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Isaac Night comes into the world already failing. He is small, too small, and weak in ways that no physician can explain without sighing and shaking their head. His chest rattles with every breath, and more than once, his mother sits in a rocking chair and rocks his tiny body as though movement alone might coax the air back into his lungs.
His father does not rock him, his father stands in the doorway with narrowed eyes, the kind of gaze that weighs and finds wanting. “You’ve bred a failure,” the man says to his wife, and Isaac (though he is too young to form words) feels the weight of that word, failure, settle into his bones.
By the time he is five, Isaac has learned silence: he has learned that his father’s fists fall more readily on mouths that speak… he has learned that his mother’s eyes are the only safe harbor, soft brown orbs that flicker like candlelight, though even she cannot stop the storm when it rages (his sister, Francoise, is the only thing brighter).
Francoise is born when Isaac is six. She arrives with lungs that sing and a smile that stretches too wide, too full of life. Where Isaac is pale and thin, she is pink and sturdy. She cries until she is given into her brother’s arms, and then she quiets, watching him with an intensity that he already knows: they are linked (two halves of a broken coin).
Their father resents them both. Isaac for his weakness and Francoise for being born a girl when he wanted another son. His rage is democratic (he does not spare either) but Isaac learns to stand between them. He learns to take the blows, the sharp words, the backhand slaps. He learns that love is protection, and that protection must come at a cost.
The first time Isaac’s heart nearly give out, he is seven. He lies on his narrow bed in the attic, the boards creaking beneath his too-light body, and he cannot breathe. The world turns black at the edges, then red, then white, and he thinks: this is death. He thinks that perhaps Father is right, perhaps he was meant to fail… but then something inside him (some cruel, desperate spark) refuses.
He stumbles from bed, crawls across the floor, and finds the discarded clock parts his father broke in one of his drunken rages. Isaac has always loved the workings of things: gears, screws, the way brass teeth interlock. With shaking hands, he begins to build (not a toy or a clock… a heart).
It takes him nine months. He rarely sleeps and he barely eats, his tiny fingers bleed as he fits each gear into place, winding copper wire through the hollow of his chest. He carves into himself with a kitchen knife stolen from the drawer, holding the blade steady even as his vision swims. And when the clockwork heart slides into place with a click, when the gears catch and begin to turn, Isaac Night draws in a full, steady breath for the first time in his life.
His chest ticks, the sound is faint but steady, a metronome to keep him alive. He hides it from everyone except Francoise. She is three when he tells her, too young to understand, but when he takes her small hand and places it against his chest, her eyes widen in wonder. “You tick,” she whispers. “Yes,” he says, his voice hoarse. “Don’t tell Father.” (she never does).
From then on, Isaac is not fragile. He is strange, cold, machine-like. He grows sharper as his body learns to live with brass and steel inside it. His skin is pale, his eyes darker than before, and when he speaks, his words are precise, measured, as though the gears inside him dictate every syllable. He does not laugh and he does not cry, only Francoise can coax a smile from him… only his beloved Francoise can break the glass wall he builds around himself.
Their father notices the change. He notices Isaac’s new strength, his steady breathing, and instead of pride, there is suspicion. He beats the boy harder, trying to find the weakness again, trying to make the gears falter. But Isaac does not break, he endures (Francoise is not so lucky).
By the time she is fifteen, the curse shows itself. She screams in the night, her body twisting, breaking, reshaping itself into something monstrous: a hyde. Isaac watches helplessly as her sweet face contorts, as claws sprout from her fingers and her back arches in grotesque spasms. Their father calls her a demon, spits at her, locks her in the cellar for days at a time. Isaac waits outside the door, listening to her sobs, pressing his ticking chest against the wood so she can hear him.
“I’m here,” he whispers. “I’ll save you.” But he doesn’t know how. The guilt begins to rot him from the inside. Why was he born with a gift of telekineses, when his sister (so soft, so kind, so undeserving) has been cursed with this? He hates himself for every gear that ticks inside him, for every sketch that comes too easily to his hand. He grows obsessed with finding a cure, with undoing the curse. His notebooks fill with diagrams, formulas, desperate theories.
