Noctis sat nestled among the smooth gray boulders on the shores of the Maidenwater, listening to the early morning crickets as they buzzed softly in the grass, his fishing pole in hand. It was the same rod they'd kept on the Royal Vessel, that Weskham had rescued and relocated to his boat, and that they had then carted all the way up into the mountains with them in their flight from Galdin Quay.
Before all that—long ago, back in their original timeline—it had lived in his old rooms in the Citadel, his weapon of choice for when he needed an escape from the pressures of his duties. The day before their roadtrip-turned-exile, he'd relocated it to the armiger. It had then become his go-to for much of the trip, ten years or a couple of months ago, depending on your point of view. Eventually—and not without reluctance—he'd switched to the technically superior rod Navyth had given him. But this one occupied a distinctive place in his heart.
Now he held it propped in his lap, winding the reel idly as his malboro popper skipped brightly across the surface. The trout that typically frequented these waters didn't seem to be biting today, but Noctis didn't mind. Ever since their Wake Up Noct Staycation—as Prompto had taken to calling it—on the Royal Vessel, there'd been hardly a single moment that hadn't been consumed with fighting, hiding, hiking, or healing. Noctis had found himself increasingly morose and irritable, memories of Reflection invading his dreams nearly every time he slept (and sometimes while he was awake). A few hours of just him and the burble of the river was already doing him good.
And to be honest, that conversation with Cor—or lack thereof—had hit him harder than he cared to admit. Despite his talk with Ignis, all those days ago back on Weskham's boat—and his own concession to the impossibility of being a viable king when he couldn't even interact with anyone—it was another matter entirely to find himself constantly reminded of that fact, often in new and unpleasant ways. Without the ability to influence anyone—to even communicate with them—what would his life be? What value was he to his people? His friends?
He knew he was going to have to get that figured out eventually. Regardless of what he'd told his friends, he couldn't just avoid Cor forever, or the people he was supposed to be protecting. Whether their time-traveling phase shift effect allowed for it or not, the fact remained that he was still the lawful king of Lucis. But when not avoiding others placed them in such danger, his choices grew slim—and the good ones virtually nonexistent.
the world burns as he watches, the last of humanity disintegrating into black tarlike miasma. Trapped in an existence full of violence and misery and vague, confused memories of their human lives, they wander the star for eternity…
A riot of crunching steps clattered and slid through the gravel behind him, beginning some distance away and growing louder with a frenetic determination that indicated it was either an attacking spiracorn or Prompto. Taking a deep, unsteady breath and slowly letting it back out, Noctis reeled in the remainder of his line and proceeded to hook the lure into its holder.
"Hey there, Noctinator, what's biting?" the decidedly not-spiracorn asked. His clip-on light flashed around wildly as he cut his dash short with an impressively long leap out onto the nearest boulder. Noctis had to remind himself that his friend had been a high school track champion once, long ago in another life.
"Nothing, tonight—uh, this morning," Noctis amended with a glance at the brightening sky.
"Yeah, we figured as much," Prompto said, reaching down to land a consoling pat on his head. "Fortunately Iggy's been making backup dinner, though, and he says it's ready. To the haven?"
"Let's do it," Noctis agreed.
Prompto offered his hand. Noctis took it, allowing himself to be pulled up off the gravelly banks and into the jumble of boulders, trailing his friend as they made their way back into the forest.
As they neared the soft glowing blue of the haven—its light growing quickly overwhelmed by the approaching sunrise—Ignis called out, "Prompto, is that you? Dirty dishes are not meant to live in the Regalia's boot, nor will they ever be."
"No need to flip your wig, Ig, they just went there temporarily while I was out looking for Noct," Prompto called.
"Nor will they ever be," Ignis repeated so pointedly it nearly gave Noctis throne-stabbing flashbacks. "The moment we start using the Regalia as our catch-all for every inconvenient item we are too lazy to deal with in any given situation is the moment we begin that slippery descent into barbarism. Before you know it we'll be dispensing with utensils altogether—" (here he cast a significant look at Gladio, who froze in the act of fishing a handful of fries from the serving plate with his fingers) "—and deciding that toilet rolls need be used only in the presence of a toilet, bearing in mind that we are in the woods. Everything has a home; and without Noct's armiger on hand to toss every trinket and trifle into, we must learn them—for the sake of our own sanity. Or at the very least," he finished, "mine."
