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When Cassandra Cillian is sixteen, she is far too busy finishing her senior year of high school to be bothered with whether or not a name appears on her wrist. So when nothing happens, when no scrawling names appear just after midnight, she barely even notices. Besides, it’s not like sixteen is the be all end all. Soulmate’s names appear on landmark birthdays, but no one ever knows which. She’s still got 18 and 20 and half a dozen decades after that. But mostly she doesn’t care if a name ever appears for her. She has better things to do, like getting into MIT and Polytech and working on this project she just knows is going to win her the Nobel Prize in a decade or two.
When it doesn’t appear at eighteen, she does feel sad. Just a little. By now she’s yearning to be something other than just the genius, just smart. But she doesn’t let it bother her. Doesn’t let it knock her off course. Cassandra doesn’t have time for romance. Or at least she tells herself that, locking herself in her dorm room for the weekend and studying for exams that won’t happen for months, fighting off a headache that makes her see white and feel faint.
Nineteen isn’t a landmark birthday, and even if it was, Cassandra wouldn’t be concerned about soulmates. A week before her birthday she’d seen bright white and the world had spun around her and suddenly everything smelled like pancakes and then she’d fallen to the floor and woken up in the emergency room with a headache that honestly felt like dying. The doctor tells her they don’t know what’s wrong, and that they called her parents but they said they couldn’t make it. Mute, Cassandra nods, and for a fleeting moment feels the absence of a name on her wrist as strongly as the pounding in her skull because then maybe… Maybe someone would be here for her. For all this. Someone to hold her hand and tell her it was going to be okay.
At the stroke of midnight on her twentieth birthday, it happens. It happens, and all she can do is hang her head and cry, because by now the doctors know. A tumor. A brain tumor. It accelerates her senses and makes her even smarter than before, but it gives her blistering headaches and makes her see and smell and hear things that aren’t there and it’s going to kill her. They aren’t sure when, but it’s going to kill her, and she’s going to die young. It’s that night, with tears in her eyes and a scrap of yellow fabric hiding the name from her sight, that she sets a date. She sets a date and she lays in bed and cries again, not for herself, but for her soulmate. For the poor doomed soul destined to love someone with a ticking time bomb for a brain, who will die far too soon for either of them to live a life together. Or maybe even for them to meet at all.
Three years later, she gets the letter from the library, and her wrist tingles, warm and sparkling, but she doesn’t go. She can’t go. She’s laying in a hospital bed hooked up to a dozen tubes and wires while the doctors search for a way to slow the tumor’s growth. Make her die a little slower. Make the headaches a little less terrible. One of them uses the phrase ‘make her comfortable’ and a shiver drips down her spine like freezing water, and she swears if she gets out of here between that day and the date she set she would never care about comfort again.
“Ezekiel Jones” the young man says, with an easy smile and a warm accent. He’s holding his hand out to shake, a leather cuff covering his wrist. Cassandra swallows, and extends a ribbon wrapped wrist herself.
“Cassandra Cillian.” she says with a wide smile, fighting to keep her voice even and cheerful. He grasps her hand, grip light and agile and skin warm, and she’s almost convinced he has to be able to hear her heart slamming against her chest, even though that’s completely improbable from this distance. She watches his face when she says her name, but it’s a perfect mask. She can’t read him at all. Maybe it’s not her name on his arm. Maybe it’s somebody else’s. Even through her disappointment, she hopes so. God, she hopes so.
When she’s standing beside Lamia, holding the crown, she wonders if this is really the right thing to do. But then she thinks of being nineteen and terrified and alone and knows that if this could help people like her, she has to try. But then she looks over and Jake looks furious, and Eve and Flynn looked shocked, and Ezekiel looks… sad. He just looks sad, but almost like he might understand. She swallows, knowledge of what she’s doing heavy in her stomach.
“Hey kid.” Ezekiel is smiling at her, hesitantly, when Flynn opens the cell she’s been locked into. Cassandra fights the urge to fly at him and hug him, but she reminds herself she just met him, she has no idea what name is on his wrist, and that would be weird.
“I’m so sorry.” she says instead. Jake won’t look at her. Flynn and Eve look like they pity her a little. But just like before, Ezekiel just looks sad. Maybe even like he understands.
Flynn is dying. He’s dying and even after she betrayed him he’s pressing the sword into her hands and tell her to cure herself. Instead, she lowers the blade and presses it into his abdomen, watches the skin close and the blood dry and the color flood back to his face. He looks up at her, shocked and confused. Eve looks sad, but proud. Jake looks… disgruntled? She’s not sure with him. And Ezekiel she can’t read at all. She smiles, eyes watery, and puts the blade across Flynn’s lap. She owed it to him. After all, it was all her fault.
