Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Prompto was seven, the first time his parents had left him for longer than a weekend.

He had watched them pack from his favourite step on the stairs, with a clenching in his stomach that was heavier and fuller than hunger, yet somehow it felt like a bloated echo of the same ache. 

His parents’ legs seemed impossibly long as they swept past him on their way up and down, carrying bags and occasionally drawing in sharp lungfuls of breath that were forcefully, soundlessly released every time they almost tripped over him. The sounds made him wince; they always sounded like the beginning of something that never got to start. He should have moved, really. But he liked to watch them when they were at home. 

He hadn’t felt too old for any of it until his mother’s legs had paused two steps down from where he sat, turned on the sharp heel of her shoes and came to stop by Prompto’s step.

Prompto had smiled when she ran her hand through his hair, even though it was never quite how he imagined it would feel. 

“Honey, you’re a big boy now,” she had hummed above his head, breath not close enough to make his hair ruffle. “You’re too old for tears. You want to show us what a big boy you can be, looking after the house while we’re away?”

He remembered nodding, hadn’t remembered crying, remembered not really knowing what ‘looking after the house’ entailed and how that had felt a little like droplets of cold water landing on the very centre of his head and slowly trickling down. But his mother had smiled again, so he tried to ignore the trickling and focus on the way her eyes crinkled a little at the corners. 

“Don’t forget there’s food in the fridge buddy, yeah?” 

His dad’s voice was bouncy, cheerful like it hadn’t been for a few weeks, and it made Prompto’s chest fizzle like candy and pulled at his lips like playful fingers tugging them into a grin almost without his say-so. He would have given anything to see those crinkles and hear that bubbling laughter-speech more often. He would learn, in the coming years, to love the mornings of his parents’ departure because he was almost guaranteed to get both, no matter what the mood had been in the preceding weeks.

Afterwards, when they had left and it was late and dark enough that Prompto had to leave his warm spot on the favourite step to switch on some lights, he had looked in the fridge. There were the usual bottles of water and a couple of the pink, bubbly sugar-free drinks that Prompto was allowed as an occasional treat.  The second shelf was packed with the extra portions his parents had ordered from their favourite burger place the previous night. Prompto had reached out, carefully re-folding the thick, colourful paper around the half of the burger that his mom hadn’t been able to finish. He smiled as he remembered the excitement in his parents’ voices as they had all sat around the dinner table and they told him about Altissia, promising to bring him back a gift.

His stomach rumbled a little, but he had gently patted the paper back in place over the burger, and pushed it a little further to the back of the fridge. It had been too early to eat, and he had enjoyed savouring the memory of last night’s meal; had wanted to prolong the excitement of knowing he could, at least in part, experience it again.

Hours later, when he had set the table for himself and reheated one of the spare burgers - not mom’s, she might want it when she got back - it hadn’t been quite the same, and for just a moment the squishy bun and melting cheese had been just a thick and tasteless goop in his mouth. He had swallowed, and the flavour quickly returned to him, and he held firmly to the fact that it tasted good, and reminded him of what it felt like to have two happy voices at either side of the table.

***

The problem was, his parents were supposed to be away for three days. At first, Prompto had thought he had misremembered. He was always doing that, and he knew it frustrated his parents. It wasn’t that he didn’t listen to them - he liked to sit and let the sound of their voices wash over him, it was comforting somehow - but he knew that was the problem. He’d be drifting in the pleasant sensation of their words falling around his ears like warm rain - and then it would suddenly stop, and the sighs would be like sharp, disapproving gusts of wind. They’d ask him to repeat what they had said, and he’d fidget and shift under the new and brittle silence because it had never occurred to him before that he had been letting all those nice words fall to the ground instead of catching them. 

So on the fourth morning of his parents’ absence, he had spent a good half an hour wondering whether he had let the date of their return fall down to the floor rather than keeping it safe like he thought he had. But he had looked at the wall calendar that his mom had shown him, at the date she had circled for him because she knew he wasn’t going to listen, and the date with the circle around it was yesterday. 

It wasn’t a huge problem, he supposed. It was just that he only had his mom’s half-burger left. He had been keeping that back for her. 

