[He drops his gaze away from the window. Even if that might not be where she's watching him from, meeting her gaze when she looks like that, all downcast with her makeup off, it's not something he can do and trot along and talk at the same time. Not and acknowledge the truth of what she did to him.]
Guess it was a little too fairy-tale, huh? Turning to one quest to fix the other. But I'm not--I don't think it was a bad idea. Just maybe not the best.
[Prompto knows something about not meaning to be awful, but things just kind of coming out that way, anyway.]
A-and, I don't feel terrible. So I don't think you should have to, either.
...You know. No one I've talked to yet has understood it. Why I did it.
[She sets her notebook aside, pulling her knees up close to her chest and wrapping her arms around them, making a flat place for her chin to rest atop them as she curls in on herself.]
It's like...like they get half of it. And then they fill in the other half on their own. What was I trying to do, what did I think would happen, why didn't I do something else, how could I think that would help.
[She rubs her nose, this time.]
Truth is, I...
[It's easier when he's not here yet, when he's not right in front of her, because she can look away from the window between them. She can look away and that makes it a little better, just like he's doing.]
It was so that it would stop. Like...I don't know. Lancing a boil. Draining a wound. I didn't think anything anyone could've said to you right then would've done anything. I didn't think it would get through all the emotion. Sometimes...sometimes you take the emotion out of something and it makes it easier to cope. That's what I did when I learned how to kill a person. First you have to just...make it stop.
[The breath he takes isn't the sharp kind from stinging, unexpected pain. It's audible like that, but a milli-beat longer, deeper, deliberate, like when you see the needle and turn away but still feel it enter--surprised not by the hurt itself, but how much.]
...Aestas.
[Prompto knew, from everything she said then and the picture he's formed of her over the last few months, that Summer stole his color from him because she honestly thought it would help, and if she thought it would help, that could only be because it had helped her in the past. To survive, on her own. In the end, the only one she could rely on to come through for her was Summer herself. That made sense, Prompto figured that much on his own.
What he didn't know was what exactly she'd had to come through, to get to this answer. Figuring out how to make it stop, when she learned how to kill--a person, not a creature.
That's what she said, isn't it? It's like you wish it could just...stop. Just for a little while.
That's how you cope when no one comes for you. That's how you cope when you have to, when no one's there to save you if you can't.]
And after? It doesn't... It didn't go away, did it? [He slows for a second, looks around, makes a turn; as he does, he presses the heel of his hand hard against his heart. No. It doesn't go away.] What do you need then?
[She goes quiet a minute, tracing idle circles with her fingertips against her shins.]
It puts distance into it. You start to forget it, a little bit — just around the edges. The details that make it so real. You still remember the big picture, just not with the same...clarity.
[She sighs.]
I only meant to take enough of your color that it wouldn't be so sharp. That it would dull enough that you could deal with it. I didn't mean to take so much of it, that was the part where I really fucked up.
[And it's not visible, but that's the moment, right then, when something fractures and she can't put her finger on what it is, only that she feels it splinter inside her; it's the reason that her eyes go hot and fill with tears as she looks up at the window once again, and it's the reason her voice comes out thin and wobbling and a pitch above where it usually sits, when she finds her words again.]
[Summer's strength gives out, and when it does, the murky unease, the week's worth of unresolved, compacted hurt Prompto's been pushing through crick-cracks and shatters open, lets everything else burst through.]
It's okay. [Untrue, but he says it. He feels it.] I'm okay. It--I'm not fucked up now.
[What he is is complicated to feel and impossible to explain, a disorienting, sloshy mix of guilt, still, and relief, and anticipation and betrayal and something overwarm that's sunk claws in him--not yet painful, but deep and impossible to ignore.
What he is tugs him towards her, yanks him across the cobblestones.]
I'm coming, A. I'm bringing you home. If--
[No. None of that. Big breath, Quicksilver, you heard what she said, and here she is, breaking for you.]
--That's what you want, right? That's what you need. Come--come home now. It's safe. We'll figure it out, we're not--I won't leave you behind.
[It's a feeble answer, one that doesn't even come close to addressing all of the, well, everything that's still in the balance between them. But there's a part of her that knows what he's doing here, and it's the same part of her that's so, so grateful for it, because what he's done is he's made it easy for her to just say yes. She doesn't have to fend for herself. She doesn't have to know the right thing to do. She doesn't have to know how to get out of this, how to fix it, how to justify it, how to make it better.
