SeaOfStars

"Perimeter's clear," he said, quiet, like nothing in the world could rattle him. He crossed the debris toward you, boots crunching over glass and rubble. "You're bleeding, though."

You looked down. A chunk of crystal debris had opened a gash along your calf and you hadn't even noticed.

"Huh. Didn't feel that happen."

"Let me look at it." He dropped to one knee, taking a bandage roll out of your hands before you'd even fully pulled it from your pouch.

His hands were warm. Warmer than it made sense, given the cold. When he folded the torn fabric of your pants back to get at the wound, his fingers grazed bare skin and something jumped straight up your spine. You bit down on the inside of your cheek so you wouldn't make a sound about it.

This was the problem with Xavier. Some days he fell asleep against your shoulder like it was the safest place in the world. Other days he kept a careful distance between you and answered everything in a polite, unreadable tone, and you were left wondering if you'd imagined the whole thing.

"Does that hurt?" his thumb pressed against the unbroken skin just above it — the touch was not necessary to wrap the bandage.

"A little," you said, watching the top of his head, how the moonlight caught the color of his hair. "Xavier. Can I ask you something?"

His hands didn't stop moving, but his shoulders went still. "Yeah."

"Why do you do this?" You asked flatly, too tired to dress it up. "Sometimes I think we’re... I don't know, really close. And then other times, you look at me like I'm just another Hunter from the Association. It's confusing."

He finished tying off the gauze, stood up and finally looked at you "I just think about things. More than I probably should."

He reached out to help you up, hands closing firm around your forearms.

"Think about what?"

You went to test your weight on the bandaged leg and the ground chose that second to be uneven. You pitched forward, right into him, your chest hitting his. His hands slid from your arms to your waist to catch you.

Neither of you moved.

You could feel his heart going fast under his uniform, which didn't match the calm on his face at all. His eyes dropped to your mouth, came back up.This is happening, you thought, a little dizzy with it. He's actually going to—.

His grip on your waist tightened. Something cracked open behind his eyes, just for a second "You shouldn't stand this close to me"

"Xavier—"

He stepped back before you could get anything else out.

Crunch. Something snapped under his boot.

A white protocore.

He picked it and it suddenly went off with light, a white light expanding outward faster than you could track. The air got sucked straight out of your lungs. Your ears popped hard enough to hurt, and then the ruins, the sky, and everything else was sucked into a roar of wind that yanked you forward like the world had grabbed you by the throat.

You hit something solid and warm.

"Oof — sorry —"

A grunt came from underneath you. You blinked against sudden dark, hands slapping down flat against Xavier's chest. You were sprawled on top of him, legs tangled, face mashed against his neck.

"Oh my god." You scrambled back so fast you scraped your palms on the floor. "Sorry — are you okay?"

Xavier sat up slowly, rubbing the back of his neck, hair falling into his eyes. "Fine. Are you hurt?"

"No, I— " You stopped. Looked around. "Wait."

You weren't standing in the ruins anymore. You were standing on a balcony with black wrought iron railing and a view of city streets that looked oddly familiar.

"Is this our building?" You turned in a slow circle, "Xavier, did you just teleport us home?"

"I didn't teleport us anywhere."

"You definitely did something..."

"I didn't" He was already moving past you toward the railing, scanning it like it might answer a question you hadn't asked yet.

"Okay, well, something got us here," you said, following him. "So if it wasn't you, what was it?"

He didn't answer right away. He crouched by one of the plants, fingers brushing the soil. Damp. Recently turned. "I don't have an explanation for this."

"When did you get so many plants?."

He moved to a small table near, where two mugs sat, both used, one rimmed faintly with lipstick.

"This is kind of freaking me out."

You spotted a newspaper folded beside the mugs and reached for it before he could stop you.

The date on the header didn't make sense. You read it twice.

"Xavier." You held it out to him, throat tight.

He took it, scanning it fast, and for the first time all night something like real alarm broke through his usual calm. "This is two years out."

"Two years." You said it slow, testing the weight of it. "Okay. We're just —somewhere else. Somewhere with your exact view, which is a really specific coincidence, but fine, sure, this is wrong, so so wrong—"

"Calm down."

"Xavier."

"What."

You pointed, wordless, toward the far corner of the balcony, where a lumpy, badly painted bird feeder hung crooked from its hook, one wing chipped clean off. You'd have known it anywhere.

"That's Fatso"s" you said.

