Work Text:
—song: Laufey - Someone New
I first saw him through the lens of numbers. Not in person, not in those dazzling training halls or dim-lit mission briefings, but through encrypted files, logs, and telemetry maps that told a story without words.
Xavier’s name came up tagged with red clearance. Highest level of sensitivity. The kind of case we, the analysts, half-feared and half-adored because it meant something important was happening out there. And for once, the data wasn’t just numbers. It moved.
His movement signature: the velocity logs, the heartbeat intervals, the decision patterns… it was art.
Clean, deliberate, elegant in a way that made my fingers pause mid-type. Every choice he made on the field looked like a composer arranging chaos into rhythm.
And me? I was the silent listener, behind triple-encrypted screens, reading his every beat.
That was how I fell.
Not for the man himself, not at first, but for the way he existed in motion.
Daily, Xavier was someone you could almost miss in a crowded cafeteria. White shirt, white jacket, with that effortless carelessness that felt practiced, though maybe it wasn’t. He’d nod at you if you greeted him, maybe add a “morning” that sounded like music only because he meant it.
He had this thing: remembering. Everyone said so.
He knew the recruit from Team D liked her coffee with honey. He noticed when Lee from the archives switched to mint gum after quitting cigarettes. He remembered my name, and I swear, I hadn’t even introduced myself properly.
“Morning, Gin.”
That was all he said the first time we spoke in person.
Just that. But the way my name rolled off his voice was steady, like he had already practiced saying it, and left me replaying it in my head the whole day.
People at the Association saw Xavier as a hero, the golden standard of discipline and grace. But working behind the glass meant I saw the cracks too.
His post-mission vitals told me when he pushed himself too far. His message drafts (yes, even the deleted ones that synced for a split second before purge) told me what he almost said. And the logs… oh, the logs told me when his hands trembled.
Sometimes, at 2 a.m., when the building was all hum and neon, I’d stay back, just scrolling through mission feeds, watching his traces.
He didn’t know, of course.
He couldn’t.
The Hunter system wasn’t built for love stories.
But it was the night feed that undid me.
I was on watch when his signal came through. No Hunt Zone mission, solo run. At first, it was clean: his heart steady at 62 bpm, oxygen stable, blood pressure balanced. But then the feed shifted. A spike, sudden and sharp.
148 bpm. Breathing irregular. Proximity sensors are lighting red.
The console buzzed, alive with him.
His heart thrummed through the speakers in small, mechanical beats, but the rhythm was human, desperate. I pressed my palm against the screen. It was warm.
And then, my own pulse began to chase his. Fast. Then faster.
He moved. Quick, decisive, his vitals flaring like light through stormwater. And in that moment, I could see him without seeing him: The low crouch, the quiet inhale, the muscles coiled under his coat. The scent of cold air, the sting of adrenaline.
My chest rose with his breath. When he steadied, so did I. When he stumbled, my ribs clenched. It was insane, like a heartbeat crossing a wire.
Then the signal cut out.
01:43.
Silence.
For thirty-seven seconds, the world stopped moving. All that existed was a blank feed and the sound of my pulse crashing in my ears. I imagined him down, hurt, maybe still reaching for his comm. My throat locked.
Then, the flicker. Vitals online. Weak, but there.
He lived.
And I broke.
Quietly, stupidly, laughing and crying at once. Because who the hell feels like that over data?
He came back three days later with a bandaged wrist and a faint bruise under his eye. Smiling, like nothing happened. Like those thirty-seven seconds hadn’t nearly erased him from my world.
He didn’t see me when he passed the data center glass.
But I saw him. Always did.
It became a strange intimacy, the kind that shouldn’t exist. He’d come in, hand over reports, and exchange a few polite words. I’d read between every line and decode the tremors behind his calm. The world saw his perfection; I saw his humanity. I want to say that I saw him.
One evening, I found a note in the logs. A personal comment buried deep between system codes.
> “To whoever checks this, thank U for keeping us alive back here.”
It wasn’t signed. But it was him. That syntax, it's his. He’d written it after that last mission, timestamped right after his vitals normalized.
Now, if you get a cent every time you cry in the data room, I have 2 cents. Not because of the words, of course, I appreciate it, but I realized he’d never know who was reading them. Who actually wants to check and keep him alive?
I always tried to tell myself it was fine. That admiration wasn’t love, that watching him through data wasn’t intimacy. That it was just part of the job.
But love has a funny way of slipping in between logic and silence.
When he passed by my desk and said, “Don’t work too late, Gin,” I laughed it off.
When he remembered that I liked my coffee with cinnamon, something I had only mentioned once in a crowded elevator, my heart clenched. He remembered everyone’s small details, I reminded myself. That’s just who he is.
And that’s when it hit me.
I’m not the female lead in his story.
I’m the one off-screen, typing in the background. The one who’ll never appear in the mission debriefs, never in the ending credits.
Just the NPC who knows too much, feels too much, but exists just enough to keep the story moving.
And I heard about Aeris sometimes — the hunter who saved his life once. The one who made him laugh again after months of silence.
I’ve never met her, but I’ve seen the shift in his patterns since she arrived. His vitals are calmer now. The microtremors are gone. His rest cycles longer. Her presence traces itself even in the numbers.
It’s beautiful, really. Watching someone heal, even if it’s not because of you.
I still process his data. Still track his missions. Still find myself tracing his path like a prayer. Sometimes, when he walks past my desk and smiles, I think to myself: if this is all I ever get, it’s still something real.
Because in this vast universe, I was once the one who saw him through the data glass.
And that, to me, will always be love.