There was much Ignis didn’t remember. The expanse of the void in his mind was … exhausting.

Even now, upon waking, the hair on the back of his neck rose as the familiar sensations of the prison no longer surrounded him. It made his heart race, his adrenaline pump, until the less animalistic part of his mind reminded him that they’d broken out of that hell. That he was no longer to suffer there. Yet, his body ached and protested, and a shiver shook him down to his bones, just as it had while he was still trapped in that endless hell.

He had a feeling … He had given into that instinct to run once already.

---

“He’s gone! How did that man get out of this room? He’s blind and injured!”

“He can’t have gone far – we’ve got to find him before he dies out on the street…”.

“Has anyone told his friends?”

-

Blind panic. Run. Get away, get as far away as possible. Find Gladio. Find Noctis, Prompto, anyone.

Chest burning. Heaving breath.

Energy running out, stumbling around in the dark, warm stone under his finger tips.

Unfamiliar sounds.

It was only a matter of time before they found him. Before they threw him in the hole again.

As a feminine voice, panicked, reached his ears, everything fell back into the void.

—

There were voices outside of his door picked up in volume. Ignis listened for a moment, before giving up on attempting to interpret anything through the swimming sensation in his mind. Instead, he once more tried to get his elbow underneath of himself to push up to a more sitting position. However, his muscles burned in protest, and as he once more gave up the fight in order to conserve his energy, the door finally opened and soft footsteps hurried inside.

Iggy didn’t recognize the gentle, feminine voice that finally broke the stiff silence of the room. He furrowed his brows in confusion as she spoke, and unintentionally flinched away from her soft touch. Ah, that would take getting used to again, wouldn’t it? How long had it been since there had been anyone reaching out to him other than Gladiolus with the intent of nothing more than a comforting touch, rather than a punishing one? He swallowed dryly, forcing himself to relax and attempted to find what remained of his trust in people as she freely gave her name.

Aerith. It was definitely a name he hadn’t heard before.

“Aerith,” he repeated the name to himself, his voice extremely hoarse with disuse, “I’m … Ignis.”

He let her other words sink in. She’d found him? Badly hurt, yes, that much he knew … but hadn’t he been in the hospital for some days now? Time moved at an odd pace for him, both sluggish and fast, and Iggy had no clue just how long he’d been out of the Gulag and in – well – wherever he was these days. Blearily, he realized, he must have given into the sensation of panic at some point. He must have run from safety, mistaking it as a trap, as a new torture.

Ignis sighed, blinking his right eye as the left still refused to open. He spoke again, groggy and confused, “I apologize if I frightened you. I … Where are we?”

He wanted to ask so much more, but the sentences were jumbling up in his mind before they could make their way out. His tongue felt tied and dry, exhausted despite having done nothing that he could remember for several days.

[attr="class","crasherslyr"]

[attr="class","crasherslyric2"]THE DAY IS GONE

[attr="class","crashersbody"]

[attr="class","crasherstag"]TAG: Gladiolus Amicitia NOTES: alright time for them to get smart

[attr="class","crasherscredit"]CODED BY BLAIR WALDORF

[attr="class","dec2"]
Have a novel where Iggy suffocates someone for an antidote

Everyday challenged the threshold of Ignis’s worry. Whether it was infection or something worse, Gladio continued to decline with each day. True consciousness had slipped away from him within the first 24 hours of the stabbing, and only the occasional murmur passed his friend’s lips. Other than that, it was nothing but grunts of pain and vomit. With each passing day, Ignis mentally tallied how much hotter the man’s forehead became, how much pus spilled from the wound that refused to properly heal, despite consistent attention. His own mental breaking point was coming.

Gladiolus wouldn’t survive without proper medication. He would turn septic, if he hadn’t already. He was starving and dehydrated, only barely taking in the occasional sips of water that wouldn’t immediately come back up. One by one, each body system would shut down until there was nothing left.

But … what could he do? The other prisoners laughed as they passed the cell. They taunted Gladio, who couldn’t hear them. The guards didn’t care. In this hellscape, Gladio would be nothing but another nameless body.

