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Character: Noctis Lucis Caelum, Prompto Argentum, Ignis Scientia, Gladiolus Amicitia, a few OCs
Pairing: Pre-Promtis
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Canon typical violence
Word Count: 3428
Notes: This is a commission for a friend of mine, based on an AU we used to roleplay in, in which Prompto is the prince of Niflheim and he and Noct (and their retinues) are basically put on house arrest together as a way to maintain the stalemate. And then shit goes sideways.
Frank is an MT. He's also Prompto's bodyguard.
I was basically given free-reign, other than the specification that I had to include Frank and while it shouldn't be full on Promtis there should be an inkling of feeeeeeelings there. I'd say I did okay!
Chapter title yoinked from Pippin's song in the LoTR movies
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.
The rock of the haven was firm, and it was very apparent that they were sitting on rock. They hardly even had anything to soften it. They had raided the safe house for most of the blankets and pillows before leaving, but it hadn’t been particularly well equipped for outings into nature. They didn’t even have a car. Gee, it was almost like none of them were supposed to leave.
Gladio and Ignis were doing their best to make the haven habitable for the night and figure out what sort of food they were supposed to put on the metaphorical table, as Frank patrolled just a few yards off. None of them really seemed to expect either prince to do anything to help at that moment. Which was good, on one hand, since Prompto had never had to set up camp a day in his life. But on the other hand, it left them with no real choice but to talk to each other.
In theory.
It wasn’t going so well.
They sat on the edge of the haven, three feet of space between them, and neither of them said a word. Only Prompto seemed to realize that it was cold as shit, and he was glad he was wearing his cape as he huddled beneath it.
The silence stretched until, at last, “Here.”
Prompto nearly leapt out of his skin when Noctis handed something over. Some sort of intricate, spherical bobble, silver but glowing red through the grooves. Frank intercepted it, one gauntlet closing around Noctis’s wrist, just barely reaching past the edge of the haven.
“You’re gonna hurt yourself,” Prompto fretted. “You know you can’t enter a haven.”
Frank seemed undeterred until Noctis relinquished the orb without a fuss.
“It’s a flask,” he offered in not-quite-a-mumble, rubbing the back of his neck with one hand. “For magic—fire magic, in this case. It’s harmless right now.”
Frank inspected it for a dubious moment before slowly, reluctantly handing it back to Noctis and once again backtracking to a safe distance.
Noctis passed it from one hand to another before he cleared his throat and held it out to Prompto once again. Prompto reached out to take it cautiously, and Noctis’s fingers were warm as they brushed. The orb settled in Prompto’s palm, surprisingly light and radiating heat, almost uncomfortable around the grooves before turning to a gentler warmth.
“Thanks,” Prompto mumbled, both hands cupped around it as he held it close to his chest.
“Right.” Noctis shuffled back to where he had initially been sitting and pulled another orb from thin air.
They sat in silence after that, until eventually Ignis and Gladio urged them to go to sleep. After all, tomorrow was going to be a long day of getting nowhere fast. But the others all seemed to have some idea of where they were going, so Prompto supposed his only option was to trust them.
He slept fitfully that night, wrapped in a blanket beside the dwindling embers of the fire.
*
When they woke up the next morning, it wasn’t really great. It remained reasonably not-great for most of the day.
It was true enough that the area the house had been in hadn’t been the warmest. It had…two and a half seasons, to be charitable—a foggy spring that bled into a frigid winter, with a gray and grayer autumn occasionally in the middle—and none of those seasons offered great opportunities for strolling.
It was all the more obvious just how isolated they had been in that house. ‘Safe house.’ Safe. Right.
They had no car. There were no chocobo rental posts nearby. Even if there had been, they weren’t exactly rolling in funds. It was a dire situation, to be sure, and one best taken seriously.
…After three days of traveling by foot, ‘serious’ had given way to ‘aggravating,’ and both Noctis and Prompto were more than willing to make their opinions on the matter known.
“You’re positive there isn’t a town closer than…how far did you say?” Noctis groused, his walk giving way to a reluctant trudge.
“Three hours to the east, if we keep up our pace,” Prompto replied, dredging up a horrible imitation of Ignis’s accent as he did. Ignis rolled his eyes and otherwise ignored them both, continuing to place one foot in front of the other.
“Kinda figured you’d put two and two together that this won’t exactly be a picnic once you realized we’d be walking the whole way,” Gladio remarked dryly, walking backwards for the moment to face both princes.
