Hi, fellow Librarians fans! This is my first Librarians fic, and it comes from a prompt by ahookedheroespureheart on Tumblr. She wanted a story with Cassandra (in the Sleeping Beauty role) in the hospital and Jake kissing her, with discussion of the "brain grape," and the story came to me almost as soon as I read the prompt. It's my first story in over a year, so I might be a little rusty, but I'm excited to have finally found some new characters to play with!
As always, none of these guys belong to me. Enjoy!
From the very first day he met her, he knew this would happen someday.
Jacob Stone walked down the stark white hallway that was rapidly becoming his own personal labyrinth. Room 3416 was the object of his quest; that's where she was. That's where he would find her…if he could find her, that is.
When he finally stumbled upon the room with the 3416 plaque outside, the sight inside stopped him dead in his tracks. She laid peacefully in the bed, her red hair splayed across the white pillow, a pop of color in the bleak setting. An oxygen tube wrapped around her delicate face, and two tiny sensors were taped on either side of her forehead. A disruptive but steady beeping punctuated the silence and monitored her heart, but despite all of this, the first thing he noticed was the rise and fall of her chest as she continued to breathe, to live.
After a few moments, Eve noticed him. She was curled up in the chair beside of Cassandra's bed, as best as one could curl up in a hospital guest's chair, that is. Her elbow rested on her knee, and her head rested in her hand. She instantly stood when she saw him standing shaken in the doorway and approached him with tired eyes.
"That was sweet of you," she said, her hand gesturing towards the present contained in his. "To bring flowers."
"I think the florist thought I was crazy, insisting on all these flowers…all these colors," Jake said.
The bundle in the vase in his hands was a bit of a scattered mess, filled with every flower in every color he could find. It looked more like something a child would construct than something done by a professional, but Jake also thought it looked like her.
"She'll love them," Eve said, and Jake appreciated her use of the future word will instead of a hypothetical word like would.
He finally tore his eyes away from Cassandra and looked at the Colonel. "How bad is it?"
"They're not sure," Eve replied.
"Baird, just give it to me straight," he insisted.
"I'm not concealing anything, Stone," she said. "They said the tumor hasn't changed much. It's slow; it's…for lack of a better phrase, still a grape."
"But?" Stone asked.
Eve sighed. "But they also think she should've woken up by now."
"And they're not sure she will?" Stone finished, though he phrased it as a question instead of the statement he knew it should be.
Eve said nothing, just rest her hand on his shoulder in comfort. "I'll give you a minute."
Eve Baird walked off down the hallway that suddenly seemed much smaller to Jake than it had only minutes before, and he slowly stepped into the small hospital room. He placed the flowers in the space where the sun poured through the blinds and paced a moment before sinking into the recently vacated chair.
She fell. They had all been standing in the middle of the Annex the night before, listening to her downright gush about a case from her little book that she had completed all by herself when her eyes glazed over and she fell, mid-sentence. He was there to catch her, as always, only this time, it wasn't brought on by complex, mathematical hallucinations, and she didn't bounce right back up. When they realized she wasn't going to, Colonel Baird had jumped into action, and Flynn had carried her to a car, and Ezekiel had dialed the nearest hospital, and it had taken Jake an entire night to work up the guts to even come to the hospital.
As he sat in the chair and watched her breathe, listening to the steady flow of the heart monitor, self-loathing towards his cowardice coursed through his veins. It should've been him spending the night in the chair by her side. It should've been him speaking to the doctors. He shouldn't have left that up to Baird.
Sure, they had had a rocky start, but Cassandra had become his closest friend at the Library. Flynn and Baird would be out on an adventure, and Ezekiel would be out doing things he had learned to stop asking about, and he and Cassandra would find a corner in the Library, where he would pour over art, and she would read about science or map out ley lines, or they'd spend their afternoon marveling over some artifact they had only dreamed about, or they'd find a corner of the world with the teleporting door and have adventures of their own.
They had spent so much time together, he thought, and he had never once tried to kiss her. He had thought about it, of course, when her face would light up upon a new discovery, or when a giggle would escape her lips after he helped ground her during a hallucination, but he had never done anything about it. As he realized his chances might actually be up, he mentally added that to the list of things to be angry at himself for.
He hated himself for not coming sooner, and he wondered how he could've held on to so much distrust for her in the beginning while he sat there now, wishing her act of desperation had worked. He wished she would just wake up and tell him what those ambiguous lines on the screen monitoring her brain activity meant. He could even go for an in-depth analysis of the mathematical patterns behind her heartbeat. He never knew what she was saying, but he never minded listening to her.
Almost subconsciously, Jake moved to the edge of the chair, leaning towards her. He brushed his lips across just her cheek (she'll never know, he thought, but he's still a gentleman) and hovered over her, lingering for just a moment. Nothing happened, and he dropped back to the chair with a noise of utter dissatisfaction, rolling his eyes at just how foolish he was to think that might work. Magic might not be just a myth, but it doesn't always trump science, and the girl lying in front of him would be the first person to admit that, even if her sunny enthusiasm over everything magic could lead someone to believe she'd feel otherwise.
