[It's hard to hear her, a little bit, with the way her words are being muffled from how she's got her face pressed against his shoulder, but there's one thing that is apparent, and it's that those aren't two separate qualities she's naming. "Dumb boy" is a thing all its own, something that comes laden with affection rather than derision.]
I flirt with you and I monopolize all of your time and I make up excuses to touch you and I hang all over you and I kiss you and you, you have to ask if it's okay. Like I haven't been wanting you to say that since the day I met you, almost.
[She breathes in slowly, holding on to him tighter than before.]
I'm scared, too. Just like you are. We're both so dumb.
[Her fingers curl, lightly, into the fabric of his shirt, and pull on it just enough to make it bunch.]
But right here like this is where I know I want to be. Is...this where you want to be, too?
[He's quiet, aware of her breath, her mouth against his shirt, her fingers' grip in the fabric. Right here, like this. Is this where he wants to be?
His fingers find her hair, smooth carefully, slowly, down the plane of her back. Prompto's always been the smallest, but here?]
I feel... like there are more important things than being safe, here. Like I can see them, when I look at you.
[It's not that she makes him feel big and strong. It's just... the fact that he's not, it doesn't matter so much. Prompto forgets what he's not, and when he does, he can suddenly be more than he isn't. He gulps and skims his hands down her arms until they cup her elbows.]
I, um. I thought you didn't remember kissing me. Or that you didn't like it, because you didn't say anything about it after, so... I tried not to think about it.
[Carefully, moving as gently as he can so as not to break her hold but slip down through it, Prompto kneels to retrieve the flowers from where she pushed them aside, one hand still on her arm. Connection; I'll be right back. That's what he'd meant with the dandelion, something like this.
He looks up, flowers in hand, on one knee.]
I'm really dumb. I'm way dumber than you, don't pretend like I'm not, Flora. Let me make it up to you. Please. I--I want to be with you. Where you are.
I didn't say anything about it because I was...afraid you'd ask me why, and I wouldn't know what to say.
[She senses, though, that to absolve him of the need of making it up to her is the wrong answer to choose. He doesn't, of course. He doesn't need to make anything up to her, but the point is that he feels like he does, and somehow she knows that forgiving him unconditionally without letting him serve a penance will just leave him feeling worse instead of better. He needs to do; afterwards he needs to be able to look at this and know what he did. Otherwise, he won't know why it happened, and he'll have to ask himself forever without ever finding an answer.]
...But. Yeah. Okay...okay. You can make it up to me. I'm...that's okay with me.
[All the noise in his head that's been blocking so many of her word starts to quiet and flicker low, like a fire going out. He takes another moment down there to take stock of himself, of both of them; the wreath is cool and pliant between his hand, the floor hard under his knee, her fingers real in his the way only things that are alive can be, solid and flexible and capable of surprise.
As he rises, Prompto wonders if he feels the same in her hand. If he's so unexpected to her, too. He reaches up and settles the crown on her brow, where it belongs.
It feels like the first time his feet have landed solidly on earth in days, when he looks at her. Like something's not going to scatter him with a blow. He's here, with her, where she wants him to be; he can hardly believe it, but he trusts her, and so he doesn't have to. He knows it.]
I think you're the most beautiful.
[His voice is soft and shy, still, but he doesn't stammer. He adjusts the leaves and petals carefully so he can see her eyes.]
And I want... to do things... that are special, only for you. Like. Like calling me Quicksilver, only... more. All the time. That's okay?
[For once, though, it's not a statement she delivers with effortless authority, the way that she does many of the things she says. It's not the voice of someone who once led five boys and herself through calamity after disaster, making snap decisions not because she thought she was fit to lead but because she thought she was right and there was simply no one else to do it. It's a voice that makes no assumptions, that doesn't demand to be recognized. It's a voice that comes as soft and shy as his is, but that slides underneath the gravity of his like a card being shuffled into a deck, like a lieutenant falling into place at its captain's side.
