Prompto and Ignis were lost.
Ignis wouldn't admit it, of course; his sense of direction was "impeccable, shall we just be honest, Prompto." And indeed, as Prompto had never seen him so much as consult the Regalia's GPS, he had no doubt the man had popped out of the womb with a compass in hand, requesting the angle of declination between true and magnetic north for "calibration purposes." But it hadn't taken long for Prompto to conclude that having the ability to point north on a dime didn't actually mean a whole lot when you didn't know where you were to begin with.
"Based on the topography of those mountains just over there," Ignis was murmuring, largely to himself, "and the way the land angles downward, I do believe if we simply follow that tributary it will eventually spit us out onto the main road, just west of Taelpar Crag. From what I recall of the view from that area, it shouldn't take us more than a day or two to—chuffing hell, Prompto, must you wrap that bandage so ruddy tight?"
"Sorry, Iggy," Prompto replied easily, making no move to loosen the offending dressing. Ignis was a tad on the cranky side, and Prompto could hardly blame him: he would be too if he had a hole in his arm, no potions, hadn't slept in one and a half nights, had poorly made up for it with a few restless daylight hours of dozing on the dusty floor of an abandoned shack, had also been wearing the same dirty pajamas for the entirety, and, most heinously of all, hadn't so much as even glanced at a bar of soap in nearly two days. Never mind that Prompto himself was in almost the same boat. Maybe minus an oar, since he didn't think he knew how to kill a marauding havocfang with his bare hands. Ignis obviously did, seeing as he had already done so today—and they hadn't even eaten breakfast yet.
On the bright side, at least they had boots again. Prompto had discovered a pile of old farmhand castoffs in the closet of some rotting, tumbledown homestead the night before. And, whereas a mere forty-eight hours ago the notion of tying his foot into a mildewed, ill-fitting husk of unpolished leather would have sent Ignis into convulsions, now he had pulled its mouse-bitten laces tight with unbridled joy, gleefully chucking the yellow galoshes out the loft window the moment they left his feet. How things did change.
"Righty-ho, all set," Prompto said, tying off the bandage (a.k.a. the cleanest strip of pajama fabric they could pick out) and giving Ignis a solid pat on the back. "Doesn't look like there's any infection settling in yet, but getting you out of the arse-endington of nowhere would really be a good thing."
"That is the intent," Ignis replied. He gingerly pulled down what remained of his sleeve to cover the wound, his face tightening in obvious pain. "Now. As I was saying, if we proceed north-northeast toward those low mountains beyond that rise there, I believe we shall presently find ourselves back at the highway, without having to contend with the Crag. By my reckoning, it shouldn't end up being more than a brisk night or two of walking."
"You mean straight into those really sketch thunderstorms?" Prompto asked, peering at the black virga sitting heavily on an otherwise cloud-free horizon.
"Yes, well..." Ignis began, then frowned as he took a second look. "Those did spring up rather suddenly, didn't they? Odd..."
"So we find the road, and then what?" Prompto asked, slumping back onto the sun-warmed boulder they'd been using as a rest stop. "Hitchhike in our jammies till a Niff convoy kindly offers a ride to the two guys matching the exact description of a couple of people they were just trying to kill?"
"Or some simple, honest farmfolk, preferably," Ignis replied, obviously somewhat less than appreciative of Prompto's glibness. "But yes, your point is well taken. We'll need to find a way to obtain clothing, and make at least some attempt at disguise. Our second order of business will then be to toss these rags into the heart of Ravatogh." He looked down at himself in disgust. "Quite honestly, I never want to have to lay eyes on them again."
"At least you don't sleep in your skivvies like Gladio," Prompto pointed out, tucking his arms behind his head. "Could you imagine the stories the locals would be spreading by now? Legends of the naked, bespectacled midnight avenger would be passed down for generations."
Ignis looked pained. "Thank you, Prompto. I believe Gladio, for his part, was rather more clothed last we saw him, which is fortunate considering the circumstances. I hate to imagine a member of the noble lineage of Amicitia, official retainer and Shield of the King of Lucis, pulling up to Hammerhead in naught but his underthings."
