It's years later, and Alibaba finds that he and Cassim stand exactly eye to eye. Cassim's going to be taller than him, he realizes with a jolt. Alibaba has already grown as tall as he ever will, but Cassim has another year or so in him, and yet when their eyes meet they are in perfect, startling alignment. It's disorienting, in the same way everything about Cassim seems to be disorienting now, from the easy, confident way he has of carrying himself to the length of his hair. A burn in Alibaba's chest wants him to go back to being a child.
"How's Mariam?" he ends up asking. He regrets it the moment he sees Cassim's face, the way his mouth falls open just enough to show a sliver of teeth and something that isn't quite disbelief. It's gone right away, as soon as Cassim answers, but the imprint of it lingers.
"Mariam is dead."
"What?" Alibaba exclaims, walking into every trap laid for him just like always. "Since when?" He's told, and the floor drops out from underneath him. "Why... why didn't you tell me?!"
"How could I tell you?" Cassim snarls, and Alibaba's chest burns more fiercely at noticing that Cassim can now look down at him, with just the slightest tilt of his jaw. "With what you're like-!" He cuts off there, but the blow connects all the same. And maybe he meant to do that, because as Alibaba opens his mouth to retort, to insist he can and should tell him, it dies in his throat at the thought that he isn't reliable. It shows, he's sure, even to strangers-how could he expect to be depended on by someone who knew him as intimately as Cassim?
Once upon a time, even sweet Mariam kept him in the dark.
But he can help now, Cassim tells him. Cassim needs him. Alibaba isn't stupid; he knows he's being used again, strung along just as he was as a teenager. But it was with honeyed words then, a pleasing distortment of Cassim and all the world around him, whispering to him everything he wanted to hear and showing to him everything he wanted to see; now, Cassim toys with him with nothing but the raw-voiced truth, and it's nothing Alibaba wants but he can't possibly turn away.