Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The end of the world comes not with a bang or whimper but with the fall of a single city. Granted, the city of Insomnia was an entire beast of a nation, the beating heart of an empire that had lasted for generations. You feel like a vulture, circling the city in its last gasps and waiting for it to die so that you can have your fill.

That’s the nature of scavenging: you have to scavenge.

You shouldn’t be watching the city with binoculars, waiting for the sea of fire and smoke to dissipate. You should be out there, offering what aid you can to the survivors. That would be the morally correct thing to do.

Morals, you’ve found, don’t keep your business afloat.

On the other end of the spectrum, you’re not about to accept gil to ferry the super-rich denizens of Insomnia to safer pastures. You’re a scavenger, not a smuggler-for-hire. You have standards. Not great ones, but standards nonetheless. Besides, your little camper van isn’t exactly made for passengers.

You have enough room for you and all the random bits and bobs you’ll end up trading for more bits and bobs with a side chance of gil. There’s nowhere to really fit more than one passenger and you only have one bed in the back, half-covered with boxes as it is. Therefore… you don’t take passengers.

What you will do is sneak into Insomnia and begin the process of picking what’s left of it clean of anything remotely useful. You’ve heard the stories about daemons fighting the Kings of Lucis, giant monsters battling magical statues, and you’re aware that much of the city is probably rubble. But the fighting couldn’t have consumed the entire city.

Something, probably on the outskirts, has to remain.

Who knows, you might manage to stumble on a pharmacy. You could never go wrong trading medicine and other such supplies. Or, even better, a grocery store chock full of canned vegetables you could raid once you dug your gas mask out of the back of your van. You didn’t think you’d manage to get there before the produce, meat, and frozen foods begin to spoil.

Never mind the dairy section. All that milk and cheese would be rancid. No, you’d rather breathe in the slightly stale air from your mask than smell that unholy combination.

You hunker over your steering wheel to peer through your binoculars. The Empire’s soldiers don’t seem to be winning. Not if the exploding drop ships are any indication of success. It’s almost like watching karmic retribution in action. Even better, the more of the Niff soldiers explode in midair or die to daemons means the less of them you’ll need to avoid.

It’s morbid, but that’s the life of a scavenger.

You’re more than willing to wait until the next day if you have to. Unfortunately for you, the bright lights of Insomnia won’t be there to keep you safe from daemons overnight. You have no choice but to return to a sanctuary and come back to Insomnia tomorrow.

You’ve even less inclination to do that than you do the desire to pick up tap-dancing. You have one shot at making a path for yourself, hidden by the chaos, that will become your back door to all of Insomnia’s wealth. Well, whatever’s left of it after the Kings of Lucis decided to have a grudge match with daemons.

You sigh as you toss your binoculars onto your passenger seat. There’s no way that you’ll be able to make a back door through the same paths that the refugees are using. Not only will someone probably notice, but they’ll tell all their friends about it. Those friends will tell their friends, so on and so forth, until another scavenger figures out your secret path.

That ruins the entire point of a secret, doesn’t it?

You throw your van into gear with an even heavier sigh.

There’s no real road where you’re going. Your camper van bounces along on overworked shocks, your pots and pans rattling away in their cupboard, and you make your own road. This is as adventurous as you get. A regular trailblazer in the strangest possible circumstances.

It’s almost hilarious how easy it is to avoid detection when you stop using common sense to govern your actions. You drive along the looming edifice that is the physical bulk of Insomnia’s Old Wall, searching for any entrances that no normal person would use. Abandoned sewers, cracks, a maintenance door. You’ll take what you can get.

You’re burning daylight and fuel at an alarming rate. The first you can do nothing about and the second you can fix at the first gas station you find inside the walls. Sanctuary? There’s probably a haven buzzing away that you can set yourself up at if you can’t find a building where all the lights work and daemons shy away. You are nothing if not self-sufficient.

It comes with the job description.

So, here you are, trundling along on a path that doesn’t exist, looking for an entrance that may or may not exist. That, too, comes with the job description. Yours is an occupation based in uncertainty. This is your version of normal, and this is as exciting as you want it to be.

You keep your eyes peeled on boring grey concrete for any sign. Hours pass with no results and you’re almost ready to call it a day. You can try again on a different stretch of wall in the morning. But, just when you have given up all hope, there it is.

A door.

But not just any door. This door has a little plaque next to it, copperplate faded from the elements, that says ‘Drainage and Flood Maintenance’ when you squint at it through your binoculars. Bingo. That’s your ticket in. Drainage and flood means stairs, ladders, and lots of water. An infrastructure you can use to your advantage. And, this is the best part, you won’t be crawling through a sewer.

Even better, this door isn’t just a simple open-and-shut affair. Oh, no. This door is one of those rolling affairs, like those on freezer doors and barns, that you can fit your camper van quite neatly through. Better still, the door looks like it will be relatively easy to hide with the surrounding bits of rubble. Insomnia’s fall has given you all the tools you need.

There’s no sign of daemons or Niffs and you’re not going to say a damn word about it. Astrals only know that you need all the luck you can get and jinxing it will ruin everything. You roll up to the door at a snail’s pace, fingers tight as death on your steering wheel.

You park your van and grab your trusty crowbar from beneath your seat, leaving the engine running, and skip your way across the way. It’s dusty and dry, little puffs kicked up by your boots, stray bits of rubble crunching beneath your feet. Sweet Astrals, you are the worst kind of vulture.

You even look the part. Battered old combat boots, dark grey pea coat, a hood to cover your face, and a rusty crowbar dangling from driving glove-covered hands. You stick to cargo pants for the pockets. Pockets you fully intend to stuff full of dubiously gotten gains.

The door squeaks as you pull on it, but it opens after a few minutes of struggling. The sound it makes is loud enough to attract any number of things that will want you dead but nothing rears its ugly head. All of the sound and fury of Insomnia’s fall seems to have scared off all the local wildlife at least.

Today is a great day for you.

You skip your way back to your van with a jaunty whistled tune and hop back behind the wheel. Your van trundles along, bouncing over the door track, and you turn on your headlights to navigate the dark tunnel. The flood maintenance door is the luckiest find of the day, an entrance tailor-made for someone like you.

You will not jinx this by thinking of how it could all go wrong.

Nope, you’re just going to focus on what kind of things were left behind in Insomnia. Your luck holds for a good few hours as you drive along the flood tunnel. It’s a very, very long tunnel. Boring and featureless, save for the drain spouts from dozens of storm drains, it’s a fabulously boring drive. You love a boring trip.

This tunnel has to lead somewhere. There has to be a point where the uphill tunnel meets open air. And that’s how you’ll get in and out of Insomnia. You bow over the steering wheel, peering out into the dark. Eventually, the tunnel levels out and is dimly lit by emergency lights.

And there, off to the side, is another sliding door. This one has a handy printed sign that says ‘Insomnia’ and something else written too small for you to read. You do not, unfortunately, have the time to read the sign. Once again, you hop out of your van, drag the door open, hop back in, and trundle on. This time, you get back out to close the door behind you.

Nobody would ever know that you were here.

Surprisingly, you’ve managed to find what appears to be a maintenance building. There are tools, manual and power, left behind by maintenance workers. Someone left their lunch, what smelled like a tuna fish sandwich, on one of the workbenches. You’ll have to remember to throw that somewhere before it makes the whole building reek.

The shutters on the massive bay doors where trucks would normally enter and exit from in pursuit of proper, civilized maintenance are shut up tight. It looks like everyone fled through the office and that will be the first place you’ll check for keys. But first, there’s a couple of gas cans you need to steal to fill up your camper van.

You’re very good at your job. Quick, quiet, and thorough. You leave no trace that the gas cans were ever there in the first place. Red for gas, yellow for diesel, and you just so happened to find gas on your first try. Both cans are emptied into your van’s gas tank and you slide open the back door to set the cans behind your passenger seat.

Nothing is useless to you, not really.

You grab the tuna sandwich with the plastic bag it had come with and toss it into a trash bag. Quickly, you head to the maintenance office with the bag in hand, tossing in whatever food you find along the way. This is going to be your base for as long as possible and you refuse to share it with insects and disease.

The office is neat, organized, and full of paperwork that is useless to you until someone specifically asks for any of it. You find a keyring hanging from a nail on the wall, helpfully labeled ‘spare’ and ‘garage’. There’s a third label obscured by oil and dirt but you’ll figure out what that key’s for later.

What’s important is that you now have the means to open the doors. Fling wide the gates and let opportunity rain on you in a shower of bounty. Insomnia is yours to plunder. Triumphantly, you unlock the bay door and shove it up with a clatter. And there, before your eyes, is a city full of untapped potential.

That untapped potential was on fire.

It would, eventually, stop burning. For now, you’ll stick to raiding the parts of Insomnia that weren’t on fire that you can reasonably get to in the remaining hours of the day. Once the sun set and the daemons came out? You’d be safely behind solid walls and the Oracle’s blessing, sipping on a can of Ebony, and plotting your next move.

You hop in your van, drive down the driveway, hop back out, and lock the bay door behind you. Then you pull out your phone and open your secret weapon: the map app. You slap a pin down for ‘parked here,’ and then it’s off into the city you go.

According to the app, there’s a pharmacy down the road. How very convenient for you. You snicker to yourself, throw your van into four-wheel-drive, and hit the gas. Rocks? Broken curbs? Potholes? Your van can handle it.

You bounce along, careful not to bite your tongue, as you floor it through the shattered remnants of the most powerful nation in the world. Your van careens around obstacles as you rapidly shift through gears. At one point, only two of your van’s wheels are on the road.

The rubble gets worse and worse until you can’t possibly take your van any further. “Well, shit,” you mutter under your breath as you hit the brakes. You hunker over the steering wheel, sighing as you peer over your dash at the veritable canyon of rubble in front of you and glorious success. “I don’t want to walk, damn it.”

All the complaining under the stars won’t change the facts. You are going to have to pull over and find an alternate route on foot. The pharmacy is just past this slag heap of concrete and rebar. It will be faster if you just get your collapsible wagon out and hoof it.

You park your van haphazardly, as if you were a refugee who had decided to abandon everything. Well, a refugee who had the sense to lock up behind you. You sling the canvas bag containing your wagon over your shoulder, grab your crowbar and shotgun (just in case), and begin the arduous task of navigating the rubble. There’s a path, wide enough for a single person, that bisects the entire pile.

You don’t want to think about why it is what it appears to be: a massive line from some unfathomable impact. Nope, that wasn’t what you were here for. Get in, find something worth something to someone, and get out. Let the Crownsguard figure out what happened when they took the city back.

Your boots crunch on gravel and glass. And there, in the middle of the rubble, are two lonely figures. Behind them is a crumbled statue that you assume used to be a very fancy statue of some king of yore. The ground is scorched and shattered, splattered with dried blood, and very clearly was the site of some epic battle.

Well, shit.

What are you supposed to do now?

Chapter Text

Dead people are not, generally speaking, in your wheelhouse. You’re not a grave robber. You loot buildings, places that have been left behind. You scavenge from the corpse of civilization, the trash heaps of the world. Random dead bodies do not fill you with unbridled joy.

Poor bastards. Left behind by their fellows to fight and die in the name of something. You squint and try to figure out if they died fighting over a physical thing that you can scavenge. One of them looks like he was a Niff, what with the godawful armor, and the other is in the charred remains of some branch of the Crownsguard uniform.

The only things around are weapons. Somehow, you doubt that they went through all the drama over just a big old sword and some knives. But there’s nothing else. For once in your career, you’re going to have to check their pockets. The Crownsguard will probably pay handsomely for whatever they were fighting over.

The armored man looks vaguely familiar under all the blood and dirt. You’ve seen him on some newspaper front page at some point. He’s a Niff general, admiral, something important military-wise. He also has… no pockets that you can find. You’re rapidly beginning to rethink this idea.

The second body is different.

He’s kneeling, as if he’d won the fight but hadn’t the strength in him to move again. Poor bastard looks like the Niff ran him over with every elemental spell in the book. He’s so burnt that the man flakes off in the slight breeze, in little puffs of white ash and dead skin.

Blood drips slowly down his side from what looks like a gunshot wound. You wince as you slip your hand into his pocket, soggy with blood, and only come up with a key ring and a can. It’s an energy drink, a pricey one, but the label has been partially obscured by a strip of masking tape that says ‘Hi-Potion.’

Your lip curls as you hold the can gingerly between your fingers, an arm’s length away for hygiene and safety. Who just runs around with energy drinks in their pockets? Is this even still an energy drink? Is it… drugs?

Oh, sweet and merciful Astrals, is this man a drug dealer?

You’re not going to sell illegal drugs to the Crownsguard. No, thanks, that isn’t how you operate. You aren’t worried about the keys. Those look as if they’re just the keys to this man’s apartment. But this can worries you on a base level. You swallow, hard enough that you taste dirt at the back of your mouth, and go to put the can back where you found it.

This is why you don’t loot corpses.

The body slumps over, head lolling onto your shoulder, and almost knocks you over. You go to shove him off of you and the corpse groans in your ear. You freeze in place, eyes widening in sheer panic, and it’s only the threat of Niff soldiers finding you that keeps you from screaming.

He’s still alive.

You look at this man. Really look at him. He’s been burned, electrocuted, shot, stabbed, and left for dead. Somehow, by some miracle, this man is still alive. Clearly, the Crownsguard are built differently from normal human beings. And, if it wasn’t for you stumbling into him, this man would have died here.

