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skin tucked in
Cor hadn't taken it seriously.
It was his duty to the Crown, of course, but given the frankly obscene list of shit Regis had put him through in thirty-odd years of loyal service, Cor felt he had a well developed sense of This-Is-Bullshit-Just-For-You-And-Clarus-To-Laugh-At-Somewhere-I-Can't-Hear-You-Isn't-It, when it came to his King's orders.
Cor loved Regis dearly, after all, but he was also one of the privileged few who knew the kind of absolute shithead the illustrious King of Lucis could be, when he was being unrepentantly himself.
So he'd looked at his latest assignment – to train one of the Prince's friends into shape fit for the Crownsguard, under the pretense of sending him along the Prince on his journey to marry the Oracle – and he'd taken the time to stare at Regis dead in the eye with as much unamused exhasperation as he could cram into a single look. According to Nyx's best estimations, that was usually enough to make lesser men piss themselves, though Cor had never actually seen it happen first hand. Heard about it, certainly, but never to his face.
Regis had smiled, because despite it all, he was not a lesser man, and then dismissed him with a taunting wave of his hand.
Clarus snickering in the back of his throat, the sound echoing vividly in Cor's ears, hadn't exactly challenged his opinion that he was being subjected to His Majesty's abysmal sense of humor.
Meeting the boy hadn't helped, either. Thin, all but vibrating with nervous energy and tripping all over himself with barely contained panic. It hadn't exactly filled Cor with determination to see this particular mission through. He was fairly sure that if the boy failed to reach the required levels of proficiency, Regis would simply send him along to compensate, because Regis loved his son and didn't know how to say no to him.
The prospect of babysitting the Prince and his friends along a cross-country roadtrip was, in fact, a much better motivation for Cor to actually consider treating the matter seriously.
“It's not so bad,” Nyx told him over dinner, when he broke the news. “Being a teacher. It's kinda fun, actually.”
Cor snorted, concentrating on slowly working his way through the plate of skewers in front of him, keeping his thoughts to himself.
“C'mon,” Nyx went on, grinning easily. “If worse comes to worst, I can give you pointers. Ignis certainly never complained about my methods, and I managed to turn him into a pretty decent murder machine. In dress shoes, no less.”
Cor wrinkled his nose eloquently. Ignis Scientia was one of the most determined, dedicated men he'd ever met; whatever he put his mind to, he succeded in, through sheer bloody stubborness and discipline. Of course he'd taken to Nyx's lessons well. Even if Nyx himself wasn't a terrible mentor – which he wasn't, Cor figured, because he was patient and kind and genuinely enjoyed the task of passing along his skills – no one could deny that most of his success had been preordained by the choice of student he'd been given. By comparison, the Prince's blond menace of a friend didn't exactly inspire confidence.
“We'll see,” Cor sighed, leaning back on his chair.
At least, he consoled himself, time spent in this endeavor would not be wasted fighting Ignis Scientia and his irritating army of charts and timetables.
It was something, he supposed.
Cor had expected the boy to be late.
He'd purposely set up their first official training session early in the morning, to best gauge what level of commitment he'd be dealing with for the remainder of their year together. Five in the morning, sharp, was the standard start of a Crownsguard shift, and if the boy was anything like the Prince, this would be the first hurdle to overcome.
So it was with no small amount of surprise that he found himself arriving at quarter to five to the agreed spot near the Citadel's main entrance, only to discover the boy sitting on the steps, cup of coffee sitting by his side as he snapped pictures of the skyline. Cor found himself irrationally irritated by the fact he was also wearing fairly sensible clothes, in preparation for physical activity. Sensible shoes, sensible pants and a shirt that, while not sensible – dark blue with a tiny moogle riding on a cartoonishly cute chocobo was as far from sensible in Cor's view of the world as it could get – was loose enough to allow freedom of movement.
“Argentum,” Cor said, voice low and expression as non-hostile as his irritation would allow.
He had a feeling it wouldn't have made much of a difference, if he actively tried to be pleasant; the boy would probably flail just the same, though Cor was surprised he caught the camera somewhat deftly in the middle of that outburst.