Cassandra’s one comfort is that not everyone falls in love with their soulmate, so nothing says she has to fall in love with Ezekiel Jones. After all, they’re Librarians. They lead busy, dangerous lives, leaving no time for silly dalliances, even though she’s pretty sure she saw Flynn and Eve making out behind a tree the other day. This line of thought works exceedingly well, until it doesn’t anymore. It all falls apart in the Labyrinth.
Her head is pounding like her skull is about to split open, her vision is swimming, and the colors and music and smells are all too much. She can feel tears pricking at her eyes even though all she wants to do is find the center of the Labyrinth, to prove to her team she’s still on their side.
“I can’t do it! Seven levels is too many, it’s too much information, my senses are completely overloaded.”
“Trust your eyes, Cassandra. Trust your senses.” Ezekiel’s voice was low and soothing and his hand was on her arm.
“I can’t trust my eyes, Ezekiel! I hallucinate!”
“Then close your eyes. Trust your other senses.”
“But… I have to lead us through. I’m the only one who can.”
“I’ll be your sight. Close your eyes, Cassie. Trust your other senses, and let me be your eyes, and lead us through.”
“You…” Cassandra frowned, pain and confusion knitting her eyebrows together. “You trust me to do that? Even after what I did?”
“‘Course. Your situation? Tumor growing in my brain, waiting to kill me? I’d have done the same thing. Except, unlike you, I wouldn’t have changed my mind. I’d have let the world burn. You came back for us. If anything, you’re the one trustin’ me.”
“I… Thank you, Ezekiel. Okay. Okay, I can do it.”
Ezekiel nodded at her, and Cassandra shivered as he took her arm, wrapping both her hands in his as she shut her eyes. His fingers rested, warm and heavy, over the yellow ribbon on her wrist, and the skin beneath it thrummed. She wondered if he could feel it. She wondered if he would look. She didn’t know if she wanted him to or not.
After that, Cassandra knew she was pretty much done for. Over and over again, Ezekiel proved to be the one person on the team who trusted her, and let her actually do things, and who seemed to think she was at least sort of capable of things. When they partnered on missions or spent time together in the Annex she didn’t feel like the sick girl, or the math girl (Even if he insisted on calling her as such), or the girl who almost screwed her friends over. She just felt like Cassandra, librarian in training and a member of the team.
For a really long time, she doesn’t tell him. She’s not sure she’s ever going to. After all, she has her date set. She knows when and where and how her life will end, and that it will end too soon, and if she is his soulmate, if her name is on his arm like his is on hers, it won’t be fair to him to lose her early. So she just doesn’t tell him. She thinks Jenkins knows. Sometimes out of the corner of her eye she watches him glance between them and frown sadly. He never says anything, not directly, though once he’d pulled her aside and grasped her shoulder and told her that everyone, no matter their future or past, deserved a real shot at life while they were alive.
The shapeshifter changes everything. Being locked in that room, desperately telling the truth to open the door, and then keep it open, changes everything. Most importantly, the look on Ezekiel’s face when she drops The Bomb changes everything.
“I set a date. They told me I was going to die and I wanted to do it on my own terms, so I set a date.” The door swings open and Jake looks shocked but Ezekiel looks… she doesn’t really even have a word for it. He starts to say something but then plans are being made and Jake is running off leaving… leaving them to tell the truth. To keep the door open.
When they run out of pointless truths, Cassandra takes the jump. She sucks in a deep breath, and thrusts a ribbon wrapped wrist towards Ezekiel. He blinks, and she nods in response. His hands are shaking as he moves to untie her wrist, and it strikes her as strange. His hands are always so steady. Master thief’s fingers, always nimble, always sure, but they shake as he reveals the truth hiding in plain sight all these months. The ribbon falls to the dusty ground, and Ezekiel swallows. He runs his fingers gently over the script, the shape of his name in her pale skin. The skin hums beneath the warmth of him and the same sparkling tingle Cassandra felt when she got the library letter, ages ago, travels through her veins.
“I… I thought I might be but… you never said anything, and the ribbon, and the brain grape and… for awhile I thought maybe you wore it because nothing was there and I didn’t want to ask if it was a sensitive topic…”
“It came when I turned twenty. I keep it wrapped because it made me… sad.”
“Here.” Ezekiel’s voice is quiet but firm, as he presses his own wrist into Cassandra’s hands. She fumbles open the snaps on the leather cuff, and then beneath her eyes and fingers, slender and shivery, is her name.
“I’m so sorry…” she whispers, eyes welling with tears as she shakes her head. “I’m so sorry, I was hoping it wouldn’t be me, you don’t… you don’t deserve that, Ezekiel.”
Her hands are still wrapped around his as she looks up at him, face drawn and pale and sorrowful.
“Wait.. what? Do you not…?” He frowns down at her, and she sighs.
“No, no, it’s not- I just… I’m dying, Ezekiel. Whether it’s next week, or next year, or on the day I set, I’m going to die, and not in a handful of decades like you, or Jacob. I’m cursed. I’m just a ticking time bomb waiting to go off and destroy anyone around me. Before the Library, before… before you were a real person I knew instead of just a word on my skin, I was safe. I was safe because no one would be hurt when I left but me. That’s why I took the crown. I’d… I’d never had a reason to need to stay before and suddenly I had people again and I… I screwed up.