This man’s continued survival is on you. You are not made for this much sheer responsibility. Hunting down canned vegetables? Sure. Keeping a man this messed up alive? You haven’t the faintest idea where to begin.

Well, that isn’t quite right. You know where there’s a veritable cornucopia of pharmaceutical supplies just ripe for the taking. Over-the-counter things have directions written right on the packaging. You can follow written instructions. If you boil everything down to the base nature of his many, and truly there appear to be many, injuries? You’ll be fine.

What’s the worst that happens?

He dies.

This man had been doomed to die from the beginning. Anything you do is a net positive in this man’s situation. With that in mind, you gently push him off of you and guide him to lay on his back. You’re not going to carry him to the pharmacy. Not when you have a wagon.

He does not fit in your wagon.

Setting it up was easy. Getting him into it was a struggle of flailing limbs and diehard determination, but he was in and that was what mattered in the end. You hadn’t the strength to drag his entire body in and you left his legs dangling half over the edge.

He was flat on his back, arms folded over his chest, knees bent over the edge, and his toes brushed against the ground.

But he was in the wagon. Besides, you were supposed to keep his legs and injuries elevated over his heart, right? He’d be fine. You were even nice enough to avoid the worst of the rubble as you towed him along behind you. A concussion wouldn’t help him.

You’re going to help him because it’s the right thing to do. Well, that and, if he somehow survives, you don’t want him reporting you as a petty thief to the Crownsguard. You have principles, standards, lines that you refuse to cross. Scavenging is a noble and necessary part of the social ecosystem. Without people like you, so many things would just end up going to waste.

His head bounces against the bottom of the wagon and you wince as you power through. He’ll be fine. You’ll slap an ice pack on it later.

The absolute irony was that this man had sat down to die not even a block away from the pharmacy. It’s not even fifteen minutes away. Granted, it takes you a bit to realize this building is even the pharmacy, so you can excuse him on that alone. The plastic signs above the shattered glass doors didn’t survive the impact shockwave from whatever nonsense had made that crater you found him in.

You roll your wagon over the broken sidewalk and through the gaping spot the automatic doors used to be in. There, glass covers the awful industrial grey carpet until you reach the scavenging holy land: fully stocked and freshly abandoned shelves. You could cry at the sheer beauty of it. But you have a dying man to try to save.

You could just dump a whole bunch of medical supplies on top of the man in trash bags and head back to your camper van. If you did that, then you would have to use part of your new stock to fix him. And that? That was a waste.

Why drag him off to be treated when you could just do it here?

There’s an unopened box of trash bags on a shelf and you pop it open with a grin. You pull bag after bag out, spreading them on the floor to create as close to a sterile workspace as you can manage. Then you drag your new patient out of the wagon, letting him flop onto the heavy-duty black plastic bags.

“Let’s get to work, shall we?”

This man should be dead.

You’ve had to cut his clothes off in order to see the extent of his injuries and you wish you hadn’t gotten involved at all. There’s no way that you can fix everything wrong with him. He needs a doctor. Probably several doctors if you can find them in this chaos. You are in over your head and it’s all you can do to keep it together.

He’s more than just burned. As if that wasn’t enough, he’s been shot twice and you had to find tweezers to dig the bullets out. You stitched him up with your ever so unpracticed sewing skills, cleaned it all up with iodine, and slapped enough gauze on it to smother a cactuar.

That was the easy part.

You go through a truly staggering amount of gauze and cotton balls, along with several bottles of rubbing alcohol and iodine. And oh, sweet and merciful Astrals, cleaning all of the burned and dead skin from his injuries is nothing short of disgusting. You end up slathering half of his body in burn cream and wrapping him up like a cadaver.

You’re very good at following the instructions on the burn cream.

You’re also very good at following the instructions on the portable defibrillator.

Halfway through picking the dead skin off of his right shoulder, the man just… stops breathing. You have zero confidence in your ability to perform CPR, especially since your hazy memories inform you that you’re supposed to keep doing it until help arrives. There’s no help coming. You’re going to have to be self-sufficient.

Self-sufficient just means you scream, punch him in the sternum to no response, and go running for the fancy machine on the back wall. You didn’t spend all this time and effort for him to die on you not even halfway through trying to fix him. You slap the pads down where the box tells you to, hook them up, and then proceed to shock the life back into him.

There’s something hilariously ironic about needing to electrocute someone who has very clearly already been electrocuted.

His back arches clear off the trash bags and he flops back down like a fish out of water. But he’s breathing again, pulse thrumming away beneath your fingertips, so you don’t care. The man’s not dead and that’s all that matters to you right now.

You don’t take the pads off, purely because you have the sinking feeling you will need to do this again. Possibly more than once.

He’s missing the ring finger on his left hand. The stump’s been cauterized, probably when his hand was burned, so at least you don’t have to worry about him bleeding to death while you slather on even more cream. You wrap the entire limb after you’ve all but drenched it and wince as he whimpers softly. There’s no question as to if this hurts.

His entire left upper body looks like he’d been love-tapped by the world’s angriest coeurl. The electric burns curl over his chest, climb his neck, and settle around his eyes. His left is the worst off and you can’t figure out how to slap bandages on without blinkering him, so you don’t bother trying.

You swear, you only cut off his pants to be thorough.

If his body is this destroyed? His lower half might be just as bad. It has nothing to do with how many abs he has or how attractive he is beneath all of his injuries. You are doing this solely to check if anything else is injured, nothing more or less.

His legs are, for the most part, perfectly fine. With the exception of his right knee, you could almost say that he was scot-free. You know, if you ignore the red blistering on both of his shins from what you assume was sliding across the scorched earth. But his knee is the worst. Swollen, a mottled rainbow of dark reds and purple bruising, and it’s enough that you wince in sympathy.

It looks as if he landed on his knee wrong. You’re not exactly a babe in the woods yourself, so you know his bones didn’t appreciate whatever he did to them. There’s nothing you can really do for him aside from slathering on some aloe gel and hunting down a knee brace for him.

That’s the extent of what you can do for him. It’s not much but it’s far more than he would have gotten if you hadn’t been there. He’ll live, you think, but he’ll bear the scars for the rest of his life.

You sit back on your heels with a sigh, wipe the sweat from your brow with your forearm, and stare at this strange man. No, those scars aren’t going to do any harm to his ability to get a date later. In fact, they might do the opposite. You roll your head to crack your neck, rocking up with a grunt, and snag the box of trash bags.

All of his clothes go in one bag and you tie it up with a knot. He can have his stuff back whenever he wakes up, including the can of possible drugs. You line your wagon with even more trash bags before you gently drag him back into your now lined wagon. He takes up the bulk of it, but you’re about to get creative with the fine art of stacking things in his lap.

Another trash bag gets filled with the remaining stock of everything that you used on him. You all but prance through the painkiller aisle, grabbing up everything from oral gels to children’s fever-reducer. These are the things most scavengers tend to ignore. The little comforts people want every day.

You hop the normally gated-off pharmacy counter and begin the fine art of scavenging. High-grade painkillers like morphine and codeine go in another trash bag. You tuck a few bottles into your pockets to use on the man, but you’re going to end up trading away the contents of this bag. Another bag is for antibiotics, steroid creams, and antihistamines.

The last bag you fill is for random medications you can’t pronounce but know a few doctors in Lestallum will want. You even double-check each bottle against the little notebook in your back pocket that you put all of your oddly specific orders in. You’re not a doctor of any kind. You have no idea what these are for and don’t care to ask.

Each bag is gently tossed over the counter for you to grab on your way out. Before you hop back over, you take the time to raid the door marked ‘Staff Only’. Your patient will need something to wear aside from his boots and underwear, but all you can find are leftover scrubs that have the cutest dancing chocobo print.

Beggars can’t be choosers, and you’re giving him these for free. Aren’t you just the soul of generosity?

You hop back over the counter and begin the fine art of stacking bags on top of the man in your wagon. Bags are tied to other bags to keep them from flying off once you hit a bumpy stretch and the precarious pile is enough. This will be a ridiculously lucrative haul.

There’s even enough daylight left for you to drop all of this off at your van and come back for a second pass.

Chapter Text

He doesn’t die when you go back for a second pass to fill up your van. This is great. He does, however, wake up. This is not great. His eyes are wide, the whites all but bulging out of his head, and he whines from the pain of his injuries. He looks at you, through you, uncomprehending of anything around him, and grits his teeth so hard that you can see his tendons standing out beneath the bandages.

You’re not a doctor. The painkillers tucked in your pocket were chosen because the label had a ridiculously high number on them, not because you know what dose to give him. As messed up as the man is, you doubt a regular aspirin is going to do anything to take even the edge off.

You throw your trash bags full of scavenged loot into your van, collapse your wagon with the toe of your boot, and throw that in too. Then you shut the door behind you, wriggle past the mountain of trash bags to the back of your van, and grab a bottle of water along the way.

He can have a single, fat white pill. You have no desire to accidentally overdose him but less desire to have his pained screams attracting things that will try to kill you. Opening the water bottle with one hand, you pop the pill into his mouth before you hold the water to his lips. He gulps it down as you watch him to make sure the pill makes it down and he doesn’t drown.

There’s almost a glimmer of intelligence behind the pain. You clear your throat awkwardly in the silence. “Hi,” you force out. “Don’t die in the back of my van.” There. You nailed it.

He just keeps staring in your general direction.

“Good talk,” you mutter. Clearly, he’s going to be a great traveling companion until you can drop him off at some clinic in Lestallum.

Unfortunately for you, the sun is beginning to set. You no longer have the luxury of messing around on the Insomnian streets. But, you have one last thing to scavenge. “Stay put,” you tell the man who most likely wouldn’t even be using the toilet without assistance.

You hop back out of your van and sprint back to where you found him like you’re trying to win a race. In a way, you almost are. It’s a race against the sun and you refuse to lose. That’s the only reason you don’t stop to kick the dead Niff in the face, not a lack of semi-patriotic desire.

You snatch up the weird knives that lay abandoned. There hadn’t been a safe way to grab them before and you had almost forgotten about them entirely. Almost being the key word here. You’re pretty sure that these weapons will either belong to the man or sell for a pretty pile of gil. The big sword? Not your problem.

Last retrieval for the day complete, you sprint back to your van. You throw one particular trash bag full of all the insulin you could find into your van’s mini-fridge, filling up the entire bottom half. That bag alone will probably pay your rent and van maintenance costs for the rest of the year.

The man hasn’t so much as moved a muscle on your bed, but at least he seems to be breathing easier.

Great. That means he won’t start screaming in panic as you floor it through Insomnia back to your new base of operations.

Sunsets take ten minutes at the longest. It took you two hours to get from the wall to your little base and fifteen minutes to get from your base to this odd crater. If you drive carefully, it will take you two hours and fifteen minutes to leave Insomnia. The sun has already started setting. A normal person would assume that they don’t have the time to make it back to base.

You are not a normal person.

You make it back with moments to spare, hopping out of your van and throwing open the bay door with a flourish. Once your van is safely back inside, you hop back out and lock up the bay door again. You steal a couple more gas cans for the road ahead and hop back behind the wheel.

The man is wide awake in your rearview mirror. He’s flattened himself against the back wall and appears to have a death grip on the van’s sides. His breathing is heavy and ragged, eyes wide, and he’s clearly trying to find a way to leave the van.

You close the driver’s side door and turn to look at him. “If you want to get out, I’m not going to stop you. But the sun’s already set.” He can either stay with you and be terrified out of his mind or face the night’s daemons in his underwear. The choice is his.

It’s not a choice at all.

He wedges himself into the corner and grabs your pillows to pad the walls so as not to aggravate his many injuries. Honestly, you’re amazed that he’s even awake, let alone coherent. Truly, the Crownsguard are built differently from mere mortals. He nods once and that’s all you need.

You put your van into gear with a grin. This time, you’d be going downhill and gravity would be on your side. Even better, you’d no longer be peering out into the tunnel in search of the exit. It’s a straight shot from here. You only have to hop out one more time to close the door behind you.

Once you hit the dark expanse of the tunnel, you flip your van’s headlights on and reach over to flip on the special bright lights you had installed on the roof. You rev the engine once, then put the gas pedal to the floor. Switching gears as the speedometer climbed higher and higher, you don’t look back to see if the man is doing alright.

You’ve got a land speed record to beat.

Surprisingly, there were no daemons in the tunnel. Or, if there were, you had sped through so fast that you never saw them. You go barreling down the tunnel, hellbent on freedom at all costs, and pull your brake to slide the last stretch.

Your van bounces on its shocks and you throw yourself out to sprint to the sliding door. If you can’t secure your secret entrance, then all of this was for nothing. Your yearly profit margin and comfortably secure lifestyle depend on this.

The man looks at you like you’re some kind of new animal heretofore unknown to mankind. You shrug and just climb back behind the wheel. He doesn’t get to judge you when his continued survival depends solely on years worth of strange habits and predilections.

You throw your emergency brake on and gun the engine, sending a spray of dirt to cover the door. The less like a visible entrance it looks, the better for you in the long run. If the man wants to use your hidden entrance to lead his Crownsguard fellows into Insomnia? Fine. But you’ll get as much use out of it before then.

“Last chance to bail,” you turn and bluntly tell the man. “It’s Lestallum from here.” If he had somewhere that he was supposed to meet people at, you wouldn’t be taking him there. You nod at the chocobo scrubs. “Put some clothes on first.”

