daithí

+ PERSISTENT ◌   PERCEPTIVE  ◌   CALM
= RESERVED ◌   IMPASSIVE  ◌   SARCASTIC
– STUBBORN  ◌   SINGLE-MINDED  ◌  RESENTFUL

Daithí’s greatest strength is his persistence. Capable of focusing on a task for hours at a time, Daithí’s patience and diligence in approaching his work was a great boon to his architectural career. This painstaking nature has made him quite perceptive; he has an eye for the details that often go unnoticed. A generally rational, orderly person, Daithí thrives on structure; to him, the natural world is made up of phenomena that can be systematically and scientifically understood. This often gives him an air of calm—no matter how outlandish the situation, there must be a reasonable explanation for events.

The mirror to Daithí’s persistence is his stubbornness. Daithí is particularly prone to believing that his judgments are superior to those of others, and once his mind is made, it’s difficult to sway him from his path. In pursuit of his goals, he can often suffer from tunnel vision, being too single-minded. This obsessive nature can also consume him, as it had in the face of his pathological fear of death. Daithí’s quiet exterior belies an inner world embroiled in jealousy, bitterness, and resentment, spurred on by years of illness and a life cut short. He feels that he’s been given the short end of the stick. Despite his best efforts, he struggles to keep this bitterness towards fate from spilling over towards other people, particularly those he sees as having squandered a life full of potential and privilege.

Generally, Daithí is rather reserved, preferring to keep to himself. This isn’t to say that he’s averse to socialization—rather, he’s just a bit out of practice. Between that and his relatively subtle way of emoting, Daithí can often come across as impassive and stern. Those that get to know him are often surprised by his dry wit—his humor has a sharp,  sarcastic streak that can sometimes border on rude.

Daithí has mixed feelings toward his attunement, and possesses equal parts resentment, fear, and begrudging awe for his newfound abilities. He is somewhat distrustful of the new and colorful cast of characters he’s met thus far—if this is truly the afterlife, it’s not the most impressive one.

—  ⧖ —

Daithí casts something of an imposing shadow, one that belies his placid, unruffled demeanor. Unlike many other denizens of WORLD, Daithí’s form is recognizably humanoid. He stands at 6’0”, with a medium athletic build. A snow-white cloak is pinned around his shoulders, secured with a silver hourglass brooch: keen-eyed observers may spot the unending fall of golden sands within. Under the cloak, a white vest sparkles with gold and silver accents; the black collared dress shirt underneath is often rolled up at the sleeves, revealing pale stone forearms joined with seams of gold to black marble hands. Jet black slacks and dark dress shoes complete the look. The formality of his base outfit seems to embarrass him, though he balks at the alternative of showing more skin—or stone, more precisely.

The majority of Daithí’s body is petrified, skin trailing off into smooth stone. Gold traces the border between flesh and marble; a sea of spiderweb-cracks wind their way across his body like golden Lichtenberg scars. Most of the stone seems to be white marble, with a notable exception being the diagonal slice of black marble that cuts starkly across his face from the upper left to the lower right. His right eye, embedded in dark stone, is unnaturally golden. His left eye, carved from that same black marble, has neither iris nor sclera, though he can see from it without issue. White marble claims the lower half of his head, dividing his face in two; the two textures meet just below the center of his brows, joined at the seams with a thick layer of gold.

His long hair is a silverish white, the hint of grey just enough to contrast it from the creamy off-white of his marble body. Short asymmetrical bangs fall in a thin sprinkle, parted in the center. His hair comes down to the center of his shoulder blades, generally straight with the occasional wavy strand. Stern brows give his chiseled face a stoic, proud air; one of them is carved delicately from dark stone. His stone lips are thin and pull back in a slight natural frown—despite their brittleness, Daithí seems to have no issue forming words or speaking. (For the sake of his sanity, he tries not to think about the biology of it all too much.)

Under his clothes, his body is a statue in disrepair—not even marble, it seems, can survive the ravages of time. His hands and forearms are littered with cracks and gouges, as if the stone has eroded heavily. But the most striking damage is around the left side of his chest, centered around his heart. There, the stone has fallen entirely apart; nothing remains but a stone ribcage, a frame around a golden heart gone eternally still.

‣ WARNINGS: ILLNESS (TERMINAL), DESCRIPTIONS OF DEATH/SURGERY,  CRISES OF THE EXISTENTIAL VARIETY

Daithí’s story, like any good tragedy, begins where it ends.

—  ⧖ —

From the moment he comes out of the womb, his days are numbered. His mother stares in horror as doctors crowd around the newborn, fretting over his unstable pulse and ashen, blue-tinged skin.

The baby is breathing, if only barely—but it’s not enough.

Something is wrong, if not with his lungs then with his heart.

