Random Baschcentric fic huh wut?
Totally randomly I was looking through my My Documents folder (all right, not really randomly, I was data dumping in preparation for my big move tomorrow and wanted to know what this Basch1.doc was about) and found this not-completely-irretrievable Basch fic I wrote a while ago, back when Marks were still fun to hunt (damn you Fenrir! D: ). Read, enjoy, whatever.
Everybody loves Penelo, by the way. The only thing saving her from being a Mary Sue here is that she's.... dead. Yeah. *shifty eyes*
If Mariagoner reads this.... miss you, dear.
And Christmas blessings to all the rest of you!
--
Many shades of armor has he worn, and his skin is scarred with each memory.
The cavalier’s armor of Landis- lines upon his back and arms he bears; the slashing claws and beaks of the fleet war chargers that brought Duchy Ronsenburg to strength, the imprints of a carelessly used riding crop, taken from his hands and used upon him to teach his young mind that a Ronsenburg NEVER whips his mount. It was a lesson he had no reason to attempt twice, and the rites of his adulthood hurried soon after- Archadia swept upon them, a haughty galleon in legions of carved black steel, smashing apart family and friend alike in her quest for power.
Two halves a whole, and more than the sum of their parts. Archadia and her relentless scourge upon them cleaved their paths in twain for decades.
The swordsman’s armaments of Dalmasca; symbols of his pride and shame both. Raminas was a good master, had done what he could for the good of his people. And yet at what cost had he taken up arms, however unwittingly, against the brother of his soul? Oftimes he catches a glimpse of Noah in passing mirrors, downcast with the heaviness of years and yearning, but can spare no time for mourning. In these armaments he laid down his life for his liege, and in these armaments stripped away Dalmasca’s lingering footprint left gouged and heavy into his very bones. The smell of sand lingered in his desert cage, and his heart yearned to its walls instead of the ruins of his childhood, willful.
Noah’s sword opened a scar from hairline to ear. His words left gangrene in his brother’s soul. Both linger still, unabated by his final demand.
The heavy chitinous shell of Archadia. The easiest to put away- and the hardest. Stepping free of it taught him to embrace the sky; leaving it behind taught him to swallow despair. Larsa is no longer a child, and the emperor has no clothes. Neither this swordsman his honor.
Noah scorned the shield. It was…a mistake… to follow in his footsteps…
And now - the cheaply bought armor of an exile, nameless, honorless, prideless and landless.
And with each passing, each little death, he becomes surer and surer that there is no such thing as an ending. There are no happily ever afters, no fading crystal lights, no happy queen and happy king in a happy kingdom. No, what there is, is an endless march of a war-game between self-proclaimed gods, the baleful surging of cast-down espers beneath his browbone, the sight of a bride’s discarded body, the harsh aberrance in an Emperor’s gaze. The Sun-Cryst is sundered, the Sword of Kings and Treaty Blade consigned to crumbling stone in the Dynast-King’s tomb, and still the gods war on, undeterred.
Gods-?
No, the Occuria¸ and his jaw aches with the grind of teeth that accompanies that thought. He distracts himself from the pain, busying himself with examining what cheap armor he has managed to procure on his flight away from his last home, hefting the great-sword upon his back with a curtness born of cold sorrow and frustration. Even the distant memory of that turning point, the sight of a vivid, golden-crowned bride with a darkened bolt, almost a javelin, piercing her trunk- her husband’s cry like a tortured animal- his armor so heavy upon him, til he felt he was swimming through Mist risen to oppose his human limbs-
Blood.
So much-
….blood never did suit her.
He remembers that, still distantly remembers handing her a handkerchief after their party came away bruised and bloodied, her hair matted with it where she had taken a shallow slice to the side of her head. It had healed cleanly with swift magicks, but a healing spell did not cleanse, and she was a sight with her yellowing blond hair dyed rust red on one side, like someone had thrown a handful of mud lopsidedly at her head. The handkerchief hadn’t done much more than provide comic relief, for most of the stain had set fast and congealed into her skin, but she had laughed, and that had made it all worthwhile.
Somehow.
But that is no longer, and he must needs look ahead to the next bleak chapter of his too-long story.
