#galahdborn

He didn't know what kind of games the gods played with humans, but he was really wishing that they - or fate, or whatever - would leave him the fuck out of it.

One second, he was scouting out an old ruin, the next he was squeezing out of a fissure in the rocks, right into the middle of a dark, fire-lit battlefield. The combatants where men and women in what looked like modified Royal Guard uniforms and what looked almost like Niflheim's mass-produced army, but not. They looked... better. More fluid, more armored.

Cor didn't know what the fuck was going on, but he sure as hell wasn't going to just sit there and do nothing. He gripped his katana, launching himself into the fight. Sure enough, when his sword cut through the robotic combatants, they fell apart into a mess of metal and miasma.

At one point, he saw one of the Royal Guard being overwhelmed, jumping into defend him, cleaving apart an MT bearing down on the man. Their eyes met for a second before Cor turned away to keep fighting.

It wasn't a particularly long fight, nor a difficult one, but Cor found himself a little bit disappointed when it was over. Things were easy when fighting like this. It was clear who was an ally and who was an enemy, even if they looked a little different than what he was used to. Now that it was over, things were about to get a whole lot more complicated. He sheathed his sword and turned toward the nearest Guard. The same one he had helped earlier, he saw.

Sure, he had nothing he was ashamed of and the weather was nice, but he'd get a lot of stares and possibly a lot of questions as well – questions he didn't want to answer. "I could also just stay here, but you get to tell the Captain why I'm not showing up," Drautos might actually listen to the Prince, after all.

Arctus chuckled and took a sip of his coffee. It was certainly tempting to send him off like that. If only so people could see the little marks he’d left on his boyfriend. But then again, he rather liked such views to stay private. On the other hand the sweatshirt he’d stolen from Nyx was so comfortable he didn’t want to remove it. 

All this has happened before, so long ago; yet as events unfold, they become ever more familiar. The towering city buildings, the noise of the crowd outside. Luna is greeted by a voice she could place anywhere, polite and formal. It does not show in her neutral smile, but it puts her off somehow to hear the absence of that playful lilt she had become accustomed to.

Nyx takes his seat behind the wheel, and the closing of the car door plunges them into silence. There is naught but the subtle purr of the engine now, and for the first time since awakening into this old world, she hesitates.

They had worked well together, once. From the second they spoke at the gathering tonight, they shared an understanding Luna quickly came to rely on through all that followed. How is she to move forward without that? Nyx does not trust her - he does not even know her. What respect he holds is due to her title, and nothing more. And she is about to ask the world of him. Still, she knows she must do something. She cannot allow history to repeat itself.

@galahdborn continued from here.

Noctis had long since given up on the idea of finding his soulmate. The timer on his arm would often fluctuate, counting down to zero but never quite getting there. It had always been impossible to narrow down, too, since whenever it did fluctuate, it was when he was in the presence of a large number of people.

When the timer began to fluctuate on his eighteenth birthday, Noctis didn't put much thought into it at first. The Citadel was full of people attending his birthday. It could be anyone.

As he reached the ballroom though, he couldn't help but notice that his timer was getting closer to zero than it ever had before. His soulmate was close. Very close. He was so fixated on his wrist that he was paying no attention to where he was going until a strong pair of arms caught him.

He blinked, eyes still locked on his wrist because the timer was now reading zero. Then he caught sight of the wrist of the person who was holding him. His timer was also reading zero which meant...

He slowly shook his head, eyes shifting upwards to finally look at the man. After so many near-meetings, he was a little stunned to finally be in the vicinity of his soulmate. He raised a hand when Gladio approached, signalling him to back off as Nyx pulled him into a hug.

Swallowing the lump in the back of his throat, he relaxed into the embrace, ignoring the way his cheeks burned from the embarrassment of all of this happening publicly.

Titus didn't react to Nyx's apparent growing upset, unfazed by the raising of his voice or the sharpness of his words. Nyx could be hotheaded. That was hardly a surprise. Could he have chosen his words better? Perhaps. But his statement still stood.

Unmoved, Titus just waited for him to stop speaking. "And what will you do if you get killed out there trying to help them? Or bring more attention to them? Getting yourself killed isn't going to do them or any of the rest of us any good. You can't help anyone if you're dead."

The injured could be found when the battle was over. Recovered and returned home. If they died... well, that was the nature of war, wasn't it? They all knew that was a possibility. They'd all accepted that. Nyx being an idiot and endangering himself, i Titus' estimation, unnecessarily wouldn't change anything in the long run.

Nyx Ulric seemed to be a magnet for trouble. It didn’t matter what Titus did, it didn’t matter how many times he placed him on guard duty or how many lectures he gave him. The Glaive would just turn around and do something stupid the next chance he got.

He’d be angry if he didn’t remind him of himself. That was part of the reason he was so fond of him – why he hadn’t dismissed him from the Glaive entirely. No matter how good of a soldier someone was, frequent insubordination was usually grounds for dismissal.

“A chat, hm?” The Captain mused, only releasing his grip once they were far enough away that he was certain Nyx wouldn’t go back. He didn’t buy his excuse though, not even for a moment. ”Would that chat happen to involve fists?”

He let out a soft sigh, pinching the bridge of his nose as they walked. Sometimes he thought Ulric had decided to make it his goal in life to make his life more difficult than it needed to be. No other Glaive had ever caused him so much trouble.

Ignis had been aware of the person in his dreams from a young age. An older boy then, who grew steadily into a young man as Ignis did the same. He had looked it up, learned about dream walking and it's connection to soulmates, and found it quite fascinating.

There was a clear age difference between them. it did not bother him, so long as his soulmate was willing to wait, as it seemed he was. Though he occasionally saw the man looking in on him, he never approached, Ignis did the same as he got older.

Now, he was no longer a child, and it did not really surprise him that his soulmate would make contact with him. Though, he did not expect it to be at the beginning of a nightmare revolving around an exponentially growing mountain of burnt muffins, of all things.

Though he had not seen the man in his dreams as more than a silhouette before, he recognized him as he stepped in to the dream version of his apartment's kitchen. Rather suddenly, the burnt food was all gone, as was the young prince Noctis wailing at the table behind him. It was just the two of them, in the neat tidiness of his kitchen.

He huffed out a sigh, adjusting his glasses as he turned to his soulmate, taking him in for the first time. He looked familiar.

@galahdborn liked for a starter.

"Really Nyx?" Dick asked as he approached, a smug grin on his face as he stopped just short of him. He was still dressed in his uniform, but he'd just finished for the day meaning he could keep company. Or he could annoy him. It was a matter of perspective, really. "Guard duty again?"

He wasn't really one to judge. Perhaps it was Nyx's influence, or perhaps it was just his nature, but he could play fast and loose with rules himself. He meant well though. He had a strong moral compass.