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I wish I knew more about [the groundskeeper], the same way I wish I knew more about the girls. His name, his hometown, his favorite flower. What color he would use to describe his eyes when he looks in the mirror. You would be able to tell a lot about someone by what color they pick, I think. I'd call mine amethyst. I'd call his orchid.
— The Spirit Bares Its Teeth, Andrew Joseph White.
Often— too often, in Silas' opinion— it is said that eyes are the windows to a person's soul. The gateway to a deeper meaning, if you will. The concept, with this idea, is that you will always be successful in revealing a person's true intentions if you look deeply, searchingly, enough into their eyes.
If one digs far enough behind a person's eyes, it is said, they can reach a person's brain, pulling out the hidden meanings behind all that person's actions with ease, but really, Silas thinks, if you dig far enough behind, with nothing of a surgeon's precision, you're a lot more likely to just hit something you weren't supposed to hit. It's not difficult at all, physically, to pull a person's eyes from their sockets, severing them from ever having a choice of their own. And it is easy enough, after that, Silas knows, to spin a web of truth from the severed optic nerve. If there is not a person attached to the other side, there is no one left to clarify if you've come to the most accurate conclusion, and then it's simply your word against their stolen one.
Somehow, for some reason, Silas doubts that's what people are referring to when they say they can tell what people are thinking based on the looks in their eyes. He knows that, he does. Only someone like him, who has been on both ends of the spectrum, pulling out the eyes of perpetuator and helpless to stop young girls from dying, would view such a phrase so darkly. Nonetheless, he still struggles to understand the benefit of trusting darting eyes over the words people say to him.
People say that eyes are the windows to a person's soul, but Silas thinks that can't possibly be true. He thinks, in the end, that eyes are sometimes just eyes. Used to justify atrocities and claim ownership, certainly, but for the most part, just organs that are used to see.
If one thinks there is a reason hidden behind a person's eyes, then they are bound to find a reason, no matter how accurate, but that doesn't change the fact that eyes mostly just function as tools to see the world with. When eyes close for good, in death, it means that a soul has moved on, becoming a spirit or twisting itself into whatever it is that people become when they aren't spirits. Silas does not think they close because they are a window, meant to lock the living out of revealing a corpse's innermost secrets. He thinks it is, quite simply, just a consequence of being dead.
But if they are actually a gateway, somehow, then Silas has managed to accidentally lock himself outside, left to rattle against the separation and be forever begging to be let back inside from the cold. Or, no, that's not quite right, is it? If the gates are real, then Silas was never given the correct keys in the first place. He still waits outside anyway, pleading to be let in and shivering through his hopelessness, but he was never granted access to understanding the intricacies of a person's soul at all. And even if he was ever to be welcomed, he doubts he would know what to do with himself once let in.
Most of the time, Silas is compelled by an irresistible urge to shrink away when he meets another's gaze. Still. Eyes are just eyes, and in those cases, it is the person, with thoughts and feelings and intentions, that is intimidating. The distinction is important, he thinks. People, whether actively intimidating or not, can be difficult to connect with, but the eyes are not the crux of the issue. There is nothing to be gained, in Silas' experience, from looking in a person's eyes, especially if you don't know where to even begin searching to parse through any potential meaning of them.
A person's eyes are just their eyes. They are all different, yes, in shade and shape and hue, but they are not the end all be all of telling you who a person may be. Eye imagery has surrounded Silas for his entire life— eyes carved into wood, into stone, into any possible material the Speakers could reach out to infect with their rot— but he knows this to be true. In fact, the abundance of importance placed on eyes by the Speakers, on the eyes reeking with the rot of punishment after being pulled from a skull, is precisely why he knows.
Less prominent in his life than ever before are eyes now, now that he has gotten away, but still inescapable, exhibited so clearly by his utter fixation on their importance now. Daphne is asleep beside him now, beautiful and relaxed and snoring lightly, yet Silas can not force himself to rest, focused so entirely on understanding.
What matters more, Silas thinks, is the way someone would describe their own eyes. A perception of their own self, in regard to the color of their eyes, is more useful than anything Silas could learn by studying a person on his own, leaning uncomfortably close so he can attempt, and fail, to look inside their soul.
Silas thinks you can tell a lot about a person through the way they describe their eyes. Yes, that is a more accurate description. You can tell how they view themselves, even beyond the specific color they say. How a person reacts to being asked matter more, Silas thinks, than the actual contents of their answer. Confirming their willingness to respond, yes, and violet, yes, but what more? So much more, certainly, but all barred from Silas, as of now. He wishes he could ask around now, but who, besides a peacefully sleeping Daphne who shouldn't be awoken for this nonsense, would there be to ask? Not many, so he supposes he has to make do with imagining their answers.
