hashtag_chocobro | The Roof; Late Tuesday Night [05/28].

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The Roof; Late Tuesday Night [05/28].

Well, Prompto's inaugural bus caper with his fellow Drama Diamonds had been....you know what? He was going to say it was a success. Sure, they got caught, but they'd managed to get all the work on one The Bus before they did, and he actually managed to get some pretty great shots of the look on Dean Skywalker's when he did catch them. Those alone would have made the whole thing worth a million detentions...

...but, of course, shenanigans for distractions could only work so far, and, once the thrill and rush of it all had sort of passed, there was a big nasty nugget of a fact left behind that he still had things to talk to Vette about and, if he was reading things right, she may have sort of known that he had to talk to her and it was sort of hanging there, being deftly pushed aside by the two of them and their incredible shared ability to just deflect and ignore things.

But he sort of didn't want to just ignore it. He sort of just wanted to get it off his chest, if anything because it seemed like such an awkward thing to bring up to someone. At least with Nina, he could frame it in the context of her death and how saving him would have been useless, and here's why. But with Vette, there wasn't any of that. It was just letting her know so she knew, so they weren't keeping awkward secrets, so nothing wound up biting them in the ass later.

The somber landscape of the island's latest incarnation put him in a pretty good mood for it, too, especially with the excitement of their caper fading, and so he asked her to meet him on the roof once everything was settled, his guns still with him to take care of any gross bug intruders (seriously, too, why did they have to be bugs? So icky!), thinking that, yeah...this was definitely a good choice. If things got too awkward, he could just pitch himself off the side of the building...

...perfect plan.

Drama Diamonds, indeed.

[[ mostly for the one, but, hey, it's an open roof, if there are any other night owls lurking about! Details of the conversation between Vette and Prompto very much NFB, though, if you please! ]]

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Vette (and Vette's guns), weren't far behind him, really. Ditching Nina for this talk hadn't even been all that hard. Nina had been far too giddy over the whole caper to pay her much mind as she'd ducked out again, and she was in the process of checking her power packs to make sure she had ammo as she stepped through the door up onto the roof.

It took her a moment of blinking into the weird greenish dark before she singled out Prompto, and she gave him a nod.

"Hey, Gunshow," she greeted. "You wanted to talk?"

It was weird, seeing that sky out there, and how it made him think about how he used to feel about the sky out here, all that time ago when he first got there and was so freaked out over how many stars there were in the sky. It definitely put him in the mood to think about home and all the stuff he was managing to remember about the other weekend, as the high from their adventure started to crumble and fall into some weird dark place that would be pretty hard to shake.

"Hey, Princess," he greeted her back, tilting his head back to look over at her as she approached, offering a faint smile. "Not so much wanted, really; more like need to..."

This was...probably going to be a lot of him rehashing some of the same lines he'd used with Nina, wasn't it? Which wouldnt' be too bad; that talk had gone surprisingly well, really.

"Thanks for meeting me up here."

"Well..." Vette smiled faintly. Shrugged her shoulders a little. "Need to, then. Who am I to say no if you've got something you need to do, right?"

That mysterious something that had her insides doing twists and flops. That something that Nina hadn't been able to talk about, that had her half terrified.

With an irreverent toss of her lekku over her shoulder, she crossed her arms over her chest and leaned herself back against the emo garden planter.

"So... what's up?"

It was such a simple question, really, so why was it so hard to know how to answer? Prompto was quiet for a moment longer, looking back to the sky, and then he shifted a little so that he could face Vette better and see her as well as the light out here would allow..

He had a million possible ways to start this, but, faced with the moment, he had no idea just how to start.

"I....uhhh....hm." He sighed, shook his head a little. He knew this was going to be hard, but this was so much harder than he thought it would be. "Um, okay, so....how about this? What...what do you think you'd do, if, you know, this place had one of those weird weekends about the future and stuff like that, and you...found out...something about yourself, that you didn't know before, and it was, you know, kind of...bad? You'd...probably just want to keep it to yourself, right, and not tell anyone about it, unless, like, you knew they'd be hurt about it or something?"

