finalflight | PSL; [TEN MILLION WAYS TO FADE]

PSL; [TEN MILLION WAYS TO FADE]

Gralea was nothing more than a wasteland of cold and snow these days. Shiva’s corpse, jutting out from the great expanse of white like shale reaching towards grey skies, had affected the area in ways one might expect from a dead astral — an endless blizzard, cutting cold swirling and snaking through the Imperial heartland, unending.

The lifelessness of such a place is reflected within Zegnautus keep, all inhuman metal and loud, echoing sounds through empty corridors. A cold chill, seeping through hairline cracks of the acute, military architecture. No sound of human voices, but the occasional clang of something moving a distance away; heavy footsteps, metal scraping against metal, as if dragging across the floor.

Within the Keep, there were plenty of places to keep prisoners sequestered — better yet, there were plenty of places to keep them subdued, bodies pinned up against steel, wrists kept restrained, a parodic caricature of a crucifixion. Bruised and battered, cold and unattended to; such is the state that Ardyn’s left Prompto. Alone, drifting in and out of consciousness, for hours now.

But there are footsteps that approach, ringing out with some dread tempo. An easy, almost lazy gait, drawing nearer. Ardyn Izunia enters the large cell, passing by a dirtied, flat metallic surgical table in which he removes his hat and places it upon. He moves towards the young man, this poor boy, and stops a mere foot away from where he’s been strung-up like some discarded toy.

A hand comes out, fingers grasping at Prompto’s chin. Nails bite into skin as he lifts his head up, at an angle that would allow the young man to look at his face if were to return to the waking world.

"Wake up." His voice is almost a drawl. Low, predatory intonations laced with amusement. "You’ve been resting long enough."

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The footsteps did not pull him entirely from the cold dark of unconsciousness, but the voice, the twinge in the back of his mind that recognized it, that screamed danger-- that made him stir. Weakly, hovering on the edge of consciousness, Prompto tried to lift his head, only to become slowly aware past the frozen numbness of how cold he was that he was being held up. That he couldn't move.

There was frost crystallizing on the edges of his long lashes when Prompto's eyelids fluttered open with effort, his eyes unfocused and confused. He remembered pain. He remembered Ardyn.

With a sudden burst of newfound strength, Prompto tried to jerk his head away from the unwelcome touch as reality came crashing back to him with a nauseating lurch of realization.

"Y-You--"

"Ah-ah," Ardyn began in a sickening, patronizing tone. He clicked his tongue, fingers tightening around the boy's jaw, his own eyes sharp; how he could nigh see his own reflection in Prompto's glassy haze of confusion and disorientation. Of panic, like a wild animal caught in a trap. He supposed the analogy was not terribly far off.

"Struggle too much, and you'll only hurt yourself more. You'll not be squirming your way out of these restraints, Prompto."

Ardyn grinned, sharp and skewed, stepping back. He extended his arms in a sweeping motion, as if the cavernous, soulless room around them was naught but a stage.

"You're probably wondering where you are. Well-- welcome to Zegnautus Keep. I'll be the one keeping you company for the days ahead."

Ardyn was unfortunately, infuriatingly right. Even just trying to yank his chin free of the grip was painful, with the way his head was throbbing horribly, the stiffness that had built up in his neck and shoulders that sent the ache crawling down his spine and outstretched arms when he tried to struggle. Prompto groaned, the sound escaping helplessly, frustratingly. He tried to swallow the noise.

He tried to focus on Ardyn's face and the-- well, it couldn't be called a room. More like a cell.

"What--?" Prompto tried, hoarse and rasping. His voice broke, and he tried again.

"What the hell... are you talking about?"

He wracked his brain, protesting and foggy as it was, trying to understand what exactly Ardyn was telling him. He'd been on his way to meet Noct and the others in Gralea, and then... he'd woken up here. And he had no idea, despite Ardyn's smug declaration, where that really was. He had no idea how long he'd been out or what had happened. He did not have the better sense or presence of mind to pause and assess his situation before he started giving away, obviously enough, the questions he most needed answers to.

"Where is this? Where's Noct? Why are you doing this?!"

A sound emanated from the back of Ardyn’s throat, a low, amused thing. Hollow-sounding as it flitted and bounced around the steel walls of the cell. The questions would come, he knew — wrought with confusion and panic, and it would be a pleasure to dismantle them as they flew from Prompto’s mouth.

He stepped forward again. Tilted his head to illuminate keen, cruel eyes.

