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A ball bounced silently on the grass.
Noctis frowned down at his lap, fingers clenching tightly in the fabric of his shorts.
Guess his dad’s not coming today either.
He knows, he knows, that that’s unfair. After all, his dad is the King, the King! Of course he’s very busy running the country and protecting everyone else. He just… wishes his dad could hang with him too.
Not look at him with those sad eyes, as if he was on death row. Not tell him that sorry Noct, you know how it is for the thousandth time. Not treat him like everyone in Lucis was more deserving of his time then Noctis.
Something in his chest ached as he watched a father play with his son across the common grounds, throwing a Frisbee back and forth and laughs soaring through the sky above. There was no father for someone like him, only empty dinner tables and even emptier silences.
His shoulder throbbed as he felt a warmth at his shoulder, and then the familiar form of Ignis was crouching next to his wheelchair.
“Do you want to play a little bit before your lessons, your highness?” Iggy’s voice was gentle, but that somehow made everything worse.
After the daemon attack, after Tenebrae, after Luna, everyone spoke to him in those kind of voices.
His hands clenched tighter. Everyone treated him like he liable to break any moment now, as if he was one step away from cracking into a thousand tiny little pieces.
Noctis was so tired.
“Yeah.” His voice was hoarse. “Let’s play a little bit.”
Sometimes, he almost wished his father hated him.
Anything, anything would be better than this. Better than Ignis’s uncle's tentative smiles, as if still unsure how much affection he could freely give but still willing to try regardless. How Clarus patted Gladio’s shoulder with a proud smile when Gladio accomplished something fantastic or ruffle Iris’s hair at her scratchy artwork.
But it’s not. His father loves him, he knows this. Just… he’s too busy for him.
Long tables, servants and guards placed respectfully along the walls. The end of the table remained empty no much how much Noctis stared at it with watering eyes until he excused himself with a trembling voice for a maid to help him back into his wheelchair.
He thinks about those bedtime stories from so long ago, where his father had sat with him regardless of the world outside and told him about his adventures growing up.
Noctis is just selfish, for wanting his father’s love to himself. So, so, very selfish.
When he was younger, he was often sickly, or so he was told. His nursemaid, before the daemon, used to giggle with him when he was supposed to be sleeping, telling stories for his enjoyment way into the night.
His father supposedly fretted himself sick over his toddler self, even as rumors flew behind his back on the chances of his survival.
When the council brought it up to your father, his nursemaid used to whisper to him from where she was cradling him against her collarbone, your father threw a complete fit.
No, she used to tell him, I will not abandon my son. I will not tarnish Aulea’s memory like that, and I will announce Noctis as my heir tomorrow, whether you like it or not.
And despite the scorn he had for putting the hands of the kingdom into a constantly feverish baby, the insults for not even trying to have a ‘spare’, the bemoans over the faith of Lucis, his father was proved right.
Noctis survived. He’s survived a lot of stuff.
Physical therapy is awful. There’s no other way to describe it, and yet here he is, alone and trying not to break out into tears as his physical therapist yells at him. Motivation, he thinks as a reason, but it has the opposite effect. Gladio had the habit of trying to do this for him during training whenever he wasn't thinking - which was often - but usually stopped and apologized immediately after Noctis’s eyes started welling with tears.
He wasn’t fragile. He wasn’t. He just felt it sometimes.
Noctis took his first hesitant steps with wet eyelashes, automatically glancing over to the waiting area with a smile on his lips, that immediately died down.
Oh, that’s right. No on was waiting for him.
He continues growing.
The wheelchair is ditched for a pair of crutches. Talks of nerve damage and muscle weakness fly over his head, nothing he understands, but oh, he understands the pitch of Iggy’s mouth, the stiff way he says thank you ma’am.
Noctis is never going to walk the same again.
His right leg will never be fully operational again. Sure, he’s assured, that he’ll be able to walk and run again, like everyone else in the Citadel. But there will be a limp for the rest of his days, an offset to the way he walks, the extra hours he’ll have to put in to be as half as good as what’s expected on him.
More hushed whispers follow after him now, and there are no more grand stories of his father defending him, nothing but the worried furrow in his brow he sees more on TV than in person.
The dinner table remained empty, He picked out his vegetables, and no is there to coax him into eating them this time.
He pressed a hand along his cheekbones, eyes riveted to the portrait above him.
There are photos, of course, but his father never left them out. Instead, pictures of his mother are kept in a locked box in his bedchambers, far out of sight of both prying eyes and Noctis himself.
So this is the next best thing. His crutches lay discarded next to him, his back to the stone wall across from the portrait.
He touched his own face again. Wow… they look just alike. From certain angles, he could be mistaken for her twin brother in her younger days rather than her son.
Maybe this is why his father looks at him like he’s staring at a ghost, but something in his gut protests that.
Noctis wondered why, but then the thought slipped away with remembrances of a political test in the next half hour as he frantically starts to study for it.
