He isn't sure — at all — where he'd been going with his previous train of thought, foresight allowing only for a few seconds here and there before his brain catches up to him and screams that he cease this at once, keep his mouth closed; with the other man so close to him, looming above and around him he swears he could count every individual hair follicle that shadows the line of his jaw, every pore from the line of his brow to the bridge of his nose and more still, damn near see his own reflection in those bright, yellow eyes.
If there were ever such a thing as personal space, Ardyn Izunia has never possessed knowledge of it, or perhaps he simply delights in invading others' so far beyond an acceptable level of discomfort that the boundary line has all but been obliterated. A fifty-fifty chance on either, though he would put every gil to his name on the latter if pressed.
The fingers that grip the very edge of his chin may as well be talons with the force put behind them, the way they feel as though they could pierce pale, beauty-marked skin with the smallest effort, the slightest shift of pressure from one finger to the other and back again. His attempts at maintaining his own stability without lending any of it to the man that now holds him captive are becoming … a bit futile, fruitless in a sense that he knows he will not win this, no matter how he chooses to look at it. The usurper was won on a technicality, and by his own submission has sealed his own fate, even if it keeps Noctis from his, and keeps him safe.
I am sorry, his consciousness calls out again to the surrounding darkness as a small sound escapes him, a breathless and devastatingly helpless thing.
It takes everything in him not to pitch forward when the other stands so abruptly, swallowing hard around the lump settled in his throat, suspiciously close to the same point at which the ring had dug in. He doesn't make an attempt to give an answer to those first few questions, well aware of rhetoric when he hears it — and so he focuses on the last little bit, the way his body goes numb at the implication, a peripheral sort of tingling as a pinched nerve recovering sensation.
He swallows again, throat dry, tongue sticking to the roof of his mouth and making speech difficult. "Perhaps if I knew of something you … desired." He pauses, still not looking back up now that his focus isn't being forced upward, the ground beneath his knees just as hard and unforgiving as the man in front of him. "We could find a way to celebrate your ascension as you see fit."
no subject
If there were ever such a thing as personal space, Ardyn Izunia has never possessed knowledge of it, or perhaps he simply delights in invading others' so far beyond an acceptable level of discomfort that the boundary line has all but been obliterated. A fifty-fifty chance on either, though he would put every gil to his name on the latter if pressed.
The fingers that grip the very edge of his chin may as well be talons with the force put behind them, the way they feel as though they could pierce pale, beauty-marked skin with the smallest effort, the slightest shift of pressure from one finger to the other and back again. His attempts at maintaining his own stability without lending any of it to the man that now holds him captive are becoming … a bit futile, fruitless in a sense that he knows he will not win this, no matter how he chooses to look at it. The usurper was won on a technicality, and by his own submission has sealed his own fate, even if it keeps Noctis from his, and keeps him safe.
I am sorry, his consciousness calls out again to the surrounding darkness as a small sound escapes him, a breathless and devastatingly helpless thing.
It takes everything in him not to pitch forward when the other stands so abruptly, swallowing hard around the lump settled in his throat, suspiciously close to the same point at which the ring had dug in. He doesn't make an attempt to give an answer to those first few questions, well aware of rhetoric when he hears it — and so he focuses on the last little bit, the way his body goes numb at the implication, a peripheral sort of tingling as a pinched nerve recovering sensation.
He swallows again, throat dry, tongue sticking to the roof of his mouth and making speech difficult. "Perhaps if I knew of something you … desired." He pauses, still not looking back up now that his focus isn't being forced upward, the ground beneath his knees just as hard and unforgiving as the man in front of him. "We could find a way to celebrate your ascension as you see fit."
Well. There goes the fucking neighborhood.