He makes it so that all she has to do is look at one simple yes-or-no question — we're going home, you have a home, you have me, we'll figure this out — and say "Yes."
She wonders if he knows how grateful she is for that. If he knows how many times terrible choices were set in front of them and everybody looked to her for an answer, and she hadn't known better than anyone else what to do but she'd had to choose it anyway. She wonders if he knows that what he's just done is really just a variation on the same theme that they've been discussing all along: taking the thing and making it stop, just enough that you can manage to deal in the interim.
She wipes at her eyes, then rubs at them outright with the heels of her hands.]
[And he is, and he's fast, and he's there, peering up each staircase until he finds the one she's on. Like they're an inverse of Cinderella on the steps of the palace, Prompto stares up at Summer, breathing just a little hard, his shoes neither glass nor lost, neither of them dressed to dance. Instead of running away, he reaches up to her--not in princely invitation, but with both hands, like a child. Or like she's the child.]
Come on. ...I can carry you.
[Not like a princess, but piggyback, like they did on their way back from the last castle.]
[If he'd asked her, which he didn't, she probably would've dubbed this one a West Side Story moment, which she also realizes is a reference he may or may not have gotten. But the fine details are all there: girl, boy, fire escape. The chasm of differences in the middle. The reaching-across anyway.]
You don't...have to —
[But that's sort of the point, isn't it? He doesn't have to. He's not doing it because he has to. He didn't have to find her, and he didn't have to understand her, and he didn't have to reach for her or light up her life or make her feel like there's more to her future than just wishing herself back to the past. He didn't have to do any of that. He just did.
He chose to do it. He chose her.]
...M'not too heavy?
[One of the ways she means it is physically. There are others.]
[He shakes his head, steps forward, and opens his mouth again, but for some reason, watching her as her voice--contracts, sort of, the sounds scrunching together to match how she's sitting, all curled up--somehow, that glues his own words together in his throat, a huge lump he can't hack up.
Of course she's not too heavy. The first thing she did was float the both of them up, lighter than air. She's a bird soul, she's firelight, she's so skinny even Prompto worries about her, a little. They're all the sorts of things he's wished he could make himself. Useful. Admirable. Light.
(The prince grunted when he hauled him up out of the dirt, used both hands and said without thinking, "Heavy--!")
As he looks at her, his hands still held up and out, the only thing Prompto manages to get out past his past is this. The truth under it all. What he always needed to hear.
[It crosses her mind, almost absently, that in a movie or a storybook or something else with a heavy emphasis on visuals, this would be one of those moments where she'd launch herself into the air off of the stairwell, and his arms would be waiting, and she'd fall gracefully down and be caught in them and he'd swing her around with the greatest of ease. And really, she's almost half-tempted to indulge that idea, stupid as it is. She could cast her flight spell on herself and it would all work out. She could make it happen.
But somehow, thinking about it, she comes to the exhausted realization that for all that she's crafted her reality around her persona of being a witch, this is actually one of the few rare times when she doesn't have to be that, either. No magic, no theatrics, no gaudy displays of power.
She stands up on her own two feet, and gets her legs under her, and descends until she's able to take his hands and let him guide her down the rest of the way.]
...We'll figure it out?
[When they get home, she means. He'll take her home like he promised and they'll sit and they'll figure it out.
What she's really asking, probably, is is it going to be okay, and looking to him in the hopes that he'll supply her with a yes.]
[Where Prompto guides her is the rest of the way to his chest, so he can wrap his arms around her and just hold her. So they can fit together again. That much hasn't changed. That's still the same. He breathes out, like a sparking wire's finally taped over once more. For now, they're safe.]
Yeah. A little later. I, I promised Iggy I'd help make dinner. [After a pause, Prompto shifts his hold so he can take more of Summer's weight against him. At the same time, he reaches up to smooth his hand down her hair. His eyes are closed, but he knows beneath his fingers, it's a dull, autumn brown. Homey. Like home. He inhales again, long and shaky like air is something new to him, and expels it with another promise.] We're going to make enough for all of us.