Gladio had to make it through. He simply had to. Ignis knew it was a childish thing, to simply try and will wellness into existence, but … what else could he do? Without treatment, there was nothing to be done. And yet, Ignis ran his fingers over the carved numerals he’d found on the wall one day. He’d tallied up the days Gladio had been locked in the cell – years. Years. He continued to add a number for each day that his friend breathed. As if the act of keeping the days recorded would extend the stay.

The darkest of thoughts sunk their claws into his mind, again and again. It was getting tiring, fighting them off.

A week had passed, before a familiar voice came by – reminding Gladio that he had a fight coming up. A voice Ignis had been waiting on.

“Let me fight,” he begged through the bars, hands clutched around the frigid steel, “Let me fight in Gladiolus’s place.”

Fighting was the only way to get anything in Gorgon. Rations, blankets, fresh water.

Medication.

The guard on the other side of the bars shrugged his shoulders, “Don’t care who fights, as long as someone does.”

The man scribbled something down on a clipboard, “Alright blind man, what do you want if you win? We ain’t got a fresh pair of eyes for ya.”

“An antidote,” Ignis let the quip pass him by without a fight. The man only grunted in response before his footsteps began echoing away.

It was insanity, what he was asking to do. There was no telling who they would pit him against in that ring of death, just to teach him a lesson for daring to fight at all. There would be a large turnout, excited to watch a disabled man get pummeled into the ground. Would it be Rurik’s men? He’d certainly pissed them off enough.

It was the only way. Without an antidote of some kind, Gladio wouldn’t survive. So, he would have to get it – or die trying.



As he walked through the hall, the sound before him built into a steady and raucous roar.

Ignis knew the moment the lights hit him, as the inmates behind the fences spat and called and screeched. The scent of the room was overwhelming; the stench of unwashed bodies, a frigid hint of iron, the vile scent of nearby vomit. Iggy had long since lost the feeling in his bare digits, professionally wrapped by his own hand. There would be no cornerman for him today, his bucket of supplies dangling from the fingers of his left hand. He’d have to avoid injury best he could. But the ring … there was no telling who would step inside.

He was only slated for a single fight; a blessing. It seemed they weren’t expecting much from him. The few tussles he’d been involved in, Gladio had always been present. It was likely assumed that he was nothing without Gladio there to protect him. A guard nudged him in the back with a freezing baton, ushering Ignis up the metal stairs and between the ropes, into the ring as an announcer declared his name and that this was his first official fight.

The jeering intensified. Ignis drowned it out, focusing instead on the feeling of the mat under his feet. He could sense the announcer in the middle of the ring shifting from his right foot to his left. Someone, heavy footed, was stepping onto the mat opposite of him. He was either purposefully stomping about, or he was larger than Gladio. Whoever he was, whatever his body count in the ring was, Ignis didn’t care. No other noise mattered other than the start of the fight. The only thing that mattered was living, and winning.

The announcer stepped out – the bell rang over the sounds of chaos.

Fighting hand-to-hand was not Ignis’s preferred method, but that hardly meant he was untrained. Hours each day, when Noctis was busy with schooling or other duties, had been assigned to physical training. He was not just the king’s retainer, but a defender. He was no shield like Gladio; more of a discreet, assassin’s arrow. Losing his eyesight had forced Iggy to relearn so many things, and self-defense had been one of the harder ones to grasp. One depended on seeing the way their opponent moved, what limb they may swing, what they may do next.

Now, it was the give of their mat under their feet. It was the bellowing grunt from the man’s throat. It was the flutter of ragged clothing as it moved through the air, and the pop of cartilage in his opponent’s knee.

The man (Levi, as he’d later remember him being called), did manage to make first contact. Ignis hadn’t managed to dodge far enough back, as an elbow came crashing into his nose. Pain flared across his face as a gasp was ripped from his throat. The crowd’s roar grew louder – first blood on the blind man. They were ready to see him torn to shreds.

