Fic: dust floating in golden sunlight

[ingenious_spark]

Title: dust floating in golden sunlight
Fandom: Final Fantasy XV
Rating: G
Warnings: post-canon character death
Relationships: Noctis Lucis Caelum/Prompto Argentum
Characters: Prompto Argentum, Noctis Lucis Caelum
Word Count: 474
Summary: The light spills in, warm and golden, as Prompto slowly realizes that this is death. But it's not so bad. The company is good, at least.

(dust floating in golden sunlight)

Prompto stares vaguely up at the ceiling, breathing slow and steady. His eyes are nearly shut, his mind at peace. Late afternoon sunlight fills the room, and he can pick out the motes of dust floating in the air.

…on the one hand, that’s gross. Maybe he should clean?

But the light quality is something he loves capturing on film, and for a moment, his fingers itch for his camera. He can never quite get the yellow-gold quality of the light quite right, and it shifts so fast, slipping sweetly into dusk.

He’s spellbound- or maybe lazy- so he doesn’t get up. It’s been so long since he could just lie here and watch the sunlight.

It stretches on into an endless, syrupy moment, and nothing hurts, nothing even matters. His belly isn’t gnawing with perpetual hunger, his one achy knee and all of his scars are relaxed and easy. The pains built up over ten years of darkness and hell don’t bother him. There’s the vague knowledge that something’s happened, but right now it doesn’t matter.

What matters is the dust in the air and the soft, golden haze.

But of course, the moment can’t last.

A door opens out of his line of sight, and a body, weight familiar and warm, flops onto the bed half beside and half atop him, sending a fresh cloud of dust particles puffing up into his sunlight.

“Took me a while to find you.” A familiar, beloved voice murmurs. Prompto smiles up at his sunlight, wrapping an arm around Noctis’s waist. “What’s a guy like you doing in a place like this?” Noctis jokes, lips soft and beard scratchy when he presses a kiss to Prompto’s neck.

“We’re dead, aren’t we?” Prompto mutters back, wishing he had something better to say. The soft golden light should have faded by now, but it seems to have gone even softer. Like the world has been drizzled with melted butter or something. Added to the fact that he hasn’t been in this room in over ten years, and Noctis is here, it can really only mean one thing.

“…yeah. Yeah we are.” Noctis says, soft and heavy.

“This doesn’t seem so bad, for an afterlife.” Prompto muses, pretending he can’t remember, now, the visceral moment when he died, protecting the Citadel- protecting Noctis, as he went to martyr himself to the dawn and to cold, heartless gods. He can feel Noctis smile against his skin. “You’re here, after all. And since you are here, we could look for Luna, and your dad.”

“Gladio and Ignis too, maybe.” Noctis agrees. “But later. We have time, now.” He lifts his head and kisses Prompto, slow and soft and sweet. Prompto kisses back, warm and loving, and the world- no, the afterlife-

…well, it’s perfect, right now.