#prommiel
Note
On that note: tell me about your Prompto ship 🎤
YES SIR
under the cut because it's long; I'm going into as much detail as I can
So they met as literal children, like Miel's mom held Prompto as a baby when Cor [plot stuff]. So they've known each other since birth, essentially, and Prompto spent a lot of time with Miel through their entire lives. Even through the rough and awkward parts XD
She's always tried to be his cheerleader and he was good company for her when she was extremely lonely. She loved him (always as a friend, but she also had an itty bitty crush on him when she started Noticing People(TM) romantically and sexually) even before they were in high school
And yet! They danced around the fact that they were kind of already in love ghdjsk like the day he left with the other bros she was there to see him off, and they just like, hugged and did that awkward little "ha" sigh when they let go.
Miel was like "shit. gods dammit. I should have kissed him." as she watched the Regalia getting small in the distance XD
Also (NSFW warning) back when I had sort of an RP/ocxoc ship with a friend of mine, Prompto and that friend's OC were both like "boy I wish I'd had sex with Miel before she died--WAIT HUH YOU TOO?" but also Miel didn't die c:<
So after [stuff from toward the end of the game] they meet up again, and she's been angsting about finding one of his bullets, then he rocks up into the diner in Hammerhead, and she's his waitress and he's like "Miel oh my gods" "yeah, I'm here, Prompto"
They go on a hunt together, find they still make a good team, and decide to make a good COUPLE (they spend the night making up for lost time, he moves in with her, then they get married about a year later)
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Miel couldn’t sleep.
That wasn’t really that rare of a occurrence, but sleep deprivation was starting to be way more detrimental to her health than it used to be. Moreover, she’d suffered this problem for a long time, but was extra-aware of it now that Prompto snored softly in her bed while she stared out the window, seeing faint beams of the daemon-deterrent lights by the garage.
Her midnight alarm began its chime, and she turned it off quickly, even though she was about to wake Prompto up anyway.
He hadn’t been asleep that long, and he could go back to sleep in a minute.
She crawled into bed, arm slipping under Prompto’s as she murmured into the shell of his ear.
“Hey, Prompto, sweetheart. It’s the 25th. Happy birthday.”
His eyes fluttered open, spectacularly blue even in the dark. “What?”
“I said it’s midnight, so it’s the 25th now. So happy birthday.”
He sighed. “Oh.”
“I know we’ve got busy days ahead, and I’m going to let you go back to sleep in a sec, but I just wanted to say, stop by the pit stop if you make it home in time, and I’ll make something special for you, since I’m cooking and waiting tables today.”
He nodded sleepily. “Okay. Can I get some more sleep now?”
She tried not to laugh. “Yeah. Goodnight, Prompto.”
He tilted his face up to hers, wanting her affection even as he slipped back into slumber. Now she did laugh a little, and pecked his lips.
“Night, Miel,” he said with a sigh.
She still couldn’t sleep.
_
That evening, before Miel gave up hope of Prompto coming in, he slid into a seat at the bar.
“If only this were like a real truck stop and they had topless waitresses,” he joked.
“You’d better not order anything with bacon, then, or these boobs you love so much are going to be marred with grease burns. “
Prompto flushed at the mental image, and finally spat out, “That’s kinda hot.”
“Behave yourself for now and we’ll see what happens when we get home. Now, what do you want to eat?”
Miel hummed as she plated Prompto’s food, then felt in her pocket to make sure she had a candle.
She came back to the bar and slid the plate in front of him. “There ya go.”
“Thanks.” Prompto tucked in, chewing carefully, to fully savor the food. “You know,” he said, mouth still half-full, “I didn’t expect you to remember.”
“I don’t make this curry thing very often because the spices cost an arm and a leg, Prom.”
He swallowed. “No, not that. I knew you remembered how to do that. I meant my birthday.”
Miel leaned on the counter, adjusting her neckline, and laughing as Prompto watched her intently. Finally, their eyes met again. “Why would I have forgotten?”
“Well, it’s not that important of a day; it’s late in the month, and you know, it’s me.”
“Every October 25th, I’ve thought of you,” she assured him. “And wished we could be together, even just to do something simple like this. I never forgot when we were kids, and I didn’t forget when I thought you were gone, and I’m not going to forget now. You’re important to me; a day celebrating your existence in this world—as much as this world sucks right now—is important to me.”
He smiled. “Thanks, babe.”
“Sure thing. Now, I should be clocking out in an hour, so… hang tight.”
He nodded, and Miel went back to work.
_
As they began the trek home (on Miel’s bike, of course), Miel handed Prompto a box to hold so she could steer, asking him to hang onto it.
“Sure. What’s in it?”
“You’ll see!” She chirped, starting the bike and heading onto the road.
When they got in, she fished the candle from her pocket and opened the box, sticking the candle in what laid inside, and then searching for matches. Once the candle was lit, she set the whole box down on Prompto’s lap while he sat on the couch.
And softly, she sang “Happy birthday.”
He looked up at her when she was done, misty-eyed. “Thanks, Miel.”
“Of course. Make a wish, sweetheart.”
He blew out the candle, then curled into Miel’s arms. “I don’t know what to wish for. I want Noct back. I want to feel sunshine again. I want you to sleep better.”
She rubbed his back. “I think you do know what to wish for.” She broke off a piece of the little cupcake she’d made, and held it up for him. “Come on. Don’t make my little theft of ingredients from work be for nothing.”
He let her feed him the bite of cupcake. “Thanks.” He sniffled. Miel just kept rubbing his back.
“This is the first time you haven’t been alone on this date in a long time, isn’t it?”
Prompto nodded, his tears hitting her neck.
Slowly, but not at length, he fell asleep like that.
And Miel hadn’t even gotten to take her top off.
_
Miel stretched when the sun finally hit her eyelids. She searched for her phone in the bedding that was bunched between her and Prompto, then she turned her bleary eyes to the floor. There it was.
Oh, gods. It was the 25th.
She’d known this, of course. Last night, she’d been excitedly buzzing about the little gathering planned.
But she hadn’t meant to sleep this late.
So up she got, padding to the kitchen to get to work on making the food and cake for the party. Well, all the stuff that Ignis wasn’t making. They’d chatted for a while about whether he could manage it, as the Regent and all, but he insisted he could, and would.
Everyone agreed, Prompto was worth putting real life and responsibilities on hold for a second.
Miel thought as she worked. What a crazy year (year-ish) it had been. The dawn returned, Ignis and Acheta had their wedding and coronation, Insomnia Nova was up and running…
She shook her head as she scraped the sides of the mixing bowl. Wild.
She put the pan in the oven and sighed, leaning against the oven and drumming her fingers on the rail of the door as she thought about what to do next.
_
Well, she had to wake Prompto eventually, and seeing as people would be arriving in an hour at least, now seemed like the time.
She sat down on her side of the bed, bending to kiss Prompto’s cheek, then his forehead, and requesting he get up in between.
“C’mon Sleeping Beauty, Ignis and Acheta are gonna be here soon. And Delph.”
“Isn’t Gladio coming, too?”
Miel sighed. “No ‘good afternoon, my lovely wife, who planned me a birthday party’? Yeah, he’ll be here, too. But you need to get uppppppp.”
“Okay,” he replied, trying to smooth his hair as he sat up. “I’m up. Is it really the afternoon?”
“Yeah, it’s like 12:30. I let you sleep while I got stuff ready.”
“Wow. Didn’t mean to sleep that long. Anyway. Good afternoon, my lovely wife, who let me sleep while she got ready for the birthday party she planned for me. Do I get a kiss?”
She leaned in and pecked his lips. “Yes. You get the other thirty later.”
He blinked, confused.
“Thirty-one kisses for thirty-one years of life.”
“That’s cute.” He leaned closer to Miel again. “But can I cash them in for one long makeout session?”
“Gods, it’s like you’re 19 again.” She replied with a scoff and gently pushing him away.
“I’m making up for lost time!”
“I have an even better deal for you. You can have both. But later.”
“Aww, why?”
“Because you need to get dressed, not undress me.”
He looked up at her with a little grin. “Darn, foiled again.”
“Get dressed, Prompto. The Scientias are almost here,” Miel said with a warm smile, while looking at her phone.
_
Later, when everyone had gone home, and Miel sat on the couch half-asleep next to him (partied out and physically tired), Prompto felt tears leave his eyes and slip down his cheeks. He let a few more fall silently, but when he sniffled, Miel sat up straight.
“You okay?” she asked, voice soft, and hand hovering near his cheek, ready to touch, caress, if he wanted her to.
“I’m okay,” he reassured her. “These aren’t sad. Er, maybe a little bit, because I still miss Noct, but. Mostly happy. It was a good party.”
“Yeah, I had a good time,” Miel agreed, settling back against the couch again. “It was good to see everyone.”
“It was nice to be surrounded by people who care.”
“You always are, dude,” she said with a giggle.
He sighed. “Yeah, you’re right.”
Miel smiled. “Oh, I just remembered.”
“What?”
She swung herself onto his lap, pressing a kiss to each cheek, then the tip of his nose. “Two, three, four… Five,” she said after a kiss to his forehead. “Am I going to have to keep count, or will you help me out here?”
Prompto laughed, but when her lips pressed to his throat before she counted six and seven, he suddenly took her hands from where they were pressed against his chest.
“I’m ready to cash in the other 24.”
“Oh, alright,” she sighed, kissing him deeply on the mouth, wrapping her arms around his shoulders. She pulled away for a second. “A good birthday, though?”
“Best I’ve had yet,” he answered, kissing her again.
#PromMiel#my math for his age is probably wrong I keep forgetting exactly how old he and Miel are#Miel
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PromMiel Fic Masterlist
Miel Lumine, Parts I-IV
Miel's Wedding
Miel's Wedding, Part Two
Union Upon Reunion
Betrothal
The Early Days in Leide
Miel's College Days (mind content warnings)
Settled In
Lost and Found
Lucky Number
A Better Copy
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A Better Copy
references info from Episode Prompto, blood warning, mostly just fluff about aging
Years had passed since the sun came back, twenty-three of them, all golden. But the sun aged those that remained in its light, like it aged grapes in the field.
