vestige – Isaac Night x f!reader
wordcount: 9k content/warnings: ghost!reader, murder, hints of domestic violence against reader (not explicit, not perpetrated by Isaac), descriptions of human remains, zombie states and mild descriptions of the decay associated with it, protective!isaac, a bit of a saviour narrative, reader has no phsycial descriptions beyond being female and wearing a dress, isaac can't stop self-sabotaging, disjointed/jumping narrative & dodgy perspectives an note: my gosh! This is the longest fic I have ever written in 10 years of writing fanfiction. It was SO difficult to end and despite being long, still somehow feels rushed! This was very much inspired by @isaacnights most recent fic 'slept so long' (which you should all read as soon as you're done here, of course) | masterlist | story moodboard
The needle crackled aimlessly, dragging along the empty ridges at the center of the vinyl, yet Isaac’s occupied hands didn’t bother to lift from their task, not even with the practised flick required to turn sides and start the music again.
He had lost track, truly, of how late it had become. He knew only that the sun had set several hours ago, and that there was a deep ache settled in the base of his neck. He could hear Francoise’s nagging in the back of his mind to straighten up, to go to bed earlier. His shoulders rolled, curving against the tension, but he made no effort to stand.
His fingers paused, however, a barely threaded screw mid turn, as the warbling scratching of the blank vinyl ceased. His gaze lifted, body strung tight, stationary, waiting a moment for the familiar reprimands of Gomez or his sister, the old rigmarole that was futile for them, and little more than tiring for himself. It didn’t come. Neither, come to think of it, had the creak of the stairs or the protests of the elevator mechanisms he really had meant to get around to fixing, but had been too focused elsewhere.
He turned, twisting upright in his chair like some macabre dancer in a music box stuck to its axis. The tone arm had been lifted, but not yet returned to the vinyl’s side, the record still spinning silently below it.
“I can assure you, Gomez, this routine is not going to scare me. You should know better than that.”
The silence remained.
He stood, letting the screw fall to the desk along with the screwdriver, a frankly exhausted hand tugging at the topmost button of his lab coat, releasing the fabric so that it hung limply from the collar. He flipped the vinyl before lowering the needle again precisely, the first movement of Dvořák's New World beginning again, tinny and quiet.
“Aren’t you bored of this one?”
Isaac turned more quickly than he ought to, eyes wide beneath a creased brow at the sudden voice, unnervingly placeless, echoing with an uncanny quality off his machines as if they hadn’t existed at all and the room were devoid of any decoration. Yet no figure presented itself, or at least not immediately.
He turned slower, cautious this time in his surveyance, watching for the shift of a shadow, something whichever foolish classmate had decided to taunt him this time would haven been too shortsighted to have considered.
“I don’t wish to understand your woeful sense of humour, but I would prefer if it ended here. I’m busy.”
Your head peaked from the edge of one of the main units of his invention before the rest of you, stepping around slowly, hands folded behind your back.
There was something unearthly about you that he failed to put his finger on – uncanny, saturnine even, in the downturn of your lips. Yet you were fascinating. For a moment, he could have gone so far as to say horribly ethereal. Something in his chest pulled taut, a summons he could not name, desperate in some perverted way to dissect the source of beauty that he failed to tear his eyes away from – not that he tried particularly hard. He ground his teeth, chastising the thought, and swallowed hard against the sudden dryness of his throat.
Your lips twitched further downwards. “It was a genuine question. I didn’t mean to upset you.”
Isaac blinked, shoulders stiffening at the unexpected kindness in your voice. “Yes, well, I prefer to be alone.” He cleared his throat, the sound catching slightly. “Who are you, anyway?”
You tilted your head, gaze drifting past him to the cluttered desk – papers splayed out, a mug half-drained and cold. He shifted uncomfortably, impatience welling, fingers drumming once against the table before curling into a fist.
You ignored the question. “People don’t usually come up here.”
“I’ve been coming here for the last eight months—”
“I know.”
It had been a cursory glance, the pull of intrigue as he realised the usually verbose floor failed to protest beneath your feet as it did others. He paused, however, scrutinising, running the estimations in his head. With where you were standing, and the off-kilter positioning of his lamp, your shadow should have stretched across the railings behind you. Yet the railings held their usual colour, completely undisturbed by your presence, much unlike himself.
His attention snapped back to your face, the sudden, familiar need to understand twinged with the impossibility of your figure. His question changed: “What are you?”
You simply shrugged, attention slipping from his face to the floor below you. He realised then that you weren’t wearing any shoes. “A girl.”
His brow creased, the imbalance of questions to answers uncomfortable. “Beyond that.”
“Dead.”
Words failed him, not from shock, nor the plausible absurdity of it all, but from the shame in himself for not piecing it together. For all the weird and mundane aspects of outcast society, the probability of ghosts wasn’t one he should have dismissed as a children’s story. But as you stepped silently again, kicking your foot slightly as if some child waiting for a parent to finish a chore, the environment around your shape gave no indication of life.
Quite the contrary, Isaac shivered against the unnatural cold. Viscerally.
“I can leave you alone again, if you wish?”
His mind snapped to again, eyes refocusing. “Have I ever truly been alone here?”
Your lips twitched, some semblance of a smile, haunting, for lack of a better word. “Not really.”
“It’s rather rude to watch someone work without their knowing, is it not?”
Your smile dropped. He cursed himself – again.
“There hasn’t been much else to do…” You moved as if to brush your fingers along the edge of the machinery he had finished not two weeks prior, his body tensing instinctually, the jerk of his arm involuntary, his power reaching to you, to stop you. Your fingers settled against the metal anyway, his power finding no purchase, and slipped through the frame, the tips of your nails sinking beneath the metal surface. The subtle tilt of your head back to him forced him to drop his arm, out of embarrassment more than courtesy.
