FFXV Fic 2

Swish.  Grunts.  A crash to the floor. Then the klaxon calls.

"Yeah, Gladio!"
"That's our Gladiator!"

He had shouldered through Red team's guard to make a lay-up right before the buzzer sounded, signalling the last 10 minutes of gym; better get your shower before it's too late--or risk being stinky the rest of the day.

Gladiolus looks past the other guys on the court out at the bleachers where the students not playing in today's scrimmage (the girls would do theirs tomorrow) had congregated with their books, backpacks, and flip phones.  Some are finishing the last few problems from the honors track Trig homework--30 problems every night-- others swapping ringtones or texting. Two are waving to him, faces smiling, scrunched and ducklike.  They always look like ducks when they look in his direction, which is a shame, since their faces are pretty cute when they aren't angling for his attention.  Two of his buddies are making their way over to those girls now, in hopes that those pouty lips would be turned on them.

He breathes heavily with exertion, breathes in the scent of the old pine walls,  the waxed floor worn smoother by decades of non-marking athletic shoes padding up and down its length than by the wax. He's passing the bleachers to the guys' showers when someone leaps down primly to the court behind him, hardly making a sound against the din of bags zipping and friends chattering echoing off all of those hard wood surfaces.  Not a girl, but another kind of long-haired freak, one that recently got bumped up a year in classes, but seemed familiar already.

Gladiolus turns back and gives the other boy a shove on the shoulder, only half-playing. "Hey, Ignis.  You playing with the girls?  We were short today."

Ignis's body is surprisingly sturdy; he doesn't stumble or lose balance the way a skinny nerd ought to, just rocks back onto his toes and brushes his bangs back to the side, maintaining eye contact.

"No." He looks away and moves to pass Gladiolus.

Gladio is the one to step back, non-plussed.  He shouts his bewilderment after him, "Well, why didn't you play today then?"

The long-hair stops and turns to fix Gladiolus with an inscrutable look. "I have a note."  He pushes his glasses back up the bridge of his nose as the words linger, floating down to the ball court.  Ignis turns again and disappears into the locker room, leaving only the faint vibrations of quantum probability and possibility behind him.

"What a weird kid," Gladio muses to himself, rubbing the knuckles of his hand to dislodge the uncanny sensation of the other failing to yield.  He starts to walk off himself, only to stop and bend down to retie his shoes, thinking that it would be pretty awkward to run into that guy in the locker room just now.

His squad rolls up, finished with their flirting for now, and one of them slaps his ass as they head in together. "Asshole!" Gladio growls, and trips him up as payback.

"What were you talking to nerd boy about, Gladiator?" the other guy asks.

"I told him the star player was too busy to go out this week, but you might be free."  That earns him a punch in the arm.  "Nah, just wondering why he didn't play today."

"And what'd you find out?" asks his first buddy while they dig their uniforms and street shoes out of their lockers.

"I dunno, he didn't say.  Guy's pretty uh..."  Shutting his locker, Gladiolus catches a glimpse of Ignis out of the corner of his eye as he leaves the room, crisply uniformed.  Looking away, but still quite within range of hearing.

"Pretty weird?" Second Buddy offers.

"Pretty quiet."

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Next period is Trig.  It wasn't Gladio's intent to join the Honors class, but his work schedule conflicted with the normal class, giving him little choice. As long as you paid attention during the lectures it wasn't that bad, but sometimes he would be too tired to think after work, much less remember how to multiply matrices.

He slouches back in the desk, knees knocking against the underside of the writing surface. The girl across the aisle drags him into the conversation she was having with the desks in front of them.

"Yeah, we're gonna kick their asses," he affirms vaguely to the basketball-related question he didn't really hear.

The desk in front of him is a girl on the cheerleading squad. She's also in the same gym class and is leaning her head back over her neck to look back at him. "Why don't you play for the school, Gladio?  You'd make varsity for sure if you always shoot like you did this afternoon." Her hair brushes across his desk, shuffling his pencil.

He rolls his eyes.  He's answered this before plenty of times. "Can't.  I have to be available for work."  He picks up the pencil and uses it to sweep her hair off of his desk.

She scrunches her face then sits upright and turns back. "Can they do that?  Like legally?  I thought if you're working while you're still in school they had to let you participate in extracurriculars?"

The girl across from him laughs.  "It's a little different for Gladi.  He works at the Citadel.  They kinda make the laws."

"Oh, well what do you do there, anyway?"

Gladio taps the eraser tip of his pencil on the desk letting his irritation show.  "Listen, I think the teacher's about to be here."  He sits up straighter in his desk and stretches his back until it pops, distancing himself from the conversation. Somewhere behind him, he hears a bemused "Mmph."  He doesn't turn around, but he's positive that it's Ignis.

The teacher comes in, checks the roll, and begins to write on the board. She's going over the homework, which he managed to finish without any issue, so he relaxes back down in his seat until something more interesting comes up.

Gladiolus refers to it as a "job", but Dad is always nagging him about how it's more than that. "Yeah, yeah, the Amicitia family duty, shielding the Kings of Lucis," he thinks to himself.  It is such a pain in the ass.  Wasting his time riding back and forth from the Citadel, not having time for things like basketball, even his classes are messed up.  He tried to argue with his dad once--"Why do I even need to graduate if I'm guaranteed a job for life?"  That had pissed the old man off.

"You're only guaranteed a job for HIS life.  It's in your best interest to make sure that it's as long as possible."

So, Trig.  And Comp.  And all the rest. It didn't really matter to him; at least schoolwork gave him a break from the royal pain. That was what he really hated about work. Drilling with Cor on swords was actually pretty fun, even if he ached the whole day after.  Even studying the battle strategies his dad used with the Crownsguard was pretty interesting, and the train ride over to the Citadel was good for a nap.  It was drilling one-on-one with the brat that drove him nuts.

Gladio might be less than enthusiastic about his future prospects, but still, he threw himself into the work; there was no sense wasting time moping about things that were decided before he was even born.  This prince, on the other hand, was the laziest shit he'd ever seen.  It was all Gladio could do to piss him off enough to actually try during their sparring, and if they were using steel blades? The moment he'd had enough beating for the day, Prince Noctis would warp up out of reach until he gave in for the night.
Gladiolus had insisted they practice with wooden staves exclusively for a month after the first time he pulled that stunt.

It was different back when Cor was leading drills, but Cor had less and less availability as the war outside the city dragged on, and once he'd gotten to the point that he was consistently disarming the replacement instructor, they'd passed the duty over to Gladio altogether.

He sits up straight. He hadn't thought about it before, but wasn't Ignis always hanging around the Citadel, too?  He wonders if the other boy can stand the prince any better than he can and whether he had any more say in how he was living his own life.

"That would explain why he's so quiet and on-edge, if he has to waste his time babysitting that royal pain in the ass, too. Noctis is enough to exhaust anyone's patience."  Not that he has all that much patience himself. He resolves to ask Ignis about it sometime.

He blinks his way back to sentience, having detected that the topic being covered is new material, and starts to scribble down the example being worked.

Later, a few minutes before the bell will ring the end of the period, he feels his pants buzzing.  He slips the cellphone out of his pocket and clicks on the screen to read the text message.

NOCT THREW UP @ S
CHOOL WENT HOME E
ARLY UR OFF 2NITE

Gladio snorts to himself.  "What a baby."  He's thinking that he might as well stick around the library for the last hour of classes to get today's trig assignment out of the way when he hears another text buzz in.  He checks his phone again, but there are no new messages.

"Ignis..." he realizes.

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