"Yeah, Noct, how'd you always keep that whole mess organized, anyway?" Prompto asked, hurrying to remove the offending tableware from the trunk. "I've gotta admit, there were some days—especially when you were really tired—that I jumped into a battle fully prepared for an old zucchini to materialize in my hand instead of my Death Penalty. Never happened, though, which I think deserves some serious kudos."
"Well, if you really want to know, everything has a different feel," Noctis said. He scaled the side of the haven stone, then clambered back to his feet, making his way over to the cooler to grab a neon green plastic plate from the assortment of cheap replacement dishware Ignis had picked up in Old Lestallum. "It…I guess you could say it weighs on your mind differently. Every item has its own space-time…signature? Something like that."
"Really?" Gladio asked, abandoning his search for the tongs to regard Noctis with interest.
"Okay, that and organizers," Noctis admitted. "I color-coded a bunch of cubbies and then summoned them into the armiger to help make sure things stayed contained." At his friends' slightly incredulous expressions, he muttered defensively, "Look, it's not always easy keeping Prompto's G.I. Glaive action figures metaphysically sorted from Ignis' self-heating butterknives, okay?"
Prompto snorted a laugh as he dumped his armload of dirty cookware back onto the prep table, earning a stare from Ignis that would have given him nightmares if he'd actually noticed it. "Color-coded cubbies, huh. So those things we had in primary school to keep our sack lunches and plastic scissors sorted?"
"If the system ain't broke, don't fix it," Gladio chuckled, earning them both a look flat enough to decarbonate their Jetty's.
"All right you two, dinner is going cold," Ignis reminded them, rescuing Prompto and Gladio probably moreso than he was Noctis.
Digging the tongs out from the bottom of the dirty dish pile, Prompto loaded up his plate until it was an only slightly miniaturized version of the Gralean crater. He fished his phone from his pocket with the unoccupied hand before flopping down onto a sleeping mat next to Ignis (their funds not allowing for camp chairs just yet).
"Man oh man, this smells delish. You outdo yourself pretty much every time, Igster."
"Thank you, Prompto," Ignis replied, dabbing carefully at his mouth. "On a different tack, though, must you play with your phone at the dinner table? You'll smear grease on the screen."
"Just trying to program everyone's numbers into my glorified alarm clock here ," Prompto replied, poking at the display as he bit off a large chunk of horntooth pie. After a moment of chewing, he said, "Crap. Turns out I don't know any."
"Ignis does," Noctis said. He parked himself next to Gladio, carefully balancing his own plate in one hand.
"How? Iggy, you know people don't memorize phone numbers anymore, right?"
"Ignis does," Noctis repeated.
"And what if I did?" the man in question primly returned. "It's saved your lot's skin more than once."
"Okay," Prompto said. "Do you know Dustin's?"
"Of course I do," Ignis replied, and told him.
"How 'bout…Holly's?"
"Naturally." Ignis reeled it off so quickly Prompto's jabbing fingers could hardly keep up.
"Dino's."
Leveling him with a gaze that was quickly turning into a Look, Ignis settled for a simple, "Yes."
"No way, man," Prompto said, his fingers flying enthusiastically across the screen. Suddenly he paused, eyes narrowing ever so slightly. "Cindy's?"
"Obviously," Ignis said, enunciating each syllable in a manner fraught with a very distinctive sort of danger that sailed entirely over Prompto's head.
"What? C'mon, dude! How? She wouldn't even give it to me when the world was ending!"
"That's cuz the cell towers got destroyed," Gladio grunted. He downed his bottle of Jetty's in one go, wiping his mouth on his arm. "She gave you her frequency instead."
"Still! I had to work hard for it. What did you even—"
Prompto cut himself off as something evidently occurred to him. With rising suspicion, he demanded, "Wait. Ardyn's."
The silence that greeted them was slightly menacing.
"Oh, Six, you had Ardyn's? Memorized? Seriously, Iggy?"
