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

[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: Brief mentions of invasion
Word count so far: 17,207
Notes:  Welp, I’m all caught up on this one now. Now the only issue is that I haven’t actually updated this fic in like a year? Yeeeaaaaah. I mean, I don’t wanna call it dead, since I still poke at it every now and then. It’s just…taking a while. *cough*
Chapter title from Song of the Sea, from...Song of the Sea.
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. Chapter Four.

 

CHAPTER FIVE: The Wind Is On the Rise

During an average day, Prompto’s job brought him in contact with numerous other staff members. Whether it was for work, as was the case with guards and other aids and assistants, or simply saying hello to the cleaning and cooking staff in passing. None of that was out of the ordinary.

What was out of the ordinary was when other staff members actively sought him out.

Prompto had paused in the hall, turning scarlet up to his hairline as a guard wondered if he was old enough for any mischief before sighing lamentably when Prompto pointed out that he was only seventeen. As Prompto turned to go, though, he ground to a halt again when he nearly walked right into Amity. She was one of Luna’s ladies maids, and rarely seen on her own. She was fretful and fidgeting, and she already had a grip on Prompto’s wrist.

“Mr. Argentum—one of His Majesty’s couriers. A few of us noticed we didn’t recognize him, but we lost track of him and none of us are allowed in His Majesty’s office.”

Prompto hardly let her finish before he was moving, sparing only a glance over his shoulder to see the guard bolt down the hall, before he turned and broke into a sprint.

The run to Ravus’s office had never seemed longer. He didn’t bother knocking, instead simply throwing the door open and stumbling inside as he tripped to a halt. There was a courier inside, though Prompto didn’t recognize his face.

Ravus looked up sharply, impatience painting itself across his features at the abrupt intrusion. His lips parted around an admonishment, but his gaze was drawn to the courier instead.

“Who—?”

“Your Majesty—“

Prompto drew in a strangled breath as the man in the courier’s uniform withdrew a gun from within his jacket.

The office itself seemed to be holding its breath for just a split second, and then everything happened all at once.

Prompto lunged and crashed into the assassin’s side, as Ravus reached for the knife in his desk and the assassin’s finger squeezed the trigger.

The gun jerked sideways with Prompto’s impact and the bullet ripped through Ravus’s shoulder rather than his chest, spraying blood over the back of the chair and the wall behind it. Prompto and the assassin landed in a heap on the rug, and Ravus lifted his knife and hurled it. The assassin’s arm spasmed as the blade sank into it, and the gun landed on the floor with a muffled thump, sitting there just long enough for Prompto to snatch it up, his hands shaking as he turned it on the assassin.

Placidly, the assassin regarded him…and then the front of his skull exploded from the inside. Prompto yelped and flinched away, blood and brain matter painting itself across the side of his face, and the assassin’s body crumpled.

Slowly, Ravus sagged back in his chair, one arm hanging limply over the side of it. “You can put it down now, Prompto,” he stated faintly.

The gun tumbled nervelessly from Prompto’s hands and he jerked back to the present as it hit the floor, and he darted to Ravus’s side. It felt as if hours had passed by the time the guards spilled into the room with Luna rushing at their heels. A glance at the clock as Prompto was led from the room showed that it had only been a few minutes.

*

Prompto sank down to the floor of the shower, hands tucked behind his knees so he would stop scrubbing before he started ripping the skin from his face.

The water was cold by the time he managed to pick himself up off of the floor.

*

“Mama—Mama, I’m not automatically involved every time there’s a dust up,” Prompto soothed, holding the phone in a white-knuckled grip with both hands. “I promise, I was nowhere near it when it all went down.”

Luna’s eyebrows rose and her expression turned faintly incredulous. Prompto lifted a finger to his lips, silently shushing her, and she held both hands up in a pacifying gesture.

It was a very long conversation before his mother was ready to hang up the phone.

*

“—some sort of internal explosive, probably activated with a false tooth.”

Prompto listened silently from around the corner as the coroner filled Luna in.

“And while there were…limited remains to examine, Your Grace, we found evidence of reconstructive surgery. We suspect our would-be assassin was a remodeled magitek trooper.”