Once he failed his homeland, then his liege-lord, then his brother. Now that he has failed his friend, he is outcast, forsworn- and his death will be a lingering one, bleeding from a thousand tiny pinpricks of regret. Each step he takes leaves eroding prints in the pale sand; before the next wind blows, there will be no trace of his being here.
So be it.
Perched high on the next sandy ripple, he thinks he can make out the curve of a woman’s body turned towards the wind, her loose clothes rippling in the desert heat.
Her hair is blond, and sparkles incandescent in the waning sun.
--
As he travels, he thinks of Dalmasca’s stately walls, now well shored from within; he thinks of Lowtown, now cleaned (as it should be) and turned into an underground garden. He thinks of Migelo, kindly canny, and Dalan, the royal’s fool; he dares not think of Ashe, Ashelia, Queen, but does, anyway. She is a good queen, a queen without patience for foolishness- and this is in itself folly, for nobody can be serious all the time, but he suspects she will change her mind when she has children- and a queen who at least tries not to hold the double standards that she abhors.
She is not a great queen. But she is a good queen, and there is a honesty in her gaze that becomes her.
Al-Cid will have a battle on his hands, if he is to win the desert queen, but the Rozzarian has a fire in him to temper the queen’s steel. He wishes the man all manner of luck. He’ll need it. The queen will stamp all over him given the chance, but Al-Cid is like a birch sapling, all bending snapping trunk with slashing branches and sharp leaves. They will sharpen each other’s tongues til the end of time, he is sure. As for himself, once the princess’ knight, once again her companion in the Occuria’s web, and now no longer anything to her than a bitter memory- he will flay the Rozzarian’s flesh from his back, should the swarthy man lead the queen into a heart’s trap.
It is the one promise he cherishes dearly in his heart. At least there is a better to even chance that this may come to pass, of all his hopes. As unmapped as his path seems to be, Al-Cid’s mischief is as constant as the dry crumbling sand underfoot, the wind sighing, the beating of the sun.
The desert winds blow, and their ribbons of sand form the flapping braids of a golden-haired dancer.
--
It is altogether something of a surprise when he hears an airship overhead, hitherto silent until it is nearly hovering over him. The make is…familiar, though somewhat altered; Balthier has apparently decided to change the Strahl’s ornamentation. But no other airship has those folding, mutable wings. No other airship has pilot-engineers skilled enough to handle the experimental accoutrements with the delicacy that this duo manages. And no other ship manages to bring back as many memories as this one does.
The cargo hold ramp lowers, and a cord of woven mithril alloy uncoils swiftly, dangling serpentine before him like an angler’s expert cast. A note attached to the loop at the end completes the image; sweet bait to lure him into the sky pirate’s lair.
come aboard, you idiot
…well, he has a fair guess who had most of the hand in writing this particular note, though it is Balthier’s neat calligraphy which pens it. The note goes into his bracer, resting dryly against the damp underside of his wrist; he grasps the cord in gauntleted hands and sets his foot into the loop at the end of the cord. As soon as his other foot leaves the ground, the cord is drawn up, sand and earth falling away at a dizzying pace while he corkscrews upward, staring at the whirling sky to avoid nausea. Even a clever sky pirate, or several of them, cannot avoid the tendency of woven cords to twist.
It is Fran who greets him at the end of the vertical trip, as ageless and dispassionate as ever. She drags him easily upright; her claws hardly scrape his shoulders, and he lifts his foot away from the loop- the cord hisses its way back into the reel where it is anchored. She ushers him peremptorily from the oblique tilt of the still-open ramp, points to the exit with an imperious claw.
He knows the way she wishes for him to take. He has walked this ship many times before; for a minute he procrastinates, hedges, moves as if reminiscing. The wrath of a second young man is, oddly enough, another cause to grieve. But the minute passes, and he throws his shoulders back with all the fortitude of a soon-to-be-amputee biting down on a leather strap, resuming something like a normal stride as he travels toward the cockpit.
Balthier’s inconveniently placed leg trips him up before he reaches the cockpit door.
There is a muffled grunt of pain from the innards of the corridor-side subarray panel, echoed by his own, in the corridor (he has now managed to snort sand up his nose, which is always rather embarrassing). Snickers drift from the piloting cabin, mellow, amused and janglingly discordant to his ears. When he pushes himself up (hands, knees, hehassanddownhisbootsandithurts, feet) and stumbles into the familiarly cramped area with its almost-empty passenger seats, Vaan grins benignly at him, stretched catlike out over two adjoining seats- his hair a little longer, pulled back into a functional scruffy tail, his Dalmascan jacket traded for a leather torso holster and a carelessly unbuttoned black shirt of the style Balthier favors. The clothes have changed, but the bared teeth is all Vaan’s, and unreasoning bile rises up in his throat.
