A/N: iggy's turn
iggy's turn
thank the lord it's iggy's turn
magic time friend
magic time :)
igs always had the air of like a kingsman agent to me
like: i'll be a gentleman while slicing your fingers off to get information out of you.
can u spy with ur little eye the extremely subtle nod to avatar the last airbender?
-oxy


Ignis stared across the street at the smoldering house - smoke climbing high into the sky and choking the moon - with thinly veiled horror stretched across his face.

"It's okay, Ignis, really," Noctis assured him, clapping a hand on his advisor's shoulder, "Everything's fine."

Ignis tore his attention away from the embers and glanced at his friend, bruises across his pale face and split lip in danger of reopening, and forgot completely about the building he'd set ablaze.

Because what was one building when Ignis had nearly been too late?

It wasn't common knowledge was that Noctis had a house before he had an apartment. It was a one-story, two-bedroom, two-bathroom thing a little closer to the Citadel than Noctis maybe would've liked, but at least his father had approved of it.

Ignis popped in every once in a while since Noctis moved out of the Citadel at 17 out of honest worry for the prince and his eating and sleeping habits. He cooked sometimes, he cleaned sometimes, and every once in a while Noctis didn't feel like being alone and so Ignis slept over.

This was one such evening. Ignis sat at the kitchen table and worked on homework for the university classes he was taking while Noctis lounged on the sofa and watched some action movie.

At around midnight, Noctis stood from the couch and turned the TV off, stretching until his joints cracked and popped. He sighed and rubbed at his eyes.

"Alright, Iggy, I'm gonna head to bed," Noctis mentioned.

"Don't forget to brush your teeth," Ignis muttered distractedly, flipping through several of the annotated pages that he'd been taking notes on for the past hour and half.

"You got it, Specs," Noctis said over his shoulder and threw up a lazy wave.

Ignis heard the gentle click of the door to the master bedroom slipping closed and removed his glasses to rub at the bridge of his nose briefly. He considered the mass of papers stacked up on the table before him that he had already read, and the even larger pile that he'd not gotten to, and then considered the time of the night.

Then he cleaned up his papers from the table and placed them carefully in his "In" and "Out" three-ringed binders, and sat ungracefully on the couch. There, he watched mindless TV in a desperate attempt to decompress, and allowed his tired eyes to slip closed.

Some - minutes, or hours perhaps - later, Ignis was startled awake by a loud noise. He glanced around the living room in suspicion and leapt from his seat when there was the sound of glass breaking from the master bedroom.

"Highness?" Ignis called experimentally, still half asleep, and was on the move after ten seconds of no response, "Noctis?" he called louder, moving down the hallway to Noctis's door.

He grabbed the doorknob and tried to turn it, but found that Noctis had locked it. Ignis huffed and resigned himself to dealing with the consequences later, and he froze the lock completely solid in a burst of hasty magic. Then he stepped back and kicked the door as hard as he could, the metal of the lock shattering and allowing him entrance.

The light from the hallway flooded the dark room, and Ignis found a shape dragging the prince to the opened, shattered window. Noctis's head lolled with every motion. Ignis saw the light catch on liquid dripping from Noctis's lower lip.

"Noct!" Ignis shouted, hands alight with fire he couldn't remember summoning. He felt his mouth twist into a snarl, "Release the Prince, now, and you may live to see another day."

"Rather not," the figure said, and Ignis noted that it was a male voice, "really rather just leave now. Boss said no witnesses, though," he said nonchalantly, and allowed the prince to fall to the ground with a loud thud.

The man cracked his knuckles and rolled his neck, and Ignis raised a brow in bemusement. Overconfident, then. Easy.

The scuffle, Ignis believed, was pitifully short and almost uneventful. Evidently, the man planning to kidnap the prince was not prepared to encounter any significant resistance.

He launched himself at Ignis with a yell of nothing in particular, and Ignis neatly sidestepped the attack while spinning to face the man and throwing the fire he'd amassed in his general direction. Once the man was distracted by trying to put out his clothing, Ignis moved to disable.

