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“Stay down.”
Ignis’ voice is barely a hiss above him. Noctis wriggles in the tight space between the passenger seat and the dashboard of Ignis’ car, the heel of his boot digging into his calf.
“Are we not past the security checkpoint already?” he complains as Ignis gradually accelerates.
“There are three unmarked patrol cars around the Citadel,” Ignis answers him. From the way he speaks, Noctis can just picture his lips drawn into a line below his sharp green eyes, the lights of the city glinting off the rim of his glasses. “I know their routes so I’m trying to slip by unnoticed but if they recognize the car or think anything is suspicious, they will alert the Citadel, might even give chase.”
Despite the ridiculousness of the situation, Noctis lets out an amused huff. “You could easily ditch them.”
There is a pause and although he can’t see him, Noctis knows Ignis is smiling.
“The point of an escape is to not get caught, Noct,” he eventually replies. Noctis hears his turn signal clicking.
“I think you can come out now.”
Late August night pours into Noctis when he rolls the window down. Leaning out the window, he draws a deep breath in, the seaborn breeze whisking through his hair, warm and sharp with the smell of salt, rubber and lavender oozing from the city’s winding streets. Ignis sits at the wheel, his shoulders tense and his eyes alert and flitting from intersections to side streets to make sure there aren’t any stray Crownsguard cars that may notice the Prince of Lucis is in a car on a highway out of the city with his very own Advisor at the wheel.
Noctis turns in his seat and pats him on the shoulder.
“Relax, no one is going to ping your beetle of a car this far away from the Citadel.”
“This is still a royal vehicle, Noct,” Ignis says and Noctis not only hears but sees that he is pouting. His laughter spills into the night from the open windows.
The traffic thins as they drive out of the busy inner-city towards the outer walls. The massive Northwestern gate looms in the distance before the silhouette of the Cavaugh Hills, their outlines drawn with the silver of moonlight against the deep black sky.
“You know, we would have already been halfway there if you had disabled the cameras,” Noctis muses.
“There is no reason to weaken Citadel’s security when we can walk past it with a little bit of patience,” Ignis says, glancing up at the rearview mirror to make sure they aren’t being followed.
“I still insist we could have just warped out the window too,” Noctis leans back in the passenger seat and lifts his booted feet up on the dashboard.
Ignis squeezes the bridge of his nose with his fingers. “Noct, we haven’t warped together in almost six years. The last time we did, you almost broke your arm trying to pull me through.” He reaches behind the passenger seat and fishes out a thin blanket from the backseat before dropping it on Noctis’ lap. “There is no way to know if it would even work and I am not fond of the idea of plummeting to my death as we try to sneak out of the Citadel on your birthday.”
“As if I would let you die,” Noctis replies with a grin before he throws the blanket back over his shoulder. “Who else am I going to convince to sneak me out of our gilded prison?”
“Ah, of course. The purpose of my existence,” Ignis returns without missing a beat and the smile on his face is both fond and exasperated. It is a smile Noctis loves more than he should, the flicker of heat that sparks inside him when he sees it, is his one private secret.
Despite the ongoing conflict with Niflheim, the gates of Insomnia remain open to all Lucian citizens. The magical wall Noctis’ father maintains around the Crown City requires no additional protection to keep its people safe so they pass through the gate without a hitch.
Almost instantly, excitement and joy explode under Noctis’ skin, the August night blown wide before the windscreen as far as his eyes could see. There is a reckless, senseless desire in the marrows of his bones to ask Ignis to keep driving, keep driving until they reach places Noctis has only ever seen in books and movies until no one they meet would care what his title is or where he came from. Until they could be whoever they want without the silent weight of their future crushing down on every thought dying behind their lips, even when he knows with every fiber of his being that he can’t.
Noctis knows all he has is this night. He hasn’t been out of Insomnia in five years, and never without an entire royal retinue. This will also likely be the last time he ever gets to be truly free and that alone ties his throat in knots when he looks at Ignis, because Ignis understood all of this the moment Noctis asked, those jade green eyes fixed to his for a long moment before he flipped the folder he was holding shut, and lead Noctis into his room to plan their escape. He understood what it meant for him to have this night and gave it to him without question.
As they drive into the night riding on the high of their successful escape, Noctis watches his profile, feeling the steady graze of his fringe against his forehead on his fingertips. Ignis doesn’t know that Noctis would willingly break every bone in his body to be able to warp away with him to a place where they could be just… this. Weightless and unbound, free to chase the road lines into the horizon, to try the sound of their quietest thoughts on the edge of their lips.
