[ Apparently this is what she does now. Spends all day running laps, fighting, scrounging around in all the forgotten corners looking for anything interesting or cigarette-like, sometimes fucks around with Shep. Then at the end of it all, sometimes tidy, more often disheveled, she comes and sits on his bed with bounce, wanting to talk. ]
So, what. You're like eighteen?
[ She's come back to follow up on the 'sleeping in a crystal' story. ]
[Sometimes, Noctis is already asleep when Annie comes in, only to awaken when he feels something shift at the foot of his bed. Mattress sinking slightly with the weight of his broodmate come to talk, come to pass the time. He'll sit up and blink the sleep away, and speak in short syllables until he can form full sentences after waking fully.
Sometimes, he's already awake, quiet with his own thoughts. This is the case today. Annie's presence is never unwelcome, but it's far easier to latch onto when he's looking for something to distract himself with. He offers her a small grin when she plants herself on his bed.]
Twenty.
[The response is automatic, if technically incorrect. He doesn't consider himself much older than that despite the ten year discrepancy, but he does realize his error a second or two later.]
[ She vetoes this. He is definitely not thirty. That would weirdly make him older than her, and that part is definitely not true. Not allowed, unacceptable. ]
Let's go with twenty.
[ Just because you say things doesn't make them true, Annie. ]
So, like. What was the plan, before great-great-grand-ancestor-douche fucked up all the shit?
[He looks minutely skeptical, but doesn't even bother arguing the point. It's probably for the best that expectations revolving around him are more suited to a boy barely out of his teens, instead of a thirty year-old man. In a way, it feels less awkward for him.]
The plan? [He echoes, because it's a loaded question. What was the plan? From the beginning, it was always that he would die to save his world. If anything, Ardyn "fucking up" everything was in line with this. The man hadn't really derailed anything.
He sets his jaw, and decides to answer a little more specifically.]
Well. I was literally on my way to get married.
[...Which was also something instigated by Ardyn. Womp womp.]
[ Her nose wrinkles. What can she say. She's never actually spent any time around a married couple. That whole idea is one ever so slightly beyond reality for her. She's read about marriages from a historical standpoint, where the people involved were just symbolic to some treaty. He is a prince, was that the deal? He did seem to like the dead girl, at least. ]
...yes? [He's confused momentarily, until he understands her meaning.] It was arranged, if that's what you were asking.
[Lunafreya's face graces his memory. Noctis casts his gaze to the floor, that nagging feeling of something cold and sharp (loss, grief) rising up. He fidgets with his Ring, considering how to continue.]
It was one of the stipulations of the peace treaty, between Lucis and Niflheim. And so, off we went, to seal the deal. [He scoffs, humorless.] Of course it's never that easy. Niflheim attacked anyway. It was a ruse.
[ Niflheim... The world of darkness. Noctis. Nyx. Niflheim. Why is everything in this world so ridiculous. She somehow refrains from reminding him, yet again, that this shit sounds fucking imaginary. Probably because, even as she's mocking that in her head, she gets a rush of Nyx: his fight for his home against the Nif, battlefields, determination. All the emotions and memories they'd carelessly sloshed in to one another.
It's a disorienting swirl. Lunafreya in the middle of it all. ]
[Let them have their ridiculous names that are too on the nose to be taken seriously by anyone who knows what Latin actually is. His world truly is an over-the-top fantasy, grounded only by the raw memories of war, of sacrifice, of a crumbling Citadel and a stolen throne.
He doesn't know how to respond to that. He twists the Ring on his finger again. Once, twice. If his ancestors were still slumbering in there, or otherwise connected, they'd scowl at the young Lucis Caelum for using it as an outlet for his anxieties.]
She's... She was what's called an Oracle. She was a princess from Tenebrae [more dumb names, Annie], and it was her job to heal the sick and keep something called the Starscourge at bay.
After her death, everything fell apart. I already told you about the state of my world now.
[ Yeah. Her brows pinch. Tenebrae also translates to darkness. Apparently this world was fuckin' obsessed with it, struggling against the crawl of the Starscourge, and against their own endless wars. Sounds like a shitty place, to Annie. As fucked up as her life in the Cartazonos Academy had been-- At least she wasn't some fucking pretty polly political toy, nor some mournful destined prince crushed under destiny's wheel.
She was just a star unburgeoned, a sleeping alien goddess walking drowsily through a lifetime.]
Sounds like a shit show. But, I mean, like. Was she a cool chick, or what?
