Trigger Warning: verbal/emotional/psychological abuse, intimidation, controlling parent behavior. No graphic violence.
Xavier should've felt better after lunch.
The anchors were holding, at least for now. The air had less bite to it. The campus felt… quieter, like the wards weren't grinding their teeth every second of the day.
But relief didn't stick to him the way it should've.
It slid right off, as if his body had no way of holding it.
He was halfway back to his dorm when his phone vibrated.
Vincent's name filled the screen like a threat.
Xavier stared at it for two full rings, thumb hovering. As if ignoring it could make the man on the other end dissolve into nothing, but he knew better.
Delaying the inevitable would only make things worse.
The third ring hit, and with a deep breath to steady himself, Xavier answered.
"What did you do?"
Not a 'hello.'
Not a 'how are you?'
A verdict and an accusation of wrongdoing.
Like he didn't trust his son not to get in trouble, or worse, not to embarrass him.
Xavier's grip tightened around his phone. "Good to hear from you, too, Dad."
"Don't get clever with me." Vincent's voice was smooth, almost too smooth.
Xavier knew that the calm in his voice meant that the rage had already been sharpened into something deliberate. "Do you have any idea how many phone calls I received today?"
Xavier's stomach dropped anyway, even though he'd known it was coming. "If this is about—"
"It is about everything, Xavier." Vincent exhaled, slowly and disgusted, as if the very concept of Xavier were exhausting. "Headmistress Maren called me. Again. Do you enjoy humiliating me?"
Xavier swallowed. "She calls you for anything."
"Because you give her reasons." Vincent's voice tightened. "I sent you to Reichenbach to keep your head down, do your work, and stop… collecting rumors like they're awards."
Xavier's throat constricted, like his body remembered this conversation before it even happened.
"Your behavior," Vincent continued, his voice dangerously soft, "has become… public. A faculty member mentioned your name with that tone. The one that says they expected better, that you weren't what I sold to them during your enrollment. Do you have any idea how embarrassing it is to have your name associated with mine?"
Xavier stared at the stone path ahead of him, the lantern light painting everything gold and unreal, as if mocking him during this dark moment.
"I'm trying to keep the school from collapsing," he said, quieter. "So, sorry if that's inconvenient for your social standing."
There was a heavy pause.
And then Vincent laughed.
Not amused.
Not warm.
But a single sharp sound, like a door slamming or a glass falling off a high table, shattering on impact.
"You really believe that?" Vincent asked softly. "You really believe you're the hero in your own story."
Xavier's jaw clenched. "I don't think I'm a hero."
"No," Vincent agreed, voice honeyed with cruelty. "You're not. You're a boy who keeps confusing attention with importance. A desperate little creature who will do anything for a scrap of validation."
Xavier's eyes stung. He blinked hard.
Vincent kept going, because he always did, and he always knew how to dig deeper.
"You always needed someone to look at you, didn't you?" he said. "Always needed to be special. Even your mother—"
Xavier's breath hitched. "Don't."
"—spoiled you," Vincent finished, like it was a dirty word. "She made you believe you were special. Filled your head with that ridiculous idea that you were gifted. That you mattered for something other than the last name you carry. She was just as delusional as you are."
Xavier's chest tightened until it hurt to breathe.
He could feel it happening, his body slipping into that old, familiar place where every nerve tried to make him smaller, quieter, easier to swallow.
Vincent's voice stayed calm.
That was the worst part.
"Even she would be disgusted with the person you've decided to become. Thank God she's dead, so she doesn't have to witness what a disappointment you've become. You're nothing but a liability to this family, to this school, to everyone who's ever had the misfortune of knowing you."
Xavier's eyes shut tightly, trying his hardest to keep the grief locked away.
"When I'm done cleaning up your mess," Vincent said, "you will come home for winter break, and we will discuss whether you deserve to continue at Reichenbach at all."
Xavier's fingers trembled around the phone.
"Do you understand me?"
Xavier's vision blurred when he opened his eyes.
He tried to speak, but the words snagged on something thick in his throat, as Vincent waited.
As if silence was proof.
"Xavier. You'd better answer me."
His voice cracked. "Yeah."
"That didn't sound convincing."
Xavier swallowed hard, forcing breath into lungs that didn't want to cooperate. "Yes, sir."
