Chapter Text
“Right,” Noct says as the alarm on her phone chimes. She looks down at the bowl in front of her, and three pairs of eyes look back up at her. One of them—she’s not sure which—blinks, first the right eye, then the left. To see it up close, the way the entire eye retracts down into the skull, makes Noct’s stomach give a squeamish roll.
“Right,” Noct says again, since her friends—her frogs—aren’t saying anything. “I guess, uh, it’s not wearing off?”
One of the frogs slides back into the water with a splash, and the other two begin to squirm, clambering over each other and over the sunken and probably sulking frog at the bottom of the bowl. Their feet—paws? feet? must be feet—are gripping the sides of the bowl, their long toes curling over the rim, the round, sticky pads at the ends of their toes clinging and pulling away from the bowl with sucking sounds.
“Shit,” she whispers, because it’s hitting home in an entirely new way, like the tiny pad at the end of each toe is another suckerpunch to her gut, “we are so fucked.”
x
She lets herself cry for a couple minutes, because this is all bullshit and she deserves the right to cry, because honestly? This is all bullshit, on top of all the other bullshit her life’s been throwing at her since she was born. She’s already got dead parents and a lost kingdom and a missing fiance; she doesn’t need this friends-stuck-as-frogs thing, like the astrals are just trying to pile on every stupid fairytale cliche they can.
Crying doesn’t do much to fix problems, though, which is something Noct knows well. Crying never brought back her mom, and it won’t bring back her dad; it won’t give her back her kingdom, or even help her find Luna and Ravus. She isn’t holding her breath that it’s gonna help now, so when crying over the bowl of water and her frogs does nothing except give her a headache and make her face feel hot and sticky, she’s not disappointed. She’s just tired, that’s all.
Tired or not, though, she’s got a bowl of frogs, and she needs to figure out what to do with them. And this—this is what her bullshit life has taught her: stubbornness and a working internet connection can do wonders for finding workarounds for all kinds of problems.
Her first search is mostly hits: “How to Take Care of Frogs,” “You Found a Frog . . . Now What?” “How to Keep Frogs,” “What do frogs eat? And more frog facts!” From skimming, the articles all seem to say the same things, some of which are more helpful than others. In general, though, keeping frogs alive mostly seems to be an issue of (A) not starving them, (B) not dehydrating them, (C) not squashing them, and (D) not letting them die in any other awful ways. Totally manageable. This’ll be fine.
“This’ll be fine,” she tells them. Whoever’s sulking at the bottom of the bowl—personally, she wants to put her money on Gladio—squirms around, turning its back on her. The other two are still clinging to the side of the bowl, and they both blink up at her, their round eyes retracting then popping back out. Cute but disgusting. The one on the left is lowering its head into the water, and it breathes out as she watches, dozens of little air bubbles growing around its nostrils. It’s like a little froggy sigh, or maybe a froggy huff, and there’s something nice in knowing that this is just as frustrating—or probably more frustrating—for everyone on the other side of the frog curse.
But as frustrating as this might be for Gladio and Ignis and Prompto, it’s Noct who ends up lugging the bowl of water and its new inhabitants back to the haven. The frogs are all pretty small, thank fuck, but a big-ass bowl of water isn’t light, especially when she’s trying to hold it steady and not slosh it all around. All three of the frogs—even the probably-Gladio-sulker—are clinging to the side of the bowl, their toes curled around the rim, and whenever she looks down at them, they’re all staring right back up at her, the undersides of their mouths flexing up and down.
“Sorry—shit, sorry, we’re almost there, promise. Just, uh, just hold on a couple more minutes, ‘kay?”
By the time she gets to the haven, the bowl’s almost empty of water, the front of her clothes are soaked through, and the three frogs are looking traumatized, which isn’t a look Noct knew frogs could have. Noct staggers up onto the top of the haven, then drops to her ass with a groan. One of the frogs is croaking at her, a keh-keh-keh, and Noct groans again as she sets the bowl down as gently as she can.
“Yeah, more water,” she says, not sure when she closed her eyes. “I’m gonna—”
She hasn’t really touched any of them since they got turned into frogs, other than when she was scooping them up post-battle and plopping them into the bowl of water. Frogs aren’t really her thing, what with how they’re all slimy and mucous-y, and even if there wasn’t that general ick factor, she’d be way put off just by how tiny and fragile they are. It’d just take her tripping over one rock, or squeezing her hand just a little too tight, and whoops—whoops, there goes one of her best friends. One of her only friends.
And even if she doesn’t manage to squash one of them to death, she doesn’t know how injuries as a frog translate into injuries as a human. If she breaks someone’s frog leg, does that mean their human leg will be broken, too? And hell, she doesn’t even know how—or if—potions work on frogs. So hands-off really seems to be the best bet here. She’s just planning on keeping her distance and doing her best not to maim and/or murder anyone while they’re the size of her palm.