"Of course," Ignis stiffly replied. "I did and I still do. You may recall we traveled with him for a short while. Neither he nor I would have found it useful to our purposes to become separated at that time."
"Ignis!" Prompto gasped. His plate was all but forgotten as he reached over to seize the man's collar. "We had Ardyn's phone number? We could have spammed the living daylights out of him!"
"I don't think he had any of those," Noctis remarked.
"Nightlights then! I would have sold that thing to every call list in existence!"
"I would have asked him where he wanted the five hundred pizzas he ordered—piled up at the Citadel's door or stacked in the front lobby," Noctis said, earning an original, all-natural Look from Ignis.
"I'd think he'd need to be informed about the dramatic monologue competition he'd won a spot in," Gladio said thoughtfully, "with an address that correlated to the inner foyer of the power plant."
"I'd want him to know how his university loans were two thousand years overdue," Prompto declared. "Time to pay up on that seven percent interest, baby." A fine shower of gravy flew from his flailing fork, landing on Ignis' well-pressed trousers.
Noctis edged backward on his mat, alarmed. Ignis' eyes were rapidly narrowing, a sure sign of impending disaster. He tossed a fry at Prompto's knee in warning, but it missed and bounced across the stone. Ignis' gaze tracked it, a light tinge of pink appearing high on his cheekbones, as the inevitable horde of local biting insects began to converge on the crumbs it left behind.
But Prompto remained oblivious. "Ughh, seriously Ignis!" he wailed. "Think of the opportunities lost—nay, squandered! We could have actually rewritten history with nothing more than a well-placed call or two hundred. We'd have had Chancellor Ardyn Assholius Caelum back in whatever moldy tomb he crawled out of before you could say 'hey man, there's black stuff on your face.'" As he talked, a morsel of pie slid free of his fork to land neatly in Ignis' lap.
"Right—I hereby sack myself as the one who keeps you lot fed, dressed, and scheduled," Ignis declared, prying Prompto's grease-slicked fingers loose from his collar. "I give you one week before you are all crawling at my feet begging my pardon."
"C'mon, Iggy, you can't tell us you wouldn't've gotten even a little satisfaction out of dropping the ol' expired car warranty gag on him," Gladio said, nearly incoherent through a mouthful of food. "Or help with his criminally overdue taxes. Coulda gotten that black heart of his pumping a little faster and his bank account info, both at the same time."
"Right?" Prompto exclaimed, his expression stern.
"Make that five days," Ignis hissed. "If you'll excuse me, gentlemen, I will now be treating myself to a morning walk. A rather lengthy one, it must be said."
Rising to his feet, he brushed Prompto's crumbs off his pants and marched indignantly away into the woods.
For a few moments, nobody said anything.
Then Noctis noted, "We should probably do the dishes or something."
"Hey hey, careful with that cast iron," Prompto warned, notably subdued, as Noctis stood and began dousing it in the corrosive solution the One Gil store chose to brand as its dish soap. "Iggy says there's a special way you're supposed to wash those, and I don't think it involves…whatever that stuff is."
"Well how the hell am I supposed to clean this without it?" Noctis complained, looking resentfully at the heavy skillet. "Ignis spent my whole sixth year of life trying to sell me on the merits of soap. And now he wants me to believe the opposite? You're turning my whole world upside down, Prompto."
"You could ask him," Gladio said, lying back on the stone and stretching his legs toward the fire. "Gonna have to run to catch him, though."
After a moment of consideration, broken only by the clamor of the waking birds, Prompto hazarded, "Um. Does anybody know his number?"
xxx
As the days drew on, they found themselves falling into an almost pleasant sort of routine: whittle away at the daemon population by night, fish and swim and sleep during the day. The cool shadows of the forest, lit only by what few streamers of sun the trees allowed into its depths, proved much gentler on their daytime sleep schedule than the heat and glare of Galdin Quay had. The river became a companion in and of itself; they learned to read its moods by its timbre and the changes in the air. And Noctis practiced with his hookshot every chance he could get, the sensation of clean wind buffeting his skin reawakening an old joy he'd first felt long ago: the moment he'd finally managed a successful warp, having at last broken free of the yearslong mental block imposed on him by the Marilith attack. Ignis, the original hookshot authority, borrowed it on occasion, but didn't seem overly keen to engage in a pursuit that Noctis knew could only remind him of that terrible day on Leviathan's altar.
