Author's Note: I think I'm finally get a handle on how I want Ignis/Aranea to go. That will probably be the most out-of-canon I go. There's no hint of that relationship in the game. But I like it so I'm going to go there. I think I see how Ignis is going to go, to try to get some realistic feeling for how he'd feel about all this but get him to the canonical confident guy he is when Talcott talks about him going out hunting on his own, or exploring the old royal tombs. I will deviate from canon a bit on that. The cane. Ignis has no sixth sense. I can't just know when a rock is going to be in his path. Rocks don't make noise. They don't smell much. So the only way he'd know to walk around them is to feel them. And he's not going to go around on his hands and knees. He will still need the cane. But maybe he finds a way to hang it from his belt when he's not using it, like in a fight. Something. I'll have to work on that.

Momentis
Part II: Lestallum

R and R
by Philippe de la Matraque

Aranea Highwind was glad she had a few days off. Biggs and Wedge were handling their newly-formed army. There were still plenty of MTs around Niflheim and other territories that used to be under Empire control. There weren't a lot of civilians left in those parts but those that were needed protection. So they'd been real busy these last sixth months as the Empire had crumbled.

If someone wanted some rest and relaxation, though, they came to Lestallum. It wasn't quite the resort town that Galdin Quay used to be, but it had strong walls and strong lights. A person could feel relatively safe in Lestallum. Even if one felt hungry and overcrowded.

Aranea had managed to find a bunk in the ladies' barracks with Gladiolus's sister, of all people. She was a lot smaller than her giant of a brother, but she had a lot of grit. She even asked Aranea to spar with her while she was in town. Most people who knew Aranea didn't want to spar with her. They usually ended up sore and disappointed. Iris, however, appreciated the challenge. Daemons wouldn't go easy on her, she had said. And she did get a few hits in here and there.

The first time Aranea had met Iris, she hadn't known of the relation. Aranea had, in passing, mentioned seeing Noctis and his entourage minus one in Tenebrae, and Iris had gotten very excited to hear about the largest member of that trio. Aranea told her all she knew, though, in truth, she hadn't paid Gladiolus much notice. He was too showy for her tastes. Noctis was too lovelorn. Prompto was a child.

No, the one she had noticed was the one who'd gone blind. She'd first taken notice of him before that, of course. He fought with a lance at times. That had been the first thing to catch her eye. But she found him to be proper and classy, clean-shaven, never a hair out of place or a wrinkle in his clothing. He was a well-dressed man at all times. He had a confidence to him that was not showy and was a fierce, skilled fighter. That classiness with that fierce confidence was a strange package. She'd never met anyone quite like him. And he could cook.

Well, he could cook and fight before. She'd been surprised and maybe a touch disappointed that they hadn't left him with her Tenebrae. They were headed into dangerous territory and he was blind. How could he possibly keep up and not end up dead in a fight?

Maybe he had, she thought, not without a measure of sadness. No one had seen or heard from then since Biggs and Wedge had escaped from the train. And the two of them had barely made it back in one piece. Two pieces. Two men. Anyway, they told her how the train had been attacked and beset by daemons. The boys had taken their car and headed into the Keep. Biggs and Wedge had gone the other way. Once they'd managed to call her, she'd sent an airship to bring them back to Tenebrae.

Aranea wasn't used to sitting and relaxing though. Iris wasn't around for training until well later into the evening. Dinner was still a few hours off. Rations sucked but they came with the crowds. And she knew it would likely get worse as the days shortened and shortened.

The sun was up now though for its brief visit in the sky, so she decided to enjoy it and take a walk.

She didn't hang out at the Outlook like so many others did. She needed to be somewhere less crowded. So she left the higher parts of the city and wandered down below. Some shops had opened up near the gates. They took gil or bartered items so she decided to see if there was anything interesting to buy.

She wasn't sure exactly what prompted her to look back up at the Outlook just when she had, but she found herself stuck to the spot and unable to look away. Gladiolus, the great hulk of a man that he was, first caught her eye. She recognized the shortcake with him. But it was the third, the man between them that held her gaze. She didn't recognize him at first. His hair was down, but it was lighter than Noctis's. He was taller than Prompto, but not quite as tall as Gladiolus. The dark glasses gave him away. She noted he wasn't standing as erect as she remembered, but it was him. Ignis had survived.