[What he's saying should be obvious. Breathing's starting to come more naturally now as he strokes Summer's hair. They're going back home.]
It's--I don't know if you'd have it where you're from. It's like, bird meat and egg mixed up over rice. It's good, I promise. Way tastier than I just made it sound.
[She's littler than him. Not tiny or anything, but just smaller enough that Prompto notices, every time. He rests his nose in her hair, then, light as a petal, touches his lips to the top of her head.]
Just come home now, where it's warm. When you're ready.
[I want to go home, she remembers thinking night after night, when she'd slept in caves and on sand and atop cots made of hay, when the six of them had been swept away from everything they'd once known and there was no telling when if ever they were ever going to see it again. I want to go home, she remembers repeating as she'd bit down on her sleeve and sobbed after another day of getting nowhere and another new set of horrors burned into her memory. She'd told herself it would be worth it, everything she did and had done, once she made it home. She'd figure it out, once she was home. She'd make her peace once she was home.
Then she'd been scarred, defeated. Then she'd been traded away to the wizard in exchange for the life she'd fought so hard to preserve, and watched as Nick and the others had returned to the one place she'd been trying to get to all along. Watched as they got the one thing she'd wanted. Watched them earn the thing the wizard had specifically denied her, expressly to taunt and to hurt.
Nick never came back. No one ever came back. And then it was more living, more enduring. With the wizard she couldn't even cry at night, lest he overhear and gain the satisfaction that his pressure was making her crack at last.
But now, somehow, she's stumbled into this. Hands that seek out hers. Arms that gather her in, a nose that brushes the top of her head and lips that press kisses against her hair. A voice that tells her to come home, and that it's okay if she can't make it alone; he'll carry her there.
Just come home, Prompto says, and it's like something jars loose that had been lodged inside her before — an ugly, wretched sob of her own that she crushes against his chest to try to stifle the sound of it.
Home.
He'll take her home.
It's okay. They can figure it out. They'll figure it out when they're home.
Because when Prompto holds out his hands, home isn't that distant faraway star that it had always been in Nevermorrow, that impossible dream to chase. Home isn't the relief at the end of a neverending endurance run, not the inspiration and justification for whatever needs to be done to get there.
Home is right here, already here, and he'll take her to it whether she's able to get there on her own or not.
But for a little while yet, she just cries against his shirt, and babbles I'm sorry until the words don't even sound like words anymore, and lets the world shrink down to nothing but the arms around her and the warm breath in her hair and the catharsis that comes from weeping and knowing that there's still gentle affection waiting on the other side for her when it's done.]
[It's okay bubbles out of him, helpless counterpoint--not because it is okay, but because the only way Prompto can imagine going on right now is to make it okay, for Summer. Everything she did is still done. They'll have to talk about it. Even he knows that.
But right now, she's crying in his arms. For him, even. And there's something he has to say, to make sure Summer knows before they go anywhere else, physically or conversationally. She has to know it the second he does, and that's right. Now.]
I love you, too.
[It's the second-absolute-worst time to say it, he realizes. But the first-worst time was when she did, after taking his color and leaving him unable to respond on any level, so fair's fair. It makes it a lot less fairy-tale, in any case.
Prompto holds Summer tight both to steady her and to keep himself grounded, drive the both of them solidly down into this moment. This is the realest he's ever been. They'll ever be.
Saying it to Ignis was different. That was stating a fact that's been true for years, and getting to tease him, too, a little bit. This--telling Summer--is making a decision. Realizing that fact, putting it into action. Prompto's placing his bruised heart in her hands with all the vulnerability she bared by stepping, slight thing that she is, into his arms. Like a light, feathered thing with hollow bones. That's all either of them is, sometimes.
He feels tall and protective and small all at once, holding her here on the stairs. Something inside him is shaking.
Maybe it's the friendless little boy he saw in the mirror.]
I want to say that now. So. S-so much.
Edited (Wait I can make that better) 2018-12-02 03:13 (UTC)
[She says, muffled, like a person who doesn't mean it in the slightest. But affection is always easier when it's unilateral, because when she's the one giving it, she's also the one controlling it. She's not nearly as adept at knowing how to receive it, which is awfully paradoxical considering it's also often the one thing she craves more than anything else.]
You're stupid and dumb and your face is dumb.
