Prompto was grateful that his friends tended to enjoy thinking ahead, plus making other generally sensible decisions, because their first daemon hunt as a time-traveled foursome was, from a completely objective standpoint, a rolling dumpster fire.
It began when Noct, having momentarily forgotten himself in the heat of combat, threw his weapon in an attempted warp. He recognized his mistake the instant it left his hand, but years of muscle memory weren't about to be erased in a day. To cover for his friend, Prompto had stepped in front of him to blast back a charging Grenade. But he'd forgotten that was Gladio's job (again with that whole "years" thing) and had ended up with a face full of shield—not to mention Shield—that had flung him groaning into a bush. Ignis, meanwhile, had been popping in from the darkest borders of the night, delivering perfectly executed, perfectly graceful attacks in the true Ignis way. But he missed a gaping opportunity for a link strike, which Prompto realized was because he had lapsed into battling with his eyes closed, apparently feeling overwhelmed by the flood of information brought about by his still newly restored sight.
In the end, they'd defeated the Grenade and all of its spinoffs with their limbs still intact. Though even that might have come down mostly to luck.
Gladio obviously agreed. Tossing his shield to the ground in disgust, he strode over to where Noct was attempting to scrape mud off the back of his shirt onto a tree. Halting, he leveled him with a stare and growled, "We need to train."
And that was how Prompto and Ignis came to find themselves standing on an isolated beach early in the morning, several miles west of Galdin Quay. Ostensibly the two of them were sparring while Noct and Gladio drilled, but in reality they had stopped some time ago to chaperone in the hope of avoiding any (more) untimely deaths.
Speaking of…
Prompto plucked at Ignis' elbow, redirecting his friend's attention to the pair in question. King and Shield were parked at the edge of the tideline, within raised-voice distance of his and Ignis' own vantage point back at the rocks. At least one of the two was already waving his arms in agitation.
"Noct!" Gladio barked. "You can't just charge into the middle anymore! That worked fine in the past, but only because you could phase out of the way and let them take each other out. Now they'll just turn you into a cheese grater!"
"I know," Noct snapped. His frustration was evident as he wiped sweat from his eyes with a sharp, angry motion. "I just…fell into the old rhythm for a moment. I want to try again."
"How long do you suppose we have until they attempt to drown each other?" Ignis said in resignation. Prompto could already see him mentally constructing formulas involving distance (in meters), running speed (corrected for sand resistance), and the time an average man could hold his breath (while completely pissed off).
"Nah," Prompto said, leaning back against a porous black rock outcropping. "Gladio's way mellowed since the old days. Now he'll probably just toss Noct in the water and let him swim back himself. Maybe swing him around a few times like a shotput, if he's really angry."
"He'll try, anyway," Ignis reminded him.
"Fair," Prompto conceded. "Noct's a scrappy thing, especially when he's mad. One moment you think he's sleeping, and then BAM! You're getting a bottle of shaving cream shoved down your throat. People think he's so disinterested, and then his greatest power is surprising them with how not slow he is."
Ignis turned to eye him at the oddly specific example. "Particularly when one is attempting to—oh, shall we say—prank him in his sleep with a feather and shave foam?"
"Erm…well, yeah. But it's usually Gladio's idea," Prompto protested. "And you tend to be out shopping, leaving us bereft of our voice of reason and good judgment."
"Hence, the reason I never had children," Ignis muttered.
"Because you've got three already?"
"Quite," he replied succinctly, and turned his attention back to the beach, where Noct and Gladio were now facing off with blades.
Prompto watched as they engaged in a graceful back-and-forth, mesmerized as always by the fluid dance of swordplay. Noct, still wielding his stolen Imperial hardware, dodged and wove between the wider, deadlier swings of Gladio's greatsword. They churned up sand as they ducked and parried, kicking the occasional splash of surf into glittering arcs against the rising sun.
Suddenly, Noct was flat on his back, the waves licking at his head and shoulders. Gladio breathed a curse and hauled him back to his feet. "Still trying to phase, huh? Remember I'm an assassin MT—it's always spin then kick."