Someone bumped into her. She looked down and saw a young boy, maybe ten years old. "So sorry, ma'am," he said. She recognized him as the one who hung around Iris or the Marshal. She looked back up but the trio was gone.

"I believe I just saw King Noctis's retainers up there," she told the boy. Talcott, she remembered. He was a very polite young man.

"Yes, ma'am. They arrived yesterday with a large group of refugees. I believe they had come all the way from Gralea."

"Just the three of them?" she asked. "Where was Noctis?"

"They say King Noctis is away, gathering his strength to defeat the Accursed who's making the world go dark."

There was more to that story, she was sure. "I'd like to visit with them, to catch up. Do you know where they're staying?"

"Mister Scientia is in the hotel." Talcott pointed in the direction of one of the older hotels in Lestallum. "Mr. Amicitia and Mr. Argentum are staying in the hunter's barracks."

Why not together? she wondered. Was it because he was blind? She thanked the boy and he went on his way. Aranea decided she'd try to find them at dinner and resumed her walk to the shops.

A few hours later, she was waiting near the door to the dining hall, scanning the crowds as they lined up for the evening rations. This dining hall was closest to the hotel as well as both barracks so they were sure to come this way. Besides, she was sure Gladiolus would eat with his sister.

"Aranea!" that sister called, waving. "Care to join us?"

"Will your brother be joining you?" Aranea asked.

"So you heard he made it back." Iris grinned wide. "I'm sure Gladio and the others will sit with us. We'll make room."

So Aranea joined her and got in line. But when Gladio joined them, only Prompto was with him.

"Where's Ignis?" Iris asked, saving Aranea the trouble.

"He said he'd rather sleep." Prompto said. "Hey, Aranea! Good to see you again."

"Did Biggs and Wedge make it out okay?" Gladiolus asked her.

"They did," she assured him. She turned to Prompto. "But they didn't know you. You must have found your friends in Gralea."

"Not quite," Prompto told her. "Ardyn caught me again." He shrugged. "He wasn't very nice about it. But Noct and the others found me in Zegnautus Keep."

"Not very nice is an understatement," Gladio added. "The Chancellor is enemy number one. He's the cause of all this."

Aranea wasn't surprised. "He always was a slimy bastard," she agreed. "Rumor has it he turned the emperor and high commander into daemons."

"Rumor's right," Gladio confirmed. "We took care of them, though."

"That explains a lot." They picked up their plates and found room at one of the tables. Aranea caught them up on the shape of things in Niflheim. "I've gone back to fighting," she told them. "Only I'm on the right side now."

As they finished dinner, she noticed the two men yawning. "Rough day?" she asked.

"Rough couple of months," Prompto replied. "Big group, lots of daemons, not enough sleep."

"Yeah, I know that feels," she said. "Helps when you've got airships."

"Oh, man!" he exclaimed. "I wish we'd had one of those. Or chocobos."

Gladio shook his head. "It's always chocobos with him."

Aranea chuckled. "I'd like to say hello to Ignis," she said, picking up her empty plate. "Which room is he in?"

"Two thirteen," Prompto replied. "How'd you know he was in a room?"

"I ran into the polite young man, Talcott."

"Ah," he got serious and caught her arm. "But listen, please. Try not to be too hard on him. He's got a lot on his shoulders."

Aranea just smiled and turned toward the hotel.

There was a knock on his door. Three knocks, to be precise. Gladio and Prompto would open the door after they knocked. Whoever this was had not. Talcott perhaps?

The door was pretty much straight out from the side of the bed. The side of the last quarter of bed anyway. He'd managed that much. He walked that way, his left arm outstretched. When his fingers brushed the door, he felt for its edge and followed it down to the knob. He opened the door and waited for the knocker to identify himself.

"Hello, Specss." Aranea? "Mind if I come in?"

Ignis was taken aback, but he stepped aside for her and shut the door after he'd heard her pass. It sounded as if she had sat in the chair to the right of him, turned as he was now, away from the door. Ignis wished he'd thought to grab his cane. The bed was too low to find it with his hands. Still, he remembered he'd also taken off his shoes. He squared his shoulders and walked forward, toward where the bed should be. He felt the edge of the comforter on the top of his foot. That allowed him to sit with some measure of dignity.

"Were you expecting someone else, maybe?" Aranea asked.

"I did not know you were in town." Ignis remembered he'd also taken off his glasses. He reached for the side table and brushed them with his fingers. He put them on and turned toward her.