Noctis, ever the mature one, stuck his tongue out in retaliation.
“You gotta admit,” Prompto chimed in, “there’s a big difference to agree to walk, uh…however far in theory, and actually walking that far—FRANK WHAT THE FUCK—“
The last came out as a high pitched shriek, as the MT picked Prompto up and slung him over one shoulder.
“You are complaining about walking,” Frank replied, his metallic tone as even and placid as it ever was. “I am remedying the problem.”
“This is not remedying anything!” Prompto squawked, thrashing like a captured bird. “Put me down!” When his demand led to nothing, he looked fruitlessly to a grinning Gladio, and then found Ignis smothering a chuckle behind one hand. He instead turned his gaze to Noctis, mouth opening to demand help, only to spot him doubled over as he howled with laughter, each step stumbling partially to the side as he tried to keep his balance.
Prompto closed his mouth with a click, his eyes going wide and his face reddening. As Noctis slowly gathered his composure, still tittering behind his hands, all Prompto could think was oh no.
Frank set him back on his feet five minutes later, content that his point—there will be no bitching in this parade—had been made. Everyone had calmed down by then, and the walked seemed a bit more…content after that, at least for a little while. At least until hunger started setting in.
Better than nothing, at least.
*
Though they had a long way to go, they didn’t actually walk the entire way. Much of it, yes, but they hopped trains on a few occasions and even snuck into the back of delivery trucks. They couldn’t exactly hitchhike with an MT in tow.
Eventually, though,
“Noct.”
Ignis pointed into the distance, the bridge to Insomnia just visible in the early morning fog.
“Are you ready?”
Noctis swallowed and nodded stiffly. “Kinda have to be.”
Prompto slung an arm around his shoulders and jostled him. “That’s the spirit.”
“Enough dilly-dallying, then,” Gladio huffed, clapping them both on the back and giving them a push forwards. “It’ll be light enough that we won’t need to worry about any daemons by the time we’re across the bridge, but we don’t know what else we’re walking into.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Noctis groused before he started walking again, stepping out from under Prompto’s arm.
The bridge seemed longer than it really was, and most of the walk happened in silence. Frank and Gladio had fallen into some form of improvised sign language as they took turns scouting ahead, but the trek was calm, at least for a tense definition of the word.
There was a pick-up truck on the side of the road, still in reasonably good condition but abandoned, and Prompto found himself observing, “You can hot-wire a car,” as Ignis fussed around beneath the steering wheel.
“I’m a man of many talents,” was the bland response, and Noctis spoke for the first time since setting foot on the bridge to point out, “Better than trying to walk the whole way.”
Where? It was on the tip of Prompto’s tongue, but it stayed behind his teeth. He figured the answer was pretty obvious, and he kept quiet as they piled into the truck, Frank sitting on the tailgate with his rifle at the ready.
When the truck came to a halt as close to the Citadel as they could get, Prompto stayed put, sitting rigidly as the others spilled out. This had been their home, and it felt sort of…presumptuous to assume that he could just intrude on that moment. It didn’t take long, though, before the silence in the truck began to feel stifling, and he scrambled out and onto the cement.
“You okay?”
Noctis jerked as if he had been shocked and scrubbed the side of one wrist over his eyes before glancing over his shoulder at Prompto. He offered a stiff nod in reply, but he said nothing. Still, he didn’t shrug Prompto’s hand off when it settled on his shoulder.
They didn’t go inside. They had planned to, but they couldn’t quite bring themselves to actually get closer than the courtyard. Either their families were dead and none of them wanted to see that, or they were alive and they weren’t in the Citadel anymore. Instead, they climbed back into the truck and headed back out of the city before night could creep up on them.
*
The truck gave up the ghost not long after they made it out of the city, unable to run on fumes any longer than it already had been. As the sky darkened above them, it seemed like the best idea to simply give it up as a lost cause and bolt down the road as quickly as their legs could carry them, until they came to a garage and a diner with a camper tucked off to the side. They had just enough money to afford the camper for the night with some pocket change left over, and none of them slept well, crammed like sardines into a camper designed to comfortably house two.
So it was no surprise, really, when Gladio reported, “Iggy and I picked up a hunt from the tipster,” the next morning.
“Like, a bounty hunt?” Noctis wondered, baffled, as if the words had never occurred to him in that order before.
