Chapter Text
"I am getting too old for this."
Cor says it under his breath, to nobody, and keeps running.
There was a time when people called him Cor the Immortal. These days, the title belongs more honestly to the young King who kept coming back from battles that should have buried him.
His boots echo down the long corridor of the Citadel's east wing. His ribs — three of them, cracked ten days ago by a daemon that was dying too slowly in the outskirts of Duscae — register every stride and file a complaint he does not have time to read. A decade ago his body would have forgiven him that by now. He is not owed that kind of forgiveness anymore, and he knows it, and he runs anyway.
His King needs him.
The text arrived four minutes ago, in the middle of a debriefing Cor walked out of without explanation:
Marshal, could I please trouble you to join us in the King's office? It is a particularly bad one today. I would appreciate your assistance again.
Ignis Scientia, polite to the last syllable, at all times, about all things. Cor has learned to read the man's alarm by what the courtesy is stretched over. A particularly bad one. Again.
When would their young King finally catch a break.
When he is dead, some tired soldier's part of him answers, and Cor shakes the thought off like rain and runs faster.
It certainly has been ten long years for all of them, but mostly for King Noctis. Providence ended three years ago. It was supposed to become easier.
He does not think about the route, his boots already know the way. Service stair, east gallery, the corridor behind the map room. Because two weeks have been enough to wear a path.
At the threshold of the King's wing he slows to a brisk walk and snaps his fingers at the two Crownsguard posted there.
"Tecta. Andro. With me."
They fall in behind him without a word. Tecta's face does the math in one glance. The Marshal, moving fast, in this wing, at this hour.
"The King?" Her voice is soft.
A sharp nod.
"Again," she mutters, and it isn't a question.
The young one, Andro, looks between them like a man who has walked into a conversation held in a language he was assured he spoke. First week on King duty. Nobody has told him anything, because the things nobody tells you are the entire point of King duty. He opens his mouth, and their arrival at the King's chambers closes it for him.
The two Glaives on the door salute. Their faces are grim, and neither of them asks a single thing, and that tells Cor more about the last twenty minutes than any report would.
He pushes open the heavy door.
King Noctis is standing behind the mahogany desk. Standing is generous. He is hunched over it, weight on two shaking arms, drenched in sweat in a room the evening has already cooled. The last of the sunlight comes down through the tall stained-glass window behind him and lays the whole office in soft green.
The room tells Cor the rest before anyone speaks. The tea at the desk's edge is full and cold; the cup beside it, Ignis's, is also full and also cold. The reports are in three stacks — signed, pending, and a third stack that has stopped pretending. Under the King's right hand is a half-finished signature, trailed off the line where the tremor took the pen from him. He has started it three times.
In the middle of all of it, the King of Lucis is trying to remember how to breathe. And trying, Cor notes, to finish signing the requisition anyway.
Ignis stands directly behind him. One firm grip on the right upper arm, one on the left wrist. Two points of contact. From the door, Cor can see that they are the only things holding the King of Lucis upright.
"Cor." Noctis lifts his head. His bangs are glued to his forehead and his eyes find Cor's through them, lined with pain and — of course, of course — disapproving. "You didn't need to come. Shouldn't you be recovering from your — argh—"
The royal reprimand folds in half along with the King. Ignis's grip tightens.
Cor crosses the room.
"Let's get you sitting down, Your Majesty."
He meets Ignis's eyes over Noctis's shoulder. Neither of them says anything. Twenty years of working alongside a man builds a vocabulary that doesn't need sound.
"Thank you for coming, Marshal," Ignis says quietly.
"Specs — the eastern relief convoy—"
"Departed on schedule at noon, Your Majesty. Everything on that desk will keep."
They take a side each and walk their King to the big leather couch beneath the window, slow, matched steps. Cor's hand settles on the small of the King's back and finds the tremor there, running through the lean frame like current through a wire. Steady. Continuous. It does not stop the whole way to the couch.
Last week, the tremor lived in his hands. It has reached the shoulders now. Cor files the measurement in the place he files advancing enemy positions.
