[She hesitates a minute, pushing up and off of the wall that she's leaning against, and then slowly reaches up to the clasp at her throat and unfastens it with deft but halting movements of her fingers. When she shrugs out of her cloak, she lets the folds of it cascade over her forearms in inky-black waves, rolling and tucking it until it's vaguely bundled into something almost pillowesque.
It might just be the first time in Chroma that she's gone without it. But it's an impulse with its roots in that thing she'd blurted before, I thought you didn't want to look at me; maybe it's just that if he's going to avert his eyes from her, she doesn't want it to be because of her cloak. She needs to know it's because of something else.
Also, it gives her something to hug. There's that, too.
She's wearing a basic, ordinary T-shirt underneath, one that clings and betrays just how relatively thin she really is, when she doesn't hide it.
She's also wearing his pants, the ones she never gave back.]
[Just like that, she's just a girl. Not a witch, not an adventurer, just a girl in a T-shirt and his roomy cargo pants. A kid like he could've been a year ago, when the Wall still stood and he barely dared dream of joining the Crownsguard, of being important to Noct like that. Like she must've been once, too, when she was learning how to drive.
His eyes start at her feet, then go up, past the long belt on his pants that hangs even longer off her hips, past that thin, thin T-shirt, up to her face once more.
She showed it to him, once. What it looks like underneath the magic. 'i thought it was because you don't think i'm pretty.']
It doesn't feel that way.
[He looks down at his hands. Then back up, tracing a line between her eyes.]
Like mooching. It... I've. Never been useful to anyone before. I mean--no one needs me. But I like to help. [He shuts his eyes, brows drawn, biting his lip.] I'm not saying this right at all, I keep messing it up. Do you like chowder?
[He's reluctant to answer, but eventually, his head jerks in a nod and immediately hangs down again, ashamed.]
But that's bad, right? 'Cause then it's like... like I'm hanging out with you to make me feel good, but it's not that, I'm here because I like you. Y-you know? You could have ten million gil and own the city and I'd still like you, because you're... you're you.
[Maybe Ignis was right, maybe Noct needs him and that's what drew Prompto to his side in the first place, knowing he could do something for someone, it didn't matter who. But that's not why he stayed. That's not why he's still with Ignis and Gladio, they never needed him, they just... like him. And he likes them all so much.
Here, now: he likes her so much.
Blinking quickly, he takes a hot bowl of potato chowder out of the Armiger. Swallowing, he sets it on the table and steps back, holding his elbows, because he doesn't have a cloak to hug.]
I don't want you to feel like...
[Like he felt his whole life, before a girl captive in another country wrote him a letter. Dear Prompto, she'd said, and it was almost like the first time he'd ever heard his name.]
[It's so strange, to stand here and listen to this, knowing the secrets she knows. It's so strange to listen to him apologizing for wanting to be needed, when she knows full well that one of her flaws is the complementary sin. Jason wanted to be needed, too. Jason always wanted to be a hero, to live out his delusions of grandeur, and she remembers how she'd played up the defenseless act early on just because it meant he would protect her, not for her sake but for the sake of having a damsel to save.]
...You ever heard of symbiosis? Ninth grade biology class. Two different organisms interact and there's all these different — like with parasites, it's good for one while also being bad for the other. Then there's another one, good for one but indifferent to the other. And then there's good for both. There's this fish that lives in the tentacles of a sea anemone, and the fish keeps away the other fish that would eat the anemone, and the anemone keeps away the things that want to eat the fish.
[She's babbling, maybe, but she's coming around to a point.]
I don't think...that it has to be mutually exclusive. And I think...you can like that I need you without liking me because I need you.
[And then she goes quiet a minute, with words caught in the back of her throat, before finally she manages to get them to dislodge and shake free.]
And I don't have anyone but I don't want just anyone — I want you.
[All the while she's talking about science class and parasites he's wincing, looking more and more crestfallen, and he's just about to look down--maybe permanently--when she says the thing that changes everything.
Instead of falling, his eyes pop back up, wide and blue as irises.
Like, want, need--they've all been one thing he's recognized by the lack in his life, the ache for it. But because of the shift here, the way Summer moves it from need, from something even she describes as impersonal and biological if not bad, to want, something in what Prompto hears shifts, too. Refracts. Something he understood as all one color hits a prism and, suddenly, there's so much to see.
Want is different from need.Want is different from like.Want is... it's specific. And it's active. And it's selfish, and it's nothing anyone's ever said to him, average to mediocre, forgettable, one of millions copied without the intention of becoming even 'just anyone.'
And she wants him.