Well. That got a frown out of Vette right there, yes.

"I mean... I guess so," she hedged. "I totally missed that weekend. I mean. I didn't exist that weekend. So... I guess I've just kind of been pretending none of it happened. Seemed... saner."

Easier. Less terrifying?

She blew out a soft breath, and then pushed off from the planter, making her way over to him. She suspected that wherever this was going, she was going to want to be in hug range, anyway.

"This bad thing," she hedged, "is it chewing at you?"

Yeah. Hug range would be nice.

"Gnawing me straight down to the bone, really," Prompto said, with a small breath of a laugh, and he shook his head. "And I...don't think I would have told anyone, except that I was kind of hoping that maybe...maybe telling Nina would...help, you know, because she....anyway, I thought it would help, but I don't think it did, because, well, one thing I don't need to tell you is how stubborn she is and telling her not to do something's only going to want to make her do it more, and I definitely couldn't have her know and then not tell you, because that's not fair, that wouldn't be right, y'know? Especially not now that we're...you know..."

He looked over at her with an expression that was almost entirely hopeful puppy-dog, though he had intended for it to be light and jocular and playful. "Stuck with each other for good, now. Drama Diamonds. Unbreakable, and all that."

Aw, Prompto. Vette smiled softly, holding up two hands and touching her fingers together in the shape of a diamond.

"Unbreakable," she agreed. "But if you're only telling me because it wouldn't be fair otherwise... I mean..." She shrugged a shoulder faintly as she lowered her hands again. "That doesn't seem fair to you, either."

There was a pause, then she added, "You going to be okay?"

Prompto grinned a little, holding up his hands in a diamond as well, but the smile fell away as soon as he lowered them and shook his head a little. "No," he said, "I'm not."

And those weren't tears in his eyes already, shut up. It was just this stupid air in this stupid wasteland, that's all.

"I mean, I might be? A lot can happen in twenty years, Nina's already on a warpath to try to fix it, so who knows? But I'm not..." His face twisted a little; so much for sticking to the same script, but he decided maybe this would be a good way to get around to it without it just sounding ridiculous, like something out of some stupid video game or something, "...built right, I guess?"

"Not... built right," Vette echoed, frowning a little. "Like you're double-jointed or something?"

See, she was trying to keep the mood light! But her attempt faltered a moment later, and she hedged, "Nina's trying to fix... it." She bit her lip for a few seconds. Nina had mentioned that Prompto hadn't looked well in those photos. Vette... had no idea what a healthy human was supposed to look like. She'd brushed it off. "Fix what? Fix you?"

The small breath of a laugh hopefully showed that Prompto did appreciate the attempt and now he sort of wished he really could be double-jointed, but that was just because he was trying to distract himself from the fact that her picking up on things this well should have made it easier for him, but it...didn't. He bit his lip a little, rubbing the back of his head. "Yeah," he said. "Fix me. I, uh...."

He, uh, really wished he could just get to the damn point...He winced a little, then tilted his head slightly as he looked at her.

"Have I ever told you about Niflheim and the Empire and the war with Lucis, any of that stuff?"

Edited 2019-05-28 20:35 (UTC)

"Um..." Vette bit her lip. "I don't think you have, no," she replied, sounding apologetic, as though that was somehow her own fault. "You've got an Empire too?"

And a Niflheim and a Lucis, whatever those were.

Oh boy.

"Yeah." That little breathy snort of a laugh was going to be making a frequent appearance tonight, apparently. "We've got an Empire, too. The Niflheim Empire, and they've been at war with Lucis...our nation...for, like, hundreds of yours. And I was...I was actually born there...at least, I...I thought I was..."

He grunted, rubbing the back of his neck again, fidgeting a little, realizing that his efforts to figure out the best way to explain all this was probably just making things more convoluted.