"Good." Vincent's tone softened again with false mercy. "Then here's what you're going to do: you're going to stop orbiting trouble. You're going to stop fraternizing with those students who will drag you down to their level—though I suppose it's not far for you to fall, is it?"
Xavier's nails dug into his palm, unable to speak.
"—and you're going to stop acting like you can save people," Vincent concluded, his voice dropping to a venomous whisper. "You can't even handle yourself. You're a drowning boy trying to throw lifelines to others. It's not noble, Xavier. It's pathetic. A desperate attempt to feel relevant."
Something inside Xavier finally snapped, but it wasn't anger.
It was just… fatigue, the same feeling he always got after he was done being Vincent's punching bag.
"You don't even know me," Xavier whispered.
Vincent paused.
Then, with quiet precision: "I know exactly what you are."
Xavier's eyes flicked towards the ground as his father continued.
"A failure."
And then the call ended with a sharp beep.
Xavier stood there, phone pressed to his ear, as if it might ring again.
It didn't.
The silence after Vincent was always the loudest thing in the world.
Xavier's knees buckled. He didn't just stumble; he collapsed, his body giving out under the weight of his father's words. He half-fell, half-scrambled into an alcove between two stone pillars, a desperate animal seeking the cover of shadows where no one could witness the fallout.
He slid down the rough stone, his back scraping against it, a pain so dull and distant it barely registered.
His phone slipped from his numb fingers and clattered on the flagstones, a sound he didn't hear. Both hands flew to his head, not just sliding into his hair but clawing at his scalp, as if he could physically rip the poison from his brain.
A sound tore from his throat. Not a sob, not a cry, but something guttural and broken. The sound of something vital snapping inside him.
He slammed the heel of his hand against his mouth, a futile attempt to shove the evidence of his weakness back down his throat.
His throat didn't just burn; it felt like he'd swallowed glass, every ragged breath scraping him raw from the inside out. His chest didn't just hurt; it caved in, a hollowed-out cavity where his heart used to be, each breath a painful reminder of the emptiness Vincent had carved out.
He breathed like a drowning man who had given up on the surface.
And the worst part wasn't the pain. It was how fast his own mind turned against him, echoing his father's verdict.
He's right. You are a liability.
You did this. You always do this.
You're pathetic. A disappointment.
He hated those thoughts because he knew they weren't his. They were Vincent's. They were parasites, burrowed so deep into his psyche they now spoke with his own voice, replaying his greatest failures on a loop until he couldn't tell where his own self-loathing ended and his father's began.
He didn't remember deciding to move.
He just… ended up walking, a ghost haunting the edges of the campus, his body moving on its own, seeking an escape from a prison he carried inside his own skin.
And then he saw her.
Thorn was standing near the edge of the quad, coat half-zipped like she'd thrown it on without thinking, a blood pouch of real blood in her hands.
Pink tab missing, a testament to the one thing he did right. The shadows behind her feet moved oddly, as if restless.
As if they'd sensed him coming.
Xavier slowed as he tried to fix his face. He tried his best to swallow it down, to be normal. To not give her any reason to pry.
Thorn's eyes lifted to him, and whatever mask he built didn't matter.
She saw through it immediately. Not through the mask, but through him, as if he were made of glass, and she could see every crack inside him.
"Hey," she said, cautiously. Not soft like pity, but it was careful. "You look like you got hit by a truck."
Xavier managed a sound that was supposed to be a laugh. It came out as a hollow, breathless rasp, a ghost of a smile touching his lips for a second before dissolving. "You should see the truck."
Thorn didn't ask what happened.
She didn't ask who, or why, or if he was okay.
That was the mercy.
She just shifted her weight and tilted her head toward the path leading away from the main quad. "Come on."
"Where?"
"Somewhere people won't stare," she said plainly, as if it weren't a question whether he'd follow.
Xavier did.
Because of course he did.
They ended up where the stone cut into quieter paths and the wind had room to move.
Not the cemetery.
Just the long stretch behind the conservatory, where dead vines, brittle and skeletal, clung to the wooden lattice like the gnarled veins of some long-dead creature. Their once-living tendrils lay frozen in desperate, climbing poses.