Luna nodded slowly. “You have my thanks,” she offered, slightly belatedly. “Keep me apprised of anything else.”

“Of course, Your Grace.”

The coroner bowed at the waist and made his exit at the clear dismissal.

Prompto slowly made his way out of his lurking spot. Luna didn’t seem surprised when he came to a halt at her side.

“How’s His Majesty?” Prompto wondered, trying for mild and instead simply sounding sort of constipated.

“Well enough,” Luna sighed. “His physician is refusing to let him him leave the medical wing until she knows there won’t be any complications.” She smiled faintly. “So of course he’s driving the entire medical staff to distraction.”

Prompto snorted out a laugh, masking it as a cough behind one hand. “Sounds like he’ll be right as rain in no time, then.”

*

Prompto lurked in the hallway, hardly even daring to peer into the room Ravus was sitting in. The king’s shoulder and arm were swathed in bandages and Luna was fretting at him quietly from his bedside. Prompto couldn’t quite hear what they were saying, though from the look on Ravus’s face, he seemed to consider the entire to-do with the doctors and staying in the medical wing overnight to be a bit much. As if he had not been shot straight through the shoulder in a botched assassination attempt.

Or rather, Prompto couldn’t hear them until Ravus pitched his voice louder to say, “And do let Prompto know that all is well.”

With a noise that he would stridently deny was a squeak, Prompto fled.

*

The bullet had gone through and through. That much was true enough. But the gunshot wound had turned black by morning, and the king was nearly delirious with pain. Poison of some sort, slow acting and painful. A contingency plan.

Despite countless tests, no one knew what it was. “Our best guess is that it was custom tailored in a Niflheim lab,” Ravus’s doctor explained. “We’re doing all we can, but we’re keeping him asleep in the meantime. Considering the pain, it would be needlessly cruel otherwise, and you and I both know that pain or not, getting him to sit still would be a hopeless cause, and we don’t need him speeding its course.”

Luna listened quietly, her expression distant and drawn. She excused the doctor with a motion of her hand before looking over her shoulder at Prompto.

“…Orders, Your Highness?” he asked quietly.

For just a second, Luna looked so tired. But she sighed slowly, and her expression steeled.

“No one outside the palace can know.”

*

“This guy always rambles until the last two paragraphs,” Prompto groused, sorting through his usual allotment of the king’s paperwork. “Is there a word quota for this stuff or something?”

*

Slowly, the veins surrounding the wound began to turn black, spreading gradually down Ravus arm and towards his chest. Slowly, the skin around the wound paled before turning a mottled green-grey.

The king continued to sleep.

*

“Ignore him,” Luna sighed, shoving an envelope aside. “Let him stew in silence for a few weeks and he’ll panic and become much more cooperative. He always does.”

Steadily, Ravus’s work got done.

*

Prompto peered into Luna’s room and found her in the fort, staring out the window as she traced a finger over the flower on the notebook in her lap with slow, aimless motions.

Prompto rapped his knuckles against the doorframe and Luna looked up slowly, as if she were emerging from a trance, pulling the book closer to her chest.

She was quiet as Umbra hopped down from the bed and trotted over. Daintily, he took the notebook in his teeth and meandered out of the room.

Finally, Luna stated quietly, “Ravus is in surgery. I authorized it this afternoon.” Her eyes were damp, but her voice was steady. Resigned. “He’s going to be so angry with me.”

Prompto knelt on the floor and shuffled into the fort, until his shoulder was pressed to hers. Luna took his hand, lacing their fingers together and squeezing.

*

When the king awoke, it was to find that his left arm was gone, removed at the shoulder before the infection could spread too far—before it could get to his heart.

Perhaps a cure might have been found eventually, but it wouldn’t have been much of a victory if it only arrived posthumously.

He sat alone for a time as Luna waffled outside the room, until Prompto all but bodily shoved her through the door. Even then, she managed to make her entrance look deliberate.

Prompto peered around the edge of the door as Luna paused within arm’s reach of the hospital bed. The silence seemed to stretch on for an eternity, until at last Luna offered, in a voice that wavered only slightly, “I’m sorry.”

