a heart like yours // chelsey

One day, the world will never have known her name.

They will forget it like how an old man’s memory forgets the lyrics to his favorite song. They will forget it like how a woman forgets the kisses of an ex-lover. They will forget it like how syllables and sounds dance on the tip of a tongue while never producing the intended word. They will forget it like how they forgot everyone that came before her.

Tomorrow, the world will have more to mourn.

More blood will be shed, more tears will be cried, more last words will be spoken. In this world, grief is two mirrors pointed at each other - infinite, unending, everlasting.

Percy Delacroix falls and a cannon booms for her. Miles and miles and miles away, Edgar the Orphan drinks until Percy’s young face blends into Laila’s, until old death is new death and healed scars bleed again.

It rains.

Seasons will wash away and kill and rejuvenate the earth. Cells will die and be replenished. Life circles on and on and on, without care for what it’s left behind or for what it’s heading towards. The world will shed the memory of her touch like dead skin.

He closes the front door of Sycamore House behind him gently. He never used to do that before.

(Before, there was too much noise and chaos within the collapsing, rotting walls. A slammed door meant nothing to the orphans who lived behind it. Before, things were much harder to break.)

One day, the world will forget. And, when all is said and done, Edgar will forget her, too.

No, he thinks as it rains. The sky grieves for another dead, little girl, and Edgar mourns with it - although not for the same one. Send the house up in flames, again. Let another name be called. Have another Percy die. Just don’t let me forget her. It’s a worthy, reasonable sacrifice, he thinks, compared to everything he’s already sacrificed.

Like indulgence, or freedom, or -

“What are you doing out here?”

- love.

She presses a blanket around his shoulders, heavy and soaked and useless in this rain. The action warms him up, even if only by a fraction, anyway. Gray sheets of water divide them, and he has to squint to clearly make out her face.

“You’ll catch a cold,” she says.

“I’ve caught worse.” He hesitates for a second before pulling the blanket open in her direction and making a gesture for her to come closer. “C’mere. ”

The rain is too loud for her to hear the hitch in his breath.

(Hopefully.)

Edgar knows a lot about burning. He’s felt it in fires that devoured his home, in the swing of his fist as it connected with a boy’s jaw, in the gulp of his fifth glass of whiskey for the night. He was born from fires, from burning, and when the fire extinguished, he was an orphan to its ashes.

He knows little of warmth. Other than the fact that it must feel smaller, gentler, and something like this: Bodies tucked close together, arms clumsily wrapped around shoulders, heartbeats wildly banging against ribcages. The warmth trickles down through him, in a way that reminds him to breathe. To see. To live. To be honest. With Lilith this close to him, he can’t not be honest.

“Rain helps me think,” he says after a few beats of silence, answering her first question in a way that he hopes sounds like “Rain forces me to remember.”

Lilith has the kind of heart that Edgar could never understand.

Not pure or untainted - because Ripred knows they’ve each had their own fair share of poison, vials of it passed around a dinner table far more often than meals ever were - but soft in the face of hardness. Light against heavy times. Expanding, despite the cage that contained it. Edgar stands still in the middle of a forest and Lilith’s heart is a vine that he let grow around his ankles until he could no longer move if he wanted to.

“Everything here reminds me of them,” she says quietly, the vines budding around his shins, and Edgar is grateful that she understands him even if only in so little words.

She has always understood him, if he thinks about it, because her place in Sycamore House has always paralleled his. Even trumped his. Why would the kids ever look up to him when they had her? Edgar was destined from birth to be a crumbling fortress, a door-step baby with nothing but a hole in the ground to serve as a front-door. And Lilith had always been the lighthouse. Her heart is full of things that shine and guide and shelter.

He could never be a part of that.

Suddenly, Edgar is all too aware of everything. The raindrops dripping from his forehead and into his eyes. The blanket sopping heavily around their shoulders. The heat of Lilith’s shoulder pressed against his.

She takes his hand.

He couldn’t move if he wanted to.

“You don’t have to stay,” she says. “I know it’s hurting you.”

Her soft, shining heart. A lighthouse in a storm. She understands him, even if only in so little words.

“It’d hurt me more to leave.”