"Cindy's definitely seen worse. And she's only got eyes for the Regalia, anyway." Prompto was quiet a moment, picking at a withered patch of lichen with his fingernails. Then he asked, lowly, "Do you think they made it? They still haven't called."
Ignis glanced away, his gaze flickering toward the east—as if he could see across the miles of mountains and forest and desert to where their missing friends might be found. "It is eminently possible that they simply never discovered the phone in the dash," he replied. "Even moreso that they arrived at Hammerhead only to realize they had forgotten our new numbers."
He sounded confident enough; but as he turned his attention back to their route, Prompto saw the way his eyes tightened in worry. Ignis had made them all memorize each other's numbers for just such an eventuality as lost phones and unplanned separations.
Not wanting to dive into that bucket of worms just yet, Prompto nodded gamely. "Yeah. Probably getting roped into playing Takka's errand boys while they wait."
"Bean-themed errands, no doubt," Ignis agreed.
"For all we know, beans are Noct's favorite food group now," Prompto groused, glaring up into the faded blue sky. He still couldn't get over the fact that his friend had probably been awake and running around in the Night like the rest of them, all those years. He'd only just gotten used to the idea of Noct's prolonged hibernation, and all the weird repercussions that could come of it. For instance, the fact that his best friend, mentally and experientially, was suddenly a decade behind him. Now he had to get back used to the likelihood that Noct wasn't, and had, in fact, been forced through some potentially hellish ordeal that none of them had been allowed to know about. Something that Noct was too scared to share with the three people he loved and trusted most in the world.
Prompto didn't like it. He didn't like it at all.
Ignis regarded him knowingly, but only said, "Well, shall we move on? The sooner we depart, the sooner we'll all be reunited."
"Yeah," Prompto replied, and heaved himself to his feet with a tired groan. Depending on which daemon breeds they encountered tonight, he might just attend the reunion in a wheelbarrow.
They trudged on, laboring through the backcountry in their borrowed boots and shredded pajamas. Prompto's stomach growled angrily—but seeing as there wasn't much to be done for the overbearing thing, he pointedly ignored it. Here the landscape was windswept and treeless—beautiful in its own way, with sprawling constellations of tiny red and yellow flowers that crept across the hillsides in a small-scale imitation of the fall foliage they'd left behind. But it had little to offer in the way of foraging. Ignis had said the flowers were good for tea, but Prompto didn't know of any bushes that grew cups or fire. Someone should probably talk to the gods about that.
Thinking of the gods took his mind back to Noct, as inexorably as the recoil of a snapped rubber band. Forcing it wide of that particular cycle of madness, Prompto turned his thoughts toward Iris and Talcott instead. But he couldn't solve their problems any better than he could Noct's: either Iris had recovered or she hadn't.
He swallowed hard, then a few times more to convince himself that he was only trying to wet his parched throat. He couldn't dwell on the possibility right now that the fact of his mere existence had hurt Iris. He just couldn't. Cor would take care of her. Cor could fix anything.
"Hey Ig, how hard do you s'pose Cor's looking for us?" Prompto asked, hopping a winding little rivulet of a stream. Tiny but persistent, it had carved itself a full hand's length down into the grassy turf. "I'm pretty sure we're double fugitives now—everybody wants to kill us. Did you see the look on his face when we ran off? We're so dead if he ever finds us again."
"You forget your own skills, Prompto," Ignis replied. He winced as the uneven terrain jostled his wound, but of course immediately tried to pretend he'd never met a day in his life that wasn't bursting with health and that all of his blood remained firmly in his body. "If you and the Cor of this time were to face each other in combat, my money would unreservedly be on you."
The concept was so startling that Prompto tripped over the stream's twin, lodging his boot in its soggy track. This latest display of grace and competence aside, he realized—with no small measure of shock—that Ignis might actually be right. Prompto had held his own during the Night for a very long time, against increasingly lethal daemons and progressively bleaker odds. Just as they all had. The people of this time were innocents, untempered by dead land and dead light and dead hope. Even Cor.
"Wow, uh…" Prompto stuttered, then cleared his throat. "Probably not in those bright yellow puddle jumpers, though. Wouldn't be a fair fight; he'd be too busy forgetting to take me seriously."
"Then it's a good job we left them back at that farmstead for whatever poor bootless sap next stumbles upon them, now isn't it?" Ignis replied with a small smile.
