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Prompto drops his cell phone onto his couch and then flops down next to it with an expressive, full-body sigh. He is clearly fishing for interaction, which Gladio is instinctively disinclined to reward him with. On the other hand, given that Gladio is at least partially responsible for this little conspiracy and came over to Prompto’s apartment specifically so he could be here for the phone call, not engaging with Prompto is more than a little ridiculous.
“So,” Gladio says, obligingly, and without even rolling his eyes, “how’d it go?”
Prompto only groans and keeps staring up at the ceiling. To be fair, he is very good at adding notes of pathetic frustration to the sound.
“Well?” he prompts again, this time with his own extra emotional notes, but these are impatient ones.
“Okay, look,” Prompto says, which is not a preamble that inspires much confidence, “I suggested the arcade because if this were a real date that got canceled, Noct would assume I was bummed out.” He lifts one hand, flails it about in a way that would probably communicate something if Gladio spoke fluent Prompto. “And Noct said ‘Maybe Ignis can give us a ride.’ Maybe Ignis can give us a ride,” he repeats in despairing tones. “Like Ignis was at his place already. Do you think he really just—got ready for the date when Ignis was right there?”
“Of course he did,” Gladio says, because he knows Ignis’s schedule and specifically told Prompto to set up the fake date for a weekend he knew Ignis would be checking in on Noctis’s apartment.
Prompto rolls his head to the side to stare at him. “…you didn’t,” he says, and oh, that’s what Prompto’s despair actually sounds like. Huh. It’s not as whiny as he thought it would be. “Gladio!” Prompto pulls himself out of his slump so he can sit up, all the better to gape at him.
Gladio raises an eyebrow at him. “You agreed to help set this whole thing up.”
“Yeah, but not to, like, torment anyone,” Prompto shoots back. “Just to give the two of them a nudge! To maybe start them actually thinking about the feelings they are clearly having.”
This time Gladio does roll his eyes. “Nudges aren’t going to work,” he says, because if they were, then he wouldn’t have needed to rope Prompto into conspiring with two of his classmates to fake a double date and a family emergency. He would’ve handled it himself earlier this year, when he put together the pieces that Ignis and Noctis are both being willfully oblivious to. He has been nudging, and neither of them has moved. “This needed to escalate.”
He knows how romance works. One of the best, tried-and-true ways to kick off a proper romance plot is to set up one of the parties with a Mr. or Ms. Wrong, and then watch the first party become dissatisfied or disillusioned with Wrong while the second party seethed in unarticulated, frustrated emotional agony. It’s one of the classics for a reason.
And he knows Noctis and Ignis. Noctis likes to hide all his soft, vulnerable parts like he’ll die if anyone even suspects he has them, especially if that person is himself. Ignis has spent the last several years perfecting his placid lake routine, and admitting any kind of romantic interest in Noctis would be chucking a boulder straight in the middle of his carefully crafted composure.
Gladio, quite frankly, is tired of it. He’s not going to endure another year of the things they do with their faces when they’re looking at each other, not when his subtler attempts at gauging their interest in each other and then implying that the other party also has interest have failed to bear fruit. They’ve put him off his food or his training or just his life too much for him to just let it slide anymore.
“Escalate how?” Prompto asks. He looks a little alarmed.
“Jealousy, first of all,” Gladio says. “This little fake date was step one.”
“Wait, how many steps have you planned? And why jealousy?”
Gladio doesn’t bother with the first question because the answer is obvious: if getting Noctis and Ignis together was easy, he wouldn’t have gotten involved this much. It’s a detailed plan. “Because jealousy is a complicated, uncomfortable emotion that it’s really fucking easy to get obsessive about. It’ll spark, and they’ll smother it, but then it’ll flare up again, and they’ll try to cool it down. It lingers, like dogshit you didn’t realize you stepped in but still brought home on your shoe anyway.”
Prompto wrinkles his nose at the analogy but doesn’t actually try to argue the point. That’s good enough for now.
“If everything went well, we’ve planted some actual seeds today. Noctis got ready for a date, and knowing Iggy, he was all helpful and didn’t actually seem to care one way or another that Noctis was going out, beyond making sure he was presentable and shit. And the part of Noctis’s brain that is attracted to Ignis isn’t going to like that one bit, even if the rest of him doesn’t realize what’s going on. And Ignis got to watch Noctis get ready for a date, and it wasn’t a date with him, and that’s no fucking fun at all even with all of Ignis’s emotional compartmentalization.”
If Gladio thought the blunt route had any chance in hell of working, he would have gone for that strategy immediately. But Noctis likes to shut down when he’s confronted by things he doesn’t like, and Ignis gets slipperier than an eel when he is avoiding shit.
“It’s a good start, but it’s just a start,” Gladio says. He plants his elbows on his knees and leans forward into Prompto’s space. “We have to keep going.”
To his credit, Prompto stands his ground to stare at him again. “I’m pretty sure we don’t, actually?”
“Do you want to spend the rest of your life watching them look at each other like that?”
Because they will take a lifetime to get together if Gladio leaves them to their own devices. He refuses to endure that.
“It’s so sad,” Prompto says. He does another one of his full-body sighs and flops back onto the couch. “And the pathetic kind of sad. All right, hit me. What’s step two? Can it be nicer?”
“Absolutely not,” Gladio says, and then he pulls out the folded piece of paper he has been using as a bookmark. “We’ve got to twist the knife some more.”
Prompto sighs, but he does listen as Gladio outlines the second step in the Get These Two Fuckers Together Plan, and that’s good enough.