A/N: Trigger warning: Mentions of unwilling suicide, not very graphic.
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Noctis had told his friends he remembered very little of his decade in the crystal. That he had slept those years away, absorbing power as he reclined in the ether of the Beyond, swaddled in safe, distant dreams. That when he had finally awoken, thrumming with ancient power, it had been as if no more than a day had passed.
Noctis had lied.
Life in the crystal didn't begin terribly, relatively speaking. After ambushing him with the fullness of the prophecy—including that noteworthy little fact of Noctis' own death—Bahamut had then begun the hands-on training. Noctis wasn't simply a battery, after all; learning how to harness the crystal's power at full efficiency required work, and effort. And pain.
Bahamut made sure he was well-versed in the latter. Many sacrificed all for the king, the god was fond of reminding him, before whisking him away to some vision of the (past? Present? Parallel reality? He was never quite sure) where Noctis drifted about the fringes like a phantom so that he could watch as fellow Lucians, bereft of the protection of his father's wall, fell beneath Niflheim swords. Or as Insomnian refugees, most unequipped for the nighttime roads, were torn apart by daemons. Or worst of all, the millions upon millions of deaths that began to amass after the Starscourge was left to circulate unchecked through the very veins of the world (because he was gone; because Luna was gone because he had failed her). Civilians, children, hunters, Glaives, shopkeepers, criminals, city protectors—regardless of who or what they were, Bahamut ensured that Noctis witness their deaths in grueling detail. As humanity's suffering grew, so did Noctis', and with it the power he drew from the crystal.
The first time he realized he could intervene in these visions—if that was really what they were—was the time Bahamut had left him to witness the fate of a young family broken down on the side of the road. They had been unable to finish their repairs in the few hours of watery daylight now left to humanity. And soon enough, three Red Giants had boiled into being, surrounding their rust-eaten pickup.
The mother and two of the children had gone first, their cries searing themselves into Noctis' memory and leaving him on hands and knees heaving up the contents of his stomach. As the father pressed himself up against the passenger side door, eyes already dead as he turned to shield their remaining child, Noctis had snapped. Desperation lending him substance in this strange otherworld, he had stumbled over to plant his own body between the man and the daemons, whipping around to face them with a feral, snarling cry.
The Giant's sword had sliced through him anyway—him and the man both. Noctis felt himself die, choking on his own blood as his heart failed. Then all had faded, and he'd woken with a gasp to power singing in his veins and the satisfied glow of Bahamut's approval. Many sacrificed all for the King; so must the King sacrifice himself for all.
And that, he learned, was Reflection.
Occasionally he existed outside of it too, between visions. He'd wake in the drafty stone hut in Angelgard, long enough to tend to his physical body's needs. Someone would keep the lone shelf stocked with canned foods and a spartan selection of toiletries—perhaps a Messenger or another Astral (though Noctis couldn't help but choke on a bit of wild laughter over the thought of Titan lumbering ashore with a bundle of shopping bags pinched between his fingers). He'd erected a fire ring outside, the crystal's power now able to manifest straight from his fingertips. The flames warmed his ignoble meals as he watched the shores across the sea grow colder and darker. And he missed his friends.
As the days, months, and years wore on, Noctis quickly learned that self-sacrifice was the key. Bahamut never said it in quite as many words, but with each willing death for the sake of others, it became apparent that Noctis was auditioning for his own role as the Chosen. Unlike traditional auditions, however, refusal was never an option.
He discovered this when one day he did refuse. Heartsick and half-crazed from the slaughter of a Glaive squadron, in which Noctis had found himself dying agonizingly over the course of several hours from a Ronin blade through the gut, having successfully saved no one—he had screamed at Bahamut, nearly incoherent in his grief and rage. He threatened to throw himself into the choppy gray waves of the sea before playing into any more of the gods' games. Bahamut had merely given him a look—something akin to a raised eyebrow—before abruptly plunging Noctis into a hellish future where he watched the world burn and the last of humanity disintegrate into black, tarlike miasma, wandering the star for the rest of eternity trapped in an existence full of violence and misery and vague, confused memories of their human lives. He witnessed each death and half-life personally, millions of them, until he had become nothing more than a shell of himself, his mind detached and floating from the broken man that was formerly Noctis.
Time passed, though he couldn't possibly say how much, and he eventually returned to himself, albeit a teetering, haphazardly reassembled version. Bahamut was there, patiently waiting for him on the other side.
