Prompt Post
Dec. 7th, 2016 04:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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ffxv_kinkmeme Welcome to Round One of the FFXV Kink Meme!
CLOSED for prompts | OPEN for fills
Please have a look at the extended rules here.
The important rules in short:
Please direct any questions or report any problems to the Ask a mod post.
Prompt, write, draw, comment, and most importantly have fun!
(You can also check out our Pinboard for Filled or Unfilled prompts)
UPDATE 12/30/16: I'm looking for some help! Details here. (I'm always looking for more pinners; this is an open invitation.)
I've added/clarified some rules to make life easier to my pinners. Please refrain from changing the subject lines except when filling or updating a fill. It makes it easier for us to keep track of what we've already looked at. Thank you so much!
UPDATE 1/28/17: We've opened up a Drabble Tree post! Go check it out.
UPDATE 2/21/2017: ROUND ONE IS CLOSED FOR PROMPTS. Please feel free to continue posting fills. Round Two will open for prompts and fills on 3/1/2017.
CLOSED for prompts | OPEN for fills
Please have a look at the extended rules here.
The important rules in short:
- Post anonymously.
- Negative comments on other people's prompts (kink-shaming, pairing-bashing etc.) and personal attacks of any kind will not be tolerated.
- One prompt per comment. Warnings for common triggers and squicks are encouraged, but not required.
- Prompts should follow the format: Character/character, prompt.
- Keep prompts to a reasonable length; prompts should not be detailed story outlines.
- Fills should have the word "Fill:" at the start of the subject line.
- Otherwise please avoid changing the subject line.
Please direct any questions or report any problems to the Ask a mod post.
Prompt, write, draw, comment, and most importantly have fun!
(You can also check out our Pinboard for Filled or Unfilled prompts)
UPDATE 12/30/16: I'm looking for some help! Details here. (I'm always looking for more pinners; this is an open invitation.)
I've added/clarified some rules to make life easier to my pinners. Please refrain from changing the subject lines except when filling or updating a fill. It makes it easier for us to keep track of what we've already looked at. Thank you so much!
UPDATE 1/28/17: We've opened up a Drabble Tree post! Go check it out.
UPDATE 2/21/2017: ROUND ONE IS CLOSED FOR PROMPTS. Please feel free to continue posting fills. Round Two will open for prompts and fills on 3/1/2017.
Fill: Father 8/?
Date: 2017-01-04 02:52 am (UTC)Servants skirted the back hallways, casting each other sideways looks in the dark as they hurried to clear out rooms, bring up new linens, dim the lights of the residential wing. They ducked around corners to huddle in quick, fervent conferences, and the one question that no one could fully answer wove through the corridors in a gentle susurrus.
Was it him?
Noctis sat out of range of these hushed discussions, in a finely furnished receiving room decked in soft shades of grey and green. Gladiolus sat in the corner of the room, watching Noct and the King quietly in his father's stead. Noct was flanked by Glaives, who had taken a personal interest in the retrieval of the man who had been whittling down their numbers over the years—prince or no—and had been none too gentle in their efforts to deliver Noct to the palace. Noct had a throbbing bruise forming on his right temple, and his legs felt like they were on fire. He sat with his body tilted slightly to the side, his shoulder braced between himself and the King like a shield.
King Regis clenched his hands on his fine black suit.
“Noctis,” he said. Noct suppressed a shudder, but only barely. “I’m sorry. I need to know. How much do you remember, before your accident?”
Noct said nothing.
“I know you know me, son.”
“Don’t,” Noct whispered. King Regis grimaced.
They sat in silence for a long time, the King with his hands on his knees, Noct with his eyes to the window.
“I don’t… not much,” Noct said, at last. The King sat up. “Hands. The face you make when you… I thought…” He ran a hand through his hair, pulling at the roots. “I don’t know.”
“It’s alright,” King Regis said. “You’re home, Noctis. You have time to sort out what’s true.”
Noct finally turned to face the King, and the look in the young prince’s eyes made Regis draw back in alarm.
“I have three days,” Noct said. The King leaned forward, but Noct turned away again, shutting himself off. When it was obvious that he would say no more, the King bade his farewells and left the prince, the Glaives, and Gladiolus in the room together.
Slowly, Noct unfolded himself from the chair and rose to his feet.
“He’s trying to help you, you know,” said one of the Glaives. His companion shot him a look, but he continued, “He had us turn the kingdom upside down, looking for you.”