The knots of tension that have twisted her stomach ever since that day at the flower-sharking are finally starting to ease. It finally makes her feel like she can eat again. It makes her feel like she can breathe again.]
Y'know, you said...that you thought, that if you found out my name, it would mean we couldn't be friends anymore.
[Her weight shifts forward, a little more onto the balls of her feet, nudging her into being just a little bit taller from how she's putting more of her weight onto her toes as she gravitates toward him.]
I don't...I don't think we're just friends anymore.
[The corner of her lip catches beneath her teeth, just for a moment.]
So maybe...if you still don't want the real one, then. Will you pick one for me that's just for us? That's just...yours?
...W-wait, right now? [Some of the spell's broken, he's startled out of just looking at her, just echoing her words three times in his head before he hears their meaning.] Um, I don't know, I'm really bad at names. Called a sorta-divine being "Tiny" before I found out her real name...
[The mumbling is automatic, like the noises a CPU makes to itself as it processes something unseen.]
How about... about...
[Look at her, so vibrantly colored, life at the height of its power and beauty. She never needed a crown, and now that she has one, it's just another symbol of her, of what she stands for, to him. Prompto's mouth hangs open a second before he says anything, before he takes his risk.]
[But it gets a little laugh out of her, his fluster and the mumbling both, and when he comes up with a name it's her turn to take it and turn it over and over in her mind, testing it on her tongue.
The wizard, sometimes, demands her name, knowing full well he'll never get it from her like that. He prompts her for it and she gives him one, and it's never the same name twice, and he knows full well it's never the right one. Maybe he thinks he'll catch her off-guard someday, as though hunger or exhaustion might make her tired enough how her life hangs in the balance of the answer to that question. Maybe he just likes to taunt her, or to see how many falsehoods she can come up with before she runs out.
She's never given him one like Aestas. She's been Maggie and Taylor and Faye, Karen and Bonnie, Susan, Joanna, Lucy. Once she was Isolde. Another she was Sparrow. It's just good habit, to never get too attached to a name, to shuffle through them like face cards in a hand of poker.
It's not her name, Aestas. But it's the name that only Prompto knows, the one meant just for her. It sounds like one that would fit in with the world that he comes from. It sounds like hope, like maybe someday she'll follow him there, and get to use it.]
...But I like it.
[There was a story, once upon a time, of a human boy who called the name of a girl steeped in fantasy and saved the whole world.]
[It catches up to him all at once, the realization that this is all happening, that not only doesn't she hate him but she likes him--wants him--thinks they're not just friends anymore. He glances down suddenly, but that hangdog, heartbroken look scatters entirely for reddened cheeks and huge, wide eyes instead.
I'm a piece of shit, said his face before, or I fucked up. But that's obliterated by the sheer force of oh, damn, son!
His eyes skitter back up, down, to the side and then up again as he sucks in his lower lip to chew it in an entirely different way than before: not wretchedly, but with his nerves tuned to a simpler key, Fidget in C Major.]
So I would... only use it here? Or in. Secret messages. Like if we had an exchange--notebook.
[If any more color floods to his head, his face might explode.]
'Cause other people stole Flora from me already. Jerks.
[Slowly, her hands creep back around to fit between them, unwinding from circling around him in favor of coming to rest lightly against his chest instead, nudging up little by little toward his shoulders.]
Are you gonna send me secret messages? Because. ...That sounds amazing.
[Her hands nudge up a little higher again, and it seems like the sum total of what she's doing is ensuring that he can't not notice how decidedly in his personal space she is, up on her toes and leaning into him and finding leverage against him.]
But it's yours. You do whatever you want with it. Whatever makes you happiest.
She could probably fry an egg on his face at this point. It's like he's looking and breathing through some warm, pink cloud. There should be flower petals, and, absurdly, he realizes there are. There are flowers in her hair. He put them there.]
I can--I can do that. Secret messages. I, I, I like spy codes and stuff. We already have a hideout.