“I’m sorry for bothering you, Isaac.”
You turned as if to step away, head tucking despite the apparent lack of need, to duck beneath the skeleton of his machinery.
“How do you know my name?” He wasn’t sure why he asked. If you had been watching, there were a great many ways you could have ascertained such liberal information. From a notebook, perhaps, his sister's conversations, his own mad ramblings. Regardless, it had the desired effect, your outline pausing, turning again. “And, once again, is it not considered impolite for you to know me, but offer me nothing in return?”
The smile returned, softer this time, spread more evenly as you spoke your name softly. A quiet lulled between you for a moment, although it was not as uncomfortable as he expected. It occurred to him then that in those eight months not once had he had any inkling that there had been another presence beside him, not once.
“Why tonight?” The question formed on his lips before his mind had time to consider it.
To his astonishment, you laughed. It was a hollow sound, short and mixed with a scoff, but somehow sweet. “Because if I had to listen to Dvořák one more time I might have jumped out of the window.”
The firm line of his lips cracked, tugging into a smile despite himself. “I’m not sure that would have much effect, all things considered.”
You only shrugged, your smile dropping just enough to lose its genuine edge. “Well, it would be fun to try.”
“What would you rather, then?” Your brow creased, confused for a moment. Isaac lifted the needle again, slipping the vinyl back into its sleeve. “Music – what would you prefer?”
“Do you have anything more… modern? Fleetwood Mac, maybe? Oh, or Queen!”
His hands paused, the vinyl half into the case, offering you a frankly disgusted look, lip curled. “I don’t know what was worse – that I had a ghost in my workshop, or that she had terrible taste in music.”
“You could have humoured me; I’ve been in here for over a decade.” It had been meant as a joke, he could tell that, but it fell flat from your lips, your conviction failing you, sticking in your throat like a clot. He adjusted the stack of vinyls distractedly, the grim line settling on his lips again as he flicked through the covers – Beethoven, Sibelius, Bach – his collection suddenly felt inadequate. “I was joking,” you clarified, suddenly very aware of the crease settling deeper in his forehead. “Besides, you seemed nice enough; I think I could put up with it if you let me stick around once in a while.”
Isaac scoffed, settling on Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto, placing it carefully on the turntable and lowering the needle. “I’m afraid your estimations fall at odds with the usual assessment,” he mumbled, more so than spoke, a passing comment barely caught from beneath his breath.
“But you helped that teacher by making that power thing, and you are so sweet to your sister, and to your friend – the boy with the funny moustache—”
“Gomez,” he filled in without much thought.
“—Gomez.” You paused for a moment, weighing your next words, your gaze leaving him to find the floor by your feet instead. “It’s been a while since I saw such kindness in a person.”
The words twisted at something in his chest that he didn’t know he still had. He watched you for a moment, unmoving, the quiet suddenly unbreakable in a way he wasn’t familiar with. A strange helplessness stirred at the back of his mind, clawing for space he refused to give. He smothered it; he wasn’t the soft-hearted boy you imagined.
“Can you sit?” His attention flicked briefly to the empty chair beside his desk, the one usually reserved for his sister, with a clearing cough. “I’d prefer you not wander around my machines if you insist on staying.”
You nodded, the movement unsure, as if you had to fight against your own mind to acquiesce, to cross beside him and sit uneasily. He could feel your gaze linger on him as he turned back to his desk, finding his place with practised ease as he resumed the laborious task of tuning the metalwork of his latest design.
For a moment, silence befell you both. Your company was so eerily quiet that, for the briefest moment, he had forgotten you were there entirely. Still and observant, much unlike the usual fidgeting company of Francoise.
“What are you building?” It was quiet, asked with slightly wide eyes and the aimless wetting of lips that weren't capeable of dryness.
“A machine to help my sister.” His wrist twisted, another bolt tightened.
“Francoise, right?” You had been watching. He nodded, curt, concentration focused elsewhere. “She seems like a nice girl,” your commentary seemed far off, somehow, airy in a way your voice previously hadn’t been. “It’s sad, really. A Hyde is a difficult thing to share a body with.”
His hand froze, eyes shifting where his body did not, watching you from his periphery.
“What do you know of Hydes?”
“My roommate was a Hyde.” Your attention dropped to your lap. He noticed your thumbs rolling over one another, able to interact with your own body where they had failed with the machine – he catalogued the motion away. “I suppose she’s graduated now. I hope she’s okay…”
Isaac set his tool down again. “How long, exactly, have you been here?” This phrasing, he decided, sounded less obtuse than the real intent of asking how long you had been dead.
“I’d say at least fifteen years.”
“Why stay in the tower?”
It was almost bizarre how human your reactions were for a form that no longer possessed muscle nor tissue, a tension settling palpably in your spine.
“It’s quiet here.” It wasn’t hard to tell that it was a stretched truth at best. “I should leave you to your work; I hate to be a distraction.”
His lips parted to protest, curiosity pulling him to learn more, but as he reached forward for your turning shoulder, it didn’t just pass through – you evaporated, melting into air, leaving nothing but your chill behind.
He hadn’t realised just how much the discovery of a ghost in his tower would unravel the precision of his usual routine. But as his mind tore itself from the work in front of him for the fourth time that day (the fifteenth time that week) it was becoming near impossible to ignore. The same muffled line of enquiry repeated itself – why you lingered, how, and, perhaps most uncomfortably, where were you?
It wasn’t that he particularly minded that there was a continuous presence beside him as he worked – although that was in itself a revelation, considering his propensity for solitude – it was more an ache, one he was disconcertingly unfamiliar with.
For never had he craved the company of another being. And yet, impossibly, he found himself craving yours.
He exhaled slowly and picked up his pen again, though even as the nib touched paper, his thoughts had already wandered elsewhere.