Jake began silently thanking god that Ezekiel had not been witness to what had just happened within the room. Baird, at least, would sympathize with the sentiment, but Ezekiel…he'd never hear the end of it. Jake mentally swore that Ezekiel could never find out, lest he have to admit to being the Librarian with the pity book, when the heart monitor changed. His eyes worriedly focused back on Cassandra as hers slowly opened. He let out a breath of relief and reminded himself to smile as she found him.
"Cassandra?" he said softly.
She gingerly raised her hand and touched one of the small sensors taped to her skull. "Oh, rats…" she muttered to herself, causing Jake to laugh as he knew she was okay. Her heart rate stabilized as the fear of waking up in a strange place dissipated. She met his eyes again and asked, "What happened?"
He knew she deserved a full explanation, but he couldn't help himself when he mumbled, "Magic."
She looked confused until her hand traveled from her temple to her cheek, and she realized that wasn't a dream. Her expression contorted into a glare filled with pure sass, though when she spoke, her voice betrayed the artificial strength reflected upon her face.
"Hey," she said softly with an accusatory tone. "I'm Prince Charming, remember?"
Jake chuckled again and grabbed her hand. "You can be whichever character in the story you want; just don't do that again."
The look on her face instantly transformed into one of deep sadness at his words. "I'm…it's going to happen again, Jake. It's the…"
She couldn't bring herself to say it – not here, not the t word, not with him looking at her like that.
"The brain grape," he finished, and even though she hates that term, she nodded. He squeezed her hand tightly, as if his grip could somehow force her into staying on this earth, and whispered, "I know."
"What did they say?" Cassandra asked, scared tears forming in her eyes. "I mean, what fruit am I not going to be able to eat now?"
"Just keep avoiding grapes, Cassie," he said.
"Really?" she quietly replied, a hint of hope in her voice. Her lips even curved into something of a smile.
"Baird can tell you more. She's been here. I…well, I haven't been very useful since you…" he started.
"It's okay," Cassandra promised, pulling their joined hands to rest above her heart. She tried to sit up a little, using his hand as an anchor, but a headache surged through her skull, and she changed her mind. She closed her eyes tightly and whimpered, "Oh, that was a bad idea.
"Are you okay?" he asked. She nodded, eyes still shut. "How do you feel?"
"Like a long conflicting string of threes," she said instantly.
The unexpected nature of her reply made him laugh again. "What the hell are you talking about?" he asked.
"Oh," she realized. "I guess that did sound strange, huh? Well, threes are yellow, and yellow can be used to symbolize weakness or illness, which I am undoubtedly experiencing right now, but it can also be used in conjunction with happiness and optimism, which I'm getting from…"
Her eyes had found his again as she spoke. As soon as they did, she shyly trailed off and looked away from him. Jake grinned. She wouldn't have had to go beyond telling him that threes were yellow for him to understand what she was saying (he loved when she combined math and art), but he was glad she did.
"So I make you feel like the good side of three…that might be the nicest thing a girl's ever said to me," Jake replied.
Cassandra smiled as silence fell between them, both of them becoming suddenly aware of the hands still clasped against her chest. She loosened her grip on his hand, and he slipped his from underneath hers. Their hands fell separately to the mattress, but she pointed her finger towards him, searching for his hand again. He complied, covering the top of her small hand with his. She took a deep, calming breath and looked at him with a familiar gleam in her eye.
"Now about that fairytale…" she said.
"What about it?" Jake asked.
"I think I'll stick with Prince Charming," she said. She playfully wrinkled her nose and said, "You're not very good at it."
"Excuse me?" he grunted, a hint of his accent coming out.
"My cheek? That doesn't wake up the princess."
"Did this time," he quickly countered.
Cassandra grinned, settled back into her pillow, closed her eyes, and clasped her hands beneath her breasts, silently willing her heart rate to stay steady so as not to give her nervousness away.
"What are you doing?" Jake finally asked.
"Pretending to be asleep so you can redeem yourself," she teased.
When he put two and two together and realized she was asking, no, telling him to kiss her, he moved to sit on the edge of her bed. His hands rested on either side of her waist.
"Really?" he asked, matching her earlier inflection of the word. When she didn't respond or so much as move, because he's still a gentleman, he asked, "Cassandra?"
Cassandra let out a noise of protest and with a slight shake of her head, simply said, "Sleeping."
Taking that as all the permission he needed, Jake lowered his head and tenderly brushed his lips against hers. She reveled in the feel of his mouth finally against hers for a moment before returning the kiss and reaching up to grip the sides of his unzipped jacket in her hands. When she used her lips to pull him into another kiss as soon as the first one ended, he slipped his hand beneath the wires surrounding her face and cradled her head in his palm.
He didn't think it would happen this way, with sensors on her head and an increasingly noisy heart monitor (a doctor, he thought, and probably Baird, too, would surely rush into the room soon) pulsing in the background.
But from the very first day Jacob Stone met Cassandra Cillian, he knew this would happen someday.
Please leave reviews if you've got a moment! You can also find me (and the story) on Tumblr under the same name I have here. Thanks for reading!