The darkness had been merciful enough to just age their hearts.
_
Miel had stopped working at the diner when she was about 45; she and Prompto had saved up enough by only living off her salary and shaving a little off the top of his earnings that they felt that they deserved an early retirement, a shift to a leisure-oriented life, with the occasional visits to court still there, but easier to schedule.
Miel having spent the bigger portion of her life in Leide at that point, as much as she still loved it, was starting to grow a little fatigued of the scene. So, she and Prompto had started to talk about moving.
They debated going out into the lusher part of the countryside, raising chocobo chicks. But they weren’t really interested in having to keep up a farm. Neither of them had been raised for it, or taught how. So they left that idea.
Eventually, they dropped the thought of moving at all, deciding staying put was the better idea. Leide was their home, the place where the two of them had finally been together the way they’d wanted to be for years. Moreover, this whole building was theirs to do with as they pleased, so why not do just that?
They overhauled the apartment, though, redecorating it by framing more of Prompto’s photographs, hanging new curtains Miel bought, then embellished by hand, adding odd little lamps to put more light into the house, using warm-tone bulbs so it was like they lived in constant candlelight after nightfall.
It was a lovely little place; they’d always been happy with it, when happiness was an emotion they experienced (during the dark, satisfaction was the closest thing).
So, thrilled as they were, Miel jumped about a foot off the couch when she heard glass shatter and a weak moan from the bedroom.
So she rose and padded into it, stepping carefully, not sure how far the glass went, or how small it had splintered into.
There was only one person who could have made that noise, so she called out. “Prompto?”
He was cradling his hand against his chest, his shirt already getting stained with the blood that was seeping through his fingers.
Miel reached out and peeled his left hand away, leaving his bleeding right one in place against his chest. Then she took that hand in hers.
She stepped forward after that, glad she had slippers on, hearing the crunch of glass under their soles.
She winced, remembering her search for Prompto in Insomnia right after the dawn had returned, how what little rubble there was had crunched under her boots, and Prompto was bleeding then like he was now.
She steeled herself, pushing aside the memory. “What happened?”
Prompto’s fingers flexed in her hand. “I broke the mirror.”
She exhaled slowly, calmly, and nodded sagely. “Come on, let’s get both of us cleaned up and you bandaged.”
Miel worked in silence, washing the blood away from Prompto’s hands, taking special care with the jagged cut on the side of his right one, then washing the residual blood from her own, taking slow, deliberate breaths the whole time.
She dried her hands and dug in the cabinets for a roll of gauze. Finding one, she took Prompto’s hand again, wrapping his entire palm, and looping the gauze up between his fingers, too. When she taped the end down on the back of his hand, she sat back on the sink.
“What happened?” She asked more seriously, now that she had given him the required medical attention, and wasn’t too scared of sending him into shock.
“Like I said, I broke the mirror,” he replied.
“Prompto?” she pressed.
“I didn’t like what I saw, and I swung, and I didn’t realize I was going to break it, and I cut myself.”
Miel sighed lightly.
She took his left hand, squeezed it, then led him back to the bedroom. She sat him down on the bed, then left to grab the broom and dustpan, and a paper bag for the glass.
As she swept it all up, she looked over at Prompto, who was simply watching her silently.
The shining glass went from the dustpan into the paper bag, light tinkling sounds accompanying Miel’s every move.
“That’s okay,” she said finally. “There was this mirror I saw in a shop in Insomnia Nova that I wanted, but I didn’t want to ask for, since we already had one.”
Prompto smiled weakly. Miel tossed the bag of glass into the trash can, then joined Prompto on the bed.
“So what did you see?”
“It’s just, as I get older,” he said, voice already wobbling like he was going to cry, “I look more like him.”
“More like—?”
“Besithia,” he spat. “My dad, my… whatever.”
“Oh,” Miel said, almost inaudible.
“I didn’t know what he looked like as a young adult, even as a thirty or forty-year-old, but now I’m starting to really age and all I see in the mirror is him, and I have to think about how I’m going to turn into… the old man I shot in a warehouse laboratory in Gralea.”
Miel let out a heavy exhale, her shoulders dropping with it. “You aren’t.”
“What choice do I have?”
“Am I Bella Lumine?” She asked finally.
“No. Miel, you- you’re not a clone.”
“But I look like my mom. But I’m not her. She didn’t live through the darkness, she didn’t hunt daemons, she wasn’t and didn’t do a lot of things. But I did. And you did.”
Prompto scoffed. Miel fished in her purse, pulling out a compact and popping it open.
“That’s you!” She said, swinging herself into his lap. She slipped her hand into his hair, trying to make it into the up-sweep he’d had it in for years. “You, with hair like a chocobo butt, even if you won’t admit it.”
Prompto laughed a little.
“That’s not Besithia. It’s you, my husband, Prompto Argentum,” she soothed. “The little boy I thought didn’t have frames on his glasses. The teenager who kicked my ass at King’s Knight. The young man I sent off one May day with our friend Noctis, and didn’t tell I loved him until we were nearly thirty. The fifty-three-year-old man I still love with my entire heart and soul, as much as I did when I was twenty. Who I’m thrilled to have spent the last seven years of no work and all play with. I’d kill Besithia, given half a chance. I only want to kiss you any chance I get.” She pecked him on the lips to prove her point, and looped her arms around his neck, shutting the compact behind his back.
Prompto pressed his forehead against hers. “I have the best wife ever.”
“That’s the Apis line, baby.” she giggled and kissed him again. “Now, you want to go to Insomnia Nova tomorrow to get that mirror?”
He chuckled. “Sure.”
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Lucky Number
Miel scanned the numbers, not sure what she was looking for exactly, but nevertheless mumbling “Oh, seventeen,” when she saw it.
“What was that?” Prompto asked from across the room.
“Seventeen,” she repeated a little louder, “my lucky number.”
“Since when?” he said, slightly confused. He hadn’t known she even had a lucky number.
She shrugged. “I dunno, since we were, like, eight? Maybe?”
Something tickled the edges of Prompto’s mind then. “So… after you met me?”
“Yeah, I guess so. That would been about a year into our friendship.”
Prompto stood up and walked to the bookshelf, lifting up and off the shelf the photo album that held the earliest pictures he’d taken, from about that time, flipping through it casually as he asked, “And why is it your lucky number?”
She shook her head. “Force of habit at this point, it’s been like 19 years.”
“Uh-huh. Miel, can I show you something?”
She looked up at him, eyes narrowing a little. “Sure…?”
He flipped a page definitively, and turned the album around so she could see it, and took a few steps closer to her. “What’s that logo on my shirt?”
Miel turned a shocking shade of pink when she realized. “A… seventeen…”
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Lost and Found
another little angsty one but more hurt/comfort. references the end events of FFXV
It probably would have been easier to find it if the skies weren’t still so dark.
Prompto blamed himself, which wasn’t new, but he was able to justify it this time. If he’d taken care of his stuff in years intervening, if he’d taken more pictures after that last one, if he saved to the camera’s memory, if he hadn’t decided right then and there that he had to have another picture of Miel lying fast asleep, arms either side of her head like they were when he pinned them to the mattress and with the moonlight in her hair (down for the first time in what must have been a month, other than when she washed it), if he hadn’t done any of that, he would still have it.
But there was a part of him still screaming if he let it: Miel would be gone someday. She would be taken from him by Death or by departure– removing herself from his presence– but either way, she’d be gone and he’d be alone again. Sometimes he dreamed about it– she took his key and threw all his stuff into the hall, and while there was no one else in the building to see the spectacle, he still felt ashamed for having disappointed her. Those nights he woke up crying, and if he was lucky, Miel heard him and woke up and held him until he could breathe again. Those nights, he felt that the day she left him, it would probably be by choice of neither of them.
He dreamt about that, sometimes, too. She’d be run through and bleeding out in his arms, or one night the parasite would take hold and she’d wake up one day soon after horned and dripping black goop from her eye and sobbing, ‘Prompto, I’m sorry.’
He kept those dreams in, even if he did cry hard enough that Miel woke up. He just told her to go back to sleep, and she did. She would move a little closer to him sometimes, thread her hand under or into the crook of his elbow, but it didn’t change much.
He would be alone.
And now he’d gone and lost the last vestiges of the last time he hadn’t felt alone, all because he wanted another photograph of Miel. What a sick trade-off.
It was four AM. Miel would be up in two hours and she was good at finding things, but he couldn’t wait two hours; he needed it now, if only so he felt more secure.
So he slipped from bed, trying to be quiet at first.
He looked around the bed, around where he’d popped the SD card out of his camera. Or where he thought he did. He looked where he kept the camera when it wasn’t by his side of the bed– even though it was normally by the bed, because he looked at his pictures, of the life gone by that they demonstrated, until he fell asleep.
He started getting more frantic, looking in drawers and on other shelves, and just… making a mess. He knew Miel was going to be upset. She’d clean it up and rub his back and tell him it was all okay, but she was going to be upset. But he needed those pictures, they were pictures of Noctis, and he missed Noctis.
He wasn’t sure how long he’d been looking when he started letting tears slip. Were they sorrowful? Frustrated? Lonely? He was, after all, functionally by himself in the apartment at the moment. And he wanted to look at Noctis. Or at least the pictures.
He’d always known he’d loved Noctis, maybe not in the way some tabloid magazines wanted to present it, but he felt so much for Noct that it filled his heart when nothing else had.
Those photos were all he had at the moment, and he couldn’t just lose them so carelessly.
Miel was important, Miel was there, Miel had been there for years, never giving up hope in Prompto one day loving her back, even when he seemed set on Noct.
So of course he wanted pictures of her, too. But he could have put it on the SD card and saved himself the trouble.
He was so stupid. As he thought it, the first sob racked his body. And then another. He wasn’t even getting anything done at this point, just knelt on the floor sobbing over a piece of plastic that held his most precious memories.
“I don’t want to be alone,” he whimpered into the dusty air of the apartment. Gods, Miel was going to be so mad; he’d stirred up so much dust and made such a mess of her living space.
But it was then a soft voice called out.
“Prompto? Prompto, where are you– oh, gods.”
He looked up at her listlessly. “Hi, Miel.”
