Chapter Text
Nyx breathed in deep. Some of the tension—finally—eased off his shoulders as freezing air filled his lungs. Lightning cracked across the sky above them, the darkness weighed down with thick sheets of rain to choke out what little light it granted as the accompanying thunder rolled down his spine. It set his blood singing with restless energy. It was a conscious effort to keep his feet still, to hold himself from the urge to stand directly under the downpour, and instead stay under the steel roof of the long-abandoned guard-post.
He turned to look at Cor. The poor man was barely visible in the shadows of the post. The lightning overhead only illuminated just past the lip of the door, simultaneously comforting and ominous in its low rolling light. They were both soaked to the bone, the thick fabric of Cor’s uniform fairing far worse than the leather of Nyx’s. It clung to Cor in a way that was decidedly unfair. Especially his formal pants, which looked painted on at this point. The rain had not let up in the least as Cor had dragged Nyx through the winding halls of the Citadel bowels to turn up here.
“Not the nicest place a man’s taken me, I’ll be honest, but I’ll give you a pass,” Nyx joked, hoping his smirk was visible and that the heat building in his cheeks wasn’t.
His brain caught up to the accidental double entendre a second too late, and he quickly turned back to looking at the sky before he could swallow any more of his foot.
“Uh,” Cor said, and Nyx winced. “I just—You mentioned that being out in the open helps, so…”
Nyx nodded absently, staring out at the open space in front of him, the rain obscuring most of it in a thick haze. He watched the water forming deep pools along the stretch of cracked asphalt, carving out shallow rivers and sweeping iridescent oil spills in its wake. Just the barest bit of light flickered out from the sporadic street lamps, making them useless in the oppressive dark. A streak of lightning shot across the black sky, its reflection fractured in the swell of water below.
Cor had taken him to an abandoned parking lot.
It was strangely beautiful, but in a way that Nyx was contributing entirely to the awful euphoria of the storm that was simmering under his skin. The sky seemed to engulf them from below as it pressed down from above, a never ending void. A childish part of Nyx worried if he took a single step out, he’d be swallowed into the deep abyss. The lingering burn under his skin begged him to run blindly into it, desperate to fill itself with nothing but electricity.
Cor cleared his throat, yanking him back to reality.
Nyx glanced over his shoulder as Cor took a few steps forward, their soaked shoulders pressing flush as he settled beside him. The low light glinted in his eyes as Cor eyed Nyx with something he couldn’t name. Possibly concern.
Nyx swallowed thickly as he forced his eyes from Cor, instead watching as the rain sluggishly tugged at a soaked cigarette butt that was resting by the toe of his boot. He gave it a small nudge and watched as the tide ripped it out into the parking lot. He wanted to go with it, but the warmth of Cor held him still.
“I come out here to clear my head,” Cor said, barely audible above a low roll of thunder.
Nyx suppressed a shudder at the warm ghost of Cor’s voice at his ear, forcing himself to focus on the conversation instead.
“And here is…?”
“Old munitions storage,” Cor sniffed. He lifted his hand to point out to the detached building on the other side of the lot. “Abandoned a year or two into my service. Our charges started getting too strong to store this close.”
“Makes sense,” Nyx said, considering. He hadn’t even known this place was here, hanging off the east edge of the Citadel like a sore. “Surprised they haven’t done anything with it by now.”
Cor chuckled, the sound sending a sweet shudder down Nyx’s spine. “Regis wants to make it a greenway, but others want it to be practical. So—”
“—It’s stuck in limbo. Nice.”
“Works for me.”
Nyx couldn’t help but smirk at how smug Cor sounded. This was definitely somewhere he came to avoid the pressures of the Citadel. Nice. Something to keep in his back pocket, Nyx thought, though he wasn’t sure Cor would want him showing up here when the other man was trying to hide. One of them could probably escape notice for a bit, but both would ruin the secret for good.
The rain pattered loudly on the metal roof of the post as they stood, something Nyx couldn’t really focus on when they had first come here, but became louder as he felt himself relaxing against the warmth of Cor’s presence beside him.