"Spinning and kicking, right," Noct muttered.
Evidently Gladio wasn't overly thrilled with his tone, because he growled, "You've got to learn these things, Noct. You're like everybody else now. You think you can keep bulldozing your way through a fight on Daddy's privileged magical inheritance? Think again."
Prompto winced. "Ouch," he said under his breath.
Noct apparently shared the sentiment. "Piss off, Gladio," he snapped.
"Oh, dear," Ignis murmured, rolling up his sleeves and straightening into a ready stance.
But Gladio just looked steadily back at him, neither angry nor insulted. "All right, that was uncalled for. I'm sorry, Noct."
Prompto almost fainted.
Noct wilted as well, looking both agitated and embarrassed. "I'm sorry too," he said, halfheartedly attempting to brush globs of wet sand from his shoulder and hair. "I wasn't trying to—look, I meant to do an aerial, but I…I got disoriented. I'm so useless without the crystal. I can't even figure out how to do basic tumbling anymore, and that was one of the first things I ever trained for."
Gladio sighed, dropping out of his guard to plant his blade into the packed sand. "C'mon. You might not be able to cartwheel ad nauseum through the sky anymore, but you do still have the moves."
"It's just so different," Noct said, shaking his head. "I have no height. I feel like I'm going to land on my head from a simple layout."
"I know it feels that way, but that's because you're used to being superpowered," Gladio assured him. "Everyone else is always that close to the ground when they flip."
"Everyone else is pretty much not doing flips at all, because we can't!" Prompto called out encouragingly. "You're both aware of that, right?"
"Look," Gladio said, struck with a sudden idea (and wholly ignoring Prompto). "Let's go back to ground zero for a while—recalibrate your baseline. We'll relearn the acrobatics, but under your own power. We'll replace phasing with evasion and defense." He looked at Noct intently. "But most of all, I want you to learn how to truly depend on your battle partners—on us. You've never had to do that before. No more flying into the thick of things without someone right there at your side or back. Deal?"
"Yeah, deal," Noct said, a bit of optimism venturing into his expression for the first time in hours.
"Great." Gladio ruffled his hair, flicking away a clump of seaweed in the process. "All right, let's start with handsprings. C'mon, I'll spot you."
"Whew," Prompto breathed from his post among the rocks, wiping fake sweat from his brow. "Think I saw my life flash before my eyes. You okay there, Igster?"
"Yes," Ignis murmured, a strange, wistful smile playing across his features. "Just pondering on how much we've all changed."
"For good or for ill?" Prompto asked. He watched as Noct threw himself into a controlled backward arc over Gladio's extended arm, his hands punching holes in the sand while his legs snapped over his head.
"Why, for good, I should think," Ignis replied. "Have you ever heard Gladio apologize?"
"Well, not to Noct, anyway, but that's mainly only because he hasn't been around," Prompto said seriously. "I think it's something Gladio picked up during all those solo months of soul-searching he did, when he wouldn't answer our calls for an age. Remember that?"
"How could I forget," Ignis sighed.
"Y'know, you've changed too, Iggy," Prompto declared. "Between your already-mad skills, then learning how to do them blind, then going un-blind, you're basically superhuman now. I hope you know that."
"Pish," Ignis scoffed. "I'm sure you witnessed my abysmal performance with last night's daemons. In many ways, I still find sight to be something of a distraction."
"If by 'distraction' you mean you're missing one out of every forty-nine marks instead of your usual fifty, then sure. Also pretty positive you're the only person alive or dead who'd call what you did last night abys-whatever."
Ignis made a noncommittal sound, but didn't argue.
They were both silent for a moment. Noct turned another handspring, then strung on a flip or two for good measure. He didn't seem to need a spotter, but Gladio hovered close, arms at the ready if he fell.
