FFXV fanfic: You're Lucky You Made It (Chapter Three)

[shaicarus]

 

Fandom:  Final Fantasy XV
Characters:  Prompto Argentum. Lunafreya Nox Fleuret. Ravus Nox Fleuret. Pryna. Umbra. A couple OCs.
Chapter Rating:  PG, for the moment. 
Warnings: Pretty hardcore bullying of a fifteen-year-old child. Brief allusions to a bombing and an attack on the city.
Word count so far: 9469
Notes:  If you have issues with bullying, maybe skip this chapter, or at least jump all the way down to the last section.
Chapter title from Defying Gravity from the Wicked soundtrack
Shilling: ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED? If not...well, sorry. But if you are, I have a Ko-fi. I'm broke and appreciate every cup.

Previously: Prologue. Chapter One. Chapter Two.

 

CHAPTER THREE: Something has changed within me

Prompto woke up to the sound of the emergency bells ringing. He hurled himself out of bed, still half-asleep and stumbling into jeans and sneakers and a sweatshirt with the lights off and his eyes half-closed before he stumbled into his parents’ room. His cell phone rang and he yanked it from his pocket, answering it with a muddled, “H'lo?”

“Oh, thank gods,” his dad sighed on the other line. “You and your mom are alright?”

“’m wakin’ her up now,” he mumbled. “Shelter’s just down the street?”

“Yours is,” his dad confirmed.

“What about yours?” Prompto asked.

“There’s one under the office. I'll…see you when I see you. Keep an eye on your mom.”

“Got it, Papa.” Prompto hung up before his voice could start doing that obnoxious shivery thing and shoved his phone back into his pocket.

“Mama!” He landed on the bed on his knees and started shaking her shoulders.

She woke with a start. “What? What is it? What’s–” Her voice died and her face went pale as she realized what the noise in the background was. She scrambled quickly out of bed and into a pair of shoes.

They hurried out the front door, where the rest of their neighbors were making their way down the street, ushered along and kept in some semblance of order by a police officer, while the sounds of the sirens gradually became background noise. Prompto stood rooted to the spot on the sidewalk outside the house.

Something exploded in the distance, the ground rattling beneath their feet. Prompto stared as smoke began to rise in the direction of the palace. The officer grabbed his shoulder and ushered him forward.

*

Everything in the shelter passed in a blur of people crying, news reports delivered briefly and abruptly by the officer, and the head of the neighborhood watch urging them to stay calm.

A day and a half later, as Prompto staged elaborate photos with his phone to keep his neighbors’ kids distracted, the shelter’s door opened and an officer stepped inside.

The danger had passed. Some parts of the city were worse off than others, but the Niffs had been repelled. Prompto and his mother met his father at the house, and they cried and babbled at each other as if it had been weeks.

Their power was out and most of the windows on the street were broken, but all things considered, their neighborhood faired well. Soon enough they got a radio working, and the prince’s voice crackled slightly as Prompto’s dad adjusted the antenna.

“–and though the queen’s passing pains us all, we remain unshaken. Despite Niflheim’s best efforts, Tenebrae remains its own and we shall not be toppled.”

The queen was dead.

Prompto was out the door and running for the palace in a heartbeat, his parents shouting after him.

*

Umbra met him at the gate. Or, at least, where the gate had been. Mangled metal hung from the hinges, and smoke still drifted lethargically skywards. Prompto put it out of his mind as best he could and laid a hand on the dog’s head, and a moment later he found himself in the field. Pryna lifted her head from Luna’s lap, but Luna’s gaze remained locked on the trident in front of her.

“I am the Oracle,” she observed eventually, her voice far away and even.

Slowly, Prompto knelt beside her and cautiously hooked an arm around her shoulders. She was stiff at first, but after a moment she turned to hide against his shoulder, her arms tightening around him like a vice. Her shoulders trembled, but she was silent.

*

It was getting dark, but Luna had passed out on his lap and Prompto couldn’t bring himself to wake her up just yet.

Startled, he looked up at the sound of boots in the grass, and he stared upwards at the pri–the king.

“Your–” He cut himself off, unsure of whether he was supposed to say Your Highness or Your Majesty.

