Rated Teen And Up Audiences
Summary Nyx Ulric, leader of Galahd, has just lost his kingdom to the conquest of Niflheim. Stranded in Lucis and unable to rescue his homeland from invaders, he seeks comfort in the safest place away from home he knows. A Lucian guard, with a shoulder to cry on and promises to reclaim his lover’s throne.
Notes Written for @nyxnoct-secretsanta! It was my job to make a list and check it twice for @chalabrun, who wanted an AU either of the Omenverse, or a fateswap. I opted to go for a fateswap! I hope you enjoy and have a wonderful holiday season!
Also over on AO3, if you would like to swing on by and leave a comment!
“Nyx… Nyx. C’mon, don’t shut down on me now. Especially not now.”
Libs’s voice was a hundred leagues away, across the sea and choked out in the smoke clouds chuckling over Galahd.
The view of the islands from Insomnia’s eastern port – the sloping, slivered crest of home – always used to be his comfort on outreach missions to their sister city. He used to stay up late and stare out his window, secure across from the constant reflection of his kingdom, just one, stolen boat ride away. He used to press his fingertips to his lips in the darkness, and send kisses across the waves, promising his prompt return.
Now, there was no one left to catch his kisses. No quiet content of coastal domesticity to hear his promises. No home for him to keep them to. There was no returning to Galahd this time, not with the airships swarming like hornets through the smoke.
It all looked so small from this far away. Like he could just press his thumb to the horizon and smudge out the black stain; wipe the skies clean like it was all just an accident, like a child had spilled ink over the cliffs, and all Nyx needed to do was clear it away with the stroke of one finger for it all to be beautiful again.
“You sound like a broken record, Libs.”
“Oh, good! So he’s not deaf after all. I was beginning to think the shock had ripped up your eardrums.”
Nyx sliced a glare through him. He didn’t need to say a word for Libertus to drop his gaze in a grimace. He paced in and out of the hotel room, crisscrossing the open threshold to the balcony like a surgeon’s thread, stitching footsteps over the open wound bleeding between them.
“Not trying to joke around,” he said, raw with the grief none of them had any words to console. “I just can’t have you running off in your own head right now, Nyx.”
It wasn’t as if his head was a sweeter escape than that black sky, than that sea running red with the blood of his people as the sun set on Niflheim’s victory. His thoughts were blacker, redder, and so much more violent than the newsprint crumpled in a ball in the trash.
He hadn’t been there. The Nifs had waited for Galahd to be vulnerable, for her to never suspect; for a routine farewell to her guardian, just like a thousand trips before. They had waited for the mundanity of royal politics to lull Galahd into a false sense of security, for the pattern of the Ulrics’ annual antics to throw them off their rhythm of everyday life. An excursion to Lucis to revise trade agreements; brief, ordinary greetings with their neighbors that had become so second nature, Nyx never thought twice about what he was leaving behind when he set sail.
He kept telling himself that he should have known. He should have looked closer at the Empire’s stillness over the past year, unmoving from the last lines of their conquest, silent to all pleas for communication. He searched back through his memories and tried so hard to find the points where he’d been blind, tried to find a moment in time where he could blame himself for failing to see what they were planning.
But there was none. As much as he wanted to blame himself, hurt himself the same way Galahd was hurting now without him there to hold her together, there was no predicting the Empire’s assault. There were no warning signs, no clues as to their desire for the islands – why would they want them? They were on the edges of the map, they served little to no purpose for the Empire. But their usefulness didn’t matter to the Emperor. He just wanted the whole world, and he would not stop until every last scrap of land was pierced with a Niflheim flag.
A knock on the door had Libertus snapping up his blade, even after the coded pattern of knocks proved it was Crowe. “I brought friends,” she said through the door, and that only made Libertus clutch his weapon tighter.