—  ⧖ —

They find the issue quickly. A congenital heart defect. Tiny holes in his left ventricle, holdovers from fetal development that were meant to have sealed themselves over time. Not an immediate death sentence, but—

And there it is, the word no mother ever wants to hear. But.

The prognosis is grim: he’s put on a waiting list for a heart transplant. The doctors can’t make any promises, they say.

And so Daithí is reared on a strict regimen of infant formula and heart medication, monitored closely as he grows into a small but precocious toddler. His parents fuss and fret over him, watching closely for any signs of decline in his condition.

—  ⧖ —

Daithí grows up with the knowledge that he is different, in some fundamental sense, from his peers. His health is capricious: fine one day, fragile the next. The older he gets, the worse his health becomes, until a flight of stairs is enough to leave him doubled over, gasping for breath.

But against the odds, he lives. A miracle, they say.

He lives, and hits puberty in a running sprint. After his last growth spurt, Daithí’s not sure how to carry himself anymore, too used to being the smallest, the scrawniest—too used to being invisible. He feels like he’s all limbs, sore in all his joints and keenly aware of what he is: a creature of flesh and bone.

But it lasts only a moment. The beauty of adolescence: to believe that you will be young and healthy and immortal, to think that nothing can hurt you, not really.

—  ⧖ —

By the time the letter arrives, Daithí is in university—though just barely.

Doctor’s appointments litter his schedule, taking up more of his time than classes do. When he lays down to sleep at night, his breath wheezes hollowly in his chest. He wakes up sometimes in the middle of the night, gasping for breath, heart beating an irregular stutter-step. Every time, he thinks he’s dying, that his time’s run out. And every time, he manages to catch his breath again, evading the reaper for another night.

 But the game of cat-and-mouse they’re playing has to end eventually—and the odds are stacked against him.

And then one day, his mother texts him a picture of an envelope. Her accompanying message is short and to the point: “We made it.”

A donor, found and matched.

They start to make the necessary arrangements. Daithí goes on medical leave, and keeps his excuses vague when people ask.

“It’s just a minor procedure,” he tells them. “Nothing serious.”

Whether or not they can hear the lie in his voice, they don’t ask any more questions, and he doesn’t offer any more information. He’s looked at the numbers more times than he can count, until he can recite them by heart. 15-20% of transplant recipients die within a year of the procedure, supposing they make it out of the operating theatre at all. After that, the death rate levels out: about four percent of patients die every year after their first.

By the time a decade goes by, half of them will be dead. Fast forward another ten years: of a hundred patients, only fifteen will be left alive.

Daithí does the math. The transplant will buy him enough time, at least, to graduate. To go on to do something more, to leave something behind.

He hopes it’ll be enough. He knows it won’t be.

—  ⧖ —

It haunts him, the misshapen lump of muscle that sits out of place in his own chest. Daithí wonders, sometimes, where it came from—who it came from. He makes a few superficial attempts at research, a handful of ill-advised Wikipedia rabbit holes at god-knows-what-time in the morning. A person cannot survive without a heart, as far as he knows; therefore, the only logical conclusion is that his donor was dead. Buried now, most likely, rotting away under soil and stone and sky. Killed in a car accident, maybe, or head trauma, or gone comatose for long enough for family members to sign their body away to be disassembled, their heart still beating when it’s cut out of their chest, ribs cracked open and exposed to surgeons’ hungry eyes. The last scenario makes him shudder.

Organ procurement, it’s called. A careful choice of words.

He’ll never really know for sure—and maybe it’s for the best. He’s spent his life running from death, and now he carries a dead man’s heart in his own chest.

No wonder, then, that it struggles against the confines of its new body. No wonder, then, that Daithí’s own body sees it as alien, as foreign, as a threat.

The doctors prescribe him more pills. Each one comes with a litany of new instructions, new restrictions. His immune system is attacking his heart, and so they need to strip it away, until even the common cold poses a lethal threat, his lungs already fragile and heavy in his chest.

And so his world shrinks, little by little. What can he do, if this is the price to pay for another month, another week, another day?

—  ⧖ —

The days pass in a steady march. Around him, the world keeps turning. His friends graduate. They travel the world. They get married. They find stable careers and start happy, healthy families, and he—

—he swallows down his bitterness, his resentment, and plasters a smile on his face. His lungs rattle when he breathes.

There are things that he will never have, lives that he will never live. He’s long-since accepted it, or so he tells himself. But if he’s honest—(and he never is, not to himself)— he’s always been too greedy for his own good, always too jealous, too selfish.  

But the most important thing is this: Daithí stays alive, by some miracle. His heart settles in his chest, if only a little. The doctors stop hovering as much. His list of prescriptions starts to get shorter, for once.