He can't even ask for what, can't narrow down what she wants him for, symbiote or friend or something else entirely. Nobody ever liked him or needed him. I want you is a revelation.
And it's her. The canyon that stood between them in that silence of hers, she crossed it. For him. To tell him that, when she's been so hurt, so afraid...
She put blue tulips in his hair and he left her there.]
Did. You want the flowers, too? The crown I made, did... do you still want it?
[His mouth is realizing things before his head, running away from him the way he ran from her, and shock and the fluttering beginning of understanding gives way to guilt in the tightening of his eyes.]
Did I really make you think I didn't want to look at you?
[The first person ever to want him enough to tell him, and he turned into one more thing that hurt her?]
[She sees it in his eyes, that moment when something changes. She doesn't know what it was, not with confidence enough to make an actual guess at it, but she knows something has changed. And admittedly, this is...more than a little nervewracking for her, because she's done impossible things and won unprecedented victories and stayed alive, somehow, through it all, but right now this is demanding a sort of vulnerability from her that has never been easy. Confessing feelings has never been easy because there's always so much to lose, and she's so resigned to losing everything already, as it is.]
I felt like you were just one more good thing that the universe decided I wasn't allowed to have for too long.
[It's so honest it actually hurts, twisting up with pangs of acid in her knotty stomach.]
I'd gotten so used to the world fucking me over that I just...stopped hoping for anything. Like I didn't even...bother to try to enjoy things, even good things, because when you get invested in something like that, it just means somebody's got a new way to hurt you. You get your hopes up, you put all your hope in something and then it just...someone takes it away. Something ruins it. For a while I would just ruin anything good I ever had myself, because then at least someone else couldn't take it away from me. I'd already taken it away from myself.
[She reaches up, rubbing at her face, where her scars are hidden still beneath her illusion.]
But then you came along and you made me happy. Every time you were around I'd get so happy and then every time you left I'd wind up counting the minutes until it wasn't weird if I went and found you again. You're the best thing that's happened to me in...so long...
[The breath she drags in wobbles, trembling as the pitch of her voice goes high and tight.]
I just thought I'd gotten it wrong. Read a signal wrong or something. I thought I was stupid for thinking I might get to have something I wanted. Pushed it too far and wrecked it. I felt like...like you did this cute thing and I was like, haha, so you think I'm pretty, and you were like well hold up, now, nobody said that.
[Prompto slaps his hand over his mouth, but the outburst's already burst out, too loud over her shaking, wounded honesty. Still watching her, how small she looks, his expression crumbles and he lets out half-breath, chest too calcified with remorse to expand fully.]
No, I didn't... that wasn't what I wanted to say. To you, when I--when.
[The words get tangled up. Tongue-tied always sounds so cute as a descriptor, no one ever talks about how much knots can hurt. He struggles with it and finally shoves out:]
No one likes me. I-I know that's not true anymore, not now, but... it was true. For a long time. And I still--I, I'm trying to explain what happened. Why I... left. [He flinches away from his own weak admission, then lowers everything, voice, head, hands. If he was too loud before, Prompto's maybe too soft now, and growing quieter.] It wasn't because I didn't want to give you the crown. I. I did. Want to. ...I was never going to give it to Ignis.
[Whatever the flowers mean, the crown was never meant for anyone but Summer. Prompto wraps one hand around the other, twists at his fingers, plucks at the fold of muscle in his palm.]
But if I gave it to you and you didn't want it, it would've been--weird, and nobody's ever wanted that from me. I'm nobody. The, the last girl I liked, I think maybe she doesn't even know my name, even after everything we've done for her. And even my parents, they adopted me and it was like they never--never really...
[His eyes are stinging and how unfair is that, when he's the one who hurt her? Ashamed, Prompto presses his lips together and then shakes his head, banishing it all, the excuses, the reasoning. He messed up. A small noise tries to escape and he muffles it, rubbing his knuckles under his nose.]
I'm sorry. I... if there's a flower that means "I'm sorry," I wish I could give it to you. For the flowers I should've given you then.
[Nothing he can do will fix this. He holds his hands low in front of him, palms up, in supplication or surrender before crystal blue light illuminates them, tinkles away, withers. Loose petals, red-yellow, fall to the floor, but in his hands, fresh and unchanged from the day he made it, is the crown. Her crown. White, violet, pink, red.
Prompto holds it close without crushing it.]
I'm a jerk. I picked them because they reminded me of you. And the way I... feel. When I'm with you. [Pink and blooming, that peony. Dandelion bright in her hands. He raises the wreath before his face like a shield so she can't see him bite down on his lip.] I should've given them to you anyway, but now I messed everything up. I'm sorry. I'm not--I've never been good, no matter how hard I try.
