Prompto stared at his feet as he followed the Lucians back to their hotel room, trying desperately to come up with something to say, some way to explain this. He wanted to be truthful, but how could he explain something so normal, but taboo at the same time? Everyone in the Niflheim military went through Inurement. Everyone. It didn't need to be explained, and it was considered rude and invasive to ask what each unit's sessions consisted of.
All too soon, they were climbing the stairs to their room, far too soon for Prompto to have worked out what to say or rehearse any kind of explanation. When the door shut, a sense of finality settled in and Prompto shifted on his feet, chewing his lip while his right hand absently rubbed his left shoulder.
“Is it sore?” Ignis asked, seeing the action.
Prompto nodded. “Aches a little.”
“Put your sling back on,” Ignis instructed. “If it’s still sore with it on in a couple of hours, you can have another potion.”
Prompto did so, relieved to have a task, instructions to follow, though he doubted Ignis realised the relief that brought him.
“So,” prince Noctis started. He was sitting on one of the beds, watching, dark eyes serious. Gladio had taken one of the seats and Ignis had moved to the small kitchenette in the room, preparing something. “This Inurement. What is it?” the prince asked.
He didn’t seem angry, at least. “I…” Prompto started, but then he cut himself off, not with pain this time, but just because he didn’t know what to say.
“Spit it out already,” Gladio growled.
“I don’t know where to start,” Prompto said honestly. “Everyone in Zegnautus does Inurement. I just assumed everyone else, even Lucians, did it too. Well I mean, not everyone obviously, there’s no need for civilians to, they’re non-combatants, but military people-”
“But what is it?” prince Noctis asked, cutting into Prompto’s babbling.
“Inurement, to inure oneself, typically against hardship or strife.” It was Ignis who answered, his back still to the party as he started mixing something in a bowl. He turned slightly so he could see Prompto out of the corner of his eye. “Am I close?”
“I guess, yeah,” Prompto said. He had never thought about it like that, but it made sense when spelled out. He sighed and flopped down into a seat. “It starts young, five or six, I guess, with basic stuff. Discipline, obedience, things like that. Do what you're told, when you're told, to perfection and don't ask questions,” he said.
“Sounds fairly standard,” Gladio said. “Young, but standard.”
Prompto nodded. “That needs to be ingrained so you can handle everything else,” he said. He kicked his boots off and pulled his feet up under him, staring at the ground.
“What do they do next?” the prince asked, his voice soft.
“Tolerance,” he said. “Pain, poison, heat, cold. If there’s something that can wear a person down, to hurt them or kill them, we’re inured against it. There was even a rumour that some units were infected with the starscourge to see if a tolerance could be built to that, but I don't know the truth of it. I wasn't, I don't think.”
“If you were, you would probably be dead by now, or at least showing symptoms,” Ignis said.
“Not if they’ve refined it or something,” Gladio said darkly. Seeing the stricken look Prompto gave him, he quickly added, “Sorry.”
“I doubt that’s the case,” the prince said. “If it was, Luna would have heard of it, she would have said something.” Privately, Prompto doubted Niflheim would have allowed the Oracle to know any such thing, but he kept that thought to himself. “That explains why it didn’t hurt when your arm was relocated, but not the near constant wincing you’ve done since.”
Prompto gave a bitter laugh at that. “Oh, that hurt, don’t worry about that,” he said. “My nerves work just fine. I was just taught not to react to pain. It’s a lot easier to fall back on training when you wake up weaponless, with an arm that doesn’t work, and surrounded by people who are supposed to be your enemy.”
The prince smirked, and said, “I can imagine,” but then waited for Prompto to continue.
Prompto pulled a leg up and wrapped his good arm around it, resting his chin on his knee as he stared. The silence stretched on, broken only by the sound of Ignis scooping his mix into a baking tray. It wasn’t like Prompto didn’t want to explain everything, he had promised he would, he just didn’t know how to find the words he needed.
“Is that what your barcode is? Tracking what you’ve become inured to?” Ignis asked.
“Hmm?” Prompto looked up, surprised, then at his wrist where his barcode was. Looking at the others, he saw that, sure enough, none of them had barcodes; yet another thing he assumed had been the same everywhere, but wasn’t. “No,” he said. “It’s an identity code. It gets added to whenever my access level changes.” Slipping his arm out of the sling, he pointed to the parts of the barcode he spoke of. “This part’s my name. It’s been there… forever, since I was born, I guess. This part I got when I started basic training. It allowed access to the training areas of the keep I would be using and my dorm room. Then this part identifies the sniper unit I was assigned to. The end bit was added when I was deemed inured enough to leave the keep, to go out to Gralea city.”
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
“What determined if you were inured enough?” Ignis asked, jumping at the chance to steer the conversation back to where it was supposed to be.
Prompto caught the grateful smile the prince shot his advisor and knew he had been manipulated but he couldn’t care. It gave him an opening, a direction. “A particularly long Inurement session determined that I think the way I am supposed to and don’t have opinions.”
“You said that earlier,” prince Noctis said. “Is that what you meant? That you need this… this Inurement to feel anything?”
“Not exactly,” Prompto said slowly. “I still think, and feel, but it hurts when the thoughts and feelings don’t align with what was taught in Inurement. And opinions aren’t allowed at all.” Confusion all round. “I’m sorry,” he said, slipping his left arm back into the sling. “I’m not explaining it very well. We don’t talk about it back home. It’s rude to ask what a person’s gone through, but it’s considered normal. Without it, I wouldn’t know how to think or act.”