"'Fo sheezy, Iggity Diggity," Prompto chirped, ignoring Ignis' pronounced wince at such wholesale butchery of his name and language in general. "Glad to have those things in my rearview. Even though I'm pretty sure the guy who owned these crimes against podiatry that're on my feet right now thought pedicures were a type of witchcraft. Might've been missing a toe, too."
"Indeed?" Ignis murmured, somewhat absently.
Prompto glanced over and saw him squinting at the horizon again, a small frown of concern marring his features. Prompto looked as well. The thunderheads they'd seen from afar less than an hour ago covered half the sky now, a blunt demarcation of thick, roiling black alongside a spread of gentle but rapidly diminishing blue.
Unfortunately, there wasn't much for it but to soldier on. Not like they had any other choice.
"So Igs, I've been thinking—argh!" Prompto interrupted himself, flapping at his head as a sudden blast of wind swept in out of nowhere to foul up his hair—the only part of himself he'd managed to keep even remotely groomed these past few disastrous days. Scowling, he smoothed it back down and continued. "As I was saying. Remember way back when in the future when Umbra told us that there'd been another way? That Noct didn't necessarily need to die to banish the Scourge?"
Ignis didn't immediately reply, and Prompto felt it was a silence suffused in sadness.
"Yes," he finally said. "I do remember. I had hoped you two had missed that part. It haunts me mercilessly—the fact that we simply accepted his fate. That we gave up before we even tried."
"That's the thing, though," Prompto hurriedly replied, hating the pain that filled his friend's voice. "I don't think we could have done much anyway—not you and me and Gladio. Not against a god. I think it's more like…the prophecy just never needed to exist the way it was to begin with. Bahamut helped write the stupid thing, didn't he? Or pitch it or bankroll it or whatever you wanna call it. But sometimes I wonder if it wasn't so much a prophecy as, like, a proclamation. Bahamut steering things in the direction he wanted them to be taken."
"So more like a decree, then?" Ignis said slowly, thinking. "Or even a self-fulfilling prophecy, if you will. But not so much a foretelling as a playbook…"
"Yeah, and the Lucis Caelums were the unwitting players," Prompto said grimly. "The whole long lot of them. Ending with Noct."
Ignis lapsed into thought, heedless of the fitful little wind gusts that were now pelting his legs with grit. His eyes rested blankly on a distant point of the horizon, just as they used to when he was blind.
"To what end?" he finally asked.
"I dunno, for fun? Sick entertainment?" Prompto suggested. "Who can say—the guy's like, a dragon or something. It's just a theory anyway. Know what else I wonder about, though?"
"In fact, I do," Ignis said, regarding him with considerable interest.
"Umbra. Do you think he's really a Messenger? Or…something else?"
"How do you mean?"
"I dunno," Prompto said, exhaling loudly. "He and Pyrna always looked similar, but they weren't really the same. I just keep remembering some of those visions he showed us, back after…uh, after we found Noct on the throne." He rushed on, content to never in his life have to roll that scene through his brain again. "At first I thought they were only a bunch of random mental images he'd thrown together—his way of talking through pics, I guess—but I kinda wonder if some of them might not be memories, too." He ran a hand through his hair. "Like, Umbra's memories—his own. Kind of sad ones, too. I just remember how he kept showing us the four dogs together, which I assume symbolized us. But then there was always the one, all by himself.
"So sometimes I just wonder if he's lonely," Prompto finished, offering a brief little shrug. "Maybe separated from his own? It'd be way sad to be immortal and alone…"
Ignis was watching him curiously. Suddenly embarrassed, Prompto laughed.
"Then again, he's got such a floofy tail and he's just the best boy in the world. So maybe he really is just a dog who happens to be indestructible and for some reason knows how to travel through time."
"You often surprise me, Prompto," Ignis said. "How long have you been harboring such insights?"
"Oh, not very long," Prompto reassured him, his ears still slightly pink. "A couple ideas started rattling around my head somewhere between Leviathan wrecking the place and my fourth pair of socks going out—you know, all those inspirational, profound moments you trip over in life. Doesn't even mean that I'm right—holy craphandles, that was close!"