Her friends, though, don’t seem to have gotten that memo, considering one of them is teetering on the edge of the bowl’s rim, its two front legs wrapped around Noct’s thumb. Its toes are so long, long and thin and spindly, with those stupidly round pads at the end, and looking at them makes her want to cry again. How is she supposed to fix this?
“Water,” she says instead of crying, and she reaches into the armiger and yanks out a few bottles of water with her free hand. She manages to unscrew the caps one-handed, and three bottles are just enough to fill the bowl up more than halfway. That should be acceptable: clean water, with room for them to climb up onto the rim of the bowl.
The frog that took her thumb hostage is still clinging to her, its back feet splayed across the rim of the bowl. Noct twitches her thumb gently to the side, trying to persuade whoever-it-is to let go without, like, accidentally sending them flying. (They are so small.) “Come on, dude, this isn’t the best place for you, ‘kay?”
Whoever-it-is lets go of her thumb, crouching down and wrapping its long toes around the bowl’s rim instead. It’s still staring up at her, though, with its overly round eyes, and Noct tries to smile at it. At whoever it is.
“Guess I should be figuring out how to tell you apart, huh? Since there’s no telling how long—” Her voice wavers, then cracks, and she clears her throat roughly before she tries again: “Since it might be a while. So, uh, if you’d—”
The frog already sitting on the rim of the bowl—the thumb-hostage taker—crawls into her hand without hesitation, hooking a long-toed foot over her fingers as she lowers her hand closer to the ground. It crawls off her hand just as quickly as it had crawled on, and it turns around to face her before it sits back on its back legs. On its hind legs? Its haunches? Haunches, maybe. It kinda looks like a cat with the way it’s sitting, if Noct ignores the whole color and texture and amphibian-ness thing. Another frog is waiting on the rim, and Noct transports this one down to the ground, too, to sit next to its froggy friend. Her froggy friend. Their other froggy friend.
The third frog, though, ignores Noct’s hand; it balances on the rim of the bowl for a moment, then jumps down to the ground itself, right past Noct’s waiting hand. So. Gladio, definitely.
“Well,” she says dryly, “at least I know who Gladio is.”
With all three of her frogs sitting on the ground, side-by-side and actually still, it’s easy to see the similarities and the differences. Gladio’s the biggest out of the three, and Noct’s not really sure whether that’s surprising or not. Are female frogs usually bigger? Or male frogs? Is this something most people know and Noct’s just ignorant, or is this, like, the kind of stuff people only know if they actually like frogs?
Either way, Gladio-as-a-frog is what Noct assumes is a nice, respectable size for frogs, or maybe even an overly-respectable size, with her body bigger than Noct’s palm. She’s a pretty shade of green, though they’re all that pretty shade of green, and there are—now that definitely-Gladio is holding still and Noct can actually look closely—mottled brown spots over her back. Gladio’s kinda fidgeting, almost puffing herself up, and the underside of her mouth and belly are a creamish color, smooth and slick looking, almost like silk. The desire to touch her—to feel the cool slipperiness of Gladio’s skin, to feel the flexing of the fragile underside of her mouth—is sudden and unexpected, and Noct closes her hands into fists, tucking them close to her thighs.
“So that’s Gladio,” she says again, nodding at Gladio. Gladio is sitting on the left end of the froggy lineup, and it’s easy to pick out the similarities between Gladio and the frog on the right end of the line. The right-hand frog is almost as large as Gladio, with the same brown spots mottling its back and the same creamy-colored belly and throat. The right-hand frog is also the frog that’s seemed the most disapproving so far, blowing huffy bubbles and croaking up at Noct; it’s also the frog that had clung to Noct’s thumb. So, probably Ignis.
Probably-Ignis is shuffling forward, croaking up at Noct, and it doesn’t seem very hard at all to put two and two together and ask it, “So you’re Ignis, right?”
Ignis croaks again, and Noct manages to smile at her.
Since she’s got Gladio and Ignis pegged, that means the frog in the middle, which also happens to be the odd frog out, must be Prompto. He’s tiny compared to the other two, and Noct squints down at him, wondering if his skin is maybe a brighter green. He doesn’t have any of those brown spots on his back, and when Noct asks him to turn, twirling her finger, it looks like his belly and throat are more pink than cream.
She thinks it’s probably sexual dimorphism. She opens her mouth to say something, then closes it again, because then again, maybe it’s not. Maybe Prompto’s just a tiny frog because Gladio and Ignis are taller than him as humans, and are therefore bigger than him as frogs. Noct doesn’t know, and she doesn’t want to say something wrong, especially when there’s no one to cover for her.
Instead, she says, “And Prompto’s the tiny one. Not much new there, huh?”
And wow, that was a stupid thing to say, too. She closes her mouth hard, her teeth clacking together and sending a short burst of pain through her jaw. Prompto is puffing himself up, just like Gladio had, except his throat is billowing out like a little pink balloon. His croak is louder than Ignis’s, like a lot louder, and Prompto stops croaking after the third keh, looking as surprised as Noct feels.
