Work Text:
didn't even know love was bigger
i.
“This isn't working,” Gladio says, with a frown like storm tied up in a gnarled knot on his brow.
And Ignis thinks, there's a merit to the words, blunt and sharp and careless, just like Gladio's always are, because the first thought pressing against the back of his teeth is, oh thank god you said it so I didn't have to. Which is really the problem, isn't it, and now they're back to where they started, staring at each other in the space squeezed between stove and counter, not sure where to go next, but dead certain they ought to at least go together, for morale.
“I've... noticed,” Ignis says, cautious, careful, certain, because Gladio is not an obstacle to size up and demolish, and he's learned to not go with his gut instinct on this, to throw the first hit and make it up as he goes, depending how the pieces fall. “Yes.”
“I'm sorry,” Gladio goes on, miserable and frustrated, because this is what he wanted but it's not what he needs, and still even now it's the wanting that's winning, the unfair rope pull in his heart. “I'm so sorry, I don't know-”
Ignis raises a hand, bare like it only ever is here, at home, before he suits up to go out and face the world. He presses his fingers against Gladio's lips, caging back all those things he doesn't want to hear, because he knows they're sincere and that's the problem, at the heart of it: they're too sincere, the both of them. Gladio sags against his hand, gone loose and weightless, and it's just like twisting magic in his hands, Ignis thinks, chaos tightly woven into the structure of his will. Gladio lays himself bare at the altar of his feelings, freely given, freely chosen, and there's nothing quite so scary, Ignis feels, like the knowledge he could crush him with the wrong tone in his voice.
“This isn't working,” Ignis says, compromising as his nature dictates, voicing thoughts he hates and weaving them into something softer, out of sheer, stubborn pride. “But we want it to work.” And he betrays himself, one moment strong, one moment crumbling, voice quivering around the vowels like a tender, wounded thing. “Don't we?”
Gladio kisses him like an ocean wave crashing onto shore, and he tastes like the warmth of home – Ignis vaguely remembers, soft and tender, like the echoes of his mother's voice.
“We want this to work,” Ignis repeats, less like a prayer, more like a baseline, fingers carding through hair finally allowed to be long enough to be unruly, and steps back before they spiral into something that feels better but does nothing, to asuage the feeling of ground fading under their feet. “So let's figure out how to make it work.”
They are, in essence, a trio forever doomed to be one short, because the Prince stands between them even when he's not there. He's reason and hope and purpose, and even when it first began, this thing that isn't working but they desperately need, they had drawn borders all around it, and the negative spaces were just large enough to fit Noctis' life in between their own.
“Have you ever...” Gladio asks, sitting on the counter, legs dangling and hands tediously spinning a mug at a rate aproximately four rotations an hour.
“When I was younger,” Ignis admits, leaning back against the kitchen sink, fingers digging into the plywood to keep him upright under the weight of truths never given voice before. “He was beautiful, when we were young. Still is, but now I'm. Not anymore, not like that.” Not like you, he means, and doesn't say, words heavy on his tongue. He licks his lips and says them anyway, because they need all the pieces to put this puzzle back together. “Not like you.” He licks his lips. “You?”
“Fuck, no,” Gladio laughs, easy, always so easy, so sincere; Ignis basks in the sound for as long as it lasts. “Maybe like I love Iris. Most of the time I swear I hate him, but then he smiles, and it's all forgotten.” His eyes soften, head dropping forward by degrees. “He's a good kid.”
“You hate that he needs me,” Ignis guesses, words sharp despite his best attempts to make them light.
“Maybe,” Gladio shrugs, storm gathering across his brow again. “Or, more like, I hate that he needs you but doesn't seem to know how much. I hate that they see the best in him and don't realize it's your doing. He's a good kid, he is,” his eyes narrow a sliver, “but not all good kids make good Kings.”
“You are to be the King's Shield,” Ignis says, breathing low and steady, even if the scream is not bubbling in his gut, raising to the surface like muck in a pond. “But he is not King yet.”
“He's gonna be, one day,” Gladio retorts, shrugging expansively, all of him.