The adrenaline of the night drive burns electric in his veins as they get farther and farther away from the city. Noctis taps the sunroof open and climbs out up to his hips, arms thrown wide, shouting into the night, his hair blowing back and his skin tingling with the cool breeze. Ignis turns on the radio and his fingers keep beat with the music against the wheel as Noctis sings out of tune into the velvet night fizzling with the sound of cicadas. Through the rearview mirror, Noctis sees the sharp, moonlit edge of Ignis’ smile, feeling its aftermath rush hotly through his veins.
It takes them nearly an hour to reach the outskirts of Cavaugh Hills. By the time the clock on the dashboard shows 2 am, the buzzing in Noctis’ bloodstream has quieted. The radio turned off, they climb a steady slope up the hills, scarcely scattered road lamps spilling their dirty yellow light along the curving road, each sallow ring swallowing them as they pass. It is almost hypnotic; the incessant passing of dark and light across the hood of Ignis’ car, the hum of the engine vibrating through Noctis, the endless night sky above them. With an elbow against the open window, Noctis watches the Crown City shrinking below, the lights of the Citadel blinking in the distance. He feels something soft against him.
“The altitude,” Ignis mutters to him, “It’s getting colder.” He puts his hand back on the wheel. Noctis unfolds the blanket this time and gets under it. He can almost feel the heat of Ignis’ contentment beside him. The fact that he does it just for that is another thing Noctis won’t tell him.
“How do you know about this place?” Noctis asks him, eyes fixed at the view on his right.
“I have been here a few times before,” Ignis answers, his voice low and warm. “The first time was shortly after I got my license. I had heard of people talking about the lookout. I’d always wanted to see it. After that,” he pauses. Noctis turns his face to look at him.
“I guess… you could say I come here when I… need to get away for a bit,” Ignis eventually says, self-conscious.
“You?” Noctis asks, raising his brows. “You need to get away?”
Ignis smiles. “Maybe I am not as impervious as you believe.”
“I don’t think you are impervious,” Noctis tells him, leaning forward. “You just seem… in control all the time.”
“I am not,” Ignis replies plainly. “More often than not, I feel worried, unequipped...” There is another pause. “Powerless,” Ignis adds quietly.
Noctis looks out the windscreen into the night, “I guess you are much better at hiding things than I am.”
Ignis doesn’t answer him. Not expecting an answer, Noctis leans back and tries to imagine Ignis driving up here, all alone, with thoughts in his mind too large to fit within the walls of the Citadel. All the things Ignis doesn’t tell him feel like every moment of every day he has ever spent away from him. Full of a kind of longing he cannot name, a deep acheful loneliness throbbing in the meat of his heart. He misses the unguarded confidence of their childhood like a lost limb, the phantom itch of it droning on like static every moment he is with him. He doesn’t understand how Ignis can simultaneously be the one person that sees and accepts all of him without question and yet has learned to give away so little of what he is thinking.
Noctis is fiercely proud of him as his Advisor, as the future Hand of the King. He doesn’t believe there is a smarter, more honorable man in the whole of Lucis that could hold a candle to all that Ignis is, but a darker, quieter part of him resents the weight of their titles and stations for burying away the parts of him he has always loved more than anything.
Ignis drives into a clearing near the top of the hills. The road continues past the outlook with a downward slope, winding into the dark shadows of the rocky ridges along the mountain. In the day time, this is clearly a place often visited with its small souvenir shop and intermittently placed benches around the clearing. They pull up close to the edge and Ignis turns the key in the ignition.
“Noct,” he murmurs his name, almost too quiet to be heard. Noctis looks at him to find him staring at the dashboard, his fingers loosely hooked around the steering wheel. When he talks, it feels deliberate, spoken with such painstaking care it somehow puts an emphasis on every word he doesn’t say.
“No matter what… I will always give you everything that I can,” Ignis meets his gaze and it’s the same as it has been for years, Noctis’ heart jolts awake and pounds hard against his chest, the shiver that he stifles in the pit of his guts makes the hair on his arms stand.
“Please never doubt that,” Ignis says and it is no different than the hundreds of vows they’d made to each other as kids. Noctis knows Ignis well enough to recognize this as his resolve, rather than a plea. Ignis is not asking him, he is reminding Noctis the truth of them, and the sense of safety he feels at his words nearly brings tears to his eyes. He looks away.
