Chapter Text
Friday nights at the twenty-four hour Crow’s Nest downtown seem to house a mixed bag of strange experiences.
There’s a man in a tropical print t-shirt asleep in the back corner, a few undergrads in pajamas playing a card game on one of the tables, and a girl in a fancy dress comes back from the bathroom and tells her partner, ‘just wait for the air to clear.’
She’s just glad she’s not working there, glad she’s here as a customer at three in the morning after another long shift at the Slactuar Mini-Mart. She’s tired but hungry, so she’s honestly kind of pumped about the food she’s carrying back to the car, a basket of fries and a cheeseburger that she’s planning on eating in front of the television to whatever old movie she’s feeling at the moment.
Well, she’s pumped until she steps out to see that some asshole has parked right next to her car. A whole parking lot - and she’d even parked towards the back of the thing, next to the dumpster so no one could park on her passenger side - and this asshole chose to park directly next to her. A closer look reveals that this asshole has parked very, very close to her driver’s side door, which is just fucking perfect because she’s parked so close to the dumpster that she can’t even get in on that side. Even better news, his brake lights are on, so he’s probably just in there, being an asshole.
She’s just tired and pissed enough that she’s ready to tap on his window and tell him to pull out so she can leave, but as she approaches the cars, she can see that the asshole’s car is really fucking nice. Like, not ‘rich but practical doctor’ nice, or ‘spoiled teenager’s first wheels’ nice.
Celebrity nice.
Nice enough that it’s recognizable, a sleek black custom Audi that belongs to-
Oh god, no.
She prays and prays those last few feet, to anyone that will hear, not him not him not him not-
And sure enough, it’s him.
The Audi’s windows are tinted, but not the kind of tinted that stops people from looking in when the reading lights are on - which, of course, they are - so she gets a perfect view of the prince of the entire goddamned country sucking face with the same blond from the Mini-Mart. Somehow, despite being probably the only person in the country privy to the prince’s personal affairs not under a gag order of some kind, all she can think as she squeezes through the small gap between their cars is a flat, They’re still going strong, I see.
He has the decency to notice her shuffling by since he’s on the driver’s side and jumps in his seat hard enough that he breaks the kiss.
Blondie - Prompto, her mind supplies unhelpfully - seems confused for a moment before he follows the prince’s gaze and does a startled little jump of his own. Then, to both her and the prince’s horror, he brightens with recognition. She can’t hear what’s going on inside the car, but Prompto’s fighting with Prince Noctis to press a button on the console on the driver’s side, then the window’s rolling down and Prompto’s sticking his head out of it.
“Oh hey!” he greets, like she’s an old friend and not the convenience store clerk that rung up his drunchies haul at three in the morning exactly one time. She would be surprised at how friendly he’s being if it wasn’t for the slight stench of alcohol on his breath and flush on his cheeks. Oh my god. “Hey, you’re that girl! From the convenience store! Downtown!”
“Uh, yeah,” is all she can think to say.
“Do you work here, too?” he chirps before noticing the bag in her hands. “Oh shit! You just came here for food. My bad!”
“Y-yeah,” she repeats, because this situation is too surreal to process, honestly. “No prob.”
“What’d you get?” Prompto asks, genuine curiosity written all over his face.
“Um, a burger,” she can’t stop herself from answering. “And fries.”
“Very nice!”
A quick glance into the car finds Prince Noctis apparently trying to become one with his seat, with how far back he’s leaning, drinking steadfastly at another fast food cup likely in an effort to cool the very undignified flush on his cheeks. She can’t tell what’s in the cup, but based on the other can in the cup holder - the gaudy and colorful one that she might have mistaken for an energy drink if she’d never had a few wild nights of her own - she figures that the prince and his boyfriend are up to a distinct kind of idiocy.
“One of you is sober, right?” she says with a frown, cursing herself internally because oh my god she sounds like a mother. She’s scolding the fucking Prince of Lucis.
“Y-yeah,” Prince Noctis chokes, almost spitting out the drink in his haste to answer her. He pulls the top off the cup and shows her a familiar translucent green liquid sloshing around inside. “Yeah, this is just a Jetty’s, honest. I’m designated driver tonight.”