#1. MRS. FORRESTER
Mrs. Forrester’s eyes, for example, were purple, pale, and not quite a color Silas would dare to call pretty. Make no mistake, his hesitation does not come from a lack of ability to recall the precise shade of her eyes. It comes from an inability to ever know her as anything other than a death sentence, after knowing how she froze to death inside that school. And a death sentence, of course, should not be considered pretty. Not by his standards, anyway.
As much as she was the Headmaster's student made into his unwilling wife, she was also the physical representation everything Silas did not want in his life. Her eyes stared back at him often, sharply, and Silas remembers always feeling the urge to shy away. It's hard to blame her for it, in some ways. He is sympathetic for her plight, but she will always be more of a warning, a cautionary tale, of what he barely managed to escape than someone he actually ever knew.
Because as much as there was a brokenness in her gaze, as present as her limp became when he knew where to look, there was always a lingering darkness too, hiding and pretending to be just out of reach. It was always clearly still in reach, obvious to even Silas who struggles to see the worst of people's intentions if they are not told to him first. Mrs. Forrester's eyes were a light heather purple on the surface, but they were wretched and cold beneath, always accompanied by an underlying threat that Silas is not sure Mrs. Forrester herself was ever even fully aware of.
Her viciousness through complacency was never all that far out of reach, and it never did take much urging to draw forth her complacency, did it. Whether it stemmed from fear or willingness, it still existed. The rest of them, with even less power than her, were always the ones who had to suffer most for it. At the end of the day, to Silas, she must always be reduced to the woman she was to him in her life. A woman who sold her students out to her husband, just to protect herself for a little bit longer, as worthless an attempt that ended up being.
Where Mrs. Forrester’s husband is a shark, she is a fish that latches itself onto his back, helping him while disguising herself and pretending like she does not. A symbiotic, mutually beneficial relationship. Protection. Or, at least, a semblance of it. He looked Mrs. Forrester in the eyes, she looked back at him in that cellar beneath the school, and they both knew what her husband did. What he would continue to do, long after Silas had been made just another subject in his experiment.
Except, it was never really mutually beneficial, was it?
Silas can’t help but feel terribly sad for her. If he were a less forgiving person, he would be more fine comparing her to a fish of that sort. That’s what Mary would say about her, Silas thinks, and it would be impossible to blame her for it, he knows. Mary knew Mrs. Forrester for longer than he ever did. She would have worse things to say than that, surely. And he thinks Daphne might even agree, although she wouldn’t be the one to voice the initial thoughts out loud. She'd just agree that Mary has a point, because she knows the difference between giving in and biding your time.
In any case, Silas personally believes Headmaster was more akin to a parasite. Yes, that sounds more right. And he leeched all the goodness that must’ve once existed tight from her. Mrs. Forrester's eyes appeared utterly lifeless even in liveliness. They were always framed by bags, a clearly visible undercut of wrongness. The hues of violet would have been far more beautiful, Silas thinks, if they were not oh so clearly rotting in their sockets.
Mrs. Forrester’s eyes looked perpetually watery and a bit like they had been rotten from the inside out. Gorged from overindulgence, all the life stolen from them by her husband. Her eyes were like an apple’s innards, like an apple core left to rot, and Silas finds himself, inexplicably, unable to hate her for it now. He should, and he wouldn’t blame anyone else for hating her, but that could have easily been him, couldn’t it? In a different lifetime where Silas didn’t grab the shards of a broken mirror and ram it into Daphne's father's throat, Mrs. Forrester is what Silas could have become, lifeless even before the lifelessness of death.
Desolate and despondent and disquieting, she was. But how could he hate her for that? If Mrs. Forrester were still alive, Silas thinks he would want to ask her what shade of purple Harriet’s eyes were, before they were stolen from her, more than he would ever want to ask for her own description. Were they cold like hers were? Were they warmer? Or were they the same drained color as hers, even before they were ripped from her skull?
#2. MISS NEULING
The single time Silas locked eyes with Miss Neuling was in the tense seconds before she was to be executed for violating the 1841 Speaker Act. Crouched over and scraping her feet along the floor, as if she'd been kicked in the stomach and could barely walk through the pain, she looked up at Silas with so much contempt that he couldn't help but flinch back, startled to be on the other end of such vitriol from a woman he'd never met.