They both had leapt backward as a bolt of lightning licked against the prairie no more than a half mile ahead. Its report crackled through the hills immediately afterward, swelling and ebbing as the echoes merged and receded and then finally combined, stacking on one another in a booming surge of sound. Prompto winced and clapped his hands over his ears. But the skies opened up a second later, rain dumping on them with a savagery that took him straight back to that awful day in First Altissia, when Leviathan was throwing seawater all over the place and then they couldn't find Ignis or Noct or Luna for ages.
"Gah!" Prompto hunched his shoulders against the onslaught as another bolt sizzled into the turf, so close they could smell the singed ozone, and shouted, "Ignis, what are you supposed to do in a lightning storm without shelter, again? All I remember is the part where you shouldn't get yourself into that situation to begin with—"
"Crouch low, head between your knees!" Ignis yelled. He pocketed his glasses as the deluge began to batter them from his face. "Stay on the balls of your feet! We must minimize our contact with the ground—"
A strange sort of crawling sensation ghosted across Prompto's skin. The discharge hit before he even had time to feel anxious about it, an ear-splitting shaft of pure energy shredding the turf less than a stone's toss away. For a moment he totally lost track of where in time and space he was. The ground reminded him soon enough as he landed on it—hard—displaced dirt and mud pattering down all around after him. His ears rang, an army of little chocobos running laps around his skull.
"Thanks for that!" Prompto yelled to the heavens from his back, trying not to drown in the rain that was actively attempting to invade his nose. "Got anything else? How about a nice funnel cloud while you're at it—maybe a flying garula or two?"
In reply, the rain coalesced into hailstones the size of Duscaen oranges.
"Prompto, I'll thank you to shut up now!" Ignis shouted, one arm raised in a vain attempt to stave off the suddenly deadly torrent. He grabbed Prompto's bicep and dragged him to his feet. "Come, there's a hollow over there between those two low hills! Pull up your shirt to cover your head and keep your arms…your arms up like…er, well now. This is unexpected."
Ignis trailed off, staring up into the clouds as the hailstones abruptly tapered into soft, delicate snowflakes. A dome of ice crackled into existence, chiming and tinkling as it surrounded them, encasing them in a tranquil, wintery cocoon. The hail and lightning continued to beat at them from outside, but it may as well have been blowing dust for all the effect it had on their sudden, unexpected refuge.
"Ah, hey, what up, Gentiana?" Prompto said into the lull, somehow unsurprised to find the dark-haired woman standing quietly behind him, looking rather downtrodden. He nudged the water from his eyes with his knuckles, the hem of his shirt having proved far too saturated for the task. The sudden silence within the ice hurt his ears almost as much as the racket outside had, the abrupt contrast leaving them ringing uncomfortably.
"Esteemed Goddess," Ignis greeted her, somewhat more respectfully. Rubbing his glasses against his equally sodden shirt, he perched them on his nose in relief. "We're grateful for the timely shelter. To what do we owe the pleasure of your visit?"
Gentiana tipped her face toward his voice, but her eyes remained closed. "The Glacian must locate the One True King," she said, without preamble. "She believes his Knights might assist in this endeavor."
"Whoa, whoa, whoa, what do you want with Noct?" Prompto asked. He cast a sidelong glance at the retina-searing explosions of light still blazing down from the clouds outside.
"It is for the Goddess to know, and mortal men to obey," she snapped, rather uncharacteristically.
"See, I don't think it is," Prompto said, feeling the stirrings of an anger he thought he'd handily locked away already. "We trusted him to you guys once already, and weren't super thrilled with the results. Truth be told, your Eminence…Divine One…whatever…I'd happily die before I let Bahamut get his claws on Noct again. Or any of the rest of you, for that matter—no offense. Ya feel me?"
Prompto could sense Ignis' increasing tension throughout the exchange, but his friend made no effort to stop him. Now the man casually dropped his hand to hover alongside one of his daggers, watching the goddess closely, and Prompto knew they were sailing the same wavelength.
But to his surprise, Gentiana wilted. Her eyes opened, and she stared morosely into the storm outside. "Yes," she said, simply.
"Gentiana," Ignis hedged after a few beats of awkward silence had passed. "Is…Bahamut the one sending you out after Noct?"