Ravus’s response was possibly the most emphatic eye roll Prompto had ever witnessed, and he seized the nearest thing at hand—a pen on the side table—and whipped it at his sister’s head.

Luna ducked aside to let it pass and clatter to the floor, and in her distraction, Ravus reached out with his remaining hand, catching Luna’s in his own. Luna let herself be drawn closer to the bed as he squeezed her fingers, and Prompto quietly retreated.

*

Time passed, as it was always wont to do. Ravus left the hospital, albeit sooner than his doctor would have recommended. And Prompto did his job, just as he always did. But not everything returned to normal.

Ravus had always been left handed, and Prompto found himself adopting the role of scribe as the king learned how to write with his right hand in a way that could passably be called legible.

And he would stumble every so often, overcompensating when he found himself several pounds lighter on one side than he expected to be. Prompto never commented, and he didn’t protest on the spare few occasions when the king caught his balance on Prompto’s shoulder.

Ravus’s fuse…shortened over time. His temper had never been particularly loud before—his irritation or impatience were frequently sharp but quiet—but he grew snappish by larger turns each time someone stared at the way his coat sleeve hung empty at his side, each time his sword tumbled from his off hand no matter how his combat trainer-turned-physical therapist assured him he was improving at a remarkable pace.

Prompto didn’t want to say he was walking on eggshells, but the facts disagreed with him. He didn’t complain, though, even as anxiety ate at his sleep schedule. In light of everything else going on, it seemed like he had so little to complain about.

*

Prompto was roughly half awake, sitting on his couch and contemplating the window blearily when his door opened and Luna breezed in. She took a seat beside him, and then toppled over across his lap. Prompto petted her hair.

“Ravus?” he wondered sleepily.

Luna squealed between her teeth, partially muffled by the couch cushion.

Prompto nodded sagely regardless of the fact that she wasn’t looking at him. “‘Kay. Want some coffee?”

“…That would be lovely.”

*

Prompto dropped a mug one day, spilling tea across the rug in Ravus’s office.

“Do you need a break until you can handle the simplest aspects of your job again?” Ravus groused as Prompto crouched to clean uptake mess.

Prompto flinched and the mug dropped from his fingers once again. He swallowed and mumbled towards the rug, “It won’t happen again, Your Majesty.”

Slowly, Prompto peeked up as Ravus sighed slowly and sagged back in his chair, lifting his hand to rub his forehead as if to stave off a growing headache.

“That was uncalled for,” he acknowledged, and his tone had gentled slightly. Prompto glanced away again.

Ravus straightened up in his seat again as he mused slowly, “I presume, should I grant you permission to inform me of when I’m being a complete shit heel, you would not take the opportunity.”

“Not out loud, Your Majesty,” Prompto confirmed before he could wrestle the words back under control, and he could feel his face heating.

Ravus sighed out something that wasn’t quite a laugh, though it was as close as he had come in a rather long time. “As I suspected.”

Hesitantly, Prompto offered a crooked smile.

*

“Prompto.”

“What’s wrong?” The words left his mouth in a hurry. He could always tell when Lunafreya was speaking to him not as Luna, but as the princess of Tenebrae.

She glanced aside for a brief moment before she cleared her throat and her expression steeled slightly.

“My family has asked a great deal of you,” she acknowledged quietly, “but I’m afraid I need to ask for another favor.”

“Anything you need,” Prompto agreed immediately, and a ghost of a smile slid across Luna’s features for a split second.

“My brother’s personal staff needs to undergo some…temporary pruning,” she explained carefully. “Even considering past losses, many of them have still known him since he was a child or a teenager. They mean well, of course, but it colors how they react to him and this entire situation. He needs—“ She paused for a breath. “…I would appreciate it if someone was at his side throughout the day, but they would have to be someone who could see him struggle and still see their king, rather than the boy they helped raise.”

“Of course,” Prompto agreed, with open bemusement. If that was it, why did she seem so serious?

“It will mean an increase in your duties across the board,” she pointed out. “Including as protection detail.” She settled a meaningful look on him. “You would need to undergo combat training.”

The world seemed to slow down for a moment as Prompto processed those words, as if they were in some foreign language.