Ravus lifted a hand, waving the matter off. “'Sir’ will suffice.” But he hardly seemed to be paying any attention to Prompto, his attention instead focused on Luna. “She’s holding up well enough?”

“Well enough, I guess, Sir,” Prompto mumbled in reply, looking fixedly at the ground between Ravus’s boots. He darted a glance upwards in time to see Ravus nod before he dropped to a knee. Prompto snatched his hands back as Ravus picked Luna up and straightened back to his full height. He adjusted her against his shoulder and ignored the trident for the moment.

“Umbra will see you home,” he reported, before he turned and began to walk away.

Prompto stared after him, until Umbra stared into his eyes and nudged at his cheek.

*

Two days later, Prompto stared at the newspaper, clenched in a white knuckled grip that wrinkled the pages.

MAGITEK SOLDIER UNMASKED

There was a picture beneath the headline, of a Magitek infantryman with its face plate torn off, to reveal a surprisingly human face beneath. A face that looked remarkably like Prompto’s, albeit a few years older and minus the freckles.

Slowly, very methodically, he crumpled the paper up into a ball and hurled it into the trashcan with enough force that the can nearly toppled over. Pryna jumped, abandoning her mostly empty bowl to instead sniff cautiously at the trashcan.

His parents were both working, and he was glad. He knew they would see the news eventually, but he didn’t want to talk about it just then.

He stomped back to his room and threw himself face down onto his bed, smashing his face into his pillow. The mattress creaked a moment later as Pryna hopped up beside him. Stubbornly, she grabbed the edge of his shirt in her teeth and began tugging at it, bouncing backwards towards the edge of the mattress until with a groan Prompto sat back up.

Pryna barked at him and delicately lifted a paw to smack his knee until he reluctantly got dressed to go running.

*

Luna wasn’t waiting for him when he got to the palace gate (an actual gate, replacing the old, destroyed one). Quietly, he let Pryna through and loped back home.

*

She still wasn’t there after his afternoon run.

*

“I’m sure no one will even notice,” his dad assured him that night, though his smile was tight and he didn’t look convinced.

*

A week and a half after the attack, school was back in session. Just like always, Pryna met him in the morning, and he got to the school early enough to take a quick shower and get dressed in the locker room.

People stared at him in homeroom. No one said anything, but Prompto could practically see the gears turning in their heads. He could see them putting the pieces together.

*

On Tuesday, he found the picture from the newspaper taped to his locker at lunch time. He tore it into confetti and tossed it into the trash.

*

Gradually, his friends stopped talking to him. Worse than that, they started talking about him. He heard them, a few times, wondering what he could’ve been trying to get from them, wondering why a Niff was spying on them.

He didn’t bother trying to correct them. What good would it have done him?

*

He attended Luna’s Ascension Ceremony, where she officially took up the role as the Oracle.

She looked beautiful.

She looked terrified.

Prompto met her afterwards, slipping into the palace while Ravus very conveniently needed the attention of the guard who might have stopped him. He found her in a sitting room, halfway out of her ceremonial regalia and slightly tangled as she tried to undress and gape at the trident that was suddenly hers simultaneously.

He slipped behind her and began unlacing the back of her dress, as Pryna and Umbra paced in circles around them.

“Holding up?” he asked eventually, as the bulk of her dress dropped to the floor. Impeccably clean, as always; there was no need to worry about the gown getting dirty.

She nodded tightly, her hands flexing open and closed at her sides. Dressed in just a small white slip and her stockings, with her hair falling loose from its trappings around her face, he could believe she was the Oracle.

*

Prompto stepped out of the shower in the locker room and tugged his uniform on halfheartedly, though his movements picked up more urgency when he heard scuffling in the locker room. Jacket still clutched in one hand, shoes draped over his neck by their laces, he loped out.

“What the hell are you doing?” he demanded, rounding the lockers. The two other boys froze like mesmenirs in a floodlight, up to their elbows in his backpack.

Prompto surged forward a step, and both of them fled as if he had pulled a knife on them.

*

He switched back to carrying his digital camera with him after that. Better something happen to that one, rather than the one Luna gave him.

*

He attended Ravus’s coronation. It was a somber affair, and Ravus spent much of the proceedings looking as if he were being slowly gutted and flayed open for the audience.