“So I didn’t tell you and I hoped it was another name on your arm because…. because you’re good, Ezekiel. I know you fancy yourself one of the bad guys, or something, but your heart is good. And you deserve better than a soulmate with a grape sized bomb growing in her frontal lobe.”
“What’s the lifespan of a librarian anyway? Twenty years, max? And I’m a thief on top of that, that cuts me down to about ten, maybe. So maybe you die. Maybe we both die. Or maybe… somewhere along the way… We find a way to help you.” Ezekiel fidgeted, keeping Cassandra’s hands on his own, refusing to let her pull away. “I’ve never really had anybody until this team either, and if we’ve both been lonely and we’re both gonna die don’t you think… maybe we deserve this?”
“I… what?” Cassandra blinked rapidly, looking vaguely overwhelmed and confused.
“I don’t care, Cassie. I don’t care if you die tomorrow or in a year or ten years or if somehow you become some terrifying and immortal sorceress queen. I don’t remember the last time I cared about someone but I ca-... no, I love you, and if you or me or both of us is gonna die, then shouldn’t we take the time we have? We already wasted… years.”
Cassandra is staring at him, eyes wide and mouth gaping, and Jake chooses that moment to rush back in, flinging the shapeshifter against the wall and shouting at them to go, go go. Ezekiel grabs her, wraps his hand around her wrist, and pulls, and then they all run out of the hole as fast as they can, the slam of the door echoing behind them as the walls wrap the shifter back into his prison. They hit sunlight and desert heat right before the shaft is planned to blow, but none of the yelling or relief or fighting makes its way into Cassandra’s ears. She doesn’t notice a whole lot of anything, for once, because the minute they’re off the platform and away from the hole, Ezekiel is still pulling on her wrist and she looks up to figure out what he wants and no one has ever looked at her quite like that before and then all she knows is his lips on hers and being sandwiched between his warmth and the hood of a sunbaked pickup.
Ezekiel lets go of her wrist to wrap his arms around her waist, and so she follows his lead, winding hands into his hair and it never even occurs to her to think about whorl patterns or anything but how warm and solid he feels. For a split second she’s angry, not at him for kissing her, but because this is what she was missing out on. If she’d been able to go to that damn interview, she could have had years more of this.
“Was that okay?” Ezekiel’s voice was practically a whisper when he pulled away, and the rare sweetness in his face warmed Cassandra from the inside out. She bit her lip and nodded, smiling as she picked up his hand to look at his wrist again. “Did you know?”
“Not… not always? I was pretty sure the past few weeks and then… in the room, when I said that I’d set a date. I didn’t know what your expression was, but whatever it was, it gave it away.”
“Yeah, that was a shock.”
“I’m sorry.” she smiles sadly, thumb stroking her name on his skin.
“It’s alright, I get it. I mean obviously not really but… mostly. I mostly get it. It’s your life, Cassie. I’m just… one part of it.”
“You’re a very important part though.”
“Yeah?” his familiar smirk was returning, and Cassandra smiled, rolling her eyes.
“Yes, Zekiel. You’re very important to me. And,I guess since we’ve told so many truths already… I love you too. But not just because you’re my soulmate. You trusted me and believed in my capabilities as a member of this team even when no one else would. You made me feel…. normal. Not like the smart math girl, or the sick and dying girl. Just Cassie. A member of the team.”
“Hey, I thought we agreed, you were the one trusting me.”
“Zekiel.”
“What?”
“Shut up and kiss me again.”
“I can do that.” he grinned, and leaned into her again, cupping the back of her head with one hand, the other slipping their fingers together.
Jake gave them as much shit as he could on the way to the Annex’s back door, but everything rolled off of Cassandra, water off of a duck’s feathers. Eve smiled, quiet and sly. But Jenkins took the cake. He practically beamed when they walked into the room, hand in hand, eyes soft and shining. He strode across the room, offered brief congratulations, and then grasped Cassandra’s shoulders. She smiled at him.
“I told you that you deserved to live.” his voice wavered slightly, and Cassandra patted his hand with her free one.
“I know. I understand now.” she slid her eyes sideways, where Ezekiel was staring at them, openly puzzled by the exchange. But he met her eyes with a smile, and squeezed her hand. Jenkins patted them both on the shoulder and wandered off to wherever he usually spent his time. Cassandra grinned and pressed her lips to Ezekiel’s ear, tugging him off to their quarters.
“Come on. After all, like you said we have wasted years to make up for and who knows how many years to make the best of.”
She can see his stomach drop with the way she pulls him backwards into her room, his shock changing to a smile as he pulls her closer. And Cassandra swears to not miss out on anything else for however much longer she lives.