It was only a few years after Noctis’ recovery in Tenebrae when King Regis stormed into the rooms that Ardyn had claimed for himself in the Citadel, looking like a man possessed.
“Tell me this isn’t true,” Regis said. He held a dossier in his free hand, and leaned heavily on his cane with the other. Ardyn frowned. When had Regis required a cane just to walk down the hall? He pushed that thought from his mind and rolled out of bed, reaching out a hand for the dossier.
“Give me a moment,” he said, and flipped it open. “Oh! Yes. This is all correct.” He handed the dossier back to Regis, and raised his eyebrows at the look of true fury in the king’s eyes. “What?”
“You involved my son in an investigation into the Kingsglaive,” Regis said, in a slow, careful tone. “You ran that investigation without my knowledge, and now you say that my captain—my captain, Ardyn—is a spy from Niflheim?”
“Yes,” Ardyn said, reasonably. Honestly, sometimes he could not understand Regis’ temper. Aulea was much better at explaining this sort of thing to him. “All Noctis did was befriend one or two of the glaives. He offered, Regis. You should be proud that he’s making an effort—“
“If they are corrupt, this could have put him at risk,” Regis said.
“Hardly.” Ardyn turned a level gaze to the king. “I would have killed them myself.”
Regis threw the dossier onto Ardyn’s ornate coffee table and sighed heavily. “By the Six, Ardyn, sometimes you—“
“Are incredibly helpful?” Ardyn offered. “Root out a coup before it happens? Are devilishly attractive in my concern for your continued well-being? Please, do go on, you know how I like it when you flatter me.”
Regis shakily lowered himself to a chair and ran a hand over his face. “I’ll bring Drautos before the Council,” he said, after a moment. “But don’t involve my son in this again.”
“I can make no promises,” Ardyn said. He looked down at Regis, noting the tremor in his bad leg, the white hairs already cropping up above the grey. “Have you considered, my dear, when you might want to pass on your duties—“
“No.” Regis’ voice brooked no argument. “Noctis isn’t ready. He needs to form the covenants, come to terms with… with what must be done.”
“He never will, if you don’t tell him.”
When Regis looked up at him this time, there was warmth in his eyes, a hint of the humor that had drawn Ardyn to him in the first place, so many years ago.
“And you have?”
Ardyn knew a lost cause when he heard one. He sat down in the opposite chair, opened the dossier once more, and rang for tea.
---
“So what’s it like?” Noct asked one morning. “The Starscourge?”
He’d met Ardyn on the way back from sparring practice with Gladio, trailing at Ignis’ heels with the languorous ease of a man with all the time in the world. At his question, Ignis whirled around, shooting the prince a disapproving glare, but Noct pointedly ignored him. Ardyn stuck his hands in his coat pockets and gave Noct a sidelong look.
“You should ask your friend Luna, Noct. She’s the expert.”
“Bullshit.” Noct ignored another hiss from Ignis. “You’re the one carrying it, right? What’s it like?”
Ardyn thought about it. “Do you remember how it felt when you were cut open by the Marilith, Noct?”
“You’re as bad as each other,” Ignis mumbled. Ardyn grinned.
“Yeah, I guess,” Noct said, looking uncomfortable.
“Imagine that, but in your blood, every waking moment of your life.”
Noct was silent for a minute, gazing up at the molding that ran along the ceiling. After a while, Ardyn assumed that was it for the prince’s bout of morbid curiosity, but then he spoke, sounding dreamy and far-off.
“I get it, then,” he said.
“Get what, Noct?”
Noctis turned his vague look to Ardyn, and shook his head. “Come on, Iggy,” he said, looking to his advisor. “I promised I’d meet Prom at the arcade.” He darted forward, wrapping a lanky arm around his friend, and dragged him off down the hall.
There was a subtle change in Noctis after that. It took Regis a while to notice, but Ardyn saw it first, unfolding like the twist of a flower to the sun. The normally recalcitrant prince started training longer with his shield. His room, according to the talkative maids who swept through Ardyn’s apartments, was starting to fill with borrowed books and piles of reports that had long gone unopened before. He could often be found wandering close to the room where the crystal was held, fingers twisting in the grooves that had been carved into the marble of the door. Regis was the one who noted that he was writing to Luna with more frequency, starting to flesh out what had once been tentative plans for forging the covenants.
As such, Ardyn was unsurprised to find Noct at his door one evening, looking awkward and anxious in his ratty nightclothes. The young man sat on the edge of one of Ardyn’s chairs and asked the same question so many of his ancestors had voiced.
“What can you tell me about the Astrals?”
