Chapter Text
Some said it was “too quiet.” That something horrible was bound to happen any day now.
There had been scarcely any Wanderer attacks over the past couple of weeks, leaving the UNICORNS sector with little to do back at the Association. The few Wanderers that had popped up were class D—hardly worth sending anyone from the alpha unit to deal with.
You didn’t care for all the foreboding and premonitions from your colleagues. The speculation rolled right off you in favor of appreciating the rare lull in work.
Said lull left you with ample time to catch up on your random duties back at your desk—and you found yourself so bored that you actually finished all the mission reports you’d been putting off for weeks. You were a hunter, after all. Your place was in Protofields and no-hunt zones, not getting a sore ass from the growing number of hours spent in your desk chair.
After almost an entire hour of tidying up your desk in lieu of any real work, Jenna emerged from her office. You straightened immediately, reaching for a report to pretend to skim through so you’d at least appear busy. The last thing you needed was more busywork to be plopped down on your desk, punished for working too efficiently.
“Everyone, listen up.” Jenna addressed the cluster of desks where the alpha unit sat, arms neatly folded across her chest. “There’s no need to keep you all here when there’s so little to do. Go home and rest before things pick up again. Who knows when we’ll get another chance like this…”
A day off? How exceedingly rare.
Your gaze shot to Xavier while Jenna continued, finding him already glancing over at you from his desk. The corner of his mouth twitched up before being promptly corrected into his usual relaxed line. He gave the tiniest nod—his way of communicating that you’d talk after being dismissed.
Perhaps great minds really did think alike.
“... Just be sure to remain on call in case the unexpected happens. I’ll be in touch about whether you can stay home tomorrow as well. Enjoy the rest of your day.”
While it didn’t feel as good as being sent home for exemplary work—or a break that was even remotely “well earned,” neither you nor the other handful of hunters were complaining. Especially when you thought you were about to get dinged for spending the majority of your working day twiddling your thumbs.
You got ready to leave in record time, rolling your chair under your desk before Jenna even made it back to her office. And somehow despite your fast pace, Xavier beat you to it, already appearing at your side before you could find him first.
“Do you want to—”
You broke in before he had a chance to finish, not caring what the next words out of his mouth would be. “Yes. Anything. Let’s get out of here before I lose it.”
He smirked. “Oh, so you do want to flip through the new edition of A Study on Stellar Kinematics together.”
That earned him a playful shove toward the stairwell.
In all honesty, you really would do anything with Xavier—even flipping through some random academic work on whatever the hell kinematics were. Despite the fact that you lived in the same building, lately it felt like the only times you saw him were at work. Usually, you’d at least find time together catching up after missions, but with so little Wanderer activity, the best you had was the occasional hallway chat.
But in the interest of not sitting in one place for hours on end again, this was something you had to turn down.
“Almost anything,” you amended. “What did you actually have in mind?”
“I was thinking we could go to the clawcade. It’s been a while, and I saw they have that alien plushie in stock again.”
Xavier being the one to suggest you go to the clawcade after you were allowed to go home early from work… What kind of good karma had you earned for this? It was surprising enough that Xavier was choosing to spend time with you instead of going straight home and crashing in bed.
“Since when do you keep up with the stock of Twinkle Toys?”
“Hmm…” He brought a finger to his chin, eyes wandering up to the ceiling in exaggerated remembrance. “I think it was around the tenth time my mission partner brought up the elusive ‘Galaxy Kid’ plushie.”
A soft blush warmed your cheeks, your own body betraying your thin facade of nonchalance.
Times like these made you wonder how Xavier really felt about you. He was impossibly hard to read most of the time, but there were faint signals. The way he was always one step ahead of you—already looking at you from across the room or showing up at your desk before you were ready to go. The way he always seemed to remember the smallest things you say.
But then he would go and call you his “mission partner” or “neighbor.” The labels were what made you so unsure. Hell, you were going on what most people would consider a date, but neither you nor Xavier had ever put a name to it.
“You look like you’re losing focus. Want me to take over?”
You blinked, Xavier’s voice bringing you out of your meandering recollection of the events from earlier that afternoon to a claw releasing nothing but air over the prize chamber.
“Ugh when did it fall out?” You whipped around to Xavier, catching an amused look that was a direct product of your repeated failures. At least he was enjoying himself.
Not wanting to be a claw hog, you stepped away from the machine, waving him toward the controls. “Fine, you have a go. We only have two tokens left, though.”