He makes it past the first year. He closes his eyes and imagines a room full of patients, once a hundred strong. He imagines himself standing among the survivors: the lucky eighty bastards that get to leave the hospital and live out the rest of their lives with a sword hanging over their heads, poised to fall at any moment.

For a moment, he wonders if he’s really the lucky one. Then the guilt comes in full force, crushing and dark, and he banishes the thought from his mind.

—  ⧖ —

Daithí goes back to school. He expects it to be difficult, the adjustment, but it doesn’t take much time at all. He’s not that much older than the rest of his new classmates, after all, and Belfast is a city in recovery, just like him. It feels good to be back, and he finds something of a purpose in his studies. He wants to create something that matters, something lasting.

Later that year, he transfers into the School of Architecture.

—  ⧖ —

Daithí meets Jialun by chance. He’s a wildcard, a sly whirlwind of a man that saunters into his Physics class half an hour late, sliding into the seat next to him without a second thought. Jialun is all confidence and sharp smiles, leaning over to Daithí with a conspiratorial gleam in his eye. “What’d I miss?”

Reluctantly, Daithí shares his notes with the stranger, and that’s how it starts, before Daithí’s even realized. Prey caught in a trap, his pulse rabbit-quick.

—  ⧖ —

In most things, Jialun is Daithí’s polar opposite. Jialun’s smiles come easy, practiced and fluid; Daithí’s are small and shy, half-tucked behind a self-conscious hand. Jialun revels in attention, a charming mask kept on around the clock; Daithí wants nothing more than to make himself small, unnoticeable. Jialun is a man with a fire in his chest, who knows exactly what he wants; Daithí’s chest is filled with a dead man’s heart and a dying man’s dreams.

And yet, and yet—despite everything, they become fast friends. Jialun is nothing if not persistent, a man who likes to pry, who won’t rest until he unravels whatever mystery’s caught his eye. And Daithí is nothing if not a puzzle, even to himself.

Their greatest similarity: they both keep their cards close to their chest. Daithí doesn’t tell Jialun about the surgery, about his limited time, about the way fear keeps him up at night and haunts his every waking moment. Just once, he wants something separate from all of that. He wants—

—  ⧖ —

Jialun has never been shy, and so he looks at Daithí over the beat-up wooden counter of their local pub one night, cheeks flushed and eyes serious, and tells him that he wants to be more than friends, if Daithí would have him.

Daithí feels undone, frayed at the edges. Jialun looks at him like he wants to pull at every loose thread, like he wants to watch him unravel.

Daithí has always been stubborn, and always selfish. The trap snaps shut.

“Yes,” he says, voice raspy and hesitant. He closes his eyes, takes a sharp breath. “If you’d have me. I’d like that, I think.”

—  ⧖ —

Daithí lies. He has a condition, he says. Chronic, but harmless.

Jialun, who’s never had a reason to doubt Daithí before, believes him, and perhaps that is the greatest cruelty of all.

—  ⧖ —

More time passses. They graduate. Jialun manages to get a fancy position at some investing firm, managing high-risk portfolios. Daithí secures a position at a local architect’s firm. Together, they bring in enough money to live more than comfortably.

Jialun tells Daithí about all the places they’ll go together, about all the adventures they’ll have, as if they have all the time in the world. Daithí doesn’t have the heart to stop him.

—  ⧖ —

Then, as Daithí’s working overtime one night, there’s a burst of pain in his chest so sharp he sees stars. His lungs clench painfully in his chest, and he can’t seem to breathe right. He stumbles, falls—and before he can think to be afraid, his vision goes black.

Luckily for him, he’s not alone: his coworker rushes to his side and calls an ambulance. He’s rushed off to the hospital, where they manage to stabilize him.

He wakes up to a doctor poring over his vitals with a nurse in tow, snippets of a conversation drifting in and out of earshot.

Organ rejection, they say. Chronic.

—  ⧖ —

He retreats into himself. Intimately familiar with the frailty of things that live and breathe, he turns his attention to safer things, solid things. Architecture becomes his passion, his one solace. Daithí spends long nights over the drafting table, sketching until his fingers are cold and numb and aching. He could do this on the computer, of course—but a part of him protests. Maybe the fatigue in his bones and the rattle in his chest makes it feel realer, somehow. Like he’s earned this. Like he’s achieved something.  

—  ⧖ —

“I need a break,” Daithí says, and it’s not a lie, not really.

He cares about Jialun too much to let him watch Daithí die, slowly and inevitably. And, more importantly, more selfishly—his presence is a reminder, at this point, of all the things Daithí can’t have. All the things that’ll be taken away from him when the heart in his chest stops beating. And he needs space, needs time. His project needs to be finished.