He had done a loop of the kitchen cupboards instead, found the pots and pans in the ones that were Prompto-height, then climbed up on the countertop like mom had always told him not to do, and found bags of flour, sugar, and coffee in the high cupboards, wobbling a little where he balanced cautiously on his knees and flapped his hand blindly towards of the back of the cabinet, feeling for anything can-shaped. He hadn’t found anything but a slightly sticky patch.

He had climbed down from the counter, rubbed his nose as he thought about the flour and sugar. Thought that there must be something he could make from that. He had vague memories of being told that you made cakes with those ingredients, but how you got from those two things in the crinkly paper bags to a delicious, spongy cake with a gleaming red cherry on top was so far beyond him that he had forced himself to stop thinking about it. He’d had limited success, returning covertly to worry at the thought throughout the day, like nibbling a scab on his lip. 

He had opened the cans of his fizzy treat drinks, even though he knew he shouldn’t, hadn’t been told that he was allowed. He had to be given those, he couldn’t just take them. But he thought that maybe the sweetness would help him feel fuller.

Somehow, it had seemed better than eating his mom’s burger. 

***

He had been woken from his nap, disoriented in the timeless darkness of the empty house, and it took him a moment to realise what had pulled him out of sleep.

When the sounds of the front door handle creaking and muffled voices finally broke through his fog, he had thrown himself out of his bed and down the stairs so fast that his stomach swooped. 

He had been drawn by the sounds of quiet shuffling, of feet toeing off shiny shoes, and coats being quietly cursed and abandoned over empty chairs. It had taken his parents a few minutes to realise that he was standing in the doorway watching them, and his mom had flinched when her eyes had drifted vaguely past him before jerking rapidly back to his spot in the doorway.

“Gods! Prom, honey.” 

She was smiling but her words were tight, like she hadn’t left enough room between her teeth for them. “It’s late, sweetheart.”

He hadn’t known what to say or do, but he had been very aware that his mom was looking at him like she was expecting something.

“Didn’t expect you to still be up,” his dad ruffled a hand through his hair as he had moved past Prompto and into the hallway.

The sound of his dad’s feet ascending the stairs had made something in Prompto’s chest start to drop and sag. He swallowed, and glanced back at where his mom was still standing, looking at him like she was expecting something of him. Her face was pinched and seemed brittle, like the waiting was taking something out of her that Prompto couldn’t see. 

In later years, Prompto would learn that this was nothing more than his own hopes and expectations, reflected blankly back at him. It was the face she made when she knew that Prompto was hoping for something from her. The knowledge that she couldn’t quite bring herself to provide it had always seemed to pain her, and when he was older, Prompto desperately tried to find some kind of comfort in that, even though it made him feel vicious and selfish.

But on that particular night, he hadn’t learnt what that face meant yet, and so he smiled despite the gentle creaking sounds of his dad settling into bed that echoed down to them both. 

“I saved your burger for you.” 

He knew that it wasn’t exactly what he had wanted to say. But it was enough, he thought, as his stomach fizzed on emptiness and he waited for realisation to dawn on his mother’s face. 

Remembrance did dawn, but only on the heels of a mixture of confusion and rapidly-blooming distaste. The scant wrinkles on her face, around her eyes and mouth, seemed to crumple.

“What? Prompto -” the fridge door made a soft shushing sound as she yanked it open, and Prompto’s chest began to feel heavier. “Oh for the love of - why did you keep this, Prompto? That’s -”

She had dropped the burger into the bin, nose wrinkled even as she tried to smooth it out with some strange, small chuckles.

“I’ve had better welcome home presents, kiddo!” She had reached out to ruffle his hair like his dad had done, although the sensation didn’t reach his scalp. “You don’t need to save food once it’s gone gross, okay honey? Just throw it away.”

The click of the bin lid was quiet, and his mom had stayed looking down at it for a few moments, standing still with her back to Prompto as if listening for something. Her shoulders had sagged a little as she sighed, but then she had smoothed her hands down the legs of her pantsuit before turning back to face him, smile stretched firmly across her face.

And then, even though she hadn’t really been in motion, she had seemed to freeze for a moment when she locked eyes with Prompto again. Looking at her had felt like holding a breath for too long, and for just one moment, there had been a flicker of something like connection between them, because she looked how he felt.  