“Sir!” The boy said, earnest and terrified, and Cor was struck by the unkind mental image of those tiny, yapping dogs that had been all the rage among high society a few years back. “Good morning, sir.”
“You're early,” Cor replied, frowning somewhat as the boy flinched on reflex.
“I didn't want to be late,” he explained, studiously looking down at his feet. “I don't come to the Citadel often, so I didn't really know how long it'd take to get here.”
“Hn,” was Cor's well-measured response. He sighed, and told himself to stop being petty at the boy purely because it was frowned upon to be petty at the King. “...acceptable choice of attire, I see,” he tried, just to shut up the echo of his concience, which as of late had taken to echo the worst of Nyx's disappointed whining. “I believe it will be for the best, to begin with the basics. I want to see you run, today.”
Cor hadn't taken it seriously, not really. Not until Prompto Argentum frowned at him, blue eyes nearly purple in the early morning light, and expression solemn.
“Sprints or endurance?” He asked, like he knew what that meant, and Cor supposed he did.
“Personal preference?” Cor found himself asking, curiosity piqued despite his sincerest intention not to play into Regis' evil, sordid plans, whatever they were.
“I really don't want to do endurance on a school day,” the boy replied, chuckling wryly. “I mean, I will, if that's what you think it's best. Sir. I just don't usually run more than eight miles before school, 'cause then I'm snoring by noon.” He laughed awkwardly, shrugging inside his shirt. Cor tried not to stare. He suspected he failed, but given the sheer nervousness oozing out of the boy, it probably went unnoticed. Probably. “To be honest I usually just do four, unless I'm training for a race, but like, you're the boss, right? You call the shots.” He licked his lips nervously. “Sir.”
Cor snorted.
“I suppose I do.”
Today, Prompto's shirt was dark purple with a small choir of moogles, and proudly announced You can do it, kupo! The cheery speech bubble was right smack in the middle of his chest, and Cor's hand slammed on it, not hard enough to aim to hurt, but certainly enough to be felt. Prompto sprawled back on the training mats, air forcefully shoved out of his lungs. There was a moment of silence, while Cor wondered if he'd over done it a little.
“...ow,” Prompto groaned, making a face. “Shit, I felt that one.” Then he slapped his hands on his mouth and looked up at Cor, mortified. “I... I mean.”
“Consider it an incentive,” Cor deadpanned, one eyebrow arched patiently, “to dodge the next one.”
He made to kick him, while he was down, but Prompto squeaked and scrambled away, rolling back on his feet and putting distance between them. The kid was never going to be anything other than a glass cannon, Cor had decided. But he had stamina, and he was almost nimble when he wasn't shaking with nerves. If Cor could get him to control that, he'd have a chance against slower, more powerful brawlers. The Prince already had Gladio, after all. And Ignis, thanks to Nyx. Cor figured it'd be best to focus on Prompto's innate strengths, and try to guide them to complement theirs.
He'd taken well, to Cor's particular blend of hand-to-hand. He didn't have the strength to match, but he was certainly flexible enough to pull most of Cor's own acrobatics. Once he got a better sense of rhythm, Cor figured a small, one handed sword would be a good match for him, at least for close combat. Sort of a middle step, between Gladio's slow but devastating power, and Ignis' feral, frantic sprees. Prompto had speed, but they didn't have enough time to train his dexterity on that level.
It was a puzzle, almost. One Cor had not expected to enjoy, but it itched in the back of his head, and now he found himself determined to solve it.
“Fuuuck,” Prompto whined, when he missed a step and Cor sank a boot into his face, unrepentant.
Then, as always, he flushed and looked over at him in mortification. Cor was privately more than a little impressed that he still had enough fire to complain about the beating before bouncing right back on his feet. Most of his recruits usually didn't get back up.
“You do realize,” he pointed out, “that in the time it takes to complain, a serious enemy would be more than likely to finish you off.”
“Right,” Prompto muttered, rubbing his jaw. “Sorry.”