[Never been good enough. Never been anything but a failure. Shivering, he tries to swallow.]
Of course you're pretty. You're so pretty, and funny, and, and... and you made me like the color red again. Because it's yours. And I thought--I thought--I didn't want to mess it up and make you not like me anymore, but that was worse, and I'm so. I'm so stupid, I'm so sorry, I didn't want to hurt you...
That's the thing that gets her first, stupid as it is. He saved it, he picked it up and put it in his magic storage closet and that's right, his works different than hers, if it were hers it would've wilted the second he took it out but the magic is different, his is different, and it's as good as it'd been the day this all went off the rails.
After that, the other things start catching up. The fact that he looks the way he did the first time she saw him, crumpled in on himself in the bottom of the well like he's waiting for someone to hurt him. The way his own self-esteem is as broken as she is. The way that after a while he turns the dagger of his explanations in on himself the same way that she would've, the way they're both insisting in their own ways that they're the stupid one, the way they're both convinced that they aren't good people except that the eyes of the beholder tell a different story.
He's like her. He's like her and someday that's — someday that's going to be something, that the same rationales she uses to console him for his feelings will fit unsettlingly well against her own insecurities, and she'll have no excuse not to apply them. She needs him, and that's another way of needing him —
He reflects her, and she always has been a little too in love with mirrors.
But he looks so miserable that she's almost grateful, maybe, not because she likes to see him sad but because he gives her a way out of the way she's feeling herself by doing it. He gives her something to say in a moment when she has no idea what to say.
They're both so stupid, aren't they.]
Fuck them. Fuck anybody who's too stupid to see how much you matter.
[It's not actually anger at the girl, specifically, or even anger at his parents. It's anger at the injustice, anger on his behalf. Anger that validates his sorrow and says it's not right that this happened to you.]
...Prommy.
[It slips out subconsciously, the name she calls him in her head because right now there's no lag time between her mind and her mouth; she's living in the moment and running purely on the here and now, and she drops her cloak aside on the ground as she crosses the distance between them and takes his hands by the wrists, curling her fingers there so that he can feel her holding on.
She thinks about what he's hiding beneath the wristband. What she's hiding beneath her face.]
Tell me what you were thinking when you made it. Not what I told you they mean. What you made it mean.
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1/3
[Hey, funny how the P key's so close to Enter, right?]
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[He's a human disaster. They're both human disasters.]
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i'm gonna do this because it's easier over text and then i'm accountable
i know this sounds stupid but don't let me leave without telling you about randy and the fucking monkeys
ok?
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?
i mean ok i guess? randy and the monkeys. i can do that.
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don't let me get out of it, it'll make sense
meet you where?
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or i can go somewhere closer to you, it's ok.
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i feel safe there
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a whole potato?
(kidding)
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[There's a pause, and then:]
(つ❀^◡^)つ☆ヾ(>ω<○)
be there soon, ok?
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i'll be there when you get there i think
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[He knocks when he arrives, like he needs to be invited in to enter.]
Flor?
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[Well, that's confirmation that she made good on her word and beat him there, isn't it.]
I'm just freeloading, c'mon in.
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It's not, actually? I left the one I was supposed to live in to stay with Noct and Ignis. So I'm freeloading, too.
[He taps the toe of his boot slowly behind him.]
...You hungry?
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[She hesitates a minute, pushing up and off of the wall that she's leaning against, and then slowly reaches up to the clasp at her throat and unfastens it with deft but halting movements of her fingers. When she shrugs out of her cloak, she lets the folds of it cascade over her forearms in inky-black waves, rolling and tucking it until it's vaguely bundled into something almost pillowesque.
It might just be the first time in Chroma that she's gone without it. But it's an impulse with its roots in that thing she'd blurted before, I thought you didn't want to look at me; maybe it's just that if he's going to avert his eyes from her, she doesn't want it to be because of her cloak. She needs to know it's because of something else.
Also, it gives her something to hug. There's that, too.
She's wearing a basic, ordinary T-shirt underneath, one that clings and betrays just how relatively thin she really is, when she doesn't hide it.
She's also wearing his pants, the ones she never gave back.]
I shouldn't mooch off of you as much as I do.
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His eyes start at her feet, then go up, past the long belt on his pants that hangs even longer off her hips, past that thin, thin T-shirt, up to her face once more.
She showed it to him, once. What it looks like underneath the magic. 'i thought it was because you don't think i'm pretty.']
It doesn't feel that way.
[He looks down at his hands. Then back up, tracing a line between her eyes.]