Eventually tiring of the cold, hard stone of the haven, they relocated to the somewhat more forgiving forest floor, just a few yards away. Wherever they slept—haven or no—at least one of them was typically standing watch; man-eating diurnal wildlife didn't much care about daemon wards, other than as a refuge when they, like the humans, found themselves predator turned prey. But without the need to forever be traveling from place to place, their window for leisure had grown; as a result, nobody was too terribly bothered by waking for a two hour watch when there would be opportunities for naps later.
Occasionally they switched on the radio, listening for news, but the blockade to the east seemed unabating. Noctis sometimes found it was all he could do to rein in his restless pacing. Trapped between his forced inactivity and a profound fear of a repeat of Altissia—where he had inadvertently drawn a whole nation into war and nearly killed their leader just by talking to her—it often took an excess of self-discipline simply to keep still, passively waiting around for life to live him.
And so they whiled the days away, poking at the fire and trading stories and continuing what they'd begun when Noctis had finally woken, there on the boat: the process of knitting the frayed edges of their sundered lives back together.
Summer held on tenaciously, but eventually even its warm, gold-tinged days were forced to give way to the cooler nights and gusty windstorms of autumn. Often they would lie in the grass, side by side, listening to the swelling rush of foliage overhead—the breezes leaving them smelling perpetually of woodsmoke and sunshine and the sweet scent of aging leaves. In wilder weather, they would hunker down in the darkness of the tent and talk, their conversation slowly fading as they listened to the rain lash at the canvas and the wind buffet the walls. It was to this refrain that they eventually drifted off to sleep, bedding and limbs and stray cards tangled up together in jumbled disarray.
It was on a day much like this—minus the rain, thankfully—that Noctis found himself wedged between Ignis and Gladio, unable to sleep. Prompto was on watch, perched within calling distance atop the haven stone. Though Noctis found himself missing both the companionship and the body heat generated by their absent friend, the watch system had turned out to be unexpectedly convenient in the fact that the advertised four-person tent Ignis had bought really meant four medium-sized children or possibly Goblins, with no accounting for Gladio types at all. As a result, three of them would be obligated to pack together in a row, with the fourth lying perpendicularly at their feet along the door. Inevitably, this person became the victim of every stumbling midday bathroom trip and Gladio's inexorable sprawling. Noctis doubted, therefore, that Prompto was unduly sad about being left to the elements.
At his side, Ignis twitched, then made a distressed noise in his sleep. Noctis shifted closer, hoping his presence on its own would be enough to dispel the nightmare. He moved slowly, careful not to wake either man. They had learned—largely the hard way—not to take each other by surprise, having lived on the knife's edge of danger for so long they often had trouble filtering dreams from reality.
Noctis smiled grimly at that. It was a good thing nobody could see into his dreams. Quite honestly, it was something of a miracle he hadn't given himself away in his sleep yet, blurting out the whole of Bahamut's nasty little nature to the world.
Ignis quieted, and Noctis relaxed. On his other side, Gladio snored on, serenely oblivious to the wind's raucous whistling as it swept down into the valley, rousing the forest into rustling conversation as it passed. The limbs above their tent groaned and creaked so ominously that for a moment Noctis found himself wondering if this would be the way the venerable king of Lucis finally ended the family line—not through prophecy, nor glorious battle, nor even feeding the wildlife, but from being flattened by a tree branch after brainlessly camping in a forest during a windstorm.
Except that he more than likely wouldn't die. Gladio would undoubtedly roll in at the last second, sheltering Noctis' body with his own, taking on his pain and injuries as he always did. Acting as dutiful Shield for a king who may as well be a ghost, for all the good he could do for his kingdom.
Noctis wondered how much longer a Shield could possibly be willing to protect such a king.
He sighed in frustration and pressed his knuckles against his eyes, guilt engulfing him as it so often did these days. Beside him, Ignis' breathing accelerated, then began hitching in panic.
Noctis knew nightmares like these only too well. Rolling to his side, he draped an arm around his friend's sleeping bag-encased form, drawing him close.