“Prompto, what happened?”
“I lost my SD card. It had all my photos of Noct.”
“Oh.”
“I need it back. I need it.”
“I know.” She said. “I’m going to help you find it. But first, I need to put all this stuff away.”
Quickly, more quickly than he’d ripped them out, he noticed, Miel put things away in their places– batteries, hair ties, screwdrivers, a magnet, scissors, all of it in the junk drawer. Folders of papers back on the shelf. Prompto’s photo albums, too. Well, Miel handed him one, from when they were kids– like, when they were seven years old kids. But it was Noctis, just like Prompto wanted. Precious memories.
He sniffled again, and Miel looked down at him.
“Gods, Prom,” she breathed. It wasn’t even a sigh, and not an admonition. Just an intercession. She was calling out to the gods to ease his suffering, even if she didn’t realize her intent.
He mumbled an apology and went back to the photo album, his elbows on his knees.
Miel drifted from the room after a few moments, and he heard things shifting. The billow of bedding, a quiet clatter. A pop as Miel sank to her knees. She hummed contemplatively, and made a sound of disappointment.
“Oh!” she called out at once. “Prompto, I’ve got it!”
“Really?” He wiped his eyes and sniffled again.
“Yeah! Or at least, I think so.”
He padded his way over to her, and she handed him the SD card gently, resting it on his fingers. He slipped it into his camera and turned it on.
He fiddled with the buttons for a moment, then– there he was, raven-haired and laughing for once.
Oh, thank the gods. Thank Miel. Just… gratitude for everyone.
He sank down onto the bed again, flicking through the photos. Miel pointed next to him and raised her eyebrows, asking a silent question.
He looked up at her and nodded once, lifting his hand off the mattress so she could sit next to him.
“Can we…” She began. He looked over at her. “Can we go through them, one by one, and you can tell all about the story behind each picture?”
He nodded. “Yeah. That’d be good,” he said, hoarse from crying. He flipped to earlier in the album, earlier in the record of the trip.
“Wait!” she cried suddenly.
He stopped flipping through the photos. “What?”
“Delph,” Miel said softly, her fingers coming to the camera screen and her voice breaking.
“You miss her?” Prompto asked.
“So much. More than I think I’d realized until now,” she replied, grabbing the blanket they slept under and pulling it around herself, as if for protection. “I miss Delph, Prompto.”
“I know. I miss her, too. Probably not as much or the same as you do.”
“Same with me and Noct,” she replied quietly. “You can keep going now.”
By the time they reached the end of the album, the last picture he had of Noctis, Miel’s six AM alarm had gone off a long time ago. But still, the both of them calmed, they chose then as the perfect time to fall asleep.
They slept in a tangle, missing people, but not alone.
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Settled In
A shortish fic about Miel finally feeling right about her place in life. (Acheta works for Ignis; they're besties)
The concept of getting dressed up was almost foreign to Miel now.
It had been 10, maybe 15 years since she’d last put on something above business casual (though the concept hadn’t existed for a while when everyone was scrabbling to survive and she was, you know, one of the last bastions of an attempt at preserving safety), other than for Acheta’s wedding. But for some reason, she felt very settled into herself when she stood in front of the mirror in her underwear, putting on just a little makeup (eyes and lips only) and calling Prompto over to help her with her eyeliner.
Acheta had sent some fancy silver eyeliner from Insomnia Nova about a week ago, and Miel had decided that this party that Ignis had invited them to was the best time to wear it for the first time.
But Prompto had steadier hands than she (funny, considering that she too shot, so you would think there wouldn’t be so wide a discrepancy), so she handed him the pen and turned her face upwards for him.
“Stop flinching,” he said softly, “I’m not going to hurt you.” With one hand, he held her face still by her chin, his thumb resting there and his index finger holding her eyelid so it didn’t crinkle quite so much, and with the other, he drew a smooth line above her eyelashes. He did the same on the other side, then let her go.
“You should probably put some clothes on, Miel,” he told her, stifling a laugh.
“Says you, not even wearing pants,” she replied, striding over to the bed, where her silver-and-blue dress lay draped.
“Well, I was putting them on when my wife asked me for help, so you can’t blame me,” he replied, following her across the room and kissing her cheek.
She smiled and stepped away from him into her dress, zipping it up three-quarters of the way, then reaching over her shoulders to zip it the last quarter. She let out a little huffy breath, as if she couldn’t sigh in contentment. She scanned the floor for her shoes, stepping into them and then fastening their straps.
She was ready now, just had to wait for Prompto.
He should have been ready already, too. All he had to do was put on his pants and throw on the vest and jacket– not a hard task at all– but instead of doing that, he’d watched Miel finish dressing.
She leaned against the door frame. “You gonna be ready soon? She asked with raised eyebrows.
“Yup!” He chirped. “I just got distracted for a minute.”
She laughed and shook her head. “Get your tail shaking, chocobae.”
_
The train ride was… quiet, so few people riding at that time of night, and the two of them in subdued moods. Ready for a party, of course, but not as high-energy as they might have once been, had this party taken place years in the past.
Miel sat in the window seat, her eyes darting as she watched the lights go by, her head rested on Prompto’s shoulder.
_
They walked from the Insomnia Nova depot to the citadel, chatting about nothing. The warm night, Acheta, the fact that Miel doubted anyone would remember who she was, how maybe they should have brought the deed to their land in case their position was questioned.
But Miel and Prompto both had plenty of reason to be there, and either could count the other as their plus one. It would be fine. But insecurity had plagued the two for years, and it wasn’t going to magically go away.
Still, Miel smiled as the two of them were let into the citadel, and then the ballroom, as Prompto offered his elbow for their entrance.
It made her feel very… official and grown- up (and again, settled into herself), entering the Citadel ballroom on Prompto’s arm.
They went to Ignis and to Acheta right away to make their greetings, Miel and Acheta hugging and Prompto and Ignis shaking hands cheerfully and affectionately.
When they left their hosts, they moved to mingle with the other guests, separately at first.
Miel found it difficult to break into conversations, because just as she’d predicted, no one seemed to remember who she was either on her own or as Acheta’s cousin. So she decided she’d just go join Prompto, who she could hear people calling out to as he milled about.
She’d followed him with her eyes at one point, watching his drink slosh in his glass as someone clapped him on the back, and seen the nervous smile and slight panic in his eyes as they asked him a question.
On his next pass, she’d get up from where she sat and join him, she told herself.
And she did; the next time his sky-blue jacket caught her eye, she headed in that direction, finding him in a conversation already, and holding two drinks.
She laid her hand on his upper arm just as someone addressed him.
“So how did things work out with Cindy, Prompto? Or did you settle down with that Commodore from Niflheim in the end?”
Prompto blushed, but turned to see who was touching him.
“Oh, hi.” He breathed. “I got you a drink.” He handed her the glass of gold liquid and she sipped it carefully, then looked up at him.
“They asked you a question,” she reminded him.
“I know,” he whispered. “I’m stalling.” He laughed nervously and looked at the asker of the question. “Well, it’s funny you should ask,” he said. He gestured to Miel. “Because this is my wife, Miel. We’ve been married for two years.”
Miel grinned and extended her hand to shake. She liked the sound of “my wife, Miel.” Yeah, she’d had two years to get used to being that, but hearing it, in a room full of important people… it pleased her.
But then, the inevitable question arose.
“Two years, huh, Mrs. Argentum? Any kids?”
She sighed, but kept the smile on her face. “Not yet! I’ve only just gotten used to the light again, I wouldn’t have considered it before we got the Regent seated on the throne.”
Now the conversation turned to the topic of the Regent… and his assistant.
“Oh? You two know them, don’t you? “Yes, Acheta’s my cousin and of course Prompto and Ignis…”
Miel sighed a little more. This was exhausting.
The two of them mingled a little more, then took a break to dance. But when that was over, they found someone who seemed to know them as sharpshooters rather than as royalty-adjacent.
“I don’t think,” he said, clearly a little intoxicated, “that it could have been that hard. You two didn’t have to get too far into battle to take things down, right? And you don’t have to be that good at aiming with targets that big.”
Miel got an almost-angry gleam in her eyes. “We’ll see about that,” she told him. “Prompto, keep him busy for a sec, I need to go talk to Acheta.”
_
There was still a dartboard in one of the deeper rooms of the Citadel (or rather, Ignis, at Acheta’s request, had put it back. Miel remembered it from her youth, the hours spent there waiting for her parents. It was how she had honed her aim when she didn’t have a bow with her, after all).
So she and Prompto, both with a couple drinks in them and dressed up, challenged this guy who felt it couldn’t have been that hard for them, to a round of darts.
And they mopped the floor with him.
_
Miel and Prompto went home even quieter than they had come, though it was just tiredness (the mingling and constant ‘who’s this? Oh? Do you two have children yet?’ had exhausted her) taking its toll.
She leaned against Prompto again on the train ride back, though she dozed off this time, drooling on his shoulder. She felt settled into herself.
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Miel’s College Days
…or rather, the end of them
CW: dubcon/coercion, references to sex acts, parental death, mentions of alcohol.
Miel’s time at the Royal University of Insomnia was short. She’d intended to go there for a full four-year course of study, but– well, that hadn’t happened.
It wouldn’t have happened, no matter what she did. If she had gone to her classes that day, she’d have been dead.
Since she’d taken a day for herself– a lot had gone on in the life of Miss Miel A. Lumine in the week prior– she’d lived. She’d contracted a strange form of survivor’s guilt.
Orphaned.
Left behind, traumatized, then orphaned. No, the middle of May hadn’t been very good for Miel.
First, she’d gone to see Noctis and Prompto (and Ignis and Gladio, but they weren’t her friends) off. She arrived when Prompto told her to be there, and whatever his majesty had to say to Noctis, it had taken up extra time, leaving Miel waiting outside for ages for him and Prompto.
Gods, she wished Delph was there. But no, Delph was busy being one of the best fighters the kingdom had ever seen (and was going to meet up with the boys later on down the road). Miel missed her like crazy, of course, and wished she’d said something about her feelings before Delph had gone. But she hadn’t. And now she wasn’t going to say anything to Prompto, either.
