#★. thread ┉ disquiet

[crowncoded]

★ — disquiet.

          ★ ▌— ❛ @synodicdeicide.

It's not getting easier and that's the unfortunate truth of Noct's final days. No matter how prepared Noctis thought he was, no matter how much he thought he was ready for the price he had to pay, he hadn’t realized until he was staring back at his friends that he never would be.

Nothing would prepare him for seeing his oldest friends weep for him, no matter the strong faces they hid behind. It was such a strong reminder of everything they’d gone through a decade ago, before he’d been swept up into the crystal to be enlightened, like he couldn’t have done that just as well beyond the boundaries of it, alongside his friends. 

He’d give anything to share a few more careless nights with them, where the fact of the entire world isn’t resting on the loss of his life. 

And like hell he can lay down and go to sleep with thoughts like these. Like hell he can lay down next to his closest friends and pretend this was ten years prior, when he slept squished between his friends, knowing he was safe from harm with them. But he wouldn’t tell his friends that; he’d never tell them that it was too hard to sleep beside them now, when so much had changed. 

Citing a decade of sleep had been enough to convince Ignis and Prompto to retire ahead of him, at least, but that didn’t leave him alone.

It left him with Gladio.

"So," Noctis begins, voice too loud in the eerie silence that’s broken only by the occasional din of daemons in the distance. Part of him wishes they would attack, give him something to think about besides his impending sacrifice and whatever botched attempt at conversation he’s about to make.

"Are you going to be okay?" he asks, but it feels so foreign to be asking Gladio that. Of all people who might worry about the man, Noctis was probably the last anyone would expect. Concern was more Ignis’s cup of tea—or maybe he ought to say cup of coffee?

But his question isn’t elaborate; it’s too vague and Noctis has no idea how else to phrase without just—

“Will you be okay without a king?”

Again, a part of Noctis wished it was jarring to say, that he was more bothered the implication that he would die, but after a decade of listening to how he would die, saying it was easy enough.

Too bad he knew already that it wouldn’t be half as easy to do as it was to say.