Like mooching. It... I've. Never been useful to anyone before. I mean--no one needs me. But I like to help. [He shuts his eyes, brows drawn, biting his lip.] I'm not saying this right at all, I keep messing it up. Do you like chowder?
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[She hugs the mess of her cloak a little closer to her chest, squeezing at it like a stuffed animal, burying her chin in a nest of the folds.]
...I like chowder. Do you —
[She seems to trip over that thought, and has to regroup to try it again.]
Do you like that I need you?
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But that's bad, right? 'Cause then it's like... like I'm hanging out with you to make me feel good, but it's not that, I'm here because I like you. Y-you know? You could have ten million gil and own the city and I'd still like you, because you're... you're you.
[Maybe Ignis was right, maybe Noct needs him and that's what drew Prompto to his side in the first place, knowing he could do something for someone, it didn't matter who. But that's not why he stayed. That's not why he's still with Ignis and Gladio, they never needed him, they just... like him. And he likes them all so much.
Here, now: he likes her so much.
Blinking quickly, he takes a hot bowl of potato chowder out of the Armiger. Swallowing, he sets it on the table and steps back, holding his elbows, because he doesn't have a cloak to hug.]
I don't want you to feel like...
[Like he felt his whole life, before a girl captive in another country wrote him a letter. Dear Prompto, she'd said, and it was almost like the first time he'd ever heard his name.]
Like I don't care who you are.
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...You ever heard of symbiosis? Ninth grade biology class. Two different organisms interact and there's all these different — like with parasites, it's good for one while also being bad for the other. Then there's another one, good for one but indifferent to the other. And then there's good for both. There's this fish that lives in the tentacles of a sea anemone, and the fish keeps away the other fish that would eat the anemone, and the anemone keeps away the things that want to eat the fish.
[She's babbling, maybe, but she's coming around to a point.]
I don't think...that it has to be mutually exclusive. And I think...you can like that I need you without liking me because I need you.
[And then she goes quiet a minute, with words caught in the back of her throat, before finally she manages to get them to dislodge and shake free.]
And I don't have anyone but I don't want just anyone — I want you.
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Instead of falling, his eyes pop back up, wide and blue as irises.
Like, want, need--they've all been one thing he's recognized by the lack in his life, the ache for it. But because of the shift here, the way Summer moves it from need, from something even she describes as impersonal and biological if not bad, to want, something in what Prompto hears shifts, too. Refracts. Something he understood as all one color hits a prism and, suddenly, there's so much to see.
Want is different from need. Want is different from like. Want is... it's specific. And it's active. And it's selfish, and it's nothing anyone's ever said to him, average to mediocre, forgettable, one of millions copied without the intention of becoming even 'just anyone.'
And she wants him.
He can't even ask for what, can't narrow down what she wants him for, symbiote or friend or something else entirely. Nobody ever liked him or needed him. I want you is a revelation.
And it's her. The canyon that stood between them in that silence of hers, she crossed it. For him. To tell him that, when she's been so hurt, so afraid...
She put blue tulips in his hair and he left her there.]
Did. You want the flowers, too? The crown I made, did... do you still want it?
[His mouth is realizing things before his head, running away from him the way he ran from her, and shock and the fluttering beginning of understanding gives way to guilt in the tightening of his eyes.]
Did I really make you think I didn't want to look at you?
[The first person ever to want him enough to tell him, and he turned into one more thing that hurt her?]
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I felt like you were just one more good thing that the universe decided I wasn't allowed to have for too long.
[It's so honest it actually hurts, twisting up with pangs of acid in her knotty stomach.]
I'd gotten so used to the world fucking me over that I just...stopped hoping for anything. Like I didn't even...bother to try to enjoy things, even good things, because when you get invested in something like that, it just means somebody's got a new way to hurt you. You get your hopes up, you put all your hope in something and then it just...someone takes it away. Something ruins it. For a while I would just ruin anything good I ever had myself, because then at least someone else couldn't take it away from me. I'd already taken it away from myself.
[She reaches up, rubbing at her face, where her scars are hidden still beneath her illusion.]
But then you came along and you made me happy. Every time you were around I'd get so happy and then every time you left I'd wind up counting the minutes until it wasn't weird if I went and found you again. You're the best thing that's happened to me in...so long...
[The breath she drags in wobbles, trembling as the pitch of her voice goes high and tight.]
I just thought I'd gotten it wrong. Read a signal wrong or something. I thought I was stupid for thinking I might get to have something I wanted. Pushed it too far and wrecked it. I felt like...like you did this cute thing and I was like, haha, so you think I'm pretty, and you were like well hold up, now, nobody said that.