Cor scoffed.
“Don't apologize,” he said sharply, “do better.”
And Prompto, because he was Prompto and Cor found he rather liked him for it, nodded solemnly, and tried.
“I see you have not killed your young student, yet,” Clarus told him, after he'd sent Prompto off for the day. “All going well, I hope?”
Cor gave him a long suffering stare.
“Must you?” He asked, falling into step with his friend as they headed back to the throne room.
“Can you blame me, old friend?” Clarus laughed, “my son had choice words to share, about your training methods.”
Cor snorted.
“Yes,” he said, lips twitching as he remembered Gladio's stubbornness during his first year in the Crownsguard. “I imagine he did.”
“And young Prompto?” Clarus insisted, because he was a hopeless gossip and Regis had probably sent him on a mission to gather it.
Cor frowned, considering.
“Not dead yet,” he replied, shrugging. “So there's that.”
“Oh, you're so fucked,” Nyx laughed, sitting on the backrest of the couch like an overgrown monkey. “You're invested now.”
Cor glared at him, eyes narrowed and mouth pressed into a tight, annoyed line. He detested when Nyx was right about something and he wasn't, he was insufferable about it. To be fair, he was insufferable always, but Cor was far less willing to find it endearing it when he was also busy kicking himself over it. Alas, Nyx was right, he was invested now.
The boy had potential.
His strength was laughable and his coordination left much to be desired, but he had a staggering amount of stamina, a surprisingly willingness to do whatever Cor told him to do, no questions asked, and best of all, his own version of unflinching discipline. It was the discipline that got to him, really. Cor admired it most out of any other quality in people. Nyx just liked to say he was a sucker for an underdog story.
“If you don't have anything useful to say,” Cor began, and then growled irritably when Nyx slid along the couch to essentially sit on his shoulders, leaning over his head to look at the mess of notes in his lap. “I suggest you make yourself scarce.”
“What, and deprive you of my expert council?” Nyx shifted until his arms were folded atop Cor's head, his body arched in a way that couldn't be any more comfortable than it was dignified. Then again, Cor had always half suspected Nyx was part cat; he possessed that fluid, boneless quality to flop about without a care in the world, when the mood struck him. “Nah huh, you're invested, now. I wanna help.”
“You could get off me,” Cor muttered between his teeth, dispassionate because he knew a lost cause when he saw it.
“Could also get you off,” Nyx replied, right on cue, not an ounce of embarrassment to him, before he snorted. “But that's not gonna get your kid in shape.”
“He's not my kid,” Cor spluttered, glaring at Nyx's unimpressed face.
“He's totally your kid.” He smirked. “Embrace it, Cor, it's normal. Hell, at this rate, you're going to feel all the emotions before your time is up.”
“I am perfectly capable of throwing you out the window, you realize,” Cor murmured, voice even if his left eye was twitching ever so slightly. “Opening the window beforehand is fully optional, at this point.”
Cor's apartment was on floor twenty-eighth.
He would do it, too, Nyx was perfectly aware. One, because Cor was kind of an asshole when you looked at him from the wrong angle – which Nyx avoided most of the time, because he liked it much better when Cor was a long-suffering idiot helplessly in love with him, instead. And two, because Nyx was the best warp-striker in the Kingsglaive and a twenty-eight floor drop had nothing on the stuff he had pulled off before, for shits and giggles – and for the sake of Drautos' ulcer.
“Fine, fine,” Nyx laughed, shaking his head. “What are you thinking?”
“Weapons training,” Cor muttered quietly. “Something that'll give him the proper edge, but there are not many things you can be sufficiently proficient in, within eight months.”
Nyx made a noise in the back of his throat.
“Have you considered range?”
Cor snorted.
“He's not very magically inclined,” he said, lips twisting. “Not enough to focus exclusively on it, at least. And the Prince is too young still, to supply him with that kind of power.”
Nyx rolled his eyes. Lucians. It was all swords and spells with them, no in between.