The room was small, two steps and he had crossed from one side to the other, made even smaller by the bed against one wall and toilet against the other. And it was cold. Prompto lay on the bed, curled in a tight ball. The bed had a mattress, but no blanket or pillow. That didn’t really bother Prompto too much, though; he knew that when he got tired enough, he would sleep no matter how cold he was.
If he was allowed to sleep this time.
Wires that came through a small hole in the wall had been attached to his head. To monitor brain activity, they said. That they had told him what it did should have been his first clue. His second should have been the theory class he had completed recently about clearing his mind.
He didn’t even know what had triggered the first zap of electricity, only that the sharp agony had triggered a spiral of thoughts and questions which, in turn, had triggered more and more pain until he lost consciousness on the floor of the room.
It had taken practice. After waking that first time, his fears and questions had once more surged to the surface and caused pain that spiralled out of control. It had taken two more attempts before he remembered the earlier class. His heart was still racing. He had sat in the corner of the room, on edge, terrified, waiting for the next surge to come, but carefully keeping his mind blank.
And then he realised: while his mind was blank, there was no pain.
Once he started to relax again, he began to experiment, laying on the bed so that if he lost control, at least he was on a mattress instead of the steel floor. What could he think? What could he feel?
At that point, the answer was not a lot before pain was triggered, but he became very practiced at stilling his mind, of thinking of nothing when the pain occurred. So much so that it became second nature, and he didn’t even have to concentrate on doing it. That first session had been rough, Arvid hadn’t understood when he had come back twitchy but with no visible injuries. It got easier, though, with each subsequent session, until not thinking and knowing what he was allowed to feel was second nature.
“Psychological conditioning,” Ignis said. He pushed the baking pan into the oven and turned back to face the group, leaning back against the bench.
“I… guess?” Prompto said, uncertain if that was what it was or not.
“Damn, kid,” Gladio said and Prompto shifted a little uncomfortably at what he saw in Gladio’s eyes: either pity or sympathy, he couldn’t tell.
“But then, what about you guys?” Prompto asked, wanting, needing to shift the attention from himself for a little bit. “If not through Inurement, how are you taught to think?”
“We… ah…” Gladio started.
“Hmm,” Ignus also started.
“We’re taught to think for ourselves,” the prince eventually said. “We go to school and…” he trailed off with a self-conscious laugh. “Ok, I think we get why it was hard for you to explain, Prom.”
“Prom?” Prompto repeated with a half smile.
“Yeah. Prom. If that’s cool with you, of course,” Noct said with a tentative smile.
“Sure, that's cool. Noct,” Prompto said, trying out the nickname he had heard the others call their prince. If he had ever addressed a superior like that back home, a beating and cleaning duty would be the very least he could expect. Here, now however, the prince just grinned back at him.
-l-l-l-
Noct leaned against the balcony railing, looking over the city lights, nibbling on one of the brownies Ignis had made earlier. Lestallum was a lively city at night and any other time he would have warped out to have a sneaky night on the town. Tonight though, he wasn't in the mood.
Prompto’s words kept being turned over and over in his mind. When he had reflected on how their childhood would have been different back when he had first seen Prompto’s face, he really had no idea. Even now, Prom hadn't shared any specific details, and no one had wanted to push the matter after getting a hint of what it entailed, but the haunted look in his eyes had said enough. It may have been normal there, but it clearly still had an effect.
“Can't sleep?”
Noct turned and gave a half smile to Ignis as the man stepped out as well, sliding the glass door closed. “I know, weird huh?”
Ignis returned the smile and lifted a smoke. “You mind?” he asked.
Noct shook his head and returned his gaze back outwards. After several minutes of silence between them, Noct said, “You knew what was up with Prompto from the get go, didn't you.”
“I didn't know,” Ignis said, “but I suspected. The wincing occurred whenever he tried to say what he wanted or what he personally thought about something. Then, when he made that comment about being told what to think, it was the only thing that made sense.”
“What is it, exactly? He was kind of vague and I didn't want to pry into something so obviously traumatic.”
“I do not know the details on how they make it work; torture is not something I have had an interest in,” Ignis said dryly, making Noct smirk. “In general, it involves physically causing pain for any undesirable behaviour, or in this case, individual thought. Over time, the brain learns to associate that feeling or emotion with pain and anticipate it. And then it anticipates it so strongly that it creates it.”
Noct was staring at Ignis by this point. “So the pain’s not real?”
“Oh, it's real,” Ignis said as he put his smoke out and dropped it in the ashtray. “Pain is simply certain electrons firing in the brain as a result of outside stimuli. Those same electrons are firing for Prompto, just without outside stimuli. It is no less real for that.”
Noct sighed and ran a hand back and forth over his head, scratching at it in irritation. Things were beginning to click into place now. Not just the pain when he said certain things, but the way he had begged to come with them instead of making it on his own. He needed someone’s orders to follow, so he didn’t have to make the decisions himself. Even something as basic as choosing clothes hurt him.
“Iggy, just promise me one thing,” Noctis said wearily as he pushed away from the railing. Ignis turned to face him, an eyebrow raised questioningly. “We’re gonna destroy those fuckers, right?”
Ignis smiled, though the look did not meet his eyes; they flashed with a hidden rage that was scary to behold. “Oh yes. That I can promise you,” he said, his voice low.
