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#six of crows a-spec au
taizi · 4 years
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Congrats on finishing your paper! (ノ◕ヮ◕)ノ*.✧ Could I request Prompto-centric stuff? If you're up for AU thoughts, I recently had an idea flash of Versus13!Prompto (from early trailers) and canon!Prom being brothers/twins and got very excited - it'd be lovely to read your take on that! Your writing is such a rich, heartwarming experience. I'm ace & a Found Family lover too so it just resonates with me so much. Thank you!
x
Prompto shows up to the Crow’s Nest looking hunted. Gladio is already sliding over to make room for him on his side of the booth, and Prompto crashes into the waiting seat without ceremony. He shoulders off a ratty backpack, letting it fall to the floor at his feet, which would imply that he literally just got back.
“Hey, guys,” Prompto says without inflection.
“Oof,” Noct says. He leans forward across the table on his elbows, and gives Prompto’s hair a friendly ruffle. “Missed you too, loser.”
It’s an understatement. Noctis and Prompto have been comfortably attached at the hip since they were fifteen, and this past week was probably the longest they’d ever spent apart. Gladio’s had to listen to the crown prince whine for the last five days, and if it wasn’t his actual job to make sure Noctis didn’t get his ass kicked, Gladio would have kicked his ass. 
Prompto makes a face and waves Noct’s hand away, but already his demeanor is thawing. “Of course I missed you. We only Facetimed like every five seconds. Sorry, it was a long drive.”
Gladio scrutinizes him on the low, taking in what Ignis probably already has. He’s wrinkled and red-eyed and jittery, something tight in the lines of his body that speaks of frustration.
“I take it you didn’t enjoy your trip?” Ignis asks. He pushes Gladio’s basket of fries under Prompto’s nose, more or less a command to eat something. 
Prompto picks up a fry and worries it apart in his fingers.
“‘Course I didn’t. Driving all the way to Duscae in a gross car with a sleazy reporter to get your idiot brother out of jail isn’t exactly a vacation. I can’t believe I had to miss Iris’ birthday.”
“Hey, don’t let your head go there,” Gladio tells him firmly. “She told you it was fine, and she loved that stupid Moogle jacket you got her.”
“There’s, like, a whole fleet of not-gross cars at the Citadel that you could have borrowed,” Noct says for the nth time. “You have the same clearance level as Ignis, and Ignis can do whatever he wants.”
“Uh, I think that’s just ‘cause he’s Ignis.”
“Either way, I would have been happy to arrange alternate transportation,” says Ignis calmly. “Threatening Mr. Ghiranze with what I would do to him if he made you uncomfortable in any way wasn’t nearly as reassuring.”
Prompto chokes on a bite of Noct’s salmon and Gladio thumps him on the back until he gets it down.
“You what?” he finally manages. “Oh, no wonder he was so weird! He wouldn’t even look at me. Iggy, you’re the best.”
He’s breathless, and bright with the beginning of laughter, and Gladio thinks, Nice one, Specs.
It felt weird to be three instead of four, even only for a week. He won’t come out and say it, but Gladio is relieved to have Blondie back where he belongs. 
He’ll be with Gladio heading up Basic Training for the next two months, and Gladio is more than looking forward to it. The new recruits are a bunch of pains in the ass, and they deserve to have Cor the Immortal’s ‘Quicksilver’ protege whip them into terrified appreciation for Gladio’s less manic approach. 
The bell above the door rings merrily, and a familiar someone shouts, “Hey, birdbrain!” 
The hard-won good cheer drains out of Prompto’s face like water from a leaky faucet. He doesn’t have time to turn around before Peregrine is upon him, pouncing like a hungry coeurl upon an injured anak.
“You left before I could say thanks,” Peregrine says with vicious glee, grabbing Prompto in a probably-affectionate headlock. His barcode is stark and bold under the fluorescent lights of the diner, hidden in plain sight by a geometric half-sleeve tattoo. “Sick of your big bro, is that it?”
“For sure,” Prompto wheezes, trying to peel him off. “Definitely, one-hundred percent.” 
To this day, Gladio isn’t sure what to make of Peregrine. He showed up in Insomnia a few weeks after Prompto’s televised swearing-in ceremony, with nothing but the clothes on his back and a shock-rifle strapped to his shoulder. Given what they are, they’re physically identical, but Prompto’s friends have never had any trouble telling them apart. 
“Whatever.” Peregrine lets Prompto go with a toothy grin. He’s causing a whole scene in the quiet diner, but he’s been a Hunter all his life and very little seems to phase him. “You gonna be home tonight?”
“If I say no, are you going to get arrested again?” Prompto asks his brother suspiciously. 
