Summary: "Her mother always said the world was built for two." Abbie and Ichabod, five lives over. Reincarnation fic. Ichabbie.

A/N: Because apparently, I love reincarnation fics. Also, I've been neglecting the otp that made me even get a fanfiction account, and that isn't cool. Also, did I mention I love this trope?

Disclaimer: Don't own Sleepy Hollow. But you knew that.

Cross Your Heart

let's walk down the road that has no end; steal away where only angels tread. heaven or hell or somewhere in between, cross your heart to take me when you leave.

don't go.

please don't go.

don't go without me. – c'est la mort, the civil wars

i.

The first time you see her, that first life, she's just a kid.

Her eyes are dark and heavy with the weight of her appointed task, but beyond that you can see it - the shiny naievete, the glow of youth that hasn't yet been dimmed by the world you'd been thrust into.

When your hands touch for the first time, you feel it, see it - the combined heat of seventeen summers, the turn of a single decade, parents dying and another girl, even younger, dragged away to the fight. You touch her hand and your souls entwine in a pact that will last until the universe takes it's final breaths.

She, in turn, sees you in all your gory glory - the heads you've taken, the towns left pillaged, the wife and son you left to starve. You are not an honorable man, and this, too, she now knows.

"They're waiting for you?" she murmurs, more to herself than to him.

You lift your shoulders, let them settle after a while. Perhaps. Perhaps not. It hardly matters anymore - you don't think you'll see them again, not for a very long time at least. Maybe never.

She doesn't prod when you don't say anything, and you're grateful for it, that the God you serve is at least a merciful one, to give you someone with a little common sense.

She is not a soldier, in this lifetime, but she will always and forever be a fighter. You teach her how to weild a sword, rip her innocence away piece by glimmering piece, and she does the same with your iron walls. You fall in love with her, of course, that first time.

You remember when you met her, back when you had a conscience telling you that what you were feeling was wrong, wrong, wrong, but it's lost now, lost in the fire and the brimstone, between angels and demons and Hell or Heaven or whatever's waiting beyond.

(what you don't know is that it's not wrong; what you don't know is that the soul she carries within her was once yours, and vice-versa)

She dies suddenly, in this first life, and you are not far behind - you watch her fall from across a blood-soaked battlefield, and the last thing you ever think is don't go.

Please.

Don't go without me.

ii.

The second time, you meet her by accident.

There is no destiny here, at least none you can immediately understand. You meet as children, as doe-eyed as could possibly be, and sneak away in the hours after dark to chase fireflies. It's a welcome change from your last life's turn of bloodshed, and you don't know why yet, but you live for these moments, the hours spent chasing lights.

You become more than just partners, in this lifetime, and your soul still aches for something you, in your boyhood, cannot discern. By the time you figure out what the throbbing thing in your chest is, you have already married the baker's daughter, and she herself has promised herself to the blacksmith's apprentice.

She seems happy enough, with the man she calls husband, so you keep your mouth shut and your wife happy. You have children. Some nights, you think of the fireflies.

And you don't know it, but both of you live and die in this life with your souls straining for something unreachable.

iii.

The third life, you don't meet at all.

She lives her life in the company of hurricanes, some vigilante huntress forever searching for the demons who stole her baby sister away. She is a shadow, a nobody, living merely in the urban myths and legends in and around Massachusetts.

She dies quietly, as does her story, the demon called Moloch slipping through her fingers like sand.

You hear of her legend around a campfire, from one young soldier from Massachusetts Bay. An urban myth, he says, just a story made up by adventurous children, or fanciful women. The rest of the men laugh the tale off, but you don't, and you can't help but think they wouldn't either, if this woman was more than a myth.

You suppose you might've liked to meet her, had fate permitted it.

You reckon she must've been brave, if she were ever real at all.

You resist, when you are at first sent to sleep.

The comforting presence of your wife slips away from you, the warmth replaced by such a bone-deep cold. You stay suspended in the dark, and there's something there, something lurking in the space beneath you.

"Stay," someone says, but it's not Katrina, this voice.

"Stay."

You don't want to - the dark is suffocating and empty, and you'd like very much to leave. Something bright lingers on the edge of your vision, and there's the smell of lilacs wafting about that you'd very much like to follow.

"Stay. I'll see you when you wake."

The voice sounds far-away, now, and you scramble for the quickly-receding light. "Promise?" you sputter, like a child, like a five-year-old who had just been promised the world.

A pause, and then -

"Of course."

And then there's nothing, nothing for quite a long while.

iv.

her mother always said the world was built for two

You sleep through what would have been your fourth life, the world above you ever-changing and morphing, again and again and again.

she walks through this life alone, soul always striving for something just beyond her reach

You sleep while she dreams, living vicariously through fire-and-brimstone paintings of another world, and a man whose eyes were so blue she could drown in them.

she lives, she loves, and she's happy, this time around

You really are sorry, you weren't there this time.

but she never was content

v.

She's different this time - closed but kind, stunning in her effervescence and grace.

You want to love her in this life, like you've wanted to in every life, but something holds you back, like something always holds you back - duty or honor or a century spent sleeping, and you wonder how fair this is, to be so close to someone, yet so immeasurably far.

The thought eats at you, ebbs away at the thing you call a conscience, as patient as water at a stone. Your soul has waited centuries - what's a few more, to be reunited with the one it calls it's mate?

And you don't see it, the connection - you don't realize it until many years have passed after meeting her, after the world is mostly saved and the wounds from the last life you lived have mostly scabbed over.

You touch her hand and it appears in flashes, those moments beyond, and you see it all - as survivors, as children, as a huntress and a soldier and all the lives that never were.

She looks at you like she's opening her eyes for the first time, and you probably do the same.

You had said once, that your paths had been entwined since the very start.

You hadn't known then just how right you were.

A/N: What even was that ending. I'll tell you what that ending was. That ending was me, struggling to make it poignant and deep and failing miserably, come the end. I'm rusty, and I'm sorry, but the plot bunnies wouldn't leave this one alone. Tell me what you think, please, if you can. Even just favoriting this if you liked it is awesome, and the feedback really helps a lot. Thank you for reading, and I'll try to dig around my brain for something else to do with these two lovely dolts. I really do miss writing them.