Luna’s words picked up speed as she hurried to explain, “It is your decision, of course. No one will order you into it. And you can have all the time you need to consider—“

“I’ll do it.” He didn’t mean to cut her off, but the words were out before he could help it.

But it only made sense, didn’t it? His princess. His king. His friends. One could argue that he had already repaid all that he owed them, but that didn’t seem important.

“I’ll do it,” he repeated, slower and steadier.

“You’re certain?” Luna asked, as if she was still trying so hard not to get her hopes up.

“Positive,” Prompto assured her, and it was like a weight dropped off of her shoulders all at once.

It seemed a bit backwards when she was the one throwing herself into his arms.

*

The trial and error of finding a weapon didn’t last long. The basics of hand-to-hand were easy enough to grasp, if a bit cumbersome at first. He flailed around with a few bladed weapons at first, without much luck. And then his trainer—Ravus’s trainer—put a pair of revolvers into his hands and something clicked.

His aim was impeccable. He told himself it was because of his photography. He got the knack of disassembling and cleaning them in an instant. He told himself it wasn’t so different from a vintage camera. He told himself it wasn’t intrinsic to who he was.

On the whole, it wasn’t too hard to put his worries out of his head. Between weapons training, new duties, and training for that expanded list of duties, he hardly even had time to think.

It wasn’t great for his sleep schedule.

*

“What? Sorry, Mama, I zoned out a little…Oh yeah, everything’s great. Wha—I’m fine, Mama. Yes, really. I promise.”

*

When the king healed enough to be fitted with a prosthetic, Prompto expected it to fix more issues than it really did. It mostly weighed as much as an arm. It was in the same place as an arm. It had the same general look of an arm. But it offered no feedback and its ability to grip things was inconsistent at best. The harness that held the arm to what was left of his shoulder wasn’t the most comfortable, and learning to use it required more visits with a physical therapist than learning how to not have an arm.

Yes, Prompto knew all of Ravus’s complaints by heart. With inflections included.

Even so, its presence seemed to be appreciated, and Prompto remained loyally at his side. ‘Good as new’ hadn’t quite happened yet.

*

Prompto had assumed he was good at reading the room. He had been decent enough at it in school, at least, until…certain events.

He learned otherwise swiftly.

There was an art to learning the difference between someone who was nervous or angry or jumpy because they were planning something, or for unrelated reasons. There was an art to learning when someone was a threat, even when all signs pointed in the other direction.

Prompto was a quick study, and his trainers were a dedicated bunch, using outings with Luna to train him when there was a safety net of her regular retinue at hand. But still, the fear of messing up loomed over his head.

He developed more of a taste for coffee.

*

“What’s that?”

As Prompto asked, Umbra trotted off with the notebook in his mouth and Luna smiled unconsciously.

“When I was young, I met a boy named Noctis,” she answered, her voice distant with fond reminiscence.

The name stirred some sort of recollection in Prompto’s thoughts, though he couldn’t recall what just then.

“He was here with his father,” Luna carried on, turning to face Prompto properly, “to be healed by my mother. They went home, of course, and since then life has pulled us in different directions, but we’ve kept in touch over the years.”

Finally, it clicked.

“Wait—Noctis—the Lucian prince?”

Luna nodded once, and Prompto blinked at her, bemused, before he said, “You’ve never brought him up.”

Luna’s gaze darted to the side and smiled quietly, small and impossibly fond. She picked her words carefully as she explained, “What exists between Noctis and I is…unique.”

“Oh.” Prompto tried not to feel the bubble of jealousy that welled up in his chest, and Luna carried onward.

“I asked for Lucian assistance in identifying a cure for the poison, and it seems one has been synthesized at last.”

“Just a day late and a gil short,” Prompto drawled in reply, and for a moment Luna looked baffled by the ire behind the observation, and Prompto felt his face heating.

Cautiously, Luna added, “I wanted you to hear the good news before half the palace was shouting about it. Ravus will pretend he doesn’t care, of course, but this is good news. No one else must suffer the way he did.”

Prompto nodded stiffly and pasted a smile into place. Luna looked concerned for a moment longer, eyes slightly narrowed and a crease furrowed into her brow, before she set a hand on his shoulder and excused him from the room.