Normally, Ardyn was loath to go into detail. The Astrals were not fond of being too well known—It was poor PR, Ardyn assumed, for people to know that they were gods in name only, and prone to their own weaknesses of character. But Noctis… He was to be the last of the line. Surely, for him at least, an exception could be made.
And so Noct became a regular presence in Ardyn’s rooms in the evenings. The young man would drape himself over priceless antiques and fiddle with ancient artifacts, pushing Ardyn to reveal more and more about the lives of the Astrals. Ardyn wasn’t sure when the subject of their nightly talks started to change, but after a while, he found himself telling Noct stories about his descendants, about what the world had looked like before, about his lovers and enemies, the pain that clawed at him when the night wore on.
One night, a few months after Noct’s twentieth birthday, Noct appeared at the door in an old shirt and black jeans. He didn’t step over the threshold when Ardyn called him in, but hovered there, looking pale and withdrawn.
“I want to show you something,” he said. “Come on.”
“I’m not one of your subjects that you can just order about, you know,” Ardyn said, with deep amusement.
“You’re following me anyway, aren’t you?” Noct’s smirk was too knowing. Ardyn had half a mind to turn back and leave him in the hall, but he had to admit to some level of curiosity. He walked in step with the prince down the dark, abandoned corridors, noting the way they followed the upward slope around the main entrance of the Citadel.
Noct led him into one of the side balconies overlooking the throne room, just above the throne itself. Ardyn’s laugh echoed in the vast, empty hall—Noct had set up a display of small iced cakes on the chair belonging to the Head of the Treasury.
“Don’t worry,” Noct said. “Ignis made them. We had to look up the recipe in the library archives, actually. Try one.”
Ardyn shook his head. “You know that I barely eat these days, Noctis—“
“Don’t be a buzzkill, Ardyn.” Noct picked one up in his fingers and held it out. Ardyn took it from him with a sigh.
“The things I do for you, my sweet,” he said, unthinking, and froze. Noct didn’t seem to have noticed. His mocking scowl was fixed on his face, waiting for Ardyn to concede to his demands. Slowly, Ardyn bit into the cake.
“Oh, no,” he said, after a moment. “You didn’t.”
“You said you hated how dry everything is these days,” Noct said, all innocence. “So I found a recipe that’s almost as old as you are.”
“If only I had the power to send overconfident princes into exile,” Ardyn said. “You, my dear, have just reminded me of the worst time in your nation’s history. No one bathed. No one. Can you imagine? Nearly one thousand years with the miracle of indoor plumbing, and suddenly, oh No, Sir Ardyn, everyone knows that water carries the Scourge! I despaired, Noctis.”
Noct snorted. “You survived, obviously.” He pulled up one of the chairs and grabbed a cake. “Come on, old man. Sit down and tell me how much you hated them. It’ll do you good.”
Ardyn stared at him, thrown off by Aulea’s words slipping so casually from her son’s lips. “You spoil me,” he said, and pulled up another chair. “I give you five minutes before I ruin your appetite forever.”
“Ten,” said Noctis. “Go on. Try me.”
Noct lasted seven. By then, the Treasurer’s chair was a mess, and the both of them were struggling not to alert any passing guards to their presence with barely restrained gasps of laughter. They were pressed up against one of the benches overlooking the throne, Ardyn running his hands over the prince’s back as Noct doubled over, struggling to breathe.
“You’re going to kill me,” Noct said, pressing his forehead to Ardyn’s shoulder. Ardyn shrugged.
“Eventually.”
Noct fell silent. He breathed into Ardyn’s neck for a moment, and Ardyn held him there, content with the warmth of him. Then the prince’s hands tugged at the scarf that Ardyn kept draped around his shoulders, pulling it loose. When he began unbuttoning the front of his vest, Ardyn lay a hand over his, stilling him.
“I know,” Noct said. Ardyn searched the young man’s eyes, and saw no confusion there, no uncertainty. His face was familiar in the way Gentiana had been familiar, the way it felt when he stepped into the old tombs and saw the carved faces of his old friends, old lovers. There was something of Regis’ desperation there, Aulea’s reckless anger, and a determination that was all his own.
“You know what this will do to you,” his brother had told him when Ardyn was young, and the Scourge was wiping out the population of Lucis in droves. He helped Ardyn pin his robes about his neck, turning him towards the mirror in what was once meant to be his royal apartments.
“I know,” Ardyn had said. He stared into the mirror, hardly surprised to find that he no longer recognized the man he’d become. “I know.”
Noctis gazed up at him with the same expression in his bright blue eyes, and when he pushed the wide jacket from Ardyn’s shoulders, the immortal king did not stop him.