At least, not yet. She had time, she figured.
Finally, the boys trudged out of the building Miel knew so well– home to her parents’ office, and where Miel had spent plenty of her time growing up– and her eyes brightened. There Prompto was in his Crownsguard gear. He looked so good, so proud of himself in those. She was proud of him, too.
She smiled at the memory of helping him pick out some of the patches on his vest.
The king called to Noctis again, and Miel sighed, but at least Prompto was still coming to her.
She embraced him immediately.
“I’m going to miss you,” she whispered.
Prompto laughed. “I’m only going for like two weeks, Miel.”
“Yeah, but still. It feels like I’ve never gone that long without seeing you.”
“You got close that one time I got sick.”
“Close isn’t the same. Whatever. Keep in touch. Stay safe. I– I’ll see you soon, huh?”
He squeezed her a little tighter. “Yeah! Sooner than you think.”
“Alright, you two,” Ignis scolded, “it’s two weeks, not a decade. Wrap it up.”
Miel laughed and let him go. “Bye, Prompto. Have fun.”
She cursed inwardly. “Close” really wasn’t the same.
_
Only a few nights later, there was something of a party to celebrate the wedding of the prince to his bride-to-be. Of course he wasn’t there, this was his citizens celebrating his joy as it would spread to them.
But still. Nothing like an excuse to party, huh?
Miel went, but she didn’t really participate the way some others she knew did– she didn’t want to speculate of the why and wherefore of the treaty details, or make conjectures about Noctis’s relationship with Luna. Miel knew the truth, anyway, or at least part of it: Noctis was probably going to be discussing the concept of a concubine with The Lady Lunafreya, seeing as neither of them was really… as invested in the marriage as a union of families as much as they were interested in the union of the countries involved.
Would Delph be the one Noctis chose to fill that role? Who was to say? It didn’t seem unlikely though, considering Delph was joining him on the trip, and the four who left would come back as six.
But it wasn’t her concern. Her job was her schooling. And it wasn’t like the affairs of Noctis’s bedchamber affected her friendship with him, or with Delph, or with Prompto.
Oh, Prompto, she thought. She couldn’t wait for him to come back, so she could finally confess how she felt about him, and maybe they’d be next in line for the whole marriage thing!
Still, when an acquaintance came up to her and asked if she wanted to get out of the stuffy room of the party, she let him take her by the hand and lead her to his dorm.
_
She knew she didn’t want this. She hadn’t had enough to drink to even be absent from her mind, though she felt distant from herself at the moment, as if she could see her classmate atop her more than she could feel him.
So she stopped looking at him, let her eyes glaze over as she stared up at the cracked white ceiling.
This wasn’t how I expected this moment to be happening, the voice in her head intoned. It’s not Delphine and it’s not Prompto. Surely, it was supposed to be one of them. I wanted it to be one of them.
It’s not. This is it now. No second chances at a first time. What am I doing?
I didn’t want this.
When he was done, when he rolled off her, Miel stood up, caring not for what ran down her thigh. She put her clothes back on and picked up her bag, walking out of his room and slamming the door behind her.
She walked back to her dorm in a haze.
That wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted Delph. I wanted Prompto. I didn’t want him.
When she got to her room, she lay on her bed, looking up at her ceiling. “I want Prompto,” she whined to no one.
She didn’t mean it sexually, not that time. She meant it the way a child asks for their parent, the same way a much younger Miel would curl up into Amador’s side and ask “when’s Mom coming home?”
She laid her arm over her eyes so she didn’t have to look at the ceiling anymore– she’d done enough of that for the day– and tried to let sleep overtake her.
It didn’t come as fast as she’d hoped.
_
She woke the next morning groggy and heartsick.
She still felt beyond gross whenever she looked at the ceiling, she missed Prompto more than she expected to, four days into his trip with the bros, and she couldn’t shake the feeling that while the night before had been a bad one for sure, another, worse, day was brewing.
She ripped the previous day’s date off her calendar, revealing the current date: May 16th. She sighed.
She wasn’t going into class today. If she had to say she was sick, she would, but she just could not go.
So instead, she went out towards the chocobo post. Yeah, it was an extended day trip, but she needed a day surrounded by just the pretty birds, birds that made her think of Prompto. And she had the morning off tomorrow, anyway.
_
When she stepped off the train, she already felt a little better. She needed this. Even without the events of last night weighing on her mind, she felt like she’d been due for a little mini-vacation. She was halfway through her course of study, after all. A reward was in order.
It just so happened that now it was also some comfort.
_
She spent the whole day in peace and quiet, including turning off her phone for the day, so she was blissfully unaware of anything going on outside her realm of sight, though there had been some worried radio-listening by the staff of the post. She was the only one there, though, and was starting to get the feeling that she looked visibly out of sorts, so they’d left her alone.
It was when she tried to go home that she ran into a problem.
She boarded the train without incident, but then, it ground to a halt and an announcement came on: “Hello, passengers of the Lucis Rail System. We regret to inform you that our final stop today will not be Insomnia. There is–” the voice broke off, and Miel felt hot fear spread through her stomach.
What was wrong with the train station in Insomnia?
“…there is no Insomnia anymore. Imperial forces have attacked. We fear the worst.”
She turned her phone on, suddenly aware that even if she did, she may not have had reception out there.
Loading, loading… finally, the photo of her, Prompto, Delph, and Noctis flashed onto her screen, and she keyed in her lock code, so she could get to her phone’s actual phone capabilities.
Immediately, she dialed her mother’s office phone.
It didn’t even ring, just gave her a disconnected tone. She tried her mother’s cell phone.
After a few rings, it picked up. “Mom!?”
“You’ve reached Bella Lumine, I’m sorry I’–”
“Fuck,” Miel breathed.
Her phone beeped as something came in. A voicemail?
…a text from Prompto; he was sending her pictures of Galdin Quay that she couldn’t see, saying how much he was sure she’d love it, and how he wanted to take her there, just the two of them, one day.
She had other priorities for the moment.
Her dad wasn’t picking up, either.
There was a voicemail, but like the photos, it wouldn’t download.
The train wouldn’t move, they said, until they were sure it would be safe to move around the country. Who knew if the Nifs would bomb or boobytrap the train tracks?
The lights sputtered out as they shut the train down to conserve power, only coming on whenever they made announcements on the PA system.
Despite the sunshine outside, Miel was left in the dark.
_
At dawn the next day, the train pulled into the train station in Insomnia… it was the only part of Insomnia left.
When Miel stepped outside, her phone finally downloaded her voicemail. But she couldn’t worry about that right now.
She headed for the Citadel… the ex-Citadel.
Before she got there, she was intercepted. Emergency services, they said they were warning her not to get close to the rubble because they weren’t sure it was physically safe, and they were postive, once she’d given her name, that it was psychologically unsafe for her.
That told her all she needed to know.
Bella and Amador Lumine, her mom and dad, were dead.
Before she could say anything to the people in front of her– even a thank-you– someone was calling to her.
“Miel! Miel!”
Miel’s face crumpled, her breaths devolving into hard sobs, as she bolted for Acheta’s arms.
“Acheta, you’re alive,” she wailed.
“So are you!” Acheta assured her, rubbing Miel’s back. “I packed you a bag of some of my clothes. Cindy says she can take us at the garage for a while, let us try to rebuild our lives out there.”
Miel nodded dumbly, then added a weak “Okay.”
_
By the time the news was reaching Galdin Quay in the papers, Miel and Acheta were already on a train to Leide.
But Prompto and Delph didn’t know that, so as the group of five processed the news, they two in particular stared out at the sea, wondering if they were about to be bound to each other by the loss of a light in their lives– a Miss Lumine, specifically.
The group broke for a while, so everyone could process the sudden shock in something like peace.
What a place to mourn.
_
Delph was at the end of the dock, looking out at the water, when Prompto found her. He wanted to approach, but wasn’t sure how to announce himself, or if Delph even wanted to be disturbed.
So he stood where the sand became the wood of the dock, and stared over Delph’s head at the water, too.
“Swear to the gods, if Miel died, and I never got to eat her out, I’m going to be mad.”
Before he could stop himself, Prompto blurted out, “Yeah, me too.”
Delph turned around in surprise, then locked eyes with him, everything about her softening and collapsing.
“Mind if I join you?” He asked, gesturing at the end of the dock.
She shrugged and scooted over. “Go ahead.” They were both quiet for a moment. Then, she spoke again. “Did you mean it, that it may not be safe for us here?”
Prompto sighed. “Well, we’re not inconspicuous. But…I couldn’t say for sure.”
“Of course not.” Delph sniffled. Prompto almost looked over to check if she’d been crying, but… he let her have her privacy. “Do you really think she’s gone, Prompto?”
“I don’t know. It doesn’t really feel like she is. I don’t want to give up hope unless and until we see… something official.”
“What, like her body?”
“…or her name in the list of the deceased.”
“So, we’re going back. Are you going to look for her?”
Prompto shrugged. “I sort of want to. If she isn’t…” he stopped, swallowed, continued, “dead, I don’t want to let her be alone, you know?”
_
Prompto couldn’t find her in Insomnia. He wasn’t looking when they passed through Hammerhead. But luckily, Delph thought about Miel one morning, and sent her a text.
Please let me know if you’re okay, and where you are. I know Prom wants to see you. - Delph.
And got a response not too long later to show him: “I’m alive, but in mourning. By Hammerhead. Doubt it.”
Miel didn’t know how wrong she was in her doubt. Pity it would take years until Prompto finally got what he wanted.
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The Early Days in Leide
references endgame events of FFXV, gives more context to Union Upon Reunion and Miel, Parts I-IV
Thank the Six Cindy had been able to get both Miel and Acheta jobs.
Well, of course she’d gotten Acheta a job; Cindy had pulled her into the garage and now Acheta wore coveralls, sleeves tied around her waist and her shoulders getting a lot of desert sun in her tank top.
But Cindy had had to pop next door to the little diner (Hammer diner, the signs outside read, though it was called Takka’s Pit Stop), asking “y’all need a waitress?” with Miel stepping cautiously behind her. The owner had put her in an apron immediately.