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[Prompto slaps his hand over his mouth, but the outburst's already burst out, too loud over her shaking, wounded honesty. Still watching her, how small she looks, his expression crumbles and he lets out half-breath, chest too calcified with remorse to expand fully.]
No, I didn't... that wasn't what I wanted to say. To you, when I--when.
[The words get tangled up. Tongue-tied always sounds so cute as a descriptor, no one ever talks about how much knots can hurt. He struggles with it and finally shoves out:]
No one likes me. I-I know that's not true anymore, not now, but... it was true. For a long time. And I still--I, I'm trying to explain what happened. Why I... left. [He flinches away from his own weak admission, then lowers everything, voice, head, hands. If he was too loud before, Prompto's maybe too soft now, and growing quieter.] It wasn't because I didn't want to give you the crown. I. I did. Want to. ...I was never going to give it to Ignis.
[Whatever the flowers mean, the crown was never meant for anyone but Summer. Prompto wraps one hand around the other, twists at his fingers, plucks at the fold of muscle in his palm.]
But if I gave it to you and you didn't want it, it would've been--weird, and nobody's ever wanted that from me. I'm nobody. The, the last girl I liked, I think maybe she doesn't even know my name, even after everything we've done for her. And even my parents, they adopted me and it was like they never--never really...
[His eyes are stinging and how unfair is that, when he's the one who hurt her? Ashamed, Prompto presses his lips together and then shakes his head, banishing it all, the excuses, the reasoning. He messed up. A small noise tries to escape and he muffles it, rubbing his knuckles under his nose.]
I'm sorry. I... if there's a flower that means "I'm sorry," I wish I could give it to you. For the flowers I should've given you then.
[Nothing he can do will fix this. He holds his hands low in front of him, palms up, in supplication or surrender before crystal blue light illuminates them, tinkles away, withers. Loose petals, red-yellow, fall to the floor, but in his hands, fresh and unchanged from the day he made it, is the crown. Her crown. White, violet, pink, red.
Prompto holds it close without crushing it.]
I'm a jerk. I picked them because they reminded me of you. And the way I... feel. When I'm with you. [Pink and blooming, that peony. Dandelion bright in her hands. He raises the wreath before his face like a shield so she can't see him bite down on his lip.] I should've given them to you anyway, but now I messed everything up. I'm sorry. I'm not--I've never been good, no matter how hard I try.
[Never been good enough. Never been anything but a failure. Shivering, he tries to swallow.]
Of course you're pretty. You're so pretty, and funny, and, and... and you made me like the color red again. Because it's yours. And I thought--I thought--I didn't want to mess it up and make you not like me anymore, but that was worse, and I'm so. I'm so stupid, I'm so sorry, I didn't want to hurt you...
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That's the thing that gets her first, stupid as it is. He saved it, he picked it up and put it in his magic storage closet and that's right, his works different than hers, if it were hers it would've wilted the second he took it out but the magic is different, his is different, and it's as good as it'd been the day this all went off the rails.
After that, the other things start catching up. The fact that he looks the way he did the first time she saw him, crumpled in on himself in the bottom of the well like he's waiting for someone to hurt him. The way his own self-esteem is as broken as she is. The way that after a while he turns the dagger of his explanations in on himself the same way that she would've, the way they're both insisting in their own ways that they're the stupid one, the way they're both convinced that they aren't good people except that the eyes of the beholder tell a different story.
He's like her. He's like her and someday that's — someday that's going to be something, that the same rationales she uses to console him for his feelings will fit unsettlingly well against her own insecurities, and she'll have no excuse not to apply them. She needs him, and that's another way of needing him —
He reflects her, and she always has been a little too in love with mirrors.
But he looks so miserable that she's almost grateful, maybe, not because she likes to see him sad but because he gives her a way out of the way she's feeling herself by doing it. He gives her something to say in a moment when she has no idea what to say.
They're both so stupid, aren't they.]
Fuck them. Fuck anybody who's too stupid to see how much you matter.
[It's not actually anger at the girl, specifically, or even anger at his parents. It's anger at the injustice, anger on his behalf. Anger that validates his sorrow and says it's not right that this happened to you.]
...Prommy.
[It slips out subconsciously, the name she calls him in her head because right now there's no lag time between her mind and her mouth; she's living in the moment and running purely on the here and now, and she drops her cloak aside on the ground as she crosses the distance between them and takes his hands by the wrists, curling her fingers there so that he can feel her holding on.
She thinks about what he's hiding beneath the wristband. What she's hiding beneath her face.]
Tell me what you were thinking when you made it. Not what I told you they mean. What you made it mean.
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