Disable and gather intelligence.

A swift kick to the man's back had him sprawling on the floor, and Ignis reached down to grab his left arm. Then, Ignis pressed his leg down hard on the man's back and pulled up harshly on his arm. The arm was pulled from the socket and the man screamed.

"Now, if you'd like to keep the other one in place, you'll tell me who your boss is and why he wants the Prince," Ignis told the man shortly, releasing the arm.

"Fuck, man!" The would-be kidnapper panted shallowly, groaning in pain, "I can't - he'll kill me!"

"I recommend you take the burden of your decision off your boss, who you know will kill you for your betrayal, and focus more on me," Ignis ground his heel into the man's spine, "as I am still making up my mind."

Ignis reached down and pressed a searing hand to the man's neck, holding it there until the flesh began to burn.

"FUCK! I can't, don't you understand?!" The man exclaimed, writhing on the floor.

"You'll tell me what I want to know, or this will be your end," Ignis threatened, and with a snap of his fingers the man's clothing was on fire again, and he couldn't roll around to put it out.

"Shit!" There was the horrific smell of burning flesh and the primal deep screaming of something in the throes of death, "OKAY - okay! His name is Virgil, he's the leader of the Helios - he wanted a ransom!"

Then he couldn't speak any longer, and was just screaming. And screaming. And screaming. And then the screaming stopped, and Ignis patted the leg of his pants to smother the patches of his slacks that had caught in the scuffle.

Ignis then turned his attention to Noctis, who was seemingly trying to fight his way out of unconsciousness. Ignis moved to the prince and grabbed his right arm.

The two were outside and across the street from the house quickly being consumed by uncontrollable elemental fire, Noctis sitting on the curb to stifle his dizziness, when the gravity hit Ignis in the stomach.

Torture. Manslaughter. Arson.

He almost wanted to laugh at the crimes he'd committed. Instead, he watched the destruction while on the phone calmly with the emergency dispatcher, asking her to send an ambulance and several fire trucks.

Other residents nearby had emerged from their homes at this point and were clustered around Ignis and his charge, asking the prince if he was alright, asking Ignis if he was alright, asking what the hell happened?

Noctis definitely had at least a concussion, Ignis decided as he took a closer look at the Prince's dilated pupils. Ignis himself had a few minor burns on his leg, but nothing extreme.

"Igs," Noctis insisted, shaking himself a little to clear his head, "Don't worry about the house - Dad can replace and pay for everything. You won't get in trouble for this, I swear," Noctis promised.

Something told Ignis that Noct was talking about more than just the house.

"How much of my exchange did you catch?" Ignis asked.

"Enough of it," Noctis declared. He stared hard up at his advisor with his uneven pupils. Noctis must have seen something in Ignis's expression that left him unsettled because he said, "I'm sorry you had to do that."

"I would do anything for the safety and continued protection of the Crown," Ignis deflected, "it is my duty as a member of the Crownsguard-"

"C'mere," Noctis ordered, and grabbed Ignis's hand to pull him down to sit on the curb, too. "Not what I meant, Iggy. I appreciate what you did. I'm sorry you had to do it."

Ignis allowed Noctis to lean on him until the ambulance roared onto the scene, and the two were loaded into the back for the journey to the hospital.

Noctis was definitely concussed, and Ignis saw his actions as a product of the confusion that accompanied it.

That confusion proved infinitely valuable, though, when the shock of murder bled through Ignis's veins an hour after the two of them were released from the hospital and settled in the residential wing of the Citadel. Noctis sat close to Ignis and started talking about arcades, and the report that was due next month in his history class, and how Prompto was saving up for a new camera.

Ignis felt the panic drain out of him with each mundane thing Noctis prattled on about.

"Hey, Igs," Noctis interrupted himself, "I'm still here cuz of you."

Thank you.

Ignis contemplated his words carefully.

"The benefits outweighed the costs, Highness."

You're welcome.