“When I was a kid,” Nyx started, not entirely sure what he wanted to say, but feeling compelled to keep the conversation from fading. “When I was a kid, I would always end up getting pretty hurt, on days like this.”
Cor adjusted his stance, pressing back into Nyx, which he took as encouragement to continue.
“This one,” Nyx gestured to the faded silver scar above his right eye, tilting his head slightly towards Cor to let him see, “I got when I was six and my mom looked away for me for a flat second before a storm. Apparently, I ran right out the side door and face-planted on the gravel walkway. Didn’t even let it stop me. Kept running. Mom swears—swore—that if my dad hadn’t come home at that moment, the River would have taken me before the storm even started.”
“You were running towards a river?” Cor asked.
“No, that—Well, maybe, but that’s just a saying. The Galahd River, it’s—was—a big fucking River that cut through the island. Nifs dammed it up a few years ago, though, so…”
So the phrase was now just another thing stolen from him. From them. From all of Galahd.
“And the one on your nose?” Cor asked, deftly cutting Nyx’s rage to the wick before it could reignite.
“Oh, that’s a good one,” Nyx laughed. “Lib beat my face in.”
A quick glance to the side proved he was getting the reaction he wanted; Cor’s brows furrowed in concern, but lips quirked just slightly in a poorly contained smirk.
“I kind of deserved it,” Nyx continued. “We were twelve. I had broken into his room and stolen his grappling hook. He’d been saving up for it for ages. My mom had outright forbidden them, and his dad wouldn’t let him use it until he showed him how, which was taking forever. I was too impatient, so I nicked it. I didn’t even get to use it before he found me out by the Outcrops, literally red with rage. Fucker broke my nose over it.”
Cor made a small considering noise at the back of his throat. “You definitely deserved it.”
“Yeah, he agrees. Bops me on the nose every time I start to piss him off now, as a warning.”
“This one,” Cor said, motioning to a thin scar near his hairline that Nyx had been caught staring at more than once on a late night in Cor’s office, “I got from Cid. He threw a wrench at my head.”
Nyx sputtered. “At your head?”
“He claims he thought I would dodge it.”
“Damn, how deep was that?” Nyx asked, still baffled.
Without thinking, he was reaching out to run his thumb along the neat little line that disappeared into the wrinkles on Cor’s forehead whenever he was yelling at soldiers. It had to have been something intense, for a potion to have not cleaned it up entirely. Cor didn’t pull away. Instead, he watched Nyx with a bemused expression, the ghost of a smile barely gracing his lips.
“Not very, thankfully,” Cor said as Nyx pulled away, “but there were a few hours where the idiot thought I had a concussion. Wouldn’t let me do anything, not even sleep.”
“Ah, yeah,” Nyx chuckled. “Guess that makes sense.”
Head-wounds could be nasty. It was one of the first things Nyx learned in the Glaive. Never, ever, use a potion on a head-wound. Not until you were absolutely sure there wasn’t damage to the brain. Something about the way magic inter-played with the complex nervous systems meant it could go wrong in all the worst ways.
He’d seen just how badly it could go in the field. Seen a glaive stripped of everything that made them, them. He pushed that memory away as quickly as it had come.
“Still,” Nyx said. “Surprised you kept it.”
“Kept it?” Cor asked, leaning away slightly to look Nyx in the eye, confusion clear on his face.
“As in, didn’t use a potion on it or whatever it is you do to make them disappear,” Nyx said quickly, laughing awkwardly to hide the anxiety crawling up his throat.
Cor was watching him carefully, eyes narrowed. Whatever he found, he clearly didn’t like.
“The scar?” Cor asked.
“Yeah?”
Cor was still staring at him, nose wrinkling as he considered Nyx with cold eyes. Fuck Ramuh’s Temper, now all Nyx wanted to do was let the storm swallow him out of shame. He could feel the ice from Cor’s stare settling in his stomach. Pure dread.
The Marshal was eyeing him in the same way he did Council members during particularly cruel meetings. Nyx wasn’t ashamed to admit it was a facet of Cor that scared him to the fucking bone. The ability to freeze out any arguments with a single glare, a warning to anyone who dared cross him. Concede.