So wait tables she did, chewing gum and taking orders and sometimes cooking. The days she did cook, there were lots of extra things on the menu—mostly made of whatever was brought in, or what was left over from the day before.
And she did that most of the time so she could take it home to the apartment she’d claimed for her own, so she had something to eat.
And she still had to answer Delph’s text. Apparently, Prompto wanted to see her, and Delph needed to know Miel was okay.
“Okay” was so relative. She snapped her gum and pretended waitressing was so boring, but it was a front. The whole time, as she took down orders—that with extra pepper, this on the side, I know you said no substitutions but—there was chatter in her mind. The last of the Line of Apis, waitressing and fixing cars. Orphans. Acheta lost her ‘parents’ twice. Mom and Dad died in each other’s arms, and you weren’t at school that day, so you didn’t die. Miss Lumine, they keep calling you, Miss Lumine, Miss Lumine. The clickety-clack of the train as you entered Leide, your new home. Prompto’s alive, Delph’s alive, but they’ll think you’re dead if you don’t just answer Delph so stop scaring her.
But she did answer Delph, sitting against the wall of her apartment—she didn’t have a couch yet, would have to get one and a bed someday soon—typing slowly.
“Hey Delph. Yeah, just shaken—” Why say that when “shaken” didn’t begin to cover it? Orphaned, her mind whispered.
“I’m okay.” Too short. Delph might still be worried.
“Thank you for asking—” Oh, absolutely not.
“I’m alive, but in mourning. By Hammerhead. Doubt it.” There. All statements and questions addressed. She dropped her phone into her lap and hung her head.
_
It only got worse as the nights grew longer. She hadn’t heard from Prompto or Delphine in what felt like centuries… well, she’d never really heard from Prompto at all, hadn’t seen him since his last day in Insomnia.
Only a few days before she’d lost most of what she knew to be life.
And now the daemons were running around, and someone had to do something. A hunter outpost was being erected more or less in the diner, so she joined them.
“You’re a little short and fat to hunt,” they’d told her, before they learned not to, having seen her in action.
“What skills do you have to hunt with?” they asked before she swung up into a tree, arrow trained and then loosed into the first thing to cross her vision—nothing large, but certainly not unformidable if you were caught unaware.
Then she got the bike, and had Acheta fix it up for her. She could go on solo hunts now, take off her apron and put on something more protective, settle into the bike’s seat and tool off into the cool desert night to find something to kill.
If Prompto missed her, why did he never contact her?
Miel got news sometimes, if she scanned the papers before they got divvied up for other uses, of what had been the coliseum crew, now hunting. She never saw “Auroris, D. E.” among the deceased, so that was good.
She never saw, “Argentum, P. N.” either, but so much of Prompto’s movement through the land was under the table that maybe she never would see his name, let alone him, ever again.
But she never got closure, so the crush—oh, no need to reduce it, she told herself, to infantilize it to schoolgirl daydreams; just call it love, it had been nearly a decade—never really went away. She just stopped feeding it.
But still, one day she’d gone out after a 12-hour shift (her first mistake), and found something big, but nearly dead. She couldn’t kill it with arrows launched from her bike, but…
She dug in her “saddlebags” and fished out a knife. She’d never been excellent at this, but she’d always been good enough. She stopped the bike, letting it idle to keep some noise to buzz in the back of her mind, drew back, and with a snap, let the knife go, spinning until it struck and plunged deep enough to finally get at the heart of the beast before her.
She thanked whomever had weakened it enough that she’d been able to take it down with five arrows and a thrown knife, and turned off her bike, swinging off it to go collect what was hers.
One arrow dropped to the ground, then two, and three, and four. With the fifth arrow she removed, closer to the heart, some blood trickled out, dripping onto her boots. And then, the knife.
With the knife, at the heart, came a bullet. It hit the steel toe of her boots, and the noise it made got her attention. She picked it up out of the sand, and only one word—really, a proper noun—came to her mind.
Prompto.
Prompto had nearly taken this thing down, maybe with help, and considering that it was still alive, she could only guess at the outcome.
The most likely possibility? Not one she wanted to think about. But she did anyway, tears rolling down her cheeks, washing away the blood and dust.
It wasn’t fair.
When she got back to her apartment at close to morning, at which she scoffed, because there hadn’t been “morning” in way too long a time, she brushed off the overwhelming grief she’d experienced as a mix of her hopes that Prompto was around getting dashed, and tiredness from her long shift and then long fight.
She wasn’t crying out of anything other than frustration, she told herself. She threaded the bullet onto a chain anyway, still in wishful thinking, threw it around her neck, where it settled with her tags, and flopped onto her bed to fall asleep.
She’d have to be up soon enough to get to work, anyway.
_
For a year—maybe… how do you count a year, or even a week, when there are no days? Just an endless cycle of alarms for 6 AM and 6 PM, with single beeps for noon and midnight, 365 times. So for a year, she guessed, she wore the bullet and her tags, and she rode out into the desert killing anything she came across before it got too close to any humans. If she went out to them, it was safer.
And she never got any thanks for it; she didn’t expect to. That was just what hunters did, even if she was going a little further past her duty than most would.
But if she was honest, it was more of a personal thing—she was going to kill any daemon she saw because if they didn’t care who they killed, would they care about the consequences?
She knew it wasn’t going to bring anyone back—not her mom and dad, who hadn’t even died by daemons, it had probably been shrapnel— and not Prompto, either. And for that, she felt guilty. There was no real reason to be doing this.
Well, other than protecting anyone at the outpost. She’d do it for them. But still. It left her worn out beyond belief, and it saddened her that she’d ended up surrendering her twenties to darkness and grief.
So what a pleasant surprise when one day, she heard her name and “hunt” in the same breath, and when she went over to talk to the guy who was being told about her, she found herself looking into cornflower-blue eyes, and suddenly the love she’d nearly abandoned re-awoke, demanding she feed it again.
And she didn’t see him all the time; it wasn’t like he stayed by her side at all times, but when he was in the area, he had a hunting partner. Sometime down the line, she heard that Talcott had told Noctis that Ignis, Gladio, and Prompto all hunted together when they were together. And that was true. She didn’t know who they hunted with on their own time, but she did know for Prompto.
…and hunt wasn’t all they did together. She wasn’t one to kiss and tell, but it became common knowledge pretty quickly around the outpost that the vivacity that rippled through Miel when Prompto was due to come into town wasn’t a lust for blood.
It was a lust for something else.
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Betrothal
starts after the events of Union Upon Reunion.
When Miel had woken up at her noon alarm that day, she was surprised to find Prompto in her bed, leafing through one of her books.
“Your little notes in the margins are so cute,” he said, before anything else.
She blinked at him silently, still mentally scrambling for why she was waking up to this. Granted, it was a dear dream of hers, but now that it was happening, she was confused. Okay, so they had kissed, and… more, but wasn’t he supposed to have left before even that? Why was he dawdling, staying in her twin bed, under her covers, reading her books? Reading her margin notes in her books?
She didn’t get an answer, or even ask the question, because as she lay there blinking and looking into his eyes, he smiled. “Also, good afternoon.” Then he leaned down and kissed her, and she let him, even slid her fingers into his hair and shut her eyes, sighing. Because she wanted this. She just wasn’t sure she was supposed to have it.
But that was six months ago. He lived with her now, still sleeping in the twin bed (they fit perfectly if he slept on her chest or they spooned), still reading her books. Sometimes he left for days at a time, sometimes she stayed awake for 36 hours, ignoring her alarms and flicking the UV lamps on and off as needed, desperate for real sunlight.
And one day, she snuck off to a cave she’d heard was nearby.
Prompto had told her it was cold, but he never wore sleeves, so maybe it wasn’t that bad. Still, she slipped on a down vest, over a thick sweater. Better too warm than too cold. She threw one more equally-thick layer on over that, then headed out.
The next day, as Prompto hung onto her waist as they careened along a dusty road through the bluffs, she spoke nearly into the wind.
“Hey, Prompto?”
“Hmm?” He asked, lips on the back of her neck.
“Do you want to…” She sighed. “Will you marry me?”
“Will I what?”
“Will you, Prompto Argentum, marry me, Miel Lumine?”
He stammered, and opened and closed his mouth a few times. Miel felt it on her neck. “I—Yeah. I will. Let’s do it.”
It wasn’t until a few weeks after the official wedding that it hit her.
It was sunset, and she hopped on her bike and rode out to the middle of nowhere, and threw herself off the bike, caring little for any scrapes she got from the brush or dirt, or burns from the bike’s parts.
She didn’t care anymore. She sat in the dirt, legs crossed, and suddenly, the tears came.
She knew she had no right to be sobbing before night had even fallen, mere weeks after her wedding. To a new life lived in the sun, she’d said.
Miel searched for a rock near her feet with bleary eyes, and finding one, flung it as far from her as she could manage. It sailed through the air and clattered somewhere over the next tiny bluff.
Miel opened her eyes and looked at the sky, speckled with stars. Like Prompto’s freckles, she thought, a wet giggle almost escaping her throat.
She wiped her eyes and clambered back up onto her bike.
She had to save the world. And she guessed she’d start with herself.
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Union Upon Reunion
More of what happened the night Prompto and Miel reunited
There wasn’t a whole lot to do out in the desert. Yes, granted, she was on a hunt, and he’d just blown back into town, and they were out here as colleagues and on a hunt. But… she’d missed him. A lot. She couldn’t help but think of this as a second chance.
A second chance at what? She asked herself. It wasn’t like she’d taken her first chance to tell him the truth about how she felt (she hadn’t told Delphine, either, before she’d gone off to chase her dreams of battle. So when Prompto left, Miel had a deep sense of multiple losses crash over her. Everyone she’d fallen for, off doing dangerous things).
That, she explained to herself, was what the second chance was for. She could do it, tell him, this time.
But first, she had to focus on getting them where they needed to be– no more going on mental journeys as she drove through the desert, though she was still very aware of Prompto’s grip on her waist.
She focused on the high-pitched whiny growl of the bike’s motor, the air otherwise still and silent. This was weird. This was rare.
Finally, they reached their destination, and she stopped the bike. Prompto immediately started to talk, possibly made nervous by the silence without the motor. Or maybe he’d finally processed everything? He’d seemed pretty shocked to see her again.
