A/N Unbeta'd oneshot written in maybe twenty, thirty minutes. It's messy. The religious undertones are strong in this one.
When Joseph Hart prays, he imagines his body is being cut open. He is on an operating table. His organs are not organs, and his blood runs with a current of stars, his heart is Jupiter or Saturn, and the cavernous space of his dissected chest is a portal to another galaxy, to somewhere indescribable and utterly beyond reach. That, Joseph Hart believes, it what Heaven must be like.
He knows this in the same way that he knows the sun rises in the East. It is something that had to be taught, but once taught, never forgotten. Joseph Hart loves his God, loves it with a strength that makes him want to evaporate into the summer breeze, or to set himself alight to prove his faith to a being he has never seen but knows exists. He wants to drown himself like a martyr, or sink below the sand. Joseph Hart wants to spin dizzily on a mountaintop, wants to perch on the crest of the tallest pine like a massive bird.
Joseph loves too much, sometimes. He is too trusting: "You're a heartbreaker," his mother warned him, "but in the sense that it is your heart that will be broken over and over again."
This phenomenon, having occurred once, began a quick tap-tap-tap of dominoes, and Joseph has been falling in and out of love since he was three years old. (Her name had been Sarah, like an age-old American pioneer, and he had wanted to build her a homely castle out of sand).
Joseph's heart is like a much-loved crystal. It has been dropped and knocked and pushed to the back of the cabinet. It has cracks that run like craters, splinters long as pythons. When the sun shines through him, it is as if his soul is refracted a million times back at whomever look closest, and they see not his whole, but several thousand versions of himself. Joseph Hart is the boy who loved too much. The boy with a hundred faces.
Joseph asks his God every day for the ability to know himself. He wants to feel like the other young people he knows, with music running through their bodies like electricity, all tapping fingers and bobbing heads. He wants to let go, to fly as swiftly as the olive-laden dove of Noah's, on that first clear morning of a storm that had lasted so long.
It is a yearning that is buried so deep within him, Joseph sometimes forgets it is there: but he is used to this. He ignores what he must forget and remembers what he swore to ignore. Joseph cannot always turn a blind eye, and when these fatal cracks appear in his well-oiled armour, they burn him as brightly as a solar flare. A plume of gold puncturing the inky black.
It is a boy with hair the colour of wheat and a too-wide smile. He is tall and sweet and he makes Joseph laugh like a child. This laugh is different to the one he plasters to his vocal chords like cheap wallpaper, the one he has displayed, many times to many different people; Joseph feels as if his heart were an open-home and he the polite realtor. He watches people peer into his mind, dipping their attentions like a watercolour brush, before sailing onwards and upwards, leaving Joseph stranded, without a drop of colour upon his barren canvas.
His name is Sam Evans. He makes Joseph Hart want to die. He makes him feel immortal. Joseph is a fleck of dust in the universe, a tiny, out-of-the-way planet that orbits Sam constantly, unknowingly. Every once in a while, Joseph's planet is bathed in the radiant glow, and then Sam turns away, and the world is suddenly very cold once again.