[ She watches his face, watches his emotion with that stupid thing the psychic chicks called the 'third eye'. She doesn't think it's that stupid, she knows all about an extra-sensory awareness, she just forever feels the need to shit on psychics in her head. But she's watching, observing with an enormous stillness. For a moment there isn't that sense of many-suckered creeping, there is a breathless stillness from many eyes. Taking measure of a little king and his memories. ]
With all the bullshit... I feel like I was never really a kid and never really gonna be any kind of fuckin' adult either.
[ That's what she came here for: to talk arrested development, and in a way she sees that in what he describes about Lunafreya too. How did you ever really settle into the cradle of 'adulthood' when you always expected your life to be fuckin' short, cut off before it was really fully honed past its wild thorns and high potency. ]
[The answer is simple: you don't. You grin and bear it, and if you're Noctis, you grow up with a quiet resignation towards the very idea. You feel caught between a childhood you never had, and responsibilities you never asked for.
Or, if you're Lunafreya, you twist it into a motivation that propels you forward, day in and day out. At least, that's what Noctis believes. He had always wondered how she did it, and how she did it with grace. Even now, after his awakening (Walk tall, my friends), sometimes he feels as if he stumbles. Here, beyond Eos, even more so.]
So which one do you feel like now? I actually... [He hesitates.] It's probably not surprising to you, but I never felt all that "grown up". Sometimes I still feel like a little kid, and people used to tell me that all the time.
[ She shrugs, uncomfortable with the whole topic but if there was anyone she was kind of getting okay at being uncomfortable with, it was him. Why the fuck else would she keep come here to talk to him, letting him wind down her manic energy and wild imagination enough for her to eventually leave and maybe sleep quietly. ]
Feel like I died when everybody else did. But I didn't, so I just keep going for them, but I'm not really goin' anywhere. So, I dunno. Guess I feel like a dead twenty year old.
[ Right there on the cusp, maybe with a little more time could have started feeling like an 'adult' but not quite weened out of adolescence yet. ]
I had just started teaching. We graduated at twenty, all four of us. Sarah and I stayed to teach, but she fucked off before shit even got--
[ The girl's face is there, a mousy thing with raw lips and freckles, her empty body slumped over. No injuries, just took her soul somewhere else and left. The difference between living and inert tissue is so tiny-- ]
I thought maybe I was good at it and I'd keep doing that until I drank myself to death. I never expected to live real long. We didn't, mainly. Even before the shit with the aliens.
[It's an uncomfortable topic all around, but how easily Noctis unfolds everything within him, to be laid bare at another person's feet if just asked. With Annie, even more so.
A dead twenty year old. The description is simple, but the words leave an imprint even as she continues to speak. Had he felt that way, years ago? In all his frustration at forces pulling him in every direction, he stubbornly refused to move, overwhelmed and confused, angry at the gods, at the Prophecy he was supposed to adhere to. It hadn't been fair.
He had been given motivation since then. But on the station, did it matter? What purpose did he have to exist anymore? A dead twenty year old, indeed. Punctuated by images of a girl he doesn't recognize flittering through his mind.]
But now we're here. Think you can find a purpose in that? Something make you feel like it matters.
[ They've had this conversation before. She hadn't realized it was going to lead them back here, when she'd been chewing over the idea: the years lost in the depths. Somehow though, this is where everything goes for her, this dead end that stretches out into infinity. All the time and potential that evaporated from them as individuals, could they now make up for it as a community? She knows what Nyx thinks about it, his utter determination to fight for the future had been intoxicating as it had hit her in waves, invigorating where she was otherwise weary-- But that's not her, and it never was.
When has she ever been alive, rather than just pantomiming the humanity of those around her. She smiles bitterly. ]
Dunno. I can fake it, I can put everything I have in to it, cuz I don't play by halves, but that doesn't--
[ It doesn't mean anything. Doesn't mean it matters. Doesn't mean her heart is behind it. It just means she's accepted a mission, and she'll accomplish it like she always does. ]
It's never enough, you know. There's no winning. You don't pass or fail at fuckin' life. But I don't know how to do the other shit, school was rigid and I needed that but without all the tests and rules and the guidelines--
[ They've talked about this too. She gives up with a helpless, expansive shrug that ends with her flopping backwards with a sullen arm thrown across her face. She's silent for a whole moment before murmuring, ]
Can I paint in here.