“Not to worry. By the time I’m done, you’ll be two plushies richer.”
His soft assurance did little to convince you. Xavier was probably the worst person you knew at claw machines. No amount of books on the subject seemed to translate into practice for him.
Still, in the rare chance that you were able to go together, you were always sure to give him at least one turn, if only to see that face he would always make when he ultimately failed.
And sure enough, not even half a minute after you gave up the reins, he wordlessly turned to you, face drawing into a grimace at your now-wasted token.
You crossed your arms, glaring at him as if he’d done it on purpose. “What was that about two plushies richer?”
Despite your half-hearted criticisms, Xavier was all smiles. “We still have one more token.”
As Xavier brazenly carried on spending your final game credit, you found yourself more focused on his face than his fruitless attempt at getting a plushie. It was astounding how quickly his expression would melt back into something so noticeably neutral. Rarely did he ever outwardly show anything other than a compact array of tame emotions. His voice was always so even-toned and soft, his face so blissfully calm, the muscles there hardly ever doing much more than lifting the corners of his mouth into a smile or tugging a brow up in inquisition.
Even when out in the field facing Wanderers, his expression hardly changed aside from a mild, concentrated furrow of his brow. Maybe that was why you liked that dumb grimace he’d make when failing to catch a plushie; it was such a change from his normally tranquil look.
Sometimes you wondered if he was purposefully holding back—hiding the depths of what he truly felt—or if this was just how he always was.
But before you could muse on it any longer, a bright, golden light from inside the claw machine pulled you back to reality.
“This again?” you remarked, shaking your head at Xavier’s last ditch effort at getting a plushie. “It never works!”
Using his light Evol on the claw itself… What would that ever do? No matter how many times you questioned him, he would never explain the theory behind the idea.
And, to neither of your surprise, the Galaxy Kid plushie you’d had your eyes on slipped right through the prongs of the claw as they squeezed together, bringing up nothing but shimmering air to dump into the prize chamber.
“It was worth another try…” Xavier mumbled, hardly able to turn himself to face your played-up wrath. “I could go get more tokens.”
You shook your head at his offer, heading for the exit before he could insist. “No need, we’ve been here long enough, anyways.”
“Then we’ll have to come back another day,” he said, hurrying ahead to hold the door open for you as you went back out onto the street. “Though, I’m not sure when we’ll get another day off like this.”
“True.” The two of you strolled down the sidewalk at a leisurely pace, bumping elbows every couple dozen footsteps from how close you were walking. “I doubt they’ll find any work for us to do by the morning. Maybe our good luck will carry on and we’ll get tomorrow off too.”
“One can only hope.”
“You need to tell me your secret to not slipping into insanity on workdays like today. You didn’t seem nearly as bored as I was before Jenna came out and let us go home.”
Xavier looked as though he’d been caught in a lie. “I… had a book propped in front of my monitor all day.”
The amusement and shock were enough to drop your mouth open into a dumb smile. The Association’s prized hunter slacking off at work… A series of jabs strung themselves together at the thought.
But just when you began to tease him for his confession, a pair of out of sync beeps from your and Xavier’s wrists snapped you into focus.
Metaflux?
A quick glance at your hunter’s watch confirmed as much. The disturbances were coming just a few hundred yards from down the road.
You and Xavier met eyes.
He gave one rigid nod. “Let’s move.”
You took off into a sprint, the all-too-familiar sounds of civilian panic growing louder the closer you got, twisting your stomach as you approached. Three Wanderers had materialized dead center of the city street. Cars swerved and horns blared as desperate drivers tried to speed away.
You pulled your pistols out and flicked the safety off, thankful that your earlier workday meant you still had them on you.
Light shined beside you as Xavier’s sword materialized in his hands. He turned to you, voice sharper from what it was back in the clawcade.
“Get the pedestrians evacuated. I’ll hold them off for now.”
“Right,” you acknowledged, splitting off from his path, heading for the people scrambling on the sidewalks.
It was impossible to hold focus on your agreed task. You shouted for people to clear out, maintained a protected path with your guns, all while chaos raged on from the center of the street. Every slash of Xavier’s blade, every grunt, every howl from a Wanderer sent pangs of worry straight to your core. They were more than temptations to turn and look. They were alarms. Sounds of a fight that Xavier was having to handle on his own until you finished helping everyone flee.
Your mind was split in fractions—concentrating on protecting all the innocent people running from danger, worrying over Xavier fighting by himself, and having to remind yourself over and over that he would be fine. He was the Association’s finest. Went on hundreds of solo missions unscathed. But even the most skilled hunter would start wearing down this far into a fight of one versus three.