He doesn’t mean to, but everything that comes out of Edgar these days is broken and vulnerable and angry (what is he, really, if not any of those things?), so he doesn’t say it so much as he spits it out. The words are quietly hostile, like lightning without the thunder. A threat. It is shame and guilt bubbling up in his gut like a pair of forgotten friends, while he lets what’s left of his fortress crumble over those feelings, and hatred, his only defense mechanism, fuels him instead. A buried part of him hopes that the venom gets trampled out from the rain.


“After all these years, and you still don’t know me?” he lies.

He’s always prided himself for being unknowable. A secret of a boy collecting the curious stares of people who crossed the street just to avoid him, like looking at him too long would be like looking into the sun. After a while, they would be forced to blink away, to wash out the pity and the queerest sense of unfathomable guilt - for reasons unknown to them - that dried out their blinded eyes. Where his heart should’ve been, Edgar wore his collection like badges on his sleeve. Anyone could win medals for spelling bees or for beating the school record for the fastest mile, but who among him could equally boast about Edgar’s feats? He was impenetrable. Impossible.

He wasn’t always proud.

Growing up with a mad woman and with the ghosts of parents he’d never know, pride was once a foreign language in a foreign continent in a foreign galaxy. A boy who hides in closets and cries himself to sleep amongst the moth-eaten sweaters is not proud - but, if anything, he is a survivor. And survival can be born from shame, and shame can spawn pride. It is only human nature that this must be so.

And so people would glance their curious glances at him, and he’d deflect it with the glassiness in his eyes, with the stoniness of his stance, until curiosity spawned guilt, and guilt spawned indifference. Defense mechanisms. Human nature. He hated them all for it.

No one is curious about orphans.

They are known, pitiable things. Figures forever lost to the past, always chasing after the shadows of dead or abandoned or forgotten parents. They are open books; where their hearts should be, they wear desperation and defeat on their sleeves. This is a rule of thumb, of sorts, of course, of all things that orphans have lost, this is not one of them: the undeniable fact of knowing they must move on with their lives.

But, Edgar has always prided himself for never being one to follow the rules.

And, Lilith knows this - she must, for they have spent their entire lives silently building an impossible wall of rules themselves, the impossible thing stretching out for miles and miles between them. No affection, no jealousy, no wearing each other’s hearts on their sleeves. And here was Edgar, the rule breaker, tearing that wall down brick by brick himself. She knows him, and that simple act is also an impossible thing.

Edgar, still angry and bitter and repulsed with himself, stares down at Lilith, daring her to say otherwise, his jaw set and his fist (the one that she isn’t holding) clenched. (Defense mechanisms. Human nature. He hates himself for it.) Even when his blinded eyes begin to beg him to blink away, he watches her cautious figure anyway, and instead pushes away that queerest sense of unfathomable guilt.

“I know you don’t like fairy tales,” she breathes, and the hurricane he stood at the center of slows to a stop, slides between the gaps of her words, and falls to the ground in a drizzle. "I know you can't seem to keep your dirty clothes off the floor no matter how often I mention it."

He doesn’t mean to, but his fist unclenches, the fingers slowly rolling out from the indents they’ve pressed into his palm like they’ve forgotten what it’s like to not be angry.

She continues, her speech streaming endlessly, every word a grenade she chucks at him just to wait and see if it’ll explode. Edgar wants to wait and see, too. He’s lived through a lot; what’s to say that he won’t be able to live through this, too?

But, then -

“I also know, if you leave - I’ll miss you.”

And, suddenly, his pride is a heavy thing he doesn’t want to carry, like the blanket sopping wet around both of their shoulders. Useless and unnecessary dead weight. If he sheds it now, though, what would Lilith see?

The guilt pressing back behind his eyes makes him think that she’s probably already seen it.

By instinct (a defense mechanism? human nature? an impossible thing?) he lets go of her hand.

“You don’t -” he starts, his mouth dry despite the rain and the wave of words and speeches and apologies crashing on his tongue. “You don’t . . .” he tries again.

Where his heart should be was a trampled, frightened thing, learning - as all living things must eventually do - to beat again.

He places his hands at either side of her face and kisses her.

You don’t know that I can’t leave without you, he tries to tell her.

He thinks that, maybe, she understands.