[She's starting to smile more and more now, little by little, as the tension from before unwinds and gets left behind in favor of this new thing, this uncertain thing that they're navigating together, rich with emotion and vulnerability and yet still with space for laughter.]
I'll wear red lipstick that could kill a man and speak with a Ru— with a thick accent you probably don't have back home.
Like...really thick and kind of bass-y. You will tell me the location of the secret base.
[That latter part, naturally, comes with a half-decent Russian accent that misses a little bit in places that call for nuance, but which overall gets it fairly close.]
[The odd accent draws an unexpected, half-open smile out of him. He's not in control of his face, it just happens, it just comes out in response to her; she has that power over him.]
Aranea? A friend. She helped me out of that place in Niflheim, you'd like her. Biggs and Wedge, her guys, they talk like...
[He thinks about it, gathering his memories, and his hands rise unbidden to her arms, just to stay there. For contact. And then he breaks out the Cockney.]
Oi! Wotchu pokin' about here for, then, eh? 'Avin' a lark in the swamp, are you?
...Wait, are you kidding? Their names are actually Biggs and Wedge?
[The nice thing about a Cockney accent is, when done in imitation, the more terrible it is, the better it actually is. It's got her laughing, anyway, which is surprisingly hard to do when you're so close to someone, but she's managing it anyway.]
We have that one. Overseas, where I'm from. It's kind of a...hmm. People who talk like Ignis does, they're seen as being like, rich and fancy. People who talk like Biggs and Wedge are down-to-earth and more average.
Same. I mean, they're from different places, I think.
[It wouldn't really make sense for Biggs and Wedge to be from Tenebrae, even though they certainly wouldn't be the first Tenebraens to rise in the Empire's ranks.]
But Ignis sounds fancy to us, too, and Biggs and Wedge sound like... you know, normal guys. Working class people. Aranea's people came up from the bottom, you can tell.
[Aranea, too. She's street smarts all over, and he always appreciated that about her. Once she stopped trying to kill Noct, anyway.]
Maybe I'd've sounded like them if I actually grew up there. Can you imagine?
That's who you are in Noct's entourage, right? The guy who came up from the bottom?
[As opposed to Ignis, who is indisputably the fanciest guy ever, and Noct who for all his average guy charms is still technically An Actual Prince. Prompto's the approachable one, the normal one. He's the one it's easy to relate to. He's the one who gets it.]
No offense but I'm kinda glad you don't sound like that. I like being able to understand every word that comes out of your mouth.
[She doesn't offer any more specificity than that. It's easier to avoid it, frankly, because like this they don't have to find exact words to fit, either. It doesn't necessarily suffer from the lack of clarity at this stage in the game, just to acknowledge that there's something, even if neither of them can really put a firm handle on what that something is.]
Seems like it. You want me and I want you and...it really sucks so, so bad when we're not...like this. So I don't want to go back to not having this. I want to keep this.
["A thing" is more than enough for Prompto to breathe out loud, amazed.]
A thing. Yeah, that works for me. ...It sounds good.
[Maybe he needs time, anyway, to get used to the very idea that he's allowed--that she wants him--to think of her as as a girl, as pretty, as wantable, not "just" a friend. Maybe he needs a day, a week, to feel what happens when he lets himself do that, instead of shutting the thought down in its tracks, screaming-brakes style in his head.
Maybe he's just realized his hands are on her arms, still, and hers are on his shoulders, and she's so close he imagines he can smell her magic, fire and growth.]
[It shouldn't be hard. He looks how the pink one looks, now, soft and flushed and delicately ruffled around the edges.]
Oh. I. I can do that. ...I've been doing that. I... haha, I guess that's okay now.
[His hands move gently from her elbows up to the backs of her hands on his shoulders, and he just holds them lightly, smiling at her like she's the Christmas gift he never dreamed he'd get.]
