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On a fine summer morning of year five nova aurora, Gladio shaves his beard.
He wakes up before work and realizes, quite suddenly, that his pain-in-the-ass Crownsguard are his pain-in-the-ass Crownsguard, and that, to his entirely inappropriate surprise, he is fond of them, and of his job, and what he does. And that the sun will still rise tomorrow. And that his beard looks pretty good on him, but it’s not his beard. At least, not anymore.
He isn’t really sure what that means. It’s just that when he sees himself in the mirror that morning, the face that looks back at him is five years out of date. It’s the face that belonged to a weary, hopeless man who was holding on out of sheer stubbornness and momentum, who went out after daemons and half-hoped to find his own death.
He can admit to that now, when the memories of those ten long years have started to grow over with every little change to the Citadel and the city, and to his own routine. He has people who joke with him just to make a joke, and not in a desperate attempt to dull the pervasive feeling of hopelessness. He has Ignis and Prompto, even if all of their schedules are usually too packed to meet up very often. He has the kids from the guard – they aren’t all kids, really, some of them are older than him – who depend on him like he’s their damn parent sometimes, which probably isn’t anything to brag about, but fuck it. He has a decent enough colleague in Cor, even though the man is a pain to work with; Cor’s a good mentor to him, regardless of anything else. Iris still hasn’t agreed to move to Insomnia, but she just might change her mind now that the kid is born.
Gladio has a godsdamn nephew. He doesn't know what's funny about that, but he smiles anyway.
He has Noctis, whom he sometimes drags out of bed in the morning and finds in the king’s office most evenings, and he's getting tired of pretending that those little flashes of domesticity, of Noct's rare smiles - not quite so rare now, thank everything - don’t settle warm and heady inside him like a mug of mulled wine.
So he shaves his beard, and it feels like he’s shaving off the decade of darkness and despair that had clung to him like a cloak for the past several years.
There's no war to wage anymore. No enemies to avoid, no battles to plan for. The closest Gladio comes to battle these days is when he throws a slacking Crownsguard on their back in the training hall.
Or, he thinks with a grin, when I need to drag Noct out of bed earlier than usual.
Peaceful times, indeed.
Five years into the dawn, Gladio feels like he’s finally starting to get used to them.
It’s a funny feeling, being clean-shaven after more than a decade of, well, not. He keeps going to scratch at his jaw and getting surprised by what he doesn’t find. He’d let his beard grow out because he rarely had time to shave and good razors were still scarce, even if Insomnia was rising from the rubble like yeast, but he isn’t really sure why he’d let it stay. Maybe for the same reason he now only wears jackets that close properly. A little bit of extra protection between the squishy bits and the big scary world.
The clean shave does make him look younger, even with the sideburns he’s kept and those crow’s feet he’s been getting and the lines under his eyes that have been there for years.
Astrals, but where has the time gone?
Yeah, I should tell Cor how old I feel, he thinks sarcastically. Someone who’s just hit sixty would sympathize.
Cor just might hear about it before lunch anyway, because half the glaives he comes across on his way through the Citadel either comment on his new style or gawk at him. “What, never seen my face before?” he snaps at one of them, out of some misguided embarrassment, and gives up on the rest. Might've been unwarranted, that, but he’s been feeling a little reckless all morning. Unfettered.
He goes to the HQ, checks the schedules, gets the night shift’s reports, marks the trainees’ tests and runs the kids through some hand-to-hand drills, all before noon. They only get a handful of new recruits every now and then, but that’s all they’re getting for now, more likely than not. More people are wanted in construction than anywhere else, still. In the meantime, the Guard barely has a hundred people where they need at least five times that number. The population has settled at several hundred thousand, and it looks like that’s all the immediate growth they’re going to get.
Insomnia used to boast over ten million citizens, before everything. Now, the population of the entire world probably doesn’t count more than one.