"Look, the Nifs are bad for a lot of reasons, but one of them is that they do all these...weird experiments on their soliders, they make them so that they're practically not human any more, and maybe they aren't even human to begin with, it's all just rumors and speculation, you know, but, the other weekend, I....I found out the truth, Vette. It's more than just experimenting on their soldiers; they're making their own soldiers. Clones. Like, they're cloning people just so they can do experiements on them, mixing them all up with daemons...and I..." It was all coming out so well all of a sudden, but there was the hitch. "...I'm....one of them. Or, I was supposed to be. I...got out. When I was a baby. Some Lucian agents snuck me out of there when they were on a recon mission, or something, but I'm not...I'm one of..."

His eyes grew a little wide, his head shaking a little as it to reject it all even though his words kept saying it. "I'm one of those things, Vette, I have a barcode and everything, I'm just this thing that was created in a lab for the entire purpose of just being made into a monster. I wasn't born in Niflheim, I was made there, and they didn't even make me right because I wasn't supposed to be anything but an experiment!"

Vette was silent as Prompto spoke, mulling that over, frowning a little at the history of it all. It sounded like an Empire was an Empire no matter what galaxy it was in, and she found herself nodding along.

Right up until that last bit. Right up until that line. Her expression tightened a little, her lekku tensed so much that they were quivering behind her, and she straightened up just that little bit more.

"You are not just a thing," she said, something fierce and protective cutting into her words as she stepped forward and grabbed him into a hug. "You're Prompto. You might've been made for something, but is that what you are? A monster?"

Really, for a little slip of a thing, she could hug hard.

"We are more than what we started as, Prompto. We're not just anything. You are not just anything. Maybe you were one of the lucky ones, you got to live and grow and you became one of the best people I know, and you weren't supposed to, but that just makes the rest of us luckier to have you, jerk."

One of the best people she knew? Prompto was tempted to insist that Vette clearly didn't know very many people, then, but there was a hug, a much needed hug, and he was just going to soak that up for a moment as he tried to figured out what else he could say while simultaniously keeping his shit together and not breaking down.

He'd done a surprisingly good job with not completely breaking down over this, after all.

"...my whole life, Vette," he finally said, barely a whisper, but they were close enough she should probably be able to hear, "up until a few years ago, I didn't even talk to anyone, because I was just so afraid they'd find out I was even from Niflheim. And it's so much worse than that. Like, I can tell you and Nina because...because it doesn't really mean anything to you two. But what if...what if Iggy, Gladio, Noctis found out...I could never..."

It was enough to make him wish that whole cell-degeneration thing would just start already and get it over with.

"If somewhere you haven't seen since you were an infant matters so much to them that they'd walk away from you now, then they're garbage people who don't deserve you," Vette growled, hugging on that little bit more fiercely. "So, maybe Niflheim doesn't mean anything to me. So what? You could've said you were made by Hutts and you'd still be our Prompto, you know."

She smushed her face into his shoulder for a moment. Just because it was there, and she could, and so there.

"For all that must mean to you, I guess," she noted, a little wryly.

Were Hutts something that could be far worse than water wings as a potential terrorist threat? Yeah, he could totally see the Kingsglaive being totally cool with something made by the enemy being all besties with the prince...

But even with that thought, Vette's words still helped, still bolstered him to know that, if anything, even if he lost everything back home, he still...had everything here. Vette and Nina. Yang and her family. Even another prince he was pretty sure he could go stand with if he really couldn't let go of that...

"Thanks, Vette," he said, tilting his head toward hers. "I might not know what Hutts mean, I guess, but I do know that hearing that means a lot..."

Vette smiled at him for a moment, leaning back but keeping her hands on his shoulders so that she could look him in the eye as she did so. There was something a little sad under it all, but that was her problem to carry, wasn't even entirely about him.

"You're good people, Prompto. You make a little more sense now than you did before, but nothing's changed beyond that, okay? And if this means you're going to get sick someday... we fix that. And if we can't, you're still stuck with us, you got that? As long as I'm able to be a pain in your butt, I plan to."