You leave the engine running while he thinks about it. Eventually, he tries to stand up and ends up falling back over with a pained shout. “Or, you come with me and I get you to a doctor.” You’re not going to pay his medical bills, but you at least know where a good clinic is.

The man closes his eyes and groans. He looks like he wants to say something, opens his mouth and everything, but the only sound he can manage is a hoarse wheeze. Instead, he flaps his hand at you in as close to consent as he can manage.

It’s good enough for you.

You’ve found the limit of a Crownsguard’s inhuman tolerance, so that’s fun.

You’re not going to tell him how exactly you’re going to get him out of here. He probably thinks that you’re going to barrel your way through the blockade on the only road in and out of Insomnia. If only that was the case.

No, you have a completely different exit plan. One that no one in their right mind would ever use. That’s probably why it worked in the first place. If the Crownsguard can figure out how to replicate it and retake the city? You’ll be impressed. Amused at their desperation, but impressed.

You drive your van back the way you had come with only your headlights and top lights to guide you. It’s no sweat off your back since you still remember how you got there. But you’re pretty sure that your passenger doesn’t share the same opinion.

Your van trundles along on a route that only makes sense to you. It takes a tedious amount of time, but eventually, you make it to the coast of the Lucinia Sound. The choppy waters are deep and dark, almost black as the stars begin to twinkle overhead. You hop out of your van one more time, ducking behind a cluster of rocks to unveil your great secret: a pontoon boat.

You shove it into the water, just far enough that the engine and motor can reach the water. Then, it’s back into your van to drive it onto the boat. This is it, your entire plan. You turn off your van to conserve fuel for the last stretch, hopping out to kick the pontoon boat into reverse. Your boat isn’t a great one, but it’s yours and that’s what matters.

The man watches you, completely gobsmacked. Clearly, this isn’t what he expected at all. Oh, you can feel the judgment prickling against the back of your neck and you don’t care.

You steer your little boat out into the open water. There’s a shorter channel, the same one the sole bridge spans, that will get you right to the rugged cliffs near the Keycatrich Ruins. You can cut past them, and the nearby garrison, and hit the highway from there. There’s not enough gas in your van to take you all the way to Lestallum, but you know where the rest stops are.

This is not the first time that you’ve done a mad dash through the night and will not be the last. It is, however, the first time that you do it with a passenger watching your every move. You’re not entirely sure if you like it or not, but you welcome the silence and solitude of manning the boat.

At least he isn’t staring at you through the back window. Though that’s probably because of his injuries and not any lack of desire. You still don’t know how he’s even conscious with injuries like that.

Your little boat putters along, the sound of waves breaking on the pontoons a pleasant break from considering what’s going on in his head. He’s not going to be your problem for very long if you have anything to do with it. You keep a steady eye on the waves around you, just waiting for some irritating aquatic daemon to rear its ugly head.

It’s been so quiet for so long that it’s discomfiting. The man, lulled to sleep by a combination of heavy-duty pain medication and the gentle rocking of the waves, snores gently away with soft little sighs. If you were a lesser person, you might even call him cute like this.

But you’re too on edge to think about it.

Every wave is enough to make you flinch, one hand drifting to your shotgun as you brace yourself for some kind of nonsense. A sahagin, seadevil, even a gods damned daemonfish. Anything can try to ruin your perfectly well-planned escape route.

When the bottom of your boat scrapes against the opposite shore, you’re ready to cry with relief. Daemons on the open water would be a death sentence. You can handle the usual assortment on land. Not by fighting them, no. Mankind made cars so you could speed away from your problems, not fight them toe-to-toe.

Such a shame that your passenger wakes up, blinking blearily at you, before grunting as he sprawls on your bed. You cannot wait to drop him off.

Chapter Text

You are stuck with this nameless Crownsguard. There’s no off-loading him onto the next passing group of refugees, not when they don’t have the supplies to keep him alive and you do. He’s your problem now, whether he likes it or not. But you don’t have to like it either.

Nor do you need to actually talk to him.

As far as you’re concerned, this man is just a living bit of cargo to shuttle off to someone who needed him. Who knows, maybe his fellow Crownsguard will pay you a finder’s fee in thanks. You are perfectly content to spend the entire trip to Lestallum in silence.

He isn’t.

Now that the man is awake, he has questions. Questions that do, in fact, deserve answers. Reasonable ones, if delivered with a slur that takes you a moment to understand. The man is, after all, heavily medicated and recovering from all sorts of trauma. He speaks as if his mouth has forgotten the taste of words, tongue curling oddly to form each sound. Galahdian, you think, makes his vowels founder and his consonants flow into each other as best they can.

You watch him in your rear view mirror as you bounce along with your van and its boat trailer. None of his stitches appear to have broken and he doesn’t seem as if he’s suffering, so you take the time to indulge your curiosity.

Beneath the bandages, he wears his hair sheared close to the skin on the sides of his head. You’ve seen his tattoos, thin black lines on various parts of his ridiculous body. He has the face and body of one of those underwear models you see on billboards, the faintest hints of laugh lines around his burned eyes and mouth. Those eyes stare right back at you, examining you as much as you do him.

He looks kind, the sort to slap people on the shoulder at bars, and friendly. Right now, he looks more like he ended up on the wrong side of a bar fight than he did make friends at said bar. But he’s handsome and jovial enough that it won’t be a problem for him later. Unless he tries to turn that jolly attitude on you, he’ll be fine.

Even on a very lucrative day like today, you are not the most social person in existence. Your customer service can sometimes be limited to grunting, pointing at your wares, and asking if the customer wants it or not. You do not haggle unless it’s to accept bartered goods in place of gil. Idle conversation is not, has not, and never will be your specialty.

He looks like he’s prepared to charm the scales off a naga. As if he’s the kind of guy who shows up to help people move for the low cost of a six-pack and a pizza just because it’s the neighborly thing to do. He’s probably dating a model and treats physical exertion like it’s a hobby. Worse still, even while injured, he sprawls indolently across your bed in a languid jumble of bandaged limbs. Every time he tries to bend his braced leg, the man winces.

You just keep driving.

He drifts in and out of sleep as you barrel down the highway. It’s not the most comfortable ride, what with your van’s suspension as wrecked as it is, but he seems determined to make it work. That Crownsguard training must have taught him to sleep whenever and wherever he could.

You’re almost jealous. You won’t be heading to bed for a good while yet. Not without putting as much distance between you and the Niffs as possible at the farthest haven your van can get to before it runs out of gas. You’ve miles to go and a long time before you can rest.

Daemons have always been more frequent in the wilds where civilization used to be. The encroaching dark just makes them bubble out of nowhere to spread their hateful malevolence like an unending blight upon the world. It’s very poetic, ever so ominous, and you’ve dented your van’s hood many a time on an unsuspecting daemon’s face. You have no patience for their kind.

But you can’t do that with your severely injured passenger. The impact from ramming your van into a daemon at cruising speed was likely to pop his stitches. Since they weren’t very good stitches in the first place, you really don’t want to have to redo even an inch of them. No, you won’t be ramming daemons down in a fit of violent rage. You go around them, drifting your van and its trailer like the consummate professional you are.

Eventually, the inevitable happens. Your van’s fuel gauge drifts perilously close to empty and you need to find the closest haven. Occupied or not, you’ll be camping there until dawn. While you could stop just long enough to use those pilfered gas cans to fill your van’s tank and keep going, you have had a very long and exhausting day.

If you keep driving, you’re likely to drive right off the road and crash. You won’t switch with the man either. Not only is he extremely injured, but you’re not going to let a stranger in his underwear drive your van. It’s unhygienic, to say the least. No, thank you.

You coast your way down the asphalt, foot barely brushing against the gas pedal. The less fuel you use, the better. This far from civilization? Gas is a precious commodity you are loathe to waste. Your van sways slightly as you turn off the road to the rough dirt and rocky wilderness, the bumping waking your passenger.

He grumbles under his breath as he tries to sit up and fails. It’ll be a long road to recovery for him, one you won’t be sticking around to help with. But still, you feel for him. It can’t be easy to rely on a stranger’s mercy to survive. You get the impression that he’s used to being fiercely independent, probably to the point that he ends up the one taking care of others.

“Almost there,” you call back to him. The haven is minutes away, its comforting glow a beacon of Oracle-brought safety. All he needs to do is keep still and wait for you to set up camp. That shouldn’t be difficult.

Except, somehow, it is.

You pull up to the mercifully empty haven, angling your van just so to leave the middle clear for a campfire. Just because you have a portable stove and heating in your van doesn’t mean you need to use them. There’s a pile of wood off to the side, left there by hunters who spend their days keeping havens stocked. Manners mean you’ll replace what you use with something else useful, usually cans of random food from the bottom of your van stock.

Your passenger manages to sit up and swing his legs over the edge of the bed in the time it takes you to park and get a fire going. He blinks at you as you climb into your van, knuckles white where he grips the sheets. “Who are you,” he rasps, voice hitching on every painful breath. “Who sent you?” You would probably be far more intimidated if he didn’t look ready to keel over if you so much as poked him.

“They call me Echo.” This is not your name. Nobody knows your name but you, so giving him your nickname will serve him better in the long run. “Scavenger Echo. And you’re going to bleed all over my sheets if you don’t settle down.”

Ah, there’s the face. Everyone makes that face when you tell them your chosen occupation. It starts off with revulsion at your chosen occupation, then slowly fades into calculating contemplation. What you do has a purpose, ignoble as it is, and people with power see the potential in it.

This man is no different.

“Nyx. Nyx Ulric. I suppose I should thank you for saving my life.” He’s cheerful, gritted teeth and all. You notice how he doesn’t give any kind of military rank. Understandable, considering you pulled him out of the aftermath of some epic battle against the Niff. “Not that I’m not grateful, but why?”

You shrug. “You were on the way to the pharmacy.” It’s nothing but the truth. “Right place, right time, right thing to do.”

“Right risk and right reward?” Nyx’s lips quirk into a wry grin, there and gone in the blink of an eye. You can’t even argue that he’s wrong. Part and parcel of being a successful scavenger is looking at a given situation and determining the payoff. Somehow, when he says it, that simple fact doesn’t sound like an insult.

You pause, one hand braced on your van’s doorframe and one foot solidly planted on the industrial carpet, to match his calculating stare with your own. “Well, you see,” you flatly begin,” I’m pretty sure the Crownsguard will appreciate having you all to themselves. Who am I to turn that down?” Rolling your eyes, you climb all the way in, wading expertly through the piles of trash bags, and you point to the neatly folded scrubs.

“Now, for the love of the Crystal, put some pants on.”

Nyx has the grace to blush as the tension bleeds from his body. Sheepishly, he chuckles. “I don’t think I can.” He’s hunched over, arms locked to keep himself upright, and he sweats from the effort.

Belatedly, it occurs to you that he might actually be so injured that he can’t summon the strength or range of motion to get dressed. It’s taking everything he has to stay upright and the rough drive hadn’t helped conserve his energy. “Oh.” Well, shit. You’re not going to like where this is going.

He blinks, slow as a coeurl, and you have the oddest feeling that he’s laughing at you. “Yeah. Believe me, I would if I could.” Nyx shrugs in that noncommittal ‘what can you do’ way, as if he’s just resigned to it. “Don’t suppose you feel like helping a guy out?”

Yup, there it is. Nyx seems to be under the impression that you’re just a nice guy under all of the obligatory scavenger mindset. So nice, in fact, that you would be willing to help a man put some clothes on for free. Your eyes narrow as you stare at him. Was it not enough that you had patched him up, dragged him out of Insomnia, and were shuttling him to Lestallum? Now you had to dress the man for him?

On the other hand, that would solve the near-nudity problem.

There was nothing as uncomfortable as having conversations with people in their underwear. Fine. You’d help him put pants on, but he could figure out how to get a shirt on himself.

You cross your van in swift steps, stopping just in front of the bed. “If I do this, we’re never speaking about it. Not to anyone.” It’s not that you care about touching him, not even in the slightest. But you’ll be damned if you let it get out that you did something like this for free. You’re a scavenger, not a personal attendant.

He tilts his head to look up at you, eyes heavy-lidded and lips parted. Nyx flashes you a tired quicksilver smile. “Sure. Not a word will leave my mouth. On my honor.” He shifts on the bed, angling himself to make this just a bit easier on you.

Grunting, you grab the chocobo-covered pants and kneel in front of him. You bunch them up, put one foot in each leg, and guide the pants up and over his boots to his knees. There, the easy part done. You look up from between his legs to see him bowed over you, ready and waiting for the hard part. “Let’s get this over with.”

Nyx puts his hands on your shoulders to brace himself. His hands are warm, even through the thick fabric of your coat, and heavy as he grips. “Ready when you are,” he quips. It’s the deep breath before stepping off a ledge into infinity, a surge of bravery.

All of this… over putting on pants.

You rise and pull up in one smooth motion, catching his weight against your upper body. Nyx Ulric is a solid wall of lean muscle, a head and a half taller than you, and every ounce of him is dead weight. You grunt again as you pull the waistband into place.

He sighs against your ear, as heavy and warm as the rest of him. “Thanks,” Nyx mutters. “You’re a lifesaver.”

The smell of burn ointment and antiseptic all but cover him, burning your nose hairs, and threatening to seep into your clothes.