Nyx dragged his gaze from the smoldering silhouette of his kingdom. He flexed cramped and clammy hands from gripping the handrail so tightly, and folded them behind his back in the resigned rest expected of a guest dignitary. He nodded for Libertus to let her in, and clasped the twin hilts of his hidden kukris behind his back.
It was hard to trust in “friends.” Crowe could be held at gunpoint on the other side of that door. Or perhaps Crowe had brought him some Niflheim couriers he could sate his revenge on. She was generous like that.
Crowe’s shrewd, brown eyes slicked over Libertus’s drawn weapon like a whetstone, sharpening the steel rather than shying away from it. She was just as hesitant to trust the Lucian companions she brought in with her as the two of them were. She was flanked by three, hooded figures, garbed in the shadowy blacks of Insomnia’s elite assassins.
“Lord Ulric,” the man in the middle greeted, crossing an arm over his chest and dropping to his knee. The other two guards followed in a mirror sync. “Condolences can’t even begin to express our shock and regret at what’s happened to Galahd.”
Nyx’s hands flexed around his kukris. No, condolences never would. Neither would thoughts or prayers or whatever political niceties passed for sympathy these days. But it wasn’t Cor Leonis he wanted to cleave in half for having no words to describe his grief. Nyx released his knives and nodded for the guards to stand.
“I don’t want condolences,” he said, meeting Cor’s hard, blue gaze over the half-mask designed to disguise the identities of the Lady of Lucis’s hand-picked guardians. He’d been escorted by these people more than enough times in his life to tell one from the other. “I want revenge, wrath on the Emperor. Unless you’ve brought me his still-beating heart for me to drive a knife through, I don’t want to hear it.”
Cor nodded in grave understanding. “Then you’re in the right place. My lady and you will have much to discuss once we escort you to the Citadel. She is eager to have you safe under her roof.”
Safety was a bitter offer to accept when his people were squashed beneath the Emperor’s boot, scorched and scattered and scared without him there to protect them. He should be across the sea, not sequestering himself in the cushy Citadel, so high above the war that not even the smoke could reach them.
“The sooner you meet with Lady Fleuret, the sooner we can make moves to take back Galahd.”
Nyx flickered a glance towards the guard who had spoken, forcing his eyes not to linger. The man’s cobalt stare pretended to be as hard as Cor’s, playing the part of the indifferent glaive, but Nyx could catch the softness around the edges; the cerulean sympathy which soothed Nyx’s rage like no one else could. He’d known he was there the moment he walked in with the others.
No mask could ever disguise Noctis from him.
“This shouldn’t have happened. If we’d known, I promise you, we would have been there.”
Breath shuddered from Nyx on one last, tearless sob, nodding against Noct’s shoulder. If he believed in nothing else – no one else – he believed in Noct, in the fierceness of his sincerity as he held Nyx. With trembling fists bunched in the collar of his shirt, in the braids of his hair, Noctis was ready to fight for him, on guard against invaders even now, in their safest, most private retreat from the scalding eyes of politics.
The Citadel was full of secret corridors and hidden alcoves, the whole palace a riddle for his thirteen-year-old self to solve when his mother thought he was old enough to attend the voyage. He always remembered the Citadel as an adventure, as something to look forward to in the summers, having marked and mapped each new door he’d discovered in the previous year in preparation for uncovering new ones.
But for the past few years, he’d looked forward to visiting Insomnia for a different secret. He no longer shared his private escapes from dull conferences with only silence. He no longer dreaded the claustrophobic narrows of the skyline as he came across the sea. Instead of smokestacks and steel on the horizon, he sailed towards the sweet serenity of blue eyes and black hair. His little knight in ebony armor, always there at the docks to greet him, always awaiting him in the shadowed chambers beneath the palace to welcome him back to Insomnia.
Nyx couldn’t wait to leave the conference room, the familiar cacophony of trade and economy now turned war council. He couldn’t wait to escape the smiles turned scowls, couldn’t wait to bury himself beneath the Citadel like the ashes of his kingdom across the sea. Catching Noct’s glance from the corners of the room where the guards were designated to watch had been a comfort, at least one thing left unsullied by Niflheim’s scourge.
