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The cave is quiet and empty, the only signs of any kind of life being a bundle of cold charcoal and ash, a handful of cold, dried wood someone had gathered the last time this overhanging rock had sheltered someone.He’s cold down to his bones and it’s not just from the weather. He didn’t survive the base or marching through the blizzards or the fall from the train just to die now so he moves forward and half-falls, half kneels by the remnants to talk shaking fingers into coaxing everything together. He isn’t Gladio, camping doesn’t come naturally to him, but he knows how to light a fire by now. He crumbles up some of the papers he took from the base (he thought they’d be useful, knowledge of what their enemies had been up to (he didn’t know. Six, he didn’t know), that maybe they’d be useful to Cor or Ignis and that they’d help in the war (fuck, he didn’t know)) and snaps the cap off a flare and tries to cajole those into starting a real fire.He’s so cold. He’s been cold before but never like this. (He’s been cold before but what if it wasn’t real? He isn’t even really human--(Human, a tiny thought asserts in his mind, and Prompto wants to laugh so hard he cries because he isn’t, not really. His purpose of birth burns cheerily away and sweet-talks winter-wood into crackling in the start of a fire.))He huddles in on himself and watches the flames, trying not to think.It’s a lot easier not to think than he thought it would be.
He doesn’t sleep. (Can’t fall asleep in the cold (he doesn’t want to die (if he isn’t human it doesn’t matter, can’t die if he isn’t real.)))He watches the fire crackle, cheery. Unworried. (What worries could it possibly have? It isn’t alive. It doesn’t have brothers (would clones be considered brothers? (gods, how many of him are there? How many did they make? (they’ve killed hundreds of MTs, he’s killed hundreds of MTs…))) or parents (what the fuck.) or friends (Noct-- Noct threw him off the train (why? (Noct always has a good reason, he has to trust there’s a good reason.))) or anything else. It doesn’t have any burdens to shoulder. It doesn’t care that there’s a war, political lines, that he’s an enemy-born weapon that fell off the assembly line--(Human, that tiny thought disagrees, fragments like shattered glass that Prompto can’t understand, danger and food and not-food and not-danger, sounds not understood. The world smells like snow and frost and wet and Prom shrugs out of his heavy winter coat when the fire is kicking, makes the mistake of looking at his wrist. Human, the thought says firmly, and he wonders. (Is he really?))
He had always thought it odd, his tattoo. He’s had it ever since he can remember, and he’s kept it covered at all times except when he was totally, utterly alone. Now it’s bared to the world, cold biting at his skin.It’s strange. He scratches his thumb across the dark beneath his skin. (A barcode scanner reads the empty space between them, not the lines themselves. He remembers learning that, when he worked his first summer as a cashier. (It reads the empty space. (Empty space. That’s what he’s supposed to be, right?) He isn’t empty space. He isn’t. (He refuses.)))The wood is warm to the touch when he picks it up, the end from the fire glowing hot, a burning shaft just this side of not engulfed in flame itself. He’s seen now what burns look like, the way they twist the skin when they scar, what little they leave behind. He doesn’t know how thick the ink is, how deep into his flesh it goes. A tattoo artist could cover it up, maybe, but then he would always know what it had been, what had been on his skin, what it meant. (It meant he was the enemy. (It meant he wasn’t human.))He turns it over, looks at the way it glows from within. It makes him think about the clones, each of them marked the way he is. Covering up what he’s supposed to be with a little bit of ink, a little more Lucian black? No. He sets his teeth and presses the charring stick to his skin. It hurts more than he thought. Keeping it there is a struggle, but he wants it gone, gone, gone, and there aren’t any other options. He starts to sweat, struggling against the instinct to flinch away.(Pain, the voice says, a howl against the wind and Prompto’s brain, and nominenonohurts.)He jerks, shoves the burning wood away, and throws himself away from the fire. His wrist is in pain. Someone is screaming. He passes out.
Fresh snow crunches beneath his feet. Snow drifts down in soft movements, fresh and crisp and clear in the morning sun, and he turns his nose up to catch some on his tongue.His brothers call for him, laughing, teasing, like they haven’t done the same thing, and he turns to tackle them, a tangle of bodies and limbs. The game doesn’t last long; he’s not the smallest but he’s not the biggest, pinned somewhere in the middle of the pile.Somewhere there’s a crack of thunder. They all lift their heads to look. There’s always danger in the woods. But it doesn’t come again. He shoves his brothers off him, shoves himself to his feet, and throws himself into a run instead, laughing, howling his challenge.Catch me, catch me if you can.The snow crunches beneath his feet.
No it doesn’t.
There’s blood in the snow, blood and pungent oils, and his brothers lay sprawled on the ground and so do the strangers, only a couple stragglers. But why should they be standing, moving, breathing when his brothers lay still—One of his brothers whines. One of the strangers turns to him and there’s a crack of thunder and he lunges at them, snaps his jaws around their throat; metal bends beneath his teeth and a covered fist catches him in his ribs, the not-human moving when it shouldn’t—
(Hurts.)
