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When it first started happening, he liked to think it was only a side effect of his combat training beginning in full earnest. The throwing knives were constantly on his mind, though his mind was not yet enough to bring them to his hands; it would be some time still before he was connected to the Armiger. It was natural to visualize it from time to time, he reasoned. In all likelihood, his targets would one day be other people.
Learning to drive was when it first became difficult. His eyes would bore holes into the red stoplights as he gripped the wheel with such force that he had to be treated for tendonitis in both wrists, all just to will himself to stay put.
“It’s not technically against the law if you drive me, right?” Noctis had pleaded on the night that Ignis earned his provisional driver’s license. “Like, with a first-year license, you’re allowed to drive with one other person in the car. They just said you can’t drive me because that’s what my dad said, right?”
“Noctis, I’m afraid His Majesty is the law,” Ignis said with a smile that he pretended was not borne out of relief.
In order to be formally approved to chauffeur His Royal Highness, Ignis required much more extensive training and experience behind the wheel. With each instructor, Crownsguard, and even once the Immortal Marshal himself sitting in his passenger seat, Ignis waited for someone to notice. Someone would watch the way his hands sat on the wheel, or the way his foot waited on the brake, or the way his gaze snapped from car to car to obstacle to pedestrian to car, blinking away afterimages of catastrophes yet unhappened. Someone would realize the death and destruction brewing in his subconscious, revoke his license, and have him removed from his service to the Crown.
As he envisioned swerving off of the road and grinding Cor Leonis into the guardrail, then grabbing his seatbelt and winding it around his neck to complete the kill, Ignis realized that, were he to be found out, corrective action would not end at his dismissal. He would likely be imprisoned on charges of conspiracy to commit.
He thought he would feel relief channeling those urges into his training. He pictured flesh bodies in the place of the silhouette targets in the training room, imagined them spurting the same geysers of blood from his sick fantasies. Instead, he felt nothing but more of the same guilt.
(He conducted various, ultimately inconclusive experiments on the topic, whether attempting to force the thoughts during those convenient periods of controlled violence had any effect on the frequency of the thoughts that haunted him at all other hours. In an attempt to stem his bias, he channeled all his hope into two opposing hypotheses in equal measure: one, that his violent desires were a finite resource that needed only to be exhausted; or two, that they were a spreading fire across his psyche that he could either fuel through this wanton encouragement or, with enough self-control, extinguish before the flames consumed his mind. But, with all the mathematical precision of desperation, he concocted contradicting trends depending on the day, the weather, his mood when he woke up. He wrote his datapoints in notebooks, catalogued them in spreadsheets, constructed plots, applied statistical theory, and willed the weak slope to tilt at all, one way or another, even if just a little bit.)
No matter the cause, this despicable development was now his fault. If it had become incorrigibly embedded in his brain as an aspect of his self, the most he could do was control and hide it. He prided himself on his self-control, a discipline unparalleled and unheard of in a man of his young age. It should have been a simple thing to assure himself that he would never harm an innocent, nor another loyal to the Crown, nor even himself, simply because he swore it to himself. He wrote such things in those private notebooks of his, as if taking a written oath, as he catalogued the datapoints still (a little bit out of habit, a little bit out of the hope that eventually a trend would emerge).
Yet it kept him up at night, imagining the day he was sworn into the Crownsguard, that in an unconscious moment, he would summon a weapon, his arms would move on his own, and someone would be dead, and there would be blood on his hands. The feeling was so palpable in those dark moments that he could not rest until he had washed them, to assure himself they were still clean. Although he had carried weapons on his person before, a necessary precaution when accompanying the Prince, it was only a deliberate, practiced move that would bring the blade to his hand. The distance, between intention and action, made it feel less dangerous.
Crownsguard training drilled him in bare-handed combat tactics. Then, there was a day of group instruction entirely devoted to drawing a concealed weapon so quickly that it became automatic. That week, he saw his datapoints form a trend for the first time—not one that proved one hypothesis or the other. Just that things had taken a statistically significant turn for the worse.