Nyx also knew how much respect Cor lost for the ones who bowed out of those arguments. The only way for him to come out of this conversation with Cor’s regard was to meet the challenge. To take at least one tentative step out onto the frozen battleground that had suddenly formed between them.
Nyx swallowed his fear.
“What did I just say that was so wrong?” Nyx breathed out, desperate to understand.
“Is that what you use curatives for?” Cor asked, voice hard.
“What? No! Just, isn’t that what Insomnians do?”
And just like that, the ice cracked. As swiftly as it had come, Nyx watched the cold expression fade like watching the sun thaw a pond. Not happy, not even fucking close, but back to the familiar neutral that was Cor, rather than an enraged Marshal staring down his next target. Nyx remained frozen, like an anak caught out in front of a car, holding his breath.
“This is another cultural misunderstanding,” Cor said carefully, watching Nyx’s face with gentler eyes. “Yes?”
“Gods, I fucking hope so,” Nyx said, letting out a deep, controlled breath.
“Explain,” Cor requested, allowing himself to settle back into the stance they had held before.
An invitation for Nyx to relax, which he took readily, though he was more conservative about the amount of his weight he allowed to lean against Cor now. He could still feel the thin ice creaking beneath him. Ramuh’s Temper was still biting at his skin, too, burning against the unease Cor had set in him.
“I—I don’t really know where the disconnect is, I’ll be honest.”
“You think we use curatives for superficial injuries. To avoid scars.” Cor said, not a question in the least.
“Not superficial, no, those rarely leave any lasting marks. Just, the big ones, I guess?”
“The purpose of a potion is to heal, Nyx,” Cor said, words carefully incredulous. As if he was speaking to a child.
“I’m aware, Cor,” Nyx bit back in annoyance. His hand was aching from where he had it clenched against the burn. “I just don’t get why they’re used as much as they are.”
Cor took a careful breath, keeping his eyes forward. “Are the Kingsglaive using curatives outside of emergencies?”
“No,” Nyx spat out into the storm. “We’ve had that argument before. You know we barely get enough to cover the serious shit as it is. I’d kill the little rats if they were using them on scrapes.”
“Then where is this coming from?”
“Fuck, I don’t know? The fact that you can buy them in a convenience store?”
“Where?” Cor asked, stiff beside him again.
“Uh, anywhere? I mean, I’ve only really seen them in Leide, but—”
Nyx stopped as Cor gasped out a desperate laugh, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Curatives are sold in certain stores throughout Greater Lucis, in controlled amounts, as a response to the lack of available medical services. They are not available for sale in Insomnia.”
Nyx watched the lightning crack across the sky, feeling very much like a sledgehammer had just hit him in the face. Was he stupid? He might be stupid. Yeah, he’d never seen them in Insomnia, but he’d assumed it was just because he usually shopped in the immigrant quarters, where nicer things never even made it to the shelves. But, then—
“—what is the obsession with having perfect skin?” Nyx let the question fall out of his mouth.
The laugh that came from Cor startled him, a sharp bark followed by gently rolling chuckles as his shoulder shook against Nyx’s. He felt like he should be more insulted, but the comforting press of Cor against him paired with the relief of not having utterly ruined the mood was robbing Nyx of his well-earned righteous indignation.
“That,” Cor said eventually, voice thick with amusement, “I can’t tell you. Never understood it myself.”
Which Nyx should have realized. Cor’s face was beautifully imperfect, in ways Nyx never let himself appreciate for as long as he’d like. Small scars and dents from years of service, paired with the gentle discoloration of a life lived under the brutal sun. It was one of the many reasons he respected Cor. The man refused to allow the prep teams do more than lightly powder his face—to reduce shine, the techs always said as Nyx tried to keep it off his own face—and never attempted to conceal his flaws. Clarus joked it was because neither of them were old, which was true enough, but Clarus also allowed the teams to cake his face with all sorts of garbage for the cameras.