Gladio’s mostly used to thinking on the new scale, but whenever he sees the city from high up, it strikes him again just how empty it still is. How wild the far-out areas have grown, with grass and bushes and ivy. It’ll be a century before civilization can reclaim everything; maybe longer. Maybe it never will.
At 11:45, he hands the trainees off to Prompto for shooting practice, rustles up the Aegis kids, and heads off to find Noct.
They have a ceremony to attend.
…
He finds the king in his suite, being fussed over by an assistant and getting concealer slathered under his eyes. He’s been pressured, or maybe even strong-armed, into shaving, too, for the occasion; it takes almost a decade off his face.
He looks good.
Gladio’s eyes follow the lines of his outfit, a suit and cape to fit a king, and even though it was probably designed to inspire rather than captivate, he thinks that it fits Noctis pretty well.
“We’ll be just another minute, Captain Amicitia,” the assistant says without turning away from Noct, and he takes that to mean they’ll be a good while, still.
Noct meets his eyes, and the put-upon look in them, so reminiscent of before, hits Gladio like a punch to the gut.
He doesn't remember when he last let himself dream, but if he'd been inclined to, some years ago, this would've been there - this expression in Noct's eyes, an unguarded complaint about something so mundane, so minor in the grand scheme of things, that it never would've occurred to anyone to worry about during the Long Night. Noct wasn't really there for the worst of it, but he did catch the fallout full-blast, and Gladio is sure Noct's head is full of his own demons, too.
He would hope that Noct's head is a more peaceful place now than it was a couple years ago. It seems so to him, from the outside.
He gives Noct a what-can-you-do grin and a shrug from behind the attendant's back, and Noct closes his eyes in exasperation and then just - doesn't open them again. Escaping his mild annoyances to the inside of his mind, looks like. Noct used to do this a lot, back in the day.
Well, if his mind is a nice enough place to escape to, Gladio can't find it in himself to rib him too much.
"Don't fall asleep there, Your Majesty," he teases, on the tail of an aborted chuckle. "I’m too far to catch you if you fall over."
Noct makes a noise that's halfway between a grunt and a hum, and doesn't reply beyond that.
In the absence of anything better to do, Gladio studies what they've wrangled Noct into for the occasion - a combination of items that reminds him of the late king Regis, the way he used to look during official addresses. He remembers being confounded by the cape, once - he'd just gotten out of a lesson with Cor about using clothing to one's advantage in a fight, and a rather comical image had popped into his head of an unreasonably large enemy picking up the king by his cape like a small kitten. But what had once looked silly and impractical on Regis to a teenaged Gladio now gives a very different impression on Noct.
Gladio is aware, if distantly, that what he's doing is ogling, and that it's pretty rude to do that, but as with all things rude, they stop being such when no one's looking.
There’s the jacket, tailored very carefully to fit every bend of Noct’s torso; the man is still too skinny for his own good, in Gladio’s opinion, but he’s getting there. There’s Noct’s shoulders, which the cape rests on and which look like they’d slot perfectly into Gladio’s cupped hand. There’s the collar of Noct’s shirt, offering just a glimpse of the dip in his throat.
Gladio’s eyes can’t seem to leave the spot where the top two buttons of Noct’s shirt are still unfastened, like if he stares long enough, they’ll reveal some secret of the universe that no one else has ever been privy to.
He looks up, finally, and finds himself looking Noct straight in the eye.
“Oh, and you’ve cleaned up the scruff, too, wonderful,” the assistant, a woman he believes is called Vivienne, says to him, and he starts a little.
“You look a lot fresher without it,” she continues while rummaging in some sort of bag. “Wouldn’t you agree, Your Majesty?”
“I’d say it’s a pity,” says Noct, a puzzlingly pleased little smile on his lips, and his eyes have shifted away while Gladio was gathering his wits, but it doesn’t feel like the focus of his attention has changed at all.