He remembered the instant he realized he was already too far gone, and it started when he was in the kitchen of Noctis’s apartment. He had always had thoughts while dicing vegetables (in fine enough pieces that his picky charge would not notice their presence) of continuing from the carrots to his own fingers—he had read somewhere that the amount of force that it took to break through a carrot was equivalent to that required to break a dactyl bone in the human hand. A new thought came while the knives were away, while the sharpest thing in reach was a round cookie cutter, slicing through the thin layer of his latest pastry dough. He was reaching into the cupboard for some cooking spray to grease the sheet—last week’s attempt had been too rich and buttery, Noct said, so he was cutting corners here by substituting a traditional layer of butter on the pan—and wouldn’t you know it, Noct’s apartment had experienced a small infestation last month from some takeout boxes under his bed that Ignis hadn’t spotted in his regular cleanings, so the aerosol can that he pulled out from under the stove was not a butter-substitute cooking spray, but a powerful insecticide.
Far be it from him to wonder anymore why Noctis’s belongings were arranged in such confounding ways. Noct had always had this lack of foresight when organizing, or attempting it. But it made Ignis consider his unique position as one of very few people outside of the highly-supervised royal kitchens who knowingly prepared food for the Prince of Lucis, and if he sprayed roach killer all over the baking sheet instead of canola oil, he could kill the boy prophesied to become the Chosen King.
He put the insecticide on the counter for a moment, well away from his hands. He touched the hardcover of the tiny notebook in his pocket, remembering the mantras he had written within it so many times.
He thought about how easy it would be for someone like him to mix poison into a batch of pastries, carefully balancing a bitter taste with a blend of spices to make that sharp flavor seem intentional.
He walked out of the kitchen with the can gingerly between thumb and forefinger, such that he could not spray it, towards the laundry room cabinet where such cleaning supplies should have been stored.
So vividly he remembered himself spraying it, felt the way the nozzle depressed under his fingertip.
He scrubbed the baking sheet to disinfection when he returned to the kitchen, just to be sure.
He saw himself having sprayed poison all over the pastry dough, all over the rinsed berries, on every countertop, on the mouth of every spoon and fork.
“My apologies, Your Highness,” he said after scraping the raw dough into the trash and sanitizing every surface in the kitchen. “It seems a number of the ingredients I’d used had actually met their expiry some time ago. I hope you don’t mind a raincheck?”
Noctis groaned and rolled his eyes. “A day-old egg isn’t gonna kill me, Specs.”
But will I? Ignis thought, then excused himself.
He tried desperately to sound proud on the day His Highness all but kicked down the door to his apartment with Gladio at his heels (Ignis had taken to tidying the royal flat while Noctis was training with his Shield) announcing that he had finally mastered how to connect others to the Armiger. Gladio, already sworn Crownsguard, held out his hand—after a squint of concentration and a couple of shakes, the crystalline blue light burst over his palm and resolved into the shape of a wooden training sword. Even easier than it appeared, he opened his hand and it vanished again. Their faces never looked so boyish as when they both turned to him with grins, seeking his approval.
“I’m gonna put myself in stasis again if I try to hook you up now and I think I’m not supposed to do it without telling my dad or anybody since you’re not Crownsguard yet,” Noctis babbled in his overexcitement, then raised a pointed finger level with Ignis’s eyes, “but you’re next, I swear.”
“Must you say it so much like a threat?” Ignis sighed. Noctis and Gladio only laughed.
Upon receipt of written permission from His Majesty, Ignis’s first object in and out of the Armiger was a mere pencil, citing caution as an excuse. Were he to lose control of what he summoned at any time while practicing, even a weapon blunted for training could become a dangerous projectile. Yet it did not stop his mind from wandering, as he attempted to feel for his path through Noctis to the Crystal’s magic. If he kept at this slow-going training for too long, perhaps his impatience would get the better of him and cause him to lose his temper. Perhaps, even with Gladio just a step away to offer advice, the Prince’s Shield would not expect such unruly behavior from Ignis and would not step forward in time to intervene. Before anyone in the room could process what was happening, perhaps Ignis would have the sharpened point driven into the flesh of Noctis’s hand—not lethal, but messy and bloody and excruciating. Attacking not even to assassinate, but just to cause His Highness—his friend—to feel pain.
