Chapter 47: Baseline

Chapter 47: Chapter 47: Baseline

Sebastian was beginning to think his death would have required considerably more grief but, without question, less paperwork.

There was a sea less than half an hour away by car and an extensive forest behind Nero’s villa, both of which currently seemed preferable to another consent form, another blood draw, or another physician asking him to explain exactly what he had felt while his body nearly crossed into berserk without informing a single machine connected to it.

"You can’t die now," Claude said dryly.

Sebastian looked at him from where he sat on the edge of the examination bed.

"That sounded less like medical concern and more like professional resentment."

"At the moment, it is both."

The joke landed, but not enough to change Claude’s face.

That was the problem.

Everyone in the room was pretending.

Sebastian was pretending that the weakness in his limbs was merely inconvenient, that the strange warmth moving beneath his skin did not frighten him, and that he had not spent the morning close enough to berserk that one more uncontrolled surge might have killed half the people around him before killing him.

Nero was pretending that sitting comfortably in a chair with a tablet made him relaxed.

The physicians were pretending Sebastian was simply an interesting diagnostic challenge.

Claude was doing the worst job of all.

He adjusted his reading glasses and looked between the tablet in his hand and the manual blood-pressure result another physician had just taken.

They did not match.

Again.

The medical wing occupied the eastern side of the villa and looked more like a private research clinic than anything Sebastian associated with a family residence. Frosted glass divided the examination rooms from laboratories beyond, recessed lighting washed every surface in clean white, and equipment disappeared into the walls wherever possible, leaving the room uncluttered despite the sensors attached across Sebastian’s chest, throat, wrist, and ribs.

The technology was the highest available in the world.

It was also lying.

"One forty-two over eighty-seven," the physician said after checking manually.

Claude looked at the continuous monitor.

"One eighteen over seventy-four."

Sebastian glanced between them. "Use whichever one makes me less likely to be admitted."

Nobody laughed immediately.

That bothered him more than the discrepancy.

Across the room, Nero finally did.

A quiet sound, perfectly timed, almost convincing.

Sebastian turned his head.

Nero sat near the windows with one leg crossed over the other and a tablet balanced against his knee, dressed in a dark violet shirt and black trousers, pale hair falling loose over one shoulder. To anyone who did not know him, he looked mildly entertained and entirely untroubled.

Sebastian knew better now.

Nero had been on the same paragraph for almost ten minutes.

"Why are you still here?" Sebastian asked.

Nero looked up.

"We don’t know what happens if I leave."

"That excuse is becoming extremely useful."

"It remains medically valid."

Claude did not look away from the readings. "Unfortunately, it does."

Sebastian gave him an offended look.

Claude ignored it.

The problem had become obvious almost immediately after the examination began.

Anything measured manually suggested a body recovering from severe physiological collapse and the beginning of a secondary-gender transition.

Anything read through Sebastian’s existing monitoring architecture insisted that almost nothing had changed.

Even the berserk markers that had terrified Claude enough to trigger the emergency council remained almost perfectly static.

That should have been reassuring.

It was not.

Those same values had remained stable while Sebastian bled from his eyes, coughed blood into Nero’s shirt, and lost enough control that the council chamber had to be evacuated.

The machines had watched him approach catastrophe and called it normal.

A Sahan physician moved a handheld scanner slowly along the side of Sebastian’s neck, pausing near the pheromonal glands.

"Again."

Her colleague recorded the value.

Claude leaned closer.

"That changed."

"Nine percent."

The physician sounded interested.

Sebastian noticed the way the others straightened.

That was another thing about Sahan physicians.

Everyone knew they were monsters. Not cruel ones, generally, but brilliant enough to be unnerving.

Dax had built much of Saha’s medical research network by recruiting people other countries could not afford to keep, offering money, laboratories, research access, and a level of freedom that bordered on irresponsible. Nero had continued the policy with the enthusiasm of a crown prince who considered budgets suggestions.

Most physicians Sebastian had seen over the last three years had eventually acquired the same expression when studying his records.

Regret.

There was nothing to match him with. Nothing to stop the progression. Nothing to offer except increasingly desperate suppressants and estimates about how long he might remain functional.

These people did not look resigned.

They looked offended by the possibility that his body might present a problem they could not solve.

Sebastian was not sure whether he found that reassuring or terrifying.

The senior specialist, an omega woman in her early fifties with silver threaded through black hair, adjusted a sensor beneath his jaw.

"Your receptor response to His Highness is increasing."

Sebastian’s attention sharpened.

"How much?"

"Enough that we can reproduce it manually. Not enough to predict the trajectory."

Nero stopped pretending to read.

The physician continued.

"The monitoring system was calibrated for a dominant alpha maintaining dominant-alpha regulation. You are no longer doing that consistently."

Sebastian looked at her.

"I am still a dominant alpha."

"Yes."

Her tone was calm.

"But your system has begun accepting enigma pheromones as regulatory instruction rather than opposing them as foreign dominance. That is already altering the way your body responds to stress."

The room went very quiet.

Sebastian knew what she was telling him.

The transition had begun in a way that could now be measured.

His gaze shifted toward Nero.

The enigma was perfectly still.

Sebastian had learned enough about Nero’s masks to recognize that one too.

Nero smiled when furious.

He joked when worried.

When genuinely frightened, he became motionless.

"How long until the monitors work properly again?" Sebastian asked.

"We don’t know."

"Great."

"We can recalibrate them, but you are changing too quickly for a permanent model yet."

Claude folded his arms.

"So manual monitoring."

"For now."

Sebastian looked down at the sensors taped across his body.

"Millions in medical equipment, and we have returned to someone holding my wrist and counting."

Nero spoke from the chair.

"I volunteered to stare at you professionally."

Sebastian turned toward him.

"You have never done anything professionally where I’m concerned."

That earned a few restrained smiles.

The tension eased. People around him showed a crack in their professionalism because the alternative was acknowledging how close Sebastian had come to dying less than half a day earlier.

Claude set his tablet down.

"We need to determine how dependent your current regulation is on Nero."

Sebastian’s mouth tightened.

"There it is."

Nero leaned back again. "I told you."

"You are enjoying being medically necessary far too much."

"I’m coping beautifully."

Sebastian looked at him.

Nero’s expression was amused.

His knuckles around the tablet were white.

Sebastian looked away.

Claude noticed the exchange but said nothing.

"We are not testing physical separation today."

Sebastian frowned. "Why?"

Claude finally looked directly at him.

"Because this morning you were close enough to full berserk that I cannot tell you with confidence what would have happened if Nero had been thirty seconds later."

The humor left the room entirely.

Sebastian’s spine straightened.

Claude continued, more quietly.

"Your control failed without warning. Your monitoring system gave us nothing. You were bleeding internally and externally while every automated parameter insisted you were stable. I am not deliberately recreating that situation until we understand what happened."

Sebastian swallowed.

There was nothing useful to say to that.

The senior specialist broke the silence by adjusting the controls.

"We start with five percent."

Nero’s gaze snapped toward her.

"Five percent of what?"

"Your current pheromonal output."

"No."

Sebastian looked at him.

Nero remained seated, but there was nothing relaxed left in his posture.

The specialist did not react.

"We need a baseline."

"You have one. He’s alive."

"That is not enough."

"It is to me."

"Nero."

Sebastian’s voice cut across the room.

Purple eyes moved immediately to him.

"I’m sitting upright and insulting you. Let them do their job."