[But her sadness is melting away because of it, dissolving the way that sadness is supposed to in a moment like this — not the gripping inescapable weight that it had been for him in the forest but something more transient, something that goes and comes like a brushfire, rapid and devastating but quickly burning out.
There's a damp spot on his shirt, which is her fault. Which means it's already destined for a wash anyway, so she feels less bad about rubbing her face against his chest to dry her eyes a little further before drawing back just enough to look up at him.]
...And I'm stupid and dumb too so I guess we're meant for each other.
[Crap, she's looking at him. He blinks back the brightness in his own eyes and puts on another smile for her, since the first one'd been such a hit. He catches part of his lip in his teeth, but then he bites it a little, and, in wryness at them, at this situation, it comes out all the more genuine. He really meant it. He really means it, when it comes to Summer.]
I dunno. I always thought you're really smart.
[He lets a beat pass, waiting for that little-kid wobbliness to get the hell out of his voice, then adds:]
Guess that just means I'm that much stupider and dumber, huh? C'mon.
[He leans backwards a little, just shifting his weight back on his heels, not even letting her go.]
Let's get off the stairs. Then I can carry you. I-it'd be really stupid and dumb to fall down the stairs.
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no subject
[He drops his gaze away from the window. Even if that might not be where she's watching him from, meeting her gaze when she looks like that, all downcast with her makeup off, it's not something he can do and trot along and talk at the same time. Not and acknowledge the truth of what she did to him.]
Guess it was a little too fairy-tale, huh? Turning to one quest to fix the other. But I'm not--I don't think it was a bad idea. Just maybe not the best.
[Prompto knows something about not meaning to be awful, but things just kind of coming out that way, anyway.]
A-and, I don't feel terrible. So I don't think you should have to, either.
no subject
[She sets her notebook aside, pulling her knees up close to her chest and wrapping her arms around them, making a flat place for her chin to rest atop them as she curls in on herself.]
It's like...like they get half of it. And then they fill in the other half on their own. What was I trying to do, what did I think would happen, why didn't I do something else, how could I think that would help.
[She rubs her nose, this time.]
Truth is, I...
[It's easier when he's not here yet, when he's not right in front of her, because she can look away from the window between them. She can look away and that makes it a little better, just like he's doing.]
It was so that it would stop. Like...I don't know. Lancing a boil. Draining a wound. I didn't think anything anyone could've said to you right then would've done anything. I didn't think it would get through all the emotion. Sometimes...sometimes you take the emotion out of something and it makes it easier to cope. That's what I did when I learned how to kill a person. First you have to just...make it stop.
no subject
...Aestas.
[Prompto knew, from everything she said then and the picture he's formed of her over the last few months, that Summer stole his color from him because she honestly thought it would help, and if she thought it would help, that could only be because it had helped her in the past. To survive, on her own. In the end, the only one she could rely on to come through for her was Summer herself. That made sense, Prompto figured that much on his own.
What he didn't know was what exactly she'd had to come through, to get to this answer. Figuring out how to make it stop, when she learned how to kill--a person, not a creature.
That's what she said, isn't it? It's like you wish it could just...stop. Just for a little while.
That's how you cope when no one comes for you. That's how you cope when you have to, when no one's there to save you if you can't.]
And after? It doesn't... It didn't go away, did it? [He slows for a second, looks around, makes a turn; as he does, he presses the heel of his hand hard against his heart. No. It doesn't go away.] What do you need then?
no subject
[She goes quiet a minute, tracing idle circles with her fingertips against her shins.]
It puts distance into it. You start to forget it, a little bit — just around the edges. The details that make it so real. You still remember the big picture, just not with the same...clarity.
[She sighs.]
I only meant to take enough of your color that it wouldn't be so sharp. That it would dull enough that you could deal with it. I didn't mean to take so much of it, that was the part where I really fucked up.
[And it's not visible, but that's the moment, right then, when something fractures and she can't put her finger on what it is, only that she feels it splinter inside her; it's the reason that her eyes go hot and fill with tears as she looks up at the window once again, and it's the reason her voice comes out thin and wobbling and a pitch above where it usually sits, when she finds her words again.]
I really fucked you up, I'm so sorry —
no subject
It's okay. [Untrue, but he says it. He feels it.] I'm okay. It--I'm not fucked up now.
