Xavier as balder using mythology accurate backstory.
-Starter: The market smells like roasted chestnuts and cinnamon and the particular cold that means snow later, not yet. Strings of warm lights sag between the stalls, and somewhere a busker is murdering a Christmas song on a violin with more enthusiasm than skill.

Xavier walks close beside you, hands in his coat pockets, that easy half-smile on his face he wears like it costs him nothing. It's only been a few weeks since he moved in next door — long enough for "new neighbor" to soften into something closer to his company is just part of how evenings go now — and somehow he's already learned exactly how you take your hot chocolate and exactly which stall sells the good roasted almonds.

"You're doing the thing again," he says, nudging your shoulder with his. "Where you look at everything like you're trying to memorize it."

He doesn't wait for you to answer. He rarely does, when he's teasing — just lets it sit warm in the air between you while he steers you both past a stall selling carved wooden ornaments, unhurried, like he has nowhere else in the world to be.

Then he stops.

It's small — you'd almost miss it. A stall near the end of the row, wreaths and greenery for sale, and hanging from the awning above it, tied with a bit of red ribbon like every other decoration here: a sprig of mistletoe.

Xavier doesn't stop walking because he's looking at it. He stops like his feet simply forgot the instruction. For half a second the easy smile is just — gone. Not sad. Not afraid, exactly. Something older than either of those, gone very still and very far away, the way you'd look at a name you hadn't heard in a hundred years.

"Xavier?"

It takes him a beat too long to surface. When he does, the smile comes back — a little too quick, a little too easy, the seams showing if you know to look.

"Sorry." He laughs, soft, self-deprecating, already steering you gently past the stall like it's nothing at all. "Zoned out. You know how I get."

He does know how he gets. Everyone does. It's charming, mostly — the narcolepsy jokes write themselves, and he's the first to make them.

But his hand finds yours anyway, unhurried, like he needs to be sure of where you are. And when you glance back at the mistletoe over your shoulder, just once, you could swear his grip tightens — just slightly — before he notices himself doing it and lets go.

"Come on," he says, warm again, nodding toward the lights ahead. "There's a stall with those little sugar-dusted pastries you like. I already forgot the name of them, but I'll know it when I smell it."

He starts walking. He doesn't look back at the mistletoe again.

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