Keeping warm

dark-ruby-regalia:

There was a frigid bite to the evening tonight. A halo round the moon; ice on the way. The stars bright.

“I’m not used to this yet,” Ignis said, as a shiver took him. It had been a clear day, the sunlight warm on the surface of skin; hope long dormant thawing just beneath it. But clear days bring cold nights, and Ignis had forgotten. He’d left his jacket home.

Still, despite the chill, the night felt comfortable in other ways. Perhaps the sun can burn the scourge from the air, but after ten years, it lingers in the mind. The blue sky still felt too sudden, too vast. Unreal. The nights bought back some familiarity.

There had been an insulated claustrophobia to the false horizon of darkness, and now – with it lifted, with the particles rained down dead and washed away – the world grew just to look at, and everything on it became small on the surface. Himself included. Even the buildings that sheltered them, bolstered and pivotal such a short time earlier, appeared now nothing more than battered husks. Each a pock. A scar to pass by. Relevant to the past, and the past only.

Noctis shrugged the jacket from his shoulders and draped it around Ignis. The glitzy bits clinked as they re-settled, musical in their chiming, quite beautiful, until stillness held them silent again.

“Will you not be too cold now?” Ignis asked.

“We can share,” Noctis said, matter of fact. For punctuation he slid his arms around Ignis in a hug, wrapping them tight to the small of his back. He pressed himself close, without hesitation, as though they’d done this a million times before, though they hadn’t. Not like this. At least nothing quite like it, and not for a very long time.

“Please don’t have come back just to break my heart,” Ignis whispered; it was a plea slipped unbidden through a crack in his affectation. His breath held.

“I just want to keep you warm, Iggy. Like you kept me. For ten years.”

Ignis was quiet, withstanding some tempest trapped wholly within his skin. Noctis was warm against his chest, breathing against his collar. There was no distance between them but Ignis’ stiff surprise.

“If I kissed you now-” Noctis asked, and he leaned back enough to roam his focus all around Ignis’ face- “would you kiss me back?”

In his arms, Ignis let go his breath.

“Without reservation.”