“It’s real late, honey.” She held out one hand for him, and he had shuffled two steps closer to her, made himself not fidget with his wristband. The lines around her eyes and mouth seemed deeper than they had just a moment before; her smile twitched and faltered, picked back up as she drew in half a breath. “Let’s get you back in bed and we can all get some proper sleep. Maybe tomorrow we’ll get some pancakes for breakfast, huh?”

Then she had taken Prompto’s wrist carefully between two of her fingers and started her own way out of the kitchen and up the stairs, flicking the kitchen light off as Prompto closed his mouth around an answer to a question she hadn’t really asked. 

***

His parents had never made a promise not to do it again, and most days, Prompto had found comfort in that. The thought of them returning home to realise, to see, to really look at him and the house long enough to understand, to remember …it had been one of Prompto’s most frequent daydreams. 

When they had quiet reading time in class, Prompto’s eyes would often catch on a word, and if it was the right word - if it was something gentle and affectionate - then it would be strong enough for him to catch onto its thread and follow it to the warm, hazy place where he could play families with the shapes of his parents. He would disappear into the spaces between gentle words and be soothed by the tones of his parents saying how sorry they were for leaving him for so long, how resourceful he had been, how it would never happen again. He would let those imagined words twist their way up through his body and around every strand of hair, until it was almost suffocating.

When he was inevitably yanked from his pleasant fog, the bitter disappointment in the actual story on the page would settle heavily in his gut. There was a small part of him that was always a little surprised that his fog-dreams hadn’t dripped out onto the page and replaced the well-worn allegories their teacher was bored of trying to drill into them. 

In the few seconds between blinks, the lingering dampness from his fog would dry, cool and tacky on his skin, and he would realise that he didn’t actually want to hear his parents make those promises. They couldn’t break what they didn’t make, he supposed.

Prompto had felt similarly about hope. It was a feathered thing, but that made it easy for Prompto to dismiss with a flap of his hands. If he let it hop about his shoulders and flitter about his head, it would swoop down to greedily peck away at all the food it could find, until Prompto found himself staring at soiled, empty plates. If he didn’t chase it away, he would start to believe that his parents would be back ‘on time’ or perhaps even ‘soon.’ 

Hope ate too quickly and too greedily, and so it had to be shooed away at the earliest opportunity.

In its place came a pragmatism that had managed to soothe the panic that roosted in the empty space that hope had left. He never really knew when his parents were going to return from their trips, but they had always left him with food when he was very young. When he had gotten a little older, they had thumbed soft and wrinkled notes into the beak of his chocobo bank, and stuck menus for nearby restaurants on the fridge. It wasn’t that he never had food. His parents weren’t assholes. It’s just that the red-circle days that his parents placed on the calendar didn’t often deliver on their promises. And that had been fine. He had been old enough to come up with his own solutions. 

He wasn’t stupid, and he wasn’t wasteful.

***

His favourite plastic box was the yellow one with the chocobo face painted on the lid. The beak had kind of faded to a dull, murky coral and the eyes had lost their shine, but it was his favourite. He remembered sitting in his dad’s lap and playing with the wing-shaped clips, when it had been shiny and new. 

The chocobox was reserved for all the hot leftovers, the best foods that would be carefully eked out every evening, the lid replaced with extra care taken over the slightly broken wing clip, and stored on the bottom shelf of the fridge, where its faded, friendly eyes would peer up at Prompto at the end of each day.

The purple box was larger, and Prompto didn’t really have any particular feelings towards it. It always smelled faintly of plastic, no matter how many times it had been through the dishwasher. He carefully stacked his dry snacks in there. The spicy wafers that came in the hot paper delivery bags (not all restaurants provided them for free, you had to be careful ), the crackers that school gave out to the kids who had the pink paper form attached to their lunch bags; they were all thin and easy enough to stack into that purple box, and so long as Prompto left the lid off a little while after re-stocking, they usually didn’t cling on to the plastic smell too badly.

The clear box was reserved for the things that would go bad the quickest. The clasps worked better on that one, so it felt only natural to put any fresh fruit or vegetables in there. It was the smallest one, and Prompto never could work out why he didn’t particularly like it.

