Final_Fantasy_Kink_Meme

The young man would have fit right in as a subject in the paintings hanging in the museum: fine features, a full mouth, lush, dark curls that just brushed his neck. . .and, Ignis noted, a conspicuously blank white t-shirt.

"Gladio," he said. "Down that hall. The young man in the white."

"You mean the one who's not wearing an access pass?"

"Precisely."

Gladio began to move through the crush of people like he was wading through surf, making his way towards the young man just as the curly head bobbed through the crowd to hurry towards where Noctis and Prompto stood milling about near an armor display, and that was incentive enough for Ignis to begin pushing through the crowd as well. While Ignis had been thinking that the dedication ceremony for the new museum wing could have been more interesting, he would have preferred it didn't occur via security breach.

The same qualities that made it easy for Gladio to cut through the crowd unfortunately made it very obvious as to when he'd arrived at his destination. The bark of, "Hey," and an iron hand clamping onto the young man's shoulder just as he managed to reach for Prompto were like a throwing a boulder in a still pond as the crowd rippled away from the disturbance. "You want to tell me what you're doing here?"

It took no time at all to realize they would be better served by an interrogation happening elsewhere. While Prompto and Noctis were trying to ask what was going on Ignis grabbed the nearest Crownsguard he could find, a woman named Eldith—family in Caem, crackshot with a hunting rifle—to take custody of the intruder, and left Gladio with the prince while they shuffled the young man to an abandoned alcove behind the grand staircase. Ignis held his back to the wall with a fist in the lapel of his coat.

"Now then. Would you like to tell me what you're doing here?"

Through a very quick questioning the young man maintained the story that he was an acquaintance of Prompto Argentum who knew he'd be attending and hoped to see him there. To improve Ignis' night, Cor Leonis came striding into the alcove with an easy step over the braided divider that cordoned it off from the hall. "Ignis, Eldith, I've got chatter about an attempt on the prince all over the museum. Someone want to explain what's going on here?"

The young man wailed, "I just wanted to talk to Prompto!"

Ignis winced. The boy—hard to think of him as anything approaching a man after that unbearable whine—had a real future as an ambulance siren. "False alarm, I believe, Marshal."

Before he could explain any further, Prompto himself came skidding around the corner with Noctis following him and Gladio on their heels. An unusual role reversal, that.

"Rhasa, what are you doing here?"

"Hey, man!" The boy perked up like a puppy whose owner had been away all day.

"Argentum," Cor growled, and Prompto shrank.

"I'm fairly certain Prompto's guilty of nothing but poor taste in company, Marshal," Ignis said. He squeezed hard on the boy's shoulder. "Gladio and I spotted our young friend here in the corridor off the east wing, well away from His Highness and Prompto. He got access to a restricted area in what can only have been a lapse in perimeter security."

It was the best kind of misdirection, in Ignis' opinion: a legitimate one. Cor frowned. "Where were you stationed, Eldith? Did you see any of this?"

"The entry point out of that corridor into the main hall." Eldith's mouth twitched. "The only way I could've seen was standing on someone's shoulders, sir." Built like a boulder, Eldith looked as though someone had made Gladio female and then chopped a foot and a half off the bottom. She might've stopped a garula at a full gallop, but for her to see through the crush down the hall would've been impossible.

"All right," Cor sighed. "Eldith, you're with me. I want to find out who should've been at the entrance, and I want them in the security office in two minutes. You all too. I'm afraid that includes you, as well, Your Highness."

Noctis shrugged. "It's better than sitting through the dedication."

When only the four of them remained, Ignis turned his attention toward Prompto. "I hadn't wanted to bring this up in front of the Marshal, but—"

"If you fucked him just tell me he's legal," Gladio said, which certainly got the point across.

"He's nineteen," Prompto said. "I met him at a club."

"And you think the kind of kid who'd sneak past security here isn't going to try to sneak into a bar?"

"It's the kind of place that's really careful about checking stuff like that!"

Ignis noticed Noct was looking everywhere but at them: whatever he knew, he also knew it wasn't his place to say. It gave him some hope that what lessons on discretion he'd attempted to drill into Noct had been successful in at least this small measure, but he suspected it had more to do with solidarity with Prompto.

"The Silver Circle, okay?" Prompto mumbled when Gladio and Ignis had been staring at him for long enough. "I met him at The Silver Circle last Friday."

Gladio whistled.

"Ah," said Ignis. Suddenly it was clear as to why Prompto was so reticent to divulge where he'd met the current thorn in their side. "Gladio, please stop looking impressed and take Prompto and His Highness to the security office as the Marshal requested. I'll be over in a moment."

When the others had turned the corner of the staircase, Ignis leaned against the marble wall in solitude for a handful of deep, careful breaths.

While The Silver Circle hosted burlesque shows, educational demonstrations, and the occasional fundraiser, its primary claim to fame was for the fetish-themed nights they held every weekend. The titular circle was a play on words between the platform stage the performances took place on and the elegant, gleaming collar that served as the logo and primary branding. The long rivalry between Kingsglaive and Crownsguard had resulted in more than one round of daring each other to step foot in to gawk or feel brave. Ignis had never partaken. He knew of it only by reputation of brash young Guards tittering in the locker room, and by reading—and re-reading, every so often—their website, the calendar of events, tormenting himself with visions of a place he didn't dare venture into, even in the insulating presence of other Crownsguard.