Prompto wanted to say something to comfort his prince–his king, but he couldn’t think of anything that wouldn’t sound trite or stupid, and he kept to himself in the end.

*

Prompto heard them whispering urgently, just after practice. He hushed Pryna as she tugged at the bottom of his shorts, and he pressed his back to the side of the bleachers and listened.

“We can’t let him run in the meet tomorrow,” Laurel, the team captain, insisted.

“He’s the best one on the team,” Ginosa reminded her, his tone impatient. “We’d be shooting ourselves in the foot.”

“But what if he’s been cheating somehow this whole time?” Laurel demanded, and though Prompto couldn’t see them, he could hear her stomp her foot into the gravel. “He’s not, like…an actual person, so who knows what he can do? He could get the entire team disqualified.”

“You’re being a little harsh,” Ginosa pointed out, but he didn’t actually argue.

Prompto didn’t stay to listen to anything else after that. He stopped by the school office and withdrew from the track team, citing family reasons that would make it inconvenient to continue with a smile.

Luna met him at the gate that afternoon, and though she tried to ask him what was wrong, he pasted a grin into place and laughed it off.

She had enough on her plate.

*

For two days, not much happened. And then…well, it was stupid, really.

They were dissecting rats in biology, and Prompto pulled his plastic gloves on over top of his standard fingerless gloves.

The teacher rolled her eyes. “Mr. Argentum, I think you can be parted from your aesthetic for a class period.”

He swallowed, fingers clenching around the edge of the work table. “They aren’t gonna get in the way,” he tried, but the teacher seemed unmoved by the assurance.

“Honestly, Prompto–”

Cutting the teacher off, a high, hurried voice rose from the back of the room, spitting out in a rush, “He has a barcode on his wrist.”

A hush fell over the classroom, and Prompto stared down at his hands, eyes wide and face pale. Slowly, he peeled his plastic gloves off and set them on the work table.

“I need to go to the nurse’s office,” he informed the teacher faintly, before he made his way towards the classroom door at a stiff, mechanical pace, all eyes on his back as he walked. The teacher didn’t stop him.

half off

half off

half off

It echoed with each footstep.

*

There was an art room that was rarely used, and it was in there that Prompto hid for the rest of the day, until the final bell rang and he went to get changed.

Four of his classmates met him outside the locker room, two boys and two girls.

“Lemme see,” one of the boys demanded. “Your arm.”

“What–no.” Prompto ducked past them, shoulders hunched as he spat, “Fuck off.”

Fingers wrapped around his elbow, and without thinking, he slammed it back. There was a grunt as it met ribs, and he wrenched his arm free and did what he did best; he ran. He could hear footsteps behind him, but as he careened through the hallways towards the main doors, he knew he was faster.

He didn’t slow until he was shoving the main door open and stepping out into the school yard. He also didn’t realize one of his pursuers had taken the side door and cut around until she body checked him into the grass and sat on his chest. It was easy for the other three to catch up after that.

One of the boys pinned his knees as he kicked, and the last two grabbed his arms and began pulling his gloves off as he squirmed. He could hear a few of the worn out seams give under the abuse.

“I found it!” one of the girls shouted, holding the offending wrist aloft, showing off the codeprint.

“What the hell?” one of the boys snapped. “What are you?”

“You’ve known me since we were six!” Prompto snapped, hating the way his voice wobbled and his vision blurred.

“I didn’t know this.” The pressure around his wrist increased.

A dog was barking in the distance, rapidly getting closer. Prompto craned his neck, tipping his head back to watch Pryna bound closer, but in that moment, she was not his Pretty Girl. Her teeth were bared in savage outrage, her ears were flattened back against her head, and her hackles stood on end from the base of her skull to the base of her tail. She seemed to fill the entire school yard and each bark sounded as if it had been ripped from the heavens, as if there were something dark and eldritch lurking beneath her pristine coat.

The group pinning Prompto paled and scrambled away as Pryna got closer, and as she stood over him defensively and snarled, they scattered.

Pryna calmed in increments as she watched them flee, until she looked down at Prompto, her tail giving a slow, hesitant wag.