“Now then, one thing at a time. This place is — or perhaps, was — a grand Imperial base. Once overflowing with those artificial soldiers. You know, much like yourself.”

Words were better than knives, easier to twist and gouge at the core of who a person was. Already, Ardyn knew he had a foothold in it, given the boy’s origins.

“But now? It’s just me and you, and a few clockwork corpses. Oh, and a daemon or two.”

It did not sting any less the more he heard it. He couldn't rein in his reaction even knowing it was what Ardyn was after. Prompto's lips twisted, his hands clenching into fists in his restraints. The trembling in his limbs wasn't only from the cold.

"What the hell do you want with me?" he snarled, the confusion starting to clear a bit in the wake of building anger and desperation. And panic. Prompto jerked against his bonds despite the pain, straining and twisting his wrists. "Let me go, you coward! You that afraid I'm gonna kick your ass?"

“Oh, utterly terrified,” came the retort, barely holding back a laugh of incredulity. The very thought that Prompto could provide even the smallest sliver of a threat to Ardyn was borderline hilarious. Unarmed, weakened, at his total mercy; he would be lucky if he could even manage to stand without crumpling to his knees, if Ardyn were so kind to release him.

The thought nestled in the back of his mind, an image that the sadistic edges of him would be quite pleased to relish in. But patience, in all things.

“If you’re wondering what use you have to me, I had rather thought that you’d provide motivation enough to bring your dear friends here. A swift and valiant rescue attempt, diving headlong into danger.”

But he gave something akin to a shrug, seeming unconcerned.

“But it’s been so long. Maybe they’ve forgotten about you. Or they’ve learned not to care.”

The bottom dropped out of his stomach, the feeling like a yawning chasm suddenly opening up inside him with a sensation of hollowness so vast, it physically hurt. He should have seen this coming. He should have realized the moment he woke up.

But he'd never even considered it was possible.

Will they even want me back? Prompto had asked himself over and over after learning what he was. Did he ever want me in the first place? he'd asked himself before even knowing the truth.

Now, suddenly, no matter what the answer was, Prompto realized it would be a terrible one.

He was bait.

He opened his mouth, but no words rose to his tongue. The look in his eyes betrayed his shock, the way the realization worked through his mind in stages, each new moment of understanding worse than the next until he felt dizzy and sick.

He was bait. Ardyn was using him to lure Noctis and his friends, to manipulate and hurt them. They would come for him and suffer. Or they wouldn't. Or they wouldn't come at all, they wouldn't care, they would abandon him-- but they'd be safe, and that was better. If they were safe. If Ardyn wasn't using some other trick.

Prompto's breathing had gone fast and shallow. He stopped struggling in his restraints, except to shake his head, again and again. It was all he could do for a few excruciating moments.

"You're... wrong."

Ardyn let those insidious, poisonous thoughts roll around within Prompto’s skull for a few long moments, like relentless waves buffeting up against the shoreline. In the grand scheme of things, he knew that most of the hollowing deprecation would come from none other than the young man himself. That all of his concerns — especially in the wake of having just visited an MT production facility — already existed, stacked up high within his mind. Ardyn only needed to apply pressure in just the right places, causing those hairline cracks to fissure. Then it was only a matter of watching it all crumble into naught.

“Oh, I don’t think I am. After the revelation of just what you are, why would they have any reason to trust you? A soulless soldier to be placed within an army of machines — and you couldn’t even manage that much. You’re little more than something to be labelled as defective, Prompto.”

Stolen away from the facilities before he could be fully transformed into an MT. Ardyn stepped forward again, his footsteps still ringing hollow.

“Not that it would bring your friends here any faster, but we could try to fix that, you know. It would give me something to do while I have to wait.”

They don't have to know, Prompto's mind screamed at him, latching suddenly onto the realization that he'd only just put it together, there was no way his friends would know. He hadn't intended to hide it. He was going to tell them...

Was he going to tell them?

"That's not true! It doesn't matter what I was supposed to be. What I am is a Lucian!" He was struggling again, though they both knew it was futile. He had to be doing something. He had to try. If he just let Ardyn talk at him and hung here limply, it would only make Ardyn's words feel more true.

At that last 'suggestion,' however, Prompto nearly paused. There was something about it that made his skin crawl, but he didn't... understand.

"Wh-what are you... talking about, you crazy bastard?"