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[It's hard to hear her, a little bit, with the way her words are being muffled from how she's got her face pressed against his shoulder, but there's one thing that is apparent, and it's that those aren't two separate qualities she's naming. "Dumb boy" is a thing all its own, something that comes laden with affection rather than derision.]
I flirt with you and I monopolize all of your time and I make up excuses to touch you and I hang all over you and I kiss you and you, you have to ask if it's okay. Like I haven't been wanting you to say that since the day I met you, almost.
[She breathes in slowly, holding on to him tighter than before.]
I'm scared, too. Just like you are. We're both so dumb.
[Her fingers curl, lightly, into the fabric of his shirt, and pull on it just enough to make it bunch.]
But right here like this is where I know I want to be. Is...this where you want to be, too?
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His fingers find her hair, smooth carefully, slowly, down the plane of her back. Prompto's always been the smallest, but here?]
I feel... like there are more important things than being safe, here. Like I can see them, when I look at you.
[It's not that she makes him feel big and strong. It's just... the fact that he's not, it doesn't matter so much. Prompto forgets what he's not, and when he does, he can suddenly be more than he isn't. He gulps and skims his hands down her arms until they cup her elbows.]
I, um. I thought you didn't remember kissing me. Or that you didn't like it, because you didn't say anything about it after, so... I tried not to think about it.
[Carefully, moving as gently as he can so as not to break her hold but slip down through it, Prompto kneels to retrieve the flowers from where she pushed them aside, one hand still on her arm. Connection; I'll be right back. That's what he'd meant with the dandelion, something like this.
He looks up, flowers in hand, on one knee.]
I'm really dumb. I'm way dumber than you, don't pretend like I'm not, Flora. Let me make it up to you. Please. I--I want to be with you. Where you are.
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[She senses, though, that to absolve him of the need of making it up to her is the wrong answer to choose. He doesn't, of course. He doesn't need to make anything up to her, but the point is that he feels like he does, and somehow she knows that forgiving him unconditionally without letting him serve a penance will just leave him feeling worse instead of better. He needs to do; afterwards he needs to be able to look at this and know what he did. Otherwise, he won't know why it happened, and he'll have to ask himself forever without ever finding an answer.]
...But. Yeah. Okay...okay. You can make it up to me. I'm...that's okay with me.
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Okay.
[All the noise in his head that's been blocking so many of her word starts to quiet and flicker low, like a fire going out. He takes another moment down there to take stock of himself, of both of them; the wreath is cool and pliant between his hand, the floor hard under his knee, her fingers real in his the way only things that are alive can be, solid and flexible and capable of surprise.
As he rises, Prompto wonders if he feels the same in her hand. If he's so unexpected to her, too. He reaches up and settles the crown on her brow, where it belongs.
It feels like the first time his feet have landed solidly on earth in days, when he looks at her. Like something's not going to scatter him with a blow. He's here, with her, where she wants him to be; he can hardly believe it, but he trusts her, and so he doesn't have to. He knows it.]
I think you're the most beautiful.
[His voice is soft and shy, still, but he doesn't stammer. He adjusts the leaves and petals carefully so he can see her eyes.]
And I want... to do things... that are special, only for you. Like. Like calling me Quicksilver, only... more. All the time. That's okay?
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[For once, though, it's not a statement she delivers with effortless authority, the way that she does many of the things she says. It's not the voice of someone who once led five boys and herself through calamity after disaster, making snap decisions not because she thought she was fit to lead but because she thought she was right and there was simply no one else to do it. It's a voice that makes no assumptions, that doesn't demand to be recognized. It's a voice that comes as soft and shy as his is, but that slides underneath the gravity of his like a card being shuffled into a deck, like a lieutenant falling into place at its captain's side.
The knots of tension that have twisted her stomach ever since that day at the flower-sharking are finally starting to ease. It finally makes her feel like she can eat again. It makes her feel like she can breathe again.]
Y'know, you said...that you thought, that if you found out my name, it would mean we couldn't be friends anymore.
[Her weight shifts forward, a little more onto the balls of her feet, nudging her into being just a little bit taller from how she's putting more of her weight onto her toes as she gravitates toward him.]