This is the most human contact you’ve had in a long time. With his arms on your shoulders and yours wrapped around his waist, it’s a strange parody of an embrace. You look up into his pretty blue eyes, not the tattoos under his eyes, and try very hard not to think about the fact that this man is the epitome of too handsome for his own good.

He groans, deep and low in the back of his throat, as he slumps over you. This poor man has truly endured horrible things to have ended up in your care. You wonder if he’s been abandoned, left for dead, or if he simply chose the heroic route to hold the line while everyone else retreated. Does it matter? Nyx Ulric is, for the moment, your problem.

You help him sit back down, even doing him the kindness of fluffing your pillows around him. “You good?”

Tiredly, he grins at you and flaps his hand in your general direction. “Yeah, thanks.” Gods, but he looks like he’s been wrung out of everything and been left broken on the side of the road like trash.

You feel… bad for him. A lifetime of service and loyalty to the crown rewarded with what? Being left for dead on the streets of Insomnia? It’s nothing but a waste. A shameful and pointless waste.

You shake your head and reach down beside your bed. Without looking at him, you crack a bottle of water open and hand it to him. In for a gil, in for a yen, the water you won’t put on his tab. You watch him guzzle the water down, a stray drop trickling down his cheek to dampen his bandages. “You’re welcome.”

Noisily, you clear your throat. “Feel up to eating? Or do you want to go back to sleep?”

“Oh,” he says with a faint laugh. “I could eat.”

Chapter Text

Sleeping in the same bed as Nyx was not happening. Not because you’re afraid that he’ll do something untoward to you while you’re asleep, oh no. Nyx is far too messed up to do anything without hurting himself even more. No, you won’t share the bed because there’s not enough room to sleep safely.

If you could cuddle up with him like you were puppies without the risk of popping his stitches wide open? You’d shove him right up against the back doors of your van.

But you can’t.

Instead, you pop the driver’s seat back as far as you can and make your own impromptu bed for the night. You only need it for a cat nap, and you won’t risk setting back Nyx’s recovery. He’ll bleed all over your only sheets and then you’ll have to use your perfectly good stash of scavenged supplies to try and put him back together again.

This isn’t the worst you’ve done to preserve your next payday.

There’s an old man sitting in your passenger seat.

You know this man. Not in person, no, you’re nowhere near important enough to even be in the same room as this particular old man. You know this man because you haven’t been living in a cave and can recognize him from newspapers.

Why is the king of Lucis in your passenger seat?

You have the sudden urge to sit up properly, adjusting your clothes to look as respectable as you can. “Um. Good evening, Your Majesty.”

It feels like a dream. You’re half-awake and drowning, the world gone somehow stretched out and stagnant. There’s no color, all washed out and hazy at the edges. Is this real? Your every move feels as if you’re against the flow of the infinite beyond, starlight dragging you against the lunar flow.

You are a creature of grim practicality.

This is not the place for you to dawdle.

Regis Lucis Caelum smiles softly at you with the patient indulgence of a grandfather. He glows, the pale blue of clouds in moonlight, somehow soft and sharp like radio static all at once. Real or a figment of your tired imagination? Does it matter?

Regis Lucis Caelum is in your van.

“Ah, what’s this?” His voice is a ghost, a memory, the echo of your father’s disapproval. Why is he here? How did he get here? “Manners from a thief? Will wonders never cease.” The king of Lucis mocks you in your dreams.

You frown, bristling at his words. “Scavenger,” you bite out. “I only take what was left behind as trash.” You don’t steal things that rightfully belong to someone. Even in your dreams, you won’t stand for such an insult.

“And yet,” he says with a low hum, “you’ve stolen something of mine.”

For a moment, you stare uncomprehendingly at the king. Was it the medical supplies? No, those had been from a branded pharmacy. The gas, maybe? Would a king really care about a few gallons of gas when his city was a wreck on the horizon?

“Nyx Ulric was not yours to take.”

What? You can’t even begin to wrap your head around this. “Nyx Ulric… is a person. You don’t own people,” you slowly manage.

He leans toward you, one hand loosely gripping his cane. The smile on his face is somehow comforting despite the topic at hand. “Go on, little thief.” If he means to be encouraging, King Regis does a poor parody of it.

Something looms in the darkness between you. You can feel it, that strange tension that threatens to throw you headlong over a precipice and deep into madness. There isn’t a single part of you that agrees with this man. And, just like that, you’re prepared to throw down against a king.

“If he’s really yours, then you left him to die like a dog.” You snap at him, uncaring of his noble lineage. “Some owner you are. What, did you expect him to fight the entire Niff army by himself? And you’re surprised he ended up being picked up by someone like me?”

He kept right on smiling. “He’s served his purpose.” The proud confidence in Regis’ voice turns your stomach. “His sacrifice means Insomnia did not fall in vain.”

You stare at him, mouth agape, horrified at the words leaving his mouth. “So you just decided he should die? This is how you reward the loyalty of your people?” You shrink away from him as you try to figure out how to run away from this insanity. “If this is how you treat your own, maybe it’s a good thing that Insomnia fell. Lucis is better off without a king who treats his people like less than trash.”

“Interesting.” That damn smile hasn’t so much as cracked. “And you think there is more than a hero’s death left to Nyx Ulric?” His fingers drum on the head of his cane. “You think you, a thief, can find a use for him that the Kings of Lucis could not? Arrogant little thing, aren’t you?”

You open your mouth to tell a king exactly where he can stuff his opinion and he cuts you off with a slam of his cane.

“Very well.” His smile fades and he pins you in place with the force of his stare. This is your king and you will bend the knee. “You who have taken my own into your home, fed and clothed him with no expectation of payment, and treated his wounds according to the laws of eld. To you, I give leave to put him to use. Find his worth, little thief, where we kings could not.”

It feels like a trap. A terrible one, where the expectations are on the floor and the only thing left is for the rug to be pulled out from under your feet. You have no idea what he means. What is the value of a single man? Who determines what he’s worth? A king? A scavenger? It’s all a joke. A laugh in the face of impossible ghosts.

What can you do but nod? He’s the fucking King of Lucis and you’re just a lowly scavenger who survives on the leftover dregs of mankind’s hubris. Who are you to tell him to fuck off? Your eyes narrow as you glare at him. “I don’t need your permission, thanks.”

The King of Lucis smiles at you and inclines his head. “And yet you have it. A stay of execution, so to speak. Be glad, little thief, that you’ve stolen time from the very kings of Lucis.”

You don’t feel glad. If anything, you feel like you’re about to throw up from the anxiety. You can’t tell if he’s giving Nyx to you like a wayward puppy or saddling you with him like an anchor around your neck. Either way, Nyx is yours according to the word of the last reigning King of Lucis. Well, there’s still Prince Noctis. If he’s still alive.

A tiny shred of optimistic patriotism hopes Prince Noctis is alive.

As long as the prince is alive, there’s still hope that everything hasn’t gone completely to shit. The last King of Lucis is in your passenger seat and the last prince is off somewhere in the wilds. That’s hope for you, a thing with teeth that will rip her way through your carefully organized life like a hurricane.

He smiles at you still, soft and kind, in a way that belies that awful thing that has happened to the world as you know it. “I look forward to what you make of this, little thief.”

The dawn rises on May 17th with all its usual grace. That’s to say that dawn sends searing sunbeams across the dash and right into your poor eyes. You hiss, try to turn away from them, bury your face into your pillow, and hiss all the harder when all you succeed at doing is falling out of your seat. The gear shift digs into your hip and now you’re hissing from an all new kind of pain and indignation.

There’s a soft sound, like a stifled laugh, from the back of your van. It cuts off into a pained groan and, just like that, you remember the man in your bed. The very injured, probably going to die soon if you don’t do anything, man in your bed. His breathing, loud enough you can hear it from the driver’s seat, sounds pinched and thin. Like a balloon struggling to fill and then hissing out of pinprick holes.

You are not a doctor, but you know that can’t be a good sign.

“Shit.” You curse, low in your throat, and scramble to your feet. “Don’t you die on me now, Nyx Ulric!” Not after all you’ve done to keep him alive. You’re about as graceful as a freshly hatched chocobo, all long legs that don’t know which way is left or forward, lurching your way to the back of your van. You snatch up the trash bag of bandages and antiseptics as you go.

You haven’t the faintest clue what you’re supposed to do or even how long he has left. Will you be helping or hurting him? Does it matter? But as long as Nyx is in your van, you’re responsible for him.

Your strange dream of the King of Lucis aside, Nyx is your problem until you can find someone in the Crownsguard to take him off your hands. And even that’s on a voluntary basis.

Nyx makes a strange rattling sound that has all the cadence of a laugh but none of the joy. He watches you with a pinched face, eyes squinting, and lips parted for his tongue to slip out like a panting dog. Beneath all those blood-stained and formerly pristine bandages, the man looks two steps away from the grave.

He was perfectly fine when you went to sleep.

He sure as hell isn’t now.

You dump the trash bag’s contents at the foot of your bed, uncaring of the way some of it spills to the floor. Your sheets are going to need to be burned after this, so you don’t particularly care about the mess as you grab a bottle of some kind of alcohol and dump it all over your hands. If he’s wheezing while he breathes, there’s a good chance that his insides are trying to become his outsides. Adding an infection on top of everything else probably will kill him. Though, at this point, anything will kill him.

Your fingers sting as unknown cuts make themselves known. But you don’t have the luxury of time to think about it. Not when he can’t breathe. You’re not a doctor, but every six-year-old from here to Shiva’s frozen tits knows that people die without air.

Nyx weakly tries to bat you away as you start stripping the bandages from his chest with still-dripping hands. “Stop,” he tries, voice clicking and hissing in a way that makes your stomach drop somewhere around your boots. “Pocket,” he forces out. “Hi-potion.”

Hi-potion? The can of weird drugs? Maybe it’s some weird Crownsguard emergency drug cocktails. Not illegal, but surely too strong for the commercial pharmaceutical market. He’s dying and you have no idea how to stop it. At least this is… something. You scramble, almost lunging, to the bag that has his cut-up clothes.

“Got it!” Triumphantly, you brandish the can in his general direction. You all but fall to your knees on the floor beside your bed and pop the tab on the can. Whatever is in the can glows, smells like what you’d imagine was the color green, and definitely is not for human consumption. “Now what? Do I just dump it on?”

Nyx’s eyes crinkle at the corners and he raises his less injured arm. He crooks his fingers at you, middle and pointer sticking oddly together, for you to hand the can over. “Drink it.”

You stare at him, uncomprehending, for a moment too long. His pained wheeze knocks you out of any kind of deeper thought. If the Crownsguard wants to drink the weird glowing drugs? You aren’t going to stop him. This man is built different and, for all you know, runs on magic and sheer willpower.

“Okay. Sure.” You’re pretty sure this is the weirdest thing you’re ever going to do for this man, but you help him hold the can to his lips and drink.

Nyx gulps it down like he’ll die if he doesn’t. Little dribbles of it run down the sides of his face where his lips can’t quite hold the liquid. His eyes are shut tight and he looks as if he’d rather be drinking anything else.

You watch in morbid fascination as the hi-potion sinks into his exposed injuries. Where you failed to wrap, unable to get the bandages to curve around his mouth and jaw, the hi-potion leaves strange trails of healed flesh. It’s impossible. A single drop speeds up the healing process from months to moments right before your eyes.

He still has scars, patches of burned skin with lightning all but writ on his bones, but Nyx Ulric no longer looks like he’s going to keel over and kick the bucket in the back of your van. He still needs a doctor. When he breathes, there’s still that strange clicking.

Nyx gives you the ghost of a smile as you help him lower the now empty can from his mouth. “Thanks,” he croaks out. He sounds exhausted beyond words and his eyelashes flutter as he tries to stay awake.

“Don’t mention it.” You can’t look at him, this fainting princess of a man. This close, you can see the shape of his jaw beneath the bandages and the burns are doing nothing to diminish his attractiveness. “I’ll put it on your tab.”

His eyes drift shut as he lazily snorts and immediately regrets it.

You have got to get this man out of your van before you go insane.

Chapter Text

Nyx Ulric is going to drive you completely insane. When he’s not sleeping, he’s watching you. You refuse to think about the only time he spoke to you (about needing to take a leak, of all things) or about your morning spent manhandling him (to rebandage all of those burns). No, you would rather think about how much longer it will take you to reach Lestallum and some doctor to foist Nyx off on.

Finding the Crownsguard can be done after you drop him off, dreams of kings be damned. You’re not stealing him, just transporting him like living cargo. Despite, and you’re aware of the hypocrisy, swearing that you will never take passengers. The joke’s on you now.

You’ve unhitched your shitty little boat in favor of speed. This close to the fallen city, the only people likely to find it would be Niffs and hunters. Neither of whom would care a jot about some random little dinky boat. And if they do? There’s nowhere for them to take it.

What matters right now is how fast you can barrel down the empty highway to Lestallum. Every minute you shave off your usual time is another minute Nyx can spend in the loving care of a licensed medical professional. Possibly a squad of them. Nurses, doctors, a surgeon to make that wheezing sound stop. Someone who knows what they’re doing.

You have no idea what in the world was in that can, but it’s probably the only thing keeping Nyx from shuffling off the mortal coil. But he’s still breathing and so you have hope. You suffer no delusions about his chances anywhere other than Lestallum. Without Lucis, Lestallum is the last true bastion of civilization on the continent.

