Okay, so here is this piece of trash. This is prompt number 21-
“Ardyn never meant for you to become infected with the starscourge, but here you are and this is gonna hurt.” @mabwee I really hope this is what you were looking for because I want to like it but at the same time I feel like I really messed this up by doing it in one night.I’ve never written for Ardyn before but this was actually really fun and I want to write more after getting through the other prompts.
Trigger warning: heavily implied death, abuse, starscourge infection, language, Ardyn is an asshole
Oh Six it hurt, and the voices, the voices, wouldn’t stop screaming. You
were choking, drowning, from the
midnight tar that clogged your throat and lungs, pouring out from your mouth like
an eldritch nightmare. Black spilled on the white marble steps of the Insomnian
citadel. Something shifted in your bones, in your skin, in your eyes, in….Astrals protect me, the sun is too bright
now. Collapsing now to your hands and knees you groped out hesitantly,
half-blinded by the ghoulish discharge that seeped out of ruined eyes. A clawed
hand met leather and gripped tight.
Ardyn Izunia had been forced to bear
witness to more monstrosities in his sempiturnal life than anyone deserved to
suffer through. The long years had seen him jaded, given him a bitter sort of
numbness that was still settling ever further into his being.Names and faces held no meaning outside
of their immediate use. Pawns fell and knights crumbled. The sun rose and set
with all the paltry significance of the minute hand ticking away. He’d watched
with frozen eyes as thousands fell to the disease he had once given everything
to end, the disease that now seeped out from his very core. He was Chernobyl
incarnate, lethal in the way he poisoned what he touched, haunting in the way
he decayed.
Every touch, every breathy gasp that escaped your lips in the
dead of night, every heart-felt confession, all equaled out to your death
sentence. For the sake of those clandestine moments that made him feel
something like human, the consequences didn’t matter. You were his pawn to use
and abuse as he saw fit, his excuse to withdraw from a world that felt cold, alien, empty. So long as you provided
his escape, what could your brief life matter in the face of all that he was?
Still, he hadn’t thought that the time spent by his side would necessarily result
in this; it had never once been
important enough to consider. Even so,
something in the way you crawled towards him then, eyes begging for aid even as
scourged tears traced a path down your face, moved him. How was it that only
now that you were broken in every sense of the word, did he finally look and
see you. Hollow creature that he was,
this was something felt.
He got down on one knee then, a
mockery of a scene you once imagined differently, gripped your wrist, and
forced it away from his ankle with apparent ease, “Dear, you always did look
just so lovely in black.”
Whatever flicker of humanity that
was left to him would not be allowed to show itself, not to you, not to anyone.
He wasn’t exactly saddened by your imminent demise, heavens no; however, he
would swallow down any truth that could make him just a little colder, just a
little more heartless. Ardyn reveled in being the villain and found his home
down in his hate. Ever the dramatic, it suited his finer sensibilities. He
would take from you whatever pain you had to give him and laugh while he
suffocated himself in it.
That was the moment you realized the man you so erroneously
believed you could change was going to watch you die with a smile on his face.
You were going to die because you had loved him, and because he had loved you
in his own twisted fashion, the bond poisoning you both all the while. You tried
to remove your arm from his grasp, but he was too strong. Helpless, you watched
as he brought your wrist to his lips and laid a glacial kiss upon it.
A practiced smirk painted itself on
his face, “Oh, now don’t be like that. I’d
almost believe you were angry with me. Look over there,” he let your arm fall
and motioned to the sky with a sweeping, grand gesture, “Can you see the sun,
love? Here soon what’s left of you will be dust in the wind, and I won’t aid
you.”
You spat out a glob of the tar onto
his boot, “Theatrical as ever, you fucking bastard!”
Pain exploded in your jaw and stars
danced beneath your eyelids. You were falling, breaking bones on every step on
your way down the citadel entryway. A bruise was already forming where his boot
made contact with your face. The crawling in your gut intensified as your skin
split apart, miasma seeping from the wounds. Moaning, you looked up towards
Ardyn as he walked down towards you. Even without the starscourge peeking
through, he was the epitome of all aberrations.
“Behave, would you? We don’t need a
repeat of all that,” in an uncharacteristic show of softness, he brushed a lock
of hair away from your face before lifting you up and carrying your immobile
form back over the stairs and through the entryway.
You watched in horror as the
darkness of that ruined citadel swallowed you and shut away the sun. The voices
were getting louder now, screaming and echoing in your head. A dark chuckle
issued forth from Caelum lips. Had you never noticed before how cold his
embrace was? Had he always been so deathly pale, and had those yellow eyes
always glowed so bright?
“Go to sleep now pet, it will all be
over soon enough.”