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"Please", Noctis croaked, cradling Prompto's chin with his two hands.
Another sob wracked through him but his best friend's face remained as impassive as it had been when Noctis first spotted him floating up in the tank.
Joyful eyes were now aimlessly staring up ahead, void of any recognition or any will. The slimy, deep purple water-like substance kept dripping from Prompto's hair. The others - Noctis didn't dare to call them specimens, because that would bring Prompto under the same category and he refused that - didn't have hair that long, when they weren't completely bald, so it had been easy to spot which one of them was his best friend.
He liked to think he would have been able to recognize Prompto from any other clones even without that detail, having known him from early childhood. The ugly part of his brain whispered that particular belief was a lie.
"Please, Prompto! Please just wake up!" His cries were unanswered, and his frenetic shaking of Prompto's shoulders only made the other's head bob back and forth. His chest kept the same, disturbingly calm rhythm to bring air in and out of the lungs, to keep the body Noctis was holding alive, but nothing seemed to spark life back into his friend's soul.
"It can't be..." Tears rolled free on his cheeks and he quickly used the back of his hand to wipe his running nose, not caring of how gross it was.
"You can't go like that! This can't be how you end..."
He had sneaked into Zagnartus Keep, left behind his two oldest friends, with nothing but the reminder of his dead family on his finger and a tiny shark of hope in his pocket. Hope that, somewhere in those heavily guarded rooms, Prompto would be alive and waiting for rescue. Hope that he would be on time.
But he had clung on that shard of hope too tightly, and now its edges were cutting open his fingers.
Every MT he came across was lying dead or in agony, spurred into a last murdering spree by whatever force that was powering them. He shouldn't have given in the tauntering words of Ardyn and cracked one of the MT's mask open. His friend's face, half eaten by ashes, had dissolved into misama in his palm. Frantic, he had opened another and another, only for the nightmarish sight to repeat itself.
At least, he had pulled through all the obstacles Ardyn had built for him and found Prompto - the real one.
Why? Why was he too late?
He had lost too much. He couldn't lose one of them too.
"Come on, Prom," he tried to beg, but his voice left him. He had to cough in order to clear his throat and voiced another set of pleas: "I know you can do it."
'Don't cry, little Prince.' Like a poisonous snake, Ardyn's sweet tone slided through the ceiling. 'This unit has only been reseted. I promised you he would stay alive, didn't I?'
Noctis didn't have any force left in him to rage at the ambitious, joyful laugh that followed.
"Come on, Prom....Please, come back to me."
Prompto's head lolled until it rested against his shoulder, wet and cold.
"It's ok," he murmured, wrapping his arms around Prompto's chest, rocking the both of them in a soothing motion. He couldn't get his voice to stop sounding wet, nor the tremors that made each of how words wobble.
"As soon as Ignis and Gladio are here, I will go find the cristal, yeah? Then I will shred Ardyn to pieces, and I promise you we will get back to your feet in no time."
In a perfect world, Noctis thought, he would have been able to hold true to his words.
Except the Astrals weren't so kind to allow him that chance.
Thrashing like a wild animal in vain, he felt the crystal absorb him. The last vision he had was of Prompto slumped on Gladio's back, clothed with the only uniform they had found in the closest locker room, and a blind Ignis attempting to kill a man that even the gods had failed to erase of existence.
The shard of hope kept cutting his hands, as he gripped it like a lifeline during a decade of oblivion. Like charcoal turned into diamond, truth began to coat that shard and embedded into despair, and acceptance.
It didn't make the edges less cutting, when upon setting foot in Hammerhead, his eyes found two shadows instead of three.