He did not wake so much as arrive—not in a place, but in a weight.
Not in complete complexity of human body, mind and soul but simple strands. Like string theory made manifest, extending through the fifth dimension to find something… someone, familiar?
It was simultaneously a question and an answer.
At first there was no body. Peace.
No pain. Relief.
No leg screaming, no shoulder grinding like sand in a joint and the perpetual pain in his jaw was gone. Handsome.
For a moment, what existed, was a sense of being poured into another shape; badly, like water into the wrong mold.
Like a burrito ready to slip out of the wrapping with the slightest tear. I'm hungry.
Everything felt wrong but in a fascinatingly specific way.
Like the twitch of phantom fingers after losing your arm—it was as if belonging but missing; however, twisted upside down and around in a context he could not decipher.
Like the first time hearing a new word.
He was younger—or at least, felt that way.
Not by memory—by posture, by weight, by shallow breaths and slow-moving eyes.
By the way his subconscious assumed it would be caught by the world if he fell—it felt like a disease that inflicted the many. That which had been stripped away in the desperate throes of survival.
He stood in a house that smelled like money and rot, finding it hard to distinguish between the two even though he clearly could feel where one ended and the other began.
It was a house of clean floors but loud silences.
Flashy design but little substance.
Neat suits on hangars but saturated with the pungent scent of newness—never been worn.
It was a house of statements more than anything.
A cry to the void 'Someone was here. And while they might still be here in body, their spirit departed long ago.'
The kind of place where everything had a price except for affection—that didn't seem to exist anymore.
Unless the affection was for money itself.
He knew the people here.
An echo of an echo, borrowed from someone else's voice.
There were things in his mind that were distinctly not him. Not Xavier.
Knowing names without caring for them, seeing faces without staring into their eyes, tasting deception in the air without a shared breath.
He smiled easily, carelessly.
His voice came out smooth, practiced, like it had never been broken by cold or blood or hunger. But somehow, this was colder than even a practiced hunter's uncivilized bellows.
Two friends orbited him.
Close enough to touch, far enough to flee.
The kind of friendships that cracked if leaned on too hard.
Jokes floated between them like glass—harmless until they cut. And when they did cut, someone would bleed to death.
He understood instinctively how to keep them laughing, how to keep them useful.
Connections were currency.
He spent them freely.
Too freely to be admired but too calculating to actually be free. It was a paradox in and of itself—paying so much just to get what would have been offered anyway, but he knew no other way.
And thus, Xavier knew no other way when he was him.
Girls noticed him.
He noticed that they noticed, what they noticed, and why they noticed it.
There was power in that, a shallow, flickering heat that made the chest feel less hollow.
Knowing was always better than not, until you noticed a bit too much.
Noticing too much would always be a curse but it was amazing what the mind could be trained to forget, so even though he saw, and he knew, he was still blind enough to survive… to live.
He took their silent, unconscious gazes without guilt.
Without attachment.
He didn't need them.
And that was the problem.
There was no singular gravity here.
Humans, those that possessed humanity anyway, would always need, be of need, and give in to the need—socially, spiritually and physically.
But what if—
No one person was withholding all the love. It was always around, but as if existing in another dimension, it flowed in and out of him in a continuous wave of ignorance.
No Wolsi-shaped focus.
Just aftermath.
Just the residue of something broken long ago, leaking into everything else.
The darkness was quieter than his own—but sharper. It was the first time he felt a pain that stabbed at himself more than anyone else.
Slow suicide. Definitely not deliberate and that made it, somehow, worse.
Killing yourself before you even contemplated the thought—like the boy in high school who imagined being hit by a car so his own body severed his spinal chord.
But whose memory was that—Xavier's or the other… Edison?
The body, as always, worked in mysterious ways—answering questions that need only be asked once.
It lived behind the eyes—he lived behind the eyes.
In the way anger arrived faster than thought.
In the way touch turned violent without permission.
In the way love was confused for ownership, and ownership for safety.
And somehow—impossibly—Xavier felt it bleeding through him.
And he bled back.
Whoever this Edison was, he was a broken boy, and becoming infinitely more broken by their entanglement.
As if the months Xavier had spent falling, starving, being bitten and burned and poisoned had thinned the wall between selves?
As if surviving too much had made him permeable. His pain fed this other boy's rage.
The boy's rage echoed back, tightening something ugly in Xavier's chest.
An ominous, inauspicious loop.
A cycle that felt virtuous only because it was active—because suffering was doing something, moving somewhere, instead of sitting still and rotting.
Which begged the question—when poison expires, does it become more or less poisonous?
Neither Xavier nor Edison were interested in the answer, but an inkling whispered they would find out regardless of their intentions.
He understood, dimly, terribly, that this was not balance.
It was the demon-like will of survival, and the broken heart of a boy.
One of them would break.
And it would not be the boy with a roof, with food, with people to catch him when he fell.
It would be the one whose body had learned to accept impact as sign of live. The one who had trained himself not to scream.
The mountain had carved him hollow enough to carry someone else's darkness too.
That realization hurt more than any broken bone.
The house flickered.
The walls warped.
Sound stretched thin like sap in the sun.
Somewhere, a door slammed. Somewhere else, something inside him recoiled, instinct screaming—
No. Not mine.
The world folded.
Pain rushed back like an insult.
And Xavier realized he had not been himself—he had been someone else. And that person—Edison—was about to experience a very rude awakening to the cruelties of the world.
I hope it forges him into a better person.
I DOUBT IT! Something thought back.
...…
Xavier woke choking.
The stench hit first—burned herbs, rot-sweet paralysis, the aftertaste of his own desperation clinging to the back of his throat.
It was like a shot of sewage water.
He gagged, rolled onto his side, bile and spit stringing from his mouth as his lungs fought to remember how to work.
Breathing was torture. Not breathing was death.
He had to navigate the fine line between the two states.
Breathe just enough to remember what it is like to live, but not enough to survive, but bear the pain just enough to feel life, but not enough pain to fan the flames of temptation to end it.
His body felt wrong. Heavy. Delayed.
Like commands took a second too long to arrive.
Considering his nerves had been wrecked from countless survival mishaps—being slower than he already was may as well have been a catastrophic bodily failure.
Parkinson's would be a better alternative—at least then, you would know exactly when it would end. That it would end someday regardless.
He forced himself up onto an elbow.
The ground moved away from him, tilted. Then it squirmed when he tried again.
It wasn't until the third try that he realized he was the one unbalanced.
It was crazy how he would assume otherwise, and a testament to just how shaken the fumes had left him.
He swallowed air that tasted like death and copper and smoke.
His eyes snapped open fully.
He scanned.
Rock. Trees. Mist thinning. No bears. No movement.
No sound but his own ragged breathing and the distant, indifferent hush of the forest.
Alone.
Relief came sharp and brief—immediately followed by something colder.
He pressed a shaking hand into the dirt, steadying himself, and felt it then.
Not pain. Not fear.
A presence.
Not here—but elsewhere.
Like a frequency still humming in his bones. Like a scar that hadn't finished forming.
Xavier wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and pushed himself upright, swaying.
"Get it together," he muttered, voice raw, barely recognizable.
But even as he said it, he knew—
Death had come due…