[ She means like on the walls, the ceiling, the floors. ]
[Retread conversations. It'll be a well-worn path at this rate, but Noctis doesn't feel the same sort of exasperation from looping the same thoughts around and around in his head. It's a habit of his -- maybe a bad one -- that he tries to keep at bay with varying levels of success. Around broodmates, this restraint twists itself outward and opposite into an echo chamber, and he unburdens them with the expediency of a man who trusts his broodmates. Who trusts Annie.
Trademark of his personality, sentimental fool that he can be.
He lets the silence linger, and answers without hesitation.]
Sure. [He knows that she means all over.] You take requests?
[ She answers in total deadpan. How many times had she been asked to paint fucking unicorns by a school full of girls... didn't help that Cartazonos itself was a different cognate for Unicorn.
She rolls over on to her side to give him an appraising look, lips pursed. ]
[But he straightens a bit, churning over in his mind his request. He settles on something silly, maybe, but unsurprising for Noctis to choose.]
A cactuar.
[He shares with her the image of the little thing, a green cactus-like creature that moved too fast and shot way too many needles. But, though he's unlikely to say so out loud, he thinks they're... cute.
[ She takes hold of the image he presents her, and turns it over like turning a crystal in the light. What a fucking ridiculous creature, was anything about his fantasy land not silly? She gives him an amused look, but yeah she could paint him some cactuars. Maybe a nice border of them around the edge of the room, dancing, chirping, emoting. Ugh, it's too cutesy but it seems about right for this loser, like another little boy's race cars and space ships. ]
[It is ridiculous. But Noctis is ridiculous, in a lot of ways. He's barely an adult, barely a teen. Still a kid, amused by little green cactuars and possessing a fondness for chocobos and cats alike.
An array of cactuars dancing around his room sounds amusing. A bit of levity and character in the cold and sterile reaches of space.]
Whatever. You're smiling, so don't pretend you don't think it's funny.
[ She wishes she felt that kind of innocent pleasure, for anything, but she'd definitely skipped that stage in her life. She'd been one of Sparrow's soldiers from the beginning, time other children had spent with toys, pets, family... She'd spent under observation, having reading and language and math shoved down her throat from as soon as she would start regurgitating it. No childhood to feel nostalgic for, just nostalgia for a stability that had been an illusion. Not even the memories make her feel particularly secure, she can see all the holes and cracks in retrospect.
Her hand reaches out slowly, wanting his back in kind. ]
Keep thinking about the cactus things, that's nice.
[ Whatever, it's fine to vicariously live through someone else, isn't it? ]
[He looks at her offered hand, and it's without much thought that he takes it. An almost absent-minded sort of touch, if it were not so obviously gentle.]
Sure... if you want.
[Noctis doesn't see anything wrong with Annie living vicariously through his memories, if that's what she asks of him. He's too eager to indulge a broodmate (mostly Annie), than to even consider if there would be any consequences to being so accommodating.
He closes his eyes for a moment, begins to think more about the cactuars. More than one, jumping around, darting here and there. He could barely keep up with them, even with his own warp strike. They'd run off beyond his reach, chittering as they do, mere moments later.
(There's also the memory of needles, so many of them, flying his way. That's less pleasant, but still comedic when he's not having to experience it in the moment; still, Noct focuses on that aspect less.)]
They're rare to find. [A fun fact, just so she knows.]
[ The tips of her fingers trace out the shape of his bones under his skin, thumb over the shape of a knuckle, the joint of the wrist. It's idle, like a cat kneading against the pleasant texture of a fabric. Her mind is on cactuars. ]
But, I mean, what the fuck are they? Are they plants?
They're monsters. [Probably not helpful, but... that's what they are.]
My friends and I... we would take up hunting tasks to help the local population. [Of course they did, because Noctis wanted to. Does this even come as a surprise anymore?
His thumb idly brushes over her skin as he tries to think of a place now. The grassy plains of Duscae. Cool and humid, under a great expanse of sky. How it seemed to stretch onwards, forever, and a pang of nostalgia unravels within him.]
[ Not a surprise at all after some of the stupid errands she's had him run, his stupid habit of wanting to help dumbasses like her and the rest of the turds on this Station.
She just settles herself comfortably in the periphery of his thoughts, like watching someone else's dream, it's an interesting detachment where she doesn't need to do any Annie things. Just shut up and listen and look, although shutting up is probably beyond her skillset. ]
Monster hunting sounds kinda fun.