A small specter of dread elbowed its way into Prompto's thoughts. If the Draconian himself was looking for Noct in this time, then he obviously wasn't hibernating in some extra-dimensional god land or whatever anymore. And if their theories about his less-than kindly nature were correct…
"Yes," Gentiana replied, and the specter grew.
"Why?" Ignis asked softly, simply. Then he continued, "The Draconian doesn't agree with you in the matter of the prophecy's fulfillment, does he?"
"The prophecy is concluded!" Gentiana snapped. "All of its conditions were satisfied. In this, the gods are of one accord."
Ignis merely waited, saying nothing. Prompto knew from personal experience that his friend's patience was adamantite-clad. Nobody could withstand the force of it. Even a god would break.
Gentiana broke. "The gods are of one accord," she reiterated. Another layer of ice was slowly blooming across the inner surface of their enclosure, and Prompto suddenly wondered if it were for protection or imprisonment. "But the Great One…is not of the gods."
"Who's the what, now?" Prompto exclaimed, forgetting about the ice. "Isn't Bahamut supposed to be, like, the cosmic big cheese or something?"
Gentiana turned from them, her gaze doleful. "Five gods were born of this star," she said. "But the Draconian arrived from somewhere Other. 'Destroyer' and 'Soul Eater' are names that have been conferred upon him on stars and ages past."
Prompto felt a chill creep up his neck that had nothing to do with the temperature in Gentiana's little hideout. Those terms didn't exactly call to mind images of a calm and peaceful Afterlife.
"The Draconian has no need of ordinary souls," Gentiana quickly amended, almost as if she were attempting to reassure them. "He feeds on the sacrifices of the great and royal ones among the children of humanity. Willing sacrifices are especially desirable to him; these sustain him for centuries, as measured by human reckoning."
Prompto could feel his jaw loosening, nearly falling open as a terrible realization began pounding at the doors of his brain—the ones he usually tried to keep locked tight against things like sadness and gloomy thoughts and a true understanding of horrible realities. Beside him, Ignis had drawn in a long breath and hadn't let it out again.
" 'Feeds on'?" Prompto choked on his own words for a moment, suddenly finding it difficult to breathe. His voice sounded strangled and far away. "So what you're saying is that all this time…Bahamut wanted Noct to sacrifice himself, not for the benefit of everyone living…but so he could EAT HIM?"
"Humanity was preserved because the True King destroyed the Accursed in the Beyond," Gentiana retorted. After a moment, she amended, almost remorsefully, "However, it is true that the Draconian's personal desires could be described as such, if the Glacian were to employ the Knight's crude, mortal terms."
Turning to Prompto, she continued, "The little Knight is correct in his supposition that other paths existed for the King. But the Great One could only be satiated in the manner that has already been observed. The Glacian was not in favor of such an approach. Nor was the Fulgarian. But the deaths of the True King, and the sacrifices offered by his foremothers and fathers in imparting their power to the crystal—along with the sustenance they provided the Draconian in doing so—these were all that kept the Great One from simply dispensing with humanity from the beginning."
"What do you mean, 'deaths?'"
Ignis spoke quietly from beside him, and Prompto took an involuntary step away, startled. A clear and present promise of violence simmered just beneath his friend's words—a tone Prompto had heard him use only a handful of times in the many years they'd known each other.
"You said, 'deaths of the True King,'" Ignis continued, still in that same calm, deadly voice. "Not 'death.' You will explain, please."
Gentiana visibly bristled at his tone, even as she seemed slightly confused. "The Knights know not of his time in Reflection?" she asked.
At their abiding stares, she almost sighed—a startlingly human act. "The Great One required the True King to prepare for his final sacrifice with many self-inflicted deaths beforehand, all on behalf of his people," she said. "The Glacian did not approve of inducing such torment on a mortal. But the Draconian would not be satisfied otherwise."
Prompto gaped at her in horror. He didn't know what she meant. He couldn't, because he was keeping that door firmly shut—the one that locked out all the vileness and savagery and monstrosities that the world had to offer—leaning into it with all his strength.
"You mean…to tell me," Ignis bit out, seeming hardly able to draw enough breath through his rage, "that that…brute, that sadist…forced Noct to practice killing himself?"