“I meant firearms,” he laughed, and tapped his fingers on the side of Cor's head. “Guns are a thing, Marshal.” He arched an eyebrow when Cor turned to squint at him. “Look, they're not very fancy, I'll grant you, but you put it in someone's hand and they're immediately able to fuck someone's day up. You'd only have to focus your training in teaching him not to fuck the wrong's person day.”
It wasn't... a terrible suggestion, no, now that he thought about it.
Cor sighed.
“You say that,” he mused, “but only because you haven't seen how much his hands shake.”
But it was, nonetheless, a thread worth pursuing.
Prompto's hands, however, were eerily steady, the moment Cor put a gun in them.
“Oh,” he said, blinking before he switched hands and shook his arm after his first shot. “Ow.”
Cor smiled, thin and faint, almost without moving his lips.
“Yes,” he mused, one eyebrow arched, “that's called recoil.”
“Yeah, uh.” Prompto laughed sheepishly. “Videogames don't have that.”
Cor shrugged and nodded at the range, encouraging Prompto to try again. He noted, however, that his posture was different, this time, actively bracing for the kickback. He'd meant to let Prompto make all the mistakes he could, during his first attempt, so he could then address them as they worked over theory. The boy, however, picked up stuff fast.
The second and third shots were off, but by the fourth, he'd gotten the hang of it, compensating for distance and recoil. By the time he reloaded for the next round, he was hitting the targets with every single shot.
“You sure you've never done this before?” Cor asked him, blinking as he looked over Prompto's first ranking in the system.
He'd expected the kid to hit rock bottom, as he'd had with pretty much every other aspect of his training so far, and then steadily work his way up. He hadn't planned for Prompto to make it into the top tenth of the ranking on his first day.
“Guns are illegal,” Prompto explained, blinking owlishly at him.
Cor's mouth twitched again.
“So if I go looking,” he teased, “I won't be finding a criminal record, is it?”
Prompto made a gurgled noise in the back of his throat and raised his hands in protest.
“What! No!” He flushed. “I just. The only guns I've ever dealt with were pixelated and on a TV screen, I swear.”
Cor believed him, if nothing else because the yearly background checks on Prompto had all come back squeaky clean. But part of him also didn't, because for as much as news broadcasters took to complain about videogame violence every few years, Cor was pretty sure videogames did not teach one how to actually handle a gun in real life. Videogames didn't give Prompto the instinctive knowledge of how to stand to negate recoil and they didn't teach how to adjust shots for distance.
In the end, Cor realized that Nyx had had the right idea, and he was probably going to be impossible to deal with, because of it.
“Focus,” Cor barked sharply, lowering the practice sword.
Prompto's accuracy didn't suffer as much as Cor had anticipated, once he'd graduated into moving targets. If anything, he had a good eye for timing and leading shots. So of course, the obvious next step, was to make Prompto a moving target. One couldn't expect to simply be allowed to set up and remain immobile, during a fight. Cor had mowed through his fair share of MTs, and part of the reason he found no challenge in it, was because they tended to stay in place. If you were fast enough to dodge their fire – which Cor was, and Prompto was slowly working up to be – you could easily zigzag your way in and take them down with a hit. The danger laid in their numbers and the way their formations were set up to maximize their range of fire.
“Right,” Prompto sighed, slapping his face lightly with his free hand, as if to wake up. “I'm good.”
Cor leaped at him, sword at the ready, and Prompto rolled and dodged, aiming, not at Cor, but at the dozens of stationary targets hanging around the arena. Cor figured once Prompto got the hang of it well enough, he could always throw the latest batch of unruly Crownsguard rookies as moving targets. Kill two birds with one stone, as it were.
They kept at it, Prompto trying to score hits on the targets and Cor trying to score hits on him, for a good half hour, before Cor managed to corner Prompto from behind, aiming to deliver a not too gentle smack with his word on his back.
Except he found himself staring at the barrel of Prompto's gun.
The moment broke and Prompto's eyes widened hilariously as he pointed the gun away sharply.