Ardyn hardly had to make the threat of telling his friends the truth of Prompto’s origin. It hung over both of their heads like a sharpened sword on a thin wire, ready to drop. It shaped the tension in the air, those reins of leverage that Ardyn could pull to and fro according to his own whims. He only smiled, the expression frustratingly indolent on his features.

“I mean that we should see it through to the end. Complete the process of your conversion to a true MT; you were already created in a facility, but you quite thoroughly managed to avoid the daemonification process.”

He placed a hand on his chest, fingers splayed, in a gesture of mock pride.

“And who better than I, to pick up where you last left off? You’ll find that I’m quite equipped the wrench away the rest of your humanity; oh, but don’t tell the scientists that.”

The reaction was vehement and visceral. Prompto recoiled, less struggling now and more shrinking back against the cross-shaped mechanism he'd been strapped to, his breathing gone high and shallow, eyes wide. The color had drained completely from his face, making his freckles and bruises stand out starkly.

"N-no..."

The terror surged up, sharp and raw, the burst of adrenaline flooding his veins. He couldn't move. It left his heart pounding, vision tunneling. All he saw was Ardyn's smile-- and, in his mind's eye, the rows of clones suspended in fluid, rows and rows of faceless armored soldiers.

He could feel a laugh bubbling up in his throat. Cruelty in every timbre of the noise if he let it fall from his lips, that ongoing amusement at poor Prompto’s expense not something he had tried to hide. And though he did not laugh, not this time, it shone behind his eyes.

“Don’t give me that look.” Like an animal freezing up, fight or flight instincts stalling in the face of futility. “You’d only be fulfilling what you were created to do. To be. Maybe more than that; my blood might even be potent enough to twist you into something truly special.”

There was no 'might' about it. He knew that was the case.

"It'll hurt, just a little. But it wouldn't be terribly fun otherwise."

"No," Prompto said again, a rough bark of a sound between a snarl and a sob, like if he only said it fervently enough, Ardyn might listen.

"You can't--"

It was an empty protest. They both knew he could.

The gleeful shine in Ardyn's eyes made him feel sick. It was a silent promise. He meant every word, and he was loving it.

Prompto's protests were swept away as if they were made of nothing. Ardyn did not even acknowledge them, instead pressing forward with his idea, the sharp look in his eyes a permanent fixture.

"Maybe your dear friends will swoop in at the last moment, right before you change, and take you away from this empty, soulless place."

This keep, full of daemons and discarded soldiers. Perhaps Prompto would make for one of their number soon enough.

"But I doubt it. Now then, before we get started, promise me you'll play nice? There's no need to make it more difficult for the both of us."

Such a question was a borderline insult, but that was hardly enough to stop Ardyn from asking it.

Dangling the hope in front of him, while Prompto knew how unlikely Ardyn thought it was (how unlikely he thought it was), just dug the knife in deeper. His lips quivered, everything in his throat and chest so tight it hurt. Prompto swallowed hard, struggling to keep the growing despair opening up inside him from overtaking his anger, trying to snap instead of sob. The result was thin-voiced and unconvincing.

"Keep dreaming, asshole," he hissed, and even if the words sounded on the edge of tears, his eyes were hard and hateful. "I'll never cooperate with you."

The thin bravado, as expected, fell upon deaf and mostly unimpressed ears.

“You’ll have little choice in the matter, I’m afraid.”

There was no fanfare, no real prelude, to the atmosphere twisting with something heavy. As if it were waiting on Ardyn, commanded by Ardyn, this awful darkness. Prompto would recognize it; the familiar dread that threads through the air, heralding the arrival of a daemon at night. But such energy merely swirled around the loosely curled fingers of Ardyn’s hand, like wisps of dark flame.

He pressed it against Prompto’s chest. It shook his body to the core, to the brink of shattering. It would be enough to steal consciousness away from him.

———————

Prompto would awaken, bleary and in pain, with the sensation of cold metal pressed to his back and encircling his wrists. The cavernous ceiling looming above, and the groan of the keep against the harsh winter winds the only thing to greet him.

Of course Prompto had felt it, recognized it-- but for all his struggling and jerking in the cuffs, there had been nothing he could do. Ardyn was as unavoidable and certain as a storm before him now. Prompto's scream had echoed off the metal walls, and cut off as he'd slumped, unconscious in his bonds.

He did not know how long ago that had been. He could not tell whether the room he found himself in now was the same one from a different angle, or a different place altogether. Reality came trickling back in bursts and snatches, between the bruising aches inside his bones and the way his head throbbed and his ribs protested every breath.