“You haven’t put any music on.”
Against his rational self, his lips twitched, pulling up into the suggestion of a smile – cautiously yet alarmingly satisfied. “I couldn’t decide what I wanted,” he said lightly, gesturing toward the gramophone without looking up. “Why don’t you pick something?”
He could sense the hesitation before he turned around, the chill seeping into his bones as you stepped closer, carefully, as if worried he would turn too quickly.
“I can’t.”
He studied you then, turning just enough in his chair to glance back at you, his focus settling on the hands clasped before you, fingers tautly interlaced, slightly hazy at the edges.
“The other night,” he said after a pause, his tone soft but curious, “you were able to stop the record, but couldn’t touch the machine. Now this. Why?”
You tilted your head, a faint echo of a smile ghosting across your lips. “It takes a great deal of effort. I’d been trying to stop the blasted thing for a good while before I managed it.”
“It annoyed you that much?”
“Well, yes,” you replied, voice lilting with something dangerously close to humour. “Especially when it takes you so little effort to change it normally.”
That earned you a quiet laugh – rare but genuine. He looked back at the silent gramophone, then at you again, the corners of his mouth softening as he stood, crossing to the alphabetized stack, and flicked through the well‑worn edges of covers. His hand dipped between them briefly, fishing out a much smaller single, the grey cover torn slightly from the haphazard care with which Francoise treated her collection. A cursory glance told him he had your interest, your neck craning slightly to make out the cover he took great effort in concealing, slipping the disc out and placing it beneath the needle.
The bass sounded strange coming from such an old machine, the cymbal crash a little too harsh, distorted almost. Your lips parted in surprise regardless, hearing Stevie Nicks’ voice for the first time in years.
“Is this—”
He only watched you as you crossed to stand beside him, reading the spinning label, steeling himself against the chill, fighting back the shiver more robustly. This close, he could make out more clearly the softened expressions this form permitted you – the way your eyes, while blank, still softened at the edges, creasing just barely when you smiled and looked up at him. He considered, for a moment, what wonder might really look like on your features had life still driven them. How would your forehead crease when your brows rose? Would you have dimples when you smiled? Nasolabial creases? It was strange how little translated in this form.
“I haven’t heard this one.”
“Francoise tells me it was number one when it was released,” he mused, more of a hum than a formed voice, still distractedly engrossed in your intangible form.
“You got it just for me?”
He snapped from his thoughts as your eyes met his again – wide, flat, and eerie in their observation, offering no reflection of him nor light. “I can’t say it’s regularly in my repertoire, no.”
Your grin widened. “I told you you were sweet, really.”
He didn’t like the way his chest tightened. For a moment, he considered whether or not it should have offended him – someone he knew so little about appearing to know him so intimately. He wished rather suddenly for the song to end, for your enrapture to break, for you to retreat back to your usual arm’s distance and return to your observance, so that he might feel nothing again.
Like a heartbeat drives you mad In the stillness of remembering what you had And what you lost.
Muffled syllables reached his ears, eyes refocusing, an unusual vacancy clearing from his mind. You took his frown, rightly, as him having failed to hear you, your lips repeating with a cursory nod toward the turntable.
“The lyrics… they’re just ironic, I suppose.”
“Very Poe of her,” he scoffed, forcing the autocratic tendencies back into position, taking a subconscious step back regardless. “But I would hardly call this second existence of yours 'loss'.”
What little emotion your face performed fell. “What?”
“You don’t think that to overcome that which sets the boundary of life is extraordinary?”
“No. I do not.” You turned sourly, a pained scoff sounding unnatural, lacking the air it needed to land fully.
“To defy death?” He stepped so as to linger in your periphery again – the effort of it unbecoming but essential, his curiosity with the fine line between death and deliberate control over it bettering him once more. “To linger beyond the—”
“Am I supposed to be grateful to have survived this?”
The interruption cut through him like a blade, your voice trembling not with weakness but with something far fiercer, angrier. The coolness that seemed to cling to you only deepened, the hairs on the backs of his wrists standing against it.
“I don’t understand why you’re—”
“No, Isaac.” You turned to him then, your voice low, your expression unreadable. “You don’t understand.” You glanced down at your hands, at the faint shimmer of them, the way light slipped through your fingers. “You think I linger intentionally,” you said, almost to yourself. “But this isn’t existence, Isaac. It’s just the echo of it.”
He had no reply – none that didn’t sound cruel or hollow, at the very least – so he stayed silent, his throat tight, clogged with irritation more than concession. You turned regardless, as if to storm back into the recesses of the stone, pausing only to glance at him once, that strange vacuity of your face rendering you entirely unreadable.
“You ought to be careful. Your obsession with dictating that which should be out of our hands will not end well.”
You vanished with a step, the chill subsiding moments later, dissipating through his skin. His tongue rolled against his cheek, frozen for a moment in his ignorance, the inability to understand why anyone would desire death, not seek to control it, mad, frankly. He tore the single from the platter, the needle scratching harshly against his ears.
The Nightshade library held books on every occult subject the mind could think of, stretching far beyond the basic curriculum, yet not one of the tomes Issac pulled mentioned a thing about why some souls continued to linger among the living.
He did not often find it within himself to care for others outside of those he considered his family – his sister and Gomez almost exclusively – but he considered these to be extenuating circumstances, for there had never been a conundrum to plague his mind that had been as nightmarishly beautiful as the ghost of Iago tower.
Dust billowed in the lamplight as he yanked another heavy tome free. Gomez had the audacity to cough, slunk along one of the old sofas, as if he weren’t currently filling his lungs with cigar smoke.
“Isaac, what are you looking for? You’re driving me mad.”