Prompto wakes up shivering, colder than before. His whole arm from fingertip to elbow is buried in snow, but he’s slick with sweat inside his uniform. Something heavy is laying across his whole torso, thick with fur, and he blinks up at it, confused. Human, something insists at him, and Prompto stares up at teeth and intelligent golden eyes. He blinks.“Uh.”A wet tongue touches his face, sweeps across his skin, feeling a little like claiming. I licked it so it’s mine, like a five year old. He scrunches his face and pushes against the beast with his good arm not buried in the snow. It huffs at him, licks his face again. Does not eat his face. Beasts usually don’t do that, given the chance. Mine. My smoke-ash-spark, and the sensation is a scent, is a taste, is the smell of a gun barrel.“What are you?” he wonders, mystified.Blood-and-oil-on-snow, and that’s presented with the automatons (Prompto’s stomach kicks, grief and guilt and horror, they’re me, that’s me, I’m a monster) and… wolves. Dead wolves everywhere, a battle with magitek troopers. Calling out in grief and hearing someone else call out in grief, last brothers both, and Blood-and-oil-on-snow is here for him.Wolves weren’t a mythos; wolfbrothers happened, a lot of the Crownsguard had them, but Prompto was a peasant and not trained enough to even be let around grown wolves, nevermind bond-puppies, so he’s only seen them from a distance. The knowledge that this one is here for him strikes a soft spot beneath his ribs. Wolfsiblings are for humans.Human, Blood-and-oil-on-snow rebukes. Human, not-metal, soft/warm/hurt. Mine. And then to emphasize hurt, the wolf stretches out and noses at the snow piled over his burnt wrist.“Did you do that?” Blood-and-oil-on-snow preens. His mind is rough-edged like broken glass, like teeth, and Prompto wonders if he’s descent from the old army, gray-and-white cream, from brothers and sisters who were left behind when their siblings died and the old King withdrew the wall and the war. Blood-and-oil-on-snow might be wild, but Prompto’s read about wolfsiblings and he knows he’s been picked. The regs were pretty clear. It was the wolf’s choice.“Uh.”…just how the hell is he supposed to argue with that?“Okay… Just… let me up?”A longsuffering huff, but the wolf moves away, stretches out as he stands up. He noses at the snow, tuffing it, pawing at it, and after a few too-long heartbeats his arm is free and Prompto sits up, cradling it to his chest.The burn is nasty, but it doesn’t hurt anymore. He can still make out the numbers and it hurts, too, the knowledge that he’s not— he’s the enemy, not a person, just meant to fuel a machine--Blood-and-oil-on-snow snaps a rebuke at him, teeth flashing in the air, warning. Human. Mine. My human.…he’s remarkably good with shaping thoughts. Prompto grimaces a bit. The books had said there wasn’t a barrier between wolf and sibling, that they shared thoughts freely, which meant anything Prompto thought the wolf would hear, and he didn’t know if he was ready for that.“Okay. Your human. Your human’s cold though, shit, I can’t feel my fingers.”The fire was still blazing. He scooted closer to it and the wolf followed, pacing around to the other side. He sat down regally, taller than Prompto sitting down. Wow. Okay.“What am I going to call you…” A mental shrug met him, I don’t care, but calling him Blood-and-oil-on-snow was a mouthful. Prompto carefully flexed his fingers, using his good hand to massage the skin. He couldn’t have been unconscious too long if the fire was still blazing like this. “Well.. I’m Prompto.”Smoke-ash-spark, Blood-and-oil-on-snow agrees. Prompto is never going to not be a pistol-shot, apparently. They’re never going to let him around Noctis once he’s crowned, with a name like that.“Yeah, alright. Fired gun. You can be Electrum,” he decides, eying the silvery strip down the wolf’s spine. “What do you think?” A shrug. Great. He supposed wolves didn’t particularly care about their spoken-name.Somewhere in the distance lightning crackled. Electrum flicked his ears back, disapproving of the noise, but he pressed a thought, a memory, to Prompto, of a great big worm winding through the forests, eating everything, even the metal-people— even the magitek troopers, Prompto’s brothers, and he shivered, inched closer to the fire. “Yeah. That’s… that’s my dad, apparently.”Bad sire. Bite. Electrum promised. Prompto laughed.Electrum survived his brothers. Prompto survived his. Survivors should stick together, the shape of the thought said, a pack of two to hunt the great-worm, and he didn’t disagree.“Alright. We’ll deal with him, and after we gotta get to Gralea. The others…” God, they were going to hate him, weren’t they, he wasn’t going to be able to keep that he was a monster away from them—Human, Electrum rebuked again. Prompto struggled not to laugh or cry. Wolves didn’t lie, didn’t see the point, and Electrum thought he was human even when he knew he wasn’t, and how could he argue with that?