“She is dead, and you laugh. You-“
“Penelo,” Vaan says sharply, grin sublimated into the crisp cool of the Ice-Crystal’ed air circulation, “is dead. I was there. I know that as well as anyone- including you.” The young pirate’s body is still stretched out on the leather-upholstered seats, but there is a subtle predator’s tension that sours the air between them now, a tension that Fran’s coming up behind him does nothing to bestir. “We’re Dalmascan, man. We know that people die. Pen knew the risk she was taking, being with Larsa. She lost her gamble.”
He stares, and finds this man a stranger, and cannot choke down the bitter disappointment that wells up in his eyes.
The former thief comes smoothly to his feet- no trace of awkward coltishness left there. How many years-? “Don’t give me that look, Basch fon Ronsenburg. The only one who’s wrong here, is you.”
Fran’s long claws close gently, firmly, on his shoulder. She is the tallest viera he has ever met, coming to stand abreast with him; he turns blindly toward her, vision fogged with the sour tang of moisture he cannot swallow fast enough, and sees nothing more than choking, twisting Mist. “Go to the bunks to rest, Captain,” her voice whispers out of the Mist, lilting. “There will be much to speak of.”
She guides him back the way he has come and down a new path, a brief corridor redolent with the odd scent of washed linens and laundry soap, which ends in two rows of doubled-up bunks built into the ship’s interior itself, like little crypt beds. As he numbly goes about the business of divesting the most unwieldy pieces of his armor and reclining upon a random knee-level niche, the viera’s tall, dark-paled form remains leant against a nearby wall (in a space as cramped as this, everywhere is nearby). He blinks hard enough for the Mist-shape to resolve into a chocolate-skinned, black-armored form (he cannot see the crimson of her eyes, though they must glow lambent in the darkness) and, facing her, he knows that she will not speak of his weakness. She knows too much of it herself.
He remains awake for a long moment more, then closes his eyes to slumber, and does not see even the whisper of golden hair at the back of his eyelids this time.
Everybody loves Penelo, by the way. The only thing saving her from being a Mary Sue here is that she's.... dead. Yeah. *shifty eyes*
If Mariagoner reads this.... miss you, dear.
And Christmas blessings to all the rest of you!
--
Many shades of armor has he worn, and his skin is scarred with each memory.
The cavalier’s armor of Landis- lines upon his back and arms he bears; the slashing claws and beaks of the fleet war chargers that brought Duchy Ronsenburg to strength, the imprints of a carelessly used riding crop, taken from his hands and used upon him to teach his young mind that a Ronsenburg NEVER whips his mount. It was a lesson he had no reason to attempt twice, and the rites of his adulthood hurried soon after- Archadia swept upon them, a haughty galleon in legions of carved black steel, smashing apart family and friend alike in her quest for power.
Two halves a whole, and more than the sum of their parts. Archadia and her relentless scourge upon them cleaved their paths in twain for decades.
The swordsman’s armaments of Dalmasca; symbols of his pride and shame both. Raminas was a good master, had done what he could for the good of his people. And yet at what cost had he taken up arms, however unwittingly, against the brother of his soul? Oftimes he catches a glimpse of Noah in passing mirrors, downcast with the heaviness of years and yearning, but can spare no time for mourning. In these armaments he laid down his life for his liege, and in these armaments stripped away Dalmasca’s lingering footprint left gouged and heavy into his very bones. The smell of sand lingered in his desert cage, and his heart yearned to its walls instead of the ruins of his childhood, willful.
Noah’s sword opened a scar from hairline to ear. His words left gangrene in his brother’s soul. Both linger still, unabated by his final demand.
The heavy chitinous shell of Archadia. The easiest to put away- and the hardest. Stepping free of it taught him to embrace the sky; leaving it behind taught him to swallow despair. Larsa is no longer a child, and the emperor has no clothes. Neither this swordsman his honor.
