#cuddlefic

“Hello, Missus Zelda!” The children of Hateno village all cheered and waved hello as Zelda walked into the schoolhouse, energized and ready to teach. “Hello, kids!” Zelda smiled brightly as she walked over to her desk. “Are we going to have a fun day today?” “Yeah!” The kids cheered as they sat down– at Symin’s insistence. “Alright! Good to hear!” Zelda turned to Symin. “What’s the lesson plan today, Sy?” “Modern history.” Symin replied, checking over the schedule. “Specifically, the Calamity and the Upheaval.” Zelda blanched for a moment. “Well, I’m a primary source on the Calamity…” She mumbled, thinking of a good way to give the fine details on the Upheaval without traumatizing the children. “But the Upheaval…” “Hey, yeah!” Narah said, suddenly. “You never DID tell us where you went during the Upheaval! Are you gonna tell us today?” “Nope! Because I am!” Link announced with a grin. “No one is a better source on the Upheaval than me! Except maybe Purah. And Robbie. And Josha. And…” Oh, thank the goddesses. Link will leave out all the horrifying details… Zelda suddenly snapped her head up. Wait, WILL he? I don’t need to traumatize the children! I’d best stick around, just to be safe… I might have to whack him upside the head if he starts getting too grim... “…and Mineru. And Rauru. And Sonia… Ok, I might not be the BEST source, but I’m still perfectly adequate!” Link announced proudly. “Thank you, Link. If you don’t mind, please tell the children what happened… leaving out the ‘unnecessary details’, if you will.” Zelda requested, shooting Link a look. “Gotcha. Nothing traumatizing. So, it started when Zelda and I–” Link began speaking. “And her chosen swordsman?” Narah asked, delighted. “I keep telling you, Narah, I AM the chosen swordsman! I have the Master Sword and everything!” Link protested. “Oh yeah? Then where is it?” Narah challenged him, a smirk on her face. “…I left her at home. ANYWAY, if I could continue…” Link cleared his throat. “Zelda and I went below the castle, where we found a withered mummy that suddenly sprung to life…”

It floats through the ruins of the moon base, slow and resonant like whale song through the oceans, and Lucretia brings a hand up to her mouth. The deepest of the voices seems to catch at something in her sternum, her whole body vibrating in time with the notes. The higher voice dances overhead playfully, a descant running up and down and around the melody.

They sound happy.

She feels selfish even for listening to it, but she heads towards the sound. A twinge of pain shoots through her right arm as she walks. Just a sprained wrist. A small price to pay for surviving yet another apocalypse.

She can find a healer if she goes planetside. Maybe that’s better. She’s not sure she can face the rest of the crew—her family—now that they know what she did to them. Now that they know how everything went wrong. She’s already spent a decade alone—what’s a few more years?

With a goal in mind her steps are steadier as she heads towards the hanger. The glass orbs have probably all been shattered, but she’s been surprised before. If not, she has enough magic left in her for Feather Fall.

She’s crossing an empty space between two domes when she sees them and freezes in her tracks. Nearly everyone is there. They must have been called by the song of the Voidfish, like she was. For a moment she fears that they’re hurt, and then she sees Carey shift and throw an arm tighter around Killian, and she realizes they’re only on the floor because they’ve chosen to be.

Magnus is the epicenter just like he always is, almost hidden behind everyone else despite his bulk. He and Killian sit shoulder to shoulder, leaning companionably against each other with Carey curled into the triangle between their bodies. The dragonborn clutches at her girlfriend’s arm, wrapping it tight in her own as if she’s trying to turn herself into a shield, and her forehead rests on Killian’s bicep. The bandages are gone—the wound healed up without even a scar for Carey’s fingers to trace.

Their third teammate sits behind them, huge and solid, with her one humanoid arm draped across Killian’s other shoulder and her conduit casting a steadfast blue glow into the dimness of the lunar twilight. A stray spark shoots from the exposed circuits on her gun arm—sliced open by another soldier of the Hunger before she blasted it back out of existence.