He didn’t answer immediately. He snapped a book shut, replaced it crookedly, and reached for another. “What do you know of ghosts?”
Gomez raised an eyebrow, smoke curling lazily from his cigar. “My uncle Spector is a ghost! Fine fellow, Spector.”
He turned, brow furrowed. “Spector? Your uncle Spector became a ghost?”
“Fantastic foresight, wasn’t it?” Gomez chuckled. He tugged the cigar case from his breast pocket, offering it generally in Isaac’s direction – a constant habit, even when Isaac declined every time. His body had been through enough to add failing lungs to the mix.
He only frowned, his eyes scanning another line of faded ink. “How is it they stick around? Not everyone becomes one, evidently.”
Gomez sat up straighter, his expression turning oddly tender. “In Spector’s case, he was desperate to cling on. Insatiable, really – it’s passion to be admired! Death simply couldn’t tame him.”
Isaac paused mid-page. “And in others?”
Gomez’s smile dimmed slightly. He leaned back, eyes unfocused. “From what I understand of it, their ends were far from pleasant.” He exhaled, the smoke forming ghostly tendrils above them. Isaac closed the book with a dull thud.
“Where has all of this come from, anyway? The occult has never interested you in such detail,” Gomez asked, watching him carefully.
He stood still for a moment longer, fingers pressed against the worn leather cover. “It doesn’t matter.”
But it did matter, it mattered immensely.
“It’s been a week! I was starting to wonder where you were.” Your voice materialized before your body did, seeping into the air as it cooled around him. His cheeks warmed regardless, the gentle lilt of your tone oddly affectionate.
He huffed, straightening his arms for his coat to slide from his shoulders. “I thought you would be angry with me.”
Your smile was tight but no less sincere. “I am. But you just didn’t understand. It’s okay.”
His coat floated to its hook, gaze softening, a pang of something morbid in his stomach. “I do now.”
You tilted your head, puzzled as his fingers busied themselves flicking through his vinyls, tugging one from its sleeve and setting the needle. “As for being late, my studies took longer than I anticipated.” It was hummed, more detached than he perhaps meant it to be.
“I didn’t think you had to study?”
He chuckled more loudly than he intended to, cheeks creasing with a smile. He didn’t dignify the question with an answer. The needle dropped with a soft crackle, and the room filled with the swell of strings. He had decided on a waltz – seldom played, but something in the odd familiarity of your company seemed to demand something lighter than the usual symphonies, and he was not about to give in to your requests for 'something more modern' again. Strauss would suffice.
He sensed your protest before you even voiced it — “It’s not Dvořák.”
You scoffed at his poor reasoning. “Okay, I’ll take it. It’s just… you can’t exactly dance to this sort of stuff.”
His lips curved faintly. “That is exactly why it was written – to dance to.”
“To waltz to. Who knows how to do that anymore?”
“I do,” he said simply, rolling his sleeves up.
“Oh yeah?” It wasn’t that it was impossible to believe. The thick signet ring that sat so proudly on his right hand, the well-tailored shirts, and a propensity for dressing well that leaned into the territory of vanity hardly screamed a childhood lacking in financial security. Etiquette lessons weren’t all that far-fetched, even if he had no kind words for the extension of his family beside his sister. “Show me.”
He hesitated, hand lingering near the gramophone, then sighed and pushed back a lock of hair that had fallen loose, tucking it neatly behind his ear. “Come here, then.”
“Excuse me?” Your voice rippled, half surprise, half amusement.
“Well, I need a partner.”
A pause, longer this time, before your tone softened. “Isaac, I can’t touch—”
“You don’t need to. Besides, it will be nice not to have someone stand on my toes, and you seem dressed for the occasion.” He extended a hand toward the emptiness, careful eyes watching as you adjusted the shady fabric of the dress at your chest, tugging the material closer, smoothing it down with twitching fingers as if suddenly self-concious, but stepping closer regardless.
He wasn’t sure what he expected from your touch. It started as a faint prickle – not quite contact, more suggestion than substance. The numbness was unmistakable, as if he had dipped his fingers in ice water and left them there too long, the tension crawling up his tendons, stiffening his fingers, your hand hovering without pressure.
His first step moved without you, taking a moment for your mind to keep up with his body, following his lead without his grip to guide you, hovering just barely above the insensate curve of your waist. Pausing, his lips parted as if to assure, but he hesitated as your eyes closed, pulling in another habitual yet senseless inhale, as if willing your immaterial body to cooperate.
He shifted, the second step followed – a tentative glide. He felt it then: Not the warmth of flesh, but the brush of presence, subtle and insistently real. Your hand weighed in his, the shape of your waist pressed against the palm of the other, and for a moment, his breath caught, fingers tensed and pressed into you, as if some desperate call within him to feel you had finally been answered, as if his grip alone could be the thing to hold you here. A third step followed, only for the sensation to fade. The chill set back in, and his fingers slipped through the perimeter of your form.
He said nothing besides gentle prompts, muttering, allowing you to fall more comfortably into following, each slow turn bubbling with laughter – nervous at first, deepening into creasing smiles as your confidence bloomed.
“It’s funny, how it keeps time.” You seemed to speak without much thought, words seeping from between laughs, far less conscious of missing some steps, he noticed, as you realized he would grin at you regardless.
“What does?” His head tilted slightly as he prompted you to turn.
“Your heart.” He looked at you, dumbfounded for a moment, his steps slowing. It took you a moment to slow with him, your feet faltering as he stilled. “I may have… peeked,” you admitted softly, the corners of your mouth twitching as you glanced up at him. “When your sister helps you clean it sometimes.”
A brow rose, but his smile barely wavered. “You 'peeked'?”
“Don’t look at me like that,” you said, laughing, stepping away from him just barely. “I was curious.”