Noctis found him in their place, in the forgotten shrine to a nameless god beneath the Citadel gardens, where the fountains leaked below to trickle tears down the statues, in lieu of the tears Nyx couldn’t seem to conjure himself. By the time Noctis appeared to offer him release, to give him the shield of his own body to break apart against where no one else could see, Nyx’s anger had dried all those tears up. All he had left were these plaintive, empty breaths smothered in Noct’s coat, the sigil of the Lucian guard branded into his cheek.
“You’re still here,” Noctis whispered, so soft that the cavernous chamber didn’t even catch the echo. “Even though I know you don’t want to be. But Libertus is here, and Crowe, and us, we’re all still here. That’s something at least, right?”
Nyx breathed out, grounding himself with the weight of Noctis in his lap, crushed around him in a protective embrace. He touched as much of his body against his as he could, each point of contact a word he couldn’t find to express the gravity of all Nyx had lost. He appreciated that. He appreciated feeling what he still had, holding it in his own hands, the tactile comfort of weight and warmth in his grasp. It made things more real than the nightmare in the distance. It almost made him feel like there was more good than bad.
“Yeah. That’s a lot,” Nyx said, drawing back just enough to face Noctis.
His throat tasted like a papercut, his hands cold in the small of Noct’s back. He knew he must have looked like a mess in Noct’s eyes, the untouchable Ulric chieftain brought down to splinter with the rest of the wreckage Niflheim left in its wake.
But Noct’s lip didn’t curl in revulsion. He didn’t turn his gaze away. He didn’t look at him in pity, didn’t reject him for his weakness like all the rest of the world was waiting to do. Didn’t glare at him through the camera lenses, waiting for him to crack under the pressure, for his unchallenged strength to falter now that the Empire had crippled him.
Noctis, the humble Lucian guard, the silent shadow of the Citadel which had crept into his heart like a summer night, just held his face in his hands and kissed wherever he could. Small, searing kisses meant to burn his promises for absolution against his skin.
“We’ll make this right,” he vowed. “Somehow. The Empire can’t win forever. We’ll teach them what it feels like to be afraid. We’ll take back everything, leave them with nothing but the ashes of the people they’ve taken from us.”
Nyx smiled, hollow. “You sound like an Ulric. Quite the impassioned politician.”
Noctis snorted, shaking his head and wrapping his arms back around Nyx to prop his chin on his head. “I’d never make it in politics. Don’t let you carry a sword around the office, for one.”
“A sword in the right place would solve all our problems,” Nyx sighed, imagining the Emperor skewered through with the blade of the Lucian guard. Yes, it would be easier. But it wouldn’t be right. It wouldn’t be any different than what the Empire did to them, taking and taking more bloodshed until they were drowning in it. “What would you do, if you were in my place?”
Noctis inhaled above him, body stiffening with thought. He was careful with how he answered.
“I would do what my father always told me: Walk tall. Through whatever comes, I would stand and face it. No matter how hard it was. But I wouldn’t do it alone.”
He sat back again, cupping Nyx’s chin in his hand. His eyes were blue jets of flame in the darkness, glowering with conviction. Between these four walls where the world went still, where the war couldn’t reach, and the past slumbered around them, untouched by time, it was so easy to believe him.
“You’ll stand by me, little knight? Even if it isn’t your fight?”
“They made it my fight when they hurt you. No one messes with my big bad chief and gets away with it.”
Nyx chuckled at that, the first time he’d laughed since the headlines came in. Noctis smirked, victorious, like one laugh was half the battle in the whole war. Maybe it was. If they could hold onto hope when the Empire took everything else, then they’d already won.
Maybe he really would see dawn rise on Galahd again. With Noctis by his side.