Xavier followed your finger, and whatever he'd been telling himself died on his face.

You grabbed for your communicator on reflex. Dead screen. "No signal," you said, more to yourself than to him.

"Mine's the same. Clock's not even holding steady." He pocketed the device "We need to see what's inside. If someone's living here, we ask them what year it is."

"Oh yeah because that is a completely normal question to walk in and ask a stranger."

"Stay behind me," he reached for the handle on the sliding glass door, testing the weight of it without committing to opening it yet. Behind the curtain, something moved.

You froze. Your fingers found the sleeve of his uniform and held on.

A hand pressed flat against the glass from the other side of the curtain, fingers spread.

Xavier looked ready to run.

A second hand appeared beside it. Bigger. Scarred across the knuckles. Something in your chest went cold with recognition even before your brain caught up. The second hand moved to close over the first, fingers lacing through.

There were two people on the other side of that door. And from the way the curtain was moving, they were not just standing there.

"Xavier," you whispered, barely any air behind it at all.

He didn't answer. He didn't move his hand off the door either —just stood there frozen, staring at those hands through the glass like his whole nervous system had collapsed.

Then he moved. His hand closed around your shoulder and pulled, one smooth backward motion that tucked you both into a narrow space where the balcony wall met the building's outer brick. The spot was tight —barely enough room for two people to stand without touching —and the angle it gave you was merciless. The glass door sat directly in your line of sight, lit from inside.

You should have looked away immediately.

But you didn't.

The curtains moved a bit. Two bodies, pressed close. The woman's face was hidden, her head tipped back behind the line of the man's shoulder. His face was visible. Hair catching the light. That jaw.

Xavier

The anger came fast and hot and settled behind your sternum like coal. Months of warmth and then distance. Months of patience that felt like it was always just about to become something and never did —and here was the answer to all of it, pressed against a glass door in an apartment that was still his, two years from now, with someone else.

He was kissing her the way someone kisses when they've stopped being careful about it. Deep, his hands dragging her back against him, the movements of his lower body slow and unmistakable.

You looked away. Focused on a crack running through the middle of the wall beside you. Breathed through your nose.

Beside you, Xavier was still looking. His face was flushed.

"Is that—" His voice came out wrong.

"Yup," you said. The bitterness in it sharper than you'd intended. "That's you"

A sound came through the glass.

The impact of skin against the glass door followed immediately by a broken moan, the sound dragged your eyes back to the glass door against your will.

The curtain had been pulled aside all the way.

The view was now unobstructed.

The woman was pressed flat against the glass, her bare breasts against the cold pane, her hands finding the frame for something to hold onto. Her face was fully visible now.

The anger in your chest went out like a light.

It was your face.

Your shoulders, your hands, the sound of your own voice coming through the glass in pieces, breathless and nothing like anything you'd heard from yourself before. Your future self's cheek was pressed to the glass too, eyes half closed, lips parted around sounds that weren't words.

Future Xavier's teeth found her shoulder and bit down, not gently, leaving something that would be visible tomorrow. His hand came around the front of her, sliding between her thighs to line his beautiful cock against her entrance.

Then he drove forward.

The sound she made came through the glass loud and clear and a small involuntary noise started building in your own throat.

Xavier's palm came over your mouth.

Fast. Firm. His fingers sealing the sound in before it could escape. His hand was shaking.

The glass door shook with the next impact. And the next.

Xavier had his mouth at her ear saying something you couldn't hear through the glass but could read in the way her expression changed when he said it.

Xavier made half a sound against the back of your head and he immediately swallowed the other half.

You felt it anyway. Felt the way his arm tightened across your chest, felt the unsteady rhythm of his breathing where his chest pressed into your back.

You couldn't look away from his face —the future version of the face that was currently breathing against your temple— wearing an expression you'd never seen on him before.

"Xavier," you said, against his palm. Muffled.

His arm tightened.

"Xavier." Louder this time, enough that he could feel the shape of his name against his hand.

His mouth dropped to your ear "Don't move." The words came out rough "If they see us—"

Inside the apartment, your future self pressed her palm hard against her lips.

Future Xavier's hand closed around her wrist.

He pulled it down. He held her hand at her side and kept it there, and when she turned her face toward him he was already looking at her.

He wanted to hear her.

Below you a glass door scraped open.

One floor down, a man stepped out onto his balcony. Cigarette unlit between his fingers, head tilted slightly, listening to the night.

You pressed further into the shadow.