“A small one,” Ignis replied, “but enough that it should at least put some gas in the truck and pay for dinner.”
And really, it sounded simple enough, at least until they were all in the middle of nowhere, tracking sabertusks through gritty beige hills and it occurred to Prompto that he had never actually had to watch anything die before in his life.
“Very rustic,” he observed somewhere around midday, standing in the shade of a rock face as Frank picked off two of their targets from the top of the outcropping, rifle trained into the distance.
Noctis snorted and slid him a sidelong glance. “Is that the word you’d use for it?” he wondered dryly, one eyebrow rising.
“Politely,” Prompto sniffed, folding his arms over his chest. He couldn’t quite hold back a triumphant grin at the bark of laughter he got in return.
Granted, it could have been worse. They could have actually needed to kill something themselves. Prompto couldn’t shake the feeling that they would still need to. But for the time being, they just needed to stand watch, and Frank’s sidearm in Prompto’s hands was more just a precaution. It wasn’t so bad.
Granted, watching Ignis butcher the bodies afterwards to collect the claws as proof was a bit weird (or more than a bit weird), but when they turned everything in back at the diner, the money they were handed was more than enough to get some actual dinner and to fill the truck’s gas tank.
Dinner was even sort of cheerful, in an understated way. But Prompto couldn’t shake the feeling that things were going to get worse. He did his best to bury the feeling so he could still cheer with the others once they got the truck started again.
They had a bit of money left. Not enough for a hotel room, but Ignis was making noise about trying to barter. So really, no one needed Prompto dragging the mood down by talking about his anxiety.
“Hangin’ in there?” Noctis asked, his shoulder nudging Prompto’s.
Prompto offered a crooked smile. “Right as rain.”
Noctis didn’t look convinced.
*
Prompto had never had to do any real bartering before, but it didn’t look fun. Granted, he was too far away to actually hear any of the conversation at the desk, but Ignis was looking increasingly more and more frazzled with each passing second.
He was edging closer to interrupt, possibly before an actual fight broke out, when someone unexpected beat him to the punch.
“Excuse me, young man?”
Ignis wrenched his attention away from the inn’s receptionist to look down at the woman. She had to have been at least sixty and she looked like she could have fit in someone’s pocket.
She smiled up at Ignis. “I couldn’t help but to overhear, and while it isn’t much and you might need to get creative with space, my husband and I have a spare room and a couch.”
Prompto blinked slowly as he processed that offer, though thankfully Ignis seemed a touch more on top of things, launching immediately into a string of gratitude even as he started rounding up Noctis and Gladio.
Which was how Frank found himself in the bed of the truck with a tarp thrown over him, and how Prompto eventually found himself folding laundry beside Noctis in the couple’s laundry room. If he listened, he could hear Ignis helping with dinner, and if he listened even harder then he could hear Gladio chopping wood in the yard. They had to earn their keep for the night somehow, after all.
Between being kept busy, dinner with Margaret and Henry, being warm, and being in a house that felt like it had actually been properly lived in, it seemed like the rest of the evening flew by in an instant. As the evening drew to a close, it wasn’t even that awkward to have to share a bed with Noctis.
They lay on their respective sides, facing each other in silence. It was Prompto who eventually broke the quiet, wondering wryly, “Hangin’ in there?”
“More or less,” Noctis sighed, his head pillowed on one crooked elbow. His other hand lay limply on the mattress between them. “This is all a bit weird, though. Or a lot weird.”
The hand that wasn’t tucked beneath Prompto’s head edged closer to begin closing the space between them. “It’ll turn out alright,” he replied, though it sounded more like he was trying to assure himself.
Noctis snorted and his eyebrows rose. “Uh huh. Thanks, Dr. Sunshine.”
Prompto’s fingertips grazed against the side of Noctis’s hand, and though Noctis darted a glance towards their hands, he made no move to pull away.
And then the guest room door opened, and they practically flew apart, snatching their hands back as Ignis stood framed in the doorway.
“Specs!” Noctis whined, sitting up, his voice low. “You’re supposed to—what’s wrong?” His voice sharpened at the end, and it was then that Prompto realized how pale Ignis was, and how tightly he was still holding the doorknob.