The intellectual knowledge that there could be no possible suspicion of him based on Prompto was little consolation. The niggling sense of exposure followed him as he tried to turn his focus to the matter at hand, which desperately needed it. There would be incident reports filed on the alleged assassination attempt and the security breach itself, which meant interviews with their tearful young pest, and Noct and Prompto, as well as the other Crownsguard on duty and the third-party museum security who were likely responsible. All that simply to determine who would require full statements.

The small office their security force had been using as central command for the event was so crowded Cor was rotating people in for preliminary interviews. Ignis stepped out of his own questioning to find Gladio sitting on his haunches in the corridor with his head tipped back against the wall.

"Surprised you're still here," Ignis said.

"Prompto's still here to make sure loverboy gets home okay, so Noctis is still here, so I'm still here. Hard to believe this mess is because that bonehead had to see Prompto. Kid's great and all but I've seen him trip over his own feet over a pretty girl. He can't be that great a lay."

"And it's only getting messier," Ignis agreed.

Rhasa Amari—who was by all official records indeed nineteen years old, a recent graduate of Insomnia's most elite private academy, studying law at university—was the owner of one late-model heavily upgraded sports car. One which had been towed from its illegal parking space.

Ignis couldn't muster much sympathy, although it did give him the satisfaction later of seeing Rhasa's equally entitled parents come face to face with the Marshal of the Crownsguard and the prince's Shield in the midst of threatening to sue all parties who'd lain hands on their son. If Ignis didn't tolerate that sort of entitlement in their future monarch he certainly wasn't going to in someone who was even more spoiled and for less cause. He gladly left them to it. Prompto typically relied on public transportation that wasn't running at so late an hour, and would likely need a ride home.

#

In the car, Prompto shifted uneasily in his seat. "Hey, thanks for going to bat for me with the Marshal."

"It wasn't worth the headache Noct would cause if you were disciplined appropriately."

"What? What did I do?"

"Presumably Rhasa was only aware you would be at the dedication because you told him."

"Yeah, I said my friend had to be there so I was going to keep him company. Guess he thought it would have to be someone pretty important if they got stuck at that thing, huh?"

Ignis was skeptical of that, having seen the lengths the boy had gone to to see Prompto and thoroughly ignore Noct, but when he glanced over Prompto was looking at him wide-eyed, guileless as always.

"Is it because it's a guy?"

Ignis' gloves creaked as his hands tightened on the steering wheel. "That," he said carefully, "would be wildly hypocritical of me."

The engine hummed along in solitude for some time as the towering high-rises of the city center gave way to a more modest residential district. The silence that filled the car lacked the air of mutually assured destruction Ignis was accustomed to in such unexpected revelations, as when he'd run bodily into a burly Kingsglaive scurrying out of the back room in a particular bookstore. Nor was it comfortable. Prompto shifted in his seat incessantly.

Having come of age in a sphere ruled by the need for marriage alliances and heirs, knowing what it might have done to know someone else like him, Ignis' impulse was for sympathy, but as it was Prompto's indiscretion in frequenting a sex club that had brought them here it was unlikely he needed encouragement.

Eventually, Prompto said very quietly, "I didn't know that. Was I supposed to know that?"

"The relevant personnel at the palace are aware. It's not information I make a habit of divulging beyond that."

"Right, gotcha. Yeah, everything about you is like a black box, mystery door kind of deal."

"It doesn't happen by accident. I am keenly aware of how my behavior could effect the royal house, given my proximity to Noct." In a way Ignis envied Prompto's infuriating thoughtlessness, the luxury to think of so little outside of himself. "You clearly lack the same education—if through no real fault of your own—but you must understand that whatever scandal touches you will no doubt cast a shadow on him as well, and that includes overdramatic lovers making a scene, gender irrelevant."

"He's not my—he was new and didn't know anyone, so I showed him around and we played around a little. I didn't even have sex with him."

"Oh, truly the salient point here," Ignis said, no longer able to contain his irritation. "Somehow I doubt it was a limiting factor in your acquaintance. Who did what to whom and how is not relevant, although I do hope you had better sense than to let him be in charge of tying anything more complicated than his own shoes." He regretted it immediately. That sort of lapse was a dangerous weakness, and Prompto's head whipping to face him with a flick of blond in the fuzzy corner of Ignis' vision proved it.

"No, I topped," Prompto said. In someone else's voice it might have sounded thoughtful. "Wouldn't think you'd know the difference."

Ignis counted three slow breaths, a city block, determined to focus on the road and not the hot feeling at his temples. Appallingly, it was a sense of embarrassment, something he hadn't had to endure for quite some time when he'd learned to control so much.

"Suffice it to say your proclivities have no bearing, except insofar as casual play partners you've picked up in a public club may accordingly have a taste for public spectacle."

"It's not like I knew he was going to be a weirdo."

"And your lack of forethought regarding security is precisely the problem."

"You can't blame me because museum security was jacked," Prompto said, as whiny and petulant as usual again, thank heavens for small favors.

"Operational security," Ignis said. "Which means not giving the details of your itinerary and location—and by extension the crown prince's itinerary and location—to any puppy-faced paramour who asks. The prince and his companion being accosted in an open street wouldn't have looked any better in the tabloids, only given the paparazzi better lighting. If you're to remain close with Noct, if you're to be part of his Crownsguard, your personal matters must remain personal. And discreet."

Prompto let things rest at that, and the car was quiet until they pulled up to the low building Prompto lived in.

Though it had caused Ignis some worry over the years, for once he was grateful Prompto's parents wouldn't require an explanation for his late arrival even if he had still been of an age where it ought to matter. They would likely never know the incident occurred, which suited Ignis just as well.

The sooner put behind them the better.