You grip the steering wheel with white knuckles as you stare down the highway. The only things that matter are your foot on the gas, how high the speedometer goes, and how empty your gas tank is. You’ve enough in the tank and pilfered gas cans to get you from Entethina Haven to the city limits, that much you know for certain.

It won’t be a smooth ride and you’ll end it on fumes, but you’ll make it to Lestallum before sunset.

Hopefully.

You are very, very good at your job.

People can trash talk your chosen profession all they want. The fact remains that scavengers are, generally speaking, in the business of getting the most use out of the smallest amount possible of any given resource. You have been at this so long that you haven’t the faintest idea how to survive in a world without war, filled to the brim with bounty. Cities like Insomnia, self-sufficient places that make things, are the bane of your very existence.

You are, at your very core, a creature of habit and the quiet art of self-sufficiency at all costs. Nyx Ulric is an unplanned burden, one you cannot wait to be rid of. Maybe that’s why you’re so desperate to be rid of him. You're not doing this out of some great moral calling, no matter what anyone wants to say behind your back.

And you know damn well that people are talking about you behind your back. You’re a lot of things, but deaf isn’t one of them.

You make it to Lestallum just as the sun begins to dip behind the horizon, your van’s fuel gauge blinking empty, and your unplanned guest still breathing. This is the kind of entrance you want nothing more to avoid, screeching to a halt and yelling out your window for help.

The poor bastard at the gates has no idea what to do with himself. Not that you can blame him. Usually, the sight of your familiar, dust-covered van is usually heralded by a veritable treasure trove of scavenged goods, not this. Your jalopy of a camper van with its sun-bleached mint green paint and its dusty rose doors is never even remotely related to emergency situations.

Well, until now.

You’ve got your window rolled down, one hand on the steering wheel, the other slapping at the metal door, and your upper body hanging out so that you can yell all the better into the quiet dusk. “I need a doctor!” More like Nyx needs a doctor, but it’s all the same in the end.

The man looks like a confused chocobo. You’ve seen him a few times before. Sold him things, too. “Echo?” Gods but he even sounds confused. “Are you okay?”

The look you give this idiot could probably peel paint. That’s perhaps the dumbest question you’ve ever heard as an actual follow-up to a shouted plea to a doctor. “Doctor,” you bark at him. “Where’s the damn doctor?”

“He’s in the clinic! Down the road, second left, red door!”

You slide back into the passenger seat and plop down hard enough that you almost bite your tongue. Nyx makes a sleepy questioning wheeze from the back and you’re pretty sure that people shouldn’t crackle when they breathe. Worse still, the sound has just gotten worse and worse as the day went on. “Hang on,” you grunt as you shift your van into gear.

The guard opens the gate just in time for your van to rumble through. You cut it close, almost running the idiot down as you pass by. He yells something at you but you don’t particularly care to pay attention.

You also don’t care about speed limits within a residential area.

What matters is that this man doesn’t die in your bed.

This close to dusk, most people prefer being indoors with the lights on. All the better to keep the daemons at bay. That small comfort keeps people sane. And, more importantly, keeps you from running over someone’s child as you drift around the turn to the clinic.

You are not a great driver or human being, but even you don’t want to run over little Suzie or Tommy when you go around a corner.

There’s not even fumes left in your van when you finally make it to the red clinic doors. The van keeps rolling along solely on its own momentum, nothing more or less. You guide it to a smooth stop with careful presses of the brakes and turns of the wheel. This is the most delicate you have ever been with your driving and your passenger isn’t even coherent enough to notice.

You put your van in park and throw on the emergency brake for good measure. Bolting to the back, you scramble to get your wagon set up and the unconscious man into it. He’s pale, shivering in spite of the blanket you threw over him when you used up the second gas can, and beads of sweat roll down his bare skin.

Nyx Ulric is not doing well in the slightest.

The wheels of your wagon clatter against asphalt and concrete as you pull it behind you at as close as you can get to a run. You don’t bother knocking on the door, kicking it open with your booted foot. Your heel makes a crescent-shaped mark in rubber and dirt that someone will need to scrub out later and you don’t care about that. “I need help!” You shout loud enough to wake the dead.

“What in the—,” an old man comes yelling out of the back, the door banging into the wall as he enters the clinic’s front lobby. It’s a quaint place, charming with its lace tablecloths and little potted plants, and it’s clearly this man’s home as well as his place of business. “The hell is wrong with you?”

“Not me. Him.”

The doctor looks like a nice man, grandfatherly almost, in his lab coat and beige jumper. Just a wizened slip of a man, wrinkled as a raisin In the sun, with a tiny little pair of glasses balanced on his nose. If there was ever a stereotype of a small-town doctor, he was it.

You don’t care about what he looks like, either. What you do care about is that the old man is a doctor in what looks like an empty but fully stocked clinic. “Can you help or not?” You’re not sure you have the resources to get Nyx to another clinic if he can’t.

He scoffs at you and pokes his glasses up his nose with two fingers. “Girl… boy, look you little upstart. I’ve been a doctor for longer—.”

Nyx wheezes in his sleep, a painful sound of misery, and the doctor shuts his mouth mid-complaint.

“Bring him in the back. Quickly!” For such a little old man, the doctor moves rather expeditiously when the need arises. He beckons you to pull the wagon into the back where his treatment room is. While you pull, the doctor ducks to the side and begins preparing a long line of glittering metal surgical implements.

You all but drag Nyx out of the wagon, bending at the knees to haul him onto the examination table. His legs dangle from the edge for a brief moment before you shove him bodily over. Once he’s there? You haven’t the faintest what you’re supposed to do now.

The old man looks at you with something close to pity. “Now get out. I’ve got work to do.”

The waiting feels like dying, or something close to it. You sit, perched on the edge of a surprisingly comfortable settee, with your booted foot tapping against the plush beige carpet. Staring, just staring, down the hallway toward the treatment room. Waiting, just waiting, because it’s all you can do.

You got him to a doctor. That was the only thing you needed to do and you’ve done it. Job’s done, show’s over.

So why are you still here?

Waiting for Nyx.

You don’t know why. It’s not as if you’re distracted by a pretty face and thinking with your cock. You haven’t got one. Nyx is pretty, as anyone with eyes can tell, but he’s not pretty enough for this. This is… pining. There’s no point or profit to this.

So why are you doing it?

Hours of waiting and for what? Some half-dead Crownsguard that the king gave you in a dream? This is some kind of useless madness that serves no purpose. And still, still you wait. For proof of life, death, or something in between.

You wait so long that the sun begins to break over the horizon in tender fingers of red and gold on the windowpanes. So long that your back and knees begin to ache and you forget that they’re aching. And still, you sit there.

Waiting.

May 18th has well and truly begun by the time the doctor emerges from the back. He wipes his hands dry on a soft white towel, shadows under his eyes, and the doctor sighs as he sees you. There’s blood down his front, splatters of it, that cuts off at his waist. “Still here? I’ve got good news and bad news for you.”

You lurch to your feet, wobbling as you rise, to stare wide-eyed at him. “Is— is he dead?” Every part of you hopes that isn’t the case. You’ve put far too much time and effort into this for Nyx to die at the end.

Not like this. Not on the clinic table.

The doctor grunts and stares back at you as if you’re stupid. “Dead? Him? Astrals, no. That man’s stubborn as a coeurl.” He shakes his head again. “Burned up, electrocuted, hole in his lung—still kicking. So to speak. That’s the good news, miss. Mister. The hell do I call you?”

You let out a heavy breath you didn’t know that you were holding. Nyx is still alive. All of this was worth it. “Echo. Not a miss or mister. Just Echo,” you sigh out. “But if he’s alive, what’s the bad news?”

“I’m going to level with you, Echo, because you seem like the level-headed type.” The doctor finishes wiping his hands and gestures for you to sit back down. “Living is the easy part. I patched up what I could, mind you, but there’s still an awful lot wrong with him. Recovering is going to be the hard part. Well, that and the bill.”

You hiss through your teeth. Of course, there’s a bill. But recovery? What are you supposed to do about that? Can you even hand him over to the Crownsguard if he’s still recovering? “How much?” You clear your throat noisily. “The bill, I mean.”

This part? This part you know how to do.

Chapter Text

Nyx Ulric owes you so much for all of the things you’ve done for him without even a word of thanks in return. You’ve gone through a broken city, driven through the wilds, dragged him to a doctor, and then had to haggle with said doctor. Granted, you were good for the payment, but it was the principle of the thing.

If you were less scrupulous about scavenging, you would have had an entire warehouse full of nothing but junk. Since you actually stock nothing but useful items and special requests, the doctor’s payment wasn’t all that terrible. Expensive, yes, but you won’t go out of business to afford Nyx’s treatment. That doesn’t mean that you have to like it.

He even managed to slip delivery into the negotiations.

Your van full of medical supplies will be half-empty by the time you manage to leave and go back to your apartment. But Nyx is alive and will remain alive. You keep telling yourself that as you load another trash bag into your wagon. You’re tired, cranky, and you want nothing more than to go home and curl up in bed.

You leave your phone number just in case the Crownsguard don’t come to fetch their wayward fellow, and that’s the end of that.

The world goes to shit in the wake of Insomnia’s fall.

On the other hand, your business has never done better. You spend most of your days driving to and from your super secret entrance into the city. Slowly, you scavenge your way through as many stores as you can. People need the basics and you are more than happy to oblige.

More and more daemons begin to rear their ugly little heads and you are beginning to think that you might need to partner up with a hunter soon if you want to keep picking Insomnia’s corpse clean. It’ll cost you, but it might be worth it in the long run. You can’t reap the benefits of your work if you’re dead.

Your shotgun and crowbar have never seen this much use in the entire time you’ve had them. At this rate, though, you’re likely to run out of shells before you finish scavenging. The daemons are growing stronger.

Every day there are more of them, oozing that cursed miasma from their very pores. They spread darkness wherever they spawn, drowning the sun itself from the heavens. Daylight grows ever shorter and the night ever deadlier. The world teeters on a knife’s edge, seconds before a fall.

But there are whispers of hope still.

They say the Last Prince of Lucis is still alive. That the Chosen King of legend has come to save them all. Noctis and his loyal retainers are out there, somewhere, fighting to change the fate of the star. You have to believe that, believe in him, because without that scrap of hope there is nothing.

People may call you a vulture behind your back, but you have no interest in a life spent picking over a miasma-riddled corpse. You do it now, in Insomnia, because the pickings are still fat and plump. Soon, you won’t be able to do it safely. And then what kind of life would you have to lead?

No, you’d rather split the profits with a trustworthy hunter than lose out on this prize. The only problem there is… well, you’re considered to be antisocial on your best days. Who is there for you to trust? You don’t exactly have a reliable friends list that you can flip through on a whim.

But you drive all the way back to your apartment in Lestallum with a van full of canned food and random grocery store finds. You’ve got a cut on the side of your face that stings and not a single shotgun shell at your disposal. The only thing you want to do is go home and sleep in your own bed.

Your apartment isn’t spectacularly large, but the storefront beneath it is what really mattered when you picked it. Most of the time, you keep the place locked up tighter than an Altissian nun. Once a week, you unlock the doors and it’s a free-for-all. Otherwise? You’re more likely to be found peddling your wares from the back of your van in the market.

The lights in your apartment are on. It’s strange, because you made sure every appliance but your fridge were turned off and every switch in the off position before you left. You refuse to pay a bill for things you aren’t even there to use.

You park your van behind the building like normal and take the back stairs two at a time, your crowbar in one hand and keys in the other. Either you forgot a light or someone has decided to squat in your apartment, but you’re ready for whichever case. You unlock the back door as quietly and quickly as you can, slipping into your own apartment like a ghost.

Someone is sprawled over your ratty old couch like they own it, propping their booted feet up on your scavenged coffee table.

“Hey! Get the fuck off my couch—,” you start yelling at the stranger, cutting yourself off when the stranger turns their head to look at you.

Nyx godsdamned Ulric is in your apartment.

He looks much better than he had when you saw him last. Not that it’s hard to look better than a soon-to-be corpse, but Nyx looks vastly better than when you saw him two weeks ago. The bandages are gone, injuries scabbed and scarring, and he’s even changed clothes. Good for him.

“Get your boots off of the furniture.” You slap the bottom of his boot and relax, no longer worried for your safety. He won’t hurt you. Not as messed up as he is. “What the hell are you doing here?”

He snorts before obliging you. His boots thud against your thin carpets and he rolls his eyes slightly as he pouts. “Happy now?”

You stare at him in a mix of exasperation and curiosity. He lists slightly to one side, right eye staring steadily at you as the left might as well be looking through you, and he has a familiar knife dangling from his right hand. You have no idea how he got in, but he certainly robbed you while you were gone. “Ecstatic. Now get out.”

When he smiles at you, only the right side of his face really moves. “But you just got here.” Now that you’re paying proper attention, you can see that the left side of his face sags slightly and he’s slurring his words. “I wanted to thank you.”

Huh, that’s different. You blink rapidly at him in your confusion. “You’re welcome?” If he’s here to pay you back for saving him, you’re all for it. “I don’t take yen,” you bluntly point out. Nobody outside of Insomnia does, so this shouldn’t be much of a surprise.

Nyx nods. “Figured as much. How much do I owe you?” He watches your mouth like a hawk and is ever so careful to shape his words just so. But the randomly loud and slurred bits give the damage away.