“Really.” Noct made his way to the wall, where he idly brushed the velvet curtains at the window with his fingers. Gladiolus stepped forward, suddenly tense and watchful. “Didn’t do a very good job of it, did he.” He pressed a hand to an upper window pane, testing the glass. “I had to come to him, in the end.”
“Noctis,” Gladiolus said. The Glaives turned to him, startled by the sound of warning in his voice.
Quietly, with all the calm deliberation of someone who had weighed all the options and found the best possible solution, Noct braced his hands on either side of him and kicked a hole through the three story window.
It took the strength of Gladio and the Glaives combined to drag Noct out of the fractured remains. He kept breaking free of their grip to kick out more of the glass, clearly hoping to swing himself down through the opening. In the end, Gladio had to pin his arms down and carry Noct, blood streaming down his legs and along one arm, into the infirmary.
Noct had to be strapped down to the table in order for the doctor to get any work done, and he’d spent the entire time glaring daggers at Gladio, using all of his training with Ardyn to rip the man’s character to shreds. Gladio took this all in silence, and saw how strangely indifferent Noct was to the pain of having glass picked out of his flesh.
“You have a high pain tolerance,” he said, when Noct was done tearing down every aspect of Gladiolus’ personality. “Sure wasn’t the case when I knew you, before.”
Noct let out a sigh and turned his face away.
“What happens after three days, Noctis?” Gladio said. He wasn’t expecting an answer. Instead, he watched the way Noct’s eyes squeezed shut for a moment as though in pain, and his fingernails cut into his palms, even though the physician had long since washed his wounds clean and wrapped his legs in gauze. When Gladio brought Noctis back up to his rooms, he didn’t mention the tremor he felt in Noct’s arms and shoulders, but filed it away in his mind for further consideration.
--
“Your father isn’t Regis,” the nurses had said, when Noct woke up all those years ago in confusion and pain. “It’s Ardyn. He’s always been Ardyn.”
If people tell you something often enough and long enough, it’s very hard to believe in the hazy contradictions of your own memory. And Noct, young and frightened and trusting, had believed them.
He wondered why he was only remembering this now. Why he’d always assumed that life was right, that affection and care made up for wide chasms of unaccountable misery that he only knew how to translate into rage. He wondered if, somehow, he’d always known the truth.
Noct stood at the bathroom sink in his new rooms for a very long time, examining King Regis’ reflection in his own face.
Three days.
If something went wrong on a mission, Ardyn gave Noct three days to get himself out. If he held on for three days, his father would come for him, and bring him home.
And that was what he wanted, of course. It had always been what he wanted.
He was startled to attention by the sound of raised voices in the hall, distant, but heightened by the tile and piping of the bathroom. Noct recognized one voice as belonging to King Regis. The other could have been Gladiolus’ father, Clarus.
“—abandon this venture,” Clarus was saying. “Ardyn has turned him into a reckless psychopath, and you bring him in and treat him like a child?”
Noct bristled at this. Ardyn hadn’t turned him into anything. He’d guided him, helped him, made him stronger, which was better than anything King Regis had ever done—
“He is in pain, Clarus,” Regis said, “In his mind, he has been abducted for the second time in his life, by a man he hardly remembers. Show a little sympathy—“
“Your sympathy is why he’s here,” Clarus snapped. “Ardyn wanted this. He turned him into this, and sent him to you to show you how thoroughly he has broken him.”
“He isn’t broken.”
Noct took slow, steadying breaths, holding onto the edge of the sink with both hands. He closed his eyes when he heard the main door to his rooms open, heard the click and thump of King Regis’ footsteps, the steady beat of his Shield’s not close behind. He knew they could see him there, braced against the sink, knuckles white. He opened his eyes and turned to face them.
“Your Shield is right,” he told the King, and both men started in surprise. “My… Ardyn has always hated Lucis. It only makes sense, if he has the opportunity to take his revenge, he’d do it. No matter what he has to sacrifice.” He looked into Clarus’ eyes, his gaze steady. “You use the resources you have at hand.” He thought of the Glaives’ lives draining out in the grass at Duscae, the deserter’s blood in the dirt at his feet. The years of training in diplomacy, in fighting, in perfecting a singular ruthlessness of purpose. “So he used me.”
“And now that he’s done with me,” he said, “He’s never coming back.”
OP here
Date: 2017-01-04 04:14 am (UTC)I really appreciate you for taking your time to fill this prompt!
Re: Fill: Father 8/?
Date: 2017-01-04 05:23 am (UTC)