“I’ll probably have my hands full with Dino, since one of your boyfriends here traumatized mine. He needs a little TLC, if you know what I–” 
“Nope!” Prompto says loudly. “Bye, Pere!“ 
Peregrine laughs, and it manages to be more affectionate than antagonistic. This time, when he leans down to hug Prompto, it actually looks like a hug instead of a cheerful mugging. 
“Thanks for coming for me, birdie,” Peregrine says, cheek propped on Prompto’s messy hair. It’s one of those unexpected moments of sincerity that occasionally pops up between the two of them like a buoy. “I know it sucked.” 
“It did suck,” Prompto mutters. But he’s leaning into his brother’s arms instead of away, and the harassed, stressed out lines of his body are relenting. “But I was actually glad you called me.”
Peregrine’s hands go tight in Prompto’s jacket for a second. Sometimes, he looks as though he’d like to grab onto Prompto and never let him go. 
The two of them spent so much of their lives alone– one in an empty house, and one in the wild countryside– and they both managed to find their own people, build their own homes. They don’t know how to be family, but they’re figuring it out. They want to figure it out. They’re learning their way around each other. 
Peregrine ruins the mood by squeezing Prompto so tight he squeaks. 
“I’ll quote you on that next time,” he chirps, and leans over to swipe Gladio’s basket of fries, and takes off as abruptly as he arrived in the first place. “See you, Prom! Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do!”
“No!” Prompto yells after him, leaning out of the booth. “No ‘next time’!”
“Text me, byeeeeeee!”
“Could you imagine being stuck in a car with him for six hours?” Noct says, with what looks like a new appreciation for Prompto’s plight.
Prompto whirls to face him, vindicated. “It was the worst!” 
Ignis soothes him with promises of green curry soup for dinner– a handy excuse for what he already had planned, the chickatrice thigh and coconut milk sitting in Noctis’ apartment for Prompto’s return– and Gladio drops a heavy arm around Prompto’s shoulders to try to absorb some of his nervous energy. 
Prom’s phone chimes while Noctis is getting the check, flashing Peregrine’s silly contact I.D. Gladio isn’t nosy enough to read over Prompto’s shoulder, but he watches the expressions parade across his friend’s freckled face. Surprise, good humor, the automatic joy of an inside joke. 
As Prompto types out a reply, he’s grinning– the lighter, brighter half of a new dynamic duo– and Gladio thinks it’s a good look on him. 
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amusewithaview · 5 years
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Triple Trouble 2 (DAI AU)
A/N: follows directly from this post.  READ THE TAGS because I’m not using usernames from this point on, only nicknames. Still tagging @uru-viel an @lucide-dreamer-dreams and @neverending-shenanigans just for funsies.
In very short order it was established that Mews was the oldest (”I am thirty years old, I don’t care if I woke up last that does not make me the goddamn youngest!”) and they were all seriously, completely fucked.
“I really don’t want to lose an arm,” Lucy said, staring at her glowing hand.
“I don’t think that’s our most immediate problem,” Shen pointed out.
“Losing an arm is a pretty big-”
“Um, hi!” Shen said brightly, waving at the two women standing in the doorway.
Lucy spun so quickly she fell on her ass.  “Oh fuck,” she said when she saw what had to be Leliana and Cassandra, the left and right hands of the recently-deceased Divine.
“That’s my line,” Mews muttered.
The game devs hadn’t done either of the women justice.  Leliana had a downright angelic face and her hair positively glowed in the flickering torchlight.  Cassandra was a good six inches taller than the other woman, with steely grey eyes and a full-lipped mouth twisted into a perpetual sneer by the scar that angled down from her cheekbone.
“Oh fuck,” Lucy said again, this time in an entirely different tone.
“Keep it in your pants,” Mews advised.  “They don’t look too friendly.”
“Maybe because we’re speaking a language they don’t know?” Shen pointed out.  So saying, she immediately switched to Trade: “Hello, could you please tell us what’s going on?”
“You claim not to know?” Cassandra demanded, stalking forward.
“The last thing I remember was...” Mews trailed off and switched to English, turning to her two companions: “Booting up the game?”
“Booting up the game,” they both agreed, nearly in unison.
“I remember a woman,” Mews said shakily, voice cracking as she stifled a hysterical giggle.  “There was a green light and...things.  Things chasing me.”
“I remember the woman,” Lucy said slowly, and the distant look on her face combined with her panicked glance at Mews made the latter almost certain she wasn’t lying.
“I think the things were spiders,” Shen said, shuddering.
“A woman?” Leliana murmured, eyes flicking between all three near-identical faces.  “And spiders, hmm?  How interesting.”
“What did happen?” Shen asked after a brief and uncomfortable silence.
“Perhaps we should show you,” Leliana said.
“Go to the forward camp, Leliana.  I will take them.”
“All three?”
“We may require it,” Cassandra confirmed, grim as death.
The redhead nodded and slipped from the room.
