Isaac Night x fem! beloved reader
The Skull Tree loomed against the cold Nevermore sky, roots twisting like skeletal fingers clawing through the earth. Isaac Night stood beneath it, his reconstructed chest clicking and whirring, each tick of his mechanical heart reminding him of the decades he had lost. Thirty years. Thirty years since fire and betrayal tore everything from him — his sister, his inventions, and most of all… you.
You had died in the same nightmarish chaos that had consumed him. His memory of your last breath haunted him more vividly than his own death. The softness of your voice, the way your hand had clutched his as the world burned, the whispered promise you never got to keep. He had carried that ghost with him into the dark silence of the grave.
The rituals, the forbidden alchemy, the science that straddled the line between madness and devotion — Isaac had devoted all of it to one purpose: to bring you back. He had tasted rebirth himself, pulled screaming from the earth by accident, stitched together by hunger and regret. But now he had the power to grant you the same.
He knelt beside the soil where your body lay hidden, the same place he had returned to day after day since he had returned from the grave beside her, whispering to bones. His fingers trembled as he brushed the dirt away, revealing fragments of you. Your name lingered on his tongue, soft and desperate.
“Y/N… my love. I’ve waited too long.”
When you stirred, when your body shivered and your eyes fluttered open for the first time in three decades, they were clouded, feral, and hungry. Not you yet. Not the woman who had once pressed her forehead against his and vowed to stand by him against the world.
Isaac knew what had to be done.
From within his satchel, he withdrew the offering — the thing that had allowed him to crawl back from death’s embrace. A glistening brain, stolen in secrecy. He cradled it in one hand, and with the other, he brushed dirt and tangled hair from your lips.
“Eat,” he whispered, voice breaking. “Please. I’ll feed you until you remember me. Until you’re whole again.”
You obeyed at first like an animal, gnashing, trembling. Isaac held you steady, murmuring soft words, the same way he once soothed you during sleepless nights. With every bite, every offering, clarity flickered across your face.
Your eyes locked on his mechanical chest, the steady tick-tick-tick that had replaced his weak heart. Recognition sparked, faint but there.
“...Isaac?” Your voice cracked, broken but real.
His breath hitched. Tears he thought his body could no longer make welled in his eyes. He pressed his forehead against yours, just like before, though now your lips were stained scarlet and his fingers shook with both dread and devotion.
“Yes,” he whispered. “It’s me. It’s always been me. I’ve waited… gods, I’ve waited.”
Your hands — still trembling, still half-dead — reached up and cupped his jaw. The mechanical heart inside his chest stuttered, skipped. For the first time in thirty years, Isaac Night felt alive.
“I’ll never lose you again,” he swore, clutching you to him. “I’ll feed you, I’ll keep you, I’ll do whatever it takes. We’ll be eternal, Y/N. Together. Even if the world burns for it.”
The Skull Tree shivered in the wind, its roots groaning. The night was silent except for the rhythm of Isaac’s clockwork heart and the ragged breaths of the woman he had torn back from death itself.
And for the first time since that cursed explosion, Isaac Night smiled.