He tilted his head again, thoughtful, a slow grin spreading across his face. “Do you want to see it properly?”
You didn’t answer immediately, lips parting, hesitating before you finally tilted your head in subtle agreement. His fingers worked the buttons of his shirt slowly, peeling the fabric away, bunching it between his fingers to the left of the clockwork masterpiece lodged in his ribcage. “My first real work of any importance.”
For a moment, he dared not breathe, watching as you leaned closer, desperate to fend off the shiver that sent goosebumps across his exposed skin, setting around the latticework like a burn. Your eyes never gave anything away, he realized, yet now, so close, he could almost imagine the glint of curiosity – the way your pupils might have expanded as you drew nearer, taking in the small clockwork mechanisms that kept him alive.
“It’s beautiful—” The words were little more than a sigh. His throat tightened at the reverence in your voice, a sensation difficult to swallow.
Your fingers rose on instinct, as if forgetting for a moment the predicament that plagued you. He noticed nothing at first, until the icy brush caught the scarred skin, clawing into the recesses of the metal. The blur of pain dragged a sharp, involuntary gasp from his lungs. His body stumbled back on instinct, recoiling against the shock until you stood at arm’s reach again, the cold lingering but hollow now, an ache that throbbed beneath the skin.
Your eyes widened, and you stepped back instinctively, an ache swelling where a heart would have raced, sharp and painful. “Isaac! I’m sorry, I didn’t—”
You couldn’t finish your sentence. His name resounded from the staircase: Francoise. His fingers moved quickly to close the buttons, fumbling as he tried to steady himself.
“It’s okay, I’m okay—” he rushed to quiet you, his voice strained but firm. The name was called again, and he gave a strained acknowledgment, glancing toward the staircase as the sound of footsteps grew louder.
As he turned back, the invitation to stay – to meet his sister – hovered on his lips. But it was too late. You had vanished.
It hadn’t been hard to source old student records. The dusty record room was hardly touched by staff beyond lugging the current graduating year’s files in to stash on derelict shelves at the end of each academic year. He counted back the years; fifteen at first, then sixteen, until, at seventeen years past, he found you: the file out of alphabetical order, tucked carelessly at the back, the name tag torn crudely from the edge of the folder.
The paper-clipped picture came loose easily. His thumb carded over the pristine edges, the face staring back at him uncanny, almost, in its liveliness. The smile he had seen but a glimmer of was more rounded, brighter, tugging at your cheeks. It took an unusual amount of effort to pull his eyes away from your visage, darting instead over the grades, the class years, the notes. They were impressive – straight As, for the most part, every note positive: kind, smart, intuitive – until they stopped.
He had half expected to find something, anything, about the events of your death – the reason, the date. His forehead creased at the erasure. As if you had simply ceased to exist. Your life, tucked away carelessly. The library newspapers had been the same: no investigations, no press, no obituary. Yearbooks followed much the same pattern – nothing made sense. The dress, the tower, the secrets, the apparently undocumented barbaric end to a girl otherwise so innocent.
Bile rose, burning his oesophagus as he snapped the file closed, the picture still lodged firmly between his fingers. He stood for a moment, the folder creasing in his grip as he tucked it crudely between the fabric of his shirt and blazer, curving it against his body, his arm folding neatly across it. His feet carried him beyond the dust before he could consider it much longer, thoughts wandering between curiosity and rage, the unknown weighing feverishly in his mind.
He barely stopped, scaling the stairs two at a time, the door opening ahead of him. He had been right in his presumption that Morticia would be holed away in his dorm; the absence of Gomez was, however, uncalculated.
“I need your help.”
“Well, hello to you too, Isaac. Gomez will be back in a—”
“I need your sight.” She only glanced up from her book, fingers pausing over the half-turned page. He yanked the file quickly from its concealment, holding it aloft, hanging tensely from outstretched fingers. “I need to know what happened to this student.”
Morticia’s fingers wrapped far more delicately around the dusty edges, waiting for his relinquished grip before flicking through the pages. His now-empty fingers sought strange comfort in the guarded picture in his pocket.
“It doesn’t always work like that, Isaac, you know tha—”
“I need you to try.” His tongue felt uncomfortably heavy, pressing dryly against the roof of his mouth. Such desperation was something he was keenly unfamiliar with; it reared its head rarely, when at work, pressing against his chest in some cruel mockery of his old heart’s failings. “She died seventeen years ago. I need to know how – why.”
Morticia’s slow exhale followed her gaze settling on the beige file front. “That sounds like a raven’s work—” her eyes snapped to his, silencing the protest on his tongue, “—but I can try.”
“Thank you.”
Her gaze widened, brow raised, the foreign words settling somewhere uncomfortable before she sat straighter, pressing the file flat between her palms. She sat quietly, shutting out his tense presence, held on the precipice. Her brow creased, lips taut, but only for a moment, before she gasped, a rush of air pulling into her lungs, wide eyes blinking open as if struggling to focus on the angles of his face.
“She was in love,” her throat tensed with the effort of swallowing, “she was happy, but her heart was broken.” Isaac frowned, the reasoning too fanciful, too tame to warrant the pause in your notes. “She was betrayed by the one she trusted most,” she murmured, eyes far away. “Wounded – but not finished. It loops back on itself somehow, as if there’s still room for her, somehow."
Her eyes narrowed, pulling the file in against her, edging it from his reach. "What is this about, Isaac?"
Morticia's suspicions of him were tiring at the best of times. An outstretched hand called the file back to him roughly, the edge catching her palm, ethcing a shallow cut into the skin.
"Nothing. Simple curiosity." He turned on his heel, already making for the corridors again, his mind pieceing it together bit by bit, fragments settling, forming a picture.
"Gomez told me."
Against his better judgement, he paused, hovering on the threshold, glancing back over his shoulder, face blank, eyes offering nothing but a warning.
