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One of the defining features of Noctis’ friendship with Prompto was, without a doubt, being woken up by the latter’s phone calls on Saturday mornings. He always knew it was Prompto, because the blond had insisted that his ringtone be the Chocobo Song, which was just good enough of a tune that Noctis didn’t completely hate it for so often cutting short his weekend lie-in.
He couldn’t remember what he’d been dreaming about, but the last part had involved threading a sword through a car radio to get it to stop playing that damn tune. Maybe he was starting to hate it. When he slowly came awake, and realised why the song wouldn’t stop, he let out a long-suffering groan and buried his face into the pillow.
Not today, Prompto.
The ringing stopped. Noctis felt himself relax. He was just dropping back off to sleep, when—
“I want to ride my chocobo all day~”
“Shut up!” he growled, rolling over and knocking his phone off his mattress with a flailing arm. It landed with a dull thud on the carpet, then continued to croon. “I hate you so much,” he grumbled, scooting over and straining to retrieve the device.
“What?” he said sharply, when he finally answered the call.
“There you are!” Prompto sounded far too cheerful. “Didn’t wake you up, did I?”
“Fuck you,” Noctis said. Prompto knew full well that he had woken him up.
The git just laughed. “Whoops! Anyway, glad I finally got through to you. You have to look at the link I just sent you.”
“You woke me up to make me look at a website?” Noctis asked disbelievingly. “This is almost worse than that time you called to ask me what filter you should use for your profile picture.”
“Hey, that was important! And trust me, you’ll thank me for bringing this to your attention.” Noctis groaned. “Come on, dude, just get your princely butt across the room to your computer. You’ll thank me.”
“Fine.” Noctis didn’t necessarily haul himself out of bed so much as haul half the bed with him—it was cold, and Ignis got on his case for leaving the heating on overnight. He wrapped the duvet around himself and shuffled over to the computer in the corner of his room.
“What are you doing over there?” Prompto asked, clearly able to hear the rustling of the blankets.
“’S cold,” said Noctis, maybe a little defensively.
“Go for a run, that’ll warm you up.”
“Thought you wanted me to look at this link?”
“Well, yeah. After that.”
“I’ll pass.” Noctis put Prompto on speaker and set the phone down on his desk as the computer booted up. He immediately saw the link Prompto had sent him.
promptographer: DUDE
promptographer: DUDE YOU HAVE TO SEE THIS
promptographer: handorheart.blogs.co.lc/
“What is it?” Noctis asked, cursor hovering warily over the link.
“Just look at it. It’s nothing bad, I swear! Safe for work! Well… sorta.”
“Sorta?”
“I mean, I doubt you’ll like it, but that’s not really the point. Just click it!”
“Okay, okay.” Noctis clicked the link.
The page loaded quickly, all-capital header, ‘HAND OR HEART?’ splashed across the top of the page, over…
“What. The fuck.”
…Over a photograph of Noctis and Ignis exchanging an amused glance, standing by the refreshment table at the Winter Solstice Banquet last month.
“I know,” said Prompto severely. “I found it totally by accident. I was trying to type in this, uh… other URL, but I typo’d it and… yeah. This came up. Thought you should know about it.”
Fighting a strange sense of revulsion, Noctis scrolled down. The blog consisted entirely of anonymous posts dating back several months, featuring photos of Noctis and Ignis together. It seemed to be laying out a case for why all evidence pointed towards them being… well. Lovers.
A small knot formed in Noctis’ stomach. The borderline obsessive analysis was one thing. The photos, however, were another. The header photo was an official image from the media kit released to press who wanted to report on the Winter Solstice Banquet, but the majority of the photos in the post were slightly grainy, zoomed-in, artificially enhanced photographs of the prince and his adviser from afar. A picture of Ignis holding open the car door for Noctis outside the restaurant where he worked part-time. A picture of them pressed shoulder-to-shoulder in a throng of people waiting to cross the street. A picture of them sitting in a café, heads close together as they leaned over something on the table—plans for the Solstice celebrations, Noctis recalled. He remembered all these moments, but he certainly didn’t remember having his photo taken.
“Noct? You there?” Prompto sounded worried.
“Y-yeah,” Noctis answered. “Just… a little creeped out.”
“I don’t blame you. Most of these photos are pretty obviously taken without permission.”
“How… how far back do they go?” Noctis was afraid to look for himself.
“Like, August or something. It hasn’t been running very long, doesn’t seem to have many hits.”
August?! Noctis felt a shudder run up his spine; a feeling like eyes on him right this second. Except the curtains were shut, and the front door of the apartment locked. He had locked the front door last night, right? Maybe he should check… but it was so damn cold and there was no way he was shuffling all the way there with a duvet wrapped around him.
