CASSIAN

He was hanging from the narrow stone ledge of the second story, his fingers hooked into the architectural molding with a casualness that bordered on suicidal.

He looked entirely unbothered by the fact that he was dangling thirty feet above a rose garden.

He wore the staff uniform, but he wore it wrong, the collar was open, the sleeves were rolled back to show his lean forearms, and his dark chestnut hair was a chaotic frizz that somehow looked intentional.

"Are you going to let me in?" Julian asked, a grin already tugging at his lips. "Or are you going to stand there until my grip gives out? Either works for me, though one of them is going to be a lot messier for the gardeners."

I felt a surge of longing so sharp it nearly knocked the wind out of me.

It was fierce and irrational. I was looking at him, right in front of me, and yet I missed him with an intensity that made my hands shake.

Behind the present moment, a shadow of the dream flickered: Julian, older, dying with a smile on his face.

The déjà vu was a physical weight. I have already lost you, I thought, the realization breaking my heart even as he climbed over the sill. You are standing right here, and I have already lost you.

"Go away," I said, my voice sounding like it belonged to someone else. I frowned, the kind of frown that clearly meant don’t you dare leave me, and I didn’t lock the window as I walked back to my bed.

Julian tumbled into the room with a huff, dusting off his trousers. "Woof. I will never get used to the size of this place. It’s almost impressive how small they managed to make this room. It’s like they built a closet and forgot the hangers."

I buried my face in the pillow, refusing to respond. I was caught in the crossfire between the dream and the reality, the sensations of the other life refusing to leave me.

I could still feel the rage and the grief, and the phantom sensation of a hand in mine, a hand that belonged to the boy named Noah.

The silence in the room stretched out, but it wasn’t empty.

I felt Julian’s body heat before he even moved. He was close, too close, his shadow falling across me as he sat on the edge of the mattress.

I turned over, and he was directly above me.

He was close enough that I could count the individual eyelashes on his lids, close enough to see the small, familiar scar near his temple that I had memorized without meaning to.

My heart did that thing it always did when he was near, it became too large for my ribs, a frantic, unreasonable throb of love that I had no way to explain and no way to stop.

In my scramble to move away from the intensity of his gaze, my elbow caught him squarely in the face. The contact was unintended, a clumsy jerk of limbs.

"Ack! My face—" Julian groaned, clutching his nose. "I think it’s bleeding. I think my vision is swimming. Cassian, you’ve blinded your only friend. Tell my mother I loved her."

I turned back, panicked. "Are you—" I stopped. Julian was looking at me through his fingers, his eyes dancing with mischief.

It was a performance, a piece of theater designed to pull me out of my head.

"Get out," I muttered, my face heating up. "I told you to leave."

"I’m sorry, I’m sorry," he laughed, settling onto the foot of the bed. "I heard what happened. Detained again. In your own house, by your own father. You must be bored out of your mind."

"I don’t need you to repeat the highlights," I said.

"You’re blushing," he noted, his smile softening into something that read me better than I could read myself.

"I’m not. It’s the heat."

"You look like a sad puppy pretending to be a wolf, Cassian."

I didn’t respond, because any answer would have been a confession.

Julian was called away eventually. I heard his name being shouted from the courtyard, some senior staff member irritated that he was slacking off again.

He left with a visible reluctance, the kind of look that said he’d rather stay in this cramped, dark room than be anywhere else.

That was the thing about Julian that I never said out loud. He protected me. He did it constantly, with jokes and sandwiches and smuggled books, and he did it without ever making it look like a chore.

As the evening bled into night, the window opened again. Julian was back, this time with a cloth-wrapped bundle of sandwiches and a deck of cards. We sat on the floor, the small lamp by the bed casting long, flickering shadows against the walls.

He talked, as he always did, about the drama in the servant’s quarters, who was sleeping with whom, who was about to be fired, the small, petty wars of a large household. I listened, though I pretended not to, eating the stolen food with a hunger I refused to admit to.

Underneath the conversation, the dream was still there, a low-frequency hum in my blood.

The love was there, the grief was there, and the image of Julian dying remained a sharp, jagged point in my mind.

It was so Julian, I realized, to die with a smile. Even in a dream, he was the only person who could make the end of the world look like a joke.

Julian stopped mid-story, laughing at something he’d said himself. The sound filled the small room, expanding until the walls didn’t feel so close anymore.

He had a way of filling space without even trying, a natural gravity that I found myself pulled into over and over again.

I looked at him in the lamplight, and the want was a physical ache in my throat. I wanted to reach out.

I wanted to close the three feet of floor between us and say the things I didn’t have words for yet.

I wanted to tell him about the dream, about Noah, about the fear that he was going to leave me.

A strange, nostalgic feeling washed over me.

It was wrong, how could I feel nostalgia for a man sitting right in front of me? This feels like remembering, I thought, memorizing the curve of his jaw and the way his eyes crinkled when he laughed.

I was memorizing him the way you memorize a sunset when you know the storm is coming.

I didn’t understand why I was so afraid of losing someone who was right here. I just knew that in the dream, the world had ended when he did, and I wasn’t sure the waking world was any different.

"Cassian?" Julian asked, his smile faltering slightly as he caught me staring. "You’re doing it again. The ’I’m brooding because I’m a tragic hero’ look."

"Shut up and deal the cards," I said, but I didn’t look away. I couldn’t. I had to keep him in my sight for as long as the light lasted, before the dream and the reality finally became the same thing.