Of course, his shock rather rapidly faded away as a numbness overtook him. He flinched beneath the horrible weight of her gaze, filled with all the anger of prey that was never even given a chance to run from predator, but he could not fault her for it.
The color of her eyes, Silas can remember with such stark clarity, were a lightened purple, like freshly bloomed flowers. Lilac. Lavender, almost. And still so intent on growing, stretching for the warm sun despite being caged. They were not less lively because of the position she'd been forced into. If anything, they appeared aflame, full of the fire of mistrust and resentment and so much anger, because of it. Her eyes watered with tears of resentment, as if unable to help themselves as much as she was trying to put on an unaffected face, but her expression remained full of life until the very end.
Silas had been pretending to be someone else than he was at the time he met her, but he was still to be her death, meant to execute her via haunting in place of the boy he had been playing at. He did not know, going in, that was what he was meant to do, suffocating her by opening the thin layer of the veil. She did not know, looking at him standing over her crouched body, that he was guilty of practicing unlicensed spirit work and falsifying Speaker documents in the same way she was. The only differences, between the two of them, was that the process of his very own execution would be prolonged, in the form of being sent to a leeching experimental school, but how could she have ever known that?
Would it have even mattered, to her, if she had gotten a chance to know? Or, to her, would he still represent all the worst parts of man? People do a lot of awful things for survival, Silas knows, and that is not always a forgivable thing. Silas still played a part in her death, even if he balked, unable to be the one to deliver the killing blow, so she died angry, her watery eyes made glassy. When she spoke to Silas a few minutes before, her voice was raspy as if someone had taken her vocal cords in their hand and squeezed them roughly, but she will never speak again. A small part of Silas can't help but blame himself for that still, even if he closed the Veil before she suffocated.
#3. AGNES WARWICK
When Silas thinks back to the Agnes he first met, who had been pressed against the banister of a staircase by an Ellen who was being watched carefully by an anxiously pressed together crowd who were all scared to move in case they'd set her off, he thinks of her looking over Ellen's shoulder at the the rest of them, her sweet plum eyes so wide with fear.
Of course, at the time, Silas had been ignorant to all the dynamics at play within the walls of the school, but the image of her like that reminded him, at the time, of a little, innocent lamb who had been surrounded by wolves with sharpened teeth. Innocent and pure, and so small in comparison. In hindsight, Silas considers it as an accurate enough read, even if a few of the other girls, like Isabella and Louise, had wanted to protect her. Accurate enough to Agnes, at least, who to her they were all certainly untrustworthy wolves, even if they were not among the biggest and baddest of them all.
Agnes had scared eyes that looked like a purple pastoral painting. She had sweetened eyes, the color of plum, and she had a charming enough demeanor, polite and lamb like. Her eyes were faded, like all of their eyes were, but they were not so far gone that there is was semblance of liveliness left. She was not yet rotted meat. She still bleated. She had tried to poison herself, but it failed. And because of it, she was still seen as ripe for the plucking, not yet spoiled.
In all her innocence, Agnes' eyes reminded Silas of the opposite of what people imagine poison looking like. Rather be alarmingly bright and cool and purple, they were a plum color, full of warmth. The brightness of her eyes remained untouched, despite everything, because people wanted to see the brightness, but Silas knows there must have been a darkness somewhere. A child does not poison herself on purpose merely to see what will happen.
Agnes was the youngest of them all within the walls of that school, and thus, in many ways, she was condemned to being forever considered the idealized version of a student to any potential suitor. Mary confessed, once, of wanting to be rid of the competition of her. Through encouraging Ellen to push her, she partially succeeded in being rid of them both, making her a wolf, even if not the strongest of the wolves that roamed through the walls of the school. What reason would Agnes, with her lamblike demeanor, ever have to view Mary as anything but a wolf, when she has bloodstained fangs? He thinks now, as he did back then, how could they have ever wanted to hurt her? even if he can't really force himself to blame Mary for it now.
When Silas thinks of the Agnes he knows now, who cradles her son close and who is angered and seeking of retribution for the things that have been done to them all, he still can't help but think of her as small, like the young little sister he never had but whom he now wants to continue protecting with all he can.