“What’s that supposed to mean,” Gladio asks, half-expecting a friendly ribbing. The other half of him is a mix of anticipation and apprehension in equal proportions.
“It looked good on you,” Noct says, now unsmiling; his face gets that faraway look of his that means he’s off in his own head again.
The only thing Gladio can do is stand there, a little confused, because he’s pretty sure what Noct just said had nothing actually to do with how good Gladio’s beard looked on him.
Vivienne looks from one of them to the other a couple times and, very pointedly, as it seems to Gladio for some reason, clears her throat.
“Captain, we need to be leaving in fifteen minutes. May I suggest you get ready as well?” she says, one eyebrow raised.
Gladio takes one last look at Noct and makes a strategic retreat.
…
It’s a hot day to be standing out in the sun, but they kind of have to be. By “they”, Gladio means Noct, and therefore himself and the Aegis kids, and the handful of assistants there to make sure everything goes to plan. The people gathered in the square don't have to be here, but they are, and Gladio's thankful for it. It would've been a pity if Noct had come here, speech and entourage and all, only to find that no one had shown up.
To be fair, today is a holiday. It's not like work is holding anyone but the very essential workers hostage.
Today is the fifth anniversary of the end of the Long Night.
"Fifteen years ago," Noct begins, and Gladio gives the crowd a quick scan by pure habit, "a horrible event fell upon all of Eos. No one was prepared for it. No one could have been prepared for it. Nothing like it had ever threatened all life on the planet, as it did then."
The square they're occupying used to be a roundabout, back when Insomnia still had enough cars to need it. Today, it's just a beaten-up paved space surrounded by reclaimed buildings, with grass and small bushes growing in the cracks in the road. Some vendor stalls have spilled over from the marketplace a street away, but it's otherwise a pretty quiet place.
Noct keeps talking: of the lives lost, the sacrifices made. The toll of survival. The unity of people in the face of an overwhelming threat.
Gladio's gaze skips to Noct, what he can see of his face: cheekbone, corner of jaw, hint of nose, hair styled subtly away from his face. Noct wasn't here for the darkest years, but he speaks like he lived through them anyway. The public will believe that - the knowledge about what happened to Noct had always been private. Gladio had lost count of how many times he'd repeated, 'The king will return,' during those years. More often at first, less so later.
"Five years ago, on this day, we all finally saw another dawn."
People have come out of the shops around the square to listen, Gladio notices. It doesn't add a lot to the crowd, but it's nice to see that at least someone's paying attention.
Noct doesn’t write most of his speeches, but this one, the yearly address on the anniversary, he always composes himself. Even that very first year, when sincere words were so hard for him to vocalize and the whole speech ended up barely a handful of lines long. How Ignis hadn’t gotten an ulcer over that, Gladio has no idea.
He manages to add something new to them every year, somehow. They used to be mostly about grief, at first, in those early years, yet with every passing year, hope for the future demands more and more space.
Gladio spots a child in the audience, around eight or nine, and it suddenly occurs to him that the kid must’ve been born during the Long Night. What could it possibly be like, he muses, to begin your life in endless darkness? What was it like to see the sun for the first time in your short life
"And as we look to the future, we shall not forget those who are not here to see it, taken from us too early by the calamity and the war that preceded it."
It is then that the cover is taken off of the monument next to Noct's makeshift stage, and a faint murmur rises over the gathered crowd. It's hardly an elaborate piece, but the dark stone shimmers in any light, and the countless little niches will protect the candles from the wind.
"Tonight, when the sun goes down, I will light and place a candle of my own, to remember those whose glow once lit up the way for the rest of us in the darkness. I will remember my father, who lost his life in the attack on Insomnia fifteen years ago. I will remember those friends who perished in the struggle against monsters during the Long Night. And this memory will keep them here, with us, as long as we remain."
Gladio thinks of his own father then. Of Jared, the Amicitias' majordomo and his and Iris' childhood caretaker. Of all the hunters he'd known, and then collected the dog tags of.