In time, the pencil disappeared and reappeared again without incident, and later more items along with it, both dangerous and mundane. Ignis made sure he kept up his practice outside of the battlegrounds with every report he drew up or was handed, and even ones he was told to discard but could not bring himself to abandon, just in case. He pulled his notebook in and out of the Armiger at the same rate at which he used to feel for its hard cover through his pocket. As much trepidation as he had about having the ability to call anything, any weapon to hand by only a thought, he found a comfort too raw and visceral to describe when that notebook came into his grasp with just the subconscious synthesis of crystal.
Daily, often multiple times a day, he looked at Noctis and thought about the weight of a knife in his hand, the force and angle at which he would throw it to reach his neck, the chemicals required to clean the blood spatter from the carpet and furniture—Astrals know Ignis had enough practice removing bloodstains from both his own and his liege’s clothing—the ease with which he could dissect His Highness’s body into pieces to fit comfortably within a small number of black trashbags taken to the dumpsters on the night just before trash collection, to be driven away before anyone would know the prince was missing.
When February staked its bitter claim on the ruthless end of winter, Ignis took the only course of action available to him. In less than one week, he would become eligible to receive his unrestricted driver’s license, after which it was only a matter of insurance paperwork until he was not just permitted, but expected to be His Highness’s primary chauffeur for non-official events. Following that, he would take his Crownsguard certification exam, which he was all but guaranteed to pass, having received private tutelage by the most elite in the service. Prince Noctis’s safety would be, without question, in his hands at all times.
In a night fraught with equal parts anxiety, Ebony, and anxiety borne from Ebony, he tendered his letter of resignation, dispelled it to the Armiger, and sought an audience with His Royal Majesty the King of Lucis on the following morning.
“Can it wait?” said Marshal Leonis, scratching his head before rubbing the same hand down the tired lines of his face. “His Majesty’s composing a statement with his council on last night’s protests out in Cleigne.”
Ignis should have been versed on the details of the protests. He remembered running his dry eyes over the report around three this morning when he tore himself from paring down his seven-page resignation (or a tidier eight pages, after adjusting the font, line spacing, and adding the appropriate headers and footers to the document) to a more manageable (and more self-serving, from the way it skimmed over the details of his intent to assassinate not only members of the public, but his charge) page and a half. The details escaped his half-strung morning-after mind, its many gaps flooded with black caffeine instead of thought or brain matter. “Yes, of course,” he said automatically, while shaking his head.
When his aching gaze made its way back to Cor again, the Marshal’s eyes were narrow and piercing. “Spit it out, kid.”
Ignis inhaled stiffly in a way that only made his shoulders rise, instead of letting his ribcage expand in all directions, and his subsequent exhale was just as shallow. “It may concern a threat to national security,” he said, the leather of his gloves squeaking as he clenched his hands into fists. “More specifically, a direct threat to the safety of His Highness.”
Cor made one of his sounds that crossed between a grunt and a laughing snort. His right hand was firm on Ignis’s tense back, and his left was firm when it knocked on the dark-polished wooden door to the King’s office. “I know you wouldn’t bother anybody for bullshit,” he said. “You gotta speak up more. You’re a smart kid, you got a good head on your shoulders.”
The double doors opened to allow entry to “Ignis Scientia, Your Majesty,” as Cor announced with a salute and bow. Ignis took a step into the chamber before doing the same, his bow deeper, his utterance of “Your Majesty” more reverent, in preemptive apology. He straightened, intending to inhale, intending to do as he’d rehearsed: pull the printed letter from the crystalline ether as he walked to King Regis’s desk, deliver it with his sincerest apologies for failing in his duties and falling short of the expectations of the royal family, and asking to be disconnected from Noctis’s Armiger before begging his leave. With security escort if required. To the dungeons if protocol necessitated his imprisonment.