***

Time made Prompto’s stomach roil uneasily, made the spaces between his ribs thrum.

Time was tricky, and Prompto never did feel like he could trust it. It was measured in swathes of blank white squares on a calendar, interrupted by the occasional block of red writing or circles, little blips on the landscape like peaks on a seismograph. Time was measured in the brittle, thinning leaves of cash left for him in the table by the front door, and later by the playfully dwindling numbers in his own bank account, by the days until payday and the short reprieve. 

Time was measured by the growth of the first fuzzy, delicate snowflake on his carefully boxed food. By the length of time it took for that first white flake to turn into something green and horribly smooth and wavy around the edges, something that, at seven years old, Prompto couldn’t quite bring himself to eat around.

Time was measured by the creeping, thumping, heavy panic of uncertainty; the number of days with no sign of his parents even after one of the red-letter days had come and gone on the calendar that hung on the fridge. In the number of days since he had given away his last crinkled bank note in return for a hot, grease-weakened paper bag.

Eventually, time would inevitably be measured by how many days it would take Prompto to try to eat around those snowflakes that had turned green.

***

The nights when his parents returned, it had always seemed to Prompto like the house somehow constricted around them all, became smaller and filled with light and noise and the familiar smells of his mom’s perfume and his dad’s aftershave mingling with the warm, spicy aroma that wafted from the paper bags that always heralded their return. 

Prompto would be drawn downstairs by the faint sounds of car doors slamming, goaded by those wonderful, clashing smells until his feet hit the cold tile floor of the kitchen and he managed to haul himself into his chair. 

He would sit at the table, drifting in the strange nothingness of the unidentified hour that always seemed both wildly late and impossibly early. He never knew what time they returned, only that it seemed to always be dark and the air seemed to hold its breath, brittle and still as if under some enchantment, as his parents fumbled with their keys on the other side of the door.

There was always a brief moment when they first walked in and saw him perched at the table, where they would pause, half bent at the waist as they unloaded all their bags onto the kitchen floor. They would glance at their watches and up at him, at each other, and seem quite sure that they should be doing something, but quite unsure about what exactly that might be. 

And then, like a breath held too long, time would unfreeze after that brief missed beat, and they would shed shoes and coats, and phones would go on the table, glowing and buzzing occasionally, and they would orbit around the table, around Prompto, keeping up a steady stream of chatter as they fetched plates and utensils. 

The meaning of the chatter was lost on Prompto, as it was mostly all the strange names and places that he knew meant Work, but that didn’t matter. It would wash over him like warm rain, and he would sink into his chair, his shoulders would slump and he would smile up at his parents through the air of the kitchen which suddenly seemed soft and filmy, and he would feel safe, even though he didn’t think he had felt scared or unsafe before then. He would slowly munch his way through whatever was placed in his hands, lips slack and jaw slow, and his father’s hand would cup the back of his head briefly. The flavour of the food would burst on his tongue, and he always felt greedy and bloated and happy, like he was finally eating up the promise of all those missed red-letter days.

***

“Prom. We’ve talked about this.”

Her voice was thin, always tight, like plastic strained too far and beginning to show cloudy white at the pressure point, just before it snaps. Prompto can taste it on his tongue, like one of his treats tainted by the clinging chemical smell of the purple box.

It wasn’t the purple box that mom held in her hands, but his chocobox, and Prompto could see the snowflakes that had been growing inside. It didn’t matter, he wanted to say. They were small and could be eaten around. It didn’t matter.

“Prom!”

Bitter and sharp, like something breaking. Prompto tasted burnt things on his tongue. 

“Prom, for the love of -” his mom’s mouth snapped shut, and Prompto clamped his hands to his sides to avoid fiddling with his wristband.

“Why do you always do this?” 

She shook the chocobox once, a sharp and jagged motion. The fingers of her hands were clenched, tight and bone-white, against the plastic, and Prompto felt the skin on his arm tingle. 

“This is disgusting, Prompto. I’ve told you before, I don’t want to come home to this. Don’t be so…vile.”

