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“Man,” Prompto says as he punches his upper arm. “I can’t believe you finally confessed to Iggy. And it took you only…what? Fifteen years?”
“I guess,” he lies. It takes a lot of effort to keep himself from mentally going back in time. “To be fair, for ten of them I wasn’t around.”
Only sometimes memories, as they’re prone to do, come flooding back all the same.
It was on the night of Noctis’s seventeenth birthday which, following the tradition, the four of them celebrated at his place. By that point Ignis had already moved out to a dorm at his college, leaving Noctis to mostly contend with himself.
At first, it felt like a breath of fresh air that carried a sweet scent of freedom or being at the helm of a boat headed for the open seas at full throttle.
It felt liberating.
Naturally, there was an occasional visit on weekends to restock the fridge and make sure the place wouldn’t turn into a wasteyard, but no one berated him for wearing the same shirt for three days in a row or gobbling down an entire box of caramel biscuits for supper. No one ordered him to go to bed because he had classes in the morning. No one kept track of the time he spent playing games on his phone.
But then the novelty of it started to wear off.
And after a couple of weeks of being exposed to his freedom, he found himself noticing that whenever he went back home from school, loneliness was in the habit of tagging along. More often than not he caught himself looking over to where Ignis used to sit in the armchair by the window quietly reading, where, according to the man himself, at sunset, the sunlight slanted just so. Sometimes it was all there was to it – just a habit born out of time – but somehow that armchair looked deserted, and the books were long gone. Or the grinding of coffee beans at the wee hours that used to serve him as a premature alarm clock, before a faint whiff of it would drift in, waking him fully. Maybe it was just another ritual Noctis hadn’t quite unlearned to expect. Like turning on his TV every Friday to watch a silly TV show together that Ignis had a secret thing for. Even if the time was mostly spent in companionable silence, slumping against the man’s side with his head resting on Ignis’s shoulder felt the only viable right, the absence of which echoed inside him with a bone-deep ache.
Sometimes it was so bad that Noctis found himself missing even the annoying stuff.
So that night, after Prompto and Gladio had left for their respective homes, he asked Ignis to stay behind and help sort out the mess their festivities had caused. As far as Noctis remembers there was confetti on virtually every flat surface, gift wrappings and empty bottles and a chocolate stain on the carpet where Prompto had slipped on a spilt beer and collapsed on a piece of cake, giggling wildly.
Immune to chaos, for Noctis it was nothing short of a propitious excuse to serve the cause.
And it fulfilled its purpose.
Without a single objection, Ignis saw their friends out the door and threw himself right into work. For the same dork who just a couple of hours ago had attempted a lecture on the subject of healthy sustenance and their medicinal value but couldn’t pronounce the word ‘ameliorative’ without tripping over his tongue, he appeared too sensible and proper. Sure, the condo did need a good clean-up, but with the buzz of alcohol in his ears, dampening his insecurities and susurrating him encouraging thoughts, and Ignis finally all to himself, Noctis wasn’t feeling like doing chores just yet. Or watching the man fussing about.
Besides, the night felt too young to meet an end like that.
“Come have a glass of wine with me, Specs,” he said before he thought better of it. It came out only mildly slurred. “It feels like we haven’t seen each other in ages, what with you constantly on the run.”
Ignoring him in favour of housework of all things, Ignis slipped a pair of yellow rubber gloves on. “Haven’t you had enough, Highness?” He asked, then armed himself with a rag and dropped to his knees in front of the chocolate stain, two feet from where Noctis was sprawled on the floor, hands folded over his full belly.
For a moment Noctis watched him assess it with an unmistakable air of responsibility surrounding him. Even in the low light coming from a sconce on the opposite wall, preoccupation taking over his face didn’t go unnoticed by Noctis.
“You clearly haven’t,” he offered under his breath. He was only half-joking – what with Ignis slipping right back into his ‘duty-mode’ when an opportunity presented itself. “Too prim for my liking.” When still Ignis didn’t react in any way, scrubbing at the patch of unsalvageable carpet, Noctis poked him with his socked foot for attention. “Just… leave that rag, Specs. I promise to lick the whole place clean tomorrow if you have a glass of wine with me.”
Ignis’s movements stilled as he looked up at him, and finally, a corner of his mouth lifted in disbelief. “Oh?”
Just because he could, Noctis poked him again. “I give you my word.”
A glass of wine turned into two as they talked about this and that and nothing in particular. Then one more.
Before long they’d emptied almost two bottles.
“The last one, Noct,” Ignis warned him, sloshing wine all over their hands in an attempt to fill up their glasses. Some of it stained their clothes, but neither of them cared.
By that point, there was a considerable slur to his speech. Amusement spilled across his cheeks in pink as he recounted something particularly funny which proved to be a challenge, what with him cracking up time and again. Noctis doesn’t recall what it was, but he distinctly remembers being in hysterics, with his forehead lulling on Ignis’s chest, Ignis’s hand holding on to his thigh where the two of them huddled together on the floor in a heap of useless limbs, sticky skin and messed-up tales. Both of them were positively plastered and shaking with laughter.
“Oh Ignis,” Noctis murmured when he somewhat got a hold of himself. “You’re hilarious.”
At the praise, Ignis giggled, then leaned in to plant a smooch that got lost somewhere in the mop of Noctis’s hair. “You’re not so bad yourself, Highness,” he said.
“Mmm.”
With his head weighing a ton, nestling it on Ignis’s pecs sounded like his best idea of the evening. And that’s what he eagerly did. The muscles tensed for a split second before going lax under his cheek. As his eyes fluttered closed, Noctis wondered fleetingly whether Ignis’s chest had been made for that purpose – a snuggly cushion to accommodate drunk royalty in time of need. It was a selfish thought, he realised, or maybe the alcohol had unlocked some secret doors, but at that moment he missed the man like a ship, moored at a dock for too long, missed open seas.
A yawn pushed out of him. Winding his arms around Ignis’s waist, he burrowed his nose into the slightly damp fabric of his dress shirt, firing his senses up with wisps of sandalwood, wine, clean sweat and something he couldn’t name but had been subconsciously craving for weeks. The missing piece he had finally found.
“I love you so much, Specs,” ripped out of him, but he didn’t register as he was now slowly drifting off. “But shh. Don’t tell anyone.”
It was a long time before Ignis blew out a shaky breath, torn between saying too much and not saying anything at all, as he held Noctis close. Until, eventually, the latter prevailed.
But Noctis didn’t catch any of it. Because by then he was fast asleep, unaware of the moon sickle slowly climbing up the firmament outside their open window. Or that when it peeked inside, spilling its pale light over the two of them, unsteady fingers found their way in his hair. For hours they kept stroking it. While he was dreaming the happiest dreams, lost in his little ephemeral fairytale, they never ceased combing through it, massaging his scalp and telling their story.
It divulged a lot more than any words could that day.
But as Noctis now knows, one day he would tell Ignis he loves him utterly sober, albeit not less unanticipated for either of them. And this time around nothing – neither his duty nor moral values – would hold Ignis back.
“It’s funny how it works out sometimes,” he finds himself telling Prompto now. Or rather thinking aloud, “despite the vagaries of fate.”
But he wouldn’t have it any other way.
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~The End.~