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There’s nothing quite like watching two of your friends try to mentally weigh their personal value without saying anything out loud. He was still shaking with adrenaline. It was rare for Gladio or Ignis to take a hit, let alone both of them. In a few minutes, Gladio was wrapping his arm with a bandage and Ignis was healed and getting ready to drive them back to the haven. Noctis looked empty, so Prompto started up with some stupid joke and let his tongue lead without any influence from his brain. But he felt slightly sick thinking about it.
Everything before was like training wheels. This was the precipice. This was where they honestly got serious. He’d been a kid carrying through a promise he made before he had a concept of self, but now he was an adult, and they were being run ragged by magitek troopers, and probably all of his casual acquaintances were dead. He wouldn’t complain, but it sure felt like occupying the role of party comic relief had gotten a lot harder.
Sometimes he could hit a trooper point blank more than once and it still wouldn’t go down. It was like they were metal all the way to the core; bits of armor would come off and the thing would keep advancing. Sometimes he saw Gladio cleave a monster in two like it was as easy as breathing, and he was glad he was there, because Noct needed to talk to some normal people and Gladio and Ignis weren’t it.
Everything was about weight and measurement, when they really got down to it. Spending the night camping vs a motel. Using curatives or not using them. Taking a hunt or not taking it. Even keeping Prompto around was probably one of those decisions. The ones that Ignis and Gladio had to make without speaking aloud. The ones that made him and Noct feel like they really were children, like they really were a long way from a home they could not go back to, like they really were on the edge with no promise of ever being on stable ground.
[#]
It was cold before the sun came up. Cold as in almost bitterly so, but Gladio liked to feel his skin go tight, he liked to feel like he was running against something. There had always been people who didn’t know him well, who thought he must get exhausted always being braced against something. But he found it draining and terrible to stop fighting. Laying down arms, giving up the fight; he had nightmares about it when he was a kid.
Somewhere he’d lost what the point was, bracing against something or being relieved of that tension. This would have been a nightmare for anyone else. It was a nightmare, arguably. He could smell coffee in Ignis’ sweat and see blood in Noct’s every glance. But he was bracing hard, and it felt like the moments his whole life had led up to.
He didn’t expect anyone to be outside when he vacated the tent in the gloom of pre-sunrise. But there was a figure hunched by the white ashes of the burnt-out fire, and a shock of blonde hair sticking up from the recesses of a blanket.
“You’re up early,” Gladio said. He dropped into the chair across from Prompto. The wind rustled the ashes, ran then up against the rocks that had encased the fire. Prompto looked up from his camera.
“Can’t sleep,” he said. Gladio nodded. He had thought… at first he had thought he wouldn’t be able to sleep. But instead he found it tugging at him every night, a safe haven, a chance to forget. And when he woke up, the promise of a chance at fighting something, at killing something, at wet blood on his face and the sun on his shoulders.
He broke it down into steps like Ignis seemed to do everything. Lie down. Close eyes. And then he’d absent himself for the night.
In the dim light Prompto looked more ghostly than usual, more washed out and drained of color.
“You running this morning?” Gladio asked. Prompto’s laugh was caught in the wind and the blanket, it dissipated to nothing before Gladio could be sure he heard it.
“Have I ever not?”
“Well you whine a lot when it comes to carrying stuff. And fighting. And putting up the tent. Figured you might be tired out.”
“Hah. Not yet.” If he had been looking closer, would he have been able to see the bruise-like marks under Prompto’s eyes? If he’d been listening more carefully, would he have heard the strain in his voice?
[#]
Noctis woke up in the backseat tasting metal. He used to get that when he was a kid a lot. Prompto was beside him flipping through photos, although he seemed stuck on one. A rare candid of Ignis laughing.
“Any good shots?”
“Yeah, they’re fine.” Prompto didn’t look up. Gladio was in the front reading. Ignis was humming along to the radio, so softly he probably thought they couldn’t hear over the wind and the engine. Prom sank deeper into his seat.
“Wish I had a real jacket sometimes,” he mumbled. Noctis laughed. It would have been nice to have planned better, certainly. Would it have made things easier if when he left, he knew he would never come home, not to the same place he was vacating? That it would all be gone? Prompto shivered. The wind was bracing, but it was hot in the car, the seats burned wherever they touched Noct’s bare skin.
“You’re cold?” he said.
“Aren’t you?”
“No? We’re in the desert,” Noct said. Prompto laughed. He put the camera away and started talking then. A stream-of-consciousness usual Prompto-bullshit. Noctis felt some tension bleed out of his shoulders. He forgot about the taste in his mouth. He let the road just be a road and the car just be a car and his friends be only that, nothing else.
