Chapter Text
On the first night he’s in no shape to notice, as he isn’t on the third, the fifth. For a good part of the next two weeks he didn’t even get to see the bedroom, with the bus instead summoning up the open moors, which he’d grown used to, and for a good couple days he couldn’t even manage to get through the door, because the room refused to form at all, and would just open a chasm across the floor, that he seriously didn’t feel like venturing into.
But by the fifteenth day Heathcliff manages to calm down, somehow, enough for everything to be in place when he opens the door. He checks the bookshelf, the dresser, the records, to find everything where he left it, from her bottles of ink to his work uniforms. And really, nothing about the room is off until he’s gotten in bed, slid the panel closed behind him, and turned to store her diary safely in the drawers— that’s when the problem becomes apparent: the ledge of the window, where she’d sit to write for hours on end, the carved up wood completely smooth, as if nothing had ever been there.
He touches a hand to it, almost expecting its old scars to resurface under his fingers, the reality after a nightmare, but they do not give. The room doesn’t change once it’s settled, he remembers that. Not by itself, at least.
He reaches under the pillow, for the knife he’s sure to find there, and then he’s reenacting an old scene, as he once watched it from the threshold: her small shape curled up on the side of the mattress, face hidden in the darkness, hands ghostly pale around the dagger, carving in the mahogany, over and over. It hadn’t been the only time, clearly, it would happen whenever the rage towards her brother and the thought of her mother proved to be too much to deal with, but it had been the one he’d seen with his own eyes, a day she’d been so distressed she’d forgotten to close the door to her room. Even so, her strikes quick, methodical, almost timed— a little waltz.
There’s nothing comforting about being in her place now. It feels like indulging in her worst emotions, making her live on in the thought of her pain, of that feeling he always understood so well: the horror with no better outlet than a weapon and a pliable target.
It would be easier to forget about it all, really. Forget her tears, forget his own, remember only the distrust and the impulsiveness and the violence and everything awful they’d grown into. Pretend they’d never owed anything to each other, pretend their time together had never been worth anything. Would do wonders, and he could stop brutalising the furniture, turn around and go to sleep.
And it would be a lie, the coward’s way out. So he brings the blade down onto the wood, right at the centre, and starts putting the memory back into place, something vivid among the vicious cuts:
Catherine Earnshaw
He’s fairly sure he carved it back into the right spot, having slept in this room for nearly a year now, though there’s no way to know for certain now. It’s better than nothing. He reaches back for the diary, forgotten on the comforter, and flips to the start, where she’d filled pages and pages with scrawls just like the ones she’d left on the window: the Edgar family name, and Linton’s in a corner, and his own, alone or next to hers, in any available ink colour, and the most ancient, something dead and buried hidden all the way at the start of a page, a name even older than Heathcliff next to Catherine’s, dutifully erased by a layer of black ink, then replaced with his. He moves back in, knife in hand, and replicates them all where they had been, up to the last one, with all the strange feelings it brings, not forgetting to scratch it back out, as she had.
Then the initials, returning, a bit everywhere over the paper in the space between each name. How she liked to sign books, projects, tree trunks, anything she dreamed of one day getting back from her brother’s grasp:
C.E.
H.C.
He carves them only once, though there were more, but by then the blanket is already covered in wood shavings, and the room has at least returned to what it used to look like at a glance— he’s forced it to.
Force, of course, same as usual. Still nothing better in his repertory, is there? He wipes the ledge clean, though he’ll have to worry about sweeping the floor tomorrow, and lays his hands down on it, waiting for the world to stop spinning.
It’s such a joke. It comes in waves, the pity for her, a child trying to figure out how to live a life without letting herself be forgotten, eaten alive, and the pity for himself, a decade older and still retracing those clumsy steps of hers, trying to figure out how to forgive both of them. He’s left with an imperfect imitation of her handwriting across the hardwood, and the fear that the room will swallow her diary next if he’s not careful, and with it his memories, their past, the entire life he lived up to this point, never to give them back.
