CASSIAN

The morning came with a harsh, gray light.

I heard Julian groan before I saw him move. He stayed under the blankets for a long time, staring at the ceiling. I was already at the table. I had made coffee. Two cups were sitting there, steam rising in the quiet air.

Julian sat up slowly. I could tell his body was sending him the bill for last night. He moved like he was made of glass.

I didn’t look at him. I kept my eyes on my own cup.

Julian stood up and walked over to the table. He moved gingerly, as if the floor might give way beneath him. He sat down across from me.

"I’m sorry," he said. It was a simple statement. He didn’t try to make excuses. "For hitting you."

I didn’t look up. I just stared at the dark surface of the coffee.

"And for, " He stopped. He cleared his throat and tried again. "I’m sorry, Cassian."

"I said things I shouldn’t have," I said. My voice sounded thin to my own ears. "I know that."

"Still." Julian reached out and took the second cup. He wrapped his hands around it as if he were trying to pull the heat into his bones.

There was a crack between us. It was a small thing, a hairline fracture in the middle of everything we had built.

You couldn’t see it if you weren’t looking for it, but I knew it was there. I could feel the cold air leaking through it.

"I’ll stop," Julian said. He was talking to the coffee, not to me. "I promise. No more of that stuff."

I looked at him then. My jaw was bruised. I could feel the purple mark on my skin. Julian saw it, too. Something crossed his face, a flash of shame that made him look younger than he was.

"I promise, Cassian," he said again. His voice was firmer this time. He looked me in the eye. "I won’t do it again."

I wanted to believe him. I needed to believe him. If I didn’t believe him, then everything we had done to get here was for nothing.

I nodded once. "Okay."

"Okay," he repeated.

We sat there in the quiet kitchen, drinking our coffee while the city woke up outside. We went back to the routine.

We went back to the rooftop and the fast food and the long walks through the neighborhood. We tried to make things go back to the way they were before.

I tried to pretend the crack wasn’t there. I tried to believe that a promise was enough to fix the world. And for a while, it almost worked. We laughed again. We planned for the future. We lived our lives.

But sometimes, when the room was quiet, I would look at Julian and wonder if the dream was starting to turn into something else.

...

The night was warm, the kind of heat that stuck to the skin even after the sun had died. We were on the rooftop, the place that had become the center of our world.

Six months had passed since the night of the fight, and the air between us was still careful, like a house made of dry wood waiting for a match.

It was my birthday. Twenty-four.

The ritual was the same as it always was: a pile of greasy takeout boxes that smelled of salt and fried dough, and more beer than we usually allowed ourselves.

The city below us was a sea of moving lights, a restless animal that didn’t care that we were watching it from the dark.

"You only turn twenty-four once," Julian said, his voice light. He was leaning back against the brick ledge, his silhouette sharp against the glow of the skyline.

"I turned twenty-four last year, too," I said. It was a joke, but my voice felt heavy in my throat.

Julian laughed, a quick, bright sound. "No, you turned twenty-four for the first time last year. Tonight you’re turning twenty-four for real. These are different things, Cassian. Keep up."

"That makes no sense."

"Drink your beer," he replied, nudging a bottle toward me.

We sat in the silence that followed, the kind of silence that happens when the night is too big and the honesty feels like something you might actually be able to afford.

The beer was cold, and as the bottles emptied, the walls Julian usually kept around himself seemed to thin. He was quieter than usual.

He wasn’t looking at the city with his usual appetite, the look of a hunter seeing a target. He looked like he was seeing something much further away.

"Do you my mother was seventeen when she had me?" he asked without any warning.

"No?"

He didn’t look at me. "She didn’t want a baby. She wanted the money. My father, whoever he was, gave her enough for the procedure. She spent it instead."

He gave a small shrug. It was a gesture without bitterness, which made the words cut deeper. Bitterness would have been easier to handle.

"I don’t know what she spent it on," he continued, his voice steady. "She never told me. She wasn’t cruel, that’s the thing. She wasn’t awful. She just... wasn’t there. Even when she was standing in the room, she wasn’t there."

I didn’t move. I didn’t even breathe. I felt like I was watching someone peel back their own skin.

"I used to steal books," he said, and a small, private smile touched his lips. It was a smile I hadn’t seen before, one that didn’t have a sharp edge.

"From the local library. I couldn’t afford them, and I wanted to know how to read properly. So I stole them. Then I stole food. Then I stole whatever I needed to keep the lights on. I got good at it. I realized early on that if you move like you belong somewhere, no one asks why you’re there."

I remembered the first time I saw him. He had been in my father’s study, his hands certain and quick as he tried to pry the gold head off a small statue.

He had looked at me with those wide, desperate eyes and begged me not to speak.

I had blackmailed him into being my slave for years, but the truth was, I had been the one who was caught.

"I never meant to stay that long," Julian whispered. He was still looking at the city.

"Six years at the estate. I had a plan. Three months. Four at most. Just enough time to map the vault and vanish." 𝕗𝗿𝕖𝐞𝐰𝗲𝕓𝐧𝕠𝕧𝗲𝐥.𝚌𝐨𝚖

He stopped. The silence held something heavy, a name we hadn’t spoken in all the years we had known each other.

"One person made me stay," he said to the city. He didn’t look at me, but he didn’t have to. The words were meant for me alone.

I hadn’t looked at the city for ten minutes. I hadn’t looked at the stars or the empty beer bottles. I had only looked at Julian. I had looked at him until I forgot that anything else existed.