Against his better judgement, he clicked through to the earliest post on the blog.
The picture was dark and grainy and had clearly been taken from a distance, then cropped and enhanced, but it was still obvious what the picture was of: Ignis, standing on the tiny balcony of his fifth-floor apartment, with an arm around Noctis, who leaned his head on Ignis’ shoulder.
He felt sick. Paranoia won out and Noctis broke free of his blanket-cocoon, scrambling first to the window to peer through the curtains at the street below—even though, given he was in the penthouse, the figures on the street below were little more than androgynous splotches against the grey cement. Next, ignoring Prompto’s concerned questions through the phone, he hurried out of his room to the front door. Locked. Fine. For good measure, he threw the latch. Okay.
His shoulders relaxed a little and he returned to his computer.
“Noct? Buddy? You okay?” Prompto asked, his voice edging towards panic.
“Yeah,” Noctis forced out. “I’m fine. Just…” He trailed off. How did he feel? Freaked out? Creeped out? Violated?
“Want me to come over?”
“No, I’m—” A knock sounded at the front door. Irrationally, his blood froze in his veins. It’s probably just Ignis, he reminded himself. Besides, an intruder wouldn’t knock.
The thought wasn’t exactly reassuring, but nonetheless, he said, “I’ll call you back,” to Prompto, hung up the call, and traipsed back down the hall to open the front door.
It was Ignis, of course. “Why is the door latched?” were the first words out of his mouth.
“No reason.” Noctis fought the urge to look up and down the hall and pull Ignis inside and lock and latch the door behind him. He let Ignis take his time coming in, though as he stopped to remove his shoes Noctis surreptitiously pushed in the lock. He was starting to shiver from the cold, now that he had departed his bed and blankets and calmed down a little.
He followed Ignis into the living room, frowning at the fresh political reports his adviser dumped on the coffee table.
“Have you had breakfast?” Ignis asked.
Noctis shook his head.
“Are you sure you’re alright?”
Noctis swallowed. “I have to show you something.”
Ignis looked at the blog silently for a couple of minutes, skipping through its pages, skimming through text. “You shouldn’t let rumours bother you so much, Noct.”
Noctis scoffed. “These are a little more than just rumours, Specs. The photos?”
“Relatively harmless.”
“Not all of them.” Noctis leaned over and took the mouse, clicking back to the earliest post, and the picture of the two of them on Ignis’ balcony.
“Ah,” Ignis uttered. “That is… disconcerting.”
“That’s one way to put it,” Noctis said.
Ignis looked at him then, and Noctis wasn’t sure what he saw, but he reached for Noctis’ hand and looked him earnestly in the eyes. “I doubt this person wants to hurt us, Noct. It’s just their way of… having fun, I suppose. It’s not the only blog of its kind.”
“I know, but—”
“Yes, the photos are a breach of privacy.” He stood, not letting go of Noctis’ hand. “I need to go to the Citadel. Will you be okay?”
Noctis took a deep breath, then nodded.
Ignis squeezed his hand. “You’re freezing. Put some warm clothes on and don’t turn the heating up too high.”
By the end of the day, the blog had been taken down and an investigation launched as to who had run it—more importantly, who had taken the photos. It should have been as simple as tracking down the I.P. address, but whoever was running the blog had used an airtight proxy server to hide their location. Clearly, they’d known that what they were doing was illegal—especially considering that the earliest photos had been taken when Noctis was still sixteen, and even at seventeen he was technically still a minor. Not just any minor: a royal minor.
The blogger was so committed to their anonymity, in fact, that they’d used a standard InsomniaNet email address for the account, with no recovery email, phone number, or other accounts of any kind attached to it.
To say that it was unnerving, the idea that this person could at any given moment be watching Noctis, taking photos of him when he was with Ignis, would be quite the understatement. He couldn’t help but regard each person he passed in the street, in the school grounds, with newfound suspicion.
“The Crownsguard will find the perpetrator eventually,” Ignis reminded him frequently over the next few days. ‘Perpetrator’. As if it were an assassination attempt, rather than an overzealous, stalker-ish fan blog.
On the fourth day, Noctis arrived at school to the tune of surreptitious glances thrown his way, muted giggles, and unintelligible whispers following him everywhere.
In homeroom, Prompto met him with a dour look. “It’s bad,” he said.
Noctis sat down next to him. “I’m not sure I want to know.”