"Your sudden interest in ghosts?" her eyes set, steely. "It's her, isn't it?"
He pressed on before dignifying her with an answer.
“You were murdered, weren’t you?”
His chest heaved from the effort of having taken the stairs rather than waiting for the geriatric elevator. The words were called into nothingness, his eyes darting wildly around the workshop, anxious to see but a glimpse of you. His call seemed to pull you from the veil, your eyes fixing on the now-creased file in his grip.
“Isaac, stop—”
He stepped closer, half aware of his state, hair tugged roughly until curls stood at all angles—the result of anxious fingers. “Someone lured you here.” His gaze dropped just briefly; the shadow on your chest, the roughly arranged fabric – it made sense now. Your heart had been broken, severed. Literally. “He hurt you, he—” he swallowed against his anger, “—the school covered it up.”
“Isaac!”
“Your body is still here, isn’t it? That’s why you can’t leave.” He was growing incessant, each step caging your incorporeality, towering in such a way that you felt alive again – trapped with the boy you had thought loved you. “Who was it?”
The dim lamp he left on for you flickered, brightening all too suddenly before popping, shrouding you both in shadow. The rain hammering against the clockface catching the occasional lightening strike.
Your artificial breath caught with a roll of thunder, and in its stoppage, you were lost, melting away until nothing but air remained again. He cursed then, the file tossed to his desk, fingers digging into the roots of his hair, dragging the strands back until they tugged against his forehead, stretching the skin painfully, released only with a shuddering breath.
Sleep escaped him that night, and the next two. Sitting hunched over the roughly drawn plans sprawled across the desk. Intricate designs, drawn and redrawn again, small cogs hastily assembled only to be torn apart and reconfigured. He kept only one light illuminating the room, its soft glow just enough to work by – afraid, in part, that it might disturb you to have anything brighter. Although he was sure that you did not sleep.
Your chill hadn’t settled across his shoulders since you had disappeared, an uncomfortable warmth in its place. It put into sharp focus just how often you had graced him with your unknown presence previously, acclimatizing him to the unearthly cold that he had put down to the drafty brick walls.
Tightening the final bolt brought the ticking mechanism to life, the smaller replica rattling softly in his palm, catching the light as the concertina pumps stretched and compressed, pumpking nothing but air.
His fingers tensed with sudden numbness, a shiver racking his tendons, as if something had passed through them, curious, restless. His breath hitched, your hand, he presumed, resting beside his.
“I didn’t mean to upset you.” It was soft, as if worried speaking too harshly would startle whatever presence you offered him. “I want to help.”
He swallowed past the lump in his throat, feeling the sudden shift beside him, your fingers moving across his again, the alien pattern not quite pressure, but not hollow, either, “I think I might know how to bring you back.”
He tensed, almost afraid to look up as you appeared beside him, your hand hovering beside his, the desire to reach out, to feel the skin of the girl in the photo obscene, impossible, tugging at the less rational edges of his mind.
“It’s like yours.” It was a simple observation, yet it wrenched at his chest regardless.
The gold-toned metalwork continued to tick in his hand, the smaller heart just as intricate, but refined, lacking the puerile mistakes of his younger, less experienced mind: “It’s better.”
He found it within himself to look up, then, as you straightened yourself and stepped back carefully from his workbench, fading softly into shadow until your edges blurred. It was funny, he thought, how you swallowed despite the redundancy of the act.
“It was the Rave’n,” you said at last, the words trembling in the space between you. “He was my date.” He placed the mechanism down softly, the ticking echoing off the wooden desk. His full attention settled on the nervous twitch of your nail against your thumb. The skin didn’t peel.
“He was a normie I’d met at an outreach day a year prior. Sweet, sensible, doting.” The chill deepened, settling somewhere uncomfortably close to his bones. Your face twisted, moving through the ingrained motions of crying without the facilities to produce tears. “He drew me here, after the dance, so sweetly, I thought we—“ the sound hiccuped, never before had Isaac itched to touch another, yet that veil still stood between you, demanding him stay removed, imprisoned by his own corporeality.
“I learned much later that the school had covered it up.” Your tone twisted, hardening itself against the bitterness. The cold deepened still, his breath now visible, each controlled puff curling from his lips like smoke. “They didn’t want the scandal, the town was more than happy to agree.” Your voice died, eyes unable to find his, settled instead on the clockwork heart catching the angled light.
"If you want me to help, I need to know where you are."
He could feel your hesitation, the subtle withdraw further into shadow, before, uexpectedly: “Come with me.”
He realised that he had never been to the lowest parts of the tower before, an old hatch disappearing into the tunnels and caverns that littered the foundations of the school, had gone unnoticed, disguised by thick dust and old crates. He moved them as instructed, reaching instinctively for your hand to balance you as you paused at the top of the revealed stairs. His fingers tightened with the faux pas as you smiled, tiredly, and descended.
The ceilings were lower here, so much so that he had to crane his neck to avoid knocking his skull, the occasional curl catching on a snag in the beamed roof.
It was not often that Isaac Night was disturbed, but his steps slowed as he reached the perimeter of the stain – dark, barely red after years of oxidation. Yet you barely faltered, from what he could tell, your eyes never dropped below your waist.
He stepped over each faded smear, as if to step on the vestiges of your life would have hurt you, disrespected the final remnants of your cruel fate. He stopped as you did, so close his shoulder would have brushed yours had you had sustenance. His head stooped against the eaves, following your gaze down, settling on the scratched floorboards, edges splintered from rushed fingernails.
“I can’t imagine there is much of me left.”
He sank to his haunches slowly, bare fingertips dragging slowly over the worn wood. He could feel you beneath it, the shape of your bones.