The lantern light here was weak and watery, struggling to push back the shadows that pooled between the slats. It cast a dim, jaundiced glow that made the air itself seem thick with dust and memory, turning the space into a corridor of forgotten promises.
Thorn sat down carefully. Xavier hovered like he didn't know what to do with his hands, or if he should be sitting next to her.
Thorn glanced at him once.
Then looked away, like she was giving him space to breathe without being watched, allowing him to choose for himself without being told what to do.
"I'm not going to ask what happened," she said softly, her voice a low hum against the silence, "But I'm also not stupid."
Her words, meant as a comfort, landed like shrapnel. Not stupid. Vincent's voice slithered into the space she had so carefully created.
She sees it, too. She sees how weak you are. How pathetic. Look at you, hovering. Can't even sit down without being told.
The urge to apologize was overwhelming, even if he didn't know exactly what for.
For existing?
For being seen in this state?
For being so transparently broken that even her kindness felt like a confirmation of his failure?
Xavier's throat tightened.
"I'm fine," he tried.
Thorn's mouth twitched. "That was a bad lie. Try again."
Xavier didn't answer.
He just stared at the ground until his vision steadied.
Thorn exhaled slowly through her nose.
"Was it Victor?" she said, like she was naming a storm, not a man. "You have the same look you did when he called you a month ago."
Xavier flinched.
"Vincent," he corrected automatically, because his father's name always came with rules.
Thorn's eyes sharpened. "Right. Vincent. The guy who thinks he owns the oxygen you breathe."
Xavier's laugh came out rough and cracked.
Thorn didn't smile.
She didn't soften it.
"I'm not going to make you talk. But if you want to do something with your hands instead of your head… we can practice."
Xavier blinked. "Practice what?"
"Our powers," Thorn said, like it was obvious. "I'm not going to let you sit there and sulk. We might as well make it productive."
It was such a Thorn solution: practical, blunt, and weirdly gentle, because she wasn't asking for his feelings; she was offering him an exit.
Something he could survive, something that could take his mind off of everything.
Xavier swallowed. "Okay."
They practiced in the cold air like two people trying not to fall apart.
Thorn lifted her hand for the umpteenth time, but her shadows didn't obey immediately.
It hesitated like a stubborn animal, refusing the orders it had been given.
Thorn's jaw clenched, irritation flickering.
"See?" she muttered. "It's not doing what I tell it."
Xavier looked at her, eyes red-rimmed, voice quiet.
"Since you've been getting real blood?"
Thorn's gaze snapped to him. "Yeah. Even when I was getting real blood at home, they didn't act like this."
He nodded once, like that tracked.
"More power," he said softly. "Less control."
Thorn sighed, tilting her head back to stare up at the pale sky.
"Love that for me."
Xavier's mouth twitched despite himself.
Thorn moved again, slower this time. Less command, more invitation. Her shadow unfurled along the ground, curling toward the rune like smoke caught in a current.
Xavier crouched beside the circle and adjusted one of the lines with his finger.
"Try feeding it through," he murmured. "Not pushing it. They're part of you. Stubbornness and all."
Thorn paused mid-motion, staring at him.
"Listen to you."
"What?"
"You sound like you've been doing this for years."
Xavier's expression flickered. Something distant passed behind his eyes.
"I… used to," he said quietly. "With my mom."
Thorn went still.
Not because she wanted to pry.
Because she understood the weight of that sentence.
Xavier didn't elaborate. He didn't have to.
He drew another small symbol beside the first. An anchor mark, crude but precise.
"It's muscle memory," he said, the words feeling foreign in his mouth. "It's just… buried."
Thorn's voice softened, not with pity, but with a quiet, unshakeable resolve. "Then dig it up."
Xavier's head snapped up, his breath catching in his throat. The command was so simple, so direct. It wasn't a suggestion or a piece of gentle advice.
It was an order, but one that came from a place of belief, not condemnation.
Thorn held his gaze like it wasn't a big deal, like she wasn't handing him a shovel and asking him to excavate memories that he kept so deeply buried.
But it was.
So Xavier did.
He dug.
He picked up a twig and began sketching in the dirt.
At first, the lines were uncertain, the way his drawings had been since the visions started, hesitant, like his hands didn't trust themselves anymore.
But the longer he worked, the steadier they became.