[What he is is complicated to feel and impossible to explain, a disorienting, sloshy mix of guilt, still, and relief, and anticipation and betrayal and something overwarm that's sunk claws in him--not yet painful, but deep and impossible to ignore.
What he is tugs him towards her, yanks him across the cobblestones.]
I'm coming, A. I'm bringing you home. If--
[No. None of that. Big breath, Quicksilver, you heard what she said, and here she is, breaking for you.]
--That's what you want, right? That's what you need. Come--come home now. It's safe. We'll figure it out, we're not--I won't leave you behind.
no subject
[It's a feeble answer, one that doesn't even come close to addressing all of the, well, everything that's still in the balance between them. But there's a part of her that knows what he's doing here, and it's the same part of her that's so, so grateful for it, because what he's done is he's made it easy for her to just say yes. She doesn't have to fend for herself. She doesn't have to know the right thing to do. She doesn't have to know how to get out of this, how to fix it, how to justify it, how to make it better.
He makes it so that all she has to do is look at one simple yes-or-no question — we're going home, you have a home, you have me, we'll figure this out — and say "Yes."
She wonders if he knows how grateful she is for that. If he knows how many times terrible choices were set in front of them and everybody looked to her for an answer, and she hadn't known better than anyone else what to do but she'd had to choose it anyway. She wonders if he knows that what he's just done is really just a variation on the same theme that they've been discussing all along: taking the thing and making it stop, just enough that you can manage to deal in the interim.
She wipes at her eyes, then rubs at them outright with the heels of her hands.]
Okay. Yeah. ...Yeah, okay.
no subject
Almost there, girl.
[And he is, and he's fast, and he's there, peering up each staircase until he finds the one she's on. Like they're an inverse of Cinderella on the steps of the palace, Prompto stares up at Summer, breathing just a little hard, his shoes neither glass nor lost, neither of them dressed to dance. Instead of running away, he reaches up to her--not in princely invitation, but with both hands, like a child. Or like she's the child.]
Come on. ...I can carry you.
[Not like a princess, but piggyback, like they did on their way back from the last castle.]
no subject
You don't...have to —
[But that's sort of the point, isn't it? He doesn't have to. He's not doing it because he has to. He didn't have to find her, and he didn't have to understand her, and he didn't have to reach for her or light up her life or make her feel like there's more to her future than just wishing herself back to the past. He didn't have to do any of that. He just did.
He chose to do it. He chose her.]
...M'not too heavy?
[One of the ways she means it is physically. There are others.]
no subject
Of course she's not too heavy. The first thing she did was float the both of them up, lighter than air. She's a bird soul, she's firelight, she's so skinny even Prompto worries about her, a little. They're all the sorts of things he's wished he could make himself. Useful. Admirable. Light.
(The prince grunted when he hauled him up out of the dirt, used both hands and said without thinking, "Heavy--!")
As he looks at her, his hands still held up and out, the only thing Prompto manages to get out past his past is this. The truth under it all. What he always needed to hear.
It doesn't matter if she's heavy or not.]
I want to.
[I want you.]
no subject
But somehow, thinking about it, she comes to the exhausted realization that for all that she's crafted her reality around her persona of being a witch, this is actually one of the few rare times when she doesn't have to be that, either. No magic, no theatrics, no gaudy displays of power.
She stands up on her own two feet, and gets her legs under her, and descends until she's able to take his hands and let him guide her down the rest of the way.]
...We'll figure it out?
[When they get home, she means. He'll take her home like he promised and they'll sit and they'll figure it out.
What she's really asking, probably, is is it going to be okay, and looking to him in the hopes that he'll supply her with a yes.]
no subject
Yeah. A little later. I, I promised Iggy I'd help make dinner. [After a pause, Prompto shifts his hold so he can take more of Summer's weight against him. At the same time, he reaches up to smooth his hand down her hair. His eyes are closed, but he knows beneath his fingers, it's a dull, autumn brown. Homey. Like home. He inhales again, long and shaky like air is something new to him, and expels it with another promise.] We're going to make enough for all of us.
[What he's saying should be obvious. Breathing's starting to come more naturally now as he strokes Summer's hair. They're going back home.]
It's--I don't know if you'd have it where you're from. It's like, bird meat and egg mixed up over rice. It's good, I promise. Way tastier than I just made it sound.