“Sorry!” The boy cried out, scrambling back to his feet. “Just. Didn't mean to!”
Very slowly, very deliverately, Cor reached with the sword and poked Prompto's chest gently with it.
“There,” he said, amused. “Dead. We're even now.”
“...isn't this like, overkill much?” Prompto asked, staring warily at the gattling gun.
Cor shrugged.
“Hopefully,” he said, arms folded over his chest. “But you never know.”
By now, he'd stopped being actively surprised, at how quickly Prompto took to doing things right.
It was worth it, though, if only for the look on Clarus' face when he walked into the training hall and saw Cor's lanky student mowing down targets with it.
“Oh, wow,” Nyx blurted out, laughing, “the shirts really are that fucking cute.”
Prompto flushed to the tips of his hair, spluttering, and quickly folded his arms, trying to cover up the three baby chocobos currently adorning his chest.
“Ulric,” Cor growled, eyes narrowed. “You're not here to comment on his fashion choices.”
Even if some of them, Cor found a little bit dubious.
“Right, right,” Nyx said, raising his hands placatingly. “Here to kick your ass, my little friend. Sorry about that.”
“Uh,” Prompto replied, squinting. “Sorry about the comment or sorry about the impending ass kicking?”
Nyx pulled out his kukris with a dramatic spin, grinning.
“Bit of both,” he said, and then threw one of them behind Prompto, warping with ease. “Not your final exam for nothing, after all.”
Prompto ducked on reflex and then rolled away, trying to put distance between them. It was good technique, Cor had to admit, standing on the sidelines and studing the fight, but Nyx's ability to close those gaps near instantaneously negated it pretty quickly. He honestly doubted Prompto would ever have to face against a warping opponent, but it was the closest Cor could get to emulating a deamon's speed without putting the boy in undue danger. And besides, if he was meant to fight alongside the Prince, he'd need to get used to it.
Prompto cartwheled around the arena, flailing and spluttering little awkward laughs as he tried his best to avoid getting pummeled. But, Cor noted, for all his dramatics, his footwork was on point, and honestly, at this point, he didn't really care about presentation, provided the foundations were solid.
Nyx wouldn't go easy on him, either. Cor hadn't asked him to, and Nyx was almost as invested as he was, in seeing Cor's unlikely proterge succeed.
“Gotcha,” Nyx cried out triumphantly, fifteen minutes later, as he tackled Prompto to the ground and sat on him.
“Congratulations, Prompto,” Cor announced, “you only died four times, there.”
Prompto laughed awkwardly, deadly still under Nyx's weight.
“Four's better than five, right?”
“And none is better than four,” Nyx pointed out with an easy grin, sliding off him and then hauling him up with ease. “You've got moves, kid.”
“Uh,” Prompto replied.
And then they were off again.
“Here,” Nyx said, grinning easily. “Got you something, little man.”
Prompto blinked as Nyx put a stuffed, baby chocobo phone charm in his hands. It was soft and plush, and it also made Prompto flush a lovely shade of fuchsia.
“Th-thank you,” he stuttered helplessly, more so when Nyx laughed.
“Figured you'd like something, to comemorate your graduation.” He snorted as he slid his hands into the pockets of his pants. “Six know Cor ain't gonna give you nothing.”
Cor had, in fact, given him something. A beautiful, high caliber hand gun with P. A. neatly engraved on the handle. Prompto had stared and stared at it, before he'd given up pretenses and hugged him tightly. Nyx knew it too, had heard all about it from Cor's own voice, and then proceeded to taunt him for days over it. It was just the principle of the whole thing.
“Nyx,” Cor deadpanned, “stop harassing the boy.”
Nyx shrugged, unrepentant, and neither pointed out the fact there were actual tears glistening in Prompto's eyes.
Cor hadn't taken it seriously, when he'd been ordered to get Prompto Argentum fit for the Crownsguard.
But, he hoped, as he watched him shuffle into the Regalia with the Prince and his friends, that he had done a good enough job, regardless.
He was a good kid; Cor could only hope he would be strong enough to survive the journey.