Well, she was happy to talk, to catch up with him. She just had to string her bow. She dug in the “saddle bags” for the segments of her bow (she was still debating a name for it in its assembled form), but looked up at Prompto as he spoke– gods, he was still such a pretty sight. She maintained eye contact as she told him what had prompted her to start hunting, even though her cheeks were flushing as she told him that he was such a key part of it– that she’d been scared she would never see him again, and she would take out that loss on every daemon she came across. But that was why she wore the bullet she’d found, too. Maybe it hadn’t been his, but it reminded her enough of him that she wore it around her neck, so close to her heart that– Her thoughts silenced as Prompto said her name, more forcefully than he just had. He was confused by what she’d said? Well, then she’d show him.
She hadn’t wanted the first time she kissed him to be so… well, impulsive was fine. “Grabby” would have been good, if it had been grabbing somewhere else. …Violent, maybe? She hadn’t meant to pull on his collar so hard and fast that she’d felt his teeth hit hers like that. But gods, if she didn’t want to kiss him and never even need to break for breath.
Unfortunately, Prompto did need air, the sharp gasp he’d taken in hadn’t been enough. She let him go to breathe, looking away into the distance and feeling her cheeks heat up again.
“Wow.” was all he said.
“Wow?”
“Miel, I didn’t know…”
“Prompto, I’m so sorry. That was super unprofessional and we can’t afford to get distracted, and I–”
He shushed her. “For how long?”
Now it was her turn to be confused. “What?”
“How long have you ‘thought you loved me’?”
She sighed. “Gods, since we were ten?”
“Oh. Even back then?”
“Yeah, you were adorable.” She giggled. He took a step towards her, into her personal space, and slowly reached a hand out to brush a clump of flyaways behind her ear. Then he leaned in and kissed her again.
She wanted to just let her mouth open to him, to stay in his arms even in the face of all that surrounded them, to be selfish and revel in the return of her sunshine, but… she couldn’t. Still, she kissed back and let him be the one to pull away. Then she said, “Prompto, we can’t. We’re on a hunt.”
“I don’t hear anything for miles. Do you?”
She was slightly shocked. But he was right. She rolled up onto her toes, wrapping her arms around his neck and molding her body against his.
_
She would have let it progress as far as he wanted to take it, but her timer beeped when they had been kissing for quite a while.
“Morning,” she breathed.
He looked surprised. “Is it?”
“It’s 6 AM.”
“Well, then good morning.” He grinned at her.
She nearly burst into tears. She loved him. She had missed him so much. All she did, all she said, was “Get on my bike, I’ll buy you breakfast.”
_
They rode back and ate in silence, until Miel offered to give Prompto a lift back to wherever he was staying.
“Oh,” he said, then dropped into a mumble. “I was kind of only supposed to be here for like a few hours, I have nowhere to go, really, I can just go talk to—” he paused— “Cindy. I haven’t talked to Cindy in forever.”
“I’m sure Cindy would let you sleep off last night, but you can just come sleep with me—I mean, in my apartment.”
“Eager, aren’tcha?” Prompto said with a wink. She was going to lose her mind if this kept up. It would be fine, where this went was all in his hands, but—she sighed.
“If you want to sleep in my bed, you can. It’ll be warmer.”
_
As it turned out, they didn’t need to huddle for warmth, as they generated enough heat to warm the entire building Miel lived in.
Miel sighed again as Prompto slept on her chest, replaying it all in her mind. When they’d stripped and settled into bed, they’d ended up kissing again, kissing turning into wandering hands, until Prompto’s hand brushed over Miel and found her yielding and wanton and—well…
She had waited so long. And, if she was honest, it had been worth every second. The thought, Prompto’s deep, even breaths, and the heat the two of them shared despite the dark chill outside the nest of comforter lulled Miel to sleep.
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Miel's Wedding Part Two
Contains references to the end of FFXV
The letter referenced is this fantastic post by @ultimoogle.
It absolutely warmed Miel’s heart that some of the “absent friends” she had toasted weren’t very absent at all.
She hadn’t been the first to see the sudden guest arrive, since she was looking at the letter in her hands. The letter was from Prompto, and was supposed to be delivered with her dress when Ignis had dropped it off, but it didn’t get into Ignis’s hands before he’d gone to the garage, so Miel was reading it now, after the ceremony.
She was also leafing though the pictures Prompto had included, some of his favorite memories of the two of them—including, to her surprise, one he’d taken after the first night they’d spent together. In it, she slept curled on her side, arm under her cheek and hair falling in her still-flushed face. He said, in handwriting on the back, that it was one of the most beautiful pictures he’d ever seen or taken of her, which was saying something, with the entire album he had marked “Best of Miel.”
Her hand was resting softly placed over her mouth, her index finger aside her nose, the other fingers trailing down to her chin, until she moved to look at another of the pictures. Prompto rubbed her shoulder through the gauze of lace the whole time, trying to keep her tears from turning into body-wracking sobs. He was beaming, but he knew that Miel reacted much more strongly to things like this (she was an easy crier, had been as long as they’d known each other), planning the wedding had been stressing her out, and they were both keenly aware of who wasn’t there with them. But mostly, she would be, she was, crying out of happiness. He’d written his heart into the letter, and it was clearly touching hers. He was glad, just as glad as he’d been all day.
But they both looked up when they heard a familiar voice call out to them.
“Prompto! Miel! Am I late?”
She looked radiant in a purple gown, nothing over-the-top, but definitely appropriate for a more formal wedding. Still, Miel thought, look at me. I have no room to talk about too-formal attire dressed like this.
Miel choked on a little gasp and sob, then broke from Prompto’s grasp to launch herself at the lady in purple, having missed seeing her rather than sending short messages like “Survived the hunt. At home now. Prompto says hi.”
“Delphiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiine!” She sang, hoisting up her skirt to run faster, dropping it to take Delphine into her arms. “Oh, Delph, I’ve missed you.”
Their relationship hadn’t been the same since the Fall. Miel couldn’t bring herself to answer Delphine’s “please let me know if you’re okay” message for days. But she knew she had to. So the day she felt settled into the area around Cindy’s, she slowly typed and re-typed a message to Delphine.
“Hey Delph. Yeah, just shaken—” No. “I’m okay.” Too short. “Thank you for asking—” Noooooo. Eventually, Miel settled on “I’m alive but in mourning. By Hammerhead. Doubt it.” Because did Prompto want to see her? Why? How? But Miel did still love both Prompto and Delphine dearly, and had thanked all of the Six that neither of them had been in Insomnia that day. Miel had lost enough family then.
And Delphine was one of the few people who had survived and still liked Hunter-Miel. Most people Miel had known before the Fall didn’t talk to her afterward. Acheta did, but they were family. Prompto did, once they’d had their… encounter that night (he’d moved in with her soon after, so he had to talk to her). Delphine had kept it up the entire time, just quick messages to check in, but that was more than most people were doing for Miel. So she’d taken to sending off quick messages to keep letting Delphine know she was still okay.
So it was very true, what Miel said. She had missed Delphine, sorely.
But now she was there! She had come to the wedding, though she’d missed the ceremony. But she was there! Miel squeezed Delphine a little tighter, then let her go. Prompto had come over and embraced Delphine quickly as well.
“Glad to have you here, Delph. You’re right on time. Well, for the reception.”
Delphine laughed, and something in Miel’s eyes sparked. Prompto led her away, towards the space they were calling a dance floor, and gestured for Delphine to follow them.
Reunions were had between Delphine and basically everyone in attendance, and then the party began. Dancing, drinking, recollection, and lots of picture-taking took place, late into the cool desert night.
As the seven of them settled down, tipsy giggling and tired on top of that, Prompto turned his gaze up to the sky, to the big moon hung above them.
Miel fluffed her skirts and sat on his lap, laying one arm around his shoulders and tipping her head back, too.
“Remember the night you told me you loved me?” He asked.
“Of course.”
“I can’t believe you’d kept that big of a secret for 15 years, Miel.”
“Well…” she began, looking down at him. “The first ten, I was just trying not to scare you off. The five after that… I figured you were long gone.”
“You know, I thought about you a lot while we were all with Noct. Delph can vouch for me.”
Miel turned her gaze to Delph, who nodded. “He did talk about you a fair amount.”
“Oh, Prom,” Miel sighed, her left hand—ring glittering in the moonlight—coming to rest on his cheek. She ducked down and kissed him, quickly but passionately. There was time to linger later. “I thought about you a lot,” she said finally, “But I never said anything.”
Cindy giggled.
“What?” Miel huffed, shooting Cindy a glare.
“You didn’t say much, but you didn’t say nothing, either,” she replied from behind her hand, as if it were all just too funny to bear.
“Well… I guess that’s true,” Miel replied. “But I had been in love with you for 15 years.”
Prompto nodded, smiling a little.
“And I missed you.”
Their fingers had been tangled in Miel’s lap, but Prompto took her hand in his and ran his thumb over her wedding band. “Well, you don’t need to anymore. I’m here now, and you can’t get rid of me. He lifted up his left arm from behind her back to show her his wedding band. “This ring says so.”
“Yes, I know with that ring I thee wed,” she giggled, “so you can’t run off again to have wild adventures where you flirt with enemy commodores or cute garage girls. You have a wife now.” She scrunched up her nose as she laughed and kissed him again.
“And you,” she said, her right hand finding its way to Delphine’s shoulder, “always have a spot with us, if you need it. You don’t get to run off again, either. I have you all here with me, and I intend to keep it that way.”
“Are you a golden eagle or a mother chocobo?” Acheta asked from the other end of the couch, where Gladio had an arm around her waist.
“Oh, you haven’t seen Golden Eagle in protective mode,” Miel assured Acheta.
And part of her prayed Acheta never would. Life was supposed to be good now, golden days for Golden Eagle and her golden boy and their friends.
All the lost little chicks had come home.