I don't...I don't think we're just friends anymore.
[The corner of her lip catches beneath her teeth, just for a moment.]
So maybe...if you still don't want the real one, then. Will you pick one for me that's just for us? That's just...yours?
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[The mumbling is automatic, like the noises a CPU makes to itself as it processes something unseen.]
How about... about...
[Look at her, so vibrantly colored, life at the height of its power and beauty. She never needed a crown, and now that she has one, it's just another symbol of her, of what she stands for, to him. Prompto's mouth hangs open a second before he says anything, before he takes his risk.]
Aestas?
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[But it gets a little laugh out of her, his fluster and the mumbling both, and when he comes up with a name it's her turn to take it and turn it over and over in her mind, testing it on her tongue.
The wizard, sometimes, demands her name, knowing full well he'll never get it from her like that. He prompts her for it and she gives him one, and it's never the same name twice, and he knows full well it's never the right one. Maybe he thinks he'll catch her off-guard someday, as though hunger or exhaustion might make her tired enough how her life hangs in the balance of the answer to that question. Maybe he just likes to taunt her, or to see how many falsehoods she can come up with before she runs out.
She's never given him one like Aestas. She's been Maggie and Taylor and Faye, Karen and Bonnie, Susan, Joanna, Lucy. Once she was Isolde. Another she was Sparrow. It's just good habit, to never get too attached to a name, to shuffle through them like face cards in a hand of poker.
It's not her name, Aestas. But it's the name that only Prompto knows, the one meant just for her. It sounds like one that would fit in with the world that he comes from. It sounds like hope, like maybe someday she'll follow him there, and get to use it.]
...But I like it.
[There was a story, once upon a time, of a human boy who called the name of a girl steeped in fantasy and saved the whole world.]
Do you?
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[It catches up to him all at once, the realization that this is all happening, that not only doesn't she hate him but she likes him--wants him--thinks they're not just friends anymore. He glances down suddenly, but that hangdog, heartbroken look scatters entirely for reddened cheeks and huge, wide eyes instead.
I'm a piece of shit, said his face before, or I fucked up. But that's obliterated by the sheer force of oh, damn, son!
His eyes skitter back up, down, to the side and then up again as he sucks in his lower lip to chew it in an entirely different way than before: not wretchedly, but with his nerves tuned to a simpler key, Fidget in C Major.]
So I would... only use it here? Or in. Secret messages. Like if we had an exchange--notebook.
[If any more color floods to his head, his face might explode.]
'Cause other people stole Flora from me already. Jerks.
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[Slowly, her hands creep back around to fit between them, unwinding from circling around him in favor of coming to rest lightly against his chest instead, nudging up little by little toward his shoulders.]
Are you gonna send me secret messages? Because. ...That sounds amazing.
[Her hands nudge up a little higher again, and it seems like the sum total of what she's doing is ensuring that he can't not notice how decidedly in his personal space she is, up on her toes and leaning into him and finding leverage against him.]
But it's yours. You do whatever you want with it. Whatever makes you happiest.
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She could probably fry an egg on his face at this point. It's like he's looking and breathing through some warm, pink cloud. There should be flower petals, and, absurdly, he realizes there are. There are flowers in her hair. He put them there.]
I can--I can do that. Secret messages. I, I, I like spy codes and stuff. We already have a hideout.
[We.]
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[She's starting to smile more and more now, little by little, as the tension from before unwinds and gets left behind in favor of this new thing, this uncertain thing that they're navigating together, rich with emotion and vulnerability and yet still with space for laughter.]
I'll wear red lipstick that could kill a man and speak with a Ru— with a thick accent you probably don't have back home.
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[He doesn't even know what he's saying anymore, not really. She's smiling.]
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[That latter part, naturally, comes with a half-decent Russian accent that misses a little bit in places that call for nuance, but which overall gets it fairly close.]
Who's Aranea?
