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English
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Published:
2025-04-19
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450
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1/1
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18
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Souvenirs

Summary:

Gladio returns from the tempering grounds, unable to shake the first shield’s last words.

Notes:

(See the end of the work for notes.)

Work Text:

When Prompto comments on the scar cleaving across your forehead, you don’t know what to say. “You should see the other guy,” falls from your lips, unbidden. Maybe you don’t mean that. Maybe you do. Your chest is puffed up in pride, your chest is caving in, your chest is dragged open and scooped out with a two millennia old spoon.

Some shield you are.

There are words that press like iron against your tongue, sticking stubbornly behind your teeth and crawling up up your brainstem like imps in the night. ‘The Last King of Lucis is ill fit to fight without his Shield.’ The last king. The words dig their sickles into your grey matter. The last king.

The words are as easy to pull apart as the daggerquill breast Ignis prepares for dinner, slow cooked and tender. You’ve read one too many historical fiction books with intrigue and nobility and prophetic words not to tear at them.

Noctis and Luna will not be cursed to a bloodline of only daughters.
Lucis will not be renamed to Caelum or New Tenebrae or New Insomnia.
Lucis will not be renamed to Nifilheim. (Or if it is, that won’t be the root of the issue. It won’t be though. You wont dwell on it.)

Noctis is going to die.

The daggerquill on your plate is half decimated where you’ve been poking and twisting with your fork. You ignore the looks Noctis is throwing your way, plate cleared of seconds and brow furrowed in thought. He’s almost kingly, like this. The thought makes your empty stomach churn.

Going to the tempering ground was a mistake, you think later, poking the fire and watching it writhe against the darkness that’s fallen over camp. It didn’t prove anything. Sure, you beat some wraiths and you survived Gilgamesh.

You didn’t defeat him.

The Last King of Lucis.

What does being a worthy shield mean when your king is going to die, young and tragic, and entirely outside of your control?

The urge wells up in you, hot and sudden to scatter the fire across the haven stone, curse and lash against the aeon old power that grant the haven and Noctis and you magic and meaning, all children wrought of stone and violence and divine purpose.

All to be left aside once your use is served.

You don’t take a swing at the fire, do not turn your face to the heavens and demand to battle the draconian- a fight you’d surely lose. You are Noctis’s shield, and you will act like it and even if he is the last king, and even if he will die young and tragic, he need not die alone.

Notes:

I think Gladio got screwed over by the writers for ffxv. Under all the macho nonsense and the anger and the tendency to butt heads with Noct, he’s an interesting character and his role as a shield doomed to be unable to save his king fascinates me a little. This was all spawned from the fact that in the English version of ff15, Gilgamesh calls Noctis the ‘last king’ and it’s never brought up again. I had to do something with that.

If you want more mad ramblings, come find me on tumblr @phoenixwithapencil