"Just taking a break," she said. "There's a lot of cleanup work to do in the former Empire territories. Missed you at dinner."

"I wasn't hungry," Ignis told her. He'd never really been alone with her, he realized. He hadn't even fixed his hair.

"I know how meager breakfast is around here and they don't serve lunch, so yeah, that's a lie."

She was perceptive. "I didn't feel like navigating the crowd."

"That's closer to the truth. Maybe it's more that now that you're not always on the move, you have to deal with the fact that you can't see."

Very perceptive. Though that wasn't all of it. "Closer," he admitted.

"I thought you were handling it fairly well in Tenebrae. This should be easier, I would have thought. What happened?"

Ignis thought about that. Noctis was locked in a Crystal, for one. But that just wasn't something he felt he should tell her. The journey from Gralea, then. That had sapped a lot of his confidence. "Six months of getting from there to here," he told her.

"Were the big guy and shortcake mean to you?"

"No!" Ignis said quickly, defending his friends. "Certainly not."

"So it was being blind on that journey."

He nodded once. "It didn't make the journey any easier."

"So what's it like?"

"Being blind?"

"Yeah."

"No one's ever asked me that." No one had. Not his friends, not Noct, or Cor, no one.

He heard her move closer, then her hand met his. "I just did." It was the softest he'd ever heard her voice.

Ignis took a deep breath. "On a good day, I can create a mental image of what's around me. What I hear and smell. What I can touch. What I remember or can intuit logically. The bathroom, for example. I haven't quite managed this room yet."

She squeezed his hand lightly. "And on a bad day?"

Ignis realized he wanted to tell her. He wanted to share his experience with someone, even if it revealed a vulnerability. "I'm not in one place long enough or don't have enough information to build that image. I know there's a real world around me, but it feels like only the closest things are real. The rest is just empty darkness, an endless void with invisible obstacles and dangers."

"I'll stick with my earlier assessment: That sucks."

Ignis sighed again. "Indeed."

"Well, let's build that image of this room, then."

He turned toward her again. "Now?"

"Why not?" She stood up. She still had his hand. Was this really the same woman who'd kicked Prompto's ass? She went on. "This is your room. You might as well feel comfortable in it. You need one place you can let your hair down."

Ignis's cheeks flushed just a bit at that. He stood. "I can see the bed," he told her. "It's a twin, one pillow, sheets, and a comforter."

"Blue sheets, dark blue," she added, "like the sky just before the black of night. The comforter is light blue, the sky at noon. How it was, anyway."

Ignis's image of the bed filled in with color. He moved to the bedside table. "A wooden table, square. It has a drawer, a lower shelf. There's a lamp."

"Cherry wood, scuffed a bit. There are some books on that lower shelf."

"Fake," he told her. "Just decorative."

"The top fake book is reddish brown, the second is a dull yellow, and the bottom one is brown, oak perhaps. The lamp shade used to be white back in the day. It's trying. The base though is blue like the sheets." She opened the drawer. "There's a notebook here."

"It's mine," he told her. "I know it very well."

"Your recipes."

Ignis nodded. "Not that I can read them anymore."

She closed the drawer and moved him around the table to the wall. "It's a pretty old hotel. Bad wallpaper. Light blue with darker designs. I'm sensing a color scheme here."

Ignis felt the wall. The designs were raised a bit from the surface. He felt thin swirls and thicker areas. He kept his hand on the wall and moved along it. He found a door. It seemed too close to be the bathroom. He opened it.

"Closet," she told him. "Empty but for a few hangers. There are a couple extra pillows on the shelf above. And an orange blanket. It really clashes with the blue."

Ignis chuckled and filled in the image in his mind. Behind him was still fairly vague but this side of the room was shaping up rather well. Next was the bathroom. And though he had it in his mind, it wasn't particularly colored. Aranea flipped on the light. "Dark blue rug, but the walls are white. Porcelain vanity. Cherry wood cabinets."

He met the wall on the other side of the bathroom door. She went with him, painting in his image as they moved around the periphery of the room. She said the chair was an armchair, high-backed, with green upholstery—not a nice green. Ignis decided to color it brown and leave it at that. She found the air conditioner on the wall across from the foot of the bed. He felt the cool breeze and she helped him adjust it to his desired temperature. That led them to the bed again and they sat down together. She still had his hand.

"Wait," she said, twisting her body. "We've missed something." He realized she was looking behind the bed. He didn't want to turn away from her, and he was rather enjoying her hand in his. He couldn't reach back to feel what she was seeing.