With how many ads Nyx saw a day for cremes to reduce stretch marks and weird oils to fade acne scars, he had assumed Insomnians only kept scars as a trophy or if they were too poor to afford the magic eraser that was a potion. He also knew plastic surgery was a thing, but he really never had thought about it too much. It was all just another bastion of the Insomnian culture of excess.
Though, knowing what he did about the scarcity of such magic, he really should have realized sooner that curatives were not a part of this obsession. That the removal of scars was a byproduct, and not the intention.
Cor was still chuckling softly beside him.
“Don’t make fun of me.”
“You thought I was that vain?”
“You? No, but,” Nyx rolled his thoughts around, trying to figure out how to express them best. “You don’t care about them the way we do. The scars.”
Cor glanced at him again, keeping their shoulders flush, an eyebrow lifted as an invitation to continue.
“In Galahd,” Nyx started. Then stopped, mulling his next words around carefully. He held his hand out to Cor, palm down, and used his thumb to tap at his index finger. “Do you know what this is?”
“The tattoo?” Cor asked. Nyx nodded. “No.”
“In Galahd, scars are stories. We don’t have the means to clean up wounds as well as most of Lucis does, since supply lines have been tight as long as anyone can remember, so most people have a lot of scars. Most of them are stupid,” Nyx tapped his own nose, “but they are still stories. And with the rains, most written stories and photographs get destroyed over time, but the scars remain.”
Nyx ran his thumb up the side of his index.
“This one is from early training. I was just learning how to use lightning and fucked it up spectacularly. This finger looked like charred kindling. Honestly, thought I was going to lose it, but then someone slapped a potion on me and—bam—all gone. Like it never happened.”
Lightning flashed across the sky like a greeting. A little wave from Ramuh, acknowledging the damage he could do to Nyx without hesitation.
“So,” Cor said after a moment, voice warm with careful consideration, “the tattoos are to preserve memories.”
“Yeah. That’s a pretty good way of phrasing it. Memories, stories, scars.”
“Then, this wasn’t a tradition before you moved to Insomnia?”
“Well, yes, and no. Was it as common? No, not at all. Usually you’ve got the scar, and that’s enough. A lot of the scars people immortalized when I was a kid were the ones that were never visible to begin with. Lost loved ones, mostly. Those are fancier. There’s no one in Insomnia I’d trust to get those right.”
There wasn’t a day that went by that he didn’t lament that. He’d come close to settling, once or twice, but. But they deserved better.
“All of your tattoos commemorate wounds,” Cor said, not quite a question.
“Yeah, but just big ones. Realized early on it would be too fucking expensive to get all of them done. Mostly, I stick to ones that I need to remember, if I want to not get myself killed in the future. Didn’t realize it would help me with training the recruits, but it’s been a nice visual for the idiots who think they’re invulnerable.”
Cor hummed.
The silence settled around them again, but Nyx couldn’t find the peace he had before. Doubt had crawled its way up through his unease, sensing his weakness in the grip of a storm and feeding on it. It was the other part of Ramuh’s Temper that Nyx hated. The one least talked about, though he knew it was just as present in his grandfather—who fought his with rage—as it was in Lib’s mother, who had bottled hers with drink. The ever present feeling that he had, somehow, failed.
His shoulder ached, phantom whispers from a man long dead weighing on him. ‘Predictable,’ Drautos’ voice hissed out from behind the mask. ‘Unlike you, I learn from history.’ Nyx bit back another thick wave of rage and grief, fingers flexing.
“Can I ask your opinion on something?” Nyx asked impulsively. He couldn’t stand to let it linger any longer. If anyone might understand, it would be Cor.
It had to be Cor.
The man in question inclined his head.
“I haven’t…” Nyx sighed. “I don’t know if I should commemorate this.”
He tapped his aching shoulder, avoiding Cor’s eyes entirely by watching the water as it continued to rise. At this rate, the streets would be flooded before he even got the chance to head home.
“I’m not sure I’m the right person to answer that,” Cor said, carefully.
“There’s no one else I can ask,” Nyx said to the storm.
He had tried. Over and over and over, he had tried to form the words to ask Lib. To ask Crowe. To ask anyone. Nyx swallowed back the heat forming behind his eyes.