"And then there's Noct," Prompto said quietly, hesitantly. "I think he's changed the most. I guess we can chalk all that up to crystal weirdness, but sometimes it's hard to wrap my head around it when all he's been doing is sleeping. I mean, have you ever thought about the fact that you and me and Gladio have had a whole ten years to get used to the absence of the people we lost in Insomnia? While for Noct, it's still like it's only been a few months since he lost his dad and Luna. Oh yeah, and then lost Luna again."
Ignis was oddly silent.
Prompto plowed on, absently watching as Gladio began Noct on a series of conditioning drills. "How does somebody even absorb mad skills and kingliness just by sitting around in a crystal, anyway? I mean, did the gods even feed him in there? They obvs never let him take a shower. Not gonna lie—I kinda thought Talcott had taken to hauling Scourge victims around on charity drives through the countryside when they first pulled up together at Hammerhead."
"Perhaps we should return to our training," Ignis abruptly suggested. "Noct and Gladio seem to have their own well in hand now."
"Yeah, sorry," Prompto said, gathering himself. "You know me, sometimes I like to give my brain a bunch of sweets and then let it run wild around the house. So anyway, what d'you wanna work on? Target practice? Forms? 'S long as I don't have to do any flips…"
Nearly an hour later, Noct and Gladio were still at it. Prompto was covered with sweat, and all he'd been doing was shooting at rocks and shells that Ignis lobbed through the air. Though still early, the sun was well above the horizon, gleefully reveling in the boilingly humid day it had in store for them. Noct and Gladio had ditched their shirts long ago, and Prompto wondered just how long Ignis was going to be able to handle them all coexisting in their one grubby outfit each before he broke and either (a) ran about on the beach filching all the swimsuit cover-ups he could find while their hapless owners paddled away in blissful ignorance through the surf, or (b) ordered them all naked.
Wiping sweat from his chin, Prompto flicked his Death Penalty's safety into place and jammed it into the back of his belt. Somewhere behind him, Noct shouted; Prompto turned in time to watch as he rolled beneath one of Gladio's tree-felling sword swings, then came to his feet only to dive straight back in. The paleness of his friend's newest scars—one on his chest and the other sitting neatly between his shoulder blades, a disconcerting contrast to the jagged mess of old slash marks lower down—showed starkly against his sun-touched skin. Prompto's gaze flitted uneasily away, and he couldn't help but wonder why Noct's had remained when the rest of them had returned to the mostly unmarked (with the exception of Gladio, the overachiever) condition of their ten-years-younger bodies.
Ignis padded up to his side, breathing hard from a sprint set. "Alright, Prompto?"
"Yeah, cracking," Prompto replied, summoning the enthusiasm back to his face. "I'm all smalty and need about six baths. That's smelly, sweaty, and salty all rolled into one," he supplied, as Ignis took a breath to ask.
"Ah. And I see Gladio and Noct are still at it. Those two do tend to overdo it at times."
"At times? Like every day. Mark my words, Iggy, Noct'll be limping back here with two dislocated knees and sand rattling around in his lungs and Gladio's hand will be all ripped open again and they'll both be grinning their faces off like it's their birthday."
"Yes. Yes, they will," Ignis agreed with growing concern. "I can actually see Gladio bleeding through his bandage from here. Perhaps you and I will need to commandeer the hunts again while we confine them both to camp."
"That'll go over like a cactuar in a bouncy house, but there's nothing saying we can't try," Prompto replied with a helpless shrug. "At least things seem to be going better than last night's disasterfest; you can tell the practice has gotten them way more in sync."
"That is good news," Ignis agreed. "Hopefully the same can soon be said for all four of us together. For now, though, we should consider returning to camp. As our immediate future appears to be nothing short of sweltering, I imagine we'll want to relocate to the caves for the day."
"Sounds good, Iggy," Prompto said. "I could use a nice long nap. Soooo…do you wanna go grab 'em or should I?"
Ignis looked toward the spot Prompto was somewhat dubiously eyeballing.
Noct and Gladio were arguing—again. Noct turned in their direction just in time for them to witness the biggest, most self-satisfied smirk they'd ever seen spreading across his face.
