citrus boys | promptis

orange

"In the wintertime, citrus fruit was so rare, and if you got one, it was better than ambrosia."
—James Earl Jones

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Today, Prompto is alive.

Prompto knows he's alive because he can feel it. He can feel his heart drumming in his chest, begging his legs to run and his mouth to laugh and his cheeks to smile with every pulse of his blood.

He doesn't know what it is about him that makes him feel this way; where everything is just so much deeper and so much more intense in a way that makes him want to just jump and run and take in as much of it as he can.

He takes deeper breaths, his lungs begging him to do so to compensate for the energy he's storing up inside every square inch of his body.

Today, Prompto's blood roars in his ears as the wonders of the world run past him, and Prompto can't help but love and enjoy all of it with every inch of his soul.

Prompto can't do anything about the sunrise; he can only sit back and watch the sun slowly break her head over the hilltops, stretching her milky pink and orange fingers across the sky, breathing violet breaths into the air, and Prompto can only watch.

Prompto can only watch as the bus rumbles along his route to work. And even though there is a bus driver in the front and a woman breastfeeding in the back, Prompto can't help feeling like the only person awake in the whole world to witness and appreciate the misty magic that descends over the land at dawn.

It's all so amazing and wonderful, and when his bus rumbles to a stop and Prompto has to walk the rest of the way to work, he takes picture after picture with his simple point-and-shoot camera.

For some reason, Prompto feels that there's a huge imbalance here; like a simple point-and-shoot camera is too insufficient of a tool to capture the beauty and wonder of the dawn sky. But it's all he can do, and it makes it feel like it's too much for him, like all of this is solely for him. Like he's the soldier, and it's his job to protect the memory of this moment.

It's in this moment that Prompto feels his best; that he just wants to tell everyone in the world about how great it is to be alive, and how wonderful it is to just exist and drive and breathe and simply be.

And as Prompto continues along the route to work, he knows that today is going to be great.

He can just feel it.

⋅•⋅⊰∙∘☽༓☾∘∙⊱⋅•⋅

Today, Noctis needs to be alive.

He needs to be alive, but unfortunately, he doesn't want to get out of bed. Consequently, this appears to create a bit of a conundrum.

For a long while, Noctis simply lays there, smothered by the mass that is his blankets in his cluttered room. Ignis hasn't been able to clean it recently, so Noctis can only lay there in his room bathed in darkness from the light canceling curtains.

Noctis knows it's morning, because he can hear the birds screaming outside, and with a grunt, he covers his ears with his pillows. Gods he wishes the birds would stop screaming; no one needs to hear how horny the damn birds are at four in the fucking morning.

Noctis groans and draws the blankets over his head, immediately trying to go back to sleep. He closes his eyes, waiting for sleep to come, but sleep doesn't come. Instead, Noctis' eyelids become tired and itchy from trying to sleep, and his blanket no longer feels warm and inviting but hot and suffocating; a coffin waiting to be locked.