Our Souls Intertwined

Set My Heart on Fire

In the hospital, Caleb brushes his fingers soft against Cassandra's scars, and she pulls away fast because it still sends shivers down her legs through the network of damaged nerves the doctors tell her will never heal. Caleb tells her that he's sorry twenty-seven times in the space between the bed and the door, the normally mischievous glint in his eyes replaced by something like anguish or regret. His mouth is pinched and his fingernails are jagged and there's a cut on his jaw from where something had fallen and hit him during the fire. He's sorry because if it wasn't for him, Cassandra wouldn't be here. He's sorry because he had come stumbling out of the mansion only seconds after she had gone in. He's sorry because he never should have refused a bodyguard, and he's sorry because for the past three weeks he's gone to bed every night telling himself that he almost killed his sister and he can't imagine anything worse than that.

What Caleb doesn't know is that Ian later tells her he's sorry eighty-seven times just standing beside her bed, and he clenches his fists until his knuckles are white as he tries to explain.

"I didn't know," He says. "They were just supposed to take the information and go but someone stayed behind and..." Ian doesn't finish and shuts his eyes tightly, taking shallow breaths.

"Okay," Cassandra says quietly.

"I swear I didn't know what they were going to do, Cass, I swear, and when we find out who did it, I'll kill him," Ian promises.

"Okay,"

"I'm sorry, I'm so sorry." He keeps saying, and his red hair is so aflame under the sunlight that it hurts to look at him.

"Okay," Cassandra repeats. Silently, she reaches out her hand, and Ian takes it.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Cassandra gets out of the hospital after another week, with Caleb on one side and Jacob on the other, holding her arms to keep her balanced.

"Never be ashamed of your battle scars," Jacob says, and he tells her to never think less of the puzzle pieces of skin grafts on her body, of the rattle of her lungs, because he would never have gotten to where he is today without shedding a little blood.

Fiona cries when she sees her, pulling her into a hug so tightly that Cassandra's weak legs begin to give out until Ian reaches out to steady her. She feels the dampness under her eyes but doesn't pull away, not even when Nathan and Caleb appear and wrap their arms around them protectively. Nobody says anything, and for a while everything is just tears and breaths of relief. There's something here that Cassandra forgets she has sometimes, and pressed in, swallowed by everyone's grasp, Cassandra never wants to forget it again.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Ian touches her in small bursts of uncontrollable desire, like he's afraid that Cassandra will slip through his fingers if he doesn't hold on tight. He keeps a hand on the small of her back when they're outside and he peppers her skin with light kisses when they're alone. Cassandra basks in the glow of his hands and his hair and his mouth, and loses herself to the emerald brilliance of his eyes.

They don't talk about the fire anymore. Ian never mentions the scars on Cassandra's legs, or the kiss on her forehead, or the crushing wall of heat, or the wailing of ambulance sirens, or the cold touch of doctor's gloves, or Ian lost somewhere in between, his voice raspy from the amount of times he's screamed her name. Ian doesn't ask what Cassandra thought about when she woke up and saw him, and Cassandra doesn't bring up the tattoo beneath Ian's ribs because they're both too scared to destroy whatever this relationship is again.

There's a fragile symmetry here neither of them want to break.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Jacob finds the man who torched the house and orders Jimmy, Kev, Svetlana, and Ian to kill him slowly, without any of the respect that's given to the other criminals. Ian comes to Cassandra that night with blood underneath his fingernails, his hands scrubbed pink, and his shoulders spotted with purple bruises from where Kev had to hold him back. Honestly, Ian doesn't really remember much - just the throbbing of his heart, the dim thrum of blood pulsing in his veins, and how he couldn't stop marking the man with his fists.