"Yes," Gentiana replied pragmatically, as if now that the truth was understood there was no need to continue to dwell on past misfortunes.
Noting their apparent unwillingness to do the same, she attempted to clarify, helpfully, "With each of the King's deaths, the Draconian bestowed upon him another particle of the crystal's power. And with each of the King's deaths, the Draconian was fed, himself."
It was too much. To think that all those years Noct had told them he'd been sleeping, he had, in fact, been tortured at the hand of a god. Threatened with the weight of humanity's destruction if he didn't comply. Keeping them all safe by giving everything he had of himself. Bahamut sprinkling bits of the crystal's power in the dust at his feet, as if in reward…and to what end? So that Noct could die again, one more time, the last scraps of his soul dragged off to feed a ruthless, bloodthirsty immortal for hundreds of years?
Prompto thought of the window, back at Claustra's estate. He thought of Noct readily throwing himself through it, almost offhandedly even, taking Prompto's attacker out with him. He remembered the Red Giants in the forest—the look on Noct's face as he greeted death with literally open arms, like it was an old friend.
It was all starting to make a depraved, ghastly sort of sense.
Prompto found himself falling back against the icy chamber's wall, heedless of the chill. He was lightheaded, his breath hitching in his chest. Nausea churned in his stomach. He leaned the side of his face into the ice, praying it would somehow numb his ability to think.
Ignis was shouting. "So now Bahamut is sending you lot out to find him, so that he can drag Noct back to his realm to finish feeding on him. Do you not find issue with that? You all agreed that the terms and conditions of the prophecy had been met! Yet the Draconian tosses away thousands of years of doctrine as if it means nothing. And you're allowing such a farce to proceed?"
The corners of Gentiana's mouth turned down. "It is not for the gods to defy the will of the Great One."
"Is it not?" Ignis seethed. "Well, we don't know where Noct is. You can thank Leviathan for that. I suppose that's Ramuh outside; you can tell him the same. And know this: we will never return him to you. You or that monster you bow to. Not while we still live. Is that understood, Divine One?"
For a moment, Prompto was sure she would turn them into ice sculptures. Instead, she inclined her head and closed her eyes, preparing to turn away.
Just as her form began to shimmer out of sight, though, she paused, cracking her lids back open.
"The Oracle," Gentiana said. Her tone was chilly, but also strangely hesitant, melting along the edges. "She is well. This, she would have the King know."
She reached out, briefly running a finger along each of their hands. Prompto felt the pain and exhaustion of two days' worth of wounds evaporate; by the way Ignis was looking down at his arm, his injury must have closed as well.
Then, the icy walls dissolved into floating motes of frost. The rain cut off abruptly, the last of it pattering noisily to the ground like dishwater tossed from a window. Afternoon sunshine broke through the clouds, the heavy black thunderheads dissipating into the atmosphere.
The gods were gone.
Prompto started forward, woodenly. He plodded across the soaked, steaming hills, one foot falling in front of the other in a stiff, spiritless stride. After a time, he simply came to a stop, his eyes resting on the horizon in a dead stare.
"I hate this so much," he said, hoarsely.
"I know," Ignis replied. Halting beside him, he pulled Prompto against his side in a loose, one-armed embrace.
And then they continued on. It wasn't like they had any other choice, after all.
xxx
Eventually, as the evening sunlight lay low and orange over the hills, Prompto began to feel slightly more human, if not necessarily better. His brain still had a lot of slogging to do on the matter of what was now, unquestionably, his severely traumatized best friend; but in the meantime, he was setting it to work figuring out how they could hide him from the gods. Measurable action always improved Prompto's mood, and the urgency to find Noct before a bunch of sadistic immortals did added a bit of a spring to his step.
Ignis strode quietly along beside him, lost in his own dark thoughts. Prompto could tell by the way the small line between his eyebrows had grown deeper every time he glanced his way.
"How 'bout that Shiva-brand potion, eh, Iggy?" Prompto said, trying to crack his friend's black mood. "If only she'd thought to leave us with a pizza, too. To be honest, I thought for sure she was going to turn us into popsicles; definitely didn't expect the little pick-me-up there at the end. Though if that's her idea of an apology, she's got another thing coming."