“And on that day,” Ignis promises, chin tilted up tauntingly, like a declaration of war written in those fancy, curly fonts they use for wedding cards: Ignis Stupeo Scientia cordinally invites you to go fuck yourself; “he'll be ready.”
“You gonna make sure of that?” Gladio asks, rough around the edges, tense like a spring gathering momentum.
“Yes,” Ignis declares, not a promise or a vow or something equally short-term.
Gladio stares and stares, openly and without shame, eyes trained for years to find the smallest weakness, the precise breaking point. Then he sighs, shedding off tension like a mountain shedding snow in spring.
“Okay.”
And that's the matter of the Prince, settled forever more.
“I hate that I want you more than you want me.”
Ignis bares his teeth, and now the storm is in his eyes, sharpening the stray flecks of gold in the forest of green into streaks of lightning ready to crash and burn. Gladio is sitting on the floor, back against the neat row of cabinets nestled beneath the breakfast isle, and Ignis is sitting crosslegged on the countertop, arms folded in his lap, lest he does something regretable with them. Gladio looks up, not quite in suplication, more like a challenge to the skies, and Ignis wonders if Gods felt like this, in the stories where they smote down humankind.
“You don't,” Ignis says shortly, voice level and calm, trying his best to still the boiling in his gut.
“I do,” Gladio insists, shrugging and making his arms flex as he does, and Ignis hates it, viscerally, the certainty that he's not doing it on purpose. “I want you always. Anywhen. Anywhere. Anyway. You say the word, and I'll drop everything and go.” He laughs again, but it's a tiny whisper of a laugh, a sigh twisted over and over until it sighs no more. “I say go and you have four separate schedules to check before you'll consider start thinking about it.”
“I hate that you can drop everything, without fear it might not be there to be picked up once you're done,” Ignis mutters viciously, in lieu of a denial they both know would be a lie. There are to be no lies, not today, not in the space they've set aside to make things work. “I hate you only had to earn what you have, not start off earning the privilege to aspire to earn what you have.” Ignis takes off his glasses, rubs his face and feels validated when it comes back dry. “And it's seven, not just four.”
Gladio laughs, like a whimper wound up into something else.
“And none of those is yours,” Gladio snorts, weirdly delighted by the embarrassment that makes Ignis look away, because he's always glad to guess a truth, even if it's covered in thorns. “What would you do, if it was just yours that mattered?”
“I won't entertain the thought,” Ignis replies, staring at his hands. “I won't,” he insists, before Gladio can press, offering a brittle laugh of his own, carefuly folded out of his own screams. “I do not contemplate what I will never have, Gladio, it's the only way I've avoided becoming bitter.”
Gladio is silent for a long, long time, and Ignis counts it in mug rotations, even if the mug has long since disappeared from his hands. One point sixty one eighty turns later, Gladio looks up at him, and his face is tilted, his neck bared to the bite of the executioner's blade.
“Did you ever entertain the thought of me?”
Ignis smiles, a scythe of teeth and tears and sheer fucking discipline.
“I never dared.”
Gladio bounces his head against the cabinet doors, and that settles it, at least, the equilibrium of want and can.
Progress, at last.
“I hate that you don't flirt anymore.”
They are lying on the floor, backs barely fitting in the space of tiny checkered tiles, legs folded up and feet resting on the dark wood of the cabinet's doors. Ignis will need to scrub the marks off, eventually, but in the meantime they stare at the ceiling and cloudgaze on the rough bumps and drips across the plaster landscape above their heads.
Gladio rumbles a sound deep in his chest, too confused to be made words, and Ignis clicks his tongue.
“You used to try, in the beginning, to flirt with me.”
“You hated it when I flirted with you,” Gladio points out, hurt surgically removed from the words, to keep them from curdling on his tongue.
The time for accusations, clearly, is long past.
“So go flirt with someone else,” Ignis shrugs, surprised at how easy the words tumble down his mouth. “Don't do that thing, where you start to and then remember me, and you withdraw with shame all over your face.” Ignis' mouth twitches into an indecisive squiggle, not quite a smile, not quite a snarl. “I've never told you to stop flirting. I've never...”
