@jjillekkot || [CONTINUED]
As he waits for Yuffie’s answer, Noctis keeps his silence. He knows the feeling of needing time to gather one’s thoughts, one’s emotions. He sets his mug down, half-emptied, and he looks outside of the window overlooking the sea. It’d been a happy coincidence that Yuffie hailed from Accordo, the daughter of the ambassador Godo Kisaragi. Hailing from the land of the mother he never knew, he decided early on that she was going to be one of his friends, whether she liked it or not. He had two friends-- Ignis and her, Iris counted sometimes, Gladio not really.
She’d been one of the reasons why he took the sudden transfer of schools in his younger days so hard. To be away from those handful few he considered friends, to be away from Iggy, her, Iris, and Gladio. To be away from those he had known all his life, the other noble and aristocratic children he had grown to like over the years. Noctis wasn’t an extrovert, by all means, wasn’t a true social butterfly, and that most of his socializations were borne of duty, not real desire. But with her and Ignis it was different. He went out of his way to see them, to spend time with them. Spare him and her his insignificant (or so, to him) problems.
And this is why he doesn’t take kindly to her sudden coolness toward him; will not let her get away lying down, not without some explanation, not without being told on what he did wrong. It is a nuisance that has got under his skin, and the unfairness of it makes him seethe. An itch he longs to scratch out of his system, even if he may bleed. He has had enough unfairness in his life, he does not need more-- nor will he stand for more.
He sees her shift and move out of the corner of his eye, and he turns his head to face her. His hands lift when her own cups his cheeks, weathered and hollowed from the unseen forces that still have a chokehold over his life. When the kiss comes he stays still. She is right-- how many kisses thus before, on the forehead, big sloppy kisses on the cheeks, on the hands, in jest. Buried in fragrant locks of hair in an overabundance of affection. She trails her lips, and the kisses become too numerous for their affection, and the air thickens between them.
A vice grips his heart in a cold hold. He stays still, too still for comfort, and when she draws back and utters the single word, his lips tingle with the touch that didn’t come, but so keenly felt if only in its entire absence. He doesn’t look away; he’s outgrown that, he never looks away. He has stared death in the eyes and lived.
And yet words fail him.
They fail him, as they always do, in such momentous occassions. For a brief pause in the infinite rolling of time he feels as if he is the Prince again, bumbling and lost and confused, unprepared.
(And yet can he, really, with his life too short? Can he give her that unfairness? And in his chest swells something warm and awful and stinging, the feeling he has not felt with Lunafreya, ever. Blood, viscous and lava-hot, courses sluggishly in his veins.)
He sucks in a breath through parted lips. Rattling through the gaps between his teeth. His thumbs rub her wrist, soft. “I am not sure I deserve something beautiful,” he says. “Not-- this, certainly.” Not this. Not this bitter and angry shell of the prince she grew up with.
(And so the monster, horrified by his own visage, recoils and hides in the dark.)