He jumped at the loud, plasticy thumps from the bin. His mom was banging the contents of the chocobox against the sides. Her face was hard and smooth, and the taste of burning in his mouth turned sour.

All of a sudden it was joined by the panicky, breathless words that all crowded into his mouth at once, clawing at the backs of his teeth and pinching the tip of his tongue with their desire to be free.

Please don’t throw those away. They’re not too badly gone.

You’re going again tomorrow. 

I don’t know when you’ll be back.

The money doesn’t last as long as you say it will.

He looked at his mom’s face, and her eyes burned so brightly from underneath her dark, evenly painted lashes that he had to look away. They were hard and blue, like the glass suncatcher hanging in Prompto’s bedroom window, and the words vying for life on the tip of his tongue collapsed into little ashy heaps. He swallowed them down, because deep inside his belly was the best place for them.

The single tight line of his mom’s lips quivered, and something in her shoulders seemed to give way, and she threw the chocobox into the garbage.

Chapter Text

It still feels weird to just… go sit with Noctis.

He’s never had anyone he can just go sit with, unless you count kids he’s paired up with in science class for group work. Which Prompto doesn’t. Hard to make it count when their bodies stiffen with the effort of keeping themselves angled away from him and they’re very careful never to lift their eyes from their phones when he takes his seat. He doesn’t even mind being saddled with all the work, because going on the assumption that they wouldn’t engage with him is better than seeking confirmation.

So. Yeah. It’s super weird to have someone he can not only sit with, but someone he can make a deliberate beeline for as soon as he walks into class. It feels…good, but wrong. Like a small weight climbing a little higher up his stomach, into his throat, every time he does it, because he’s just waiting for the day when his over-eagerness results in one of those tight scowls and narrow shoulders being turned away. Waiting for the day when that little weight will finally swoop and drop and leave him feeling sick and dizzy.

But Noct…doesn’t seem to care. Even more impossibly, he seems to actively encourage Prompto’s clinginess. It feels that special kind of wrong, like Prompto knows he’s getting away with something, but Noct hasn’t quite figured it out yet. He supposes it makes him a terrible person, supposes he should clue Noctis in before someone else does, but...he wants so badly to hold onto this for as long as he can.

Noct doesn’t look up at him when he makes his way over, but it makes Prompto’s belly fizzle with warmth instead of dread, because Noct’s eyes are closed and his head is resting on his folded arms, but he still manages to make one of his welcoming grunts.  

“Morning, buddy!”

“Yeah, it sure is.” Those eyes crack open to regard him like a malcontent cat, and Prompto feels the corners of his mouth twitch further up. He tastes sweetness on his tongue, like popping candy.

Although perhaps that’s somewhat influenced by the smell of the immaculately glazed pastry that is slowly oozing sugary stickiness into Noct’s lazily curled hand. It smells like summer and sunshine and lazy, bright afternoons spent trawling through the mall with Noct.

“Okay, hold all the phones…what majestical creation am I looking at here?” Prompto lowers his voice to the appropriately reverent volume as he takes his seat and swivels back around to consider the pastry from all angles. “Do not -” he holds up one finger as he sees Noct’s chest swell with an intake of breath “- say yourself. That joke was old before you told it.”

Noct lets out his breath in a slow, sugary sigh, accepting the harsh critique with a shrug and a raised eyebrow. 

Cocking his head and receiving nothing but that calm, implacable gaze, Prompto returns to studying the pastry slowly becoming one with Noct’s palm.

He hears Noct take another breath. There’s a pause, and for a moment it seems like nothing’s going to come of it, but then - 

“You know, technically, if anyone’s ‘majestical’ it would be my dad. As I’m sure he’d be all too happy to tell you.”

Prompto can’t help the laugh that trips out from under his tongue. He lifts his gaze to those sleepy, half-lidded eyes that are watching him with a lazy kind of satisfaction, like each Prompto-laugh counts as some kind of point he can mark down on a scoreboard. 

He immediately tries to stifle the sound before it can grow into something more boisterous, because, technically, he just laughed at the king. Indirectly. Kind of. He still feels like it counts.