Of course, Silas is under no illusion that she would even want his protection. She has other people in her life now, he knows. People that all look out for each other. And she is capable of protecting herself, in certain circumstances and to a certain extent, as much as she is capable of deciding to fight. Still, a part of Silas aches to be there for her now. She is the same age now that he was when they first met, as young as she seems to him, and she dedicates so much of her time to being a part of the Anti Speaker movement which has begun rising in England. It pains him to think of her eyes, and it pains him to think that she has never gotten a chance to be a child, in part, because of them. She spends much of her time with Mary now. Silas finds himself worried for the both of them often, but it is difficult to fault either of them for being unable to sit still. He'd probably worry for them regardless, in any case.
#4. ELLEN WRIGHT
Truthfully, Silas does not remember Ellen all that much, as much as it shames him to say. He does not remember her as much more than her final fate, strapped to that operating table, and he certainly does not remember the color of her eyes.
He remembers her for her anger, made so clear in his first day at Braxton's. He remembers the way she practically snarled as she pushed poor Agnes over that banister, but even under the threat of being pushed himself, he does not think he could describe the exact color of her eyes. Unlike Agnes, who looked towards the crowd for help, she had her eyes trained firmly away, as if she couldn't bear the idea of looking any of them in the eyes. Silas can recall Agnes' expression in that moment, but he does not remember Ellen's, because she had been looking away.
Who does Ellen have left to mourn her, if he, one of the few people who remembers her, never even knew her? Mary, maybe, but Mary is Mary. As much as Silas has grown to love Mary, for her underlying goodness and faults alike, she is still Mary. Mary was the one who urged Ellen to push Agnes, and she has confessed to him that she always knew she would be punished severely for it. Even if she feels guilt for not knowing the extent of that punishment, which Silas thinks she does, is that really a true mourning? He doesn't know. No one really liked Ellen, Isabella and Louise told him once, but they always tried their best to be nice to her. Surely the two of them would still be sad for her, right? Isabella, if she was alive, and Louise, if she hadn't made it so abundantly clear she never again wanted anything to do with the rest of them. Maybe Louise would know, maybe she could say, but Louise told Mary and Agnes to not write to her again.
Silas did not get much of a chance at all to study Ellen's eyes before she tipped Agnes off the banister and was subsequently made to disappear. He feels sad for her now, but he can not claim mourning as his own. He barely got a chance to know her. She was a tall girl, with a nose that looked like it was broken and never quite set right, but that is the extent of his knowledge about her. He can not recall much else, as much as he struggles trying, as much as he sifts through his mind. The area around her eyes, he remembers, had been swollen, bruised as if she’d been punched in the face, but the ring of surrounding color was distracting from the precise shade of violet. He can remember the ombré of bruising more than he can remember the ring of her iris.
He only knew her briefly, but it's hard to imagine her eyes ever being anything but angry and unkind. But he knows, he knows, that they must've been something more. Even Louise, who always seemed to be just a bit terrified of her, was able to spare nice words about her. She told him once, through stilted words after she'd learnt she was dead, that Ellen was kind to the groundskeeper. Kind to him, the implication perhaps had been, when no one else had been. Maybe the groundskeeper remembers, maybe he would mourn her, but Silas does not know where he is now. And he could not ask him for clarification, even if he knew whether or not he'd lived or died. Maybe Ellen's eyes had been dark and cumbersome, or maybe they were light and no less heavy for it. In either case, for Silas, she has been condemned to forever being a question, in death.
#5. LOUISE HARE
Sometimes, Silas thinks of himself as more similar to Louise than either of them would surely be willing to admit. If he is a rabbit, skittish and easily ready to run at a moment's notice like a coward, then wouldn't Louise be a deer, a doe, an animal often associated with those same things? As much as he doesn't think of Louise as a coward— not when he knows it was just something she was called and not indicative of her actions— he can't help but sometimes fault himself as one, too scared to join Mary and Agnes in fighting and campaigning and fighting through campaigning. Too scared, most days, to even leave the house.
Silas doesn't know what exactly it is that Louise is up to these days. He barely knew much about her when they slept in beds across each other. When Silas knew her, she often kept her eyes directed at the floor, diverted and avoiding anyone’s gaze. Silas could relate to that, but he was occasionally been able to catch a glimpse of color regardless.