Gilgamesh had said, a lifetime ago now during Gladio’s foray into the Tempering Grounds, that their generation didn’t know real war, but the war had always been on their doorstep. Maybe they’ll never get used to real peace, the kind where you don’t keep expecting to find airships trawling the skies above your home every morning or daemons growling at your doorstep.
They can reclaim their humanity, at least, piece by elusive piece.
…
By the time Gladio returns to the Crownsguard headquarters, it’s well past lunch, and there’s a stack of forms waiting for him on his desk that wasn’t there in the morning. Conrad, his assistant, takes a break from his own paperwork to give him a summary of the morning shift’s reports. Conrad’s a bright kid, with a head for numbers and logistics and a tendency to put his foot in his mouth; he’s been on assistant accountant duty for years now. Gladio can forgive a lot for that.
They settle in at their respective desks and get to work. He fiercely misses the time when computers were everywhere. The Citadel barely has a dozen sluggish machines, cobbled together from the functioning remains of a formerly extensive fleet, and those are dedicated to bigger and better purposes than “the administrative needs of a quasi-military unit of dubious necessity,” as those with regular access to computers tell him. ‘Those’ being the main Citadel accounting, for the most part.
Right now, Gladio really, really misses the ability to copy-paste.
“You got rid of the beard,” Conrad pipes up with the requisite mention, and really, Gladio is bored of coming up with elaborate answers to that one.
“Yeah,” he grunts.
“It suits you, sir.”
Gladio huffs in amusement.
“Noctis was telling me the complete opposite this morning,” he says through a grin. His mind conjures up the way Noct had looked at the time, at Gladio and in general, and he loses track of everything else for a moment.
Conrad’s writing doesn’t pause as he says, in a distracted tone, “Well, I guess His Majesty is a fan of beard burn.”
Gladio looks up.
“What?”
Conrad stops writing and meets his eyes, face slowly growing crimson. For several long seconds, neither says anything.
Then the kid’s face twists, like he bit into a lemon.
“Uh, sorry, chief. Left my filter in my room,” he says, looking back down at his paperwork.
“No, wait, what-”
“Please,” Conrad meeps, tense and ashamed, and Gladio is still stunned.
“Alright,” he says, uncertain. Then he plays back the last few minutes of conversation in his head.
And suddenly feels a little bit queasy.
‘Why would you think that,’ he almost asks, but he knows why, if he’s honest with himself. He just doesn’t particularly want to be honest.
They finish their work in silence.
It doesn’t end there, of course. Of course it doesn’t end there.
“Wow,” says Emily, a former hunter and one of his brattiest lieutenants, when Gladio goes out to the arena to help her drill the latest batch of trainees. “That’s a new look. His Majesty’s influence?”
“-the blazes you talking about?” Gladio asks, nonplussed – for all of a second. Then he remembers Conrad.
“Some of us prefer our men beardless,” she goes on, oblivious and glib, “You've had that scruff as long as I've known you, though, I wonder if the king was too cowed by your drill-sergeant manners to say anything until now?”
“That’s your king you’re talking about,” he chokes out.
Emily looks surprised at first, but then realization seems to strike, and her face splits with a shit-eating grin. “Gonna fight me for his honor, Sir Shaves-a-Lot?”
Gladio feels his eye twitch.
“Fifty laps,” he says as he crosses his arms and puts his patented drill sergeant face on, jerking a thumb towards the field, where the jogging trainees are just coming up on another lap. “Now.”
“Chief?!”
“I said, now,” he growls.
Cowed, but obviously irked, Emily jogs up behind the recruits, yelling obscenities and insults at them to make them go faster. She flips Gladio the bird without looking back.
“That’s another twenty-five!” he shouts after her, and she swears at nothing in particular, an enraged outburst that makes the trainees put on a burst of speed.
Back in Gladio’s father’s day, this kind of insolence would’ve gotten her kicked out of the Guard in a heartbeat.