You’ve peddled your wares to enough elderly people to know all of the tricks. Nyx Ulric, rescued Crownsguard, is deaf. Probably not completely, but enough to change the way he interacts with people. On top of that, his facial contortions speak to a stroke.

“More than you can afford.” You get the feeling that the Crownsguard haven’t exactly put him back on the active payroll. “Income-based payment plans are probably going to be your best bet. Unless you have something to trade that I might actually want.”

Nyx’s eye narrows as he stares at you. “How much do I owe?”

You pull your battered notebook from your back pocket, flipping rapidly to the relevant sections, and you begin adding up the current street values of all the supplies you spent getting him back from Insomnia alone. “Five hundred and twenty-two thousand gil for transportation and medical fees.” You were even kind enough to round it down to the nearest whole thousand. It’s still a staggeringly large amount to pay at once.

Nyx tries and fails to whistle. “Damn, that’s a lot.”

“Told you,” you say with a shrug as you tuck your notebook back into your pocket. “Get the Crownsguard to foot the bill.”

He winces at that. “Ah. I’m not actually in the Crownsguard.”

You sit down on the side of your coffee table and put your head in your hands. Never in the history of your life have you ever scavenged something this incredibly worthless. He can’t afford it, has no government organization backing him financially, and is so messed up that he shouldn’t even be out of sight of a medical professional yet.

In short: you will never recoup this investment.

You sit there, head in your hands, as you begin to laugh nigh hysterically. “Oh, fuck me,” you sob out. “Of course you aren’t.” The only thing you can do is laugh and laugh so hard you cry. You have made a terrible mistake and there’s no coming back from this.

Nyx clears his throat awkwardly. “Yeah, I’ll just… come back later. With something to trade.”

You hiccup. “Sure. You do that.” There’s nothing in all of Insomnia or Lucis that this man can find in the space of a single evening that is worth that much. Honestly? You’re just going to take this as a learning moment. Never, absolutely ever, trade in live cargo.

Lesson learned.

Your morning routine hasn’t changed since you got your lease. Wake up, shower, eat something pre-packaged, down enough caffeine to jumpstart a chocobo, brush your teeth, and then start doing inventory of the goods in your van. It’s a tried and true method to your madness.

You’re looking forward to doing your inventory this time. After all, you now have a massive investment loss to recover from. But, if there’s anything scavengers are good at, it’s making the most out of nothing but scraps and leftovers. In your case, your scraps are a whole lot of cans of vegetables and questionable meat products.

Except when you make it to your van? It’s empty. There isn’t so much as a scrap of cardboard remaining. Even your bed sheets are gone. You can be forgiven the unholy screech you make at the discovery.

Something whizzes past your ear and space distorts.

A warm arm wraps around your middle and you’re swiftly shoved behind a broad, black-clothed back. The man gives a familiar-sounding grunt as he defends you from who-knows-what. “Where’s the fire?”

What in the actual fuck is happening? More importantly, when did Nyx get here and how? You have not had nearly enough caffeine to be dealing with all of this nonsense. But you’ve been robbed, so you take all of your questions and concerns regarding one Nyx Ulric and shove them to the back of your mind to be dealt with later.

“Somebody stole everything out of my van!” If he’s going to be here, knives at the ready, then you’re going to get some use out of him.

He relaxes, laughing almost nervously, and tucks his knife away who knows where. “Oh. No, that was me.” Nyx turns on his booted heel and grins sheepishly and lopsidedly at you. “You said I needed to trade something of equal value and that I could do installment plans.”

You resist the urge to strangle him. Owing you money does not mean show up in the wee hours of the morning and move things. It doesn’t make any kind of sense. “What does that have to do with robbing me?” You’re careful to speak evenly, your mouth moving wide to enunciate. You refuse to give him any chance of saying he didn’t understand.

He straightens with a shrug. “I don’t have anything to trade. I figured you could use some help with manual labor.” The unspoken insinuation that, if you don’t take the offer, this will be the only way you’ll ever recover your losses.

And yes, fine, you could use the help. You had just been considering how to find and hire a trustworthy hunter to deal with the increasing daemon population. It’s as if the gods themselves have decided to make amends for the sheer irritation of the situation. You scowl at him, teeth grinding as you think it over.

“Fine,” you snap out. “But only if you can prove that you’ll actually be of any use.”

How much physical exertion could a man fresh from being one foot in the grave even do?

Chapter Text

As it turns out, one man has the capacity to do an awful lot when he set his mind to it. When faced with your disaster of a store room, filled with random bits and bobs, Nyx Ulric didn’t back down. It was as if he relished the challenge, no matter what shape it came in.

Your van was empty, the contents set on your rickety shelves in a way that made actual sense to a casual onlooker. Bandages were with gauze and tape, right above the bottles of various antiseptics, and below the boxes of adhesive bandages. Across the way were bottles of painkillers and other medicines.

All in all, Nyx had managed to turn your pharmacy haul into quite the stock. It was almost as if the shelves had been teleported from one viable store to your scavenged madness. You really had nothing to complain about.

You’ve never had an employee before, but this one might just spoil you for any future ones. Nyx is quiet, efficient, and as long as you ignore his love of playing with knives in his downtime? He’s a fantastic employee you never asked for but somehow managed to receive in the dead of night. There’s no real reason for you to ask him to leave.

He hovers in the corner of your eye, waiting for the final verdict. His arms are crossed behind his back with military precision as he stands at ease, the ghost of a grin managing to only tweak the right side of his face. Honestly, if this is how he wants to pay you back for everything you’ve spent on him? It’s a win-win scenario for you.

That doesn’t mean you have to be gracious about it.

You’re allowed to frown, hem, and haw about accepting the terms he’s offering. There’s a part of you that recognizes the fact that people might start muttering about the fact that you would look like you had hired eye candy, taking horrible advantage of an awful situation to have some sweet thing around. The scars on his body really don’t detract from the bulk of him, that nigh statuesque look he exudes without even trying.

Mostly, it feels as if you’ve adopted (though in this case it feels more like you’ve been adopted by) a forcibly retired military hound. You wonder, somewhat uncharitably, if he’ll chase it if you throw a stick. His eyes dart back and forth beneath furrowed brows and you can feel the tension from across the room. You drag your verdict out as long as you possibly can.

“Oh, for Astral’s sake.” You run your hand through your hair with a frown and a heavy sigh. “Fine. You can work here to pay me back.”

He exhales, heavy with the sudden release of that tension. “Good. What else needs doing?”

Everything. Anything. Your storeroom is an exercise in organized chaos at best and a horrifying mess at the worst. If he’s essentially willing to suffer through your terrible organization for, what might as well be, free? Oh, you’re the last person to stop him. But you hem and haw, make a great big spectacle of thinking things over, and give up.

“Inventory.” You smile at him, more feral than anything else. “Counts and organizing of everything in the back.” If there’s anything that active people like Nyx Ulric hate, it’s inventory. You’ll run him off, back to the Crownsguard, by the power of boring repetition and dust bunnies.

Inventory does not, in fact, put Nyx Ulric off. He limped his way along your storeroom like he belonged there. Your first and only employee looked at your supplies, cracked his knuckles, and started organizing as if his life depended on it. Meanwhile, you left to go eat your body weight in frozen waffles and canned coffee. You thought that he’d give up after the first hour.

You thought wrong.

Nyx Ulric did not look particularly pleased that he’s stuck on inventory duty but, by the Astrals, he was going to do it to perfection. He took over your entire downstairs, slowly emptying shelf after shelf to then put everything back on a different shelf. You watched him squint at expiration dates and cycle cans based on what he found, muttering under his breath about how many canned vegetables you have in stock.

He kept at it for days, making labels and writing down counts in one of your spare notebooks. You feed him exactly once before he kicked you out of your own kitchen and took over cooking. Neither of you were professional chefs, but at least Nyx knew how to make very basic Galahdian cuisine versus the paltry recipes you’ve put together. You won’t burn water, but you will burn bacon.

Nyx, still a stranger, slept on your couch. He took his painkillers grumpily, and primarily when you reminded him, but he was on the mend. You supposed redoing your stockroom counted as some form of physical therapy at least. He didn’t complain about anything when he thought you could hear.

After four days, Nyx was finished.

He stood there, proud as could be and smug beyond that, and watched you go over his work. “And?” His voice was strained, raspy, and hoarse. When you opened your mouth to answer, Nyx turned his head slightly to the left as best as he could with his many scabs and scars in the way. “Good enough?”

It is, in fact, better than good. You can find everything like this and see what you’re low on with just a glance. While he was sorting, you were selling in the market and now you can see that you need to go back to Insomnia and pick at the corpse until your stocks overflow.

“Good enough,” you begrudgingly agree. “I need more soap.” Of all the things for you to be low on, why soap? Your pharmacy run had been fantastic and you could probably use more canned food (you can never have too many cans of food), but you only have two bars of soap left. Two bars of soap will not keep the little old ladies at the market appeased.

You try very hard to keep the little old ladies appeased.

Little old ladies in the market form the backbone of your customer base. You have a list of their usual orders carefully written down in a series of little notebooks and even more carefully stored on rickety shelves in your bedroom. Old Mrs. Winston, who runs the laundry, is almost due for another soap order. Two measly bars will not even remotely fulfill her order. You need soap, laundry detergent, and a whole pile of other things that you just don’t have.

The only place you can think of to scavenge so many things on such short notice is a grocery store in Insomnia. Insomnia, where the daemons are crawling out of the woodwork and oozing miasma everywhere you could ever want to go. But, you have your secret route and all the confidence in the world that you can get in and out mostly safely.

Nyx all but perks up at the mention of doing something, anything, that isn’t inventory. He would probably look more intimidating if there wasn’t a bandage falling over his eye, but he puffs up his chest. “Where are we going?”

You blink at him. The man looks like a stiff breeze will knock him over and you distinctly remember desperately struggling to keep him alive not even three weeks prior. “I’m going to Insomnia. You are going back to the Crownsguard or wherever you came from.” There’s no way you’re taking him anywhere but back to his sickbed.

He plays idly with a little ball of fire and smirks lopsidedly at you. “Sure,” he rasps out. Nyx Ulric looks as if he’s as likely to follow your instructions as he is to sprout a tail.

“Absolutely not.” You are his boss now. Nyx has to follow your orders.

"Get your boots off of my dash.”

He looks over at you, his ridiculously huge knife balanced on his lap as he sharpens the edge with one hand, and slowly drops his dirty boots from the dash to the passenger floor board. Nyx doesn’t stop his weapon maintenance. He drops the passenger seat back instead and runs the whetstone up and down the knife’s edge until he’s satisfied.

The rasp of metal against stone grates on your nerves almost as much as the fact that, once again, you have a passenger. At least he’s awake this time and not bleeding to death. You’re not sure if this is an improvement or not. Regardless of your opinions on the matter, Nyx has managed to weasel his way onto your scavenging trip. Well, if you could call ‘breaking into your van in the middle of the night and refusing to budge’ as weaseling anyway. He’s far stronger and taller than you, his injuries be damned, so you lost that fight before it even began.

You tried getting your revenge by playing the most annoyingly bubbly pop radio station you could find but that backfired spectacularly on you. Nyx, as it turns out, can barely hear and has just been reading your lips and matching the cadence of vibrations to the shape of your mouth. The only person you annoy with that is yourself.

He doesn’t even have the decency to be an awful passenger. Nyx doesn’t fiddle with the radio, make annoying small talk, or try to dissuade you from your path. The man doesn’t even have the grace to scream or panic at how you drive. Sure, he gripped the passenger door with white knuckles and a locked jaw for the first few hours, but Nyx adjusted rapidly. He seems to consider this as a challenge of some kind and is just gamely going with this.

It’s enough to make you wonder just what he got up to in service to the crown that he can relax under your employ. And then you think better of that train of thought in order to focus on what’s really important: breaking back into Insomnia. You’ve got three full boxes of shotgun shells rattling behind you and you redid the tape grip on your crowbar in preparation for the unholy numbers that await you, but you aren’t sure that will be enough.

Maybe that’s why you didn’t protest as much as you should have.

Even a half-dead Crownsguard is far better than you could ever dream of being when it comes to daemon eradication. You stole him, fair and square, so you might as well put him to use. He’s already finished your stockroom. What else could you possibly use him for? Certainly not haggling at the market.

The little old ladies would eat this poor man alive. Did he even understand the concept of bartering? You get the feeling that he’d just be tutted and fretted over, his cheeks pinched, and all manner of photos of young relatives paraded under his nose. The man’s name should be listed in the phonebook under Harmless, Mostly.

You putter along down the highway in your dearly beloved jalopy, doing your absolute best to ignore your passenger. The last thing you want is to look at his judgmental face as you show him the way to your secret entrance. You don’t want to look at his stupidly pretty face at all if you can help it.

“Put this over your eyes.” You hold up a length of dark fabric you think might have been a dark purple necktie before you had started using it to wrap around your travel cups to keep the condensation from ruining what remained of your van’s upholstery.

His tongue clicks against his teeth and he makes a grim rattling sound as he inhales sharply. “Didn’t know it was that kind of job,” Nyx wheezes out. He takes the tie from your outstretched hand, his fingers brushing against yours, and you watch him tie it deftly around his eyes with what passes for a smug smirk around his injuries.

Your eyes roll heavenward without your input. “Don’t be gross.” Angrily, you shift gears with a mighty yank and a scowl. “You’re pretty, but I don’t run that kind of business.”

As if you would stoop so low as to get into the business of human trafficking or anything else as morally bankrupt.

