Full Chapter

The knock at my door pulls me out of the world of papers and notes and schematics that I had been wandering through, trying to recreate from memory. I mutter enter automatically, a habit still left over from having Cassian as an assistant at my labs. A habit that started just so I could save face when he’d barge in regardless of what I said.
The door opens and closes and I look up to see Cassian standing by my desk with a brown paper bag and a pair of apples.

“You’re a very difficult man. You know that, Jizabel?”
Cassian puts the bag and one apple down on my desk, while he tosses the other apple between his hands like some toy ball. Cassian always said something like this back at Delilah, either after our missions or just because.
“I know I am… I’m sorry for the trouble.” And I’ve never replied like that before, but this time it just felt natural- like if it was, as they say, the right thing to do.
Cassian’s warm laughter breaks up what threatened to become a somber mood.
“If you’re actually saying sorry over it, that’s a major step forward, kid.” I laugh, sigh and rest my head on my desk. I shut my eyes and just listen to that voice, with it’s deeper pitch and greater resonance than back at Delilah. Now when Cassian speaks, he genuinely seems adult in something other than the bitter way he used to view the world.
“So I am still the child, Cassian? Aren’t you going to scold me? Do you not want to interrogate me over why I’ve acted as I have, bothersome as it is?”
Cassian stops playing with that green apple and finally takes a bite out of it.
“If I scold you a millionth time, it still won’t sink in. You’re stubborn like that. And if I interrogate you over why you act like you do… Well, you’ll tell me when you’re ready, won’t you Jizabel?”
I perk my head up to watch, feeling the same awe I do whenever I realize that someone has such honest belief in some good in me. I myself am now trying to believe.

“Be careful about having such faith in me, because-
what if in the end I can’t even meet you half way, and then all your faith just leaves you empty handed?”
There is no easy way to tell someone that you may or may not need you should consider having a life beyond me, for your own sake. Cassian just nudges the second apple towards me.
“It’s really alright, Jizabel. Even then I’d still choose to be standing right here, waiting for you- if waiting is all I can do. Now, why don’t you go ahead and eat?
Oh, and by the way that bag has some trinkets for you. Your little sister insists that they’re your Christmas presents, so don’t open it for another week or two.”

My curiosity’s piqued by that drab paper bag, now that I know Cassian got me something.
I ignore everything around me save for that unassuming bag. I even ignore it when Cassian ruffles his hand through my hair. It is all I can do to keep my hands still, as I wait for him to leave so that I may pour out the bag’s contents.
Trinkets, like he said: yukata and netsuke. They are humble gifts, but thoughtful ones. Or at least ones that show I was considered: the yukata has print of birds in forests, and none of the netsuke are made out of bone. There seems to be no other hidden message in the selection of trinkets, and no motive beyond a simple act of kindness. They are completely innocent gifts. Not a fur coat, no steak dinner, not the bodies of my mother and sisters. They are just innocent gifts, not meant to me pull into some mental game. I think of how it has been more than a decade since life could seem this simple, and my thoughts sting.

As evening draws closer, I’ve pulled myself together. I must admit I do look quite civil: shirt neatly tucked and buttons all done, concealing my glass crucifix. After all, it is not something the world must see. I plait my hair back knowing what I will be doing this evening and not wanting it to fall into a body cavity, again. The only thing I can do until he arrives is wait. Waiting on others is all I ever seem to do, and I hate myself for it. Because then all I can do is think. And I don’t know why I care, for any of it. I didn’t expect myself to care for anyone besides Father ever again, until…
Until I realized that Cassandra’s blade had not gone through my body, but Cassian’s. When Cassian claimed he’d save me, I was so certain he was simply thinking of his own past. What else could it be?  But now I had to believe him, didn’t I?  I knew that he would fail at no fault of his own. It was my fate that was predetermined.
I thought to myself at that moment that even if it means nothing in the end, there is an aching comfort in knowing that someone had tried. As he laid dying, I may have spoken more than I had ever meant to. But most dangerous of all was what I thought. For a moment, Cain and his Riff did not seem so foolish in their belief in unconditional love. I am a sick, ugly person and yet someone had thought I was worth dying over. Now, I don’t believe in such a thing as unconditional love, but what else can I call that?
What followed is still a blur to me, though I know it was the most meaningful choice of my whole hopeless life.