Clearing everyone out took far too long.
By the time you finished and joined Xavier in the fight, he was already heaving with effort. His forehead was coated in sweat, the ends of his hair plastered to his skin, unmoving as he relentlessly swung his sword.
You resonated as soon as you got to his side, bolstering his Evol to sweep across the Wanderers on the now-empty street.
The first two went down easily after that—one by your pistols, the other by Xavier’s sword. But the last one was stubborn. Worlds stronger than the others.
You and Xavier got in a wordless flow, your typical battle cycle coming to life as you whittled down the strength of that last Wanderer. Resonate, attack, dodge, repeat.
But the moment that flow was interrupted, shit hit the fan.
Something got kicked into your eye. Dust, sand, a loose eyelash, you didn’t know. For just a fraction of a second, you paused, your concentration broken by a reflex you couldn’t help. You blinked furiously trying to clear your vision, left temporarily blinded, your guns rendered useless without the ability to aim.
There was a shuffle from where Xavier was standing beside you. A muttered curse under his breath.
“Get behind me!”
His voice suddenly came from somewhere ahead of you now, the jump intensifying the disorientation of your temporary darkness.
Desperate to make sense of it, you pried your stinging eyes open to a blur of movement directly in front of you.
Xavier had thrown himself forward, darting in the space between you and the Wanderer with his sword drawn, blocking its trajectory. And just when you reoriented yourself, his sideways movement abruptly broke.
A guttural yowl tore out of him.
Your blood ran cold. The sound was like none you’d ever heard from him before. A primal, broken shriek unleashed on instinct alone, reserved only for when the mind couldn’t process anything beyond intense pain.
His shoulders jerked forward, sword clattering to the ground, hands flying to his core. His head curled into his chest so tightly it nearly disappeared from view.
You froze, seemingly along with time itself. Paralyzed from shock. Your lungs refused to expel the air you’d gasped when that yelp pierced your ears. You hadn’t fully registered what happened until you saw light reflecting off the blood coating the tip of the Wanderer’s misshapen blade.
Xavier had been stabbed. Deep.
A strangled inhale snapped you back to reality, clipped short from pain.
“Xavier?!”
“Don’t—”
Don’t what? Help? Talk? Worry? At this moment, you were only capable of the latter.
Priorities scattered like glass smashed against concrete, each jagged shard a choice that cut deep whether picked up or left on the ground to be stepped on. Whether to drag Xavier away with a Wanderer in your wake. To retreat entirely or just get him somewhere temporarily safe. Or to take the Wanderer on alone. To fight the threat that managed to severely injure the best hunter you knew.
“‘m fine.” Xavier ground out, the lie hardly making it past his gritted teeth. He could barely stand as it was, legs starting to weaken and bend at the knees while his hands struggled to clutch at his bleeding core. “J’st… f’nish it.”
Your eyes dropped to the wound for only a moment before a switch was flipped inside. All it took was a mere glimpse at the front of his sweater. A brief, sanguine flash that sent you into overdrive. Maybe it was the adrenaline from seeing so much blood. Some instinct of your own that kicked in even though the wound wasn’t yours.
You fought in a frenzy, unloading round after round in the damned creature until it dissolved into nothing but a Protocore on the ground.
Threat quickly neutralized, you whipped around, eyes frantically searching the battered city street for the person you’d lost track of in your fury.
Xavier was only a few strides away, still standing. Just barely. The lower half of his white sweater had almost entirely turned a deep crimson—significantly more spread out than it was the last time you looked.
His frame began to sag as if gravity had singled him out.
“Shit— Xavier!”
You ran. It was nowhere near quick enough to catch his collapsing body before it slammed into the ground sideways.
Panic tightly coiled around your throat, trapping the many words you couldn’t string together as you dropped down beside him, hardly feeling the pavement slam into your knees.
Your hands hovered, shaking. You didn’t have the first idea of what to do. There was so much blood. Spreading outward through the fibers of the sweater. Staining the ends of his sleeves. Coating his hands. You could already smell it from where you were, sharp and metallic.
You didn’t need to see the gash to know it was bad.
But the most horrifying part of all was Xavier’s face. Not annoyingly neutral like it always was. Not calm.
Contorted in agony.
His eyes were screwed shut. Jaw clenched, breath hitching as it rapidly huffed in and out of his nose. There were creases in his skin you’d never seen before—nose wrinkled, nostrils flared, brows so furrowed they practically touched together.