Noah scorned the shield. It was…a mistake… to follow in his footsteps…
And now - the cheaply bought armor of an exile, nameless, honorless, prideless and landless.
And with each passing, each little death, he becomes surer and surer that there is no such thing as an ending. There are no happily ever afters, no fading crystal lights, no happy queen and happy king in a happy kingdom. No, what there is, is an endless march of a war-game between self-proclaimed gods, the baleful surging of cast-down espers beneath his browbone, the sight of a bride’s discarded body, the harsh aberrance in an Emperor’s gaze. The Sun-Cryst is sundered, the Sword of Kings and Treaty Blade consigned to crumbling stone in the Dynast-King’s tomb, and still the gods war on, undeterred.
Gods-?
No, the Occuria¸ and his jaw aches with the grind of teeth that accompanies that thought. He distracts himself from the pain, busying himself with examining what cheap armor he has managed to procure on his flight away from his last home, hefting the great-sword upon his back with a curtness born of cold sorrow and frustration. Even the distant memory of that turning point, the sight of a vivid, golden-crowned bride with a darkened bolt, almost a javelin, piercing her trunk- her husband’s cry like a tortured animal- his armor so heavy upon him, til he felt he was swimming through Mist risen to oppose his human limbs-
Blood.
So much-
….blood never did suit her.
He remembers that, still distantly remembers handing her a handkerchief after their party came away bruised and bloodied, her hair matted with it where she had taken a shallow slice to the side of her head. It had healed cleanly with swift magicks, but a healing spell did not cleanse, and she was a sight with her yellowing blond hair dyed rust red on one side, like someone had thrown a handful of mud lopsidedly at her head. The handkerchief hadn’t done much more than provide comic relief, for most of the stain had set fast and congealed into her skin, but she had laughed, and that had made it all worthwhile.
Somehow.
But that is no longer, and he must needs look ahead to the next bleak chapter of his too-long story.
Once he failed his homeland, then his liege-lord, then his brother. Now that he has failed his friend, he is outcast, forsworn- and his death will be a lingering one, bleeding from a thousand tiny pinpricks of regret. Each step he takes leaves eroding prints in the pale sand; before the next wind blows, there will be no trace of his being here.
So be it.
Perched high on the next sandy ripple, he thinks he can make out the curve of a woman’s body turned towards the wind, her loose clothes rippling in the desert heat.
Her hair is blond, and sparkles incandescent in the waning sun.
--
As he travels, he thinks of Dalmasca’s stately walls, now well shored from within; he thinks of Lowtown, now cleaned (as it should be) and turned into an underground garden. He thinks of Migelo, kindly canny, and Dalan, the royal’s fool; he dares not think of Ashe, Ashelia, Queen, but does, anyway. She is a good queen, a queen without patience for foolishness- and this is in itself folly, for nobody can be serious all the time, but he suspects she will change her mind when she has children- and a queen who at least tries not to hold the double standards that she abhors.
She is not a great queen. But she is a good queen, and there is a honesty in her gaze that becomes her.
Al-Cid will have a battle on his hands, if he is to win the desert queen, but the Rozzarian has a fire in him to temper the queen’s steel. He wishes the man all manner of luck. He’ll need it. The queen will stamp all over him given the chance, but Al-Cid is like a birch sapling, all bending snapping trunk with slashing branches and sharp leaves. They will sharpen each other’s tongues til the end of time, he is sure. As for himself, once the princess’ knight, once again her companion in the Occuria’s web, and now no longer anything to her than a bitter memory- he will flay the Rozzarian’s flesh from his back, should the swarthy man lead the queen into a heart’s trap.
It is the one promise he cherishes dearly in his heart. At least there is a better to even chance that this may come to pass, of all his hopes. As unmapped as his path seems to be, Al-Cid’s mischief is as constant as the dry crumbling sand underfoot, the wind sighing, the beating of the sun.
The desert winds blow, and their ribbons of sand form the flapping braids of a golden-haired dancer.
--
It is altogether something of a surprise when he hears an airship overhead, hitherto silent until it is nearly hovering over him. The make is…familiar, though somewhat altered; Balthier has apparently decided to change the Strahl’s ornamentation. But no other airship has those folding, mutable wings. No other airship has pilot-engineers skilled enough to handle the experimental accoutrements with the delicacy that this duo manages. And no other ship manages to bring back as many memories as this one does.
