ticked here in the dirt, patient, waiting.
The boy you had loved. The boy who had died with you.
You pressed the heart to your own chest, sobbing. The steady tick echoed against your ribs, a sound more alive than your own silence.
“If your heart’s here,” you rasped through a throat scraped raw, “...then you are too.”
The dirt swallowed your words, but you answered them yourself: you dug.
You tore the ground apart. Your fingertips snapped off at the first joint, regrew, and snapped again. Your arms flayed open from wrist to elbow, exposing tendon and vein as you ripped at the earth like an animal.
And at last—wood. Another coffin.
You ripped it open, and the stench hit you first. Not of rot. Of preservation. A wrong stillness, as though death had passed him by. Isaac lay within, his skin pale but not decayed, his lips faintly blue, his body perfect as the day you’d last seen it, except for the hollow in his chest where his clock heart had once beat.
Your stomach lurched. This was not natural. Nothing about this was natural.
But still—you dragged him out. His limbs flopped heavy, dead weight against your lap. You laid him on the grass beneath the Skull Tree, brushing dirt from his cheek with a trembling, blood-slicked hand. His lashes were still long, still delicate, shadows against his white skin.
The heart ticked in your palm.
Your own hands shook violently as you pressed it back into the cavity of his chest. The brass gears fit with a sickening click, sinking into flesh that did not bleed. The heart twitched, shuddered, then spun to life with a shriek of grinding metal.
Isaac’s body convulsed. His back arched so hard his spine cracked. His mouth yawned open in a soundless scream as air, rancid with thirty years of earth, tore from his lungs. His eyes shot open—glowing gray, feral, seeing nothing.
He gasped, heaved, clawed at the dirt as if he too were trapped beneath it. And then his gaze locked on you.
You expected horror. Disgust.
“Y/N…?” His voice was ruined, gravel dragged over glass.
You broke, sobbing so hard you nearly collapsed over him. “Isaac.”
His trembling hand reached up, fingertips skimming your cheek. His nails scraped blood and filth, but his touch was reverent. His eyes widened, wild and awed.
“You’re…still seventeen,” he whispered. “Not a day changed. As if…”
You shook your head, tears dripping onto his chest. “I don’t age. I don’t die. I stayed alive in that box, Isaac. I felt every second. Every worm. Every root tearing me open. I screamed until my throat split. Thirty years.”
His expression fractured. He pulled you against him with trembling arms, his grip both desperate and tender. His chest rattled with the tick of the heart inside, uneven, wrong.
“I’m sorry,” he breathed into your hair. “God, Y/N, I should have—should have been with you, should have…”
“No,” you hissed. Your teeth caught on a sob. “We died together. But my body wouldn’t let me go. It made me live through it. Made me remember every second.”
He leaned back, cupping your ruined face in his hands. His gray eyes gleamed with grief and awe.
“You brought me back,” he whispered. “You clawed your way out of death itself…for me.”
“I couldn’t leave you in the dark,” you rasped. “Not when your heart was still beating. Not when you were waiting.”
His lips trembled. Slowly, he smiled—a smile cracked with pain but radiant all the same.
“My immortal girl,” he said, voice breaking. “My miracle of rot and blood.”
You laughed, a choked, ugly sound, and pressed your forehead to his. “I thought I’d lost you forever.”
“And yet,” he murmured, his breath sour with earth, “here we are.”
The night air hung heavy with damp soil, with the scent of something wrenched from the grave too soon—or too late. The Skull Tree loomed above like a sentinel, its branches clutching at the stars.
Isaac’s body trembled as he sat fully upright. His movements were jerky, wrong, like a puppet yanked back into motion. The ticking inside him echoed in the silence. His gaze roved over you, tracing every line of your bloodied, unaging face.
“You look the same as the night we died,” he whispered. “But stronger. Hungrier. You clawed through death itself.”
“I’d do it again,” you swore, your voice raw. “I’d crawl through fire, through worms, through eternity itself.”
He kissed you then, sudden, desperate, his lips cold but alive, tasting of earth and metal. You clung to him, half in love, half in horror. His heart ticked wildly against your chest, mechanical and relentless.
When he pulled back, his smile was feverish. “What now? The world’s forgotten us. It’s moved on.”
You looked at the graves, at the soil you’d clawed through, at the faint lights of Nevermore glowing in the distance. The years yawned like a chasm behind you.
“We take it back,” you said. “The world, the time they stole from us.”
Isaac’s grin sharpened. His gray eyes glowed like stormlight. He pressed his hand over yours, over the ticking in his chest.
The Skull Tree groaned in the wind above, its roots twisted with graves. The ground stank of old death. But beneath it, two creatures who should have rotted held each other close, not alive, not dead—immortal and terrible, bound by love and the grave.
And for the first time in thirty years, you were not alone.