The shape wasn't complicated. Just a frame. A boundary.
A place for something to exist.
And slowly, very slowly, his hands stopped shaking.
The air shifted, not dramatically, but just enough that Xavier felt it before he saw it.
Thorn's shadow, which had been resisting her all night, slid forward.
It followed the lines he'd drawn like water finding the edges of a carved channel.
Thorn blinked, a flicker of genuine surprise breaking through her calm.
"I didn't tell it to do that."
Xavier frowned, his mind racing, watching the shadow settle into the shape he'd sketched.
It was… holding. Contained.
The space felt quieter. Denser. Like the air itself had decided to stay put, a pocket of perfect stillness in a world that refused to stop moving.
Xavier stared at the symbol.
"I didn't either."
Thorn crouched beside him, studying the lines with an intensity that made his skin prickle.
Her shadow rested inside the shape calmly now, no longer fighting her, no longer fighting itself. It had finally found where it belonged.
She glanced at him sideways, a new understanding dawning in her eyes.
"Did you just… make it behave?"
Xavier shook his head slowly.
"No."
His eyes lingered on the drawing, on the simple, powerful lines. "I think I just gave it somewhere to go."
For a moment, neither of them spoke. The only sound was the distant rustle of dead leaves.
The cold wind passed over them, a sharp, biting gust, but the space inside the small circle stayed still. Untouched.
Thorn looked at the symbol again. Then at him, her expression softening into something that looked dangerously like awe.
"Yeah," she said quietly, a slow smile spreading across her face.
"Definitely dig that up."
"Come on," he said, after a moment of silence, standing up from the cold ground, "I'll go back with you before Pippa assumes you died."
The path back to the dorms was quieter than usual.
Night had settled over Reichenbach in that heavy alpine way, where the air felt sharper, and the lanterns along the stone paths glowed like small islands of warmth in a sea of shadow.
For a while, neither of them spoke.
Their footsteps crunched softly over gravel as they walked side by side.
Thorn kept her hands tucked into the sleeves of her coat, shoulders slightly hunched against the cold. Xavier walked with his hands in his pockets, gaze fixed somewhere ahead that wasn't quite the path.
Thorn could hear it.
The uneven rhythm of his breathing.
The faint way his pulse sped up and slowed again, like his body was still trying to come down from something.
Vincent.
She didn't say the name.
Didn't ask.
Some things weren't meant to be pried open in the dark.
Instead, she nudged his elbow lightly with her sleeve.
"You look less like you're about to punch a wall," she said.
Xavier huffed out a quiet breath that might have been a laugh.
"Progress."
They walked a few more steps.
The dorm towers came into view ahead of them, their tall windows glowing softly against the mountainside.
Thorn tilted her head slightly.
"You hungry?"
"Always," Xavier said automatically.
"Good," she replied. "Because Pippa definitely stole snacks again."
Xavier shook his head faintly.
"Of course she did."
By the time they reached the dorm entrance, the tightness in his shoulders had loosened just a little.
Not gone.
But manageable. A dull ache instead of a crushing weight.
Thorn pushed the door open and stepped inside, the warmth of the building rolling over them.
"Try not to collapse dramatically," she said as they climbed the stairs. "Danny gets weird about that."
For the first time that night, a real smile touched Xavier's lips, faint and fleeting, but there. "I'll do my best."
Pippa and Danny were already in Thorn's dorm when they arrived.
Pippa was perched on Thorn's bed as if she lived there, one knee up, hoodie sleeves shoved past her wrists. Danny sat in the desk chair, trying to look casual but failing. There were snacks on the floor, and someone had stolen tea from the kitchen again.
Pippa's eyes flicked to Xavier immediately.
Not his face, but the slump of his shoulders, the careful way he placed his feet, as if the floor might give way.
"Oh my god, you're alive." She joked.
Danny snorted. "Barely, apparently."
Thorn tossed her coat over the chair. "Don't start."
Pippa's gaze ping-ponged between them. "I wasn't going to."
A pause stretched, thick and unsure.
Then, with forced lightness that did little to disguise Pippa's need to break the tension: "So. Are we… doing something? Or are we just sitting in existential dread again?"
"Both," Thorn said.
"Perfect," Pippa replied, relieved.