The cargo hold ramp lowers, and a cord of woven mithril alloy uncoils swiftly, dangling serpentine before him like an angler’s expert cast. A note attached to the loop at the end completes the image; sweet bait to lure him into the sky pirate’s lair.
come aboard, you idiot
…well, he has a fair guess who had most of the hand in writing this particular note, though it is Balthier’s neat calligraphy which pens it. The note goes into his bracer, resting dryly against the damp underside of his wrist; he grasps the cord in gauntleted hands and sets his foot into the loop at the end of the cord. As soon as his other foot leaves the ground, the cord is drawn up, sand and earth falling away at a dizzying pace while he corkscrews upward, staring at the whirling sky to avoid nausea. Even a clever sky pirate, or several of them, cannot avoid the tendency of woven cords to twist.
It is Fran who greets him at the end of the vertical trip, as ageless and dispassionate as ever. She drags him easily upright; her claws hardly scrape his shoulders, and he lifts his foot away from the loop- the cord hisses its way back into the reel where it is anchored. She ushers him peremptorily from the oblique tilt of the still-open ramp, points to the exit with an imperious claw.
He knows the way she wishes for him to take. He has walked this ship many times before; for a minute he procrastinates, hedges, moves as if reminiscing. The wrath of a second young man is, oddly enough, another cause to grieve. But the minute passes, and he throws his shoulders back with all the fortitude of a soon-to-be-amputee biting down on a leather strap, resuming something like a normal stride as he travels toward the cockpit.
Balthier’s inconveniently placed leg trips him up before he reaches the cockpit door.
There is a muffled grunt of pain from the innards of the corridor-side subarray panel, echoed by his own, in the corridor (he has now managed to snort sand up his nose, which is always rather embarrassing). Snickers drift from the piloting cabin, mellow, amused and janglingly discordant to his ears. When he pushes himself up (hands, knees, hehassanddownhisbootsandithurts, feet) and stumbles into the familiarly cramped area with its almost-empty passenger seats, Vaan grins benignly at him, stretched catlike out over two adjoining seats- his hair a little longer, pulled back into a functional scruffy tail, his Dalmascan jacket traded for a leather torso holster and a carelessly unbuttoned black shirt of the style Balthier favors. The clothes have changed, but the bared teeth is all Vaan’s, and unreasoning bile rises up in his throat.
“She is dead, and you laugh. You-“
“Penelo,” Vaan says sharply, grin sublimated into the crisp cool of the Ice-Crystal’ed air circulation, “is dead. I was there. I know that as well as anyone- including you.” The young pirate’s body is still stretched out on the leather-upholstered seats, but there is a subtle predator’s tension that sours the air between them now, a tension that Fran’s coming up behind him does nothing to bestir. “We’re Dalmascan, man. We know that people die. Pen knew the risk she was taking, being with Larsa. She lost her gamble.”
He stares, and finds this man a stranger, and cannot choke down the bitter disappointment that wells up in his eyes.
The former thief comes smoothly to his feet- no trace of awkward coltishness left there. How many years-? “Don’t give me that look, Basch fon Ronsenburg. The only one who’s wrong here, is you.”
Fran’s long claws close gently, firmly, on his shoulder. She is the tallest viera he has ever met, coming to stand abreast with him; he turns blindly toward her, vision fogged with the sour tang of moisture he cannot swallow fast enough, and sees nothing more than choking, twisting Mist. “Go to the bunks to rest, Captain,” her voice whispers out of the Mist, lilting. “There will be much to speak of.”
She guides him back the way he has come and down a new path, a brief corridor redolent with the odd scent of washed linens and laundry soap, which ends in two rows of doubled-up bunks built into the ship’s interior itself, like little crypt beds. As he numbly goes about the business of divesting the most unwieldy pieces of his armor and reclining upon a random knee-level niche, the viera’s tall, dark-paled form remains leant against a nearby wall (in a space as cramped as this, everywhere is nearby). He blinks hard enough for the Mist-shape to resolve into a chocolate-skinned, black-armored form (he cannot see the crimson of her eyes, though they must glow lambent in the darkness) and, facing her, he knows that she will not speak of his weakness. She knows too much of it herself.
He remains awake for a long moment more, then closes his eyes to slumber, and does not see even the whisper of golden hair at the back of his eyelids this time.