“You still haven’t said what happened,” Mews pointed out.
“It will be easier to show you.”
They kept quiet while the warrior slipped the chains from the pole, leaving their hands bound together but no longer tethered to the center of the room.  Shen caught Mews’ eyes and gestured towards Lucy, whose eyes were firmly planted on Cassandra’s swaying hips as they followed her through the creepy basement to the hall and out into the sunlight.
“She’s straight,” Mews hissed out the side of her mouth.
“I know,” Lucy said mournfully.  “I’m just looking!”
“Look up,” Shen instructed in a wobbly voice.
The sky was a nightmare writ large.  It looked broken in a way that was difficult to put into words.  It looked like a thousand things pulled from the uncanny valley.  It looked like a cracked window into a basement, like fractured ice over a deep lake, like heavy fog in an unfamiliar place, like flickers at the corner of your eye, like the feeling of someone watching you, like missing a step at the bottom of a staircase.  It was jarring and unearthly and it bypassed the eyes and reached directly towards the hindbrain singing a discordant song of wrong, wrong, wrong.
Mews had to swallow hard to keep from gagging.  Lucy dropped to her knees, legs gone numb.  Shen swayed and might have fallen if Cassandra had not grabbed her arm and levered her up.
“It’s like-” Lucy gestured wordlessly, face scrunched up.
“Worlds of nope, fucking galaxies of nope,” Mews muttered in English.
“We can fix this,” Shen said.  They had to fix this.  They were the only ones who could, apparently.  She nodded at Cassandra to show that she could stand on her own again.  “We will help you, however we can.”
Haven was crowded, smelly, and full of people glaring at them.  They were all very happy to be shot of it.  The walk from the first bridge to the second took significantly longer than any of them expected, and the Breach expanded twice in that time.  Both instances sent all three elves to their knees.  The second time, Mews and Lucy vomited from the pain and shock.
“The pulses are coming faster,” Cassandra said, helping Shen grab handfuls of clean snow for the other two to wash out their mouths with.  “We need to move more quickly.”
The second bridge was already destroyed by the time they got there and demons were pacing around the shattered remains.
“We must get past them, this is the only way,” Cassandra said, clearly unhappy with the options available to her.  She gestured to a few boxes of supplies on their side of the broken bridge.  “There are weapons there, you may arm yourselves.  Know this - I am Templar trained and should you turn on me, I will not be merciful.”
“Noted,” Mews said.
“I would never!” Lucy cried.
“Understandable,” Shen responded with a brief nod.
The trio exchanged glances as they slowly moved towards the boxes.
“What are we specced as?” Mews whispered.  “I mean, I always play as a mage but I don’t really feel too...different?”
“Aside from shorter?” Shen asked, tongue planted firmly in cheek.
“Aside from shorter,” she agreed, scowling.
“I think I’m a mage,” Lucy said, grabbing a staff and turning it this way and that.  She tapped it gently against Mews’ forehead, whispering, “Protec,” and grinned when a shimmering teal bubble briefly flickered into view around her.
Mews rolled her eyes and grabbed a staff as well, angling it towards one of the Shades circling the frozen riverbed.  “Attack,” she muttered, and jumped when ice suddenly spiked up through the demon, impaling it.  “Holy shit!”
“Hey, don’t leave me out!”  Shen took her own staff and aggressively stabbed towards a different Shade, grinning when a ball of fire the size of a man’s head flew from the end, exploding when it impacted the demon.  “This is wicked,” she breathed, beaming.
“A little warning next time,” Cassandra said dourly before sliding down the incline and engaging with the half-frozen demon.
“Three mages, no waiting,” Lucy said.  “Little lame that I don’t have any attacks, though.  You guys get fire and ice and I’m spirit?”
“Try attacking,” Mews said.
Lucy pointed her staff at the scorched Shade and nearly dropped it when lightning burst from the sky, sizzling the demon into a puddle of blackish goop.  “Storm and spirit!” she crowed.  “This is awesome!”
Shen frowned thoughtfully, “You know, I think-”
“Way ahead of you,” Mews said, and hurled some lightning of her own.
“We’re all storm,” Shen confirmed, waving her glowing hand at the other two.  “Look at the light.  Mine is fire and lightning.”
“I must be ice and lightning,” Mews guessed, poking at the green gash.
“Stop that,” Lucy said, slapping her hand away.  “You’ll go blind.”
“Oh har dee har.  Is this really the time?”
“We’re about to go risk our lives to save a universe that didn’t exist outside pixels a few hours ago.  Yeah, I think it’s the time.”
They picked their way down the incline carefully to where Cassandra was waiting.  “You are effective,” she said, her tone making it difficult to say whether it was a compliment or potential proof of their assumed crimes.  “Come, we must move faster.  They are waiting.”
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