Angus is asleep on Magnus’s lap, snoring gently. His skinned knees almost make him look like an ordinary child who’d taken a tumble during play, but his tattered clothes and the snapped feather that dangles pathetically from his cap remind her of everything he’s been through. Nothing a child should ever have to experience.

Nothing a child will have to experience again. They won. Part of her still doesn’t believe it, and part of her—the part that was forged during her first year of loneliness, the part as strong and unyielding as steel—clings to their victory as proof that she had been right, that everything she’d done had been justified if it led to this. The Hunger had been defeated. The world was still there. She clings to the thought as tightly as Carey clung to Killian’s arm, anchoring herself as best she could in the maelstrom of guilt that swirled through her chest.

She watches Magnus, whose happy ending had crumbled with the rocks of the Craftsman’s Corridor, squish close to Killian on one side and then to Taako on the other. She watches Merle, who had run from his family and grown embittered by his faith, stretch out his tree arm and snuggle deeper into the nest he’s made between the other two Reclaimers. She watches Davenport, restored to his eloquent, brilliant self, sitting slightly away from everyone else with his back to her. She watches Taako . . .

She’d barely been able to bring herself to look at the lefthand side of the group where Lup’s spectral lich form floats between Taako and Barry, her robe rippling with unseen astral breezes. They’d find some way to restore her to her mortal form eventually. Lucretia is sure of that. But for now she’s insubstantial. Ephemeral. Untouchable. Taako’s hand twitches next to his sister’s, his fingers reaching for something he can’t feel.

Then his hand moves in a familiar pattern and he mutters something, and Lucretia gasps as a glowing blue shape appears next to him, a hand of shimmering spectral force encasing his own. The Mage Hand reaches for Lup, flipping up the hood of her robe before closing around her skeletal fingers. Like her, it’s made of magic. She laughs when it connects, and she squeezes back.

Lucretia watches until the Mage Hand blinks out. Taako re-casts it. Lup keeps holding her brother’s hand.

The certainly that Lucretia had held onto for the past decade dissolves away. There’s no way they’ll ever forgive her. She wouldn’t expect them to.

Behind and above the group Fisher floats in the air, dancing and singing, and the singing is more joyful than anything she’s heard in years. The baby Voidfish loops around its parent, weaving through its tendrils and singing its own melody. Somehow, Magnus has already given it a duck.

She’d only meant to look for a moment, long enough to fix the scene in her memory. It wasn’t something she’d ever dare to paint, but perhaps a sketch to carry with her. Perhaps a reminder that her family would be all right without her.

But she lingers too long, and only realizes it when one of the baby Voidfish’s playful orbits takes it over Magnus’s head, ruffling his hair. He looks up, laughing, and his eyes meet Lucretia’s. She sees the shock in them. The recognition that she’d missed so much and that hurts so much now that she has it. She turns to flee.

“Lucretia!” he calls. “Wait!”

She does. Squeezes her eyes shut to steel herself, and then turns back.

They’re all watching her, but Magnus is the only one who’s moved. He’s halfway upright, gently handing Angus off to Killian, and then he’s walking towards her. Lucretia just stands there and waits—for the tirade, for the blow, for whatever she has coming. But when he speaks, it’s the last words she ever thought she would hear.

“Thank you.”

And he hugs her, his big arms closing around her back and knocking the breath out of her lungs. Everyone else looks as surprised as she is. Taako’s face twists into a sneer. Angus rubs his eyes and blinks at them, bewildered.

Slowly, she lets her arms fall until they’re resting tentatively on the soft fabric of Magnus’s shirt. He hasn’t let go, but he raises his head from her shoulder so that she can see his face.

“Thank you,” he says again. “For Raven’s Roost.”

It’s like a knife in her heart and she stiffens and shakes her head. “No. No, don’t . . . I’m sorry, I couldn’t . . .”

When Magnus speaks again, his voice is shaking. “Don’t get me wrong. What you did was . . . stupid, and wrong, and . . . I know we’re probably going to spend a lot of time talking about how it was stupid and wrong. But . . . with Raven’s Roost, with Julia . . . I was happy. I was so damn happy and I would never have had that without you, so . . . thank you.”