Failure of the Chosen will not be an option, he reminded Noctis helpfully.
And Noctis believed him. He believed him to the depths of his being. The laid-back, sometimes lackadaisical youth of twenty was slowly being bent into the haunted, docile soul of however many years he was now. He began waking to his physical reality on the island less frequently, the growing power within him keeping him physically sustained as he diligently trained to die.
When he did wake, he would choke down a few bites of whatever was in reach on the little stone shelf in the hut, then wander out to the beach to stare blankly across a harsh, whitecapped surf—where the shifting winds now blew the smells of ash and dust onto the island more often than salt and sand. And he wondered about his friends.
It turned out he didn't have to wonder long—though if he had known about the impending alternative, he would have done his damnedest to never let himself wake long enough to ever think again. Evidently done with dumping him on strangers, Bahamut got personal: he turned to the people Noctis cared more about than any others on this star.
This would have been something of a comfort in any situation other than the one the god presented him with—Noctis would happily die for any of his friends at any time and for any reason, especially after all the practice. As it turned out, though, launching himself in front of Ignis as he battled a Cryonade, alone and blind on the outskirts of post-apocalyptic Lestallum, was no longer enough. Tackling a Ziggurat to the ground as it rushed an injured Prompto, impaling himself on the creature's bladed limbs in the process, wasn't enough. Setting an entire forest full of daemons ablaze—himself in their midst—in an attempt to shield his own Shield wasn't enough. And simply turning around and fighting back never worked.
Bahamut had upped the ante—the sacrifices had turned arbitrary. It became a guessing game as to what his Bahamut-prescribed death was in every situation. More often than not, they were entirely unrelated to the scene at hand. The god forced him to replay every scenario, sometimes scores of times, until he got it "right." (For Ignis he was apparently meant to walk into the Cryonade's explosion; for Prompto, he should have turned and stepped off a nearby cliff. And as for Gladio… Noctis lived through that scenario dozens of times—the King dying for his Shield in every conceivable manner until in one instance he'd accidentally sliced himself fatally with his own sword and discovered that particular death had been the winning sacrifice Bahamut had been waiting for.) In the meantime, he watched his friends fall, over and over again.
The whole thing was almost laughable, if it hadn't been so horribly twisted. If it hadn't begun twisting him into such a wretched, pitiable version of himself.
And so Reflection, Noctis learned, was essentially Bahamut's personal playground—doubling as his own sacrificial training grounds. So that when it came time to perform in the final act, he would play his part flawlessly.
He never knew to what degree the visions reflected reality—whether his intervention in his friends' struggles made any impact in their real lives, the ones he assumed they were still living outside of Reflection. They never seemed to perceive his presence either way. But the arbitrary nature of Bahamut's newest diversion was so absurd that Noctis felt hints of the old rebellion stirring up embers he'd thought long drowned.
Bahamut sensed this. The king must prove now that he is prepared to submit to any death required of him. Otherwise, how are the Six to know he will remain worthy of the True King's destiny when the final moment arrives? Ah— he said, and if Noctis didn't know better he could have sworn the disimpassioned god had given in to smugness, just for a moment—perhaps humanity must fall after all.
He added, rather primly, Practice enables perfection.
Then he proceeded to bowl Noctis over with vivid scenes of Luna dying by Ardyn's blade; of Ignis, his eyes burned out by a legacy of Lucian phantoms who should have been protecting him in his cause; of his own father and Gladio's, betrayed and brutally murdered in their own home.
When he was done, Noctis was in pieces again, the embers smudged into ash. Many sacrificed all for the king…sacrificed all…sacrificed all… rippled through the air around him, burrowed into the core of his being.
By the time the tenth year approached, Noctis had indeed become a king in his own right: a king filled with compassion and resignation, wisdom and helplessness, determination and despair. He was a man both potent and shattered, haunted by incomprehensible horrors, invested in the pain of his people to a scale never experienced by any of the one hundred thirteen Lucian monarchs before him.
And so it was almost a relief when he finally died, one last time, in the real world, his father's blade skewering him to his own throne. And when the Ring burned both himself and Ardyn up into nothingness in the Beyond, he was finally able to sleep.
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A/N: This is a bit darker than I usually go…but there's light at the end of the tunnel, I promise.