Every time he'd woken up for what felt like weeks now he'd been cold. Perhaps he should have gotten used to it by now. He wasn't.

This time, however, in his bleary assessment of his sorry physical state, Prompto realized the metal against his back was chilling his bare skin. The position he was in was nearly the same as the one he'd been forced into before, arms out to either side and bound, but this time he was flat, staring up and up at the dark ceiling-- and stripped from the waist up.

The cuffs were just as sturdy as they'd been before.

Prompto was left alone, cold and unattended to, for a long while. Moments transformed into minutes which piled up into a full hour of cold isolation and uncertainty. Occasionally, there would be the groan of something inhuman echoing down a long corridor, far detached from his large, empty cell. A clatter of metal, a tempo reverberating along flooring that could be interpreted as footsteps, though there was something ungainly about the gait. But beyond strange noises, nothing and no one came to meet him a second time — one might even think he had been forgotten, if he were not so very purposefully placed in his current position.

Yet when Ardyn did show, there was nothing to prepare Prompto for it. He simply appeared, as if out of thin air, a terrible trick of his; hovering above Prompto with that sickening smile, mussed hair tugged downwards, courtesy of gravity. One hand pressed against the cool steel of the table as the ex-Chancellor leaned forward, and in his other he held a knife.

Without warning, the tip of the blade slammed against the surgical table, mere inches away from the young man’s ear. The sudden noise in the otherwise quiet atmosphere was nigh deafening, yet Ardyn was as unfazed as ever.

“Awake?”

He couldn't tell how long had passed. It could have been minutes, hours-- longer? His body ached with cold and with the stress of being pinned in place like an insect for so long; the cuts and bruises he'd accumulated along the way to coming here and from his capture throbbed at first with the frantic beating of his heart before they numbed out with cold too. Eventually, it all melded together. The terror came back around to frustration, doubt, and finally a blankness that felt like the cold had seeped not just into his bones but into his mind to leave it grasping at nothing and wandering, helplessly replaying the moments that had brought him here.

When Ardyn appeared again -- too suddenly, without a sound -- Prompto wasn't asleep. His eyes were open, but he did not look entirely aware in that first moment either, disoriented and drifting. He gave a start when Ardyn's smile floated into view, too-close. And then a violent jerk and a yelp of shock at the noise.

It made his pulse spike so suddenly, his head spun, ears ringing, senses abruptly overwhelmed. It was another moment before his mind could catch up enough to realize what, exactly, it was in Ardyn's hand so close to his face. This time, he couldn't even muster a comeback.

Pinned down and unable to see Ardyn fully, it would be easy to miss how he had at some point shrugged off the heavy black coat, left only instead with a white undershirt with the sleeves rolled up halfway. Oddly — or perhaps unsurprisingly — the chill in the air doesn’t seem to bother him; there was not even the subtle crawl of goosebumps across the exposed flesh of his arms, not a single shiver. The burnt orange scarf he seems so fond of wearing still hung loosely around his neck, drooping slightly as he gazed down at the young man.

The vibrations shuddered across the table, finally waning into silence. But Ardyn soon replaced it with a long scrape of metal against metal, gliding the tip of the knife against the surface, just inches away from the contours of Prompto’s neck and shoulder. A grating, shrill noise that existed only as a prelude to sadism.

“I need you conscious and focused, Prompto. Say something.”

The screech of metal on metal made his teeth hurt. Prompto cringed, instinctively trying to shrink away from the awful scrape that seemed to be trying to dig into his brain-- and then the realization that it was a knife, the blade barely visible out of the corner of his eye with Ardyn leaned over him so close.

"Stop!" he gasped, eyes wild. The knife was very close to his neck.

And like that, he stopped, lifting the knife and giving it a little twirl between deft fingers. It caught light along its edges with each rotation.

“That’s better,” he remarked, smiling, and it was hard to know what Ardyn was referencing. Prompto’s cognizance, his lucidity, the wide-eyed sting of panic likely shooting through his numb spine like electricity. Perhaps all of the above.

“It wouldn’t be very exciting if you weren’t awake for any of this.” The rustling of clothing, the shifting of Ardyn’s weight onto the table, seated just at the edge under where Prompto’s arm was placed, disturbingly near his mid-section. He leaned forward, facing him, a palm pressing against the cool surface. “I’ve given your friends a handful of hours to show, and my, how they drag their feet. I wonder if it’s fallacy of the cruelest sort to even hope at all?”