Instead, he stared at the morning sunlight shining through the stained glass behind the small figure of the seated King, beams filtering through the straying strands of his greying hair, his Shield cutting an imposing silhouette over His Majesty’s left shoulder. It was a symbolic thing, the Shield standing by his charge’s left side: a knight bears a shield on his left arm so that he may thrust and parry with the blade in his right—and the right side was where the Hand of the King would stand. Gladio had also told Ignis it was so that the Shield could be closer to the King’s heart, to be some small number of inches nearer to blocking a fatal blow. But a well-aimed shot with a knife, the flat of its blade parallel with its target’s ribs, could do damage just as lethal as a strike to the heart, were it plunged strategically into the far edge of the right lung, asphyxiating a King of Lucis on his own blood just out of reach of his only line of defense in this room where no one would expect him to enact an assassination plot despite all of the signs, all of these months.
Ignis thought, for a moment, of what might happen if, in his inexperience, he drew the wrong thing from the Armiger. If, instead of his freshly-printed letter, he called forth his freshly-sharpened knives, if muscle memory drove him to fling the blades at the King before anyone knew what was happening, not even himself. No one would expect this of the Prince’s young advisor. No one would be ready.
He heard the phantom crash of shattering glass as the chair of the King would tip back into the window and cascade a rainbow of shards upon his corpse.
With all of these calculations suddenly crushing him, he fumbled on his first step towards the desk, choked on nothing, turned heel, and sprinted out of the room.
His ears were still pounding with the rushing of blood when he was caught, though he had made it out of the office. He was nowhere near a safe number of metres away from the still-ajar doors to the King’s office when a firm hand grabbed his shoulder and stopped him in his tracks. His vision blurred with every rapid beat of his pounding heart.
He slammed his hands against the ornate relief in front of him, because if he filled his hands with stone—failing that, with his own hair, threatening to tear it from his scalp, after the tug on his shoulder wrenched him away from the wall—he couldn’t fill them with weaponry. He could not hear Cor until the second or third time he was addressed—he could not tell—“Scientia. Scientia, report.”
Cor’s thumbs pressed down on the tendons in Ignis’s inner wrists, forcing his clenched hands open. The distance, once his blurring vision resolved enough to see it, was precarious for the Marshal. Were Ignis to pull a blade of any significant length from the Armiger to his hand at this range, perhaps not a throwing knife, but something not even as formidable as a shortsword—
And he had to let out a laugh, because he’d finally found the one thing that could stop his raging, violent mind, determined to kill. His twisted imagination could not ignore the formidable strength of the Immortal: if a blade began to form in his hand, Cor would have Ignis’s arms snapped in half like a pair of toothpicks.
“Scientia,” he said again, more coldly. “The threat to His Highness.”
“Marshal, please—my apologies.” As threadbare as Cor’s patience had worn, Ignis’s voice was thinner. “I must ask you to—escort me to a secure location. The threat is me.”
For the sliver of a second that Ignis could stand to meet his eyes, Cor looked neither worried, nor surprised. Though fiercer now, tight with the effort of keeping Ignis’s hands from ripping out his own hair, his expression was almost unchanged from when Ignis had first walked up to him this morning: inquisitive, anticipating, expecting.
“Ignis—Cor.”
His Majesty’s wispy hair was still settling back down to his head after his rush to the door. His cane wobbled under the weight he thrust upon it as he drew himself forward. Though his voice was thick with labored breath, it still carried the soft tone he always used when he forewent titles and formalities and addressed his subjects by their first names. It was a signal to his company that he was speaking to them not as their King, but as their friend.
Despite knowing and understanding this, the words “Your Majesty” escaped Ignis’s lips on nothing more than a whisper, more a plea than an address. He felt no control over the gangling puppet of his body, neither to draw his hands into fists at his chest to salute, nor to close his hand instead around a neck in regicide. Someone was causing an absolute nightmare of a scene in front of King Regis CXVIII and His Majesty’s most trusted retinue in the Citadel, and it certainly could not be Ignis, could it?