“He’s designated driver every night and everyday.” Prompto explains, a sincere and genuine expression on his face, as if this is information she absolutely must know. He leans out of the window a little, then continues in a stage whisper, “Do you see how nice this fucking car is?! It’s probably worth more than my life! I’d never drive it, even if I wasn’t sober.”
“Even if you weren’t drunk, babe,” Prince Noctis says gently as he takes one of Prompto’s hands. Somehow, the next heir to the throne holding hands and calling someone ‘babe’ doesn’t phase her at all. That is just where she is at. “You’re already not sober.”
“You are very right about that,” Prompto grins, squeezing at Prince Noctis’ hand.
“And you’re worth more than this car to me,” Prince Noctis says with a sincere sparkle in his eye, evidently forgetting that she is there, that she is witnessing this disgusting made-for-tv romance movie bullshit. And supposedly he's the sober one.
“That’s not what my bank statement says,” Prompto deadpans.
It’s such a change in demeanor, in general atmosphere that she’s almost concerned they’re having a moment - a fight? - but then they both start cracking up and it coaxes an amused huff out of her. Just the one huff though, while they continue to laugh on in the car.
Meanwhile, she’s still just standing out here, in the parking lot, her food getting colder by the second, unable to leave because the asshole who boxed her in turned out to be Prince Noctis Lucis Caelum, son of King Regis Lucis Caelum CXIII and the chosen heir to the Crystal’s light.
“Um,” she starts, trying to get their attention with purpose this time.
Thankfully, Prompto notices and understands.
“Oh, is this your car?” he asks, then flushes. “Wait, of course it’s your car! Why else would you be here? Oh, and you can’t open your door...”
“Shit, sorry,” Prince Noctis startles in the driver’s seat as the realization apparently dawns on him. He hastily shoves the Jetty’s into the cup holder and fumbles his keys back into the ignition. “Thought this was an employee car.”
Well, that explains why he’d been so comfortable swapping spit with his boyfriend there. “It’s fine.”
“Here, um, I can pull out,” he says, pushing the stick shift a little too forcefully into reverse in his haste.
Prompto frowns. “That’s not what you were-” then a kind of understanding becomes apparent on his face as Prince Noctis leans back, looks over his shoulder and starts backing out of the spot. “Oh, oh that’s what you meant.”
She’s not entirely sure she wants to know what Prompto thought he meant. She can’t focus on that, anyway, with how Prompto starts making beeping noises with each inch Noctis makes the car roll backward.
To his credit, Noctis seems unfazed and is polite enough to give her a fair amount of room to open her car door. He even turns on his low beams, and while she can guess it’s for her benefit, so she can better see her car door in the darkness of the parking lot, she can’t help but feel like the whole country is watching her.
In the poetic kind of sense, that is exactly what is happening.
They're talking and laughing loud enough that she can hear the sound of them but not the words, and she feels like she’s not even in her body as she opens her car door and puts her bag of food in the passenger’s seat, this is honestly just so surreal. The prince pulls back into the spot as she’s finishing buckling herself in and she rolls down her window to say a quick thank you, even though the prince had been the one to start all this.
“Sorry about that, really,” Prince Noctis cuts in before she can say anything, he looks genuinely apologetic as he leans over the steering wheel so he can make eye contact with her past Prompto in the passenger’s seat. “Didn’t mean to give you any trouble.”
“It’s fine,” she says, not sure if she’s doing the right thing by letting him think she doesn’t know he’s the prince or if this is the kind of treason that’s going to follow her.
But the prince seems to relax a little, if only because he’s now convinced himself she doesn’t know him and he’s avoided a scandal. She can sympathize with that. It must be tiring, not even being allowed the harmless youthful dalliance that was ‘making out with your boyfriend in a fast food parking lot’ without the threat of a potential country-wide backlash.
“But it was nice to see you again!” Prompto pipes in, still cheerful somehow.
“Yeah. You... too?” she says, feeling at once more relaxed and more awkward than she’d felt around the prince of the entire country and his boyfriend. She’s thrown that she actually has a baseline for this comparison. She puts her car in reverse as quickly as she can and gives them a nod. “Right, well. Have a good night.”
“You, too!” she hears as she pulls out of the spot. That’s definitely Prompto. “And enjoy your burger and fries!”
Definitely Prompto.
She lets out a shaky laugh as she drives out of the parking lot and onto the street that’s a straight shot to her apartment.
Whoever was working the front at that Crow’s Nest was about to have an interesting night.