“Go,” he pushed softly, strained eyes remaining fixed where his fingers met the floor, “you don’t have to see this.”
“Don’t hurt me, please.”
His gaze softened, searching until they caught yours – steady, unflinching. “I would never,” he said, almost reverently.
He waited beyond your vanishing until your chill had subsided, replaced with what he predicted to be normal for the cellars beneath the tower before lifting the panels, stacking them with careful shifts of his fingers. It had been 17 years, and yet more of your remained than he had expected, as if your tether to this world had slowed the process, held you in stasis.
There was a strange beauty to it, the way your cheeks had hollowed, swallowed under the weight of time. Even beneath the decay, he could still trace the aching grace of your features: the curve of your lips, half-ruined by the wear of skin and muscle; the tangle of hair, matted with dust and what remained of blood. And there, shrouded in the torn remnants of your once-fine, blood-dyed dress, lay the wound that had so violently ended your life: the cruel gash that split through your heart, beside the darkened void where your ribs had given way.
It was difficult, lifting you from the hollow recesses of the floor, but the required intimacy of his task demanded that he used nothing but his hands. To lift you with anything but would, in his mind, have been sacrilege, too inhumane, too impersonal to a body that had not known kindness in so many years.
It was no great challenge beyond that to cradle you to him, your Rave’n dress in a worse state than your body. He paused a moment, the hand below your knees flexing for a moment, power tugging the larger swathes of fabric closer across your body, folding them across you, between you, so as to protect the sanctity of your shape.
It was a strange relief, when he reached the workshop, that you were not there. Laying you out on the platform initially designed for his sister, as if in some delayed mourning, but he couldn't delay. The ritual of his work consumed him – the slide of gloves over his fingers, the soft, magnetic pull of the scalpel to his palm, the tick of the clockwork heart still echoing faintly from the desk.
“Is that it?”
His head lifted, the faintest crease forming between his brows as his hands paused mid-motion, the sheet he had pulled over your body dropping from his fingers.
“It?” he echoed softly.
Your nod was slight, the loosest gesture to the shape beneath the sheet – one he almost missed. “The body.”
He bristled at that. The word struck him, the impersonality of it unsettling. “Your body,” he corrected. “Yes.”
Your lips didn’t lift from their grim line. “It doesn’t feel like mine anymore.”
He stared down at the shape of you, the suggestion of form beneath. “It will,” he murmured, almost to himself. “Soon.” Silence held for a moment longer, broken only by the soft tick of the second heart beneath the sheet.
“What are you going to do?”
He hesitated. The answer – one that usually would have spilled out of him with excitement, pride even – caught in his throat. The air felt too heavy for his usual rhetoric. “Reanimation,” he said at last.
“Will it hurt?”
He drew in a slow breath. “I don’t think so,” he admitted, voice low. For once, the truth carried no pretense of control. His eyes flicked back toward where you stood, uneasily, always an arm’s length away. “It won’t be intentional,” he added, quieter still. “Nor will it last. Be sure of that.”
“And after that?”
“If my theory is correct,” he busied his hands with the machine’s panel; the brief rewiring it had taken to up the voltage, change the parameters of what he had needed for his sister to this had been simple, but looking at you in that moment was not, “then it should have taken a matter of days, maybe a week, for you to be as you were.”
“But it’s deca—”
“You—” he reaffirmed, jaw tightening against your sordid defamation of your physical form, “—will be restored. If you trust me.”
At last he glanced back up, holding your eyes intently, searching aimlessly for a hint of trepidation he knew you could not show. “Do you trust me?”
It took a moment, although it was perhaps shorter, he calculated, than it felt, for you to nod. “I trust you, Isaac.”
He flipped the first switch. The electricity surged.
The light drizzle was refreshing against his cheeks. It reminded him of just how long he had spent indoors, the cool water rolling over the cold-pinched skin, catching on the apex of his lips.
It was only as the car he leaned against beeped and unlocked that he turned away from the sky, leather-gloved hands pulling from his coat pockets.
“Hey, man, that’s my car!”
The aggression, so assured, so sudden, made him smile.
“I know.”
The man faltered, frown etched deep into his forehead. The last 17 years had been satisfyingly cruel, it seemed, weighing more like 30 on his features. He supposed that was what guilt did to a man less calculating than himself.
“I’ve been waiting for you. They don’t allow under-21s inside, you see.”
The man scoffed, shaking his head as he twisted his keys around his fingers and stepped toward the car again.
“Look buddy, I ain’t in the business of buying kids drinks. Now beat it—“
“Oh I’m not here for alcohol. I’m here for food.”
The frown returned, growing more perplexed by the second. He pushed himself from the car, self-satisfied grin not once wavering as his fingers twitched. It took no effort at all to have the excuse of a man pressed against the driver’s door, feet just high enough from the ground to instill panic, the air tightening around his throat. The croak of something that sounded like a curse drowned out by the scuffling against metalwork.
Isaac huffed, stepping just close enough to see the steady popping of blood vessels in the whites of his eyes. “What the fuck are you—“
The murmur of your name silenced him, the thrashing ceasing, muscles tensing under a different strain. Isaac dropped him, stepping back as he collapsed to his knees in the dirt.
“I don’t know who you’re talking about.”
Another twitch of his fingers had the man pinned by the throat once again, knees bent awkwardly beneath him still as his back arched into the car.
“Wrong answer.” The man’s fingers clawed at his throat to no avail, the dirty nails opening the skin without thought, raking red lines through ill-maintained stubble. “Now I know the means, but the motive? I’ll need you to piece that bit together for me.”
Gasping remnants of words struggled past the block on his throat, more denial. The pressure increased, Isaac’s jaw set more firmly, the frustration looping back on itself, doubling over, resettling in the hollow of his throat.
Then, finally: “Why do you care about her, anyway? She’s dead.”