The royal raiment's cape is lying across the cushions, discarded there hours ago. Ignis throws it off onto the floor.
Cor has known Ignis Scientia since the man was six years old. He has watched him align cutlery on a battlefield. He has never once, in all those years, seen him throw a garment on the ground.
They lower Noctis onto the warm leather. A folded gray blanket lives on the couch's arm now; it did not, a month ago. Ignis sits, and shuffles sideways with the ease of practice, and then the King of Lucis's head is resting on his adviser's thigh, and nobody in the room finds this remarkable, and that is its own kind of information.
Noctis breathes out, long. Turns his head toward the door, where the two Crownsguard stand at attention.
"Tecta. Andro." A small smile. A vague gesture down the length of his own body. "Sorry about this."
"Your Majesty, please, anything we can do to help," Andro blurts, which is not protocol, and nobody corrects him.
"What—" the young soldier starts.
He does not get to finish, because that is when the King screams through his teeth.
Noctis's body seizes, back arching clean off the couch, head grinding into Ignis's thigh, and a shower of blue crystals bursts out of him, out of him, out of the center of the man, scattering light across the green room. A groan comes with it, crushed down to almost nothing.
Then it stops. As fast as it came. Noctis goes slack in Ignis's grip, eyes squeezed shut, breathing shallow, his black shirt and vest soaked through.
Cor is already on his knees in front of the couch. His fingers go to the vest's buttons; Ignis's are there from the other side; between them they strip the thing open to let the man breathe. The vest gives more easily than a tailored garment should. He has lost weight, and his tailor has not been told, and Cor files that too.
"How many has it been?" Cor asks, working the last button.
"With this one, four in the last twenty minutes."
Four in twenty. Cor keeps his face still.
"Where is Gladiolus?"
"Fetching Prompto. I felt it prudent it be the three of us this time."
The three of us. Cor nods, and does not say what they are both thinking, which is that it has never before needed the three of them.
"Sir." Andro's voice cracks across the quiet. "Sorry. But what is happening?"
Cor glances up at him. First week, no briefing, and his King is seizing on a couch in front of him. The lapse in formality can wait. The kid's hands, Cor notices, have already moved to useful positions. His eyes are terrified and his feet haven't retreated an inch.
He'll do, Cor thinks. He'll be one of us within the year.
"You know about the Power of Providence," Cor says.
"Of course," Andro says, almost offended.
Every citizen of Lucis knows the broad shape of the story.
As long as memory reached, the nights had belonged to the daemons. They came with darkness, carrying the Starscourge, the blight that turned the living into more of itself. Daylight drove them back. The Wall of Lucis held them farther still. For centuries, the Crystal and the royal bloodline it had chosen stood between the world and the night.
Then King Regis was wounded.
His spine was severed protecting his son from a daemon. Without a king who could fully answer the Crystal, the Wall had to be drawn back until only the Crown City of Insomnia remained beneath its light. That's when the Dark Years began.
While Regis lay in a coma, the gods named Prince Noctis the True King. Providence was the answer the gods offered: seven hours a day before the Crystal, every day for ten years—not merely to restore the Wall, but to forge the King who would one day end the Starscourge itself.
Cor remembers something rather different.
He remembers standing guard at the Providence chamber door. The chamber changed everyone who stood watch outside it. The Prince walked in every morning because he had to, and never once had to be made. The men waiting outside stayed because, after seeing that, leaving simply stopped being an option.
Ten years of it. Seven hours a day. The Crystal pouring power into a body never meant to contain it. Every session hurt. Every year hurt even more. The scholars called it destiny. Cor remembers only the chamber door.
His father's injury had stolen Noctis's childhood almost as completely as it had stolen the King's legs. Between Providence and the council chamber, tutors and advisers, he grew into a ruler while other boys were still growing up. Whenever the burden threatened to become too much, there were always three others waiting outside that door to walk him home.