Time slipped through fingers. The table in no longer empty, coated in a light shine of dust as his new phone is filled with tentative ‘Raincheck?’ “Sorry, you know how it’s been’.
Talcott Hester is borne in a wave of good cheer, everyone fighting for a chance to hold the baby. When it’s finally his own turn, Talcott’s father hesitantly with eyes as wide as saucers teaches the crown prince how to hold his infant son.
Personally, he thought the baby is a little ugly, but what really stoped his chest is the unfathomable adoration in Talcott’s father's eyes, reflected right back in Talcott’s exhausted mother smile.
His guts twisted. Did… his own father ever look at him like that?
Noctis learnt how to stand without his crutches, and doesn’t look back at more comments are whispered behind his back at the way his right leg drags ever so slightly behind him.
Before he knew it, he’s already a teenager and living on his own.
No more time for stories, not for him.
Meeting Prompto made things… not easy, but easier. It’s awful, but there’s something comforting in dusty tables shared between them and phones full of pointless messages.
People think that because he’s the prince that means he gets everything he wants.
But - the things he does want, those are not so easily obtainable.
Prompto plopped next to him heavily in his school chair, bags under his eyes and a flush along his cheeks.
Noctis frowned. “You should be home, you’re obviously sick.”
The blond winced. “About that…” Prompto bit his lip at that. “You know how it is, midterms week. I promise I’ll rest up over winter break, I just hate doing makeups for exams.”
“I’ll hold you to it,” Noctis punched his shoulder, looking back over where the teacher was getting ready to hand of their history exams, a headache already building behind his eyes. “Whatever this bug is, I hope it goes away soon. I feel like half the school’s sick.”
Prompto’s admitted to the hospital two days after he collapsed in the hallway after his final exam, running a dangerously high fever of over one hundred and four.
He’s far from the last.
“I’m not going back to the Citadel, it’s safest here in my apartment.” He complains over the phone to Ignis, balancing the device carefully between his cheek and shoulder as he unlocks the door. “The Citadel has thousands living in it, never mind the thousands more just working there. So, tell my dad -” He has to break for a moment to cough into his sleeve, phlegm coming up only to rest on the back of his tongue disgustingly.
“No specs, I just swallowed the wrong way - I’m fine, tell dad not to worry about it.” Noctis hangs up after that, not quite caring about how rude that was when he still has phlegm in his mouth. Quickly, he rushed over to the sink and spat in it, wincing at the strange yellowish tint to it.
It’s nothing. He’s just being over dramatic, as usual. Iggy made him read up all about hysteria when he was younger, the giant psychological impact it can have on a community.
Just that, he tells himself as he flicks on the TV, trying to push it to the back of his head.
“In today’s news, the ongoing epidemic has been running rampant in Insomnia. Sourcing from what believes to be the newest batch of refugees entering the city, hundreds having fallen ill, and a reported eighty citizens have been admitted to hospitals. Three elderly have already died, along with one infant -”
He later learns that it came from a nearby shelter he passed everyday on the way to school and back. No one can tell who, despite the intense quartering and testing the Kingsglaive did, carried the virus. Only that one teenager volunteered from a neighboring school for community service, and it spread like wildfire throughout the school systems, later branching out towards the young and elderly.
Teenagers are strong, but some are weaker than others, and the longer it took for a cure to be found, the less chance those who received the virus first would survive.
It was only later that he learned that it was likely Prompto who passed it on to him, and that Prompto was one of the firsts to fall seriously ill.
Ignis found him huddled under the stream of cold water in his shower, fully clothed and barely conscious as the fever tore through his body.
It passed in feverish glimpses, Iggy’s panicked expression, feather light touches along his wrists, the bump of a car ride.
Gladio’s scared face as he was rushed away. A room filled with people in hazmats.
He thought he saw his father, but he can’t be sure.
Either way, he drifted off to the sounds of alarms buzzing in his ears.
When he woke up, his father is dressed in a t-shirt and sweats, something unheard of, and most surprising of all, holding his hand.
“I know I wasn’t the best father.” He was saying, his voice rough with strain or disuse, Noctis can’t tell either way. “I know you loved me still despite me being too busy - no, never making time. Truth was, my son, I was scared. Every time I looked at you, all I could see was Aulea’s face, and that wasn’t fair to either of you. So I ran away, like the coward I was.”
His father dips his head, and something wet meets the back of his hand. “I’ll make it right, I promise.”
“So please don’t die.”
“News today, we’ve received word from the Citadel that Prince Noctis is in critical condition, along with many of the Prince’s classmates. Already, fourteen dead have been accounted for, over three fourths of them belonging to minors, some as young as infancy and kindergarteners. A cure has finally been made, along with a vaccine, that it being given out by Crownsguard posts around the city, but there are concerns that many of the first to be infected are too weakened to fight off the virus, and that many more will die despite developments in medicine and science, including Crown Prince Noctis. Now, moving onward -”