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Maera brushed her fingers against her daughter’s soft cheek, trying and failing to hold back the tears threatening to spill over.
They’d had her name picked out for months, her cradle painstakingly hand painted, stacks of clothes the neighbourhood children had grown out of set aside, plans and dreams for her whole life. Maera had imagined holding her, teaching her to walk, braiding her hair, perhaps one day even holding her hand as she had a child of her own. She had imagined her coming into this world screaming, the way she had witnessed her own younger siblings.
Sinara, instead, was stubbornly silent and wide-eyed as they laid her on Maera’s chest. She almost laughed until she caught sight of what was too intricate to be a birthmark.
Life expectancy on Nux wasn’t very high to begin with but having her baby marked for death the moment she’d come into this world…
She furiously rubbed her thumb over the discolouration on her wrist; it stayed right where it was and Sinara mewled her displeasure at the harsh treatment.
“I’m sorry, sweetheart,”Maera whispered, cradling the girl against her chest. The babe settled, happily oblivious to the doom the shapes on her arm spelt.
No one with the mark ever made it past twenty-five.
Kasius sometimes thought he should probably mind how little attention his father paid him, both the younger son and the cursed. But he’d rather not spent more of his limited time in this world than necessary with him, so it suited Kasius well enough to be mostly left to his own devices.
It left him free to seek out the new palace guard as much as he pleased.
She had easily laid him out in training. He was used to as much. But then she had kept training with him, hadn’t scoffed at his attempts, had helped him back to his feet. That he was decidedly not used to.
The small smiles he could earn from her with the right story or a pastry snuck to her on duty were something he wanted to get used to. So he kept finding her.
“You shouldn’t be here,”Sinara told him often. She never once asked him to leave.
When he offered, she rolled her eyes - and smiled that little smile of hers.
“I wish I wasn’t dying,”he confided one day, as they sat on the terrace overlooking the grounds.
He didn’t need to elaborate. Everyone knew the younger prince bore the mark.
She lightly bumped her shoulder against his.“We’re all dying.”
“Of course.” He couldn’t help but smile at her, even with this topic.“I’m just doing it a little faster, I suppose.”
“So am I,”she returned and pushed up her sleeve, for just a moment, exposing a familiar sight.
It pained him worse to see it on her. He had made a sort of peace with dying, years and years ago. He could not imagine ever making peace with her death.
“Guess we’ll just do that together,”she said lightly.
He bumped his shoulder against hers, the way she had done. Unlike her, he didn’t move away again after. He glanced at her from the corner of his eyes, satisfied to see the way her lips quirked into the slightest smile.
He had hoped to find a remedy to the curse and never been successful. He decided to take the efforts up again.
“We’ve still got time,”he reminded her.
There was no clear consensus on just how the curse killed you.
Kasius had hoped it would take the shape of a heartattack in his sleep, not that of his generals turning on him. He closed his eyes, not wanting to see the blade coming.
Next thing he knew, he was yanked away from the generals’ corpses.
“Not here,”Sinara said, her fingers still curled into the fabric of his shirt.“Not like this.”
And then she was kissing him, fierce and deep and like she meant to keep doing it for the rest of their lives, however short that might be.
He pulled her closer, until nothing existed but them, until he would have been content to die right there and then.
She pulled away eventually, a mere few inches, and he dropped his forehead against hers.
“We should leave,”she said. She made no move to do so, though she was certainly right.
Kasius kissed her, short and sweet, before pointing out,“We’ll be exiled, if we’re lucky.”
“What, for the year we have left?” She turned towards the shipyard, taking his hand to make sure he’d follow.“Doesn’t sound too bad. No court, no battlefields, just exile and wine.”
He laughed. That sounded far better than not too bad.
Kasius traced patterns across Sinara’s skin as she drifted in and out of sleep, up her back and along her arm, hesitating at her wrist. She didn’t like him preoccupying himself with their marks.
She sighed as his fingers stilled and turned her arm so he could properly see the shapes on her skin.
“Are you certain?”he asked. There was something strangely intimate to this. The marks were best ignored, or so he'd been told all his life.
She lifted her head off the pillow just long enough to roll her eyes at him.“Go ahead, before it’s curiosity that kills you.”
He chuckled, leaning in to inspect her mark. As intricate as the one on his own arm, it was different yet somehow very familiar.
He flicked on the light to get a better look.
Sinara groaned and threw her arm across her eyes; he pulled it back to him.
“Strange,”he mumbled.
She sat up.“What is?”
He put his arm next to hers, their marks facing up. Sinara ran her finger across his, slowly, a frown on her face.
“That is strange,”she finally agreed.
It was the exact same shape, yet where hers had gaps, his had colour, and vice versa.
They stared at the marks in silence for a while longer, not sure what to make of them.
Sinara broke the silence.“Perhaps they’re all like this.”
“Perhaps,”Kasius said, and tried to reach the memory niggling at the back of his mind, just out of reach.
He was older than Sinara by a handful of months and selfishly glad for it. He could not imagine losing her. The thought alone was enough to chill him to the bone; without her, there would be no sense in living on.
It was his death they awaited, though neither of them said it, locked away in his chambers, lost to the world, trying not to count the hours - and then the minutes.
Kasius had suggested they go to sleep and Sinara had scoffed. They’d settled in bed anyway. Her head was on his chest and he was sure she was as painfully aware as him that every heartbeat might be his last.
“Maybe,”she whispered,“it’s not real. Maybe people just die because they think they’re supposed to.”
“Scare themselves to death?” Kasius combed his fingers through her hair and hummed in consideration.“Quite possible, my darling.”
He didn’t think so, not really.
She shifted closer; he ignored that her cheek was decidedly wet. She tried to sound casual as she added,“You never do what you’re supposed to.”
“And why start now?”he said, brushing a kiss onto her forehead.
“Exactly.”
She clung to him as if it might keep him alive.
And perhaps that was what did it.
Because there he was, twenty five years and one day old, mark on his arm, still breathing.
Kasius was nervous when her birthday approached; Sinara had written it all off as superstition when he had survived his own.
It wasn’t until midnight had come and gone, and Sinara was still alive and well and teasing him for the relieved sigh that escaped him, that he really and truly believed that they would be alright.
He still did not agree that the marks were superstition. There was still that sense that he’d forgotten something.
She was eight days past the lifetime the mark had allotted her when it came to him; a story his mother had once told him, maybe to comfort him about the cursed patterns on his skin, maybe because she had hoped for it to be true.
“There’s this legend,”Kasius started. Sinara rolled her eyes, setting aside the knife she was sharpening and turning that smile he loved to him to hear the rest.“The gods split souls in half and now they’re trying to find each other again, across time and space. They need one another. If they can’t find their beloved, they wilt.”
She cocked her head to the side.“Are you saying we didn’t die because we found each other in time?”
“I’m saying there might be a reason why true love’s kiss is such a prevalent remedy in folklore,”Kasius said.
“That’s ridiculous.” She walked over to him and settled on his lap.“But just to be safe, go ahead and kiss me some more.”