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Aranea? A friend. She helped me out of that place in Niflheim, you'd like her. Biggs and Wedge, her guys, they talk like...
[He thinks about it, gathering his memories, and his hands rise unbidden to her arms, just to stay there. For contact. And then he breaks out the Cockney.]
Oi! Wotchu pokin' about here for, then, eh? 'Avin' a lark in the swamp, are you?
[It's terrible. He's terrible.]
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[The nice thing about a Cockney accent is, when done in imitation, the more terrible it is, the better it actually is. It's got her laughing, anyway, which is surprisingly hard to do when you're so close to someone, but she's managing it anyway.]
We have that one. Overseas, where I'm from. It's kind of a...hmm. People who talk like Ignis does, they're seen as being like, rich and fancy. People who talk like Biggs and Wedge are down-to-earth and more average.
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[It wouldn't really make sense for Biggs and Wedge to be from Tenebrae, even though they certainly wouldn't be the first Tenebraens to rise in the Empire's ranks.]
But Ignis sounds fancy to us, too, and Biggs and Wedge sound like... you know, normal guys. Working class people. Aranea's people came up from the bottom, you can tell.
[Aranea, too. She's street smarts all over, and he always appreciated that about her. Once she stopped trying to kill Noct, anyway.]
Maybe I'd've sounded like them if I actually grew up there. Can you imagine?
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[As opposed to Ignis, who is indisputably the fanciest guy ever, and Noct who for all his average guy charms is still technically An Actual Prince. Prompto's the approachable one, the normal one. He's the one it's easy to relate to. He's the one who gets it.]
No offense but I'm kinda glad you don't sound like that. I like being able to understand every word that comes out of your mouth.
[She grins.]
I'm glad you're a normal guy, too. I like it.
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[He means it, and he's smiling, finally, not here and gone but on his face to stay. Clouds B Gone; Prompto has his own silver lining.
((ăvă))]
So are we, um. You and me, we're...?
[Back and forth, he rocks slightly on his heels, slow vent of nervous energy--but good nervous. Grounded nervous. Hopeful and warm.]
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[She doesn't offer any more specificity than that. It's easier to avoid it, frankly, because like this they don't have to find exact words to fit, either. It doesn't necessarily suffer from the lack of clarity at this stage in the game, just to acknowledge that there's something, even if neither of them can really put a firm handle on what that something is.]
Seems like it. You want me and I want you and...it really sucks so, so bad when we're not...like this. So I don't want to go back to not having this. I want to keep this.
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A thing. Yeah, that works for me. ...It sounds good.
[Maybe he needs time, anyway, to get used to the very idea that he's allowed--that she wants him--to think of her as as a girl, as pretty, as wantable, not "just" a friend. Maybe he needs a day, a week, to feel what happens when he lets himself do that, instead of shutting the thought down in its tracks, screaming-brakes style in his head.
Maybe he's just realized his hands are on her arms, still, and hers are on his shoulders, and she's so close he imagines he can smell her magic, fire and growth.]
Wow.
[This. This sounds good.
...]
Oh, no, I let your chowder get cold.
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[You can tell by her deadpan that this is a serious and not at all joking matter.]
You kept my flowers fresh, though. That's what matters. That's...what I really needed, today. And every day.
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[He's pretty sure that's not what she means, but he wants to hear the way she'll tell it.]
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[She chews on her lower lip, glancing up at him with slight hesitation.]
I want to make you feel how the pink one looks, all the time. Every day. If I can.
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Oh. I. I can do that. ...I've been doing that. I... haha, I guess that's okay now.
[His hands move gently from her elbows up to the backs of her hands on his shoulders, and he just holds them lightly, smiling at her like she's the Christmas gift he never dreamed he'd get.]
Do... you want me to heat your soup up now?
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[That's not a definitive answer, Summer, and that's definitely not making it easy for a poor indecisive boy like our Mr. Argentum here.]
Or you can stay like this. I'd be okay with that, too.
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