Chapter Text
The metal bars are thick and cold on your fingertips.
“This is your new home,” says Noctis inconsequentially, gesturing around the cage as though it is the normalcy in Niflheim to proclaim cages are homes for humans, not animals.
Comparing the bars to your fingers, it is easy enough to say three of yours is equivalent to one solid thickness. You know there is no hope in sawing through these metal bits, and that alone splashes cold water in the embers of your fighting spirit. They remain unbending even in your tightest grasp, and you know full well that by the time the one Chosen by the Stars comes to rescue you, you will have memorised the texture, ridges and indents of all 247 bars separating your space and his.
“What will become of Tenebrae?” you dare yourself to murmur under your breath, watching how the prince lifts his steely eyes to meet yours.
“Why does it matter,” he replies, a tone always too impersonal, always too detached, with a smile that has a bit of teeth to it. “Tenebrae’s already gone.”
Stories of Prince Noctis of Niflheim were as common as the sylleblossoms in your backyard. How the prince in his jagged black armour slew allies and foes alike, making him a figure whose respect is earned out of fear than honour. He learnt the art of war at the age of three, debuted on the battlefield at the age of twelve, and had drawn a bloodied line of victories ever since. When he came for hushed, tranquil Tenebrae with his army of MTs in that dark dropship emblazoned in Niflheim scarlet, you knew he’d paint a line here as though he merely played connect-the-dots with the continents.
Mother lay in red amidst the blue sylleblossoms, and father’s last scream escorted you to Noctis’ cold, awaiting hands.
There is no sense of time where you are.
You know it is on purpose, for Noctis wants to slowly deprive you of your sensory stimuli how one deprives fish of oxygen. It is simply one of the many games he plays to pass his time before he claims another piece of Lucis on another day. Galahd, Caem, Ravatogh, these are some of the names of the chess pieces on Noctis’ chessboard, amassing an army of white pawns in a pile of black ones. Should boredom seize him, he only needs to lift a rook and set it in a square to mark his territory like he kindly demonstrated with Tenebrae.
In his room, there are no windows for sunlight to penetrate. With no sunlight, you know nothing of the outside world and you’ll soon feel time slipping from your hand no matter how hard you grasped. The last sliver of sun you saw fractured on Noctis’ face when he stood at the edge of the dropship closing in on itself. And then it was black, the colour Niflheim worshipped.
It is true, for Niflheim’s prince bore the colour all over him.
When he removed his heavy headgear that distorted his voice, for a moment, you allowed childlike curiosity to manifest with a frown. You’ve certainly heard tales of the Daemon Prince and how he singlehandedly slaughtered Shiva, bringing forth an everlasting chill over Ghorovas Rift as her icy corpse serves as warning for all the other Astrals to heed. But you’ve never expected your eyes to trace the arrogant slant of his lips stemming from years and years of unbroken victories, just the barest kiss of pink over skin too pale, too delicate to belong to a cruel conqueror like him. If those blue eyes aren’t narrowed, aren’t coagulated by blood, you thought he would’ve appeared much kinder for his age.
Noctis unclasps his bracer and it lands on his desk with a dull thunk. The disordered mess of his black hair from the helmet suits him. “See something you like?”
You fold your hands over your lap, taking in how he sheds his armour to reveal a clean cut body of lean muscles under fine metal. “You’re young,” you say, stating the obvious, to which he returns with an amused smirk.
“Really?” he says almost conversationally, leaning his weight against his ornate desk, fingers splayed over his helmet. “My dad thinks I’m old enough to give him two grandkids.”
“Aren’t all parents like that?” you muse as mother squats in her private garden of Lucian lilies and starts naming all the flowers after her future grandkids, giddy with thoughts of your marriage if Niflheim hadn’t senselessly killed her.
Noctis says nothing. He doesn’t need to say anything at all when a smile travels across sealed lips, guiltless even when he ended father in half.
In Tenebrae, with moist earth between your toes, wild greeneries aging with grace under the mothering sun, air dense with an aftertaste of rain, your hands are dirty and smudged brown. Marbled moss of the late Oracles stand tall with the trees, their gossamer veils frozen in time by the expert hands of a carver who’s learnt how to bend stones into silks. You hoped to be someone like that too, with your dirt-caked fingernails and a fistful of musty fertiliser, tending to a patch of sylles sickened by pests. Someone whose hands can nurture life even in the most resilient of hearts.
In Niflheim, you have no purpose other than to remain as what you are: A trophy of war.
You suppose, to an extent, that is why Noctis has you on display for his eyes and his eyes only. In a cage, like an endangered species in an ecosystem too brutal to sustain survivability, you are paraded on a pedestal – the bed – for him to enjoy. He looks, but he does not touch, yet your skin prickles with the hungering want in his eyes, shadowed only by his bangs. He is free to look all he wants from his side of the room, while you are left vulnerable, exposed, with no pretence to privacy from his burning stare, having nowhere left to hide.