*

“Do you know Noctis?” It was probably dumb to ask, but the words were already out of Prompto’s mouth.

“Prince Noctis,” Ravus corrected disinterestedly, not even bothering to look up from the missive. “I’ve not seen him since he was a young boy, and my correspondences with Lucis have all been with his father. You’ve read some of them.”

“Any idea what he’s like?” Prompto wondered, trying for casual as he cleaned a shelf. He succeeded well enough at the cleaning, but not so much at the ease. “Uh—Noc—Prince Noctis, I mean.”

Finally, Ravus gave up on reading, sighing out an impatient breath through his nose as he looked up. “Luna mentioned him,” he guessed. “And you’re prying.”

Prompto shuffled in place, tapping one foot against the ground and fiddling with one of the items on the shelf. “She never brought him up before,” he mumbled reluctantly.

“You don’t know him, and she would need to catch you up on years of correspondence,” Ravus stated simply. “Stop pouting over something that isn’t a snub.”

Prompto ducked his head back towards his tidying.

*

When it came to carrying on a conversation, Ravus was not ideal.

When it came to speaking to his people, it was another story entirely. Prompto wished he could have listened more closely as the king explained the attempt on his life and his subsequent absence from the public eye, but his attention was caught up in the crowd, eyes peeled and roaming for anything suspicious.

He spotted his parents, briefly. He recognized some of his old classmates. His parents’ neighbors. A few teachers.

And a man in a hood.

The hood itself was nothing unusual; it was raining. All Prompto could see was the bottom half of the man’s face, but something was familiar all the same.

There was security all over the place. Getting a guard’s attention was just a matter of catching the nearest guard’s eye and motioning in the general direction of the suspect. So his concern about things getting out of hand during the speech was minimal. Afterwards, however? That had Prompto concerned.

He couldn’t slow or stop time, though, so inevitably the speech did indeed come to an end. And things seemed to be going well enough at first, at least until Prompto heard an outcry from the crowd, and heavy steps rounding the corner after them.

When the MT came to a halt, he still looked like Prompto. That was probably what the hood was for, Prompto supposed.

Some sort of cogs were definitely turning in the MT’s head as he stared at Prompto’s face, though he came up short when Prompto remained stubbornly in his path as the rest of the guards steadily closed in.

Prompto’s revolver was comfortable in his hand. He focused on that, rather than the fact that he was pointing it at a face almost identical to his own.

Thoughtfully, the MT looked around. Took note of his lack of options. And then looked contemplatively back at Prompto. His jaw clenched as he chomped down on something.

Prompto skittered back several feet, getting well out of range when the front of the MT’s face exploded into pieces. The rest of the body crumpled to the ground with a wet, meaty smack, and Prompto cringed at the sound.

Everything was silent for a few moments, taut as a wire. And then Ravus observed blandly, “Quite an eventful day.”

Prompto scuffed one heel against the ground, as if to scrape something off of it, and his eyebrows rose as he gave His Majesty a rather pointed look.

Ravus held a hand up in surrender and let himself be shepherded away.

*

Prompto face-planted on the rug in the fort. A moment passed before Luna joined him, patting his head consolingly.

“Is there a problem?”

Prompto turned his head so his cheek was against the carpet. “That last attempt seemed too half-assed. And I? Am stressing about it.”

“I think it was largely a reminder that they’re still displeased with my brother’s continued existence. The magitek soldiers are—“

“Cannon fodder, I know. They can be wasted to make a point.”

“Not how I would have phrased it,” she returned wryly.

“Considered to be disposable,” Prompto corrected, pitching his voice to a falsetto. He snorted when Luna smacked his shoulder with the back of her hand.

Eventually he rolled over onto his back, hands linked together beneath his head. “Why the focus on Tenebrae, anyway?” he groused. “Don’t they have something better to do?”

“No,” Luna answered frankly. “Most everywhere else is theirs. Even Accordo is a Nifilian territory, despite playacting at borrowed autonomy, and Lucis is herded closer and closer to its capital city each day.”

“…Oh. Right.”

