Good evening, and welcome to the longest chapter yet. It's day 10 which means two things:
1. We're 1/3 done babey!
2. I've run out of pre-written things so now it's crunch time. I've already partially written days 11-15 (only two of them in their entirety, the rest in various states of progress) but I'm still somewhat anxious about not having them just ready to go anymore. Wish me luck for the rest of October, lol.

For this one, I only chose one prompt to be represented in the title because I didn't want a slash in the title (the quotation marks from the days for which I chose the quote prompt are already on thin fucking ice, I do NOT like the aesthetics of that) but it's actually two prompts combined into one. I'll list them below as always.

Repeating myself here but I'm thrilled to have you here, reading my stuff and enjoying it enough to come back the next day. Much love to all of you! Oh, and I do plan on replying to y'all's super kind reviews eventually, just bear with me please!

Prompts:

No. 10: "Can't you see that you're lost without me?"
Broken Phone | Stranded | "You said you'd never leave."

Warnings: None

No matter how one feels about working with other people, in the Darkness, it's no longer optional. It's rule number one at the hunters' headquarters - no hunting alone.

Ignis, while stubborn and confident in his own abilities, isn't actually stupid enough to question that rule, even though Gladio seems to think otherwise. No, he wouldn't dare venture out alone, blind or not, but finding other hunters willing to take the perceived risk and bring him along turns out to be a bigger challenge than anticipated.

It irks him, that he has to prove himself over and over again while even Iris, not even fully grown yet, regularly joins groups of hunters and people have long stopped even batting an eye at that. What irks him even more is that he cannot even truly blame them for being hesitant about him tagging along - sometimes he himself can hardly believe how far he's come since stumbling around the waterlogged mine in Cartanica.

Still, it means that he has to take what he can get, and so when he hears of a group of hunters heading out to reclaim a fallen outpost, he jumps at the chance.

From the very start, Ignis doesn't like them. He's disgusted with their leader's arrogant attitude, and the others seem like spineless cowards unable to think for themselves. Looking back, he definitely should've known better, but they agree to take him along and he's itching to get out and be useful, so he doesn't question them nearly as much as he should.

Hindsight and all.

As it turns out, his assessment of the group as spineless cowards was more than accurate and paired with a leader who is too full of himself, it's a perfect recipe for disaster. Once it becomes clear that things are going irreparably downhill, those fools turn on their heel and flee, leaving Ignis to struggle alone.

It's not like he thinks fleeing is a bad idea - in fact, it is a capital idea and he'd love nothing more than to do the same, but he's been backed into a corner and so his only options are to fight his way out of it or die trying.

He manages to go with the first, preferred option, but only barely, and he doesn't make it very far until he collapses into the dirt and passes out before he can properly process it.

Ignis wakes, and that in itself comes as a surprise, at least once the events that lead to this situation come back to him. He passed out somewhere in the wilderness, in an area that is crawling with daemons, and somehow they haven't eaten him alive. It's almost too lucky, but Ignis isn't going to complain about it.

He has a far more urgent problem, anyway - he has no gods-damned idea where he is.

Stubbornly shoving the panic that threatens to arise within him back down, he drags himself upright and assesses his injuries.

His right wrist hurts something fierce, and he hopes it's just sprained but he wouldn't bet on it - he thinks he feels something shift inside, but perhaps he's just imagining it. Either way, he'll have to resort to one-handed fighting for the time being.

He doesn't think he's actively bleeding anywhere, which is good. He does have cuts and bruises all over his arms and torso, but they all seem to be superficial.

Aside from his wrist, his head hurts the worst, likely the reason why he passed out. Concussion, most likely. He suspects he's only been out for a couple of minutes at most, but it's enough to leave him completely disoriented.

They didn't venture too far from the road, but even though Ignis can still see some light despite his blindness, that is only the case when he's looking directly at it, not from a distance like the street lights would be. If he starts walking now, it's a gamble that'll most likely end with him wandering even further into the darkness.

Hauling himself to his feet with gritted teeth - his body feels like one giant bruise and he wants nothing more than to lie down in a soft bed - he summons his polearm and uses it as a cane. For now, he has to get out of the open, find shelter to try and contact someone for help.

Stumbling around for a while eventually leads him to a little dent in a rock face. Not deep enough to be a cave where daemons might be lurking, but allowing him to nestle into it enough to not be immediately spotted by anything that passes by.

Dismissing the polearm into the Armiger, he takes his phone out instead.

"Call…" he trails off, thinking. Prompto and Gladio are both about equally far away, one in Lestallum, the other in Hammerhead, but they might be able to send someone to find him. Gladio might be out hunting, but Prompto should have returned from a mission just a day or two ago, he'd probably still be in Hammerhead.

