please rant about declan deklo D douche bag lynch, please
Declan Lynch at 5 years old had already reached a level of lifeless self-discipline that prevented him from connecting with his mother figure, who was literally dreamt to love people in the way they preferred. He spends the days leading up to Christmas irritated that, while Niall brings home many dreamt items, he hasn’t gotten (what he describes as) the only thing he wants—a microscope. When Aurora finally and unexpectedly gifts him something “entirely to his tastes” (a set of marbles that shine like raven’s eyes), he runs off crying, a reaction his parents find strange. In CDTH, when he and Ronan stop to look at some paintings, Declan recites a quote: “a window looks outside, but a painting should do the opposite—it should look inside of us,” and proceeds to say the art makes him “want to goddamn cry.” This becomes relevant in MI, when we learn of the moment Declan found art; he’d seen an exhibit that stretched over the museum in black threads, forcing viewers to tread carefully or risk destroying the piece entirely. Declan balances he and his brothers’ lives in a web of his own creation: dangerous, delicate, deliberate. And seeing this piece makes him, again, want to “goddamn cry.” All of this is to say, Declan’s preferred method of love is being understood without asking, without drawing attention to that want. Because that’s what art gives us, isn’t it? At 5, Declan cries when he’s gifted something he didn’t even know to ask for, and at 21 he cries over art and hoards it in a shrine to his hidden self. It makes sense then, that he can’t help being drawn to dreams. Aurora, a portrait who understands without being asked, Matthew, who hugs Declan when his responsibility makes him seem cold, and Jordan “a piece of art herself,” who has pinpointed exactly why he struggles to accept her realness. Isn’t it significant then, that now, Declan, neither dreamer nor dreamt, gets to be the artwork himself? That, makes me want to goddamn cry.