Clarus stepped beside the King, a firm hand on his shoulder, a signature Amicitia glower taking his features, a readiness of his feet and legs that promised absolute defense. Ignis’s vision stopped shaking—Ignis himself stopped shaking, he realized. Two points of reality were coming to him on the backs of his shoulders, two hands gripping hard enough to steady him. His Majesty’s round, soft eyes looked so… perhaps disappointed was the best way to describe it.
Ignis closed his eyes and wondered, if he tried to summon a poleaxe into the hand threaded through his bangs, whether its haft would materialize directly through his head, instantaneously mutilating his brain and ending his life.
One of the hands on his shoulders released, then came back for a firm—pat. “Scientia, with me.”
Cor’s gruff, authoritative tone was the same one he employed on his Crownsguard and in his training sessions. It compelled Ignis into instinctive compliance. He almost felt, somewhat saw the dip of his head as he nodded.
“Regis,” Cor said, in a voice Ignis had never heard from him before, but the rest was conveyed only in a nod and a knowing gaze, one that His Majesty and even Clarus returned. It all had that same look that King Regis had been wearing, that soft, disappointed expression.
“Be well, Ignis,” said Regis gently. With that, the King and Shield returned to the office.
Ignis went somewhere. He was not watching much more than his feet as Cor led him down the hall, and perhaps the hand at the base of his neck was encouraging him to do just that. It could have been five minutes or fifteen seconds before they entered a room that Ignis only knew was small and vacant because it sounded like nothing.
“Sit,” Cor said.
Ignis sat. There was a chair to sit in. In front of him, he found a desk—the back of a desk. By the time his eyes made it over its cluttered surface—cluttered with what?—he found Cor seated on the other side.
“Talk,” Cor said, arms folded.
“I,” Ignis started immediately, but the words jammed in his throat from shame. With a series of shakes and starts, and only with the resolute knowledge that Cor would exterminate him before he could land a single scratch on the man, he peeled one hand up from his legs, leaving the other to continue clutching the fabric of his pants. He called the letter of resignation to his trembling, open hand, then passed it over the desk to Cor.
Cor gave the paper a glance, then eyed Ignis with suspicion, before taking the paper and beginning to read. Ignis dragged his hand back across the surface of the desk and left it hanging at the edge, gripping for dear life. Cor’s eyes worked quickly down the page, too quickly to be doing anything more than skimming—and then he glanced at Ignis’s tightly clenched hand at the end of his desk.
“Get out that notebook of yours if you need it,” he said.
Lifting his notebook from the Armiger was easier than blinking. Ignis did both, the latter before the former. His hand filled with the familiar texture—a fine, leather-wrapped hardcover, with a ribbon stitched into the binding, and smooth pages edged in gold paint. A buckle and lock concealed its contents from any who might seek his secrets through the Armiger, but he had already summarized them in the contents of the printed letter in Cor Leonis’s hand.
He remembered the vehicular manslaughter he had schemed against Cor months ago, which he had chosen to omit from the final draft, and dismissed the notebook again.
His hand trembled, empty. He called the notebook back to hand. It was good to practice. He banished it again and clenched his fist, feeling the tightness of the leather.
He summoned it again. Dismissed it again. Summoned it. Dismissed it.
Finally his hand lost its tremble and its tension. He set it back in his lap. When his eyes ventured back up, Cor was staring at him.
“Yeah,” he muttered. “Four times.”
Ignis swallowed. “Sir?”
Cor folded his arms again, still holding the letter, so that it began to crumple at the bottom where he gripped it. “You remember the training exercise I had with you, back before you had a link to the Armiger, where I had you throwing at an increasing number of targets each round? Said it was for building speed and endurance.”
Ignis’s brain, so dysfunctionally over-focused on the present moment, took a full three seconds to re-engage memory recall, and another few after to come up with the practice Cor had described. “Yes, sir.”