"Call Prompto Argentum," he decides, but to his utter horror, his phone doesn't respond to the command at all.

"Call Prompto Argentum," he says again, and then he tries Gladio for good measure, but his phone is dead silent. Drained battery, maybe, or perhaps it broke during the fight, but either way, it means he has no way to contact anyone.

The panic he's shoved down earlier returns, and it's decidedly harder to ignore this time. This… complicates things. His earlier decision still stands - he can't stumble blindly in one direction and hope to find the road on his own, and even if he did, he'd still be stranded miles away from the nearest safe outpost. There is a haven nearby, he knows, but those tend to be either deep in the woods or on open fields and he's sure to get himself killed way before he even gets close to it.

His only real option is to sit and wait and hope those good-for-nothing hunters at least have the decency to send someone after him.

Ignis leans his aching head back against the cool stone and closes his eyes. His body feels beaten and bruised and his wrist is throbbing fiercely - there's no ignoring the fact that it's broken now. Fear is steadily thrumming through him and as time passes, it gets harder and harder to keep himself together and not start panicking.

His concussion seems to be worse than initially suspected because he eventually starts drifting in and out of consciousness, and the fear has a tight grip on his heart now, squeezing tighter and tighter until he feels barely able to breathe.

He… he doesn't want to die here, doesn't want to die alone in the middle of nowhere. The last time he spoke to Prompto was a week ago, and he hasn't heard Gladio's voice in nearly a month. Noct… gods, Ignis wants to be here when Noct comes back, at his side when he reclaims the throne as he has always been.

Salty tears sting the cuts on his face and he sobs, no longer able to keep himself together.

Ignis can't tell how long it's been when he hears footsteps and startles to attention, summoning one dagger to his good hand out of pure reflex.

The footsteps sound human, but that doesn't have to equal safety, so he presses himself closer to the rock and waits in tense silence.

"Hey!" a voice calls. It's not Prompto or Gladio, but it's familiar, even though it takes Ignis a moment to assign a name to it.

"Hey, oh, thank the gods, there you are!" The footsteps come to a halt in front of Ignis' hiding place, and the name snaps into place a second later.

"Dave?"

"Yeah, it's me, think you can stand? C'mon, let's get out of here."

Dave helps him stand, steadying him when getting upright comes with a wave of dizziness that nearly sends him crashing back to the ground.

"How did you find me?" Ignis croaks, only now realising how dry his throat is. Perhaps he's been out here longer than he thought.

Dave snorts but there's no mirth behind it. "Them hunters came back without you, I knew something ain't right. Didn't wanna talk at first but then I got it out of them that they just up and left you here. Couldn't stand for it of course, so I pressed them for details and gathered a search party."

Dave stops them both and lets go of Ignis to unlock his truck, then helps him climb into the passenger seat. There are other people sitting in the back, the aforementioned search party, but Ignis is too tired to try and make out any familiar voices.

"I appreciate it," Ignis says, leaning his head back against the headrest and closing his eyes. He's just so tired, he's vaguely aware that he's trembling and he tastes something wet and salty on his lips.

"'Course, we owe you and yours a lot." Dave waves him off, and then, in a softer tone, "Hey, you want me to call one of your boys?"

Gods, yes.

"Please," he manages, hoping it doesn't come out as desperate as it feels. "My phone isn't working."

"Sure," Dave drawls. "You just rest 'n don't worry about a thing."

Later, he barely remembers the ride, let alone how Dave hauled him to a bed and let him rest, but when he wakes the next time, his wounds are dressed, his broken wrist is splinted and the fingers on his good hands are entangled with someone else's.

"Iggy?" Prompto asks when Ignis stirs, sleepy and disoriented but unmistakably Prompto. "Iggy, you're awake, how do you feel?"

Embarrassingly, for the third time in an entirely too short time, Ignis burst into tears, but this time, Prompto wraps him up in a gentle embrace and makes reassuring noises at him, and Ignis finally feels safe.

I like making Iggy cry.

Okay so hear me out *pulls out powerpoint presentation* idk how common knowledge this is (I mean it's on the Episode Ignis wiki page), but in Episode Ignis, if you're bad enough in the Verse 2 fight against Ardyn and get Iggy killed, what he says vastly differs depending on the localisation/language. In Japanese, he just says "I don't want to die", and in English, he says "I don't want to die without him", him being Noct. But the first time ever that I played it, I played with Japanese audio and German subtitles, and the German version is my fave and burnt into my brain ever since because Ignis says "I don't want to die alone" and that just breaks my fucking heart. So ever since I've been headcanoning dying alone as one of Iggy's greatest fears and I really wanted to incorporate that in a fic someday ;_;

Anyway, tomorrow it's Noct's turn again and, spoiler, I've spent entirely too much time researching bear traps :)

Have a nice day, see you tomorrow!