[ What would she have been in Eos? A war orphan like Nyx probably, or was she thinking that because she'd gotten the full taste of the Glaive life when they'd been much too close. ]
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somnifacient) wrote2017-03-25 01:39 am
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So, what. You're like eighteen?
[ She's come back to follow up on the 'sleeping in a crystal' story. ]
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Sometimes, he's already awake, quiet with his own thoughts. This is the case today. Annie's presence is never unwelcome, but it's far easier to latch onto when he's looking for something to distract himself with. He offers her a small grin when she plants herself on his bed.]
Twenty.
[The response is automatic, if technically incorrect. He doesn't consider himself much older than that despite the ten year discrepancy, but he does realize his error a second or two later.]
Well, thirty now, I guess.
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[ She vetoes this. He is definitely not thirty. That would weirdly make him older than her, and that part is definitely not true. Not allowed, unacceptable. ]
Let's go with twenty.
[ Just because you say things doesn't make them true, Annie. ]
So, like. What was the plan, before great-great-grand-ancestor-douche fucked up all the shit?
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The plan? [He echoes, because it's a loaded question. What was the plan? From the beginning, it was always that he would die to save his world. If anything, Ardyn "fucking up" everything was in line with this. The man hadn't really derailed anything.
He sets his jaw, and decides to answer a little more specifically.]
Well. I was literally on my way to get married.
[...Which was also something instigated by Ardyn. Womp womp.]
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[ Her nose wrinkles. What can she say. She's never actually spent any time around a married couple. That whole idea is one ever so slightly beyond reality for her. She's read about marriages from a historical standpoint, where the people involved were just symbolic to some treaty. He is a prince, was that the deal? He did seem to like the dead girl, at least. ]
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[Lunafreya's face graces his memory. Noctis casts his gaze to the floor, that nagging feeling of something cold and sharp (loss, grief) rising up. He fidgets with his Ring, considering how to continue.]
It was one of the stipulations of the peace treaty, between Lucis and Niflheim. And so, off we went, to seal the deal. [He scoffs, humorless.] Of course it's never that easy. Niflheim attacked anyway. It was a ruse.
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It's a disorienting swirl. Lunafreya in the middle of it all. ]
What's with the girl.
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He doesn't know how to respond to that. He twists the Ring on his finger again. Once, twice. If his ancestors were still slumbering in there, or otherwise connected, they'd scowl at the young Lucis Caelum for using it as an outlet for his anxieties.]
She's... She was what's called an Oracle. She was a princess from Tenebrae [more dumb names, Annie], and it was her job to heal the sick and keep something called the Starscourge at bay.
After her death, everything fell apart. I already told you about the state of my world now.
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She was just a star unburgeoned, a sleeping alien goddess walking drowsily through a lifetime.]
Sounds like a shit show. But, I mean, like. Was she a cool chick, or what?
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Yeah, you could say that. She was... [He turns to Annie, eyes distant with the look of someone trying to recall a memory in the finest detail.]
Caring. Strong-willed. [Maybe even a little stubborn.] She carried a lot of responsibilities on her shoulders, with more grace than I ever did.
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With all the bullshit... I feel like I was never really a kid and never really gonna be any kind of fuckin' adult either.
[ That's what she came here for: to talk arrested development, and in a way she sees that in what he describes about Lunafreya too. How did you ever really settle into the cradle of 'adulthood' when you always expected your life to be fuckin' short, cut off before it was really fully honed past its wild thorns and high potency. ]
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Or, if you're Lunafreya, you twist it into a motivation that propels you forward, day in and day out. At least, that's what Noctis believes. He had always wondered how she did it, and how she did it with grace. Even now, after his awakening (Walk tall, my friends), sometimes he feels as if he stumbles. Here, beyond Eos, even more so.]
So which one do you feel like now? I actually... [He hesitates.] It's probably not surprising to you, but I never felt all that "grown up". Sometimes I still feel like a little kid, and people used to tell me that all the time.
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Feel like I died when everybody else did. But I didn't, so I just keep going for them, but I'm not really goin' anywhere. So, I dunno. Guess I feel like a dead twenty year old.
[ Right there on the cusp, maybe with a little more time could have started feeling like an 'adult' but not quite weened out of adolescence yet. ]
I had just started teaching. We graduated at twenty, all four of us. Sarah and I stayed to teach, but she fucked off before shit even got--
[ The girl's face is there, a mousy thing with raw lips and freckles, her empty body slumped over. No injuries, just took her soul somewhere else and left. The difference between living and inert tissue is so tiny-- ]
I thought maybe I was good at it and I'd keep doing that until I drank myself to death. I never expected to live real long. We didn't, mainly. Even before the shit with the aliens.