But it seems like enough for now, to write her name, to recall her shape, in each form: the shouting and fighting with the child she was, the young lady’s fearsome highs and aching lows, the adult hidden inside her childhood bed, terrified of the marital chamber. Her worst traits that are so often his own, but that never made her any less worth loving, and her old smile in that featureless room, with the wordless request he’d extend that same mercy to himself.
Her open hands and her dark eyes always prowling, searching for something, but finding purchase in his own, resting. Under the rain, through the thunder, by the fireplace.
The weight settles gradually over his body, and Heathcliff wonders if she can in some way feel his presence keeping her company, as the thought of her does to him. The ground looks steady now. He puts down the knife, drops it inside the drawer, and lays back down, to his bed finally welcoming him. The diary finds its way back into his hands, the soft leather lavish to the touch, carrying the faint scent of dried flowers, and he turns it to the window, to try and catch some better lighting. He flips to a random page near the start, it doesn’t matter, sleep isn’t going to come anyway. From the autumn of 976, Catherine concurs,
The moon is high and I cannot sleep.
After the first line are a series of letters, sparse words barely visible, half covered by ink stains, but still recognisable as poetry of some sort, painstakingly copied in the best calligraphy she could manage. The text reprises soon, still in bits and pieces, but legible.
I wish someone else were awake and… well, I wish one person were awake, and we could escape to the rooftop together. I fear the nightmares will come if I sleep, but I fear the darkness outside the door just as much, or else I would go look for…
Wings, H. would surely make fun of me. Really, Kitty, still a chicken, what’s wrong with you?
And he would be right to laugh. But he’d ask what I want to do about it, and even just being together would be
The text cuts off, the ink pooling around the last letter, and Heathcliff can almost see her face, the pout and the furrowed brow as she tries to figure what to say next, before giving up.
Maybe work would help. I don’t know what to do with my hands. I think I think I think…
The words seem to yawn, stretching lazily across the paper, and her hand starts to lose the proper grip on the pen as the tiredness sets in, without relief and without comfort— the curse of insomnia, he can recognise it from here. After their childhood in that place, each night he’d have to spend out in the rain and each night she’d be sent to her room without supper, it only makes sense they’d both be plagued by it, sharing it silently while curled up in the darkness, like a promise, like a kiss. Even now, with her words in his hands, a poor substitute for her face, her smile, but something to hold on to nonetheless.
Catherine’s voice fizzles out as he reaches the end of the paper, devolving into little drawings of the view from her window, the coloured ink for the flowers spreading above whatever poem she’d started to put together in the bottom corner till it’s barely visible beneath the violet and pale pink. He skims ahead through the brimming pages, until the season changes, to the late winter of the next year, shortly after her birthday, thoughts in black ink.
I thought I saw her standing in the kitchen yesterday. It ruined my appetite, if I had any. I could feel her stare follow me as I ran back to my room, freezing…
There are a lot of pages like that. It was surprising to find out, when she’d always told him about the things that walked the halls of the manor, and yet had neglected to mention she’d recognised one. He traces her words attentively, almost to make up for the uncertainty in her handwriting, marked by the shame of remembering that woman she never managed to muster up any love for, and the exertion of holding on to herself, even when her thoughts started to get erratic.
She’d tried to hide it for a time, because they were young and it was easy to believe that whenever she talked about the things she’d see it was some kind of attempt to impress him with her storytelling skills, but as they grew up and the episodes got more serious it became impossible not to notice. He remembers one time Hindley had just returned from a trip in a terrible mood, so in the afternoon he’d been in Nelly’s room while she patched him up, and from her window he could see right into Cathy’s on the other side of the house, and watch as she closed the door behind her and slumped motionless to the ground, hands over her ears.