Easy as you please, Ardyn lowered his hand so that the tip of the blade rested almost gently against Prompto’s sternum. No pressure, no cutting into exposed skin; not yet.

“Besides, I’m an impatient man, never mind what people might think of me. I do want to see what makes someone like you tick; see if we can unearth that smattering of humanity you have, buried deep within your chest. Perhaps inside your beating heart.”

Prompto watched him with that same panicked, helpless stare; there was nothing more he could do. He could only watch. His eyes followed Ardyn's awful smile, his movement as he settled almost intimately close, his hand, the knife. He tried to stop the shallow heaving of his chest as the point of the blade settled closer and closer, until he wasn't breathing at all when he felt the soft, barely-there prickle of a sharp edge.

The tears stung his eyes, gathered on his lashes. Prompto's fists, clenched in white-knuckled terror, strained against the cuffs so his muscles stood out tense and quivering, his heart a frantic drumbeat in his head.

Noct. Iggy. Gladio. Please.

He didn't want to die. He wasn't ready.

"Please... don't..."

An idle thought formed in his head, a quietly amused consideration. Ardyn thinking that maybe if he focused hard enough, he could see the minute vibrations of Prompto’s heart hammering in his chest, the way skin moved against the tip of the knife with each hurried breath, threatening to break skin without him even having to move. That Ardyn could make him bleed by merely being close was a morose, delightful thought. He wondered how long he could simply sit like this, on the threshold of a silent threat but never crossing that line. How much damage Prompto might do against his own body (wrists likely to blossom with color, the consequences of blood vessels bursting just under the skin against those restraints) and his mind. The terrible anxiety of not knowing what Ardyn would do to him. Worse than any sort of pain he could hope to inflict.

Almost, anyway.

He pressed down, just enough to draw blood, then slid the blade almost lackadaisically downwards. A trail of red blossomed in its wake, bright crimson against the dull hues of the room, of Prompto’s pale skin.

“If you struggle, it only cuts deeper.”

Dizzy with terror and holding his breath out of fear of cutting himself on the blade against his skin if he so much as let his chest rise, Prompto felt frozen, floating. It didn't feel real. Like a nightmare, a bad joke. So much of the last few days had felt like a bad joke.

He saw Noct's face contorted with rage and hatred, that look he'd never leveled on Prompto that would haunt his dreams even if he understood now it hadn't been meant for him. His own best friend trying to kill him.

The knifepoint was so sharp, the barest kiss against his sternum had soft skin parting beneath it, barely deep enough to bleed but enough to make Prompto hiss and clench his teeth in anticipation of more pain.

Was it okay to wish for his friends to come for him, to come rushing into danger for someone like him? How could he want that, when it put them at risk?

I wonder if it's fallacy of the cruelest sort to even hope at all.

The knife slid down his exposed chest, a tingling, unpleasant sting and sharp pain as it bit through skin. It wasn't possible to hold his breath much longer. Slowly, trying his best to focus, Prompto tried to breathe from his stomach shallowly, holding tense and very still as the tears slid down his temples and onto the cold metal beneath his head.

Ardyn was playing with him. Like a cat batting its living prey around for sport until it finally got hungry enough for the kill.

"Look how very red it is," he said after a handful of perilously silent moments, watching the slow eke of blood from the cut, languidly crawling down Prompto's pale skin. The tip of the knife still brushed against his body, the quiet threat ever-present, while Ardyn moved the forefinger of his other hand across slender wounds. Small smear marks were left in his wake, like a thin layer of paint across a canvas.

He lifted this hand to the light, fingertip wet and gleaming. A small spot of warmth against cool skin, the contact already beginning to scent of iron.

"Do you know that mine no longer looks like this? I'm almost jealous; this sort of scarlet was always one of my favorite colors."

Lightheaded with fear and the shallowness of his breaths, Prompto flinched when Ardyn swiped a hand across the cut, dragging the blood across his quivering chest. He had to struggle to focus on what Ardyn was saying, past the thundering of his own wild pulse.

"Wh-what...?"

Prompto stared at the smear of red on Ardyn's fingers. The word came out nearly soundless, mostly breath, frightened and confused. Maybe if he could keep Ardyn talking, he'd stop using the knife. But probably not.

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PSL; [TEN MILLION WAYS TO FADE]

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THANK YOU FOR WAITING FOR ME....cry

NO CRYING