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A dead twenty year old. The description is simple, but the words leave an imprint even as she continues to speak. Had he felt that way, years ago? In all his frustration at forces pulling him in every direction, he stubbornly refused to move, overwhelmed and confused, angry at the gods, at the Prophecy he was supposed to adhere to. It hadn't been fair.
He had been given motivation since then. But on the station, did it matter? What purpose did he have to exist anymore? A dead twenty year old, indeed. Punctuated by images of a girl he doesn't recognize flittering through his mind.]
But now we're here. Think you can find a purpose in that? Something make you feel like it matters.
[He's asking Annie, and he's asking himself.]
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When has she ever been alive, rather than just pantomiming the humanity of those around her. She smiles bitterly. ]
Dunno. I can fake it, I can put everything I have in to it, cuz I don't play by halves, but that doesn't--
[ It doesn't mean anything. Doesn't mean it matters. Doesn't mean her heart is behind it. It just means she's accepted a mission, and she'll accomplish it like she always does. ]
It's never enough, you know. There's no winning. You don't pass or fail at fuckin' life. But I don't know how to do the other shit, school was rigid and I needed that but without all the tests and rules and the guidelines--
[ They've talked about this too. She gives up with a helpless, expansive shrug that ends with her flopping backwards with a sullen arm thrown across her face. She's silent for a whole moment before murmuring, ]
Can I paint in here.
[ She means like on the walls, the ceiling, the floors. ]
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Trademark of his personality, sentimental fool that he can be.
He lets the silence linger, and answers without hesitation.]
Sure. [He knows that she means all over.] You take requests?
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[ She answers in total deadpan. How many times had she been asked to paint fucking unicorns by a school full of girls... didn't help that Cartazonos itself was a different cognate for Unicorn.
She rolls over on to her side to give him an appraising look, lips pursed. ]
What'ya got in mind?
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[But he straightens a bit, churning over in his mind his request. He settles on something silly, maybe, but unsurprising for Noctis to choose.]
A cactuar.
[He shares with her the image of the little thing, a green cactus-like creature that moved too fast and shot way too many needles. But, though he's unlikely to say so out loud, he thinks they're... cute.
No unicorns, indeed.]
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You're ridiculous.
[ Laughing, fond. ]
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An array of cactuars dancing around his room sounds amusing. A bit of levity and character in the cold and sterile reaches of space.]
Whatever. You're smiling, so don't pretend you don't think it's funny.
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Her hand reaches out slowly, wanting his back in kind. ]
Keep thinking about the cactus things, that's nice.
[ Whatever, it's fine to vicariously live through someone else, isn't it? ]
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Sure... if you want.
[Noctis doesn't see anything wrong with Annie living vicariously through his memories, if that's what she asks of him. He's too eager to indulge a broodmate (mostly Annie), than to even consider if there would be any consequences to being so accommodating.
He closes his eyes for a moment, begins to think more about the cactuars. More than one, jumping around, darting here and there. He could barely keep up with them, even with his own warp strike. They'd run off beyond his reach, chittering as they do, mere moments later.
(There's also the memory of needles, so many of them, flying his way. That's less pleasant, but still comedic when he's not having to experience it in the moment; still, Noct focuses on that aspect less.)]
They're rare to find. [A fun fact, just so she knows.]
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But, I mean, what the fuck are they? Are they plants?
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My friends and I... we would take up hunting tasks to help the local population. [Of course they did, because Noctis wanted to. Does this even come as a surprise anymore?
His thumb idly brushes over her skin as he tries to think of a place now. The grassy plains of Duscae. Cool and humid, under a great expanse of sky. How it seemed to stretch onwards, forever, and a pang of nostalgia unravels within him.]
Last one I saw was here.
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[ Not a surprise at all after some of the stupid errands she's had him run, his stupid habit of wanting to help dumbasses like her and the rest of the turds on this Station.
She just settles herself comfortably in the periphery of his thoughts, like watching someone else's dream, it's an interesting detachment where she doesn't need to do any Annie things. Just shut up and listen and look, although shutting up is probably beyond her skillset. ]
Monster hunting sounds kinda fun.
[ What would she have been in Eos? A war orphan like Nyx probably, or was she thinking that because she'd gotten the full taste of the Glaive life when they'd been much too close. ]
Coulda done that.
[ With a whole stable of cactuars. ]
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