“I’ve known for years,” Noct said. He leaned in, lips an inch from Ardyn’s, and tilted his head, pressing his warm mouth to the line of Ardyn’s jaw. “You’ve been telling me since I was a kid. Little things. The way you talked. The way you didn’t. Dad, too.” He resumed unbuttoning Ardyn’s vest, and his breath tickled the curve of his neck.
“Neither of you talked about the future like I was going to be a part of it,” he said, and his voice was matter-of-fact. Whatever tears he had for this had already been shed. Ardyn wished the young man would cry, would scream, would hate him for it, but the prince only pressed his hands to Ardyn’s bare chest and ran them down to the weight of his belt.
“I’m not a part of that future, either,” Ardyn said. Noct drew back, and held his gaze with eyes that were much too old.
“I know that, too,” he said. “I asked Luna.”
He pulled off his shirt, and Ardyn unconsciously raised his hands to the prince’s waist. He held him by the hips and pulled him close, and Noct straddled his lap, settling down to press his hard length against Ardyn’s.
“One day,” Noct said, “I'll be the death of you.”
“Yes,” said Ardyn. Noct ground down with his hips, and pleasure pooled in Ardyn’s belly, rippling over his skin like the crackle of magical fire. “Perhaps we shouldn’t, Noctis.”
“Shouldn’t what?” Noct asked. “Destroy the Starscourge?” He lowered his mouth to Ardyn’s neck and bit down, grinding into him again. “Save Eos?”
“You know what I mean, Noct.”
Noct paused, and his low, steady voice broke. “I know I’m… I know your reputation. You’ve taken lovers before. It’s in all the books.”
“This is the problem with a literate population,” Ardyn said. “They read things they truly shouldn’t.”
“I know you love my dad,” said Noct. “Or you did. I’m not gonna say that isn’t weird as hell.”
“I’ve loved many people, Noctis.” Ardyn said. “I loved your four-times great grandfather. I loved a traveling musician who came to town just after you were born. I loved—“
“Me,” Noct said, and kissed him properly, dragging at his lower lip with his teeth as he pulled away.
They stared at each other for a long, long moment.
“Yes,” Ardyn said, at last. “I believe I might.”
“Let’s find out, then,” said Noct, and smiled grimly as Ardyn lowered him gently to the floor.
-------------
And then they had sex directly above the throne, because Ardyn.
FILL Age of Kings 4/? Re: Ardyn/Noct or Gen, Everyone in the world knows Ardyn AU
“Tell me this isn’t true,” Regis said. He held a dossier in his free hand, and leaned heavily on his cane with the other. Ardyn frowned. When had Regis required a cane just to walk down the hall? He pushed that thought from his mind and rolled out of bed, reaching out a hand for the dossier.
“Give me a moment,” he said, and flipped it open. “Oh! Yes. This is all correct.” He handed the dossier back to Regis, and raised his eyebrows at the look of true fury in the king’s eyes. “What?”
“You involved my son in an investigation into the Kingsglaive,” Regis said, in a slow, careful tone. “You ran that investigation without my knowledge, and now you say that my captain—my captain, Ardyn—is a spy from Niflheim?”
“Yes,” Ardyn said, reasonably. Honestly, sometimes he could not understand Regis’ temper. Aulea was much better at explaining this sort of thing to him. “All Noctis did was befriend one or two of the glaives. He offered, Regis. You should be proud that he’s making an effort—“
“If they are corrupt, this could have put him at risk,” Regis said.
“Hardly.” Ardyn turned a level gaze to the king. “I would have killed them myself.”
Regis threw the dossier onto Ardyn’s ornate coffee table and sighed heavily. “By the Six, Ardyn, sometimes you—“
“Are incredibly helpful?” Ardyn offered. “Root out a coup before it happens? Are devilishly attractive in my concern for your continued well-being? Please, do go on, you know how I like it when you flatter me.”
Regis shakily lowered himself to a chair and ran a hand over his face. “I’ll bring Drautos before the Council,” he said, after a moment. “But don’t involve my son in this again.”
“I can make no promises,” Ardyn said. He looked down at Regis, noting the tremor in his bad leg, the white hairs already cropping up above the grey. “Have you considered, my dear, when you might want to pass on your duties—“
“No.” Regis’ voice brooked no argument. “Noctis isn’t ready. He needs to form the covenants, come to terms with… with what must be done.”
“He never will, if you don’t tell him.”
When Regis looked up at him this time, there was warmth in his eyes, a hint of the humor that had drawn Ardyn to him in the first place, so many years ago.
“And you have?”
Ardyn knew a lost cause when he heard one. He sat down in the opposite chair, opened the dossier once more, and rang for tea.
