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No one liked doctors, right?
Being small and weak and dragged to a strange place with strange smells. Being poked and prodded and told to stick out your tongue. Having a bright light shone in your eyes. Everyone hated that. Everyone had one bad memory or another, perfused with the scent of bleach and hum of fluorescent lights.
Prompto scrunched up the tissue, covering the alarmingly colored gunk he’d hacked up, and tossed it feebly toward the trash can. It fell short, but he had no energy to pick it up. Instead he rolled over, tossing aside the blanket that clung to his sweat-sticky skin, trying to ignore the gurgle in his lungs and the scratching in his throat. It was only a few breaths before the hacking resumed, followed by a chill that left him groping for the blanket again.
He wasn’t quite awake, and he wasn’t quite asleep. The watery heaviness in his chest felt a familiar ache, and the fever made the room swim before his eyes. The poster that hung on his wall was for a video game, but as his vision swum, the cold steel vault reminded him of that room.
He must have been sick a lot as a kid, though he couldn’t recall his parents ever telling him with what. If it was a chronic illness or if he’d had the misfortune to come down with every bug that got passed around. What he did know is they’d taken him to the doctor, like, a lot. Even when he’d hid in the closet, or protested that he wasn’t really sick, not at all. It was normal for kids to be scared of doctors, right?
Or maybe it was just him.
In any case, his parents hadn’t let him get away with being a brat. They’d shut down his complaints, hauled him out of hiding places, bundled him into the car. They’d passed through the traffic gates into that concrete parking lot, again and again. They’d shown ID to the guard at the door, and again to the person at the front desk, who’d push a button and open the sliding glass doors for them. The ones that wouldn’t open when he ran toward them, and led to a bank of elevators. The elevator his parents led him into didn’t have buttons for the higher floors. It only went down.
Elevators. That was another thing that scared him, one that got real awkward whenever he accompanied Noct to the Citadel. He’d made the excuse that they just kinda made him claustrophobic, particularly when they were crammed in there with Gladio, when really, the problem was that elevators reminded him of doctors. And doctors, well…
He managed to haul himself onto one elbow and grab a tissue just in time to avoid hacking blood and gunk over his hand. Doctors. He should probably see one. At least that’s what the most recent message from Noct said, still blinking on his phone.
And the one from Ignis, offering a ride to Prompto's general practitioner if it was needed. Noct must have prodded him to send it.
How did people even find a doctor's office, anyway, if they didn’t usually go? He pulled up a search engine on his phone and stared at it groggily, like he’d never seen it before. Where was the place he used to visit? His head swum with feverish memories, brought up by the nausea he’d felt back then.
“—shown any abnormalities?”
“None,” replied his mother’s voice, and she sounded disappointed.
“—hoping for some insight into their biotechnology—”
The receptionist tapped her pen as she spoke, obscured from his line of sight by a high counter.
“—if behavioral indications are normal then we proceed to biomarkers, blood, bone marrow, cerebrospinal fluid—”
“All right. I’ll come collect him at five. Behave.”
The last part was addressed to him.
“What do you think the doctor’s going to do about it?”
It was a few minutes before his phone blinked again.
“IDK. Give you antibiotics or something? They might run some tests.”
Tests.
Noct had always joked about how wound up Prompto got when the teacher announced one, even though his grades in mathematics and science were higher than any of his classmates had expected. It was stupid, he thought. It’s not even the same kind of test. But the fear coiled in his chest and around his wrist, tangled with all the other things that felt wrong and that he longed to ask about but instead hid, frightened of others seeing his wrongness.
Whatever his doctors had been testing for, it must have been something bad. They’d probed his body’s responses to just about everything, electric shock, ice water baths, running on a treadmill until he collapsed. None of those things had given them the answers they were looking for, and by the looks they gave, it was almost like they blamed him.
It was after one of these failed tests that the man in the long coat, the one with the silver hair and grimly set jaw, had grabbed him by the shoulder and hauled him to a partitioned section of the room. The others in white coats turned their heads, but no one moved to stop him. One said, as if it were a joke, “Careful, you'll owe the Crown a fortune if you ruin their only sample.”
The chime of the doorbell startled him.
“You look like shit,” said Noct, his expression dismayed.
“Thanks buddy,” Prompto croaked, rolling half onto his side rather than sitting up, then descending into another round of coughing from the effort. Noct slapped him on the back.
“Look, I don’t know what it is, but if it’s about money, I’ll take you to the Citadel doctors. Hell, I’ll take you there anyway. You won’t need to pay, or get your parent’s permission, or—”
Prompto shook his head violently, and Noctis stared back, as if wondering if that was some kind of disease-induced tremor.