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Miel's Wedding
contains references to spoilers for the end of FFXV
Miel couldn’t believe she’d slept most of the day, on this, her wedding day. Perhaps “most of the day” was a bit of an exaggeration. Yes, she’d slept later than normal, and yes, it was her wedding day, and she still had to go make sure Acheta and Cindy weren’t having much trouble getting things together, and Ignis had said he and Gladio had a surprise for her. But she had been delighting in the fact that she could rise with the sun again, instead of depending on 24-hour clocks and alarms to keep all she—anyone—could call a circadian rhythm oriented. So sue her for sleeping in, still wrapped in a comforter and Prompto’s arms.
But she had to get up. She pulled herself away from Prompto, knitting her brow when he frowned at the loss of her in his arms. She bent down then, still covered in her comforter and kissed his temple. His burns were healing nicely. She brushed back his hair from his eyes and then left bed, drifting from their apartment as silently as she could.
She made her way over to the garage at a leisurely pace. There was still plenty of time. She called out to Cindy, who waved as she finished setting up a row of chairs. There weren’t very many chairs set up, but there didn’t need to be—most of the people in attendance were the wedding party.
Acheta arrived about that time as well, and the three of them had a bit of a squeal, even though this was the second time this was happening. Though, Miel supposed, Acheta didn’t actually know about that… Still, Cindy and Miel shot each other a knowing glance and a giggle when Acheta talked about cold feet.
“What?” Acheta asked as they laughed.
“I just—” Cindy snorted a little— “I doubt Miel would back out now.”
Miel nodded. “I’m in it for the long haul now.”
As the conversation lulled, Cindy fetched a ladder and grabbed the material they were going to hang as a backdrop over the front of the garage, a gauze-y mass of material that would only just obscure the Hammerhead logo it hung before. Miel spotted her as she hung it, then passed her the gold fabric that would sit at the edges of the gauze as a jabot, and Acheta stepped back to nearly the street to make sure Cindy hung the fabric evenly.
“No,” she said, “move it a little to the right… back to the left… okay, yes. There.” Acheta nodded her approval, and Miel looked up at the fabric, her lips parting as she craned her neck back. Cindy came down from the ladder and joined Acheta then, looking at her work.
“Oh, I bet Prompto will want to—oh, yeah.” Acheta laughed. “He can’t take pictures of it.” At this, Cindy giggled again. She continued to decorate, tying ribbons around chairs (gold, of course) and telling Miel to go grab her dress.
“We should be about ready here and starting to get dressed by the time you get back.”
“Oh, true.” Miel set off, hands in her pockets. It wasn’t a long walk, but she was still antsy to get home as soon as possible, so she walked with an extra speed to her step. She knew that after this, she wouldn’t be able to see Prompto until she came down the aisle. Everyone was very eager to make sure the traditions were adhered to, even though this was such a tiny wedding. The last one hadn’t been like that. She and Prompto had dressed together, first of all.
When she arrived home, she thought for a moment that Prompto had left. She hoped not; Ignis and Gladio were supposed to be there at any moment. But as she entered her bedroom (and she still thought of it as hers, even though she knew better), she saw Prompto seated on the bed, paper in hand.
“They’re not here yet?”
He shook his head.
“Whatcha working on?”
“Finishing touches on what I’m supposed to say,” he mumbled.
She crouched in front of him. “Going well?”
He shrugged.
“Something bothering you?”
“Not other than the obvious,” he said quietly. “I had always hoped he would be here for this.” A single tear slipped from Prompto’s eye, followed quickly by one on the other side. Miel rose a little bit, to wrap her arms around him.
“I know, Prompto. I know. And it’s okay that you miss him. I don’t blame you for being sad.” She ran her hand over the back of his head. “I just hope that today can distract you from that a little bit.” She was quiet for a moment, just holding him. Then she kissed him.
“Hey,” he said, a wet giggle following. “Save it for later.”
“Oh, alright.” She stood up, grabbing her dress—the same dress as the first time. “I’ll see you later. I love you.”
“You too,” he replied, waving.
When Miel got back to Hammerhead Garage, Acheta was dressed, and Cindy was struggling her way into her dress. Also, to Miel’s surprise, Ignis was there.
She folded her arms, looking at him curiously. “Ignis, aren’t you supposed to be getting ready with Prompto and Gladio?”
“I am. But I had to make a delivery first.” He held out a tightly-wrapped mass of brown paper to her, and she took it from him.
“This is heavy, Ignis. What is it?”
“Open it, you’ll see. Now, I’d better go.” And then he took off in the direction of Miel’s place.
She squinted, then rolled her eyes towards the blue sky. “Acheta, can you hold my dress while I open this?”
Acheta took the dress and stood off to the side, catching the falling bits of brown paper as they dropped from Miel’s hand.
Miel could only say “oh” softly when she finally got the package undone. She shook out the gold-and-feather dress, holding it to herself. Finally, she whispered “…wow.”
She got herself into it, and twirled before the first reflective surface she found, as soon as Acheta was done with her hair. Miel felt lighter than air, though she was still a little baffled how Ignis had known that she’d wanted the dress, let alone been able to find it, or get it in her size.
But that didn’t matter now. She was dressed and the sun was going to set soon. It was time for her (second) wedding.
She stepped out into the reddish light of the sunset to see everyone milling about. She hissed for Cindy.
“Okay,” she said when Cindy made it over to her side, “I’m ready. Could you go get Ignis?”
Ignis came over to Miel then, extending his arm. “I trust you’re ready then, Miss Lumine?”
She winced again, but understood what he meant, why he said it. She looped her arm around his. “Yup!”
Miel didn’t think she had ever heard Ignis shout before, but his call for everyone to get to their places snapped everyone to attention. Prompto waited near the gauze and gold they’d set up, Gladio stood with Acheta, waiting to get up there, and Ignis, as both celebrant and the one to give Miel away, led her to wait behind them. He patted her hand as they stood, waiting.
Cindy stood at the front, hitting some car part with a wrench to create something like the sound of wedding bells.
Gladio and Acheta made their way up the short aisle and parted, Acheta waiting for Miel and Gladio joining Prompto. And then Ignis turned to Miel, squeezing her hand.
“You ready?”
She beamed. “Let’s go.”
It was a very short walk down the aisle, and it passed without incident. The entire time, Miel’s eyes were locked with Prompto’s, and her wide smile hadn’t left her face.
Prompto, on the other hand, looked a little shocked. Miel looked… the only word he could think of was radiant. The setting sun was lighting up the gold of her dress, and the feathers at the bottom of her skirt glowed around the edges. She shone. Granted, he always felt a little like this when he looked at her, but this must have been the first time everyone else could see what he did. Gladio sensed the tone of his confusion regarding the dress’s origin though, and leaned in, whispering to him, “Iggy got her the dress after you mentioned it.” Prompto coughed, but smiled as Miel reached him.
Ignis kissed her hand, nodded to her with a “Miss Lumine,” then laid her hand in Prompto’s. He settled himself behind the podium they stood in front of, then cracked open a book. Miel looked at its white pages, confused.
“It’s in braille,” Prompto mouthed. She nodded.
“Beloved,” Ignis began, his fingers running over the page. “But basically, just Cindy and Acheta,” he added, laughing. “We’ve come here today to witness the union of the Prompto we’ve known for so long, and the lovely Miss Miel Lumine.”
Miel smiled. Ignis went on.
“Miel, Prompto, have you come here to enter into this marriage freely and wholeheartedly?”
They both nodded. “We have.”
“Are you prepared, as you follow the path of Marriage, to love and honor each other for as long as you both shall live?”
Miel spoke first. “Of course.”
Prompto nodded, enthusiastically, then realized Ignis couldn’t see him. “Yeah.”
“Then Prompto, do you take Miel for your lawful wife, to—” Ignis paused. “This says ‘to his,’ that can’t be right.” Prompto paled, but Ignis charged onward. “To have and to hold, from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do you part?”
Prompto looked solemn. “I do.”
“And Miel, do you take Prompto for your lawful husband, to have and to hold, from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do you part?”
Miel beamed. “Yes. I do.”
Ignis sighed, turning the page. “May the Six in their kindness strengthen the consent you have declared before us, and graciously fulfill their blessings within you. What the gods have joined, let no one put asunder. And may the Six bless these rings, which you will give to each other as the sign of your love and fidelity.”
Prompto fished the rings out of his pocket, handing one to Miel and keeping one for himself. Then he took a deep breath. “Miel, take this ring as a sign of my love and fidelity.” She giggled as Prompto slid the ring onto her finger, then looked at the pink rose design on it for a moment.
Then she looked up at Prompto and took his left hand. She slid the gold band down his finger easily, saying, “Take this ring as the marker of my love and fidelity, Prompto.” She didn’t let his hand go, her fingers tangled with his as she looked at the little rose engraved into the ring. Only the two of them knew that she had a barcode like Prompto’s on the inside of the ring she now wore, and he had an arrow engraved on the inside of his ring.
Finally, Ignis broke the silence. “Alright, stop dawdling. You can kiss your bride.”
Prompto and Miel let go of each other’s hands then, and wrapped their arms around each other to kiss. Everyone not involved in that—Gladio, Acheta, Cindy, and then Ignis after a delay—clapped politely.
As Prompto brought Miel up from a dip, Gladio popped a bottle of champagne and poured them both a glass. Miel toasted, “To absent friends,” and while Prompto had a brief moment of misting in his eyes, he kept it together and they drank.
To absent friends. To a new life in the radiant light.
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Miel Lumine, Parts I-IV
combining four posts into one, Miel's thoughts before/during the hunt that brought her and Prompto back together
Contains references to the end of FFXV
I.
If she went to school with Prompto, then she must have gone to school with Noctis, too. But she didn’t really remember that. She remembered being a little girl and thinking about the adorably chubby blond boy with steely eyes behind his glasses. He looked lonely. Like her.
She’d always liked him, even as he dropped all the weight, and she seemed to pick it up, now soft and curvy while he was all hard angles. She wished she’d said something before he’d taken off for Noctis’s wedding.
But she didn’t.
II.
She hadn’t said anything, and she was going to have to live with that for the rest of her life. She’d made it out of Insomnia, but she hadn’t heard anything– good, bad, anything– from Prompto, so she feared the worst. Why wouldn’t she?