“You shouldn't have to,” Gladio mutters as he closes his eyes, licking his lips. “I've got you. I want you. I'm not supposed to want anything else.”
Ignis hears the confession in the way the words are poorly strung together, and he sits up to look down at Gladio's frame, cramped at his side, spilling at the seems.
“But you do.”
Gladio flinches, as if struck. Then again, when Ignis presses a hand to the center of his chest, feeling the echo of his heartbeat on his palm, like a drum missing two beats out of ten.
“Let me think on it,” Ignis sighs, sliding back to his feet with the ease of one who has been thrown down a thousand times by Nyx Ulric's best moves. He offers a hand, staring at Gladio's eyes with what he hopes is an ecouraging smile, even though his lips seem to have forgotten how they work. “I don't know if you know,” he adds, waiting still, for Gladio to grab his fingers and let him hoist him up. “But I'm supposed to be some kind of strategic genius. I'll figure something out.”
Gladio stands up slowly, with about the same speed as molasses sliding down a spoon and into a bowl. Ignis scoops him up as best he can, hands wrapped around his back, and shuffles them back into his bedroom, so he can lay Gladio back on the covers and take him apart piece by piece. It is not unlike cleaning an old clock: every bit carefully inspected, every speck of dust washed clean, and then sliding everything back where it was meant to go, but not the same as it had been.
Halfway through, Ignis' phone rings, vibrating loudly and slowly crawling the distance to the edge of the dresser table. Ignis has one of Gladio's knees hooked on his shoulder and two fingers crawling in warm heat, trying to figure out if they're enough to make Gladio yield. Gladio stares at him as he goes still, and Ignis stares blankly at him for a moment, before curling his fingers resolutely when Gladio's expression begins to cloud.
They watch the phone's journey across his dresser with rapt attention, each ring an inch closer to the fall.
Ignis replaces his fingers with his cock when it does, and Gladio's shout covers up the sound of Ignis' phone clattering on the carpet, screen cracking from end to end.
ii.
“I thought things were going well,” Ignis says, fingers fussing with the tips of Gladio's hair. “What happened?”
He thinks back to the bar, to the naked lust in the woman's eyes, the way her hands kept finding themselves on Gladio's arms and chest. He looks for it, again, just to be sure, but the corkscrew of jealousy is nowhere to be found. He still remembers the bite of it into his heart, though, roused into being by the exact same things he witnessed in the bar tonight. But he supposes back then he hadn't considered everything else that exists around that touch, and that he knows now is still firmly outside that woman's grasp.
This was his idea, anyway, and inside his head, Ignis figured if Gladio had fucked her after all, it would been Ignis roundabout fucking him by proxy instead.
“It got weird,” Gladio muses quietly, huffing a soft breath. “Maybe I'm out of practice. It's been, what, two years now? Maybe I can't just hit the ground running, after all.”
Ignis curls his finger into the hair at the nape of Gladio's neck, tugging gently but purposefully. Words cut straight to the bone, in his apartment, but it's the agreement they've reached, to make it work. Gladio shivers and shifts, lying more fully on Ignis' side, face tucked under his chin.
“...it's weird,” he mutters, rebellious but not actually fighting it, and Ignis still gets overcome with anger, whenever shame rears its ugly head, but he's gotten better at dealing with it, too.
“Weird is the fact you eat pears whole, core and all,” Ignis mutters sullenly, before he digs his fingers precisely between the sixth and seventh rib, two inches left from his spine.
Gladio splutters, shrieks and flails in quick succession. Ignis laughs – inside these walls, away from the world, he can laugh as loud as he want, and no one but Gladio will ever know – and laughs, even when Gladio pins him to the bed and growls at him like he actually means it.
“Can you take maybe five fucking minutes and not be a dick?”
Ignis shrugs, slow and purposeful, and laughs again when Gladio kisses him like he's air itself.
“You were going to tell me how it got weird,” Ignis says, even though they both know it's not true, but now that he's said it outloud, Gladio realizes he much prefers that option, to: you were giving up on all this.
“I started wondering if it was gonna be as good as I remember,” Gladio says, each word carefully measured, “you know, before you.” He snorts. “And then I just started thinking about you.” He lowers himself to lie back on his spot, chin on Ignis' shoulder, breath on his ear. “Do you remember what it was like, before me?”