Thinking of the color of Louise's eyes now, rolling the concept of them around in his head, Silas settles on calling them mauve. Puce, almost. Neither of those colors exactly lands on the precise shade, he thinks, but it is close enough. Louise had carefully pinned back hair and a small mouth and eyes almost like that of a doe's. Almost, but not quite. Like a deer, she was skittish. She had big, wide eyes that stared at him in shock as she watched him summon spirits that he was not supposed to be summoning, and he remembers the color fo them being close to mauve. Close, even if not quite, because he never got to know her that well, because they never traced the outlines of themselves and looked to see just how well they matched each other. He remembers, clearly, the way her eyes had filled with tears as she realized Ellen and Frances were dead, but most of all, he remembers the look in her eyes the final time he saw her. He remembers her being brave, playing at the coward they had claimed her as so she could save the rest of them, and he hopes he will never forget that image of her. Forgetting it, he thinks, would mean forgetting the way all of them— him and her and little Agnes and Mary— fought until they were freed.
#6. CHARLOTTE HUDSON
Charlotte's eyes were a medium shade of purple, leaning only slightly towards light. He remembers the shade as he recalls her peering over the rim of her glasses, instead of looking through, to peer down at him like a rather judgmental owl. In many ways, the image reminds Silas of a darkened version of Mrs. Forrester's de-saturated gaze. The light would have faded more with time, if allowed, surely, but for all Silas knows, she is dead, frozen to death and buried beneath the crumpled corpse of Braxton's. She will never have a chance to become worse than she was made to be.
In Silas' memory, her eyes are light purple. That is her sentence. She had hard eyes that were set in their way, and she never got a chance for them to not be. Silas didn't have many things in common with Charlotte, other than the most obvious situational of circumstances, but they both had violet eyes. And they were both students who had been labeled as wrong. That is where the similarities cease. Where Silas had a chance to get away, with Daphne and Mary, she never got that chance, in all her hopelessness. Even Mary, in all her cruelty in the name of personal gain, had the hope of finding Frances again after escape, and when she discovered there was no Frances left to find, she held on to the rage of that. Her previous teetering hope carried on to Silas and Daphne, becoming tenacious. Charlotte, however, never seemed to have anyone.
Charlotte used to fight, Silas knows, before they ruined her. But when everyone tells someone that they are wrong enough, that they should hate themself for their wrongness, they are bound to start believing it eventually, if there is no one saying the opposite to them. She used to be brave, braver than Silas who considered, even if just briefly, the idea of killing Miss Neuling if it meant he could escape with his Speaker Seal, even if that bravery didn't last long under pressure. Even if she spent her final moments wishing death on her fellow student, who could have understood her more than Mrs. Forrester, in all her acquired distance, ever did.
The last time Silas saw Charlotte, her eyes were loathing until the very last second, even through the barely hidden fear, because she was willing to do anything to make herself look better in the face of the people who wanted to hurt her. Silas could not let himself linger, staring at her eyes. Her eyes had been piercing, a thousand pinpricks of resentment towards him, and he had turned away, knowing there was nothing left for him to do for her, as miserable as it made him feel.
Maybe that brave girl, the one Charlotte was before Silas knew her, had an owlish, curious expression instead of the faraway look in her eyes he'd grown to know. Maybe she still wore glasses, and the light still reflected off of their frames. Maybe Silas would have been more willing to described her eyes like wisteria, instead of just feeling an unbearable sadness at never really getting to know her, the real her who hadn't been changed so terribly, at all. Maybe she wouldn't remind him now so much of a wilted, dying flower that was not once ever given the proper sunlight it needed to survive.
#7. MARY CARTER
If Silas were to ask Mary what color, what shade of purple, she’d describe her own eyes as, she would probably laugh in his face. Mary would laugh and she would roll her eyes and then she would maybe, just maybe, consider answering. Maybe. Depending on the day, and depending on whether or not Frances’ fluttering, always-lingering spirit seemed fond of the idea, Mary might play along. Silas doesn’t think she’d be overly thrilled about participating in his study— because that’s really what it is, isn’t it? A study— but she’d play along well enough, even as she pretends to hate it.
Still, Silas thinks Mary would take the suggestion that her answer has any deeper meaning as ridiculous, and Silas would be tempted to reply that that response alone is enough to answer his true, underlying question. He wouldn’t actually say it, of course, but he’d think it. Loud enough for her to hear anyway, just by looking at the expression on his face, at his raised brow, because Mary is good at capturing and understanding those nuances in a way he isn't. And even if she wasn't, barring Daphne, she is his closest friend. She is among the top two people in the world who know him best, and she would understand what he meant. He knows she knows that, and he knows his pleading would encourage her participation, even if she would sigh and roll her eyes as she obliged.
Unfortunately, Mary is currently on the other side of London and therefore unavailable for questioning, so he'll have to fill in the blanks for her himself.