Eventually, she used her connections (a friend of her cousin worked at a garage, it wasn’t some big thing) to get a job out near said garage. So now she was a waitress and a part-time hunter. Very part-time, fewer than 10 hours a month. Just occasional trips out because sometimes people needed something like cover fire, and she was a good shot (with a bow, which always surprised people, but that wasn’t her fault or problem).
So imagine her surprise when one day, a blond breezed in while she was waiting tables, and when he asked about hunts, was told, “Go ask Miel, she hunts part-time and she’ll probably know. She handles ranged work like you, too.”
She looked away as she heard his reply. “Miel, huh? I used to know a girl named Miel.”
She bit the bullet and waltzed over to him, putting on a service voice, “I heard my name and ‘hunt.’” She forced herself to look at him.
When he turned to her, he made eye contact, then blinked in surprise. “You are that Miel.”
She smiled. He wasn’t as cheery as he had been before– she understood why–but still, even with the darkness all around them, it felt to her like the sun had risen. “Yeah. I missed you, Prompto.”
III.
She wasn’t crazy about the bike, but it was hers, and it was better than running (or pedaling, it wasn’t that kind of bike) everywhere, and she didn’t have a car. She’d never learned to drive– she was going to, but then she nearly died, and then she was waitressing a short walk from where she slept, so it was all pretty whatever.
But when she drove Prompto out to that hunt (silent because her mind was still pretty blown that he was there, he was alive, and now he was being sent out on a hunt with her), him clinging to her waist as they sped through the desert, she was suddenly very happy to have the bike.
He just wondered why he always ended up on bikes with pretty women to go fight things.
They arrived at the spot they were to wait at, waiting for their prey of course, and there was time to kill– they couldn’t see the daemon yet– so what better to do than catch up?
“So why do you hunt, Miel?” he asked her, watching her assemble and string her bow. “You never struck me as the type when we were younger.”
“Well, neither of us were the type,” she replied, her tone significantly tougher now she was out of her work uniform, with no need to be cordial for tips. And more than likely, this was her tone for hunts, to be taken seriously. “But things happened. I dunno. I think you’d laugh if I told you specifics.”
“I’ll try not to!” he replied. She sighed.
“Fine. I was trying to work through a variety of feelings, and I guess one of them was ‘the desire for revenge,’ because I figured if a daemon had killed you, then I ought to kill a daemon. Even things out a little.”
“Why?”
“I was angry. I should have said something before you left with Noctis. But I thought you were coming back I didn’t think we were going to brush with death like that. And then I just kept doing it, because people needed it and you didn’t come back, so why not?”
“Miel.”
“This is why I didn’t want to say anything.”
“Miel.”
“What?”
“Said something?”
She pulled him to her by his collar, their teeth colliding behind their lips.
“Yeah. I should have told you I thought I loved you.”
IV.
Something was wrong.
Miel had been seated, staring at her hunter tags and reading her name over and over: Miel Apis Lumine. It didn’t say “Miel Apis Lumine-Argentum,” even though she said she’d hyphenate, because no one else knew that was her name. Well, her and Prompto…and Cindy. But no one else. It’d been spur of the moment, the two of them tooling along in the darkness of the desert-like landscape when she’d turned around and said, “Hey, will you marry me?” And after some spluttering, Prompto had agreed. They’d been married the next morning. Even before them being married—or even a couple—she’d had a sense around Prompto. She had felt when he was coming back to her, for example, and she knew when something was wrong with him, no matter how far he was from her.
And something was wrong now.
She jumped into her leggings and skirt (well… technically it was a kilt, but no one else seemed to recognize that) and bolted from her apartment, cursing herself for not living somewhere, as she put it, “closer to those damn battle chickens.” …Her damned battle chicken. She’d raised this one, it was hers, it was just boarded at the Chocobo Post. She fed gil into the machine, waiting for the bird to appear—there she was.
As she clambered up onto the bird, she began tying her hair into the usual style she wore for hunts, twisting and looping it until it sat behind her ears and she secured each with a tie. The sinking feeling in her stomach hadn’t left her. But she couldn’t get more of a read on it– was this a “he’s dead” dread, or general fear of whatever else she’d find?
She couldn’t know until she got there. After all, this wasn’t some psychic link. She didn’t believe in that kind of thing, anyway, destiny and soulmates. She couldn't—after all, circumstances and cruel gods had ripped pairs of supposed soulmates apart anyway.
She leapt off her bird when she felt she was close enough to walk, leaving the brightly-dyed bird with a suddenly heavy heart. She didn’t want to leave Lavender, but she didn’t want Lavender in immediate danger, either, if there was still danger—she refused to lose her… her husband and her bird in so short a time. What would she have left?
She looked around as she walked, a single arrow in one hand. She hadn’t been near the Citadel, where her parents had worked until Insomnia fell and they lost their lives, in years. Not now, not now, she told herself, boots crunching in the rubble—bits of glass, stone, and metal that once made up her home crushed under her boots in a frenzied dash to seek answers.
She was looking for a specific chunk of metal, to either allay her fears, or give her comfort in the face of them. She scanned the ground with every step, looking for Prompto’s tags.
She’d told him he had to wear them more now, if he was going to hunt with her; he wasn’t on the road trip with Noctis anymore. She didn’t realize it was going to matter.
She wasn’t finding them. So they were still on him, at least. She didn’t hear gunshots, so either everything was fine, or everything was very wrong.
“Miel!”
She slid and dropped to her knees at the sound of her name, tearing the right knee of her leggings open as she landed.
“Prompto, gods above.” Her forehead was against his chest, so she applied minimal weight to him. “Are you okay?”
He lifted one hand to her. “You’re going to need to tourniquet it, right?”
She looked at the wound and sighed. “No. Tourniquets are for people who want to lose limbs. It’s not even that bad.” She pressed a bandanna, one of many she kept with her for this reason, to his arm, wiping away what she could of the blood. She fished a fresh bandanna from one of the pouches on her hips and put it on the wound, applying much firmer pressure this time to stop the bleeding. “Where else did you get hurt?”
“That’s all I remember,” he told her, his free hand coming over his body to touch her shirt. “You’re not even dressed, Miel.”
She tried not to let tears well in her eyes, but… Well, it was true. She’d started running before she’d even thought to put on hunting gear; she’d been wearing this shirt when he’d left. She swallowed, blinking the tears away. “I wasn’t about to take and waste time to change my shirt when you needed me.” She lifted his hand off her and onto the bandanna. “Hang on tight to that, and keep it above your heart.” She positioned his hand ever so gently.
He looked up at her as she held his hand in place. “I didn’t hear your bike.”
“I didn’t take the bike. I didn’t want to be heard. I rode Lavender.”
“Oh.” They sat in silence for a moment.
“Can you sit up?” She laughed once, a breathy bark. “I’ll hold this arm still.” Using the other to support himself, Prompto sat up. Miel rested Prompto’s forearm over her shoulder and pulled his head against her chest. She took in a long, deep breath. He was okay. Injured, but alright. He was alive; she hadn’t lost him a second time. She lifted her eyes to the sky and—she didn’t whisper, he’d hear her—mouthed a “thank you.”
“Miel.” His voice was still weak.
“Hmm?”
“What about Ignis and Gladio?”
She felt bad, but she shrugged. “I didn’t look for them. Neither of them is my husband.”
“What if they need you?” Prompto was right. She didn’t want to leave him sat there alone, though.
“Then we’ve got to get up. I’ll take you to Lavender.” Slowly, she guided him towards the bird, glad to see that nothing had happened to her while Miel had been gone. She eased Prompto into sitting next to Lavender, then started walking again, shoulders slumping as the rubble crunched.
With all her fear having been drained from her, Miel wasn’t moving with the same drive she had been on her quest for Prompto.
Too much was swirling in her mind at that point—her parents had died in this city, while she and Acheta had made it out. The last family Acheta had had died here, ending the Apis family line except for the two of them. Miel didn’t even have the last name; she was an Apis on her mother’s side.
Crunch, crunch, the shearing of rock and the cracking of larger shards of glass with each step. Was it worth it to call out? Maybe for Ignis.
“Iggy!” It came out broken, less a friendly call and more like a cry that had gotten trapped. She tried again, with slightly better luck. “Ignis! Mr. Scientia!”
He was fine. Gladio was fine. They were, on the other hand, apologetic for leaving Prompto behind.
“He’s alright now.” She told them.
Ignis was freakishly formal with his next response to her, falling back on not knowing her well. “Miss Lumine, I never would have—”
She shuddered at “Miss Lumine.” She’d been Miss Lumine the entire ride to Hammerhead, seated across from Acheta, the both of them silent as the grave as they stared out the window at the landscape passing them by. “Mrs. Lumine-Argentum.” She corrected him flatly.
“Miel, is Prompto really okay?”
“He’s with my Chocobo, Lavender. I intend to return to where I left them and take my mount and husband home.” If she were in a better mood the possibility of lewdness in her statement would have amused her. But she was not, so it wasn’t funny. She moved to set off again, but Gladio caught her hand. There was no escaping his grip, so she turned around.
“Your husband? He didn’t tell us he was getting married.”
“It was… impulsive.”
Ignis chimed in. “Is it recent?”
She was hesitant. “It wasn’t very long ago.”
Gladio let go of her, but she didn’t take off. She just folded her hands in front of her, feeling the beginnings of another question hang in the air.
“Would you… have another one so we could be there?” Ignis finally said. “He’s like a brother to us.”
“Yeah, an annoying little brother.”
“Gladio! Ignore him, Mrs. Lumine-Argentum.” Ignis took her hand as he stressed her new name, making her giggle a little. “It would be nice to see our brother be wed.”
She wrapped her fingers tighter around Ignis’s. “Come ask him yourselves.”
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Directory of Fic Masterlists
Heart of Light
That's A Morax
Dendro Dalliance
Cypress and Camellia
Cordifolia
Reason For Reason
Five Card Stud ♠️
Prommiel
Aihisande (In progress)
His Museum
Etidon (External AO3 link)
Star or Nothing
Let's Talk About Caine Baby
Two Toreador Tango
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oh I'm gonna have to upload all my PromMiel fics here; the tag on my main is a little messy
so I guess I'll finish up this fic for Friday and then do that
BE READY, BELOVEDS
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