#bleedingivorydraws

Quick Fic Pick 78: the price we’ll pay for the dawn

“I’ll be fine,” he says, and he turns away from the frown that is still and already knotting on Ignis’s brow. “Everyone else needs the things we’ve still got. I’ll be fine. I’m still walking.”

“It’s the still that worries me. You know that,” and Prompto can hear far too many edges in those words. Edges like: worry and fear and calculation. The tallies, the ongoing logistics. How much Prompto’s managed to salvage and bring in this time, against how much -- and what exactly -- Prompto’s going to need this time.

Need, in terms of patching up: and gone are the days of easy healing. Not even Ignis can fix his scars now. 

One and two and three more, to add to the collection that he’s been making on himself, since Zegnautus Keep. 

He thumbs thoughtfully at the savage slashed-in sunken line running down his left temple, down almost onto his cheek, and he takes his leave of Ignis, and he’s not sorry, that there’s one thing he never turned in -- one thing he has no plans of turning in.

So he’s a hypocrite. He’s only human. 

In the shelter of the little room he’s claimed for himself, somewhere on the still-ragged outskirts of Lestallum, he throws the windows open wide to admit the light-polluted darkness -- murky brown shadows skittering away in the wan gray glow from the fitful spotlights -- and he faces himself in the mirror, and -- 

Okay. It does look bad.

He’s grateful Ignis probably never got a chance to see exactly what’s been done to him this time. Bruises still mottling his jawline from the last series of sorties. The long claw-scratches on his face are narrow, but deep, and he regrets even speaking, earlier, because now there’s a little too much blood pooling and caught in the ragged neckline of his ragged shirt and -- the thing’s not much good for anything else other than scraps, really, and he hates having to put something newer on, because, again, everyone else needs clothes and he’s far from the only person combing the wild darkness. 

The hunters, the last of the Glaives, the ragtag group forming around Gladio. Ignis and Aranea and Cindy, each serving their specific functions in the slow coalescing of humanity, the slow trickling gathering of people in the last cities of light. 

And there’s him. Just one person. Just one Prompto.

Shake in his hands as he patches himself up. The one thing he’d kept for himself, in secret. These bandages, at least, smell new: and that’s a strange thing to be caught on, he thinks. The smell of never-used cotton and linen and loose-woven gauze, quickly overtaken by the copper and hot rust of dried and drying blood. Water, tasting like iron, that he drinks straight from the drip in the tap and then he has to wash off the blood matting in his hair. 

Patching up his own hands is another matter: he’s had to go back to using actual bullets, and he’s still careless from time to time, still catches burns from the flight of spent casings, the heat of the magazine after it’s been ejected. His burned hands. His burned fingertips.

It’s done, somehow, eventually. He gets it done: gets himself all patched up and then he can feel all the strength leave him on a ragged breath, that he barely hears because he’s toppling into his makeshift bed and -- 

Tired. He’s so tired.

And still he sleeps and wakes himself up shivering, with a name on his lips. The ghost-sensation of missing warmth, missing life, the missing heartbeat he’d once held tight against his own: the counterpoint of a pulse beating with his own.