The spark of recognition tugged at his cheek, self-satisfaction manifesting in a smirk. He stepped closer, movements precise, hands flicking the wool of his coat behind him nearly as he crouched to fall level to the dilated pupils.
“Why?”
The pressure tightened, just briefly enough to serve as a reminder, a satisfying croak forced from the voice box under strain followed quickly by a gulp for air.
“All you outcast freaks are the same–“ Isaac should have known better than to have released too much force, the man’s lips curling before hurling spit across his cheek. The base tantrum was quickly over-corrected, pressure against his throat and jaw, this time, holding his lips sealed. The desperate attempt for breath was too much for his nose alone to satisfy.
He only laughed, maniacal, tugging his sleeve over his palm and wiping at the smear. Of course he had no imaginative cause – he had reduced you to little more than a trophy.
“You know, I thank you for your cooperation, now—“ he straightened himself, forcing the man’s head back further, tightening his phantom grip, “—I’m afraid I’ll have to speed this up, I’m late for my darling’s dinner.”
The man’s eyes widened for just a moment, met only with the sly tug of Isaac’s grin, before a twisting wrist snagged his neck to the side, a sudden crunch slackening his features, ending the struggle.
It had been harder to remove the brain in the carpark than he had expected, but as with many endeavours, the anticipation of reward made the effort of washing the blood from his cheek all the more worth it.
He glanced at your reflection through the mirror as he dragged the towel over his damp face, the healing skin across your cheek, the thickening hair.
This dress fitted you far better, changed into as soon as you had regained your facilities, his refusal to so much as brush your healing skin paramount, obsessive almost. It was not, though you had questioned it as your voice returned to you, out of disgust. He had yet to form an answer as to why it had seemed impossible even then for him to extend any closer than that careful arm’s length you had both crossed only twice.
He wouldn’t admit it, and on several occasions had pushed it down to some dark recess behind his ribs, but he had wondered if only briefly, if this sentinel guardsmanship had been fear. Not, again, of your not-yet-regenerated body, but to be close without the burning cold he had grown so accustomed to.
For without it, would it all have felt more real? Or simply too much like indulgence? Moreover, how would a body, starved of touch for nigh on two decades, and of love for far longer, cope under the weight of his true admiration?
Your head lifted, chin stained with his sin, mouth full, the mottled skin of your throat regaining color, your lips healing.
He smiled.
He heard the grammarphone only as the elevator came to a stop, his hand resting on the gate for a moment as he listened to the soft piano that warbled from the old bell. A song he was not familiar with, soft, far too fanciful to be his.
To you, I’ll never be cold ‘Cause when I feel that when I’m with you It’s alright, I know it’s right
He opened the gate slowly, fingers lingering on the metal work as he stepped out, cautious eyes glancing over the seemingly empty workshop, your empty cot, his unusually tidy desk.
“Isaac!”
A wide smile tugged at your cheeks as you stepped from around a corner, a box balanced on your hip – old parts he had meant to tidy away weeks ago.
His breath caught, lips falling slack as he took you in – each crease in your skin, the swell of your cheeks, the way your eyes lit up with your smile. The girl in the picture actualised in completion at last. Every detail he had pondered, hypothesised, material before him.
“I hope you don’t mind, the A side was damaged, so I’ve just kinda had this one on repeat— Isaac?”
You set the box down, head tilted.
No right part of his mind was in control as he closed the gap between you, inspecting the map of your fully restored features, correcting his assumptions, adding to his conclusions, drawing and redrawing the lines in his minds eye.
He was so engrossed in his assessment he hadn’t noticed your lifting hand until he felt the brush of your fingers against his. The shock startling, his hand pulling back as if you had burned him. The weight of anticipation clouding the air.
“You can touch me, you know.”
His breath caught. “But—”
“I haven’t held another person’s hand in seventeen years.” Your voice was almost a whisper. “I’d quite like to hold yours.”
He swallowed, the motion rough, visible in the line of his throat. His hand rose between you almost mechanically, the motion stilted, uncertain
It was the lightest touch — the barest suggestion of contact. Your fingers brushed against his outstretched palm, trailing slowly along the dip at the base of his thumb, following the quiet geography of his skin. The touch was barely there, and yet it undid him.
The lightness of it permitted reprieve when you needed it. You hesitated, breath caught, before instinct drew you closer – pressing until your palm lay flat against his, fingers splayed against his own, as if in shared prayer before they curled, lacing through his, the tremor in your hands matched only by his.
And then you collapsed into him. The shock of it forced him back a few uneven steps, his body tensing beneath the sudden, impossible weight of you – warm, real, alive. A sound broke from him, half laugh, half sob, as though his body could not decide what to feel first.
His free hand rose without thought, finding the back of your neck, steadying you – steadying himself – pulling you closer until your forehead tucked firmly the hollow of his shoulder.
He held you there, the twin ticking of clockwork hearts echoing faintly between your chests. A slow inhale – your scent, faint and strange and familiar all at once – filled his lungs.
He closed his eyes and sighed, the sound trembling in the quiet. For the first time in longer than either of you could remember, neither of you felt alone.
𝕝𝕚𝕜𝕖, 𝕔𝕠𝕞𝕞𝕖𝕟𝕥, 𝕣𝕖𝕓𝕝𝕠𝕘
🏷️ @sabrinasonlyangel2 @osball @flirtysnakes @whateverali28 @analovesmarvel @mysticwitchcraftco @purplefluffycows @callsignwidow
[random side notes: Firstly, uncle spector is a real Addams family character from the 90s series who is, in fact, a ghost. Secondly, the Fleetwood Mac single Isaac steals from Francoise is the 1977 Dreams single, of which Songbird really was the B side. And yes. He does get reader the full album after the events of this fic]