Chapter Text

You have never been more wrong about another person before in your entire life. If anything, your first impression had been right and you should apologize to this man for daring to think otherwise. Yes, he's gravely injured and on the mend. Yes, he's easy on the eyes.

But, for all the facts you have learned about him, one very important thing is unequivocally and inconceivably true: Nyx Ulric is built different in ways you are not prepared to handle.

To be perfectly frank, you're not sure anyone is. You're beginning to see why one of the Kings of Lucis gave Nyx to you in the first place. If you were dead? You wouldn't want to share your afterlife with him either. It's like Nyx has no idea of what it means to be incapacitated.

He has one functioning arm and, by all that is good and holy, Nyx is going to use it to kill every daemon from here to wherever you decide to scavenge from next. You're not even sure if this man is aware of the concept of physics. He's certainly ignoring enough aspects of it that you don't even have the words to begin to understand what he's even doing. Whatever it is, it's so effective that you're rapidly beginning to rethink how much you're willing to let him get involved in your business.

You aren't the most patriotic person, but even you know what the King's Gift looks like. Nyx has magic, that much you already knew, but what he's doing is far beyond what the standard rank and file should be capable of. This is what only two groups of people should be capable of: the Crownsguard and the Kingsglaive. Not just any Crownsguard, but the kind that end of so skilled that they end up with fancy titles like "the King's Shield" and "the Immortal."

It's the ease at which he uses his knives that cinches it for you.

How in the name of every Astral did you end up with a member of the Kingsglaive warping around, stabbing daemons in the face, and gleefully escorting you around as you picked the corpse of Insomnia clean? Isn't your business some shade of betrayal of everything Nyx swore to uphold in order to get his fancy magical powers? Yes, you were given the other end of his leash by a king's ghost, but shouldn't he feel some kind of guilt for this?

This may not be his home (that Galahdian accent gives that away all too quickly), but it is certainly the home of the man he swore to serve. Shouldn't he be trying to talk you out of bustling in and out of various stores with your little wagon? You're stealing, right in front of his face, and he's cheerfully escorting you around instead of arresting you. It doesn't make any sense.

You fill your van to the brim with no regrets and stop to look at the time on your phone. With Nyx's help? You could probably start transferring everything from this shop to the maintenance office that serves as your secret base. It would be better to start doing it now, before the daemon population increases so much that not even having a Kingsglaive as an escort will keep you safe.

Nyx makes the impossible look easy. He just limps along beside you and throws his blade at whichever daemon is stupid enough to pop its head out of the woodwork. It's like you've picked up some action movie hero as your temporary employee. The bastard doesn't even have the courtesy to break his stride. If it wasn't for the fine sheen of sweat across his brow, you might have suspected this was just an act.

He zips around killing daemons and returns to your side with a quirk of his lip that you just know was meant to be a reassuring smile. Sometimes he even tosses some rare product of his kill into your cart before he does some complicated motion with his wrist and sheathing his knife.

Sweet Shiva's tits, it's like this man was crafted in a master artisan's workroom just to drive you insane. There's no reason for this man to be this attractive and competent otherwise. And he'd just been thrown away by his king and master as useless when, clearly, there was plenty of use left in him.

This infuriatingly impossible man is yours now. He had his chance to go back to his fellows and he chose not to. You're responsible for him in every way that matters and a few more besides. Willingly, even, for you gave him every chance to leave and instead he came back to you.

You'd be a fool not to accept such a willing employee. Yes, you've technically paid his wages for the next five years by getting him desperately needed medical attention. He owes you. But you could get your money back from him in any other way than letting him carve through daemons in your name.

Not that watching him commit violence is boring.

Far from it, in fact.

Your van is full to the point of bursting with scavenged loot and you barely have room for yourself, let alone a passenger. You stare from the seat with its buckled-in flats of baby formula to Nyx and back again. "I'm not leaving that for the maggots," you say flatly.

"It's fine," he replies with a shrug of one shoulder. "There's room on the roof."

Built. Different.

Slowly, you're beginning to come to terms with the fact that Nyx is going to always choose the option that no one sane ever would. Ride on top of your van as you blitz merrily along with your usual reckless abandon? Sane people would rather walk back to the maintenance shaft. Nyx Ulric is many things, you've realized, but sane is not one of them.

"Okay then," you slowly begin, blinking even slower back at him. "Don't fall off." There's a rack on the top of your van that you rarely use (you're too short to bother) so at least he'll have something to cling to. With his injured arms. His tired and still healing arms. Shit. He's all but guaranteed to go flying.

He just gives you that damnable lopsided grin of his before warping his way onto the top of the van. You can hear him getting settled above you, laying out flat, before he slaps the roof for you to go.

Why the fuck not. This is your life now, you suppose. It could be worse. This way, you don't think about losing any cargo and you can keep maximizing how much you normally dream about hauling on a single trip. The more you can haul, the more things you can scavenge and sell to a desperate populace. You don't need all of that income, but you wonder if you can make enough of a nest egg to retire.

Your hair isn't even going gray and you're talking about retirement. What has your life become? Is this the kind of madness you get to look forward to when Nyx Ulric is in it? It's not a bad trade-off.

It's a terrible trade-off. You wonder if you can take him back to the store like he's a broken toaster. Customer service, may you have a refund for this madman, please and thank you? But he's a human being, so you can't. Oh, if you could, you would.

Nyx is very good at finding emergency havens to sleep in, so there's that handled. No daemons will come for you in the middle of the night. Yay for you! The downside of this find? You can't park your van in there. Which means it's either drag your mattress in (which you don't have time for) or share the same sleeping bag on a cot. You can't sleep in the middle of daemon-infested streets without a blanket and not freeze to death. Literally. Miasma makes places cold as Shiva's backside.

You also can't just take the only cot and leave him to freeze to death on the floor, which is what you can tell he wants to do. This is nice of him and all that, but you'll legitimately feel like a monster. Nyx has been such a good employee that you don't want to reward him with the wonders of back pain. Old age and injuries do not a cozy sleeping situation make. Plus, the man would likely freeze to death and you'd lose such a valuable employee.

He's a great employee. You aren't afraid to admit that.

You also aren't afraid to admit that two fully grown adults aren't going to fit on one miserable little camp cot. Either one of you sleeps on the floor or both of you do. There's no in between. On the upside, if you both sleep on the floor? At least the body heat will keep you warm all night. But you barely know this man and, here you are, plotting to sleep with him like it's nothing but common sense. Just sleep, mind, because you aren't so stupid as to have sex in the middle of daemon territory.

Great, now you're staring at Nyx and wondering what the sex would be like. A glorious disaster, probably, where he'd spend a good minute confused about the staggering lack of a penis. he seems like one of those who reads you as male from birth to grave. Joke's on him. You're none of those things. But it brings you back to the most important thing: where are either of you sleeping tonight?

"Cot or floor? Where do you want to sleep? If its the floor, you're down with me." There. Nailed it. You are a master at the art of conversation. No wiggle room, just the joy of absolutes. Cot or floor, no weird arguing.

You really need to learn how to handle Nyx. He always does the absolute unexpected at the weirdest times. Your options were made to cut down on the available choices. Instead, he opts to create a third option. Nyx grins at you as he dashes back out into the preternatural darkness. When he comes back, he has your only mattress neatly under his good arm and your blankets draped over his shoulders like a motley pile of very unfashionable capes. "Floor works for me. Cot's got a hole anyway."

Crying would help nobody. You've just gotten new sheets for your mattress and your pillow has finally stopped smelling like blood and antiseptic. Now it'll smell like Nyx. Wait, he didn't even bring a pillow. What, are you supposed to use his chest? You don't know why that sticks out to you, but it makes you laugh.

There really was only one bed and Nyx was the one making it.

"Well at least we'll be warm this way," he says laughingly as he unties the blankets from around his neck and lets the mattress flop onto the floor. "Think we're safe enough to not need to keep watch? Door's got a pretty big lock." He rubs his chin contemplatively and you can't help but wonder if he's lost his mind. The whole point of a haven was so that no one would need to take watch. And this one? Is still as shiny and new as the day the Oracle put it down.

"Just go get dinner started." Such a smart-ass, your only employee. He can figure out how to make military rations taste good as punishment.

You give up. Abandon hope and expectations when Nyx Ulric is involved. He's not normal. He'll never be normal. He is physically incapable of even touching the same dictionary page. Normal is for lesser beings and the Kingsglaive didn't have any such creatures.

"What was your nickname? In the Glaive. Don't tell me you didn't have one." He rides on vans, blitz chain warps like other people skip, survives the unsurvivable, and completely managed to make a military ration taste like what was on the label. This impossible man is clearly an elite. He had to have a fancy callsign or epithet or whatever they call it these days.

He chews on a mouthful of meat lasagna (it's best you don't ask what the meat is) and swallows. "Hero. They call me Hero."

What. The. Fuck. Who is so fancy and dramatic while saving the day to the point he got called Hero? Nyx fucking Ulric, that's who. This is your new employee in a nutshell: a big damn hero. "Shiva's tits, don't you have better places to be than scavenging?"

He shrugs. This motherfucker has the audacity to shrug at you. "This is important, too. People need these things. And nobody in Lestallum wants charity. Helping you is helping them." It takes a long time for him to get the words out, his tone rising and falling oddly as he speaks, but you have the time to wait.

The answer you get just makes you want to start violently shaking him until sense returns. Was he built in a factor? Are there settings you can disable? Is there a switch somewhere you can flip to make him chill the fuck out? Please, Astrals, let there be an off-switch.

You stare at him, open-mouthed with many emotions at once, and you want to strangle him. "Are you real?" The words fall out of your mouth out of your control. "You cannot be real." It's all you can do to keep from throwing something at him to see if it passed through him like a ghost. "Am I dead?"

He laughs at you. The audacity just never ends. "Should be me dead. But you saved me, so let me use this life for something good."

Oh by the gods. Sweet and merciful Astrals have mercy on you, because Nyx motherfucking Ulric certainly won't.

Chapter Text

Waking up has never been your favorite thing. You prefer the warm nest of your bed more than the cold floor under your feet and the quiet loneliness of the life you've chosen to lead. It's not often that you reminisce on what you don't have in your life, but when you do? You let yourself have just five minutes to miss normality.

Nyx sighs into your neck and shivers with the cold. He's wrapped himself around you tighter than a blanket, leaving you deliciously warm even as he battles the cold for you. It's strange how this warms your heart and bones at the same time. You're a grouch on a good day and, here this man is, treating you like you're something precious that should be protected at all costs. It's strange… but also somehow flattering. People like you aren't precious to people like Nyx.

He's an Astrals damned hero of the people and you literally go through those people's abandoned trash. There is no world in which you should even meet, let alone work together. No world but this one, apparently, because here he is at your side. With no chance of leaving, either. It's actually… nice.

You let yourself cling to his warmth for a moment too long. He smiles against the curve of your neck, absentmindedly pressing a kiss where your jacket collar bends. Nyx hums contentedly, you freeze, and then he wakes to your sudden tension. He hummed again, bleary and confused, and you take the time to assess how easily you can get yourself out of this situation.

Not, as it turns out, very easily.

Nyx has somehow managed to entirely cocoon you in every blanket he'd brought from your van and then wrapped himself around it. No wonder you couldn't feel the bite of miasma's chill all through the night. How could you when you were so snug and comfortable like this? Clearly you didn't fight it, either, judging by how soundly you slept in his hold. Was it a hold or an embrace at this point? Who even knew anymore. What mattered now was that he let go of you so that you could get away from him and figure out what was going on.

What possessed a man to randomly hold someone in his sleep? The miasma chill. Easy enough to figure out. What's not so easy to figure out is why his sleeping brain decided that kissing you was a good idea. You need space to figure that out, away from him and the random touching that makes something strange flutter in your stomach. Normally, you would be halfway across the room from him by now, crawling if necessary. But you can't do that.

Screaming would just attract daemons. Flailing your arms to punch him wasn't going to work when you were this restrained. The only thing you can safely do is wait for him to wake up and realize that he's cuddling you in his sleep. Waiting, unfortunately, is not your favorite thing either. "Nyx. Nyx. Hey. Nyx. Wake up," you start muttering lowly under your breath. Slowly, you begin to raise the volume and urgency of your voice.

Nyx, the bastard, just shifts and mutters, adjusting his hold on you and nuzzling his scarred cheek against your neck. He holds you like you're going to run away if he doesn't find some way to persuade you to stay in bed with him. And, oh, he has every way to get you to stay in bed. Nyx is a warm and enticing body that smells like leather and smoke, treating you like something fragile, and his subconscious acts are enough to set your heart aflutter.

You act tough, but not even you can resist something like being embraced like this. Life as a scavenger has left you overwhelmingly and completely lonely. You know that better than anyone else. This? This is a carefully crafted trap to lure you into complacency and you wouldn't care if not for the looming deadline of total miasma-induced darkness. If you don't go now, in the dwindling daylight, your profits and continued survival will suffer. That is the one thing you cannot abide.

"Nyx. Wake the fuck up!" You hiss at him, just shy of a shout.

That seems to do the trick.

Nyx jolts awake with military precision, arms tightening around you as he rolls to cover you from harm. He goes from sleep to full alertness, one of his knives appearing magically in his hand, and has the look of a guard dog defending his master. Nyx even growls as he glares around the room, hunting for the threat. Despite just waking up, Nyx seems fully prepared to throw down for your sake. Against absolutely nothing but his own snuggling, but that hasn't dawned on him yet.