Ignis said nothing, instead simply motioning for them to follow him, pressing one finger to his lips as he did. Silently, Noctis and Prompto got up and fell into step behind Ignis as he led them back through the house, Prompto fumbling the handgun off of the nightstand at the last second. They came to a halt again in the kitchen, behind the wall that lead to the entryway. Gladio was pressed to the opposite wall, listening intently to the conversation happening at the front door.
“…know there’s someone else in the house, Ma’am. I heard a door.” It was a man’s voice, though Prompto didn’t recognize it.
Margaret sounded only mildly affronted as she said, “My son is home for the week. The ruckus you’ve decided to make probably woke him up.”
Ignis motioned Prompto and Noct towards one window, and Gladio silently peeled away from the wall to head towards another. As the three of them carefully snuck outside, Prompto could hear Ignis stepping into the entryway, his accent flattened until it was nearly undetectable as he said, “Seriously, Mom, just let him have a look around if he’s going to be like that.”
“If you’re sure, dear…” Margaret sighed, and after that the conversation was muffled beyond Prompto’s ability to hear it.
Outside, they followed Gladio around the side of the house until they could peek around the corner, just in time to see a man in the uniform of a Niflheim official stepping into the house and closing the door.
In his wake, he left have a dozen MTs standing in the yard, including a sniper at the back of the pack. That…wasn’t good. Their attention snapped towards the house in unison as a crash sounded from inside.
A moment later, there was an explosive bang and the distracted sniper crumpled to the ground in a heap of so much scrap metal. Prompto nearly leapt out of his skin as he whirled towards the truck, where he could just barely see the end of the barrel of Frank’s rifle sticking out from beneath the tarp. There was a flurry of activity as the remaining five MTs armed themselves and began to move.
Gladio’s greatsword appeared in his hands and he lunged forward, sword swinging to cleave the nearest MT in half.
A pair of daggers appeared in Noctis’s hands and he hurled them both towards a second MT, and vanished in a crackle of blue light. Both daggers sank into the MT’s chest, and then Noctis slammed into it boots first an instant later. His knives vanished, his sword appearing in his hand instead, and he severed the MT’s helm from its neck.
Prompto fired one round into an infantry unit’s chest, and as it stumbled back a step, he fired a second unit into its head. With a series of sparks and a smell like burning electronics, it toppled to the ground. Prompto turned, firing a round into the next infantry unit’s chest, and Gladio bisected it half a second later.
Five down. One to go. Prompto cast around for it quickly.
He braced the handgun in both hands and fired, right over Noctis’s shoulder. Noctis whipped about, blinking as the axeman that had been looming behind him rocked on its feet. It twitched erratically for a moment before Noctis plunged his sword through its neck and wrenched it out to the side.
The last MT fell and the front door opened again, and Ignis stepped out, dragging the unconscious official out by the back of the collar of his jacket. As soon as he dropped the official and backed up to close the door again, a final shot rang out, tearing through the side of the official’s head and sinking into the dirt.
“Frank!” Maybe it was supposed to be scolding, but Prompto’s voice was more of a squeal, aghast, his gaze locked on the…corpse. A corpse. A dead body. Because they had just killed someone. Well, Frank had just killed someone. An actual, human person who had been alive until just a moment ago.
Frank sat up in the bed of the truck finally, the tarp falling down around him. “Recommendation: leaving.”
“Specs?” Noctis asked, voice strangled.
“He’s—he’s right,” Ignis offered after a moment of delay, leaning back against the door and staring at the body, before he lifted a hand and the body burst into flames. “…Best not to linger.”
“Then let’s get going,” Gladio snapped, crossing the yard to the truck. He caught Ignis’s arm on the way and tugged him into motion, and both Prompto and Noctis took it as their cue to stumble after them.
They climbed in in a hurry, and soon the dirt road was rumbling under the tires was the only sound any of them could hear.
Someone was dead.
A person was dead. Because he was supposed to track them all down like a gaggle of lost dogs.
Prompto jerked back to the present when Noctis’s knuckles grazed his fingers. Startled, as if he hadn’t even known he was moving, he went to pull his hand back, but Prompto caught his wrist. Noctis stilled and made no move to break Prompto’s grip.
With a slow, unsteady sigh, he asked, “Hangin’ in there?” He turned his hand in Prompto’s hold, finger’s brushing his wrist.
Prompto swallowed and nodded stiffly. “Y-yeah.” Noctis didn’t call his bluff.
“Yeah. Me, too.” And Prompto didn’t call his.