He’s crying properly by the time he finishes, big sloppy tears that run down his face and plop onto Lucretia’s robe. He doesn’t even try to wipe them away.

Lucretia doesn’t know how to respond. There’s nothing she can say that will convey all the grief and the regret and the sorrow and the gratitude that are bubbling through her, so she doesn’t try. She just leans forward and throws her arms around her friend, clutching at his shoulders and feeling the warmth of his body, his heartbeat, the moisture of his tears on her neck.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers, over and over until he stops crying. “I’m sorry. I love you. I never wanted . . .”

“I know,” he chokes out.

Lucretia feels a drop run down the side of her nose and realizes that she’s crying too.

Eventually, Magnus draws back. He doesn’t wipe his eyes, just shakes his head like a dog and lets out a shaky little laugh.

“I don’t . . . know how to feel,” he says. “In general. There’s so much to talk about. There’s so much to figure out. But do you think . . .” He pauses, looking over his shoulder at Taako. “Do you think we can do that later?”

Taako looks from Magnus to Lup and finally up at Lucretia. “I’m not forgiving you,” he says.

“I wouldn’t expect you to.”

“I . . . don’t know yet,” says Barry. “But I think we’ve probably had enough fighting for today.”

Slowly, everyone nods.

“All right,” says Lucretia. “I . . . won’t leave. When you’re ready to talk . . .”

Magnus takes her hand and pulls her back towards the group. “No,” he says. “Stay.”

“But . . . why?”

“We’re your family, idiot,” says Lup, and Merle and Angus nod. Magnus sits, and Carey and Killian and Angus cuddle back up to him, but he doesn’t let go of Lucretia’s hand.

With everything she wants to say thrumming in her throat, with tears on her cheeks and an ache in her chest, Lucretia kneels, and then as a sob rises through her she curls up like the frightened girl she’d been when the Starblaster first began its voyage and slumps against Magnus’s chest. He holds her. And he doesn’t let go. Angus lays a tentative hand on her upper arm, and Carey and Killian are holding the boy on their laps with their hands clasped around his waist, and Noelle is holding onto the two of them. And they don’t let go. Merle moves closer, holding Davenport’s hand with his tree arm, and claps his flesh-and-blood hand onto Magnus’s shoulder. And they don’t let go.

A glow of magic flares as Barry casts Mage Hand and reaches up to caress Lup’s cheek. She takes the spectral hand gently, and on her other side Taako’s fingers, enveloped in blue light, are entwined with hers. And they don’t let go. Fisher and its baby float towards the group, still singing. The grown-up Voidfish wraps two of its tendrils around its baby and one around the duck it’s carrying and one around Magnus, who hums softly back to it. And they don’t let go.

None of them let go.

Our capacity for love increases with each person we cross paths with throughout our lives and with each moment we spend with those people. Across a hundred worlds and a hundred years the Starblaster crew crossed paths with countless individuals. And on every world, despite themselves, they always found something and somebody to love, even knowing as they did that they would have to turn and flee when the Hunger arrived and drained the color from the sky.

But all capacities have their limits. As much love as they saw, they also saw pain and sorrow and heartbreak beyond what anyone should have to bear. Finally, it was their very love for each other and the universe around them that tore them apart and set them adrift. Lucretia’s love for this Plane that made her vow to save it, and her love for her friends that led her to make the foolish, terrible choice to heap their combined suffering onto her own shoulders.

Our capacity for forgiveness does not grow linearly. Lucretia knows this. She has known this since before she made her choice, but she made it anyway. At the very point that her friends remembered how much they loved her, she expected to lose them.

And perhaps she still would, at least some of them. She would accept it. But for the moment she feels her friends around her, feels hope that they can be free now, that the time they have left won’t be overshadowed by tragedy the way their past was. She feels love burning in her chest as sharp and bright as the Light of Creation.

She spreads her arms as far as she can, embracing everyone she can reach.