And after a moment, Ignis calmed. After several more, he had fallen back into the smooth, even rhythm of untroubled sleep.
Noctis listened to his friends breathe, eyes wide open and staring out into the storm.
xxx
"Iris called," Gladio said. He held his phone aloft with one hand as he shoveled down breakfast with the other.
"Yeah? What'd she say?" Noctis asked, rubbing his eyes tiredly.
It was hours later—early evening now—and he had yet to sleep. Eventually he'd simply crawled out of the tent to relieve Prompto, then sat cross-legged on the stone letting the wind billow through his clothes. Dark, moody clouds skimmed along overhead, barely visible through the canopy and casting everything below into a cheerless half-light. At least the gloom was serving as something of a relief to what was becoming a fairly insistent headache.
"Wants to know if we can help 'em out with a little daemon incursion that's been giving them issues down at the beach." The big man flicked away a couple of shriveled leaves that had pattered across the stone, all in a rush, to land in his eggs. "We said we wanted to, right? Now'd be a good time. It sounds like none of the marks are all that dangerous—just noisy. You know, Snaga and the like."
"Noisy?" Ignis repeated, one eyebrow arching delicately upward, another question altogether lurking conspicuously behind his words.
"Yeah, you've heard the little monsters carry on. How'd you like to be kept up all night by those chittering hell clowns?" Gladio replied.
"Setting aside, for now, the fact that I often am, and it's called you three—I feel moved to ask whether this 'noisiness' would have nothing at all to do with a certain flame your sister holds for a certain king we all know and the fact that she hasn't seen him in a number of weeks now," Ignis remarked, sipping his coffee.
Gladio opened his mouth to reply—then paused, looking slightly disturbed. "Whoa. I'd kinda forgotten about that whole thing."
Two pairs of eyes swung his way. Noctis, having been picking at his omelet, staring blearily off into space, and not particularly paying attention, blinked. "What?"
Gladio's gaze swept him up and down, taking in the bloodshot eyes, disheveled hair, and scraggly beginnings of a beard his twenty-one-year-old face still couldn't grow properly but that he hadn't bothered to shave off in several days.
"Huh," Gladio said. "Well, that might just take care of itself." He turned to Ignis. "No worries here, Iggy, I'm pretty sure we're safe for the near future, and probably the far one too—"
Half an omelet sailed through the air and stuck to the side of his face. Noctis, suddenly and inexplicably breakfastless, sat blankly, but wreathed in a distinct air of satisfaction.
His expression unchanged, Gladio peeled the egg delicately from his neck, where it had slid down his skin to leave a trail of watery grease. He set his plate carefully beside him on the stone. "Be right back."
Ignis put his own coffee down, somewhat more hurriedly and with no small measure of alarm. "No, don't you dare—"
But it was too late. "Gladio! Noct! Quit—no, let go! Stop that right now! You're going to— We don't have enough clothes for this—Not to mention curatives—Oh, bollocks, go ahead and kill each other then, for all I care. It will decrease my workload significantly."
Noctis, panting with exertion, strained to look up at him from the awkward angle in which Gladio had him pinned, purely by virtue of being huge. "No need to stress, Specs, just reminding this big idiot...who's boss here...ugh, Gladio, do you have extra bones in your knees or something?"
"Nope. Give up?" Gladio smirked, digging the aforementioned weaponry deep into his shoulder blades.
"No, that's what your parents did when they first saw you—augh, no tickling—!"
"Ah yes, very mature, both of you," Ignis said in clipped tones, frowning down at them from atop the haven. "Am I soon to expect one of you to cry because the other was looking at him wrong? Or are we going to begin the flinging of devastatingly well-crafted insults? 'Meanie' and 'poophead,' perhaps?"
"Isn't there a regulation or a royal edict or something that says Shields aren't supposed to rub kings' faces in the dirt? At least not literally?" Prompto asked, the commotion having roused him from the tent. He yawned as he stepped up alongside Ignis, looking down on the scene with sleepy curiosity.
"Absolutely not," Gladio replied, one enormous hand clamped casually over most of the face in question. "In fact, we're encouraged to. Especially if said kings are in need of a little humbling." Looking cheerful, he stood, then reached down for Noctis. Grabbing his arm, he plucked him free of the pulverized leaf matter and ruffled his hair obnoxiously.