Nor, it seems, will it any time soon. Not on his own. You'll have to help him wake up and see reality for what it is. A hard task, when you're wrapped up tight and stuck beneath him while he growls at ghosts only he can see. Who knows what monsters and doubts plague him when he's like this.

You wish you could be soft and kind towards him like he deserves. A hero needs better than what you are, better than what you do. But he is yours and so you're responsible for him. You wriggle beneath him like a worm to get him to snap that electric gaze on you.

He sees but doesn't see you, caught in the memory of whatever he had been dreaming. It's as if he knows you're there but remains on the hunt for whatever could have disturbed you so, not understanding that he was the sole source of your distress. The lack of self-awareness is staggering, but you can forgive him for it, sleepy as he is. He wants to protect you and it's sweet. Somewhat irritating, but sweet.

"Wake up, Nyx Ulric. We have work to do."

That, somehow, manages to get through his brain. He starts, blinking against sleep to look blearily around the room. "What's going on?" Nyx's voice rises in that odd cadence of his that you're rapidly beginning to find somehow endearing. "Where's the fire?" He looks around the room, then down at you. The look on his face reminds you of a hunting dog that has no target.

You want to pat him on the head but you can't. Instead, you huff and roll your eyes at him playfully. "You're heavy. Get off, you lummox." You grin to remove the sting from the insult, wriggling beneath him to prove a point.

Nyx moans, a bitten back thing that makes you both freeze. He blushes, so pretty that you can't help but repeat the motion to make that blush deepen, and looks at you with naked adoration shiny in his eyes. "Careful," he warns with a husk that warms your bones.

This is new and uncharted territory for both of you. It's terrifying and yet exhilarating, the kind of prize that always makes you want to test your luck. You've never made it your business to play it safe. "Careful is overrated." You wiggle again, raising one leg beneath the blankets to brush against his thighs. "Tell me to stop." Not that you want to, but you'll give him the choice.

His hand flexes beside your head, his knife vanished back where it came from. Nyx mewls, a plaintive sound that makes some terrible thing in you take notice. "Don't stop," Nyx groans, sleep and something else robbing both of you of sense and any semblance of restraint.

Bound up in blankets as you are, there's only so much you can do. But you can do this for him, at least. Your leg presses up as far as it can and Nyx sighs above you. He moves, slow and languid, against your leg in the thralls of some half-asleep passion. Nyx whimpers with it, poor man, and that terrible thing in you purrs with contentment. "Good boy," you absentmindedly let slip out.

That does something to him. Something primal, a touch feral, and every bit as needy as he looks right now. His hips move faster as he grumbles, rutting uselessly against your leg. Nyx is mindless, seeking nothing more or less. "I'm gonna cum," he whines as he rolls his hips against your leg. "Please, let me cum." Uselessly, hopelessly, ardently, Nyx Ulric breaks down and begs.

For a moment, you simply watch him. He looks on the edge of it, desperate and longing, but he won't let himself fall over the edge. Not without permission.

Your other foot taps beneath the blankets to the stuttering pace of his hips as he seeks that blissful final end. The added motion makes him cry out, hopeful for more. And, oh, how you'll give it to him. On your terms, not his.

You do nothing, say nothing, until you can see tears of frustration pricking at the corners of his eyes. He's reduced to babbling, begging you so sweetly in that soft and loud voice. You're not even sure if he can hear you beneath his frantic cries. But he watches your mouth with single-minded determination and desperation. "Go ahead, Nyx," you carefully say.

He falls over the edge and you've never seen anything so beautiful in all your life. Nyx is like a work of art; mouth open in a startled and broken off cry, eyes wide as he stares into your eyes, back arched like a bow ready to snap, and every bit of him consumed by startled and satisfying lust. This man is yours, in every way that could ever matter, and you won't trade this for anything. You made the deal then with a ghost and now you've sealed it with Nyx's own rapture.

What a rapture it is.

He falls upon you like a starving wolf, kissing your cheeks and forehead like the very act is a benediction. A thanks, a plea, and love in each press of his lips to your feverish skin. "Let me even the score?"

Your scavenger brain likes the idea of a trade. You wiggle suggestively beneath him as a reminder of your current status. Wrapped up in blankets as you are, there's only so much you or he can do. "Do your worst," you suggest: half-joking and half-serious. "Be a good boy and make it worth my while."

Nyx's head tilts slightly as he sits up to look at you. There's a wet spot on the front of his pants and he doesn't seem to care a single bit about it. The wetness cannot possibly be comfortable. But he sits back on his heels as you helpfully move your legs out from under him with a giggle you can't hold back, beginning the complex task of unwrapping you from your blanket cocoon.

"Come on then, Hero," you goad him on when he growls in frustration at the sheer mess he made while asleep. "A blanket too much of a challenge?" It's more like three blankets, but who's counting? Certainly not you.

The sound Nyx makes is so guttural a growl that you could almost believe it came from a beast and not the man before you. He begins to unwrap you, layer by layer, as if you're a delectable treat for him and him alone. But all throughout, he watches you for any sign that you dislike what he's doing. Even now, he wants your permission and acceptance. Nyx is so good, both for you and as a person. Again, you have to wonder what he's doing with someone like you.

But there's no time to dwell on such thoughts. Not when he's so eagerly peeling you out of your clothes. At first, he undoes your zipper and goes hunting for the cock you very much don't have stashed away, then grunts in acknowledgment. "I got it. Sure," he says in the tone of someone who very much doesn't get it but is game to try anyway. Nyx might not get it, but he'll certainly do his best.

You lift your legs and hips to help him strip you of your pants and underwear, leaving you to his hungry (if not slightly confused) gaze. Bold as a daemon and thrice as clever, Nyx falls forward to rest between your legs. He presses his fingers and lips to the soft skin of your inner thighs. Nyx worships at the altar of devotion, praying to you and you alone.

It goes straight to your head.

He belongs to you.

Nyx presses the first of many kisses to the top of your wet slit. You aren't unaffected by the things you've been up to since waking up. Despite all attempts otherwise, you're not dead yet. Nyx has made damn sure of that. Your hand flies unbidden to the top of his scarred head, gripping his hair hard enough that he hisses. Not only from pain, if the heavy-lidded gaze he shoots adoringly at you is any easy judge. The thought dawns on you, sudden as a daemon attack, that there's something unexpected driving this man.

You tug his hair and he resists. "Look at me," you order him lowly. he goes easily, sweetly, and his face is wet from the tip of his nose down. "You're in love with me." You meant to ask it as a question but it comes out as an awed statement instead, soft as the night breeze.

He turns his face in your hold to kiss your inner thigh, his cheeks bright red and bashful. "Yes," he whispers. "But that doesn't have to change anything."

It changes everything.

Your hand gentles and you begin petting his hair instead. Is it love, then, that beats in your own chest? It must live next to the irritation, bafflement, and general sense of being overwhelmed that being around him caused you to feel. You like having him around, the way he handles himself in a fight and around you. You're not ready to, for instance, stand before a priest and swear until death do you part. But you don't need to. The now-dead King of Lucis had already bound you together firmer than any vow.

He lives because of you and you can truly live because of him. Neither of you are alone anymore, adrift without purpose.

If you don't love him? You're certainly well on the way to it. And that? You don't mind that at all.

Nyx is between your legs, looking dejectedly at you, or at least as close to it as the cocky bastard can manage. "You don't have to say yes, Echo," he begins with a wince that only uses half of his face.

You silence him with a firm tug of his hair and a snort. "I'll think about it, for now. Unless you want to convince me otherwise." A good scavenger, after all, knows the value of what everyone else leaves behind. And his love? This man's love is a priceless treasure you'd be a fool to not even consider. Let him make his case, however easy it might be, that you should love him back.

He grins at you with renewed dedication. "Persuade you, huh? Now why do I get the feeling that won't be hard?" The rumble of his voice so close to your clit makes you shiver with anticipation. He's back to being so sure of himself and what he'll do next, a plan already forming in the back of his mind. You can all but see the calculating way his eyes gleam.

You set the rules of this and that terrible thing inside you delights in that fact. To want and be wanted is the sweetest prize of all. You find that you want him and that suits you just fine. Your fingers loosen their grip and he's quick to seize the slight advantage you've given him.

Nyx Ulric remains, as you've always said, built different from the rest of you mere mortals. He takes your suggestion as a personal challenge, as if every chance is the last chance to prove his point.

Whatever else you think? Is lost.

He likes doing this, you realize. Eating you out is a challenge and a delight to this man, one that you don't want to let him stop. No, you'd do anything for him to keep going. He's sloppy with it, writing his name over and over on your clit, as if he's trying to brand you with his devotion. And it's good, so good, enough to make your legs clamp down around his head as you cry out.

"Don't stop!"

Nyx groans, his own hips beginning to rock back and forth against the mattress. He sets to with a will and a focus he normally reserved for felling daemons, magic sparking electric on the tip of his tongue.

It's that spark that undoes you. More than the knowledge that this excites him enough to want to cum again. The literal and metaphorical shock of it sends you right over the edge, messily and with a bitten back cry. But once is not enough, not for the insatiable thing in your chest that beats a frantic tempo. "Holy shit," you pant out. "Do that again."

And he does.

Over and over. Until your legs shake and you can't even hold onto his hair to keep you grounded in reality. Until the only thing you can do is pray to the Astrals that you'll make it out of this alive. He proves his devotion with broad licks of his tongue and the crook of his fingers inside you, leaving you no room to doubt the depth and breadth of his affection.

Nyx Ulric loves you.

You hold your arms out to him when not even that thing in your chest can deny that you love him just as fiercely. "Come here," you say with a breathy sigh. "You big idiot."

He crawls his way up the mattress with an eagerness you can't dare to match, wrung out by his mouth and hands as you are. This, too, is love, shining in his eyes as he looks down at you. How did you miss it? It was plain to see this entire time. "Feeling a bit more persuaded?"

You go to punch him in the shoulder with arms weak as cooked noodles and huff when the most you can manage is a slap. "Don't be a brat," you say, rolling your eyes at his smugness. "Unless you don't want me to let you fuck me."

Nyx presses an apologetic kiss to the corner of your mouth and you splutter with the lingering taste of yourself. "I'll be good." His word, once given, is his bond. You find that helplessly endearing. He's quick to grab the corner of a blanket to wipe his face, grinning at you all the while. That cocksure grin of his is back up by the hard length of him that he unzips from his wet pants, throbbing and needy, and he looks down at you with quiet contemplation.

"Yeah, I can work with this," he chuckles. There is no way he can't figure out how to fuck you properly, as laid out for his eyes as you are. Both of you are still mostly clothed, with you from the waist up and him entirely, but it's a simple matter of common sense from here. The instructions were clear enough—.

Nyx slips slowly inside while you contemplate things, the sensation enough to banish even the deepest thoughts from your mind. You cry out with it, babbling out some manner of affirming nonsense, and cling to his shoulders. He loops one muscled forearm under one of your legs and then braces the other by your head, staring into your eyes as he slowly keeps pressing forward. When he finally fills you to the brim, Nyx groans.

He sets a steady pace, fucking mercilessly into your welcoming body. And, all the while, Nyx keeps on staring into your eyes as if he will find all the secrets of the Astrals in them. He loves you, oh Astrals does he love you, and he's willing to prove it to you with every stroke.

It's too much, not enough, overwhelming what little reason left in you. For a moment, this moment, you forget the worries and weight of the world. There are no daemons or kings of yore, no threats of miasma, here inside this haven. The only thing that matters, the only thing you have the brain power to think about, is the way he fucks you slowly. There's no denying his love, not now, and it changes everything about this relationship.

You gasp, fingers scrabbling at his back for purchase. His shirt bunches up to expose the scarred expanse of skin and he moans so prettily as your nails scratch the sensitive skin. He bottoms out in one thrust and begins to set a new pace, one made of frenzy and need. It sets something aflame in your chest and you bite back a scream of impassioned delight.

Nyx drags you over the precipice of pleasure and you revel in it with a choked off gasp as your whole body tenses and releases. Your orgasm washes over you like a shock, in little waves that lap at your resolve. And he watches you, kisses you through it, and breaks away only to press his forehead against yours. "I love you, Echo," he moans as his hips piston away. "I love you."

You watch him for a moment, heart full and aching, and decide to put him out of his misery. What's the point of holding your affection over his head, bright as the moon and forever unreachable. You reach up to cup his cheek in your palm. He bares his teeth just once before gasping and you know you could say anything to save or destroy this moment.

You choose the truth.

"I love you."

That terrible thing in your chest finally has a name. It's love, sweet and world-altering, and it can't be taken back now. Nor do you want to. You have your pride, after all, and you won't be dishonest now. Half-naked and well-fucked, you can be honest to the one you love.

Three little words cause a chain reaction through him. He groans, shudders, jacks his hips once, then pulls out to finish messily over your stomach with a low growl. Nyx pants, more exhausted than any daemon fight would ever make him, and grins at you before kissing your forehead and reaching for the blanket to begin wiping you both clean. When he's done, he leans back down to kiss you again, soft as summer rain.

You let him, kissing him back just as fiercely. But, unlike him, you remember the most important thing: you still have a job to do. You smack his shoulder. "Good. Now, think you can get the mattress to fold in half? I saw a pawn shop with some old weapons."

Nyx laughs and sits up. "As you command."