 It is hardly easy to preform a theoretical procedure against the clock. Luckily, for whatever reasons, Zenopia was as invested in it’s success as I was. The difficult part was convincing him to declare Cassian dead. He agreed surprisingly soon, considering that such a declaration would mean a black mark to his area of interest.   
It hurt, in some amount, to let Cassian go free. However, I did understand why I had to rid myself of him as quick as possible: Cassian might matter to me. Seeing the fate of everything I’ve cared for, I couldn’t afford to find out. If my father did not suspect us before, he would have after the transplant. And it would be the same as Snark, as my Sisters and as my Mother. I would have been handed a corpse to hold and then the last fragments of my mind would have left me. I was being selfish, in all honesty, trying to protect myself.

I had to explain to Father what had happened:
“It was a failed experiment, Card Master. Complications arose after surgery causing an autoimmune reaction against the brain tissue. Brain death occurred and I saw no cause for life support or resuscitation.”
“I guess that’s to be expected. You never did think things through, did you little Jizabel?” I bow my head, hair falling in my eyes.
“Yes, Card Master.”
“There is one thing I wonder, though. Why haven’t you kept the body? Certainly you could still have uses for it.”
“It was not suitable. Gladstone was too old and had to many vices to be usable for my experiments, and there was nothing that needed to be learned by dissection. I thought it best to dispose of him and not waste any further time on this issue, Card Master.”
“Good boy, Jizabel.” Good boy, Jizabel isn’t that what I lived for?
…I let Cassian go free, because nobody was ever supposed to die protecting me and because unconditional love is not real and because no one so good should suffer for something as worthless as me.

If there is anyone who is in the sun

Will you help me to understand

‘Cause i been caught in between all I wish for and all I need

Maybe you’re not even sure what it’s for

Any more than me

May God’s love be with you, always

fic here

It’s the same as the library of any of the nobles’ houses where the Doctor and I worked. The shelves are lined with all the classics that every good English school boy has read. I’m sure the Doctor and his brother have them all memorized, but me, I’ve only ever heard some of the books’ names. I take a swing from my flask, and look at the shelves for a good place to start.

“Love, Death, Failure and Rebirth: the Myths of Ancient Greece”

“Love, Death, Failure and Rebirth” That’s a pretty fitting title for my life right now. I pull the book down and flip it open, thinking back on love, death and rebirth.
Love: when was that? The last time I remembered love it was bitter and about my parents, from before I knew any better. I’d thought I was completely over love, until I found myself getting skewered by Cassandra’s sword to save him.
Death: It’s funny, but right then for all the blood loss and and the pain and the gaping hole in my chest, the only thing I could think about was how sad and alone Jizabel looked. And how just maybe, I’d like a second chance. Not to get an adult body and not to get my life back, but so that I could try to save him, or at least make him a little less sad. And that was funny, too; because I’m a criminal and not the type of guy that has selfless thoughts like that. I wondered just what meeting that kid had made me into.
Rebirth: I never thought that God -or the Devil- would finally ever listen to me and grant that second chance. Waking up in a gutter wasn’t exactly new to me, but the body I was in was new to me. Well, not exactly new so much as not mine. Gladstone’s. It was Gladstone’s. That’s the sort of thing that only happens in horror stories and some nightmares, waking up as someone you know doesn’t deserve to live. I was furious, tearing through my coat pockets and wondering if the Doctor was laughing somewhere thinking of this all as a joke.
Right then, in my fury and rage, I found it: the first miracle in my violent life, a simply folded elegant letter in Jizabel’s penmanship reading Cassian, leave. If I see you again, I will kill you. There was a train ticket and quite a few pounds there in my pocket, too. Jizabel was saving me. The second miracle: I cried then, for the first time since I stopped being a child, and for someone other than myself I cried. Jizabel had chosen my freedom and my future over his own. Did he really value himself so little?
Broken and mad as he is, he’s still an angel. That’s what he is: my angel. So I will be his.
That’s when it hit me, that there are some very important words that have been left out of that book’s title: devotion, and sacrifice.

I know I would apologize if I could see your eyes

‘Cause when you showed me myself, you know, I became someone else

But I was caught in between all you wish for and all you need

I pictured you fast asleep

A nightmare comes

You can’t keep awake

May God’s love be with you, always

“The Hebrew word timshel—’Thou mayest’—that gives a choice. For if ‘Thou mayest’—it is also true that ‘Thou mayest not.’ That makes a man great and that gives him stature with the gods, for in his weakness and his filth and his murder of his brother he has still the great choice. He can choose his course and fight it through and win.” - from East of Eden

We are all our own devil, and we make this world our hell.

fic here

The great and terrifying strength of love is such that it compels us to stand firm, even in the most lost and desperate of tasks.
AU, Cassian and Jizabel in a certain sort of fairy tale.