Prompto sighed slowly and stared up at the blanket that made the fort’s ceiling.

*

“Sooo,” Prompto began, voice too casual, “what happens when someone realizes I’m an MT and shoots me? Or stabs me, I guess.”

“You aren’t an MT,” Ravus pointed out distractedly, shuffling through a drawer in his desk. “At least keep writing.”

Prompto ducked his head back towards the page, pen scratching over it rapidly for a moment, until he looked up again. “I was made to be an MT, probably,” he reasoned. “So what’s the difference?”

“The presence of a personality and a marked lack of homicidal intent. Think of a polite way to say we aren’t interested.” Ravus paused, gaze drifting thoughtfully towards the ceiling as Prompto wrote. “And were I to offend you, I have my doubts that your skull would explode, though I suppose we could test it.”

“I’ll pass,” Prompto sighed, rolling his eyes. “I was being serious, though. Eventually someone will make the connection.” He set the pen and clipboard down.

“The palace staff know you,” Ravus reminded him as he closed the drawer, “and when you’re outside its walls, rarely are you not with myself or Lunafreya. The risk of a mistaken identity seems rather low.”

Prompto was quiet as he mulled that statement over. It hadn’t quite occurred to him, save for in a vague and distant sense, that his role as protector was also for his own protection.

*

Prompto remembered it was his birthday when he got a phone call from his parents. Other than assuring them he would try to be there for dinner, he hardly got a word in edgewise as they gushed about how their little boy was an adult, passing the phone back and forth so they both could say their fill.

It was nearly forty minutes before Prompto hung up, and he was grinning fit to split his face in half by the time he did, at least until he nearly had a heart attack when he spotted Luna sitting peacefully on his couch.

“How long have you been there?” he practically yowled, voice half an octave higher than usual.

She smiled pleasantly. “I’m certain Ravus will let you take the evening off. Would you come with me?”

“…Okay?”

She allowed him about three minutes to get dressed and ready before she grabbed his hand and began towing him along.

“You’ve given much to my family,” she began eventually, still towing him after her. “I thought it was time we give something back.”

“But you’ve already—“

She shushed him as the stables came into view, and she picked up the pace until they breezed through the doors, pulling all the while. Leading him past her own silver-white chocobo Nova and Ravus’s enormous mercury black Aquila, to a third bird that he didn’t recognize.

She was only a little larger than Nova, with feathers such a pale yellow they were nearly white. Prompto stared at her in open wonder until Luna gestured him forward with an expectant motion of her hand.

“She…?” Prompto trailed off in disbelief.

“She’s yours,” Luna confirmed quietly.

Prompto tripped forward the last few steps to the bird—his bird—until he was standing just outside her stall.

“What will you call her?” Luna wondered.

She didn’t get an answer immediately, as Prompto was too busy laughing while the bird preened a strand of his hair, until he took her face in both hands and held her back at a polite distance.

“Paisley,” he decided eventually, before turning his hopeful gaze on Luna. “Can we go for a ride?”

*

Prompto was an adult. Admittedly, he didn’t feel much different than before and he was still treated as the baby of the palace staff, so he supposed being an adult wasn’t actually that fascinating.

And he suddenly had a bizarre amount of things to sign, as he was abruptly old enough to have an official say in any aspect of his life. He had a strange urge to ask how much of the paperwork his parents had been confused by.

Amazing, the difference a day could make. He adjusted quickly enough, though. Paperwork wasn’t exactly something new.

And everything seemed…kind of normal. Or as close to normal as they were ever likely to be.

And then Pryna woke him up one morning, bouncing insistently against his hip until he groaned and rolled out of bed. He had only a moment to scowl at the window as he realized the sun was hardly even rising, before Pryna began to whine. She yapped out a shrill bark, and Prompto flapped a tired hand at her and set about getting dressed.

Pryna waited just long enough for him to make toast, but not to actually eat it, and Prompto had to eat it on the go as he followed her at a jog to Luna’s suite.

Luna was sitting on the couch when they arrived, the red notebook on her lap and Umbra at her feet. She was smiling quietly as she informed Prompto, “You need to pack. We’re heading to the Lucian capital.”