Noct’s expression falters a little. Something flickers across his eyes and he scrubs a hand through his messy mop of dark hair as he tries to shore up the smile on his face. Prompto suddenly feels bad, and the sweetness on his tongue threatens to dissolve like cotton candy.

“He doesn’t usually send the glaives in when people laugh at him, y’know.”

Prompto forcibly stifles the voice inside his head that’s screaming ‘treason, treason, you’re probably committing some kind of treason, there’s definitely an old book somewhere that says you’re being illegal right now!’  

He twists his wristband around, feels that one loose thread snag against his fingernail. Figures that he's already committed probably-treason, so he might as well compound his sins.

“Oh, for sure. I bet he just sends The Immortal out to deal with all the comedians, right?”

The inelegant snort and the loosening of Noct’s shoulders melt the residual anxiety away. Prompto leans more of his weight against Noct’s desk, trying to get a better look at the pastry that Noct is now lazily picking apart. 

“Pretty sure Cor knows how to say ‘get out of my office, your majesty’ in at least four languages.” Noct shunts his bag off his desk to make room for Prompto’s elbows. “It’s hard to take yourself too seriously when you have to look at Cor's face and know that he's weighing your soul and making a list of all the many ways you've disappointed him."

Prompto giggles with the self-assurance of one safely out of the firing line, and the residual nerves of someone who maybe has a small case of hero-worship for Cor the Immortal. Maybe. Just a little bit. It’s not like he ever had posters or anything. 

He nudges Noct’s elbow with his own. 

“You speaking from experience?”

Noct grimaces. “Cor’s what Ignis calls ‘an effective communicator.’”

Prompto blanches a little bit. He’s never actually met Ignis, and if he’s honest, he’s…kind of anxious to keep it that way. It’s not that he doesn’t want to meet people who are important to Noct, but he’s seen Ignis. The man is so beautiful it’s actually kind of terrifying, and it seems like the phrase ‘sharp wits’ was invented for him. Prompto feels sure that Ignis could absolutely eviscerate him using nothing more than his words, and he feels small just thinking about having to be introduced to him. He kind of feels like he might sully Ignis’ perfection with his very presence. 

At least Gladio just straight-up looked like he was going to snap Prompto in half with his bare hands.

Prompto’s brought out of his fearful internal musings by another snort from Noct, who’s looking at him as though he can see all Prompto’s panicked, prey-animal thoughts.

“Iggy’s not so bad.” Noct tilts his head, considering. “Well, he totally is when he’s trying to sneak veggies into my food - like I can’t taste them in there - or get me out of bed at some ungodly hour, or asking me questions about council reports that he knows I didn’t read. But...he’s not so bad, you know. He made that pastry you’re currently trying to make sweet eye-love to.” 

Prompto perks up from his contemplation of the precious royal pastry.

“Seriously? This is an Iggy dessert?”

Noct’s smile falls somewhere between proud and smug.

“Yep. He makes batches of them, changes up the recipe a little every time. Kinda got this perfectionist thing going on. You want the other one?”

Prompto’s brain has barely caught up with the words when he sees Noct pulling a box out of his backpack. He opens it, and Prompto’s hit with a waft of warm, sweet air that makes his tongue ache and mouth water.

“Oh. My gods.” He swoops in to take a big lungful of the air that smells exactly like happiness. He recoils back a little, knowing where that road leads, and gives Noct a smile that he’s sure is a little off. 

“Ah, thanks man, but…Ignis made these for you. Pretty sure stealing desserts from the prince is some kinda treason, right?”

Noct regards him with a flat, unimpressed gaze, one of his eyebrows twitching up towards his hairline, and suddenly Prompto is struck with the vivid reminder that Noct is royalty -   is going to be the actual king one day. He tries to will away the heat swelling in his face, before it gets any worse and Noct does something terrible like mention it.

Noct seems to have other things on his mind.

“Sure, Iggy made these for me. So they’re mine now. I can do what I like with them.” 

Prompto feels rooted to the spot, aware that he’s making moon eyes up at Noct’s calm, sure expression. He wonders what it’s like to be able to say things like that. 