"Oh, yeah, sure," Prompto murmured, and he tried to smile, really, he did, but it didn't last very long because that just made everything go blurry from what he was just going to say had to be a genetic defect making his eyes randomly start watering. "That's easy for you to say now that we all know it's on a time limit anyway."

Was it time to open the door to dark and morbid jokes about his newfound awareness of his pending mortality yet? It was totally time to open the door to dark and morbid jokes about his newfound awareness of his pending mortality!

Vette chewed her lip for a moment, and then shook her head slightly.

"You know it's not that simple," she noted. "I mean... I'll only live about as long as any human. Maybe less. Probably less. I grew up hard, that's not genetics, that's just a childhood gone bad. Maybe I'll make it to sixty if something big and mean doesn't kill me first. Heck, I'd be impressed by forty. You know how long Zora live?"

She hiked up one shoulder a little. Looked down at her toes.

"You're worth knowing, Prompto. You're worth sticking with. So you might get sick? Maybe I will, too. Maybe next week the island will just drop an asteroid on our heads and it won't matter anyway. Do you know where I was, that weekend? Because I sure don't. It's all poodoo anyway."

Could an asteroid drop on their heads next week? Prompto was feeling like he wouldn't mind that at all, and now it was his turn to chew on his lip a little.

Should he tell her?

It was definitely something she should probably hear from Sidon, but...she should probably know.

"No one knew where you were that weekend," he said quietly. "We did try to find you, though, but..." His world went to shit and Sidon went as long as he could before he could no longer justify being away from his people for so long. "But, you're right. It's all...poodoo anyway."

Well... that was...

That was something to chew on later, maybe. Something potentially ugly that Vette wasn't so sure she wanted to really understand.

"You... tried?" She swallowed. Flattered, maybe. Maybe surprised. She wasn't sure. People didn't just... try to find her. That wasn't how things went. "I mean... I mean, that could be anything. We don't know, right? Nobody knows."

She pulled in a slow breath.

They tried.

"Tell you what," she said, "I try this thing where even if I manage to find my way home, I leave you enough to at least figure out where I've gone from there. I won't ever take off without looking back. If I fall off the grid, something happened. I didn't walk away."

"I..." There was that small breath of a laugh surfacing again, and Prompto shook his head a little, "...don't think I'm the one who needs to hear that one."

Did you know how much alcohol it took to get a Zora drunk, Vette? Because Prompto knew. And it was a lot.

"But that's...good," he said, nodding, then breathing out slowly, rubbing his neck again. "You know what, though? That whole stupid weekend is starting to feel like maybe it's the island's way of trying to teach us how to better our futures or some dumb shit like that."

"Maybe," Vette replied, glancing out over the island.

If that was what that weekend was, what in the world was this?

She shook it off, and then looked back at Prompto.

And then reached up a hand to chuck him a good one on the shoulder.

"So, that's what we'll do, right? If we're handed all these hints, we make it better. It'd be cruel to give us this much if it was impossible, right?"

Well, then, Prompto was just going to have to chuck her a good one back.

"I don't know, Vette," he said. "We've still got detention coming up. We probably don't even know the meaning of the word 'cruel' yet."

"Sure, but how bad can it be?" Vette was giving Prompto a smile that was edging right on into cocky, now. "They haven't invented the jail cell yet that can hold me for long, you know."

... There were some moments where it was very clear that Vette didn't actually have experience with schools.

And Prompto opened his mouth to say something, stopped, reconsidered, and then laughed. A genuine laugh, too, not just a small little breathy one trying to chase away something worse.

"You know?" he said. "I was going to explain that detention at high schools doesn't usually involve a jail cell, but, around here? I...honestly would not be surprised if that's exactly what we're gonna get."

Vette's own laugh echoed Prompto's, and then she raised a hand and drew a tickymark in the air.

"Score one for practical experience!"

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The Roof; Late Tuesday Night [05/28].

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