@lucianmade
It was hard to keep track of time when there was no real way to tell when day was turning to night or when night was turning to day. Nisha stopped trying fairly early on. It just…seemed like such a small, unimportant detail, compared to everything else that was going on. She wanted to get Noct’s opinion on it, but…well.
A lot of things seemed like small details in his absence, really.
It didn’t take long before the others began acquiring apartments. Of course they did. They were always so much better at practical things than she was.
She slept on Ignis’s couch, because she couldn’t bring herself to care enough to look for a place of her own. Besides, she appreciated the company, and she suspected he did, too. True enough, she hadn’t known Ignis as well as Noct had, but she was pretty sure he didn’t actually know how to function if he wasn’t taking care of anyone other than himself.
And maybe she was taking him for granted, just a bit. He made it easy. He never complained. He didn’t scold her, he didn’t nag her to find a job to do or her own apartment, he rarely asked her to make any sort of decisions. He was on autopilot just as much as Nisha was.
But most things come to an end eventually. Bad or good—and she was willing to bet, in retrospect, that the living arrangement didn’t actually count as good—most things ended in time.
The wake-up call was actually fairly unexpected. There was no dramatic shouting match, no words to be regretted later, no ultimatums.
Ignis kept his apartment spotless, and Nisha dropped a pile of laundry in just the wrong place on the floor. He had been gone for a few days, and she hadn’t remembered to pick up after herself before he got back.
She watched in something like slow motion—like a horror movie—as he tripped on the pile and went sprawling, slamming his chin into the floor with enough force that she swore the apartment rattled. She was sort of glad he couldn’t actually see just how near he had come to bashing his face on the corner of the coffee table.
Like an exclamation point, an empty soda tipped off of the coffee table and smashed as it hit the hardwood, and Nisha cringed at the noise. She hid her face behind her hands, peeking at Ignis through her fingers.
“Nisha!” he barked, and it was the most awake and present she had heard him in months. She scrambled to his side as he sat up, only for him to wave her off, and she redirected herself towards the kitchen to fetch a broom and a dustpan, hastily sweeping the shards of the bottle into it before scampering back to the kitchen just as quickly to dump the dustpan’s contents in the bin.
It was…a very clear reminder that Nisha had barged into his life, and for all that he didn’t complain, he wasn’t actually getting anything out of letting her stay.
She waited until she was finished cleaning up the broken glass before she mumbled, “I’ll be out of your hair in a couple days.”
The response she got was a frank, “Nisha, we both know you don’t have anywhere to go, and I’m not certain how living off of someone else’s couch would be an improvement.”
She stared down at the floor, fingers clenched in the fabric of her pants. “I need to do something, though,” she mumbled towards the floor.
And maybe it had been a wake up call for him, too, as he heaved a sigh and offered, like an olive branch, “Then you go hunting with me next time, and you leave the apartment every so often, and you show everyone that their princess hasn’t crawled into a hole and died.”
His voice was level enough that she risked a glance at his face, and already he looked as if his anger had cooled to exasperation.
“…And what if she has?” she asked quietly. She certainly felt like she had crawled into a hole and died, sometimes.
“Then I will lower a rope to you,” he replied, finally levering himself up, off of the floor, “and you’ll climb out.”