Prompto showed him anyway: the newly-printed edition of Insomniac’s Digest, the single trashiest gossip magazine in the city, with that same image of Noctis and Ignis at the Winter Solstice Banquet on the front cover. The bold yellow headline read: Royal Romance: Is it just Loyalty? Or is it TRUE LOVE?
“You’re kidding me,” Noctis managed to say, though he felt like he’d been punched in the lungs; all the air had left him. He glanced around the room, seeing several faces hurriedly turn away as he did so.
He flicked to the page detailing the cover story. The headline was repeated across the top of a two-page spread, featuring several familiar images. The unsolicited images from the ‘hand or heart’ blog. Including the picture of them on Ignis’ balcony.
The love life of Prince Noctis Lucis Caelum, one day destined to be King Noctis Lucis Caelum CXIV, has long been a subject of debate. Despite attending a public high school and sporting desirably handsome features and a physique to match—deliciously honed from his years of weapon training in preparation for the royal mantle—the young royal has never once been seen with any lucky young ladies, or reported to be in a relationship. Rumours about his relationship status have, before now, not only been few and far between, but consistently unfounded.
Today, however, Insomniacs will learn the reason for all of this: Prince Noctis may have, in fact, been in love with his adviser-in-waiting; his chamberlain; future hand to the king all along! Our meticulously gathered evidence heavily suggests—
“I think maybe you should go home,” Prompto suggested in an undertone, hand hovering by Noctis’ shoulder. Noctis’ hands were shaking on the pages of the magazine. He snapped it shut, and swallowed.
“Yeah,” he agreed. “Can you, uh—”
“I’ll tell the teacher you were sick. Like, about-to-hurl sick.”
“Right.” With one more glance around the room (everyone was still pointedly avoiding his gaze), Noctis stood, grabbed his bag, and left the room. It was right before the bell was due to ring, so the halls had emptied. A pair of girls standing outside the room hardly even tried to stifle their giggling as he hurried past.
He ducked into the nearest bathroom, checking to make sure there were no other occupants before locking the door. Technically, he could get detention if he was caught locking the bathroom, but he didn’t really care right now. He’d rather have detention for a week than have to endure the looks, the giggles, the whispers, the judgement for one day. He’d endured it once before, on his first day, and hated it then, too. But that was different. That was: “oh my goodness, the prince is at our school!” This was: “oh my goodness, the prince might be fucking his adviser!” Which, for the record, he was not.
Noctis sat with his back against the far wall, where he couldn’t be overheard, and fumbled his phone out of his pocket.
“Noct?” Ignis answered on the second ring.
“Have you seen it?” Noctis asked. “The magazine?”
A long silence. “It has been brought to my attention. The edition is being pulled from print as we speak.”
“Kinda late for that, don’t you think?”
“Quite. Of course, you have the option to sue for libel.”
“Libel? But they didn’t—they didn’t say anything bad about me. Just that…”
“That your lack of romantic pursuits is thanks to…” he paused, and Noctis heard the rustling of pages, “your ‘spectacle-donning, green-eyed Adonis of a chamberlain’ having already stolen your heart?”
Noctis couldn’t help it: he snorted.
“It’s nothing to get upset over, Noct,” Ignis assured him.
“I know, it’s just… could you… could you come get me?”
Another long pause. “Of course I can.”
Noctis had training with Gladio that evening. But with all that was running through his head, it was almost impossible to concentrate.
It wasn’t just the article. After thinking about it, he decided he wasn’t bothered by that too much—it wasn’t the first time Insomniac’s Digest had published a sensational feature on him, and probably wouldn’t be the last. They could be stopped from printing additional copies after the first run, but thanks to free press laws, that first run was untouchable. Noctis was all for freedom of speech, but unfortunately it didn’t always work in his favour.
There was also the matter of the photos. Had the editors of Insomniac’s Digest already known about the ‘Hand or Heart’ blog and saved the images before they’d been taken down? Or had the person who’d run the blog sold the pictures to Insomniac’s Digest as a sort of revenge for having their blog revoked? That was the version of events which Ignis thought likely, and since Ignis thought so, Noctis did, too.
Ignis had a copy of the magazine in his car when he’d picked Noctis up from the back gate of the school. It gave Noctis a good chance to fully examine the article, and make a decision on whether or not to sue for libel. They hadn’t said anything negative about him, or explicitly tried to smear his name, but the Citadel lawyers would certainly be able to make a case about the implications they were making about him having a potential impact on his reputation.
The article itself was full of garish epithets and wild assumptions. Hardly the sort of thing anyone but the overly-impressionable would take seriously. Including, unfortunately, high school students.
Noctis had spent a long time—probably too long—looking at the photos. He had to admit to himself: out of context, he and Ignis really did look like… well, like a couple.