Francoise, even in her brokenness, remains gentle. She strokes his hair when he works too late into the night. She bandages his hands when he cuts himself on gears. She tells him she loves him, and the words sound wrong to his ears because they are too pure (love is not something he understands). Their father taught them love is a blow, a demand, a punishment. Isaac does not know how to separate that from what he feels for his sister.
It is love, yes. But is it the kind brothers feel for sisters? Or something darker, something more desperate, born of isolation and pain? He does not know. He only knows that everything he does, everything he is, turns around her like planets around a dying sun.
When he leaves for Nevermore Academy, he does not go for himself. He goes because he believes they have knowledge, resources, something that will save Francoise. He rooms with Gomez Addams, who is the second person to ever make him laugh, the second person who can drag him out of his cold calculations into something resembling life.
Isaac grows to love Gomez too, in his way. But he knows (he has always known) that if it came to a choice between Gomez and Francoise, he would slit his friend’s throat without hesitation. Because Francoise is everything, she is the only light.
The years crawl forward, and her light dims. Slowly, painfully, the curse eats at her. Isaac watches helplessly as her body falters under the strain of transformations, as the girl who once laughed so easily begins to wither beneath the weight of something she never asked for. And each time, he feels the same coil of rage: ‘Why her? Why not me?’
He has his gift, his mind, his precision, the tools to build impossible things. She has only the curse. She deserves brilliance, deserves sunlight, and yet it is he who walks in the halls of invention, while she is dragged screaming into the dark (it is wrong… it has always been wrong).
So he makes himself a vow: if his genius means anything, it will be to save her. Whatever it costs, whatever it takes. He fills notebooks with diagrams, symbols, calculations that only he can read. He works until his hands bleed, until his clockwork chest seizes with strain. He dreams not of glory, not of accolades, but of her smile, of the sound of her voice free from pain. That is the only future he can imagine worth living for.
And yet, the longer he works, the more he realizes the price. Every machine requires power and every cure demands sacrifice, even he cannot create something out of nothing. It gnaws at him, the choice that looms ahead. He does not want to think of it, and yet he cannot stop circling back to the same conclusion. To save Francoise, something (someone) must be given. He hates himself for the answer that comes so naturally: Gomez.
The one friend who slipped past his walls. The boy who, without even trying, became something like a brother. The boy who taught him laughter, warmth, a fragment of life beyond the ticking metronome of his chest. Gomez, who trusts him completely. Gomez, who has never once doubted that Isaac’s heart (metal and all) was still capable of loyalty.
And Isaac loves him for it. In his own way, he truly does, he cherishes him... he would protect him against anyone else in the world. But against Francoise, there is no competition (there never was).
So he steels himself, he tells himself it is mercy, in a way. That Gomez, of all people, would understand sacrifice, would embrace death if it meant saving someone Isaac loves. He clings to that thought because it keeps the guilt at bay, dulls the horror of what he is prepared to do.
He grows quiet in those final days. Withdrawn, colder than ever. The walls around him turn to ice, but within, the storm never stops. He oscillates between conviction and despair, between devotion and revulsion at himself. At times, he convinces himself this is not love at all, not the kind one should feel for a sister. It is obsession, warped and unclean, a mirror of the only love their father ever showed them (violent, possessive and consuming). He wonders if he is damning them both, if the curse lies not only in Francoise’s blood but in his own heart.
And yet, he cannot stop. He has lived his entire life for her, every gear and every breath turning toward the same purpose. If he stops now, then what was the point of any of it?
The decision calcifies inside him, and in that final moment (before the end, before the silence) he feels a strange clarity: cold, sharp, merciless. He has chosen and he had betrayed the only friend he ever had (he would burn the world to ash and he would offer up anything for Francoise… even himself).
And so, when death comes (swift, violent and absolute) he does not fight it. His clockwork chest ticks one last futile beat before collapsing into stillness. What he leaves behind is not triumph or salvation, only unfinished work: a shadow of genius, and the echo of a boy who could not tell the difference between love and obsession, sacrifice and destruction.