“Hey, Pretty Girl,” he breathed quietly, and he sat up just enough to throw his arms around her, pull her tight to his chest, and bury his face in her neck.

When he refused to move beyond that, no matter how she prodded at him or licked his hair, she threw her head back and howled. He didn’t even bother to cover his ears.

At the sound of approaching paws, though, Prompto looked up into Umbra’s eyes. Wordlessly, he hooked an arm around Umbra and reeled him in.

His ears popped, and suddenly all three of them were elsewhere, sitting on an immaculate white rug.

“…Prompto?”

With a jerk, he looked up at Luna, blinking slowly as he realized Umbra had just dumped him in the middle of her bedroom, before he clamped his eyes shut. The tears squeezed past anyway, dripping silently down his face.

She knelt in front of him as Pryna and Umbra moved out of the way, and mutely, he brandished his wrist at her. “They took my gloves,” he managed, his voice quiet and unsteady.

Luna opened her arms, and Prompto flung himself at her, words pouring out in fits and starts as he explained everything that had happened since the attack. Afterwards, as he leaned back to arm’s length so he could look at the clock, Luna looked thoughtful, as if her thoughts were lightyears away.

“My mom’s gonna be worried,” Prompto mumbled, looking from the clock to the window.

“Would you like Umbra to bring you home?” Luna asked, as the dog in question butted his head between them.

Slowly, Prompto shook his head. He felt…worn out and drained, but at the same time, everything vibrated. He needed to run.

Luna paused, and for a moment it looked like she would object. Then she simply sighed and reached back, pulling the long, white ribbon from her hair. Wordlessly, she wrapped it around Prompto’s wrist and tied it in place.

“Be careful,” she cautioned him, tipping his chin up with two fingers so he was looking at her.

He nodded dumbly, and when he left, it was with both dogs escorting him.

*

It was two in the morning and Prompto woke up with a jolt when he fell out of bed, thrashing and kicking, one arm cradled close to his chest. Hyperventilating, he stayed right there on the rug, legs tangled in his blanket.

His bedroom door opened and his dad peered in, rumpled and sleep-mussed. He stared for a moment at the pile of Prompto on the floor. “…Okay?”

“Yeah,” Prompto sighed, sitting up on his elbows. “Papa–?” He paused, glancing away. When his dad made an inquisitive noise, Prompto mumbled, “I don’t wanna go to school tomorrow.”

For a moment, it looked as if his dad was going to argue, but then he simply looked at Prompto for a long moment, before he dragged his hand over his hair and heaved a slow sigh. “Alright,” he agreed quietly. “I’ll let your mom know.”

Prompto offered him a fragile smile and a quiet, “Thanks, Papa.”

*

He went running like normal in the morning, though he turned around and went home once he got to the palace gate. And come the afternoon, he made his way to the school with some reluctance. Rather than get too close, he whistled for Pryna from across the street.

Luna met him at the gate, and he sheepishly admitted, “I’m kinda playing hooky today. Just…couldn’t do two days of it in a row.”

Luna informed him, a bit cryptically, “I have a surprise for you. It…might make things better.” She didn’t elaborate beyond that, and soon enough he was on his way home once again.

*

That evening, a car pulled up outside his house. Prompto watched it through his bedroom window as it pulled to a halt on the street and the driver, dressed elegantly in white, climbed out and let the passengers in the backseat out. Prompto cocked his head to one side, eyebrows furrowing together in bewilderment when Luna and Ravus climbed out of the car.

By the time they were knocking on the front door, Prompto was already standing in the living room. His mom opened the door, and both she and his father stared like a pair of startled deer, before they remembered to bow, his father offering an anxious, “Your Majesty. Your Grace. It’s an honor.”

Ravus motioned impatiently for them to stand up and got straight to the point.

“We’ve come to speak with you about your son.”

Immediately, his father’s arm was around him protectively, and his mother was hurriedly babbling, “Whatever anyone has been saying about him, Your Majesty, it isn’t true, we swear it, Prompto’s a good boy, he would never hurt anyone–”

She fell silent abruptly as Ravus held up a hand. “That is not why we’re here, Mrs. Argentum.”

“We’ve come,” Luna added, “to offer him a job.”