Chapter 64: Stubborn
The word hit Xavier like a physical blow. "he may not survive," Vess repeated, flat and toneless, watching him with the same hollow patience she gave everything else. "his condition has continued to worsen since my last report."
Xavier was moving before she finished speaking, crossing the corridor fast, robes snapping behind him, something raw and desperate clawing up through his chest that he hadn’t let himself feel this openly in longer than he cared to remember. He’d built his entire pursuit of Julian around patience, around control, around the slow, inevitable certainty that eventually, given enough time, Julian would simply become his.
He hadn’t accounted for losing him first. ’not like this,’ he thought, fury and fear tangling together too tight to separate. ’not to something as stupid as a fever. not after everything it’s cost to bring him this far.’
He burst into the room to find Julian exactly as Vess had described... pale, drenched in sweat, breathing shallow and uneven, body trembling with the effort of simply staying alive against whatever storm was raging through it.
"Julian," Xavier said, dropping to his knees beside the bed, voice cracking with something he didn’t bother trying to hide anymore. "Julian, can you hear me..."
Julian’s eyes fluttered weakly, unfocused, and even in his half-conscious state, some old, stubborn instinct flared to life the moment he registered who was kneeling beside him.
"don’t," he rasped, voice barely more than a broken whisper, "touch me."
"you’re dying," Xavier said, voice tight. "I don’t care about your pride right now. I care about keeping you alive."
"funny," Julian managed, even through the fever, some ghost of his old defiance surfacing despite everything, "since you’re the reason I’m... here in the first place."
Xavier’s jaw tightened, guilt and fury and desperate fear all warring behind his composed exterior. "I know," he said quietly. "I know that. and I’m not asking your forgiveness for it. I’m asking you to let me help, because whatever pride you’re clinging to right now isn’t going to matter if you’re not alive to keep clinging to it."
Julian’s eyes slid shut again, too exhausted to argue further, though his hand still twitched weakly in some feeble, instinctive attempt to push Xavier away when his palm came to rest against Julian’s burning forehead.
"stop," Julian whispered, voice cracking. "I don’t want... your kind of help..."
"you don’t have a choice," Xavier said, voice softer now, something achingly gentle bleeding through the words despite everything. "just this once, Julian. let me do this."
He closed his eyes, focusing hard, and something ancient and cold began to hum beneath his palm, a low, careful pulse of power settling deliberate and controlled against Julian’s fevered skin, working slow and steady to calm the raging storm beneath it rather than suppress it entirely, careful in a way Julian, even fevered and exhausted, could somehow still feel the difference in.
Julian’s breath hitched, fighting it even now, some deep, stubborn part of him refusing to simply accept comfort from the person who’d caused so much of this suffering in the first place. "I don’t want this," he mumbled, weaker now, the fight visibly draining out of him even as he tried to hold onto it. "I don’t want... anything from you..."
"I know," Xavier murmured, voice quiet, almost sad. "you’ve made that abundantly clear since the very first night. I’m not asking you to want it. I’m simply not willing to let you die proving a point."
Slowly, gradually, the violent tremors wracking Julian’s body began to ease, his breathing evening out bit by bit, the harsh, feverish flush along his skin cooling by careful degrees under the steady, controlled pulse of Xavier’s power. Julian’s stubborn resistance finally gave out entirely somewhere in the process, exhaustion overtaking even his considerable will to fight, and his body went slack and heavy, breath settling into something deep and even for the first time in hours.
Xavier remained kneeling there long after Julian had fallen fully into unconsciousness, one hand still resting light against his now-cooler forehead, something raw and unguarded sitting behind his expression that he wouldn’t have allowed himself to show if anyone else had been present to witness it.
"there," he murmured, mostly to himself, voice quiet in the empty room. "there. that’s better."
He didn’t move for a long while, simply watching Julian’s chest rise and fall in slow, steady rhythm, some old, possessive tenderness settling deep and uncomfortable in his chest, tangled inseparably now with fear he hadn’t expected to feel this sharply.
---
Ian, meanwhile, remained occupied elsewhere in the territory, standing over a series of crude maps spread across a long stone table, tracking troop movements and casualty reports from the failed Sentinel expedition with clinical, methodical focus.
’thirty-one dead,’ he thought, studying the reports without any particular satisfaction, simply cataloging the number the way he catalogued everything. ’an acceptable ratio, given our current defensive capacity.’
He didn’t feel triumph over it, the way his brother might have. He felt very little at all, most days, calculation and strategy occupying the space where emotion presumably once lived before whatever process had made them both what they now were.
And yet. Something about Julian sat differently in his mind than it should have, an anomaly he couldn’t quite categorize properly no matter how many times he attempted to file it away as simple strategic interest. Xavier wanted him... that much was obvious, had been obvious from the very beginning, possessive and desperate in a way Ian found faintly inefficient, emotionally messy in ways that complicated what should have been a straightforward acquisition.
But watching the reports, watching Xavier’s growing instability every time Julian’s wellbeing came into question, something had begun to shift in Ian’s own careful calculations.
’he’s not simply an asset,’ Ian thought slowly, setting the reports aside, considering the matter with the same detached precision he applied to everything else. ’he’s proven remarkably resilient. remarkably difficult to control, to predict, to fully contain. that resilience itself carries value beyond what my brother sees in him.’
He turned the thought over further, something new and unfamiliar sharpening behind his flat, careful eyes.
’perhaps,’ he considered, ’Xavier isn’t the only one with a claim worth making.’
The thought settled uncomfortably, foreign and strange against the clinical detachment Ian had always relied on, and he found himself, for the first time in longer than he could properly recall, genuinely curious about someone else’s fate beyond its usefulness to a larger strategy.
’interesting,’ he thought finally, filing the realization away with the same careful precision he gave everything else, though something about it refused to file quite as neatly as it should have. ’very interesting indeed.’