The first time Silas met Mary, a long time before they were anything close to friends, he thought of her as akin to a wolf. Going off that first glance, Silas is tempted to describe Mary’s eyes as violet and nothing else. Dangerous in their simplicity, unknowable and vicious.
Leaning blue, they are icy and cold, dark in shade, but Silas has since gotten to know the warmth hiding just beneath them. Her eyes are violet, not like flowers, or night, but like the moments before morning. They are a royal purple. They are a hearth, a dying fire of ember threatening away the cold. It does not work, not fully, and the coldness does not recede entirely, but the battle is there. She has never once stopped fighting against the chill.
She visits him and Daphne often now, the spirit of Frances trailing behind her lovingly always, and each and every time, she makes it clear that she will never stop fighting. Towards the beginning, in the first months after Braxton's fell, Silas was worried that she was lonely and would act brashly with only spirits as her company, but he needn't have worried. Mary has confessed to him that she has found a purpose through her spirited sisters, a purpose that she wouldn't have found if not for him. Whenever she visits, she makes thinly veiled remarks, offering for him to join her and Agnes on the front lines, and Silas strongly suspects he will one day take her up on that.
Truthfully, in hindsight, Silas does not know how he could have ever thought of Mary as a wolf, as a predator who would tear his throat out in a heartbeat. It is so obvious now that she never truly was, not like the people who hurt the both of them were. He can see through her too well now to remember her anger as the only thing worth knowing her for. He can't believe he ever found it strange to see Mary's expression be kind. She has always been as much of prey as the rest of them were, and her wolfish-ness was a disguise. She was a sheep in a wolf's clothing rather than the other way around. And she is loyal to her pack in a way not many of Braxton's students managed to be.
Of course, Mary is still Mary, she would still burn the world down if left unattended for too long, but his perception of her has changed over the years. Despite the lingering roughness and her coldened edges, there is a hesitant kindness to her that Silas finds himself grateful to be on the receiving end of. She still is trying to burn down the world's corruption down to the ground, but Silas finds it rather difficult to blame her for it. He wishes to do the same, doesn't he, in studying medicine. In working through the shadows of corruption to help people like them in the way only he, with his skills, can.
#8. FRANCES NICOLL
If Silas had a chance to ask, Mary would doubtlessly have a lot more to say about Frances than she does herself. She always seems to have more to say about her than she does herself, if asked. Not so secretly, Silas suspects that it's to keep her memory alive, so he and Daphne try to ask her as many little things as possible, as if their questioning could ever stop Frances from being swept away by the unforgiving tide of time.
This, however, is a question Silas does not think he will ask Mary. Mary gets a specific softness to her whenever Frances is brought up, but more often than not, it is accompanied by a sadness. Would she be more upset or pleased to be asked? She likes to talk about Frances more than she does herself, but she always talks more of actions than she does appearances. Does she even remember, Silas wonders, the precise color of her eyes? For herself, at least she can look at the reflection of herself, citing the precise hue. If she even been allowed to have a photograph of Frances, as unlikely as that would be, she could only be able to tell the shade. Frances' eyes would still be greyed out, obscured by a distance that can never be breached again, because she is dead. Nothing Mary does will ever bring her back, allowing her to see them in all their color.
Mary's love is dead and talking about her won't bring her back. It will carry on her legacy, sure, but it won't bring her back to life. She will never blink again. She died scared, and then, her eyes were taken from their sockets to be experimented on. If nothing changes for the worse, Silas will get to be with his love for the rest of his life. He will get to look Daphne in the eyes, savoring the color of them, for so many years. Mary can never again be sure of the precise hue of her love's eyes. It would be a terrible thing to ask, Silas thinks. It is better, he thinks, to not ask questions that cause doubt, rubbing the loss in her face. It is better to just imagine for himself.
Where Silas knows Mary as the warring sunrise of morning, he imagines Frances as the oppositional sunset. He imagines her eyes as the color it gets outside right before the sky goes fully dark. The moment preceding darkness. Her eyes, in his imaginings, are the moment of anticipation as one waits, breath caught in their throat, for the shift to occur. One waits and they wait and they wait, and then it happens in a snap, catching them off guard even though they were waiting for her to strike like a wolf. Like a fox who loved a wolf in her life and continues to love her through death.
Silas never got a chance to meet Frances, but he imagines her eyes to be companionable to Mary’s eyes. Not oppositional, but similar. Not quite the same, but close enough to be recognized as the same. He envisions them as ultramarine red, skewing more towards red than Mary's blue but fundamentally similar all the same. The color of wine, almost. If Mary’s eyes are dawn, then Silas imagines Frances' to be dusk. Different, but fundamentally the same. As concepts, they— the two things, Mary and Frances— are closer together than they are farther apart. They will always be closer together than they are farther apart, even if they will never again get to stare into each other's eyes like they surely once did.