“You know that I don’t,” he tells him, his voice surprisingly steady despite the ache he feels inside. When he opens his door, the cool summer breeze helps him tug the knot in his throat loose. “Come on” he calls back to him, stepping out of the car. “Let’s see this view you have been going on and on about.”
“I have only mentioned it once,” Ignis notes as he follows him out. At the front of the car, they stand side by side and lean back against the hood, Noctis still wrapped in the blanket.
Insomnia lays beneath their feet like a pulsating sea of embers, the night sky above the city blanched with light pollution. The Lucian sea is a crescent embrace, shimmering under the moonlight, wrapped around the city like a velvet mirror reflecting the lights of the stars in listless flux. Noctis feels his breath catch.
“Six,” he whispers.
“Yeah,” Ignis whispers back beside him.
The city Noctis has spent his entire life looks small enough to fit one of his mother’s old snow globes, the world beyond it, as vast as the night, as endless as the expanse of the sky above him. Looking down at the pinprick flicker of lights, Noctis suddenly feels claustrophobic with the jarring perspective, with the realization of how small and narrow his entire life has been and smaller and narrower it is yet to be. The breeze quivering through his hair feels borrowed.
“Do you ever…” he mutters, the rest of his question dangling on the edge of ‘too far’. Beside him, Ignis shifts his weight. Noctis can feel his eyes on him.
As of almost three hours ago, he is nineteen. He doesn’t think he will ever get to be here with Ignis again.
“Do you ever want to run away?” he asks him, unable to strip his voice from the tremble of emotion surging beneath his skin.
“Run away, where?” Ignis asks in return and Noctis meets his gaze. His eyes are dark in the night, the skull necklace glinting against the crevice between his collarbones. The whole of Insomnia lives in the green.
“Anywhere. Just away,” Noctis answers, holding his gaze. This is a dance they have perfected in the past few years; the intricate art of looking at each other. They have both mastered the ability to measure the quiet count of time in their gaze, knowing when to look away just before the look alone said more than their words did.
Ignis searches his eyes, silent and Noctis doesn’t understand how that look alone unravels him every time. Something tender and constricted, deep in his chest, unfurls at the warmth of his gaze, the core of his heart lifting behind his ribcage. Noctis knows the faster his heart beats, the less time he has to hold his gaze. Breathing out, he looks away towards the city.
He hears Ignis sigh beside him.
“My place is with you,” Ignis tells him.
That’s his answer.
It is loyalty. It is his duty. To stand with Noctis has always been the very core of all that defines his purpose. It is what his title as the Advisor to the Crown Prince demands of him.
Noctis knows his answer has nothing to do with his title or the duties expected of him.
“What if I ran away?” he asks him. He knows he shouldn’t ask. He knows he is already way past ‘too far’. His hands shake under the blanket.
He counts seven beats of his heart before Ignis speaks beside him.
“My answer wouldn’t change.”
It takes all of his willpower to not crumble where he stands. Air punched out of his lungs, he looks up at the endless night sky, hanging on the brink of giving in. He draws the night air into his lungs, breathless, drowning in the immeasurable ache of yearning, held back by a single thread. A single word. A single move. A single dizzying move.
Every bone in him begs him to move.
Noctis reaches out, hushed and gentle and his fingers brush against the edge of Ignis hand and slide into his palm.
He will pretend it is no different than the hundreds of times they have fallen asleep doing this in their youth. He will pretend that it has no meaning deeper than their shared history, holds no weight to it on its own; a casual gesture they just happened to avoid the past several years. He will pretend it doesn’t light cinders along his skin where he can feel his pulse thrumming in between. Pretend that the warmth of him against his palm doesn’t become all he can think. How he wants to tear himself into pieces with how maddeningly right it feels.
He will pretend he doesn’t notice the way it makes Ignis tremble, the way he can’t help the gasp that slips through his lips.
He can’t look at him, he won’t look at him because if he does he knows it will be their breaking and Noctis respects Ignis too much to take the decision away from him, he loves him too much to make him choose between all that he has ever known in life and the notion of something Noctis has no freedom to give him.
Insomnia glimmers beneath their feet, the sky heaves with the light of the stars and Noctis feels Ignis’ hand tighten around his own, long fingers curling over his knuckles, the beat of their hearts whispering to each other all the nameless things they cannot say.
Above the city, a single stray meteor blazes across the sky, a transitory arch of brilliant blue-green, leaving its imprint behind Noctis’ eyelids as he closes his eyes, his wish a single tacit plea burning in his heart.
Please.