Well.
This certainly isn’t his father’s Crownsguard.
But it’s mine, he thinks, and chuckles to himself like a loon.
Later that evening, he finds himself on the couch in Noct’s study, reading while Noct finishes up whatever it is he’s working on. Because of course that’s where he’s going to be in the evening, even if he should be catching a nap while he can before the vigil that Noct - and by extension, all of the Aegis in shifts - is going to be holding at the monument tonight. It’s been like that since the beginning, even when he and Noct barely knew what to say to each other. Sometimes, he’ll be reading something that makes him laugh, and Noct will ask him to share. Sometimes, he reads leftover reports instead, and those can be funnier than the books, because his subordinates are utter nutjobs, and sometimes, on a very rare occasion, quotes from them makes Noctis drop his face on the desk and shake with silent laughter, and Gladio will grumble at him through his own smile to laugh it up, sure, I’m the one who’s gonna have to deal with the consequences.
It’s not like he’s never noticed before how all of this looks from the outside.
And all the times he’s helped Noct walk late at night when his knee was acting up, his arm around Gladio’s back and Gladio’s around his, holding tight, all so that he could walk to his own bed with as little pain and indignity as possible, and those few times he’d straight up carried him from elevator to bed like a brand-new bride because Noct couldn’t even get up from his chair, much less walk anywhere, and that one time he’d slept across the foot of Noct’s bed all night and the cleaning lady had barely batted an eye except to glare at the dirt on his boots.
And in the five years that Insomnia’s been rebuilding, he’s only ever stayed right next door to Noct. For security purposes, of course. Of course.
Really, is it that surprising that people talk? That they make their own conclusions?
Gladio has always prided himself on not giving a damn about gossip, but for some reason, this time, he can’t let it go. There’s no one he can really talk to about it, though, not even Noct. Especially not Noct. ‘Apparently, half the Crownsguard thinks we’re fucking’ is a bit weird for a conversation starter. And even if he did say that, what would he expect Noct to say in return?
"Why don't we give them something to really gossip about?"
Gladio shakes his head so hard he feels his brain rattle inside his skull.
"You okay?" comes from Noct.
"Yeah, it's nothing," he replies, and hopes that none of his weird thoughts had shown on his face. “What’re you working on?”
Noct gives him a considering look, but leaves it be.
“Remember I told you, I wasn’t sure about the future of monarchy? For Lucis?”
Gladio almost doesn't. He remembers the setting sun in the desert, and the faraway look on Noct’s face, and how the meaning behind what he’s said had made him worry. How he’d vowed to himself to never leave Noct alone. Noct used to worry him a lot, those first few years.
“I’ve been working on a project, with Ignis and a few other people.”
There's a thoughtful non-expression on Noct's face. Gladio can sort of guess where Noct's going with that sentence, and he isn't sure what to think about his guesses.
"We're looking to abolish hereditary monarchy. Hereditary positions of power in general, really. I did away with the nobility back in the early days, and it didn't go as badly as it could have, all things considered - but that was a time of big change in general. The start of a new era."
Noct isn't looking at Gladio as he speaks - he can't tell if Noct's not meeting his eye on purpose or if he's just staring into space. He's talking faster than usual, too, like he's rushing to get the words out.
"Now that we've stabilized, somewhat, it would be a lot harder to pull off something like that. Ignis says it would be straight up impossible in my lifetime. That's there's no point anyway, not with a citizenship of a hundred thousand. But...
"That's not what it's about," Noct says. “Not really.”
A quiet envelops them, stark after all the speaking. There’s a clock on Noct’s desk that ticks, very subtly, more of a snicking than anything. Gladio listens to that, and watches Noct, because he can tell Noct’s not done.
“I want there to be a choice,” is what breaks the silence at last. Noct meets his eye for this, and Gladio’s stunned by the unassuming determination there. “For the people, but also for those who would lead them.”