They could only just hear Gladio's reply to whatever it was he had said. "Why you little—"
Hefting a squirming Noct easily over his head, the big man walked out into the surf, tossed him bodily into the breakers, and dusted his hands together in satisfaction.
"Aaaaaand they're right back to drowning each other," Prompto said. "This isn't gonna end well. Remember that whole thing about Noct—"
Before Gladio had even turned all the way back toward shore, a bedraggled marine specimen vaguely resembling the King of Lucis burst from the water at the big man's feet, catching him wholly off guard, and tackled him down into the waves.
"—being faster than people expect," Prompto finished anticlimactically.
Ignis considered the churning surf for a moment, watching as limbs and glops of wet sand flew in all directions.
"Right, well. I'll be at camp," he said in clipped tones. "Napping."
With that, he turned and walked off down the beach.
xxx
"So there we are, everybody tense and ready for a beatdown, when in skips this ugly, freckled little imp."
"Hey!" Prompto protested.
"No, the actual Imp," Gladio said. "It had spots, remember? You skipped in right behind it."
They were all crowded around the campfire after another night of daemon slaying, the dark early hours having grown cold despite the sweltering nature of the previous day. Their teamwork had improved considerably since that first night, leaving Gladio—much to Prompto's chagrin—in extremely good spirits.
This was not normally a condition Prompto would complain about, except when it involved stories involving him. And especially when they were embarrassing. And especially especially when Gladio was telling them, as he wasn't one to spare details for the sake of little trivialities like feelings.
The most current and ongoing example of this referred back to an occasion about two years into the Long Night—still some time before the darkness had forced the very last of humanity into Lestallum—when Gladio and Aranea had been called out to Ravatogh to mediate a dispute between two hunter camps. Prompto'd happened to be with them at the time, the three of them having hooked up as part of a campaign to clear the Ravatogh Trail of a supply route infestation. Bands of hunters, in those days, had begun appropriating havens, both for their resources and the refuge they offered—repurposing magical artifacts in clever feats of engineering that allowed them to mine the magic deposits for heat and electricity. In this case, one faction had decided that the other, being farther up the volcano, wouldn't need their fire anyway and had taken it upon themselves to run a couple of cables up to their deposit. The other didn't take kindly to this, with predictable results.
"So this Imp stops short and stares all around in surprise at the forty armed, angry men and women surrounding it, who are all staring right back. Then it lets out this horrible, shrieking yowl that's loud enough to wake the dead."
"Or other daemons, anyway," Prompto glumly contributed.
"Yeah. In this case, about twenty-five of its closest relatives, plus a Red Giant. Which would have been straightforward enough for forty hunters any other day of the week, except…"
Here he eyed Prompto knowingly. Prompto groaned. Ignis, sipping his herbal tea, actually leaned forward.
"…except when it starts lobbing out Confuse spells like that's its born life's purpose," Gladio finished, a giant grin spreading across his face. "And all its friends follow suit."
"I don't know why there were so many of them anyway, the Glaives were supposed to have cleared that place out," Prompto muttered to the fire.
"Prompto, having unwittingly wandered in right behind the little menace, was hit first, and the hardest," Gladio continued. "So he starts gravisphering everyone. And I do mean everyone. Meanwhile, the Red Giant also gets Confused, and turns from smashing up the infrastructure to anything that moves, including the Imps.
"So there we are, all angrily spooning each other in these nice little gravity bubbles courtesy of our very own Prom. Imps are canoodling with hunters; faction leaders from both sides are mashed together inside the tangles of a supply tent; Aranea's hugging this innocent wyvern that got clotheslined into the fray; the Red Giant is repeatedly walking into the side of the mountain. All of us packeted into these tidy little heaps of helpless outrage as Prompto stands in the middle of it all, grinning ridiculously as he tries to gravisphere his own head." Gladio chortled in remembered glee. "I'd never seen Aranea so pissed off in my life."
"His…head?" Ignis repeated, raising one all-too-amused eyebrow.
"I thought I was fixing my hair," Prompto sulkily retorted. "Nobody was manufacturing any more grooming products by then. It makes sense when you're Confused, okay?"
