Hi! You Know Who I Am And What I Bring, So... Nox And Ardyn Having Serious Arguements; What's Do You

Hi! You know who I am and what I bring, so... Nox and Ardyn having serious arguements; what's do you reckon it would be like and how others think of it?

YOU. HOW DARE. (grumbles) fine. Lemme see how long it takes me to make everyone cry.

-There are very few things that Ardyn and Nox have serious arguments about. That doesn’t mean they don’t fight (they do, nigh constantly unless one or both need moral support instead) but the things that make them have serious fights are things they intentionally try to avoid. Those things can basically be boiled down to:

1. Nox not taking his health/self-preservation seriously

2. Ardyn not taking his health/self-preservation seriously

3. The Past (not just their personal past, but the past that lies between them as the Accursed and the Chosen King, the 114th of Somnus’s line and the Betrayed Healer King, and no matter how hard they try sometimes, after bad nights or hard days, it weighs them down).

-Both of them are aware of their own buttons and take pains to avoid them, which is why a serious, slow-burn argument literally never happens between them. If tension starts to slowly rise between them, one of them will notice before it gets too bad and call a time out for them both to cool off.

-No. When these two fight, really fight, it’s sudden and devastating. Like flash floods and lightning strikes. Little to no warning, sudden escalation that looking back on it either can fully explain. From the outside it’s a little more visible, the sudden tensing of shoulders, the way Ardyn’s teasing because suddenly layered in venom without him even seeming aware, the way Nox’s insults turn genuine and become pointed, stabbing into old wounds that normally he would never touch. For the two of them, there is no real memory of when or how their words escalate from the norm to trying to verbally rip each other apart.

-No matter what the topic is about or who “started” it (and really there is almost no way to tell who starts the escalation in these things), it always ends the same way: one of them crosses a line. Spirals out of control so far and so fast they reach out and verbally gut the other with something that only they know about. Ardyn might reference the Train Incident with Prompto, or him not being there when his father died, or, worst of all and only in his blackest of moods, Nox’s failure to save Luna (no one is ever mentioned by name, but the references of trains, ignorance, protecting loved ones… Nox always knows what Ardyn is talking about and it always cuts too deep). Nox, on the other hand, drags up Ardyn’s own temper, needles him over his old manipulations and his lies or, in his worst, most poisonous moments, references Ardyn’s lover Aera (again, no specifics or names, just oblique references, random phrases that only the two of them understand).

-(It is ironic, in a way that makes both of them hurt, that their greatest weaknesses are the Oracles they loved and lost. This one pain they share on an intimate level yet somehow can’t always stop themselves from weaponizing against the other).

-After that Final Line is crossed, the silence that falls around them both is a weight of its own. Anyone unfortunate enough to witness it can feel the hurt emotions, the regret for words that cannot be taken back and the anger that keeps apologies from being aired. From the inside of the argument it feels like a tornado just whipped through, tearing apart their emotions and leaving them both stunned and hurt and confused on how it went that bad so fast or even what the argument was originally about. From the outside, it feels like witnessing a horrible car crash, the silence that follows being the harsh ringing in the ears after metal stops screaming.

-One or both of them always leaves the room after that. If the other stays, they tuck into themselves, refusing to interact with anyone, drifting to some window or corner where they can brood and seethe.

-The silence will stay for at least a week. Maybe more. Less because they are being stubborn and more because they have little to no sense of time on a good day, and they are Not Having A Good Day right now. They won’t stay in the same room, won’t talk, won’t even look at each other.

-Ardyn will sometimes leave the Citadel altogether, disappear into the wilds for however long it takes him until he either no longer looks at Nox and sees Somnus standing over Aera’s corpse calling her a “foolish woman” (if Nox is the one who crossed the line) or no longer feels like there’s a monster trying to crawl out of his skin and finish the job he did hurting his nephew (if he’s the one who went too far).

-Nox, since he cannot exactly leave the Citadel without an escort unless he wants to panic his dad, will go mute entirely. He won’t talk to anyone, will barely eat or drink and often can’t hold it down as he stews-stews-stews. If Ardyn is the one who crossed the lines (particularly the Luna line), Nox might go out into the garden and scream wordless pain into the rain (and it will always rain when he goes to the garden, his magic calling down Ramuh’s storms even as the Fulgarian tempers away the lightning and thunder that want to come to the grieving Chosen’s call). If Nox was the one to go too far, eventually someone will find him in one of two places. One of those places is the Hall of Arts.

-The other is the Throne Room.

-For Regis, there is nothing quiet as terrifying as the day he walked into his Throne Room without warning or knowledge of Nox’s presence and walked straight into a grieving magic field so thick and powerful it took him ten seconds of frantic blinking to see Nox standing by the throne, touching one armrest with shaking fingers rather than sitting on the throne looking too-old-too-tired in a pool of his own blood with a sword through his heart (he never asks what that vision was, but he does order an extra close watch kept on Nox for the next month, just in case it was a look at his eldest child’s inner thoughts).

-Eventually, whoever wandered off will drift back in, fall into the other’s orbit without a word. They’ll stare at each other for a while, not apologizing, not speaking. Then either Ardyn will plop his dreaded hat onto Nox’s head, or Nox will slide forward and hug his Uncle with shaking hands and they will know that all is forgiven. Their regular snarking and arguments resume like nothing has happened. To an outsider, it looks unhealthy. Surely they need to talk about what happened, to understand each other to prevent if from happening again?

-They don’t though. They had an entire afterlife and time-traveling journey to hash out their issues and scream their grief and sob their apologies. What arguments that flare between them, the hurts they air, are nothing that they have not already bared their souls about and apologized for a hundred thousand times before. They know where they went wrong, they know that they are both sorry. They don’t need to say it again, just like they don’t need to bother pretending that the wounds ripped open in the latest fight ever really stopped bleeding in the first place. They know that the other will never intentionally hurt them anymore, so flash-fire fights like these are just … slip-ups. Steam blowing before they can turn it against someone who doesn’t understand what they do and might not survive the fallout should it turn physical.

-That’s why they so rarely fight. They’ve both done enough hating and hurting for lifetimes. After everything they’ve been through, there is very, very little worth fighting over in their minds. And certainly nothing worth the inevitable fallout.