[#]
Prompto woke up in the bathroom. He was sitting fully-clothed on the lid of the toilet, his cheek made an audible noise as he peeled it from the counter beside him. It felt like his whole body had been put through the spin cycle on an overzealous washing-machine. He was doing something. He was doing something but he couldn’t remember what.
Someone knocked on the door.
“Are you asleep in there? Did you fall in?” Gladio called. His voice almost seemed to shake the floor. Or the floor was just like that. Prompto blinked hard but the sparks refused to leave his vision.
He was doing something. Thoughts failed to crystallize, but he found his voice somehow.
“Hang on I’m--uh--my hair.” Bandage. He was changing the bandage. When they’d been stopped after the hunt he didn’t mention it because Ignis and Noct were both injured and they had only two potions, and he kept thinking of days back, Gladio and Ignis having that silent conversation. He didn’t want to see them do the math and come up short.
And then he slept through the next rest stop and forgot to ask. And then it was healing on its own, it was, until there was heat crawling up his side.
And now, now he peeled away the bandage and saw it weeping yellow, he saw the edges of the wound swollen with fluid, and the new bruise spreading up his side.
His hands were shaking in the sink under the hot water. The new bandage clung gladly to the wound. He went back into the room. Noctis was sprawled over one bed looking at his phone. Ignis was holed in a corner looking over their finances.
“Took you long enough,” Gladio said. Prompto nodded. His tongue felt oversized for his mouth.
In another few minutes Gladio emerged from the bathroom.
“You running today?”
“When am I not?” Prompto said.
But it was hard to keep up with Gladio. And still, he had sparks in his vision, dipping in and out.
“You look like a dead person,” Gladio said, after he’d brought them to a sudden stop not far from the hotel.
“I’m born with it,” Prompto responded automatically. But then Gladio was pressing a hand to his forehead, then ice-cold fingers to his neck. “Hey.” Prompto squirmed away. The world tilted and refused to resolve.
“Astrals, how are you even standing?”
“What?”
“You have a fever. No one’s that hot regularly.”
“I’m an exception,” Prompto mumbled. Gladio snorted. Then he started back for the hotel. “I thought we were running?”
“You’re not running anywhere.” Gladio’s tone didn’t leave room for argument. And Prompto’s legs felt unsteady, so he followed him back. Rinse and repeat. He woke up in the bathroom again a few hours later. This time Gladio was pounding on the door. Ah, right. He locked it this time.
“Prompto!” and that was Noctis, sounding strained. But he just needed to peel away the bandage. It was too hot to touch, if he could peel it away--if he could convince his useless fingers to function for even a minute.
A chunk of the wood tore out when Gladio broke through the door. It hung by a single splinter, like a severed MT head clinging by one wire.
“Dude, we thought you died,” Noctis said. Ignis was crossing the room. Ignis touched his face gently for someone looking so angry. “How’d he get so sick?” Noctis said, from somewhere in the far distance. The world was faded at the edges, the sounds of his own body were totally void.
“Prompto. Did you eat anything strange these last few days? Did you get injured or bitten by something?” He could focus on Ignis’ face or he could listen to the question but the two were not compatible. All this was irrelevant. He needed to change the bandage, and get up, and re-inhabit his position.
He fumbled at the hem of his shirt. And he couldn’t keep his eyes open, so he didn’t have to see Ignis’ face when he peeled away the bandage and saw the infection that had hooks all the way down to his blood.
And he didn’t hear Gladio’s swear, even though it echoed off the tile. Instead, the next thing he was aware of was Noctis’ hand in his, and the night air on his face.
Everything after that was worse. Up in the brain melting range, he hadn’t been really thinking much. It was like working through molasses.
He came back to himself in the bathroom adjacent to his hospital bed, down the hall from the ER where someone was still screaming without tiring.
The lights were too bright, and the person in the mirror looked like they’d been scraped off the road somewhere. Prompto let the water run over his hands until the sink auto-shut off. Ignis was absent somewhere when he got back to his bed, but Noct and Gladio were still there. Gladio was pacing.
Noctis had been sullen on the ride, from what Prompto could pick out as real, at least. But he got up from his seat so he could half-drape himself over the bed, reaching out to grab hold of Prompto, the hospital gown, his arm.
“Noct, leave him alone,” Gladio started, but Noctis pressed his face against Prompto’s cheek, and Prompto couldn’t tell which of them was trembling.
But it didn’t really matter. He was slipping back into sleep. Someone brushed a hand on his forehead, and he heard Gladio’s voice nearby.
“Rest up kid,” he managed to make out. It was an easy order to follow.