"I daresay once the spell wore off, the effect was—shall we say—hair raising," Ignis chortled into his cup. Gladio devolved into a wheezing bout of laughter, even though it really wasn't funny.
"Ugh, barfarama, Iggy—where's your shame?" Prompto exclaimed in horror. "Noct, this story is boring and uncultured and you're ready for a new one, right? C'mon, help a buddy out here…"
Noct, though, was strangely expressionless, even as he continued to listen intently. At least he wasn't laughing.
"Please don't tell me that as a result of their forced proximity, the hunters decided their differences weren't so irreconcilable after all, causing all present to unite in a renewed sense of harmony and determination." Ignis was downright cackling now, his shoulders shaking with mirth. Gladio hooted, slapping his knee.
"No," he finally said, wiping away a tear. "They resolved their differences because they discovered they were living with a Red Giant and a mountain full of Imps. And because their stuff had been flattened by a gravity cannon. So they all ended up moving to Lestallum."
Their hilarity mellowed. A thoughtful moment ticked by, crickets in the reedy dune grasses seizing the opportunity to cautiously hum back to life.
"Well," Ignis finally said, his renowned poise returning by degrees. "That was an unexpectedly heavy ending."
Gladio sipped from his own tea, his face a study of composure. "Fell flat, did it?" he said.
"Oh-em-gee I hate you guyyyys…" Prompto moaned as their howls of laughter rang across the beach.
A small smile had finally cracked Noct's poker face, though it seemed aimed more at the spectacle of his Shield and supposedly distinguished advisor and tactician rolling around sobbing on the stone than the story itself. Prompto cast him a grateful look.
Eventually, after the two had managed to collect both themselves and their tattered dignity, Noct finally spoke up. "So you and Aranea were together?"
Gladio looked momentarily surprised. Then he relaxed into an easy smile. "On and off." He nudged Noct with his foot. "What, you don't think your big old brute of a Shield could land someone like her?"
Noct opened his mouth like he wanted to ask something else, then closed it. Then he opened it again.
"She teach you how to fly?"
Gladio leaned back in his chair, folding his hands over his stomach as he pinned Noct with a probing look. "Yeah, actually she did. Talcott tell you that?"
"Mm, yeah," Noct hummed, though to Prompto's mind it was the most noncommittal affirmative in the history of avoidant replies.
"She gave me a month or two of lessons," Gladio continued after it became clear Noct wasn't going to say anything more. Prompto kicked his feet up to rest on their driftwood pile and listened, having never actually heard the big man talk about this before. He noticed Ignis was leaning in too. "Just enough for me to learn a throttle from a stick, really."
"Why'd you stop?" Noct asked quietly, staring down into the flames.
"Daemons. Isn't it always?" Gladio replied with a shrug. "Destroyed her ship. We got out, but 'Nea was never quite the same afterward. There were only a few places she could have hoped to find the replacement parts she needed, and most of the world was inaccessible by then. Took some of her spirit with it.
"But damned if we didn't have some good times together," he continued after a somber moment of reflection. "Prompto and Iggy were there for some of them too. And you'd better believe Prompto kicked so much more ass than that one time with the Imps. Still my favorite story, though," he grinned.
"Would that I had been there," Ignis smiled. Prompto sighed in beleaguerment.
"Why didn't you stay together while I was gone?" Noct abruptly asked. "The three of you."
Prompto choked, then frantically tried to swing it so that everybody would think he'd inhaled too much smoke. An ungainly silence descended on the group, punctuated only by the cracklings of the campfire. Nobody spoke. Gladio's expression remained outwardly relaxed, but there was a certain frozen quality to it.
After a beat, Ignis quietly explained, "Skilled fighters were in high demand and short supply during the Night. We were able to do more good by dividing our forces, so to speak."
It was a cop-out, and everybody knew it. Prompto scuffed at a patch of stray ash.
"And now, we really ought to look at getting ourselves onto a more regular schedule," Ignis continued smoothly, as if they had just been discussing Noct's latest catch. "If we plan to embark on our quest to eradicate the world's daemons, we should commit ourselves to the nocturnal life, with a regular daytime sleep period built in."