"I'll bet," she said, her voice playful, "you can't guess the color of the curtains." A window.

"Hmmm...blue?"

"They went with the color of the comforter," she confirmed. She turned back to him. "So, can you see it now?"

Ignis closed his eye. He smiled. "I can. I even see you sitting beside me. Oddly, you're still in your armor. But I don't feel armor."

She chuckled. "Well, I did have it last time you actually saw me. I'm dressed down a bit. Black pants, blacker boots—with heels. White top, red vest—long, form-fitting."

"Low cut, as I remember you seemed to have a taste for."

"You don't like it?" she flirted. She was flirting with him!

"I didn't say that," he flirted lightly back. He adjusted his image of her.

"Your shoulders do look a little lighter," she said. She got serious again. "So what else is weighing them down? Prompto said there was a lot on them."

Ignis sighed again. "Apparently, I'm to be something short of the savior of Lestallum, bringing order to chaos and ensuring everyone's survival."

"Now that is heavy," she agreed. "Who's put all that on you? And why?"

"The Marshal. My training, education, my former responsibilites. I was meant to be the chief advisor to the king."

"So they figure you've got the brains to bring all this together," she said. "Do you?"

"Probably," he replied, chagrined. He turned his head away to face front. "I have no idea where to start."

"Well, what do you need?"

"Information, I suppose. An inventory of supplies, diagrams of housing I can't see."

"That's what they need from you," she said. He didn't understand. But she touched his cheek and turned his face toward her. Ignis felt a slight tingle under her hand. His pulse increased. "What do you need from them?" she asked.

He couldn't provide all that information. She didn't mean that. What he needed was deeper. "I need to work on this." He pointed to his eyes. "I need that before I can manage any of the rest."

She still touched his cheek gently. "So tell Cor that. He's stern but reasonable. They need a hell of lot from you. Make sure you get what you need from them."

Something near her hip beeped. Her hand left his cheek. "Oh," she said. "It's nine. I promised Iris I'd spar with her before the barracks locked down for the night."

"She's brave," Ignis told her. Aranea chuckled a bit. She rose. He did, too. She still had his hand, after all. He walked her to the door. Right to the door. She opened it, then turned. "Will I see you at breakfast?"

He smiled lightly. "I believe you will. Thank you, Aranea." He meant it.

She squeezed his hand. "You are most welcome, Ignis Scientia." He felt her lips on his cheek. It was electric. And then she was gone, her heels clicking on the hallway floor. Had that just happened? He touched his fingers to his cheek where she'd kissed him. He was flustered, but he stayed there listening to her footsteps until he could hear them no more. Finally, he turned, walked to the chair and sat down.

He wasn't sure how long he'd sat until he heard footsteps. He found himself hoping she'd come back. It was a new feeling for him. Dating had never managed to find a place in his agenda. The footsteps came and went. There were other rooms, of course. It was a hotel.

Prompto ran up the steps two at a time. He was a little excited. It had been good to see Aranea at dinner but it intrigued him that she'd been so interested in Iggy. Gladio had told him she had noticed his eyes in Tenebrae and was probably just curious how he was faring.

"Maybe," he replied. They reached Iggy's door. Prompto knocked twice and opened it. Ignis was sitting in the chair for a change. He looked different somehow. More relaxed perhaps. "Aranea was looking for you," Prompto said, hoping he'd flustered him.

Ignis's expression gave nothing away. "She found me."

Gladio gave him a look that said 'cut it out.' His voice said something more neutral. "She filled us in on things in Niflheim. The empire's fallen apart. Biggs and Wedge made it back."

"Oh that is good news," Ignis replied. "How was dinner?"

"Light," Prompto said. He pulled a napkin from one pocket and bottle from another. "I brought you a roll and a bottle of water. The rest wasn't all that portable. I'll put it here on the table."

"Thank you."

"Ignis," Gladio said, "are you going to be okay here by yourself?"

Ignis didn't reply right away. He leaned forward. "Here," he said, pointing down to the floor, "I'll be fine, I think." He pointed toward the door. "I'm still working on out there. To that end, could you please ask the Marshal to meet with me after breakfast?"

"We can do that," Prompto told him. He scrunched his eyebrows. "Did she tough-love you, too?"

Ignis smiled the slightest of smiles. Was he blushing? "Not at all."