Noctis batted his hands away and began the heroic but ultimately futile attempt of brushing dirt from his clothes. "I'll show you humbling," he said. "We're one-one now; next time's match."
"You got it," Gladio grinned.
"Honestly, how old are you two?" Ignis sighed.
"See, we've got the luxury of choosing now," Gladio replied. He stretched languorously, then popped his shoulders in satisfaction.
"Well, if you're both finished acting like witless imbeciles, I'd like to return to matters of actual importance," Ignis said, retrieving his coffee from the ground. "Given the fact that we've dispatched most of the daemons in the immediate area and are being driven farther afield every day simply to find any, relocation might not be such a terrible idea. Particularly if they are gathering near the Caem safehouse, which could attract larger specimens in the future."
"Yeah, and both Cor and the radio still report most of the Imperial presence in the east," Gladio said, temporarily conceding his victory to help Noctis brush the last of the forest from his back. "Things have stayed quiet in Cleigne so far."
"And what about Iris and Talcott?" Noctis asked, straightening his shirt. "And Monica and Dustin...and me?" His voice faded as he grew serious. "What if they...react?"
Ignis regarded him gently. "As we discussed before, this may be a good opportunity to gauge just where their limits are. Though I hardly relish experimenting on our friends, these would be important boundaries to define. Umbra may have warned us to keep our distance, but I believe even he understands that no one can truly exist as an island."
"I think so too," Prompto said, somewhat more restrained than usual as he dangled his legs over the lip of the haven. He sipped slowly on a Jetty's, sugar and caffeine apparently being all the breakfast nutrients he needed. "Plus we're getting kind of beat up over time, and the storebought curatives can't keep up. Gladio's got that big old gouge in his arm from the Ronin we tripped over the other day, you're still full of holes from when you were gnawed on by that mandrake, Ig, and Noct and I still have our multiple square footage of bruises each from…er, well from when we swam too far out into the rapids and got stuck in all those rocks and meanwhile that gang of seadevils ate our clothes but let's not dwell on that and anyway, skipping out on a chance to rest might actually be kind of irresponsible at this point."
"Wisely spoken," Ignis said, politely refraining mention of what Gladio, the first to get an eyeful of the aforementioned scene, had come to refer to as the "bare-assed beach brawl incident." "Yes, I think we could all use a period of convalescence, even if just for a week or two."
"Yeah, okay," Noctis conceded. "Let's try it. But not before we've made contingency plans for if the phased reality effect kicks in. Both for you guys and for me."
"Agreed," Ignis said, and Gladio nodded in approval.
So they broke camp for the first time in nearly a month, all of them a little melancholy about leaving a space they had begun to think of as a home.
But the mood was soon replaced by an air of celebration as they took to the road once more. The smell of the sea greeted them like an old friend as they turned south to meet it; his friends' levity and the familiar distraction of arguing over the radio were contagious, and Noctis soon felt his own spirits lift. He was worried about seeing their Caem companions again, but also unexpectedly hopeful. He couldn't contest the fact that they seemed to have tolerated his presence better than others. Which meant that, with luck, he might not be doomed to a life of total exile after all. And what Prompto had said about taking time to recover made sense.
And yet, as the headache began rattling around his skull once more, he couldn't seem to shake the feeling that somewhere within all that practicality and logic lurked a profound mistake.
xxx
A/N: Buckle in, you guys. Things are about to get real.
And now, seeing as ffnet won't allow me to DM guest reviewers…
To my new guest: Welcome, and thank you so much for your kind review! With all the ficcage out there, it's gratifying to hear that a potentially original idea is floating around somewhere in here. ;) And daaang, I can't believe this was recommended on Reddit! That's way exciting.
You're spot-on with the angst. Glad you're all in, because there are buckets of it in store (at least to my mind...) And I do appreciate the heads-up about Ao3! Even though I already post there, I hadn't even heard of it before last year. So you never know!
To my regular guest: What a compliment! I love to hear about the guys' adventures being able to touch people in some way. That being said, I'm glad your reading didn't end up too life-threatening. ;)