“I asked you to prepare to take out three targets. You grabbed four knives,” Cor said. “I asked you to set up for four targets. You grabbed four knives. Five targets, you grabbed six knives. Six targets, six.” He was drawing the letter up into his fist as he curled and uncurled his fingers. “You grabbed an even number, no matter what. Thought it was…” His desk chair twisted away slightly as he made that snort-laugh sound of his. “Odd.”
Memory recall and hyperawareness were Ignis’s only two mental capabilities at the present moment. Verbalizing why it was aesthetically and kinesthetically pleasing to hold the same number of knives in each hand, especially when he had no idea where this conversation was going, was not currently within his ability.
Ignis watched the Marshal inhale and exhale deeply, his free hand clenched in his hair. His chair was turned perpendicular to Ignis, facing him at the adjacent wall with all his focus.
“I’d better tell you this, too,” he said under his breath. “Once you get used to the Armiger, you can get a sense of people… pulling at it. Filling it, emptying it, how much space they’re making, all that. You’ve been connected for, what, a couple of weeks?”
Ignis’s answer came after only a quick beat. “Seventeen days, sir.”
“Few weeks. Yeah.” Cor straightened up in his seat and turned it forward. Then, with a grimace, he kept turning, so that he still wasn’t looking directly at Ignis. “You’ve filled the Armiger with more books and papers than I knew you even got in a day. I mean, the storage is infinite, sure, but…” Cor lowered his head and shook it. “You’ve got a hoard in there.”
He put his eyes on the letter half-wrinkled in his grip—looked at it rather than read it, as if it were an object and not a message. It still made fury crease into his face.
“The gloves,” he said suddenly, pointing at Ignis’s hands with the hand holding the paper—all but balling it in his hand when he closed his fingers around it, he was really ruining it. “What’d you tell me when I asked about them? When you were driving.”
They were back to memory recall. “It keeps oils from the skin off of the steering wheel when driving,” he said. “To avoid damaging the leather.” After a second of silence, he shook his head quickly, snapping himself back to attention, and added, “Sir.”
“Oh, knock it off. Last thing I need you thinking about is rank right now.” Cor—
—threw the letter across the room.
Ignis watched it sink like a malformed paper airplane: a crumpled, compacted bottom corner for weight, and the relatively-flat rest of the page catching on the air and slowing its descent.
“You’re still wearing the gloves,” Cor said. Ignis turned back forward to find him scratching his head with both hands. “Sure, it’s—damn, it’s February already, isn’t it—but you were wearing them in August. All the time, you’re wearing those damn gloves, not just when you’re driving. Why’s that?”
Ignis shrank against the back of the chair. “The principle still applies,” he said, or perhaps mumbled. “General cleanliness.”
Cor snorted again, but this one was humorless. “Yeah. Cleanliness. Ignis, do me a favor and show me your bare hand right now.”
The gloves were more difficult to remove in winter, but the sweat that his hands had worked up throughout this episode loosened the leather’s hold from even the rawest sores on the backs of his knuckles.
“Shit, that’s gotten worse,” Cor muttered. “That’s from how long you’re always…”
He trailed off with a sigh. Ignis drowned in the silence that filled the room. While his hands were agile and in good working order, their skin was in sorry shape, cracked and dry and inflamed. Ironically, for how hard he worked to keep clean of blood, he had begun to seep blood of his own.
“There was one time,” Cor said finally, scratching at his scalp slower and longer, enough that Ignis could hear the short hairs rubbing against his fingers. “You were in the men’s room, alright, washing your hands. I…” The hand scrubbed down his face as he rolled his eyes to the ceiling. “I walked in, did my business, washed my hands, walked back out, and you were still washing your hands. I was thinking, what the hell happened. Then I started hearing how long the sink runs in the locker rooms after practice. That’s just you washing your hands, isn’t it?”
“I suppose,” Ignis said, and he sounded about as faint as he felt.