“Like hell I’m letting you lie here and die. Listen—” he said, over Prompto’s panicked wheezing, “you can’t even breathe. You’re godsdammned grey right now, you know that? I’ve never seen a person turn that color. So would you PLEASE—”
He cut himself off, raking an anxious hand through his hair, taking a long gulp of the air Prompto couldn’t seem to get. His hand clenched by his side, but his voice was softer.
“Please. Let me help.”
And that was why Prompto was fucked, because if Noct was asking like that, he’d follow him to hell.
Noct had called Ignis, and upon arriving, Ignis had assessed the situation and called an ambulance.
By Prompto’s count that was Noct's third betrayal of the day, after coming over when he’d been told not to, and begging him like that. He probably should have been madder than he was. At Ignis poking around in his sweaty blanket nest, questioning him softly, and scooping his disgusting tissues into the trash without complaint. At Gladio, who must have been with Ignis, taking his pulse and temperature and positioning him to keep his airway open, then moving him from the small bedroom to somewhere the paramedics could maneuver a stretcher. But it was getting really hard to hold on to any feeling over the grey haze in his head and the slosh in his lungs. He wasn’t even sure if he’d counted to three correctly.
A mask was pressed over his nose and mouth, and somewhere in his drowning he summoned up a further level of panic, flailing heavy limbs. He was suffocating, he was being suffocated— he reached for the mask with numb fingertips only to have his limbs wrenched back down.
“Breathe,” someone said.
“Breathe,” someone had said.
Back in the vault, the mask pressed to his face had exuded a strange-tasting gas. He had thought to pull it off, but only thought— his limbs refused to move.
“Paralytics only,” the grim man instructed. “Keep a record of his vitals.”
His eyes wouldn’t move either. They remained fixed on the white ceiling, no matter how much he wanted, or wanted not to see the source of the burning pain that slit him from chest to belly, the slow rasp and crack of the saw through his ribcage, his heart bared to beat an arrhythmia against alien air. There was nothing but the whiteness and the bright agony and the distant, incomprehensible voices. Again and again he thought he had crossed the threshold of the unendurable only to find that the pain to endure was more yet. The time that passed was unfathomable.
“— going into shock—”
“—just enough to stabilize—”
“—the pain will kill him—”
And the grim man spoke like a devil above him, the hammer crushing him to the anvil, the face of the nightmare he couldn't wake from.
“Since when do we assume that Niff inventions feel pain?”
When he awoke in the hospital, it was as though the devil had finally dismounted from his chest. Perhaps. It also felt like the devil had first tap danced on his ribcage a few times for good measure. But the ache rose and fell with his breathing, which reminded him that he was breathing, and didn’t the air taste sweet?
His body was still heavy, fusing fuzzily with the pillows propping him up. At length, he turned his head to see a figure slumped in the chair by his bedside. It figured that Noct would be asleep.
“Hey,” he said, and Noct opened his eyes, rearranging himself in the chair.
“Hey. Feeling better?”
“Right as rain,” he asserted, ruining it when his voice pitched up into a loud wheeze. Maybe not quite yet.
Noct raised an eyebrow, but said nothing for a while. When he finally spoke, he said.
“You’ve got a lot of scars, you know.”
Prompto shrugged. “Had surgery when I was little.”
Noct raised both eyebrows this time.
“Yeah, so, even the doctors were asking what the hell had happened.” He runs his hands through his hair again. “Like, maybe if your surgeon moonlighted as a butcher…”
Prompto barked out a laugh for lack of a better response. He avoided thinking about the implications of what Noct was saying, what the doctors had said. Thinking was effort, and he just wanted to lie in his bed, even if it was in a hospital. Thankfully, Noct dropped the subject.
Prompto thought of telling him about it. Later. Maybe.
His eyes strayed to the bedside table, where he spotted a vase and a bunch of yellow flowers. Roses and… well, he didn’t really know any other fancy flowers but the thought counted more than anything.
“Dude, you bought me flowers?” He was half-joking, but where else could they have come from?
Noct immediately turned a fascinating color.
“Shut up. I just— Ignis thought—”
“Thanks, buddy. Or should I thank Ignis?”
“Not Ignis,” Noct scowled, and he was definitely red, definitely annoyed now. Prompto noted this with muted glee. He was doing a pretty good job at needling him for someone who could barely move.
He smiled through his tiredness, then his gaze drifted to the wall.
“Thanks for coming to see me,” he sighed, brushing limp hair from his forehead, then letting his hand flop onto the sheets. He wasn't sure if he meant now, or back at the house. Perhaps both.
“Hey, anytime. If you ever need me…”
Noct’s hand on his was so warm.