hobo heart x reader. Perhaps we value each other?

Chapter 20

I had lied to myself for so long that I forgot why I even started. A lie told for so many years that it had become my only truth, a survival mechanism turned into a religious belief.

No one could ever love someone like you.

After all, how could they? I had been exposed and tainted, stripped down to my barest vulnerabilities and left to rot. Broken, bruised, and scarred. Beaten completely beyond recognition, not just in the flesh, but in the quietest corners of my soul. Made to feel entirely inferior, malnourished of affection, and destroyed beyond any hope of repair. I was a casualty of a domestic war I never volunteered to fight. Even now, with his hands wrapped firmly around my upper arms, my hypersensitive skin flinched, anticipating the deep, blooming ache of new bruises. I was waiting for the hands to turn into fists. I was always waiting for the fists.

"Please, Molly," his voice was cold, but it shook with an uncharacteristic, trembling desperation that felt far too real. "Please. Don't lie to me."

A sharp, tightening pain suddenly spiked somewhere deep inside my empty chest, a phantom agony that shouldn't have existed without an organ to feel it. Almost instantly, Hobo Heart gasped, his posture fracturing as he slammed one of his hands flat against his own ribs. My agony was bleeding directly into him through the meat I had surrendered.

"Don't lie to the one person who can tell exactly when you're doing it," he choked out, his jaw clenched hard against the sudden, violent influx of my memories. "Don't lie to me. Not now, and not ever again."

Without warning, the strength evaporated from my legs. The structural integrity of my armor just collapsed. My knees gave out, and I crashed heavily onto the floorboards, a heap of tangled limbs and raw nerves. Hobo Heart dropped with me, kneeling directly in front of me in the dirt of my breakdown, refusing to break the connection. My hands shook violently against my lap, and my vision blurred into a smeared, watery mess.

I shook my head violently, trying to claw myself out of my own skin, trying to escape the suffocating weight of his perception. "I'm sorry! I can't! I can't do this! I can't let you love me, because if you love me, then..." I collapsed forward, burying my face until my forehead pressed against the cold, hard floor, letting the dust scratch my skin. "Then... I'll actually have a reason to live. And I don't want to live with this pain anymore! I don't want to be responsible for keeping a soul intact! In my head... it's a dark place, Hobo. It's an absolute graveyard."

"Molly."

His voice shifted, turning soft and impossibly warm just as quickly as it had been ice. He didn't pull away from my ugliness. He didn't look at my weeping form with disgust. "... Pain is a burden, but it is one you don't have to bear alone anymore. I can help you through this. I can help you understand it. I can help you wield it, Molly. We can turn that hatred, that anger, and that systemic pain into a weapon. Into strength."

The shadow of his towering frame shifted. Hobo Heart stood up, a dark silhouette against the bleak light of my room, and slowly offered me his hand.

"Let me teach you to value yourself as I have come to value you," he whispered, his palm open, scarred, and waiting. "Come with me, Molly. Let's try my heart."

My entire body racked with violent, sobbing hitches that threatened to tear my ribs apart. How could I ever come to terms with what I had been through? How could I ever learn to coexist with the pure, unadulterated agony that had tried to end my life a thousand times over? How could any living creature possibly understand the sheer, suffocating weight of how I felt?

It was a deep, gnawing pain rooted in my very core—a systemic rot so heavy it could sink a battleship into the deepest trenches of the ocean. An ache so vicious it could shake a mountain to its foundations and bring the sky crashing down. I carried memories so violent, so disgusting, that they would make actual monsters shiver and cry in the dark, and nightmares so vivid they could wake the dead from their graves just to scream with me.

How could anyone survive a life like this? How could anyone look at this wreckage and see something worth keeping?

But then, the chilling reality hit me. How could I even choose to die? I was literally standing there, breathing and functioning without a heart in my chest. He had it. He was guarding it. He was keeping the rhythm going. He...

He lives like this.

The realization shattered my panic like glass, leaving a cold, clear clarity in its place. He lived with this exact brand of agonizing pain, these precise, twisting thoughts, and these horrific, bloody memories. He was a monster who ripped out hearts because his own chest was a hollow, bleeding ruin—yet here he was, offering me the only piece of himself that mattered, willing to take on my wreckage just to give me a pulse.