on the edge of salvation (pt 1.)
even after 214 years on earth, the nightmares persist.
Xavier nightmare hurt/comfort fic inspired by To Your Yesterday and his Shining Traces 4*
this is a two-part fic, part two can be found here
Ი𐑼 ♪⋆.✮ ─────────────────── ★ ˙ ̟｡
It’s well into the night when Xavier finally wakes up. Midnight yawns, darkness stretching through the room, heavy, foreboding, strange.
It’s a subtle difference that only the trained senses of a Light Evol user would be able to perceive. Darkness didn’t end at sight— Xavier could feel it seep through his flesh, sinking into the marrow of his bones. Yet, it wasn’t unfamiliar.
He runs a hand through his hair, contemplating the foreign familiarity of his bedroom. Leather chafes his forehead, and he stills. Curiously, he flexes his gloved hand, his fingers snugly moving within the fabric. Gloves? He certainly didn’t sleep with those. The rough brush of his gloves against his face is interrupted by a familiar rip in the fabric. Not just any gloves— his Lightseeker uniform.
Xavier glances down at his hands, but nothing meets his gaze. Light blooms from his fingertips for a moment. A blink, and it’s extinguished. He sighs, suspicions confirmed by the absence of warmth.
He bitterly closes his eyes at the realization. After a moment, he opens them again.
Mist curls around him, opaque tendrils dissipating at the brush of his fingers. Within seconds, they reappear, coiling around his hand again. It’s this kind of push-and-pull that he hates the most, the brief moment he’s awarded hope before despair so cruelly clamps around his throat. Xavier remains perched on the edge of the bed, waiting.
He didn’t mind. After all, Xavier was quite good at waiting. Patience was a virtue, and he was a virtuous prince. Or at least, he’d been expected to be for the better part of 400 years. Old habits die hard.
He steadies his heart for what’s to come. He strains his eyes in the dark, tracing the vague lines of the thatched cottage room above from his memory. He didn’t need to see it to know it was there. His fingers skim the hard mattress beneath him. At least some semblance of this dream was still solid. They catch on a thin, tattered blanket. The periwinkle fabric has long decayed since he first arrived here, and now he can feel the rough threads fraying at the edges.
Exhausted, Xavier relents to the dream. It took quite a few runs to figure it out— the vaguely game-like dream sequence wouldn’t progress until he did its bidding. He never stopped trying to stall it, though— that sort of stubbornness came easy to him. He’d ignored the well-tread path of fate to forge his own uneven trail right next to it. But for now, he’ll play along.
Xavier leans against the hard body of the mattress; It doesn’t creak under his weight. The room seemed to exist in a cosmic vacuum; no sound arose from any of his movements. He can’t hear the beating of his own heart, only feel the irregular drumbeat of his pulse echoing in his chest. He places his hand over his heart, desperate to cling to the faint reverb of it. It’s the only indication that he’s alive— and as long as he was alive, he’d always make his way back to you. He promised, after all. Xavier Shen wasn’t one to break promises.
At another stretch of nothingness, Xavier relents to the whims of his subconsciousness. Sleep, it speaks. He pulls the thin sheet over his body. The threadbare rag barely covers his torso, blanketing his midriff alone. It offers no warmth, but he lets himself pretend. It’s after he’s peacefully settled that the odour hits him, assaulting his senses. Heavy, foreboding, familiar.
He sits upright with a start. Xavier instinctively reaches for the other side of the bed. There isn’t anything there, he knows, he’s known the last hundred times he’s done this. But he reaches anyway, because something is different this time. Something is wrong. Wronger even in this nightmarish dreamscape.
His fingers catch on something long, a weapon, he realizes. For a second, hope glimmers within the depths of his soul. The inevitability of space-time on which his dreams had been pillared on had now collapsed. His actions had changed something.
Xavier pulled it toward him, his belated realization drawing a noiseless sound from his throat. A human spine. At its apex, a skull. The soulless, fleshless remnant of life gleams white in the vast darkness, its empty sockets locked into his.
From the depths of the fog, a scream erupts.
Xavier runs his hand through his hair, slick with sweat. His shirt clings uncomfortably to his back, soaked in trepidation.
The guilt doesn’t get any easier after 214 years. It was just another perk of being near-immortal— he’d remain trapped in this body, encased in eternal youth as his soul decays. Philosians weren’t the type to get attached, knowing their fates. And yet, Xavier foolishly believed the path he’d carved for himself would lead him elsewhere, let him defy the nature of his being to be with you.
He couldn’t change fate. You were destined to die, no matter what he did, and he’d sworn to find you as long as his heart kept beating. But what after that? When the clock of his life had ceased to tick, and you’d remained a knightless queen waiting for a dead star for an eternity? How much longer could he go on like this?
It was easier to bear the guilt when he was asleep, but even that momentary reprieve has been stolen away from him. Once his breathing steadies, Xavier dares himself to look at you, slumbering away next to him. His pupils trail your undulating chest. He leans back against the bedframe, a small sigh escaping him.
You’re alive, you’re alive, you’re alive. And as long as you’re alive, as long as you’re safe and within his reach, it was okay. He’d bear the weight of it all on his shoulders for you.
“I hope your dreams are sweet,” he mumbles, his voice hoarse with emotion. He lightly pinches your cheek. “At least one of us deserves to be happy.”
He takes the flutter of your lashes as an affirmation of his wish.