Sometimes, if he was alone, and certain he was alone, he would be filled with a morbid fascination with the lines etched into his wrist, even and precise, a tiny series of numbers just below the bar code, spending the small hours of the morning studying them, unable to return to sleep. The tattoo had something to do with the restlessness and the nightmares. He was sure of it, somehow. Instinct, maybe, or a forgotten memory.

It was the nightmares, tonight, the shock of thunder from outside pulling him from his fitful sleep, and, once awake, the flashes of lightening, dark interspersed with light, almost sending him into a panic until he'd turned to the window to see rain pelting at the glass. Just a storm.

It was just a storm.

Prompto sighed, and, giving up sleep as a lost cause, moved to the window that made up one wall of the room. He was at Noct's; crashing on his couch was becoming a common occurrence—ostensibly because he kept missing the last train home when they got too caught up in a video game or a movie, losing track of time, but truthfully, Prompto found himself dreading the return to his own apartment. There would be no one there when he got back, the empty quiet deafening and unbearable now that he'd become accustomed to a different kind of silence—that of quiet companionship.

Prompto worried the band over his wrist, making sure it was covered, as he looked out over the city spread before him. It was little more than indistinct lights twinkling in the rain beyond the glass, but it was beautiful nonetheless. It only took a couple steps to retrieve his camera and bring it to the window, fiddle with the settings until he'd captured a few passable shots. It wasn't something a camera could quite do justice, but he'd be satisfied in capturing the feeling of it.

Returning the camera, Prompto snagged his blanket and pulled it around his shoulders. Noctis was asleep in the other room, and that was a comfort, knowing he wasn't the only soul in the apartment. Even so, he tiptoed to Noct's room to confirm it, nudging the door open just enough to catch sight of a sleeping form and a tuft of black hair. It made him smile, a little; Noct looked so peaceful. Prompto envied him his ability to sleep seemingly anywhere and any time, but he was glad for it, glad that Noct wasn't disturbed by his own restlessness. Prompto watched over him for a few minutes, finding the gentle rise-and-fall from Noct's breathing calming, and it was probably a little weird, to watch his best friend sleep, so Prompto turned and moved back to the window in the lounge, instead.

It was a little easier to shake the malaise from the nightmares when he wasn't alone, even if Noct was asleep, and Prompto didn't think he'd ever stop being grateful for Noct's friendship. Because a part of him knew that Noct knew he'd rather be here than home, and that Prompto wasn't the only one who conveniently lost track of time.

Or maybe Noct was lonely, too. Prompto might've found that difficult to imagine—after all, Noct had Iggy and Gladio and a father—but he'd seen that look in his friend's eyes, the one that was familiar because it was one he'd seen so often in the mirror, and if Prompto's company helped, who was he to refuse? Prompto couldn't bear to see Noct anything but happy, even if it meant plastering on a smile when he was courting a panic attack.

A sound behind him made him tense so hard it hurt, the fear from his nightmare returning with its sharpened nerves.

But it was just Noct. That was all it could be, the soft shuffle of bare feet against the floor, and Prompto took a breath, forcing himself to relax, and then Noct came to a stop next to him, leaning his head on Prompto's shoulder, banishing the tension with the simple action.

"Hey." Noct's voice was gruff with sleep, and Prompto was surprised he was awake enough to walk and talk—the same Noctis who took ages to climb out of bed in the morning, and he wondered if Noct had actually been asleep, after all. It was sometimes hard to tell, with him.

"Hey." Prompto tried not to dwell on the possibility that he'd been caught watching Noct sleep.

"Couldn't sleep?"

"The storm woke me up." It wasn't a lie, not entirely. He didn't want Noct to worry, or worse, to inquire after his nightmares—not that he could give any kind of accurate account of them, anyway, but he'd rather just put it behind him.

Noct hummed a response, his hair tickling Prompto's cheek.

"I've probably said this before," and yeah, he was about to babble, but that was okay; Noct never seemed to mind, "but you've got a great view up here." Prompto gestured down at the lights sprawled below them, twinkling. "I got a couple shots, you know, the rain and the lights and everything, it looks really cool through the window." Abruptly, he realized Noct would ask to see them—he usually did—and he'd be happy to, later, but just now, he didn't want to give up this comforting closeness, so he changed tack. "Hey, but what about you? Can't you like, sleep through an earthquake or something? How come you're awake?"