Providence ended on Noctis's twentieth birthday. King Regis placed the Ring of Light in his son's hand and surrendered the throne before the day was out. The other nations had waited a decade for that morning. They needed a King who could raise the Wall around them again, and Regis had never pretended to be that man after the Marilith attack.
By nightfall, the Wall enclosed the cities, the roads and most of the settled world. Beyond it, whole stretches of the continents remained Scourge Country.
For three years, it looked as though the worst of the suffering had ended and the Dark Years with it.
Cor nods once toward the couch.
"Then you know what he is."
Andro looks over.
"Ten years of the Crystal's power, poured into one man a day at a time. The Crystal regulated it. Metered the flow. Even after Providence ended."
He watches understanding begin to move across the young guard's face.
"The Crystal has been in Niflheim for two weeks. We knew taking it away would hurt him. We'd planned for that." Cor's eyes stay on the King. "What none of us knew was that, even after Providence ended, the Crystal had never stopped carrying part of the weight."
Andro's eyes go wide. Most of the older Crownsguard stood witness at least once, back when it was guard duty at the Providence chamber. They came off those shifts gray and quiet and unwilling to say much. Andro was too junior. He has only ever heard it secondhand, in the barracks, in lowered voices.
"His Majesty is suffering from Crystal withdrawal," Cor says. "It is somewhat worse than we anticipated."
"Worse than—" Andro's voice jumps; Tecta's elbow finds him; he drops to an urgent whisper. "But if His Majesty knew this would happen, why did he let them have it?"
"Niflheim spent thirteen years in a dark our Wall didn't reach," Cor says. "Aldercapt named the Crystal as compensation and promised war if we refused. It was an empty threat, and every soul in the council chamber knew it was an empty threat, including His Majesty."
"Then why—"
"'S because we owe it to them."
The voice from the couch is quiet and rough and entirely certain.
"Oh, Noct," Ignis sighs. There is a whole argument inside the two words, an old one, worn smooth on both sides, and underneath the argument something so plainly devoted that Andro looks away from it.
Ignis cards his fingers through the sweat-damp hair. "How are you feeling, Your Majesty?"
"I'll live." A small chuckle at some private joke that nobody in the room asks him to explain.
The tremors are still running through him. But his eyes are open now, and lucid, and that is the currency they count in this room.
"Where are Gladio and Prom—mmhnn—"
The seizure takes the rest of the sentence. Blue crystals again, bursting and raining and gone.
"Almost here, Your Majesty." The fingers never stop moving through his hair.
"'Kay." Eyes closing. The King's whole weight settling against his adviser like a man giving up an argument with gravity.
The door bursts open.
Prompto comes through it half running, half sliding, and arrives at the couch on his knees. "Noct! Buddy!"
Noctis, eyes still shut, smiles.
Gladio enters behind him, composed, which for the King's Shield is a relative term, and Cor reads the truth of it in his shoulders. His voice comes out low.
"How's he doing."
"He'll need all three of us today," Ignis says. "Five now, in the last thirty minutes."
The sharp breath Gladio takes is the loudest thing he lets himself do. He crosses the room and goes to his knees between Cor and Prompto, who is finishing a quiet hello to his father.
"Marshal." A nod.
"Amicitia." Cor rises, giving the three of them the space that belongs to them.
"Hey, Princess." Gladio's voice, gentled to a register the recruits would not believe he owns. "We're here now. Don't you worry."
"Hey, guys…" The corner of the King's mouth twitches upward around the old nickname.
Gladio lays his hand over Noctis's right, resting on his stomach — and snatches it back like a man burned.
He looks at his own palm. Then at the King's hand, at the Ring of Light sitting on it, dark and ancient and, apparently, hot as a stovetop.
"Is that normal?" His eyes find Ignis.
"I'm afraid so. His magic is raging uncontrolled."
And then the King screams.
Not through his teeth this time. Out loud. A full-throated sound that tears free of him as the worst seizure yet locks every muscle at once, and it takes all three of them, all their weight, to keep him on the couch, blue light rippling and bursting around the four of them in a continuous shower. The lamps gutter brown and surge back. Frost races out across the window glass in fast feathered sheets, and the water glass on the side table whitens solid to its rim. Another scream. Then, as if strings were cut, nothing — Noctis slumps boneless, eyes shut, breathing shallow, and whatever lucidity he had is gone.