His boots are a heavy sound when he approaches you, stopping scant inches from the bars keeping you safe.
You dare not touch him with your hands, for you know you cannot grow anything when he has no heart to begin with.
Weeks ago, the Chosen King and his sister came in a royal entourage. Dressed in the finest Lucian whites, the grand Nox Fleuret procession sheltered from the glittering Tenebraean sun under laced white parasols. All fourteen of them in two straight lines, looking like the dashes painted on roads. You remember laughing atop the steps with mother and father chiding you by your sides with you shouldn’t laugh at your would-be husband and you, as Ravus lifted his chin and gifted you a smile most beautiful, most dazzling, whispered fondly to your parents, why shouldn’t I laugh at my would-be husband for being the poor fool who has to marry me?
“Your poor fool,” says Noctis, his gloved hand coming to settle on your shoulder with a warning squeeze, “is currently setting off on a journey to get all the Astrals to help him out.” His other hand, one that is not gloved, cups your cheek to tip your head, dominating your vision. The calluses on his hand are rough, the mark of a man made on battlegrounds. “Gotta pity that guy, the Astrals are not gonna wake up for him unless you’re around.”
You had been sitting on the edge of your bed, reading the lines on your palm. It is the only thing you could read, for Noctis gave you no books to pass the time. “He’ll come,” you say, Noctis’ hand moving with every word from your lips. “The prophecy does not lie.”
The devastating beauty gives an impassionate smile that is almost sympathetic at the longing in your syllables. “You just don’t know when to give up, do you?”
“No,” you say, and it is the truth. The Astrals have promised you that Ravus will be the last light to eradicate all darkness from Eos, and it is your duty to see him through his task. Your kidnapping served as a strategic manoeuvre meant to thwart his progress, but Ravus will find another way to reach you. You know he will.
—only, Noctis looks at you with so much of pity, it makes you wonder what he knows that you don’t.
Two sets of bed, one for you, one for him, always unmade, in two opposite ends of the room. When he isn’t killing, he sleeps. Temporary lapses of peace, you tell yourself, grateful for all the innocent blood unshed in the hours spanning his rest. He tosses and turns on his bed, rucking black silks, restless legs kicking and curling. What is he fighting, you wonder. Nightmares? Oh, what a silly thought; isn’t he nightmare himself?
There are no maids uprighting the mess Noctis makes on his desk whenever he flicks through pages of reports he occasionally brings with him. If you knew him any better, you’d daresay he’s bored of them. What’s the use of pages and pages of elaborate script detailing all the skirmishes in Lucian border when he knows it will all tally up to his perfect victory in the end? You can’t say you’re pleased with yourself for thinking in such a way, but the lines on your hands are unchanging and you’ve grown restless studying Ravus’ fate, wondering if his name is on the documents and if he’s the one responsible for the mess Noctis is reading.
At the exact same moment, black lashes flutter and you find yourself a captive subjected under the intense scrutiny of his hooded eyes.
You don’t look away; you won’t look away. As childish as it is, you won’t let this end in cowardice, even if it is a staring contest for two. You’ve already lost the battle for Tenebrae so what else do you have to lose when you have nothing left in your hands? Perhaps Noctis catches on your thoughts, for he’s willing to humour you in this game, lowering his report just so you’d follow the hypnotic shift of his smile into a smirk. Pinpricks of unease settle on your nape just as soon as the ashen grey in his eyes spark blue, the very shade of the sylleblossoms you grew.
Shadows from where the chandelier fails to light are too harsh a colour on Noctis, yet strangely, it suits what he is. He isn’t the righteous whiteness Ravus wears. He’d sully the purity with his sinful hands. Black alone suits him, eternal blackness of his hair and his name, Noctis of the night. You hate it.
He is the first one to break the brittle silence, an eyebrow mildly arched. “You’re a funny one, Oracle.”
Ravus called you many things before, things that were the norm between two soon-to-be-wedded lovers: Lovely, adorable, intelligent, witty—and then there were certain nicknames you were less fond of: Foolhardy, obstinate, sulky, pick-up-the-phone-when-I-call-you-fool. Noctis’ ‘funny’ doesn’t match up to any of it, not that you were imprudently cracking a joke on enemy grounds.
Still, you try on a smile anyway, just for the sake of spiting him. “I see.”
His eyes are always bright when he’s about to say something cruel. “I like that.”
“That?” You feign polite indifference at his words.
Noctis knows what you’re doing, knows you’re only faking things just to tolerate his presence to live through another day, not that you’re making extra effort to hide the poisoned sugar in your tone. Yet he indulges you as one would a pet, like rubbing the belly of a cat and knowing when a swipe of its claws would come and he’d still do it over and over and over again, just to indulge you the way he wants.
“That look of defeat you’re wearing right now,” Noctis says, smirk turning lazy at the corners, head tipped back. “That’s addictive. You’re addictive.”
There is a different lustre in his eyes that has you conceding his victory, for you’re sure you can’t win against the sickness swelling your stomach.
Ravus never called you that either.