“And His Highness says you’re always cleaning around his apartment, too.” Cor’s breath whistled through his clenched teeth as he exhaled. “Figured he was just always making a mess. But it’s not just that, is it.”
Cor was making direct eye contact with him now, and his last words had perhaps been in the form of a question. Ignis wasn’t sure he was supposed to answer, but here came the silence again, smothering, suffocating. “I—don’t understand, sir,” he choked.
“That—bullshit.” With a scowl, Cor jabbed a finger at the remains of Ignis’s letter of resignation lying in an inglorious heap on the carpet. “All that crap about how you can’t—you’re obsessing over this. Right?”
“I don’t mean to.” Ignis didn’t remember calling his notebook back to his hand, but he was clutching it again now, squeezing it tight and feeling its texture with his ungloved fingertips. With how much his hands were sweating, would that leave stains on the leather? He might be able to wash them out with the same materials he used to clean his gloves—
“I know, kid.” Cor leaned over the desk towards him, his face set with—was that disappointment again? “And you don’t want to, either. You came to us ready to throw it all away for the Prince’s safety.”
Ignis tried to steel his flinch, but his teeth clicked together in the clench of his jaw. “Yes, sir.”
Cor sighed, and something in the way his face fell, and in what he said next, made his expression suddenly recognizable. “Listen, Ignis, I’m not a shrink or anything, but—I think you’ve got OCD.”
It wasn’t disappointment. It was worry.
“OCD,” Ignis repeated, his voice hoarse and flat.
“Yeah. You know what that is, right?”
“Obsessive-compulsive disorder,” Ignis said like a recitation.
He stared at his hands, at the terrible condition into which he had scrubbed his skin. He thought of the daggers, evenly distributed between each hand. Yes, those lined up with what he knew about the disorder. It was interesting, perhaps even enlightening. But—
“But the assassination plots,” Ignis protested, and there it was. He had said the heinous word out loud, assassination. “My—idiosyncrasies, yes, I suppose they could be explained by—but the violent fantasies, the—”
“That’s the obsessive part.” Cor arched an eyebrow at Ignis. “That’s the difference between just being a neat freak and having a mental disorder.”
Those words hit Ignis in the gut harder than expected. He had said the word disorder aloud already—agreed to it, even—but it stung to hear himself, in so few words, all but diagnosed as inherently flawed by an innate and abhorrent defect in his brain. He stared down at the hands in his lap, at the sickness in his mind manifesting in the cracks and sores on his blotchy skin.
“Dunno if I need to say it, but I will.” Cor stood from his desk and began to walk around to its other side. “You’re not obligated to disclose any details of your mental health status to anyone outside of your healthcare providers. Everything we discussed…”
He stooped down to pick up the letter. He mashed it into his palm with a blow from his opposite fist.
“Will be kept in strict confidence between us,” he finished. “I’ll tell the King you’re handling a health concern, and that’s it.”
Cor pitched the balled-up paper across the room. It bounced off of the wall just above a wastebin, then clattered down inside. Ignis whipped his head back to Cor, but the Marshal was just looking at his bankshot with a satisfied little smirk.
As soon as he noticed Ignis looking, he forced his face back into stern composure. “The Crown can get you connected to mental health services while you’re on short-term disability leave,” he said. “Medication, therapy, whatever you need to get back.”
These words had to stack up before Ignis noticed them. Short-term leave. To get back. He blinked up at Cor in disbelief. “I—” He turned over his shoulder towards that letter. “My resignation—if I’m assessed to be mentally unfit for duty, I should—”
“Resignation denied.” His Crownsguard Marshal voice had been creeping in once he started issuing Ignis’s mental health plan, but here it came back in full force as a decree. “You think you can’t handle this, Scientia? You’re wrong. You can.” He shook his head and relaxed his voice. “If mental disorders made you unfit for duty, the Prince would be out his Hand and his—”
Abruptly, he cut himself off, eyes wide, and pressed his lips thin and flat. He glanced at Ignis, then away again.
“I’ll just say you’re not the first,” he mumbled, “and you’re gonna be in good hands.”