“Sorry,” Noct offers, “that was—I shouldn’t tease, right? That was—”
It’s stupid, how the apology just dredges up all that hopelessness that’s lodged itself in her gut. It’s stupid how she wants to cry again, and it’s stupid how she wants everything to be fixed. It’s stupid how her friends being frogs makes her think of her dad, but it does, and then she can’t stop thinking about her dad and how she’ll never see him again, or talk to him again, or hug him again, and she doesn’t—she can’t—
Noct digs the knuckles of her fists into her eyes until they hurt, and then a little longer, until she’s pretty sure that as red and swollen as her eyes might be, at least she’s not obviously, actively crying anymore. She avoids looking down at her friends, because she thinks she might actually die if they’re looking up at her with pity or anything like that. They’ve lost just as much as her, and they’re stuck as frogs, and even if it’s not entirely her fault, it’s at least entirely her family’s fault. It’s her and her dad who are to blame, and her dad’s not even around anymore, so it’s really just her. She should be the one who fixes things, and she shouldn’t expect pity. She shouldn’t get pity, especially since she’s the person everyone else keeps sacrificing themselves for.
The hopelessness in her belly has crawled up to her throat, but it’s manageable. She clears her throat, then swallows hard, pushing down the phlegm from her crying, and all the miserable things she wants to say, too. Her voice is rough and thick from her clogged nose when she says, “I guess we should figure out how to catch some bugs, huh?”
x
She spends the early evening scrounging around for worms in the dirt just off the haven. The frogs croak their disapproval, especially the bigger one that’s probably Gladio. It’s at least easier to shoot her down when she’s a frog—to lift probably-Gladio and deposit her in the bowl of water, telling her, “It’s fine, I’m not actually going anywhere.”
They seem to take her at her word, because she doesn’t have any angry frogs hopping around her (Hopping mad, she imagines Ignis saying with delight) or croaking at her. They stay up on the haven, clustered at its edge, looking down at her. Small as they are, she can only see them because she knows they’re there, and she knows where to squint and pick out silhouettes caused by the backlighting of the fire.
She’s not sure how much frogs eat, or if humans turned into frogs require more food. Curses are a type of magic, and magic for her is an exhausting exercise that always leaves her hungry. She used to carb-load before magic training when they were still in Insomnia—when she still had a dad and rooms at the Citadel and a nation that would be her responsibility. Now she always feels hungry, even when Ignis shovels extra food onto her plate and she eats until she thinks she’ll be sick. Maybe it’s just that she’s using more magic now, or maybe it’s that the crystal is feeding off of her. If it’s just magic feeding off her, though, then is there magic feeding off Ignis and Gladio and Prompto, too? Is feeding them now like feeding a fever? She doesn’t know the daily caloric intake of frogs, let alone humans who are magically frogs; nor does she know how many calories worms even offer. Are they good for calories? They at least have to be good for protein, right?
At any rate, the grubbing around in the dirt for worms is slow going at first, up until she finds a soggy patch of earth on the north side of the haven. There’s a rotting log there, covered in moss and fungus, and it splinters amazingly when she cautiously kicks it, the wood breaking apart in chunks and splinters and an explosive puff of wood dust and spores. The best part, though, is the bugs that begin to scatter as soon as their cover is gone: beetles, their carapaces black and glinting, and maggots, their fat, white bodies clumped together; worms, their slimy bodies slick and shining in the faint light cast over the haven’s edge. Noct doesn’t know what most of the bugs are, has no idea if any of them—or many of them—are poisonous to humans or frogs, so she only picks out the worms she can find, since that feels like the safest bet.
She fills a plastic container, one she’d preemptively poked holes in; it’s a few handfuls of dirt, then dozens of worms, until the container is almost full. It might, she thinks ruefully, be a bit much—she might be going overboard. She might not know when to stop, or how, with Ignis and Gladio not here to tell her. Or unable to tell her. Whichever. Both.
She wipes her muddy hands on her trousers, pops the lid onto the container, and climbs back up onto the haven where her frogs are waiting for her. It’s hard to tell for sure, but she thinks they may be looking up at her expectantly. It feels like they’re looking up at her expectantly. She smiles at them, the expression feeling tight and unnatural on her face, and says, “Orders up, I guess?”
She doesn’t watch them eat. She’s sure it’d just make her feel sick, so she spends the time on her phone instead, scrolling through amphibian forums. She considers making a username for one of the forums, but doesn’t. With any luck, she won’t need to ask any questions about frog habitats, or frog dietary needs, or frog lifespans. With any luck, her friends will be human again by morning, and all of this will be a bad dream.
The tent seems massive when it’s only her, a large bowl with three frogs, and a plastic tub with several handfuls of dirt and worms. All three frog faces are peering at her over the edge of the bowl’s walls, and Noct wants to make a joke, say something to ease the tension that’s building in the air.
“Guess the tent’s all mine.” Her voice cracks on mine. She doesn’t try again. Nothing feels very funny right now, anyway.