Zane is the other half of me, the other half of my everything. The words part the air between them with their rawness. Cait doesn’t expect them to catch the air the way they do. Soulmate. That’s a road Cait does not want to go down, a spiral she doesn’t really want to descend.
Cait doesn’t believe in soulmates. Not really. The word makes her bristle — too soft, too final, like a lie people tell themselves to make loss feel fated instead of hollow. The idea that there’s one perfect match for every person sounds suspiciously like bad magic: comforting, seductive, and dangerously easy to misuse. She’s seen what people do when they think they’ve found “the one.” How far they’ll go. How much they’ll bleed. Soulmates, in her experience, are just another excuse to justify madness — to carve someone open and call it devotion.
But still... still, there's something about watching Harley talk about Zane that tugs at something small and quiet inside her, something old and aching and hard to look at. Maybe it’s envy. Maybe it’s grief. A part of her — tiny, inconvenient, buried under years of discipline and deliberate distance — wonders what it would feel like to be someone’s inevitable. Not needed. Not feared. Just… chosen. And maybe even loved for it.
She smothers that thought as soon as it rises, but it leaves a bitter warmth in its place — like the ghost of a fire she doesn’t remember lighting. "Soulmates... I don’t know if I’ll ever believe in that," Cait says quietly. "But I hope, for your sake, that it’s true."
There’s a beat of silence after she says it, the kind that stretches too long if you let it. Cait doesn’t. She shuts it down the way she shuts most tender things down — by pivoting. Her expression shutters, gaze narrowing back to the thread she can control: magic, theory, the mechanics of what’s real. Whatever sentiment had cracked loose is gone by the time she speaks again, tucked away beneath the practiced calm of someone who prefers certainty to hope.
"Fear and guilt," she echoes, soft but precise. Not mocking. Diagnosing. "That’s a heavy foundation to build anything on."
But the words aren’t judgment. They're acknowledgment. Cait knows all about building weapons out of pain. She paces a step, thoughtful, one hand skimming the edge of the worktable, mind ticking through calculations he can’t see. Patterns. Systems. Leverage. What Harley’s doing — raw instinct shoved into structure by the force of grief and love — that’s rare. Dangerous. The kind of thing the wrong person could break open and weaponize without even meaning to.
"But I don’t just want to interrogate you," Cait says, her voice smoothing back into steadiness. "I want to understand you."
A beat. Her expression softens — just barely. "If you’ll let me," she continues, "I’d like to run some experiments. Safely. On your terms. No tricks. No exploitation."
Her mouth tilts into something almost — almost — like a smile.
"I think you’re neat, Harley."