Ignis sighs in stages, air hissing between his teeth. Truth, he tells himself, above all. The truth shall set you free, is the popular saying. But no one mentions how it'll mangle you and break you to pieces in the process.
“No,” he says, swallowing hard, “seeing how there was no one before you for me to recall.”
Gladio makes a wounded sound, deep in his throat, so deep Ignis swears it's echoing straight from his heart.
iii.
“Life is not a novel, Gladio,” Ignis says, perhaps more sharply than he should, but delivery does not take away from the truth.
And oh, they are both so good with truth, now. The harsh and the soft and everything else in between. They've become connoisseurs, swishing it against their teeth before each gulp.
“I don't love you for who you could be, if I peeled the skin off your bones and took the time to remake you in my image.” He smiles thinly, reaching a hand to tap the wide forehead currently scrunched up in thought. “I have two perfectly functional hands, if I were that narcissistic.”
His eyes soften, and his arms open, and though he shouldn't, by sheer bulk alone, Gladio slides in, every chipped, bruised bit of him finding its place against every tired, chaffed bit of Ignis. He smells of smoke and beer, of laughter and all those things that make his eyes glint with amusement, wherever the doubt didn't scorch it clean.
“I'm not mad.”
He's not. He thinks he should be, really, and if he weren't himself and Gladio wasn't himself and they weren't living the mess that are their lives, Ignis thinks he could almost see himself being mad about this. But he is and they are, and deep down, he wonders if it's going to work out properly one day. Then he remembers Gladio is terrible at telling apart, what he wants from what he needs, and that's why Ignis is there, always, to nudge him down the right path. Except he no longer knows, what's right and what's wrong, only the bit where this hurts less than the alternative. So long it does, they'll keep guessing and going in blind, like the miniature free fall between each step in a staircase.
One day it'll stop hurting. One day they'll find the right balance. It occurs to Ignis this is like trying to make foreign pastries for Noct, based on hazy memories from childhood. He knows what the goal is, in theory, but he has no context to guide him there. And if he hasn't given up on Noct, how could he give up on Gladio?
Gladio, who clings and wants and feels, everything so strongly and singlehandedly, all the time. Gladio, who's carved up each sliver of weakness and entrusted them to Ignis for safekeeping, so he can be everyhing he's supposed to be. Gladio, who trusts Ignis to know him better than he can ever know himself.
“We'll get it right, yet.”
iv.
Ignis wakes up to the sound of Gladio shuffling about his kitchen, making breakfast and a mess. He lays in bed a moment longer, listening to Gladio's tuneless whistling, still too close to sleep to discipline his thoughts as they flutter about endlessly.
It gets better, with time, this unwieldy, unruly thing of theirs. Easier. It takes time, one dollop at the time, like adding cream into a soup, tempering it until it doesn't curdle. Ignis is still surprised, sometimes, by what he's learned about himself, about the limits and the lines he hadn't known he needed. Gladio clings to them religiously, the port in the storm that is his inability to see and not want.
And they stumble, sometimes. Argue. Fight. Ignis is delicately vicious at the best of times, for all he makes sure not to let it show. Gladio talks as he thinks, sculping his thoughts with each word until he figures out what he actually means.
But bit by bit the pieces fit, and though there's gaps still to fill, Ignis is sure they'll figure it out yet.
It's not what they were taught. It's not what they were told. But it's theirs and it works, and the day Ignis walks into the realization, it's the day he watches Gladio bask in the attention, comfortable in his own skin, because vanity has always been his best defect. And he knows then, they'll be fine.
“Had a good night?” He asks, in lieu of an actual greeting.
“Good enough to share,” Gladio grins, looking over his shoulder.
“Mm,” Ignis grunts, walking over to lean against his back. “I love you.”
“You say that because I made you coffee,” Gladio taunts, eyes bright.
“Probably,” Ignis shrugs, but when he tries to get to said coffee, Gladio grabs his shoulder and tugs him back to press his mouth to his.
Yeah. They'll be fine.