The room has gone very still. The lamps burn steady again. On the window, the frost has already begun to weep.
Cor Leonis has heard the King scream before. Once, when he was seven. Then for ten years there was a room in this Citadel where it happened every morning. Cor stood more watches at that door than any man alive, learning to keep his face still while the sound came through the stone.
Toward the later years of Providence, the room grew quieter.
Not because it hurt less.
Because the threshold kept moving higher.
By the end, the things that would have broken another man scarcely earned a sound.
Cor had thought there was nothing left in this world capable of dragging that sound out of him again.
He is hearing it now.
"…That one was different," Ignis says. Quietly. Mostly to himself.
"How?"
A pause. Ignis Scientia, who has an answer for everything, who has had an answer for everything since he was six years old, looks at his King's slack face and says:
"…I don't know."
"What the hell, Iggy." Prompto's fists are balled in the fabric of Noctis's slacks, white-knuckled. "Aren't those crystals only supposed to show when he's — like, warping—"
"As I said." Something in Ignis's composure is developing a crack, and he speaks through it. "It's his magic. We have to act now."
"What do you need me to do." Prompto's face has changed, all the sunshine set aside somewhere for later, everything remaining pointed at the problem. He has never been present for one of these. Only Gladio and Ignis, until tonight.
Ignis takes a breath and goes to the place Noctis fondly calls tactician mode.
"Picture the Providence as a waterfall, drip-fed for ten years into a growing vessel. The Crystal metered the flow. And the Crystal is now too far away to do it." His voice is steady, instructional, a man laying out an operation. "That is where we come in. We anchor him through the Armiger, and we help His Majesty take back the flow."
Prompto's eyes are wide. He nods slowly anyway.
Ignis grips his shoulder. "I know you can do this. Trust me — we are meant to do this."
Something in the youngest of them sets, like concrete going off. "Let's do it."
Ignis looks at Gladio. "You know what to do."
What follows has the terrible gentleness of a thing that has been practiced.
The three of them arrange their King into a sitting position. Gladio taking most of the weight, cradling the dark head until it rests tipped back against the cushion. Then the Shield sits at his charge's left and lowers his forehead into the space between Noctis's shoulder and jaw. Ignis mirrors him on the right. Prompto stays on the floor, wraps both arms around his friend's legs, and rests his forehead just above the knees.
Three men, folded around a fourth, close as prayer.
Cor turns to the door.
"Tecta."
That is the entire order. She nods once and takes position behind Gladio, both hands settling on the big man's shoulders. She has stood this post before.
"Sir—" Andro starts.
Cor takes his elbow and walks him to Ignis.
"They're going into the King's Armiger. There's a storm in there. They need contact with the outside world while they do it — otherwise they lose themselves in it." He sets the young man's hand on Ignis's shoulder. "You're a grounding rod. That's the whole job. Don't let go."
Andro snaps to attention under the instruction like it's a parade order, and does not let go.
Cor takes his own place last, behind Prompto, one firm hand on his son's shoulder.
Prompto turns his head a fraction, forehead never leaving the King's knees, and mouths: thank you, father.
Cor gives the shoulder a squeeze that says everything he isn't equipped to.
A breath. "We're ready. You can begin."
Andro startles when it happens, because there is nothing that could have prepared him: a deep blue light wells up from the center of the King's chest and spreads over all four of them, the King and the three men holding onto him, rippling across skin and cloth like light through water, pulsing outward in slow waves that make the lamps gutter in their sockets.
Nothing changes on Noctis's face. The shallow, pained breathing goes on.
But the three faces pressed against him strain with a concentration that looks like labor, and within minutes the sweat stands on all three brows. The last of the sun goes down behind the stained glass and nobody in the room moves at all.
Andro's weight shifts from foot to foot, his hand never leaving Ignis's shoulder.