Noct shrugged. "Dunno." He shifted, wrapping an arm around Prompto and effectively snuggling into him; it took a conscious effort not to glance down at his wristband to make sure it was still in place, and instead just let himself relax more into the embrace, but it was a worthwhile effort.

Prompto tilted his head until it bumped Noct's. This kind of affectionate contact was still new between them—in fact, Prompto couldn't remember ever being this close to someone else—but it was nice, welcome. It made him full and warm and happy, and he wanted it to last forever, so he fished his phone out of his pocket—it wasn't worth disturbing them to retrieve his camera—and snapped a selfie. The lighting wasn't great, but there was enough ambient light from outside to capture the shapes of their faces, hair both light and dark mingling together.

Noct made a sound of amusement when Prompto angled the screen toward him. "Your hair is a mess, Prom, you sure you wanna keep that one?"

"Nooooct!" Prompto jabbed him with his elbow half-heartedly, and slipped the phone back in his pocket. He gave an exaggerated sniff. "I don't expect you to understand the true art of photography."

"Yeah, okay." A yawn cut off Noct's low chuckle.

"You should go back to bed," Prompto murmured. "Iggy'll have a fit if you doze off tomorrow." He reluctantly started disengaging himself from Noct's hold, but Noct only tightened his grip, a small, disappointed sound in his throat. "Uhm, Noct?"

And when he shifted enough to see his friend's face, Prompto pursed his lips. Noct's expression was carefully guarded, but Prompto was experienced in reading that look, the one that said don't leave me alone—as if Prompto could!—and the hand clutching Prompto's arm that underlined the sentiment. So he just smiled and leaned into Noct.

"Alright, but if you fall asleep on me, I'm not carrying you back to bed! You know I'm not strong like Gladio."

Noct rolled his eyes, something like mischief quirking his lips. "That's not a problem if we're already in bed." And when Prompto said he wasn't strong like Gladio, he meant he wasn't really strong at all, not even as strong as Noct, who was tugging him back towards his room with maybe a little more force than necessary, considering Prompto wasn't inclined to resist.

"Alright, alright, I'm coming!" Prompto wasn't exactly sure what this situation would entail, but he would probably follow Noctis to the end of the world if he had to, so following him in the safety of Noct's apartment was a small matter. When Noct practically tackled him onto the bed, and they collapsed in a pile of laughter, he changed his mind—this was no small matter.

It was everything.

It took a few minutes, to figure out how to arrange their limbs so they were both comfortable, but once they did, it was perfect. Warm and soft, and Prompto was pretty sure it was as close to heaven as someone could get, and that he'd never been happier, his nightmares and restless energy forgotten as he melted into the bed with Noct.

"Bed's more comfy than the couch," Noct mumbled, voice already thick with sleep.

"Yeah." Prompto smiled. It never took Noct long to fall back asleep. "Very comfy."

Noct nuzzled closer—Prompto hadn't thought it possible, but he was being proved wrong—and Prompto thought his heart would burst at Noct's next words: "I'm here, Prom. I'm here for you."

It never failed to surprise him, when Noctis had these little moments: moments of perfect perception (or maybe Noct was saying what he wanted to hear from Prompto, but the two of them were alike, in many ways, in tune with each other as only the closest friends could be) that set the world to rights even as Prompto was trying to hide that anything was wrong at all. Prompto felt his eyes stinging with unshed tears as he pressed his face into Noct's hair.

"Me too, Noct," and even though he was whispering, his voice felt too loud in the quiet of the room. "I'm here for you, too." Noct's arms tightened around him in a hug.

Noct's breathing evened out after only a few more minutes, and Prompto pressed an affectionate kiss into his dark hair.

No photos would ever be able to capture this, but that was okay, because Prompto would hold onto it in his heart for as long as he lived, held onto it even as he drifted off to sleep, finally; peaceful, safe.