Oh, deer. What am I writing now?

Haha, bad pun.

Well, the things you see while waiting in line at a FedEx (yes, that’s a real book):

A Heart Warming Delilah Christmas Special

Truly, the holidays could be an amusing time with the Doctor’s company. Of course this all required that one had a masochistic definition of ‘amusing’, Cassian thought. Really, he had no idea what devil had possessed him to volunteer to help Doctor Disraelli run Christmas errands. The hacking of an elderly man ahead of them in the checkout reminded Cassian why: paid sick days. And a possible 401k contribution from the so called hospital where he had his so called job.

I mean Doctor Disraelli was the son, even if the hated bastard son, of Saint Delilah Mercy Hospital’s owner/ administrator/ chief- investor- with- criminal ties, Alexis Hargreaves. So a good review from Doctor Jizabel had to be worth something, because Cassian really needs that promotion. And health insurance.

The old man kept coughing, and off to Cassian’s side the Doctor muttered about ‘the polite thing for a man that age to do would be die’. Lovely, this was whom Cassian would be spending his holidays with. Then again, maybe visiting Jizabel and his deranged family for Christmas was less pathetic than eating TV diners on the porch with that stray cat?

A tug at his sleeve interrupts that train of thought. The Doctor looks up at Cassian, a polite and warm expression on his face.

“Cassian, could you please be so kind as to remove that man from the line for me?”

Cassian inches away nervously: “Doctor, you do realize that we’re not allowed to do that outside of Delilah, right?”       The Doctor waves his hand and pushes his hair back in the most casual gesture.

“Oh, of course; I always keep forgetting that! Thank you for reminding me, Cassian. I suppose I just don’t get out of Delilah too often these days. Honestly, the outside world is unbearably strange in comparison.”     Cassian wondered why he ever took a job with such madmen. Then again, with today’s economy he was lucky to even be employed.   And so Cassiain was grateful, that was until the Doctor’s foot-tapping, huffing, and checking a non-existent watch became unbearable.

“Okay, you know what, Doctor? Why don’t you just read one of the books they have here?”

“Excuse me, Cassian? What could a FedEx possibly have to amuse a man of my intellect and tastes?”     Stuck up pretty boy brat, even his hair seems full of itself.   Though it is very, very pretty.  And sparkly. But Cassian’s used to dealing with brats. There were those unfortunate years he spent working with the Pete’s Circus Party Mobile. Never again. If he could deal with 28 snot- nosed brats and balloon animals, he could deal with one Doctor.

“How about that one? It’s about a Snark. I don’t know what a Snark is, but I know you love them. You keep saying that whenever you fall asleep on your desk.  You also keep saying ‘no, daddy’ and ‘but I’ve been a good boy’ . Do you have any idea how awkward things get for everyone else when you fall asleep on the intercom?”      Things were about to get much, much more awkward for Cassian.

The Doctor stepped back trembelingly, suddenly. ‘ Oh, shi-‘  was all Cassian had the time to think before it started. The entire checkout line dispersed and then gathered around them to watch as Jizabel’s breakdown took place.

The sad part was that ever since Alexis’ fellow reputable “business associate” Cassandra had come along, Cassian had seen the need to establish a routine for dealing with the young Doctor’s episodes. The latest instance had been at the frozen meats section of a grocery store. That was nowhere near as bad as the one where Jizabel had seen a Lamb Chop plushie.

As he sat there, rubbing the back of the frantic and wide eyed young man, it occurred to Cassian what the absolute worst part of these experiences was.
It was the procession of little old granny- types that would walk up to Cassian as he rather embarrassingly held Jizabel. They would all in turns place a hand on Cassian’s shoulder as they looked to the Mad Doctor and said that they ‘wished the little deary well’.  Sometimes, there were even offerings of stale candy and dinner mints from out of over sized, overstuffed purses.

Eating TV dinners alone with the cat somehow didn’t seem that pathetic anymore.

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This was somehow what seeing that book at a FedEx made me think of… Sometimes I worry about the way my mind works. Then again, there’s worse.

Also, a legitimate fic update.

Monsters, ponies in comas and ska-flavored apples?
Yes, please.

Song is Little Talks by Of Monsters and Men

Update on SitS!
Seeing how it’s near winter break, I just might mange to finish this fic in a timely manner…

Update on SitS

…the above is probably cannon, knowing Alexis.