"Fifteen minutes, usually," Cor says, to the question the boy hasn't worked up to asking.
"How — " the young soldier stops, checks himself, asks it anyway. "How often has this happened?"
"This is the fourth time in two weeks." Cor watches the light turn. "It used to take one of them. Ignis or Gladio. He'd stabilize, recover on the spot." A pause the length of a decision about honesty. "This is the worst one yet."
The light pulses. The King breathes. The grounding rods hold.
In the far quiet wing of the Citadel — the one with the gardens, the one he kept when he surrendered the rest of the building to his son — Regis Lucis Caelum is most likely sitting by his pond with a blanket over his knees, worrying about his son the way he has worried every evening for sixteen years. Cor will call him tonight. The King will tell him not to — don't worry him, Cor, he's earned his rest — the way he tells him every time.
Cor will call him anyway. Some orders even a Marshal disobeys. Regis will answer on the second ring, pretending he wasn't sitting by the phone. He will ask for the security report, and listen to none of it, and then ask the only question he actually called to ask, which is whether the boy has eaten.
Andro cannot stop looking at the four of them. The practiced fold of it, the way even the impossible has a procedure here.
"They've done this before," he says. Not a question.
"They learned it from Queen Lunafreya." And for the first time all evening there is a note in the Marshal's voice adjacent to relief. "With her and Lady Gentiana at our side, we might actually have a fighting chance."
Andro stares at him. The Queen of Tenebrae. And her wife, the Messenger Divine. What do they have to do with —
"Mhhh. Luna's great."
The mumble comes from the couch, riding a long exhale, wearing a lazy smile.
"Your Majesty," Cor says, and does not bother to keep the relief out of it.
The light thins and settles. The three retainers stir, slow, like divers surfacing. Cor squeezes Prompto's shoulder; Tecta and Andro mirror him; and the four on the couch untangle by degrees — sitting up, drawing back, and never once, Cor notes, does any of the three fully stop touching their King. A hand stays on a knee. A shoulder stays against a shoulder. As if to confirm, continuously, by contact, that he is still with them.
Noctis rolls his head in a slow circle, working his neck, eyes still closed.
"Noct?" Ignis's voice comes out rasped.
"Yeah. I'm alright, Specs. Give me a minute, please."
Ignis nods, and rises, and Gladio rises with him, and Prompto follows their lead. The three of them stepping back in loose formation, a tide going out exactly as far as it must.
Noctis shifts forward on the couch. Forearms on thighs, hands clasped between his knees, head hanging low.
Prompto looks at his father, the question on his face.
"You've done the hard part," Cor says quietly. "Now give His Majesty room to finish putting up his blocks."
"His blocks?"
"To keep his magic contained."
So the six of them stand in silence and bear witness to the quiet part. Their King, alone with the storm they helped him catch, forcing its current back under control by sheer will behind a face furrowed in concentration.
The air above his clasped hands shivers like heat off summer pavement. Thin ice creeps across his knuckles and is forced back — creeps, and is forced back — the tide of it retreating a little further with every slow breath. The nearest lamp stops flickering. The fine hairs on Prompto's forearms lie back down. Centimeter by centimeter, breath by breath, the King of Lucis wills the storm back under its own weight.
Nobody helps with this part. Nobody can.
Minutes pass. Then a long breath goes out of him, Noctis straightens his back, and stands.
Gladio drifts in behind him, close, hands loose, a man prepared to catch something and committed to appearing otherwise.
Another breath. Noctis opens his eyes.
He takes in the six worried faces around the room, and a smile lights up the exhausted face, gentle and entirely real.
"Thank you, guys."
Andro has to swallow. He has never stood this close to His Majesty's undivided attention before, and nothing in his training covered it. The sheer quiet pressure of the man's regard, like standing too near something with its own gravity. It roots him to the floor.
The others bow slightly, fists over hearts. Noctis turns toward his desk, already reaching for the scattered reports.
"So," he says, "where were we? I believe Ignis was about to tell me about the plan the Oracle and her partner have put together."