It’s Gladio’s turn to look away and go quiet then, because this time he knows Noct’s done, but that doesn’t mean he knows how to reply. Thoughts swirl in his mind like crows over a carcass: one of them is a memory of Cor going, ‘Never trust a man hungry for power’; another is of Noctis, bowing under the weight of what his birthright demanded of him; many more are vague worries and fantasies. He can’t make sense of them.
It’s quiet for a while.
“We were raised for duty,” Gladio says in the end, voice low as if he’s afraid to make the words real, to air out this unspoken knowledge that’s been with him like a brand all his life. Take that away, take away his duty to the king, what’s left?
“I wish we weren’t,” comes from Noct, just as quiet, but he doesn’t say it like it’s some pointless childhood dream, doomed to forever stay a regret. Gladio looks up, and the expression on Noct’s face is not quite a smile, but it’s something light. Something that lets him believe that they might be able to make some choices, still.
It’s too much to keep looking at.
Nothing really seems worth saying, after that.
“Gladio?” Noct calls eventually, and something in his tone makes Gladio go alert like there’s a sabertusk charging at him. It’s just a moment, though, there and gone again in a blink, and Gladio doesn’t have a habit of entertaining moments like that outside of combat. It wasn’t a ‘danger’ moment, anyway. More like a ‘heads-up’ moment.
“Hm?”
And then he actually twitches, because his phone rings very loudly in his pocket.
Godsdamn this timing.
Gladio glances at the screen.
It’s one of the lieutenants.
Of course it is.
He cuts an exasperated look up at Noct, who looks frustratingly unruffled. Hah. Let’s see him when it’s his ass making a shrill noise out of nowhere.
“Wanna bet on what they’ve broken this time?” he offers, with no small amount of ridicule.
“Your last nerve,” answers Noct with a deadpan face, and Gladio could throw his phone at him. He really could.
“Ha ha,” he intones in the flattest voice he can manage, and answers the phone. “What.”
They’ve broken a fellow Crownsguard trainee, it turns out.
“Look, just get him to medical,” Gladio grouses, because it’s past eight and why does his job never stop. “I’ll go down there, sort this out, his CO and everyone involved better be there.”
He very deliberately doesn’t let his irritation pass into exhausted acceptance as he hangs up.
“Sorry, you were saying?”
“It’ll keep,” Noct says, and when Gladio looks up at him, he’s smiling. It’s a rare sort of smile, the kind where it seems like the gargantuan weight he carries around has suddenly lifted, but lately… Lately, some things have been changing about Noct. Some smiles becoming a little less rare. Gladio sleeps easier for it. “I’ll tell you soon.”
Part of him wants to press, but he’s learned to let Noct keep his secrets when he wants them.
It’s hard to hold onto his annoyance when Noct is being like that, and Gladio finds himself in a grudgingly better mood as he gets up to go deal with his idiots. It didn’t sound like the kid was on death’s door, and anyway, he can delegate the reading of the riot act to one of his subordinates. He might even get some dinner if he’s gonna pass by the kitchens, let the cooks slip him seconds as they insist on doing now that their food production has stabilized, and that reminds him, he should probably make sure Noct’s had something to eat, too. He can bring something up, once the SNAFU’s been settled.
“The beard really did suit you,” Noct says to his back, rather out of the blue.
Gladio looks back, and there’s Noct, looking down at the documents on his desk again like he’s tired of eye contact, or – or more like he’s embarrassed, really, or shy, something along those lines. He remembers the flustered prevarications of a younger Noct, whenever he ended up being sincere by accident, but this is the furthest thing from that.
The way Noct still doesn’t say exactly what he means, though, that’s the same.
“It’ll grow back,” he promises, tone just that little bit soft to match Noct’s, and sees another little smile, this one subtly pleased, crawl out onto Noct’s downturned face.
So that’s how it is, huh, Gladio thinks to himself, and smiles as well.