Jialun doesn’t take it well. They go back and forth in brisk, hurt voices at first, before it escalates to an all-out argument. Daithí almost craves it, the opportunity to be angry—but he’s not angry at Jialun, not really.
(He’s angry at himself, if he’s honest. Angry that he let it get this far, angry that in his selfish need to be loved, he let someone else get hurt.)

Daithí doesn’t even remember what he blames it on. Himself, probably. Family circumstances, even. Anything and everything to avoid telling the truth.

—  ⧖ —

“Alright.” Jialun says, finally. His tone is resigned, his voice gravelly from yelling.

There’s a part of Daithí that wants to get angry, that feels betrayed—no, you’re not supposed to give up, he thinks, not that easily. But he’d initiated this, and he’d see it through.

“Alright,” Daithí repeats, and it’s over, just like that.

—  ⧖ —

The waiting list is long, they tell him. Longer than it was a decade ago.

You should get your affairs in order, they tell him. Daithí knows a lost cause when he sees one.

—  ⧖ —

Nights spent in the office blur into one another. Daithí pins the last of his fading energy on one final hope: that the structures he designs will survive him, one way or another, a legacy of concrete and glass.

Here, a spine of steel, rooted deep enough in the earth to hit bedrock.

Around them, flesh and fat and fascia, poured in concrete around rebar bones.

And over them all, a stone skin of marble, of granite, of limestone, strong enough to shield a skyscraper’s heart from the winds.

—  ⧖ —

It’s a night like any other, except that there’s a dram of scotch on the counter, and he’s staring down at his phone, too-bright in the oppressive dark of his room. Jialun’s contact information is still saved there, and it would be so easy to reach out—except for this, the million-dollar question.

How do you tell someone you love that you’re dying?

That you are going to leave them, once and for all; that this is inevitable, irreversible, eternal; that this is the final domino in a chain reaction that has been unfolding since before you were born, the final consequence of those pinprick holes in your fetal heart that never quite sealed themselves up.

Daithí is familiar with the dilemma—he’s turned the shape of the question over and over in his head a hundred times, knows the weight of it in the pit of his stomach like an old friend. And every time, he chooses the same answer.

He doesn’t.

His thumb hovers over the call button for a beat, then another—and then he turns off his phone entirely. There’s no point, he tells himself. He’s romanticizing a connection that doesn’t even exist. Pinning his hopes on someone who probably doesn’t even remember him.

Daithí lies awake the whole night, staring up  at the ceiling, at the flickering spots in his vision that show up when he inhales too deeply, at nothing at all.

—  ⧖ —

The morning comes, as it always does. The first fingers of sun pry their way through his shut blinds, they land on Daithí’s skin, dappled strips of light and dark painted across his sheets.

He wishes that he was a better person, a stronger person, a braver person.

And more than anything: he wishes that he had more time.

—  ⧖ —

His health declines, inevitably. He can feel himself getting weaker. Breathing is harder by the day. His moods swing wildly, from violent anger to all-consuming depression.

Is there a correct way to do this, he wonders? Is there a graceful way to die?

He tries everything, anything he can get his hands on: experimental treatments, snake oil, faith healing. Nothing works.

In his darkest moments, Daithí hopes—prays, even—that someone will die, so that he can live. So that he can replace his stranger’s heart with another, if only to eke out another moment.

Eventually, he stops looking in the mirror, for fear of what he’ll find. The shell of a man, driven to desperation and paranoia in his final months.

—  ⧖ —

There’s nothing special about his final day.

It’s a weekend. Daithí wakes up, stepping out of bed and into the shower. He checks the fridge: he’ll run out of groceries soon. He’ll need to get more. He’s only been buying as much as he’ll need for the next week, if even that. He has dreams of them finding him, dead and decaying, with a fridge stocked full of food that he’ll never eat. It’s wasteful—no need. He’ll go out to the market, and he’ll restock his fridge, and with any luck, he’ll survive long enough to empty it again. An endless cycle of preparing for the end.

It’s raining outside. He puts on his coat, picks up an umbrella on his way to the door. And then, his lungs seize again in a way that’s painfully familiar, and black dots dance across his vision. His heart stutters—

—  ⧖ —

—and then, against all odds: he wakes up.

Whether that’s a blessing or a curse, he has yet to decide—but if it gets him another day, another chance?
He’ll take it, regardless of the cost.

• Pinterest board here.
• Was a platinum blond in life with hazel eyes.
• Daithí’s design is heavily inspired by the works of Billie Bond.
• Daithí was born and raised in Belfast, and speaks with a Belfast accent. There, he probably attended Queen’s University Belfast.
• Daithí was born with a congenital heart defect that affects his left ventricle. 
• Besides English, Daithí speaks a bit of Gaeilge (Irish Gaelic)—though rather badly. He also studied French throughout university, but doesn’t remember a thing.
  
  

• TBA
  
  

• TBA