---
“So what’s it like?” Noct asked one morning. “The Starscourge?”
He’d met Ardyn on the way back from sparring practice with Gladio, trailing at Ignis’ heels with the languorous ease of a man with all the time in the world. At his question, Ignis whirled around, shooting the prince a disapproving glare, but Noct pointedly ignored him. Ardyn stuck his hands in his coat pockets and gave Noct a sidelong look.
“You should ask your friend Luna, Noct. She’s the expert.”
“Bullshit.” Noct ignored another hiss from Ignis. “You’re the one carrying it, right? What’s it like?”
Ardyn thought about it. “Do you remember how it felt when you were cut open by the Marilith, Noct?”
“You’re as bad as each other,” Ignis mumbled. Ardyn grinned.
“Yeah, I guess,” Noct said, looking uncomfortable.
“Imagine that, but in your blood, every waking moment of your life.”
Noct was silent for a minute, gazing up at the molding that ran along the ceiling. After a while, Ardyn assumed that was it for the prince’s bout of morbid curiosity, but then he spoke, sounding dreamy and far-off.
“I get it, then,” he said.
“Get what, Noct?”
Noctis turned his vague look to Ardyn, and shook his head. “Come on, Iggy,” he said, looking to his advisor. “I promised I’d meet Prom at the arcade.” He darted forward, wrapping a lanky arm around his friend, and dragged him off down the hall.
There was a subtle change in Noctis after that. It took Regis a while to notice, but Ardyn saw it first, unfolding like the twist of a flower to the sun. The normally recalcitrant prince started training longer with his shield. His room, according to the talkative maids who swept through Ardyn’s apartments, was starting to fill with borrowed books and piles of reports that had long gone unopened before. He could often be found wandering close to the room where the crystal was held, fingers twisting in the grooves that had been carved into the marble of the door. Regis was the one who noted that he was writing to Luna with more frequency, starting to flesh out what had once been tentative plans for forging the covenants.
As such, Ardyn was unsurprised to find Noct at his door one evening, looking awkward and anxious in his ratty nightclothes. The young man sat on the edge of one of Ardyn’s chairs and asked the same question so many of his ancestors had voiced.
“What can you tell me about the Astrals?”
Normally, Ardyn was loath to go into detail. The Astrals were not fond of being too well known—It was poor PR, Ardyn assumed, for people to know that they were gods in name only, and prone to their own weaknesses of character. But Noctis… He was to be the last of the line. Surely, for him at least, an exception could be made.
And so Noct became a regular presence in Ardyn’s rooms in the evenings. The young man would drape himself over priceless antiques and fiddle with ancient artifacts, pushing Ardyn to reveal more and more about the lives of the Astrals. Ardyn wasn’t sure when the subject of their nightly talks started to change, but after a while, he found himself telling Noct stories about his descendants, about what the world had looked like before, about his lovers and enemies, the pain that clawed at him when the night wore on.
One night, a few months after Noct’s twentieth birthday, Noct appeared at the door in an old shirt and black jeans. He didn’t step over the threshold when Ardyn called him in, but hovered there, looking pale and withdrawn.
“I want to show you something,” he said. “Come on.”
“I’m not one of your subjects that you can just order about, you know,” Ardyn said, with deep amusement.
“You’re following me anyway, aren’t you?” Noct’s smirk was too knowing. Ardyn had half a mind to turn back and leave him in the hall, but he had to admit to some level of curiosity. He walked in step with the prince down the dark, abandoned corridors, noting the way they followed the upward slope around the main entrance of the Citadel.
Noct led him into one of the side balconies overlooking the throne room, just above the throne itself. Ardyn’s laugh echoed in the vast, empty hall—Noct had set up a display of small iced cakes on the chair belonging to the Head of the Treasury.
“Don’t worry,” Noct said. “Ignis made them. We had to look up the recipe in the library archives, actually. Try one.”
Ardyn shook his head. “You know that I barely eat these days, Noctis—“
“Don’t be a buzzkill, Ardyn.” Noct picked one up in his fingers and held it out. Ardyn took it from him with a sigh.
“The things I do for you, my sweet,” he said, unthinking, and froze. Noct didn’t seem to have noticed. His mocking scowl was fixed on his face, waiting for Ardyn to concede to his demands. Slowly, Ardyn bit into the cake.
“Oh, no,” he said, after a moment. “You didn’t.”
“You said you hated how dry everything is these days,” Noct said, all innocence. “So I found a recipe that’s almost as old as you are.”