"Guess we'll be moving to the caves, then, since we still don't have a tent," Prompto said. He cast a nervous, fleeting glance at Gladio and Noct, both of whom were conspicuously withdrawn.
Suddenly Noct stood. "Sounds good, Specs. I'm going for a walk."
Gladio stirred. "Nobody goes off alone in the dark."
"Sun's coming up," Noct said, nodding at the eastern sky, its stars washed out in the ubiquitous gray of the pre-dawn. "I'll stay on the beach, and in sight of the haven until it's light. I promise." When nobody protested, he flashed them a smile and hopped down into the sand. Prompto watched his retreating back as he became nothing more than a dark outline against a darker sea.
Gladio stood as well, his chair creaking. "Gonna make sure he doesn't get himself killed." Springing off the edge of the stone, he tailed Noct, but at a respectful distance, allowing him his space.
"I suppose that leaves the two of us to forage up some breakfast," Ignis said, after a short beat of silence. "To the caves? I saw a number of mushrooms there earlier in the day."
"Sure thing, Iggy," Prompto replied, offering him a quick grin. "Just as long as you don't make me eat 'em."
As Ignis turned away, the smile faded. Prompto looked off into the darkness after his friends and sighed.
xxx
Noctis wandered blindly down the shoreline, his eyes fixed straight ahead, hands clenched at his sides. Stumbling over a pitted patch of sand, he stopped and leaned forward, his hands on his knees, sucking in great, strained breaths through tightly clenched teeth. The surf hissed and boiled at his feet, soaking the cuffs of his pants; he barely noticed.
After a moment, he straightened, knowing his Shield was tailing him and how alarming his behavior might look from afar. But his hands shook. He wasn't sure if it was from elation or despair.
Gladio's relationship with Aranea was real. The flight lessons were real. The attack had been real.
And Noctis had been there.
He knew, as surely as he'd come to know the burning of the crystal's power through his veins, exactly what Gladio and Aranea's airborne daemonic attackers would have looked like. He knew their playful conversation beforehand down to the very last word—could've quoted it right there at the campfire, if Gladio had asked.
He knew the panel in the wall where Aranea hid her three backup firearms…
Their deaths, now…obviously those hadn't been real. Neither were Noctis' "sacrifices," physically speaking (though the memories were—vividly so). But the Draconian had always been good at such games—at mixing the "haves" with the "might haves." Of threading truth and lie and illusion together until they were virtually interchangeable.
And he knew, now, that Prompto and Ignis' experience with the Nagarani had to have been real, too. He had been right there with them, on the other side of a reflection. Burning himself to death so that Bahamut would end the "vision," make it stop, save his friends—even if they hadn't actually been there.
But they had been there. They'd been real.
What he didn't know was how they had survived. He'd never seen the endings—the true ones—of these stories, because he'd been so busy dying.
He desperately wanted to ask Gladio more. Had the ship crashed, then? If Aranea hadn't actually died at the hand (or claw or tentacle) of some flying daemon, and Gladio hadn't been torn apart avenging her, what exactly had occurred? Had Noctis' thirty-one self-inflicted deaths in Reflection led Bahamut to intervene in the physical world, to demonstrate some particle of fairness or mercy after all? Had the unfeeling Draconian scattered the attacking daemons and softened the impact of the falling ship, solely because Noctis had succeeded in his sacrifice du jour?
It seemed impossible…
He'd wanted to ask. But he hadn't. Because he was too afraid to hope.
xxx
A/N: Couple o' little interlude-ish chapters here before getting back into the swing of things next time. For those of you who like knowing where you're at in a story, we're probably a few updates shy of the halfway point.
As for the last little bit of this chapter: reference back to Aces [Chapter 5] and the prologue if you need to. Because I can't seem to figure out if it's confusing or not, basically Noct's just hoping he had some positive impact in the physical world, and that everything Bahamut made him see/experience in the crystal wasn't for nothing.