Pippa stood up to pull their portable projector out from one of the desk drawers.
"Hell yeah, movie night," Danny smirked, standing up and helping Pippa set everything up while Thorn moved towards the kettle. She stole half of Danny's snack without asking while the water warmed.
"You think we need more snacks?" Thorn asked, pulling open her drawer.
Xavier slowly looked up at Thorn and then down at the pile of snacks in her drawer.
"That's an impressive collection."
Danny leaned forward in the desk chair, eyeing the growing pile on Thorn's desk as she pulled them free.
"Careful," he said. "That's at least three days of survival rations."
"Please," Thorn scoffed, pushing another bag toward the middle of the desk. "That's barely an evening."
Pippa reached across the desk and immediately stole a handful of something without asking.
"Your definition of 'sharing' is very aggressive," Xavier observed.
Pippa shrugged. "You're welcome to participate."
Xavier leaned back slightly against the headboard of Thorn's bed, watching the quiet chaos unfold. Thorn had already opened two bags of chips and pushed them toward the group, as if it were an unspoken invitation.
Danny grabbed one.
Pippa grabbed two.
Thorn grabbed whatever Danny had just taken right out of his hand.
"Hey!" Danny protested.
"You hesitated," Thorn said simply.
Xavier shook his head faintly, a small smile tugging at the corner of his lips.
For a while, the room filled with the small, comfortable sounds of people existing together, crinkling wrappers, Danny muttering under his breath, Pippa narrating a completely unnecessary story about how she had acquired the snacks in the first place as she scrolled through the list of pirateable movies.
Xavier didn't say much. His words were trapped beneath the weight of the evening, but his presence was a quiet anchor.
He stayed.
And slowly, the knot of tension in his shoulders began to unravel, thread by thread.
At some point, Thorn's black cat plush, a creature with mismatched button eyes and a perpetually unimpressed expression, ended up in Xavier's lap, tossed there by Pippa with a careless, "Here. Emotional support demon."
Xavier didn't argue.
His hands curled around it automatically, like his body recognized comfort even when his brain refused to accept it, even when it was still echoing with his father's voice.
The room warmed, not just from the radiator in the corner, but from the shared, easy humanity of it.
The conversation blurred into a pleasant, indistinct hum, a soundtrack to the slow, steady beat of his own heart.
And for the first time in what felt like days, Xavier's eyes started to drift.
He blinked once, the room swimming back into focus.
Then twice, the lights smearing into starbursts.
His head tipped forward, caught itself with a jerk, and then leaned back against the fortress of pillows Thorn had stacked against her bed.
His fingers tightened around the plush cat as he rested his eyes for just a moment.
But the second he closed his eyes, he was gone.
Gone into the kind of sleep you fall into when your body decides it doesn't care what your brain wants anymore.
Pippa and Danny stared blankly, unsure how to handle the situation.
Thorn stared as if she were watching something fragile survive.
"Do we… wake him?" Danny whispered.
Pippa made a face. "Ew. I mean, he's drooling a little."
Thorn's glare snapped to them so fast it could've cut glass.
"Absolutely not."
Danny blinked. "Thorn—"
"He hasn't slept," Thorn said, voice low and sharp in a way that shut down argument. "Like, actually slept in weeks. You don't wake someone when their body finally stops fighting."
Pippa's expression softened, just a little.
"…Okay," she said quietly.
Danny shifted, lowering his voice. "He's holding the cat like it's a life raft."
"Leave him alone," Thorn muttered.
She moved closer, careful not to jostle him, and pulled her favorite green blanket up over his legs like it wasn't a big deal.
Like she didn't notice the way his shoulders eased when the warmth hit.
Like she didn't notice how the plush cat was pressed to his chest like protection.
Pippa watched her do it.
Then looked away quickly, like she didn't want Thorn to see she'd notice the kindness in her actions.
Danny whispered, "He's lucky."
Thorn's mouth twitched, barely.
"Watch it," she said.
Pippa leaned back against the wall, quieter now. "Okay. So. What do we do while he sleeps?"
Thorn sat down beside the bed, eyes on Xavier's sleeping face like she was guarding something she didn't want to name.
"We keep the room quiet," she said flatly.
And nobody questioned it.
Not when Xavier finally looked like the world wasn't about to swallow him whole.