[She's littler than him. Not tiny or anything, but just smaller enough that Prompto notices, every time. He rests his nose in her hair, then, light as a petal, touches his lips to the top of her head.]
Just come home now, where it's warm. When you're ready.
no subject
Then she'd been scarred, defeated. Then she'd been traded away to the wizard in exchange for the life she'd fought so hard to preserve, and watched as Nick and the others had returned to the one place she'd been trying to get to all along. Watched as they got the one thing she'd wanted. Watched them earn the thing the wizard had specifically denied her, expressly to taunt and to hurt.
Nick never came back. No one ever came back. And then it was more living, more enduring. With the wizard she couldn't even cry at night, lest he overhear and gain the satisfaction that his pressure was making her crack at last.
But now, somehow, she's stumbled into this. Hands that seek out hers. Arms that gather her in, a nose that brushes the top of her head and lips that press kisses against her hair. A voice that tells her to come home, and that it's okay if she can't make it alone; he'll carry her there.
Just come home, Prompto says, and it's like something jars loose that had been lodged inside her before — an ugly, wretched sob of her own that she crushes against his chest to try to stifle the sound of it.
Home.
He'll take her home.
It's okay. They can figure it out. They'll figure it out when they're home.
Because when Prompto holds out his hands, home isn't that distant faraway star that it had always been in Nevermorrow, that impossible dream to chase. Home isn't the relief at the end of a neverending endurance run, not the inspiration and justification for whatever needs to be done to get there.
Home is right here, already here, and he'll take her to it whether she's able to get there on her own or not.
But for a little while yet, she just cries against his shirt, and babbles I'm sorry until the words don't even sound like words anymore, and lets the world shrink down to nothing but the arms around her and the warm breath in her hair and the catharsis that comes from weeping and knowing that there's still gentle affection waiting on the other side for her when it's done.]
no subject
But right now, she's crying in his arms. For him, even. And there's something he has to say, to make sure Summer knows before they go anywhere else, physically or conversationally. She has to know it the second he does, and that's right. Now.]
I love you, too.
[It's the second-absolute-worst time to say it, he realizes. But the first-worst time was when she did, after taking his color and leaving him unable to respond on any level, so fair's fair. It makes it a lot less fairy-tale, in any case.
Prompto holds Summer tight both to steady her and to keep himself grounded, drive the both of them solidly down into this moment. This is the realest he's ever been. They'll ever be.
Saying it to Ignis was different. That was stating a fact that's been true for years, and getting to tease him, too, a little bit. This--telling Summer--is making a decision. Realizing that fact, putting it into action. Prompto's placing his bruised heart in her hands with all the vulnerability she bared by stepping, slight thing that she is, into his arms. Like a light, feathered thing with hollow bones. That's all either of them is, sometimes.
He feels tall and protective and small all at once, holding her here on the stairs. Something inside him is shaking.
Maybe it's the friendless little boy he saw in the mirror.]
I want to say that now. So. S-so much.
no subject
[She says, muffled, like a person who doesn't mean it in the slightest. But affection is always easier when it's unilateral, because when she's the one giving it, she's also the one controlling it. She's not nearly as adept at knowing how to receive it, which is awfully paradoxical considering it's also often the one thing she craves more than anything else.]
You're stupid and dumb and your face is dumb.
[But her sadness is melting away because of it, dissolving the way that sadness is supposed to in a moment like this — not the gripping inescapable weight that it had been for him in the forest but something more transient, something that goes and comes like a brushfire, rapid and devastating but quickly burning out.
There's a damp spot on his shirt, which is her fault. Which means it's already destined for a wash anyway, so she feels less bad about rubbing her face against his chest to dry her eyes a little further before drawing back just enough to look up at him.]
...And I'm stupid and dumb too so I guess we're meant for each other.
no subject
I dunno. I always thought you're really smart.
[He lets a beat pass, waiting for that little-kid wobbliness to get the hell out of his voice, then adds:]
Guess that just means I'm that much stupider and dumber, huh? C'mon.
[He leans backwards a little, just shifting his weight back on his heels, not even letting her go.]
Let's get off the stairs. Then I can carry you. I-it'd be really stupid and dumb to fall down the stairs.