Blood gushed from Iggy’s nose and soaked into the too-large, stained tank he wore. There was no time to address the issue, though, as the man attempted to take him down to the mat. Ignis managed to move out of the way of a second strike, forcing the pain from his face from his mind, focus, focus! The weight on the mat shifted again, his opponent crying out before his next strike. Ignis slipped through on a crouch, and his foot made contact with a large, hairy jaw with a sickening crack.

Most of their movements were a blur as Iggy moved on instinct. He wasn’t sure when he was struck across the face again, only vaguely aware that the scarred skin above his left eye had been torn open. His right hand ached after making contact with a skull. He managed to slip away from another devastatingly powerful strike, and the crowd booed him in anger.

Somehow, their bodies hit the mat. Levi tried to get a proper grip on Ignis’s throat, but perhaps the blood had made him too slick. Was it some sort of animal instinct that forced Iggy to slip through the man’s hold and manage to wriggle his way to his head? Vaguely, the scent of acrid sweat, grime, and blood mixed as his face was pressed into the mat. One arm wrapped around the man’s meaty neck in a death grip, while his legs secured one arm and his free hand fought with the other. Dull nails scratched at his face, but the adrenaline made it feel more like ice against his skin.

The man’s struggle became less and less. Was it an eternity, or only moments, before the man stopped moving entirely? Ignis lay there, afraid to loosen his hold, the roar of the crowd more deafening than it had ever been before. The fight … was a blur. How many times did he hit the man? How many times was he hit?

… Had he won?

“Let go of the corpse,” some guard barked at him.

Ignis felt numb – from the cold, he reasoned. He let go of his opponent and brought himself to his feet as the announcer declared him the winner. At the moment, it didn’t feel like a victory. He reached out and grabbed the fabric of a guard’s uniform, “When do I get it? What I won?”

He was shoved off toward the ropes, “When we feel like it, cripple. Get out of the ring!”







Ignis mopped up his face to the best of his ability with the scrap of a rag that hadn’t been used to clean up Gladio’s sick. His fingers were numb, and it was difficult to tell exactly if he’d managed to wipe blood away rather than smear it, but it would have to do for now. It would be much harder to get off once it had dried. For the most part, adrenaline covered his aches and pains, but the world still threatened to spin as he shoved rolled toilet paper into his nostrils to stem the flow of blood.

“I hope you didn’t worry while I was gone,” Ignis spoke to his unconscious friend as he sat at the foot of Gladio’s bunk, “You’ll chastise me for it, I’m sure, but I fought and won today. I know I’ve asked you to wait for quite some time already, but I’m afraid I have to ask you to keep holding on a little bit longer. Until they deliver my prize.”

His ears were ringing louder than they ever had before. Perhaps it was a mixture of the volume in the ring and the strike to his head? Things felt fuzzy, and the longer Ignis sat still, the more he wanted to lay back (Gladio’s legs be damned) and rest. The aches and pains began letting themselves be known quite rudely. Ignis rested his head against the metal post as he brought his arms around himself, shivering as his cooled sweat turned icy against his skin.

“Hey, blind man.”

The voice of a guard brought Ignis out of his daze. The man didn’t continue, so Iggy forced himself to his feet and fought against the sensation of pins and needles as he forced one foot in front of the other to the bars.

The guard continued, “Warden wanted me to drop this by now. Doesn’t want you losing your motivation.”

A bottle was pressed into Iggy’s freezing hands. He felt along the seams and the top, identifying the bottle as some kind of curative, “And how do I know this isn’t some sort of trick?”

The guard grabbed his collar through the iron and pulled him hard against the bars, “Don’t you dare doubt the warden's hospitality, little shit. You wanted this, you earned it. Go make big ugly all better, then get ready to step back in the ring to get your ass handed to you in a couple weeks.”

The man shoved Ignis as he let him go, and his heavy footsteps echoed off the walls as he stomped away.

Iggy clutched the bottle in his hands. He either trusted what he’d been given, or he let Gladio die, slowly and painfully from infection. His choices were limited. Ignis made his way back to Gladio’s bunk, bunching up his own blanket to prop his friend up. He unscrewed the top of the curative, his fingers shaking, before tapping Gladio’s cheek that was still burning to the touch.