“If only I had the power to send overconfident princes into exile,” Ardyn said. “You, my dear, have just reminded me of the worst time in your nation’s history. No one bathed. No one. Can you imagine? Nearly one thousand years with the miracle of indoor plumbing, and suddenly, oh No, Sir Ardyn, everyone knows that water carries the Scourge! I despaired, Noctis.”
Noct snorted. “You survived, obviously.” He pulled up one of the chairs and grabbed a cake. “Come on, old man. Sit down and tell me how much you hated them. It’ll do you good.”
Ardyn stared at him, thrown off by Aulea’s words slipping so casually from her son’s lips. “You spoil me,” he said, and pulled up another chair. “I give you five minutes before I ruin your appetite forever.”
“Ten,” said Noctis. “Go on. Try me.”
Noct lasted seven. By then, the Treasurer’s chair was a mess, and the both of them were struggling not to alert any passing guards to their presence with barely restrained gasps of laughter. They were pressed up against one of the benches overlooking the throne, Ardyn running his hands over the prince’s back as Noct doubled over, struggling to breathe.
“You’re going to kill me,” Noct said, pressing his forehead to Ardyn’s shoulder. Ardyn shrugged.
“Eventually.”
Noct fell silent. He breathed into Ardyn’s neck for a moment, and Ardyn held him there, content with the warmth of him. Then the prince’s hands tugged at the scarf that Ardyn kept draped around his shoulders, pulling it loose. When he began unbuttoning the front of his vest, Ardyn lay a hand over his, stilling him.
“I know,” Noct said. Ardyn searched the young man’s eyes, and saw no confusion there, no uncertainty. His face was familiar in the way Gentiana had been familiar, the way it felt when he stepped into the old tombs and saw the carved faces of his old friends, old lovers. There was something of Regis’ desperation there, Aulea’s reckless anger, and a determination that was all his own.
“You know what this will do to you,” his brother had told him when Ardyn was young, and the Scourge was wiping out the population of Lucis in droves. He helped Ardyn pin his robes about his neck, turning him towards the mirror in what was once meant to be his royal apartments.
“I know,” Ardyn had said. He stared into the mirror, hardly surprised to find that he no longer recognized the man he’d become. “I know.”
Noctis gazed up at him with the same expression in his bright blue eyes, and when he pushed the wide jacket from Ardyn’s shoulders, the immortal king did not stop him.
“I’ve known for years,” Noct said. He leaned in, lips an inch from Ardyn’s, and tilted his head, pressing his warm mouth to the line of Ardyn’s jaw. “You’ve been telling me since I was a kid. Little things. The way you talked. The way you didn’t. Dad, too.” He resumed unbuttoning Ardyn’s vest, and his breath tickled the curve of his neck.
“Neither of you talked about the future like I was going to be a part of it,” he said, and his voice was matter-of-fact. Whatever tears he had for this had already been shed. Ardyn wished the young man would cry, would scream, would hate him for it, but the prince only pressed his hands to Ardyn’s bare chest and ran them down to the weight of his belt.
“I’m not a part of that future, either,” Ardyn said. Noct drew back, and held his gaze with eyes that were much too old.
“I know that, too,” he said. “I asked Luna.”
He pulled off his shirt, and Ardyn unconsciously raised his hands to the prince’s waist. He held him by the hips and pulled him close, and Noct straddled his lap, settling down to press his hard length against Ardyn’s.
“One day,” Noct said, “I'll be the death of you.”
“Yes,” said Ardyn. Noct ground down with his hips, and pleasure pooled in Ardyn’s belly, rippling over his skin like the crackle of magical fire. “Perhaps we shouldn’t, Noctis.”
“Shouldn’t what?” Noct asked. “Destroy the Starscourge?” He lowered his mouth to Ardyn’s neck and bit down, grinding into him again. “Save Eos?”
“You know what I mean, Noct.”
Noct paused, and his low, steady voice broke. “I know I’m… I know your reputation. You’ve taken lovers before. It’s in all the books.”
“This is the problem with a literate population,” Ardyn said. “They read things they truly shouldn’t.”
“I know you love my dad,” said Noct. “Or you did. I’m not gonna say that isn’t weird as hell.”
“I’ve loved many people, Noctis.” Ardyn said. “I loved your four-times great grandfather. I loved a traveling musician who came to town just after you were born. I loved—“
“Me,” Noct said, and kissed him properly, dragging at his lower lip with his teeth as he pulled away.
They stared at each other for a long, long moment.
“Yes,” Ardyn said, at last. “I believe I might.”
“Let’s find out, then,” said Noct, and smiled grimly as Ardyn lowered him gently to the floor.
-------------
And then they had sex directly above the throne, because Ardyn.