i cannot defend, this untamed heart is waiting;

[innoctuous]

For all that he is the embodiment — the epitome, the poster-child, the flagship — of one that would rather leave effort as something meant for other people, the gusto he sometimes enters battle with would surprise anyone, especially anyone that has known him as long as the group that follows him now, and perhaps even more especially the one that has been with him from the tender age of three. Because if there is any measure of knowing what the crowned prince of Lucis is capable ( or incapable ) of, it is one ( 1 ) Ignis Scientia.

Sometimes, he goes looking for a fight. Not for any real need to work out anger, or frustration, or anything that might equate the need for it, but sometimes there is a reserve of restless energy just thrumming beneath the surface of his skin, something that accumulates and sits and festers when they go too long between picking up hunts, or there's a stretch of fetch quests that net them some good gil, but not the challenge that results in his body being so damned worn out that he can't do a damned thing but faceplant into a motel bed — or his bedroll if they're roughing it. There's a reason that he makes it a point to check out the hunts at every Crow's Nest they stop at, but it seems like the pickings have been slim for the last however-long, and he swears by the Six that he's about to go out of his damned mind.

Maybe that's why he can't sleep, even though it's been hours since the sun had gone down, since Ignis had prepared one of his favorite campsite meals — which stands to reason, really, that the older has noticed the prince as a restless and irritable thing — and even more hours still since they'd decided to call it a night, because the King's Knight server was down for maintenance and when you're out in the middle of fucking nowhere, there's little else to do but either look at the stars or try to get some sleep. And for all Noct has studied the stars from a very young age, they don't hold much interest for him when he can't sit still, and so he. Wanders.

The roads are treacherous at night, an echo of his chamberlain's voice breathes into his awareness, and that should, by all accounts, be enough to keep him within the soft blue glow of the haven's protection — but it doesn't. He's restless and anxious and all those adverbs one might think in Prompto's general direction on any given day, and maybe a walk in the darkness will clear his mind or make him so gods-damned bored that he can finally sleep, but either way, it would be too simple to turn back and call the whole thing off. So he isn't going to. He's —

Not expecting a Red Fucking Giant to come crawling its way out of the ground, but it Fucking Does, and whether it's close enough to the haven for the sound of it to echo or there is just some inherent alarm instilled in someone's brain when they sense their prince is in danger, Noct has been warp-striking this thing for a good ten straight minutes when the other three make their presence known, and he's pretty sure he hears Gladio growling out what the actual fuck, Noct before he. Uh.

( Look, hindsight is always going to be twenty-twenty, and he is going to come back to this in the morning and think something along the lines of what the fuck himself, but it goes without saying that this had started out as an innocent stroll, and daemons are always going to be the ones that fuck everything up. That's his story and he's sticking to it. )

So, the damned thing picks him up — you know, like they do, squeezing and squeezing just long enough to have him squirming and gritting his teeth against the pressure — and while under normal circumstances, being thrown from that unsolicited handshake would find him point-warping out of harm's way, but it's either a lack of sleep or something else that sees him slammed into the ground hard enough to have him seeing stars, and not just the ones that are hanging out in the sky above him, because those are pretty damned innocent and he's almost positive the ones that burst behind his eyes are the sinister sort that laugh at the fact that he's just been face-slammed into the dirt.

To his credit, there have only been a handful of times in which he's blacked out and come to with Ignis looming over him like some great mother chocobo, concern etched into the whole of his expression as a potion or whatever-else is pressed into his hand and promptly administered; he can feel the thrum of healing through the whole of himself, extremities and appendages and all the things in between, and while it's enough to get him back on his feet, there are still a few bits of him that don't feel like they're actually attached. Like he's meandering through a bit of cold molasses in pieces, or like his legs don't belong to him, or the tips of his fingers won't stop tingling no matter how much he shakes out the feeling of being maybe-almost-not-alive.

He leans, bodily, against Ignis on the way back to the haven — even if it's not very far, and even if he doesn't really need to ( in his head, because everything is fine, even if he'd just gotten himself face-slammed into the dirt ), but there's a bit of a lurch in his steps that have him stumbling, just a little. He's fine, damn it. He's alive. That's all that matters.