"Yes, she does," Ignis muttered tersely, splashing through a rain-filled pothole without sparing it a second glance. "As do they all."
Definitely still seeing red, then. Prompto reached out to hook his hand around Ignis' elbow.
"Hey," he said softly. "At least we know they haven't got him. Sounds like he and Gladio escaped before Leviathan had a chance to flatten them with her fish breath. Which means they're probably just lying low with the Regalia somewhere until all the fuss dies down."
"Perhaps," Ignis replied, shortly.
Prompto sighed, dropping his hand. "Iggy, what're we gonna do? I don't even fully understand what Noct went through, but he's got to be seriously screwed up by it. I…I wouldn't even know where to start…" He trailed off, his sense of helplessness so profound that he couldn't even figure out how to finish his thought.
"What we will do is be there for him," Ignis said, "hopefully in as unlike a manner to these past ten years as possible."
"Hey…Ignis…" Prompto faltered.
His friend slowed, then came to a full stop. He glared a hole into the darkening hills, his fists clenching spasmodically at his sides.
"How could we have let this happen?" he snarled. "How could I? I, who was privy to visions of the future—who saw exactly what was coming—"
"Hey," Prompto snapped, startling himself with his own vehemence. "Are you a god? No, and let's thank our lucky friggin' stars for that. You're a human, and so am I, and we can't know or understand or prepare for everything. The colossal upside to it all is that we can love, unlike those single-minded lumps of killjoy our ancestors for some reason decided to up and deify. And we love Noct. And that's a truth that won't change, whether we're humanly failing or humanly succeeding."
Prompto reached out to grip Ignis' arm, forcing him to take notice. "So all we can do is keep loving, and keep aiming to be there for him and for each other, even if we don't always hit the mark. And also, never let the gods touch him again," he added, almost as an afterthought.
Ignis glanced at him out of the corner of his eye. His expression didn't change, but his fists relaxed, the fingers loosening to hang at his sides.
Eventually, he took a deep breath, releasing it slowly. "Wisdom from the rough, once again. Prompto, what would I do without you?"
"Whatevs, you only like me 'cuz I help clean up," Prompto sniffed, dropping his arm. "You would've murdered Noct and Gladio a thousand times over by now for obliviously leaving you with the dishes every night. And then Cor would've gutted you for regicide, and none of us would have made it to Altissia, and Ardyn would've cried 'cuz his favorite revenge was ruined, and then I'd be the only one left to save the world, which nobody wants. So hey, look at that, I guess I am a hero after all!"
Ignis' mouth twitched. "Indeed," was all he said.
"And on that note, there goes the sun," Prompto said, turning his eyes westward toward the last of the day's afterglow. "Y'know what would be great is if the daemons took a night off. Just one. One night! For once. Oh look at that, here they are. Hey, Ignis, 'Accidentally Summon Evil' still works."
A Red Giant boiled from the ground, snorting animalistically as it prepared its attack. Sighing loudly in annoyance, Prompto flicked Death Penalty's safety off and began picking at the weak points on its neck, underarms, and eyes, just as he'd done about half a million times before. Ignis flipped his daggers from his belt, wearily preparing his body for yet another night of acrobatics on suboptimal levels of food and sleep.
A low droning noise approached from the west, a dark, blocky shadow obscuring the slightly brighter shades of dusk. Grinding to a midair halt, its cargo door whined open. Prompto muttered beneath his breath as he reloaded his weapon. Niffs were just exactly what he needed after a day of sleeping on mice-infested floors and eating nothing and wearing somebody else's manky old footwear and telling the gods to go to hell and discovering his best friend was essentially a brutalized prisoner of war—
A figure in black and silver streaked down from the sky, its spear punching though the spot where the Giant's armor pulled away from its neck, just enough for a well-placed polearm. The daemon dissolved in silence, evaporating into the darkness as if it had never been.
"Well if it isn't my favorite marks," Aranea said, smirking as she flipped open her visor. "You boys need a hand?"
xxx
A/N: Araneaaaaaaaa!
P.S. For those of you who are here mainly for the shenanigans, I'm just gonna apologize right now: there's a lot between here and the eventual end that's pretty heavy in the angst department.
Considering the premise of this fic, though, that probably shouldn't be shocking to anyone.