More often than not, Silas watches as Frances' ghostly form wraps its way around Mary’s body, intertwining them, when let loose from the haunted ring hidden beneath the collar of Mary's clothes. Mary relaxes, each and every time she does. And because of it, Silas supposes it does not really matter what color her eyes are. It does, in the way it matters to acknowledge what was stolen from her when they were severed and used and broken to pieces, but Frances still has someone who loves her unconditionally. She is not like Ellen. She has not been condemned to being unknown in death, even if her eyes have been lost. As long as Mary is alive, Frances will be remembered. She will be loved.
#9. ISABELLA ROSSI
Silas calls Mary his closest friend, but before Mary, there was Isabella.
But Isabella has been condemned to forever being a voiceless, eyeless spirit.
Silas only knew her for a short amount of time before that, shorter than he ever would have preferred, but in that time, she was the best friend Silas has ever had. The most understanding friend he'd ever had. Silas calls Mary his closest friend, but at the end of the day, Mary is still Mary. He loves her and he plans on remaining in her life for as long as they are both alive, but she is still Mary.
It is different to be with Mary than it was to be with Isabella. She is not gentle in the way Isabella is, and she would consider burning down all of London before being vulnerable without Silas first having to fight for her to be. Her eyes are not gentle in the same way Isabella’s were. Silas doesn't even ever want them to be, because nothing could ever replace Isabella or Mary, but it is impossible to ignore their differences.
Isabella has— had— eyes like flowers.
Silas forgets himself in forgetting the exact shade, and perhaps that is why he hesitates so much when it comes to Frances and Ellen. He can barely remember what Ellen looked like, beyond imagining a field of wilting, sad flowers. He never knew Frances as all.
Isabella, he remembers, always had rather sad eyes.
Her eyes were so violet that they were almost blue, like the sky just before nightfall, but they were always so sad. And then they were dead. Now, her eyes are to be forever closed. Flowers are not that difficult to take care of, Silas thinks, but so often, they die. Never of their own volition, even if they hated the cage of the pot they were replanted into after being taken forcibly from a field. Even if they never got to know a fate other than being trapped inside an inescapable pot.
They were soft despite the sadness, warm and welcoming when no one else was, but it's difficult to recall the intricacies of her now, without crying, obscuring his own vision.
Isabella no longer has any eyes. Her eyes are eyes that will never be allowed to be surrounded by wrinkles of age, because she will never get to grow any older than the eighteen years she died at. Silas is older now than she ever got to be, and Isabella is hovering spirit in his life, coming and going as she pleases. There will be no smile lines, and once Silas is gone, there will be no sign that she ever existed at all other than the oddness of a singular crack of many in the Veil.
Silas wonders if he sees Frances' eyes as close to Isabella's for Mary or for his own grief. If Mary is the sheep or the wolf or the weird amalgamation of the both to Silas' rabbit, then Isabella is the hare. If Mary is a wolf, then Frances must be a fox. In the sanctity of Silas' mind, he considers a hare to be stronger than a rabbit. All the same, in many ways, they are close enough to each other, similar in all the ways that truly count, even if most people can not tell the difference between the two animals.
But the average lifespan of a hare, on average, is shorter than that of a rabbit. Isabella was no exception to that terrible rule. Silas does not understand the disdain so many people seem to have with growing up and being labeled as old because of it. They get to grow up, and they get to age. Some people, like Isabella and Frances and Ellen and perhaps even Charlotte, never will. More people than not, Silas thinks, in the grand scheme of things, have not gotten to age than people who have. Isabella is just another drop in that impossibly large bucket.
Again, Silas worries that he will one day forget the exact shade of her eyes. Perhaps that, more than Mary's own feelings, is why he can not ask. Mary always has something to say about Frances, but sometimes, Silas can not force the words of his love for Isabella out, as much as he chokes desperately in trying to. He remembers, for now, but what if one day he no longer does? The idea of Isabella slipping away haunts him almost as much as her ghost does.
#10. THE RABBIT SILAS BELL
Before the rabbit was vanquished, ripped from Silas' chest, he imagined it often.