Your heart, still pounding from the fight, hammered even harder in your chest with every noticed detail, sending your soaring pulse to thrum in your ears.
“Just— just hang on, okay?! I’ll call for help!”
All you got in response was a shaky nod and a weak grunt. It was clearly all Xavier was capable of at the moment.
On trembling fingers, you dialed the number for emergency services.
The moment you heard a voice connect on the other end, you began stammering, completely steamrolling over whatever they were saying.
“We— we need an ambulance! On Riverset Drive, near— across the street from the bus stop— in the middle of the road. There were Wanderers— one of them stabbed my partner. It’s really deep— fuck— he’s bleeding a lot! I think it might’ve nicked an artery or something. The Wanderers are all dead, the scene is clear— just send help quickly please!”
Verbalizing the scene in front of you only served to make it more real. It was visceral. Too real. Xavier was losing too much blood too fast. Bleeding out on the ground right in front of you.
The person on the other end responded, their voice slow and clear, “Ma’am, please try to stay calm. Some civilians reported the attack and help has already been dispatched to your location. Is he responsive?”
Help was already on the way. Good. Good. Not that the news made you feel any better.
Was he responsive…? He made a sound not long ago. You pried your eyes away from the red slick, watching for movement in his chest. It rose and fell uneven and shallow, the air sputtering out if he breathed too sharply, rejected by his diaphragm.
You responded, voice breathy with panic. “Yes, he is. I think he might be hyperventilating, I can’t tell.”
“Hold firm pressure on the wound and continue to monitor his breathing until help arrives. If he stops breathing, initiate CPR. Keep him conscious and calm as best as you can. I’m going to disconnect the call and contact the ambulance en route to update them on the situation. They should be there within a couple minutes.”
The onslaught of information swirled through your already short-circuiting brain.
CPR… You tried not to get lost in that part. To think about the possibility that Xavier would need intervention that intense.
The ambulance will be here soon. You clung to that fact as if it was the only thing keeping you afloat.
Monitor breathing. Apply pressure. You could do that.
You tried to be gentle when rolling Xavier onto his back, but it didn’t seem to matter how careful you were. Another deep wail bellowed out of him all the same. You pushed through his protests, both hands replacing Xavier’s over the gash in his belly. You pressed hard, the hot slickness that met your hands making your stomach lurch.
His face contorted even more with the added pressure, his breath hitching when you pushed. Even during the short time you were on the phone, the blood stain had grown significantly.
“I’m sorry. Shit, I’m so sorry, Xavier.” One moment of distraction on your end. And now he was bleeding out beneath your hands.
You spoke again, trying and failing to stop the shake in your voice, “Help is coming, okay? They’ll be here soon. Talk to me. Say anything.”
“‘t’s okay…” he slurred, tongue hardly moving in his mouth. Suddenly, you noticed the tension in his face relaxing, how pale he was becoming. “Sleepy…”
“No, nono— Xavier, you have to stay awake. Look at me. Open your eyes.”
He was slipping. Fast. But he followed your instructions, lifting his eyelids halfway as if that was all he could do with the energy he had left.
Bleary blue eyes made a half-hearted search for you, that deep sapphire shade nearly eclipsed by pools of black. His pupils were too dilated, blown wide from shock. Any hint of struggle was absent. You could practically watch the pigment in his skin draining away, the strain in his face slackening.
But you had to keep him conscious.
“Good, Xavier. Keep them open, okay? I know it’s hard, but just— just stay with me.”
The way you spoke felt like a lie. Having to hide your own snowballing panic, or pretend you weren’t about to puke from how frayed your nerves were.
And just when you needed some new hope to cling to, you could hear a siren wailing in the distance.
“Can you hear the siren?” You asked, desperate to say anything to keep him awake.
He hummed. Beneath his pale face almost fully slack from blood loss, he was still holding on, just barely. Blinking slowly but persistently to clear his blurring vision. Continuing to breathe even though it clearly hurt.
Flashing red lights lit up Xavier’s frame, growing brighter with a crescendoing sound of a rumbling engine and wheels on pavement.
Salvation was coming.
Your eyes remained locked on Xavier, not daring to lose focus on holding pressure until whatever medics were coming were ready to take over.
Doors opened and slammed shut. Footsteps thundered closer. Wheels rattled over the pavement. Gloves snapped on.
It wasn’t until someone knelt on the other side of Xavier that it hit you—his life was now out of your hands.