“Gladio. I need you to wake up. Just a little, just for a moment.”

He barely tipped some of the curative past Gladio’s dry, cracked lips.

[attr="class","dec2"]
Next time on deadly prison gang, Iggy volunteers to fight

Weeks ago, Ignis wouldn’t have dared to try and lead them from the yard. Without his sight, all the unknown variables piled up much too high, and it was very likely he’d run into trouble; a guard bearing down, an unhinged gang member, even a stone wall. However, even in the thick of the crowd now, Iggy clutched onto the confidence of his known footing and the strength of his senses. His left hand remained clutched on Gladio’s sleeve as he weaved and shoved through the crowd of inmates beginning their dangerous swarm, and his foot made contact with steps in mere moments.

All too quickly, the noise began to fade away as they crossed the threshold into the prison. The thick, cold walls drowned out the chaos outside, even as inmates began to fall to swinging batons. The shriek of a whistle burned his ears. However, Ignis didn’t waver, and continued to walk quickly forward, unable to let go of Gladio’s sleeve.

He wanted to stop and assess the wound Gladiolus had suffered, but if they stopped now, they risked any of the angry mob of inmates that had managed to slip past the guards catching up to them. No, it wasn’t safe to stop and check anything until they reached the confines of their cell. At the very least, then, they’d have a door to hold them off for a moment or two.

However, even through the horrific muck and stank of the prison, Ignis picked up the scent of blood. The steady drops he was hearing splatter against the concrete floor was certainly not water leaking from the roof. It wasn’t rhythmic enough. No, blood was seeping freely from Gladio’s side. Ignis grimaced, mentally counting their steps down the long corridor. Was there anything in their cell he could sew a wound with? Unlikely …

Finally, they crossed into their cell, with what near non-existent safety it provided for the time being. Ears and eyes were everywhere, but at least in the bunk, Ignis knew each and every inch of the area and could use it to his advantage. No one would dare approach them unless they wanted to find their head dented through a metal sink.

Gladio immediately began to chastise himself, and Ignis shook his head. There was no predicting that the man would have some kind of a shiv, nor that he would have launched himself at Gladio so recklessly. Iggy moved around their small, shared space as Gladio mumbled to himself, picking up a torn piece of cloth he’d been using as a makeshift rag and running it under the cold water of the tap. Gladio’s outburst and swing against the metal bunk rattled Ignis for a moment, and the adrenaline of the situation caught up with him as he rung out the rag in the sink and rounded on his injured friend.

“Enough,” he pointed to Gladio sternly, before moving forward and grabbing Gladio’s free hand, shoving the rag into it, “What’s done is done. Let’s treat your wound best we can for now, and we’ll deal with the fallout when it comes.”

Easier said than done, of course, as Ignis simultaneously felt like cursing just as loudly as Gladio had and vomiting all the same. Gladio was still healing from his previous fight, and now this. Ignis swallowed his worry for the moment, making quick work of removing Gladio’s jacket and forcing the bottom of his shirt up, so that he could assess the wound to the best of his ability.

The mixture of thick, cooled blood and warm, slick blood met his fingers. Ignis moved Gladio’s hand away from the wound and tentatively felt for the edges of his skin where the knife pierced, before grabbing the wet rag and pressing it hard against the wound, “Sit. Lay on your side, we have to stem the bleeding.”

It wasn’t a request. It was a demand.

Anxiety bubbled in his gut. How dirty was that knife? Was there anything on it? Either way, the wound needed to be cleaned as soon as it stopped bleeding as much as it was. But, how much time would they have? Gladio had said that he would be forced into the ring again soon. Even with stitches, there was no way he’d be in fighting shape anytime soon.

His fingers around the rag began to tremble. Ignis blamed the cold.

"Other than anger, I need to know what you feel. Are you light-headed? Colder than you should be? Can you feel the wound?" Iggy asked, more gently than his earlier tone, attempting to assess how much the blood loss may have already gotten to Gladiolus.