The rhythm inside the apartment changed. Not slower. The opposite. The glass shook in its frame and the sounds coming through it stopped being something that could be mistaken for anything else, and the man one floor down stopped trying to light his cigarette.

You looked at future Xavier's face.

His eyes were angled down and to the left.

He picked up the pace.

She tried again, her hand came up toward her mouth. Future Xavier caught her wrist without looking and his mouth moved against her ear again.

Whatever it was, she stopped trying to be quiet.

You thought about what you'd just watched him do. The escalation. The man on the balcony below. The reason your future self's hand kept getting pulled back down.

Was he jealous of that stranger?

Inside, her feet left the ground. Xavier had both arms around her, her arms caught under his, breast bouncing with every thrust.

You saw it first.

An unmistakable pressure beneath the surface of her stomach. Moving with every thrust. A belly bulge.

Your mouth went dry.

She was dripping. You could see it even through the glass —the inside of her thighs slick and glistening where his movements had worked everything down, coating her skin, catching the apartment light every time he pulled back. The glass had a faint fog to it from her breath, small clouds appearing and disappearing with each exhale.

The deep flush running from her chest to her throat made something in your lower stomach pull tight.

The Xavier beside you tracked every place her body responded to him, her hardened nipples, the way her toes curled against nothing, the flutter beneath her skin that mapped exactly where he was.

Crash

A flower pot.

It hit the floor and you both stopped breathing.

Inside the apartment, silence.

Immediate and total.

Through the glass you watched future Xavier's head come up. No panic in it. No confusion. Just a slow turn toward the sound, his eyes moving through the dark until they found the spot where the two of you were standing.

He couldn't see you. The angle was wrong, the shadow too deep.

He knew someone was there anyway.

His expression went cold and your future self said something against his chest. The curtain moved slowly across the glass from inside and the light behind it went out.

You had thirty seconds. Maybe less.

Xavier crouched beside you. The Protocore looked small against his palm, throwing a faint white pulse between his fingers for just a second.

The glass door began to slide open.

The air changed, the balcony, the broken pot, the man with his unlit cigarette, all of it collapsing into white noise and rushing dark.

You hit the ground hard. Your knees met broken stone, the air was knocked out of you on impact and you spent the first few seconds just existing on the ground.

Xavier landed beside you.

You pushed yourself up to sitting. "So..."

Xavier said nothing.

"That was weird."

Still nothing.

"We were—"

"I saw it" he opened his hand and noticed the Protocore was gone "I was standing right next to you."

"So we're both aware of what we watched."

"Yes."

"And we're not going to talk about it?"

He looked at you. "Are you going to be able to not talk about it?"

"Probably not."

He made a sound that wasn't quite a sigh, stood up and offered you a hand. You took it and he pulled you to your feet and didn't immediately let go.

"That man on the balcony," you said.

Xavier's jaw moved. "What about him."

"Future you saw him and then—"

"I know what he did." He dropped your hand. Turned to look at anything that wasn't your face. "You don't need to walk me through it."

"I'm just—" You pressed your lips together, trying very hard not to smile, it felt inappropriate and also completely unavoidable "Was he showing off?"

"We're not talking about that."

"Xavier—"

"Not yet." He said it quietly. Just a line in the ground, clearly drawn. "Not tonight. There's—" He exhaled. "There's a lot I need to sit with before I talk about any of it."

You nodded. That felt fair.

You started walking, picking your way back through the rubble toward the gap in the wall where you'd come in, and Xavier fell into step beside you like he always did —slightly behind, slightly to your left, a position that meant he could see everything around you before you could.

The walk back was quiet. You were almost at the gap in the wall when he spoke.

"Can I ask you something."

"Go ahead."

He was quiet for a beat. Just long enough that you glanced over at him.

"Future me?" he said. "Or me?"

You stopped walking. "What?"

"You heard me. Who do you like more?

"Xavier, that's not—you are the same person—"

"Future me is two years ahead and has information I don't have and he was doing—" a small pause, "—things to you that I have not yet done. So. Future me or me?"

You stared at him.

He stared back.

"That is the most ridiculous question you've ever asked me"

"Humor me."

"You"

Something in his face changed.

"Good," he said.

"But future you did have his—"

The not quite smile disappeared. "We're going home," he said, and turned toward the gap in the wall.

You followed him, and you were very glad he was walking ahead of you this time because the smile on your face was not something you were ready to explain.