“So, I can give them to whoever I want. Besides,” Noct’s face seems to soften all of a sudden, the prince disappearing as he flashes Prompto one of his crooked, dorky smiles, “pretty sure Iggy’s gonna be way more pissed to find out that I ate two of these in one day than he would be to find out that I shared with you. You’d be doing me a favour, to be honest.”

And Prompto knows, he knows that he’s being gently played, but just this once, he wants to give into it. He feels warm and his mouth is full of the taste of that popping candy as well as something softer and sweeter. He wants to swallow it down and keep it, just this once. 

“Well, anything to help out my prince, right?”

Noct rolls his eyes, slouching back in his chair as he opens up the box again. He’s never looked less like a prince, and Prompto feels that fizzing warmth inside his belly again.

“For your own sake, just stuff this in your mouth so you can’t say anymore nerdy shit. And yeah, that is a royal decree, if it helps.” 

***

Prompto’s parents aren’t home, and that’s just fine with him. They’ve stopped leaving red marks on the calendar, which does make certain things a little more difficult, but for the most part it’s not a problem because Prompto has learned well from experience.

He’d usually get started on his homework straight away, but today he has something special that has to be dealt with first. 

He trots up the stairs to his bedroom, and drops to the floor, resting on his belly so he can fish around underneath his bed. 

He knows each container by feel alone, and he doesn’t stop until his fingers brush against the smooth edges that he’s looking for.

He drags his best box out from under the bed, knowing that it currently sits empty. Frankly, even if it hadn’t been empty, his current prize would be far more worthy than whatever else may have been in there. He undoes the clasps - dismisses the tired old recollection of his chocobox, because honestly - and carefully retrieves his perfectly-preserved pastry.

Noct had given him the fleeting shadow of an odd look when Prompto, mouth still full of that delicious, flaky concoction of sugar and sheer godsdamned joy , had blinked hard a few times, and then immediately, reverently began to wrap the rest of the pastry up in a napkin.

He had glanced up just in time to catch the look that flitted across Noct’s face, there and gone again in an instant. He had swallowed his mouthful, flashed Noct a sickly smile, garnished with pastry crumbs lingering at the corner of his mouth.

“I - I gotta save this for later. This needs savouring and cherishing like the work of culinary art it truly is! It deserves so much better than to be shovelled into my cake-hole before the bell rings. I couldn’t disrespect Ignis’ skills like that!”

It wasn’t even a lie. There was no way that Prompto could have just wasted it by gobbling it down all in one go. He was taking it home to save it. 

But then, why did a part of him still feel like he hadn’t been honest with Noct? Why did he feel like he had yet again managed to get away with something?

He pushes the uneasy thought away, licking his lips to try to rid himself of the thin coating of grease that it left in his mouth. He isn’t doing anything wrong. He’s being responsible, he’s taking control of himself and his circumstances. He’s being safe.

He lovingly transfers the pastry to his favourite box, seals the lid, and slowly slides the box back beneath his bed, pushing it as far towards the back as he could manage, just in case.

He hooks his other boxes out and inspects their contents, one by one. Only one of them is so bad that he really can’t justify keeping it around, and he has enough left in the others that scraping the mouldy contents into the kitchen bin doesn’t trigger his usual sharp spike of anxiety.

The thing is…the thing is, he knows that this probably isn’t necessary anymore. His parents are gone more often than not now that he’s older, sure. But he’s older. He’s not helpless anymore. He knows how to source and make his own food, even if his ‘cooking’ does leave much to be desired. He has a part-time job. He has his own money coming in, in addition to the money his parents transfer to him so he can cover the household bills. He’s fine. He shouldn’t need to keep food safely stored away in secret anymore.

Except…things happen. People lose their jobs and food prices rise, bills increase…things happen , and you can never really be sure when, or how, or how long for. Prompto won’t be caught out like that, he’s not stupid.

So he counts his boxes, he inspects the contents, and he keeps them all safely tucked away, where nobody will be able to interfere with his emergency stockpiles.

He feels content as he settles down at the desk crowded into the corner of his room, despite the fact that he’s cracking open his trig book. He remembers the technicolour flavours of the pastry dancing along his tongue, and the way that Noct kind of snorts when he rolls his eyes, the way his face looks all dorky and ridiculous when he’s doing that smug little smile of his. The memories taste like candy.