He remembers finding her in the same spot the morning after, and he remembers how many more times that scene would repeat itself as the years went on. They really hadn’t had a nice childhood, had they? Ever since leaving, Heathcliff has tried to just… not let the thought stay in his mind more than it needed to. With the Rabbits, then here at the LCB, it’s always been a good deal easier to talk about the cruel woman who broke his heart, rather than to have to think about everything else, but skimming through the memories recorded by Catherine makes his own resurface, with the sharp awareness of just how far away that past is now.
The text itself stumbles as the diary reconstructs it. Maybe it’s that strange ink of hers, or a consequence of the Bough’s actions, or maybe something about her own subconscious as she left this behind, but often a sentence will cut off into nothing, a word will disappear, or even just a few letters: not a work of censorship, but something closer to the result of a long process of decay. Now, if she were here she’d likely have some idea of how to handle a fragile manuscript, but after all she’s entrusted it to him, and Heathcliff reminds himself he should try to be as confident in his ability to treat it well as she was. The gaps in the writing unsettle him, as does the crackle of the paper as he flips the page, but the text never goes on too long before the words coalesce again.
H. said they can’t hurt me unless I let them, because spirits are fragile things, and it’s like that in all films. And I want to trust him, obviously I do. But if it’s the person that gave me life wouldn’t she always have power over me?
Father would say I have her eyes, then I start to think she’s still watching thro[
It ends abruptly, the sentence extinguished with an ease that Cathy would’ve certainly envied: the real thoughts must’ve been much more of a handful to shut up. Even more so when you can’t share them with someone you trust— Heathcliff understands it deeply, now more than ever. How many times would things have been better if they could’ve reached out to each other? Easier said than done, of course, but he can’t help but think about it. He knows that when it was her struggling he’d not been helpful, for the longest time, that it took him too long to figure she had enough people saying “it’s not there” and that she needed someone to just tell her “it’s alright”, but he’d felt unable to for so long that by the time he started it was probably too late for her to believe him.
The thought is still shameful, no matter how well aware he is that the fault was shared between the two of them. The question still comes natural: what could have been done differently? The answer surely wouldn’t be in the ink-stained pages of the last year, though their voice seems so loud as they call:
What is it like to die? If I knew it would be less daunting to accept that it will be here so swiftly.
Whenever I’d see the graveyard from the window it looked like the most lonely place on earth. Yet that’s where we have t
No. He snaps the diary closed in a fit of ire, only to open it again and start flipping the pages backwards, away from there. He can’t quite bear the sight of those chapters, when her sanity had since slipped, her bright mind occupied with nothing but the looming shadow of that cursed mirror, the plans for her little shop of horrors. Even after hearing it from her own mouth, seeing it written in her own hand, it seems impossible that she’d truly chosen to go to such lengths for him— the same he’d been ready to go to for her. Hollow, self-serving gestures that weren’t good enough to improve a single thing, but his heart still races at the thought of how deep Catherine’s feelings ran, enough to cross through the countless reflections of the mirror, burning everything in their path. Monster of a woman, not a single thing right about her. How dearly he misses her.
Before he knows he’s found his way back to the start, to Catherine Earnshaw, her book. Then there seems to be silence, away from the broken confessions and back to the calligraphy practice of her youth, and Heathcliff glances tiredly down the messy writing, that gentle murmur of a heart not yet broken. In the chaos of it all, of her name repeated over and over, a slant in the order, a mistake no doubt, yet there all the same: his first and her last name, staring back at him. A tentative question mark. He groans.
“Really, Cathy, how old are you?”
If she were here, she would’ve started a fight over that, for daring to make fun of her youthful heart and greatly disappointed expectations, and he would’ve loved to stand his ground and anger her further, no matter how hypocritical it would be for someone still wearing that ring— she wouldn’t have let him live that down either, would she? For now, he lays alone in this bed, with the secret she hid for him to find, and he hopes one day she’ll get to.