And he wasn’t really sure how he felt about that.
The fifth time Gladio managed to disarm him, he lost his patience and swept a leg behind Noctis’ ankles, knocking him to the ground.
“Ow!” Noctis yelped, sitting up. “What was that for?”
“You’re distracted,” Gladio said. “Come on. What’s up? You’re not bothered by all that tabloid trash, are you?”
“No,” said Noctis. “Maybe.”
Gladio sighed, and sat cross-legged in front of him. “This time next week, the new rumour rags will be out and everyone will forget all about whether or not you’re dating Iggy.” He snorted. “Sorry. Can’t say that with a straight face. But this effects him, too, you know.”
“I know.”
“Today I had at least three junior Crownsguard members ask me if it was true, so I can’t imagine what he’s had to deal with.”
Noctis blinked. Ignis hadn’t mentioned anything—but of course he hadn’t, he’d been too busy making sure Noctis was okay.
“You worried about whoever’s been taking the photos?” Gladio continued.
“Yeah, I guess.” Noctis looped his arms around his knees. “Ignis thinks I should stay home as much as possible until they catch them.”
Gladio hummed. “Well, as your Shield, I’m inclined to agree.”
“Yeah.”
A long silence fell. Noctis stared at the polished training room floor between his feet, feeling Gladio’s eyes boring into the side of his face.
“Cough it up, Noct. I won’t judge.”
Noctis couldn’t even really put words to what it was that bothered him so much.
“You… aren’t actually in love with Ignis, are you?” Gladio ventured.
Noctis probably took a little too long to answer. “Why does there have to be a difference between love and in love?” he asked. “I… I don’t know.”
Gladio let out a puff of air. “Sounds like maybe I’m not the right person to have this conversation with.”
“Maybe not.”
“I know this, though: you’re the prince. You’ll be king some day. And as king, you’re under no obligation to follow any rules—whether those rules are imposed by language, society, whatever. A king makes the rules, and anyone who tries to stop him can get fucked.”
“That’s pretty extreme,” Noctis commented, finally looking up.
“Maybe.” Gladio smirked, and stood, offering a hand. “One more round, come on. Prove to me that you’re fit to make your own rules.”
Noctis smiled, and let Gladio haul him up.
Gladio, in his brash variety of wisdom, had a point: Noctis was under no obligation to follow anyone’s rules. He and Ignis looked like a couple, because, in a way, they were, and always had been. He couldn’t remember Ignis not being there for him. He couldn’t remember Ignis not knowing exactly what to say to make Noctis feel better. He couldn’t remember Ignis ever denying Noctis those small, gentle moments of physical affection—hugs, soft touches, kisses on the hand, forehead, cheek. He couldn’t remember Ignis not being the most wonderful thing to ever happen to him.
And, okay, maybe Noctis did have a teensy bit of a crush on him, and maybe he’d have to examine that further and decide what to do about it. But even if nothing ever came of it—that was okay. It wasn’t an I-want-to-have-sex-with-you crush, if anything at all, because Noctis wasn’t sure he was capable of that. It was… I never want you to leave me. He felt it keenly; a warm, expanding bubble in his heart.
The Insomniac’s Digest could interpret that however they liked. Obsessive fan blogs could interpret that however they liked. Noctis was inclined to believe that ‘dating’ was far too shallow of a term for what bound Noctis and Ignis together.
“Great news, Noct,” Ignis said. He was leaning on his car in the Citadel’s parking building. “Our elusive blogger has been found. As I suspected, they sold the photographs to Insomniac’s Digest as an act of revenge. The editor claimed that she had no idea the photos were unsolicited, and pointed us straight to them. You needn’t worry anymore.”
“That is great,” Noctis agreed. Then he wrapped his arms around Ignis’ middle and pulled him close.
Ignis reciprocated the hug as if on impulse. “Noct?”
“I don’t care what magazines or blogs say,” Noctis said into Ignis’ shoulder. “They don’t understand. You won’t ever leave me, right?”
Ignis tightened his hold, pressing his cheek into Noctis’ hair and whispering into the nape of his neck, “Even if the world were to end right now, I’d hardly mind if it meant spending my last moment with you. Just like this.”
“Severe,” Noctis mused.
“Dramatic enough for you?”
“Just about.”
“How about this, then?” Ignis pulled away, instead grabbing Noctis’ shoulders and staring severely into his eyes. “If I had to choose between you and Ebony,” he began, “I’d probably choose you.”
“Wow.”
“I know.”
“Well, I’m sold.”
Ignis smiled, and pressed his lips to Noctis’ forehead, pulling him in for another hug.