“I don’t,” Cor began. Then stopped. Nyx almost swept it under the rug then, desperate to keep whatever emotion that was threatening to spill over from rising any further, but Cor’s hand settled on his shoulder, right over the phantom wound. “I don’t think you should let him steal your traditions from you. I can understand not wanting to let him leave his mark, but it was not his victory in the end. He was wrong and now he is dead. We are alive. That’s the lesson learned.”
Nyx couldn’t pretend the warm tears on his face were the rain, much as he wanted to. He sniffed wetly as they came, unwilling to look at Cor, who must have thought him a child. He felt exhausted, as he always did once the storm finally came, the burn in his hands leaving behind an old, familiar ache. In Galahd, he used to bury himself into his mother’s arms, letting the storm roll around them as the grip of Ramuh’s Temper finally let him loose. He had no shame in his tears back then.
Now? Now there was only shame.
He pulled away from Cor, quickly turning to rub the rough edge of his sleeve over his face like a sniveling child. Cor’s hand was still on his shoulder, firm, but Nyx was desperate to make space between them. To spare Cor the indignity of comforting him.
“Cor, I’m sorry, I—”
“No.”
The fight left him as that firm hand pulled him in, warm arms coming to wrap around and hold him close. Nyx stood, stunned, as Cor hugged him. A broad palm made slow, warm circles on his back as Nyx choked on the tears he couldn’t swallow anymore. The thick embrace of the heavy rain swallowed the noises of the city, and as Nyx relented into his arms, all he could hear was the thundering of his own heart against the steady rhythm of Cor’s. He let his forehead fall to Cor’s damp shoulder, his arms coming up to grip desperately at the man that held him.
“It’s okay,” Cor whispered. “I have you.”
Thunder shuddered around them as Nyx relaxed into his embrace. The proud part of him wanted to pull away, to fake bravado and deny himself this humanity as he had done storm after storm in Insomnia, but he didn’t. He burrowed his face into the crook of Cor’s neck, content to ride out the storm in his arms.
It was warm. Warmer than it had any right being, soaked from the rain as they were. Nyx couldn’t even remember the last time he hugged someone, beyond the barebones slap on the back Lib had given him a few weeks ago at Yamachang’s. He didn’t know how, but life had slowly dissolved into nothing but workday after grinding workday, every moment spent picking up the pieces that monster had left behind and attempting to cobble them back together into a respectable Kingsglaive. To sew himself back together, too, in the wake of his betrayal.
They stood for a while, Cor gently murmuring comforting words in his ear as the man continued to soothe his hand against Nyx’s soaked jacket. His face was aching from where it was pressed against the obnoxious epaulettes of Cor’s formal uniform, and Nyx couldn’t help but snicker at the stupidity of their situation.
Two of the strongest men in Lucis, soaked to the bone and hugging it out in an abandoned guard post. The press would have a field day.
“Feeling better?” Cor asked, voice warm and bemused against Nyx’s temple.
“Yeah,” Nyx sighed, still unwilling to pull away from Cor’s embrace. “Fuck, I needed that.”
Cor hummed, hand smoothing down Nyx’s back one last time before he pulled away. Nyx let him, meeting his gaze with a sad, self-depreciating grin.
“We should head back,” Cor said, returning his smile with a rueful one of his own. “At this rate, the roads are going to—”
As if on command, both their phones let out a low siren. Nyx couldn’t bite back a cackle as Cor pulled his out and glared at the screen.
“Flash-flood warning?” Nyx asked, silencing his phone in his breast-pocket without even looking at it.
The withering glare he got in return was all the confirmation he needed.
“Well, looks like I’m stuck doing paperwork after all,” Nyx sighed, tucking his arms back behind his head as he eyed the pouring rain that stood between them and the entrance back into the Citadel. He shot Cor a winning smile, knowing exactly how stupid it looked with his red-ringed eyes. “Race me?”
Nyx barely had time to bark out a laugh as Cor shot past him, quickly darting out after the man as they both ran out into the storm.