The rabbit didn’t have violet eyes. It had beady black eyes that stared unflinchingly at him. A part of Silas was just as scared to look at it directly as he was scared to listen to the tittering words it had to say. The rabbit itself was not frightening— it was a small sort of thing, the kind surgeons train their techniques on— but its eyes were always particularly uncomfortable in their watchfulness.
Okay, that's not really fair of Silas to say, is it?
You can tell a lot about a person through the way they describe their eyes. You can tell a lot about how they view themselves, about how they feel about themselves and the things they have done to outlive others. You can tell when they can't quite manage to look themselves in the eye.
The rabbit is Silas, and the spirit of the rabbit latches onto Silas’s shoulder rather than press against his lungs inside his chest, digging its untrimmed nails into his shoulder rather than cause him breathlessness.
Is it fair of him, to hate the rabbit so? Is it fair of him, to describe it as evil, with inescapable eyes, when it only ever wanted to be safe?
It is not Silas' fault that Miss Neuling died. If he could have saved her, he would have tried. If he had known she would need saving, he would not have put himself in the position he did at all. Mrs. Forrester's death was not on him either, and whatever happened to Charlotte can not be claimed his fault either. His hand was forced. Frances died, Ellen died, and then Isabella died. He would have been next, alongside Mary, if he had not acted rapidly. He doubts Agnes with her bitterness or even Louise with her letters without return addresses blames him for it, when his rash decisions gave them their means of escape.
And, oh—
That's it, isn't it? That's why Silas is thinking about this now.
#11. DAPHNE LUCKENBILL
Nowadays, on the first look, Silas knows he looks like a man.
A soft voice asks, "Silas?"
The first time a person's gaze passes over him, they lock in on his violet eyes, and they know him as a man with violet eyes. Then, they look closer. They all look closer, and sometimes, a spark of doubt creeps in, making them question himself. Maybe that doubt, that fear that patters against his chest like the ghost of a rabbit's thumping foot, is his imagination, but its never worth risking it. Sometimes, Silas wonders if it is the fear lingering in his eyes that gives him away to questioning. Can people see what was done to him, to all of them, through them? Is that what people mean when they claim eyes are the windows to the soul? He still doubts that people can even see vulnerability simply through eyes alone, but a small part of him can't help but roll the question around in his head, wondering and wondering and wondering.
Silas questions, momentarily, if he's hearing things, and then the word comes again, louder.
"Silas?"
Daphne's voice is startling in its suddenness, but Silas does not flinch at it, feeling instead a delighted, aching warmth in his chest. He looks down beside him, watching his wife's eyes flutter open and reveal the always beautiful green.
"Why are you still awake?" Daphne asks, not unsympathetically. "Did you have another nightmare?"
Daphne’s eyes are not violet like her father would have wanted them to be in all his violet-eyed power. They are green. They are the most beautiful shade of green Silas has ever had the pleasure of seeing. Emerald green, with flecks of brown you have to get close to see. Framed by long, dark lashes, her eyes stand out as sharply and as strikingly as a scalpel.
Truthfully, Daphne is the only person in the world who has ever been able to see him from the very beginning. She saw through what he tried to hide from the very beginning. He suspects Isabella would have known where to look to truly see him, if she'd lived long enough to discover how, and he knows Mary has grown to understand him. But it's different. Daphne— wonderful, loving Daphne, who Silas loves more than he loves anyone else in the world— didn't even have to meet Silas' eyes to know and understand. She just innately did. She has never once forced him to look her in the eyes when he has found himself unable.
Daphne's eyes sparkle when she smiles. It is because of her that he is still alive. They are the color of the grass you see when you escape a dreadful winter. Of foliage, of healthy leaves on trees. They are the color of life itself. They are the color of a freedom that was only made entirely possible through the woman behind them. They are lively and calming and gentle and full of such intelligence, and Silas loves those eyes like he loves not much else.
It takes Silas a moment to find his words.
Daphne waits patiently.
He loves her so impossibly much.
"No. No, I was just," Silas hesitates, staring at the tiredness that permeates around her eyes, "thinking about something."
Daphne moves, as if to sit up straighter, but Silas shakes his head before she has a chance to rub the sleep out of her eyes. Before she has a chance to fall into a thought exercise that will have her up until the sun has already begun rising again. For different reasons, perhaps, than his very own.
He shifts to meet her instead. Immediately, she wraps her arms around him.
The bed shifts as they move in tandem, drawing nearer to each other.
"It wasn't important," Silas says into her shoulder. His love for her, he thinks, grows with every passing day, a constant uphill motion. He resists the urge to yawn no longer, "Let's go back to bed. I'll tell you in the morning."